As I essay to challenge my memory of that pleasant past, the first results are not satisfactory. The pictures are confused in composition and blurred in general effect. After a little patient waiting—much in the manner of our late friend Stead in Julia’s bureau—the blurred pictures acquire other characteristics. The second effect is kaleidoscopic. The retrospect is full of movement and colour. At last the kaleidoscopic effects become mere atmosphere, and one by one, or in groups, the dramatis personæ take their places on the stage. And the curtain rises on the play.
CHAPTER II
DRIFTING INTO IT
Nowadays, I understand, there are schools to educate young gentlemen for the Press. Indeed, in my own time a school of journalism was founded by a man who had taken to the calling quite late in life. But I have never heard that the seminary in question turned out any pressman of eminence or even of uncommon aptitude. The founder of the singular academy was a Mr. David Anderson, about whom and about whose school I may have something to say in another chapter.
A man of very different calibre, a profound literary scholar, the most cultured critic of his time, was, at a more recent period, imbued with Anderson’s idea that a special training was desirable in the case of candidates for a vacancy on a newspaper staff. He was, indeed, prepared to carry the notion much farther than the system of perfunctory instruction instituted by the founder of the “school,” who was more or less a blind leader of the blind. The second reformer to whom I allude contemplated the establishment of a Chair of Journalism at the University of Birmingham. Indeed, he had obtained considerable support for his enterprise, and had it not been for his lamented death, I believe, the scheme would have taken shape. I had several opportunities of discussing the proposal with Professor Churton Collins—for it is of that accomplished critic and enthusiastic educationist I am speaking—and, although it was difficult to withstand arguments conveyed in the Professor’s felicitous language, and uttered in his melodious and persuasive tones, I was never quite convinced of the utility of the scheme. From whence are the Professors to be drawn? Not from the ranks of journalism, surely. Because the men who have risen to such an eminence in journalism as would qualify them for the position would be very unlikely to abandon their fat editorships for the poor emoluments of such a Chair.
Churton Collins was a man with a passion for accuracy. His whole teaching was a protest against the slipshod style in literature. His favourite epithet was “charlatan,” which he hurled against all incompetent persons professing to instruct the public. Moreover, though in the earlier stages of his career he wrote for newspapers, he was never what was known as “a newspaper man.” He was on the Press, but not of it. And I question if he had taken much notice of its later developments. Had he observed the signs of the times as they are seen in our daily broadsheets, he would have perhaps admitted that among the qualifications which should be demanded in any occupant of a University Chair of Journalism was a good working knowledge of the camera, and the ability to instruct students in the most suitable subjects for photographic reproduction.
Schools of journalism and professorships of Press lore are “all my eye and Betty Martin.” The journalist, like the poet, is born, not made. A University education can do him no harm. A large proportion of the men of the seventies and eighties had had a distinguished University career. Nor does the absence of a college education prejudice the aspiring neophyte. Those men, indeed, who have made themselves a name in journalism—such men, for instance, as George Sala and Archibald Forbes—started without any of the equipment supplied by an Alma Mater. Any training worth mentioning must be picked up on the Press itself. And the main qualification is a natural aptitude. Thus, the journalist—self-taught man, or public-school man, or University man—just drifts into it.
Personally I have to admit that it was in my own case entirely a matter of drifting. Unconsciously and gently impelled toward it by the motions of a certain desire for facile and frequent expression in print, one becomes eventually the subject of an invincible attraction. Those who were responsible for the ordering of my early life took a large view of their responsibilities. The same persons who had provided me with a rattle and a cradle, in later years selected for me a profession. And although I have never ceased to be a member of the learned profession chosen for me, in the same way that I abandoned the rattle and the perambulator, it has never afforded me either the amusement or the support supplied by the toys or the equipages of childhood. I am indebted to it, however, for some cherished friendships, and for introductions to some valuable “openings” into that teeming journalistic arena with which I was to become identified. Those set in authority over me believed that I was “cut out” for a barrister. But when I, my friends, was called to the Bar, I’d an appetite—well, for anything but law. The law never appealed to me. Literature always did. Before I went into chambers—and for some time after that—the only interest the Temple possessed for me was that Goldsmith lay buried there, and that there Warrington and Pendennis railed against the publishers, and wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette, thus antedating by many years the actual appearance of that journal. While reading for the Bar and keeping my terms, I had few acquaintances in London beyond those I met at the dinners in Hall, and Mr. MacDermott, with whom I “read.” The town seemed deadly lonely at first. It takes some time before the new-comer realizes that he is part of the crowd that jostles him, before the feeling of isolation gives way to that of fellowship.
