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.

And talking of artists, I may mention here that the only person of distinction whose acquaintance I ever made through my host was Frost, the accomplished follower of Etty as a painter of the nude. I had the mild, man-in-the-street sort of admiration of Frost’s work, which I had seen on the walls of the Royal Academy Exhibition, then held, not at Burlington House, but in Trafalgar Square. And from his pictures I expected—such are the perverse preconceptions of youth—to meet a young, tall, flamboyant man with flowing locks and the airs of a Grand Seignior. We were walking one morning—my host and I—down the main avenue of the Regent’s Park. It was spring-time. The flower-beds were ablaze with bulb plants. But few people were about at the moment. Presently we came upon a small and sombre man feeding the sparrows, which followed him in flocks, hovering about his head, and now and then lighting on his hand to snatch a crumb. The small, sombre man was dressed in rusty broadcloth. He wore a wig, had a most melancholy expression, and might have been put down as a superannuated tax-collector, a solicitor run to seed, a Dissenting preacher out of work; but not one man in a thousand would have identified him as a painter of nude subjects, which had been severely reprobated by the unco’ guid. Yet the amiable provider of food for the sparrows was none other than the celebrated Mr. Frost. Frost was a bachelor, and his house was kept for him by a couple of old maiden sisters, who had little sympathy with the direction in art which their brother’s genius had taken. But the sparrows in Regent’s Park altogether approved of their eccentric benefactor. And in this particular form of charity he was the forerunner of the amiable M. Pol (that is the Frenchman’s name, I think) whom I have watched feeding the birds in the gardens of the Tuileries. On this occasion Frost was not to be tempted into any discussion on art. He was intent on arguing the question of drains with my friend, and spoke on the sewer question with the dry particularity of a sanitary engineer. Altogether a disappointing experience of the painter of “Actea: the Nymph of the Shore,” a work which had stimulated all my youthful enthusiasm.

The first movement in the drifting stage of my career was the result of my presence at the first performance of “School” at the old Prince of Wales Theatre in Tottenham Street. The hatchment painter and I had long before agreed that we would be present on that memorable occasion. The night came at last. We were early—or what in those days would have been considered early—and obtained seats at the back of the pit. At that time the suburbs still remained sane. There was no queue of demented women posted outside pit and gallery doors at eight o’clock in the morning so as to be in good time for a performance commencing at eight at night. But the seating capacity of Miss Wilton’s theatre was limited, the pittites being restricted to a very small area, and, having passed the check-taker, we felt that we might consider ourselves lucky in having gained admittance at all. Ah, to recall the sensations of that playgoing! The sigh of relief as I settle myself in my seat! The roseate air of pleasurable anticipation on the faces of those about me; the empty rows of the booked stalls stretching from the front row of the pit to the orchestra; the eager scanning of the features of the stalls as they file in; the curious feeling of cheery elation, of high expectation—these are sensations which grow very stale with use; they are the prerogatives of youth. Enjoy them, my boys, while you are in your heyday. They are moods for which the old and the blasÉ would give a ransom to experience once again.

Indirectly and ultimately this visit to the pit meant much to me. Immediately it meant my first appearance in print in a London publication; eventually it meant my first acquaintance with a dramatic author. Ultimately, perhaps, it meant the determination to a calling quite apart from that to which I had been devoted by my friends. My chirpy companion, as he kept pointing out to me the various distinguished stall-holders as they filed into their places, little dreamed—as, indeed, how should he?—that he was conversing with a dramatic critic in embryo, and that in the course of a few short years I, too, would have a stall set apart for me in that select parterre.

