George Dawson as Editor--Birmingham Politicians--John
Blight'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.
For two or three bright and happy months I acted as George Dawson's
amanuensis after a rather curious and unusual fashion. In his unclerical
suit of Irish homespun and his beaded slippers, with a well-blacked clay
between his lips, he would roam up and down the Turkey carpet of the
editorial room and talk about some topic of the day, and in that fashion
he would make his daily leader. “Now,” he would say, “take that to your
own room and get as much as you can of it into a column.” I made no
notes, for I had a verbal memory in those days like a steel rat-trap.
But I used to go away charged sometimes with matter enough for a
newspaper budget, or nearly, and it was my business to condense and
select from this material that which seemed worthiest of preservation.
I offer here a fragment or two of the kind of thing he used to say at
these times. Talking of Disraeli, whom he hated vehemently, he said:
“The man has been writing all his life of the great Asian mystery
without guessing that he is the greatest Asian mystery alive. His
politics are romantic, his romances are political, and he himself is
a fiction founded on fact.” Of another person whom I will not name, he
said: “You put the man into a book as you put a sponge into a bucket.
You take him out and squeeze him, and he returns the stream uncoloured.
He is a sort of _Half Hours with the Best Authors_, bound in man's skin;
he is intellectually impotent, he never begot an idea.”
But he could be as generous in praise as savage in condemnation, and his
occasional lapses into tenderness of mood were very sweet and touching.
I recall one night at the Church of the Saviour, after his return from
a holiday in Rome, when he told us how he had purposely lost himself in
the viler quarters of the city. The noon-day sun beat down, eliciting
abominable stenches and revealing, without compromise, the ugly squalors
of the region. He walked on right into the country, strolled on the
Campagna, and at night-fall regained the city by something like the same
route he had chosen in leaving it. The garish sun was down. The evening
dews had laid the foul odours. The moon was at the full. Every ugliness
was turned to beauty. Vile things were transfigured in that softening
light. “Christianity,” he said, “is the moonlight of the soul.” It was
note a complete saying, but Dawson was a creature of intimations. He
startled one sometimes by an intellectual crudity, but he had always
reserve.
There are many still living who remember the truly astonishing eloquence
and devotion of those improvised prayers of his at the Church of the
Saviour. Old mouthing George Gilfillan, by the way, author of the _Bards
of the Bible_ and other deservedly neglected works, wrote to Dawson when
his congregation built this church for him: “You have started the Church
of the Saviour, but you will never be a saviour to the church.” To which
the other George fittingly responded “that the Church had its Saviour
already and it was a plain man's business to preach His plain meaning.”
But those prayers! They were the mere breathing of a strong, sane
soul towards an infinite hope, an infinite possible good, a great
half-revealed Fatherhood. Doubt faltered there, hope exulted. I have
not heard from other mortal lips--I do not hope to hear again--such an
expression of humble hope and doubt, such a tone of complete abasement
before the Divine Ideal, such a final triumphant note of praise in the
far-off haven to which creation moves.
The best result of the life of my dear old chief was the effect he had
upon the municipal spirit of that town of Birmingham. It was not then
a city in those days to which he devoted so large a portion of his
many gifts and his great energies. Such men are the salt of great
communities. Not so endowed as to command the armies of the world,
missing something of the ambition, or the vanity, or the push of
potential greatness in its wider spheres, they gain in force by the
very limits of the current to which they commit their powers. Many a
generation will go by before the capital of the Midlands wholly forgets
the influence of the man whose character I have so feebly indicated
here, who was to its teeming thousands the lighthouse of honesty, and
who still seems to me, after the lapse of all these years, the bravest,
the sincerest and the most eloquent soul it has been my fortune to
encounter. I owed to him a personal acquaintance with the leading
politicians of the town. John Skirrow Wright--of whom Dawson always
spoke as the “great Liberal party”--a big, noisy, vehement, jovial man,
whom the phrase accurately fitted; Dr R. W. Dale, the Archbishop of the
Nonconformists of his day and many others.
On one memorable afternoon, he introduced me to John Bright. I do not
think I ventured to take any share in the conversation between the two,
but I recall one interesting passage of it “Tell me, friend George,”
said Bright, “you have, I suppose, as large an experience in public
speaking as any man in England. Have you any acquaintance with the old
nervous tremor still?” “No,” said Dawson, “or if I have, it is a mere
momentary qualm which is gone before I can realise it.” “Now, for my
part,” said the great Tribune, “I have had practice enough but I have
never risen to address an audience, large or small, without experiencing
a shaking at the knees and the sense of a scientific vacuum behind the
waistcoat.”
When I enlisted under Dawson's banner, on the _Birmingham Morning News_,
I was the junior reporter, but in the course of a month or two, I was
promoted and became the recognised descriptive writer on the staff.
Throughout my journalistic experience I have been fortunate in one
respect. The men under whom I have worked have, for the most part, had
the knack of extorting one's best, and one of the ways of extorting the
best of an enthusiastic youngster is to let him know cordially when he
has done well. I shall never forget the flush of resolve which came
over me when Dawson first laid his hand upon my shoulder with a cheery
“Bravo, my lad,” in acknowledgment of a piece of work of mine. It was
the first really great chance I had had. I was just newly married at the
time and supposing my work to be over for the day I was taking my way
homeward, when the printer's “devil” overtook me after a breathless run
and told me that I was wanted at the office. I went back to learn that
there was a mine on fire at Black Lake, some seven miles away, and I was
bidden to go and see what was to be seen there.
