Produced by David Widger
RECOLLECTIONS
By David Christie Murray
With Photogravure Portrait of the Author and a number of Original
Letters, of which one by George Meredith and another by Robert Louis
Stevenson are reproduced in facsimile.
London
John Long Norris Street, Haymarket
1908
[Illustration: Frontispiece-Portrait]
[Illustration: Titlepage]
CONTENTS
Chapter I........9
The Unlucky Day of the Fool's Month--High Street, West Bromwich--My
First Pedestrian Triumph--The Common English Bracken--The Sense of
Beauty.
Chapter II........14
My Father--The Murrays--The Courage of Childhood--The Girl from the
Workhouse--Witchcraft--The Dudley Devil--The Deformed Methodist--A
Child's Idea of the Creator--The Policeman--Sir Ernest Spencer's
Donkey--The High Street Pork Butcher.
Chapter III........28
My Father's Printing Office--The Prize Ring--The Fistic Art--First Steps
in Education--A Boy's Reading--Carlyle--Parents and Children--A School
Chum--Technical Education--Plaster Medallions.
Chapter IV........42
A First View 01 London--Charles Dickens--The Photograph--On the Coach
to Oxford--The Manuscript of Our Mutual Friend--An Unpublished
Chapter--Dickens as Reader--The British Museum Reading-Room.
Chapter V........53
I Enlist--St George's Barracks--The Recruits--From Bristol to
Cork--Sergeants--The Bounty and the Free Kit--Life in the Army--My
Discharge--A Sweet Revenge.
Chapter VI........67
Towards Journalism--Dr Kenealy as Parliamentary Candidate--The
Wednesbury Advertiser--George Dawson--The First Private
Execution--Misprints--The Black Country Sixty Years Ago--Aunt Rachel Old
Servants--Local Poets--Mining Dangers.
Chapter VII........84
George Dawson as Editor--Birmingham Politicians--John Bright's
Nervousness--The Black Lake Rescue--The Pelsall Hall Colliery
Disaster--Archibald Forbes--Out of Work--Edmund Yates and The World--The
Hangman--Human Oddities--A Mislaid Cheque--Hero Worship--Three Stories
of Carlyle--Journalism.
CHAPTER VIII.......118
The House of Commons Press Gallery--Disraeli as Orator--The Story of the
Dry Champagne--The Labour Member--Dr Kenealy's Fiasco--Mr Newdigate's
Eloquence--Lord Beaconsfield's Success--“Stone-Walling”--Robert Lowe's
Classics--The Press Gallery and Mr Gladstone.
Chapter IX........141
The Russo-Turkish War--Constantinople--His Friend the Enemy--Col.
Archibald Campbell--The Courage of Non-Combatants--Father Stick--Turkish
Economy--Memories of Constantinople.
Chapter X........159
Constantinople--The Massacre of Kesanlyk--A Sketching
Expedition--Failure of Supplies--Correspondent for the Scotsman and the
Times--Adrianople--The Case of the Gueschoffs--The Bulgarians.
Chapter XI........177
Retrospect--Return to London--Interview with Mr Gladstone at Ha
warden--Reminiscences.
Chapter XII........189
First Fiction--A Life's Atonement--The Casual Tramp--Poor Law
Relief--Charles Reade--The Cloister and the Hearth--Wilkie Collins--The
Figure in Mediaeval Costume--Joseph's Coat--At Roche-fort--Rainbow
Gold--The Anarchist--The Police--The Text of Scripture.
Chapter XIII.......221
Eight Hours in Melbourne--The Australian Born--Australians and the
Mother Country--The Governor--The Sydney Bulletin--The Englishman
in Australia-Australian Journalism--The Theatre--The Creed of
Athleticism--The Future.
Chapter XIV.......257
Mr Rudyard Kipling and “Brugglesmith”--New Zealand--Its
Climate--People--Future--Neds Chum--Sir George Grey.
Chapter XV........268
The Dreyfus Case--Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Opinion--Meeting at
the Egyptian Hall--Interview with Zola--Maître Labori--M. Henri
Rochefort--Major Esterhazy.
Chapter XVI.......285
A Few Letters--George Meredith--J. M. Barrie--Advice on Going to
America--A Statue to Washington--Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Right
Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, M.P.--Robert Louis Stevenson--Mr Edmund Gosse
on the Neo-Scottish School--My Contemporaries in Fiction--Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle--Mr Joseph Hocking--Robert Buchanan--Mr E. Marshall Hall,
K.C.
Chapter XVII.......311
Sixtieth Birthday.
RECOLLECTIONS
CHAPTER I
The Unlucky Day of the Fool's Month--High Street, West
Bromwich--My First Pedestrian Triumph--The Common English
Bracken--The Sense of Beauty.
I remember that in a fit of petulance at some childish misdemeanour, my
mother once told me that I came into the world on the unlucky day of the
fool's month. It was her picturesque way of saying that I was born on
the thirteenth of April. I have often since had occasion to think that
there was a wealth of prophetic wisdom in the phrase which neither she
nor I suspected at the time.
I did the world the poor service of being born into it in the year 1847,
in a house not now to be identified in the straggling High Street of
West Bromwich, which in those days was a rather doleful hybrid of a
place--neither town nor country. It is a compact business-like town now,
and its spreading industries have defaced the lovely fringe of country
which used to be around it.
