CHAPTER II_Bohemian Days in Fleet Street

DRIFTING INTO IT

NOWADAYS, I understand, there are schools to educate young gentlemen for

the Press. Indeed, in my own time a school of journalism was founded by

a man who had taken to the calling quite late in life. But I have never

heard that the seminary in question turned out any pressman of eminence

or even of uncommon aptitude. The founder of the singular academy was a

Mr. David Anderson, about whom and about whose school I may have

something to say in another chapter.

A man of very different calibre, a profound literary scholar, the most

cultured critic of his time, was, at a more recent period, imbued with

Anderson’s idea that a special training was desirable in the case of

candidates for a vacancy on a newspaper staff. He was, indeed, prepared

to carry the notion much farther than the system of perfunctory

instruction instituted by the founder of the “school,” who was more or

less a blind leader of the blind. The second reformer to whom I allude

contemplated the establishment of a Chair of Journalism at the University

of Birmingham. Indeed, he had obtained considerable support for his

enterprise, and had it not been for his lamented death, I believe, the

scheme would have taken shape. I had several opportunities of discussing

the proposal with Professor Churton Collins—for it is of that

accomplished critic and enthusiastic educationist I am speaking—and,

although it was difficult to withstand arguments conveyed in the

Professor’s felicitous language, and uttered in his melodious and

persuasive tones, I was never quite convinced of the utility of the

scheme. From whence are the Professors to be drawn? Not from the ranks

of journalism, surely. Because the men who have risen to such an

eminence in journalism as would qualify them for the position would be

very unlikely to abandon their fat editorships for the poor emoluments of

such a Chair.

Churton Collins was a man with a passion for accuracy. His whole

teaching was a protest against the slipshod style in literature. His

favourite epithet was “charlatan,” which he hurled against all

incompetent persons professing to instruct the public. Moreover, though

in the earlier stages of his career he wrote for newspapers, he was never

what was known as “a newspaper man.” He was _on_ the Press, but not _of_

it. And I question if he had taken much notice of its later

developments. Had he observed the signs of the times as they are seen in

our daily broadsheets, he would have perhaps admitted that among the

qualifications which should be demanded in any occupant of a University

Chair of Journalism was a good working knowledge of the camera, and the

ability to instruct students in the most suitable subjects for

photographic reproduction.

Schools of journalism and professorships of Press lore are “all my eye

and Betty Martin.” The journalist, like the poet, is born, not made. A

University education can do him no harm. A large proportion of the men

of the seventies and eighties had had a distinguished University career.

Nor does the absence of a college education prejudice the aspiring

neophyte. Those men, indeed, who have made themselves a name in

journalism—such men, for instance, as George Sala and Archibald

Forbes—started without any of the equipment supplied by an Alma Mater.

Any training worth mentioning must be picked up on the Press itself. And

the main qualification is a natural aptitude. Thus, the

journalist—self-taught man, or public-school man, or University man—just

drifts into it.

Personally I have to admit that it was in my own case entirely a matter

of drifting. Unconsciously and gently impelled toward it by the motions

of a certain desire for facile and frequent expression in print, one

becomes eventually the subject of an invincible attraction. Those who

were responsible for the ordering of my early life took a large view of

their responsibilities. The same persons who had provided me with a

rattle and a cradle, in later years selected for me a profession. And

although I have never ceased to be a member of the learned profession

chosen for me, in the same way that I abandoned the rattle and the

perambulator, it has never afforded me either the amusement or the

support supplied by the toys or the equipages of childhood. I am

indebted to it, however, for some cherished friendships, and for

introductions to some valuable “openings” into that teeming journalistic

arena with which I was to become identified. Those set in authority over

me believed that I was “cut out” for a barrister. But when I, my

friends, was called to the Bar, I’d an appetite—well, for anything but

law. The law never appealed to me. Literature always did. Before I

went into chambers—and for some time after that—the only interest the

Temple possessed for me was that Goldsmith lay buried there, and that

there Warrington and Pendennis railed against the publishers, and wrote

for the _Pall Mall Gazette_, thus antedating by many years the actual

appearance of that journal. While reading for the Bar and keeping my

terms, I had few acquaintances in London beyond those I met at the

dinners in Hall, and Mr. MacDermott, with whom I “read.” The town seemed

deadly lonely at first. It takes some time before the new-comer realizes

that he is part of the crowd that jostles him, before the feeling of

isolation gives way to that of fellowship.