A hasty search through the time-table showed that there was no train
running in that direction for an hour or two and so I was bidden to take
a hansom and to use all despatch. The scene of the disaster lay a mile
or two past the house in which I was born, and by the time at which
I reached this point I could see that the tale was true. It was a
perfectly still and windless evening with an opalescent sky, and far
away I could see a great column of smoke rising like the stem of a giant
mushroom and over it a canopy of smoke like the mushroom's top, and as
I drew near I could see that the lower part of the column was faintly
irradiated by the flames at the bottom of the pit shaft. The mine was
situated in the midst of an open field and there was a great surging
crowd about it which made way for me at a word. Round about the bed
shafts of the mine, the downcast and the upcast, a little space was held
voluntarily clear and half a dozen men in coaly flannels were standing
there. A little tin pot of an engine in a miniature of an engine-house
was labouring and panting at a little distance, and almost as I arrived
upon the scene, the great iron bucket capable of containing as I should
judge some five or six hundred gallons, was brought from the upcast,
lowered there, set upon a trolley and then run along the rails until it
could be emptied into the shaft in which the fire was raging.
This poor attempt to extinguish the flames was continued for perhaps a
quarter of an hour, but at last one of the little band said, “This is
no good, lads, we might as well stand round in a ring and spit at it.
We shall have to get the 'Stinktors' out. A man or two will have to go
down.” The coal-smeared men were all standing close together and they
looked at each other with faces pale beneath the grime. For a second or
two none of them spoke, but at last one said, “Will you make one?” and
the first man answered with a mere nod and a sullen-sounding growl.
The others were appealed to each in turn, and each gave the same sulky
seeming acquiescence. I had at the moment no idea as to what it was
actually proposed to do, but the plan was soon made clear. What
the first speaker had called “stinktors” turned out to be little
barrel-shaped objects about one foot by two.
They were called “l'extincteur,” and they contained some gas which in
combination with water was fatal to fire. But when I reflected that in
a confined space like that into which they proposed to venture, any gas
which was fatal to fire would in all probability be fatal to human
life, I almost wondered if the men were mad. Mad or no, they made their
preparations with a deliberate swiftness which showed that they knew
perfectly well what they were about. The man who had first proposed
the venture was the first to set out upon it. The large iron bucket,
technically called “bowk,” was attached to the steel wire rope which
hung about the smouldering shaft. The man stepped into this, the chain
was passed about his waist, he was smothered in heavy flannels which
were tied about him with cords; the end of a long coil of dirty, oily,
coaly, three-ply twine was fastened round his right wrist, and he was
swung into the smoke. The word was passed to the engine-room, the little
tin pot of an engine began to pant and snort 30 or 40 yards away and the
man dropped out of sight. The coal-smeared comrade who had charge of
the twine paid it out delicately fathom by fathom. It was the only link
between the adventurer down below and the chance of life, and the merest
tug at it would have caused an immediate reversal of the engine and
would have brought him back to bank. But no signal came, and for
anything that anybody there could have told, the man below might have
been suffocated by the smoke. There was not a sound to be heard but
the creaking of the wheel as it revolved above the shaft and the hoarse
panting of the little engine, and the crowd which had by this time grown
to vast dimensions waited in so tense a silence that there was something
awful in it.
How long we waited I cannot tell, but at last the signal came. The
word was flashed to the engine room and the rope came gliding swiftly
upwards. The hero was comatose and was hanging all limp and loose by the
chain which had been passed about his waist. He was seized, swung to one
side and lowered and landed and one great fiery flake of flannel as big
as a man's hand fell from the rough garments in which he was swathed
from head to foot. A bottle of whisky came from somewhere and was put to
his lips and in a while he recovered consciousness though he was still
gasping and choking and his eyes were streaming. In the meantime another
man, as good as he, was ready, and he came back, as it turned out
afterwards, blinded for life, but neither that nor anything that fear
could urge could stay the rest, and man after man went down and faced
that lurid smoke and hell of darkness undismayed, until at last their
valour won the day and they brought out every man and boy and beast. One
coaly giant yelled, “That's the lot,” when the last batch came up, and
then the crowd went mad, weeping, cheering, dancing mad. I have seen
many deeds of valour in my time, both in peace and war, but I have never
seen anything to match the Black Lake rescue for deliberate courage.
I feel inclined to say less about the courage displayed by the members
of the next rescue party whose work I saw, for the very sufficient
reason that I was a member of it To tell the honest truth, I had not
the remotest idea that I was courting any sort of danger. At the Pelsall
Hall colliery, which lay two or three miles from Walsall, there had been
an inrush of water from some old deserted workings near at hand, and
twenty-two miners were imprisoned. The water filled the shaft to a depth
of sixty feet, and so the rescuers were really hopeless of being able to
pump the mine clear before the prisoners had been reduced to a state of
absolute starvation. There was always the certainty that the inrush of
water would be followed by an influx of poisonous gases. This, in fact,
proved to be the case, and every man had been dead a week before the
first body was recovered.
