Memories and Adventures by Arthur Conan Doyle - HTML preview

CHAPTER XXIII
SOME NOTABLE PEOPLE

President Roosevelt—Lord Balfour—Mr. Asquith—Lord Haldane—George Meredith—Rudyard Kipling—James Barrie—Henry Irving—Bernard Shaw—R. L. S.—Grant Allen—James Payn—Henry Thompson—Royalty.

When I have chanced during my life to come in contact with notable people, I have often made some short record at the time of what they said and how they impressed me. It is difficult, however, to use these notes for publication when you happen to have been a guest, and it can only be done, I think, by using one’s judgment and never consciously harming one’s host. If every one were altogether silent upon such occasions the most pleasing side of great contemporaries would never be chronicled, for the statesman in slippers is a very much more human and lovable person than the politician on the platform.

Among the great men that I have known President Roosevelt occupied a prominent place. He was not a big, nor, so far as one could see, a powerful man, but he had tremendous dynamic force and an iron will which may account for his reputation as an athlete. He had all the simplicity of real greatness, speaking his mind with great frankness and in the clearest possible English. He had in him a great deal of the boy, a mischievous, adventurous, high-spirited boy, with a deep, strong, thoughtful manhood in the background. We were present, my wife and I, at the Guildhall when he made his memorable speech about Egypt, in which he informed a gathering, which contained the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, and many of our Cabinet, that we should either rule more strictly or clear out altogether. It was, of course, a most unwarrantable intrusion into our affairs, but it was a calculated indiscretion, and very welcome, I believe, to those who were dealing with Egypt. As he made his way through the dense crowd afterwards he passed me and said with a grin: “I say, I let them have it that time, didn’t I?” There was the mischievous boy coming out.

He had a quick blunt wit which showed itself often in his metaphors. He spoke to me, I remember, of some one who had a nine guinea-pig-power brain. One of his entourage told me how the President had been awakened once to address some prairie folk at a wayside station. “They have come sixty miles to see you,” said his secretary. “They would have come a hundred to see a cat with two heads,” said the ruffled President.

I met him once at a small luncheon party at the invitation of Lord Lee, who had soldiered with him in Cuba. He was extremely talkative—in fact, I can hardly remember anyone else saying anything. Thinking it over afterwards I concluded that two ideas were running through his mind, and every now and then coming to the surface. They were formidable ideas, and may have been some temporary wave of feeling, but they were certainly in his thoughts. The one was that there would be another civil war in the States. The second, that if you had the farmer class on your side they presented the best military material. From this I gathered that it was not a geographical but an economic struggle that was in his mind. Absit omen, but great men are often pessimists, and the Duke of Wellington was deeply convinced that Britain could not long survive his death.

When Roosevelt was shot I sent him a cable to express that sympathy which every Englishman felt. I have his answer before me, written only a day or so after the event:

MERCY HOSPITAL,
 CHICAGO,
 OCTOBER 19, 1912.

DEAR MR. DOYLE,—

Many thanks for your kind message of sympathy. As you know, a bullet wound is rather a serious thing, but all conditions seem to be favourable, and I hope in a few days we will all be relieved from anxiety.

Sincerely yours,
 THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

It is typewritten, but signed by his own hand. I do not think that a more brave and detached letter was ever written by a sufferer.

Roosevelt was a very loud hearty man, with a peculiar wild-beast toothy grin, and an explosive habit of slapping his hand down for emphasis. I jotted down a few of his obiter dicta after our conversation. He had no good word for Henry James. “He is not a whole man. All that subtlety is really decadence.” He was very virile, not to say heroic in his views. “A man should guard particularly against being led from his duty, especially a dangerous duty, by his women. I guess a woman would have had a bad time if she had tried to lead Leonidas from the pass.” Of the German Emperor he said that he was jealous of the King’s dog at the King’s funeral because he attracted the more notice. Altogether he was one of the raciest talkers I have ever met.

