about it with the skill and knowledge acquired during many years of
slow experience; and he performed it with distinguished success. He
was now forty-four; and he had had more to do with the laying down of
rails than any other man then living. The great difficulty of the
Liverpool and Manchester line lay in the fact that it had to traverse a
vast shaking bog or morass, Chat Moss, which the best engineers had
emphatically declared it would be impossible to cross. George
Stephenson, however, had a plan for making the impossible possible. He
simply floated his line on a broad bottom, like a ship, on the top of
the quaking quagmire; and proceeded to lay down his rails on this
seemingly fragile support without further scruple. It answered
admirably, and still answers to the present day. The other works on
the railway, especially the cuttings, were such as might well have
appalled the boldest heart in those experimental ages of railway
enterprise. It is easy enough for us now to undertake tunnelling great
hills or filling up wide valleys with long ranges of viaduct, because
the thing has been done so often, and the prospect of earning a fair
return on the money sunk can be calculated with so high a degree of
reasonable probability. But it required no little faith for George
Stephenson and his backers to drive a level road, for the first time,
through solid rocks and over trembling morasses, the whole way from
Liverpool to Manchester. He persevered, however, and in 1830, after
four years' toilsome and ceaseless labour, during which he had worked
far-harder than the sturdiest navvy on the line, his railway was
finally opened for regular traffic.
Before the completion of the railway, George Stephenson had taken part
in a great contest for the best locomotive at Liverpool, a prize of 500
pounds having been offered by the company to the successful competitor.
Stephenson sent in his improved model, the Rocket, constructed after
plans of his own and his son Robert's, and it gained the prize against
all its rivals, travelling at what was then considered the incredible
rate of 35 miles an hour. It was thus satisfactorily settled that the
locomotive was the best power for drawing carriages on railways, and
George Stephenson's long battle was thus at last practically won.
The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway was an era in the
history of the world. From the moment that great undertaking was
complete, there could no longer be any doubt about the utility and
desirability of railways, and all opposition died away almost at once.
New lines began immediately to be laid out, and in an incredibly short
time the face of England was scarred by the main trunks in that network
of iron roads with which its whole surface is now so closely covered.
The enormous development of the railway system benefited the Stephenson
family in more than one way. Robert Stephenson became the engineer of
the vast series of lines now known as the London and North Western; and
the increased demand for locomotives caused George Stephenson's small
factory at Newcastle to blossom out suddenly into an immense and
flourishing manufacturing concern.
The rest of George Stephenson's life is one long story of unbroken
success. In 1831, the year after the opening of the Liverpool and
Manchester line, George, being now fifty, began to think of settling
down in a more permanent home. His son Robert, who was surveying the
Leicester and Swannington railway, observed on an estate called
Snibston, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch, what to his experienced geological
eye looked like the probable indications of coal beneath the surface.
He wrote to his father about it, and as the estate was at the time for
sale, George, now a comparatively wealthy man, bought it up on his
son's recommendation. He also pitched his home close by at Alton
Grange, and began to sink shafts in search of coal. He found it in due
time; and thus, in addition to his Newcastle works, he became a
flourishing colliery proprietor. It is pleasing to note that
Stephenson, unlike too many other self-made men, always treated his
workmen with the greatest kindness and consideration, erecting
admirable cottages for their accommodation, and providing them with
church, chapel, and schools for their religious and social education.
While living at Alton Grange, Stephenson was engaged in laying out
several new lines in the middle and north of England, especially the
Grand Junction and the Midland, both of which he constructed with great
boldness and practical skill. As he grew older and more famous, he
began to mix in the truly best society of England; his acquaintance
being sought by all the most eminent men in literature, science, and
political life. Though but an uneducated working man by origin, George
Stephenson had so improved his mind by constant thought and expansive
self-education, that he was able to meet these able and distinguished
friends of his later days on terms of perfect intellectual and social
equality. To the last, however, he never forgot his older and poorer
friends, nor was he ever ashamed of their acquaintance. A pleasant
trait is narrated by his genial biographer, Dr. Smiles, who notices
that on one occasion he stopped to speak to one of his wealthy
acquaintances in a fine carriage, and then turned to shake hands with
the coachman on the box, whom he had known and respected in his earlier
days. He enjoyed, too, the rare pleasure of feeling his greatness
recognized in his own time: and once, when he went over to Brussels on
a visit to the king of the Belgians, he was pleased and surprised, as
the royal party entered the ball-room at the Town Hall, to hear a
general murmur among the guests of "Which is Stephenson?"
