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SOME EMINENT VICTORIANS

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PREFACE

It was only a few weeks ago that I ventured to enquire of a cultivated young writer of the newer school if Dickens was now much read by the generation which presumably he had a claim to represent. The question gave him no pause. In a sentence that was dictated solely, as it seemed, by a sincere desire to impart accurate information, he gravely informed me that among young men of culture Dickens was now never read after the age of fourteen. I confess that, despite the coldly judicial tone of this utterance, I was not entirely convinced, for I happen to know even young people who are still so far belated in their taste as to regard Dickens as an incomparable genius. But the statement helped me at any rate to realise how easy it is to grow old-fashioned, and suggested to me that in addressing an age which believes that art, like science, is always advancing, it would be prudent, on the threshold of these reminiscences of some of the men I have known and whose work I have worshipped, to make frank avowal of my own faith, and humbly to confess my limitations.

Let me say, then, that in the region of Art and Literature I am still an impenitent Victorian. I have no desire to disparage the work of those who profess a more modern creed, and I think, although this perhaps may be vainglorious boasting, that I am not unable to appreciate the more instant appeal of a later day. But my talk with younger men, whose comradeship delights me, makes it often abundantly clear to me that I am disqualified, perhaps by age, from sharing to the full measure their more recent enthusiasms. Our occasional divergence of feeling, which it would be idle not to recognise, rests in some cases upon an essential difference in the point of view. The progress of science which, to borrow a phrase from Mr. Gladstone in regard to our revenue, is in our day “advancing by leaps and bounds,” has, I think, set some younger men aglow with the thought that art too is destined, with the passing of the ages, to claim and to inherit a realm correspondingly enlarged.

This belief, perhaps only half confessed, that in the fields of Literature and Art the later achievement must, for that reason alone, be the greater achievement, is apt to beget in the minds of some younger men a certain impatience with the heroes of an earlier day. As the topmost pebble set upon the upraised cairn which represents the sum of scientific knowledge must of necessity record the final altitude which science has reached, so it is in some quarters held, by an analogy that seems to me radically mistaken, that the most modern achievement in art has the right to claim in virtue of its historical position a higher place than that which it has succeeded.

Let me confess at once that this is not my belief. There is a little fringe of science lying at the threshold of every art, and until the secrets it has to yield are conquered, the illusion of progressive advancement is inevitable. But that puny conquest counts for nothing beside art’s constant and unchangeable conditions, conditions which leave its earlier victories unsurpassed and unsurpassable. It is, indeed, the glory of the artist’s spirit, in whatever field it be exercised, that it is incapable of advancement. Each achievement, as time attests its worth to rank at all, remains through all time incomparable. It knows no rivalry. It defies all competition. It affects no advance upon the triumphs of yesterday; it fears no eclipse from the victories of to-morrow. And although history shows many barren seasons when the spirit of the artist sinks and flags, the revival, when it comes, is due to no added store of knowledge, but is the free gift of men newly risen whose genius proves itself able to recapture that power of imaging life which in the hands of genius has always been perfect from the first.

Supported by this faith I will own I am not very gravely discouraged by occasionally finding myself ranked as a champion of an outworn fashion. The progress of art is the progress of the pendulum. It advances and recedes according to a law of movement that only the fullest and profoundest knowledge of all the factors that make up human life can enable us to decipher.

But that art does often lie fallow after a period of rich harvest must be indisputable to all who have carefully studied its history. It need not, therefore, be wholly surprising if, in that little corner of time we inhabit to-day, there should have come a momentary lull following on a period of intense and varied vitality.

My mission here is simply to recall and to record personal reminiscences of some of the great men who sowed and reaped a part of that great harvest garnered during the later half of the last century. In the history of English Literature and English Art, I believe it presents a rich yield that will not soon be equalled as the fruit of an equal measure of time, and I am prepared to accept lightly enough the criticism that probably awaits me, that the heroes whom I have worshipped are no longer the heroes of to-day.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

The garden and fields, now partly built over, formed then a little earthly paradise to a large family, and the open Common covered with gorse and bracken served as a part of our wider playground. There we roamed at will, and it was there, with each returning October, that we used to gather the material for a great bonfire with which we annually celebrated the fifth of November.

Sallying forth from our field-gate that abutted upon the Common, armed with a bill-hook surreptitiously filched from the gardener’s tool-basket, there we used to pile up our wheelbarrow with the gorse we had no right to cut, keeping a careful eye the while, lest the sudden approach of the policeman should set us within the grip of the law.

These raiding expeditions sometimes brought us into collision with the boys of the village, whom we only knew under the generic title of “the cads,” and with whom we waged unceasing warfare. Especially did we dread their onslaught as the fifth of November approached, for we knew well it was ever their malignant purpose to fire the pile before the appointed night had arrived.

