against his free trade prepossessions, I had asked him why he didn't found a municipal opera house and theatre in Birmingham and so lift its spiritual life to the level of life in Marseilles or Lyons.
Gladstone's Home Rule bill was defeated because he yielded to small personal prejudice, and yet every Englishman who knew this thought Gladstone a great man; and he commanded a personal reverence greater even than Bismarck in Germany. For my part, I never esteemed him, save as an orator, and at this time had not yet been introduced to him.
All this while the discontent of the working classes in Great Britain, as in Ireland, grew steadily and increased in bitterness. In London it found determined defenders in the Social Democratic Federation. Mr. H. W.
Hyndman had started this association a couple of years or so before as a follower more or less convinced of Karl Marx. The first time I heard Bernard Shaw speak was at a meeting of the Federation, but I had left it before he joined and he left it soon afterwards. On a Monday early in February, 1886, the Federation called a meeting in Trafalgar Square which ended in a riot.
The mob got out of hand and marched to attack the clubs in Pall Mall and soon proceeded to loot shops in Piccadilly and hold another meeting at Hyde Park Corner. The ringleaders were arrested and tried: they were Hyndman, Williams, Burns and Champion. Williams and Burns, both workingmen, were bailed out by William Morris, the poet. Hyndman seemed to me an ordinary English bourgeois with a smattering of German reading: he was above middle height, burly and bearded; Champion, the thin, well-bred officer type with good heart and scant reading; Williams, the ordinary workingman full of class prejudices; and John Burns, also a workingman, but really intelligent and thoughtful, who afterwards proved himself an excellent minister and resigned with Lord Morley rather than accept the world war. In spite of deficient education, Burns was even then a most interesting man; though hardly middle height, he was sturdy and exceedingly strong and brave. He had read from boyhood and we became great friends about the beginning of the century through the South African War. Burns was an early lover of Carlyle, and the experiences of a workingman's life had not blinded him to the value of individual merit. In many respects he stood on the forehead of the time to come, and if his education had been equal to his desire for knowledge, he would have been among the choicest spirits of the age. Even in 1886 I'm glad to say I rated him far above most of the politicians, though he never reached any originality of thought.
CHAPTER XV
From 1883 on for thirty years I studied English life and English politics, literature and art as closely as I could. As editor first of the Evening News and then of the Fortnightly Review, I could meet almost anyone I wanted to meet, and as I made a good deal of money from time to time and soon got the name of giving excellent luncheons, I could meet even people of importance on an even footing. I may as well prove this at once for the benefit of the ordinary American journalist who declares in the New York World that all doors were shut in my face and that Balfour sneered at me. Such a journalist is totally incapable of reading between the lines of plain print.
The incident he refers to is recorded in Mrs. Asquith's Autobiography. 'On one occasion,' she wrote, 'my husband and I went to a lunch given to meet Mr. Frank Harris.' She goes on to tell that I monopolized the conversation and that her hero, Arthur Balfour, 'scored' off me. I don't recall Balfour's 'score'; I never heard him score off anyone; but the fact that the Prime Minister and his wife were asked to meet me shows that I had a very considerable position in London, and I can recall other occasions on which the Asquiths were invited to meet me by more important people.
I have explained such facts in the most modest way by saying that I gave good luncheons and had very interesting people at my table; but the Michael Monohans and other tenth-rate American critics persist in regarding me as one of themselves. How did 'an obscure journalist,' they wonder, come to talk with this and that celebrity on an equality? Perhaps because he was not 'obscure,' but happened to be an equal, and I emphasize this at the beginning because it redounds to the honour of England, and, indeed, is the chief factor in making English society the most interesting in the world.
London recognizes individual ability more quickly and more surely than any other city on earth. Consequently, there is here a diversity of talents not to be found elsewhere and a rich piquancy of varied interests that one seeks in vain in any other capital. Even Vienna and Paris seem dull after London, for in those cities you can always guess whom you will meet from the position of your host and hostess. In one room in London I have seen Prince Edward (afterwards King Edward) talking to Hyndman, the socialist agitator, while Lord Wolseley and Herbert Bismarck listened eagerly intent; at the same time near the fireplace Arthur Balfour, Henry Irving and Theodore Roosevelt hung on the lips of Whistler, who was telling a story.
I remember giving a lunch when I had the old Duke of Cambridge on my right and Russell Lowell, the American ambassador on my left, besides Beerbohm Tree and Willy Grenfell (now Lord Desborough), John Burns, the firebrand agitator, afterwards an M.P. and minister, the poet George Wyndham and Alfred Russel Wallace, all listening spellbound to the humour and eloquence of Oscar Wilde; and it was the uncle of the Queen who had asked me to invite him, as he had heard so much of Wilde's genius.
I want to tell of these men and of many others at least as justly renowned in order to give a picture of those crowded days of London in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth century.
As I have said, cherishing the ambition of going into the House of Commons myself, I was at first more eager to know the politicians than the poets. I took pains to be present every evening in the House for several years, until I had learned not only to know the fifty or sixty more prominent members, but also the procedure, traditions and tone of the Assembly. It is often spoken of as unique, ideal and all the rest of it, and the House of Commons must certainly be regarded as the finest deliberative assembly in the world. In the first year or so the circumstance that made the greatest impression on me was the election of Mr. Arthur Peel early in 1884 to the Speakership, instead of Mr.
Brand, whom I knew, who was retiring as Lord Hampden. At that time few members even knew anything of Arthur Peel, who was the youngest son of the famous prime minister, and who had been almost undistinguished as a member from Warwick for many years. But the moment he got on his feet to return thanks for his election everyone was thrilled. He was fairly tall, had a good presence, a dark, bearded face set off by a high aquiline nose, an ordinary, baritone voice; yet he had an air of masterful dignity that was impressive; and what he said was noteworthy.
I shall always remember one long sentence, badly constructed, but perfectly natural-the talk of a man thinking aloud and not one reciting a carefully prepared oration-yet carrying in clumsy words a curious sense of authority.
'With the support of the House,' he said, 'I may be permitted,' and he paused-'to enforce the unwritten law, the most cherished and inestimable tradition of this House, I mean that personal courtesy, that interchange of chivalry between member and member-compatible with the most effective party debate-which is one of the oldest, and I humbly trust may always be, the most cherished of the traditions of this great Assembly.' The sensation was astonishing: everyone felt that he had struck the right note, and had struck it with an almost magical dignity of personal character. From that moment the Speaker held the house in awe. Not his impartiality alone, but his greatness of character was never questioned. Ever afterwards I had a higher opinion of the House of Commons; perhaps among the ruck of silent members whom one didn't know, there might be another Arthur Peel!
I followed the debates more closely than ever and I was able to do this most comfortably through the kindness of Lord Randolph Churchill, whom I came to know well about this time. As soon as he found that I had some difficulty now and then in getting a seat in the 'Distinguished Stranger's Gallery,' he spoke to the Speaker and to the funny little Master of Arms, Gossett, whom I never saw but in his court dress with little sword, knickers and black silk stockings; and so got me a seat on the floor of the House itself in a sort of pew set apart for the half dozen of the Speaker's friends. There I could hear and see everything, even with my short sight, as if I had been a member.
My first meeting with Lord Randolph Churchill impressed me hugely. He was always represented by Punch and the comic papers as a very small man, or even as a boy, in spite of a ferocious upturned moustache. To my
