I lived alone in a room at the top of 37 Charles Street, and worked in the winter months extremely hard. Special coaches used to come to me, and special teachers of arithmetic. One of them had a new system of teaching arithmetic, which was supposed to make it simple, but in my case the system broke down.
Mr. Scoones told my father after I had been there a little time that I was sure to pass eventually.
On Sunday evenings I used often to have supper with Edmund Gosse at his house in Delamere Terrace, and there I met some of the lights of the literary world: George Moore, Rider Haggard, Henry Harland, and Max Beerbohm. Sometimes there would be serious discussions on literature between George Moore, Edmund Gosse, and Arthur Symons. I remember once, when Swinburne was being discussed, Arthur Symons saying that there was a period in everyone’s life when one thought Swinburne’s poetry not only the best, but the only poetry worth reading. It seemed then to annihilate all other verse. Edmund Gosse then said that he would not be at all surprised, if some day Swinburne’s verse were to appear almost unintelligible to future generations. He thought it possible that Swinburne might survive merely as a literary curiosity, like Cowley. He also said that Swinburne in his later manner was like a wheel that spun round and round without any intellectual cog.
George Moore in those days was severe on Guy de Maupassant, and said his stories were merely carved cherry-stones. Edmund Gosse contested this point hotly. Still more amusing than the literary discussions were those occasions when Edmund Gosse would tell us reminiscences of his youth, when he worked as a boy at the British Museum, and of the early days of his friendship with Swinburne.
There was an examination for the Diplomatic Service that autumn, and I was given a nomination for it, but I was ill and couldn’t compete.
I went back to Hildesheim for Christmas. Christmas is the captain jewel of German domestic life, and no one who has not spent a Christmas with a German family can really know Germany, just as no one who has not lived through the Easter festival with a Russian family can really know Russia. It is only in Germany that the Christmas tree grows in its full glory. The Christmas tree at Hildesheim was laden with little tangerine oranges and sprinkled over with long threads of silver snow. When it was lighted, the carol: “_Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht_,” was sung round it. The presents were arranged, or rather displayed, on a table under the tree: new presents, and a present of many years’ standing, the _Puppenstube_, which took on a new life every Christmas by being redecorated, and having the small kitchen utensils in its dolls’ kitchen refurbished. The presents were not wrapped up in parcels, but they were exposed to the full view of those who were about to receive them, and so arranged that they appeared at their very best, as though Santa Claus and a fairy godmother had arranged them themselves. My present was a beautiful embossed dicky.