Among the occasional great ones of earth whom I have met there is hardly anyone who stands out more clearly than Arthur Balfour, with his willowy figure, his gentle intellectual face, and, as I read it, his soul of steel. I should think that of all men of our day he was the last who would be turned from any path which he had deliberately taken, but, on the other hand, he was capable of standing a most unconscionable time at the place where paths divide, for his mind was so subtle and active that he would always see the two sides of every question and waver between them. He could never have been a pioneer.

The occasion of our first meeting was a most ridiculous one. Old Lord Burnham, the first of his line, had invited me down to his country house at Beaconsfield—a wonderful house which had been built originally by Waller, the Royalist poet. Burke had lived close by, and the dagger which, in a melodramatic moment, he threw upon the floor of the house, in order to show the dangers of French Republican propaganda, is still on exhibition. I can remember the party well, though nearly all of them are now on the farther side. I see Lady Dorothy Nevill with her mittened hands and her prim pussy-cat manner, retailing gossip about Disraeli’s flirtations. Sir Henry James walks under the trees with bended head, talking to the rising barrister who is destined as Lord Reading to be Viceroy of India. Lady Cleveland, mother of Lord Rosebery, is listening with her old face wreathed in smiles to Lady Dorothy’s scandal. Young Harry Irving looks unutterably bored as Lord Burnham explains golf to him, bending his head over to get a glimpse of the ball round the curve of his goodly waistcoat. Mr. Asquith stands smiling beside them. As one looks back they seem all to have been shadows in a world of shadow.

Lord Burnham’s hobby was Turkish baths, and he had an excellent one in the front of the house, the drying room being the first door on the right as one entered, and being a simple sitting-room as far as appearance went. With his usual kind hospitality Lord Burnham had urged me to try his bath, and having done so I was placed, arrayed in a long towel, and with another towel screwed round my head, in the drying room. Presently the door opened, and entered Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister of England. He knew nothing of the house or its ways, and I can remember the amazement with which he gazed at me. Lord Burnham following at his heels introduced me, and I raised the towel on my head. There were no explanations, and I felt that he went away with the impression that this was my usual costume.

I did not see him after that week-end—he kept his room, I remember, until midday on the Sunday—until some years later when, after heavy domestic loss, I was endeavouring to collect myself again in a little inn near Dunbar. He heard of my presence, and in his kindness sent a car over from Whittinghame, only a few miles away, with a request that I should come over for a couple of days. There was present his brother, Gerald Balfour, a man with a beautifully refined face and manner, not unlike that of Andrew Lang. His wife is the famous Lady Betty Balfour, the daughter of Lord Lytton. When one thinks of that group of inter-allied families—the Balfours, Cecils, Sedgwicks, and Lyttons—it seems a sort of nerve ganglion of British life. There was also Lady Frances Balfour, who was a daughter of the Duke of Argyle, and not unlike him, as I can remember him. Her husband was Arthur Balfour’s brother, an architect and antiquary, while another brother was Colonel of the London Scottish. Finally, there was Miss Alice Balfour, a very sweet and gentle intellectual person, who was my actual hostess.

I found Arthur Balfour in great spirits because he had just won a golf medal at North Berwick. He seemed as pleased as any schoolboy, and his sister told me that no political success ever gave him the keen pleasure which he had from his golf victory. He was an average player, orthodox in style, and about 10 or 12 in handicap. He proved to be a charming host, for he was a good listener, seeming to be really eager to hear your opinion, laughed heartily at small provocation, and talked always very frankly and modestly of himself. After my long solitude I was more loquacious, I remember, than is my way, but he bore it with good humour.

Every night—or at least on the Sunday night—the whole staff of the large rambling establishment, maids and grooms, some twenty in all, came in for prayers, which were read by the head of the house. It was fine to hear groom and statesman praying humbly together that they be forgiven the sins of the day, and merging all earthly distinctions in the presence of that which is above us all.