It was our custom, therefore, to keep watch and guard for several preceding nights, and sometimes when we heard sounds heralding the approach of the enemy across the fields we would send rockets whizzing along the grass—a defensive operation we discovered to be greatly dreaded by even the boldest of “the cads.”

The choice of an appropriate Guy was always an important point of consideration. One year, I remember, it was Bomba, and during the days of the Indian Mutiny a great effigy of Nana Sahib was consigned to the flames, which gathered added intensity by the insertion into the midst of the huge pile of gorse and dried wood of a seasoned tar-barrel annually purchased by my father as his contribution to the revels of this well-loved day.

The valorous deeds of our soldiers in the Crimea and the nameless horrors of the Mutiny which followed so closely at its heels stand among my most vivid recollections of those earlier days.

I was born in the year 1849, and I can still remember an elder cousin in his scarlet uniform taking his way across the foot-path that leads to Barnes station, to start for the war in the Crimea.

With the events of the Mutiny our sympathies were even more actively engaged. We were closely allied at that time with a family, one of whom, General Henry Marshall, but lately commanded the Artillery in South Africa. They had lived in India, and had relatives still there at the time of the outbreak, and the terrible news as it reached England had therefore an enthralling interest for us all.

It was not to be supposed that my father could afford to any of us the luxury of a public school. At first, with my brothers, I was educated at home under a private tutor, and then at the age of thirteen I took my way to Bruce Castle School, Tottenham, at that time under the mastership of Arthur Hill, brother of Sir Rowland Hill of postage-stamp fame.

I remember my elder brother and I took our places on the form allotted to new boys side by side with William Lewin, better known as William Terriss the actor, and it was only a little while before his tragic end that he and I were recalling those times at Bruce Castle, where, if he gained but little learning, he at any rate acquired a perfect mastery in the art of tree-climbing. There was no elm in the playground, or beyond it, which he had not scaled in search of rooks’ eggs, and his constant companion in these lawless excursions was Fred Selous, the African hunter and explorer, with whom not long ago in his Surrey home, where we sat surrounded by his many trophies of the chase, I was glad to renew our memories of that earlier time.

Terriss’s name reminds me of an incident of our school-days which proves that at that time, at any rate, his histrionic abilities were scarcely equal to mine. Bruce Castle School boasted two masters of the French language, both of whom were regarded as marks for the ridicule and scorn of the English-born boy. Something of the spirit of Waterloo still survived in our outrageous treatment of these gentlemen, whom we could not help regarding as the luckless representatives of a beaten and inferior race.

One of them, I remember, had a known fondness for natural history, and under cover of sharing his enthusiasm we could nearly always lure him to stories of different wild animals which served to fill the hour which should have been devoted to the study of the French language.

This was our more amiable way of tormenting the unfortunate gentleman. Occasionally, in order to frustrate his well-meant efforts to instruct us, we resorted to more drastic measures. I remember one day it was jointly agreed among us that we should all assume to be afflicted with the worst kind of hacking cough, and from the very moment the class opened the room resounded with the most distressing symptoms of our common complaint.

Our master became at length fully conscious of the plot that had been forged against him, and slamming the book in a rage announced his determination of summoning Mr. Arthur Hill to restore the discipline of the class. This show of unexpected authority on his part produced something like consternation, and in a moment all the bronchial sounds were silenced—all save one, for it seemed to me then that the only policy, however desperate it might prove, was to persist in the signs of the malady which had already been announced.

In the interval of dead silence in which we awaited the arrival of the headmaster I therefore continued, at brief but regular intervals, with the same persistent cough which the others had abandoned. On Mr. Arthur Hill’s arrival, Mon. Delmas—for that was the unfortunate gentleman’s name—explained with some volubility the cause of his complaint against us, but at the finish, with a noble credulity that I had hardly dared to hope for, he exempted me from the general condemnation.

“Now, Carr,” he said, “has a cough, but he suffer so much it is better he do not attend the class for a space.”

On this intimation I was permitted to quit the room and to spend the rest of the dreaded hour in the playground, where afterwards I incurred the obloquy of my companions, and especially of William Terriss, because they had failed to adopt my more ingenious policy.

It is small wonder, with these obstacles deliberately set in our own path, that at our school, at any rate, the acquisition of any knowledge of the French tongue was of the very slightest.

I suppose every boy has his school hero. Mine, I remember, was a South American Spaniard named Echenique, whose father had, for a brief space, figured as President of Peru. He was as handsome as Dickens has pictured Steerforth; and afterwards, when I made the acquaintance of David Copperfield, I had cause to recognise with what unerring sympathy and fidelity the greatest of our masters of romance has mirrored the worship of a boy.