I began my friendship with Archibald Forbes at Pelsall, and I began
it in a rather curious fashion. The place was a wretched little mining
village with a solitary beer shop in it, and there was only one house in
which it was possible to secure decent accommodation. I bargained with
its tenant for a bed, and agreed to pay him half-a-crown a night for the
accommodation. Forbes had made a precisely similar arrangement with the
woman of the house, and there was but a single bedroom to be disposed
of. Neither of us knew anything of the other's bargain until the
following morning. Forbes was under the belief that an attempt at
descent was intended to be made that night, and that it was to break
into an old abandoned air-way which had long been bricked up at the side
of the shaft, and was believed to lead to the stables of the mine which
were situated at a point above the level of the flood.
The dialect of the Black Country, when spoken at its broadest, is not
easy for a stranger to understand. I, as a native of the district,
was of course familiar with it, but Forbes was out of his element
altogether, and might almost have tried talking chockjaw. I, knowing
perfectly well that the intended attempt could not be made for at
least twenty-four hours, went away with a comfortable mind and slept
in Bailey's cottage. When I left the door next morning I saw striding
towards me through the mud a very begrimed and unprepossessing-looking
figure. It was, after all, a man with a two days' beard, a very dirty
face, a collarless, grimy shirt, who wore heavy ankle Jack-boots,
and had his trousers rolled above his ankles. This person accosted me
brusquely. “What are you doing in that cottage there?” he asked me, and
I asked in turn, “what business of his that might be.” He told me he
had hired and paid for the only available bed in the house from
the landlady, and I told him that I had hired and paid for the same
accommodation through the landlord. The stranger claimed precedence, and
was good enough to tell me that if he found me attempting to infringe
upon his privileges he would take the liberty of throwing me out of the
window. I was five-and-twenty at this time, stood five feet eleven in my
socks, and reckoned myself a pretty good man with my hands, as a pupil
of the old Slasher had a right to be, and in considerable wrath at the
stranger's insolence, I drew myself up shoulder to shoulder with him,
and told him hotly that that was a game that two might play at. There
came a quiet humorous gleam into his eye, and when he looked at me for
half a minute he burst into a great roar of laughter. “Newspaper man?”
he asked me. I answered in the affirmative, and he stretched out an
unwashed hand. “I am Forbes,” he said. “I am here for the _Daily News_;
if I can't bully a man I make friends with him.”
Now Forbes for years had been one of my heroes and I was simply
delighted to meet him. We struck up an immediate friendship but in
an hour he turned into bed and I saw him no more until the following
morning when I believed that I had made of him an enemy for life. I
learned at the mine head the hour at which the rescue party was to
descend and I made arrangements to join it. Then I walked in to Walsall
and there hired a saddle horse which I bestowed in the stables of the
beer shop. This done, I made my way back to the mine and found the party
just in readiness to make the descent. There were six of us, all told,
and the little contingent was captained by Mr Walter Neas, who, partly
as a reward for gallantry as I believe, was afterwards appointed manager
of Her Majesty's mines in Warora, Central India. We were all lowered in
a skip together and the position of the air-way having been precisely
ascertained one man lay face downwards on the skip's bottom and broke
through the brickwork with a pick. The sullen waters of the pool were
only some eight or ten feet beneath us. The bricks splashed in one
after the other until there was a space large enough for a man to
whirl himself into it, and one by one we entered the passage. It was a
tremendous scramble, and here and there the roof of the place had sunk
so low that we had hard work to squeeze through on our hands and knees.
In places we had almost space to walk upright. We came at last upon a
face of brick, the wall of the stable for which we were bound and beyond
which there was some faint hope of finding the imprisoned men. The sound
of our picks elicited no response though we paused more than once to
listen, but the wall being at length broken down, we entered the stable
and I was the first of the party to perceive the dead body of a man who
sat leaning against the wall of coal looking for all the world like a
wax-work figure.
I was holding a candle to the dead man's face and we were all gathered
round when the light went out suddenly as if it had been quenched in
water. In a second we were in pitch darkness and our leader called out
“Choke damp--back for your lives,” and in the pitchy darkness back
we struggled. I have forgotten to say that water was running down the
air-way like a little mill-stream, though it was barely over shoe-tops.
We scrambled on with the deadly gas following us, sucked and drawn along
by the draught of air. I was last but one and was saved many of the
bruises and excoriations which befell the leader. The warning voice
would come out of the darkness, “duck here,” or “hands and knees,” and
on we toiled, panting and perspiring, until we reached the shaft and
were all drawn up again. I dried myself roughly before a roaring fire in
the hovel of the mine and then made all haste to the beer shop where I
mounted my horse and rode full tilt into Birmingham. The paper had gone
to press early that night and the press was already clanking when I rode
into Pinfold Street and sat down, all muddy and dishevelled as I was,
to dictate my copy to a shorthand writer. What I had to say filled two
large type columns and with the copy of the paper in my pocket, I rode
back to Pelsall. There I found Forbes at breakfast--he asked where I had
been and I produced the paper and showed my work in silence. He read
it through without a word of comment, good, bad or indifferent, laid it
down upon the table and left the room. I heard him rummaging about in
the chamber overhead and by and by he came down with a portmanteau in
his hand and without a word or a look left the house. I thought that he
was galled to feel that he had been beaten by a novice.
Two years had elapsed when I met him again. I found him by hazard in the
Ludgate Bar, which was then a great resort of the bigger men among the
London journalists. As I entered he sat among a knot of his companions.
