Between my first visit to Henry James and my period of intimacy with him my meetings with Conrad and Crane had taken place. I was then living at Limpsfield, in a region of commons and public woods just across the Kent border in Surrey. A mistaken search after high thinking took me to Limpsfield; all the while I was there I was humiliated at being in Surrey and not in Kent. Kent is a man’s county, with hops, orchards, chalk downs, Men of Kent. You can see France from Kent; from Surrey you can only see the loom of London lights on the sky. It is in a county of commuters and Limpsfield was a queer place as outer fringes of suburbs are apt to be. Their inner regions are conventional, crowded and wealthyish: their outer rings are sparsely settled and given over to odd people.

Limpsfield was the extra-urban headquarters of the Fabian Society. Its permanent secretary dwelt there and there meetings sanctioning the marriages of members – in the case of the Committee usually with wealthy American women – were held. Mr Shaw’s marriage was there sanctioned. Other meetings defined the beliefs, rules of conduct and other private details of the lives of the members. Today the Fabian Society is an integral part of the British Government. It was not then. Its members then wore beards, queer, useful or homespun clothes and boots and talked Gas and Water Socialism. They were the Advanced.

They advanced, however, only by rule. I remember consternation at a meeting in Limpsfield. The Fabians were all happily discussing in polite and not brilliant speeches the nature of the Deity if there was a Deity. It had been going on for a long time. A lady in the audience suddenly rose and exclaimed determinedly:

‘What I want to know is: does this Society, or doesn’t it, believe in God?’

This brutal manner of address caused deep perturbation in the quiet hall. You could no longer hear the sheep bleating on the common. At last an agitated official rose and exclaimed – bleatingly, too:

‘If Mrs – will consult Fabian Tract number 677a she will see what Fabians are expected to believe in this matter.’ I was once gravely reproved by the Fabians, not as a member of the Society, for I wasn’t one. My hat – rather like a Stetson of yesterday – had been blown off on Waterloo Bridge whilst I had been making for the station on its southern side. I bought at the bookstall a cloth cap of the type still worn by golfers and went on my way to Limpsfield. I continued to wear that cap; in those days I did not think about what I wore. I was approached by a deputation of Fabian members. My cap ‘stuck out’ on their countryside: I was requested to abandon it.

These things may seem trivial but they have made England what she is today. Mr Shaw, Lord Ollivier, Mr Sidney Webb, all wore beards and homespuns and Stetson hats and now govern England. Local residents were requested to imitate them. I don’t think I wore a beard in those days though I did earlier. It was long and rufous and the late William Archer once mistook me in it for Mr Shaw. I then abandoned it.

I wrote a poem in those days and was proud of it. It ran:

The other three were Sir Sidney Colvin, the biographer of R.L.S., Lord (then, Mr Sidney) Ollivier, and Sir Sidney Lee. Mr Webb is also now a peer.

Anyhow, there on those breezy uplands, amongst the geese, donkeys, goats and sheep of the gorse-covered commons, with a sprinkling of Russian revolutionists and a few stockbrokers, flourished the Advanced.

I was not then a member of the Fabian Society for I never took any stock in politics. I subsequently became one in order to have eleven votes for the election of Mrs Wells to the Governing Body of that Society. I don’t know why subscribing a guinea should give me eleven votes but it apparently did. I don’t even remember whether Mrs Wells was elected. At any rate my friend Mr H. G. Wells was at that date engaged in turning the Society inside out. He thought its members had not enough imagination. But I think it takes imagination to see a golfer’s cap stick out of a landscape.

I made an impassioned speech in support of Mr and Mrs Wells at some meeting or other. I have never been received with such hatred – not even in Springfield, Ohio, where I once made a speech about the war to an audience that turned out to be almost entirely German. I fancy I did more harm than good at that Fabian meeting, employing too much imagination. I must have imagined statistics or something. Anyhow the meeting broke up in disorder and I went to Germany. Mr Wells was not successful. I lunched one day whilst the struggle was on at the house of the Editor of the Quarterly Review. Next me was Mrs Sidney Webb. She addressed but one remark to me. It was:

‘Your friend Mr Wells thinks he will get rid of us from the Fabian Society. He calls us the Old Gang. But he won’t. It takes gentlefolk to run a political body in England.’