George Stephenson continued to live for sixteen years, first at Alton
Grange, and afterwards at Tapton House, near Chesterfield, in comfort
and opulence; growing big pines and melons, keeping birds and dogs, and
indulging himself towards the end in the well-earned repose to which
his useful and laborious life fully entitled him. At last, on the 12th
of August, 1848, he died suddenly of intermittent fever, in his
sixty-seventh year, and was peacefully buried in Chesterfield church.
Probably no one man who ever lived did so much to change and renovate
the whole aspect of human life as George Stephenson; and, unlike many
other authors of great revolutions, he lived long enough to see the
full result of his splendid labours in the girdling of England by his
iron roads. A grand and simple man, he worked honestly and steadfastly
throughout his days, and he found his reward in the unprecedented
benefits which his locomotive was even then conferring upon his
fellow-men. It is indeed wonderful to think how very different is the
England in which we live to-day, from that in which we might possibly
have been living were it not for the barefooted little collier boy who
made clay models of engines at Wylam, and who grew at last into the
great and famous engineer of the marvellous Liverpool and Manchester
railway. The main characteristic of George Stephenson was
perseverance; and it was that perseverance that enabled him at last to
carry out his magnificent schemes in the face of so much bitter and
violent opposition.
III.
JOHN GIBSON, SCULPTOR.
In most cases, the working man who raises himself to wealth and
position, does so by means of trade, which is usually the natural
outgrowth of his own special handicraft or calling. If he attains, not
only to riches, but to distinction as well, it is in general by
mechanical talent, the direction of the mind being naturally biased by
the course of one's own ordinary occupations. England has been
exceptionally rich in great engineers and inventive geniuses of such
humble origin--working men who have introduced great improvements in
manufactures or communications; and our modern English civilization has
been immensely influenced by the lives of these able and successful
mechanical toilers. From Brindley, the constructor of the earliest
great canal, to Joseph Gillott, the inventor of the very steel pen with
which this book is written; from Arkwright the barber who fashioned the
first spinning-machine, to Crompton the weaver, whose mule gave rise to
the mighty Manchester cotton trade; from Newcomen, who made the first
rough attempt at a steam-engine, to Stephenson, who sent the iron horse
from end to end of the land,--the chief mechanical improvements in the
country have almost all been due to the energy, intelligence, and skill
of our labouring population. The English mind is intensely practical,
and the English working man, for the last two centuries at least, has
been mainly distinguished for his great mechanical aptitude, bursting
out, here and there, in exceptional persons, under the form of
exceedingly high inventive genius.
At our very doors, however, there is a small nation of largely
different blood and of wholly different speech from our own; a nation
forming a part of our own kingdom, even more closely than the Scotch or
the Irish, and yet in some respects further from us in mind and habit
of life than either; a nation marked rather by the poetical and
artistic, than by the mechanical and practical temperament--the ancient
and noble Welsh people. It would hardly be reasonable to expect from
the Welsh exactly the same kind of success in life which we often find
in English workmen; the aims and ideals of the two races are so
distinct, and it must be frankly confessed the advantage is not always
on the side of the Englishman. The Welsh peasants, living among their
own romantic hills and valleys, speaking their own soft and exquisite
language, treasuring their own plaintive and melodious poetry, have
grown up with an intense love for beauty and the beautiful closely
intwined into the very warp and woof of their inmost natures. They
have almost always a natural refinement of manner and delicacy of
speech which is unfortunately too often wanting amongst our rougher
English labouring classes, especially in large towns. They are
intensely musical, producing a very large proportion of the best
English singers and composers. They are fond of literature, for which
they have generally some natural capacity, and in which they exercise
themselves to an extent unknown, probably, among people of their class
in any other country. At the local meetings of bards (as they call
themselves) in Wales, it is not at all uncommon to hear that the first
prize for Welsh poetry has been carried off by a shepherd, and the
first prize for Welsh prose composition by a domestic servant. In
short, the susceptibilities of the race run rather toward art and
imagination, than toward mere moneymaking and practical ingenuity.