He was very interesting when he spoke of the outrage which the Russian fleet had committed when, on their way to Japan, they opened fire at the British trawlers on the Dogger Bank. It was curious to hear his gentle voice and to note his listless impersonal manner while he spoke in this fashion: “I was very angry, really very angry about that affair. If our fleet had been at home I should have been inclined to have stopped them in the Straits. Of course, one would not do that unless one had overpowering force, so as to avoid bloodshed and save the Russian face. Their Ambassador called that morning and gave complete assurances, or really I should have had to do something. He got himself into trouble with his own Government, who felt that he had given away their case.”

I asked him how Cabinet Councils were worked. He said that they voted upon points and went by majorities, unless it was a vital thing, when of course the dissenters must resign.

I observed in his character a very great horror of cowardice. Nothing seemed to arouse such scorn in him. He grew quite red, I remember, as he spoke of Lord George Sackville, and recalled that though he had been broken and should have been shot at the Battle of Minden in 1759, he was none the less Minister of War during the American campaign. He was also, as I reminded him, a most debauched man; and the murder of his mistress, Miss Reay, the actress, by her true lover, the clergyman Hackman, was one of the causes célèbres of that century.

I shall always carry away the memory of that visit—a bright gleam in a dark passage of life. I see very clearly the old house, the huge broken tree outside, inside which a State conspiracy was once hatched, the fine library with its wealth of French memoirs, and above all the remarkable man who stood for so much in the life of the country. I was not at that time so convinced of the primary importance of psychic things as I became later, and I regret it, as this would have been my one opportunity to explore a knowledge which at that time was certainly greater than my own. Years later, when the fight was heavy upon me, and when I was almost alone in the polemical arena, I wrote to Mr. Balfour, and charged him with sharing all my convictions and yet leaving me to defend them single-handed. His answer was: “Surely my opinions upon this subject are already sufficiently well known,” which is surely an admission that I was right in my description of them, and yet was not much of a prop to me in my time of need.

I cast my mind back to other statesmen whom I have known, and Mr. Asquith’s kindly personality comes into my memory. I remember playing a round of golf with him once—and a very bad player he was—but his conversation as we went round was plus four. He was a naturally sweet-natured man, but under that gentleness there lay judgment and firmness, as was shown at the great crisis of history. He never said too much, but what he did say he lived up to. In conducting us safely through those first two years of war he did that for which he has never had sufficient credit, and the more light we have had since, the more clear it has been that Lord Kitchener and he were really doing all that men could do, in munition work and all other ways. Because he had the solid Yorkshire stolidity, more nervous and excitable people thought that he did not take the war sufficiently seriously, while the constant lies about the pro-German tendencies of his wife increased the evil impression. We owe him a reparation which is second only to that which is due to Lord Haldane.

And that is indeed a heavy one. If one man could be named who was absolutely indispensable to victory it was Haldane. He it was who built up the whole splendid weapon which flashed so swiftly from its sheath, and which Germany was so amazed to find directed at its breast as it rushed forward upon its furious course. He could not work miracles; he could not introduce conscription when a candidate with such a programme would have been chased from the hustings; he could not prepare the public mind in some dramatic way which would have precipitated the very crash which there was still some chance of avoiding. But all we had he gave us—the eight divisions which saved France, the Territorials who carried on the good work until the new armies were ready and the Officers’ Training Corps, which strengthened us where we should have been fatally weak. There has never been so foolish and ungrateful a clamour as that which has been raised against Haldane. I remember that when he took the chair for me in the first war lecture which I gave in London there were cries of “Traitor!” from people, chiefly women, among the audience. I had never seen Haldane before, and have never seen him since, so I have no personal bias in the matter, but I am proud that it was in my first volume of the “History of the War,” published in 1915, that I first put forward the unpopular view which will now be more fully accepted.