Bruce Castle was, in its way, a remarkable school, though it made no pretence of affording any very extended classical education. It was, indeed, designed for boys of the middle class, of whom I was one, but it was remarkable in this sense, that it was governed on principles of conduct that differed materially from those accepted in other schools of the time.

The Hills held peculiar theories upon the education of boys. Corporal punishment was a thing altogether unknown, and the severest penalty even upon the most hardened offender consisted in nothing worse than a course of compulsory exercise. There was a Prefect, specially told off to take out every day, in what in happier circumstances would have been their play-time, those malefactors who had failed to conform to the discipline of the school.

And yet, under this mild régime, discipline was never lax, both Mr. Arthur Hill and his son Dr. Birkbeck Hill, who succeeded him soon after I entered the school, possessing in a rare degree the power of evoking a sense of responsibility in those elder pupils who controlled the school’s conduct. I

think only once in the period of my school-days did a case occur in which the headmaster had need to resort to the final penalty of expulsion.

Dr. Birkbeck Hill was, in a special sense, a man who won the affection of his pupils. He came to us from Oxford, where he had been the friend of Morris and Swinburne, and I remember the first time that I saw one of those newly designed wallpapers, which were destined afterwards to play so important a part in the movement initiated by Rossetti and Morris, was in the dining-room of Bruce Castle School.

Dr. Birkbeck Hill was a man of considerable literary taste and literary power. He was contributing at that time, though it was not generally known, some brilliant light articles to the Saturday Review under the editorship of Mr. Harwood, and he very soon attached himself to that devoted study of Dr. Johnson which finally provided the theme for some admirable work in criticism and biography.

It is possible that he may have perceived in me some inclination towards letters, for he often used to show me his articles in the current number of the Review, and very soon by his own enthusiasm he awakened in me an interest in his hero Johnson, which has never since abated. A copy of Boswell’s Life, which he afterwards gave me on the occasion of my marriage, still stands in its ten little volumes as one of the books within reach of my bed. They share the honours of my book-shelf with the novels of Charles Dickens, and for me there are no two authors to whom I can so constantly return with ever-renewed enjoyment when sleep is not easy to win.

But there was an older master, Mr. Braid, who exercised an even more powerful influence in forming and directing my taste. His special subject in the curriculum of the school was mathematics, but he was an ardent lover of literature and a devoted student of Shakespeare. He did not live in the school, but many times after school hours he used to take me down to his modest rooms in the village and show me some of the books in his small but well-loved library.

Impelled by his enthusiasm I had read, before I left school, the whole of Shakespeare, as well as Paradise Lost and the shorter poems of Milton; and it was by his encouragement that I made my first attempt in writing, in the sufficiently ambitious experiment of an essay on King Lear. I have lost the essay, and the world has lost it, a fact not to be deeply deplored by either. But this crude experiment set me on my way, and when I quitted school at the age of sixteen my ambition was already aflame to try and do something in the world of letters. But, curiously enough, the aptitude which I had shown at school was towards mathematics, and here my work had so far impressed the examiners, one of whom was Charles Faulkner, afterwards so closely associated with Rossetti and Burne-Jones, that Dr. Hill endeavoured to persuade my father to send me to Cambridge.

I do not now know whether I regret the fact that my father’s means did not suffice to carry out that project. It might have diverted me from those things which I even then began to love, and have never ceased to care for. In any case it seemed obviously necessary that, as one of a family of ten, I should at once apply myself to a calling in which I could earn my living. Accordingly at the age of sixteen, when I quitted Bruce Castle School, my father articled me, at some considerable sacrifice to himself, in a stock-broker’s office in the City.

It will be evident that the education with which I went forth into the world could not have been very profound—a little Latin, enough to enable me to read, in later years, Horace and Virgil with pleasure, but not without the aid of a dictionary; no Greek—that was not considered indispensable to a commercial career; mathematics sufficient, as my examiners told me, to have given me more than a fair chance of a scholarship at Cambridge; and a taste for literature mainly acquired in the vacant hours after school.

From the first my task in the City was not congenial to me, although I worked hard and worked early and late. But when office hours were over I still contrived to keep alive that interest in books which had already been deeply implanted in me, and to make some small essays in journalism and in verse which at the first, I am bound to admit, met with scant encouragement from the editors whom I bombarded. I can remember now receiving from Charles Dickens, with a pain that was also blended with pleasure, a polite little note in blue ink returning one of my many rejected communications. Mr. Thackeray from the Cornhill conferred upon me a like distinction—a distinction, as I call it, because even the fact that they declined to publish what I wrote seemed to me at the time almost to form a link of association with men whom I so greatly admired.

All this tentative work was done in the late evenings, carried sometimes far into the night, but it did not prevent me from being at my office in the City at a quarter past nine, and remaining there always till six and sometimes, on account days, till nine and ten. At the same time I was greedily reading the works of the men I worshipped most—the drama, and the lyrical poetry of the Elizabethans; the novelists, starting with Sterne, Fielding, and Smollett; the poets of the great revival which ushered in the nineteenth century; and those later poets and writers, all of whom were then living, who gave to the Victorian era its glory.

