A week later Dawson was lecturing at the Birkbeck Institute and I went to hear him and afterwards drove with him to the Victoria Hotel at Euston where he was staying for the night. I told him of the tremendous adventure just recounted and he asked me if I would like to meet Carlyle. In the explosive mood which came natural to seven and twenty, I answered that I would go on my hands and knees from there to Chelsea only to hear him speak and to be able to boast that I had shaken him by the hand. “No need for that,” said Dawson, “I'll take you to him one of these days, when I have an hour or two to spare in town,” and then he began to tell me that he had often thought of leaving behind him some intimate record of his association with the great man whose most popular and familiar translator he himself had been to the people of England. “But,” he acknowledged, “I have always been too busy or too idle and I begin to fear that that duty will never be performed. I'll tell you what,” he added suddenly, “I'll hand the whole thing over to you if you care to have it. I make a point of going now and then down to Rickmansworth, where I had my first cure of souls and where there are still a few of my old friends left. We'll go down there together and have a quiet day.” Dawson began straightway to open, as it were, a bag of samples. He told me three stories of Carlyle; they were all I ever had from him, for that was the last occasion on which we met. I learned that when Carlyle, who was then engaged in the preparation of those seven tremendous volumes of The Life of Frederick the Great, made an excursion into Germany for the purpose of getting a view of his hero's battlefields, Dawson was one of his travelling companions—the other was a German gentleman who, according to my old chiefs account, did a great deal of what he Called the underground work on which Carlyle's monumental edifice was reared. The trio, if I remember rightly, rested at Munich and the historian expressed a wish to find some quiet place in which he could assort his notes and at the same time enjoy a day or two's repose. Dawson and his companion set themselves to work and found a charming little farmhouse within easy distance of the city. “And between ourselves,” said he, “we weren't sorry to be left for a little while to our own devices; we were like a pair of schoolboys broken loose. We went to the theatre and afterwards dropped in to listen to the music in the Beer Garden and altogether we made rather a late night of it. We were breakfasting in the open air at our hotel the next morning about eleven o'clock when suddenly I spied Carlyle with his coat tails flying and his old felt hat rammed on angrily anyhow. He was gesticulating wildly with his walking-stick and began to talk whilst he was twenty yards away. 'Ca' ye that a quiet place?' he shouted, 'ca' ye that a quiet place? At three o'clock they damned cocks began to crow, and a hour later they damned oxen began to low and every dog was barking for a mile around; and that,' he said, casting both hands to heaven as if he were appealing for a judgment on some heart-breaking iniquity, 'and that's your notion of a quiet place!' The culprits looked guiltily at each other, but for the life of them they could not refrain from smiling; the smile became a laugh in spite of effort, and Carlyle, after one withering glance at the pair of them and one frenzied exclamation of 'Ma Goad!' dropped suddenly into a chair and laughed uproariously.”
When Emerson was in England, Carlyle and Dawson were his companions on his visit to Salisbury Plain. They went to Stonehenge together and on that day Carlyle was in one of his saddest and most pessimistic moods. Life was not worth living—the whole world was rotten and wrong—and he wondered, like the old monk in Longfellow's Golden Legend, why God didn't lose his patience with it wholly and shatter it like glass. Men were fools and liars, and impostors and quackery reigned supreme. “And in a world like this, George,” he was concluding with a tragic emphasis, “I see nothing for it, for two honest men like you and me, but just to sit down on yon heap of road metal and have a quiet smoke together.”
I wish I could tell the third story with half the gusto with which Dawson related it. At the time of that visit to Germany of which I have already spoken, there was no Prussian Empire. Bismarck may, even then, have dreamed of it, but what is now a united Germany was split into an infinite number of little principalities. In one of these, a Serene Transparency—or some personage of that order—held rule over a handful of subjects. It happened that he was a profound worshipper of Carlyle, regarding him as the greatest humorist, philosopher and historian of his age. He wrote to Carlyle a letter full of German enthusiasms, begging him to name an hour at which he could present himself for the personal delivery of his homage. “But,” said Carlyle, “we are in the man's territory and it is only in the fitness of things that we should pay our respects to him.” Accordingly the two set out together and reaching the palace proposed to send in their names. They were encountered by some kind of glorified flunkey, an official of the toy court of the principality—who assured Carlyle that it was impossible to present him to the Serene Transparency in the costume he was then wearing. Carlyle wanted sardonically to know what was the matter with the costume, and the major-domo instanced his hat. Carlyle tore the hat savagely from his head and punched it two or three times before he thundered: If His Serene Transparency objected to the hat he might object; it was the only hat the philosopher owned and he had no immediate intention to provide himself with another! And whilst he was brandishing the hat and raging at the astonished major-domo, who should appear on the scene but His Serene Transparency, who rushed forward and, falling on his knees, embraced the legs of the amazed philosopher. Dawson declared the whole scene to have been beyond pen and pencil. Carlyle's face was a wonder for wrath and astonishment, but that of the court official was beyond speaking for amazement. Who or what he supposed the visitor to be was altogether beyond conjecture!
