OVERTIME
To play is for a man to do what he pleases or to do
nothing――to go about soothing his particular fancies
CHARLES LAMB: “Letter to Bernard Barton.”
That idea of soothing your particular fancy gives to me the very
clearest image of play and playtime. And most men’s fancies take a
deal of soothing, since man will fancy himself and his capabilities to
be x, when his nearest and dearest could tell him, if they were not
his nearest and dearest, that they are not even y, but something far
nearer to _a b c_.
And as long as a man does not fancy himself at his real work, but only
in playtime, what does it matter? For in a sane man it seems a natural
attribute that he should dislike work he is peculiarly fitted for, and
should hanker after jobs that he is naturally ill-equipped to perform.
I always looked forward to what I called “overtime,” when I could get
away from briefs and law books, and put in a few solid hours spoiling
beautiful hand-made paper with inharmonious water-colours, or writing
plays and stories that nobody wanted to publish. Why I should have
called it “overtime” I do not know, for real overtime is paid at least
at the rate of “time and a quarter,” but my overtime generally cost me
money. Perhaps the idea I have in calling it “overtime” is that these
tasks could only be done after the day’s work was over, which is the
only attribute my “overtime” had in common with the overtime of the
working man.
From my earliest days――when to the dread and horror of my family I
bought a fiddle and tried to learn to play it――I have experienced a
sane and healthy desire to spend my working hours on jobs I know I can
never do, rather than in exercising capacities which have always been
with me. I call it a sane and healthy tendency, because I find it to
exist in nearly everyone who feels physically and mentally well.
I once knew a plus 2 golfer who spent all his overtime away from the
links in trying to grow tomatoes out of doors. Each season the
climate――which he spoke of as a horticultural bogey――was at least 7 up
on him before the first frost came and stopped the round. But he had
many merry hours in his garden, and laughed gaily when he topped a
budding plant with a careless approach with a hoe or was badly
bunkered by a patent manure. What really bored him was the monotony of
golf with eighteen perfect drives every round he played. It was only
on those rare occasions when he pulled or sliced into the rough that I
have known him to smile and openly admit “that there was some fun in
the old game, after all.”
I early discovered the delights of “overtime” in my father’s library,
where I was supposed to do my home-work whilst I was at King’s College
School. There I read all the great English writers with a larger
enjoyment, because, like the Jew who ate the pork chop, I could feel
that I was “sinning at the same time.” I think that library and its
contents are entirely responsible for my taste in overtime.
Shakespeare, Fielding, Smollett, Dickens, Thackeray, Mrs. Opie, and
Aphra Behn. I remember the very format of each volume. I do not think
there was a single dramatist or novelist of any mark in the English
tongue that was unrepresented.
Perhaps my favourite book was Cumberland’s “British Theatre,” with its
forty-eight volumes. The stage-directions of the bloodiest of the
melodramas were my favourite reading. Their only rival was the brief
in some sporting case which lay on the table at which I worked. I
would often slip the papers out of their red tape and peruse them far
more diligently than I did in after days, when I was paid for doing
so. How carefully I read the solicitor’s story of the case. In later
years I found that no self-respecting advocate ever studied these
lengthy pages, well understanding that under an absurd legal system
they are put there merely for the taxing master to appraise and allow
in the form of costs.
I remember Nash being amusingly scored off by a well-known solicitor,
who rather plumed himself on his frugal literary gifts, and took much
pains in the composition of the story of a case. He complained to Nash
that he never read these narratives, and Nash had assured him, out of
polite respect to his hobby, that he always made a point of studying
them and greatly admired them. Soon afterwards Nash was instructed by
the solicitor to defend a client in a criminal case at the assizes,
and a fat brief, marked “30 guas” and beginning with a very lengthy
narrative, was delivered to counsel. How far Nash read any of it I do
not know, but he duly acquitted the prisoner. To Nash’s annoyance and
surprise――for the solicitor was a most solvent and respectable
person――the fees were not paid. Nash’s clerk made several efforts to
solve the mystery, and was told that they had been paid to Mr. Nash at
the assizes, but Nash knew that this was not so, and was very
indignant with the solicitor about it. A month or two afterwards Nash
met the solicitor in Cross Street, and going up to him expressed his
views of the solicitor’s conduct very roundly.
