“John Williams was a godly man
Whose name was on Wesleyan Methodist plan,
He rose one morning and kissed his wife
And promised to be home at night.
But ah! he met the fatal flame
And never he went home again.”
The indifference with which these men lived in the face of danger was something truly remarkable. One would barely encounter a working miner at that time who had not, on face or hands, a deep blue mark like an irregular tattoo, branded where the blast of the exploding gas had driven the coal-dust into his skin, and every man thus marked had been in imminent peril of his life at least once, and had probably found himself in the midst of a dozen or a score of his dead comrades. After one of my own earliest descents into the underground region of the old Staffordshire ten-yard coal, I found myself in a great dimly lighted hall, where the men were pursuing the dangerous task of cleaning out the pillars which had hitherto been left to support the roof. This was a common enough procedure at the time, and many a life was lost in it. I was seated on an upturned wheel-barrow, talking to a doggy or ganger, who was taking his mid-day meal of bread and meat and cold tea. We were perhaps half a dozen yards apart when right between us from the invisible roof, thirty feet above, a cartload of rocky fragments fell without warning. A foot this way or that and one or other of us must inevitably have been crushed. It was the first close and immediate danger of which I had been conscious in my life, and I do not scruple to say that it set me trembling and shaking and left me with a curious sense of emptiness and nausea. But the old doggy just cocked his eye towards the invisible roof and looked down at the heap of débris, and saying, “That stuck up till it couldn't stuck up no longer,” went on quite composedly with his meal.
CHAPTER VII
George Dawson as Editor—Birmingham Politicians—John
Blight's Nervousness—The Black Lake Rescue—The Pelsall
Hall Colliery Disaster—Archibald Forbes—Out of Work—
Edmund Yates and The World—The Hangman-Human Oddities—
A Mislaid Cheque—Hero Worship—Three Stories of Carlyle—
Journalism.
For two or three bright and happy months I acted as George Dawson's amanuensis after a rather curious and unusual fashion. In his unclerical suit of Irish homespun and his beaded slippers, with a well-blacked clay between his lips, he would roam up and down the Turkey carpet of the editorial room and talk about some topic of the day, and in that fashion he would make his daily leader. “Now,” he would say, “take that to your own room and get as much as you can of it into a column.” I made no notes, for I had a verbal memory in those days like a steel rat-trap. But I used to go away charged sometimes with matter enough for a newspaper budget, or nearly, and it was my business to condense and select from this material that which seemed worthiest of preservation. I offer here a fragment or two of the kind of thing he used to say at these times. Talking of Disraeli, whom he hated vehemently, he said: “The man has been writing all his life of the great Asian mystery without guessing that he is the greatest Asian mystery alive. His politics are romantic, his romances are political, and he himself is a fiction founded on fact.” Of another person whom I will not name, he said: “You put the man into a book as you put a sponge into a bucket. You take him out and squeeze him, and he returns the stream uncoloured. He is a sort of Half Hours with the Best Authors, bound in man's skin; he is intellectually impotent, he never begot an idea.”
But he could be as generous in praise as savage in condemnation, and his occasional lapses into tenderness of mood were very sweet and touching. I recall one night at the Church of the Saviour, after his return from a holiday in Rome, when he told us how he had purposely lost himself in the viler quarters of the city. The noon-day sun beat down, eliciting abominable stenches and revealing, without compromise, the ugly squalors of the region. He walked on right into the country, strolled on the Campagna, and at night-fall regained the city by something like the same route he had chosen in leaving it. The garish sun was down. The evening dews had laid the foul odours. The moon was at the full. Every ugliness was turned to beauty. Vile things were transfigured in that softening light. “Christianity,” he said, “is the moonlight of the soul.” It was note a complete saying, but Dawson was a creature of intimations. He startled one sometimes by an intellectual crudity, but he had always reserve.
There are many still living who remember the truly astonishing eloquence and devotion of those improvised prayers of his at the Church of the Saviour. Old mouthing George Gilfillan, by the way, author of the Bards of the Bible and other deservedly neglected works, wrote to Dawson when his congregation built this church for him: “You have started the Church of the Saviour, but you will never be a saviour to the church.” To which the other George fittingly responded “that the Church had its Saviour already and it was a plain man's business to preach His plain meaning.” But those prayers! They were the mere breathing of a strong, sane soul towards an infinite hope, an infinite possible good, a great half-revealed Fatherhood. Doubt faltered there, hope exulted. I have not heard from other mortal lips—I do not hope to hear again—such an expression of humble hope and doubt, such a tone of complete abasement before the Divine Ideal, such a final triumphant note of praise in the far-off haven to which creation moves.
The best result of the life of my dear old chief was the effect he had upon the municipal spirit of that town of Birmingham. It was not then a city in those days to which he devoted so large a portion of his many gifts and his great energies. Such men are the salt of great communities. Not so endowed as to command the armies of the world, missing something of the ambition, or the vanity, or the push of potential greatness in its wider spheres, they gain in force by the very limits of the current to which they commit their powers. Many a generation will go by before the capital of the Midlands wholly forgets the influence of the man whose character I have so feebly indicated here, who was to its teeming thousands the lighthouse of honesty, and who still seems to me, after the lapse of all these years, the bravest, the sincerest and the most eloquent soul it has been my fortune to encounter. I owed to him a personal acquaintance with the leading politicians of the town. John Skirrow Wright—of whom Dawson always spoke as the “great Liberal party”—a big, noisy, vehement, jovial man, whom the phrase accurately fitted; Dr R. W. Dale, the Archbishop of the Nonconformists of his day and many others.
On one memorable afternoon, he introduced me to John Bright. I do not think I ventured to take any share in the conversation between the two, but I recall one interesting passage of it “Tell me, friend George,” said Bright, “you have, I suppose, as large an experience in public speaking as any man in England. Have you any acquaintance with the old nervous tremor still?” “No,” said Dawson, “or if I have, it is a mere momentary qualm which is gone before I can realise it.” “Now, for my part,” said the great Tribune, “I have had practice enough but I have never risen to address an audience, large or small, without experiencing a shaking at the knees and the sense of a scientific vacuum behind the waistcoat.”