When I first came up, I lodged at the house of an old gentleman in Woburn

Place, Russell Square. He was a typical Londoner, and he followed a

calling of which, I should imagine, he must have been the very last

professor. He was a painter of hatchments. In those days the death of a

member of the aristocracy was indicated by the appearance on the

house-front of a canvas bearing a representation of the armorial bearings

of the deceased. This work of art was usually fixed between the windows

of the first-floor. These grim heraldic emblazonments were at one time

exhibited in considerable profusion in the streets and squares of the

West End. The custom seems to have “gone out.” So many swells now live

in flats, where the exhibition of such mural decoration might be

misunderstood and resented, that the grisly custom has grown into

desuetude. My landlord was the last of the hatchment painters. He was a

little man close upon seventy years of age. He was extremely

good-looking, had small side-whiskers and a tiny imperial, both

snow-white. The rest of his face was clean-chaven. His salient physical

peculiarity was a pink and white complexion which have been the despair

and envy of his aristocratic patrons. He was a brisk, cheery mortal

wonderfully quick in his movements. For the rest, he loved the London in

which he had been born, and from which he had never wandered much farther

than Hampton Court; he had a fund of information about the houses of

Mayfair and Bloomsbury; he was a determined playgoer; he had an

acquaintanceship with some actors and actresses, and was on particularly

friendly terms with Charles Mathews. Naturally, he was a wellspring of

gossip regarding the noble families with whom his melancholy art made him

acquainted.

His studio was in Great Ormond Street, and next door to the Working Men’s

College, where he had got to know the Rev. F. D. Maurice and the Rev.

Charles Kingsley. Of the latter broad-minded Broad Churchman he had

several stories. One only can I recall. Kingsley had felt called upon

to reprove a parishioner of his on a growing spirit of miserliness which

he was exhibiting. The fellow was well off, a widower, and living alone.

He was denying himself the necessaries of life, when his Rector thought

it time to remonstrate. But the old man was immune against reason, or,

rather, he had an objection to every argument urged by his spiritual

adviser. At last Kingsley took him on lower ground. The old fellow had

an only son. He was a sailor and a notoriously free-handed young man.

“This money,” urged the Rector, “which you are hoarding, and which you

might employ so usefully, will come at last to your boy, who will fling

it about with both hands.” “Ah, well,” observed the unrepentant niggard,

“if Jim has on’y half the pleasure a-spendin’ on it as I’ve had a-savin’

on it, I wholly envy ’im—that ’a do.” A congregation composed of rustics

of that type must have been a bit of a trial to a man of Kingsley’s

optimistic temperament. But, then, his reverence was also endowed with

the saving grace of humour.

I suppose the hatchment habit—which had persisted for so many

generations—had fallen into a rapid decline just about this period, for

my cheery little landlord had but lately taken to letting apartments.

The income from heraldic painting had ceased to prove sufficient for the

upkeep of a big house. The old gentleman’s housekeepers were a wife and

daughter, whose second-hand acquaintance with the heraldry of the great

had induced the belief that, if not actually “in Society,” they were very

much in touch with it. Their conversation was studded with allusions to

“Lady This” and “Lord That.” It was some time before I discovered that

their constant conversational appeals to “the Dook,” a personage with

whom, it might appear, they lived on terms of considerable intimacy, was

His Grace the Duke of Bedford. Their supposed friendship with that

nobleman rested solely on the circumstance that His Grace was the ground

landlord of the premises in which they lived. “I shall certainly speak

to the Dook about it,” or, “You must reelly write to His Grace, my dear,”

were tit-bits that were served up to me _ad nauseam_ when—as would

sometimes be the case—I was asked to join the ladies at five o’clock tea.

In his reminiscences of “the nobs,” as the Upper Ten were then called,

the hatchment painter himself betrayed no snobbishness whatever. He

related anecdotes of his noble employers, just as he would tell a “good

thing” about a divine, or an actor, or an artist.

And talking of artists, I may mention here that the only person of

distinction whose acquaintance I ever made through my host was Frost, the

accomplished follower of Etty as a painter of the nude. I had the mild,

man-in-the-street sort of admiration of Frost’s work, which I had seen on

the walls of the Royal Academy Exhibition, then held, not at Burlington

House, but in Trafalgar Square. And from his pictures I expected—such

are the perverse preconceptions of youth—to meet a young, tall,

flamboyant man with flowing locks and the airs of a Grand Seignior. We

were walking one morning—my host and I—down the main avenue of the

Regent’s Park. It was spring-time. The flower-beds were ablaze with

bulb plants. But few people were about at the moment. Presently we came

upon a small and sombre man feeding the sparrows, which followed him in

flocks, hovering about his head, and now and then lighting on his hand to

snatch a crumb. The small, sombre man was dressed in rusty broadcloth.