It seemed a queer remark to be made by a Socialist Leader.

There is, of course, something to be said for not sticking out of a countryside, at any rate when it comes to architecture. I have always liked the rather rare white frame houses that are to be seen in England. They are mostly on the sea shore. But I have heard Americans speak of them as tiresome and wondered at it. I remember being years ago on a trolley-car somewhere between Concord, Mass. and Boston. I gave the trolleyman a rather large tip because he had been helpful with my baggage and amusing about the residents in the frame houses that we passed. He said: ‘If I had many like you on my trolley I’d soon build a brick house.’ He said that was a local saying. I hoped that countryside would not unduly prosper. But the other day being taken on a very protracted automobile excursion through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee, I found myself thinking that the white frame houses that covered all those countrysides were tiresome. The countrysides, particularly in Tennessee, are of an extreme, simple beauty. You might be in England. (There is insularity for you!) The slopes and declivities running for miles and miles away from the high-roads are so cropped by cattle and sheep that they look just like English downs. And great clumps and spinneys of timber standing isolated have for all the world the air of trees in august parklands. There the little, white frame houses ‘stuck out.’ After a thousand miles or so of them one wished they would not cut into the slopes and be at discord with the beautiful spinneys.

The Fabians of Limpsfield had thought that out. They had arrived at the conclusion that houses should be built of local materials so as to weather down into the general hues of the hillsides. They were probably right. At any rate the there-favoured architects in those days used to quarry enormous boulders of the local stone that they mortared undressed together, covering the resulting houses with thatch or slabs of local stone.

I daresay they weathered all right. But I was only a very little time a resident amongst those uplifting uplands. Whilst I was there the solid, rough houses, like monoliths, were bright yellow, the local stone being like that when first quarried. As it was they stuck out from the green hillsides.

They confused people. When Crane came to see me in my cottage he called it a bully old baronial ruin. It was then a fortnight old.

Let us consider for a moment more the surrounding period. It was a warlike era. There were Boer Wars, China-Japanese, Russo-Japanese wars. There had been very nearly a war between Great Britain and the United States. Mr Kruger, president of the Transvaal, and Mr Chamberlain between them manoeuvred Great Britain and the Transvaal into what Lord Salisbury called ‘a sort of a war’. – It occupied the whole strength of the British Army for several years. Mr Chamberlain on the other hand had the credit of having, together with Mr Olney, extricated Lord Salisbury and President Cleveland from the disagreeable positions into which their obstinate characters had forced their respective countries over Venezuela. Then came the Hispano-American war.

It was a period of riots and reactions, the late ’nineties, and these clamours were not without their reactions on the tribe of writers. Mr Kipling, the matchless short story writer, began to come out as the jingo lyrist. Crane made his appearance in Limpsfield fresh from Cuba. I first saw him when he was delivering a lecture on flagwagging at the house of the Secretary of the Fabian Society, up the hill. Mr Cunninghame Graham, born like Hudson in South America, and like him, bearded à la Henri IV and romantic – oh, but infinitely romantic when you saw him sombreroed and with negligent reins, riding in the Row – Mr Graham, the magnificent prose writer, rightful king of Scotland, head of the clan Graham, Socialist member of Parliament, gaolbird and all, came out violently in favour of Spain and, in consequence, with a rare hatred for the inhabitants of the United States.

He took it out by, in various ways, infuriating the Master. He called for instance at Lamb House, Rye and must tell Mr James that he had had extreme difficulty in getting directed to that stately residence. He said he had asked of various citizens and several policemen. ‘It would take Mr Graham,’ Mr James said, ‘to find in Rye a policeman who did not know where I lived.’ And we all felt that Mr Graham had carried his Hispanic sympathies too far.

Once, driving with Mr Graham to Roslyn Castle from Edinburgh I heard a politically minded lady say to him:

‘You ought, Mr Graham, to be the first president of a British Republic.’

