CHAPTERXIVOVERTIMETo play is for a man to do what he pleases or to do nothing—to go about soothing his particular fanciesCharles Lamb: “Letter to Bernard Barton.”That idea of soothing your particular fancy gives to me the very clearest image of play and playtime. And most men’s fancies take a deal of soothing, since man will fancy himself and his capabilities to be x, when his nearest and dearest could tell him, if they were not his nearest and dearest, that they are not even y, but something far nearer toa b c.And as long as a man does not fancy himself at his real work, but only in playtime, what does it matter? For in a sane man it seems a natural attribute that he should dislike work he is peculiarly fitted for, and should hanker after jobs that he is naturally ill-equipped to perform. I always looked forward to what I called “overtime,” when I could get away from briefs and law books, and put in a few solid hours spoiling beautiful hand-made paper with inharmonious water-colours, or writing plays and stories that nobody wanted to publish. Why I should have called it “overtime” I do not know, for real overtime is paid at least at the rate of “timeand a quarter,” but my overtime generally cost me money. Perhaps the idea I have in calling it “overtime” is that these tasks could only be done after the day’s work was over, which is the only attribute my “overtime” had in common with the overtime of the working man.From my earliest days—when to the dread and horror of my family I bought a fiddle and tried to learn to play it—I have experienced a sane and healthy desire to spend my working hours on jobs I know I can never do, rather than in exercising capacities which have always been with me. I call it a sane and healthy tendency, because I find it to exist in nearly everyone who feels physically and mentally well.I once knew a plus 2 golfer who spent all his overtime away from the links in trying to grow tomatoes out of doors. Each season the climate—which he spoke of as a horticultural bogey—was at least 7 up on him before the first frost came and stopped the round. But he had many merry hours in his garden, and laughed gaily when he topped a budding plant with a careless approach with a hoe or was badly bunkered by a patent manure. What really bored him was the monotony of golf with eighteen perfect drives every round he played. It was only on those rare occasions when he pulled or sliced into the rough that I have known him to smile and openly admit “that there was some fun in the old game, after all.”I early discovered the delights of “overtime” inmy father’s library, where I was supposed to do my home-work whilst I was at King’s College School. There I read all the great English writers with a larger enjoyment, because, like the Jew who ate the pork chop, I could feel that I was “sinning at the same time.” I think that library and its contents are entirely responsible for my taste in overtime. Shakespeare, Fielding, Smollett, Dickens, Thackeray, Mrs. Opie, and Aphra Behn. I remember the very format of each volume. I do not think there was a single dramatist or novelist of any mark in the English tongue that was unrepresented.Perhaps my favourite book was Cumberland’s “British Theatre,” with its forty-eight volumes. The stage-directions of the bloodiest of the melodramas were my favourite reading. Their only rival was the brief in some sporting case which lay on the table at which I worked. I would often slip the papers out of their red tape and peruse them far more diligently than I did in after days, when I was paid for doing so. How carefully I read the solicitor’s story of the case. In later years I found that no self-respecting advocate ever studied these lengthy pages, well understanding that under an absurd legal system they are put there merely for the taxing master to appraise and allow in the form of costs.I remember Nash being amusingly scored off by a well-known solicitor, who rather plumed himself on his frugal literary gifts, and took much pains in the composition of the story of a case. He complainedto Nash that he never read these narratives, and Nash had assured him, out of polite respect to his hobby, that he always made a point of studying them and greatly admired them. Soon afterwards Nash was instructed by the solicitor to defend a client in a criminal case at the assizes, and a fat brief, marked “30 guas” and beginning with a very lengthy narrative, was delivered to counsel. How far Nash read any of it I do not know, but he duly acquitted the prisoner. To Nash’s annoyance and surprise—for the solicitor was a most solvent and respectable person—the fees were not paid. Nash’s clerk made several efforts to solve the mystery, and was told that they had been paid to Mr. Nash at the assizes, but Nash knew that this was not so, and was very indignant with the solicitor about it. A month or two afterwards Nash met the solicitor in Cross Street, and going up to him expressed his views of the solicitor’s conduct very roundly.“But I paid you at the assizes, Mr. Nash.”“Nothing of the sort, sir, and you know it.”“Did you read my story of the case, Mr. Nash?” asked the solicitor.“Of course, I did. I always read every word of my briefs,” said the unblushing Nash.“H’m, that’s very curious. I can’t understand it,” said the solicitor, with his head on one side, and his left eye half-closed. “I can’t understand it at all, because on page three of that statement of the case I pinned a cheque for your fees, and—hadn’tyou better go back to chambers, Mr. Nash, and read that brief again?”But when I was a lad the introduction to the brief was my first study. If it looked dull and boresome I dropped the papers speedily. How often in after life I wished I could deal with briefs in similar fashion. And as no child will ever read these pages I may confess that from the short years of my schooling the only things that remain with me are elegant extracts of forbidden reading; forbidden not by my father, I should say in fairness to both of us, for he knew all about it and winked, but by my pastors and masters.I think it is Walt Whitman who expresses the thought that he would like to get away from mankind and “turn and live among the animals, they are so placid and self-contained.” And I have the same kind of feeling about school-masters. The prosperous incompetence of the school-master is to me one of the great mysteries of life. When I lived among school-masters a cowardly idolatry, the offspring of tyranny and coercion, prevented me using opportunities to make careful observation of their mental and moral constitution. I had a vague knowledge that they were hopelessly wrong, but I had not the energy and ability to analyse the wherefore of it. Physically they were of varying size and beauty, but mentally they were absolutely and uniformly all alike. It never occurred to my young mind that this was a natural result of pouring youthful educational hot