He wore a wig, had a most melancholy expression, and might have been put

down as a superannuated tax-collector, a solicitor run to seed, a

Dissenting preacher out of work; but not one man in a thousand would have

identified him as a painter of nude subjects, which had been severely

reprobated by the unco’ guid. Yet the amiable provider of food for the

sparrows was none other than the celebrated Mr. Frost. Frost was a

bachelor, and his house was kept for him by a couple of old maiden

sisters, who had little sympathy with the direction in art which their

brother’s genius had taken. But the sparrows in Regent’s Park altogether

approved of their eccentric benefactor. And in this particular form of

charity he was the forerunner of the amiable M. Pol (that is the

Frenchman’s name, I think) whom I have watched feeding the birds in the

gardens of the Tuileries. On this occasion Frost was not to be tempted

into any discussion on art. He was intent on arguing the question of

drains with my friend, and spoke on the sewer question with the dry

particularity of a sanitary engineer. Altogether a disappointing

experience of the painter of “Actea: the Nymph of the Shore,” a work

which had stimulated all my youthful enthusiasm.

The first movement in the drifting stage of my career was the result of

my presence at the first performance of “School” at the old Prince of

Wales Theatre in Tottenham Street. The hatchment painter and I had long

before agreed that we would be present on that memorable occasion. The

night came at last. We were early—or what in those days would have been

considered early—and obtained seats at the back of the pit. At that time

the suburbs still remained sane. There was no queue of demented women

posted outside pit and gallery doors at eight o’clock in the morning so

as to be in good time for a performance commencing at eight at night.

But the seating capacity of Miss Wilton’s theatre was limited, the

pittites being restricted to a very small area, and, having passed the

check-taker, we felt that we might consider ourselves lucky in having

gained admittance at all. Ah, to recall the sensations of that

playgoing! The sigh of relief as I settle myself in my seat! The

roseate air of pleasurable anticipation on the faces of those about me;

the empty rows of the booked stalls stretching from the front row of the

pit to the orchestra; the eager scanning of the features of the stalls as

they file in; the curious feeling of cheery elation, of high

expectation—these are sensations which grow very stale with use; they are

the prerogatives of youth. Enjoy them, my boys, while you are in your

heyday. They are moods for which the old and the _blasé_ would give a

ransom to experience once again.

Indirectly and ultimately this visit to the pit meant much to me.

Immediately it meant my first appearance in print in a London

publication; eventually it meant my first acquaintance with a dramatic

author. Ultimately, perhaps, it meant the determination to a calling

quite apart from that to which I had been devoted by my friends. My

chirpy companion, as he kept pointing out to me the various distinguished

stall-holders as they filed into their places, little dreamed—as, indeed,

how should he?—that he was conversing with a dramatic critic _in embryo_,

and that in the course of a few short years I, too, would have a stall

set apart for me in that select parterre.

With the production of “School” the Bancroft management and the Robertson

comedies reached high-water mark, and all the town was soon rushing to

the Royal Dustbin in its grimy and shabby little street off the Tottenham

Court Road. A return to the natural in comedy has always spelled

success. Farquhar’s was such a return. Goldsmith’s return to nature was

hailed by a community sick of stilted heroics and artificial sentiment.

Sheridan later on recalled the playgoer to the fact that to give a

humorous presentation of society as it is means the highest pleasure to

the patron and the highest profit to the playwright. At this present

time of writing a return to nature has a meaning very different indeed to

that which it bore at other periods. Nowadays the meaning of a return to

nature seems to be a return to obscenity. Natural is a term connoting

lubricity. And to this confusion in the minds of some modern dramatists

as to the true significance of words I attribute much of the irritation

caused by supervision and most of the agitation fomented with a view of

disestablishing the censorship. But in the old Tottenham Street days we

had not as yet accepted the quaint perversion of ideas at present offered

us by an anæmic, exotic, futile section of playwrights, whose goods are

exhibited at unlicensed matinées, because—luckily—the managers see “no

money” in them. The word “nature” was not understood in this foul

fashion by T. W. Robertson. The men and women of Robertson’s comedies

were the men and women of his own day. The incidents were amusing

without being preposterous, or pathetic without being maudlin. The

construction of the Robertson series was close, intelligible, sequent.