‘I ought, madam, if I had my rights,’ he answered sardonically, ‘to be king of this country. And what a three weeks that would be!’

Robert I of Scotland married two ladies without going through the ceremony of divorcing the first. Something like that! The Stuarts were the offspring of the second marriage, the Grahams of the first and Mr Graham was the head of the Grahams. He was, all in all, the most brilliant writer of that or of our present day. But he was aristocratically negligent of the fate of the products of his muse and has remained fittingly little known. Nevertheless such things as ‘Beattock for Moffatt’ or the figure of the Spanish officer, sitting a skeleton in an armchair, on the Cuban shore long after the battle of Guantanamo are pieces of writing that can never die.

Thomas Hardy at Dorchester was at that time resenting the outcry against Tess of the d’Urbervilles and getting ready with Jude the Obscure to abandon novel writing. George Meredith at Box Hill was immensely eminent and writing Lord Ormont and His Aminta and The Amazing Marriage. Mr Swinburne was living at Putney with Mr Watts Dunton. The Poet Laureate was – I think – Mr Alfred Austin. But all these Great Ones, like Mr Kipling, sat apart on their little hills. The English Great Writer is seldom intercommunicative, living in the company, usually, of several devoted females, a lawyer, some scientists and a few parasitic beings, and mingling very little with his kind.

There had been – I am talking of 1898 or thereabouts – a brief moment when England had been a nest of singing birds and in that moment Mr James and his attendant Americans had played their part. There had been, that is to say, the Henley gang and the Yellow Book group. Henley was a great, rough, tortured figure but a considerable and fine influence. Without him Stevenson would hardly have bulked as he did; and such writers as Whibley, Wedmore, George Warrington Steevens and Marriott Watson made up with Henley a formidable group. In his National Observer Henley serialised Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus and I have always liked to think that according to Conrad it was Henley who recommended the author of the Nigger to ask me to collaborate with him. As I shall afterwards point out, that can hardly have been true but Conrad always maintained that it was.

The ‘note’ of Henley and his gang was on the whole one of physical force and Tory reaction. They revelled in the good brown earth, the linotype machine, motor-cars as promotive of thought and such things. The Yellow Book movement had – as became a largely American movement – much more really a technically literary impulse. The periodical was founded by Henry Harland the author of The Cardinal’s Snuffbox. Its principal backer was Henry James. It fell with the trial of the miserable Oscar Wilde.

Wilde I can never forgive. You may maintain that he had a right to live his own life and for the sake of sheer vanity get himself into Reading Gaol. For there was no reason for his going to prison and the last thing that the British authorities wanted to do was to put him there. On the day of his arrest his solicitor received warning that the warrant would not be issued until after seven p.m., the night train for Paris leaving at 6.50 from Charing Cross. I remember still the feeling of anxiety and excitement of that day. Practically everybody in London knew what was agate.

Wilde went to his solicitor – Mr Robert Humphreys: I once had him for my lawyer – about eleven in the morning. Humphreys at once began to beg him to go to Paris. Wilde declared that the authorities dared not touch him. He was too eminent and there were too many others implicated. To that he stuck. He was immovable and would listen to no argument. There came a dramatic moment in the lawyer’s office. Wilde began to lament his wasted life. He uttered a tremendous diatribe about his great talents thrown away, his brilliant genius dragged in the mud, his early and glorious aspirations come to nothing. He became almost epic. Then he covered his face and wept. His whole body was shaken by his sobs. Humphreys was extremely moved. He tried to find consolations.

Wilde took his hands down from his face. He winked at Humphreys and exclaimed triumphantly:

‘Got you then, old fellow.’ He added: ‘Certainly I shall not go to Paris.’ He was arrested that evening.

I always intensely disliked Wilde – faintly as writer and intensely as human being. No doubt as a youth he was beautiful, frail and illuminated. But when I knew him he was heavy and dull. I only once heard him utter an epigram. He used to come to my grandfather’s with some regularity at one time – every Saturday, I should say. My grandfather was then known as the Grandfather of the pre-Raphaelites and Wilde passed as a pre-Raphaelite poet.