stuff into an old-fashioned mould and turning it out when it had grown cold.There were, of course, many charming persons among them. What an excellent fellow was E——. I have long forgiven him, but his offence was rank and smells to heaven. He it was who persuaded me for a whole term to spend my overtime on school books. I have some prizes on my shelves now, the result of my foolish complaisance. I have never looked inside them, but the bindings are handsome, and they serve as amemento moriof wasted hours that can never be replaced. The speculation was commercially sound, no doubt, but whilst I was doing it my conscience smote me. The next term I dropped it, and my good friend, with that rare prophetic insight that enables the school-master to foresee the unbetiding, filed my deficiency account in words that still have a haunting sound of failure: “has some ability, but no staying power.”It does not need an alphabet of scholastic degrees to enable a man to back a double event and find both of them to be losers. And yet old E——’s epigram, that looked at the time so like real stable information, was but a huckster’s tip after all. Most of my relatives and all my real friends, those who know best, have cheerily shaken their heads at the word ability—did so, I remember, at the time—and have admitted that he was wrong there, but even E—— himself would not now, I think, gainsay the fact that I have stayed the course. And yet my innate reverence for the school-master is such that I have an uneasy feeling that I ought to have so shaped my life that the words of the school-master might be fulfilled, andthat in not having done so I am in danger of judgment.The early days of the Bar are all overtime. And the first big overtime job that I undertook, and perhaps the pleasantest I ever carried through, was the preparation of a version of “Dorothy Osborne’s Letters,” the first edition of which I finished in my early days at Manchester, and published in 1888. I remember my joy when Mr. Comyns Carr, who then edited theEnglish Illustrated Magazine, accepted my first essay on Dorothy Osborne. How I still reverence his critical acumen. The joys of winning a legal scholarship, or having that first brief at quarter sessions delivered to you by a real solicitor’s clerk, have none of thattremensdelirium about them that you attain when your literary essay is accepted in a courteous autograph from a master in letters. The manuscript of “Dorothy Osborne’s Letters,” like all great works, was refused by many of the leading publishers, and when it was published the book was an immediate success. It has been pirated in many countries, and will, I think, remain in the English library, not on account of any work of mine, but because of the peculiar charm of Mistress Dorothy’s style in letter-writing. It was a satisfactory bit of “overtime.”My next book was a life of Macklin, the actor, written for a series edited by William Archer. Mr. Lowe wrote a life of Betterton. Mr. Archer himself wrote Macready, and then came my “Life of Macklin.” For some reason or other that ended theseries. It was not half a bad book, and a friend of mine in Dublin says my chapter on the Irish stage has amused and entertained him for many pleasant hours in tracing out and confuting by authority the errors and inaccuracies it contains—but, then, he admits that no other Saxon had ever dared to try and write such a chapter.And I suppose it is only right to enter on these time-sheets my journalistic work as overtime. I know nothing so exhilarating as journalism. If I was really to take to writing as a business, I should hire an upper chamber in some building which was gently rocked from below by a steady throbbing engine, and arrange for the smell of its oil, coupled with the aroma of printer’s ink, to pervade the atmosphere, then having hired a whistling and insistent boy, with a raucous voice, to put his head in and shout “copy” at me every quarter of an hour, I should sit down to work, hopefully assured of a glorious “spate of style.” For many years I wrote dramatic criticism and reviewed books, and wrote “shorts” and occasionally full-dress leaders for theManchester Guardian. I do not think I had any very particular reputation in Cross Street, except for punctuality and dispatch. It is not every journalist who has even these humble attributes, but they were evidently well remembered of me.I mind meeting C. P. Scott one autumn morning some three years after I had been judge, as I was walking down to my work—along the fragrant groves of Rusholme. He seemed somewhat disconsolateand told me his trouble. He had an advance copy of “Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Letters,” and through illness there was no one in the office free to review it. Two columns about were wanted before going to press. “I wish, Parry,” he said, with half a sigh, “that you were available.”Of course I was available. The book, with its two volumes of over eight hundred pages, came down to the Court. I started it in the luncheon hour. I got at it again after the Court rose at about 4 o’clock, and before 11 at night I entered the office and was received with enthusiasm by a grateful sub-editor thirsting for copy. I compared my work the next day with that of some of the London champions, the plus 4 men at the game. I had scooped out nearly all the tit-bits, and I had done more. I had discovered that Mrs. Browning’s baby was a good half-column, and the other fellows had missed that delightful child altogether. Moreover, I had not only written my review, but I had copied out all my extracts, for I never could bear the thought of mutilating a book, and so the volumes remain with me as a pleasant memory of a happy day’s overtime. For when I had had some supper I had missed the last tram, and dreaming that I was still in the days of my youth and could not afford a hansom, I had a joyful walk home in the moonlight.And long before that, whilst I was at the Bar, Hulton, the elder, came into my chambers and asked me to write some articles for theSunday Chronicle. For some reason or other a new hand was suddenlywanted. The articles had to be a column and a turn-over. Any subject might be written upon as long as the writing was tense, vivid and entertaining and the matter was of popular interest. The manuscript had to be ready by Friday. I doubted my capacity for the task, but Hulton told me that he had been assured by that kind-hearted doyen of the craft, Spencer of theGuardian, that I was all right. I bowed to his verdict, for to me Spencer’s was the last word about journalistic matters.I shall never forget that week. Nothing happened. Day succeeded day in stagnant succession, no one of importance said or did anything. There was not a crime or a law-suit, or even a political speech in which one could pretend an interest. On the Thursday morning I rose early and rushed at the newspapers. The same dismal outlook of barren nothingness. I passed the canal and looked at its waters lovingly. Was I to disgrace myself by going back on the verdict of Spencer? It seemed impossible that I could do that and live.About midday, whilst sitting in chambers with a blank sheet of paper before me, symbolic of the mind within, my clerk brought in some papers, and in a diffident off-hand manner said casually, “I suppose you’ve heard the news!”