“But I paid you at the assizes, Mr. Nash.”
“Nothing of the sort, sir, and you know it.”
“Did you read my story of the case, Mr. Nash?” asked the solicitor.
“Of course, I did. I always read every word of my briefs,” said the
unblushing Nash.
“H’m, that’s very curious. I can’t understand it,” said the solicitor,
with his head on one side, and his left eye half-closed. “I can’t
understand it at all, because on page three of that statement of the
case I pinned a cheque for your fees, and――hadn’t you better go back
to chambers, Mr. Nash, and read that brief again?”
But when I was a lad the introduction to the brief was my first study.
If it looked dull and boresome I dropped the papers speedily. How
often in after life I wished I could deal with briefs in similar
fashion. And as no child will ever read these pages I may confess that
from the short years of my schooling the only things that remain with
me are elegant extracts of forbidden reading; forbidden not by my
father, I should say in fairness to both of us, for he knew all about
it and winked, but by my pastors and masters.
I think it is Walt Whitman who expresses the thought that he would
like to get away from mankind and “turn and live among the animals,
they are so placid and self-contained.” And I have the same kind of
feeling about school-masters. The prosperous incompetence of the
school-master is to me one of the great mysteries of life. When I
lived among school-masters a cowardly idolatry, the offspring of
tyranny and coercion, prevented me using opportunities to make careful
observation of their mental and moral constitution. I had a vague
knowledge that they were hopelessly wrong, but I had not the energy
and ability to analyse the wherefore of it. Physically they were of
varying size and beauty, but mentally they were absolutely and
uniformly all alike. It never occurred to my young mind that this was
a natural result of pouring youthful educational hot stuff into an
old-fashioned mould and turning it out when it had grown cold.
There were, of course, many charming persons among them. What an
excellent fellow was E――――. I have long forgiven him, but his offence
was rank and smells to heaven. He it was who persuaded me for a whole
term to spend my overtime on school books. I have some prizes on my
shelves now, the result of my foolish complaisance. I have never
looked inside them, but the bindings are handsome, and they serve as a
_memento mori_ of wasted hours that can never be replaced. The
speculation was commercially sound, no doubt, but whilst I was doing
it my conscience smote me. The next term I dropped it, and my good
friend, with that rare prophetic insight that enables the
school-master to foresee the unbetiding, filed my deficiency account
in words that still have a haunting sound of failure: “has some
ability, but no staying power.”
It does not need an alphabet of scholastic degrees to enable a man to
back a double event and find both of them to be losers. And yet old
E――――’s epigram, that looked at the time so like real stable
information, was but a huckster’s tip after all. Most of my relatives
and all my real friends, those who know best, have cheerily shaken
their heads at the word ability――did so, I remember, at the time――and
have admitted that he was wrong there, but even E―――― himself would
not now, I think, gainsay the fact that I have stayed the course. And
yet my innate reverence for the school-master is such that I have an
uneasy feeling that I ought to have so shaped my life that the words
of the school-master might be fulfilled, and that in not having done
so I am in danger of judgment.