John Gibson, sculptor, of Rome, as he loved to call himself, was a
remarkable embodiment, in many ways, of this self-respecting, artistic,
ideal Welsh peasant temperament. In a little village near Conway, in
North Wales, there lived at the end of the last century a petty
labouring market gardener of the name of Gibson, who knew and spoke no
other tongue than his native Welsh. In 1790, his wife gave birth to a
son whom they christened John, and who grew up, a workman's child,
under the shadow of the great castle, and among the exquisite scenery
of the placid land-locked Conway river. John Gibson's parents, like
the mass of labouring Welsh people, were honest, God-fearing folk, with
a great earnestness of principle, a profound love of truth, and a
hatred of all mean or dirty actions. They brought up the boy in these
respects in the way he should go; and when he was old he indeed did not
depart from them. Throughout his life, John Gibson was remarkable for
his calm, earnest, straightforward simplicity, a simplicity which
seemed almost childish to those who could not understand so grand and
uncommon and noble a nature as his.
From his babyhood, almost, the love of art was innate in the boy; and
when he was only seven years old, he began to draw upon a slate a scene
that particularly pleased him--a line of geese sailing upon the smooth
glassy surface of a neighbouring pond. He drew them as an ordinary
child almost always does draw--one goose after another, in profile, as
though they were in procession, without any attempt at grouping or
perspective in any way. His mother praised the first attempt, saying
to him in Welsh, "Indeed, Jack, this is very like the geese;" and Jack,
encouraged by her praise, decided immediately to try again. But not
being an ordinary child, he determined this time to do better; he drew
the geese one behind the other as one generally sees them in actual
nature. His mother then asked him to draw a horse; and "after gazing
long and often upon one," he says, "I at last ventured to commit him to
the slate." When he had done so, the good mother was even more
delighted. So, to try his childish art, she asked him to put a rider
on the horse's back. Jack went out once more, "carefully watched men
on horseback," and then returning, made his sketch accordingly. In
this childish reminiscence one can see already the first workings of
that spirit which made Gibson afterwards into the greatest sculptor of
all Europe. He didn't try even then to draw horse or man by mere
guesswork; he went out and studied the subject at first hand. There
are in that single trait two great elements of success in no matter
what line of life--supreme carefulness, and perfect honesty of
workmanship.
When Jack was nine years old, his father determined to emigrate to
America, and for that purpose went to Liverpool to embark for the
United States. But when he had got as far as the docks, Mrs. Gibson,
good soul, frightened at the bigness of the ships (a queer cause of
alarm), refused plumply ever to put her foot on one of them. So her
husband, a dutiful man with a full sense of his wife's government upon
him, consented unwillingly to stop in Liverpool, where he settled down
to work again as a gardener. Hitherto, Jack and his brothers had spoken
nothing but Welsh; but at Liverpool he was put to school, and soon
learned to express himself correctly and easily in English. Liverpool
was a very different place for young Jack Gibson from Conway: there
were no hills and valleys there, to be sure, but there were shops--such
shops! all full of the most beautiful and highly coloured prints and
caricatures, after the fashion of the days when George IV. was still
Prince Regent. All his spare time he now gave up to diligently copying
the drawings which he saw spread out in tempting array before him in
the shop-windows. Flattening his little nose against the glass panes,
he used to look long and patiently at a single figure, till he had got
every detail of its execution fixed firmly on his mind's eye; and then
he would go home hastily and sketch it out at once while the picture
was still quite fresh in his vivid memory. Afterwards he would return
to the shop-window, and correct his copy by the original till it was
completely finished. No doubt the boy did all this purely for his own
amusement; but at the same time he was quite unconsciously teaching
himself to draw under a very careful and accurate master--himself.
