Bohemia in London

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BOHEMIA IN LONDON

«/ toute majeunesse ;
Je I'aifait sans presque y songer.
IlyJ>arait, je le con/esse,
E t j' aurais pu le corriger.

Mais quand Vhomme change sans cesse,
A u j>asst fiourquoi rien changer ?
Va-t 'en, pawvre oisean passager;
Que Dieu te niene a ton adresse !

First Published 1907
Second Edition , 1912

DOCTOR JOHNSON'S HOtfSE IN GOUGH SQUARE

BOHEMIA IN

LONDON * * *

BY ARTHUR RANSOME

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
BY FRED TAYLOR

LONDON

STEPHEN SWIFT AND CO LIMITED
1 6 KING STREET COVENT GARDEN

MCMXII

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE SOULS OF THE STREETS.

1904

THE STONE LADY. 1905
A HISTORY OF STORYTELLING.

1909
EDGAR ALLAN POE : A CRITICAL

STUDY. 1910
THE HOOFMARKS OF THE

FAUN. 1911
OSCAR WILDE : A CRITICAL STUDY.

1912

ETC.

TO
M. P. SHIEL

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER

PAGE

Planning books and writing them — The material of the
book — Paris and London — The method of the book —
The word " Bohemia "—Villon— Grub Street— Haz-
litt and Reynolds — Petrus Borel, Gautier, Murger —
Modern Bohemia — Geography . . . ... 1

AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA

Walking home in the morning — Coffee-stalls — Hazlitt,
De Quincey, Goldsmith — The grocer's van — The
journey— "Love for Love" at the World's End— The
first lodging — Furniture — The first night in Bohemia 11

OLD AND NEW CHELSEA

Don Saltero's— Smollett— Franklin— The P.B.— Carlyle
and Hunt — Carlyle's house — Chelsea and the river —
Rossetti in Cheyne Walk — Whistler's dinner-party —
and Steele's — Turner's house — The Embankment . 29

A CHELSEA EVENING

An actor — "Gypsy" — A room out of a fairy tale— The
guests — "Opal hush" — Singing and Stories — Going

home . .45

ix

x CONTENTS

IN THE STUDIOS

PAGE

The Studio — Posing the model — Talking and painting —
The studio lunch — The interrupter — Artists' models
—The Chelsea Art Club— The Langham Sketch Club
— Sets in the Studios— Hospitality . * . . 63

THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA

London full of countrymen — Hazlitt in the Southampton
— Borrow and the publisher — Bampfylde's life — The
consolation of the country — Country songs from an
artist's model — A village reputation .... 81

OLD AND NEW SOHO

Pierce Egan — " Life in London " — De Quincey in Greek
Street — Thackeray — Sandwiches and bananas —
Barrel-organs — The Soho restaurants — Beguinot's—
The Dieppe — Brice's — The waiters .... 97

COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO

Casanova at the Orange — The Moorish — The Algerian —
The Petit Riche — The Bohemian in the Province —
Newspaper proprietors in the Europe . . .117

THE BOOK-SHOPS OF BOHEMIA

The Charing Cross Road — Book-buying — " The Anatomy
of Melancholy " — The ordinary shop — Richard Savage
pawning books — Selling review copies — Gay and the
book-shops — Lamb and "street readers" — Market-
stalls— True Bookmen— Old ladies— Tom Folio— A
prayer to my publishers . • • . .135

CONTENTS xi

OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET

PAGE

Johnson and Boswell — Goldsmith and Doctor Kenrick —
Hazlitt and Charles Lamb — De Quincey and Coleridge
at the Courier office — The " Tom and Jerry" times —
Dickens— Elizabethan Fleet Street— Fleet Street on a
sunny morning — The pedestrians — Mitre Court —
Salisbury Court— The Cock — The Cheshire Cheese —
The Rhymers' Club— The Press Club— Cafes in Fleet
Street— A Fleet Street Talking Club . . . .153

SOME NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES

An organ of enlightened criticism — An editor — Methods
of work — The gay way with reviewing — Log-rolling —
Our circulation — Another editor — Two more — The
Bohemian magazines — Financiers and poets . .177

WAYS AND MEANS

Literary Ghosting — " An author to be let" — Borrowing —
Chatterton — Waiting for your money — Penury and
art — Extravagance the compensation for poverty —
Scroggen — A justifiable debauch .... 195

TALKING, DRINKING AND SMOKING

The true way for enjoyment — " Tavern crawls" — The
right reader — Doctor Johnson — Ben Jonson —
Beaumont— Gay— Herrick— " The Ballad of Nappy
Ale ''—Keats —William Davies— The Rules of the old
Talking Clubs— To the reader . . . . .211

OLD AND NEW HAMPSTEAD

Steele — The Kit-cats — Dickens and red-hot chops — Lamb
— Leigh Hunt's cottage — "Sleep and Poetry" —
Hazlitt on Leigh Hunt — Leigh Hunt's friends —
Modern Hampstead — The salons — The conversation —
The Hampstead poets ....... 229

xii CONTENTS

A WEDDING IN BOHEMIA

PAGE

Bride and bridegroom — The procession — Madame of the

restaurant — Creme de Menthe — The morning . . 241

A NOVELIST

, . , . ..',-. 7.-. . "•(» ,' • 253

A PAINTER
. . . ,.. .267

A GIPSY POET

.. ' • . ..' v': .•'-.."•:' . . 275

CONCLUSION

Crabbe in 17B1 and in 1817 — Bohemia only a stage in a
man's life — The escape from convention — Practical
matters — Hazlitt and John Lamb — The farewell to
Bohemia — Marriage — Other ways out — Quod erat
demonstrandum . . . . . 283

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER

BOHEMIA IN LONDON

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER

WHEN authors are honest to themselves, they admit
that their books are failures, in that they are never
quite what they wished to make them. A book has
a wilful way of its own, as soon as it is fairly started,
and somehow has a knack of cheating its writer out of
itself and changing into something different. It is
usually a reversal of the story of " Beauty and the
Beast." The odious beast does not become a prince ;
but a wonderful, clear, brilliant coloured dream (as
all books are before they are written) turns in the
very hands of its author into a monster that he does
not recognise.

I wanted to write a book that would make real
on paper the strange, tense, joyful and despairing,
hopeful and sordid life that is lived in London by
young artists and writers. I wanted to present life in
London as it touches the people who come here, like
Whittingtons, to seek the gold of fame on London
pavements. They are conscious of the larger life of
the town, of the struggling millions earning their
weekly wages, of the thousands of the abyss who earn
no wages and drift from shelter to shelter till they

4 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

die; they know that there is a mysterious East End,
full of crowded, ill-conditioned life ; they know that
there is a West End, of fine houses and a more
elaborate existence ; they have a confused knowledge
of the whole, but only a part becomes alive and real,
as far as they themselves are concerned. That part
is the material of which I hoped to make this book.

There are a dozen flippant, merry treatises on
Bohemia in London, that talk of the Savage Club
and the Vagabond dinners, and all the other con-
sciously unconventional things that like to consider
themselves Bohemian. But these are not the real
things ; no young poet or artist fresh to London,
with all his hopes unrealised, all his capacity for
original living unspent, has anything to do with
them. They bear no more vital relation to the
Bohemian life that is actually lived than masquerades
or fancy-dress balls bear to more ordinary existence.
Members of the Savage Club, guests of the Vagabonds
have either grown out of the life that should be in
my book, or else have never lived in it. They are
respectable citizens, dine comfortably, sleep in well-
aired beds, and find hot water waiting for them in the
mornings. It is, perhaps, the unreality of their pre-
tences that makes honest outsiders who are disgusted
at the imitation, or able to compare them with the
inhabitants of the Quartier or Montmartre, say that
there is no such thing as Bohemia in London.

But there is ; and any one who considers the
number of adventurous young people fresh from con-
ventional homes, and consequently ready to live in
any way other than that to which they have been

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 5

accustomed, who come to town with heads more full
of poetry than sense, must realise how impossible it is
that there should not be. Indeed, it is likely that
our Bohemia, certainly in these days, is more real
than that of Paris, for the Quartier is so well adver-
tised that it has become fashionable, and Americans
who can afford it go there, and almost outnumber
the others who cannot afford anything else. Of
course, in London too, there are people who are
Bohemians for fun ; but not so many, because the
fun in London is not an organised merriment that
any one may enjoy who can pay for it. Visitors to
London do not find, as they do in Paris, men waiting
about the principal streets, offering themselves as
guides to Bohemia. The fun is in the life itself, and
not to be had less cheaply than by living it.

I wanted to get into my book, for example, the
precarious, haphazard existence of the men who dine
in Soho not because it is an unconventional thing to
do, but because they cannot usually afford to dine
at all, and get better and merrier dinners for their
money there than elsewhere, the men who, when less
opulent, eat mussels from a street stall without
unseemly amusement at the joke of doing so, but
as solemnly as you and I eat through our respect-
able meals, solacing themselves meanwhile with the
thought of high ideals that you and I, being better
fed, find less real, less insistent.

It was a difficult thing to attempt ; if I had simply
written from the outside, and announced that oddly
dressed artists ate bananas in the streets, that is all
that could be said ; there is an end of it ; the meaning,

6 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

the essence of the thing is lost, and it becomes
nothing but a dull observation of a phenomenon of
London life. There was nothing for it but to
confess, to write in the first person of my own
uncomfortable happy years, and to trust that actual
experience would give blood and life, at least
to some parts of the picture. Now that would
have been very pleasant for me, in spite of the risk
that a succession of pictures connected by an ego,
should seem a conceited ego exhibiting itself by means
of a succession of pictures. But there was another
bother; for the life would not have been expressed
if there were no suggestion of the older time, the
memories of famous artists and writers that contri-
bute to make the poetry of the present. Now it was
impossibly ludicrous to be continually flying off' from
the detailed experience of an insignificant person like
myself, to dismiss in a cursory sentence men like
Johnson, Hazlitt, or Sir Richard Steele. Separate
chapters had to be written on historical Bohemia,
giving in as short a space as possible something of
the atmosphere of reminiscence belonging to par-
ticular localities. There are consequently two
separate threads intertwisted through the book,
general, historical and descriptive chapters, as im-
personal as an egotist could make them, chapters on
Chelsea, Fleet Street, Soho and Hampstead, and any
number of single incidents and talks about different
aspects of Bohemian life — in short, all the hotch-
potch that would be likely to come out if a Bohemian
were doing his best to let some one else understand
his manner of living. A chapter on the old book-

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 7

stalls will jostle with an account of the Soho coffee-
houses. One chapter will be a straightforward
narrative of an adventure, another a discussion of
the amazing contrast between the country and the
town, the life of the Bohemians and the places from
which they come. The whole, I had hoped, would
give something like an impression of the untidy life
itself.

Bohemia is an abominable word, with an air of
tinsel and sham, and of suburban daughters who
criticise musical comedies seriously, and remind you
twice in an afternoon that they are quite unconven-
tional. But the best dictionaries define it as : " (1)
A certain small country; (2) The gypsy life; (3)
Any disreputable life; (4) The life of writers and
painters " — in an order of descent that is really quite
pleasant. And on consulting a classic work to find
synonyms for a Bohemian, I find the following :
" Peregrinator, wanderer, rover, straggler, rambler,
bird of passage, gadabout, vagrant, scatterling, land-
loper, waif and stray, wastrel, loafer, tramp, vagabond,
nomad, gypsy, emigrant, and peripatetic somnambu-
list." If we think of the word in the atmosphere of
all those others, it is not so abominable after all, and
I cannot find a better.

I suppose Villon is the first remembered Bohemian
poet. He had an uncomfortable life and an untidy
death.1 Hunted from tavern to tavern, from place
to place, stealing a goose there, killing a man here

1 Probably.

8 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

in a drunken brawl, and swinging from a gibbet in
the end (though we have no proof of this), he is a
worthy example for the consideration of all young
people who wish to follow literature or art without
any money in their pockets. But even his fate would
not deter them. Indeed, when I was setting out, I
even wished to emulate him, and was so foolish as
to write to an older friend that I wanted to be such
another vagabond as Villon, and work and live in my
own free way. The conceit of it, the idiocy — and
yet, it is something to remember that you have once
felt like that. My friend wrote back to me that of
all kinds of bondage, vagabondage was the most cruel
and the hardest from which to escape. I believe
him now, but then I adventured all the same.

Looking from Villon down the centuries, Grub
Street seems to be the next important historical fact,
a street of mean lodgings where poor hacks wrote
rubbish for a pittance, or starved — not a merry
place.

And then to the happy time in England, when
the greatest English critic, William Hazlitt, could
write his best on a dead player of hand fives; when
Reynolds, the friend of Keats, could write a sonnet
on appearing before his lady with a black eye, " after
a casual turn up," and speak of "the great men of
this age in poetry, philosophy, or pugilism"

Then we think of the Romantics in France.
There was the sturdy poet, Petrus Borel, setting up
his "Tartars' Camp" in a house in Paris, with its
one defiant rule pasted on the door : " All clothing
is prohibited." There was Balzac, writing for a

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 9

fortnight on end without leaving his garret. There
was Theophile Gautier, wishing he had been born in
the pomp of ancient days, contenting his Grecian
instincts by writing in a big, bare room, with foils
and boxing gloves lying always ready for the other
Romantics who shared the place with him, and played
the Porthos and the A ram is with a noble scorn for
the nineteenth century. There was the whole jolly
crowd that clapped Hernani into fame, and lasted
bravely on through Murger's day — Murger, with his
Scenes de la Vie de Boheme, and his melancholy verdict,
" Bohemia is the preface to the Academy, the
Hospital, or the Morgue."

And now, to-day, in this London Bohemia of ours,
whose existence is denied by the ignorant, all these
different atmospheres are blended into as many
colours as the iridescence of a street gutter. Our
Villons do not perhaps kill people, but they are not
without their tavern brawls. They still live and
write poetry in the slums. One of the best books
of poetry published in recent years was dated from
a dosshouse in the Marshalsea.1 Our Petrus Borels,
our Gautiers, sighing still for more free and spacious
times, come fresh from Oxford or Cambridge, write
funny sonnets lamenting the age of Casanova, and,
in a pleasant harmless way, do their best to imitate
him. Our Reynoldses are mad over football, and
compose verse and prose upon the cricket field. Our
Romantics strut the streets in crimson sashes, carry
daggers for their own delight, and fence and box and
compose extravagant happy tales. Grub Street has

1 " The Soul's Destroyer." By W. H. Davies.

10 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

broken up into a thousand garrets, but the hacks
are still the same. And, as for Murgers young men,
as for Collin, as for Schaunard with his hundred ways
of obtaining a five franc piece, why I knew one who
lived well for a year on three and sixpence of his
own money and a handsome borrowing face.

« Where are they all ? " you ask. « Where is the
Quartier ? " It is difficult to give an answer without
telling lies. For London is more unwieldy than
Paris. It is impossible to draw a map, and say,
pointing with a finger, " Here are artists, here
romantic poets, here playwrights, here writers of
polemic prose." They are scattered over a dozen
districts, and mingled all together. There are only
a few obvious grouping points. The newspapers, of
course, are in Fleet Street, and the writers find that
much of their life goes here, in the taverns and coffee-
houses round about. The British Museum is in
Bloomsbury, and students take lodgings in the old
squares and in the narrow streets that run up to the
Gray's Inn Road. The Charing Cross Road is full
of bookshops where all, when they can afford it, buy.
Soho is full of restaurants where all, when they can
afford it, dine. And Chelsea, dotted with groups of
studios, full of small streets, and cheap lodgings, is
alive with artists and writers, and rich with memories
of both.

But Bohemia may be anywhere. It is a tint in
the spectacles through which one sees the world in
youth. It is not a place, but an attitude of mind.

AN

ARRIVAL
IN
BOHEMIA

AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA

I HAD hesitated before coming fairly into Bohemia, and
lived for some time in the house of relations a little
way out of London, spending all my days in town,
often, after a talking party in a Bloomsbury flat or a
Fleet Street tavern, missing the last train out at
night and being compelled to walk home in the early
morning. Would I were as ready for such walks
now. Why, then, for the sake of one more half hour
of laugh and talk and song, the miles of lonely trudge
seemed nothing, and all the roads were lit with lamps
of poetry and laughter. Down Whitehall I would
walk to Westminster, where I would sometimes turn
into a little side street in the island of quiet that
lies behind the Abbey, and glance at the windows of
a house where a poet lived whose works were often in
my pocket, to see if the great man were yet abed,
and, if the light still glowed behind the blind, to
wait a little in the roadway, and dream of the rich
talk that might be passing, or picture him at work,
or reading, or perhaps turning over the old prints I
knew he loved.

Then on, along the Embankment, past the grey
mass of the Tate Gallery, past the bridges, looking
out over the broad river, now silver speckled in the
moonlight, now dark, with bright shafts of light

13

14 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

across the water and sparks of red and green from
the lanterns on the boats. When a tug, with a train
of barges, swept from under a bridge and brought
me the invariable, unaccountable shiver with the cold
noise of the waters parted by her bows, I would lean
on the parapet and watch, and catch a sight of a dark
figure silent upon her, and wonder what it would be
like to spend all my days eternally passing up and
down the river, seeing ships and men, and knowing
no hours but the tides, until her lights would vanish
round a bend, and leave the river as before, moving
on past the still lamps on either side.

I would walk on past Chelsea Bridge, under the
trees of Cheyne Walk, thinking, with heart uplifted
by the unusual wine, and my own youth, of the great
men who had lived there, and wondering if Don
Saltero's still knew the ghosts of Addison and Steele
—and then I would laugh at myself, and sing a
snatch of a song that the evening had brought me,
or perhaps be led suddenly to simple matters by
the sight of the bright glow of light about the
coffee-stall, for whose sake I came this way, instead
of crossing the river by Westminster or Vauxhall
Bridge.

There is something gypsyish about coffee-stalls,
something very delightful. Since those days I have
known many : there is one by Kensington Church,
where I have often bought a cup of coffee in the
morning hours, to drink on the paupers' bench along
the railings ; there is another by Netting Hill Gate,
and another in Sloane Square, where we used to take
late suppers after plays at the Court Theatre ; but

THE COFFEE STALL

AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 17

there is none I have loved so well as this small un-
tidy box on the Embankment. That was a joyous
night when for the first time the keeper of the stall
recognised my face and honoured me with talk as a
regular customer. More famous men have seldom
made me prouder. It meant something, this vanity
of being able to add " Evening, Bill ! " to my order
for coffee and cake. Coffee and cake cost a penny
each and are very good. The coffee is not too hot
to drink, and the cake would satisfy an ogre. I
used to spend a happy twenty minutes among the
loafers by the stall. There were several soldiers
sometimes, and one or two untidy women, and, almost
every night, a very small, very old man with a broad
shoulder to him, and a kindly eye. The younger
men chaffed him, and the women would laughingly
offer to kiss him ; but the older men, who knew his
history, were gentler, and often paid for his cake
and coffee, or gave him the luxury of a hard-boiled
egg. He had once owned half the boats on the
reach, and been a boxer in his day. I believe now
that he is dead. There were others too, and one,
with long black hair and very large eyes set wide
apart, attracted me strangely, as he stood there,
laughing and talking scornfully and freely with the
rest. One evening he walked over the bridge after
leaving the stall, and I, eager to know him, left my
coffee untasted, and caught him up, and said some-
thing or other, to which he replied. He adjusted
his strides to mine, and walked on with me towards
Clapham. Presently I told him my name and asked
for his. He stopped under a lamp-post and looked

18 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

at me. « I am an artist,11 said he, « who does not
paint, and a famous man without a name." Then,
angry perhaps at my puzzled young face, he swung
oft' without saying good-night into one of the side
streets. I have often wondered who and what he
was, and have laughed a little sadly to think how
characteristic he was of the life I was to learn.
How many artists there are who do not paint ; how
many a man without a name, famous and great within
his own four walls. He avoided me after that, and I
was too shy ever to question him again.

Often the dawn was in the sky before I left the
coffee-stall and crossed the river, and then the grey
pale mist with the faint lights in it, and the mysteri-
ous ghosts of chimneys and bridges, looming far away,
seemed the most beautiful thing in life, one of those
promises that are fairer than reality. It was easy to
be a poet, gazing into that dream that hung over the
river ; easy to be a painter, with that delicate picture
in my eyes. Sometimes, in the middle of the bridge
I choked in my throat, and walked on as fast as I
could, with my eyes straight before me, that I might
leave it, before spoiling that beautiful vision by
another even in a little less perfect.

The rest of the journey lay between red brick
houses, duteously asleep ; ugly flats, ugly villas, as
like to each other as the sheets from a printing press,
lined the roads, until my eyes were rested from their
ugliness by a mile and a half of green and sparsely
wooded common land, sometimes young and almost
charming on a dewy morning, sometimes old, ragged
and miserable in rain. Then I had to turn once

AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 19

more into the wilderness of brick, through which I
passed to the ugliest and most abominable of London's
unpleasing suburbs.

I do not know quite what it is that leads artists
and writers and others whose lives are not cut to the
regular pattern, to leave their homes, or the existences
arranged for them by their relations, for a life that
is seldom as comfortable, scarcely ever as healthy, and
nearly always more precarious. It is difficult not to
believe that the varying reasons are one in essence as
they are one in effect, but I cannot find fewer than
three examples, if all cases are to be illustrated.

There is young Mr. William Hazlitt, after being
allowed to spend eight years doing little but walking
and thinking, suddenly returns to his childhood's plan
of becoming an artist, works like mad, gets a com-
mission to copy Titians in the Louvre, lives for an
eager four months in Paris, and returns to spend
three years tramping the North of England as an
itinerant portrait painter. De Quincey, on the other
hand, walks out from his school gates, with twelve
guineas (ten borrowed) in his pockets, to his adven-
turous vagabondage on the Welsh hills, for no more
urgent reason than that his guardians' ideas do not
jump with his in the matter of sending him instantly
to college. These are the men marked out early for
art or literature. The one sets out because his old
ones are not in sufficient subservience to him, the
other because they think him a genius and allow him
to do what he wants. In both of these cases the
essential reason seems to be that when either wants
anything he wants it pretty badly. But besides these

20 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

there are the men who, like Goldsmith, take up an
art by accident or necessity in later years, and more
often than not are sent into the world because they
are failures at home, and given their fifty guineas to
clear out by an Uncle Contarine who wishes to relieve
his brother's or sister's anxieties rather than those of
his nephew.

Things were so a hundred years ago, and they are
still the same. I was very young, and mad to be a
Villon, hungry to have a life of my own. My wishes
told my conscience twenty times a day that my work
(my work ! ) could but ill progress in a house where
several bustling lives were vividly lived in directions
opposite to my own desires. I think my relations
must have been quite as anxious to get rid of me.
At last I spent a morning prowling round Chelsea, and
found an empty room with four windows all in good
condition, and a water supply two floors below, at a
rent of a few shillings a week. I paid for a week in
advance and went home, ordering a grocer's van to
call after lunch. The van drew up before the door.
I announced its meaning, packed all my books into
it, a railway rug, a bundle of clothes and my one
large chair, said good-bye to my relations, and then,
after lighting my clay pipe, and seating myself com-
placently on the tailboard, gave the order to start.
I was as Columbus setting forth to a New World, a
gypsy striking his tent for unknown woods ; I felt as
if I had been a wanderer in a caravan from my child-
hood as I loosened my coat, opened one or two more
buttons in the flannel shirt that I wore open at the
neck, and saw the red brick houses slipping slowly

AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA

21

away behind me. The pride of it, to be sitting
behind a van that I had hired myself to carry my
own belongings to a place of my own choosing; to
be absolutely a free man, whose most distant desires

seemed instantly attainable. I have never known
another afternoon like that.

It was very warm, and the bushes in the tiny
suburban gardens were grey with dust, and dust
clouds blew up from the road, and circled about the
back of the van, and settled on my face and in my

22 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

nostrils as I broadened my chest and snuffed the air
of independence. As we came through the busier
thoroughfares, errand boys, and sometimes even
loafers, who should have had a greater sympathy with
me, jeered at my pipe and my clothes, doubtless en-
couraged by the boy who sat in front and drove, and
was (I am sure of it) carrying on a winking conversa-
tion. But I minded them no more than the dust.
For was I not now a free Bohemian, on my way to
the haunts of Savage, and Goldsmith, and Rossetti,
and Lamb, and Whistler, and Steele, and Carlyle, and
all the others whose names and histories I knew far
better than their works. No, I will not do myself
that injustice ; I knew nothing of Carlyle's life, but
his w Sartor Resartus " was my Bible ; I knew little of
Lamb, but I had had " Elia " bound privily in the
covers of a school Caesar, to lessen the tedium of well-
hated Latin lessons, I remember being called upon to
construe, and, with unthinking enjoyment, reciting
aloud to an astonished class arid master the praises of
Roast Pork. I knew the works of these two better
than their lives. And Carlyle had lived in Chelsea,
whither my grocer's van of happiness was threading
the suburban streets, and Lamb had lived in a court
only a stoned-throw from the office of the little news-
paper whose payments for my juvenile essays had
helped my ambition to overleap the Thames and find
a lodging for itself.

Over the Albert Bridge we moved as leisurely as
the old horse chose to walk in the August sun, and
then a little way to the left, and up to the King's
Road, by way of Cheyne Walk and Bramerton Street,

AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 23

past the very house of Carlyle, and so near Leigh
Hunt's old home that I could have changed the time
of day with him had his kindly ghost been leaning
from a window. And I thought of these men as I
sat, placid and drunk with pride, on the tailboard of
the van. Pipe after pipe I smoked, and the floating
blue clouds hung peacefully in the air behind me, like
the rings in the water made by a steady oarsman.
Their frequency was the only circumstance that
betrayed my nervousness.

We turned into the King's Road, that was made to
save King Charles's coach horses when he drove to see
Nell Gwynne. We followed it to the World's End,
where I thought of Congreve's " Love for Love."
and having the book with me in the van, glanced, for
pleasure, in the black print, though I knew the thing
by heart, to the charming scene where Mrs. Frail and
Mrs. Foresight banter each other on their indiscre-
tions ; you remember : Mrs. Foresight taunts her
sister with driving round Covent Garden in a hackney
coach, alone, with a man, and adds that it is a re-
flection on her own fair modesty, whereupon sprightly
Mrs. Frail retorts :

" Pooh ! here's a clutter, why should it reflect upon
you ? I don't doubt but that you have thought
yourself happy in a hackney coach before now. If
I had gone to Knightsbridge, or to Chelsea, or to
Spring Gardens, or Barn Elms with a man alone,
something might have been said."

" Why, was I ever in any of these places ? What
do you mean, sister ? "

24 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

« Was I ? What do you mean ? "

" You have been at a worse place."

" I at a worse place, and with a man ! "

" I suppose you would not go alone to the World's
End?"

"The World's End? What, do you mean to
banter me?"

« Poor Innocent ! You don't know that there is a
place called the World's End? I'll swear you can
keep your countenance purely ; you'd make an ad-
mirable player. . . . But look you here, now —
Where did you lose this gold bodkin? Oh, sister,
sister ! "

"My bodkin?"

« Nay, 'tis yours ; look at it."

« Well, if you go to that, where did you find this
bodkin ? Oh, sister, sister — sister every way."

Was ever a more admirable little scene to read
upon the tailboard of a van on a hot summer's day ?
I made my boy pull up, and go in at the tavern and
bring out a couple of pints of ale, old ale, one for
me, for once his lord and my own master, and one
for him to drink my health in, and the health of
William Congreve, who doubtless drank here many
years ago, when green fields spread between here and
Westminster, and this was a little inn, a naughty
little inn, where gay young men brought gay young
women to talk private business in the country. I
saw them sitting in twos outside the tavern with a
bottle of wine before them on a trestle-board, and
a pair of glasses, or perhaps one between them, graven

AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 25

with the portrait of a tall ship, or a motto of love
and good fellowship.

And then, when the ale was done, we went on,
and I forgot old Chelsea, the riverside village in the
fields, to think upon how I was to spend the night in
this new Chelsea, haunted, it was true, by the ghosts
of winebibbers and painters and poets, but, to me
who was to live in it, suddenly become as frightening
and as solitary as an undiscovered land.

In a street of grey houses we stopped at a corner
where an alley turned aside ; we stopped at the corner
house, which was a greengrocer's shop. Slipping
down from the tailboard of the van, I looked up at
the desolate, curtainless windows of the top floor that
showed where I was to sleep.

The landlord was an observant, uncomfortable
wretch, who ran the shop on the ground floor, though
in no way qualified for a greengrocer, a calling that
demands something more of stoutness and juiciness of
nature than ever he could show. He watched with
his fingers in the pockets of his lean waistcoat the
unloading of my van, without offering to help us,
and when my vassal and I had carried the things up
into the bare top room, he came impertinently in,
and demanded if this were all I had brought?
Where was my furniture ? He was for none of your
carpet-bag lodgers.

" I am just going out to get my furniture," I
replied, and, as if by accident, let him see my one
gold piece, while from another pocket I paid the boy
the seven shillings agreed upon as the hire of the
van, with an extra shilling for himself. He watched

26 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

unimpressed, till I moved towards the door with such
an air that he withdrew with a little more deference,
though he chose to descend the stairs before me. I
hated him. His manner had almost been a damper
on my happiness.

From the nearest grocer's shop I bought three
shillings' worth of indifferently clean packing-cases,
and paid an extra sixpence to have them taken home
at once. I went on along the Fulham Road, buying
apples, and cheese, and bread, and beer, till my
pockets and arms were laden with as much as they
could carry. When I returned, the boxes had been
delivered, and my landlord was standing indignant
in the middle of my room.

" You must understand " he began at once.

My temper was up. " I do," I replied. " Have
you the key of the door ? Thank you. Good-night,"
and smiled happily to myself as the shuffling foot-
steps of that mean-spirited greengrocer died away
down the stairs.

The lodging was a large square place, and did not
(I admit it now, though I would have shot myself
for the thought then) look very cheerful. Bare and
irregular boards made its floor ; its walls were dull
grey green ; my books were piled in a cruelly careless
heap in one corner, my purchases in another; the
pile of packing-cases in the middle made it appear
the very lumber room it was.

The boxes were soon arranged into a table and
chairs. Two, placed one above the other on their
sides, served for a cupboard. Three set end to end

AN ARRIVAL IN BOHEMIA 27

made an admirable bed. Indeed my railway rug
gave it an air of comfort, even of opulence, spread
carefully over the top. The cheese was good, and
also the beer, but I had forgotten to buy candles,
and it was growing dark before that first untidy
supper was finished. So I placed a packing-case
chair by the open window, and dipped through a
volume of poetry, an anthology of English ballads,
that had been marked at ninepence on an open book-
stall in the Charing Cross Road.

But I did not read much. The sweet summer air,
cool in the evening, seemed to blow a kiss of promise
on my forehead. The light was dying. I listened
for the hoot of a steamer on the river, or the bells
of London churches ; I heard with elation the feet
of passengers, whom I could see but dimly, beating
on the pavement far below. A rough voice was
scolding in the room under mine, and some one was
singing a song. Now and again I looked at the
poetry, though it was really too dark to see, and a
thousand hopes and fears flitting across the page
carried me out of myself, but not so far that I did
not know that this was my first night of freedom,
that for the first time in my life I was alone in a
room of my own, free to live for poetry, for philo-
sophy, for all the things that seemed then to matter
more than life itself. I thought of Crabbe coming
to London with three pounds in his pockets, and a
volume of poems; I thought of Chatterton, and
laughed at myself, but was quite a little pleased at
the thought. Brave dreams flooded my mind, and I

28 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

sat content long after it was dusk, and smoked, and
sent with infinite enjoyment puffs of pale smoke out
into the night ! I did not go to bed at all, but fell
asleep leaning on the window-sill, to wake with a cold
in my head.

OLD AND NEW CHELSEA

OLD AND NEW CHELSEA

CHELSEA has waged more than a hundred years'
war with the common sense of the multitude. Long
before Leigh Hunt settled with his odd household in
Upper Cheyne Row, with Carlyle for a neighbour,
Chelsea had begun to deserve its reputation as a
battlefield and bivouacking ground for art and
literature.

Somewhere about 1690 an inventive barber and
ex-servant called Salter, who renamed himself Don
Saltero, with an eye to trade, set up at No. 18
Cheyne Walk a coffee-house and mad museum.
Those who wished for coffee visited the museum, and
those who came to view the curiosities — which were
many and various, including a wild man of the
woods, and the tobacco pipe of the Emperor of
Morocco — refreshed their minds with coffee. Some
trades seem invented to provide the material of
delightful literature ; barbers especially are men
whom the pen does but tickle to caress. Don
Quixote met such an one in the adventure of the
helmet ; Shibli Bagarag of Shiraz, the shaver of
Shagpat, the son of Shimpoor, the son of Shoolpi,
the son of Shullum, was a second ; and Don
Saltero seems to have been just such another. Steele

32 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

wrote a laughing friendly portrait of him in the
Tatler:—

"When I came into the Coffee House I had no
time to salute the Company before my Eye was taken
by ten thousand Gimcracks round the Room, and on
the Ceiling. When my first astonishment was over
comes to me a Sage of a thin and meagre Counten-
ance ; which aspect made me doubt whether Reading
or Fretting had made him so philosophick. But I
very soon perceived him to be of that Sect which the
Ancients called Ginquistae; in our Language Tooth
Drawers. I immediately had a respect for the man ;
for these practical philosophers go upon a very
rational Hypothesis, not to cure but to take away the
Part affected. My Love of Mankind made me very
benevolent to Mr. Salter, for such is the name of this
Eminent Barber and Antiquary."

