Chapter I: Introductory

From my earliest boyhood I think my bent was towards a literary career, but it was long before my ambition could be put to the test. The seventh of a family of ten, it was scarcely to be expected that I could, in those earlier days, make known my choice of a calling that seemed so little likely to yield a livelihood. My father was in business in London, and although he took the keenest interest in politics and public affairs, and was an eager reader of the literature of his time, he had a sufficiently hard struggle to provide for us all, and it was but natural in his care for our future that his thoughts should turn to the choice of some solid commercial career.

We lived, in the days that I can first recall, in the Manor House on Barnes Common, a picturesque old-fashioned building that still remains, though shorn of the larger grounds which were our delight as children.

The garden and fields, now partly built over, formed then a little earthly paradise to a large family, and the open Common covered with gorse and bracken served as a part of our wider playground. There we roamed at will, and it was there, with each returning October, that we used to gather the material for a great bonfire with which we annually celebrated the fifth of November.

Sallying forth from our field-gate that abutted upon the Common, armed with a bill-hook surreptitiously filched from the gardener’s tool-basket, there we used to pile up our wheelbarrow with the gorse we had no right to cut, keeping a careful eye the while, lest the sudden approach of the policeman should set us within the grip of the law.

These raiding expeditions sometimes brought us into collision with the boys of the village, whom we only knew under the generic title of “the cads,” and with whom we waged unceasing warfare. Especially did we dread their onslaught as the fifth of November approached, for we knew well it was ever their malignant purpose to fire the pile before the appointed night had arrived.

It was our custom, therefore, to keep watch and guard for several preceding nights, and sometimes when we heard sounds heralding the approach of the enemy across the fields we would send rockets whizzing along the grass--a defensive operation we discovered to be greatly dreaded by even the boldest of “the cads.”

The choice of an appropriate Guy was always an important point of consideration. One year, I remember, it was Bomba, and during the days of the Indian Mutiny a great effigy of Nana Sahib was consigned to the flames, which gathered added intensity by the insertion into the midst of the huge pile of gorse and dried wood of a seasoned tar-barrel annually purchased by my father as his contribution to the revels of this well-loved day.

The valorous deeds of our soldiers in the Crimea and the nameless horrors of the Mutiny which followed so closely at its heels stand among my most vivid recollections of those earlier days.

I was born in the year 1849, and I can still remember an elder cousin in his scarlet uniform taking his way across the foot-path that leads to Barnes station, to start for the war in the Crimea.

With the events of the Mutiny our sympathies were even more actively engaged. We were closely allied at that time with a family, one of whom, General Henry Marshall, but lately commanded the Artillery in South Africa. They had lived in India, and had relatives still there at the time of the outbreak, and the terrible news as it reached England had therefore an enthralling interest for us all.

It was not to be supposed that my father could afford to any of us the luxury of a public school. At first, with my brothers, I was educated at home under a private tutor, and then at the age of thirteen I took my way to Bruce Castle School, Tottenham, at that time under the mastership of Arthur Hill, brother of Sir Rowland Hill of postage-stamp fame.

I remember my elder brother and I took our places on the form allotted to new boys side by side with William Lewin, better known as William Terriss the actor, and it was only a little while before his tragic end that he and I were recalling those times at Bruce Castle, where, if he gained but little learning, he at any rate acquired a perfect mastery in the art of tree-climbing. There was no elm in the playground, or beyond it, which he had not scaled in search of rooks’ eggs, and his constant companion in these lawless excursions was Fred Selous, the African hunter and explorer, with whom not long ago in his Surrey home, where we sat surrounded by his many trophies of the chase, I was glad to renew our memories of that earlier time.

Terriss’s name reminds me of an incident of our school-days which proves that at that time, at any rate, his histrionic abilities were scarcely equal to mine. Bruce Castle School boasted two masters of the French language, both of whom were regarded as marks for the ridicule and scorn of the English-born boy. Something of the spirit of Waterloo still survived in our outrageous treatment of these gentlemen, whom we could not help regarding as the luckless representatives of a beaten and inferior race.

One of them, I remember, had a known fondness for natural history, and under cover of sharing his enthusiasm we could nearly always lure him to stories of different wild animals which served to fill the hour which should have been devoted to the study of the French language.

