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Chapter VII
Journalism

Journalism in my case was merely a sideline, though a necessary and profitable one, to teaching. It was also a corrective. It checked in me, I hope, that tendency to dogmatism to which all teachers are prone because of their constant association with inferior, or, at any rate, younger minds. Teaching confines you to the world of the school; journalism forces you into the school of the world.

My "first guinea" brought me the same exquisite joy that it has, I expect, to every other literary aspirant. I received it from a Napier paper in my eighteenth year for a set of verses on a topical theme—a parody on Bret Harte's "Fight upon the Stanislow." But as I have not preserved a copy of those verses I am unable to say exactly how bad they were.

In 1891 I became attached to the contributing staff of the Christchurch Press, and my first leader appeared on January 21st of that year. It was on the "No Confidence" vote that drove the Conservative party out of power and brought in the Liberal party which, led by John Ballance, Richard John Seddon, and Sir Joseph Ward in succession, governed New Zealand for nearly twenty years.

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During all the years I was leader-writer the task set me was to fight the battle of the Conservative "diehards" and to attack the Radicals in power; and attack I did, occasionally with a wealth of vituperation of which I am now ashamed. But party feeling in New Zealand in those days ran high and produced much bitterness on both sides, often fiercely personal.

I possessed no special qualifications for the profession of journalism when I entered upon it except a certain fatal gift of fluency with tongue and pen which has often stood me in good stead, but has also occasionally been my bane. I had, too, some capacity for writing lucid and forcible English of the kind demanded in the leading articles of a morning paper if it is to have any influence in shaping public opinion.

I joined the staff of the paper at an interesting time in its history. It had just come under new management and had embarked upon an energetic fighting policy in defence of the many vested interests, chiefly pastoral, that were supposed to be threatened by the party now come into power with its avowed policy of "bursting up" the large estates of the squatters and wealthy runholders by means of a graduated land-tax. For the purposes of this fight the paper was well provided with capital and courage, and its chief contributors were given a wide discretion.

In one article I remember I fiercely attacked a flagrant piece of political jobbery—the appointment to a high and dignified post in the public service of a man of notoriously disreputable character. The Editor—who, dear man, was as timid as a page 86hare—sent my article to the Company's solicitors for their advice upon it. "Libel in every line," said the lawyers; "it might cost the paper anything from one to three thousand pounds." I had small respect for lawyers in those days, I fear, and rather less for editors. I took the article and the legal opinion upon it to my friend the Chairman of Directors, determined to appeal to Cæsar. "Can you justify the libel?" he asked. "Every line and every word of it," I assured him. "Then tell the editor with my compliments that I regard the legal opinion upon it as the best possible reason for publishing it." And published it was next morning, with the result that it created no little stir in the country and in Parliament. But if the victim of my attack ever contemplated a libel action, he thought better of it. An honest newspaper has nothing to fear from the British libel laws; but it is not every paper that has the courage to act upon that conviction.

I threw myself into my new work with great enthusiasm, though I soon found that writing leaders for a morning paper was strenuous work for a schoolmaster. It was in the days before the typewriter had come into general use. I soon learned that I could trust neither printers nor proof-readers to decipher my crude handwriting. This meant that I had to wait in the office two or three nights in every week till one o'clock in the morning, and sometimes later, to see a "first pull," and as I had to be at prayers when school began at 9.30 in the morning, I found the work occasionally nerveracking. Proof-readers are the bane of a journalist's life as examiners are of a schoolmaster's. In the page 87matters of spelling and punctuation they are unrestrained tyrants. Their way is the only way; your carefully chosen "colons" are converted into semi-colons; your felicitous use of the "dash" displeases the conventional "reader," and commas, or worse, are substituted; while your spelling is "favored" and "honored" with transatlantic obstinacy. As regards spelling, however, I expect I had more reason to be grateful to proof-readers than critical of them. For when in my eighteenth year I sat for an examination for a teacher's certificate I failed ignominiously in spelling. There were two hundred and thirty candidates, I remember, and my aggregate marks in six subjects placed me head of the list, but I had twelve words wrong out of twenty in a spelling test, and so received only a "partial pass." Next year I sat again—in spelling alone, and had fourteen words wrong! But as I had in the meantime won a University exhibition in English Language and Literature, and as I was after all only a benighted foreigner, I was generously granted the necessary certificate speciale gratia.

But a worse tyrant than the spelling and punctuation expert is the "genteel" proof-reader. In the course of a vigorous controversial leader I had occasion to refer, not without point, I hope, to the famous apology of the midshipman who had told the bo'sun he wasn't "fit to carry guts to a bear." Next morning, to my horror, I saw that "offal" had been substituted for "guts"; the "genteel" proof-reader had adapted Captain Marryat's breezy story to the vocabulary of the self-respecting nursemaid!