Steele was not the only man of letters who loved
the place. Doctor Tobias Smollett, when he lived in
Chelsea, used to stroll in here of an afternoon. On
Sundays he was busy feeding poor authors at his own
house on "beef, pudding, and potatoes, port, punch,
and Calvert's Entire butt-beer," but on week-days he
went often to Don Saltero's. Before his time Benjamin
Franklin, a journeyman printer,had dutifully examined
the place as one of the London sights. Indeed, against
the inexcusable autobiography of that austere, correct
fellow we must set the fact of his swim back from
Chelsea down to Blackfriars. We can forgive him
much righteousness for that. But Steele's is the
pleasantest memory of the old museum. I think of
the meagre barber, proud of his literary patrons,

OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 33

serving coffee to them in the room decorated with
gim cracks on ceiling, walls, and floor ; but I should
have loved above all to see Steele swing in, carelessly
dressed, with his whole face smiling as he showed Mr.
Salter his little advertisement in the lazy pages of
the Taikr, fresh and damp from the press.

Though No. 18 has long been a private house,
Chelsea still knows such characters as the man who
made it famous. I lost sight of one of them only a
year or two ago. I forget his name, but he called
himself the "P.B.," which letters stood for "The
Perfect Bohemian." He wrote most abominably bad
verses, and kept a snug little restaurant in the
Fulham Road, a happy little feeding-house after the
old style, now, alas ! fallen into a more sedate
proprietorship. Half a dozen of us used to go there
at one time, and drank coffee, and ate fruit stewed by
the poet himself. We sat on summer evenings in a
small partly roofed yard behind the house. Creepers
hung long trails with fluttering leaves over green
painted tables, and, as dark came on, the P.B. would
light Japanese lanterns that swung among the foliage,
and then, sitting on a table, would read his poetry
aloud to his customers. The restaurant did not pay
better than was to be expected, and the P.B. became
an artist's model. He was fine-looking, with curly
hair, dark eyes, a high brow, and the same meagreness
about his face that Steele noticed in the ingenious
barber. I hope he made a fortune as a model. He
must have been an entertaining sitter.

I had been looking for a picture of old irregular
family life when I came on Carlyle's description of the

c

34 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

Hunts. It is curious how slowly Bohemia changes.
The last fifty years, that have altered almost every-
thing else, have left the little Bohemian family life
that there is very like this, at any rate in essentials :
" Hunt's household. Nondescript ! Unutterable !
Mrs. Hunt asleep on cushions ; four or five beautiful,
strange, gypsy-looking children running about in
undress, whom the lady ordered to get us tea. The
eldest boy, Percy — a sallow black-haired youth of
sixteen, with a kind of dark cotton nightgown on —
went whirling about like a familiar, pervading every-
thing; an indescribable dreamlike household. . . .
Hunt's house excels all you have ever heard of ...
a poetical Tinkerdom, without parallel even in
literature. In his family room, where are a sickly
large wife and a whole school of well-conditioned wild
children, you will find half a dozen old rickety chairs
gathered from half a dozen different hucksters, and
all seeming engaged, and just pausing, in a violent
hornpipe. On these and round them and over the
dusty table and ragged carpets lie all kinds of litter
— books, paper, eggshells and, last night when I was
there, the torn half of a half-quartern loaf. His own
room above stairs, into which alone I strive to enter,
he keeps cleaner. It has only two chairs, a bookcase
and a writing-table ; yet the noble Hunt receives you
in his Tinkerdom in the spirit of a king, apologises
for nothing, placea you in the best seat, takes a
window-sill himself if there is no other, and then,
folding closer his loose flowing " muslin cloud " of a
printed nightgown, in which he always writes, com-
mences the liveliest dialogue on philosophy and the

OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 35

prospects of man (who is to be beyond measure happy
yet), which again he will courteously terminate the
moment you are bound to go."

As for Carlyle's own house, just round the corner,
he left a description of that too, in a letter to his
wife, written to her when he took it.

"... on the whole a most massive, roomy,
sufficient old house, with places, for example, to hang,
say, three dozen hats or cloaks on, and as many
curious and queer old presses and shelved closets (all
tight and well painted in their way) as would satisfy
the most covetous Goody : rent thirty-five pounds. . . .
We lie safe at a bend of the river, away from all the
great roads, have air and quiet hardly inferior to
Craigenputtock, an outlook from the back windows
into more leafy regions, with here and there a red
high -peaked old roof looking through, and see
nothing of London except by day the summits of
St. Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, and
by night the gleam of the great Babylon, affronting
the peaceful skies. The house itself is probably the
best we have ever lived in — a right old strong roomy
brick house built nearly one hundred and fifty years
ago, and likely to see three races of these modern
fashionables come down."

There it stands still, and in a way to fulfil the
prophecy. The houses have closed in about its quiet
street. The little villagery of Chelsea has been
engulfed in the lava stream of new cheap buildings.
The King's Road thunders with motor buses and
steam vans, but here in this quiet Cheyne Row the
sun yet falls as peacefully as ever on the row of trees

36 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

along the pavement, and, over the way, on the stiff
front of the " sufficient old house," in at the windows
where Carlyle sat and smoked long pipes with
Tennyson, and talked to « my old friend Fitzgerald,
who might have spent his time to much better
purpose than in busying himself with the verses of
that old Mahometan blackguard," Omar Khayyam.
They tell me that upstairs is still the double-walled
room where so many groans were hurled at unnecessary
noises and the evils of digestion, and where, in spite
of all, so many great books came alive on the paper.
There is a medallion on the front of the house, and
visitors are allowed to nose about inside. But it is
better to forget the visitors, as you look down that
shady street on a summer's day, and to think only of
the old poet-philosopher who was so happy there and
so miserable, and loved so well the river that flows
statelily past the foot of the street. There, looking
out over the water, from the narrow gardens along
Cheyne Walk, you may see his statue, the patron
saint of so many wilfully bad-tempered fellows, who
cannot, as he could, vindicate their bad temper by
their genius.

The river made Chelsea the place it is, a place
different specially from every other suburb of the
town. Mr. G. K. Chesterton says he loves Battersea,
" because it is the only suburb that retains a local
patriotism."" Chelsea has a local patriotism too, but
of another kind, the patriotism of members of a
foreign legion. Chelsea does not breed artists, she
adopts them ; but they would die for her. But
apart from this patriotism, she has a local atmosphere

OLD AND NEW CHELSEA

37

that has nothing to do with
the artists, the feeling of a river-
side village that not even the
rival highway of the King's
Road has been able to destroy.
Chelsea was once such a place for
Londoners as Chertsey is now.
People came there to be near
the river. Visitors to the World's
End, then the limit of fashion,
where galknts brought their Mrs.
Frails, came by boat. Big country
houses were built round about.
Sir Thomas More's house, where
he entertained Holbein and the
observant Erasmus, was built in
1521 where Beaufort Street is
now, and had "a pleasant pro-
spect of the Thames and the
fields beyond." And all the
best memories of old Chelsea
rest in the narrow stately fronted
houses along Cheyne
Walk, or in the little
taverns by the river-
side, or in the narrow
streets that run up
from the Embank-
ment, just as the vil-
lage streets might have
been expected to run
up from the banks of

38 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

the stream when, in the old days, people came here
to bathe and be merry in the sunshine.

Three of those Cheyne Walk houses must be
mentioned here. In 1849 some members of the
newly-established Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood looked
over No. 16, "with which they were greatly taken.
It is capable of furnishing four good studios, with a
bedroom, and a little room that would do for a
library, attached to each. « P. R. B.' might be written
on the door, and stand for < Please Ring the Bell'
to the profane. . . ." How cheerful that is. But
the house was not taken till a dozen years afterwards,
when Rossetti, whose life had been broken by the
death of his wife nine months before, took it with
Swinburne and Meredith. In the back garden he
kept all manner of strange beasts, zebus, armadillos,
and the favourite of all, the wombat, an animal
almost canonised by the Pre-Raphaelites. " Do you
know the wombat at the Zoo?" asked Rossetti,
before he had one of his own, " a delightful creature,
the most comical little beast." They used in the
early days to make pilgrimages to Regent's Park on
purpose to see it, and in Lady Burne-Jones's life of
her husband she records how the windows in the
Union at Oxford, whitened while Morris and Rossetti
and the rest were decorating, were covered with
sketches of wombats in delightful poses. I wish I
could get a picture of one to make a jolly island in
the text of this book.

Going west along Cheyne Walk, past Oakley
Street and the statue of Carlyle, past old Chelsea
Church, we come to Whistler's lofty studio-house, a

OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 39

grey magnificence of which it is impossible to tire.
Here lived Whistler in his own way, and flaunted
his own way of living. He had some sport with his
life. There is a tale told of him before he lived
here, when he had the White House in Tite Street,
that is very pertinent to this book, and is the more
interesting in that it is the duplicate of one of Sir
Richard Steele's exploits. Mr. William Rossetti
gives the story in his big book of reminiscences, and
Johnson in almost the same terms tells the same tale
of Steele, who is known to have rented a house some-
where along the waterside. Here is the Steele story ;
the Whistler is exactly similar, but I have not the
book in the house :

" Sir Richard Steele one day having invited to his
house a great number of persons of the first quality,
they were surprised at the number of liveries which
surrounded the table ; and after dinner, when wine
and mirth had set them free from the observations
of a rigid ceremony, one of them inquired of Sir
Richard how such an expensive train of domestics
could be consistent with his fortunes. Sir Richard
very frankly confessed that they were fellows of whom
he would willingly be rid. And then, being asked
why he did not discharge them, declared that they
were bailiffs, who had introduced themselves with an
execution, and whom, since he could not send them
away, he had thought it convenient to embellish with
liveries, that they might do him credit while they
stayed."

Johnson does not say whether it was in Chelsea
that this occurred. So it is safer, and at least as

40 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

pleasant, to read Whistler for Steele, and imagine
the dinner party in Tite Street. The humour of it
would have delighted either of these very different
men. Whistler must have carried it off with a superb
nicety, but it is not told that his friends paid up,
and set him free, as they did for Dick Steele. It
is possible he would have resented it.

Further along Cheyne Walk, beyond Battersea
Bridge, where the stately houses dwindle into a
regular little riverside street, with cottages, and non-
descript shops, and nautical taverns, with old quays
and landing stairs just over the way, is No. 118, a
tiny red-tiled house, a little below the level of the
street, set back between an inn and a larger house,
behind faded wooden palings, and a few shrubs.
There are birds' nests in the creepers that cover the
walls and twist about the windows. Here Turner
lived under an assumed name (they thought him an
old sea captain) and climbed the roof to watch the
sunsets, as a retired sailor might watch for small
shipping coming down the river. Here he died in
1851, a tired old man, only a few years after Ruskin
had proved to the world that of all modern painters
he was the greatest and least honoured.

Now, in the twentieth century, the riverside streets
only live their old lives in the minds of the young
and unsuccessful who walk their pavements in the
summer evenings. Those who rent houses in Tite
Street or in Cheyne Walk live nicely and reverently.
They are either more respectable than Steele or
Whistler, or less magnificent. Bohemia has moved

OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 41

a little further from the river. The river has given
place to the King's Road as Chelsea's main artery,
and now the old exuberant life is lived, not in the
solemn beautiful houses by the waterside, nor in the
taverns by the deserted quays, but in the studios and
squares and narrow streets along the other thorough-
fare. There is Glebe Place, full of studios ; there is
Bramerton Street, and Flood Street, and then there
is modern Chelsea, a long strip of buildings cut by
narrow streets, between the King's Road and the
Fulham Road. Studios are dotted all about, and
at least half the ugly, lovable little houses keep a
notice of "Apartments to Let" permanently in the
windows, an apt emblem of the continual flitting that
is characteristic of the life.

But there is a time in the evening when the ir-
regulars of these days cross the King's Road and
usurp the Bohemia of the past. When it grows
too dark for painters to judge the colours of their
pictures, they flock out from the studios, some to go
up to Soho for dinner, some to stroll with wife or
friendly model in the dusk. The favourite prome-
nade is along Cheyne Walk, where the lamps shining
among the leaves of the trees cast wavering shadows
on the pavements. Only the black-and-white men,
working against time for the weekly papers, plug
on through the dark. Now and again, walking the
streets, you may look up at a window and see a man
busily drawing, with a shaded lamp throwing a
bright light on the Bristol-board before him. For
myself, I soon discovered that the dusk was meant
for indolence, and always, a little before sunset,

42 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

threaded my way to the King's Road, and so to the
river. I would leave the spider strength of the
Albert Bridge behind me, and stroll on past Batter-
sea Bridge to a promontory of embankment just
beyond, the best of all places for seeing the sunsets
up the river, and the blue mists about those four tall
chimneys of the electric generating station. I used
to lean on the balustrade there and watch the green
and golden glow fade away from the sky where those
great obelisks towered up, and think of Turner on
the roof of the little house close by ; I would watch
the small boats bobbing on their ropes, and listen for
the noises of the King's Road behind the buildings
to the right, or the clangour of the factories on the
other side of the water. And then I would turn,
and watch the butterflies of fire flash out of the dusk
and perch along the bridge in glittering clusters.
As the dark fell, lights shone out along the Embank-
ment, climbed slowly up the rigging of the boats by
the wharf, and lit up the square windows of the
houses and taverns by the waterside. Often, walk-
ing along, when the reflections followed me with long
indexes across the water as I moved, when the tugs
coming round the bend of the river lit up their red
and green, when over everything hung that mist so
miraculously blue that it took a Whistler to perceive
it, I have thought of the old times when kings and
philosophers bathed in the reeds here, and when at
night there were no lights at all, except where the
sailors were merry in a tavern, or a Steele was giving
a party in one of the big houses. I have thought of
Chelsea and her river in those days, and Chelsea and

OLD AND NEW CHELSEA 43

her river in ours, and then, as I have looked again
along the glimmering Embankment, or seen a poet
and a girl pass by arm-in-arm, with eyes wide open
to that spangled loveliness that smiles undaunted by
the stars, I have thought it not impossible that we
are the more fortunate in knowing Chelsea now.

A CHELSEA EVENING

A CHELSEA EVENING

CHELSEA seemed, in spite of all its memories, a
desolate lonely place when I woke sitting on the
packing-case by the window of my lodging on the
morning after my arrival. It became populous with
friends, through circumstances so typical of the snow-
ball growth of acquaintanceship, and of one kind of
Chelsea life, that they deserve a description in detail.
The only man I knew in Chelsea was a Japanese
artist who had been my friend in even earlier days,
when both he and I had been too poor to buy tobacco.
We had known each other pretty well, and he had
come to Chelsea some months before. I called on
him, and found him lodging in a house where he
shared a sitting-room with an actor. This man,
called Wilton, was such an actor that he seemed a
very caricature of his own species. It was a delight
to watch him. He was lying at full length on a
dilapidated sofa, so arranged that he could, without
moving, see his face in a mirror on the other side
of the room. He was very long, and in very long
fingers he held a cigarette. Sometimes, with the
other hand, he would rumple the thick black hair
over his forehead, and then he would open his eyes
as wide as he could, and glance with satisfaction
towards the looking-glass. The Japanese, twinkling

48 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

with mirth, was seated straddle wise round the back
of a chair by the fireplace, and was trying eagerly,
with short flashes of uncertain English, to reason the
actor into a piece of common sense about his pro-
fession. He jumped up when I came in, and the
actor languidly introduced himself. Then they con-
tinued the discussion. Wilton refused to believe that
observation was in any way necessary to his art.

"Pluck," he said, with a magnificent gesture,
« your characters from your own heart and soul. If
I act a king, I will be a king in my own right, and
find all majesty and pride in my own consciousness."

I thought privily that he might find that easy, but
the Japanese, reasoning more seriously, continued :
" But if you were going to act an idiot or a drunkard,
would not you ? "

" No, I would not. Every man, or all great men,
have all possibilities within them. I could be divinely
mad without ever wasting time in watching the antics
of a madman.*"

" But do you tell us you would dare to act the
drunkard, without watching to see how he walks, and
how he talks, and sings? Would you act an old
woman and get true like, without seeing first an old
woman to copy the mumbling of her lips ? "

" Ah," said the actor, with delighted logic, " but I
would never act an old woman. And you are losing
your temper, my dear fellow. Some day, when you
consider the matter more calmly, you will realise that
I am right. But do not let men of genius quarrel
over an argument."

And then, as the Japanese smiled unperceived at

A CHELSEA EVENING 49

me, and rolled a cigarette, the superb Wilton turned
himself a little on the sofa, rearranged a cushion
beneath his elbow, and began a long half-intoned
speech about newspapers, the folly of reading them,
the inconceivable idiocy of those who write for them,
and so forth, while I agreed with him at every point,
and the Japanese, who knew my means of livelihood,
chuckled quietly to himself.

The actor was happy. Flattered by my continual
agreement, the billows of his argument rolled on and
broke with increasing din along the shores of silence.
The only other sound beside the long roll of his im-
passioned dogma was the low murmur of my assent.
Give a fool a proselyte, and he will be ten times
happier than a sage without one. Wilton must have
enjoyed that afternoon. He thought he had a
proselyte in me, and he talked like a prophet, till I
wondered how it could be possible for any one man's
brain to invent such floods of nonsense. I was happy
under it all, if only on account of the quiet quizzical
smile of the Japanese, who was making a sketch of
the orator's face.

The end of it was that he fell in love with an
audience so silent, so appreciative, and decided that
he must really have me with him that night, at the
house of a lady who once a week gave an open party
for her friends. I was wanted, it was clear, as a foil
to his brilliance. It was at least an adventure, and I
agreed to come. What was the lady's name, I asked,
and what was she ?

He was too impatient to go on with his harangue to
tell me anything except that she was an artist, and

50 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

that at her rooms I would meet the best poets and
painters and men and women of spirit in the town.
« Indeed," he added, " I go there myself, regularly,
once a week."

A red-haired serving-maid brought up tea at this
moment, before he had again got fairly into the
swing of his discourse, and he withheld his oratory to
give directions for us, as to the quantities of milk and
sugar we should mix for him, together with a little
general information on the best methods of drinking
tea. The Japanese set a chair by the sofa for him,
and I carried him his cup and saucer, and a plate of
bread and butter from. the table. He ate and drank
in silence for a moment, and then broke out again in
florid talk about slavery on sugar plantations, the
text being the two lumps which, at his orders, had
been placed in his saucer. After tea, he went on
talking, talking, talking, until eight in the evening,
when he went upstairs to put on a clean collar and
to rearrange his hair.

Presently he reappeared, with a curl above his
forehead. He suggested that we should start. The
Japanese excused himself from accompanying us, and
went down to the river to make studies for some
painting upon which he was engaged. We set off
together down the Fulham Road, in the most beauti-
ful light of a summer evening. There was a glow in
the sky that was broken by the tall houses, and the
tower of the workhouse lifted bravely up into the
sunset. Below, in the blue shadows of the street,
people were moving, and some of the shops had lights
in them. It was a perfect night, and completely

A CHELSEA EVENING 51

wasted on the actor, and indeed on me too, for I
was intent on observing him. Now and again, as he
strode along the pavement, a girl would turn to look
at his tall figure, and it was plain that he noticed
each such incident with pleasure. When we came
among the shops, he would now and again do his
best to catch sight of himself in the glasses of the
windows, and occasionally to this end, would stop
with a careless air, and light a cigarette, or roll one,
or throw one away into the road. The whole world
was a pageant to him, with himself a central figure.

At last we turned to the right, between houses
with narrow gardens and little trees in front of them,
and then to the right again, till we stopped at the
end of a short street. " Her name is Gypsy,'1 he
said dramatically. " No one ever calls her anything
else." Then he swung open the garden gate, walked
up the steps of the house, and knocked vigorously
on the door. Through a window on the left I had
caught a glimpse of a silver lamp, and a brazen
candlestick, and a weird room in shaded lamplight.
I was tiptoe with excitement. For I was very young.

Some one broke off in a song inside, and quick
steps shuffled in the passage. The door was flung
open, and we saw a little round woman, scarcely more
than a girl, standing in the threshold. She looked
as if she had been the same age all her life, and would
be so to the end. She was dressed in an orange-
coloured coat that hung loose over a green skirt, with
black tassels sewn all over the orange silk, like the
frills on a red Indian's trousers. She welcomed us
with a little shriek. It was the oddest, most uncanny

52 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

little shriek, half laugh, half exclamation. It made me
very shy. It was obviously an affectation, and yet
seemed just the right manner of welcome from the
strange little creature, " goddaughter of a witch and
sister to a fairy," who uttered it. She was very dark,
and not thin, and when she smiled, with a smile that
was peculiarly infectious, her twinkling gypsy eyes
seemed to vanish altogether. Just now at the door
they were the eyes of a joyous excited child meeting
the guests of a birthday party.

The actor shook hands, and, in his annoying laugh-
able dramatic manner, introduced me as "a clever
young man who has read philosophy." I could have
kicked him.

" Come in ! " she cried, and went shuffling down
the passage in that heavy parti-coloured dress.

We left our hats and followed her into a mad
room out of a fairy tale. As soon as I saw it I
knew she could live in no other. It had been made
of two smaller chambers by the removal of the
partition wall, and had the effect of a well-designed
curiosity shop, a place that Gautier would have loved
to describe. The walls were dark green, and covered
with brilliant-coloured drawings, etchings and pastel
sketches. A large round table stood near the
window, spread with bottles of painting inks with
differently tinted stoppers, china toys, paperweights
of odd designs, ashtrays, cigarette boxes, and books ;
it was lit up by a silver lamp, and there was an urn
in the middle of it, in which incense was burning.
A woolly monkey perched ridiculously on a pile of
portfolios, and grinned at the cast of a woman's

A CHELSEA EVENING 53

head, that stood smiling austerely on the top of a
black cupboard, in a medley of Eastern pottery and
Indian gods. The mantel-shelves, three stories high,
were laden with gimcracks. A low bookcase,
crammed and piled with books, was half hidden
under a drift of loose pieces of music. An old
grand piano, on which two brass bedroom candle-
sticks were burning, ran back into the inner room,
where in the darkness was a tall mirror, a heap of
crimson silks, and a low table with another candle
flickering among the bottles and glasses on a tray.
Chairs and stools were crowded everywhere, and on
a big blue sofa against the wall a broadly whiskered
picture dealer was sitting, looking at a book of
Japanese prints.

We had scarcely been introduced to him, and
settled into chairs, while the little woman in the
orange coat was seating herself on a cushion, when
a quick tap sounded on the window-pane. "The
Birds," she cried, and ran back into the passage.
A moment or two later she came back, and a pair
of tiny artists, for all the world like happy sparrows,
skipped into the room. The actor knew them, and
welcomed them in his magnificent way. They were
the Benns, and had but recently married; she
modelled in clay and wax, and he was a painter
newly come from Paris. Two people better deserving
their nickname would be hard to find. They flitted
about the place, looking at the new prints hung on
the walls, at the new china toy that Gypsy had
been unable to deny herself, and chattering all the
time. Benn and I were soon friendly, and he

54 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

presently asked me to visit his studio. Just as he
gave me a card with his address upon it, for which
he had to ask his wife, he was caught by a sudden
remembrance, and turning about asked Gypsy point-
blank across the broadside of conversation, " I say,
you haven't such a thing as a big sword, have you ? "
Oh yes, but she had, and in a minute the two little
people were looking at a gigantic two-edged sword, as
long as either of them, that hung from a hook on
the wall. The actor, with a delighted exhibition of
grace and height, reached it easily down, and Benn
was for swinging it at once, with all the strength
that he had, if his wife had not instantly brought
him to sense and saved the room from devastation.
Instead, he described the picture he was painting.
The central figure, he told us, was to be an old
knight looking regretfully at the armour and weapons
he had used in his youth. This was the very sword
for his purpose.

Just then there was another tap, and two women
came in together. The first was a tall dark Scottish
girl, with a small head and a beautiful graceful neck,
very straight and splendid (I called her the Princess
at once in my fantastic boyhood), and the other a
plump jolly American.

As soon as the shaking of hands was all over, some
one asked Gypsy for a song. " Got very little voice
to-night," she coughed, " and everybody wants some-
thing to drink first. But 111 sing you a song after-
wards.'" She went through to the table with the
glasses in the inner room. " Who is for opal
hush?" she cried, and all, except the American girl

ROSSETTI'S HOUSE IN CHEYNE WALK

A CHELSEA EVENING 57

and the picture dealer, who preferred whisky, de-
clared their throats were dry for nothing else.
Wondering what the strange-named drink might be,
I too asked for opal hush, and she read the puzzle-
ment in my face. " You make it like this," she said,
and squirted lemonade from a syphon into a glass of
red claret, so that a beautiful amethystine foam rose
shimmering to the brim. "The Irish poets over in
Dublin called it so ; and once, so they say, they went
all round the town, and asked at every public-house
for two tall cymbals and an opal hush. They did
not get what they wanted very easily, and I do not
know what a tall cymbal may be. But this is the
opal hush." It was very good, and as I drank I
thought of those Irish poets, whose verses had meant
much to me, and sipped the stuff* with reverence as if
it had been nectar from Olympus.

When everybody had their glasses, Gypsy came
back into the front part of the room, and, sitting in
a high-backed chair that was covered with gold and
purple embroideries, she cleared her throat, leant for-
ward so that the lamplight fell on her weird little
face, and sang, to my surprise, the old melody :

" O the googoo bird is a giddy bird,

No other is zo gay.
O the googoo bird is a merry bird,

Her zingeth all day.
Her zooketh zweet flowers

To make her voice clear,
And when her cryeth googoo, googoo,

The zummer draweth near."

Somehow I had expected something else. It seemed

58 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

odd to hear that simple song drop word by word in
the incense-laden atmosphere of that fantastic room.

After that she chanted in a monotone one of the
poems from Mr. Yeats's " Wind among the Reeds " :

" I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread."

And then the stately Scottish girl sat down at the
old piano, and after playing an indolent little melody
over the faded yellow keys, brought out in tinkling
sweetness the best of all the songs that have ever
come to London from the sea. Nearly all the com-
pany knew it by heart and sang together :

" Farewell and adieu to you, fair Spanish ladies,
Adieu and farewell to you, ladies of Spain ;
For we've received orders for to sail for Old England,
And we may never see you, fair ladies, again.

" So we'll rant and we'll roar, like true British sailors,
We'll range and we'll roam over all the salt seas,
Until we strike anchor in the channel of Old England ;
From Ushant to Scilly 'tis thirty-five leagues."

It is no wonder that such a lad as I was then should
find the scene quite unforgettable. There was the
beautiful head of the pianist, swaying a little with her
music, and the weird group beside her — Gypsy in the
orange coat leaning over her shoulder, the two small
artists, on tiptoe, bending forward to remind them-
selves of the words, the hairy picture dealer smiling

A CHELSEA EVENING 59

on them benignantly, the actor posing against the
mantelpiece, the plump American leaning forward
with her elbows on the table, her chin in her hands,
a cigarette between her lips, with the background of
that uncanny room, with the silver lamp, the tall
column of smoke from the incense urn, and the mad
colours, that seemed^ like the discordant company, to
harmonise perfectly in those magical surroundings.

When the song was done, the actor told me how
its melody had been taken down from an old sailor in
this very room. The old fellow, brought here for
the purpose, had been shy, as well he might be, and
his mouth screwed into wrinkles so that no music
would come from it. At last they made him com-
fortable on a chair, with a glass and a pipe, and
built a row of screens all round him, that he might
not be shamed. After a minute or two, when the
smoke, rising in regular puffs above the screens, told
them that he had regained his peace of mind, some
one said, « Now, then ! " and a trembling whistling of
the tune had given a musician the opportunity to
catch the ancient melody on the keyboard of the
piano. They had thus the pride of a version of their
own, for they did not know until much later that
another had already been printed in a song-book.

Presently the American girl begged for a story.
Gypsy had spent some part of her life in the Indies,1
and knew a number of the old folk-tales, of Annansee
the spider, another Brer Rabbit in his cunning and
shrewdness, and Chim Chim the little bird, and the
singing turtle, and the Obeah Woman, who was a

1 These same tales are told among the Ashantis.

60 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

witch, " wid wrinkles deep as ditches on her brown
face."" She told them in the old dialect, in a manner
of her own. Fastening a strip of ruddy tow about
her head, so that it mingled with her own black hair,
she flopped down on the floor, behind a couple of
lighted candles, and, after a little introductory song
that she had learned from a Jamaican nurse, told
story after story, illustrating them with the help of
wooden toys that she had made herself. She told
them with such precision of phrasing that those who
came often to listen soon had them by heart, and
would interrupt her like children when, in a single
word, she went astray. To hear her was to be carried
back to the primitive days of story-telling, and to
understand, a little, how it was that the stories of
the old minstrels were handed on from man to man
with so little change upon the way.

That was my first evening of friendliness in Chel-
sea. For a long time after that I never let a week
pass without going to that strange room to listen to
the songs and tales, and to see the odd parties of
poets and painters, actors and actresses, and nonde-
script irregulars who were there almost as regularly
as I. Sometimes there would be half a dozen of us,
sometimes twenty. Always we were merry. The
evening was never wasted. There I heard poetry
read as if the ghost of some old minstrel had de-
scended on the reader, and shown how the words
should be chanted aloud. There I heard stories told
that were yet unwritten, and talk that was so good
that it seemed a pity that it never would be. There
I joined in gay jousts of caricature. There was a

A CHELSEA EVENING 61

visitors' book that we filled with drawings and
rhymes. Every evening that we met we used its
pages as a tournament field,

" And mischievous and bold were the strokes we gave,
And merrily were they received."

There, too, we used to bring our work when we were
busy upon some new thing, a painting, or a book,
and work on with fresh ardour after cheers or criti-
cism.

The party broke up on that first night soon after
the stories. We helped Gypsy to shut up the rooms
and dowse the lights, and waved our good-nights to
her as we saw her disappear into the house next door
where she lodged.

At the corner of the street the Benns and I were
alone, to walk the same way. We went down the
Fulham Road together, those two small people chat-
tering of the new picture, and I, swinging the great
sword that was to pose for it, walking by the side of
them, rejoicing in my new life and in the weight
and balance of the sword, a little pleased, boy that I
was, to be so much bigger than they, and wonder-
ing whether, if I swung the sword with sufficient
violence, I had the slightest chance of being rebuked
by a policeman for carrying a drawn weapon in the
streets.

IN THE STUDIOS

IN THE STUDIOS

A LARGE bare room, with no furniture but a divan
or a camp-bed, a couple of chairs, an easel, and a
model-stand made of a big box that holds a few
coats and hats and coloured silks that do duty in a
dozen pictures ; a big window slanting up across the
roof, with blinds to temper its light; canvases and
old paintings without frames leaning against the
walls ; the artist, his coat off' ready for work, stroll-
ing up and down with a cigarette between his lips,
looking critically and lovingly at the canvas on the
easel, and now and again pulling out his watch : that
is a fair picture of a studio at about half-past ten on
a workaday morning.

There is a tap on the door.

" Come in ! " and a girl slips into the room,
apologises for the thousandth time in her life for
being so late, and proceeds to change her clothes for
the costume that will make her the subject he wants
for his picture, and then, taking the chair on the top
of the costume-box, assumes the pose in which she
yesterday began to sit. While she has been getting
ready, he has made his last preparations, and turned
the key in the door, so that no chance outsider may
stumble in and discompose his model.

He looks at his rough drawing, and then at the

66 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

girl. " We'll get to work now — Your arm was
hanging a little further back — Yes — And your head
is not quite — That's better — So — Are you easy?
We had it natural yesterday — "

« How is this ? " She alters herself slightly, and
the artist steps back to have another look in order
to arrange the drapery.

" There's only one thing wrong now,1' he will say.
" We must just get that dark shadow that there was
below your knee."

The girl twists her skirt over, so that it falls in
a crease, and gives the streak of dark that he had
missed.

« That's it. Well done, Serafina ! " he exclaims,
and is instantly at work. He has already arranged
the blinds over the window so that the light is as it
was when he began the painting.

As he paints he tries to keep up some kind of
conversation with the girl, so that her mind -may be
alive, and not allow her to go rigid like a lay figure.
" You are giving me the whole day ? " he will ask,
although the matter has been settled already.

Gradually, as he grows absorbed in the painting,
he has even less brain to spare, and the talk becomes
more and more mechanical; but if Serafina is the
right kind of model she will do her share of keeping
herself amused.

" What have you got for lunch ? " she asks.
" Four eggs ! "

" What way shall we cook them do you think ? "
" You know how to scramble them. Four eggs
are enough for that ? "

IN THE STUDIOS 67

" Yes. Ill scramble them — you have milk ? — and
butter?"

w Got them first thing this morning. By the
way, I met Martin at breakfast. You've posed for
him, haven't you ? "

And so the talk goes on, like the talk of puppets,
she just passing the time, trying to keep interested
and real without moving out of her pose ; he slash-
ing in the rough work, bringing head, neck, shoulders,
the turn of the waist, the fold of the skirt, into their
places on the canvas. Then he begins to paint in
the details, and is able to tell her what he is about.

"I've done with the right arm for the present.
Busy with the face," he says, and she is able to move
her arm with relief, and bend it to and fro if it is
getting cramped.

It is far more tiring than you would think to
remain motionless in a particular pose. The model
stiffens insensibly, so that an interval of rest is as
necessary for the success of the painting as it is for
her own comfort. For a minute or two she will
be luxurious in leaving her pose, and he will walk
anxiously up and down, looking at the picture, seek-
ing faults, and plotting what to do next with it.
And then, with less trouble than at first, she will
take her pose again, and he will paint on, and talk
emptiness as before.

At last his wrist begins to tire, and he glances at
his watch.

" We'll have lunch now. I expect you are ready
for it too." He puts down brush and palette, and
flings himself on a divan opposite the easel, where

68 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

he can see the picture. For he works on at it in his
head, even when he is not painting. She slips down
from the model-stand and puts a match to the little
oil stove on the soap-box in the corner, takes the
eggs and milk and butter out of the cupboard, and
sets about making ceufs brouittes, the favourite dish
of half the studios in the world.