Already, however, he found his paintings had patrons, for he sold them
when finished to the other boys; and once he got as much as sixpence
for a coloured picture of Napoleon crossing the Alps--"the largest
sum," he says brightly in his memoirs long after, "I had yet received
for a work of art."
Opportunities always arise for those who know how to use them. Little
Jack Gibson used to buy his paper and colours at a stationer's in
Liverpool, who one day said to him kindly, "My lad, you're a constant
customer here: I suppose you're a painter." "Yes, sir," Jack answered,
with childish self-complacency, "I do paint." The stationer, who had
himself studied at the Royal Academy, asked him to bring his pictures
on view; and when Jack did so, his new friend, Mr. Tourmeau, was so
much pleased with them that he lent the boy drawings to copy, and
showed him how to draw for himself from plaster casts. These first
amateur lessons must have given the direction to all Gibson's later
life: for when the time came for him to choose a trade, he was not set
to till the ground like his father, but was employed at once on
comparatively artistic and intelligent handicraft.
Jack was fourteen when his father apprenticed him to a firm of
cabinet-makers. For the first year, he worked away contentedly at legs
and mouldings; but as soon as he had learnt the rudiments of the trade
he persuaded his masters to change his indentures, and let him take the
more suitable employment of carving woodwork for ornamental furniture.
He must have been a good workman and a promising boy, one may be sure,
or his masters would never have countenanced such a revolutionary
proceeding on the part of a raw apprentice. Young Gibson was delighted
with his new occupation, and pursued it so eagerly that he carved even
during his leisure hours from plaster casts. But after another year,
as ill-luck or good fortune would have it, he happened to come across a
London marble-cutter, who had come down to Liverpool to carve flowers
in marble for a local firm. The boy was enchanted with his freer and
more artistic work; when the marble-cutter took him over a big yard,
and showed him the process of modelling and cutting, he began to feel a
deep contempt for his own stiff and lifeless occupation of woodcarving.
Inspired with the desire to learn this higher craft, he bought some
clay, took it home, and moulded it for himself after all the casts he
could lay his hands on. Mr. Francis, the proprietor of the marble
works, had a German workman in his employ of the name of Luge, who used
to model small figures, chiefly, no doubt, for monumental purposes.
Young Gibson borrowed a head of Bacchus that Luge had composed, and
made a copy of it himself in clay. Mr. Francis was well pleased with
this early attempt, and also with a clever head of Mercury in marble,
which Gibson carved in his spare moments.
The more the lad saw of clay and marble, the greater grew his distaste
for mere woodwork. At last, he determined to ask Mr. Francis to buy
out his indentures from the cabinet-makers, and let him finish his
apprenticeship as a sculptor. But unfortunately the cabinet-makers
found Gibson too useful a person to be got rid of so easily: they said
he was the most industrious lad they had ever had; and so his very
virtues seemed as it were to turn against him. Not so, really: Mr.
Francis thought so well of the boy that he offered the masters 70
pounds to be quit of their bargain; and in the end, Gibson himself
having made a very firm stand in the matter, he was released from his
indentures and handed over finally to Mr. Francis and a sculptor's life.
And now the eager boy was at last "truly happy." He had to model all
day long, and he worked away at it with a will. Shortly after he went
to Mr. Francis's yard, a visitor came upon business, a
magnificent-looking old man, with snowy hair and Roman features. It was
William Roscoe, the great Liverpool banker, himself a poor boy who had
risen, and who had found time not only to build up for himself an
enormous fortune, but also to become thoroughly well acquainted with
literature and art by the way. Mr. Roscoe had written biographies of
Lorenzo de Medici, the great Florentine, and of Leo X., the art-loving
pope; and throughout his whole life he was always deeply interested in
painting and sculpture and everything that related to them. He was a
philanthropist, too, who had borne his part bravely in the great
struggle for the abolition of the slave trade; and to befriend a
struggling lad of genius like John Gibson was the very thing that was
nearest and dearest to his benevolent heart. Mr. Francis showed Roscoe
the boy's drawings and models; and Roscoe's appreciative eye saw in
them at once the visible promise of great things to be. He had come to
order a chimney-piece for his library at Allerton, where his important
historical works were all composed; and he determined that the clever
boy should have a chief hand in its production. A few days later he
returned again with a valuable old Italian print. "I want you to make
a bas-relief in baked clay," he said to Gibson, "from this print for
the centres of my mantelpiece." Gibson was overjoyed. The print was
taken from a fresco of Raphael's in the Vatican at Rome, and Gibson's
work was to reproduce it in clay in low relief, as a sculpture picture.