He would sit beside the high fireplace and talk very quietly – mostly about public matters, Home Rule for Ireland and the like. My grandfather was a rather down-to-the-ground sort of person so that Wilde to him talked very much like anyone else and seemed glad to be in a quiet room beside a high fireplace.

Once, at a garden party at the Bishop of London’s, I heard a lady ask him if he were going to the dinner of the O.P. Club that evening. The O.P. Club had some grievance against Wilde. It was a dramatic society or something of the sort. Dramatic organisations are excitable and minatory when they dislike anybody. It was a dramatic society that booed and hissed at Henry James when he took his curtain call after Guy Domville. But really they were venting their wrath against Sir George Alexander, the actor manager who had that evening for the first time made a charge for programmes. So Wilde would have had a rough house at the dinner of the O.P. Club. He therefore replied to the lady at the Bishop’s party:

‘I go to the dinner of the O.P. Club. I should be like a poor lion in a den of savage Daniels.’

I saw Wilde several times in Paris and he was a truly miserable spectacle, the butt usually of a posse of merciless students. He possessed – and it was almost his only possession – a walking stick of ebony with ivory insertions, the handle representing an elephant. This he loved very much because it had been the gift of someone – Lady Mount Temple, I think. He would be of an evening in one or other disagreeable bouge in Montmartre. The students would get about him. It was the days of the apaches. There would be a fellow there called Bibi La Touche or something of the sort. The students would point him out to Wilde and declare that Bibi had taken a fancy to his stick and would murder him on his homeward way if he did not surrender it. Wilde would cry, the tears pouring down his great cheeks. But always he surrendered his stick. The students would return it to his hotel next morning when he would have forgotten all about it. I once or perhaps twice rescued his stick for him and saw him home. It would not be agreeable. He did not have a penny and I, as a student, had very little more. I would walk him down the miserably lit Montmartrois streets, he completely silent or muttering things that I did not understand. He walked always as if his feet hurt him, leaning forward on his precious cane. When I thought we were near enough to the Quartier for my resources to let me pay a cab – usually in the neighbourhood of the Boulevard de la Madeleine – we would get into one and would at last reach the rue Jacob. This happened I think twice, but the memory is one as if of long-continued discomfort. It was humiliating to dislike so much one so unfortunate. But the feeling of dislike for that shabby and incoherent immensity was unavoidable. It has proved so strong that, the locality taking on an aspect of nightmare, I have only once since visited Montmartre at night in, say, thirty-five years and then found it very disagreeable. Of course the sight of the young people, like starlings, tormenting that immense owl had a great deal to do with my revulsions.

On one occasion – I should think in the Chat Noir – I was with Robert de la Sizéranne and, looking at Wilde who was across the room, he said:

‘Vous voyez cet homme là. Il péchait par pur snobisme.’

He meant that, even in his offences against constituted society, Wilde was out to épater les bourgeois – to scandalise the middle classes. Sizéranne added: ‘Cela le faisait chaque fois vomir!’

That was pretty generally the French view and, on the face of it, I should say it was just. Sizéranne who was then accounted a very sagacious critic of art, mostly pre-Raphaelite, moved in French circles where Wilde had once throned it almost as an emperor.

The rather idle pursuit of épate-ing the bourgeoisie was very much the fashion amongst the Yellow Book group who surrounded Wilde. In order to ‘touch the Philistine on the raw’ as they called it, the Thompsons, Dowsons, Davidsons, Johnsons and the rest found it necessary to introduce an atmosphere of the Latin Quarter in its lighter – or more dismal – side, into London haunts. The Latin Quarter is in fact a very grave, silent and austere region. But it has its Bohemian fringes – and a non-Anglo-Saxon population bred to survive such dissipations as are there to be found. Anglo-Saxons are not so bred. They resemble the populations of Central Africa succumbing before the clothing, gin and the creeds of white men. That in the bulk. There are of course individuals who survive.