His dialogue rippled rather than sparkled; the story was invariably

simple, wholesome, attractive; and over each production was the

incommunicable Robertson atmosphere.

And the management that presented these dainty works exercised a care, a

taste, and a scrupulous devotion to the details of representation which

came as a revelation to those acquainted with the stage methods of the

period; and marked, indeed, a revolution in stage management. It is not

overstating the case to say that, had it not been for the lead given in

this direction by the Bancrofts in the ’sixties and early ’seventies, and

subsequently followed up with still greater _éclat_ by the same artists

at the Haymarket, one would scarcely have witnessed the elaborate sets

and costly casts to which Irving accustomed us in the ’eighties and

’nineties, or on which, in our own time, Sir Herbert Tree spends so much

money and so much intelligent enterprise. In the history of stage

reform, however, the Bancrofts must always figure as pioneers; nor is

anyone who is old enough to remember the London stage as it was accepted

before their management of the Prince of Wales Theatre, at all likely to

controvert the statement. Happily for the public, the lead was quickly

and largely followed. The old-fashioned stage-manager became a thing of

the past. What was once the exception is now the rule.

“Most can raise the flowers now,

For all have got the seed.”

Slender as was my experience of London theatres and immature as was my

judgment, I was intelligently impressed by the idyllic delicacy of the

work represented, and by the exquisite rendering accorded by a company so

wonderfully fitted with their parts. I confess to having felt an

enthusiasm then which now I should have some difficulty in explaining.

That emotion was soon to find an opportunity for expression. When

“School” had been running for some little time, a letter appeared in the

_Times_, conceived in that spirit of dignified rebuke which, in its

correspondents, seems to have appealed to successive editors of that

great newspaper. In this communication Robertson was crudely accused of

having stolen the play, lock, stock, and barrel, from a play then (or

recently) running in Germany. I had no acquaintance with the German

language and no time (so insistent on protest was my indignation) to

inquire into the facts. But I felt that from the internal evidence

afforded by “School” I would be able to make a good case. Even in those

remote days many of our most admired articles of so-called British

manufacture were “made in Germany,” and most of them bore about with them

the ineffaceable signs of their origin. I strongly felt that on internal

evidence I should have little difficulty, in that “School” was “quite

English, you know,” and that, above all, there was no trace whatever of

anything German in the conception or the treatment. I had already seen

the play a second time when the _Times_ letter made its appearance. On

the night of the day on which it was published I paid a third visit to

the pit of the Tottenham Street playhouse. When I got back to my

“diggings,” I sat down and commenced to write what I intended to be a

letter to Jupiter Tonans of Printing House Square, but what turned out to

be my first professional contribution to the London Press. Next day I

abandoned my more legitimate studies, and rewrote and polished—as well as

I knew how—the essay over which I had burned my first sacrifice of

midnight oil. The result was in no way suitable as a letter in the

correspondence column of a newspaper. My own poor outlook assured me of

that. Where to send the essay? A copy of a weekly magazine called _Once

a Week_ lay on a chair in the room. I caught it up, looked for the

editorial address, wrote a brief note to the editor apprising him of the

drift of my contribution, addressed an envelope, and posted my “stuff,”

as I subsequently learned to call my articles in manuscript.

Had a mentor, skilled to advise, been available at that moment, he would

no doubt have advised me to send my essay to any other publication, but

_not_ to _Once a Week_, because the paper in question was then under the

editorial control of a member of the staff of the _Times_. So that—a

circumstance of which I was happily ignorant—the organ selected haphazard

for my venture was the very last that should be likely to serve my

purpose. Four days after its despatch I received a proof of the article

with a request that it should be “returned immediately” to the printer.

A delightful sensation—that of correcting one’s first galleys of matter

moist from the press! The following week the article appeared in all the

pride of print, though I confess that the pride of print (a mere

figurative locution) was as nothing to the pride of the author who

already saw himself on the high-road to fame and fortune. Alas! it is a

highroad which, while the gayest and cheeriest to travel, rarely leads to

fame, and never to fortune. . . . I have no doubt that this first

published composition of mine was a tremendously faulty piece of

work—immature and pretentious. But the appearance of no subsequent

production of mine has afforded me a tithe of the pleasure. And,

incidentally, it was the means of my making the acquaintance of “Tom”

Robertson.