With the production of “School” the Bancroft management and the Robertson comedies reached high-water mark, and all the town was soon rushing to the Royal Dustbin in its grimy and shabby little street off the Tottenham Court Road. A return to the natural in comedy has always spelled success. Farquhar’s was such a return. Goldsmith’s return to nature was hailed by a community sick of stilted heroics and artificial sentiment. Sheridan later on recalled the playgoer to the fact that to give a humorous presentation of society as it is means the highest pleasure to the patron and the highest profit to the playwright. At this present time of writing a return to nature has a meaning very different indeed to that which it bore at other periods. Nowadays the meaning of a return to nature seems to be a return to obscenity. Natural is a term connoting lubricity. And to this confusion in the minds of some modern dramatists as to the true significance of words I attribute much of the irritation caused by supervision and most of the agitation fomented with a view of disestablishing the censorship. But in the old Tottenham Street days we had not as yet accepted the quaint perversion of ideas at present offered us by an anÆmic, exotic, futile section of playwrights, whose goods are exhibited at unlicensed matinÉes, because—luckily—the managers see “no money” in them. The word “nature” was not understood in this foul fashion by T. W. Robertson. The men and women of Robertson’s comedies were the men and women of his own day. The incidents were amusing without being preposterous, or pathetic without being maudlin. The construction of the Robertson series was close, intelligible, sequent. His dialogue rippled rather than sparkled; the story was invariably simple, wholesome, attractive; and over each production was the incommunicable Robertson atmosphere.

And the management that presented these dainty works exercised a care, a taste, and a scrupulous devotion to the details of representation which came as a revelation to those acquainted with the stage methods of the period; and marked, indeed, a revolution in stage management. It is not overstating the case to say that, had it not been for the lead given in this direction by the Bancrofts in the ’sixties and early ’seventies, and subsequently followed up with still greater Éclat by the same artists at the Haymarket, one would scarcely have witnessed the elaborate sets and costly casts to which Irving accustomed us in the ’eighties and ’nineties, or on which, in our own time, Sir Herbert Tree spends so much money and so much intelligent enterprise. In the history of stage reform, however, the Bancrofts must always figure as pioneers; nor is anyone who is old enough to remember the London stage as it was accepted before their management of the Prince of Wales Theatre, at all likely to controvert the statement. Happily for the public, the lead was quickly and largely followed. The old-fashioned stage-manager became a thing of the past. What was once the exception is now the rule.

“Most can raise the flowers now,
For all have got the seed.”

Slender as was my experience of London theatres and immature as was my judgment, I was intelligently impressed by the idyllic delicacy of the work represented, and by the exquisite rendering accorded by a company so wonderfully fitted with their parts. I confess to having felt an enthusiasm then which now I should have some difficulty in explaining. That emotion was soon to find an opportunity for expression. When “School” had been running for some little time, a letter appeared in the Times, conceived in that spirit of dignified rebuke which, in its correspondents, seems to have appealed to successive editors of that great newspaper. In this communication Robertson was crudely accused of having stolen the play, lock, stock, and barrel, from a play then (or recently) running in Germany. I had no acquaintance with the German language and no time (so insistent on protest was my indignation) to inquire into the facts. But I felt that from the internal evidence afforded by “School” I would be able to make a good case. Even in those remote days many of our most admired articles of so-called British manufacture were “made in Germany,” and most of them bore about with them the ineffaceable signs of their origin. I strongly felt that on internal evidence I should have little difficulty, in that “School” was “quite English, you know,” and that, above all, there was no trace whatever of anything German in the conception or the treatment. I had already seen the play a second time when the Times letter made its appearance. On the night of the day on which it was published I paid a third visit to the pit of the Tottenham Street playhouse. When I got back to my “diggings,” I sat down and commenced to write what I intended to be a letter to Jupiter Tonans of Printing House Square, but what turned out to be my first professional contribution to the London Press. Next day I abandoned my more legitimate studies, and rewrote and polished—as well as I knew how—the essay over which I had burned my first sacrifice of midnight oil. The result was in no way suitable as a letter in the correspondence column of a newspaper. My own poor outlook assured me of that. Where to send the essay? A copy of a weekly magazine called Once a Week lay on a chair in the room. I caught it up, looked for the editorial address, wrote a brief note to the editor apprising him of the drift of my contribution, addressed an envelope, and posted my “stuff,” as I subsequently learned to call my articles in manuscript.