With George Meredith I had several interesting connections. I have the greatest possible admiration for him at his best, while his worst is such a handicap that I think it will drag four-fifths of his work to oblivion. If his own generation finds him hard to understand, what will our descendants make of him? He will be a cult among a few—a precious few in every sense. And yet I fully recognize that his was the most active original brain and the most clever pen of any man, novelist or otherwise, of my time. Knowing this well, it is strange that I can see so limited a future for him. His subtle and intricate mind seemed unable to realize the position of the plain outsiders who represent the world. He could not see how his stained-glass might be less effective than the plain transparent substance as a medium for vision. The first requisite is to be intelligible. The second is to be interesting. The third is to be clever. Meredith enormously filled the third, but he was unequal upon the other two. Hence he will never, in spite of the glories of “Richard Feverel” be on an equality with Dickens or Thackeray, who filled all three. He had simply no idea how his words would strike a less complex mind. I remember that once in the presence of Barrie, Quiller-Couch and myself, he read out a poem which he had inscribed “To the British Working-Man” in the “Westminster Gazette.” I don’t know what the British working-man made of it, but I am sure that we three were greatly puzzled as to what it was about.

I had written some articles on his work, which had been one of my youthful cults, and that led to his inviting me to see him at his villa at Box Hill—the first of several such visits. There had been a good deal in the papers about his health, so that I was surprised when, as I opened the garden gate, a slight but robust gentleman in a grey suit and a red tie swung out of the hall door and came singing loudly down the path. I suppose he was getting on to seventy at the time but he looked younger, and his artistic face was good to the eye. Greeting me he pointed to a long steep hill behind the house and said: “I have just been up to the top for a walk.” I looked at the sharp slope and said: “You must be in good trim to do it.” He looked angry and said: “That would be a proper compliment to pay to an octogenarian.” I was a little nettled by his touchiness, so I answered: “I understood that I was talking to an invalid.” It really seemed as if my visit would terminate at the garden gate, but presently he relented, and we soon became quite friendly.

He had in his youth been a judge of wine, and had still a reverence for a good vintage, but unfortunately some nervous complaint from which he suffered had caused the doctors to prohibit it absolutely. When lunch came round he asked me with a very earnest air whether I could undertake to drink a whole bottle of Burgundy. I answered that I saw no insuperable difficulty. A dusty old bottle was tenderly carried up, which I disposed of, Meredith taking a friendly interest in its dispatch. “The fact is,” said he, “I love my wine, and my little cellar was laid down with care and judgment, so that when some guest comes and drinks a glass and wastes the rest of the bottle it goes to my heart. It really did me good to see you enjoy that one.” I need not say that I intimated that I was always prepared to oblige.

His conversation was extraordinarily vivid and dramatic, uttered in a most vehement tone. It may have been artificial, and it may have been acting, but it was very arresting and entertaining. The talk got upon Napoleon’s Marshals, and you would have thought that he knew them intimately, and he did Murat’s indignation at being told to charge au bout, as if he ever charged any other way, in a fashion which would have brought down the house. Every now and then he brought out a Meredithian sentence which sounded comic when applied to domestic matters. When the jelly swayed about as the maid put it on the table he said: “The jelly, Mary, is as treacherous as the Trojan Horse.” He laughed when I told him how my groom, enlisted as a waiter for some special dinner, said, “Huddup, there,” to the jelly under similar circumstances.

After lunch we walked up a steep path to the little chalet or summerhouse where he used to write. He wished to read me a novel which he had begun twenty years before, but which he had not had the heart to go on with. I liked it greatly—and we roared with laughter at his description of an old sea-dog who turned up the collar of his coat when he went into action as if the bullets were rain. He said that my hearty enjoyment encouraged him to go on with it, and it has since appeared as the “Amazing Marriage,” but whether I really had anything to do with it I do not know. I should be proud to think so.