James Edward Fitzgerald, the founder of the page 88Press, set at the outset a high standard of literary excellence in its columns. Men like J. Veel Colborne-Veel, Sir Charles Bowen, and "Erewhon" Butler followed him; and after sixty years, so far as my judgment goes, I can see no signs of falling away from this literary tradition. Men of wide learning and broad culture, trained in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, their English was based on sound classical scholarship and upon an intimate knowledge of the Authorized Version, without which neither written prose nor spoken oratory can ever, as it seems to me, attain distinction. Of Fitzgerald, by the way, a good story is told. At one of his election contests (he was the first Premier of New Zealand) he was subjected at the hustings to much interruption by a butcher who had acquired notoriety as a raucous heckler at political meetings and also as owner of the first sausage machine imported into the new settlement. The crowd grew tired of the butcher's interjections and heckled him in turn. "Leave politics alone and go back to your sausage machine," called one. "Yah!" retorted the excited butcher, "if I had that Tory in my sausage machine I would soon make mince-meat of him!" whereupon Fitzgerald said, "Is thy servant a dog that thou shouldst do this thing?'"

For five years I contributed to the paper a weekly "squib" column—satirical sallies and alleged humour—mostly about politics and politicians. I put myself in the way of hearing lobby gossip and obtaining some acquaintance with the personal idiosyncrasies of members of the House. Scattered through my Saturday column there are a dozen or page 89so of anecdotes that 1 feel tempted to snatch for a moment from oblivion—not for any intrinsic merit of wit or humour they possess, but because they illustrate the manner of men to be found in a Colonial Parliament.

The House of Representatives in the nineties seldom contained more than five or six "Labour Members"—strictly so called; but there was usually a fair sprinkling of working-men in both Liberal and Conservative ranks. There were still left—in spite of the "one-man-one-vote" franchise —a few wealthy men, runholders and squatters, some of them cultured gentlemen; but side by side with them sat a member who had once been lamp-lighter to the borough he represented, and another who followed, when the House was not in session, the humble but ancient avocation of a village cobbler—and a very good member he was. The New Zealand Cincinnatus was a boiler-maker. When elevated to a seat in the Upper House by the Ballance Ministry, the postman who delivered the Governor's warrant found him at the railway workshops, inside a boiler, strenuously hammering at the rivets.

A member who was at once uneducated and pretentious provided the gaiety of three successive Parliaments by a ludicrous combination of purism and pedantry with incorrigible ignorance. He condemned a "school reader" on the ground that it contained "coarse expressions"—"quite unfit for the ears of boys, to say nothing of girls!" Challenged to cite an instance, he quoted the sentence," The sailor ran amuck," believing apparently that the expressive Malay derivative contained an page 90inelegant allusïon to a midden. It may have been from patriotic desire to attribute Scotch nationality to as many as possible of the worthies of history and fiction that he referred to a Greek philosopher as Archie Medes, and in a laboured quotation from Pope mistook the sex as well as the name of the wife of Hector and called her "Andrew Mackie." Laughter had no terrors for this intrepid soul; he had been to a feast of languages and stolen the scraps—and he wasn't going to waste them.

Foreign quotations or literary allusions, however, may be dangerous things even for the learned to play with. A Minister in a former administration who was a classical scholar and an enthusiastic student of Homer, was visiting a Board School on one occasion; his attention was attracted by a pretty little girl with large, brown, saucer-like eyes. He stopped before her and asked her, "My little girl, did you ever hear of the ox-eyed Juno?" The little girl never had "Well, my dear, you are very like her," and, with a pat on the head, he passed on. The next issue of the local paper had a letter from an "Indignant Mother"—and indignant mothers have votes in this country—complaining that the Minister had insulted her daughter— before the whole school too! She had come home crying bitterly because "the gentleman said she looked like a cow."

On one occasion there was a proposal before the House to introduce chamois into the mountain districts of New Zealand. The clause was strenuously opposed by Mr. K——, a politician of Scotch descent, whose constituents included many runholders in the mountainous country south of page 91Nelson. Had not the acclimatisation societies done enough mischief already, with their rabbits and sparrows, their stoats and weasels? What was this "chamois" anyway? A Minister—Mr. W. P. Reeves—obligingly sent to the library for a copy of Mark Twain's "A Tramp Abroad" and handed it to the member with this passage marked:

The chamois is a black or brown creature no bigger than a mustard seed; you do not have to go after it, it comes after you; it arrives in vast herds, and skips and scampers all over your body, inside your clothes; thus it is not shy, but extremely sociable; it is not afraid of man, but, on the contrary, it will attack him; its bite is not dangerous, but it is not pleasant; its activity has not been overstated—if you try to put your finger on it it will skip a thousand times its own length at one jump, and no eye is sharp enough to see where it lights.

