I think the error was repaired in time; but I remember that the author of it was forcibly invested by his comrades with a leather medal, and that the whole establishment below stairs revelled in beer at his expense. In the same journal appeared a report of a speech delivered by its own editor, who having said of Shakespeare, “We turn to the words of this immortal writer,” had a “t” knocked out for him, and was represented as having spoken of “this immoral writer.” I was with the dear old chief at the time at which the blunder was discovered and the most eloquent conversationalist at that time alive in England surpassed himself. The offending “reader” was a married man with a family, and a hard-working, conscientious creature, as a rule, and he escaped with the mildest wigging, though I should not like to have been responsible for the consequences which might have ensued had he been present at the instant of discovery.
For a good many years it had been my habit to tramp of a Sunday night some five or six miles out, and some five or six miles home, to hear George Dawson preach at the Church of the Saviour; and it was thus that I learned that he was to be the editor of a new daily newspaper, the Birmingham Morning News, and, as I have already said, I was employed by him at 25s. a week. He left little behind him to justify the belief I had in him, which was shared, by the way, by a good many thousands of people. I reckon him to have been, upon the whole, potentially the greatest man with whom I ever rubbed shoulders. He was a very wide, though possibly a somewhat shallow, student; he was, without exception, the best talker to whom I have ever listened. He possessed a certain magnetic quality which extorted in a really extraordinary degree the worship of thinking young men; and there was no man in his own day who was more courageous in the expression of his beliefs, though they were often enough likely to cost him dear. I cannot think of him as ever having entertained an intellectual fear. He was honesty personified; but his heart had established a curious mastery over his mind. He was telling me one day in New Street that promiscuous charity was a curse to the community, and that it was a man's duty to button up his pocket at the first sound of a beggar's whine. While he was still intent upon this moral lesson, he gave a half-crown to a mendicant Irishwoman, who did most certainly look as if she were in need of it. The great-hearted, big-brained, eloquent man has even yet his monument in the hearts of those whom he inspired; but he left next to nothing as a lasting memento of his own genius. The truth is that, when he took pen in hand, the genial current of his soul was frozen. In print he was curiously stiff and unimpressive; and it has been one of the wonders of my lifetime that a man so wise, so learned, and so original should have left so faint a trail behind him.
I suppose that really no greater stroke of luck could possibly have befallen a student of the oddities of human nature than to have been born in that desolate Black Country sixty years ago. Almost x everybody was an oddity in one way or another and that defacing School Board which has ground the lower middle class of England and its labouring population into one common monotony had not yet laid a hand upon the people. They spoke a very beautiful old English there, full of the quaint plurals long since obsolete in most other places. “Shoon” and “housen,” for example, and now and then a double plural—a compromise between the ancient manner and the new—would creep into their speech; “eysen” was the plural of “eye,” “peasen” the plural for “pea;” and the patois was rich with many singularities which I have known often to be quoted as “Americanisms,” although, as a matter of fact, the “Americanisms” are no more than the survival of the early English form.
If I had only had the brains to know it, there lay before me as fine a field as any craftsman in the art of fiction ever had a chance to glean in. It is an impertinence for a man to speak of his own work, but I have often thought in my own story of Aunt Rachel, there is at least an adumbration of what a man aimed with real sympathy and humour might have done with the people of that place and time. When I say that the characters in Aunt Rachel are all real, I do not mean to make the foolish boast that they are all alive. I mean simply to say that they are all sketches from the life and are as true to their own lineaments as my hand could make them. The old musical enthusiast who, having heard Paganini, laid down his bow for ever because he could be content with nothing less than the great virtuoso's perfections, was a maternal great-uncle of mine, and the pathetic little story of the manner in which the life-long severance between himself and his sweetheart was brought about is literally true. “Aunt Rachel” herself in her extremely starched and dignified old age was a constant visitor at my mother's house. She had, for a space of something like forty years, had charge of successive generations of children in a stately country house in Worcestershire, and when she was honourably pensioned and retired, she used to boast, in her prim way, that she was not unacquainted with the airs and graces of the higher powers. She must at least have reached the age of fourscore when on one occasion she had lingered at my mother's house until darkness fell. The cottage she lived in was a mile away and was approached by a somewhat lonely road. My brother Tom, at that time a stalwart lad of eighteen, was suggested to her as an escort. The little old lady drew herself up to the full height of her dignity. It was a saying of hers that she could not by any loyal person be described as a female of inferior stature, since she was but one barleycorn less in height than Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria. She rebuked my mother with a solemnity which laid a heavy tax on our politeness. “No, Mary, my dear,” she said, “I will go alone; I have my reputation to consider.”