I have often thought that the youth of a later generation can hardly realise the wealth of contemporary achievement that lay around those of us who chanced to be born in that fortunate hour. However great, or however greatly admired, may be the writers of a past day, they can never speak with the quickened magic that a living master can command. And what masters then stood there to win our worship! Tennyson in his prime, and Browning, whose unexhausted energy had yet to give to the world The Ring and the Book; Swinburne, whose new and intoxicating music came like a voice from an undiscovered land of song; and Morris, who in his Defence of Guinevere had already found a key that was to unlock a long-unused storehouse of legend and romance. And then, a little later, Rossetti, mystic and passionate, whose brooding melodies seemed to mirror in verse those “painted poems” that were wrought by his brush; and in fiction, where Meredith had only lately arisen, there still stood Dickens and Thackeray, George Eliot and the Brontës; and in other fields of literature, Carlyle, Mill and Ruskin, Emerson and Froude.

They were all our heroes then, and if Time has not left the place of all unshaken, enough remain to form such a goodly company as no later hour can boast. And this is so far acknowledged by the youth of a younger generation that I find those of quickest appreciation in poetry and fiction constantly tempted to steal my heroes and set them above their own.

Already at school I had made acquaintance with the poems of Wordsworth, a strange choice for a boy; and the circumstances of his life, and the revolution which he partly headed, drew me quickly to others of the group until all lesser admiration was finally merged in my worship of Keats. It was only in later days that I brought myself to the study of the poets of the intermediate time between the Elizabethans and the close of the eighteenth century, and I will confess that even now I have no great zest for them.

But turning aside for the moment from the things that already interested me most, I remember being vividly impressed by some events that occurred in the City during the period of my apprenticeship. The sudden transition from private school to the Stock Exchange presented points of interest that could not fail to attract a boy, even though his ambition was otherwise engaged.

I was in the City in the year 1867, the year of the great financial crisis which is associated with the name of Overend Gurney. The streets and narrow lanes round about the Stock Exchange during that turbulent time presented many picturesque sights, and within the Stock Exchange itself were daily scenes of almost maddening excitement.

One day I waited outside a great bank, one of a seething crowd of many hundreds, in momentary expectation that the doors would be closed, but the minutes and the hours passed, and as four o’clock approached it became known that the danger had been averted. Many similar scenes were to be witnessed at that time, but, although they provided me with excitement enough and to spare, even these vivid incidents in the career into which I had been thrust did not induce me to swerve from the resolution I had already secretly formed, not to remain in the City when the days of my apprenticeship were concluded.

I think, however, that, notwithstanding the distaste I had for my work, I performed my task zealously enough. So, indeed, it must have been, for when I finally announced to the firm my intention to retire, one of the partners asked me to reconsider my decision, holding out to me the inducement that if I would remain till I was twenty-one there would be a good prospect of my being promoted to a junior partnership.

But my choice had already been made, and I was in no mind to change it. Still secretly nursing the thought of a literary career, it was, nevertheless, clear to me that, for the time at any rate, I must adopt a more definite occupation. I therefore made up my mind to study for the Bar. My only trouble was to know how to announce this decision to my dear father, who had spent his hardly-earned money in giving me this first and great chance in the world, and to whom I knew the resolution at which I had arrived would be a source of bitter disappointment and regret.

And so, indeed, it was! But he was the widest-minded and the most liberal-hearted of men, and, when at last I found the courage to break it to him, he hardly allowed me to perceive the deep disappointment which I knew he was suffering. For my own part I have never regretted those days passed in the City, though at the time I felt them to be barren and wasted. Perhaps I learned as much as I should have acquired at Cambridge, though it was learning of a different sort. Some knowledge of men I certainly gained, some knowledge also of the habit of work which no career, however detached from business, can afford to dispense with.

Certainly, if there had not been some such obstacle in my path, I should not have thrown myself into the life I had chosen with the same keenness and persistence. The opposition which these earlier years set in the way of the calling I most wanted to pursue nerved and stiffened my resolution. I did a prodigious amount of reading in those late nights after the strenuous days in the City, and I think the fact that I had broken away from the life that was laid out for me gave me a higher courage to try and succeed in the life of my own choosing.

Already, before I had made my change of view known to my father, I had resolved to matriculate at the London University in preparation to becoming a student for the Bar, and, when the break came, I at once joined the classes at University College and assisted myself further by private tuition in several branches of knowledge which I had to take up for examination.