“News,” I cried testily, “there is none.”He turned on his heel.“What is it, then?” I called after him.“Only Mr. Parnell’s dead!”I had a real reverence for Parnell, but to undertakersand journalists death is indeed the reaper, and the poor gleaners cannot be blamed that they are thankful when the season brings them their only harvest. In truth I never wrote with greater sense of responsibility nor with a more eager desire that every word and sound should toll the message of his life into the hearts of my readers. Heaven knows how far I succeeded. It was enough for me that Spencer nodded approval. And to the quiet homage for the statesman that most of us have to-day there comes into my heart a thrill of grateful emotion whenever I hear the name of Parnell.I wrote thoseSunday Chroniclearticles for some time, but it was a worrying task, and my work at the Bar began to creep into the overtime, and ultimately, like Aaron’s rod, swallowed up all other pursuits. But I look back to the task with pleasure, because it enabled me to write an article to the glory of Charles Hopwood and his policy, and I still possess a faded letter, full of hope for the future and thanks for the help that had been given to the cause he had so much at heart. Of course, I had known Hopwood as a leader on circuit for some years, but after theChroniclearticle he began to talk to me about his various views and plans of reform in a way that was deeply interesting.And to go back to my earliest recollection of Hopwood I must go back to when I first joined the circuit, and recount an early journey to Lancaster Assizes with Falkner Blair. He had been retained to defend a wretched man who, in a fit ofdespair, had taken the lives of his three children. It was a very sad case, and the only line of defence was insanity. When the train stopped at Wigan a gentleman got into our carriage for a smoke. He got into conversation with Blair, and hearing of the murder case expressed his desire to attend the trial. He turned out to be the Reverend E. Burnaby, a brother of the celebrated Captain Burnaby, hero of the “Ride to Khiva,” and we invited him to join us at Bar mess. He was on his way to the Lake District, but his interest in trials made him gladly accept our invitation, and we appointed him a sort of honorary chaplain to the mess during the three or four days he was with us.That chance meeting saved the life of Blair’s client. Blair made an eloquent speech in defence of the murderer, but the medical evidence was conflicting, and Mr. Justice Cave did not sum up for a verdict of insanity. He left the matter to the mercies of the jury, who could not see far beyond the horrible fact and circumstances, and without long consideration brought in a verdict of guilty. Burnaby was strongly convinced that the man was insane, and expressed his intention of moving for a reprieve. The means of the man’s friends had been exhausted in preparing the defence, and had it not been for Burnaby’s energy nothing would have been done. Burnaby started a local petition, and later on, followed the circuit to Manchester, where he interviewed Cave, and there he met Hopwood. Hopwood made a most careful inquiryinto the facts of the case, and having satisfied himself that it was a case for the interference of the Home Office, assisted Burnaby with his counsel. Under his direction the matter was carried to a successful issue. A further examination of the prisoner was made, and he was pronounced to be insane, and sent to Broadmoor.This was my first experience of Hopwood, and as I grew to know him better I came to the conclusion that not only was he a very kind-hearted and merciful man, but he was also one of the wisest and most sensible of judges in a criminal court that I ever appeared before. People were very apt in those days to look upon him as a visionary and enthusiast, but the fact is the administrators of the criminal law in all its harshness were the real visionaries, for they kept their eyes straining after a set of affairs fast passing away instead of keeping a brave, healthy outlook on the actual facts before them.Nowadays, with our Criminal Court of Appeal and our humaner rendering of the criminal code, it is difficult to understand what horrible things were done twenty-five years ago. But by no means let us believe that the judges who did these things were themselves cruel and harsh. It is so difficult when you have grown up with a system to see that there is anything fundamentally wrong in it. It seems so dangerous to reform or to alter existing laws that have apparently worked so well for years. I do not think the judges who sentenced young men andwomen to be hanged for theft, nor the later judges who transported hundreds of small offenders to the Antipodes, were cruel men. Certainly I know that some of those judges who were harshest in their sentences in the earlier eighties were kind-hearted gentlemen in action and sentiment. They believed in the system. They thought it was a good and just system. It was Charles Hopwood, with his deeper insight, who showed them they were wrong.When Hopwood became Recorder of Liverpool he was able for the first time to put his principles into execution. The kind of thing that had been going on all over Lancashire was instanced in one of his charges to the grand jury after he had been a year or two in office. “A woman,” he said, “pleaded guilty before me of stealing some articles of little value. I looked at the record of her history. She had just come out after three several sentences of penal servitude a poor, broken-down, miserable being. Her first severe sentence anterior to the above was one year’s imprisonment for stealing a pound or two of butter. Her first seven years’ sentence was for stealing some trifling quantity of butter again. Her second seven years was for stealing some butcher’s meat. From this she had been out a month and was again committed and sentenced to another seven years for stealing a duck from a poulterer’s shop. Twenty-two years for five or ten shillings’ worth of food. It calls to mind Hood’s passionate cry, ‘That bread should be so dear, and flesh and blood so cheap.’ Every one ofthese offences points to the pressure of extreme want. I gave her a slight punishment and have never seen her since.”And that is what happened in practice. It was found that very many of these petty criminals pleaded guilty at Liverpool Sessions, received a light sentence, and came out with a hope and intention, often fulfilled, of leading honest lives. Others, of course, fell again and again into bad ways, but those, he argued, were really persons who wanted some form of asylum rather than a gaol, where their feeble will power could be protected from the temptations of the world. These long terms of penal servitude for petty thefts were survivals of the old criminal code. In the middle ages a thief was hard to catch, and probably when he was caught the best use to put him to was to hang him. Nowadays the thief is comparatively easy to catch, and therefore the hanging of him when caught ceases to be a sensible action. One of Hopwood’s arguments was that at his sessions prisoners pleaded guilty and gave no trouble to the prosecutor, whereas in the days of harsh sentences prisoners pleaded not guilty and juries hesitated to convict. Another of Hopwood’s reasons for weighing carefully the length of a sentence was—as he often reminded us—that every year, every month, nay, every day that is added to a prisoner’s sentence is too often a year or a month or a day added to the misery of guiltless women and children, whose lives and happiness depend on the return of the wretched men whose liberty is forfeit.I have often heard Hopwood discuss these matters, and always with profit to myself. The mere fact that such long sentences could be defended was, to him, evidence that the passing and witnessing of such sentences led to a moral deterioration—a hardening of the moral nature of both judges and spectators. I think this is true. We have recognised the truth of it in relation to public executions, and there is no doubt that to be a part of the working machine of the criminal law blunts the edge of compassion. Further, one effect of long sentences on prisoners was to make them commit worse crimes and to resist capture by violence. That is an aspect of criminal policy that is apt to be overlooked by those who clamour for harsher and stronger measures against evil-doers.One of Hopwood’s best attributes was that calm, reasoning detachment of mind which enabled him to understand the point of view of the poorer classes on our administration of justice. What the bottom dog sees when he puts his nose over the dock and blinks at the learned Recorder and his brother magistrates of the city, is a very different picture of Justice from that which we behold so complacently from our side of the railing. To him it seems a mere mockery to behold Justice, well fed and prosperous, blind to the many frauds and much misconduct of its own class, pompously and Pharisaically denouncing the less guilty, the mere stealing of something to eat or something to clothe, by sentences which should be reserved for real and atrociouscrime. Certainly, it makes one uneasy to remember how many successful and fraudulent schemes have swept away the savings of the working classes into respectable broadcloth pockets—even magisterial pockets—and the law has found no remedy and no punishment. But the scandal is not a new one, and is well sanctioned by precedent. Our forefathers rhymed it, in their easy-going way:You prosecute the man or womanWho steals the goose from off the common,But leave the larger felon looseWho steals the common from the goose.Hopwood was a much-abused reformer, but he kept a stout heart, and went his way remitting hundreds upon hundreds of years of imprisonment in mercy to his fellow-creatures. There is no evidence that his methods injured any class of the community. He preached the cause of criminal appeal to deaf ears, but since he has gone we are all converts to his view, and wonder how we could have hindered the reform so long. What was it that began to awaken Lancashire folk to the belief that Hopwood had not only a warm heart, but a clear head, and was talking business sense? Sometimes I think it was the statement in one of his later charges that in not inflicting long sentences he had already saved the taxpayer £28,000. If there is one thing Lancashire does understand it is figures.Looking back on my recollections of the men on circuit, I think he was undoubtedly the greatest man I knew. I say great, inasmuch as he fulfils Longfellow’swords, for his life indeed reminds us of the greater possibilities of our own humbler lives. Even now that he has departed his footsteps re-echo along the hopeless corridors of the gaol as of one who brought glad tidings to the oppressed. When the social history of the nineteenth century comes to be written the man who, by his fearless example and persevering energy, proved to society that the existing treatment of the smaller criminal was unnecessarily cruel will have a higher place than many more ambitious reformers.And in spite of his tenacity and the outspokenness of his unpopular opinions we all loved him on circuit, though not all of us were his disciples, and I shall never forget the cheers of laughter and delight that went up when an Irish colleague thus concluded an after-dinner peroration in his honour: “Hopwood has indade taught us what a beautiful thing it is to temper mercy with justice.”After all, like many a “bull,” it really expresses very clearly what Hopwood was doing.And though I have never more than half believed the extravagant claims of the almost mesmeric power of the Press over the common horde of us, yet as a mere “man in the street”—to use a phrase that Greville brought from Newmarket—I have seen enough of the inner chambers of journalism to know that if a journalist may not do much to educate the public he can do something towards the education of himself. The discussions you enter into with men of all parties, the books you have to read, andthe plays you cannot stay away from, ought to cultivate in you a better sense of charity. If it does not, then the fault is in the seedling and not in the soil.I have never been under any delusion about thescribendi cacoethes. It is not a pleasant disease, but it has comparatively good points about it. When the fit is upon you, you do not worry your family and your neighbour with the details of it, as you do when you have an attack of the spleen, or the rheumatism, or the slice, or the pull, or whatever recent manifestations of neuritis you may be suffering from. You only wish, like any other well-mannered sick mammal, to be left quietly and undoubtedly alone till the fever leaves you. I know I have wasted a lot of my spare time in writing; it soothes my particular fancies, it is the form of indolent amusement that I enjoy.I daresay if I had tackled the higher things of life, and given the industry of my overtime to more serious pursuits, I could have reduced my golf handicap below the mediocre twelve at which it stands, or lost more money on horses than I have on books. But this I can say with honesty, that when I writefinison the last page, and my time is over, the best of it has been the “overtime.”
To play is for a man to do what he pleases or to do nothing—to go about soothing his particular fancies
Charles Lamb: “Letter to Bernard Barton.”