This was our more amiable way of tormenting the unfortunate gentleman. Occasionally, in order to frustrate his well-meant efforts to instruct us, we resorted to more drastic measures. I remember one day it was jointly agreed among us that we should all assume to be afflicted with the worst kind of hacking cough, and from the very moment the class opened the room resounded with the most distressing symptoms of our common complaint.

Our master became at length fully conscious of the plot that had been forged against him, and slamming the book in a rage announced his determination of summoning Mr. Arthur Hill to restore the discipline of the class. This show of unexpected authority on his part produced something like consternation, and in a moment all the bronchial sounds were silenced--all save one, for it seemed to me then that the only policy, however desperate it might prove, was to persist in the signs of the malady which had already been announced.

In the interval of dead silence in which we awaited the arrival of the headmaster I therefore continued, at brief but regular intervals, with the same persistent cough which the others had abandoned. On Mr. Arthur Hill’s arrival, Mon. Delmas--for that was the unfortunate gentleman’s name--explained with some volubility the cause of his complaint against us, but at the finish, with a noble credulity that I had hardly dared to hope for, he exempted me from the general condemnation.

“Now, Carr,” he said, “has a cough, but he suffer so much it is better he do not attend the class for a space.”

On this intimation I was permitted to quit the room and to spend the rest of the dreaded hour in the playground, where afterwards I incurred the obloquy of my companions, and especially of William Terriss, because they had failed to adopt my more ingenious policy.

It is small wonder, with these obstacles deliberately set in our own path, that at our school, at any rate, the acquisition of any knowledge of the French tongue was of the very slightest.

I suppose every boy has his school hero. Mine, I remember, was a South American Spaniard named Echenique, whose father had, for a brief space, figured as President of Peru. He was as handsome as Dickens has pictured Steerforth; and afterwards, when I made the acquaintance of David Copperfield, I had cause to recognise with what unerring sympathy and fidelity the greatest of our masters of romance has mirrored the worship of a boy.

Bruce Castle was, in its way, a remarkable school, though it made no pretence of affording any very extended classical education. It was, indeed, designed for boys of the middle class, of whom I was one, but it was remarkable in this sense, that it was governed on principles of conduct that differed materially from those accepted in other schools of the time.

The Hills held peculiar theories upon the education of boys. Corporal punishment was a thing altogether unknown, and the severest penalty even upon the most hardened offender consisted in nothing worse than a course of compulsory exercise. There was a Prefect, specially told off to take out every day, in what in happier circumstances would have been their play-time, those malefactors who had failed to conform to the discipline of the school.

And yet, under this mild régime, discipline was never lax, both Mr. Arthur Hill and his son Dr. Birkbeck Hill, who succeeded him soon after I entered the school, possessing in a rare degree the power of evoking a sense of responsibility in those elder pupils who controlled the school’s conduct. I

_To face page 7._ ]

think only once in the period of my school-days did a case occur in which the headmaster had need to resort to the final penalty of expulsion.

Dr. Birkbeck Hill was, in a special sense, a man who won the affection of his pupils. He came to us from Oxford, where he had been the friend of Morris and Swinburne, and I remember the first time that I saw one of those newly designed wallpapers, which were destined afterwards to play so important a part in the movement initiated by Rossetti and Morris, was in the dining-room of Bruce Castle School.

Dr. Birkbeck Hill was a man of considerable literary taste and literary power. He was contributing at that time, though it was not generally known, some brilliant light articles to the _Saturday Review_ under the editorship of Mr. Harwood, and he very soon attached himself to that devoted study of Dr. Johnson which finally provided the theme for some admirable work in criticism and biography.

It is possible that he may have perceived in me some inclination towards letters, for he often used to show me his articles in the current number of the _Review_, and very soon by his own enthusiasm he awakened in me an interest in his hero Johnson, which has never since abated. A copy of Boswell’s _Life_, which he afterwards gave me on the occasion of my marriage, still stands in its ten little volumes as one of the books within reach of my bed. They share the honours of my book-shelf with the novels of Charles Dickens, and for me there are no two authors to whom I can so constantly return with ever-renewed enjoyment when sleep is not easy to win.