Our acquaintanceship—never an intimate one—began with a correspondence,

friendly and genial on his side, ebullient and unctuous, I fear, on mine,

for I was very young. Some time elapsed before I met him in the flesh.

The introduction was effected at the Albion Tavern in Russell Street,

Covent Garden. That famous hostelry has gone by the board this many a

day. When first I knew it the Albion was a London institution for which

one might have prophesied a permanence as secure as that of St. Paul’s.

It faced the north side wall of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, some

distance west of the stage-door. It was the favourite supper resort of

theatrical people, and famous for its tripe and onions and for its

marrow-bones. An excellent dinner of fish, joint, and cheese was served

earlier in the evening at half a crown a head—the carver, in white smock

and apron and white cook’s cap, wheeling the joint round from table to

table on an ambulatory dumb-waiter, and carving in front of the customer,

and according to the customer’s desire. The place was run by two

brothers, named Cooper, who owned a similar house in Fleet Street. This

was called the Rainbow. It was a great luncheon-resort of lawyers, and

three-fourths of the present occupants of the judicial bench must have

taken their midday meal there from time to time. The Rainbow, alas!

where once law officers chopped and learned leaders absorbed the midday

refresher, is now mainly a wine-bar—the daily resort of the Guppys, the

Joblings, and the Smallweeds of the profession.

The brothers Cooper were not very much in evidence at either house. They

presented none of the characteristics of the typical licensed victualler.

Indeed, they were the most highly respectable looking men to be seen in

any walk of life—rosy-cheeked, white-whiskered, of solemnly benign

expression, and dressed with an amount of elderly foppishness which, in a

drab mid-Victorian age, was quite delightful to behold. Up the

Thames—somewhere in the Hampton Court direction, if I remember

aright—where their home was, the neighbours who were “not in the know”

supposed them to be stockbrokers of a sporting turn of mind. But if the

Coopers took no ostensibly active part in the management of the Albion,

they were most effectively represented by their head-waiter—the

incomparable Paunceford. Even now, across the years, one can see his

beaming face, his head held a little to one side—a propitiatory pose—his

twinkling eye, his mellifluous and insinuating tone as he proceeds from

box to box, half an hour, or even an hour, after closing-time, with the

half-plaintive, half-humorous admonition of “Time, gentlemen, if you

please!” Paunceford and the Albion should both have been made immortal.

For when the Albion closed its doors, another race of waiters had arisen,

and Paunceford’s occupation was gone. The last time I passed through

Russell Street, Covent Garden, a merchant from the neighbouring market

was running the premises as a store for fruit and vegetables. I wonder

whether the ghosts of those departed who once made merry within ever

appear to the eminent salesman, flitting behind his mountains of

green-stuff, or playing phantom hide-and-seek among his boxes of oranges

and bananas.

The first meeting between Robertson and myself was cordial enough, but

though he evidently appreciated the defence of “School,” which was the

basis of our friendship, it was equally apparent that he had expected to

meet an older man, and one who was at least somewhere “in the movement.”

When at last we were alone, he became communicative. He was at the time

probably suffering from the premonitory distresses of the disease which

was destined to carry him off untimely. My first impression was of the

bitterness with which he discussed men and things. It was so entirely

different from that which I had expected in the mood of one who stood so

illuminated in the sunlight of popular approval. Fame and competence had

come too late for him. The long, hungry struggle for recognition had

soured a nature once, perhaps, sunny enough. More than once during our

conversation he alluded to his troubles with his first success,

“Society.” It had originally been intended for Buckstone at the

Haymarket—then _par excellence_ the Comedy theatre; and for six years

after its refusal by Buckstone its author had hawked it about to all the

London managers and to some in the provinces. I had asked him what

chance of recognition a beginner at stage-writing should have with the

managers. This it was that brought “Society” on the tapis. He drove

home the lesson with the _argumentum ad hominem_. His deliverance

certainly put me off any vague scheme I may have formed of commencing

dramatist, and made me resolve to advance in the critical career upon

which, in my youthful folly, I imagined I had successfully embarked.

Speaking with great acerbity, he said:

“I was born among stage associations. I grew up among them. It was the

natural thing for me to look to the stage for my daily bread. My

earliest craft was stagecraft. If I was compelled to carry about in my

back-pocket for six years the play into which I had put all my experience

before I could get a hearing, you can calculate for yourself the chances

of an outsider.”

Reverting to the charge of having drawn on the work of others for his