Had a mentor, skilled to advise, been available at that moment, he would no doubt have advised me to send my essay to any other publication, but not to Once a Week, because the paper in question was then under the editorial control of a member of the staff of the Times. So that—a circumstance of which I was happily ignorant—the organ selected haphazard for my venture was the very last that should be likely to serve my purpose. Four days after its despatch I received a proof of the article with a request that it should be “returned immediately” to the printer. A delightful sensation—that of correcting one’s first galleys of matter moist from the press! The following week the article appeared in all the pride of print, though I confess that the pride of print (a mere figurative locution) was as nothing to the pride of the author who already saw himself on the high-road to fame and fortune. Alas! it is a highroad which, while the gayest and cheeriest to travel, rarely leads to fame, and never to fortune. . . . I have no doubt that this first published composition of mine was a tremendously faulty piece of work—immature and pretentious. But the appearance of no subsequent production of mine has afforded me a tithe of the pleasure. And, incidentally, it was the means of my making the acquaintance of “Tom” Robertson.

Our acquaintanceship—never an intimate one—began with a correspondence, friendly and genial on his side, ebullient and unctuous, I fear, on mine, for I was very young. Some time elapsed before I met him in the flesh. The introduction was effected at the Albion Tavern in Russell Street, Covent Garden. That famous hostelry has gone by the board this many a day. When first I knew it the Albion was a London institution for which one might have prophesied a permanence as secure as that of St. Paul’s. It faced the north side wall of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, some distance west of the stage-door. It was the favourite supper resort of theatrical people, and famous for its tripe and onions and for its marrow-bones. An excellent dinner of fish, joint, and cheese was served earlier in the evening at half a crown a head—the carver, in white smock and apron and white cook’s cap, wheeling the joint round from table to table on an ambulatory dumb-waiter, and carving in front of the customer, and according to the customer’s desire. The place was run by two brothers, named Cooper, who owned a similar house in Fleet Street. This was called the Rainbow. It was a great luncheon-resort of lawyers, and three-fourths of the present occupants of the judicial bench must have taken their midday meal there from time to time. The Rainbow, alas! where once law officers chopped and learned leaders absorbed the midday refresher, is now mainly a wine-bar—the daily resort of the Guppys, the Joblings, and the Smallweeds of the profession.

The brothers Cooper were not very much in evidence at either house. They presented none of the characteristics of the typical licensed victualler. Indeed, they were the most highly respectable looking men to be seen in any walk of life—rosy-cheeked, white-whiskered, of solemnly benign expression, and dressed with an amount of elderly foppishness which, in a drab mid-Victorian age, was quite delightful to behold. Up the Thames—somewhere in the Hampton Court direction, if I remember aright—where their home was, the neighbours who were “not in the know” supposed them to be stockbrokers of a sporting turn of mind. But if the Coopers took no ostensibly active part in the management of the Albion, they were most effectively represented by their head-waiter—the incomparable Paunceford. Even now, across the years, one can see his beaming face, his head held a little to one side—a propitiatory pose—his twinkling eye, his mellifluous and insinuating tone as he proceeds from box to box, half an hour, or even an hour, after closing-time, with the half-plaintive, half-humorous admonition of “Time, gentlemen, if you please!” Paunceford and the Albion should both have been made immortal. For when the Albion closed its doors, another race of waiters had arisen, and Paunceford’s occupation was gone. The last time I passed through Russell Street, Covent Garden, a merchant from the neighbouring market was running the premises as a store for fruit and vegetables. I wonder whether the ghosts of those departed who once made merry within ever appear to the eminent salesman, flitting behind his mountains of green-stuff, or playing phantom hide-and-seek among his boxes of oranges and bananas.

The first meeting between Robertson and myself was cordial enough, but though he evidently appreciated the defence of “School,” which was the basis of our friendship, it was equally apparent that he had expected to meet an older man, and one who was at least somewhere “in the movement.” When at last we were alone, he became communicative. He was at the time probably suffering from the premonitory distresses of the disease which was destined to carry him off untimely. My first impression was of the bitterness with which he discussed men and things. It was so entirely different from that which I had expected in the mood of one who stood so illuminated in the sunlight of popular approval. Fame and competence had come too late for him. The long, hungry struggle for recognition had soured a nature once, perhaps, sunny enough. More than once during our conversation he alluded to his troubles with his first success, “Society.” It had originally been intended for Buckstone at the Haymarket—then par excellence the Comedy theatre; and for six years after its refusal by Buckstone its author had hawked it about to all the London managers and to some in the provinces. I had asked him what chance of recognition a beginner at stage-writing should have with the managers. This it was that brought “Society” on the tapis. He drove home the lesson with the argumentum ad hominem. His deliverance certainly put me off any vague scheme I may have formed of commencing dramatist, and made me resolve to advance in the critical career upon which, in my youthful folly, I imagined I had successfully embarked. Speaking with great acerbity, he said:

“I was born among stage associations. I grew up among them. It was the natural thing for me to look to the stage for my daily bread. My earliest craft was stagecraft. If I was compelled to carry about in my back-pocket for six years the play into which I had put all my experience before I could get a hearing, you can calculate for yourself the chances of an outsider.”