That idea of soothing your particular fancy gives to me the very clearest image of play and playtime. And most men’s fancies take a deal of soothing, since man will fancy himself and his capabilities to be x, when his nearest and dearest could tell him, if they were not his nearest and dearest, that they are not even y, but something far nearer toa b c.
And as long as a man does not fancy himself at his real work, but only in playtime, what does it matter? For in a sane man it seems a natural attribute that he should dislike work he is peculiarly fitted for, and should hanker after jobs that he is naturally ill-equipped to perform. I always looked forward to what I called “overtime,” when I could get away from briefs and law books, and put in a few solid hours spoiling beautiful hand-made paper with inharmonious water-colours, or writing plays and stories that nobody wanted to publish. Why I should have called it “overtime” I do not know, for real overtime is paid at least at the rate of “timeand a quarter,” but my overtime generally cost me money. Perhaps the idea I have in calling it “overtime” is that these tasks could only be done after the day’s work was over, which is the only attribute my “overtime” had in common with the overtime of the working man.
From my earliest days—when to the dread and horror of my family I bought a fiddle and tried to learn to play it—I have experienced a sane and healthy desire to spend my working hours on jobs I know I can never do, rather than in exercising capacities which have always been with me. I call it a sane and healthy tendency, because I find it to exist in nearly everyone who feels physically and mentally well.
I once knew a plus 2 golfer who spent all his overtime away from the links in trying to grow tomatoes out of doors. Each season the climate—which he spoke of as a horticultural bogey—was at least 7 up on him before the first frost came and stopped the round. But he had many merry hours in his garden, and laughed gaily when he topped a budding plant with a careless approach with a hoe or was badly bunkered by a patent manure. What really bored him was the monotony of golf with eighteen perfect drives every round he played. It was only on those rare occasions when he pulled or sliced into the rough that I have known him to smile and openly admit “that there was some fun in the old game, after all.”
I early discovered the delights of “overtime” inmy father’s library, where I was supposed to do my home-work whilst I was at King’s College School. There I read all the great English writers with a larger enjoyment, because, like the Jew who ate the pork chop, I could feel that I was “sinning at the same time.” I think that library and its contents are entirely responsible for my taste in overtime. Shakespeare, Fielding, Smollett, Dickens, Thackeray, Mrs. Opie, and Aphra Behn. I remember the very format of each volume. I do not think there was a single dramatist or novelist of any mark in the English tongue that was unrepresented.
Perhaps my favourite book was Cumberland’s “British Theatre,” with its forty-eight volumes. The stage-directions of the bloodiest of the melodramas were my favourite reading. Their only rival was the brief in some sporting case which lay on the table at which I worked. I would often slip the papers out of their red tape and peruse them far more diligently than I did in after days, when I was paid for doing so. How carefully I read the solicitor’s story of the case. In later years I found that no self-respecting advocate ever studied these lengthy pages, well understanding that under an absurd legal system they are put there merely for the taxing master to appraise and allow in the form of costs.
I remember Nash being amusingly scored off by a well-known solicitor, who rather plumed himself on his frugal literary gifts, and took much pains in the composition of the story of a case. He complainedto Nash that he never read these narratives, and Nash had assured him, out of polite respect to his hobby, that he always made a point of studying them and greatly admired them. Soon afterwards Nash was instructed by the solicitor to defend a client in a criminal case at the assizes, and a fat brief, marked “30 guas” and beginning with a very lengthy narrative, was delivered to counsel. How far Nash read any of it I do not know, but he duly acquitted the prisoner. To Nash’s annoyance and surprise—for the solicitor was a most solvent and respectable person—the fees were not paid. Nash’s clerk made several efforts to solve the mystery, and was told that they had been paid to Mr. Nash at the assizes, but Nash knew that this was not so, and was very indignant with the solicitor about it. A month or two afterwards Nash met the solicitor in Cross Street, and going up to him expressed his views of the solicitor’s conduct very roundly.
“But I paid you at the assizes, Mr. Nash.”
“Nothing of the sort, sir, and you know it.”
“Did you read my story of the case, Mr. Nash?” asked the solicitor.
“Of course, I did. I always read every word of my briefs,” said the unblushing Nash.
“H’m, that’s very curious. I can’t understand it,” said the solicitor, with his head on one side, and his left eye half-closed. “I can’t understand it at all, because on page three of that statement of the case I pinned a cheque for your fees, and—hadn’tyou better go back to chambers, Mr. Nash, and read that brief again?”
But when I was a lad the introduction to the brief was my first study. If it looked dull and boresome I dropped the papers speedily. How often in after life I wished I could deal with briefs in similar fashion. And as no child will ever read these pages I may confess that from the short years of my schooling the only things that remain with me are elegant extracts of forbidden reading; forbidden not by my father, I should say in fairness to both of us, for he knew all about it and winked, but by my pastors and masters.
I think it is Walt Whitman who expresses the thought that he would like to get away from mankind and “turn and live among the animals, they are so placid and self-contained.” And I have the same kind of feeling about school-masters. The prosperous incompetence of the school-master is to me one of the great mysteries of life. When I lived among school-masters a cowardly idolatry, the offspring of tyranny and coercion, prevented me using opportunities to make careful observation of their mental and moral constitution. I had a vague knowledge that they were hopelessly wrong, but I had not the energy and ability to analyse the wherefore of it. Physically they were of varying size and beauty, but mentally they were absolutely and uniformly all alike. It never occurred to my young mind that this was a natural result of pouring youthful educational hot stuff into an old-fashioned mould and turning it out when it had grown cold.
