The Adventure of Living | Page 5

London to read for the Bar, a year and a half
after I had left Oxford, that I made any attempt to write for The
Spectator. In the last few days of 1885 I got my father to give me a
formal introduction to the editors, and went to see them in Wellington
Street. They told me, as in my turn I have had to tell so many would-be
reviewers, what no doubt was perfectly true, namely that they had
already got more outside reviewers than they could possibly find work
for, and that they were sorry to say I must not count upon their being
able to give me books. All the same, they would like me to take away a
couple of volumes to notice,--making it clear, however, that they did
this out of friendship for my father.
I was given my choice of books, and the two I chose were a new
edition of _Gulliver's Travels_, well illustrated in colour by a French
artist, and, if I remember rightly, the _Memoirs of Henry Greville_, the
brother of the great Greville. I will not say that I departed from the old
Spectator offices at 1 Wellington Street--a building destined to play so
great a part in my life--in dudgeon or even in disappointment. I had not
expected very much. Still, no man, young or old, cares to have it made
quite clear that a door at which he wishes to enter is permanently shut
against him.

However, I was not likely to be depressed for long at so small a matter
as this; I was much too full of enjoyment in my new London life. The
wide world affords nothing to equal one's first year in London--at least,
that was my feeling. My first year at Oxford had been delightful, as
were also the three following, but there was to me something in the
throb of the great pulse of London which, as a stimulant, nay, an
excitant, of the mind, even Oxford could not rival.
For once I had plenty of leisure to enjoy the thrilling drama of life--a
drama too often dimmed by the cares, the business, or even the
pleasures of the onlooker. A Bar student is not overworked, and if he is
not rich, or socially sought after, he can find, as I did, plenty of time in
which to look around him and enjoy the scene. That exhilaration, that
luxury of leisurely circumspection may never return, or only, as happily
in my own case, with the grand climacteric. Once more I see and enjoy
the gorgeous drama by the Thames.
To walk every morning to the Temple or to Lincoln's Inn, where I was
reading in Chambers, was a feast. Then there were theatres, balls,
dances, dinners, and a thousand splendid sights to be enjoyed, for I was
then, as I have always been and am now, an indefatigable sightseer. I
would, I confess, to this day go miles to see the least promising of
curiosities or antiquities. "Who knows? it may be one of the wonders of
the world" has always been my order of the day.
I was aware of my good fortune. I remember thinking how much more
delightful it must be to come fresh to London than to be like so many
of my friends, Londoners born and bred. They could not be thrilled as I
was by the sight of St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey, or by the scimitar
curve of the Thames from Blackfriars to Westminster. Through the
National Gallery or the British Museum I paced a king. The vista of the
London River as I went to Greenwich intoxicated me like heady wine.
And Hampton Court in the spring, _Ut vidi ut perii_--"How I saw, how
I perished." It was all a pageant of pure pleasure, and I walked on air,
eating the fruit of the Hesperides.
But though I was so fully convinced that the doors of The Spectator
were shut against me, I was, of course, determined that my two reviews

should, if possible, make the editors feel what a huge mistake they had
made and what a loss they were incurring. But, alas! here I encountered
a great disappointment. When I had written my reviews they appeared
to me to be total failures! I was living at the time in an "upper part" in
South Molton Street, in which I, my younger brother, Henry Strachey,
and two of my greatest friends, the present Sir Bernard Mallet and his
younger brother Stephen Mallet, had set up house. I remember to this
day owning to my brother that though I had intended my review of
_Gulliver's Travels_ to be epoch-making, it had turned out a horrible
fiasco. However, I somehow felt I should only flounder deeper into