In Sir John Everett Millais' latest days, I met him at a cricket match at Lord's, and made some attempt to describe to him the truly indescribable riot and glory of the colour of the New Zealand forests. He turned to me with an odd mixture of petulance and humour and asked me: “Why the devil didn't you tell me all this when I could paint?” I believe he was the only man alive who could have translated those splendours truly.
It is the desire of all good New Zealanders that the beauties of their country should be advertised. I offer this humble contribution to that end with a willing heart. I shall be thankful to my latest day to have seen those beauties which I have been able only to hint at. The traveller who misses New Zealand leaves unseen the country which, take it all in all, is probably the loveliest in the world. The climate varies from stern to mild. That of Auckland is warm and sluggish; that of Dunedin keen, inspiring. Situate midway between the two you find perfection. Napier will be the sanatorium of that side of the world one of these days. All over New Zealand one meets people who went out there to die, twenty, thirty, forty years ago, and who are living yet, robust and hale. The air is fatal to phthisis, as it is also in Australia. The most terrible foe of the British race is disarmed in these favoured lands. Take it in the main, the climate of New Zealand is fairly represented by that of Great Britain. The southern parts remind one of Scotland, the northern of Devon and Cornwall. The variety of which Lesser Britain has so much reason to complain is absent. The British climate is idealised in New Zealand.
This fact alone is one of the utmost importance in the estimation of the future of the race. In similar environment the British people have already pretty clearly shown what they can do, and in New Zealand I found myself absolutely unable to trace the beginning of a variation from the British breed. Dunedin, allowing for an influx of Southern Britons, might be Aberdeen; Christ-church, population and all, might be planted in Warwickshire, and no tourist would know that it was not indigenous there. They call their local stream the Avon, and boating there some idle summer days, I easily dreamed myself at home again, and within bow-shot of the skyward-pointing spire which covers the bones of Shakespeare. It is, I believe, a fact that the stream is christened after another river than that which owes its glamour to the poet's name, but in a case of this kind mere fact matters little, and the inhabitants themselves are, for the most part, quite willing to ignore it.
It was in New Zealand that I made my first practical acquaintance with the stage. I have already spoken of that remarkable child actor whom I brought over to England and introduced to the London public in my own comedy of Ned's Chum. I saw him first in Little Lord Fauntleroy, and I expressed myself in such terms about him to his manager that I was offered a commission to write a play in which he should be the principal figure. I was making holiday just then, and having nothing to detain me, I anchored myself in one of the quietest places in the world and threw myself into my task with so much vigour that in a fortnight the comedy was completed, and within a month from its inception was produced at Auckland. Sir George Grey who was then, though he had long retired from office, the tutelary genius of the place, supplied me with the means for the production of such a stage illusion as can hardly have been seen elsewhere. The second act of the comedy was supposed to take place in the heart of the New Zealand bush. “That's a thing,” said Sir George, “which no scene-painter's brush can imitate; you must have the real thing upon the boards.” And straightway he gave me an order for the cutting down of any number of forest trees I might require in his own grounds at Cawai. How these were got into the theatre I do not remember, but the scene produced by their aid was the most perfect and beautiful I can remember to have seen. They were braced by invisible wires, and the severed trunks were concealed behind mounds of real forest moss and cart-loads of last year's withered leaves. There was an artificial waterfall on a level with the upper entrance and the back cloth conveyed the impression of an illimitable vista. As anybody may guess who has the slightest knowledge of work behind the scenes, the preparation of this spectacle and its removal necessitated two tediously protracted waits, but the audience appeared to think that the show atoned for tedium, and our only three performances in Auckland were an overwhelming popular success. The author—good, easy man—naturally attributed that success at the time to the charm of the comedy, but though that went well enough in other places later on, it never afterwards secured the same enthusiastic acceptance. It was the realism and originality of the forest scene which did the trick. Its glories were evanescent, and on the third night the characters, who had moved amidst all the splendours of full summer, were straying under brown and withered autumn leaves.