There were, of course, many charming persons among them. What an excellent fellow was E——. I have long forgiven him, but his offence was rank and smells to heaven. He it was who persuaded me for a whole term to spend my overtime on school books. I have some prizes on my shelves now, the result of my foolish complaisance. I have never looked inside them, but the bindings are handsome, and they serve as amemento moriof wasted hours that can never be replaced. The speculation was commercially sound, no doubt, but whilst I was doing it my conscience smote me. The next term I dropped it, and my good friend, with that rare prophetic insight that enables the school-master to foresee the unbetiding, filed my deficiency account in words that still have a haunting sound of failure: “has some ability, but no staying power.”
It does not need an alphabet of scholastic degrees to enable a man to back a double event and find both of them to be losers. And yet old E——’s epigram, that looked at the time so like real stable information, was but a huckster’s tip after all. Most of my relatives and all my real friends, those who know best, have cheerily shaken their heads at the word ability—did so, I remember, at the time—and have admitted that he was wrong there, but even E—— himself would not now, I think, gainsay the fact that I have stayed the course. And yet my innate reverence for the school-master is such that I have an uneasy feeling that I ought to have so shaped my life that the words of the school-master might be fulfilled, andthat in not having done so I am in danger of judgment.
The early days of the Bar are all overtime. And the first big overtime job that I undertook, and perhaps the pleasantest I ever carried through, was the preparation of a version of “Dorothy Osborne’s Letters,” the first edition of which I finished in my early days at Manchester, and published in 1888. I remember my joy when Mr. Comyns Carr, who then edited theEnglish Illustrated Magazine, accepted my first essay on Dorothy Osborne. How I still reverence his critical acumen. The joys of winning a legal scholarship, or having that first brief at quarter sessions delivered to you by a real solicitor’s clerk, have none of thattremensdelirium about them that you attain when your literary essay is accepted in a courteous autograph from a master in letters. The manuscript of “Dorothy Osborne’s Letters,” like all great works, was refused by many of the leading publishers, and when it was published the book was an immediate success. It has been pirated in many countries, and will, I think, remain in the English library, not on account of any work of mine, but because of the peculiar charm of Mistress Dorothy’s style in letter-writing. It was a satisfactory bit of “overtime.”
My next book was a life of Macklin, the actor, written for a series edited by William Archer. Mr. Lowe wrote a life of Betterton. Mr. Archer himself wrote Macready, and then came my “Life of Macklin.” For some reason or other that ended theseries. It was not half a bad book, and a friend of mine in Dublin says my chapter on the Irish stage has amused and entertained him for many pleasant hours in tracing out and confuting by authority the errors and inaccuracies it contains—but, then, he admits that no other Saxon had ever dared to try and write such a chapter.
And I suppose it is only right to enter on these time-sheets my journalistic work as overtime. I know nothing so exhilarating as journalism. If I was really to take to writing as a business, I should hire an upper chamber in some building which was gently rocked from below by a steady throbbing engine, and arrange for the smell of its oil, coupled with the aroma of printer’s ink, to pervade the atmosphere, then having hired a whistling and insistent boy, with a raucous voice, to put his head in and shout “copy” at me every quarter of an hour, I should sit down to work, hopefully assured of a glorious “spate of style.” For many years I wrote dramatic criticism and reviewed books, and wrote “shorts” and occasionally full-dress leaders for theManchester Guardian. I do not think I had any very particular reputation in Cross Street, except for punctuality and dispatch. It is not every journalist who has even these humble attributes, but they were evidently well remembered of me.
I mind meeting C. P. Scott one autumn morning some three years after I had been judge, as I was walking down to my work—along the fragrant groves of Rusholme. He seemed somewhat disconsolateand told me his trouble. He had an advance copy of “Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Letters,” and through illness there was no one in the office free to review it. Two columns about were wanted before going to press. “I wish, Parry,” he said, with half a sigh, “that you were available.”
Of course I was available. The book, with its two volumes of over eight hundred pages, came down to the Court. I started it in the luncheon hour. I got at it again after the Court rose at about 4 o’clock, and before 11 at night I entered the office and was received with enthusiasm by a grateful sub-editor thirsting for copy. I compared my work the next day with that of some of the London champions, the plus 4 men at the game. I had scooped out nearly all the tit-bits, and I had done more. I had discovered that Mrs. Browning’s baby was a good half-column, and the other fellows had missed that delightful child altogether. Moreover, I had not only written my review, but I had copied out all my extracts, for I never could bear the thought of mutilating a book, and so the volumes remain with me as a pleasant memory of a happy day’s overtime. For when I had had some supper I had missed the last tram, and dreaming that I was still in the days of my youth and could not afford a hansom, I had a joyful walk home in the moonlight.
And long before that, whilst I was at the Bar, Hulton, the elder, came into my chambers and asked me to write some articles for theSunday Chronicle. For some reason or other a new hand was suddenlywanted. The articles had to be a column and a turn-over. Any subject might be written upon as long as the writing was tense, vivid and entertaining and the matter was of popular interest. The manuscript had to be ready by Friday. I doubted my capacity for the task, but Hulton told me that he had been assured by that kind-hearted doyen of the craft, Spencer of theGuardian, that I was all right. I bowed to his verdict, for to me Spencer’s was the last word about journalistic matters.
I shall never forget that week. Nothing happened. Day succeeded day in stagnant succession, no one of importance said or did anything. There was not a crime or a law-suit, or even a political speech in which one could pretend an interest. On the Thursday morning I rose early and rushed at the newspapers. The same dismal outlook of barren nothingness. I passed the canal and looked at its waters lovingly. Was I to disgrace myself by going back on the verdict of Spencer? It seemed impossible that I could do that and live.