Tom Hood was there as I remember, and Henry Sampson, founder of the
_Referee_ with Major Henty, the famous writer of books for boys, and
poor brilliant young Evelyn Jerrold. Forbes greeted me boisterously,
and, springing from his seat, clapped me upon the back. He took me
to his friends and introduced me with words that put me to the blush.
“Here,” said he, “is a man who writes English, and here is the only man
who ever beat me on my own ground.” “No,” I answered, “it was my ground,
Mr Forbes, and I should not have beaten you if you had spoken the
language of the natives.” I never had a better or more generous friend
than Forbes.
The _World_ Journal, founded by Edmund Yates, was just then entering
into its first dawn of success. Forbes had been asked to write a
series of articles for it on a subject which, as he confessed, had no
particular charm for him. He handed it over to me and that gave me my
first chance in the higher journalism of London. But I am running
far ahead now and there is much to tell before my narrative arrives
legitimately at this point.
The _Birmingham Morning News_ was a financial failure from the first,
and towards the end of its second year its proprietors determined to
reconstruct it. How or by whom they were advised I never knew, but a
person who had no acquaintance either with finance or with journalism
was entrusted with the command and Dawson threw up his post in dudgeon.
I had fully intended to resign with him, but I had no time given me in
which to do it, and in the space of a few weeks after the arrival of the
newcomer, I was free to seek my fortune in London. By the good offices
of the late Charles Williams, war correspondent on the staff of the
_Morning Advertiser_, I was introduced to Colonel Richards, the editor
of that journal, and did actually secure a berth as gallery reporter,
but I was suddenly called back to the country by a grave domestic
trouble, no less than the illness of my wife, which terminated fatally
eight or nine weeks g 97 Recollections later. When I returned to London
my place was filled and for a while the outlook was extremely desolate.
My funds were very limited to begin with, and in spite of all the care
I could exercise they dwindled at an appalling rate. I abode in a shabby
little back bedroom in a lodging off the Gray's Inn Road and sat at my
table wrapped in an ulster to prevent myself from freezing, whilst
I wrote, and sent broadcast prose and verse, essays, short stories,
journalistic trifles of every kind. All were ignored or returned.
Where the handsome offices of the _Daily News_ now stand in Bouverie
Street, there was at that time a doleful place of resort for life's
failures. It was called the Sussex Hotel. The _habitués_ of the place
were for the most part broken journalists and barristers, some of whom
were men of considerable native talent and attainment. They were mostly
given to drink, but they contrived to maintain at least such an outward
semblance of respectability as enabled them to loaf about the Fleet
Street offices and bars without being actually the objects of derision.
I do not suppose that there is anywhere at this time such a contingent
to be found in London. I went to live amongst them for economy's sake.
We each paid sixpence a night in advance for a bed, the linen of
which had a look of having been washed in tobacco juice and dried up a
chimney. When a guest had paid his money, he was supplied with a key and
about an inch of thin candle, which was affixed by its own grease to a
broken shard of pottery. I spent about six weeks there and during the
latter part of the time at least, my one daily meal consisted of a
hard-rinded roll and thick chocolate. My belongings had all dwindled
away, and at last I found myself penniless and homeless in the midst of
London.
It is not, when all is said and done, a very dreadful thing for a
healthy man to be without food for a few days, nor is it such a hardship
as the fastidious might fancy to snatch one's nightly rest on the
benches of the Embankment. I passed four nights there, chivied with the
rest of the abject crowd by the ubiquitous policeman with his eternal
“Wake up, move on there!” and for four days I was entirely without food.
I can quite honestly say that I cared very little for these things
in themselves, but where the iron enters into a man's soul in such
conditions is when he feels that his degradation is unmerited and knows
that he has powers within him which, if he could find a vent for
them, might lead him on to fame and fortune. The exasperating raging
bitterness of this, the grudging envy with which he looks at those more
fortunate than himself, whose intellectual equipment he despises, these
are the things which sear the heart.
I had resolved--let come what might come--that I would never go home to
confess myself a failure. The thing, of course, might have had a tragic
ending; there have been thousands of tragic endings to such enterprises
as that in which I was engaged, but in my case, fate ordered otherwise,
I have told the tale elsewhere, but it will bear re-telling. I was
drifting about Fleet Street, mournfully conscious of the extent to which
my appearance had deteriorated, of the unblacked boots and the yellow
linen, and the general air of being unkempt and unwashed, when I found
myself standing in front of the window of a filter-maker's shop, close
by old Temple Bar. In this window were displayed a number of glass
domes, under each of which a little jet of water tossed about a cork
ball. The ball would soar sometimes to the roof of the dome and would
then topple over, sometimes to be caught midway upon the jet and
sometimes to fall to the bottom, but always to be kept drenched and
dancing in a melancholy futile way. I was comparing it with myself when
a hand was clapped upon my shoulder and a jolly voice accosted me. The
speaker was John Lovell, the president of the Press Association, which
had its offices in Wine Office Court hard by. He could not have failed
to be aware of my condition, but he gave no sign of having observed it
and asked me if I could spare the time to earn a couple of guineas,
by writing “a good, sea-salt, tarry British article about Christopher
Columbus.” Time pressed, he told me, and he was too busy to undertake
the article himself. If I would accompany him to the office, he would
supply me with the necessary materials and would pay money down for the
work. On to the office I went with him, with a sudden bright confidence
that here at last the lane of ill-luck had found a turning. I was
ushered into a little private room, and writing materials were set
before me. In a couple of hours I sent in my copy, and there came back
to me at once a pill-box, on the lid of which was inscribed in a very
delicate handwriting, “The prescription to be taken immediately.” The
box being opened was found to contain two sovereigns and two shillings,
wrapped in cotton wool, and I went away to break a fast which was then
entering on its fifth day. My next proceeding, after having somewhat
refurbished myself, was to go back to the dingy old hole in Bouverie
Street and to write an article on “Impecunious Life in London.”