Then she will come and look at the picture, and
tell him how well and rapidly it is coming together,
and what a nice splash of colour the crimson silk
gives where the light falls on it. They will sit down
to lunch if there is a table, or if not, will walk about
the room, eating the eggs with spoons out of saucers,
and munching bread and butter. The kettle will be
boiling briskly on the stove, and they will make a
little brew of coffee, and take a quarter of an hour
of leisure, with cigarettes and coffee-cups, before
going on with the work.

They are lucky if they can work on long after
four o'clock without another knock sounding at the
door. There are as many again lazy fellows who go
about to waste time as there are hard-working artists.
Surely enough, when the picture is all juicy and
pliable, when all is going as a painter loves it best,
there will come a tap at the locked door.

" Oh, curse ! " says the artist under his breath,
and paints on, pretending not to hear. Tap comes
the knock again. He flings down his brushes, turns
the key, and opens the door to the interrupter, one
of those pleasant, friendly people who never seem to
have anything to do. " Oh, it's you, is it ? " he says,
as graciously as he can. " Come in."

IN THE STUDIOS 69

The man, genial, full of chatter, as they all are,
comes in, volubly apologetic. " Look here," he says,
« don't let me disturb your work. Oh, hullo ! How
are you, Serafina ? He's doing well with you this time.
You'll be in all the papers, my dear, and then you'll
be too proud to pose for any but swells. Yes, I'll
have a cigarette ; and now, look here, don't stop
working on my account. Go on painting. I'll be
making you two some tea."

For a few minutes, as he warms the tea-pot, and
brings the tea out of the cupboard, and drops in the
recognised four teaspoonfuls, one for each of them,
and one for the pot, the painter works desperately on.
Presently the interrupter walks up to have another
look at the picture. He stands at the painter's
elbow, buttering the bosom of a loaf of bread, and
cutting it off in thick rounds. " What are you going
to put in, to bring the light up into that corner ? "
he asks, pointing with the butter-knife.

" I was thinking of a silver pot : what do you
think yourself? Anyhow, Serafina, we've earned our
tea." So work comes to an end for the day. That
is the sole virtue of the interrupter — he keeps other
people from over-working themselves, and Serafina at
least is grateful.

All three will discuss the picture ; how its lights
and shadows are to be arranged into repose, and pre-
vented from playing battledore and shuttlecock with
the observer's eye ; what colours are to be heightened,
what toned down ; what artifice of detail, what care-
ful obscurity is to be introduced, and where ; and so
on, in a jargon incomprehensible to the lay mind, as

70 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

the talk of any other trade. The discussion is not
only between the artists ; Serafina will bear her share,
and likely enough make the most useful of the
suggestions. For artists' models are not hampered,
like the painters themselves, by knowing too much,
and at the same time they are not ignorant as the
ordinary picture buyer is ignorant. Some of them
have been brought up in the studios from their
earliest childhood, and all spend so much of their lives
with the artists, and watch so many pictures from
their inception to their failure or success, that they
have a very practical knowledge of what makes a
painting good or bad, and are often able to help a
picture in other ways than by posing for it.

Indeed, most of them talk of the men for whom
they pose as « my artists," and take a most personal
interest in the fortunes of their pictures. A model
is as happy as the painter when she can say, « I was
in the New Gallery this year, or the Academy, in so
many different paintings." They are a class very
much misunderstood. A girl who poses for an artist
is not the immoral abandoned woman that the suburbs
suppose her. She picks up something of an education,
she learns something of art, she lives as interestingly,
as usefully and as honestly as many of the people who
condemn her. Many an artist owes his life to the
Serafina, the Rosie, or the Brenda who, coming one
morning to ask for a sitting, has found him ill and
alone, with nobody to nurse him but an exasperated
caretaker. Many a man has been kept out of the
hospital, that dread of Bohemia, by the simple, kind-
hearted model who has given up part of her working

ORK

IN THE STUDIOS

73

day to cooking his food for him, when he was too
weak to do it himself, and then, tired after the long
sittings, has brought her work with her, and sat down
and sewed in his studio through the evening, and
talked cheerful rubbish to him that has kept him
from utter
dishearten-
ment.

There is
rich material
for novelists
in the lives
of these girls.
One would
have liked to
be an actress,

but had not a good enough voice.
Another would have served be-
hind a counter, if some artist
had not noticed her, begged her
to allow him to paint her, and
then recommending her to his
friends shown her this way to a
livelihood. Some have stories that read like penny
novelettes, and, tired of oppressive stepmothers, or
guardians, or elder sisters, have deliberately left
their homes, and, perhaps knowing a few artists, have
taken up this work so that they might have their
own lives to themselves. Some are even supporting
their mothers and younger brothers or sisters. In
nearly all cases they come to the studios through the
accident of meeting a discerning artist in the street,

74 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

and to some this accident happens so early that they
are practically models all their lives. One child
used to come to read fairy stories with me, and to
cut out paper figures (a most joyous game), who had
posed for artists since she was three years old, and
was now fourteen. Her mother had been badly
treated by her father, and the little girl and her
two elder sisters had made enough to keep the
family without his help. All three were very
beautiful. Both the elder ones married artists, and
the little girl told me when last I saw her that,
so far as she was concerned, she was going to marry
either an artist or a member of Parliament. Another
model had been a gypsy, another was a genuine
transplanted specimen of the rare species dairymaid
as Izaak Walton knew it, another the runaway
daughter of a shopkeeper in the North of France ;
the list could be made interminable.

As for the men models, they are not so numerous
as the girls, and less interesting. They are nearly
all Italians, tired of organ-grinding or ice-cream
making, or else handsome old soldiers, or good-
looking men who have come down in the world.
Some of them are picturesque enough. One morning,
still in bed, in lodgings over some studios, I heard a
noise in my work-room, and jumping up, flung open
the door, thinking to surprise my burglar in the
act. In the middle of the room stood a charming
old fellow, with a small knobbly head, very red skin,
blue seafaring eyes, and a wispy white beard round
cheeks and chin. He thought I was an artist, he
said, and had come to see if he could be useful. We

IN THE STUDIOS 75

breakfasted, and he became talkative at once. He
had been a sailor, had done well about the world, and
had settled in California as a storekeeper, when he
had been ruined by a big fire. " That was because
I took Our Lord to mean insurance, when He said
usury. It was set clear to me afterwards, but it was
too late then, my shift' was gone." Since that time
he had drifted, too old to pick up again, too proud
to give in and enter the workhouse. He had
worked his way to England on a ship he had once
commanded, and an artist painting shipping had£met
him walking about the docks, and told him he could
make a living as a model. " And
I'm doing it," he said, " and it's
not a bad life. There's hard
times, and there's times rough on
an old man, but I'm not so weak
yet, thanks be, and I get tidily
along. Yes. I'll have another
pipe of that tobacco. It isn't
often you gents have the right
stuff."

But this has been a long di-
gression from Serafma, the painter,
and the interrupter, whom
we left taking tea and dis-
cussing the picture. What
do they do next ? Perhaps
if the daylight has not
gone, and the interrupter
has not been thoroughly
efficient, a little more

76 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

work may be done after tea. But it is more likely
that the painter will wash his brushes, and go up
to Soho to dine with the interrupter, possibly
taking Serafina with him, if she has nothing to do
with her evening. Or he may go to one of the
artists' clubs.

In the old days there was no club in Chelsea, and
the artists used to feed and talk at the Six Bells
Tavern, the public-house in the King's Road, or else
at one or other of the small inns along the riverside. I
do not think, the story of the founding of the Chelsea
Art Club, in Church Street, has been printed before.
It had been proposed that, as Chelsea had so long
been associated with art, an exhibition should be held
to illustrate the work of the principal painters who
lived here. Meetings were held in the Six Bells, and
a committee was appointed to report on the pos-
sibilities of the scheme. All the artists concerned
met in one of the Manresa Road studios, with Mr.
Stirling Lee, the sculptor, in the chair, to hear the
result. Whistler and half a dozen other famous
artists were there. The report was duly read, when
some one got up and said that surely there was
something that Chelsea needed more than an exhibi-
tion, and that was a club. " Club, club, club ! "
shouted everybody, and the exhibition was completely
forgotten at once, and has never been held to this
day. A Teutonic gentleman proposed that they
should rent a room for the club in the Pier Hotel,
which he pronounced, after the manner of Hans
Breitmann, « Bier." Whistler rose, in his most
dignified, most supercilious manner : " Gentlemen,"

IN THE STUDIOS 77

he said, slowly, " Gentlemen, let us not start our
club in any beer hotel — let us start our club CLEAN."
The result was the Chelsea Art Club, in a house of
its own, the meeting-place of all the Chelsea artists,
and the centre of half the fun, the frivolity, the
gossip of Chelsea studio life.

Another famous artists' club is the Langham
Sketch Club, whose rooms are close behind the
Queen's Hall. Artists meet there regularly, and
draw and make pictures all in a room together, with
a time limit set for the performance. At intervals
they exhibit the harvest of their evenings on the
walls. They have also merry parties, for men only,
when the doors are opened by fantastical figures, and
scratch entertainments go on all the time, and there
are songs and jovial recitations. Nights there are as
merry as any, and the rooms are full of celebrated
men, and men about to be celebrated ; for the club
does not tolerate bunglers.

The painter might go to one of those places ; or
else, after a supper in Soho, or in one of the very
few little restaurants in Chelsea, he might spend the
evening in some one else's studio, perhaps in the
same block of buildings as his own, for few of the
studios are isolated, and there are often three, five,
eight, or more under a single roof. The studio life
is almost like the life of a university, with its
friendliness, its sets, and their haughty attitude
towards each other. There is the set that scorns
the Academy and all its works ; whose members
never cross the threshold of Burlington House, and
smile a little pityingly if you mention an R.A. with

78 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

anything but contempt. For them the ideals and
exhibitions of the New English movement,1 unless
indeed they are bold Ishmaels and have for ever
shaken the dust of exhibitions from their feet. Then
there is the rather amusing set of people who laugh
at the Academy, but recognise that it is the best
picture shop in Europe, and exhibit there for their
pocket's sake. And then there is the set made up
largely of old Academy students, and of men with
wives (who will, no matter what you say to them,
care for material success), who regulate all their work
by the Academy standards, beg advice from the
R.A/s, and live and die a hundred times in hope and
despair between the sending in day and the day of
last rejections from that most august, most oligarchic,
most British of institutions.

The men of each set have a habit of dropping in
to talk away their evenings in particular studios. It
is curious this : how one studio will be chosen with-
out arrangement, by accident as it seems, and yet be
made by custom so regular a rendezvous that its
visitors would scarcely know what to do if they were
asked to meet anywhere else. If you are at dinner
in Soho with men of one set, then afterwards by
some natural attraction you find the party setting
out for Brown's place ; if with men of another set,
then assuredly before the night is out you will be
smoking a cigarette at Robinson's. It is not that
the man whose studio is so honoured is the cleverest,
the leader of the set — he is often a mere camp-
follower in whatever movement may be afoot. It is

1 Remember wheii this book was written.

IN THE STUDIOS

79

^^x«

not even that he has the most comfortable rooms-
one favourite studio is the poorest in a building, and
so ill-furnished that if you
visit it you are wise to
bring your own chair. I
do not know what the
reason is. Some men are
best in their kennels, others
best out of
them ; and the
atmosphere of
some kennels
is more com-
panionable
than that of
others ; there
can be nothing
else.

About nine
o'clock the
painter, if he
has not gone
to a club, will
arrive, with-
out particular
effort, at one
of these more
h ospitable
studios. Perhaps there will be a piano in a corner,
with a man playing over its keys in the dark.
Another man will be looking at the prints in a
book by the light of a candle. Perhaps there will

80 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

be a witty little model telling stories and keeping
everybody laughing. Perhaps there will be no more
than a couple of friends, who no longer find talk
necessary for intercourse, but can be perfectly con-
tented in tobacco smoke and each other's silence.

They will greet him when he comes with a question
about the new picture. He will tell them, of course,
that it is going to be a failure, and they will tell him
not to be a fool. And then they will sit on, smoking,
playing chess, singing, talking of their plans for the
year, or the idiosyncrasies of a refractory picture
buyer, or the abominable vanity of some stout
gentleman who wants to look slim in a portrait, and
so on and so on. Late at night they will separate,
and he will go home to have a last look at the
picture, anxiously, sleepily, holding a flickering
candle ; and then to sleep on the camp-bed in the
corner of the studio, to dream of work and of the
picture as he would like it to be, unaccountably more
beautiful than he can make it, until he wakes next
morning, hurries over the road to the cook-shop for
his breakfast, and back again to be impatiently ready
for the arrival of Serafina, late as usual, after the
custom of her kind.

And so go twenty-four hours of an artist's life.

THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA

WILLIAM HAZLITT

THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA

LONDON is full of people who keep the country in
their hearts, and the life of studios, taverns, and
newspaper offices is lived by many who would scorn
the name of a Londoner. One thinks himself a
Devon man, another is a Scot, another, though he
works in London all the year, calls the Lake Moun-
tains home. It is so now ; it has been so ever since
the green fields drew away from London, and made
town and country two hostile, different things.
HazUtt, talking metaphysically in the little tavern
under Southampton Buildings, or seated in his
favourite corner there, with a pot of ale before him
for custom's sake, and a newspaper before his eyes,
listening to the vain talk of " coffee-house politicians,"
must often have congratulated himself on having
been able to ask from his heart for " the clear blue
sky above my head, and the green turf beneath my
feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours'
march to dinner — and then to thinking.'" He can
never have forgotten that he was more than the
townsman, in that he had known the Great North
Road.

Borrow was another of your countrymen in town.
You remember — when he wished to fight his way
among the hack writers with " Ancient Songs of

83

84 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

Denmark, heroic and romantic, with notes philo-
logical, critical, and historical," or "The Songs of
Ap Gwilym, the Welsh bard, also with notes critical,
philological, and historical" — his disconcerting inter-
view with the publisher :

" I am very sorry, sir," says Borrow, " to hear that
you cannot assist me. I had hoped "

" A losing trade, I assure you, sir ; literature is a
drug. Taggart (this to his clerk), what o'clock is it ? "

" Well, sir, as you cannot assist me, I will now
take my leave; I thank you sincerely for your kind
reception, and will trouble you no longer."

" Oh, don't go. I wish to have some further
conversation with you ; and perhaps I may hit on
some plan to benefit you. I honour merit, and
always make a point to encourage it when I can ;
but — Taggart, go to the bank, and tell them to dis-
honour the bill twelve months after date for thirty
pounds which becomes due to-morrow. I am dis-
satisfied with that fellow who wrote the fairy tales,
and intend to give him all the trouble in my power.
Make haste. . . ."

Ill warrant Borrow was helped to keep his upper
lip straight then, and afterwards, when he was
dismally translating into German the publisher's own
philosophical treatise, that proved the earth to be
shaped like a pear and not "like an apple, as the
fools of Oxford say," by the thought of country
roads, and horses galloping, and his own stout legs
that could walk with any in England, and his arms

THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA 85

that could swing a hammer to a blacksmith's ad-
miration.

And what of Bampfylde in an older time, who
was not able, like Hazlitt and Borrow, to see the
country again and again, but came here from it, to
live miserably, and die with its vision in his heart ?
Southey, grave, hardworking, respectable as he was,
felt something of the tragedy of that countryman's
irregular life. Through the sedate and ordered
phrases of this letter of his to Sir Samuel Egerton
Brydges, the vivid, unhappy life of the man bursts
through like blood in veins. The letter is long, but
I quote it almost in full : —

" KESWICK, May 10, 1809.

« SIR,

"... It gives me great pleasure to hear that
Bampfylde's remains are to be edited. The cir-
cumstances which I did not mention concerning him
are these. They were related to me by Jackson, of
Exeter, and minuted down immediately afterwards,
when the impression which they made upon me was
warm.

"He was the brother of Sir Charles, as you say.
At the time when Jackson became intimate with
him he was just in his prime, and had no other wish
than to live in solitude, and amuse himself with
poetry and music. He lodged in a farmhouse near
Chudleigh, and would oftentimes come to Exeter in
a winter morning, ungloved and open- breasted, be-
fore Jackson was up (though he was an early riser),
with a pocket full of music or poems, to know how

86 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

he liked them. His relations thought this was a sad
life for a man of family, and forced him to London.
The tears ran down Jackson's cheeks when he told
me the story. ' Poor fellow,' he said, f there did not
live a purer creature, and, if they would have let
him alone, he might have been alive now.'

"When he was in London, his feelings, having
been forced out of their proper channel, took a
wrong direction, and he soon began to suffer the
punishment of debauchery. The Miss Palmer to
whom he dedicated his Sonnets (afterwards, and
perhaps still, Lady Inchiquin) was niece to Sir Joshua
Reynolds. Whether Sir Joshua objected to his
addresses on account of his irregularities in London,
or on other grounds, I know not; but this was the
commencement of his madness. He was refused
admittance into the house ; upon this, in a fit of
half anger and half derangement, he broke the
windows, and was (little to Sir Joshua's honour) sent
to Newgate. Some weeks after this happened, Jack-
son went to London, and one of his first inquiries
was for Bampfylde. Lady Bampfylde, his mother,
said she knew little or nothing about him ; that she
had got him out of Newgate, and he was now in
some beggarly place. 'Where?' «In King Street,
Holborn, she believed, but she did not know the
number of the house.' Away went Jackson, and
knocked at every door till he found the right. It
was a truly miserable place ; the woman of the house
was one of the worst class of women in London.
She knew that Bampfylde had no money, and that
at that time he had been three days without food.

THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA 87

When Jackson saw him there was all the levity of
madness in his manner ; his shirt was ragged and
black as a coal-heaver's, and his beard of a two
months1 growth. Jackson sent out for food, and
said he was come to breakfast with him ; and he
turned aside to a harpsichord in the room, literally,
he said, to let him gorge himself without being
noticed. He removed him from thence, and, after
giving his mother a severe lecture, obtained for him
a decent allowance, and left him, when he himself
quitted town, in decent lodgings, earnestly begging
him to write.

" But he never wrote ; the next news was that
he was in a private madhouse, and Jackson never
saw him more. Almost the last time they met,
he showed several poems, among others, a ballad
on the murder of David Rizzio ; such a ballad !
said he. He came that day to dine with Jackson,
and was asked for copies. < I burned them,' was the
reply ; * I wrote them to please you ; you did not
seem to like them, so I threw them in the fire.'
After twenty years'1 confinement he recovered his
senses, but not till he was dying of consumption.
The apothecary urged him to leave Sloane Street
(where he had always been as kindly treated as he
could be) and go into his own country, saying that
his friends in Devonshire would be very glad to
see him. But he hid his face and answered, < No,
sir ; they who knew me what I was, shall never see
me what I am.1* . . ."

His was a different case from that of Hazlitt

88 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

leaving Wem, of De Quincey running from school,
or of Goldsmith setting out from Lissoy. It is a
sad story this of the strength of the town, of its
coarse fingers on the throat of a wild bird, and I
should like to pretend that there are no Bampfyldes
in Bohemia to-day who have lost their poetry in
London, and dare not go back to their own country,
« lest those who knew them what they were, should
see them what they are." It is a terrible thing
to feel ashamed in the presence of the hills, and
fearful that the spring has lost its power of refresh-
ment.

But there are many stronger men, who have come
to London because poetry or pictures will not sup-
port them in the villages they love, and carry a
glad pride in their hearts that softens the blows,
and eases the difficulties of the town. It is some-
thing as you walk disconsolate down a publishers
stairs, like a little boy from a whipping, to be
able to pull up your despair with a stout breath,
a toss of your head, a thought of the wind in
your face, and the straight road over the moorland,
with the peewits overhead ; something, when eating
a hard-boiled egg at a coffee-stall, to remember
another occasion, when in greater straits you were
less pusillanimous, and tossed away your last eighteen-
pence to feed and sleep royally in a little village
inn, ready to face the world with empty purse and
cheerful heart in the sunshine of the morning. Ay,
it is a great thing to be a countryman, to know
the smell of the hay when a cart rolls by to
Covent Garden, and to dream in Paternoster Row

THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA

89

of the broad open road, with the yellowhammer in
the hedge and the blackthorn showing flower.

It is a very joyous thing for a countryman in
town, when some small thing from the Happy Land
breaks through the gloom or weariness or excitement
of his irregular life, like a fountain in the dusk.

For example, I have seldom been happier in Bohemia
than when an old country song that has, so far as
I know, never been written down was sung to me in
some dingy rooms over a set of studios by an artist's
model I had never seen before.

There was a yellow fog outside and a lamp burned
on my desk, in the ashamed manner of a lamp in
daylight. It does not matter what article my brain
was flogging itself to produce, for the article was

90 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

never written. My landlady had brought me up
some beef and fried onions in a soup plate, but
things were altogether too woeful for the enjoyment
of lunch, when someone tapped at my door, and
almost instantly a dainty, slight girl, with a little
brown felt hat on her head and a green cloak about
her, opened the door and smiled at me from the
threshold.

" Do you need a model ? " she asked.

I was so glad to see anything so young and
fresh and beautiful in the dull lamplight of that
fog-choked room, so heartened by the very sight
of her, that I almost forgot to answer, and then,
in an agony of fear lest she should go at once,
when she saw that she was not in a studio, explained
very awkwardly that I was very glad she had called,
that it was an unpleasant day, that, that .... and
could she stop to lunch.

She laughed, a clear country laugh, that made it
possible for me to laugh too ; and in a moment the
gloom seemed to have vanished for the day, as she
sat down as pretty as you please to share my beef
and onions.

We came at once to talk of the country, and, after-
wards, when we pulled our chairs up to the fire, and
she let me light a cigarette for her, she was telling
me of her old life, before she came to London, where
she lived in a little village in Gloucestershire. Play-
ing with the cigarette in her fingers, she told me how
she used to get up to make her brother's breakfast
before he went out to labour on the farm, how before
that she had been at the village school, and how,

THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA 91

when they had all been children, her old grandmother
had used to sing to them every evening songs she had
learnt in her youth. " Did she remember any of the
songs ? " I asked, hoping, and yet telling myself to
expect no more than the modern jingles that have
been made popular by print. " Why, yes, she re-
membered a few, but she could not sing as well as her
old grandmother." And then, after a little entreaty,
in that little dark dusty room in Chelsea, she came
out with this ballad in a simple untrained voice that
was very well suited to the words :

Oh it's of a fair damosel in Londin did dwell ;
Oh for wit and for beauty her none could excel.
With her mistress and her master she served seven year,
And what followed after you quickely shall hear.

Oh I took my box upon my head. I gained along,
And the first one I met was a strong and able man.
He said, " My pretty fair maid, why are you going this

way ?
I'll show to you a nearer road across the counterey."

He took me by the hand, and he led me to the lane ;
He said, " My pretty fair maid, I mean to tell you plain.
Deliver up your money without a fear or strife,
Or else this very moment I'll take away your life."

The tears from my eyes like fountains they did flow.
Oh where shall I wander ? Oh where shall I go ?
And so while this young feller was a feeling for his knife,
Oh this beautiful damosel, she took away his life.

I took my box upon my head. I gained along,
And the next one I met was a noble gentleman.
He said, " My pretty fair maid, where are you going so

late?
And what was that noise that I heard at yonder gate ?

92 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

" I fear that box upon your head to yourself does not

belong.
To your master or your mistress you have done something

wrong ;
To your mistress or your master you have done something

ill,
For one moment from trimbeling you really can't stand

still."

" To my master or my mistress I have done nothing ill ;
But I feel within my own dear heart it's a young man I

do kill.

He dem'ded my money, but I soon let him know,
And now that able feller lies bleeding down below."

This gentleman got off his hoss to see what he had got ;
He had three loaded pistols, some powder and some shot ;
He had three loaded pistols, some powder and some ball,
And a knife and a whistle, more robbers for to call.

This gentleman blew the whistle, he blew it both loud

and shrill,
And four more gallant robbers came trimbling down the

hill.
Oh this gentleman shot one of them, and then most

speedilee,
Oh this beautiful damosel, she shot the other three.

" And now, my pretty fair maid, for what you have done,
I'll make of you my charming bride before it is long.
I'll make of you my own dear bride, and that very soon,
For taking of your own dear path, and firing off a goon."

It was a strange thing to hear the gentle, lazy melody
that carried those words in the foggy little London
room. It was the stranger to hear the words and
the air from a girl like this, who had now taken
off her hat, and lay back in the rickety deck-chair,

THE ARTIST'S MODEL

94 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

smoothing her tangled golden head, and ready for
another cigarette. The setting was London of
London : the song and its melody carried the very
breath of the country into the room ; the girl, an
artist's model, smoking cigarettes, ready I have no
doubt to compare with knowledge the merits of
cherry brandy and benedictine, and yet as happy
in singing that old tune as her grandmother had
been long ago in the far away Gloucestershire
cottage.

Soon after that she stood up, laughing because there
was no mirror, to put on her little hat. I begged
her to stay and come to dinner with me in Soho, but
she had a business engagement, to pose for a pen and
ink illustrator in the evening. She left me, and it
was as if the blue sky had shown for a moment
through the clouds and disappeared. The afternoon
was foggy London once again, and Gloucestershire
seemed distant as the Pole.

In talking of countrymen and their comforts in
town, I cannot think how I forgot to mention the
consolation of a village reputation far away. When
editors refuse your works, and Academies decline to
hang your pictures, you have always the reflection of
the lady of the nursery rhyme :

" There was a young lady of Beverley
Whose friends said she sang very cleverly ;

' She'll win great renown

In great London town/
So said the good people of Beverley.

THE COUNTRY IN BOHEMIA 95

" But in London this lady of Beverley
Found all her best notes fell but heavily ;

And when this she did find,

She said, ' Never mind,
They still think me a songbird at Beverley.' "

It is a reflection often made by countrymen in town.

OLD AND NEW SOHO

OLD AND NEW SOHO

SOHO has always been a merry place. Even at the
time when Keats wrote scornfully of it in a letter to
Haydon :

" For who would go

Into dark Soho,
To chatter with dank-haired critics,

When he might stay

In the new-mown hay
And startle the dappled crickets ? "

— even then there were plenty of fellows, more merry
than critical, who sported as playfully in its narrow
streets as ever poets did in hayfields. A street out
of Soho Square, now so heavily odorous of preserved
fruit, from the factory at the corner, was for a time
the home of so redoubtable a merrymaker, so sturdy
a Bohemian, as Pierce Egan, the author of « Life in
London, or the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry
Hawthorn, Esq., and his elegant friend Corinthian
Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic the Oxonian, in
their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis."

A jolly book indeed, whose very pictures but

Thackeray has described them in a manner inimitable
by any clumsy careful fellow : —

"First there is Jerry arriving from the country,
in a green coat and leather gaiters, and being

100 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

measured for a fashionable suit at Corinthian House,
by Corinthian Tom's tailor. Then away for the
career of pleasure and fashion. The Park ! delicious
excitement ! The theatre ! the saloon ! ! the green-
room ! ! ! Rapturous bliss — the opera itself ! and
then perhaps to Temple Bar, to knock down a Charley
there! There are Jerry and Tom, with their tights
and little cocked hats, coming from the opera — very
much as gentlemen in waiting on Royalty are habited
now. There they are at Almack's itself, amidst a
crowd of highbred personages, with the Duke of
Clarence himself looking at their dancing. Now,
strange change, they are in Tom Cribbs' parlour,
where they don't seem to be a whit less at home
than in fashion's gilded halls: and now they are at
Newgate, seeing the irons knocked off the malefactors1
legs previous to execution. . . . Now we haste away
to merrier scenes: to Tattersall's (ah, gracious
powers ! what a funny fellow that actor was who
performed Dicky Green in that scene at the play !) ;
and now we are at a private party, at which
Corinthian Tom is waltzing (and very gracefully,
too, as you must confess) with Corinthian Kate,
whilst Bob Logic, the Oxonian, is playing on the
piano ! "

I can never see this giddy rampant book without
thinking of a paragraph in it, that shows us, through
the Venetian-coloured glass of Mr. Egan's slang : —

" Mr. Hazlitt, in the evening, lolling at his ease
upon one of Ben Medley's elegant couches, enjoying
the reviving comforts of a good tinney (which is a
fire), smacking his chaffer (which is his tongue) over

OLD AND NEW SOHO 101

a glass of old hock, and topping his glim (which is
a candle) to a classic nicety, in order to throw a new
light upon the elegant leaves of Roscoe's < Life of
Lorenzo de Medici,' as a composition for a New
Lecture at the Surrey Institution. This is also Life
in London."

I like to think of Hazlitt at Ben Medley's, who
was " a well-known hero in the Sporting World,
from his determined contest with the late pugilistic
phenomenon, Dutch Sam."" It is pleasant, is it not ?
Almost as delightful as that glimpse of him driving
back from the great fight between Hickman and
Neate, when " my friend set me up in a genteel drab
great coat and green silk handkerchief (which I must
say became me exceedingly)."

Pierce Egan knew well the Bohemian life of his
day. There is a story that is a better compliment
to his spirit than his head. Some of his friends
lifted him, dead drunk after a masquerade, into a
cab, put some money in his pocket, gave the cabby
his address, and announced that he was a foreign
nobleman. OIF drives cabby, and finds the house,
with ten bell-pulls, ringing to the rooms belonging
to the different tenants. Cheerfully, as one with
nobility in his cab, he tugs the whole ten. From
every window indignant night-capped heads deny
relationship with any foreign nobleman. " But I've
brought him from the masquerade, and he's got
money in his pocket." Instantly everybody in the
house runs downstairs and out into the street.
Egan's wife recognised her errant husband, and, with
the help of the other lodgers, carried him to his

102 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

room. He was out on the spree again the following
day.

Egan was a gay fellow, wrote voluminously, lived
vigorously, and if he did not deserve it in any other
way, fully earned the title of a Man of Letters by a
passage in the dedication of his most famous book to
his Majesty George IV. : —

"Indeed the whole chapter of 'Life in London'
has been so repeatedly perused by your Majesty, in
such a variety.'of shapes, from the ekgant A, the refimd
B, the polite C, the lively D, the eloquent E, the honest
F, the stately G, the peep o' day H, the tasteful I, the
manly J, the good K, the noble L, the stylish M, the
brave N, the liberal O, the proud P, the longheaded Q,
the animated R, the witty S, the flash T, the knowing
U, the honourable V, the consummate W, the funny
X, the musical Y, and the poetical Z, that it would
only be a waste of your Majesty's valuable time to
expatiate further upon this subject."

But Soho has known more lettered men than
Egan. De Quincey, young and new to London,
before he had lost the poor woman of the streets
who, out of her own penury, bought port wine for
him when he was likely to die on a doorstep in Soho
Square, found lodging in an unfurnished house in
Greek Street. The ground floor of the house was
occupied by a rascally lawyer, whose best quality was
a devotion to literature that led him to shelter the
boy scholar, or at least to allow him to sleep on the
floor of nights, with waste papers for a pillow, and
an old horse-blanket for a covering, that he shared
with a hunger-bitten child.

OLD AND NEW SOHO

103

Hazlitt rests in the graveyard of St. Anne's,
Wardour Street, having put oft'
the wild nervous tangle of joys
and miseries, hopes and dis-
appointments, and violent hates,
that he summarised on his
death-bed as a happy
life. He died in Frith
Street.

In Gerrard Street,
Dryden lived at No. 43,
and doubtless found it
very convenient for
walking down of an
afternoon to the coffee-
houses about Co vent
Garden. Burke lived
for a time at No. 37,
and the greatest of all
clubs, The Club, of
Johnson, Goldsmith
and Reynolds, met at
the Turk's Head Tavern / *r
in the same street.

There were clubs
here in the early nineteenth
century, and Thackeray de-
scribed one of them in "The
Newcomes": — "We tap at a
door in an old street in Soho :
an old maid with a kind comical
face opens the door, and nods friendly, and says,

104 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

< How do, sir ? ain't seen you this ever so long. How
do, Mr. Noocom ? ' < Who's here ? ' < Most every-
body's here.' We pass by a little snug bar, in which
a trim elderly lady is seated by a great fire, on which
boils an enormous kettle; while two gentlemen are
attacking a cold saddle of mutton and West Indian
pickles : hard by Mrs. Nokes the landlady's elbow —
with mutual bows — we recognise Hickson the sculptor,
and Morgan, intrepid Irish chieftain, chief of the
reporters of the Morning Press newspaper. We pass
through a passage into a back room, and are received
with a roar of welcome from a crowd of men, almost
invisible in the smoke."

All the districts of London that have once made
themselves a special atmosphere, keep it with extra-
ordinary tenacity. Fleet Street is one example,
Soho is another. The Turk's Head has disappeared,
Thackeray's club is not to be found; but every
Tuesday a dozen, more or less, of the writers of the
day meet at a little restaurant in the very street
where Goldsmith and Johnson walked to meet their
friends. This is the Mont Blanc, a very old house,
whose walls have once been panelled. In the rooms
upstairs, the mouldings of the panels can be felt
plainly through the canvas that has been stretched
across them and papered to save the cost of painting.
And all over Soho are similar small meeting places,
where irregulars of all sorts flock to lunch and dine.
Still, in some of the upper rooms of the streets where
De Quincey walked to warm himself before sleeping
on the floor, the student life goes on. Still in some
of the upper windows may be seen the glitter of a

OLD AND NEW SOHO 105

candle-light where a scholar, probably foreign, pores
over a book in the hours when the British Museum
is closed to him. And in a hundred of the small
rooms in the piles of Soho flats, small rooms furnished
with a bed, a chair, and a table that also serves for
a washing-stand, are there young actors and actresses,
studying great parts and playing small ones, eager
to be Macduff and content meanwhile to represent
the third witch on the boards of a suburban theatre,
copying the mannerisms of Miss Edna May, and
keeping alive by smiling at the pit from the medley
of the ballet.