One meets rarely at this time the example of the attached old school of servants, who used to identify themselves with the household to which they ministered. The faithful servant of the antique world is dead, but I remember dozens of instances in my childhood where even in establishments as humble as our own, a domestic who had entered into service in early childhood had stayed on until age or a by no means premature marriage put an end to the association. One of my mother's maids stayed with her for a matter of some thirty years and finally left her to share the destinies of a working mason. The honest fellow had just fulfilled a profitable, small contract in so satisfactory a manner that he was offered something bigger which, in due time, was followed by a something bigger yet. In a while, Jane was keeping her carriage, but on her frequent visits to her old mistress her demeanour never changed, unless one could read into it a trifle of apology for her rustling silk dress and black kid gloves. She developed a love for long words which had not distinguished her in her earlier years, and this tendency betrayed her into occasional malapropisms, the best of which is perhaps worth preserving. My mother was a very notable housewife and trainer of domestic servants. It was her pet hobby to take some neglected little draggle-tail from the workhouse and to turn her into an efficient maid-of-all-work. When this self-imposed duty was accomplished, the maid invariably went elsewhere in search of higher wages, so that my mother was rarely without some slatternly little pupil whom she was drilling into ways of household order. Jane came one day in her rustling silks and streamers to announce a discovery. “The very girl you want, ma'am; I am sure you could turn her into a perfect treasure.” “Well, Jane,” said my mother, “you know what I want. I want three qualities in a girl and if she has them, I can make a good servant of her. I want her to be honest and willing and clean. Is she honest?” “As the day, ma'am,” says Jane. “And is she willing?” “Oh, as willing as the rising sun, ma'am.” “And is she clean?” “Clean, ma'am,” says Jane, raising her black gloved hands to emphasise the affirmation, “she's scrofulously clean!”
And then the poets! there was not a parish or a hamlet for a good ten miles round but had its own acknowledged bard. There were continual tragedies happening in the coal mines. Men were much more careless in the handling of naked lights than they are now, and the beneficent gift of the Davy lamp was looked on with mistrust. The machinery by which the men were lowered to their work was often inadequate. There was nothing like a scientific system of ventilation and fatalities were appallingly frequent. Whenever one happened, the local bard was ready with his threnody and the little black-bordered, thick leaflets were sold at one penny apiece for the benefit of the survivors. The prince of the poetic throng in my day was one Alfred Randall whom I used to encounter on Sunday mornings on his way to chapel dressed in black broadcloth, with huge, overlapping, rhinocerine folds in it—for, as I have remarked elsewhere, a Black Country tailor who had supplied the customer with merely cloth enough to fit him, would have been thought unpardonably stingy—a very high false collar tied at the back of the neck by a foot or two of white tape which as often as not trailed out behind, a woollen comforter dangling almost to his toes whatever might be the season of year, and the hardest looking and shiniest silk hat to be had for love or money—these were Mr Randall's Sabbath wear, and it always struck me as a child that he had very much of the aspect of a cockatoo in mourning. He was a preternaturally solemn man and when I felt that I could command my features, I used to like to talk with him about his Art, and hear in what manner his inspirations occurred to him. “It's no credit to me,” he used to say, with a sort of proud humility, “it's a gift, that's what it is.” Mr Randall's views were not always engaged on tragic themes, and I have the most delightful recollections of a pastoral of his entitled:—“Lines on a Walk I once took on a Day in May into the Country.” It began thus:—
“It was upon a day in May,
When through the fields I took my way.
It was delightful for to see
The sheep and lambs they did agree.
And as I walked forth on that day
I met a stile within my way;
That stile which did give rest to me
Again I may not no more see.”
I had the pleasure to put this effusion into type with my own hands. My father was generally his own proof reader, and when I went to him with the first impression and began to read to him from the manuscript, I was really very terribly afraid. My father was a man who hid a great deal of tenderness and humour under a very stern exterior, and I felt that it was my duty in his presence to go through my share of the proof-reading with a grave and business-like countenance. I approached one couplet with terror, for I knew beforehand that it would break me down.
“As on my way I then did trod
The lark did roar his song to God.”
I had to laugh, whatever might happen, but to my relief my father laughed also. I believe that was the first real, honest, human communion that he and I had ever known together, and Mr Randall's poem did more to make us friends and to break down the life-long shyness which had existed between us than anything else I can remember. I remember this gem from Randall's hand concerning a comrade who met death by his side in the mine in which he worked:—