During the brief run of the _Illustrated Midlands News_, to which I
had been a frequent contributor of verse, the late Richard Gowing, then
editor of the _School Board Chronicle_, had officiated as Mr Joseph
Hatton's assistant editor. He had just acquired the copyright in the
_Gentleman's Magazine_, and I bethought me that here lay my opportunity.
I took the article to him, and after turning the manuscript pages
swiftly over, he decided to accept it. It ran, I think, to two and
thirty pages, and I received his cheque for ten shillings and sixpence a
page.
Thus armed, I felt more than fit to face the world again, and it was
whilst I was yet in this new flush of fortune that I walked into the
Ludgate Bar as already recorded, and for the second time encountered
Archibald Forbes.
And now began a period of halcyon weather. A kinder, more discerning and
more helpful chief than Edmund Yates no aspiring young journalist ever
had. He was as genial and as quick to recognise honest effort as Dawson
himself, and he knew ten times better what he wanted, and a thousand
times more about the taste and temper of the public.
He had conceived the idea of a series of articles on our civilisation,
in which the writer should deal with the sores and oddities of it, and
into this work I plunged with all the splendid vigour and avidity of
youth, I chose the hangman as my first theme, because I happened to have
had an acquaintance with a gentleman of that profession, and to have
been engaged in some personal dealings with him. His name was James
Smith, and he lived about midway between Rowley Regis and Dudley. I
held that property in trust for my infant daughter, and the rents were
collected for me weekly by a little lame clockmaker named Chesson. At
one time my business often led me along that road, and I was familiar
with the figure of a great, sprawling, muscular-looking, idle fellow,
who, whenever I passed him, was leaning across the garden-gate in his
shirt sleeves and smoking. He seemed to have no sort of employment, and,
though I did not notice it at the time, it occurred to me afterwards,
when I knew the truth about him, that I had never seen him exchange so
much as a passing salutation with a single human creature. The rents
came in regularly for some time, and then it was reported to me that
my idle tenant had not paid. Time went on, and the idle tenant _never_
paid. I determined to look into the thing myself, and I set out with the
lame clockmaker to interview the man. He was sprawling over the gate as
usual when we reached his cottage, and, to my surprise, the little lame
man lagged some yards behind and refused to approach him. I explained my
errand to the idle tenant, and he lugged out a handful of half-crowns.
“That cove,” he said, indicating the clockmaker “'as never been a-nigh
me this four months. The money's always bin 'ere for 'im if 'e'ed a-come
for it. What d'you take me for?” he asked savagely. “I ain't a wild
beast, am I? It's Government work, and somebody's got to do it.” It
turned out upon inquiry that my collector had actually paid three or
four weeks' instalment out of his own pocket, rather than face the
hangman, after he had discovered the nature of his trade. I am not
writing melodrama, but it is a simple fact that I have never seen a
man more profoundly distressed. The hangman's speech was broken and
obstructed, his face worked strongly, and there was an actual glint of
moisture in his eyes. He and my collector had been cronies until his
dreadful secret was surprised, and had shared many a friendly half-pint
together.
His ostracism seemed to have hit him hard. Even a hangman, one supposes,
has some sort of human feeling.
At the time at which I wrote this narrative, I had gone into lodgings at
Barnsbury, and shared rooms with a struggling water-colour painter, who,
for the most part, in default of patrons, worked for the pawn-broker--a
harum-scarum, ripe-hearted Irishman; and on the Sunday on which I turned
out my first contribution to the _World_, he sat painting and smoking
close at hand, and I read out to him, paragraph after paragraph, as I
wrote. Those days are gone, but the glow, the passion, the very rage of
achievement, which possessed one's work, are not to be forgotten.
The work took Yates's fancy mightily, and he had the good sense and
generosity to let me know it. The Bentley Balladist wrote years ago:
“Excuse me, gents, but to poetic ponies,
One ounce of praise is worth ten tons of corn.”
Yates did not stint the corn because he was generous with the praise,
and throughout our association he was most unfailingly good and kind.
He was a bitter enemy and a hard striker, and he went into battle with
a good heart and made for himself many foes, but a more loyal colleague
and leader it would have been hard to find.
My search for human oddities led me into strange places and made me
acquainted with strange people. The most astonishing and complete
example of human vanity and pretence I ever encountered was one of
these. He was a pavement artist and he had a pitch outside the railings
of the great terminus in Euston Road, where he used to sit and patronise
London. There was something in the fellow's look which invited me,
and when I got into conversation with him, I learned that nothing but
jealousy had kept him from taking a high place as a scene-painter, and
that artists of far less merit than himself had a place, year after
year, on the line at the Academy. Where he had picked up his phrases
it was of course impossible to guess, but he talked a good deal of the
dissipation of the grey matter of the brain, which resulted from his
artistic occupation.