It is odd to think of the days when a shilling
dinner was beyond achievement, when a sandwich and
a couple of bananas seemed a supper for a Shakespeare.
Yet those were happy days, and had their luxuries.
There are sandwiches and sandwiches. In one of the
narrower streets that run up from Shaftesbury Avenue
towards Oxford Street, there is a shop whose pro-
prietor is an enthusiast, a facile virtuoso in their
manufacture. He is an amateur in the best sense,
and no selfish arrogant fellow who will allow none
but himself to be men of taste. You stand in the
middle of his shop, with all kinds of meat arranged
on the shelves about you, a knife on every dish.
Veal, potted liver, chicken, artfully prepared, pate de
foie gras or a substitute, tongue spiced and garnished,
tongue potted and pressed, lobster paste, shrimp
paste, cockle paste, and half a hundred other luscious
delicacies, wait in a great circle about you, like paints
on a palette ; while you stand hesitating in the middle,

106 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

and compose your sandwich, a touch of this, a taste
of that, a suspicion of this, a sprinkling of that again,
while he, at once a skilful craftsman and a great
genius, does the rough handiwork, and executes your
design, often, like the great man of the art school,
contributing some little detail of his own that is
needed for perfection, and presents you finally with
the complete work of art, cut in four for convenient
eating, for sixpence only, an epicurean triumph, and
enough of it to sustain you till the morning.

After your sandwich, you will find, in Little
Pulteney Street, if I am not mistaken in the name,
a man with bananas on a hand barrow, and likely
enough an Italian woman with a red or green shawl
about her head, turning the handle of a barrel-organ.
With these things it is easy to be happy. How happy
I used to be, walking along that street peeling f and
eating my bananas, while my heart throbbed bravely
to the music of the organ. Sometimes a couple of
children would be dancing in the street, as nautch
girls might enliven the supper of an Indian potentate ;
and often some one would be singing the words to
the barrel-organ's melodies. What were the favourite
tunes ? Ah yes :

" Dysy, Dysy, give me yer awnser, do ;
I'm arf cryzy all fur the love of you/'

and

" As you walk along

The Bar de Bullong
With an independent air,

You 'ear the girls declare

There goes the millyonaire,
The man wot broke the benk at Monte Carlo."

OLD AND NEW SOHO 107

Yes ; those were very happy days, and you, O reader,
lose much if the fulness of your purse, or the delicacy
of your ear, deprives you of such an enjoyment.

When your income rises beyond the contentment
of bananas and sandwich for dinner, or earlier, when
the sale of a picture, or a longer article than usual,
entitles you to a tremulous extravagance, you have
an adventurous choice to make among the Soho
restaurants. Every evening after half-past six or
seven, Soho takes on itself a new atmosphere. It is
grubby and full of romantic memory by day. At
night it is suddenly a successful place, where the pro-
prietors of little restaurants are able to retire upon
the fortunes they have made there. The streets,
always crowded with foreigners, now suffer odder
costumes than in daylight. Artists, poets, writers,
actors, music-hall performers, crowd to the special
restaurants that custom reserves for their use. I do
not know how many small eating-houses there are in
Soho ; though I set out once, in a flush of reckless-
ness at the sale of a book, to eat my way through
the lot of them ; the plan was, to dine at a different
restaurant every night, taking street by street, until
I had exhausted them all, and could retire with un-
rivalled experience. The scheme fell through, partly
because I fell in love with one or two places, so that
my feet insisted on carrying me through their doors,
when my conscience announced that duty to the pro-
gramme demanded a supper elsewhere, and partly
because of a relapse into impecuniosity that compelled
a return to the diet of bananas and sandwiches.

Alas that this should be a record of fact. What

108 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

mansions of the stomach could I not describe, what
sumptuous palaces, where wine and Munich lager flow
from taps on every table, where food is as good in
the mouth as in prospect, where landlords and pro-
prietors stand upon their dignity, and refuse money
as an insult to their calling. How perfectly could I
reconstruct Soho in a gastronomic dream. Unfor-
tunately I am bound as tight to fact as to penury.

The first Soho restaurant I knew was Roche's, now
B^guinot's, in Old Compton Street. A lean painter
took me ; it was a foggy night, and we crossed
Cambridge Circus with difficulty, and then, almost
groping our way along the pavement, found the door,
and stepped into the glamour and noise of the long
room that you enter from the street. The painter
wished to show me the whole place. We went right
through to the inner room where we so often dined
in later years, and downstairs to the hot little
inferno, where a few brave spirits descend to feed
and talk. The painter nodded to men in both
rooms, and then turned to me. " This is Bohemia,"
he said ; " what do you think of it ? " We went
back into the front room, and sat down behind the
long table, so that I could see the whole place, and
observe the people who came in.

Opposite our long table were half a dozen small
ones placed along the wall, and at one of these
sat a very splendid old man. His long white hair
fell down over the collar of his velvet coat, and
now and again he flung back his head, so that his
hair all rippled in the light, and then he would
bang his hand carefully upon the table, so as not to

OLD AND NEW SOHO 109

hurt it, and yet to be impressive, as he declaimed
continually to a bored girl who sat opposite him,
dressed in an odd mixture of fashion and Bohemian-
ism. They seemed a queer couple to be together,
until the painter told me that the man was one
of the old set, who had come to the place for years,
and remembered the old mad days when every one
dressed in a luxuriously unconventional manner, like
so many Theophile Gautiers. The painter, who was
a realist, referred scornfully to the old fellow as
" a piece of jetsam left by the romantic movement."
There have been such a number of romantic move-
ments in the last thirty years that it was impossible
to know what he meant. But the tradition is still
current at the Soho dinner tables that there were
a few grand years in which we rivalled the Quartier
in costume, and outdid Montmartre in extravagant
conversation. It was pathetic to think of the old
Romantic as a relic of that glorious time, alone in
his old age, still living the life of his youth.

All down our long table there were not two faces
that did not seem to me then to bear the imprint of
some peculiar genius. Some were assuredly painters,
others journalists, some very obviously poets, and
there were several, too, of those amateur irregulars,
who are always either exasperating or charming.
The painter pointed out man after man by name.
There was So-and-So, the musical critic ; there
was somebody else, who painted like Watteau :
" ridiculous ass," commented my realistic friend ;
there was So-and-So, the editor of an art magazine ;
there a fellow who had given up art for a place in

110 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

his father's business, but yet kept up his old ac-
quaintanceships with the men more faithful to their
ideals.

These Soho dinners are excellently cooked and
very cheap. Only the wine is dearer in England
than in France. There, you can get a carafon for
a few pence, and good it is. But here the cheapest
half-bottle is tenpence, and often disappointing.
The wise drink beer. It is Charles Godfrey Leland
who, in his jovial scrap of autobiography, ascribes
all the vigour and jolly energy of his life to the
strengthening effects of Brobdingnagian draughts of
lager beer, drunk under the tuition of the German
student. It is good companionable stuff', and a
tankard of it costs only sixpence, or less.

In the same street with Beguinofs, a little nearer
Piccadilly Circus, there is the Dieppe, a cheaper
place, but very amusing. We used to feed there
not for the sake of the food so much as for the
pictures. Round the walls are several enormous
paintings, some of which suggest Botticelli's Prima-
vera in the most ridiculous manner, only that all
the figures are decently clothed in Early Victorian
costume.

On the other side of the street is a white-
fronted restaurant kept by a Monsieur Brice, to whom,
through several years, I have been faithful. Night
after night I have walked through the glitter and
the dusk of the Soho streets, past the little tobacco
shop where they sell real Caporal tobacco, one whiff'
of which transports you as if in an enchanted cloud
to the Boulevard St Michel, where the chansonniers

A SOHO RESTAURANT

OLD AND NEW SOHO 113

sing their own ballads, to the Bal Bullier and the
students' balls, and make you a Parisian in a moment.
I have walked along there night after night, and turned
in at the small side door, and through into the little
white back room, where the best of waiters kept a
corner table.1 What suppers have vanished in that
inner room, how many bottles of dark Munich beer
have flowed to their appointed havens. Here the
Benns, that little painter and his wife, used to join
us, and sit and talk and smoke, planning new pictures
that were to be better than all that had been done
before, talking over stories as yet unwritten, and
enjoying great fame in obscurity. Here too used
other friends to come, so that we often sat down
a merry half-dozen at the table, and enjoyed our-
selves hugely and also other people. That is one
of the chief merits of Soho dinners — the company
is always entertaining. Sometimes there would be
an old philosopher at the table opposite, who would
solemnly drink his half-bottle, and then smoke a
cigarette over some modern book. One day he leaned
across towards our table with Haeckel's « Riddle of
the Universe " in his hand. " Read this book, young
people," he said, " but you should read it as you read
Punch" That was his introduction to our party,
and thenceforward, when he had finished his meal, he
would always smoke his cigarette with us, and, smooth-
ing his white beard with a pensive hand, employ him-
self upon our instruction in philosophy.

On other evenings, strangers would come in, and

1 The restaurant has been redecorated since this book was
written, and the inner room has gone.

H

114 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

we would guess their ideals from their manners of
unfolding their napkins — the gay flourish meant the
artist, the deliberate disentanglement the man of
prose, the careless fling the poet, and so on — or per-
haps one of our enigmas would join in our talk, and
puzzle us the more. So many of the faces were far
from ordinary, so many had that in their lines that
suggested an interesting mind. We were content to
let them remain enigmas, and construed them each
one of us to please himself.

Once there was a wedding party at a longer table,
made by joining the three small ones at one side of
the room. The bride was a pretty model, the man
a tousled artist ; probably, we agreed, a very inferior
craftsman, but certainly an excellent fellow, since he
insisted on our joining his company, which was made
up of others like himself, with their attendant ladies.
He and his bride were oft' to Dieppe for an inexpensive
honeymoon, so that the feast could not be prolonged.
At half-past eight the supper was done, and in a
procession of hansom cabs we drove to Victoria, and
cheered them off* by the evening boat train, the two
of them leaning out of the window, and tearfully
shouting of their devotion to art, to each other, and
to us, an excited heterogeneous crowd, who sang
« Auld Lang Syne," « God Save the King," « The
Marseillaise," and the Faust " Soldiers1 Chorus,"
according to nationality, in an inextricable tangle
of discord. That was a great night.

The Boulogne, the Mont Blanc, Pinoli's, the
France, and many another little restaurant knew us
in those days; there was scarcely one, from Brice^s

OLD AND NEW SOHO 115

and the Gourmet's in the^south, to the Venice, at
the Oxford Street end of Soho Street, that had not
suffered our merry dinner parties. There was not
one that was not in some way or other linked with a
memory of delight. The waiters, Auguste, Alphonse,
Jean, le gros Paul, le grand Renard, all, were our
friends, and joked with us over our evil dialect
and our innumerable acquaintance. It was le grand
Renard, that great man, who elaborated the jest of
greeting us every time, as soon as we entered, with
" Ah, bon soir, Messieurs. Your friend IVTsieur So-
and-So has not been here to-day, nor M'sieur So-and-
So, nor M'sieur So-and-So, nor M'sieur So-and-So,
nor IVTsieur So-and-So, nor IVTsieur So-and-So," as
far as his breath would carry him in an incoherent
string of fantastic names, real and invented, that
delighted us every time.

COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO

COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO

THE day that Casanova, travelling as the Chevalier
de Seingalt, arrived in London, he strolled some little
way from his lodging through the old streets of Soho,
then as now the Italian quarter. Presently, he says,
" I saw a lot of people in a coffee-house, and I went
in. It was the most ill-famed coffee-house in London,
and the meeting place of the scum of the Italian
population. I had been told of it at Lyons, and
had made up my mind never to go there ; but chance
often makes us turn to the left when we want to go
to the right. I ordered some lemonade, and was
drinking it, when a stranger who was seated near me
took a news-sheet from his pocket, printed in Italian.
He began to make corrections in pencil on the
margin, which led me to suppose he was an author.
I watched him out of curiosity, and noticed that he
scratched out the word ancora, and wrote it at the
side, awhora. This barbarism irritated me. I told
him that for four centuries it had been written with-
out an h.

" « I agree with you,' he answered, < but I am quot-
ing Boccaccio, and in quotations one must be exact.'

" ' I humbly beg your pardon ; I see you are a
man of letters.1

" ' A very modest one ; my name is MartinelhV

119

120 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

« « I know you by reputation ; you are a cousin of
Casabigi's, who has spoken of you ; I have read some
of your satires."*

" < May I ask to whom I have the honour of speak-
ing?'

" « My name is Seingalt. Have you finished your
edition of the " Decameron " ? '

" * I am still working at it, and trying to get more
subscribers.1

" ' Will you allow me to be of the number ? '

" He put me down for four copies, at a guinea a
copy, and was surprised to hear I had only been in
London an hour.

" < Let me see you home,"* he said ; « you will lose
your way else.'

" When we were outside he told me I had been in
the Orange Coffee-House, the most disreputable in all
London.

" « But you go.'

« « I go because I know the company, and am on
my guard against it.'

" < Do you know many people here ? '

" « Yes, but I only pay court to Lord Spencer. I
work at literature, am all alone, earn enough for my
wants. I live in furnished lodgings, I own twelve
shirts and the clothes I stand up in, and I am per-
fectly contented.' "

That dialogue might serve well enough for an
exaggerated description of our own day. For the
people of this book are willing to drink anywhere
but in the more tame and expensive places of the
West End. They " know the company and are on

COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 123

their guard against it," and go cheerfully where they
may get most amusement at the smallest cost.

The coffee-houses best loved by the Bohemians are
not so disreputable as the Orange ; I doubt if their
reputations can have gone far beyond Soho. But
they have atmospheres of their own ; and they are
not places where you are likely to meet any one
oppressively more respectable or better dressed than
yourself. I am thinking of two small houses in
particular — " The Moorish Cafe " and « The Algerian."
Beside these there are many others, and a few neater,
more luxurious, more expensive, that help to wean
the Bohemian from Bohemia ; and then there are
the big drinking palaces by Leicester Square and
Piccadilly Circus, where he goes when he needs the
inspiration of a string band, or the interest of a
crowd of men and women.

Near the Oxford Street end of Soho Street, on
the left-hand side as you walk towards Soho Square,
is a small green-painted shop, with a window full
of coffee cups, and pots, and strainers of a dozen
different designs. Looking through the window,
that is dimmed likely enough with steam, you may
see a girl busied with a big coffee-grinding machine,
and watch the hesitant blue flames of the stove on
which the coffee is stewed. Opening the door, you
step into a babble of voices, and find yourself in a
tiny Moorish Cafe. The room is twisted and narrow,
so that you must have a care, as you walk, for other
peopled coffee cups upon the small round tables. At
every table men will be sitting, blowing through their
half-closed lips long jets of scented smoke that disturb

124 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

continually the smoke-filled atmosphere. Some will
be playing at cards, some at backgammon, some
talking eagerly among themselves. Dark hair, dark
eyes, sallow-skinned faces everywhere, here and there
a low caste Englishman, and sometimes, if you are
lucky, a Bohemian in emerald corduroy, lolling
broadly on his chair and puffing at a porcelain pipe.
Sit down near him, and it is ten to one that you will
be engaged in a wordy battle of acting, of poetry, or
of pictures, before the sediment has had time to settle
in your coffee.

The coffee is thick and dark and sweet ; to drink
it alone, and to smoke with it an Eastern cigarette,
is to hear strange Moorish melodies, to dream of
white buildings with green-painted porticoes, to see
the card-players as gambling dragomans, to snatch at
a coloured memory from the Arabian Nights. The
material for the dream is all about you ; gaudy
pictures in bright blues and oranges hang on the
walls; there is Stamboul in deliciously impossible
perspective, there the tomb of the Prophet, there an
Ottoman warship, there Noah's Ark, with a peacock
on the topmast, a serpent peering anxiously from a
porthole, and Noah and his family flaunting it in
caftans and turbans on the poop ; from the brackets
of the flickering incandescent lamps are hung old
Moorish instruments, tarboukas, and gambas, dusty,
with slackened strings, and yet sufficient, in the
dream, to send the tunes of the desert cities filtering
through the thick air of the room.

"The Algerian" is in Dean Street, close by the
Royalty Theatre, where Coquelin played Cyrano de

COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 125

Bergerac and kept a whole party, French painters
and English writers, quavering between laughter and
tears, uplifted with pride that there could be such
men as Cyrano, and joy that there was yet such an
actor as Coquelin. It is on the same side of the
street, a plain square window, thoroughly orthodox,
with "The Algerian Restaurant" written over the top.
Behind a small counter sits Madame, knitting,
smiling to all her acquaintance that come in, and
selling neat brown packages of wonderful coffee.
Beyond is an inner room, whose walls are covered
with cocoanut matting, and decorated with tiny
mirrors, and advertisements of special drinks. If
you can get a corner seat in that crowded little room,
you may be happy for an evening, with a succession
of coffees and a dozen cigarettes. Sometimes there
will be a few women watching the fun, but more
often there will be none but men, mostly French or
Italian, who play strange card games and laugh and
curse at each other. There used to be a charming
notice on the wall, which I cannot remember
accurately.

ANYONE CAUGHT GAMBLING OR

PLAYING FOR MONEY

Will be kicked into the gutter

and not picked up again.

PROPRIETOR.

It ran something like that, but it has now been
replaced by a less suggestive placard.

126 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

Also there used to be another room downstairs,
a gay companionable place, where I have played a
penny whistle and seen some dancing to my music.
Here we used to come after supper, to drink coffee,
smoke cigarettes, and argue according to custom.
Here would young Frenchmen bring their ladies, and
talk freely in their own tongue. Here would we too
bring our young women. It used to amuse me to
notice the sudden hush that fell on the talk of all
the couples and argumentative people, when the
grim Police Inspector and his important bodyguard
stumped heavily down the stairs, stood solemnly for
a moment in the middle of the room, and then went
slowly up the stairs again and the flood of ex-
cited chatter in several languages that followed their
disappearance.

It is impossible to leave the Algerian without re-
membering the wonderful big dog who used to be
a visitor in the room below. He was a very large
ruddy coUie. Left to himself he was an easy-going
fellow who would accept the hospitality of anybody
who had anything to spare ; but his master had only
to say one word, and he would not dip his nose in
the daintiest prettiest dish of coffee in the world.
He was a gentleman of nice manners; if his master
directed his attention to any lady who happened to
be there, and whispered in his silky ear, " Toujours
la politesse," immediately, with the gravity of an
Ambassador, he would walk across and lift a cere-
monial paw. It is sad that the room is now filled
with lumber that was once so gay with humanity.
But perhaps it will be opened again.

COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 127

Close round the corner opposite the Algerian is a
pretty white cafe, with a big window of a thousand
little leaded panes, through which it is impossible to
see. The whole suggestion of the outside is comfort
and secluded luxury. And indeed so it is ; you go
there when you are a success ; or, not being one of
the famous or opulent, when, having just sold a book
or a picture, you feel as if you were. Its air is very
different from the friendly untidiness of the other
two places. White cloths are on the tables, a little
cut-glass is scattered about, and there are red and
white flowers in silver vases — it is all so neat that I
would not describe it, if it were not a favourite place
of the more fortunate of the Bohemians, and if it
had not been so sweet a suggestion of what might
sometime be.

I came here in the pride of my first twenty-guinea
cheque, and was introduced with due ceremony to
Jeanne downstairs, pretty little Jeanne, who says
most mournfully that some one has told her from the
lines of her hand that she will not be married till
she is two-and-thirty — eleven whole years to wait.
My companion was a literary agent, who showed me
three successes, two novelists and a critic, out of the
half-dozen people who were sitting at the other tables.
I almost wished he had not brought me, until Jeanne
came back with black coffee in tall straight glasses, and
some excellent cigarettes, when I changed my mind,
and thought how often I would come here, if the world
should turn good critic, and recognise in solid wealth
the merit of my masterpieces. But the world still
needs reform.

128 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

Across Shaftesbury Avenue, past the stage doors
of Daly's and the Hippodrome, through the narrow
asphalt passage that is often crowded with ballet
girls and supers, walking up and down before the
times of their performances at one or other theatre,
you find your way into the brilliance of Leicester
Square. The Alhambra and the Empire fill two
sides of it with light, and Shakespeare stands on a
pedestal between them, resting his chin on his hand
in melancholy amazement.

Downstairs at the corner of the Square there is the
drinking-hall of the Provence, a long L-shaped room,
with a band playing in a corner, and smaller rooms
opening out of the first, and seeming a very multitude
of little caverns from the repetition of the mirrors
with which they are lined. There are frescoes on the
walls of the larger room, of gnomes swilling beer,
and tumbling head first into vats, and waving defiance
at the world with all the bravado of a mug of ale.
Fat pot-bellied little brutes they are, and so cheer-
fully conceived that you would almost swear their
artist had been a merry fellow, and kept a tankard
on the steps of his ladder where he sat to paint
them.

There is always a strange crowd at this place,
dancers, and singers from the music halls, sad women
pretending to be merry, coarse women pretending to
be refined, and men of all types grimacing and clink-
ing glasses with the women. And then there are the
small groups indifferent to everything but the jollity
and swing of the place, thumping their beer mugs on
the table over some mighty point of philosophy or

COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 129

criticism, and ready to crack each others' heads for
joy in the arguments of Socialism or Universal
Peace.

I was seated at a table here one night, admiring
the picture in which a gnome pours some hot liquid
on another gnome who lies shrieking in a vat, when
I noticed a party of four men sitting at a table
opposite. Three were obviously hangers-on of one or
other of the arts, the sort of men who are proud of
knowing an actor or two to speak to, and are ready
to talk with importance of their editorial duties on
the Draper's Compendium or the Toyshop Times. The
fourth was different. A huge felt hat banged freely
down over a wealth of thick black hair, bright blue
eyes, an enormous black beard, a magnificent manner
(now and again he would rise and bow profoundly,
with his hat upon his heart, to some girls on the
other side of the room), a way of throwing his head
back when he drank, of thrusting it forward when
he spoke, an air of complete abandon to the moment
and the moment's thought ; he took me tremendously.
He seemed to be delighting his friends with im-
promptu poetry. I did a mean but justifiable thing,
and carried my pot of beer to a table just beside
him, where I could see him better, and also hear his
conversation. It was twaddle, but such downright,
spirited, splendid twaddle, flung out from the heart
of him in a grand, careless way that made me
think of largesse royally scattered on a mob. His
blue twinkling eyes decided me. When, a minute
or two later, he went out, I followed, and found
him vociferating to his gang upon the pavement,

I

130 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

I pushed in, so as to exclude them, and asked
him :

" Are you prose or verse ? "

" I write verse, but I dabble in the other thing."
It was the answer I had expected.

" Very good. Will you come to my place to-
morrow night at eight ? Tobacco. Beer. Talk."

" I love beer. I adore tobacco. Talking is my
life. I will come."

" Here is my card. Eight o'clock to-morrow.
Good-night." And so I left him.

He came, and it turned out that he worked in a
bank from ten to four every day, and played the wild
Bohemian every night. His beard was a disguise.
He spent his evenings seeking for adventure, he said,
and apologised to me for earning an honest living.
He was really delightful. So are our friendships
made ; there is no difficulty about them, no diffidence ;
you try a man as you would a brand of tobacco ; if
you agree, then you are friends ; if not, why then you
are but two blind cockchafers who have collided with
each other in a summer night, and boom away again
each in his own direction.

Over the road there is the Cafe de TEurope, where,
also downstairs, there is an even larger drinking-hall.
Huge bizarre pillars support a decorated ceiling,
and beneath them there are a hundred tables, with
variegated maroon-coloured cloths, stained with the
drippings of tankards and wine-glasses. There is a
band here too, in a balcony halfway up the stairs.
This place, like all the other cafes, is not exclusively
Bohemian ; we are only there on sufferance, in isolated

COFFEE-HOUSES ABOUT SOHO 133

parties, and it is a curious contrast to look away to
the clerks, demi-mondaines, and men about town, sit-
ting at the other tables ; faces that have left their
illusions with their youth, faces with protruding lips
and receding chins, weak, foolish faces with watery
eyes, office boys trying to be men, and worn-out men
trying to be boys, and women ridiculously dressed
and painted. We used to go there most when we
were new to journalism, and we found it a great
place for planning new periodicals. Eight or nine of
us used to meet there, and map out a paper that was
to startle the town, and incidentally give us all the
opportunities that the present race of misguided
editors denied. We would select our politics, choose
our leader-writers, and decide to save quarrels by
sharing the dramatic criticism between us all. We
would fight lustily over the title, and have a wrangle
over the form. Some would wish to ape the Saturday
Review, some would desire a smaller, more convenient
shape for putting in the pocket, and others, commer-
cially minded, would suggest a gigantic size that
might make a good show on the book-stalls. We
would stand lagers again and again, proud in the
knowledge of our new appointments, leader-writers,
editors, dramatic critics every one of us. And then,
at last, after a whole evening of beer and extra-
vagance, and happy pencilled calculations of our
immediate incomes, based on a supposed sale of
100,000 copies weekly (we were sure of that at least),
we would come suddenly to fact. The Scotch poet,
whom we usually elected business manager on these
occasions, would smile grimly, and say, " Now, gentle-

134 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

men, the matter of finance. There will be printers
and papermakers to pay. Personally, and speaking
for myself alone, I will give all that I possess."

« And how much is that ? " we would cry, although
we guessed.

"Well" — and he would make great show of rummag-
ing his pockets — " it seems that I was cleaned right
out of bullion by that last lot of beer. O'Rourke, it's
your turn to stand. Waiter — waiter, another round
of lagers."

This was the invariable end, and at closing time,
having swung from the glory of newspaper proprietor-
ship to the sordid penury of sharing out coppers in
order to pay all bus fares home, we would walk along
Cranbourn Street to Piccadilly Circus, and separate
for the night.

THE BOOK-SHOPS OF BOHEMIA

THE BOOK-SHOPS OF BOHEMIA

WHERE the Charing Cross Road swirls up by the
Hippodrome in a broad curve to Cambridge Circus
and Oxford Street, it drops, for the short space of
a few hundred yards, all shout and merriment and
boisterous efflorescence of business, and becomes as
sedate and proper an old street as ever exposed books
on open stalls to the public fingers. The motor-buses
may rattle up the middle of the road on their
rollicking dance to Hampstead, the horse-pulled buses
may swing and roll more slowly and nearer the gutter ;
no matter, for the pavements are quiet with learning
and book-loving. All through the long summer after-
noons, and in the winter, when the lamps hang over
the shelves, books old, new, second and third hand,
lie there in rows, waiting, these the stout old fellows,
for Elias to carry them off under their arms ; waiting,
these the little ones, for other true book-lovers to
pop them in their pockets. The little brown Oxford
classics, the baby Virgil, the diminutive volumes of
Horace and Catullus seem really to peak and shrivel
on the shelves, suffocated in the open air, and long-
ing, like townsmen for the town, for a snug square
resting-place against the lining of a smoking-coat.
All about them are innumerable bound magazines,
novels of Dickens, Scott, and Thackeray, novels of

137

138 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

later times marked at half price, old sermons from
sold vicarage libraries, old school grammars, and here
and there the forgotten immortals of the nineties,
essayists published by Mr. John Lane, and poets with
fantastic frontispieces. Against the window panes,
behind the books, hang prints, Aubrey Beardsleys
now, and designs by Housman and Nicholson, where
once would Rowlandsons have hung, Bartolozzis, or
perhaps an engraved portrait of Johnson or Gold-
smith, done by Sir Joshua Reynolds, or perhaps again
a selection of Amazing Beauties from the " Garland "
or the « Keepsake " or the « Offering."

Summer and winter, book-buyers range up and
down the street ; book-buyers who mean to buy,
book-buyers who would buy if they could, and book-
buyers who have bought, and are now tormenting
themselves by looking for bargains that they might
have made, choicer than those they have already
clinched. There is a rare joy in picking books from
the stalls without the interference of any commercial
fingers ; a great content in turning over the pages of
a book, a Cervantes perhaps, or a Boccaccio, or one
of the eighteenth-century humourists, catching sight
here and there of a remembered smile, and chuckling
anew at the remembrance, putting the book down
again, rather hurriedly, as if to decide once for all
that you must not buy it, and then picking up
another and repeating the performance. And then,
the poignant, painful self-abandon when at last you
are conquered, and a book leads you by the hand to
the passionless little man inside the shop, and makes
you pay him money, the symbol, mean, base, sordid

THE BOOK-SHOPS OF BOHEMIA 139

in itself, but still the symbol, that the book has won,
and swayed the pendulum of your emotions past the
paying point.

I remember the buying of my " Anatomy of Melan-
choly " (that I have never read, nor ever mean to —
I dare not risk the sweetness of the title *) ; two big
beautiful volumes, with a paper label on the back of
each, they stood imperious on the shelves. I had
seven-and-sixpence in the world, and was on my way
up to Soho for dinner. I took one volume down,
and turned the thick old leaves, and ran my eye over
the black print, broken and patterned by quotations
in italics, Latin quotations everywhere making the
book a mosaic in two languages. To sit and smoke
in front of such a book would be elysium. I could,
of course, have got a copy at a library — but then I
did npt want to read it. I wanted to own it, to sit
in front of it with a devotional mind, to let my
tobacco smoke be its incense, to worship its magnifi-
cent name ; and here it was in such a dress as kings
and hierarchs among books should wear. If I were
ever to have a Burton, this Burton would I have. I
remember I laid the book down, and stoically lit a
pipe, before daring to look at the flyleaf for the
pencilled price. Just then another man, one with
the air of riches, walked casually up to the stall, and,
fearful for my prize and yet timorous of its cost, I
seized it and turned with trembling fingers back to
the beginning :

" Two vols. 8/-."

I am glad to say I later took that risk.

140 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

Turning my purse inside out, I went in, with the two
volumes and the three half-crowns, to come to some
agreement with the bookseller. He let me have the
books, but dinner vanished for that night, as the
meats from the table of Halfdan the Black, and I had
to walk to Chelsea. But what a joyous walk that
was in the early autumn evening. Those two heavy
volumes, one under each arm, swung me up the hill
from Piccadilly as if they had been magic wings.
The feel of them on my sides sent my heart beating
and my face into smiles. One of the volumes was
uncut — UNCUT. My landlord met me at the door
with my bill. « The Devil ! " my heart said, « I
will attend to it," uttered my lips; and upstairs,
penniless, by the light of a candle, that is, after all,
as Elia has it, "a kindlier luminary than sun or
moon," I spent three hours cutting that volume, leaf
by leaf, happier than can well be told.

There is something more real about this style of
buying books than about the dull mercenary method
of a new emporium. It is good, granted, to look
about the shelves of a new book-shop, to see your
successful friends and the authors you admire out-
glittering each other in gold-lettered, brilliant-
coloured bindings; to pick up pretty little editions
of your favourite books — what pretty ones there
are nowadays, but how sad it is to see a staid old
folio author compelled to trip it in a duodecimo

; all that is pleasant enough, but to spend

money there is a sham and a fraud ; it is like buying
groceries instead of buying dreams.

And then, too, the people who buy in the ordinary

THE BOOK-SHOPS OF BOHEMIA 141

shops are disheartening. There is no spirit about
them, no enthusiasm. You cannot sympathise with
them over a disappointment nor smile your congratu-
lations over a prize — they need neither. They are
buying books for other people, not to read them-
selves. The books they buy are doomed, Christmas
or birthday presents, to lie about on drawing-room
tables. I am sorry for those people, but I am
sorrier for the books. For a book is of its essence a
talkative, companionable thing, or a meditative and
wise ; and think of the shackling monotony of life on
a drawing-room table, unable to be garrulous, being
uncut, and unable to be contemplative in the din of
all that cackle.

The others, who deal at the second-hand shops,
come there of a more laudable purpose, to buy books
for themselves — or to sell them, if their libraries have
become insufferably fuller than their purses. This
last case is at once sorrowful and happy : sad for the
heart-pangs of playing the traitor to a book by hand-
ing it back to a bookseller, happy in that other
people, perhaps you, perhaps I, have then a chance
of buying it. It is an odd thing, by the way, that
sumptuous volumes are always easiest to part with ; a
ragged, worn old thing, especially if it is small, tugs
at our feelings, so that we cannot let it go, whereas
a school prize or an elegant present — away with it.
They say that little women are the longest loved. It
is difficult for us to sympathise with Lord Tyrconnel,
when in withdrawing his patronage from Richard
Savage he alleged that, « having given him a collec-
tion of valuable books stamped with my own arms, I

142 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

had the mortification to see them in a short time
exposed to sale upon the stalls, it being usual with
Mr. Savage, when he wanted a small sum, to take his
books to the pawnbroker." How many presentation
copies, in large paper and vellum, have not gone in a
like manner ? Though nowadays we deal direct with
the bookseller, and do not soothe our consciences with
the pretence of intended redemption that is possible
when a pawnbroker receives the books.

This leads me conveniently to another subject.
Many young authors find help towards a livelihood
by selling the copies of new works that come to them
for praise and blame from the newspapers. I re-
member, when first my reviewing began, thinking it
unfair to their writers thus to place books they had
sent for nothing to the papers at once upon the
second-hand stalls. But presently, as a Christmas
season came on, and children's books and sensational
novels poured in in their dozens and their twenties,
the pile in the corner of my room grew beyond all
bearing, for I would not insult the books that had
been purchased in their own right by giving them
these foundling new-comers as neighbours on the
shelves. I was driven to reasoning again, and soon
proved, with admirable comfortable logic, that an
advertisement, or a piece of good advice, from so
able a pen as my own must be worth more to an
author than the chance sale of a copy on the stalls.
I sent immediately for a bookseller, and from that
time on he called each Monday to remove the
jetsam of the week before. This practice, which
is very generally adopted and makes a pleasant

THE BOOK-SHOPS OF BOHEMIA 143

little addition to many meagre incomes, is the explana-
tion of the quantities of glowing new novels and
other books (some of
them, to the dis-
credit of the review-
ing profession, uncut)
that can be seen
marked down to half
or a third the pub-
lished price in almost
any book -shop in the
Charing Cross Road.
It is a temptation
to buy the books of
your friends in this
easy way. I have
often hesitated over
a Masefield, or a
Thomas, and the
works of half a score
of little poets. But
God deliver me from
such baseness.

