by Unknown
Into the night have gone many of his attempts, but heroines he was often to inquire into, and no doubt he turned to sparrows because he had pulled it off with rooks. His sparrows were those that demonstrated vocally of a morning outside his window. Often must they have made previous lodgers wrathful, because they were incapable of coping, but Anon sat at his window and glared at sparrows until at last he made two guineas out of them. They are only worth a friendly mention now as belonging to the days when he made it a stern rule of life, instead of grumbling at misfortunes, to consider whether there might not be an article in them. As for the rate of payment, it was princely at a time when I wrote two stories of twenty thousand words, and received three guineas for each of them. This also I gratefully acknowledge, though being done at a few sittings they left a permanency on my second finger.
Greenwood was soon suspicious of Anon’s birds, and perhaps let some of them in out of kindness. He never knew of Anon’s dark design, if the worst came to the worst, which was some day to go to the Zoo. Here there must be scores of articles behind little bars and wires. It is a proof of light dispelling darkness that he never did go to the Zoo for many years, nor to any other of the London sights. He certainly soon wrote about a night he spent among the murderers at Madame Tussaud’s, but where Madame Tussaud’s establishment was he did not know till somewhere in the ‘nineties. For relaxation (it is now horrible to remember) he liked best to wander the streets eating his buns. I had a look round for his old shops the other day, and most of them are gone, with so much else that once was Bloomsbury. There still remains one in a little passage between Southampton Row and Queen’s Square, and another in Lamb’s Conduit Street, which is now very battered and has been to let for years, but ‘Doig, Baker’ still shows vaguely over its shuttered window. Anon, though perhaps the greatest authority of his day on buns, scones and penny tarts (on all of which he has written articles), could be haughty with the purveyors, and would sternly withdraw his custom at the slightest touch of familiarity, as when without waiting for his order they at sight of him began putting four halfpenny buns into a bag.
I note one odd thing about his early articles, that they are mostly written, though anonymously, as the experiences of himself. This is a sure sign that he was still groping for a method. By and by he nearly always assumed a character, writing as a doctor or sandwich-board man, a member of Parliament, a mother, an explorer, a child, a grandsire, a professional beauty, a dog, a cat. He did not know his reason for this, but I can see that it was to escape identifying himself with any views. In the marrow of him was a shrinking from trying to influence any one, and even from expressing an opinion. On an occasion long afterwards when I had to do it I invented a M’Connachie to share the brunt.
This paper, ‘Better Dead,’ is the original fragment of Anon’s first little book, published at the price of a shilling fully two years afterwards at his own expense. He lost about £25 over this transaction. By that time one could have waded in the articles of his that were printed in the ‘ St. James’s,’ but why this one should have encouraged Anon to its enlargement I cannot see; however insignificant the others are this one seems to me among the smallest of the catch. Nevertheless from no other book of his had he such a lively rush of blood to the head as when ‘Better Dead’ was first placed in his hands. For a week or more he carried it in his pocket, he felt for it with his fingers, and slipped into passages to make sure that some sentence was still there.
The cover of the book, which is certainly the best of it, shows the then wellknown figures of Sir William Harcourt and Lord Randolph Churchill about to turn a street corner where the well-intentioned hero is waiting for them with an upraised knife. I have been lent a copy for reproduction, as the only ‘first edition’ I seem to possess of my works is the third volume of ‘The Little Minister.’ The designer of this cover of ‘Better Dead’ was William Mitchell, an old school friend of Dumfries days, with whom I used to wait at pit doors in Edinburgh to be haunted by the dire orbs of Irving. The hero is called Andrew Riach, in order to associate him with Sandy Riach, one of the new friends Anon gradually made in London, and among the best of all. Anon read the work to him chapter by chapter, and Riach listened with proud delight to his depredations. I like the book in memory because I see his face at those readings and the smoking-cap in which Anon insisted on his hearing them. Sandy Riach was the only person who led me into crime. He begged me (and I fell), as one uninterested in politics, to let him have the satisfaction of being able to say that he had bribed me into voting for I know not whom with a glass of beer. This, I think, was the only time I was ever in a London pub. I have, however, been wilder than that.