He had one awful daub which he called “The Guardship Attacked,” in
which was depicted a vessel, broadside on to the spectator, wedged very
tightly into the sea and sky of an impossible blue, with little pills of
white smoke clinging to a porthole here and there. This work he told me
was his “chef de hover,” and he volunteered to furnish me with a copy of
it on cardboard for half a crown, and to deliver it at my lodgings for
his 'bus fare and a drink. I closed with that proposal and in a week's
time he brought the work to me. My chum's painting tools and easels were
scattered about the room in which I received him, and a dozen or so of
sketches in various stages of progress were propped up on the buffet and
the mantelpiece. He surveyed these with an ineffable sniff and said:
“Oh! I perceive you are a brother of the brush.” I took him outside to
give him his promised drink and found that he was accompanied by an
elderly, bearded, incredibly dirty man, who dealt in chick-weed, and
who shared his room with him in Gees Court, Oxford Street. This fearsome
person was absolutely alive with vermin and his unkempt grey beard was
as the wrinkled sea. The pavement artist ordered a drink for him at my
expense and when he had consumed it, he told me that I was a patron
of the arts and wanted to embrace me. I held him off by the aid of
an umbrella, and his companion told me that he had been a beneficed
clergyman of the Church of England, and a companion for dukes and
princes. However that might have been, the wretch had certainly the
unmistakable _no_ accent of a gentleman and spoke with a certain beery
eloquence which reminded one of poor Tom Robertson's Eccles.
My acquaintance with these gentlemen led me to a somewhat familiar
knowledge of Gee's Court I have not been near the place now for more
than thirty years and, for aught I know to the contrary, it may long
since have been wiped out of existence. But when I knew it it was an
awful place, the haunt of thieves and prostitutes, the vilest offsprings
of the streets of London. What with the aid of the Scripture-readers,
the various nursing and charitable sisterhoods, and the young medical
accoucheurs in their fourth year, with whom I scraped acquaintance, I
got to be quite well known in Gee's Court and could go about in safety.
But one evening as I was entering the low-browed slimy archway by which
it was approached from Oxford Street, a young policeman stopped me
and asked me if I knew where I was going. I told him that I was quite
intimate with the place and quite safe there. “Well, sir,” he answered,
“you know your own business best, but I wouldn't go along there for a
fiver.” My investigations had by this time brought me acquainted as
I have said already with all manner of queer people. Amongst others I
recall an omnibus driver who told me that he was the rightful heir to a
big estate by Guilford. At my invitation he told his story, and he began
it with this astounding proclamation: “It's like this, sir,” he began,
“my grandfather died childless,” and when I failed to disguise my
amusement he explained. “He was not really my grandfather but he was my
father's uncle and we always called him grandfather.” Then he went into
a long and tangled statement of which I could neither make head nor
tail, but the fact remained clear that in his own opinion he ought to
have been a millionaire or thereabouts, and by rights able to pass his
time in smoking cigars and drinking champagne wine, which he appeared to
regard as the summit of human felicity.
The contract I had made with Edmund Yates was for a series of thirteen
articles, and when it was fulfilled, there was no more immediate work
for me to do and another little period of stress set in. But in the
meantime I had written a little handful of short stories, and one
of these, entitled _An old Meerschaum_, I sent in to Messrs Chatto
& Windus. It owed its immediate acceptance to an accident Mr George
Augustus Sala had agreed with that firm to supply a two-part story
entitled _Dr. Cupid_. For some reason or another the second part of this
story was never forthcoming, and my copy arriving in the nick of time
was used to stop the gap. It brought me a regular commission, and month
by month thereafter, for quite a considerable time, I contributed a
short story to the _Belgravia_ Magazine. Very early in the history of
this connection a curious accident happened. I was looking forward to a
cheque for seventeen guineas and it came to me as a surprise when, from
paymasters so scrupulously punctual, no cheque arrived at the date fixed
for its delivery. I could afford to wait for a day or two and I waited,
but by and by things became pressing. My landlord, who was a sorter in
the Post Office and not particularly well paid, grew exigent The supply
in the cupboard became scanty and yet scantier. I found my way to “my
uncle's” once more, and week after week went by until I was once more
face to face with that grim phantom of actual want which I had already
once encountered. Partly from pride and partly from fear of disturbing
a valuable arrangement, I refrained from any approach to my publishers,
but at last when I had decided upon it as an unavoidable necessity, a
slatternly little maid came in with a dirty mildewed envelope between
finger and thumb and said she thought that it was addressed to me. I
pounced upon it and there, all soaked and bedraggled but still quite
legible, I found the cheque, which had been sent to me nearly a month
before, and it had been by some accident dropped into the area where it
had lain unregarded all this time. There was a feast that night, but the
truth is that life was one constant vicissitude, an unfailing series of
ups and downs, of jolly happy-go-lucky rejoicings with comrades who were
equally careless with myself, and of alternating spells of hardship.
“Literature,” said Sir Walter, “is an excellent walking stick but a very
bad crutch,” and so in truth I have found it all my days.