About midday, whilst sitting in chambers with a blank sheet of paper before me, symbolic of the mind within, my clerk brought in some papers, and in a diffident off-hand manner said casually, “I suppose you’ve heard the news!”
“News,” I cried testily, “there is none.”
He turned on his heel.
“What is it, then?” I called after him.
“Only Mr. Parnell’s dead!”
I had a real reverence for Parnell, but to undertakersand journalists death is indeed the reaper, and the poor gleaners cannot be blamed that they are thankful when the season brings them their only harvest. In truth I never wrote with greater sense of responsibility nor with a more eager desire that every word and sound should toll the message of his life into the hearts of my readers. Heaven knows how far I succeeded. It was enough for me that Spencer nodded approval. And to the quiet homage for the statesman that most of us have to-day there comes into my heart a thrill of grateful emotion whenever I hear the name of Parnell.
I wrote thoseSunday Chroniclearticles for some time, but it was a worrying task, and my work at the Bar began to creep into the overtime, and ultimately, like Aaron’s rod, swallowed up all other pursuits. But I look back to the task with pleasure, because it enabled me to write an article to the glory of Charles Hopwood and his policy, and I still possess a faded letter, full of hope for the future and thanks for the help that had been given to the cause he had so much at heart. Of course, I had known Hopwood as a leader on circuit for some years, but after theChroniclearticle he began to talk to me about his various views and plans of reform in a way that was deeply interesting.
And to go back to my earliest recollection of Hopwood I must go back to when I first joined the circuit, and recount an early journey to Lancaster Assizes with Falkner Blair. He had been retained to defend a wretched man who, in a fit ofdespair, had taken the lives of his three children. It was a very sad case, and the only line of defence was insanity. When the train stopped at Wigan a gentleman got into our carriage for a smoke. He got into conversation with Blair, and hearing of the murder case expressed his desire to attend the trial. He turned out to be the Reverend E. Burnaby, a brother of the celebrated Captain Burnaby, hero of the “Ride to Khiva,” and we invited him to join us at Bar mess. He was on his way to the Lake District, but his interest in trials made him gladly accept our invitation, and we appointed him a sort of honorary chaplain to the mess during the three or four days he was with us.
That chance meeting saved the life of Blair’s client. Blair made an eloquent speech in defence of the murderer, but the medical evidence was conflicting, and Mr. Justice Cave did not sum up for a verdict of insanity. He left the matter to the mercies of the jury, who could not see far beyond the horrible fact and circumstances, and without long consideration brought in a verdict of guilty. Burnaby was strongly convinced that the man was insane, and expressed his intention of moving for a reprieve. The means of the man’s friends had been exhausted in preparing the defence, and had it not been for Burnaby’s energy nothing would have been done. Burnaby started a local petition, and later on, followed the circuit to Manchester, where he interviewed Cave, and there he met Hopwood. Hopwood made a most careful inquiryinto the facts of the case, and having satisfied himself that it was a case for the interference of the Home Office, assisted Burnaby with his counsel. Under his direction the matter was carried to a successful issue. A further examination of the prisoner was made, and he was pronounced to be insane, and sent to Broadmoor.
This was my first experience of Hopwood, and as I grew to know him better I came to the conclusion that not only was he a very kind-hearted and merciful man, but he was also one of the wisest and most sensible of judges in a criminal court that I ever appeared before. People were very apt in those days to look upon him as a visionary and enthusiast, but the fact is the administrators of the criminal law in all its harshness were the real visionaries, for they kept their eyes straining after a set of affairs fast passing away instead of keeping a brave, healthy outlook on the actual facts before them.
Nowadays, with our Criminal Court of Appeal and our humaner rendering of the criminal code, it is difficult to understand what horrible things were done twenty-five years ago. But by no means let us believe that the judges who did these things were themselves cruel and harsh. It is so difficult when you have grown up with a system to see that there is anything fundamentally wrong in it. It seems so dangerous to reform or to alter existing laws that have apparently worked so well for years. I do not think the judges who sentenced young men andwomen to be hanged for theft, nor the later judges who transported hundreds of small offenders to the Antipodes, were cruel men. Certainly I know that some of those judges who were harshest in their sentences in the earlier eighties were kind-hearted gentlemen in action and sentiment. They believed in the system. They thought it was a good and just system. It was Charles Hopwood, with his deeper insight, who showed them they were wrong.
When Hopwood became Recorder of Liverpool he was able for the first time to put his principles into execution. The kind of thing that had been going on all over Lancashire was instanced in one of his charges to the grand jury after he had been a year or two in office. “A woman,” he said, “pleaded guilty before me of stealing some articles of little value. I looked at the record of her history. She had just come out after three several sentences of penal servitude a poor, broken-down, miserable being. Her first severe sentence anterior to the above was one year’s imprisonment for stealing a pound or two of butter. Her first seven years’ sentence was for stealing some trifling quantity of butter again. Her second seven years was for stealing some butcher’s meat. From this she had been out a month and was again committed and sentenced to another seven years for stealing a duck from a poulterer’s shop. Twenty-two years for five or ten shillings’ worth of food. It calls to mind Hood’s passionate cry, ‘That bread should be so dear, and flesh and blood so cheap.’ Every one ofthese offences points to the pressure of extreme want. I gave her a slight punishment and have never seen her since.”