Lord Randolph was not only one of the few people who wrote to the author about ‘Better Dead,’ but he was also the first. Rivers will run uphill before we forget our first. I hope this book is better than the article, but I shall never know for certain. No author can have more pleasure in revising his works, or even in rewriting them in proof, but once publication has taken place they and I never salute again.
However, we are now far ahead of our date. One thing I should like to know is whether Anon wrote ‘Better Dead,’ the article, in a gloomy mood because of the rejection of so many of his effusions. If so, it may have been directed against the other Anons who forestalled him in the ‘St.
James’s,’ some of whom I was to know in later years. They were of course people who in his interest would have been ‘better dead.’ I hope there is nothing in this, however, as one of them, then I think at Oxford, is now the highest Prelate in the land, and has stated that my industry on the ‘St. James’s’ was what made him turn to another calling.
CHAPTER IV
“A SMALL LATH” — CARLYLE AND THE CARLYLES
“COCKCROWING as a disturbance to the sedentary man’s peace came up again for hearing; and we agreed as usual that the only way to stop it was to kill the cock. However, an inventor now steps in and says Not at all. Stop the crowing is his plan.
It can be done very easily. All that is required is ‘a small lath suspended about eighteen inches above the perch.’ A cock cannot crow without stretching his neck, and when he stretches his neck his comb strikes sharply against the lath. Cocks cannot endure having their combs touched; and so this simple contrivance reduces them to silence. Had the invention been known of in Thomas Carlyle’s time, the lath in his neighbour’s back premises would have been the lever of Archimedes, and it would have rested on a henhouse spar. Alas, ah me.
It was not the crowing itself that turned Carlyle into a dyspeptic, but the awful intervals of silence while he waited. The days were too short to banish the horrors of the night; an unseen cock sat on his shoulder as he wrote; it strutted behind him in his Chelsea walks, and was never so threatening as when silent. On such occasions he would have given folios to hear it crow. It blackened his existence, and when he had visitors it took their form. Most of the savage sayings Mr. Froude has chronicled were really addressed to the cock.
What a different man Carlyle would have been had his neighbour’s henhouse had a small lath. Instead of hundreds of books about him, there would have been an autobiography, ‘My Sunny Self, by T. Carlyle.’ Mr. Froude would have been asked to edit it; but, after looking through the materials placed at his disposal, would have said that they were hopelessly good-natured. The genial work would have consisted largely of extracts from the sage’s diaries, private letters, and reminiscences of friends. We see his cheery face as he writes:—’June 24, 185-. Had just sat down to my desk, unwieldy lump of misshapen ash painted mahogany, false faced, yet inexpressibly dear, when Leigh Hunt’s head in the doorway. Away with musty records. No more digging for mummies; hand forth, head forward to welcome heartiest friend of me. Leigh Hunt, innocent, guileless, scintillating creature, truly preferring dandelions to guineas. Ah, we have little growth of that kind in windy Scotland. He stays to tea, twittering enchantingly. How he draws Jeanie out, and how merrily their words clash — self rubbin
g hands and eyeing the sparks. When Hunt goes Jeanie comes into my room and tats (mysterious play with wooden spikes called tatting-needles), while her husband smokes the pipe of peace; and we agree that Hunt’s great charm is his affection for his species: best of human qualities; light, bright feather of a man, yet dagont loveable.’ A little further on, ‘December 23, 186-. Jeanie Welsh, Jeanie Welsh, look upon the man you promised to love, honour, and obey. Here must I huddle in a corner far from the writing tools, because the whole house, no less, is needed for a Children’s Party. And am I truly, then, to crawl on all fours beneath a hearthrug to amuse these youngsters? Ah, well, so shall it be, Jeanie woman, you grand divert of me.’