These shops are
not the stalls that
delighted Lamb, and
Gay before him. ________„

Those were farther

east, some in Booksellers' Row, now cleared away
by the improvements in the Strand, some in the
neighbourhood of Covent Garden, some close by St.
Paul's, where in the alleys round about Ja few such

144 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

shops may still be found. The City shops were
those that Gay describes : —

" Volumes on shelter' d stalls expanded lie,
And various science lures the learned eye ;
The bending shelves with pond'rous scholiasts groan,
And deep divines to modern shops unknown :
Here, like the bee, that on industrious wing
Collects the various odours of the spring,
Walkers at leisure learning's flowers may spoil,
Nor watch the wasting of the midnight oil.
May morals snatch from Plutarch's tattered page,
A mildew' d Bacon or Stagira's sage.
Here saunt'ring 'prentices o'er Otway weep,
O'er Congreve smile, or over D * * sleep."

Gay, walking " with sweet content on foot, wrapt in
his virtue and a good surtout," the first covering
perhaps being scanty enough, loved this impecunious
public so much better than his own more opulent
patrons that he prayed to his publisher, Bernard
Lintot, " a great sputtering fellow," who must have
been vastly annoyed at his author's unbusinesslike
fancies : —

" O Lintot, let my labours obvious lie,
Ranged on thy stall, for every curious eye ;
So shall the poor these percepts gratis know,
And to my verse their future safeties owe."

Lamb loved them too. "There is a class of street
readers," he says, " whom I can never contemplate
without affection — the poor gentry, who, not having
the wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little
learning at the open stall — the owner, with his hard
eye, casting envious looks at them all the while, and

THE BOOK-SHOPS OF BOHEMIA 145

thinking when they will have done. Venturing
tenderly, page after page, expecting every moment
when he shall interpose his interdict, and yet unable
to deny themselves the gratification, they « snatch a
fearful joy!'1'

Some of the older-fashioned stalls remain, but
they are solitary. They do not sing together like
the morning stars. They are isolated hermits, often
in strange surroundings. In the open markets held
in the shabbier streets, where flaring naphtha lights
swing over barrows like those set up once a week in
the squares of little country towns, I have often stood
in the jostling crowd of marketers, to turn over old,
greasy, tattered covers. There is an aloofness about
the bookstall even there, where it stands in line with
a load of brussels sprouts and cabbages on one side,
and a man selling mussels and whelks on the other.
The bookstall, even in its untidiness, has always the
air of the gentleman of the three, come down in the
world perhaps, but still one of a great family. I
have sometimes been tempted to apologise to the
bookseller for taking a penn'orth of cockles and
vinegar while looking at his books. It seemed
etiquette not to perceive that grosser, less intellectual
stalls existed.

There are similar book barrows in the market
streets of the East End, and some in Farringdon
Street, where I have heard of bargains picked up for
a song. But I have never visited them. There are
good second-hand shops up the Edgware Road, and
I got Thorpe's Northern Mythology for threepence
in Praed Street. But my favourite of all the isolated

146 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

shops is a queer little place at the dip of Bedford
Street, where it drops into the Strand. It has but
a lean row of books ranged on a narrow table in
front of the window, but its prints are superb.
There are maps sometimes, and often old hand-
coloured caricatures, figures with balloons full of
jokes blowing from their mouths, hanging behind
the glass or fluttering in the doorway. And though
the books are so few, I seldom pass the shop
without seeing office boys from the Bedford Street
or Henrietta Street offices skimming through them,
now looking at one, now at another, until their
tardy consciences hurry them at last upon their
masters'* errands.

Still, if we except Paternoster Row, mainly occu-
pied by publishers, the Charing Cross Road is the
only street whose character is wholly bookish. By
these shops alone are there always a crowd of true
bookmen. There are the clerks who bolt their
lunches to be able to spend half an hour in glancing
over books. There are reviewers selling newspaper
copies. There are book-collectors watching for the
one chance in ten thousand that brings a prize into
the fourpenny box. There are book-lovers looking
for the more frequent chance that brings them a
good book at a little price, or lets them read it
without buying it.

I have met old ladies there, with spectacles, and
little bonnets with purple ribbons, eating buns before
going back to the Museum to read, scanning over
the bookshelves like birds pecking for crumbs over
the cobbles. And sometimes I have met really old

THE BOOK-SHOPS OF BOHEMIA 149

ladies, like Mrs. , who told me she had sat on

Leigh Hunt's knee and put strawberries into his
mouth; old ladies who remember the old days and
the old book-shops, and come now to the Charing
Cross Road for old sake's sake, just as a man reads
over again a book that he read in his childhood for
that reason alone. There was an old gentleman, too,
whom I loved to see striding across the street from
shop to shop, dodging the buses as he crossed, with a
long grey beard that divided at his chin and blew
over his shoulders, and a huge coat, all brown fur
without, that flapped about his legs. There was
another, too, with a white forehead and an absent eye,
and thin black clothes with pockets bagged out by
carrying libraries. I caught him once looking at a
book upside down, deep in some dream or other : he
came to himself suddenly, and saw that he had been
observed — I loved him for the shame-faced, awkward
way in which he tried to pretend he had been looking
at a mark on the page. Then, too, there are young
serious-faced poets, with who knows how many great
works, ready planned, floating in the air about their
heads : it is pleasant to watch the supercilious scorn
with which they pass the shelves of lighter literature.
It is delightful, too, to see the learned young men
from the country trying to hoodwink the bookseller,
who really does not care, into thinking that they are
of the connoisseurs, and in the know, by asking him
with a particular air about special editions of Oscar
Wilde, and who has the best collection of Beardsley
drawings.

Nor must I forget the true Tom Folios, who are

150 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

"universal scholars as far as the title-pages^ of all
authors, know the manuscripts in which they were
discovered, the editions through which they have
passed, with the praises or censures which they have
received from the several members of the learned
world. They think they give you an account of an
author when they tell you the subject he treats of, the
name of the editor, and the year in which it was
printed." We have several such about the British
Museum, and often they may be seen in the Charing
Cross Road, picking over the older books, glancing
at the title-pages (if by any chance you catch them
looking at the text, be assured they are only examin-
ing the print). Some of them are useful fellows, like
one I know, who, when he is in drink and merry, can
give you a list of the half-dozen best works on any
subject you like to mention, with the libraries or
bookshops where they may be found.

All these characters may be met by the book-
stalls. Surely among the lot of them the books on
those shelves have a better chance of finding their
proper owners, the readers planned for them from
their creation, than in any of the glass-fronted shops
where the customers are harassed by extravagantly
dressed young men, who assume, and rightly more
often than not, that they know better what is wanted
than the customers do themselves.

Indeed, I am quite with Gay in the matter. I would
be happier to think of this book tattered and torn in
a twopenny box than lying neat and uncut upon a
drawing-room table. Therefore, O my publishers,
though I cannot address you in neat verse like Mr.

THE BOOK-SHOPS OF BOHEMIA 151

Gay's, let me pray you in plain honest prose — do
send out a superabundance of copies to the news-
papers, so that some at least may find their
ignominious, happy way to the best and untidiest
book-shops in the world.

OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET

OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET

JOHNSON and Boswell walked once in Greenwich Park,
then very decent country, and even now no despicable
imitation. " Is not this fine ? " says the Doctor ;
Boswell answers, " Yes, sir ; but not equal to Fleet
Street"; and the Doctor clinches the matter with,
" You are right, sir, you are right."

Indeed, Fleet Street, brave show as it is to-day,
must have been splendid then, seen through old
Temple Bar, a turning, narrow thoroughfare, with
high-gabled houses a little overhanging the pave-
ments, those pavements where crowds of gentlemen,
frizzed and wigged, in coloured coats and knee-
breeches, went to and fro about their business. There
would come strutting little Goldsmith in the plum-
coloured suit, and the sword so big that it seemed a
pin and he a fly upon it. There would be Johnson,
rolling in his gait, his vast stomach swinging before
him, his huge laugh bellying out in the narrow street,
with Boswell at his side, leaning round to see his face
and catch each word as it fell from his lips. There
would be Doctor Kenrick, Goldsmith's arch enemy,
for whose fault he broke a stick over the back of
bookseller Evans, and got a pummelling for his pains.
There would be the usual mob of young fellows trying

156

156 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

as gaily then as now to keep head above water by
writing for the Press.

And then think of it in a later time, when Hazlitt
walked those pavements, with straight, well-meant
strides, as befits a man who has done his thirty miles
a day along the Great North Road. Perhaps as he
walked he would be composing his remarks on the
oratory of the House of Commons, which he was
engaged to report for Mr. Perry of the Morning
Chronicle. Or perhaps, if it were Wednesday, he
would turn in at Mitre Court, or meet a slim-legged,
black-clothed figure with a beautiful head, Charles
Lamb, coming out of the archway, or hurrying in
there, with a folio under his arm, fresh from the stall
of the second-hand bookseller. Perhaps Lamb might
be playing the journalist himself, writing jokes for
Dan Stuart of the Morning Post. You remember :
" Somebody has said that to swallow six cross-buns
daily consecutively for a fortnight would surfeit the
stoutest digestion. But to have to furnish as many
jokes daily, and that not for a fortnight, but for a
long twelvemonth, as we were constrained to do, was
a little harder exaction." Or perhaps you might
meet Coleridge coming that way from his uncomfort-
able lodging in the office of the Courier up the Strand.
Coleridge knew the ills of journalistic life. De
Quincey " called on him daily and pitied his forlorn
condition," and left us a description of his lodging.
De Quincey had known worse himself, but this was
evil enough. " There was no bell in the room,
which for many months answered the double purpose
of bedroom and sitting-room. Consequently I often

FLEET STREET

OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 159

saw him, picturesquely enveloped in nightcaps, sur-
mounted by handkerchiefs endorsed upon handker-
chiefs, shouting from the attics down three or four
flights of stairs to a certain ' Mrs. Brainbridge,' his
sole attendant, whose dwelling was in the subterra-
nean regions of the house. There did I often see
the philosopher, with the most lugubrious of faces,
invoking with all his might this uncouth name of
« Brainbridge,' each syllable of which he intonated
with long-drawn emphasis, in order to overpower the
hostile hubbub coming downwards from the creaking
press and the roar from the Strand which entered at
all the front windows."

And then there was the Tom and Jerry time, when
young bloods for sport came down at night to Temple
Bar to overturn the boxes of the watchmen and
startle their rheumatic occupants; when Reynolds
would leave his insurance office to go to Jack
Randall's in Chancery Lane to watch the sparring ;
when Pierce Egan, the first and greatest of sporting
writers, would slip along the Strand from Soho for
the same splendid purpose.

And then there was the time when Dickens, a very
young Bohemian, saw his first sketch, " called « Mr.
Minns and his Cousin ' — dropped stealthily one
evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a
dark letter-box in a dark office up a dark court in
Fleet Street — appear in all the glory of print."

And then, long before, there had been the magical
Elizabethan Fleet Street, when Ben Jonson and his
friends drank by Temple Bar, when Shakespeare met
Falstaff and Pistol in the Fleet Street taverns, and

160 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

was probably contemptuously cut by poor Greene, as
" an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, a
puppet speaking from our mouths, an antick garnisht
in our colours."

And now there are all these different Fleet Streets,
one on the top of the other, dovetailed together in-
distinguishably. A building here, an old doorway
there, the name of a side street, brings back a memory
of one age or another. This tavern, for example,
was given its name as a jest by a gay-dressed fellow
in long locks, with a sword swinging at his side.
There is the street of the White Friars. That build-
ing was designed by a subject of Queen Anne. Lamb
walked past while those offices were still cradled in
their scaffolding.

On a sunny morning there is no jollier sight in all
the world than to look down Fleet Street, from a
little below the corner of Fetter Lane on that side of
the road. The thoroughfare is thronged with buses
— green for Whitechapel, blue going to Waterloo
Bridge, white for Liverpool Street, gay old survivals
of the coaching days, with their drivers windblown
and cheerfully discontented, the healthiest-looking
fellows, who would once have driven four-in-hand,
and are too soon to vanish and be replaced by uni-
formed chauffeurs. Already the great motor-buses
whirl past them down the narrow street, and dwarf
them by their size. There goes a scarlet mail wagon,
there a big dark van from some publishers up Pater-
noster Row. Barrows creep along the gutter, some
selling chocolates « for an advertisement," at a penny
a stick, some selling bananas, " two for IJd.," the

OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 161

penny written big, and the halfpenny as small and
apparently insignificant as is consistent with street-
selling honesty. The toot-toot of a motor bicycle
worries among the other noises like the yap of a
terrier, and a boy swings past, round the backs of
the buses, twisting his way under the horses' noses

with devilish enjoyment, a huge sack of newspapers
fastened on his back.

On either side, above all the flood of traffic, stand
the tall narrow houses, and the larger newer buildings,
with the names of newspapers and magazines blazoned
in brilliant gold and colour across wall and window.
The sunlight, falling across the street, leaves one side
in shadow, and lights the other with a vivid glare, as
if to make the shadowed side as jealous as it can.
Men and women hurry on the pavements : typewriter
girls, office boys, news editors, reporters, writers, and

162 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

artists in pen and ink jostling each other down the
street. And if you look up from the noise and
movement, you see the grey dome of St. Paul's,
standing aloof, immutable, at the top of Ludgate
Hill. How many times has the sun shone on that
great pile of stone, how many lives have been hurried
through within sight of its majesty and calm ! How
many men yet will untidily live out their days,
harassed, nervous, never giving a moment but to the
moment itself, while that massive building rises as if
in the sky, a monument of peace above the tumult !

As you watch the people on the pavements you
will gradually learn to distinguish by their manner
of walking the men who pass you by. There are the
young fellows who walk as hard as if the world
depended on the rapid accomplishment of their
business; these are the men who do not matter,
who seek to hide their unimportance from themselves.
The real editor of a successful paper walks with less
show of haste, an easier tread, a less undignified
scramble. He knows the time he may allow, and is
never in a hurry. It is his subordinates, the fledglings
of the Press, and the editors of small unsuccessful
rags, who are always, as we north-countrymen say,
in a scrow. Poor fellows ! Fleet Street life is so
heartless, so continuous : they must do something, or
it would not know that they were there.

Then there are the writers and illustrators, men
of a less regular stamp, men whom it is difficult to
imagine sitting at an office desk, men who walk at
their own pace, and look into the shop windows, men
who make of their walk a lazy kind of essay, with all

OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 163

manner of digressions. These are the unattached,
the free-lances, who know that the papers for which
they write cannot do without them (it is extraordinary,
though, how soon the feat is accomplished if they
happen to die), and in that proud knowledge saunter
down to shake the editors by the hand, and ask what
is to be the game this week, or to suggest some topic
of their own. There will be Chesterton, Ursa Major
Redivivus, rolling with an armful of papers from side
to side of the pavement, cannoning from astounded
little man into astounded little man, and chuckling
all the time at one or other of the half-dozen articles
that he is making inside that monstrous head. There
will be a writer of special articles, walking the pave-
ment with the air prescribed by the best of drill
sergeants, " as if one side of the street belonged to
him, and he expected the other shortly." There
will be the critic from the country, striding down
Bouverie Street to see what impertinent poets have
dared to send their books to his paper for review.
There a little dark-faced writer of short stories, an
opulent manufacturer of serial tales, a sad-looking
maker of humorous sketches, and a dexterous twister
of political jokes into the elaborate French metres
that make a plain statement look funny. There will
be twenty more.

As you walk down the street you realise how
impossible it is to throw off the consciousness of its
ancient history. Over the way is Mitre Court, where
Lamb's friends met on Wednesday's and discussed
" Of Persons One would wish to have Seen." How
impossible it was even then appears from the fact

164

BOHEMIA IN LONDON

that Chaucer's name was suggested to the Mitre
Courtiers by some one asking whether they could
not " see from the window the Temple Walk in
which old Chaucer used to take his exercise."

Farther down there is an alley-way leading to
Salisbury Court, where Richardson ran his printing
business, and built the house that his wife did not

like, and wrote his interminable books. In the alley-
way is the tavern where at the present day the
Antient Society of Cogers meet to discuss the world
and its affairs. They used to meet at the Green
Dragon round the corner, in Fleet Street again.

Farther up, at the top of the street, close by
Temple Bar, there is the Cock, an admirable place,
where you are still fed in high-backed pews and
served by English waiters. Tennyson was so de-
lighted by one of them that he wrote "Will Water-

OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 165

proofs Lyrical Monologue,"" from which I filch some
livening verses : —

" Oh, plump head-waiter at the Cock,

To which I most resort,
How goes the time ? 'Tis five o'clock,

Go fetch a pint of port.
And let it not be such as that

You set before chance comers,
But such whose father grape grew fat

On Lusitanian summers.

The Muse, the jolly Muse it is !

She answered to my call,
She changes with that mood or this,

Is all in all to all :
She lit the spark within my throat,

To make my blood run quicker,
Used all her fiery will, and smote

Her life into the liquor.

And hence this halo lives about

The waiter's hands, that reach
To each his perfect pint of stout,

His proper chop to each.
He looks not like the common breed

That with the napkin dally ;
I think he came, like Ganymede,

From some delightful valley.

The Cock was of a larger egg

Than modern poultry drop,
Step'd forward on a firmer leg,

And cram'd a plumper crop ;
Upon an ampler dunghill trod,

Crow'd lustier late and early,
Sipt wine from silver, praising God,

And raked in golden barley.

166 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

A private life was all his joy,

Till in a court he saw
A something-pottle-bodied boy

That knuckled at the taw ;
He stoop'd and clutch'd him, fair and good,

Flew over roof and casement ;
His brothers of the weather stood

Stock still for sheer amazement.

But he, by farmstead, thorpe, and spire,

And follow' d with acclaims,
A sign to many a staring shire

Came crowing over Thames.
Right down by smoky Paul's they bore,

Till, where the street grows straiter,
One fix'd for ever at the door,

And one became head-waiter."

It reads as if he had enjoyed the place. The Cock
is still above the door, and it is not impossible to
believe that these waiters, like that one, were brought
in a manner of their own from some hidden valley
where the napkin is the laurel of ambition, where
men are born waiters as others are born priests or
kings.

Pepys loved the Cock : « eat a lobster here, and
sang and was mighty merry." Johnson knew it too.
The tavern has been rebuilt, though all the old
fittings are retained, and every day from half-past
twelve till three its dark square pews are full of talk-
ing, feeding men, as in the older days.

Far down on the Fetter Lane side of the street
there is the Cheshire Cheese, still the dirty-fronted,
low-browed tavern, with stone flasks in the window,
that it was even before Johnson"^ time. Here, so

OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 169

people say, Johnson and Goldsmith used to sup and
be merry with their friends. Perhaps it was the
haunt of one of the talking clubs of which neither
of them was ever tired. Although it is nowhere
written that Johnson crossed the threshold, it is very
unlikely that the man who asserted that "a tavern
chair was the throne of human felicity" could have
neglected such an opportunity as was his. For he
lived for some time in Wine Office Court, in whose
narrow passage is the entrance to the tavern, and I
doubt if he could have passed it every day without
finding some reason for encouraging it. Indeed,
with Macaulaic logic, they show you Johnson's
corner seat, the wall behind it rubbed smooth by the
broadcloth of innumerable visitors, <e to witness if
they lie/1 It is a pleasant brown room, this, in the
tavern, with Johnson's portrait hanging on the wall,
old wooden benches beside good solid tables, and a
homely smell of ale and toasted cheese. Here many of
the best-known journalists make a practice of dining,
and doubtless get some sauce of amusement with
their meat from the young men and girls, literary and
pictorial, destined to work for the cheap magazines
and fashion papers, who always begin their professional
career by visiting the Cheshire Cheese for inspiration.
Up a winding, crooked, dark staircase there are other
rooms, with long tables in them stained with wine
and ale, and in one of them the Rhymers' Club used
to meet, to drink from tankards, smoke clay pipes,
and recite their own poetry.

In the passage into Wine Office Court, almost
opposite the narrow entry of the Cheshire Cheese,

170 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

there is a door set back, that denies admittance (in
big printed letters) to all but members of the Press
Club. This is a sort of substitute for the coffee-
houses of the eighteenth century. Goldsmith used
to gather suggestions for the Bee at "The Temple
Exchange Coffee House near Temple Bar"; and in
the fourth number of that ill-fated periodical he
confessed that he was tempted —

" To throw oft' all connexions with taste, and fairly
address my countrymen in the same engaging style
and manner with other periodical pamphlets much
more in vogue than probably mine shall ever be.
To effect this, I had thought of changing the title
into that of The Royal Bee, The Anti-Gallwan Bee,
or The Bee's Magazine. I had laid in a stock of
popular topics, such as encomiums on the King of
Prussia, invective against the Queen of Hungary and
the French, the necessity of a militia, our undoubted
sovereignty of the seas, reflections upon the present
state of affairs, a dissertation upon liberty, some
seasonable thoughts upon the intended bridge of
Blackfriars, and an address to Britons ; the history
of an old woman whose teeth grew three inches long,
an ode upon our victories, a rebus, an acrostic upon
Miss Peggy P., and a journal of the weather. All
this, together with four extraordinary pages of letter-
press, a beautiful map of England, and two prints
curiously coloured from nature, I fancied might touch
their very souls."

Reading that is like listening to plans laid down
a hundred times a year in the Press Club smoking-
room. There are the members, their legs hung

OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 171

elegantly over the backs of chairs, cigars, briars, or
meerschaums between their teeth, glasses of whisky
on the small round tables at their sides, planning
their baits for the British public much as anglers
observe the sky, and decide between the likely merits
of different artificial flies. The prints "curiously
coloured from nature " have still their votaries. « A
good three-colour plate, that's the very thing " —
I can hear the tone of the conspirator's voice.
Reverse Goldsmith's popular politics, abuse Germany,
fling in a black-and-white cartoon of a fat John
Bull kissing a short-skirted French demoiselle, with
a poem about the entente cordiale, substitute Labour
Party for liberty — the picture is the life.

The Press Club is a great manufactory of comfort-
able fame. It hangs caricatures of its members
round its walls. A man who sees his own caricature
has a foretaste of immortality, and of this flattery
the Club is generous to itself. And you cannot
ask a member what such a one of his fellows does
without being made to feel ashamed of your ignor-
ance of his celebrity. With a cold shock you learn
that you have fallen behind the times, and that men
are famous now of whom you never heard.

As well as the Press Restaurant, and the more
noted taverns, there are plenty of places up and
down the street where famous men can get their
beef and beer like ordinary people ; but the most
entertaining places of refreshment are two small cafes
that are exactly similar to many in other parts of the
town. At the top of Bouverie Street there is a little
white-painted, gold-lettered shop, with cakes and

172 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

pastries in the window. You go in there, and find
rows of chocolate-coloured marble table-tops, standing
on moulded iron legs, and surrounded by cheap
wooden chairs. There are mirrors on all the walls,
which are hung with notices that tell of the price of
Bovril by the cup, or the cost of a pound packet
of special coffee. Girls, dressed in black, with peaked
white caps and spotless aprons, scuttle about with
trays, and cloths to mop up the tea which previous
customers have spilt. You may go downstairs into
a yellow atmosphere of smoke and electric light, and
find another room, full of tables like ,the first, where
crowds of young men are drinking tea and playing
chess. If you sit down here, and ask knowingly
to have the moisture wiped off before you lay your
book on the table, and then have buttered toast
and tea brought you by the white-capped girl,
and finally throw the food into yourself as if by
accident while you read your book ; if you do all
these things as if you were born to it, why then
you may feel yourself the equal of any journalist
in the place.

The other little cafe is on the opposite side of the
street, close by Fetter Lane. A green, elaborately
fronted shop, it is slightly more expensive than the
first, and more luxurious. The tables hide their
innocence under white cloths, and you are not given
the satisfaction of watching the swabbing up of the
last customer's tea. There is a string band playing
in a recess. If you wish to see real live journalists, you
may see them here drinking black coffee out of little
cups in the mildest possible manner.

OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 173

This chapter is long already, and a little unruly in
digression, but I cannot conclude it without mention-
ing one of the innumerable talking clubs that meet at
the taverns in the neighbourhood, just as Goldsmith's
friends used to meet on Wednesdays at the Globe,
and for the same purpose. I was introduced to it
soon after coming into Bohemia. There was a long
table down the middle of the room, and round it,
on benches, were seated about a dozen men, some
young, some very young, few over thirty, with beer
mugs and spirit glasses before them, and pipes in
their mouths. The room already reeked of the good,
dirty, homely smell of tobacco smoke, although they
had but just assembled. There was a big cigar box
at one end of the table, into which each member
dropped a coin representing the amount of liquor he
expected to drink during the evening, and the amount
he thought fitting for any guest he had happened to
bring. A huge snuff-box was passed round at in-
tervals. All the members took pinches, and sneezed
immediately afterwards, with apparent enjoyment.
There was a fierce argument in progress when we
came in. One of the members had just published
a book, and the others were attacking him as healthy
wolves worry a lame one. " What do you mean by

this in the chapter on Swinburne?" "I think

you're a little mistaken in saying this about Raphael "

" Swinburne has ceased to count anyway "

" Who dared say that Swinburne had ceased to

count ? " " Swinburne's poetry will last as long as

Victor Hugo's, and Hugo is the greatest of the nine-
teenth century " " Hugo, Pfa ! a meteor flash, no

174

BOHEMIA IN LONDON

more ... a careless fellow . . . But the question

of French poetry is interesting enough " " Ah !

French poetry . . ." Half the company turned on
the last speaker, and the poor author, who had been

waiting to answer his critics, took a drink of beer,
filled his pipe, and smiled to himself. French poetry
as matter for discussion led them to Villon, and from
Villon they passed to the question of capital punish-
ment for trivial offences, and from that to the ques-
tion whether capital punishment is justifiable at all.
At this there was a cry of faddism, which introduced

OLD AND NEW FLEET STREET 175

an argument about Mr. Bernard Shaw. The evening,
typical of many others in Fleet Street, passed like
magic, as the talk swung from subject to subject, and
the tankards were emptied and refilled, and the snuff-
box made its rounds.

SOME NEWSPAPERS AND
MAGAZINES

SOME NEWSPAPERS AND
MAGAZINES

I MENTIONED a little newspaper that, by its payments
for my young essays and exuberantly juvenile reviews,
made it possible for me to adventure by myself and take
my first lodging in Chelsea. It was a good example
of those obscure, high-hearted little rags that keep
alive so many of the unknown writers, and help so
many youthful critics to deceive themselves into self-
congratulation at the sight of their own names in
capital letters. Your name in capital letters at the
foot of a review seems as permanent, as considerable
a memorial as the dome of St. Paul's. It is im-
possible to imagine it forgotten. Indeed, there have
been plenty of people surprised by their first glad
printed outbursts into contented silence for the rest
of their lives. For them, their doings have been for
ever consecrated from those of the herd by the
memory of that great Saturday long ago when their
names flaunted it upon a Fleet Street poster. Their
air of " having been through all that " is very
delightful.

The little paper was published once a week as an
organ of sane Liberal opinion and enlightened criticism
(I quote from memory of its prospectus). It had
offices and a brass door-plate in a street off the

179

180 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

eastern end of the Strand. Well I remember the
thrill of passing that door-plate as a regular contri-
butor. Surely, surely, I thought, all the street must
know that I was I, the I whose articles were, well,
not the best in the paper, but certainly among the
pleasantest. I used to glance both ways along the
pavement, before plunging in on Tuesday afternoon
to learn, as a privileged counsellor, what we were to
announce to the world on the following Saturday.

Up three pair of stairs I used to stamp, quite
noisily, perhaps with half an idea of further establish-
ing my self-confidence ; for always, in those early
days, I nursed a secret fear that each article would be
the last, that on the next Tuesday the editor would
frown upon my suggestions, and firmly dismiss me
from his employ.

How groundless was my fear: this editor could
never have brought himself to dismiss any one.
When he engaged new contributors, instead of dis-
missing the old, he used to swell the paper to make
room for them, without, alas ! increasing the circula-
tion. It grew from eight to twelve pages, from
twelve to sixteen, from sixteen, with a triumphant
announcement on its solitary poster, that was pasted
by the editor himself, when nobody was looking, on a
hoarding outside the office, to a magnificent twenty.
There it rested; not because its editor had grown
flint of heart, but because he had grown light of
purse, and been compelled to cede the publication to
another.

He was the most charming editor I ever met. A
little out of breath after the three pair of stairs, I

NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES 181

would swing through the long attic that was piled
waist-high with the past issues of the moribund little
periodical, through the « ante-room," a small scrubby
hole partitioned from the attic, and furnished with
an old cane-bottomed chair for the use of visitors,
to be greeted by a glad and boyish shout from the
chief himself. An eager-faced, visionary little man,
he lolled in an expensive swing chair before an
expensive roll-top desk, both obviously bought in the
first flush of editorial dignity. A cigarette in a
patent holder stuck jauntily between his teeth, and a
pile of white unwritten paper stood before him on
his blotting-pad. It was delightful to see the un-
affected joy of him at the excuse my arrival afforded
him for talking instead of writing.

" Was he busy ? " I would mischievously ask.
" Had I not better disturb him another time ? "

" Yes, he was busy, always busy ; but," and here
he would hurriedly scuffle all his papers into the back
of the desk, and close his fountain pen, " he held it
the first duty of an editor to be ready to listen to the
ideas of his contributors " ; and then, dear fellow, he
would talk without stopping until, after perhaps a
couple of hours of wide, of philanthropic conversa-
tion, in which he took all sides and argued all
opinions with equal skill, I would venture to intro-
duce, as a little thing that scarce deserved a place in
such a talk, the subject of work and the week^s issue
of the paper. He would sober instantly and sadly,
like a spaniel checked in mid career. " Well, what
is it you want to write? An article on prettiness
in literature. Do it, my good chap, do it. I concur

182 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

heartily in all your views. Prettiness in literature is
an insipid, an effeminate, a damnable, despicable
thing. Oh — I see — you intend rather to show its
merits. Yes, yes; very true indeed. He would
surely be a mean-souled creature who would ask for a
coarser dish. Prettiness in literature, delicacy, dainti-
ness, poetry, the very flower of our age, the white-
bait of the literary dinner. Certainly, young man,
certainly ; a column and a half, by all means." And
then, after I had asked for and obtained a few books
for review (classics if possible, for they were at the
same time education and a source of profit), he would
rattle off' again into his flowery talk of the reforma-
tion of the world, that must take its beginning in the
heart of man, of a scheme for working men's clubs,
of a project for turning Socialists into sane Liberals,
such as would be regular buyers of the little paper,
and so on, and so on, ending up always with the same
exhortation : " My dear young fellow, do smoke
cigarettes instead of that dirty cesspot of a pipe.
Consider : with a cigarette you destroy your instru-
ment, the paper tube, with each enjoyment. Where-
as with the thing you smoke, you use it until it is
saturated with iniquity and become a very still of
poisonous vapours. Well, well, good afternoon.
Let me have the article on Thursday morning, and
come and see me again next Tuesday.*"

That was in the early days of my connection with
him. But after a few months I was admitted a
member of the chosen band who met on Thursday
morning, and, with paper and ink provided free, lay
prone on the back numbers in the long attic, and

NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES 183

practically wrote the whole paper, improving the
work of other contributors, curtailing their articles,
filling them up with jokes or parentheses, till they
swelled or shrank to the required space, and in their
own special columns, over their own names, instructed
the universe on everything under heaven, and some-
times made metaphysical excursions even there.

We used to meet at three after a Soho or Fleet
Street lunch, and wrote continuously until we fell
asleep, or until the work was done. The office boy,
who loved these days because on them we made a
point of calling him Mr. Sub-Editor, went whistling
to and fro, carrying big envelopes to the printers
round the corner, and bearing mighty jugs of beer,
from the tavern a few doors off, to the perspiring
men of genius who lay and laughed and toiled on
the waste of dusty back numbers in the attic room.

It was a spirited little paper. We used to attack
everybody who was famous, excepting only Mr. Kipling,
Mr. Sturge Moore, Mr. Yeats, and Mr. Laurence
Binyon. Each of these four had his passionate
admirers on the staff, and was consequently exempt
from criticism. We had a gay way with any writer
on whose merits we had no decided opinions. Two
of us would put our heads together, and the one
write a eulogium, the other a violent attack. One
would exalt him as a great contributor to English
literature, the other jeer at him as a Grub Street
hack. The two reviews, numbered one and two,
would be published side by side. It was an enter-
taining, admirable system. In matters other than
literature we had our fling at everybody, except the

184 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

select, the very select few to whom our editor
attributed the mysterious " sane Liberalism " with
which he was himself inspired. But our happiest
moments were when one of our company had written
a book. We were all young and all ambitious. The
most energetic and diplomatic of us contrived to
coax a publisher into issuing one book, or even two,
every year, and, of course, we looked to our own
organ for a vigorous backing. We got it. On the
day of publication would appear large-typed, efflo-
rescent articles, headed « At last a Novelist," or " A
Second Balzac," or "An Essayist of Genius," or
"The True Spirit in Poetry," and one of the staff
would redden with pleasure as he read the article
that referred to him, and wonder if this miraculous,
this precocious, prodigious, world-shaking genius were
indeed himself.