The Bodley Head group did not survive. They succumbed in London’s Soho haunts – to absinthe, to tuberculosis, to starvation, to reformers or to suicide. But in their day they were brilliantly before the public and London was more of a literary centre then than it has ever been before or since.

The Book World was then electric. Books were everywhere. Accounts of the personal habits of writers filled the daily papers. Minute volumes of poems in limited editions fetched unheard prices at auctions. It was good to be a writer in England. And it is to be remembered that, as far as that particular body was concerned, the rewards were earned. They were skilful and earnest writers. They were an immense improvement on their predecessors. They were genuine men of letters.

I was looking last night at the works of Ernest Dowson. They are faint; like dry-point etchings. Their daringnesses are the common coin of today. But they have the authentic note. When you read them you have a faint flavour of what was good in those days – the tentativeness of thought, the delicacy, the refinement of point of view. In their day they were international and brilliant. I do not think they will ever appear ignoble.

But all that went with the trial of Wilde.

I hardly came at all in contact with either the Henley or the Yellow Book group at that date, though later, I just knew Henley, and Messrs Whibley, Wedmore and Marriott Watson. I thought then that the others were too harshly brilliant for me. So I was astonished to find in the work of Dowson just now, almost New England delicacies – an as it were Bostonian after-taste. And, if you consider what a considerable part was played by Americans of that type in the art worlds of London and Paris you will be less astonished to find that flavour.

Those were days when James and Howells and Harland and Whistler and Sargent and Abbey, not to mention lesser lights like G. H. Boughton, more popular ones like Bret Harte or immensely great ones like Mark Twain, bulked enormously in politely advanced artistic circles in London.

The Yellow Book was, as I have pointed out, an American venture and made for those American virtues of delicacy, French technical achievement and New England refinements – thus touching hands with both sides of the Atlantic. And the Yellow Book as nearly captured the stronghold of the Established Comfortable that London is as later – and I hope to show you that – the American movement led by Ezra and called indifferently Vorticism, Futurism, Imagism so nearly achieved that feat. The condemnation of Wilde wiped out the one, a larger cataclysm the other.

Wilde, then, brought down the Yellow Book group and most of the other lyrists of a London that for its year or two had been a nest of singing birds. James and Harland were almost the only survivors. Poets died or fled to other climes, publishers also fled, prosateurs were fished out of the Seine or reformed and the great public said: ‘Thank heavens, we need not read any more poetry!’

You may think that an exaggeration. So did I at the time. But, just after the papers had announced the conviction and sentence on Wilde, I was going up the steps of the British Museum. On them I met Dr Garnett, the Keeper of Printed Books, a queer, very tall, lean, untidily bearded Yorkshire figure in its official frock coat and high hat. I gave him the news. He looked for a moment away over the great yard of the Museum, with its pigeons and lamps and little lions on the railings. Then he said:

‘Then that means the death of English poetry for fifty years.’

I can still hear the high tones of my incredulous laughter. At the moment he seemed to me an old obstinate crank, though I knew well how immense was his North Country commonsense.

Having a passion for cats, Egyptology, palmistry and astrology, the great scholar could assume some of the aspect of deaf obstinacy that distinguishes cats that do not intend to listen to you. He cast the horoscopes of all his friends and reigning sovereigns, he knew the contents of a hundred thousand books and must have stroked as many thousand ‘pussies’, pronouncing the ‘pus’ to rhyme with ‘bus’. He was inseparable from his umbrella with which he once beat off two thieves when at five in the morning he had gone to Covent Garden to buy the household fruit. He was the author of the most delightful volume of whimsico-classical stories that was ever written and the organiser of the compilers of the catalogue of the British Museum Library – an achievement that should render him immortal if his Twilight of the Gods fails to do so. He would say to you that the ancient Egyptians were the only really civilised race, for, when fires occurred in their great buildings, they organised environing cordons, not to put out the fires but to see that no cats re-entered their burning homes.