He did so entirely to his new patron's satisfaction, and this his first
serious work is now duly preserved in the Liverpool Institution which
Mr. Roscoe had been mainly instrumental in founding.
Roscoe had a splendid collection of prints and drawings at Allerton;
and he invited the clever Welsh lad over there frequently, and allowed
him to study them all to his heart's content. To a lad like John
Gibson, such an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the works of
Raphael and Michael Angelo was a great and pure delight. Before he was
nineteen, he began to think of a big picture which he hoped to paint
some day; and he carried it out as well as he was able in his own
self-taught fashion. For as yet, it must be remembered, Gibson had had
no regular artistic instruction: there was none such, indeed, to be had
at all in Liverpool in his day; and there was no real art going on in
the town in any way. Mr. Francis, his master, was no artist; nor was
there anybody at the works who could teach him: for as soon as Mr.
Francis found out the full measure of Gibson's abilities, he dismissed
his German artist Luge, and put the clever boy entirely in his place.
At this time, Gibson was only receiving six shillings a week as wages;
but Mr. Francis got good prices for many of his works, and was not
ashamed even to put his own name upon the promising lad's artistic
performances.
Mr. Roscoe did not merely encourage the young sculptor; he set him also
on the right road for ultimate success. He urged Gibson to study
anatomy, without which no sculpture worthy of the name is possible.
Gibson gladly complied, for he knew that Michael Angelo had been a
great anatomist, and Michael was just at that moment the budding
sculptor's idol and ideal. But how could he learn? A certain Dr. Vose
was then giving lectures on anatomy to young surgeons at Liverpool, and
on Roscoe's recommendation he kindly admitted the eager student gratis
to his dissecting-room. Gibson dissected there with a will in all his
spare moments, and as he put his mind into the work he soon became well
versed in the construction of the human body.
From the day that Gibson arrived at man's estate, the great dream of
his life was to go to Rome. For Rome is to art what London is to
industry--the metropolis in its own way of the entire earth. But
travelling in 1810 cost a vast deal of money; and the poor Liverpool
marble-cutter (for as yet he was really nothing more) could hardly hope
to earn the immense sum that such an expedition would necessarily cost
him. So for six years more he went on working at Liverpool in his own
native untaught fashion, doing his best to perfect himself, but feeling
sadly the lack of training and competition. One of the last works he
executed while still in Mr. Francis's service was a chimney-piece for
Sir John Gladstone, father of the future premier. Sir John was so
pleased with the execution, that he gave the young workman ten pounds
as a present. But in spite of occasional encouragement like this,
Gibson felt himself at Liverpool, as he says, "chained down by the leg,
and panting for liberation."
In 1817, when he was just twenty-seven, he determined to set off to
London. He took with him good introductions from Mr. Roscoe to Mr.
Brougham (afterwards Lord Chancellor), to Christie, the big
picture-dealer, and to several other influential people. Later on,
Roscoe recommended him to still more important leaders in the world of
art--Flaxman the great sculptor, Benjamin West, the Quaker painter and
President of the Royal Academy, and others of like magnitude. Mr.
Watson Taylor, a wealthy art patron, gave Gibson employment, and was
anxious that he should stop in London. But Gibson wanted more than
employment; he wanted to LEARN, to perfect himself, to become great in
his art. He could do that nowhere but at Rome, and to Rome therefore
he was determined to go. Mr. Taylor still begged him to wait a little.
"Go to Rome I will," Gibson answered boldly, "even if I have to go
there on foot."