Mr. K—— solemnly read the extract to the House, without even a glimmering suspicion that Mr. Samuel Clemens was not a writer upon natural history; expressed his belief that "we have quite enough of these nasty jumping things in the country" and declared his fixed intention to vote against the Bill.

"Noxious weeds," equally with noxious insects, are responsible for one of the little incidents that relieve the tedium of Parliamentary proceedings. A member who had all a Yorkshireman's difficulty with his h's based on his own lingual deficiency a retort which he himself doubtless thought extremely felicitous, and which the members certainly received with huge delight. He was addressing the House on Sir John Mackenzie's "Noxious Weeds Extermination Bill," and in the course of his speech page 92made some exceedingly "tall" statements about the luxuriant growth of "Californian thistle" in his constituency—so "tall" that members received them with derisive incredulity. Sentence after sentence was greeted with incredulous "Ohs!" from every part of the House. At last the Yorkshireman turned on his tormentors: "You may hoh! and you may hoh! and you may hoh! But you can't'hoh' me down." And then, after an inspired pause—"I hain't no noxious weed!"

On one occasion a member whose devotion to "this' ere splendid system of National Education" was, as he frankly admitted, the outcome of his own lack of "schooling," was about to refer, in terms of eulogy doubtless, to the exemplary educational establishment in his own particular "model borough." "Sir," said he, rising to address the chair, "I have a school in my eye——" "No," came the prompt interjection of Dr. Fitchett—"only a pupil."

When Sir Julius Vogel, the Hebrew financier, who inaugurated what was known as the "Public Works Policy," returned from London after the successful flotation of one of his big loans, he was welcomed with great jubilation by the citizens of Wellington and honoured by them with a torchlight procession through the town. A political opponent—W. B. D. Mantell, M.L.C.—being met in a by-street by a friend who asked why he was not at the procession, promptly retorted, "Le Jew ne vaut pas la chandelle."

But punning in French is by no means a common accomplishment with New Zealand politicians; their efforts at pronunciation are not usually suggestive of much familiarity with that language. page 93On one occasion when the French Consul at Wellington, the Count d'Abbans, had made a presentation of works of art to the House, a Minister, in moving a motion of thanks, referred to him as Count Door-bang; the seconder called him De-e Abbans. The leader of the Opposition, who was in courtesy bound to speak to the motion, and whose French was not of "Stratford-atte-Bowe," was in a quandary: he could not utter the name correctly without appearing to pass a priggish reflection on the mispronunciation of preceding speakers. His wit, however, served him; and he managed to make a graceful five minutes' speech in which he referred to the Count by half a dozen periphrases, all different and all felicitously elegant, without once mentioning his name.

His over-sensitiveness, however, was quite unnecessary. Members are seldom in the least put out by laughter at their solecisms. They usually retort that they haven't had the advantage of a college education like the member who is laughing; they regret it, but are not ashamed of it; and they sometimes add, in the best of good humour, that they are prepared "to back themselves" according to their particular avocation "to hump coal" or "fell Kauri pine" or "yard cattle" with the best man in the House! And they are, not unfrequently, as good as their word.¹

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Actors, equally with politicians, furnished anecdotal "copy" for my Saturday column. I met many interesting men and women of "the profession," partly because it fell in the course of my work, still more, no doubt, because of my love for what reporters always insist on calling the "Thespian art." Living, as I did, at the antipodes, away from the centre of all things in London, I lost no opportunity of getting to know most of the interesting people who found their way to the colony. In this way I met lecturers like Stanley the explorer, Forbes the war correspondent, and Christie Murray the novelist—whose "Joseph's Coat" remains one of the best-told narratives in English fiction. Occasionally one struck a thoroughly disagreeable man, like the unspeakable "G. A. S."; but most of these visitors from the great world were well worth cultivating by us provincials.

Of the actresses I met, the one who left the deepest impression on my mind was the incomparable Geneviève Ward. She played Stephanie de Morivart in "Forget-me-not," The Duchess of Marlborough in "A Glass of Water," and Fédora in the tragedy of that name, and is still remembered by old playgoers in New Zealand as the most consummate artist who ever appeared on our stage.