Some Greek I had to learn, for I had none, a little chemistry, and then there was my Latin, not at any time considerable, to be furbished up. None of these things could I have done without the liberal help of my father, for I had no resources of my own. But this liberal help was never lacking, and I think, when his first disappointment had passed, he became interested in furthering my new career. But the work had to be swiftly done, for I was impatient to be upon my way, and could not have been done in the time, in view of my meagre stock of scholastic knowledge, if it had not been for the zealous help of those who coached me.

By their aid I was enabled to matriculate at the London University, and in the Honours Division, in February of the year 1870, just a month before my twenty-first birthday. In February 1871 I obtained the First Class in Honours in Jurisprudence and Roman Law, and in July 1871, having already been entered as a student of the Inner Temple, I secured the scholarship in Roman and International Law from the Council of Legal Education. Shortly afterwards, in the year 1872, I was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple, and with this event the period of my boyhood may be said to have closed.

CHAPTER II

IDLE HOURS

My grandfather’s farm was situated at Jonby, midway between Penrith and the shores of Ullswater, and it was natural, when my father’s resources sufficed, that our summer outing should be made in the land of his birth.

I think we all of us inherited his love of the hills, and it was in those fishing days, while we were staying in a house that stood close beside Grasmere churchyard, that I renewed and completed my study of Wordsworth, whom I had first learned to love while I was at school.

How simple must have been my father’s life in those boyish days before he set forth on his business career is shown in the fact that he was fond of relating to us that he and his brothers used always to go barefoot to school, and only put on their shoes and stockings when they neared the village.

To Scotland my brother and I journeyed mostly alone, combining the pleasures of a walking tour with the exercise of our favourite sport. Our means were not very ample for these rambling excursions, and we not unseldom found ourselves in a tight place before the end of our journey was reached.

I remember in particular that on one occasion at the close of a delightful holiday we arrived at Callander with little more than our third-class return tickets in our pockets. That afternoon we were to take train for London, but we had walked for many miles and were desperately hungry. Outside what seemed to us to be the most modest inn in the town we held a council of war, and at last determined to venture upon ordering a cold lunch.

The resources of the establishment were meagre, and were fairly outstripped by our ravenous appetites. Long before the latter were satisfied, the one cold joint of lamb which the establishment possessed was exhausted. We called for more, but there was no more, so there was nothing left for us but to call for the bill, when, to our horror and dismay, we found that the amount surpassed by two or three shillings the little hoard that was still left to us.

The situation was critical and called for a Napoleonic remedy. After a whispered consultation with my brother I boldly summoned the waiter and demanded to know if the fixed price charged for a cold lunch did not allow us to have as many helpings as we pleased. The waiter, brought to bay, had to confess that this was the case, and thereupon, with sudden audacity, I urged the point that, as he had been unable to satisfy our just demands, the bill must be proportionately reduced. After considerable parley, with an occasional reference to a landlady who sat behind a screen, and who may have been moved by a feeling of pity for our obvious embarrassment, our plea was allowed, and we walked from the inn with a sense of triumphant victory in our hearts, and with just threepence-ha’penny in our pockets to start on our journey to town.

As we were waiting on the platform of Callander station, with no baggage but our knapsacks and our fishing-rods, I overheard a conversation which has always seemed to me to throw a lurid light upon certain aspects of the Scottish character.

Two pawky tradesmen of the district were pacing up and down the platform in earnest talk, and as they passed me I caught this one sentence, torn from its context:

“Should I outlive my wife, as I hope to do——” said the elder to the younger, and then they passed out of hearing.

What was to follow on the realisation of this fond dream I have often longed to know, but even as the statement stands I have always thought it forms a notable monument to the caution and foresight of the race.

There are several picturesque sayings of the Highlanders that come back to me as connected with these annual excursions. We had been staying for a few days at the little inn at Luib, situated about five miles from Loch Dochart, where we went daily to fish, and the gillie who used to row us on the loch had many a pleasant story to tell of his working days in the years when he had followed the calling of a shepherd.

I remember one evening, as we walked home with our faces turned to one of those beautiful sunsets that I think are only to be seen in the Highlands, he was telling us of a favourite sheep-dog that had been for years his companion on the hills. But the time came when age unfitted the poor animal for his work, and when the only kindness in the shepherd’s eyes was to put an end to its life. And then he described how he had tied it to an apple-tree and got his gun to shoot it.

“An’ I could scarce look at the beast,” he said, “as I fired, for I loved him well and he had been sae wise.”

The tears rolled down his cheeks as he told the story, and we paused in our talk as we trudged along the sun-lit road. Then out of the silence came this further utterance:

“I buried him,” he faltered, “at the foot of the apple-tree”—and then another pause, and then the final words—“an’ there would be a rare crop of apples on the tree the year, for there’s naething for an apple-tree like a dead dog.”

This anecdote has always seemed to me characteristic of the Highland nature where poetry and prose lie closely side by side, and where the simple mind that holds them both is quite unconscious of any shock of feeling in the rapid transition from one to the other.