But there was an older master, Mr. Braid, who exercised an even more powerful influence in forming and directing my taste. His special subject in the curriculum of the school was mathematics, but he was an ardent lover of literature and a devoted student of Shakespeare. He did not live in the school, but many times after school hours he used to take me down to his modest rooms in the village and show me some of the books in his small but well-loved library.

Impelled by his enthusiasm I had read, before I left school, the whole of Shakespeare, as well as _Paradise Lost_ and the shorter poems of Milton; and it was by his encouragement that I made my first attempt in writing, in the sufficiently ambitious experiment of an essay on _King Lear_. I have lost the essay, and the world has lost it, a fact not to be deeply deplored by either. But this crude experiment set me on my way, and when I quitted school at the age of sixteen my ambition was already aflame to try and do something in the world of letters. But, curiously enough, the aptitude which I had shown at school was towards mathematics, and here my work had so far impressed the examiners, one of whom was Charles Faulkner, afterwards so closely associated with Rossetti and Burne-Jones, that Dr. Hill endeavoured to persuade my father to send me to Cambridge.

I do not now know whether I regret the fact that my father’s means did not suffice to carry out that project. It might have diverted me from those things which I even then began to love, and have never ceased to care for. In any case it seemed obviously necessary that, as one of a family of ten, I should at once apply myself to a calling in which I could earn my living. Accordingly at the age of sixteen, when I quitted Bruce Castle School, my father articled me, at some considerable sacrifice to himself, in a stock-broker’s office in the City.

It will be evident that the education with which I went forth into the world could not have been very profound--a little Latin, enough to enable me to read, in later years, Horace and Virgil with pleasure, but not without the aid of a dictionary; no Greek--that was not considered indispensable to a commercial career; mathematics sufficient, as my examiners told me, to have given me more than a fair chance of a scholarship at Cambridge; and a taste for literature mainly acquired in the vacant hours after school.

From the first my task in the City was not congenial to me, although I worked hard and worked early and late. But when office hours were over I still contrived to keep alive that interest in books which had already been deeply implanted in me, and to make some small essays in journalism and in verse which at the first, I am bound to admit, met with scant encouragement from the editors whom I bombarded. I can remember now receiving from Charles Dickens, with a pain that was also blended with pleasure, a polite little note in blue ink returning one of my many rejected communications. Mr. Thackeray from the _Cornhill_ conferred upon me a like distinction--a distinction, as I call it, because even the fact that they declined to publish what I wrote seemed to me at the time almost to form a link of association with men whom I so greatly admired.

All this tentative work was done in the late evenings, carried sometimes far into the night, but it did not prevent me from being at my office in the City at a quarter past nine, and remaining there always till six and sometimes, on account days, till nine and ten. At the same time I was greedily reading the works of the men I worshipped most--the drama, and the lyrical poetry of the Elizabethans; the novelists, starting with Sterne, Fielding, and Smollett; the poets of the great revival which ushered in the nineteenth century; and those later poets and writers, all of whom were then living, who gave to the Victorian era its glory.

I have often thought that the youth of a later generation can hardly realise the wealth of contemporary achievement that lay around those of us who chanced to be born in that fortunate hour. However great, or however greatly admired, may be the writers of a past day, they can never speak with the quickened magic that a living master can command. And what masters then stood there to win our worship! Tennyson in his prime, and Browning, whose unexhausted energy had yet to give to the world _The Ring and the Book_; Swinburne, whose new and intoxicating music came like a voice from an undiscovered land of song; and Morris, who in his _Defence of Guinevere_ had already found a key that was to unlock a long-unused storehouse of legend and romance. And then, a little later, Rossetti, mystic and passionate, whose brooding melodies seemed to mirror in verse those “painted poems” that were wrought by his brush; and in fiction, where Meredith had only lately arisen, there still stood Dickens and Thackeray, George Eliot and the Brontës; and in other fields of literature, Carlyle, Mill and Ruskin, Emerson and Froude.

They were all our heroes then, and if Time has not left the place of all unshaken, enough remain to form such a goodly company as no later hour can boast. And this is so far acknowledged by the youth of a younger generation that I find those of quickest appreciation in poetry and fiction constantly tempted to steal my heroes and set them above their own.