Reverting to the charge of having drawn on the work of others for his most popular success, he said:

“The author of a successful play is always charged with plagiarism. It was a commonplace to accuse Sheridan of the crime. And Shakespeare was—according to the critics—the greatest thief of all. I am, at least, pilloried in good company.”

After a pause, he continued, with increased bitterness:

“According to your critic, the only man who never plagiarizes is the dramatist who is hidebound by tradition; whose work reeks of the essence of authors who have gone before him, or who are his contemporaries. The only originality they know of is originality of phrase. Original dramatists of the sort generally find time to do a little dramatic criticism as well, so that their case runs no danger of being understated on the press.”

I could not help reflecting at the time that of all men T. W. Robertson had least reason to complain of the indifference or the ineptitude of the dramatic critics. Altogether my sentiment on bidding Robertson “Good-night” was one of depression, which quite overbalanced that feeling of elation which a raw and callow youth would naturally experience after having enjoyed a couple of hours intimate and uninterrupted chat with the most popular dramatist of the hour.

William Brunton—that most lovable and luckless of Irishmen and artists—had given me the coveted personal introduction. Him I had met at the hatchment studio in Great Ormond Street. Brunton was himself a dabbler in heraldry, and, before he started as a comic artist on the pages of Tom Hood’s Fun, had been something of an authority on family escutcheons. A handsome, distinguished-looking fellow was Brunton in those days. His laugh was contagious, and greeted impartially his own jokes and those of his friends. His own jokes were curious, involved, impromptus, mostly without meaning, but characterized by an irresistible quaintness of manner. His own hearty enjoyment of these cryptic morceaux made up for any lack of substance in the things themselves, and, by a sort of infection, aroused the laughter of his hearers. Thus I have myself roared with merriment over his report of the ultimatum delivered by the Irish widow on a third-floor-back in Clare Market to her countrywoman occupying the third-floor-front. It was the way he did it, for in cold print the joke scarcely moves even the most facile muscles:

“I declare to Hiven, Mrs. Dooley ma’am, if ye don’t take yer washin’ off the lobby, I’ll quit th’ tinimint! There it is shmokin’ like a lime-kiln, and my dog Towzer barkin’ at it, thinkin’ it’s a robber!”

When Brunton heard of my appearance for the defence of Robertson in the matter of “School,” and became acquainted with my desire to be introduced, he at once promised, in his jovial, off-hand manner, to bring about the accomplishment of my wish. That he faithfully fulfilled his undertaking has been seen. I met Brunton shortly after at the Strand Theatre. I confessed to him that Robertson’s conversation had not exhilarated me, and that I had not been prepared for a mood so pessimistic in a man so fortunate.

“That’s nothin’,” declared Brunton cheerily. “You should hear Tom sometimes. Last night he was denyin’ th’ existence of th’ Almighty. Dr. Barnett, the editor of the Sunday Times, was present. B— was at one time a Dissenting divine, you know, and is as orthodox as the Pope of Rome. He gently rebuked Tom. It was only addin’ fuel to the flame. ‘If there be a God, why don’t He destroy me now?’ says Tom. Then it was old Barnett’s turn. With a sweet smile and the soft accent of a sort of evangelical angel, he answered: ‘You forget, Tom, that the Almighty is capable of an infinite contempt!’ And be jabers,” concluded Brunton, “poor Robertson was as dumb as an oyster for the rest of the evening.”

It was a noble retort, and it is pleasant to know that Robertson accepted it in silence, and subsequently expressed a very pretty contrition. Robertson was the first experience I had of the fact that an author’s personality or temperament can rarely be gathered from his works. During my sojourn in the tents of Shem I was destined to meet many famous illustrations of the same truth.