The nervous complaint from which he suffered caused him to fall down occasionally. As we walked up the narrow path to the chalet I heard him fall behind me, but judged from the sound that it was a mere slither and could not have hurt him. Therefore I walked on as if I had heard nothing. He was a fiercely proud old man, and my instincts told me that his humiliation in being helped up would be far greater than any relief I could give him. It was certainly a nice point to decide.

George Meredith’s religious convictions were very difficult to decide. He certainly had no glimmering so far as I could see of any psychic element in life, and I should imagine that on the whole he shared the opinions of his friend, John Morley, which were completely negative. And yet I remember his assuring me that prayer was a very necessary thing, and that one should never abandon prayer. “Who rises from prayer a better man, his prayer is granted,” says the Aphorist in “Richard Feverel.” How far these positions can be harmonized I do not know. I suppose that one may say that God is unknown, and yet rear a mental temple to the unknown God.

Rudyard Kipling I know far less than I should, considering how deeply I admire his writings, and that we live in the same country; but we are both absorbed in work, and both much away from home, which may explain it. I can well remember how eagerly I bought his first book, “Plain Tales,” in the old Southsea days, when buying a book was a rare strain upon my exchequer. I read it with delight, and realized not only that a new force had arisen in literature, but that a new method of story writing had appeared which was very different from my own adherence to the careful plot artfully developed. This was go-as-you-please take-it-or-leave-it work, which glowed suddenly up into an incandescent phrase or paragraph, which was the more effective for its sudden advent. In form his stories were crude, and yet in effect—which, after all, is everything—they were superb. It showed me that methods could not be stereotyped, and that there was a more excellent way, even if it were beyond my reach. I loved the “Barrack Room Ballads” also, and such poems as “The Bolivar,” “East and West,” and above all the badly named “L’Envoi” became part of my very self. I always read the last one aloud to my little circle before we start on any fresh expedition, because it contains the very essence of travel, romance, and high adventure.

I saw Kipling most nearly in his very early days when he lived at Brattleboro, a little village in Vermont, in a chivalrous desire to keep his newly married wife in touch with her own circle. In 1894, as I have recorded, there was a good deal of tail-twisting going on in the States, and Kipling pulled a few feathers out of the Eagle’s tail in retaliation, which caused many screams of protest, for the American was far more sensitive to such things than the case-hardened Briton. I say “was,” for I think as a nation with an increased assurance of their own worth and strength they are now more careless of criticism. The result at the time was to add oil to flames, and I, as a passionate believer in Anglo-American union, wrote to Kipling to remonstrate. He received my protest very good-humouredly, and it led to my visit to his country home. As a matter of fact, the concern shown in America, when the poet lay at death’s door a few years later, showed that the rancour was not very deep. Perhaps he was better known at that time in America than in England, for I remember sitting beside a bushman in London, who bowed his red face to my ear and said: “Beg your pardon, sir, but ’oo is this ’ere Kilpin?”

I had two great days in Vermont, and have a grateful remembrance of Mrs. Kipling’s hospitality. The poet read me “McAndrew’s Hymn,” which he had just done, and surprised me by his dramatic power which enabled him to sustain the Glasgow accent throughout, so that the angular Scottish greaser simply walked the room. I had brought up my golf clubs and gave him lessons in a field while the New England rustics watched us from afar, wondering what on earth we were at, for golf was unknown in America at that time. We parted good friends, and the visit was an oasis in my rather dreary pilgrimage as a lecturer.

My glimpses of Kipling since then have been few and scattered, but I had the pleasure several times of meeting his old father, a most delightful and lovable person, who told a story quite as well as his famous son. As the mother was also a very remarkable woman, it is no wonder that he carried such a cargo.