The early days of the Bar are all overtime. And the first big overtime
job that I undertook, and perhaps the pleasantest I ever carried
through, was the preparation of a version of “Dorothy Osborne’s
Letters,” the first edition of which I finished in my early days at
Manchester, and published in 1888. I remember my joy when Mr. Comyns
Carr, who then edited the _English Illustrated Magazine_, accepted my
first essay on Dorothy Osborne. How I still reverence his critical
acumen. The joys of winning a legal scholarship, or having that first
brief at quarter sessions delivered to you by a real solicitor’s
clerk, have none of that _tremens_ delirium about them that you attain
when your literary essay is accepted in a courteous autograph from a
master in letters. The manuscript of “Dorothy Osborne’s Letters,” like
all great works, was refused by many of the leading publishers, and
when it was published the book was an immediate success. It has been
pirated in many countries, and will, I think, remain in the English
library, not on account of any work of mine, but because of the
peculiar charm of Mistress Dorothy’s style in letter-writing. It was a
satisfactory bit of “overtime.”
My next book was a life of Macklin, the actor, written for a series
edited by William Archer. Mr. Lowe wrote a life of Betterton. Mr.
Archer himself wrote Macready, and then came my “Life of Macklin.” For
some reason or other that ended the series. It was not half a bad
book, and a friend of mine in Dublin says my chapter on the Irish
stage has amused and entertained him for many pleasant hours in
tracing out and confuting by authority the errors and inaccuracies it
contains――but, then, he admits that no other Saxon had ever dared to
try and write such a chapter.
And I suppose it is only right to enter on these time-sheets my
journalistic work as overtime. I know nothing so exhilarating as
journalism. If I was really to take to writing as a business, I should
hire an upper chamber in some building which was gently rocked from
below by a steady throbbing engine, and arrange for the smell of its
oil, coupled with the aroma of printer’s ink, to pervade the
atmosphere, then having hired a whistling and insistent boy, with a
raucous voice, to put his head in and shout “copy” at me every quarter
of an hour, I should sit down to work, hopefully assured of a glorious
“spate of style.” For many years I wrote dramatic criticism and
reviewed books, and wrote “shorts” and occasionally full-dress leaders
for the _Manchester Guardian_. I do not think I had any very
particular reputation in Cross Street, except for punctuality and
dispatch. It is not every journalist who has even these humble
attributes, but they were evidently well remembered of me.
I mind meeting C. P. Scott one autumn morning some three years after I
had been judge, as I was walking down to my work――along the fragrant
groves of Rusholme. He seemed somewhat disconsolate and told me his
trouble. He had an advance copy of “Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s
Letters,” and through illness there was no one in the office free to
review it. Two columns about were wanted before going to press. “I
wish, Parry,” he said, with half a sigh, “that you were available.”
Of course I was available. The book, with its two volumes of over
eight hundred pages, came down to the Court. I started it in the
luncheon hour. I got at it again after the Court rose at about 4
o’clock, and before 11 at night I entered the office and was received
with enthusiasm by a grateful sub-editor thirsting for copy. I
compared my work the next day with that of some of the London
champions, the plus 4 men at the game. I had scooped out nearly all
the tit-bits, and I had done more. I had discovered that Mrs.
Browning’s baby was a good half-column, and the other fellows had
missed that delightful child altogether. Moreover, I had not only
written my review, but I had copied out all my extracts, for I never
could bear the thought of mutilating a book, and so the volumes remain
with me as a pleasant memory of a happy day’s overtime. For when I had
had some supper I had missed the last tram, and dreaming that I was
still in the days of my youth and could not afford a hansom, I had a
joyful walk home in the moonlight.
And long before that, whilst I was at the Bar, Hulton, the elder, came
into my chambers and asked me to write some articles for the _Sunday
Chronicle_. For some reason or other a new hand was suddenly wanted.
The articles had to be a column and a turn-over. Any subject might be
written upon as long as the writing was tense, vivid and entertaining
and the matter was of popular interest. The manuscript had to be ready
by Friday. I doubted my capacity for the task, but Hulton told me that
he had been assured by that kind-hearted doyen of the craft, Spencer
of the _Guardian_, that I was all right. I bowed to his verdict, for
to me Spencer’s was the last word about journalistic matters.