On this occasion he held his tophatted head obstinately and deafly on one side and repeated, with half closed eyes:

‘That means the death blow to English poetry. It will not be resuscitated for fifty years.’… We have a decade or so to wait for that phoenix. Dr Garnett was in the right of it…

I never, as I have said, saw much of that brilliant group. I was at that time mainly a horticulturist. I was attempting to promote the growing of corn, tobacco and wine on my own land in England. Hence my early visits to the United States. I may add as a detail that I have grown as good Golden Bantam and Country Gentlemen in Kent and Sussex as I have ever seen grown or planted in Virginia. But as for wine and tobacco, the Inland Revenue effectually stopped that by enforcing the duty of £50 per acre on all of either sort of crop. The land which I occupied at Limpsfield was stifled by thistles. I made several experiments in their quick eradication, more particularly by intensive plantations of potatoes which has become the standard method. Whilst at Limpsfield I wrote an article on this subject and submitted it to several literary journals. It was sent back.

Crane came to see me whilst I was doing these things in the troglodytic cottage that he mistook for a baronial ruin. He was brought there by Mr Edward Garnett, the son of the Keeper of Printed Books, who will be as immortal amongst publishers’ advisers as was his father among cataloguers. I don’t think Crane wanted to come and see me because he took me for a pre-Raphaelite poet. But in Limpsfield there was a strong get-together movement in those days and poor Crane had to come and plant a rose-tree beside the lintel of the door which was formed of half a mill-wheel.

The rose-tree was there a few years ago. You may no doubt still have souvenirs. I may add that Conrad and I once planted an orange-tree grown from a pip under a south wall at the Pent. That also was still growing when I visited the place after Conrad’s death. It grew no higher than the rim of the wall, the north wind cutting it back; but the fact should to the incredulous be a testimony to the climatic mildness of that Gulf-Streamed part of the shores of England.

Crane could use a spade all right. He could, that is to say, lift a heavy, wrought steel, sharp implement and, bringing it down from the full extent of his uplifted arm smash it into the yellow clay between a couple of rocks with accuracy and all his small weight duly in operation. I watched him with the sardonic attention that the inhabitants of Kent and Sussex bestow on all foreigners. One did not credit writers and particularly American journalists with much practical knowledge or skill. I once was visited by a fellow who wrote and talked about camping in the Rockies with the volubility and technical knowledge of a man who had been a lumberer all his life. I was then cutting timber and we gave him an axe. He grasped it by the extreme end of the helve, whirled it round his head as if he were throwing the hammer at the Olympic sports and, letting it glance at the tree-trunk, all but cut his leg off. My foreman turned paler than I have ever seen a man turn and we set that fellow to carrying logs and saw that it was the big ones he carried. I still have not forgiven him the scare he gave us.

But Crane was all right. He could use a spade or an axe; he rode well. And he had as I have said an enviable trick with a gun. He would put a piece of sugar on a table and sit still till a fly approached. He held in his hand a Smith and Wesson. When the fly was by the sugar he would twist the gun round in his wrist. The fly would die, killed by the bead-sight of the revolver. That is much more difficult than it sounds. One may be able to use a gun pretty well, but I never managed to kill a fly with the barrel much less the bead-sight.

I don’t know that physical gifts are necessary to the imaginative writer. But I think a certain delicacy in handiwork goes often with accuracy of observation, just as the patience of the field naturalist goes with good prose. Hudson, White of Selborne and Waterton were three of our best prose writers, Hudson the best of all. For myself, I know that the writer whose cadences have most intimately influenced me were those of Thomas Edwardes, the Scottish cobbler-naturalist who could neither read nor write till long after middle life – and after following birds alongside the sea on the links of Banffshire for years and years.

In the Middle Ages they used to say that the proper man was one who had written a book, built a house, planted a tree and begotten a child. I don’t know that Crane ever built a house. He avoided having children because he was afraid of giving them the heritage of tuberculosis. But as a writer of books he was incomparable and the Limpsfield tree that he planted is alive at this day to testify to his handiwork.

There are few men that I have liked – nay, indeed, revered – more than Crane. He was so frail and so courageous, so preyed upon and so generous, so weighted upon by misfortunes and so erect in his carriage. And he was such a beautiful genius.