As one is drawn into late middle-age there are few things more affecting
and in a measure more surprising than the recollection of the ardent
hero-worship of one's youth. Whether, if my dear old chief were back
again and I could survey him in the light of a riper experience than
I had during his lifetime, I should still be able to offer him such an
undivided fealty as I paid him then, I cannot guess; but all the other
gods of youth and early manhood, with one exception only, have
fallen somewhat into the sere and yellow leaf. For some six or eight
enthusiastic years, I was saturated with Carlyle; I thought Carlyle
and talked and wrote in unconscious Carlylese, and one day when in the
library at the British Museum I got an actual bodily sight of my deity,
I was translated into a heaven of adoration which is really, at this
time of day, pathetic to remember. I knew him from his portraits at
a glance and I was assured of his identity, if any assurance had been
necessary, by the profound and flattering deference which was paid to
him by the officials and by the unanimity with which the students in the
big circular hall found it necessary to pass the place at which he had
taken his seat. He was not there more than a quarter of an hour, and
during that time he behaved quite like an ordinary mortal except when
he once produced a dark red handkerchief of enormous size and broke the
silence of the place by a nasal blast which sounded like a trumpet call
to arms. When he arose to go I arose also and followed him; I could no
more have helped it than if he had been a magnet and I a bit of iron
filing. He walked to Oxford Street and took a seat in a 'bus bound for
Chelsea. I followed and sat opposite, hardly daring to lift my eyes to
him until I found that he was wholly absorbed in the notes he had taken.
When he alighted I followed him all the way to Cheyne Walk and watched
until the door closed behind him.
A week later Dawson was lecturing at the Birkbeck Institute and I went
to hear him and afterwards drove with him to the Victoria Hotel at
Euston where he was staying for the night. I told him of the tremendous
adventure just recounted and he asked me if I would like to meet
Carlyle. In the explosive mood which came natural to seven and twenty,
I answered that I would go on my hands and knees from there to Chelsea
only to hear him speak and to be able to boast that I had shaken him by
the hand. “No need for that,” said Dawson, “I'll take you to him one of
these days, when I have an hour or two to spare in town,” and then he
began to tell me that he had often thought of leaving behind him some
intimate record of his association with the great man whose most popular
and familiar translator he himself had been to the people of England.
“But,” he acknowledged, “I have always been too busy or too idle and
I begin to fear that that duty will never be performed. I'll tell you
what,” he added suddenly, “I'll hand the whole thing over to you if
you care to have it. I make a point of going now and then down to
Rickmansworth, where I had my first cure of souls and where there are
still a few of my old friends left. We'll go down there together and
have a quiet day.” Dawson began straightway to open, as it were, a bag
of samples. He told me three stories of Carlyle; they were all I ever
had from him, for that was the last occasion on which we met. I learned
that when Carlyle, who was then engaged in the preparation of those
seven tremendous volumes of _The Life of Frederick the Great_, made an
excursion into Germany for the purpose of getting a view of his hero's
battlefields, Dawson was one of his travelling companions--the other was
a German gentleman who, according to my old chiefs account, did a
great deal of what he Called the underground work on which Carlyle's
monumental edifice was reared. The trio, if I remember rightly, rested
at Munich and the historian expressed a wish to find some quiet place
in which he could assort his notes and at the same time enjoy a day or
two's repose. Dawson and his companion set themselves to work and found
a charming little farmhouse within easy distance of the city. “And
between ourselves,” said he, “we weren't sorry to be left for a little
while to our own devices; we were like a pair of schoolboys broken
loose. We went to the theatre and afterwards dropped in to listen to the
music in the Beer Garden and altogether we made rather a late night of
it. We were breakfasting in the open air at our hotel the next morning
about eleven o'clock when suddenly I spied Carlyle with his coat
tails flying and his old felt hat rammed on angrily anyhow. He was
gesticulating wildly with his walking-stick and began to talk whilst he
was twenty yards away. 'Ca' ye that a quiet place?' he shouted, 'ca' ye
that a quiet place? At three o'clock they damned cocks began to crow,
and a hour later they damned oxen began to low and every dog was barking
for a mile around; and that,' he said, casting both hands to heaven as
if he were appealing for a judgment on some heart-breaking iniquity,
'and that's your notion of a quiet place!' The culprits looked guiltily
at each other, but for the life of them they could not refrain from
smiling; the smile became a laugh in spite of effort, and Carlyle, after
one withering glance at the pair of them and one frenzied exclamation of
'Ma Goad!' dropped suddenly into a chair and laughed uproariously.”
When Emerson was in England, Carlyle and Dawson were his companions on
his visit to Salisbury Plain. They went to Stonehenge together and on
that day Carlyle was in one of his saddest and most pessimistic moods.
Life was not worth living--the whole world was rotten and wrong--and
he wondered, like the old monk in Longfellow's _Golden Legend_, why God
didn't lose his patience with it wholly and shatter it like glass. Men
were fools and liars, and impostors and quackery reigned supreme. “And
in a world like this, George,” he was concluding with a tragic emphasis,
“I see nothing for it, for two honest men like you and me, but just to
sit down on yon heap of road metal and have a quiet smoke together.”