I shall never forget that week. Nothing happened. Day succeeded day in
stagnant succession, no one of importance said or did anything. There
was not a crime or a law-suit, or even a political speech in which one
could pretend an interest. On the Thursday morning I rose early and
rushed at the newspapers. The same dismal outlook of barren
nothingness. I passed the canal and looked at its waters lovingly. Was
I to disgrace myself by going back on the verdict of Spencer? It
seemed impossible that I could do that and live.
About midday, whilst sitting in chambers with a blank sheet of paper
before me, symbolic of the mind within, my clerk brought in some
papers, and in a diffident off-hand manner said casually, “I suppose
you’ve heard the news!”
“News,” I cried testily, “there is none.”
He turned on his heel.
“What is it, then?” I called after him.
“Only Mr. Parnell’s dead!”
I had a real reverence for Parnell, but to undertakers and journalists
death is indeed the reaper, and the poor gleaners cannot be blamed
that they are thankful when the season brings them their only harvest.
In truth I never wrote with greater sense of responsibility nor with a
more eager desire that every word and sound should toll the message of
his life into the hearts of my readers. Heaven knows how far I
succeeded. It was enough for me that Spencer nodded approval. And to
the quiet homage for the statesman that most of us have to-day there
comes into my heart a thrill of grateful emotion whenever I hear the
name of Parnell.
I wrote those _Sunday Chronicle_ articles for some time, but it was a
worrying task, and my work at the Bar began to creep into the
overtime, and ultimately, like Aaron’s rod, swallowed up all other
pursuits. But I look back to the task with pleasure, because it
enabled me to write an article to the glory of Charles Hopwood and his
policy, and I still possess a faded letter, full of hope for the
future and thanks for the help that had been given to the cause he had
so much at heart. Of course, I had known Hopwood as a leader on
circuit for some years, but after the _Chronicle_ article he began to
talk to me about his various views and plans of reform in a way that
was deeply interesting.
And to go back to my earliest recollection of Hopwood I must go back
to when I first joined the circuit, and recount an early journey to
Lancaster Assizes with Falkner Blair. He had been retained to defend a
wretched man who, in a fit of despair, had taken the lives of his
three children. It was a very sad case, and the only line of defence
was insanity. When the train stopped at Wigan a gentleman got into our
carriage for a smoke. He got into conversation with Blair, and hearing
of the murder case expressed his desire to attend the trial. He turned
out to be the Reverend E. Burnaby, a brother of the celebrated Captain
Burnaby, hero of the “Ride to Khiva,” and we invited him to join us at
Bar mess. He was on his way to the Lake District, but his interest in
trials made him gladly accept our invitation, and we appointed him a
sort of honorary chaplain to the mess during the three or four days he
was with us.
That chance meeting saved the life of Blair’s client. Blair made an
eloquent speech in defence of the murderer, but the medical evidence
was conflicting, and Mr. Justice Cave did not sum up for a verdict of
insanity. He left the matter to the mercies of the jury, who could not
see far beyond the horrible fact and circumstances, and without long
consideration brought in a verdict of guilty. Burnaby was strongly
convinced that the man was insane, and expressed his intention of
moving for a reprieve. The means of the man’s friends had been
exhausted in preparing the defence, and had it not been for Burnaby’s
energy nothing would have been done. Burnaby started a local petition,
and later on, followed the circuit to Manchester, where he interviewed
Cave, and there he met Hopwood. Hopwood made a most careful inquiry
into the facts of the case, and having satisfied himself that it was a
case for the interference of the Home Office, assisted Burnaby with
his counsel. Under his direction the matter was carried to a
successful issue. A further examination of the prisoner was made, and
he was pronounced to be insane, and sent to Broadmoor.
This was my first experience of Hopwood, and as I grew to know him
better I came to the conclusion that not only was he a very
kind-hearted and merciful man, but he was also one of the wisest and
most sensible of judges in a criminal court that I ever appeared
before. People were very apt in those days to look upon him as a
visionary and enthusiast, but the fact is the administrators of the
criminal law in all its harshness were the real visionaries, for they
kept their eyes straining after a set of affairs fast passing away
instead of keeping a brave, healthy outlook on the actual facts before
them.