Alas ! I doubt whether any article of ours ever
sold a single book, for we had no circulation. Indeed,
so notorious did our non-success become, even among
ourselves, though we discreetly tried to veil our
knowledge from each other, that when the editor had
arranged with three new poets, whom I did not know
by sight, to write poetry for us, and I saw a man in
a coffee-house reading the paper, I went boldly up to
him and asked, " Are you Mr. So-and-So, Mr. So-
and-So, or Mr. So-and-So ? "

" I am not," he replied.

" Do you mean to say you bought that paper and
are not a contributor to it?" The thing was a
miracle.

He actually had, and it was so delightful to find

NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES 185

any one outside ourselves who read what we had
written, that I made friends with him at once, and
have remained in friendship with him ever since.
But I believe he was the only one.

It was natural that the editor, who was also the
proprietor, should at last be compelled to abandon a
paper so meanly supported. The
man who took it over made a
different thing of it. Its youth
and jollity and energy
were left behind, and
it did its best to be-
come a staid paper of
the world. The new
editor was of those
Hazlitt classed as "a
sort of tittle-tattle — difficult to
deal with, dangerous to discuss."
He disliked all suggestion that
had not come from himself. It
was necessary, if an idea were to
be adopted, to flatter him into
thinking it his own. I never knew him write an
amusing thing, and I only once heard him say one,
and then it was by accident. He had assembled us,
and announced that in future we should not be
allowed to sign our articles. The very joy of life
was gone, but he said he wanted the paper to have
an individual personality. We protested, and he
replied quite seriously : « That is all very well. But
if all you fellows sign your articles, what becomes of
my personality ? " I forgave him everything for that.

186 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

This is not a chapter on newspaper editors, but I
cannot go on to talk of magazines without paying
some tribute to the ingenious adventurers who, more
successful than those two, manage to keep their little
rags afloat. It is amazing how many small papers,
without any circulation, are yet published week by
week. The secret history of the struggles with the
printers, who insolently refuse to work when their
bills are too long overdue, and the battles with the
contributors, who prefer to be paid than otherwise,
is as entertaining as the intrigues of courtiers to save
themselves from downfall and disgrace.

There is a story in Fleet Street now about a little
paper devoted to mild reform — vegetarianism, no
cruelty to dogs, anti-vaccinationism, and the like —
whose editor managed to keep the paper and himself
alive on subsidies from religious faddists. From his
office at the end of an alley he could see his visitors
before they arrived, and when he saw a likely victim
in some black-coated righteous old gentleman, he
opened a Bible and laid it on his desk. Then he
knelt down at his chair. When the old gentleman
had climbed the stairs, and had inquired for him
of the office boy, he heard from the inner room a
solemn, earnest voice: "O Lord, soften Thou the
heart of some rich man, that of his plenty he may
give us wherewithal to carry on the good work that
this small paper does in Thy name . . ." and so on.
He would lift a finger to the boy. « Hush ! " he would
say ; " your master is a good man," and presently
going in, when the prayer was ended, would write out
a cheque at least as liberal as it was ill-deserved.

NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES 187

The Jonquil is a famous example. It was edited
by a man called Beldens, who had a little money, but
not much. He contrived to retain his writers by a
most ingenious appeal to their gambling instincts.
Every Saturday all the cheques were accurately made
out and delivered to the contributors. But these
soon found that there was never more money to the
credit of the paper in the bank than would pay the
first three or four of the cheques presented. The
rest were returned dishonoured. The result was not
unamusing, for Beldens had chosen a bank in Fulham,
while his office was in Covent Garden. Every Saturday
at the appointed time all the contributors used to
attend, with hansoms, specially chosen for the fleet-
ness of their horses, waiting in a row outside.
Beldens would come, smiling and urbane, into the
outer office, with the bundles of little pink slips. As
soon as they had been passed round there would be
a wild scuffle of genius on the stairs, the dishevelled
staff' would rush out of the door, leap into their
hansoms, and race pell mell for the bank, the
fortunate first arrivals dividing with their cabbies
the moneys that their respective efficiencies had
achieved.

The larger newspapers, and the popular monthlies,
are not important in Bohemia, except as means of
earning money or getting on in the world. We
flatter ourselves that they would be dull without us,
but their life is not ours. The periodicals that
really matter to us are of a different kind, and we
run them ourselves. They are quarterlies, or annuals,

188 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

never perennials. Few survive three issues, and
those that live long do no honour to their old age.
For the glory of these papers is their youth. A
dozen names spring to mind : The Yellow Book, The
Savoy, The Pageant, all of the time when Arthur
Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, Frederick
Wedmore, were not yet known and discussed by the
laggard public ; The Butterfly, The Dial of Shannon
and Ricketts, The Dome of Laurence Housman, W.
B. Yeats, Laurence Binyon, and another brood of
writers ; down to The Venture, that lived two years,
1904 and 1905, and then died like the rest. And at
the present moment at least three new dreams are
being crystallised into the disillusionment of print,
and will appear and fail next year.

These magazines are not like the " Literary
Souvenirs" and the pocket books of the early nine-
teenth century, to which they have been often com-
pared. They have no delicious little engravings by
popular artists of lovers reading books together, nor
are they full of " pieces " of prose and verse collected
from the most obliging of the well-known authors
of their day. They are written and illustrated by
men more famous in Bohemia than elsewhere.
Bohemia is the one country whose prophets find most
honour at home. They are read lovingly by their
writers, looked at by their illustrators, and discussed
by all the crowd of young women who, by dressing in
green gowns without collars, wearing embroidered
yokes, scorning the Daily Mail, and following the
fortunes of the studios, keep in the forefront of
literary and artistic progress.

NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES 191

The Germ is the original of all these undertakings.
From time to time a set of young men, like the Pre-
Raphaelites, grow beyond the stage of sedulous aping,
and find that they are producing something in litera-
ture and art that, not being a facile imitation of
an established mode, is difficult to sell. They want
a hearing, and find their pictures refused by the
exhibitions as insults to the traditions of art, and
their poems and stories rejected by the ordinary
magazines and reviews as incomprehensible rubbish.
Half a dozen poets, painters, and prosemen put their
heads together, and plan a magazine that is not to
be as others, gross, vapid, servile to a vulgar or
sentimental taste, but a sword to cut upwards through
the conventional fog to the brightness and glory of
a new constellation of ideals. You must be one of
them to appreciate their pictures, and have read
what they have read to enjoy their writings. They
hear " different drummers/' and all who are not for
them are against them. It is in such ventures that
the men who are later to be accepted with applause
make their first appearance. " The Blessed Damozel "
was published in The Germ when few knew anything
of the Pre-Raphaelites. The Germ was a commercial
failure, but who has not heard of Rossetti ?

Few printed things are more delightful or more
troublesome to produce than one of these free-lance
miscellanies. The editors (there is usually a com-
mittee of at least three) go about in pride, conscious
of the vitality of their movement, scornful of popular
ignorance, and hopeful in their secret hearts that
they are making history as others did before them.

192 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

They carry with them through the studios the
glorious feeling that " there is something in the air."
They spend whole nights planning together, exa-
mining a dozen different kinds of papers, to find
one suitable alike for blocks and text, comparing
specimens from twenty printers. All is pleasant for
them until their friends, outside the particular set
that work together and believe in each other, begin
to offer contributions. It is a difficult thing to tell
a man that his work is not good enough, when he
is no younger than yourself; it is an insult to
suggest that he belongs to an older school, that his
is a dying day, and that you cannot join the evening
and the morning lights in this paper of yours that
is to represent the dawn. But it must be done ; and
it is likely that thenceforth there is a studio you must
not visit, an injured man whom you must skilfully
avoid in taking your place at the Soho dinner-tables.
This is one of the difficulties ; another, even more
serious, is of finance. It is a sad thing that financiers
are not often constructed like poets, eager to spill
their best for the sweetness and the joy of spilling it.
It is hard that a man of money can seldom be per-
suaded to run a magazine except with a view to
material profit. Even if the enhanced price of
The Germ makes him think that another Garland of
Youth, another Miscellany sounding another bugle,
will, if better advertised, pay (loathsome word !) from
the first, he assumes command of your fair vision,
as if of a department store, inserts some terrible
verses by a friend of his, and turns your dream to
dust before your eyes. I was connected with one

NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES 193

such performance, run for sordid gain by a financier,
and it was a miserable affair. The stupid fellow saw
money in poetry and pictures, as he might have seen
it in corn or beef. He knew nothing, and it was as
if the magazine had been edited by a five shilling
piece. Each new contributor that he enrolled spun

him in a new direction. One suggested a second, and
the second suggested a third, so that the prose, the
poetry, and the pictures sounded the whole gamut of
intellectual notes, and the original projectors retired
in disgust, to the financier's surprise. Of all such
magazines, as he ruefully claimed for it, it was the
most varied. It was also the least successful. It
represented money instead of youth.

194 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

No ; you have not only to catch your financier, but
to tame him. He must understand that he is no
more than the means to the end, and be proud of his
subjection, happy never to see his money again, and
content to have contributed his insignificant aid to
the progress of literature and art. When such a man
is discovered, which is not often, there is joy in
Bohemia. The models, gossiping as they go, carry
the great news. In a dozen studios men paint as
their caprice takes them, and in a dozen lodgings
imps of freedom ride a dozen pens. The shackles are
off at last, that is the cry, and something fresh and
extravagant is the result, something that overshoots
the mark by its own vigour, but shows by its direc-
tion that there is a mark to be shot at, at which
people have not aimed before.

WAYS AND MEANS

WAYS AND MEANS

A LITTLE time ago there was a great outcry against
what was called "literary ghosting," a fraudulent
passing off of the work of unknown writers under
more famous names. There was a correspondence
in a literary paper that betrayed how novels were
written in the rough by inexperienced hands under
the guidance of hardened manufacturers of serials ;
and, indeed, when we consider only how many
prominent athletes of no particular literary ability
are able to publish books on their profession, it is
obvious that a good deal of this kind of business must
be done. Indeed, in one form or another, ghosting
is one of the usual ways by which the unfortunate
young writer sustains himself in Grub Street, or
Bohemia, or whatever else you like to call that
indefinite country where big longings and high
hopes are matched by short purses and present dis-
comforts.

Many a man has been saved from what seemed
a descent into the drudgeries of clerkship by the
different drudgery of writing, say, the reminiscences
of an admiral, the history of a parish, or innumerable
short reviews, for which other people got the credit.
And Richard Savage, in his witty pamphlet called
" An Author to be Let," betrays that the abuse is

197

198 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

not only of our day. Iscariot Hackney 4of that book
confesses that :

" Many a time I wrote obscenity and profaneness,
under the names of Pope or Swift. Sometimes I was
Mr. Joseph Gay, and at others Theory Burnet, or
Addison. I abridged histories and travels, translated
from the French what they never wrote, and was
expert at finding out new titles for old books.
When a notorious thief was hanged, I was the
Plutarch to preserve his memory ; and when a great
man died, mine were his Remains, and mine the
account of his last will and testament." That is the
whole trade put in a paragraph.

Nowadays the matter has been reduced to system.
There are men who are paid to write all the reviews
in a paper, and farm out the work piecemeal, or even
get ambitious boys and girls to do it for them, by
way of apprenticeship, paying them a meagre wage.
There are agents who make a living by supplying
ghost-written books to publishers who keep up for
appearance sake the pretence of not being in the
know. They get their twenty, forty, fifty pounds
a volume, and have them written by impecunious
Bohemians to whom they pay the weekly salary of a
junior clerk. Here is a true account of a youthful
ghost.

He was a poet, and in those days a bad one. He
carried more poor verses than good money in his
pocket. And one day, when he had little more than
a few coppers and some penny stamps, he happened
to see an advertisement for " a young and experienced
writer with a thorough knowledge of athletics." He

WAYS AND MEANS 199

kept the appointment suggested by the newspaper,
and found a mean house in one of the southern
suburbs. A herd of lean fellows were waiting in a
dirty passage, and presently a cheerful business-like
little man came out, and chose him with one com-
panion as the likeliest-looking of the lot. They were
set to write, at tables in the corners of an undusted,
cat-haunted room, specimen chapters of a book on
croquet. They were both appointed, and the other
man, an old hand, borrowed five shillings in advance.
Next day, when the young fellow arrived in the
morning, he found that his colleague was there before
him, drunk, holding the garden railings, and shouting
blasphemies at a bedraggled cat that slunk about the
waste scrap of ground behind them. The agent held
up the drunkard to him as a warning, told him that
sobriety was the spirit of success, and that, as he had
the job to himself, he would be allowed to gain extra
experience by doing the other man's work as well as
his own. He was young, enthusiastic, glad to have
an opportunity of working at all. In two months
he had finished six books, that still annoy him by
showing their bright-lettered covers on the railway
bookstalls. He wrote on an average between two
and four thousand words a day. At last, one day
when he was working in an upper room of the agent's
house, the little creature came upstairs and saw fit
to congratulate him. " You are doing very well
indeed," he said, " for one so unaccustomed to literary
labour." That brought an end to the engagement.
He left immediately, lest he should be unable to
refrain from throwing an inkpot at the agent's

200 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

head. It is in its way rather fun to be suddenly
an authority on subjects of which you knew nothing
till you sat down to write about them. And it is
very good practice in journalism — though it is always
easier to write when you are ignorant than when you
know too much ; you have a freer hand. But for a
poet to hear such work called literary labour ! That
was too much. He never returned, and the agent was
left sorrowing for the loss of an industrious hack.

Of course, the young man, you will say, should
never have stooped to such work. He ought to have
borrowed, or persuaded his landlady to let him live
until his good luck should bring the settlement of her
bills. But he could not borrow. There are some
unfortunates who cannot ; I hate borrowing myself.
And it is an awful thing to be without money and
miserably afraid of tiding over evil straits on some-
body else's. Some there are, brave, high-souled
fellows, who could borrow the world to play at ball,
and never feel the responsibility, whereas others are
uneasy and not themselves with a single shilling that
does not belong to them. Some seem to live on
credit as naturally as they breathe, and I remember
the surprise of one of these : " What ! You don't owe
anybody anything ! Good Lord ! man, lend me half
a sovereign."

People who by some misfortune of nature are
unable to risk dishonesty by borrowing without
having certain means of repayment are reduced to all
kinds of unhappy expedients, and sometimes even to
dying, like poor Chatterton,1 in order to make both

1 In Brook Street, Holborn.

A BOOK-SHOP

WAYS AND MEANS 203

ends meet. Of him Johnson could say, " This is the
most extraordinary young man that has encountered
my knowledge. It is wonderful how the whelp has
written such things," and yet, after three months'1
fight among the papers, living on almost nothing,
and writing home to his people brave proud letters
about his success, to keep them from anxiety, he spent
three days without food, and then killed himself with
arsenic, rather than accept from a landlady the food for
which he doubted his ability to repay her. The most
terrible detail in the tragedy was the memorandum
that lay near him when he died, and showed that
over ten pounds were owed him by his publishers.
Ah me, in the days when I read that story ten
pounds seemed opulence for a lifetime. It seemed a
cruel and impossible thing, as all cruelty seems when
we are young, that one who was owed so much should
yet starve into suicide.

That is one of the worst hardships of painter or
writer. His money, even when earned, is as intangible
as the dawn. It is gold, but he may not handle it ;
real, but a dream. He must live, while he does his
work, on air, and then, when the picture hangs in the
drawing-room of the purchaser, and the article has
been printed, published, and forgotten, he must wait,
perhaps for months, perhaps for years, and sometimes
indeed until he is passed into another world where
he can have no opportunity of spending it, for the
money that is his. It is not until he is a success, or
at least no longer an anonymous Bohemian, that his
money is paid in advance, or upon the completion
of his labour. Little wonder that when at last it

204 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

comes, it comes as a surprise, and sends him gaily
into bright extravagance that leaves him with a purse
as empty as before.

I have heard people say that all the wild, irregular
struggle for existence that was known by Goldsmith,
by Johnson, by old Roberto Greene, has faded away
from the literary life. They say that now, young
men, top-hatted, frock-coated, enter the offices of
newspapers, earn comfortable salaries, write their
novels or whatever they may be in their spare hours,
and arrive, neat, unruffled as Civil Servants, by mere
process of time at their success. It is not so.
" Once a sub-editor always a sub-editor," said a very
successful one, who had given up hope of succeeding
at anything else. He was well known, his books had
sold better than better books, and his portrait had
been often in the papers; but that was not the
success he had wanted, nor a success that was worth
having, and he was honest enough to admit it to
himself. The men who really care for their art, who
wish above all things to do the best that is in them,
do not take the way of the world and the regular
salaries of the newspaper offices. They stay outside,
reading, writing, painting for themselves, and snatch-
ing such golden crumbs as fall within their reach
from the tables of publishers, editors, and picture-
buyers. They make a living as it were by accident.
It is a hard life and A risky : it is deliciously exciting
at first, to leap from crag to crag, wherever a slight
handhold will preserve you from the abyss, but the
time soon comes when you are tired, and wonder,
with dulled heart and clouded brain, is it worth while

WAYS AND MEANS 205

or no ? Those who are strong enough to continue
are given their own souls to carry in their hands, and
those who admit defeat, surrender them, and, know-
ing in their hearts that they have sold themselves,
hide their sorrow in a louder clamour after an easier
quest.

The j oiliest of the irregulars, in spite of the
anxiety of their life, are those who carry on a guerilla
warfare for fame and a long struggle for improvement,
never having been caught or maimed by the newspaper
routine, or by the drudgery of commercial art work.
(For artists as well as writers have an easy way to a
livelihood, which they also must have strength to
resist.) Some men live as free-lances, by selling their
articles to such papers as are willing to admit their
transcendent worth, and ready to pay some small
nominal rate, a guinea a thousand words perhaps, for
the privilege of printing them. Many live by review-
ing, getting half a dozen books a week from different
papers, reading or skimming them, and writing as
long a paragraph as the editor will allow on each
volume. The artists coax dealers into buying small
pictures at a cheap rate, satisfying their pride by
contemplation of the vastly larger price at which
their purchasers seem to value them as soon as they
appear in the glamour of the window. Others again,
artists and writers too, these perhaps the most sincere
and admirable of the lot, refuse any degradation of
their art, and live hand to mouth by any sort of
work that offers. There was one man who wrote
poems in the intervals of stage carpentry, and another
who made dolls while compiling a history of philo-

206 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

sophy. Some indeed seem able to live on nothing at
all, and these are more cheerful than the rest whose
stomachs are less accommodating.

There are compensations to poverty, and one of
them is extravagance. Goldsmith would not so have
enjoyed the pomp of his bloom -coloured suits and
his gorgeous Brick Court chambers if he had not
known an earlier and different life :

" Where the Red Lion, staring o'er the way,
Invites each passing stranger that can pay ;
Where Cal vert's butt and Parson's black champagne
Regale the drabs and bloods of Drury Lane ;
There in a lonely room, from bailiffs snug,
The Muse found Scroggen stretched beneath a rug ;
A window, patched with paper, lent a ray
That dimly showed the state in which he lay ;
The sanded floor, that grits beneath the tread ;
The humid wall with paltry pictures spread ;
The royal game of goose was there in view,
And the twelve rules the Royal Martyr drew ;
The Seasons, framed with listing, found a place,
And brave Prince William showed his lamp-black face ;
The morn was cold ; he views with keen desire
The rusty grate unconscious of a fire :
With beer and milk arrears the frieze was scored,
And five crack'd teacups dress'd the chimney board ;
A night-cap decked his brows instead of bay,
A cap by night — a stocking all the day ! "

Johnson enjoyed his pension and all that it meant
the more for having known a time when he spent the
night hours with Richard Savage walking round and
round St. James's Square, for want of a lodging,
inveighing cheerfully against the Ministry, and
« resolving they would stand by their country."

The moments of opulence when they come are the

WAYS AND MEANS 207

brighter gold for the grey anxiety that has gone
before. They make extravagance a joy in itself, and
even change the distresses of the past into a charming
memory.

I had lived once for over a week on a diet of
cheese and apples — cheap yellow cheese and apples at
twopence or a penny halfpenny a pound. A friend,
also impoverished, was sharing my expenses and my
diet, and slept in a small room in the same house.
Our two sleeping boxes, for they were no more, were
on the ground floor, and a large fat postman, our
landlord, slept in the basement underneath. On
the Wednesday of the second week, by the three
o'clock post, came a letter for my friend, from a
literary agent, containing a cheque for twenty-five
pounds — TWENTY-FIVE POUNDS ! I believe the tears
came into our eyes at the sight of that little slip of
magenta-coloured paper. We shook hands hysteri-
cally, and then — remembering that the bank closed
at four — unshaved as we were, without collars, with
baggy trousers, we took a hansom for the town.
The cheque was cashed, and that somehow seemed a
marvel, as the five-pound notes and the gold were
slid over the counter in a way most astonishingly
matter-of-fact. We went out of the bank doors with
a new dignity, paid the cabby, and walked the Strand
like giants. It became quite a question what place
was best worthy of the honour of entertaining us to
tea. Wherever it was — I fancy a small cafe — it did
its duty, and we sat, refreshed and smoking (new
opened packets of the best tobacco) while we planned
our evening.

208 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

At half-past six we went up to Soho, and crossed
Leicester Square with solemnity, as befitted men with
an aim in life, and that so philanthropic as to dine
better that night than ever in their lives before.
There was no undignified hurry about our walk, but
there was no lingering. I was rebuked for glancing
at the window of a print shop, and in my turn
remonstrated equally gravely with him for dallying
over some pretty editions at a bookseller's in Shaftes-
bury Avenue.

We dined at one of our favourite little restaurants :
we dined excellently, drank several bottles of wine,
and had liqueur glasses of rum emptied into our
coffees. We smoked, paid the bill, and went out
into the narrow Soho street. Just opposite, at the
other side, where we could not help seeing it as we
hesitated on the pavement, was another of our
favourite feeding places. The light was merry
through the windows, the evening was young, and —
without speaking a word, we looked at each other,
and looked at each other again, and then, still with-
out speaking, walked across the street, went in at
the inviting door, and had dinner over again — an
excellent dinner, good wine, and rum in coffee as
before.

Remember the week's diet of apples and cheese
before you condemn us. We argued it out as we
smoked over our second coffees, and convinced our-
selves clearly that if our two dinners had been spread
evenly and with taste over our last ten most ill-
nourished days, we should not yet have had the food
that honest men deserve. That being so, we stood

WAYS AND MEANS 209

upon our rights, and gave clear consciences to our
grateful stomachs.

On our way home we met an old acquaintance,
whose hospitality a few days before would have been
as manna from heaven, but whose port, good though
it was, was now almost superfluous. We reached our
lodgings at three in the morning, and my last memory
of the festival is that of my friend, usually a rather
melancholy man, sitting on my bed drumming with
his feet upon the floor, and singing Gaelic songs at
the top of his voice, to a zealous accompaniment on
my penny whistle. From below came a regular
grunting monotone — the landlord snoring in bed.
Presently there was a deep thud that startled us for
a moment into quiet. We listened, and almost at
once the snoring boomed again, as the postman
slumbered on the floor where he had fallen. Then
we continued our minstrelsy.

It is an up-and-down life, my friends — it is
indeed.

TALKING, DRINKING, AND
SMOKING

(WITH A PROCESSION OF DRINKING SONGS)

TALKING, DRINKING, AND
SMOKING

(WITH A PROCESSION OF DRINKING SONGS)

TALKING, drinking, and smoking go better together
than any other three pleasant things upon this earth.
And they are best enjoyed in company, which is
almost as much as to say that they are not best
performed at home. Individually they may be ; — a
pipe over your own fire, a glass of wine close by the
elbow of your own easy-chair, a quiet- comfortable
talk with your particular friend, whose opinions you
know before they are uttered, are severally very
delightful. But if good liquor, talk, and smoke are
to be enjoyed to the utmost, why then, get you half
a dozen honest fellows about you, with no particular
qualification, and have your evening out. Go to a
tavern or a coffee-house, where you will be left to
yourselves. Be free from womenfolk, with their
pestilential seriousness or more aggravating flippancy.
Get you and your company into a cosy room, with a
bright fire and a closed door, where you may be free
men before the universe. Then may your words
express the mood you feel, the liquor hearten you,
and the smoke soothe you in argument ; and if with
that you are not happy, why, then, the devil fly away

213

214 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

with you for a puritanical, melancholiac spoilsport,
whom I would not see with my book in his hands,
no, not for four shillings and sixpence on the nail.

No, sir, if you cannot be happy so, why, you are
a fellow unclubable, unsociable, a creature without
human instincts — no true man. I'll have none of
you, and if your name come up for election at any
of our clubs, I'll blackball you with all my heart, and
wish the ball were twice as black and twice as big.

Not that I am a friend to drunkenness and
bestiality : far from it. Only children lick honey
from the spoon. But spread honey on bread and
butter, and season good liquor with mirth and
company, talk and tobacco, and either is a gift from
the gods. Nor do tavern crawls, those itinerant
extravagances, stand higher in my favour, dear though
they are to the irregulars who practise them. To
sup with ale at the Cheshire Cheese, to drink at the
Punch Bowl, at the Green Dragon, at the Mitre, at
the Cock, at the Grecian, at the George, at the
Edinburgh — in short, to beat the bounds of every
tavern in Fleet Street, from Ludgate Circus to the
Strand, that is a festival too peripatetic to be com-
fortable, an undertaking too serious to be light-
hearted.

But you, sir, who smile at the thought of beer —
or is it port or sherry, or perhaps good, rollicking,
stout-flavoured rum ? — who dream joyfully of brown-
walled rooms, of tables worn and polished, covered
with stained rings where the bounty of innumerable
glasses has overflowed their brims, whose eyes are
alight with the fire of the fine things you are ready

TALKING, DRINKING, AND SMOKING 215

to say, whose pipe is even now in your hands, you are
a man of another sort and the right one. You do not
forget that the first and proudest of man's inventions
when his reason came
to him was a club,
that Bacchus was the
favourite of the
ancient gods, and
Silenus the
most lovable of
the sub-divini-
ties. You re-
member that
the Scandi-
navian heaven was a
club, Valhalla, where i
the heroes met to f
enjoy themselves, and
fight with swords
even as we fight with
arguments, and after
the fighting to drink,
and sing, and be good
fellows one to the other.
You regret each century
for the merry companion-
able evenings you have
missed by living in another time. You, and you
alone, will read with the right understanding, with a
smile of sympathetic memory, with no lemon-juiced
condemnation tightening your lips.

What an illustrious company is ours : Ben Jonson,

216 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

Beaumont, Fletcher, Herrick, Congreve — the list
would fill the book. Cromwell was not against us,
and even Doctor Johnson (although he did drink
port, bottle by bottle, in his own company — a
swinish, inhuman procedure) wrote for us our philo-
sophy :

" ' Hermit hoar in solemn cell,

Wearing out life's evening gray,
Strike thy bosom sage, and tell,

What is bliss, and which the way ? '

Thus I spoke, and speaking sighed,
Scarce repressed the starting tear,

When the hoary sage replied,

' Come, my lad, and drink some beer/ "

Once, after an evening spent in a tavern with a
mob of honest, open-hearted fellows, I sat in my
chair at home, before going to bed, thinking of the
older time. I was smoking the last pipe, the
mystical last pipe that is always full of dreams, and
seemed suddenly to see all ages together, and the
Bohemians of all time coming through the walls into
my room.

Ben Jonson, pimple-nosed, strong-headed, appeared
sitting in an easy-chair, as if in the Devil Room at
the Apollo, reading a paper sent him from his
friend Master Beaumont, who was busy with Master
Fletcher in the country, writing a play. He read
aloud :

" Methinks the little wit I had is lost
Since I saw you ; "

TALKING, DRINKING, AND SMOKING 217

(honest fellow, Master Beaumont, generous mind !)

" for wit is like a rest

Held up at tennis, which men do the best
With the best gamesters. What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid ! heard words that have been
So nimble and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life ; there where there hath been thrown
Wit able enough to justify the town
For three days past : wit that might warrant be
For the whole city to talk foolishly,
Till that were cancelled ; and when that was gone,
We left an air behind us, which alone
Was able to make the next two companies
Right witty ; though but downright fools, more wise."

" Aha, they know their Ben. They know him." He
fell to murmuring over his own verses :

" Welcome all who lead or follow

To the Oracle of Apollo

Here he speaks out of his pottle,

Or the tripos, his tower bottle :

All his answers are divine,

Truth itself doth flow in wine.

Hang up all the poor hop-drinkers

Cries old Sim, the king of skinkers ;

He the half of life abuses

That sits watering with the Muses.

Those dull girls no good can mean us ;

Wine it is the milk of Venus,

And the poet's horse accounted ;

Ply it, and you all are mounted.

'Tis the true Phoebian liquor,

Cheers the brain, makes wit the quicker ;

218 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

Pays all debts, cures all diseases,
And at once three senses pleases.
Welcome all who lead or follow
To the Oracle of Apollo."

"A very charming rhyme in praise of grape
liquor," I was about to say, " but a little too scornful
of ale. Ale is a good drink, and hearty, the parent
of as much good prose as ever Spanish wine made
good verse." I was about to say this, when I saw
a gaily dressed little man, with a tankard in one hand
and a sheaf of paper in the other, come walking
through my bookcase. I knew Mr. Gay at once, and
guessed that he had come to battle for the best of
drinks. But, before he could speak, a pretty little
parson fellow skipped into the room, bowed
unctuously to Ben, shot this verse at him, and with-
drew :

" Ah, Ben,
Say how or when
Shall we thy guests
Meet at those lyric feasts,
Made at the Sun,
The Dog, the Triple Tun 1
Where we such clusters had
As made us nobly wild, not mad ;
And yet each verse of thine
Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine."

" Herrick ! " cried Ben joyfully, but he was gone,
and little Mr. Gay was bowing in his place. Placing
his dripping tankard on a new volume of poems that
lay on my table, he bowed respectfully to my dis-
tinguished guest, and then, laying his left hand easily

TALKING, DRINKING, AND SMOKING 219

upon his sword-hilt, sang merrily and with a provoca-
tive, mischievous air :

" Whilst some in epic strains delight,
Whilst others pastorals invite,

As taste or whim prevail :
Assist me, all ye tuneful Nine ;
Support me in the great design,

To sing of nappy ale.

Some folks of cyder make a rout,
And cyder's well enough no doubt,

When better liquors fail ;
But wine, that's richer, better still,
Ev'n wine itself (deny't who will),

Must yield to nappy ale.

Rum, brandy, gin with choicest smack
From Holland brought, Batavia arrack,

All these will nought avail
To chear a truly British heart,
And lively spirits to impart,

Like humming, nappy ale.

Oh ! whether I thee closely hug
In honest can or nut-brown jug,

Or in the tankard hail ;
In barrel, or in bottle pent,
I give the generous spirit vent,

Still may I feast on ale.

But chief when to the chearful glass
From vessel pure thy streamlets pass,

Then most thy charms prevail ;
Then, then, I'll bet, and take the odds
That nectar, drink of heathen gods,

Was poor compar'd to ale.

BOHEMIA IN LONDON

Give me a bumper, fill it up.
See how it sparkles in the cup,

Oh, how shall I regale !
Can any taste this drink divine
And then compare rum, brandy, wine,

Or ought with nappy ale ? "

He paused for a moment to take a long drink from
the tankard, which he replaced on
the poetry-book. Then, delicately
wiping his lips, which were curved

with satisfaction, he went

on :

" Inspir'd by thee, the

warrior fights,
The lover woos,

the poet writes,
And pens the pleasing tale ;
And still in Britain's isle confess'd
Nought animates the patriot's

breast
Like generous, nappy ale.

High Church and Low oft raise a strife
And oft endanger limb and life,

Each studious to prevail ;
Yet Whig and Tory, opposite
In all things else, do both unite

In praise of nappy ale.

O blest potation ! still by thee,
And thy companion Liberty,

Do health and mirth prevail ;
Then let us crown the can, the glass,
And sportive bid the minutes pass

In quaffing nappy ale.

TALKING, DRINKING, AND SMOKING 221

Ev'n while these stanzas I indite,
The bar bell's grateful sounds invite

Where joy can never fail !
Adieu ! my Muse, adieu ! I haste
To gratify my longing taste

With copious draughts of ALE."

He had scarcely finished, and was emptying the
tankard, when John
Keats appeared (I had
not seen him coming).

" Shades of poets dead
and gone/'

he chanted, coughing
painfully, but keeping
a smiling face, that
made kind old Ben
Jonson wince :

"Shades of poets dead
and gone,

What elysium have ye
known,

Happy field or mossy
cavern,

Choicer than the Mer-
maid Tavern ? "

" Aha ! You are a
friend for me, sir ! "

cried Gay, and taking him familiarly by the arm,
walked off with him through the writing-desk. They
were not ten yards away before they were walking
apart, quarrelling vigorously, which was puzzling, till
I remembered that Keats was no drinker of nappy

222 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

ale, but so passionate a lover of wine that he once
covered all the inside of his mouth and throat with
cayenne pepper, in order to enjoy " the delicious
coolness of claret in all its glory."

" Who is that young man ? " asked Ben, but before
I could answer him there was the stump, stumping
of a wooden leg, and little William Davies stood
before us. He was laughing merrily, and sang :

" Oh, what a merry world I see

Before me through a quart of ale.
Now if sometimes that men would laugh,

And women too would sigh and wail

To laugh or wail's an easy task
For all who drink at my ale-cask." *

« Ale, all ale," interrupted Ben Jonson. " Why do
they sing of ale ? "

« Here's whisky for you, then," 2 cried Davies, and
sang mournfully :

" Whisky, thou blessed heaven in the brain,

Oh, that the belly should revolt,
To make a hell of after pain,

And prove thy virtue was a fault !