Its great peculiarity to a thoughtful child lay in the fact that even
at his small rate of progress he could pass in an hour from the clink,
clink, clink on the anvils of the poor nailmakers, who worked in their
own sordid back kitchens about the Ling or Virgin's End, to a rural
retirement and quiet as complete as you may find to-day about Charlcote
or Arden, or any other nook of the beautiful Shakespeare country. Since
the great South Staffordshire coal fault was circumvented, nearly
all the wide reaches of rural land which I remember are overgrown and
defaced by labour. The diamond stream in which I used to bathe as a boy,
where you could have counted the pebbles at the bottom, was running ink,
and giving forth vile odours, when last I saw it. But fifty years ago,
or more, there was the most exquisite green fringe to that fire-rotted,
smoke-stained, dirty mantle of a Black Country. In the extreme stillness
of the summer fields, and more especially, as I seem to remember, in
a certain memorable hush which came when afternoon was shading into
evening, you could hear the clank of pig-iron which was being loaded
into the boats on the canal at Bromford, quite two miles away, and the
thump of a steam hammer at Dawes's foundry.
I have begun many a child's ramble by a walk down Bromford Lane, to look
in at the half-naked figures there sweating and toiling at the puddling
furnaces, and have brought it to an end in the middle of the fairy ring
on Stephenson's hills, only a couple of miles away, in what felt like
the very heart of nature's solitude. Thus the old parish, which was
not by any means an ideal place to be born and bred in, had its
compensations for a holiday schoolboy who had Milton, and Klopstock, and
Bunyan at his finger-ends, and had hell and the plains of heaven within
an easy ramble from the paternal doorstep. But the special memory about
which I set out to write was the one which immediately follows on the
baby experience already recorded. It is almost as brief and isolated in
itself; but I know by after association precisely where it took place,
and I am almost persuaded that I know who was my companion.
I think it is Mr Ruskin who speaks of our rural hedgerows as having been
the pride and glory of our English fields, and the shame and disgrace
of English husbandry. In the days I write of, they were veritable
flower-gardens in their proper season. What with the great saucer-shaped
elderberry blooms, and the pink and white dogroses, and the honeysuckle,
and the white and purple foxgloves, and harebell and bluebell, and the
starlike yellow-eyed daisy, there was an unending harvest for hand
and eye. But the observation of all these things came later. Below the
hedges the common English bracken grew, in occasional profusion, and
it was a young growing spray of this plant which excited in my mind the
very first sense of beauty I had ever known. It was curved in a gentle
suggestion of an interrogation note. In colour, it was of a greenish-red
and a very gentle yet luxuriant green. It was covered with a harmless
baby down, and it was decorated at the curved tip with a crown-shaped
scroll. There is really no need in the world to describe it, for one
supposes that even the most inveterate Cockney has, at one time or
another, seen the first tender offshoot of the commonest fern which
grows in England.
From the time at which I achieved my first pedestrian triumph until I
looked at this delight and wonder, I remember nothing. A year or two had
intervened, and I was able to toddle about unaided; but, for anything I
can actually recall, I might as well have been growing in my sleep. But
I shall never forget it, and I have never experienced anything like
it since. Whether I could at that time think in words at all, I do not
know; but the beauty, the sense of the charm of the slender, tender
thing went into my heart with an actual pang of pleasure, and my
companion reproved me for crying about nothing. I don't remember crying;
but I recall the question, and I know that nothing has ever since moved
me in the same way.
I was about nineteen years of age, I think, when I first awoke to the
fact that I had been born shortsighted. I bad had a year in the army,
and when we were at the targets, or were out at judging-distance drill,
I was aware that I did not see things at all as the musketry instructor
represented them. But it happened one starlight night, after I had
returned to civilian life, that a companion of little more than my own
age, who had always worn spectacles in my remembrance of him, began to
talk about the splendid brilliance of the heavens. I could discern a
certain milky radiance, with here and there a dim twinkle in it, but
no more. I borrowed my comrade's glasses, and I looked. The whole thing
sprang at me, but rather with a sense of awe and wonder than of beauty;
and even this much greater episode left the first impression of the
child unchanged.
There is, or used to be, a little pleasure-steamer which starts at
stated times for a voyage on Lake Wakatipu in New Zealand. For a while
it passes along a gloomy channel which is bounded on either side by dark
and lofty rocks of a forbidding aspect. This passage being cleared, the
steamer bears away to the left, across the lake, and, beyond the jutting
promontory near at hand, there lifts into sight on a fair day the first
mountain of the Glenorchy Range. When I first saw it, the sky at the
horizon was almost white; but the peaks of the distant mountains had, as
Shakespeare says, a whiter hue than white, and through field-glasses
its outlines could be perfectly distinguished. Then swung into sight a
second mountain, and a third, and a fourth, and so on, in a progression
which began to look endless. There is a form of delight which is very
painful to endure, and I do not know that I ever experienced it more
keenly than here. The huge snow-capped range gliding slowly up, “the
way of grand, dull, Odyssean ghosts,” was impressive, and splendid, and
majestic beyond anything I have known in a life which has been rich in
travel; but if I want, at a fatigued or dispirited hour, to bathe my
spirit clear in the memory of beautiful things seen, I go back, because
I cannot help it, to that tender little fern-frond in a lane on the edge
of the Black Country, which brought to me, first of all, the message
that there is such a thing as beauty in the world.