Nowadays, with our Criminal Court of Appeal and our humaner rendering
of the criminal code, it is difficult to understand what horrible
things were done twenty-five years ago. But by no means let us believe
that the judges who did these things were themselves cruel and harsh.
It is so difficult when you have grown up with a system to see that
there is anything fundamentally wrong in it. It seems so dangerous to
reform or to alter existing laws that have apparently worked so well
for years. I do not think the judges who sentenced young men and women
to be hanged for theft, nor the later judges who transported hundreds
of small offenders to the Antipodes, were cruel men. Certainly I know
that some of those judges who were harshest in their sentences in the
earlier eighties were kind-hearted gentlemen in action and sentiment.
They believed in the system. They thought it was a good and just
system. It was Charles Hopwood, with his deeper insight, who showed
them they were wrong.
When Hopwood became Recorder of Liverpool he was able for the first
time to put his principles into execution. The kind of thing that had
been going on all over Lancashire was instanced in one of his charges
to the grand jury after he had been a year or two in office. “A
woman,” he said, “pleaded guilty before me of stealing some articles
of little value. I looked at the record of her history. She had just
come out after three several sentences of penal servitude a poor,
broken-down, miserable being. Her first severe sentence anterior to
the above was one year’s imprisonment for stealing a pound or two of
butter. Her first seven years’ sentence was for stealing some trifling
quantity of butter again. Her second seven years was for stealing some
butcher’s meat. From this she had been out a month and was again
committed and sentenced to another seven years for stealing a duck
from a poulterer’s shop. Twenty-two years for five or ten shillings’
worth of food. It calls to mind Hood’s passionate cry, ‘That bread
should be so dear, and flesh and blood so cheap.’ Every one of these
offences points to the pressure of extreme want. I gave her a slight
punishment and have never seen her since.”
And that is what happened in practice. It was found that very many of
these petty criminals pleaded guilty at Liverpool Sessions, received a
light sentence, and came out with a hope and intention, often
fulfilled, of leading honest lives. Others, of course, fell again and
again into bad ways, but those, he argued, were really persons who
wanted some form of asylum rather than a gaol, where their feeble will
power could be protected from the temptations of the world. These long
terms of penal servitude for petty thefts were survivals of the old
criminal code. In the middle ages a thief was hard to catch, and
probably when he was caught the best use to put him to was to hang
him. Nowadays the thief is comparatively easy to catch, and therefore
the hanging of him when caught ceases to be a sensible action. One of
Hopwood’s arguments was that at his sessions prisoners pleaded guilty
and gave no trouble to the prosecutor, whereas in the days of harsh
sentences prisoners pleaded not guilty and juries hesitated to
convict. Another of Hopwood’s reasons for weighing carefully the
length of a sentence was――as he often reminded us――that every year,
every month, nay, every day that is added to a prisoner’s sentence is
too often a year or a month or a day added to the misery of guiltless
women and children, whose lives and happiness depend on the return of
the wretched men whose liberty is forfeit.
I have often heard Hopwood discuss these matters, and always with
profit to myself. The mere fact that such long sentences could be
defended was, to him, evidence that the passing and witnessing of such
sentences led to a moral deterioration――a hardening of the moral
nature of both judges and spectators. I think this is true. We have
recognised the truth of it in relation to public executions, and there
is no doubt that to be a part of the working machine of the criminal
law blunts the edge of compassion. Further, one effect of long
sentences on prisoners was to make them commit worse crimes and to
resist capture by violence. That is an aspect of criminal policy that
is apt to be overlooked by those who clamour for harsher and stronger
measures against evil-doers.