Had these been fair samples of the book, countless newspaper articles would have had to be written on other subjects. The ‘Saturday Review’ would have slated somebody else; the ‘Spectator’ have preached on other texts; scores of writers would have been hacked to pieces who now enjoy a high reputation; thousands who have got their amusement from the ‘Reminiscences’ or the ‘Letters’ would have had to patronize the theatre. Numbers of young men, instead of falling into the sere, would have frequented ‘At Homes’ and been pierced by maidens. Some would have gone in for racing and made a fortune; others would have gone in for racing and been welshed. Those who ran round to the circulating library in slippers to get the third volume, and caught cold and died, would be flourishing mothers and doting dads.
So much talk was there about whether Mr. Froude had been discreet that in the news-sheets ‘Another insult to the British Flag’ was printed in small type and never taken seriously. In other circumstances the country would have been roused, and there would have been a war. France would have taken the opportunity to march into Germany; Germany would have bribed Russia by offering to assist her to our Indian Empire. It is probable that our dogs would never have been muzzled; exhibitions at South Kensington might have remained in the egg; half the smokers of Great Britain might have perished of tobacco grown in Herefordshire.
But those things were not to be; no one had thought of the lath.”
WHEN in later days circumstances were ‘easier,’ and my splendid father made his grand visit to London (he could read the Bible with such awful reverence as I have never heard from a pulpit), the first place we sought out together was neither Westminster Abbey nor the Tower, but Carlyle’s house in Cheyne Row. In our Scottish home the name that bulked largest next to Burns was Carlyle. It is not surprising, therefore, that before our Anon had been long in Grenville Street, Carlyle was appearing in various guises in the ‘St. James’s.’ I can recall Edinburgh days when I was in full sail in Carlylese, quite the ‘sedulous ape,’ indeed he was the only writer I ever tried to imitate. I revelled in reading R. L. S. on style, but it depressed me also, and I had a childish notion (which I passed on to Anon) that style is, in a sentence, the way in which you paint your picture. The proper definition is of course far more difficult than that. Nevertheless, Anon inherited a revered approach to Carlyle, and I am surprised to see that in the first of various papers on the great man he dared to be somewhat playful. One would have expected to find him, so to speak, approaching Carlyle in the Hat.
When I was at school in Dumfries I often saw Carlyle in cloak, sombrero and staff, mooning along our country roads, a tortured mind painfully alone even to the eyes of a boy. He was visiting his brother-in-law, Dr. Aitken, retired, and I always took off my cap to him. I daresay I paid this homage fifty times, but never was there any response. Once I seized a babe, who was my niece, and ran with her in my arms to a spot which I saw he was approaching; my object that in future years she should be able to say that she had once touched the great Carlyle. I did bring them within touching distance, but there my courage failed me, and the two passed each other to meet no more. He may have thought me one of the tribe who tried to get a word from him for storage by asking, for instance, if this was the road to Lochmaben, when he would undo them by pointing out the way with his staff and silently wander on.
This is a recollection of many years ago, and I know not whether visitors still come from afar to gaze at his birthplace in Ecclefechan, which is not far from Dumfries. In my boyhood they went in numbers. There was, for instance, an American clergyman who reverently sipped of the polluted water of the burn and carried off a stone from it as a relic in his pocket-handkerchief.