When I first came up, I lodged at the house of an old gentleman in Woburn Place, Russell Square. He was a typical Londoner, and he followed a calling of which, I should imagine, he must have been the very last professor. He was a painter of hatchments. In those days the death of a member of the aristocracy was indicated by the appearance on the house-front of a canvas bearing a representation of the armorial bearings of the deceased. This work of art was usually fixed between the windows of the first-floor. These grim heraldic emblazonments were at one time exhibited in considerable profusion in the streets and squares of the West End. The custom seems to have “gone out.” So many swells now live in flats, where the exhibition of such mural decoration might be misunderstood and resented, that the grisly custom has grown into desuetude. My landlord was the last of the hatchment painters. He was a little man close upon seventy years of age. He was extremely good-looking, had small side-whiskers and a tiny imperial, both snow-white. The rest of his face was clean-chaven. His salient physical peculiarity was a pink and white complexion which have been the despair and envy of his aristocratic patrons. He was a brisk, cheery mortal wonderfully quick in his movements. For the rest, he loved the London in which he had been born, and from which he had never wandered much farther than Hampton Court; he had a fund of information about the houses of Mayfair and Bloomsbury; he was a determined playgoer; he had an acquaintanceship with some actors and actresses, and was on particularly friendly terms with Charles Mathews. Naturally, he was a wellspring of gossip regarding the noble families with whom his melancholy art made him acquainted.
His studio was in Great Ormond Street, and next door to the Working Men’s College, where he had got to know the Rev. F. D. Maurice and the Rev. Charles Kingsley. Of the latter broad-minded Broad Churchman he had several stories. One only can I recall. Kingsley had felt called upon to reprove a parishioner of his on a growing spirit of miserliness which he was exhibiting. The fellow was well off, a widower, and living alone. He was denying himself the necessaries of life, when his Rector thought it time to remonstrate. But the old man was immune against reason, or, rather, he had an objection to every argument urged by his spiritual adviser. At last Kingsley took him on lower ground. The old fellow had an only son. He was a sailor and a notoriously free-handed young man. “This money,” urged the Rector, “which you are hoarding, and which you might employ so usefully, will come at last to your boy, who will fling it about with both hands.” “Ah, well,” observed the unrepentant niggard, “if Jim has on’y half the pleasure a-spendin’ on it as I’ve had a-savin’ on it, I wholly envy ’im—that ’a do.” A congregation composed of rustics of that type must have been a bit of a trial to a man of Kingsley’s optimistic temperament. But, then, his reverence was also endowed with the saving grace of humour.
I suppose the hatchment habit—which had persisted for so many generations—had fallen into a rapid decline just about this period, for my cheery little landlord had but lately taken to letting apartments. The income from heraldic painting had ceased to prove sufficient for the upkeep of a big house. The old gentleman’s housekeepers were a wife and daughter, whose second-hand acquaintance with the heraldry of the great had induced the belief that, if not actually “in Society,” they were very much in touch with it. Their conversation was studded with allusions to “Lady This” and “Lord That.” It was some time before I discovered that their constant conversational appeals to “the Dook,” a personage with whom, it might appear, they lived on terms of considerable intimacy, was His Grace the Duke of Bedford. Their supposed friendship with that nobleman rested solely on the circumstance that His Grace was the ground landlord of the premises in which they lived. “I shall certainly speak to the Dook about it,” or, “You must reelly write to His Grace, my dear,” were tit-bits that were served up to me ad nauseam when—as would sometimes be the case—I was asked to join the ladies at five o’clock tea. In his reminiscences of “the nobs,” as the Upper Ten were then called, the hatchment painter himself betrayed no snobbishness whatever. He related anecdotes of his noble employers, just as he would tell a “good thing” about a divine, or an actor, or an artist.