I wish I could tell the third story with half the gusto with which
Dawson related it. At the time of that visit to Germany of which I have
already spoken, there was no Prussian Empire. Bismarck may, even then,
have dreamed of it, but what is now a united Germany was split into
an infinite number of little principalities. In one of these, a Serene
Transparency--or some personage of that order--held rule over a handful
of subjects. It happened that he was a profound worshipper of Carlyle,
regarding him as the greatest humorist, philosopher and historian of his
age. He wrote to Carlyle a letter full of German enthusiasms, begging
him to name an hour at which he could present himself for the personal
delivery of his homage. “But,” said Carlyle, “we are in the man's
territory and it is only in the fitness of things that we should pay our
respects to him.” Accordingly the two set out together and reaching the
palace proposed to send in their names. They were encountered by
some kind of glorified flunkey, an official of the toy court of the
principality--who assured Carlyle that it was impossible to present him
to the Serene Transparency in the costume he was then wearing. Carlyle
wanted sardonically to know what was the matter with the costume, and
the major-domo instanced his hat. Carlyle tore the hat savagely from
his head and punched it two or three times before he thundered: If His
Serene Transparency objected to the hat he might object; it was the only
hat the philosopher owned and he had no immediate intention to provide
himself with another! And whilst he was brandishing the hat and raging
at the astonished major-domo, who should appear on the scene but His
Serene Transparency, who rushed forward and, falling on his knees,
embraced the legs of the amazed philosopher. Dawson declared the whole
scene to have been beyond pen and pencil. Carlyle's face was a wonder
for wrath and astonishment, but that of the court official was beyond
speaking for amazement. Who or what he supposed the visitor to be was
altogether beyond conjecture!
I was still waiting for that promised invitation to Rickmansworth when
Dawson died. He had suffered for some years, though he did not know it,
from an aneurism of the aorta, and the bursting of the aneurism into the
larynx was the cause of death. He used to say that he should pray to be
taken suddenly and to be spared the misery of a prolonged deathbed. He
had his wish, for it was all over in a few minutes and was absolutely
painless. I was staying with a chum of mine in his chambers in Dane's
Inn--long since gone the way of all stone, bricks and mortar. My host
came in with a newspaper and laid it on the table before me with his
finger on a cross-headed paragraph, “Death of George Dawson, M.A.”
Nothing in all my experience had ever hit me so before, and whatever
may be held in reserve for me, nothing can ever so profoundly affect me
again. The whole world went dark and empty--George Dawson dead! He had
been my man of men, for years my dearest friend and helper, my Moses in
the spiritual wilderness through which it is the doom of every young and
ardent soul to travel, and with his going, everything seemed blank and
waste.
If you search all the professions round, you will not find one in
which men display such an extraordinary divergence of intellect and
acquirement as you will if you turn to journalism. There are men
employed in that craft who are better qualified for Cabinet rank than
half the men who ever hold it, and there are, or used to be in my time,
hundreds of intelligences as purely mechanical as if they had been born
to be hodmen. With one of the latter species I was officially associated
for a year. He is now dead and no truth can hurt his feelings any more,
but I think he was about as ignorant and self-satisfied an ass as I can
remember to have encountered anywhere. There was one thing to be said
for him: he had mastered the intricacies of Pitman's shorthand system
and wrote it almost to perfection. You might rely upon him to get
down in his note-book every word he heard, or thought he heard, but
in transcription he sometimes achieved a most extraordinary and
unlooked-for effect, as for example: A meeting of the Licensed
Victuallers' Association was held in the lower grounds at Aston, and
Mr Newdigate--the member for North Warwickshire--presided over it, and
during the annual address--what else the right honourable gentleman had
to say I have long since forgotten--he wound up by quoting a verse from
Lord Tennyson's “Lady Clara Vere de Vere “:--
“Howe'er it be it seems to me
Tis only noble to be good.
Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood.”
This the shorthand genius rendered in the manner following:--“The right
honourable gentleman, who resumed his seat amidst loud and prolonged
cheers, concluded by remarking that however it might represent itself
to others it appeared to him that the only true nobility consisted in
goodness, that kind hearts were better than coronets, and that simple
faith was more to be esteemed than Norman blood.” Somehow this passed
the printer's reader and appeared in all the glory of type the following
morning. It fell to my lot to take the criminal to task, but he disarmed
me by a mere turn of the hand. “I don't call it fair,” he said, in
his soft, insinuating Rother-ham accent, “to expect a man to have all
English literature at his fingers' ends for five and thirty bob a week,
and beside that, if you look at Mr Pitman's preface to his last edition”
(he produced the book from his coat pocket), “you'll find it set down as
an instruction to all shorthand writers that it's a reporter's duty to
make good speeches for bad speakers. I have got down what he said right
enough, but I thought I'd touch him up a bit!”
On another occasion the improver of Tennyson came across from the Town
Hall to the office with the final “turn” of an address which had just
been delivered by Mr Bright to his constituents. “I'm in a bit of a
difficulty,” he explained to me breathlessly, “there's old Bright been
havering about in his customary manner and he has been talking about
Hercules and some kind of stables. I got a 'j' and an 'n' down on my
notes, but I forgot to vocalise the word and I can't remember it.” I
suggested Augean. “That's it,” he said joyfully, “but, my word! what a
memory you've got to be sure!”
One almost incredible example of mental agility he gave me. He came to
me one day beaming with an unusual complacency, and announced that he
had made a discovery. He had an absolutely hairless, shining dome
of head, and he confided to me the fact that the boys in Rotherham
seventeen years ago had nicknamed him “bladder o' lard.” “I could never
make out what they meant by it,” he said, “until this morning I was
standing in front of my looking-glass shaving, and it came to me at a
run--they gave me that nickname because I'm bald!”