One of Hopwood’s best attributes was that calm, reasoning detachment
of mind which enabled him to understand the point of view of the
poorer classes on our administration of justice. What the bottom dog
sees when he puts his nose over the dock and blinks at the learned
Recorder and his brother magistrates of the city, is a very different
picture of Justice from that which we behold so complacently from our
side of the railing. To him it seems a mere mockery to behold Justice,
well fed and prosperous, blind to the many frauds and much misconduct
of its own class, pompously and Pharisaically denouncing the less
guilty, the mere stealing of something to eat or something to clothe,
by sentences which should be reserved for real and atrocious crime.
Certainly, it makes one uneasy to remember how many successful and
fraudulent schemes have swept away the savings of the working classes
into respectable broadcloth pockets――even magisterial pockets――and the
law has found no remedy and no punishment. But the scandal is not a
new one, and is well sanctioned by precedent. Our forefathers rhymed
it, in their easy-going way:
You prosecute the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But leave the larger felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
Hopwood was a much-abused reformer, but he kept a stout heart, and
went his way remitting hundreds upon hundreds of years of imprisonment
in mercy to his fellow-creatures. There is no evidence that his
methods injured any class of the community. He preached the cause of
criminal appeal to deaf ears, but since he has gone we are all
converts to his view, and wonder how we could have hindered the reform
so long. What was it that began to awaken Lancashire folk to the
belief that Hopwood had not only a warm heart, but a clear head, and
was talking business sense? Sometimes I think it was the statement in
one of his later charges that in not inflicting long sentences he had
already saved the taxpayer £28,000. If there is one thing Lancashire
does understand it is figures.
Looking back on my recollections of the men on circuit, I think he was
undoubtedly the greatest man I knew. I say great, inasmuch as he
fulfils Longfellow’s words, for his life indeed reminds us of the
greater possibilities of our own humbler lives. Even now that he has
departed his footsteps re-echo along the hopeless corridors of the
gaol as of one who brought glad tidings to the oppressed. When the
social history of the nineteenth century comes to be written the man
who, by his fearless example and persevering energy, proved to society
that the existing treatment of the smaller criminal was unnecessarily
cruel will have a higher place than many more ambitious reformers.
And in spite of his tenacity and the outspokenness of his unpopular
opinions we all loved him on circuit, though not all of us were his
disciples, and I shall never forget the cheers of laughter and delight
that went up when an Irish colleague thus concluded an after-dinner
peroration in his honour: “Hopwood has indade taught us what a
beautiful thing it is to temper mercy with justice.”
After all, like many a “bull,” it really expresses very clearly what
Hopwood was doing.
And though I have never more than half believed the extravagant claims
of the almost mesmeric power of the Press over the common horde of us,
yet as a mere “man in the street”――to use a phrase that Greville
brought from Newmarket――I have seen enough of the inner chambers of
journalism to know that if a journalist may not do much to educate the
public he can do something towards the education of himself. The
discussions you enter into with men of all parties, the books you have
to read, and the plays you cannot stay away from, ought to cultivate
in you a better sense of charity. If it does not, then the fault is in
the seedling and not in the soil.
I have never been under any delusion about the _scribendi cacoethes_.
It is not a pleasant disease, but it has comparatively good points
about it. When the fit is upon you, you do not worry your family and
your neighbour with the details of it, as you do when you have an
attack of the spleen, or the rheumatism, or the slice, or the pull, or
whatever recent manifestations of neuritis you may be suffering from.
You only wish, like any other well-mannered sick mammal, to be left
quietly and undoubtedly alone till the fever leaves you. I know I have
wasted a lot of my spare time in writing; it soothes my particular
fancies, it is the form of indolent amusement that I enjoy.
I daresay if I had tackled the higher things of life, and given the
industry of my overtime to more serious pursuits, I could have reduced
my golf handicap below the mediocre twelve at which it stands, or lost
more money on horses than I have on books. But this I can say with
honesty, that when I write _finis_ on the last page, and my time is
over, the best of it has been the “overtime.”