In this respect I think they show a close resemblance to the peasants of Northern Italy, in whom there is this same frank avowal of swiftly changing feeling; and neither in the one nor in the other does there seem to occur the need, always felt by the Englishman, of forming a bridge of sentiment from the world of fact to the world of passion.

A great race are these Highland gillies, claiming and according equality even in a calling in which they are very conscious of their superiority; never lacking in courtesy, and yet yielding with a certain proud independence all deference that is rightly due to the temporary relation of master and servant. In their speech they are sometimes curiously felicitous, and, using our English language as in a sense a strange tongue, they sometimes exhibit, for that reason, a purity and delicacy in the selection of words that a native can hardly command.

There was a very pretty phrase used by an old peasant at Killin with whom I was chatting one evening outside his cottage door. A pretty girl passed along on the other side of the road, and, wishing to be as Scotch as I could in order to ingratiate myself with the old man, who was vastly entertaining in his stories of the village, I said, “That’s a bonny lassie!” to which he replied, “Ay, sir, she is, but I’m thinking maybe she’s just bonnier than she’s better.” How much more delicate in its inference, how much milder in its condemnation, than our crude statement, “She’s no better than she should be!”

In those earlier times the “dry fly” as a lure for trout was scarcely known, and even to this day it is regarded with undisguised scepticism by the majority of Scotch gillies. It is not many years ago that I astonished an expert in the older fashion by its successful application on a little loch on the hills above Glenmuick, where I was staying with Lord Glenesk. We had ridden for five or six miles to reach our fishing-ground, and when we arrived it seemed as though we had come upon a fruitless errand—there was not a ripple upon the water and not a rise to be seen. The gillie who was with me scanned the surface of the lake with a melancholy eye. Towards evening, however, the fish began to move, and as sunset approached they were feeding eagerly. But the absence of any breeze rendered casting with the wet fly a barren toil. It was then that I drew from my case a large alder dressed as a floating fly. When I showed it to the gillie his contempt was unconcealed. “What sort of an animal might that be?” he inquired, and when I explained its uses to him, he turned his face towards the sunset with a look of patient and pitying toleration, merely remarking for my comfort that I “might just as well throw my bonnet into the loch.” But his scorn quickly changed to wonder as fish after fish was drawn to the bank, and when we parted at the close of the day he somewhat sheepishly entreated me to leave him as a legacy one or two specimens of those same “animals.”

I had a somewhat similar experience in Switzerland a few years later. The little crater lakes on the summit of the Gothard Pass are well stocked with trout, and the landlord of the hotel where we lunched advised me to accept the services of the chef, who was reckoned locally a very mighty exponent of the piscatorial art. But when my comrade observed my methods and noted the results, he very speedily returned to his kitchen: “Oh! là, là ça, vous savez, je ne comprends pas du tout. Bon jour, monsieur,” and so we parted.

I think every sportsman-born has in him something of the poacher. Certainly one of the keenest and most skilful fishermen of my acquaintance has made confession to me of occasional lapses into the most illicit practices when fairer means had failed. In our earlier essays among the hills of Westmoreland and Cumberland my brother and I were frankly unscrupulous, in so far at least as our limited skill permitted. There was a little pool in the hills above Thirlemere called Harrop Tarn which was so completely surrounded by a quaking morass that fishing from the bank was almost impossible. And yet we contrived to extract many a good trout from that same tarn by the poachers’ device of cross-lining. Joining our casts together, we were able, by letting out the line from either rod, to reach the very centre of the sheet of water, and when a fish was hooked we reeled in and drew him to the one little bit of firm land on one side or the other where he could be safely brought to the basket.

I knew nothing of the literature of the art when I first learned to fish at the age of twelve, and it has often amazed me since to note what wondrous feats of skill can be performed—in books. How to cast in the teeth of a facing wind, how to avoid the sagging of the line in a swift stream, how to clear a spreading bush immediately behind you—there are exact and precise receipts for all these accomplishments, but they do not always serve you by the water-side. There was a time when the written record of such triumphs of skill made me feel that I scarcely deserved to rank as a fisherman at all, but it has been my fortune occasionally to see some of these bookmade anglers at their work, and the result in nearly every case has been to restore to me a measure of self-esteem.

The truth is that the art of fishing can only be acquired on the banks of a stream, and is rarely acquired at all unless it has been practised in boyhood. And even so it lies not within the reach of all, even of those who ardently desire to succeed. I remember a comrade in one of my earlier fishing excursions in Scotland who laboured zealously but fruitlessly to obtain even the most modest degree of proficiency, and as he stood up in the boat, his line hopelessly entangled for the hundredth time, the gillie who was rowing us, moved by a spirit of prophecy that broke down all social reserve, suddenly turned to him and addressing him by his Christian name: “Frank, Frank,” said he, “you’re a good fellow, but you’ll never be a fisherman!” And in truth he never was.