Already at school I had made acquaintance with the poems of Wordsworth, a strange choice for a boy; and the circumstances of his life, and the revolution which he partly headed, drew me quickly to others of the group until all lesser admiration was finally merged in my worship of Keats. It was only in later days that I brought myself to the study of the poets of the intermediate time between the Elizabethans and the close of the eighteenth century, and I will confess that even now I have no great zest for them.

But turning aside for the moment from the things that already interested me most, I remember being vividly impressed by some events that occurred in the City during the period of my apprenticeship. The sudden transition from private school to the Stock Exchange presented points of interest that could not fail to attract a boy, even though his ambition was otherwise engaged.

I was in the City in the year 1867, the year of the great financial crisis which is associated with the name of Overend Gurney. The streets and narrow lanes round about the Stock Exchange during that turbulent time presented many picturesque sights, and within the Stock Exchange itself were daily scenes of almost maddening excitement.

One day I waited outside a great bank, one of a seething crowd of many hundreds, in momentary expectation that the doors would be closed, but the minutes and the hours passed, and as four o’clock approached it became known that the danger had been averted. Many similar scenes were to be witnessed at that time, but, although they provided me with excitement enough and to spare, even these vivid incidents in the career into which I had been thrust did not induce me to swerve from the resolution I had already secretly formed, not to remain in the City when the days of my apprenticeship were concluded.

I think, however, that, notwithstanding the distaste I had for my work, I performed my task zealously enough. So, indeed, it must have been, for when I finally announced to the firm my intention to retire, one of the partners asked me to reconsider my decision, holding out to me the inducement that if I would remain till I was twenty-one there would be a good prospect of my being promoted to a junior partnership.

But my choice had already been made, and I was in no mind to change it. Still secretly nursing the thought of a literary career, it was, nevertheless, clear to me that, for the time at any rate, I must adopt a more definite occupation. I therefore made up my mind to study for the Bar. My only trouble was to know how to announce this decision to my dear father, who had spent his hardly-earned money in giving me this first and great chance in the world, and to whom I knew the resolution at which I had arrived would be a source of bitter disappointment and regret.

And so, indeed, it was! But he was the widest-minded and the most liberal-hearted of men, and, when at last I found the courage to break it to him, he hardly allowed me to perceive the deep disappointment which I knew he was suffering. For my own part I have never regretted those days passed in the City, though at the time I felt them to be barren and wasted. Perhaps I learned as much as I should have acquired at Cambridge, though it was learning of a different sort. Some knowledge of men I certainly gained, some knowledge also of the habit of work which no career, however detached from business, can afford to dispense with.

Certainly, if there had not been some such obstacle in my path, I should not have thrown myself into the life I had chosen with the same keenness and persistence. The opposition which these earlier years set in the way of the calling I most wanted to pursue nerved and stiffened my resolution. I did a prodigious amount of reading in those late nights after the strenuous days in the City, and I think the fact that I had broken away from the life that was laid out for me gave me a higher courage to try and succeed in the life of my own choosing.

Already, before I had made my change of view known to my father, I had resolved to matriculate at the London University in preparation to becoming a student for the Bar, and, when the break came, I at once joined the classes at University College and assisted myself further by private tuition in several branches of knowledge which I had to take up for examination.

Some Greek I had to learn, for I had none, a little chemistry, and then there was my Latin, not at any time considerable, to be furbished up. None of these things could I have done without the liberal help of my father, for I had no resources of my own. But this liberal help was never lacking, and I think, when his first disappointment had passed, he became interested in furthering my new career. But the work had to be swiftly done, for I was impatient to be upon my way, and could not have been done in the time, in view of my meagre stock of scholastic knowledge, if it had not been for the zealous help of those who coached me.

By their aid I was enabled to matriculate at the London University, and in the Honours Division, in February of the year 1870, just a month before my twenty-first birthday. In February 1871 I obtained the First Class in Honours in Jurisprudence and Roman Law, and in July 1871, having already been entered as a student of the Inner Temple, I secured the scholarship in Roman and International Law from the Council of Legal Education. Shortly afterwards, in the year 1872, I was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple, and with this event the period of my boyhood may be said to have closed.