Did ever poet seek his bed

With a sweet phrase upon his lips

Smiling — as I laid down my head,
Pleased after sundry whisky-sips ?

I pitied all the world : alas !

That no poor nobodies came near,
To give to them my shirt and shoes,

And bid them be of goodly cheer.

1 From ' ( New Poems.'' By William Davies. Published by
Mr. Elkin Mathews. 2 Ibid.

TALKING, DRINKING, AND SMOKING 223

A blessed heaven was in the brain ;

But ere came morn the belly turned
And kicked up hell's delight in pain —

This tongue went dry, this throat it burned.

Oh dear ! oh dear ! to think last night
The merriest man on earth was I,

And that I should awake this morn,

To cough and groan, to heave and sigh ! "

" Nay, nay," said Ben, surprised, " I know nothing
of all that."

There are some, who do not understand true en-
joyment, will tell you that rules spoil convivial meet-
ings, and that a merry company becomes a dull
committee as soon as it is called a club. Do not
believe them : the precedents are all against them.
Unless you have a club to regulate the times and
seasons of your mirth you are likely enough to be
merry when your friends are sad, and melancholy
when they are joyful. Whereas, if all the week you
have a pleasant consciousness that on Wednesday,
say, or Thursday night there will be jollity, you go
to the tavern in the proper spirit, and smile before
you turn the door. And as for rules, why, rules are
half the fun. You remember Ben JonsoiVs own :

" Id iota, insulsus, tristis, turpis, abesto.
Eruditi, urbani, hilares, honesti, adsciscuntor ;
Nee lectae feminae repudiantor.
De discubitu non contenditor.

Vina puris fontibus ministrantor aut vapulet hospes.
Insipida poemata nulla recitantor.
Amatoriis querelis, ac suspiriis liber angulus esto.
Qui foras vel dicta, vel facta eliminet, eliminator."

224 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

There are some of them, and are they not admirably
contrived? (Though I suspect the third, and the
one about a corner for lovers, were dictated by some
momentary caprice of the poet himself, contrary as
they are to all the best practice in England. In
France it has always been the thing : the student's
mistress hears her lord discuss ; but here, until very
lately, men have talked and smoked to themselves.)
The neat compliment to the members insinuated by
the first and second — no objectionables admitted,
and the whole company able to congratulate them-
selves as learned, urbane, jolly, and honest men —
is delightful. There was to be no squabbling for
places ; the wine was to be kept at a good level of
quality by the simplest means ; no fool to interrupt
the flow of talk with his tasteless verse, and all
reporters to be expelled. What evenings those must
have been. It is easy to imagine the door open to
each new-comer primed up with hope of happiness,
glancing about to see which of his friends were there
before him, and bowing to receive a nod from the
great Ben. And late at night, when all was over,
can you not envy them, strolling, rolling, tumbling,
strutting out into the moonlight of old Temple Bar,
with their heads full of wholesome wit and wine ?

Then, for another set of rules, remember those
" enacted by an Knot of Artizans and Mechanics " as
Addison read them " upon the wall in a little Ale-
house."

"I. Every Member at his first coming shall lay
down his Two Pence.

TALKING, DRINKING, AND SMOKING 225

" II. Every Member shall fill his Pipe out of his
own Box.

" III. If any Member absents himself he shall forfeit
a Penny for the Use of the Club, unless in Case of Sick-
ness or Imprisonment.

" IV. If any Member swears or curses, his Neighbour
may give him a Kick upon the Shins.

" V. If any Member tells stories in the Club that
are not true, he shall forfeit for every third Lie a
Halfpenny.

" VI. If any Member strikes another wrongfully, he
shall pay his Club for him.

"VII. If any Member brings his Wife into the
Club, he shall pay for whatever she drinks or smoaks.

"VIII. If any Member's wife comes to fetch him
home from the Club, she shall speak to him without
the Door.

"IX. If any Member calls another Cuck-old, he
shall be turned out of the Club.

"X. None shall be admitted into the Club that is
of the same Trade with any Member of it.

"XL None of the Club shall have his Clothes or
Shoes made or mended but by a Brother Member.

"XII. No Non-juror shall be capable of being a
Member."

The humorous third rule, the somewhat disconcert-
ing fifth, the cynical eighth, all these are pleasant,
but the tenth and twelfth contain more club wisdom
than all the others put together. For the tenth rule
secures to each member the right to speak on one
subject with authority. Silenced, for example, in an
argument on knife-grinding, the carpenter can solace
himself by bragging of his exclusive knowledge of
joinery, a solid comfort that would vanish if a rival
carpenter should cross the threshold — for then, at the

226 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

moment of the poor fellow's discomfiture, when still
weak from the conflict with the grinder of knives,
his supremacy in his own business might be usurped,
and he be left nincompoop for ever. And as for the
twelfth rule, it is the neatest conceived of safeguards
against faddists. It is as if we in one of our clubs
were to prohibit vegetarians or anti-vaccinationists.
It is a charming testimony to the beef and beer
sanity of the members (a shoemaker and a tailor

from internal evidence. How ingratiating looks

" Brother Member " on the paper !) who wrote the
rules.

It is impossible to get away from the rules of
the old clubs before listening for a moment to those
that governed " the moral philosophers, as they called
themselves, who assembled twice a week, in order to
show the absurdity of the present mode of religion
and establish a new one in its stead." Their rules,
as Goldsmith says, " will give a most just idea of
their learning and principles." Some of his own
clubs cannot have been very different.

" I. We being a laudable society of moral philo-
sophers, intends to dispute twice a week about religion
and priestcraft; leaving behind us old wives' tales,
and following good learning and sound sense : and if
so be that any other persons has a mind to be of the
society, they shall be entitled so to do, upon paying
the sum of three shillings, to be spent by the company
in punch.

" II. That no member get drunk before nine of the
clock, upon pain of forfeiting three pence, to be spent
by the company in punch.

"III. That, as members are sometimes apt to go

TALKING, DRINKING, AND SMOKING 227

away without paying, every person shall pay sixpence
upon his entering the room ; and all disputes shall be
settled by a majority, and all fines shall be paid in
punch.

" IV. That sixpence shall be every night given to
the president, in order to buy books of learning for the
good of the society : the president has already put
himself to a good deal of expense in buying books for
the club; particularly the works of Tully, Socrates,
and Cicero, which he will soon read to the society.

" V. All them who brings a new argument against
religion, and who being a philosopher and a man of
learning, as the rest of us is, shall be admitted to the
freedom of the society, upon paying sixpence only, to be
spent in punch.

VI. Whenever we are to have an extraordinary
meeting, it shall be advertised by some outlandish
name in the newspapers.

SANDERS MAC WILD, President.
ANTHONY BLEWIT, Vice- President,

his X mark.
WILLIAM TURPJN, Secretary.

What clubs there must have been ; and yet why
regret them ? What clubs there are to-day ; what
clubs there will be until man changes his nature, and
becomes an animal that does not talk, or drink, or
smoke. If you, O honest, not inhuman, reader, ever
find your way into Bohemia, my best wish for you is
a club, a company of fellows as jolly as yourself, a
good cosy room, a free-burning hearth, plenty of
whatever tobacco smokes best in your pipe, of what-
ever liquor flows easiest in your gullet, of whatever
talk, of poetry, of romance, of pictures, sounds

228 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

sweetest in your ears. Or, if you have been in
Bohemia, and now are far away, or grown old, may
this chapter suggest the evenings of your youth, and
(but it would need to be better written) bring back
something of the old good fellowship that made those
evenings so hearty a delight.

OLD AND NEW HAMPSTEAD

OLD AND NEW HAMPSTEAD

IT is only lately that Hampstead has become an
integral part of London ; only a century since one
could be stopped by highwaymen on one's way into
town from the Heath. It used to be the most
beautiful country within reach of the city, and so
a proper place for "shoemakers' holidays" and for
retirement. Even now you may go to sleep behind
a bush in one of the little wooded valleys of the
Heath, and doubt on waking if you are not in a
dream, when you hear the bells of London churches
strike the hours. In those older days, when there
were fewer houses, and the city had not yet swept
the edge of the green with her dusty grey petticoat,
it was no wonder that Hampstead was loved by men
of letters chained to the neighbourhood of the town.

Steele's cottage was on Haverstock Hill, just op-
posite "The Load of Hay," and within easy walking
distance of "The Upper Flask," "The Bull and
Bush," " The Spaniards," and the other taverns of
the Heath. Here he came to work, but doubtless
often found that " the sun was on the other side
of the road," and stepped over to "The Load of
Hay." Or perhaps he made the pot-boy of the inn
carry the sunlight over to him in a pewter tankard.
Here he lived, like the untidy, pleasant creature that

232 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

he was, half gentleman and Captain of the Guards,
half just jolly humanity, the friend of all the world.
He was more often Dick than Captain Steele.

Up Haverstock Hill on summer days came as
many of the " thirty-nine noblemen and gentlemen,
zealously attached to the Protestant succession of the
House of Hanover," as thought it worth their while
to journey out from town to the meetings of the Kit
Cat Club at « The Upper Flask." There would be
Addison, sure to call for the better half of the
Spectator on the way. Or if not Addison, then
another of them would find Steele, doubtless pretend-
ing to be busy, but really waiting eagerly for the call
that would persuade him from his labours. Then, at
" The Upper Flask," they would drink, and perhaps
sing, and certainly talk, as they sat under a mulberry
tree enjoying the fresh air and each other's society.

" The Spaniards " inn too has its history. Gold-
smith met there with his less reputable friends, the
friends with whom he could " rattle away carelessly ,"
without dread of Doctor Johnson's conversational
bludgeon. And in later times it shared with « Jack
Straw's Castle " the affections of Dickens, who gave
Mrs. Bardell an afternoon there with her friends, the
afternoon that was so cruelly interrupted by the
terrors of the law. Dickens wrote to Forster in
1837 : " You don't feel disposed, do you, to muffle
yourself up, and start off with me for a good brisk
walk over Hampstead Heath ? I knows a good 'ouse
there where we can have a red-hot chop for dinner,
and a glass of good wine." It is easy to picture
them at it, and the taste for red-hot chops continues

OLD AND NEW HAMPSTEAD 235

still, and often in the summer twos and threes go up
to walk the Heath and feed at one or other of its
inns, and still there are clubs that meet to chatter at
" The Spaniards" or the « Bull and Bush."

Lamb knew the Heath; sorrowfully upon occa-
sion, when he walked hand in hand with his sister,
taking her to the asylum at Finchley when her old
mania showed any sign of an outbreak; merrily
enough though at Leigh Hunt's, and quite pleasantly
by himself:

" I do not remember a more whimsical surprise
than having been once detected — by a familiar damsel
— reclined at my ease upon the grass, on Prim-
rose Hill (her Cythera), reading « Pamela.'' There
was nothing in the book to make a man seriously
ashamed at the exposure; but as she seated herself
down by me, and seemed determined to read in
company, I could have wished it had been — any
other book. We read on very sociably for a few
pages ; and, not finding the author much to her taste,
she got up, and — went away. Gentle casuist, I leave
it to thee to conjecture, whether the blush (for there
was one between us) was the property of the nymph
or the swain in this dilemma. From me you shall
never get the secret."

Leigh Hunt had " a little packing-case of a
cottage" in the Vale of Health. There never was
such a man for illustrating his own character. When
he was in prison he decorated his room with painted
roses; and see how he shows his pride in the very
cottaginess of his cottage. " I defy you," says he,
" to have lived in a smaller cottage than I have done.

236 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

Yet," he continues, " it has held Shelley, and Keats,
and half a dozen friends in it at once." There is a
good deal of Leigh Hunt in those two sentences.
He loved to retire there to work, out of the bustle
of London ; and there were spent the evenings that
Shelley remembered in Italy, in the little room that
Keats describes :

" the chimes

Of friendly voices had just given place
To as sweet a silence, when I 'gan retrace
The pleasant day, upon a couch at ease.
It was a poet's house who keeps the keys
Of pleasure's temple. Round about were hung
The glorious features of the bards who sung
In other ages — cold and sacred busts
Smiled at each other

Sappho's meek head was there half smiling down
At nothing ; just as though the earnest frown
Of over thinking had that moment gone
From off her brow, and left her all alone.

Great Alfred's, too, with anxious pitying eyes,
As if he always listened to the sighs
Of the goaded world ; and Kosciusko's worn
By horrid suff ranee — mightily forlorn.

Petrarch, outstepping from the shady green,

Starts at the sight of Laura ; nor can wean

His eyes from her sweet face. Most happy they !

For over them was seen a fair display

Of outspread wings, and from between them shone

The face of Poesy : from off her throne

She overlook'd things that I scarce could tell.

The very sense of where I was might well

Keep Sleep aloof: but more than that, there came

Thought after thought to nourish up the flame

OLD AND NEW HAMPSTEAD 237

Within my breast ; so that the morning light
Surprised me even from a sleepless night ;
And up I rose refreshed, and glad, and gay,
Resolving to begin that very day
These lines ; and howsoever they be done,
I leave them as a father does his son."

Hazlitt came here to listen to Leigh Hunt
"running on and talking about himself at his own
fireside." Hazlitt thought Hunt a « delightful cox-
comb," and doubtless told him so. " Mr. Hunt ought
to have been a gentleman born, and to have patronised
men of letters. He might then have played, and
sung, and laughed, and talked his life away."

All that set of men loved the Heath. Leigh
Hunt found it an admirable place for studying Italian
landscapes ; Shelley used to run about it in the dark,
leaping over the bushes, and shouting like an
exuberant imp let out in upper air. Coleridge
finished his life out at Highgate, on the other side ;
and Keats bought the Heath for himself by right of
song. Here he wrote the " Ode to a Nightingale,"
and he lived at one time in Well Walk, lodging with
a postman, and at another in John Street, where he
was next door to Fanny Brawne. From the time
of the Kit Cats the place has never been without
its writers; and as for painters — Romney, Collins,
Linnell, Constable, Madox Brown, Kate Green-
away. . . .

To-day things are different. Hampstead is no
longer a fashionable watering-place some way out of
London ; it is within half an hour of the middle of
the town. It has suffered from its own reputation,

238 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

and become a stronghold of the " literary life," which
is a very different thing from the honest, hard-working
existence of men like Hunt or Keats. It is the home
of people who have had trivial successes, and live on
in the sequestered happiness of forgotten celebrities,
and of the people who have been able to spend their
lives playing amiably at art or literature. Painters
who can no longer paint, poets whose fame has
penetrated the suburban wildernesses and become no
more than notoriety, journalists who have never had
their day, all live here together, a curious unreal life,
like fragile puppets in a toy theatre. The place has
the feeling of a half-way house between this world
and the next.

Its convention of unconventionality is too rigid
for Bohemia. Every one is congratulating every
one on being so different from every one else. No
one is content to live as life has made them and as
they are. Indeed, there would be no chapter about
the place in this book if it were not that young
writers and painters so often get their first queer
foretaste of reputation in the Hampstead salons.
For there is competition among the wives of the
elderly critics and the elderly minor poets, who wish
to make their houses centres of intellectual life, to
collect the most youthful specimens of genius, and to
hear, as from the mouths of babes and sucklings, the
meanings and messages of " the newer movements."
A dozen charming middle-aged women struggle, with
the aid of Messrs. Liberty and a painful expenditure
of taste, to turn their drawing-rooms into salons.
And a young man cannot be long in the life of the

OLD AND NEW HAMPSTEAD 239

studios or the reviews without being introduced to
one of them.

Ah, the Hampstead salon. Imagine a room
papered in delicate green, with white mouldings
dividing the walls and white paint along the cornices,
and a fringe of Hobbema trees running round below
the ceiling. The room has half a dozen nooks and
corners, and in each corner, seated on cushions, are a
young man with long hair and flowing tie, and a
maiden out of a Burne-Jones picture, reading poetry,
listening to the talk or to the music made by a
youthful Paderewski at the piano. The hostess will
be draped in green or brown, to tone with the wall-
papers, and she will talk anxiously with one or
another young man, thinking all the time about the
intellectual level of the conversation and the balance
of her sentences. And the talk ? In the corners of
the room it will be of poetry, or ideals in art or
politics ; but through all will run a deeper, more
serious note. Some cause, some movement, some
great and vital matter will stir the whole salon.
For Hampstead has always her causes, forsaken one
by one as some new Pied Piper carries the ladies after
him. A man will address the hostess and shake his
fist, and talk of Ireland, and the brutality of English
rule; of the deplorable condition of the Russian
peasants; of the open shame of the Ipecacuanha
Indians, who prefer tattoo to decent clothing. " Shall
these things be ? " he asks. « What, tell me, is to become
of liberty, of humanity, of civilisation, if Hampstead
pass by on the other side of the way ? " What in-
deed ? Several committees will be formed at once.

240 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

I have a tenderness for the people in the corners ;
with them lies hope. It is not their fault if they
have been brought up in the masquerade ; nor are
they much to blame if they have mistaken its doors
(with imitation old English latches) for the gates of
the promised land where convention is no more, and
art and poetry flourish together like birds in the
dawn. A salmon-coloured tie may really help a
young poet to be himself; it only becomes abhorrent
when it is put on as a fashionable affectation. Long
and matted hair is quite intelligibly worn by the
young men who are mad to " return to the primitive
emotions of healthy barbaric life " (I quote from a
Hampstead conversation). It is certainly entertaining
to watch the chase of barbaric emotion in a Hamp-
stead drawing-room — but we can be grateful for
amusement. And if we ask for seriousness of pur-
pose— it was one of these Hampstead poets who
wrote on his birthday : " Eighteen to-day. . . . And
NOTHING done ! " You cannot have anything much
more serious than that.

A WEDDING IN BOHEMIA

A WEDDING IN BOHEMIA

A SCULPTOR and a painter girl fell in love with each
other, and, as they had neither money nor prospect
of getting any, had nothing to wait for, and so got
married at once. A cousin of the sculptor, not
knowing what was on foot, unexpectedly ordered a
bust, and paid him twenty pounds : with so much
opulence, they decided to spend their honeymoon in
the Latin Quarter.

We were very fond of them both, and held a con-
sultation on the matter. Was it right, was it fitting,
we asked, that these two should be married and have
no wedding party ? Let us uphold the honour of
the arts, and give them a send off. Things were very
well with some of us, and we were sure of a couple
of sovereigns, so four of us set off through the back
streets of Bloom sbury to a small French restaurant
that had always held us welcome.

" A wedding party ? " asked madame of the
restaurant. " And who of you is to be married ?
Monsieur the sculptor — quel brave gar^on — and the
mademoiselle si petite, si jolie." She was delighted,
and promised us the upstairs room to ourselves, and
said she would do her best for us. We separated, to
whip up the guests, collect the money, buy some
roses in Covent Garden, and borrow a famous and

243

244 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

gigantic loving-cup that has taken its part in a dozen
celebrations. We bought a modelling tool and a
huge cheap paint-brush, and decorated them with
ribbons.

Our party met that evening at the Mad Club,
twelve men and women, determined on enjoyment.
The sculptor, who had shaved his beard for the
blessed occasion, arrived last, with the little painter
girl. He was twenty- two, and she nineteen, and we
greeted them with cheers. Then, delighting in the
envy of the rest of the Club, who had not been in-
vited, and had the bad taste to laugh at our enthu-
siasm, we set off in procession. A sturdy fellow with
an accordion, which he had promised not to play in
the streets, marched in front, side by side with our
principal poet, who had composed a wedding ode.
Then came the bride and bridegroom ; then three
girls, two students, and a model, with their attendant
men ; and lastly a big fat Scotch writer of humorous
stories, and I with a penny whistle. Our satisfaction
with ourselves was sublime, and showed itself, in
spite of the prohibition, in spasms of melody on
the way. We walked merrily, shouting jokes from
rank to rank, up Long Acre, across Holborn, and
then to the right from Southampton Row, until we
reached the restaurant.

When we turned the last corner, we saw, far away
at the other end of the grey street, the black and
white figure of a waiter standing expectant in the
middle of the road. At the sight of our proces-
sion he hurriedly disappeared, and when we reached
the door madame in person, big, red-cheeked, blue-

A WEDDING IN BOHEMIA

245

bloused, white-aproned, was standing smiling on the
threshold.

The sculptor turned timorously to the rear ranks :
" She does not know which of us it is ? " he whispered,
with fear in his voice. But she
enlightened him herself.

" Ah, Monsieur et Madame,1'
she cried, breaking into the midst
of us, and seizing the hands of
the bride and bridegroom. " You
have the best of my wishes for
the happy married life, the dear
love, and the large
family. Your
little wife, is
she not so
charming, so
beautiful?...
Your hus-
band, ce bon
garcon, is he
not so well-
set-up? All
is ready,"
she laughed
a welcome to
the rest of

us: "the wine has come, and the bouillon is hot;
it is Monsieur's favourite bouillon," she added,
turning again to the sculptor, "and for Madame I
have made a salade with my own hands. . . . Ah,
the happy married life, Monsieur et Madame.1''

246 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

Upstairs madame had kept her promises. Bottles
ranged down the table, and the red and white roses
made a rare show. A paper crown, looked upon
lovingly by the Frenchwoman as her own work, folded
and frizzed like the decoration to a tart, lay on the
plate of the bride, and a huge cigar, a present from
madame's husband, lay on the plate of the bride-
groom. The paint-brush and the modelling tool,
gay with ribbons, lay crossed between them. Corks
flew from bottles with a joyous crackling. Madame
stood in the doorway, her hands on her hips, shouting
joyfully to the waiter to be quick with the bouillon,
which presently came up in a vast tureen. She sent
the waiter packing down again, to bring up her shy
red husband, made him shake hands with the lot of
us, and then remained after he had escaped, to hear
the sculptor, in a nervous, efflorescent speech, acknow-
ledge the gifts of crown and cigar and the effective
symbolism of the paint-brush and the moulder.

Indeed, she could not find it in her heart to leave
us. She waited on us, bullying the waiter out of the
jollity of her heart, and addressing remarks all the
time to " Monsieur et Madame," a huge smile express-
ing her own satisfaction, and a crimson face the
confusion of the little painter girl, while the sculptor
pretended not to mind. The soup was served, and
the waiter vanished regretfully, as the rest of the
meal was to be cold, and we had agreed to help our-
selves. . . . Surely she was going. No. " Pardon,
Monsieur et Madame," she beamed in the faces of
the uncomfortable two, and rearranged their knives
and forks. Again she tried to go, again was over-

A WEDDING IN BOHEMIA 247

come by the fascination of the newly married. " Que
je suis imbecile," — she shuffled back and altered the
position of the flowers in the middle of the table.
" Oh, Monsieur et Madame," she murmured, smiling
with as matronly an enjoyment as if the pretty little
painter had been one of her own stout daughters.
Suddenly the sculptor's self-possession left him. He
put down his spoon, and fairly loosed himself in
laughter, and the good woman, enjoying but not in
the least understanding the joke, threw her head
back and laughed uproariously with him. Some one
lifted the loving-cup. " Yes, yes ! " we shouted.
" To the health of Monsieur et Madame ! " " To
Monsieur et Madame ! " she said with fervour, and
holding the great bowl between her fat jewelled
hands, she drank. How we laughed. She set the
loving-cup on the table, and, suddenly bending over,
kissed the little bride on the forehead. How we
cheered. Then at last she went out. " Oh, Monsieur
et Madame," we heard her gurgle as she closed the
door.

That set the dinner going gaily. The food dis-
appeared, and the beer, and the wine. We made
speeches ; we sang ; the poet recited his ode ; we
made the little bride put on her paper crown, and
compelled her husband to smoke his gigantic cigar;
the loving-cup passed round twice, and then could
go round no more except as the emblem of a vanished
joy. There was a piano in a corner of the room,
and when we left the table we did a little dancing ;
the man with the accordion used it well, the penny
whistle sounded, and one of the bridesmaids, who was

248 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

an art student, sat at the piano with a painter, to
play a ten-finger duet, their spare hands clasped about
each other's waists. At half-past ten we begin to
be thirsty again with our merriment, and there was
no wine or indeed drink of any kind in the place,
for the restaurant had no licence. The street door
had been shut a quarter of an hour before. We had
to draw lots as to who should go out to replenish the
canteen. Two were to go — the one to see, as some-
body impertinently suggested, that none of the
precious liquor was drunk upon the way — and the lot
fell on the fat story-writer and me. The others were
to let us in from the street, as soon as they heard us
knock.

Ideals cause a great deal of discomfort. There
was really no need for us to have any ; we could
have been contented with wine — but our ideal was
creme de menthe. In other parts of the town you
have but to ask for creme de menthe to see it handed
over the counter ; but here it was a different matter.
We got our dozen of cheap bad claret with ease, and
borrowed a basket to carry it in ; but we went to at
least eight little shops in those back streets before
we found a man who had ever heard of the liqueur.
At last we found a spirit-shop with a very intelligent
proprietor, whose intelligence we welcomed, that
afterwards we had cause to curse.

" Creme de menthe," he said ; « is not that the
same as essence of peppermint ? "

" Yes, surely." We had heard something of the
sort. " Anyhow, it is always sold in narrow bottles.1'1

The man went downstairs behind the counter, and

A WEDDING IN BOHEMIA 249

we heard him strike a match and move about in the
cellar under our feet. Presently he came up with two
very big bottles.

" At least these are the right shape."

We bought them, and, laden with our purchases,
set oft' eagerly back to the restaurant.

All the lights were out below stairs, and the
blinds were down in the windows of the room our
party were enjoying. The accordion was going
merrily, and several voices were singing different
songs. We banged and thundered on the door, but
they were making too much noise for anybody in
the house to hear us. Standing well back from the
pavement, I began to throw pennies at the lighted
windows. The first penny touched the cornice, fell
in the gutter, and rolled away irretrievably in the
darkness of the street. The second hit the sill, and
dropped through the grating into the basement.
The third, the fourth followed its example. There
was no other missile left but my latch-key. The
other fellow had nothing at all.

" You'll have to make a good shot, and smash the
window, or else you'll lose the key. We'll make
those deaf idiots share the expense."

I took a step back, and a deliberate aim, and then
let fly. There was a crash of falling glass as the
latch-key fell inside the room. The music stopped,
the blind was pulled aside, and half a dozen of the
rogues trooped downstairs, let us in with cheerful
apologies, and took the claret bottles from the
basket as we carried it up.

The creme de menthe, the prize of the evening,

250 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

was to be kept to the end, and we gave ourselves up
gladly to singing, and drinking the claret. It had
been found that the poet's rather solemn epithalamium
fitted admirably to a popular music-hall tune ; it
was rendered with energy, and such success that
even the poet, inclined to be unhappy at first, at last
joined in good-temperedly, and sang as loudly as the
rest. It was very late when we took the first of
those long bottles, opened it with elaborate ostenta-
tion, and poured a green liquid into the empty wine-
glasses. Thank goodness, it was the right colour.

" Health ! " cried the sculptor, " to the two brave
fellows who gave their all (for did they not leave us,
and is not merriment such as ours the sum of human
joy) to bring us this liqueur. Gentlemen, brother
artists, your very good health ! "

The glasses, shimmering with dark green, were
lifted, and ten happy men and women drank to our
prosperity. I have seldom seen ten faces flash with
such perfect unanimity from exultation to dismay.
Their mouths screwed up. Their eyes blinked.
They put the glasses unsteadily down.

" You two fellows had better drink our healths
now,"" was the sculptor's only comment, as he set his
glass on the mantelpiece, with the tears in his eyes,
and wrinkles round his mouth as if he had been
drinking lemon juice.

We sipped gingerly, walked to the window, and
hurled the bottles that had cost so much to sudden
chaos on the opposite pavement. So much for ideals.

Just then the big French lady opened the door.
" It is half-past twelve," she said ; " I regret much

A WEDDING IN BOHEMIA 251

that you must go.11 She looked round the room for
the bride, and smiled again her prodigious wonderful
smile. « The bill ? Ah yes. That is quite right."

" We have broken a window," said the sculptor.
He had insisted that the window at least should be
paid for by himself.

Madame smiled again. " Ah oui. A window.
It is the youth. One does not get married every day.
The window shall be my wedding gift to Monsieur
et Madame." She caught the young sculptor, who had
unwarily approached too near, and kissed him loudly
on either cheek. I am really happy to record the
fact — he kissed her in return.

And so the twelve of us bundled out into the
street again, half an hour after midnight, leaving
madame waving farewells from the door. This time
we did not walk in twos and twos. Our hearts were
high, and needed a more general comradeship. We
walked twelve deep, arm in arm, along the narrow
streets, to the tune, or something like the tune, of the
" Soldiers' Chorus," played bravely on the accordion.
It was not genteel ; it was perhaps a little vulgar ; but
it was tremendously genuine.

We went to a flat in the Gray's Inn Road that was
rented by two of the men. As long as the wine and
the jollity kept us awake we made speeches, and sang,
and prophesied of the success of the sculptor, and
told stories without point that seemed prodigious
witty. Gradually we grew sleepier and sleepier, and
at last were all asleep, some on the divans, some in
chairs, some on the floor with heads on cushions or
backs propped against the wall. . . . We awoke only

252 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

just in time to take the two children, bride and
bridegroom, to the station, where their luggage, such
as it was, was waiting for them, and to see them off',
dishevelled, dirty, weary as ourselves, in the morning
boat train for Paris.

A NOVELIST

A NOVELIST

IT is a joyous day for a young man when one of his
articles wins him a letter from a well-known writer.
I walked through Bloomsbury with elation, feeling,
square in my pocket, the note that invited me to call
on a novelist whose work had given me a paragraph
in one of my diminutive essays. He was so well
known that it was a little surprising to find him in
Bloomsbury at all. Why not in St. John's Wood ?
I asked. Why not in the real country ? At least I
pictured a very sumptuous flat. Through the old
streets I walked, through the squares of tall old
houses once fashionable but now infested by land-
ladies, expecting all the time, as I neared the street
he had mentioned, to find more signs of opulence.
I found it at last, and it was dingy, miserable, more
depressing than the rest. The novelist lived at
number seven. I rang the bell and waited with a
fluttering heart.

Presently the door opened a suspicious six inches,
and the tousled head of an elderly woman in curl-
papers showed itself in the opening. On asking for
my novelist, I was told to come in, and driven into
the usual lodging-house dining-room. A huge gilt
mirror hung over the mantelpiece, faded rhododen-
drons upside down made a grisly pattern on the wall-

256 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

paper, the table was covered with a purple tasselled
cloth with holes in it, and the furniture was up-
holstered in a material that had once been pink.
The curtains drawn across the windows were yellow
and grey with age and dust, and I could not bear to
look at the carpet. There were four pictures on the
walls, portraits of Queen Victoria and Mr. Gladstone,
and two enlarged photographs, coloured, and mag-
nificently framed, that showed the curl-papered lady
who had opened the door, dressed in a low-necked
evening gown, with jewels about her fat creased neck,
and flowers in her hair.

The door had been left open, and presently she
shouted, " Go upstairs ! First on the left." The
door of " first on the left " was ajar, and a baby was
squalling inside. I knocked, and went into the most
dishevelled room it is possible to imagine. There
was a big bed in it, unmade, the bed-clothes tumbled
anyhow, several broken chairs, and a washing-stand
with a basin out of which some one had taken a
bite. The novelist, in a dressing-gown open at the
neck, and showing plainly that there was nothing but
skin beneath it, was writing at a desk, throwing off
his sheets as fast as he covered them. A very pretty
little Irish girl, of about nineteen or twenty, picked
them up as they fell, and sorted them, at the same
time doing her best to quiet the baby who sprawled
all over her, as she sat on the floor. They stood up
when I came in, and the novelist tried to apologise
for the disorder, but the baby howled so loudly that
it was impossible to hear him.

" Take it out ! " he shouted to the girl, and she

THE NOVELIST

A NOVELIST 259

obediently picked it up and carried it out of the
room.

« That was a very good essay of yours, young man,
and I thank you for it. I scarcely thought you
would be as young as you are. How young are
you ? "

I told him.

" Fortunate fellow. Old enough for wine, and too
young for liqueurs. The best of all ages. I hope
you thank Jupiter every morning for your youth.
Ah me, what it is to be young ! I was a strapping
fellow when I was as young as you. And now ! Oh,
you fortunate young dog ! " He thumped his broad
chest, that was covered with thick black hair, as I
could see, for the dressing-gown had fallen partly
open. His big eyes twinkled under their strong dark
brows, and he suddenly buried a huge unwashen hand
in his curly black hair.

« Aha ! You are thinking that it is not worth
while to be a success, if this is all it leads to. Eh !
What ? Yes. I am right. I can always tell.
That is the curse of it. Look at my wife, for ex-
ample. She loves me. Yes. But she does not guess
that I know she looks upon me as a big bull baby,
very queer and mad, but so strong that it has to
be humoured. In fact, when she carried off that
vociferous little Victor Hugo, she was only looking
upon you as a lamb offered providentially for sacrifice
in place of Isaac. She is always afraid I shall throw
Victor Hugo out of the window. It is very annoying
to know that she feels like that. Funny woman.
Pretty, don't you think? But what about that

260 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

wine ? If you go and shout < Mrs. Gatch ! ' at the top
of that staircase, the she-dragon who runs this place
will come and bring up a bottle of something or other.
I would shout myself, but you are younger than I."

I crossed the landing and shouted for Mrs. Gatch.
Presently she stood below me in the narrow hall.

" Well, and what is it ? " she asked crossly.

I was just going to reply, when the voice of the
novelist bellowed from his room, like the voice of one
of the winds of God.

« Mrs. Gatch, you are a bad-tempered woman.
Don^t deny it. Bring me a bottle of the best bad
Burgundy you have in your filthy cellar.""