And that is what happened in practice. It was found that very many of these petty criminals pleaded guilty at Liverpool Sessions, received a light sentence, and came out with a hope and intention, often fulfilled, of leading honest lives. Others, of course, fell again and again into bad ways, but those, he argued, were really persons who wanted some form of asylum rather than a gaol, where their feeble will power could be protected from the temptations of the world. These long terms of penal servitude for petty thefts were survivals of the old criminal code. In the middle ages a thief was hard to catch, and probably when he was caught the best use to put him to was to hang him. Nowadays the thief is comparatively easy to catch, and therefore the hanging of him when caught ceases to be a sensible action. One of Hopwood’s arguments was that at his sessions prisoners pleaded guilty and gave no trouble to the prosecutor, whereas in the days of harsh sentences prisoners pleaded not guilty and juries hesitated to convict. Another of Hopwood’s reasons for weighing carefully the length of a sentence was—as he often reminded us—that every year, every month, nay, every day that is added to a prisoner’s sentence is too often a year or a month or a day added to the misery of guiltless women and children, whose lives and happiness depend on the return of the wretched men whose liberty is forfeit.
I have often heard Hopwood discuss these matters, and always with profit to myself. The mere fact that such long sentences could be defended was, to him, evidence that the passing and witnessing of such sentences led to a moral deterioration—a hardening of the moral nature of both judges and spectators. I think this is true. We have recognised the truth of it in relation to public executions, and there is no doubt that to be a part of the working machine of the criminal law blunts the edge of compassion. Further, one effect of long sentences on prisoners was to make them commit worse crimes and to resist capture by violence. That is an aspect of criminal policy that is apt to be overlooked by those who clamour for harsher and stronger measures against evil-doers.
One of Hopwood’s best attributes was that calm, reasoning detachment of mind which enabled him to understand the point of view of the poorer classes on our administration of justice. What the bottom dog sees when he puts his nose over the dock and blinks at the learned Recorder and his brother magistrates of the city, is a very different picture of Justice from that which we behold so complacently from our side of the railing. To him it seems a mere mockery to behold Justice, well fed and prosperous, blind to the many frauds and much misconduct of its own class, pompously and Pharisaically denouncing the less guilty, the mere stealing of something to eat or something to clothe, by sentences which should be reserved for real and atrociouscrime. Certainly, it makes one uneasy to remember how many successful and fraudulent schemes have swept away the savings of the working classes into respectable broadcloth pockets—even magisterial pockets—and the law has found no remedy and no punishment. But the scandal is not a new one, and is well sanctioned by precedent. Our forefathers rhymed it, in their easy-going way:
You prosecute the man or womanWho steals the goose from off the common,But leave the larger felon looseWho steals the common from the goose.
You prosecute the man or womanWho steals the goose from off the common,But leave the larger felon looseWho steals the common from the goose.
You prosecute the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But leave the larger felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
Hopwood was a much-abused reformer, but he kept a stout heart, and went his way remitting hundreds upon hundreds of years of imprisonment in mercy to his fellow-creatures. There is no evidence that his methods injured any class of the community. He preached the cause of criminal appeal to deaf ears, but since he has gone we are all converts to his view, and wonder how we could have hindered the reform so long. What was it that began to awaken Lancashire folk to the belief that Hopwood had not only a warm heart, but a clear head, and was talking business sense? Sometimes I think it was the statement in one of his later charges that in not inflicting long sentences he had already saved the taxpayer £28,000. If there is one thing Lancashire does understand it is figures.
Looking back on my recollections of the men on circuit, I think he was undoubtedly the greatest man I knew. I say great, inasmuch as he fulfils Longfellow’swords, for his life indeed reminds us of the greater possibilities of our own humbler lives. Even now that he has departed his footsteps re-echo along the hopeless corridors of the gaol as of one who brought glad tidings to the oppressed. When the social history of the nineteenth century comes to be written the man who, by his fearless example and persevering energy, proved to society that the existing treatment of the smaller criminal was unnecessarily cruel will have a higher place than many more ambitious reformers.
And in spite of his tenacity and the outspokenness of his unpopular opinions we all loved him on circuit, though not all of us were his disciples, and I shall never forget the cheers of laughter and delight that went up when an Irish colleague thus concluded an after-dinner peroration in his honour: “Hopwood has indade taught us what a beautiful thing it is to temper mercy with justice.”
After all, like many a “bull,” it really expresses very clearly what Hopwood was doing.
And though I have never more than half believed the extravagant claims of the almost mesmeric power of the Press over the common horde of us, yet as a mere “man in the street”—to use a phrase that Greville brought from Newmarket—I have seen enough of the inner chambers of journalism to know that if a journalist may not do much to educate the public he can do something towards the education of himself. The discussions you enter into with men of all parties, the books you have to read, andthe plays you cannot stay away from, ought to cultivate in you a better sense of charity. If it does not, then the fault is in the seedling and not in the soil.
I have never been under any delusion about thescribendi cacoethes. It is not a pleasant disease, but it has comparatively good points about it. When the fit is upon you, you do not worry your family and your neighbour with the details of it, as you do when you have an attack of the spleen, or the rheumatism, or the slice, or the pull, or whatever recent manifestations of neuritis you may be suffering from. You only wish, like any other well-mannered sick mammal, to be left quietly and undoubtedly alone till the fever leaves you. I know I have wasted a lot of my spare time in writing; it soothes my particular fancies, it is the form of indolent amusement that I enjoy.
I daresay if I had tackled the higher things of life, and given the industry of my overtime to more serious pursuits, I could have reduced my golf handicap below the mediocre twelve at which it stands, or lost more money on horses than I have on books. But this I can say with honesty, that when I writefinison the last page, and my time is over, the best of it has been the “overtime.”