James Barrie is one of my oldest literary friends, and I knew him within a year or two of the time when we both came to London. He had just written his “Window in Thrums,” and I, like all the world, acclaimed it. When I was lecturing in Scotland in 1893 he invited me to Kirriemuir, when I stayed some days with his family—splendid types of the folk who have made Scotland great. His father was a fine fellow, but his mother was wonderful with a head and a heart—rare combinations—which made me class her with my own mother. Kirriemuir could by no means understand Barrie’s success, and looked upon their great son as an inexplicable phenomenon. They were acutely aware, however, that tourists were arriving from all parts to see the place on account of Barrie’s books. “I suppose you have read them,” I said to the wife of the local hotel man. “Aye, I’ve read them, and steep, steep, weary work it was,” said she. She had some theory that it was a four-horse coach which her good man was running, and not the books at all which accounted for the boom.

Great as are Barrie’s plays—and some of them I think are very great—I wish he had never written a line for the theatre. The glamour of it and the—to him—easy success have diverted from literature the man with the purest style of his age. Plays are always ephemeral, however good, and are limited to a few, but Barrie’s unborn books might have been an eternal and a universal asset of British literature. He has the chaste clarity which is the great style, which has been debased by a generation of wretched critics who have always confused what is clear with what is shallow, and what is turbid with what is profound. If a man’s thought is precise, his rendering of it is precise, and muddy thoughts make obscure paragraphs. If I had to make my choice among modern stylists, I should pick Barrie for the lighter forms of expression and our British Winston Churchill for the more classical.

Barrie’s great play—one of the finest in the language—is of course “The Admirable Crichton.” I shall always hope that I had a hand in the fashioning of it. I say this not in complaint but in satisfaction, for we all drop seeds into each other, and seldom know whence they come. We were walking together on the Heath at Kirriemuir when I said: “I had a quaint thought in the night, Barrie. It was that a king was visiting India and was wrecked on the way on some island far from the track of ships. Only he and one rather handy sailor were saved. They settled down to spend their lives together. Of course the result would be that the sailor would become the king and the king the subject.” We chuckled over the idea, and when Crichton appeared, I seemed to see the fine plant which had grown from the tiny seed.

Barrie and I had one unfortunate venture together, in which I may say that the misfortune was chiefly mine, since I had really nothing to do with the matter, and yet shared all the trouble. However, I should have shared the honour and profit in case of success, so that I have no right to grumble. The facts were that Barrie had promised Mr. D’Oyley Carte that he would provide the libretto of a light opera for the Savoy. This was in the Gilbert days, when such a libretto was judged by a very high standard. It was an extraordinary commission for him to accept, and I have never yet been able to understand why he did so, unless, like Alexander, he wanted fresh worlds to conquer. On this occasion, however, he met with a disastrous repulse, and the opera, “Jane Annie,” to which I alluded in an early chapter, was one of the few failures in his brilliant career.

I was brought into the matter because Barrie’s health failed on account of some family bereavement. I had an urgent telegram from him at Aldburgh, and going there I found him very worried because he had bound himself by this contract, and he felt in his present state unable to go forward with it. There were to be two acts, and he had written the first one, and had the rough scenario of the second, with the complete sequence of events—if one may call it a sequence. Would I come in with him and help him to complete it as part author? Of course I was very happy to serve him in any way. My heart sank, however, when, after giving the promise, I examined the work. The only literary gift which Barrie has not got is the sense of poetic rhythm, and the instinct for what is permissible in verse. Ideas and wit were in abundance. But the plot itself was not strong though the dialogue and the situations also were occasionally excellent. I did my best and wrote the lyrics for the second act, and much of the dialogue, but it had to take the predestined shape. The result was not good. However, the actual comradeship of production was very amusing and interesting, and our failure was mainly painful to us because it let down the producer and the cast. We were well abused by the critics, but Barrie took it all in the bravest spirit.

I find, in looking over my papers, a belated statement of account from Barrie which is good reading.

IN ACCOUNT WITH J. M. BARRIE.

Our associations were never so closely renewed, but through all my changing life I have had a respect and affection for Barrie which were, I hope, mutual. How I collaborated with him at cricket as well as at work is told in my chapter on Sport.