There are few of us who have not discovered that the affability of a distinguished man may be amongst the most disagreeable of all human characteristics, though when one encounters the real thing which has its root in nature and not in policy it is certainly amongst the most delightful. In Sir George Grey one knew it instinctively to be spontaneous; the man seemed to have been born out of his time; he was a survival from another age, In South Africa, South Australia and in New Zealand he proved himself almost an ideal manipulator of men, and wherever he went he reaped a harvest of personal affection. Nobody meeting him without a knowledge of his record would have guessed that he was in the presence of a man distinguished alike as a diplomatist, a soldier and a scholar; he would have been conscious only of a singularly unassuming urbanity and charm. His manner with children was patriarchal. I was strolling one day during my stay in Auckland with that child actor for whom I had written my comedy of Ned's Chum, when we met the ex-governor of the colony at the foot of Mount Eden, now a green turfed slope and at one time a volcano. “Look here,” said the boy to the venerable welder of Empire, “you take my ball and see how far you can throw it uphill.” “Certainly,” said Sir George. He threw the ball to a considerable distance and it settled in a hollow on the hillside. The child raced after it, and before he returned the veteran statesman and myself had each forgotten all about him and were deep in the history of Auckland. By-and-by the young gentleman came back again and tugged at the skirt of the diplomatist's frock coat. “I've been standing up there,” he complained, “for three or four minutes calling coo-ee, and you never answered once!” “Did I not?” the statesman answered, “now that was very wrong of me. You try me again and you will see that I shall not misbehave myself next time.” The child sped away in pursuit of the ball which Sir George once more threw for him, and in a litde while we heard his call. The old gentleman responded to it and the boy came racing back to have the game repeated, and throughout the whole of our ramble which lasted for an hour or two, the game was carried on with a tireless persistence on the child's side and an unflagging patience on Sir George's. He was talking to me with great animation about the Maori legends which he had himself been the first to collect and translate, but he never neglected to respond to the child's call, and left him, I am sure, under the impression that he was the one person of interest in the party.
CHAPTER XV
The Dreyfus Case—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Opinion—Meeting
at the Egyptian-Hall—Interview with Zola—Maître Labori—M.
Henri Rochefort—Major Esterhazy.
One of my hobbies for the last forty years has been the study of character in handwriting. It is pretty much with the various forms of caligraphy as it is with the human face or with the human voice. The vast majority of faces that one sees are essentially commonplace, but each has somehow an individuality of its own. Handwriting has its physiognomy, and everybody who has been accustomed to a large correspondence knows how instinctively and unfailingly he recognises a caligraphy which has been presented to him only twice or thrice. It was as a result of my pursuit of this hobby that I first began to take a real interest in the Dreyfus case. When the first rough and ready facsimiles of the famous Bordereau and of the authentic letters of Captain Dreyfus were published side by side, it struck me with an immediate amazement to conceive that any person who had given even the most casual attention to this study of handwriting could possibly have supposed that the various documents had emanated from the same hand. The forgery of a signature is one of the simplest businesses in the world, but the truly deceptive forgery of a document of any length is an absolute impossibility—an impossibility as complete as would attend the continued personification of a dual character by the most skilful mimic under the observation of one who was able to maintain a sustained and microscopic examination of the two.
It was an article in the Strand Magazine communicated by that eminent statistician, Mr Holt Schooling, which first enabled me to form a judgment in this matter, and until it and its accompanying photographs of original documents were brought to my notice, I had taken no more than an ordinary passing interest in the case. But since it had been decided, on the strength of an imagined resemblance between the handwriting of the prisoner and that of the author of the Bordereau, I had not a moment's hesitation in arriving at the conclusion that the charge against him was unfounded and absurd, and it seemed to me to be no less than a duty to bring other people to the conclusion which I so strongly held. It was not easy. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote to me:—