Carlyle’s brother James I got to know a little in Ecclefechan and at his son’s farm of Priestlands, a shorter man than Thomas, and not near so like him as the son promised to be, but with similar keen eyes, shaggy hair, and rugged lines. My brother was school inspecting at Ecclefechan when I first met James Carlyle in a comparatively talkative mood (for they could all be as taciturn as the great one), and he said to me with a grand burr, ‘You make a terrible to-do nowadays about education by what was the case in my young days. One day at the school when I was a nine-year-old my teacher was hearing me say my catechers (catechism), and I said “he believes” instead of “he believeth.” He knocked me down and pulled my lugs and banged me on the desks; and I ran out and lay at the foot of a hedge among dockens and nettles for three whole days.’ Three whole days seems a long time for a nine-year-old, but they were queer ones, the Carlyles. Grimly attached as they certainly were, they were famed among grim neighbours for the way they ‘took each other off’ round their ingle-neuk, and in my youth there were still octogenarians able to recall red fires, granite faces, and fierce talk. ‘You need not expect us to go out of our way to belaud the Carlyles,’ more than one patriarch said, but they had some of the Carlylean humour themselves, and seem often to have accosted Thomas to find out whether he was genial to-day, or ready to flay them. One story told was at the expense of a relative, a tradesman in the little town, notorious for a habit of standing in his doorway thoughtfully scratching his elbows. He propounded a poser one day, ‘And what would you say, Mr. Carlyle, is the greatest pleasure in life?’ Mr. Carlyle was, as we all know, profoundly learned on the subject, and he replied, ‘To scratch the place that’s itchy.’ He used a better word than itchy, but only Scots would understand.
CHAPTER V
“LOVE ME NEVER OR FOR EVER” — LITERARY VAGRANTS IN HOLYWELL STREET
“‘Love Me Never or for Ever’ (writes ‘Disillusioned’) was the title of my only published novel, and as the months rolled by I had a craving, surely not altogether venal, to see some one buy it. Any one would have done. It was in three volumes, a form whose drawback, as I shall explain, is that the author cannot see his book bought. It is natural that he should like to be present at this transaction, to watch the customer’s eye upon the volumes, to hear him ask the price, to observe his hesitation, to gloat over his inability to put off the purchase till tomorrow, to see him pay his money across the counter; yes, even to follow him to his home on the chance of his reading the first chapter in the streets, to save his life at the crossings, and to walk up and down in front of his house, looking at his pleasant shadow on the blind. This must be a familiar joy to authors in one volume, but it may hardly be done with the three deckers. They are bought only by the libraries, who send round a sort of ennobled wheelbarrow for them.
The best place at which I could hear about my book was not, as it ought to have been, in the newspapers, but at Mudie’s. The young men there did not seem to know that I was the author; or perhaps when I asked them (with a shake in my voice) whether they had a novel called ‘Love Me Never or for Ever,’ they would have said ‘Yes,’ or even ‘Yes indeed,’ instead of passing the question from one to the other. I got ‘Love Me Never or for Ever’ three times out of Mudie’s, so that they must have thought I liked it. On the third occasion I asked in as casual a tone as I could assume whether there was a run on it, and was told that this was the fourth time it had been asked for. Two of the other times I had been the subscriber; but the third time — who had got it the third time? I ask that here, but could not summon courage to put the question to the young men at Mudie’s. I don’t even know whethe
r it was a man or a woman; I think in this case I should prefer a man. What did he think of it? Perhaps he was married, and so there were really two of them. Was he a town or country subscriber? These conjectures however are idle now.
I had nigh ceased to read ‘Love Me Never or for Ever,’ when one day I saw it on a shelf in Holywell Street: one of those shelves outside the window, where you may read as many books as you like without buying them (by taking them a few pages at a time on your way home from the office). It was marked ‘By a popular writer, 924 pp.; the three vols is. 9d.: worth 2s.’ This was not perhaps quite correct; for it is idle to pretend that I am a popular writer; and ‘Love Me Never’ (my pet name for it, as you might say Peg dear or Bess my love) was certainly worth more than 2s. Nevertheless this unexpected meeting strangely affected me; for I had never seen my novel exhibited for sale before. It had been advertised in the publishers’ columns once; yet I never felt exactly what were the joys and pangs of fatherhood until I saw that copy. I was timid of approaching it at first, pretending to look at the other books, but all the time with a loving nod for it. Getting nearer and nearer, I at length had it warm in my hands. I examined each volume, saw that my name was there (just as in my own copy), and looked to see that the first volume had the preface about good wine needing no bush. Nobody had been tampering with my work. Then I viewed the effect from the opposite pavement. The situation was so new and charming that I could hardly tear myself away.