When I was at the Front, on Kemmell Hill in 1916, I had – I have elsewhere related it but I will here re-adumbrate it since it is almost the most singular tribute that one can pay to a writer – the curious experience of so reading myself into the Red Badge of Courage which is a story of the American Civil War, that, having to put the book down and go out of my tent at dawn, I could not understand why the men I saw about were in khaki and not in the Federal grey. And I can still see the Bride coming to Yellow Sky, the barbarous and abrupt waves that tossed about the Open Boat, the ring of the gun-muzzle in the saloon of the White Mice… The beautiful genius!

I saw him, as I have said, first at a lecture he was delivering up on the Chart at Limpsfield and I had not been much attracted to him. He was then enormously belauded and, on account of the harshness of his voice and his precision of language as a lecturer, I had taken him to be arrogant. The subject of his discourse was flagwagging, as he called it – Morse signalling by flags. It is not a very inspiring subject, though I remember getting some amusement when, being examined for signalling at Cardiff in 1915, I transmitted to a classically minded fellow officer the line of Sappho’s: Eramen men ego sethen athi palai pota.

The recording colour-sergeant struck the message off his tablets. It was to have been inspected by the examining general and the good sergeant thought that anything in a foreign language must of necessity be obscene.

But I have not even that as a memory of Crane’s lecture. I remember his standing-on an improvised platform in a Fabian drawing-room and looking young, pained, and dictatorial. I avoided being introduced to him.

It is curious that I should have at first rather disliked all three – Crane, Conrad, and James. That must have been because of the nature of the adoration bestowed upon them by their respective groups. I was a young man of a little achievement of my own. I must at that date or before have had larger sales for my books than James and certainly than Conrad, though Crane of course with the Red Badge was a best seller of fantastic proportions. So it may have been latent jealousy. But I think it was rather a form of dislike for being, as it were, taken by the elbow and thrust into the presence of personages before whom the thrusters orientally prostrated themselves.

And I was not much of a reader in those days. I do not think that I had read any of James or Crane before I met them. Conrad’s second book – The Outcasts of the Islands – I had read in typescript. Mr Garnett had brought it down to my cottage in Bonnington-in-the-Marsh along with a lot of other manuscripts and I had read it with a great deal of admiration. But that was rather tempered by the fact that Mr Garnett laid almost more stress on the anti-colonising force of the book than on its literary qualities. I never took much interest in politics though from my earliest days I always hated the idea that any one man or set of men should have any temporal powers over any other men of different races and religions. So were I a politician I should be an embittered anti-Imperialist. I have always called myself a Tory, much as Shelley called himself an Atheist. It stops political discussions when I find myself amongst the Advanced. And as for the Right, no one of that complexion knew what a Tory was – at any rate then.

I daresay that irritated Mr Garnett into emphasising the propagandist nature of the Outcasts. But I disliked the idea that a man of the gifts shown in the manuscript should prostitute them by putting them to political purposes. Nevertheless I was so shocked when Mr Garnett said that his employer was in some doubt as to publishing the book because he could not be expected to pay expenses – I was so shocked that I offered to guarantee the publisher against loss on the book. I had lately come into money left me by an uncle who had been a forty-niner… Yes, I too had my oncle de l’Amerique. Indeed I had two. Thus dollars might even in those early days have played their part in Conrad’s fortunes and the history of Literature. They did not in the event. The book just paid its way. Conrad earned a minute sum by it.

He must have come to see me a year or so later, just after the visit of Crane, and I remained rather prejudiced against him. As in the case of Crane, it was Mr Garnett who brought him to my door. I don’t know why. I was no very amiable character in those days and I was temporarily in no mood for meeting men of letters. I had my potatoes and my thistles.

1 Note – At the time of Lord Passfield’s betrayal of the Zionists, I wrote another:

A Jew did once betray our Very Lord,

A record in a world of fire and sword!

Ambitious P – f – d, having power to abuse,

To beat it, has betrayed the very Jews.