I was still waiting for that promised invitation to Rickmansworth when Dawson died. He had suffered for some years, though he did not know it, from an aneurism of the aorta, and the bursting of the aneurism into the larynx was the cause of death. He used to say that he should pray to be taken suddenly and to be spared the misery of a prolonged deathbed. He had his wish, for it was all over in a few minutes and was absolutely painless. I was staying with a chum of mine in his chambers in Dane's Inn—long since gone the way of all stone, bricks and mortar. My host came in with a newspaper and laid it on the table before me with his finger on a cross-headed paragraph, “Death of George Dawson, M.A.” Nothing in all my experience had ever hit me so before, and whatever may be held in reserve for me, nothing can ever so profoundly affect me again. The whole world went dark and empty—George Dawson dead! He had been my man of men, for years my dearest friend and helper, my Moses in the spiritual wilderness through which it is the doom of every young and ardent soul to travel, and with his going, everything seemed blank and waste.
If you search all the professions round, you will not find one in which men display such an extraordinary divergence of intellect and acquirement as you will if you turn to journalism. There are men employed in that craft who are better qualified for Cabinet rank than half the men who ever hold it, and there are, or used to be in my time, hundreds of intelligences as purely mechanical as if they had been born to be hodmen. With one of the latter species I was officially associated for a year. He is now dead and no truth can hurt his feelings any more, but I think he was about as ignorant and self-satisfied an ass as I can remember to have encountered anywhere. There was one thing to be said for him: he had mastered the intricacies of Pitman's shorthand system and wrote it almost to perfection. You might rely upon him to get down in his note-book every word he heard, or thought he heard, but in transcription he sometimes achieved a most extraordinary and unlooked-for effect, as for example: A meeting of the Licensed Victuallers' Association was held in the lower grounds at Aston, and Mr Newdigate—the member for North Warwickshire—presided over it, and during the annual address—what else the right honourable gentleman had to say I have long since forgotten—he wound up by quoting a verse from Lord Tennyson's “Lady Clara Vere de Vere “:—
“Howe'er it be it seems to me
Tis only noble to be good.
Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood.”
This the shorthand genius rendered in the manner following:—“The right honourable gentleman, who resumed his seat amidst loud and prolonged cheers, concluded by remarking that however it might represent itself to others it appeared to him that the only true nobility consisted in goodness, that kind hearts were better than coronets, and that simple faith was more to be esteemed than Norman blood.” Somehow this passed the printer's reader and appeared in all the glory of type the following morning. It fell to my lot to take the criminal to task, but he disarmed me by a mere turn of the hand. “I don't call it fair,” he said, in his soft, insinuating Rother-ham accent, “to expect a man to have all English literature at his fingers' ends for five and thirty bob a week, and beside that, if you look at Mr Pitman's preface to his last edition” (he produced the book from his coat pocket), “you'll find it set down as an instruction to all shorthand writers that it's a reporter's duty to make good speeches for bad speakers. I have got down what he said right enough, but I thought I'd touch him up a bit!”
On another occasion the improver of Tennyson came across from the Town Hall to the office with the final “turn” of an address which had just been delivered by Mr Bright to his constituents. “I'm in a bit of a difficulty,” he explained to me breathlessly, “there's old Bright been havering about in his customary manner and he has been talking about Hercules and some kind of stables. I got a 'j' and an 'n' down on my notes, but I forgot to vocalise the word and I can't remember it.” I suggested Augean. “That's it,” he said joyfully, “but, my word! what a memory you've got to be sure!”
One almost incredible example of mental agility he gave me. He came to me one day beaming with an unusual complacency, and announced that he had made a discovery. He had an absolutely hairless, shining dome of head, and he confided to me the fact that the boys in Rotherham seventeen years ago had nicknamed him “bladder o' lard.” “I could never make out what they meant by it,” he said, “until this morning I was standing in front of my looking-glass shaving, and it came to me at a run—they gave me that nickname because I'm bald!”