And yet, once a measure of mastery is won, fishing remains for those who love it an abiding passion. Time leaves undisturbed the keen excitement of the first adventure, and with each return of spring the longing to be out beside a stream sets the pulses newly beating. One day when we were trudging through a field of turnips in Fifeshire, the late Sir William Harcourt, as though pierced by sudden conviction, turned to me with the remark, “Carr, what a bore sport is!” And of some forms of sport that, I think, may sometimes be truly said. But your true fisherman is never bored. He counts no day blank till it is ended, for the last hours, as he well knows, may restore his broken fortunes and set a goodly brace or two in the empty basket.

And there is no sport, I think, that sorts so well with the occupations of a writer. Shooting and stalking need the surrender of the entire day, and are too exhausting to leave any appetite for intellectual labour. But with fishing it is not so. The angler who has the good fortune to dwell beside a stream can divide his energies between work and sport without neglect of either, and in my own case I have found them go happily hand in hand. Much of my play of King Arthur was written by the shores of Rannoch, which I had first known and loved as a boy, and there is a little cottage in Hertfordshire, unhappily no longer mine, that enshrines many happy memories wherein work and sport are linked in close association.

Walking tours have gone out of fashion nowadays; the bicycle and motor-car have engendered another taste, and have partly ruined the quiet ways that were once the exclusive property of the pedestrian. But they were a favourite pastime in the sixties and seventies, and, apart from the longer sojourn we used to make in the Lake District or in Scotland, there was scarcely an Easter or a Whitsuntide holiday which did not find me among the hills of Westmoreland and Cumberland. There, with a friend of my early years and still a friend to-day, we explored every hill and dale of the Lake District.

On one of those spring excursions I remember we had made rather a long day of it, starting from Patterdale in the morning, lunching at Grasmere, and then making our way by Easedale Tarn to the summit of High White Stones. It was our intention to descend from that point and to reach the hotel in Dungeon Ghyll in time for dinner. But on High White Stones an eerie and impenetrable white mist descended upon us and we missed our way. For several hours we wandered in the mist until we lost all count of where we were, but at last, by some strange good fortune, we found ourselves on the top of Langdale Pikes, a spot which I knew well from many an earlier excursion.

We both knew that below us lay Stickle Tarn, and that from Stickle Tarn ran the brook which would finally lead us to our now much-desired inn. And so in the drenching rain we cautiously descended the hillside till we got to the shores of the Tarn. Then, by some unexpected error, instead of turning on our right, which in a few moments would have led us to the issue of the brook, we took the other direction and were forced to make the whole circuit of the Tarn, reaching at last, almost exhausted, the rushing torrent that descends to the valley. In such fear were we of losing our way again that we determined not to desert the bed of the stream, and, crawling catlike from boulder to boulder, we found the village at last, and saw, with a delight that may be easily imagined, the far-off glimmer in the windows of the Dungeon Ghyll Hotel.

It was half-past ten before we arrived at the door, wet through, and with our slight stock of change contained in our knapsacks sodden with rain. But the landlord kindly lent us some strange garments of his own, and I do not think two men ever enjoyed a meal more than we two as we fell upon that staple dish of the Lake District, “ham and eggs.”

CHAPTER III

ESSAYS IN JOURNALISM

O’Neil, who was older than I, and who had already had some slight experiences as a journalist, with a desire to encourage my budding ambition, asked me to do a criticism on a recently published volume of Longfellow’s Poems for this same Dramatic and Musical Review, of which he was the proud editor. I duly received and duly corrected the printed proof of my article with feelings of exaltation only to be realised by those who, for the first time, see their ideas in printed type, and then waited with eager expectation for the day of publication.

The office was situated in that older part of the Strand near St. Clement Danes which is now no more, and the publisher owned the two-fold responsibility of also issuing another weekly journal entitled the Labour News. Twopence was, I think, the price of our artistic organ, and as early as I could on the Saturday morning I presented myself at the office and tendered the sum required. Almost overwhelmed with excitement I rapidly scanned the columns of this slender journal to find the first-fruits of my pen. But my search yielded nothing but disappointment. The article was not there. I stood in the tiny office crushed by a sense of failure and misfortune, and was just going out into the grey street when the enterprising boy behind the counter, actuated by the simple desire to do business, asked me if I wanted a copy of the Labour News.

As a fact I wanted nothing but some place to hide the sense of humiliation which overpowered me, but as he added, “It’s only a penny,” I took the journal and went out into the street, and, as I listlessly scanned its pages through, I found, to my astonishment, my lost article on Longfellow’s Poems.