It was clear that Mrs. Gatch was frightened of
him, for she brought the bottle at once, wiping it on
her apron as she came into the room. We drank
out of a couple of glasses my great man brought
from a box in the corner. Then he talked of litera-
ture, and so well that the untidy bed, the unclean
room, the wife and the baby were as if they never had
been. In spite of his unwashen hands, in spite of
the dressing-gown, he won his way back to greatness.
He lifted the tumbler magnificently to watch the
ruby of the wine, while he talked of Edgar Allan Poe,
and of his methods, and of that wonderful article
on the principles of composition. Poe was profound,
he said, to have imagined that article, but the article
represented him profounder than he really was. From
Poe we came to detective and mystery tales, Gaboriau,
Sherlock Holmes, and the analytical attitude, and so
to the relations between criticism and art. It was a
most opulent conversation.

A NOVELIST 261

I sat on a three-legged chair where I could see out
of the window, and presently noticed the novelist's
wife walking up and down on the opposite pavement,
carrying the child and a blue parasol. She had not
troubled to put on a hat, and she was evidently wait-
ing till we had done our talk. It was clear that they
had no other room. And so, regretfully, calculating
a time that would leave her at the top of the street,
while I escaped at the bottom, not wishing to put her
to confusion, I told the novelist of an appointment
with my editor, shook hands with him, was pressed to
come again, ran downstairs, and walked away up the
street. I walked quickly away, but not so quickly
that I did not see the little woman hurry back into
the house with Victor Hugo, to resume, doubtless,
her occupation of sorting the pages of deathless prose
that her " big bull baby " dropped from his desk.

I saw him more than once there later, and always
the room was in the same condition, the child howling,
the wife pretty, untidy as ever, the great man un-
washed but working. How he could work ! Sheet
after sheet used to drop from his desk. Sometimes
when I called upon him he would be in the middle of
a chapter, and then he would ask me to sit down and
smoke, while his pen whirled imperturbably to the
end. He could write in any noise, and he could
throw oft' his work completely as soon as the pen was
out of his hand. He was quite contented in the
lodging-house, living with wife and child in a single
room. He seemed more amused than annoyed by its
inconveniences. « After all," he would say, " I have

262 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

to pretend to superb intellect, and the pretence would
be exposed at once if I let such things worry me."

One day I had a post-card from him, saying he
was going abroad. I did not hear from him again
for several years, when a letter that came in a crested
envelope told me he was settled in a flat. Would I
come to dinner ?

He was in Bloomsbury again, but the flat was
more comfortable than the room. It was very
decently furnished, and quite clean. A book of his,
that had had a great success in America, was the
explanation of his magnificence. The door was
opened by an elderly housekeeper, and I was ushered
into his study with considerable ceremony.

He rose to greet me, but sat down again at once,
and said that he was very ill.

I said I was sorry to hear it.

" Damn you, young man ! You can aftbrd to be.
Look at you, you young bullock, and then look at me
— a miserable wreck."

He lay back in his chair, with his black hair crisp
and curly, his cheeks red and healthy, and his heavy
black eyebrows stiff and strong over his active eyes.
He was dressed, except that he had not a collar, and
the muscles of his throat were as fine and beautiful
as those of a statue. I could not think of him as ill.

But from time to time he reached languidly to the
table, and took a tumbler of yellow opaque liquid,
from which he drank a little, and then, after making
a wry face, put the tumbler back.

Presently he explained. " Have you heard," said

A NOVELIST 263

he, «< that a great doctor, a man called Verkerrsen,
has been investigating the long life of the Hungarians,
and attributes it to the quantities of sour milk that
they drink ? "

I had not heard.

"Yes," he went on. «The whole matter is ex-
plained in an article in the Medical Journal. You
had better read it." He took a sip from the tumbler,
and made a horrible grimace. " Ugh ! " he said,
" but I think the Hungarian sour milk must be nicer
than the sour milk of London. Ugh ! Disgusting.
But I must take it, I suppose."

He loved theories above everything else, and went
on sipping heroically till he finished the glass. Then
he jumped to his feet, and arched his biceps, and
smote proudly on his chest. « Ah ! " he cried, « it
was worth it. I feel better already. Let's have
supper."

Supper was brought in, admirably cooked, and laid
on the study table. We sat down to it with the
elderly housekeeper. The novelist, restored by sour
milk to ebullient health, was as happy as could be,
joking now with her, now with me, talking most joy-
fully. Something crossed his mind, when he was
half-way through his soup, but it was no more than
the shadow of a bird flying over a flower-bed in the
sunlight. He bent towards me. "I say," he said,
" my wife is dying in Dublin this week. Pass the
toast."

I did not know what to reply. Bnt there was no
need, for he had passed on instantaneously to a new
ingenious notion of his, that everything was a brain,

264 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

that molecules were brains, that we were aggregations
of tiny brains, that the world was a huge brain with
us as parasites upon it, and that the universe, made
up of brains, was nothing but a mighty brain itself.
He could think of nothing else till supper was done.

Then when the housekeeper had cleared away the
supper things, he went to the cupboard and pulled
out two long narrow stands, each holding a dozen
liqueur glasses. " My own idea," he explained, and
proceeded to place upon the table one by one a dozen
different bottles of liqueurs — Chartreuse, Benedictine,
Creme de Menthe, Anisette, Cherry Brandy, and
several with fantastic names of his own invention.
" Let us drink each liqueur to a different genius,"
he said. « Chartreuse for Alexandre mon cher
Dumas, Benedictine for the noble Balzac, Cherry
Brandy for Fielding, Anisette for Sterne, Creme de
Menthe — dull stuff', Creme de Menthe ; we'll drink
Creme de Menthe to — to — to Samuel Richardson.
He'd have thought it so naughty."

There was a curious point about this man. He
loved the bravery and show of conviviality, but he
was not a Hans Breitmann to " solfe der inh'nide in
von edernal shpree." He never got " dipsy," and
he hated drunkenness above all other vices. The
only time we quarrelled was when, hearing that I
was going to see him, another man whom I scarcely
knew forced himself upon me, and had to be intro-
duced. The great man plied him with liqueurs till
he fell on the floor, and quarrelled with me for six
months because he had to help to carry the fellow to
his lodgings.

A NOVELIST 265

I should like to see him again, but Bloomsbury
has been the poorer for some time, being without
him. I think he is in France. I never dared ask
if the wife lived or died. It would have been so
difficult to find the correct manner. Something like
this, I suppose : " By the way, that wife of yours ;
underground or not ? Pass the cigarettes."

A PAINTER

A PAINTER

THE painter had a studio made of two rooms, one,
long and dark, opening into the other, which was
larger, but kept in a perpetual twilight by shades
over the window. The walls were covered with dark
green curtains, and on them were hung weird, fiery-
coloured pictures, compositions for Oriental dreams :
two peris caressing a peacock by a golden fountain ;
a girl in crimson and gold holding fantastic wine-
glasses towards the shadow of a man ; a sketch in
pastels of a pair of struggling gods. All round the
floor, leaning up against the walls, were unfinished
canvases, half realised dreams that had not the
energy to get themselves expressed before they were
forgotten, and other dreams, to be abandoned in
their turn, were striving for the light. There was
an old piano in a corner, and a sofa, a dark wood
table, and some ebony chairs.

He was a small man, with hair not long but very
curly, beautiful eyes, and a little moustache. He
dressed neatly, though he had less money for the
purpose than most of the other artists in the build-
ing. He worked entirely alone, and laughed quietly
at the anxiety of people who wished to succeed, to
exhibit, to be publicly recognised as painters, unless
he understood that they looked upon success only

270 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

as guarantee of bread and butter. He could under-
stand that people might, without degradation, work
for bread and butter, and he always said he was
willing to do so himself. But he never did. Chances
came to him, as they come to everybody ; but either
the would-be purchaser was not appreciative, or he
chose the wrong things to commend. The painter
could never have slept with the thought that one
of his pictures, an arrangement in colours, was in
the house of a gold- watch-chained plutocrat who loved
it for the sake of a story he had happened to read
into it. He would have counted the picture as wasted,
and would not have let it go to such a man, even if
the money would have saved him from starvation.

There were only two very small exhibitions where
he felt he could show his pictures with a free con-
science, and he had a painting in each every year ;
and yet, though he had the year in which to paint
them, his two pictures always went down unfinished.
He used to paint on, dream after dream, imagining
that each one was to be the annual masterpiece, and
then, before any one of them was done, he would
be started on another, until, a week before the ex-
hibitions, he would find that he had not a single
picture in such a state that he could expose it with-
out shame to the eyes of other painters. Then he
used to work furiously, first on one picture, then on
another, now on the first again, until at the end of
the week, almost in tears, he would send off the least
unfinished of the lot, and, shutting himself up in his
studio, refuse to allow any one to interrupt his self-
accusation and remorse.

A PAINTER 271

He called on me in my first lodging, and found me
trying to play "Summer is icumen in" on an old
wooden flageolet. But, although he was a musician,
he asked me to come to his studio, to see his piano,
which, very old, was a perfect instrument for the
older music, Scarlatti, Corelli, and the Elizabethan
songs. Very often after that he would play for hours
in that dim room, while I listened, sitting and smok-
ing over the fire. Sometimes another man used to
come in and play the piano for him, so that he was
free for the 'cello, that he handled with the love that
is the greater part of skill. One winter we made
friends with a model who had a violin. Then we
used to keep Tuesday nights free for concerts : there
would be the pianist, the artist round the corner in the
large room playing the 'cello, and the pretty, fluttered
little girl playing the violin in the long room by the
fire, while I sat on the sofa and tried to keep time
(for they could not see each other) by beating my
foot on the floor. Sometimes all three would be to-
gether, and they were never more than two bars
apart, and the caretaker who lived below the stairs
used to thank us solemnly each night for the sweet
music that we made. The painter made a sketch of
her, the only humorous drawing he ever did, show-
ing her seated in her chair, with her glasses in her
lap, her hands clasped, her eyes turned up to the
ceiling, entranced as if by a melody from heaven.

When we were tired of the music, the little model
used to take the kettle from the cupboard, and make
coffee for us, with a very pretty assumption of house-
wifeliness and motherhood. Then, after the coffee,

272 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

we would talk, and the painter used to sing old songs,
or more often would sit content by the fire, watching
the firelight bring out strange colours in the un-
realised dreams that waited on the canvases against
the wall.

His was a simple, earnest life, of a kind that is not
so rare as one might think. There are many like
him, who care more for art than for recognition,
and work on quietly, happily, living on bread and
cheese, or going without it when painting materials
become a more insistent necessity. Since those days
he has become a success in spite of himself. Some
illustrations he made to fairy tales interested people,
and though he fled them when he could, and only
asked to be let alone, he has become famous and
almost opulent. But he lives as simply as before,
and paints in the same manner. His pictures are
all wonderful, but his patrons find it as difficult to
get him to finish one as it is to persuade him to
let it leave his studio when done. In the Middle
Ages he would have been a monk and a painter of
frescoes, loved by all the gentle-minded folk who came
to worship in the church where his dreams were
painted on the walls. Now, except among the few
who know him well, the best word I hear said of him
is that he is a good artist but a criminally unbusiness-
like man.

A GIPSY POET

A GIPSY POET

No one knew whence he had come. Only, he had
stood one day, a slight, black-haired, black-eyed boy,
on the doorstep of a publisher's office, shy to enter
or to retreat, with a little manuscript volume of
poems in his hand. By some chance the publisher
himself happened to come out on his way to lunch,
and asked what the lad did, waiting there on his
threshold. On hearing the boy's reply, and glancing
for a moment through the volume that was timidly
held out to him, he took him to his club, gave him a
good lunch, and asked a number of questions. He
confessed afterwards that he had learnt nothing
except, what could be seen at once, that the boy was
of an odd kind. Of what kind he decided as soon
as he had read the poems.

In a month's time the little book was published,
and the grace, the finish, the freshness of the songs
in it ensured at least a critical success. There was
something in this little book that had not been
written before, something of the open road seen from
other eyes than those of townsmen or the ordinary
country poet. The phrases were not those of the
casual observer. The hedges were real hedges, with
blackberries in them, or good twigs for burning, or
straight branches for switches or walking-sticks. The

277

278 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

dark nights were not made in theatres, but were bad
for travellers, good for thieves. Men and women
were men and women of the open air. There was
something in every poem in the book that had the
real blood and spirit of the country, something that
made the book different from every other volume of
the season. It was praised in half a dozen of the
best papers, and the publisher, proud of his little
romance, gave dinner parties, inviting distinguished
guests to meet his poet.

Before the interest in him that the book had
caused had died away, some one, more practical and
more benevolent than most admirers of young poets,
had got the boy permanent work as librarian of a
small library in town. He settled in here among the
books and students, and worked steadily from the
autumn of one year to the June of the next. He
had made other friends besides the distinguished
people. There were several lodgings of poets as
young and less fortunate than himself, where he used
to come in the evenings and read his verses aloud, in
an effective sing-song way, the manner, so he said, in
which he composed them. He loved to listen to the
old stories of Morte d"* Arthur and the Mabinogion,
that used often to be read aloud in the evenings at
these lodgings, and there was an Indian book called
" Old Deccan Days," for whose stories of rajah and
ranee he would ask again and again. Often he would
come back, some days after one of these readings, with
poems in which he had retold the tales and given
them a fresh significance. For us he was always
eerie ; there was a motive in his poetry that could

A GIPSY POET 279

never be ours, an indefinable spirit of wandering, and
of nights spent in the open or in the shadows of the
moonlit woods. It was as if a goblin were our friend.
Nothing that he did or said could have surprised us
much.

When that June came, it was after a cold May.
Winter had lingered later than usual, and June came
with a sudden warmth and a sense of spring as well
as of summer. One evening one of his friends called
at the library to take him up to Soho to drink red
wine, which he loved, and to talk and dine in one of
the little restaurants. The library clerks told him
that the poet had not been in the place either that
day or the day before. He had left no message, and
was not in his rooms. His landlady only knew that
he had gone out very early in the morning two days
ago, and had not returned to sleep. He had not
come back the next day, and after that his friends
took in turn to call every evening. They found it
necessary to persuade his landlady that she had no
right to sell his few possessions. Ten days later, as
we were sitting at dinner at our usual small restau-
rant in Soho, he came in. His clothes were dirty and
ragged, and his boots were almost worn out. He had
no money, he said, but he was going to the library in
the morning, where some was due to him. He was
skilful in parrying our urgent questions, and we
scarcely knew if he wished us not to know where he
had been, or if he were ignorant himself. But there
was a brighter light in his eyes than we had seen
since first he came among us, and a clearer ring in
his voice.

280 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

For the rest of that year he worked regularly in
the library, and read and wrote or saw his friends in
the evenings. Sometimes, when we were with him in
the streets, a man or a woman would speak to him in
an odd tongue. He always pretended not to under-
stand them, but we noticed that afterwards he con-
trived to be rid of us for the rest of the evening.
We knew that somehow his life was not ours, but we
liked him very well.

In the following May he disappeared again, though
for a few days only. In June he went, and in July,
returning each time tired out, happy and secret, an
insoluble enigma. There began to be troubles for
him with the library authorities.

One evening in early August he was in a room in
Chelsea, drinking and singing old songs. His face
was flushed, and he was over-excited. The songs
seemed a relief to him, and he sang one after another.
At the end of the evening, after some one had sung
one of the usual English songs, he jumped up, waving
his glass, and sang uproariously in a language we none
of us understood. His face was transfigured as he
sang, and he swayed his whole body with the rhythm
of his tune. When he had finished singing he tossed
the wine down his throat, looked queerly at us, and
then laughed to himself and sat suddenly down.

Afterwards two of his friends walked with him to
the Embankment, as he lived at that time in lodgings
on the south side of the river. Just as they turned
up over Battersea Bridge, a man and a woman
stepped across the road and waited in the lamplight.
The man had a cap over his eyes, and a loose necktie.

A GIPSY POET 281

He was very straight, and walked more easily than
a loafer. The woman had a scarlet shawl. As the
three of them went by, the poet humming a tune
for the others to hear, the woman touched his arm,
and he looked round into her face.

" Good-night, you fellows," he said to the two who
were with him, shook hands with them, which was
not his usual custom, and left them, and went oft'
with that strange couple. They stood looking after
him in surprise, but he did not turn.

He disappeared from Bohemia as mysteriously as
he came. That was four years ago, and not one of
us has seen him since that night. Perhaps he will
walk in again, with his boots worn out and happiness
alight in his face. Perhaps he is dead. Perhaps he
is wandering with his own people along the country
roads.

CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION

CRABBE wrote to Edmund Burke in 1781 :

" I am one of those outcasts on the world, who are
without a friend, without employment, and without
bread. I had a partial father, who gave me a better
education than his broken fortune would have allowed,
and a better than was necessary, as he could give me
that only. ... In April last, I came to London with
three pounds, and flattered myself this would be suffi-
cient to supply me with the common necessaries of
life till my abilities should procure me more ; of these
I had the highest opinion, and a poetical vanity con-
tributed to my delusion. I knew little of the world,
and had read books only; I wrote, and fancied per-
fection in my compositions ; when I wanted bread they
promised me affluence, and soothed me with dreams
of reputation, whilst my appearance subjected me to
contempt. Time, reflection, and want have shown me
my mistake/1

In 1817 he wrote to a young lady :

"You may like me very well — but, child of sim-
plicity and virtue, how can you let yourself be so
deceived? Am I not a great fat rector, living upon
a mighty income, while my poor curate starves upon
the scraps that fall from the luxurious table ? Do I
not visit that horrible London, and enter into its
abominable dissipations? Am I not this day going
to dine on venison and drink claret? Have I not

286 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

been at election dinners, and joined the Babel-confu-
sion of a town hall? Child of simplicity, am I fit
to be a friend to you ? . . ."

Bohemia is only a stage in a man's life, except in
the case of fools and a very few others. It is not a
profession. A man does not set out saying, " I am
going to be a Bohemian " ; he trudges along, whisper-
ing to himself, " I am going to be a poet, or an
artist, or some other kind of great man," and finds
Bohemia, like a tavern by the wayside. He may
stay there for years, and then suddenly take post-
horses along the road ; he may stay a little time,
and then go back whence he came, to start again
in another direction as a Civil Servant, or a re-
spectable man of business ; only a very few settle
down in the tavern, for ever postponing their depar-
ture, until at last they die, old men, still laughing,
talking, flourishing glasses, and drinking to their
future prosperity.

I have tried to show what life is like in this tavern
on the road to success — this tavern whose sign, gaily
painted — a medley of paint-brushes, pens, inkpots,
and palettes, with a tankard or two in the middle
of them — hangs out so invitingly over the road that
no young man can pass it without going in at the
door. With memories of the older times, and
pictures of the life of to-day, I have done my best
to get the spirit of it on paper ; and it is clear, now
that I have finished, that there is something left
unsaid. I have not brought Bohemia into per-
spective with the rest of a man's existence, nor told
what happens when he comes to leave it.

CONCLUSION 287

For it is not an uninterrupted succession of arti-
fices to get hold of daily bread, drinking bouts, wed-
ding parties, and visits to the studios and lodgings
of friends — small meaningless pains and pleasures.
These things are not ends in themselves. There is
something behind the very extravagance of the
costumes that we wear. Our life, our clothes are
different from conventional life and fashionable
clothes, but they are not different from whim or
caprice. People do not make fools of themselves for
the fun of the thing, except in France. They never
do it in Bohemia. The secret of the whole is a need
for the emphasis and expression of individuality.
When a youth, brought up in ordinary family life,
feels somehow that he is not quite like the others,
that he also is one of the prophets, the very sign of
his vocation is an urgent need of marking his differ-
ences. He may have an overwhelming desire to
shock his nearest and dearest relatives — even that is
excusable — perhaps he will leave " Tom Jones " on
his mother's drawing-room table. The regularity,
the routine, the exactness of his home life will be
about his neck like a mill-stone, as he struggles to
fly with wings where others walk. He will feel,
perhaps without admitting it to himself, the horror
of being indistinguishable from among the rest of the
human ants about him, and, by growing long hair,
and refusing to wear a collar, does his best to
strengthen, not others so much as himself, in be-
lieving that his is a peculiar species.

And so, when he goes along the road with his
manuscripts or his sketch-books, lonely but very

288 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

hopeful, and sees that gay sign hanging out, and,
looking into the tavern, catches glimpses of a hundred
others as extravagant as himself, he tells himself with
utter joy that here are his own people, and, being
like every one else a gregarious creature, throws him-
self through the door and into their arms. There
are no Bohemians in the desert.

As soon as he is with his own people, dressing to
please himself, and living a life as different as possible
from the one that he has known, the whole energy
of his need for self-expression pours itself without
hindrance into his art. (Only the wasters lose sight
of the end in the means, and live the life without
thought of what they set out to gain.) The mad
pleasures of the life, even the discomforts, the possible
starvation, have their value in being such contrasts
to the precision of the home he has left. Material
difficulties, too, matter little to him, for his interests
are on another plane. He can escape from the
harassing knowledge that his purse contains only
twopence-halfpenny in the glorious oblivion of paint-
ing a picture or fitting exact words to an emotion.
He has always a temple in his mind which the winds
of trouble do not enter, and where he may worship
before a secret altar a flame that burns more steadily
and brighter with every offering he lays before it.
More practical things disturb him very little : do you
remember Hazlitt's saying when he and John Lamb
" got into a discussion as to whether Holbein's colour-
ing was as good as that of Vandyke ? Hazlitt denied
it. Lamb asserted the contrary ; till at length they
both became so irritated, they upset the card-table

CONCLUSION 289

and seized each other by the throat. In the struggle
that ensued, Hazlitt got a black eye ; but when the
two combatants were parted, Hazlitt tnrned to Tal-
fourd, who was offering his aid, and said : « You need
not trouble yourself, sir. / do not mind a blow, sir ;
nothing affects me but an abstract ideaS " x

That is a very perfect illustration of the Bohemian's
attitude towards reverses of fortune that are not con-
cerned with the progress of his art. A picture ill
painted, a stodgy article (oh, the torments of forcing
life into a leaden piece of prose!), these will upset
him, make him miserable, dejected, at war with all
the world. But penury; why, that is but a little
price to pay for freedom ; and squalor may be easily
tolerated for the sake of an escape from convention.

And now to speak of the farewell to Bohemia ; for
the young man grows older, and perhaps earns money,
and takes upon himself responsibilities to another
goddess than the white Venus of the arts. It is a
long time since "The Lady Anne of Bretaigne,
espying Chartier, the King's Secretary and a famous
poet, leaning upon his elbows at a table end fast
asleepe, shee stooping downe, and openly kissing him,
said, We must honour with our kisse the mouth from
whence so many sweete verses and golden poems have
proceeded " ; 2 but women have still a fondness for
poets and painters, and, not too critical of the value
of the verses and pictures, are even willing to marry
their authors, moneyless, untidy wretches as they are.

1 B. R. Haydon's " Correspondence."

2 Peacham's " Compleat Gentleman."

290 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

But no sooner have they married than they begin to
tame them. Even the maddest cigarette-smoking art
student, when she has married her painter, takes him
away from Bohemia, which is, as perhaps she knows
without thinking of it, not the place for bringing
up a family. The woman is always for stability
and order ; a precarious, haphazard, irregular, un-
healthy existence has none of the compensations for
her that it holds out to her husband. Not that she
does not think of him, too ; but she prefers to see
him healthy than a genius. Anyhow, the door into
the registrar's office is the door out of Bohemia.
Things are never quite the same again. Witness
Lamb, writing to Coleridge : " I shall half wish you
unmarried (don't show this to Mrs. C.) for one evening
only, to have the pleasure of smoking with you and
drinking egg-hot in some little smoky room in a pot-
house, for I know not yet how I shall like you in a
decent room and looking quite happy."

And then, too, whether she means it or not, the
woman alters the man's view of the goal at the end of
the journey. She is always on the side of the recog-
nised success. The artist, however unruly, finds him-
self once a week wearing a frock coat at an " at
home " given by his wife to " useful people." He
soon discovers that he must exhibit in the usual
places, if only to please his lady. He makes fewer
experiments, but settles down to adapt his technique
to subjects that are likely to tell. He works harder,
or at least more consistently, and has less time for
other people's studios. He learns that he is not a
god after all, but only a working man. The re-

CONCLUSION 291

bellious dreams of his youth die in his breast, and
he ends a Royal Academician.

The writer, when he marries, learns that he must
no longer trust to earning a living by accident, while
he does his favourite work. There are two ways
open to him : he may do an immense amount of
criticism and journalism, and keep his originality for
what leisure he can find, or he may make his best
work the easiest to sell. To keep up his prestige at
home he must become a popular author.

And in becoming a success he loses the sympathy
of the friends he has left in Bohemia, and finds
that for them he is even as one of the abhorred
Philistines, tolerated for old sake's sake, but no
longer one of the fighting band.

On the other hand, if the young man does not
marry, he finds as he grows up that he is less and less
of a Bohemian. His individuality no longer needs
for its emphasis expression in externals. His taste
in talk becomes less catholic — he is bored by the
extravagant young fools who are ready to say any-
thing about everything they know nothing about.
He is annoyed at last, unless he is so philosophic as
to be amused, by the little people with their great
pretences, their dignities without pedestals ; and he
finds, as he becomes less able to give them the homage
they require, that they become annoyed with him, and
can do very well without him, having new sets of
young admirers of their own.

A novel, a book of poems, or a picture wins him
some real recognition — and with it, perhaps, a rise in
income. His relations, who have for so long neglected

292 BOHEMIA IN LONDON

him as a black and errant sheep, discover a pride in
him, and want to introduce him to their friends.
He is compelled, as it were by circumstances alone, to
wear better clothes, and to take what he is told is
his place in society. With better clothes comes a
snobbish but pardonable dislike of being seen with
the carelessly dressed. He moves to more convenient
rooms, has a napkin on his breakfast table, and is
waked in the morning by a maid with hot water,
instead of by an alarm clock. Who knows? — he
may even rent a cottage in the country. A thousand
things combine to take him out of Bohemia.

And it is better so. There are few sadder sights
than an old man without any manners aping the
boyishness of his youth without the excuse of its
ideals, going from tavern to tavern with the young,
talking rubbish till two in the morning, painfully
keeping pace with a frivolity in which he has no part.
Caliban playing the Ariel — it is too pitiful to be
amusing. There are men who live out all their lives
in Bohemia (to paraphrase Santayana's definition
of fanaticism), " redoubling their extravagances
when they have forgotten their aim." I am re-
minded again of my friend's saying, that of all
bondages vagabondage is the one from which it is
most difficult to escape. If a man stay in it too long,
if he allow its garlands to become fetters, its vagaries
to lose their freshness and petrify into habits, he can
never get away. When I think of the deathbed of
one of these old men — of the moment when he knows
of a sudden that his life is gone from him, and that
after all he has done nothing — I quicken my resolve

CONCLUSION 293

to escape when my time comes, and not to linger till
it is too late.

But now, in youth, it is the best life there is, the
most joyously, honestly youthful. It will be some-
thing to remember, when I am become a respectable
British citizen, paying income tax and sitting on the
Local Government Board, that once upon a time in
my motley " I have flung roses, roses, riotously with
the throng." It will make a staid middle age more
pleasant in its ordered ease to think of other days,
when a girl with blue sleeves rolled to her elbows
cooked me a dinner from kindness of heart, because
she knew that otherwise I should have gone without
it ; when no day was like the last, when a sovereign
seemed a fortune, when all my friends were gods, and
life itself a starry masquerade. My life will be the
happier, turn out what it may, for these friendships,
these pot-house nights, these evenings in the firelight
of a studio, and these walks, two or three of us to-
gether talking from our hearts, along the Embank-
ment in the Chelsea evening, with the lamps sparkling
above us in the leaves of the trees, the river moving
with the sweet noise of waters, the wings of youth on
our feet, and all the world before us.

Printed by BALLANTYNK, HANSON & Co.
Edinburgh &* London

PRESS NOTICES OF THE FIRST

EDITION OF THIS VOLUME

AND OTHER WORKS BY THE

SAME AUTHOR

PRESS NOTICES

OF THE FIRST EDITION OF

BOHEMIA IN LONDON

"We should like to quote many other passages, such as
the acute and the humorous account of Pleet Street life, or
the admirable pen-portraits of a half-successful novelist
and a wandering gipsy poet; but the worst of extracts is
that they only break up the lights and shades, and disturb
the effect of the whole picture. And this book must be
taken as a whole, and read from cover to cover. For it is
a finished, delicate, artistic piece of workmanship, a book
of laughter and tears, of happiness and of regret ; a book,
in fact, of the brave days when all the world is twenty-one ;
when all the year is spring; and when the heart rides
lightly in the breast, because everything is possible to the
golden future of one's own imagination." — The Daily Tele-
graph, 25th September 1907.

" This is altogether a charming book, designed to foster
that kind of literary exercise called ' browsing ' — precisely
such a volume as would have delighted Hazlitt, De Quincey,
or the gentle Elia, because of its easy, natural, genial
style."— The Dundee Advertiser, 3oth September 1907.

" There are some books that have the power of exciting
their readers to a spirit of emulation. There is in them
some quality of suggestion and reserve that quickens the
imagination ; a fecundity of ideas, an aptness of expression,

that stimulates the tired mind into activity and imbues
even the unliterary man with the wish, if not to write, at
least to think thoughts that might be written. Of such is
Mr. Ransome's Bohemia in London. It is full of inspira-
tion for others, because it lives itself, and because it
breathes of the youth, the vigour, the ambition, the power
to do, the freedom, the untrammelled imagination, which
are of Bohemia." — The Literary World, i5th October 1907.

4 'Mr. Ransome tells us that he wanted to write a book
that would ' make real on paper the strange, tense, joyful
and despairing, hopeful and sordid life that is lived in
London by young artists and writers.' He has succeeded.
In adding to the immense library of books on London one
which helps to the better understanding of its many-sided
life, written with a knowledge of London and of human
nature, Mr. Ransome has turned to the best account the
experiences gained in the sturm-und-drang period of his
life, when he 'flung roses, riotously, with the throng.'" —
The Daily Graphic, 2 yth September 1907.

" It is a book for all lovers of books, pictures, and
music ; it tells of the making of beautiful things that are
better worth remembering than the price of shares ; it
takes the reader into the workshop where the furnace is
the human brain and the tools are human fingers, only too
often stained with ink or paint.

" From Fleet Street our author journeys to Hampstead,
and concludes a delightfully rambling, gossipy book with a
series of Bohemian characters and studies and a Bohemian
wedding. The illustrations by Mr. Fred Taylor are singu-
larly happy, and there is not a dull page in the book, but
it is one to be read in an easy-chair and with a pipe in
one's mouth ; a book for idle hours ; above all, a book for
book-lovers." — The Weekly Sun, i2th October 1907.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

EDGAR ALLAN POE

A CRITICAL STUDY

Demy 8vo, Cloth extra, 75. 6d. Net

"This very interesting study." — Times.

" This book describes Poe's sad and extremely lonely life,
with all its pride and morbidness, and it also gives a subtle
and clear analysis of his brilliant gifts." — Standard.

" Mr. Arthur Ransome has given us a workmanlike and
readable book." — Chronicle.

"The study is thorough and conscientious, and is enter-
taining as a whole as it is in parts provocative." — Saturday
Review.

"Always interesting, often ingenious, sometimes bril-
liantly written." — Nation.

"Prefaced with a biographical account which is quite
one of the best sketches of Poe's oddly vagabond life that
we have in English." — Pall Mall Gazette.

" It is possible that the grace and charm of Mr. Ransome's
style may deceive some as to the serious import of his
work ; but it seems clear to us that in his critical study of
Poe, Mr. Ransome has made a potent but mysterious
person much more truthfully visible than before ; and, in
the larger matters, has shown himself one of the present
time's most vital and original writers on philosophic criti-
cism, one in whom the right instincts are mated with an
enthusiastic and careful precision of analysis." — Liverpool
Courier.

PUBLISHED BY

STEPHEN SWIFT, 16 KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

HOOFMARKS

OF THE FAUN

Half-a-Crown Net

" Mr. Arthur Ransome's « The Hoofmarks of the Faun ' is a
collection of short stories of a kind not very common in
English — half-narrative, half prose-poem. They are fantasy
in which some symbolic meaning is evidently intended. And
they are put forward, not as vague pictures of mood, in the
manner of most prose-poems, but with the definite imaginary
logic which the relation of an event requires.

" Mr. Ransome is at his best where his subject lets him play
freely with his own love of nature. One of his pieces, in the
form of criticism of an imaginary book mixed with biography
of its imaginary author, is at once a confession of Mr. Ran-
some's intimacy with nature, and an essay on the development
of literary expression of nature independent of humanity ; it
has in it much delicate writing, as well as the sight and the
insight which nature demands of her serious worshippers.
More characteristic, and perhaps more praiseworthy, because
succeeding over more troublesome difficulties, are 'The Hoof-
marks of the Faun ' itself, and ' The Ageing Faun,' two charm-
ing inventions." — Times.

" There are few things in the world more difficult to write than
fairy-tales, and few better worth reading. When a modern pen
is found equal to the task, we are correspondingly delighted.
Mr. Arthur Ransome is the possessor of such a pen. It is not
merely that he has imagination and a sense of poetry and a
good style. He might well have all these and yet fail in
striking the precise fairy-tale note. It is a certain way of
looking at life, a certain wonder and simplicity and acceptance,
which children enjoy and a few saints and a few (a very few)
poets, that is needed. You will find it in the best of Mr.
Ransome's stories, and, so far as contemporary writing goes,
hardly anywhere else." — Eye- Witness.

PUBLISHED BY

STEPHEN SWIFT, 16 KING STREET, Co VENT GARDEN

DA 688 .R35 1912

SMC

Ransome, Arthur,

1884-1967.
Bohemia in London /

BCA-6839 (sk)