It turned out afterwards that the Dramatic and Musical Review in that particular week had more than its needed supply of “copy,” and the Labour News, on the other hand, finding itself short of material, a bright idea had come into the printer’s mind that the review of Longfellow’s Poems might be appropriately set beside advertisements as to the advantages of Canadian Emigration.

Little by little, from this first ludicrous start, I gained a modest footing in the world of journalism, at first as dramatic critic to the Echo, then edited by Arthur Arnold, brother of Sir Edwin Arnold, so long connected with the Daily Telegraph.

My services upon the Echo were not particularly lucrative, the payment for an article being rarely more than six or seven shillings; and my fare to and from Clapham Junction, where we lived at the time, and the necessary modest meal before the theatre began, almost entirely absorbed the sum that I earned.

From the Echo I drifted to the Globe, which was then under the editorship of Dr. Mortimer Granville, and here my work began in something like earnest. During my services as dramatic critic I had become acquainted with Thomas Purnell, and it was he who secured for me a regular position upon the staff of the Globe.

Our work there was sufficiently strenuous. There were three of us stationed in a room above the editorial sanctum, and here, between the hours of nine o’clock in the morning and twelve, we were engaged upon three columns of notes which formed the first page of the paper. The three of us were Purnell, Francillon the novelist, and myself; and the life, wholly new to me, was at the time strangely fascinating and attractive.

Purnell was himself one of the quaintest and most characteristic figures I have ever encountered. A regular Bohemian in a Bohemia that has long lost its sea-board, he had the Bohemian frank detestation of work and utter disregard of all social conventions, and yet with these peculiarities were linked a fine taste and a personality of real distinction.

When I first met him he had just completed a series of papers in the Athenæum upon the drama under the signature of “Q,” winning some little renown in a sharp controversy with Charles Reade, in which he was certainly not worsted.

My other stable companion, Francillon, was of an exactly opposite temperament. Endowed with considerable imagination, which was happily exhibited in Pearl and Emerald, a novel which had been published in the Cornhill Magazine, he was by habit plodding and industrious, qualities which aroused in Purnell a degree of disapproval that sometimes almost verged on resentment.

“Now, Francillon,” he used to say, “loves work. I don’t. I hate it; I loathe it! People will tell you, my dear Carribus”—for so he often addressed me—“that to work is to pray. Well, of the two, I find it easier to pray. Why should I work?” he used to add, with an air of deep and earnest conviction. “I want nothing, only my twopence. All I need is a herring and a glass of ale, and when I have earned that I like to be idle. Some men, so they say, like work. I don’t!” And he did not.

One fixed appointment which he held was to contribute a weekly article on Conservative Policy to the pages of an important provincial paper. Long before the day came when this article had to be despatched by the evening post he used to look upon the impending task with something like horror, and yet nothing could ever induce him to anticipate by an hour the execution of his labours.

Indeed, as a rule, he never wrote it at all. When the day came and we had finished our morning’s work on the Globe, he would generally invite Francillon and myself to a frugal lunch at the old Gaiety Restaurant, and when the invitation was issued we always knew what was in store for us. As the lunch neared its end he would breach the subject by imploring us to supply him with a topic.

“It’s the topic, my dear boy, there’s the devil of it. If I only had a topic I could do it in an hour”—a purely fallacious statement, seeing that no amount of topics would ever have induced him to do it single-handed at all.

Francillon would sometimes heave a sigh, and then with newly-lit cigars we would wend our way back to the old Globe office, where our working-room overlooked the chapel of the Savoy. By that time either Francillon or I had found a topic, for although I was then, and have since remained, a Liberal in politics, I found it not difficult, and sometimes even diverting, to engage in the advocacy of Conservative Policy in the service of our indolent friend.

Perhaps it was I who generally found the subject for the article, and when I announced it Purnell would reply, “Then begin, my dear boy; begin it, Carribus; the thing’s done.”

In those days a leading article always consisted of three paragraphs, and the three paragraphs of this authoritative statement on Conservative ideas were on these happy occasions divided between the three of us, Purnell always reserving to himself the conclusion, not because I think he had any special aptitude in bringing the argument to an end, but because it gave him a longer time to smoke his pipe before his turn came to set upon his task.

And so it came about that I having opened the debate, Francillon at the same time would be busily engaged in the discussion necessary for the central paragraph, while Purnell, looking over our shoulders with chuckling glee, and passing contentedly from chair to chair as he saw his task nearing its end, would finally be persuaded to sit down at his own desk and scribble about eight sentences which were supposed, by their invincible logic, to confirm and strengthen the Tory convictions of the city to which the article was to be despatched.

But hurry and scurry as we would, this terrible task was scarcely ever finished till within a few minutes of the time for post, and even then it often happened that one of us had to come to Purnell’s rescue and try as best we could to adjust the scattered arguments which he had been vainly endeavouring to set in logical sequence.