A younger and more beautiful actress who strove to follow in the steps of Geneviève Ward was Janet Achurch. The main attraction in her repertoire was Henrik Ibsen's "A Doll's House," in which she made a most intriguing Nora. I rather think, but I may be wrong, that she was the first actress who ever played the part in English. I was asked page 95to "special" her by several newspapers in the Colony because I had acquired some reputation as an authority on Ibsen. I used to get his plays out from the Danish publishers long before they were translated into English, and was able in this way to keep in advance of English critics and translators. A monograph on "Henrik Ibsen's Social Dramas" which appeared in 1888 in a New Zealand magazine, "The Monthly Review"—long since, alas! defunct—was in fact my first contribution to magazine literature.

The mere list of names of a few of the actors who came to New Zealand reminds one how fortunate we are, distant more than 12,000 miles from London, in receiving visits from its theatrical stars. Would that the members of their supporting companies always came with them too; but this, save in exceptional cases, is, I suppose, too great an expense. J. L. Toole, Charles Warner, Robert Brough, Titheradge, Dion Boucicault, Edward Sass, Charles Hawtrey, Cyril Maude, and H. B. Irving, but not, unfortunately, his great father.

With Charles Warner I was on terms of affectionate intimacy and toured with him over part of the North Island, a stage-struck and love-lorn youth.

In London, of course, he was regarded as transpontine; he made his great hit, one remembers, in the part of Coupeau in Charles Reade's "Drink" —an adaptation of Zola's novel "l'Assommoir." But although his draw-piece on his colonial tour was a melodrama of the Drury Lane type, "Hands Across the Sea," he was greatly daring and produced out here plays in which London playgoers would page 96not have tolerated him—"The School for Scandal," "The Lady of Lyons," and even "Hamlet."

This last was truly a bold effort, especially having regard to the very meagre talents of the "stock company" from Australia which supported him. I remember being present at his performance of "Hamlet" on his last night in Napier. That was the only town in New Zealand in which he did not make money, and he was consequently in the worst of tempers at the end of his disastrous week there. He was to leave with his company for Auckland the same night, the steamer having been detained till after the performance, and everything was consequently in a turmoil. He was in one of his furious rages, directed on this occasion against the stage-hands, whom he charged, quite unjustly, with stealing from his laundry bags. They determined to pay him out by "ringing down" on him before he had finished the last scene.

Lying, in his most graceful attitude, well "down stage," the dying Prince adjured Horatio:

Absent thee from felicity awhile
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my——

"Quick curtain," whispered the arch-conspirator among the stage-hands; and down it came, not with the slow pace appropriate to tragedy, but with the rattle and bang of a comedy drop.

Warner was furious; but at first did not suspect design. He came before the footlights, apologised for the mishap, and begged the audience—already rising—to resume their seats. Once more he composed himself on the stage to die and up again page 97went the curtain. This time they allowed him to get as far as—

But I do prophesy the election lights
On Fortinbras; he has my——

Again on "my," which was evidently the cue agreed upon, the curtain came down with a rattle.

The audience now began to titter, some to laugh. Once more Charles presented himself before the curtain. With a wave of the hand he silenced the tittering:

"Ladies and gentlemen, some infernal scoundrel among the stage-hands is determined to ruin my performance; I am equally determined to finish it. I beg of you most earnestly to resume your seats for one moment and let me finish the play."

The audience responded with great good-nature to his appeal, and again he composed himself to die.

So tell him [gasped the dying Prince], with the occurrents,
more and less,
Which have solicited! The rest——

Thud, the curtain roller on the stage once more. He never finished that line—and, indeed, "the rest," was anything but silence. The laughter in the audience grew to a roar from the men and a shriek from the women—as the people made noisily for the exits.

The story, of course, got to London long before Charles; all the theatrical papers "paragraphed" and "cross-headed" it; and at every turn he was mercilessly chaffed about it. Poor Charles! He had a warm and generous heart; but with it went an egregious vanity, through which he was often page 98deeply wounded. It was, I fear, an accumulation of hurts to his self-esteem like this, coupled with the consciousness of failing powers as an actor, that made him ultimately violate

The Everlasting's canon'gainst self-slaughter.

I saw a good deal of J. L. Toole on his visit to New Zealand early in the nineties. He had with him as "leading lady" Miss Irene Vanbrugh, then a beautiful girl in her'teens; his old friend Miss Johnson, who played comedy women; Lowndes, Skelton, and Billington. He was troubled with sleeplessness, and someone—generally Lowndes or Skelton—had to sit up with him till two or three every morning to listen to his stories. Very frequently some college friends and myself would relieve them; for what was an irksome duty to them was a great delight to us, to whom all his stories were new. Of all actors I have ever met, Toole was the most lovable. He was an excellent raconteur; but he was entirely free from the vanity and jealousies so often bred behind the footlights; and I never heard him utter an unkind or uncharitable word about any of his contemporaries in the profession.

Old as he was, he had not lost his love of practical joking. Seeing in the shop-window of a scenic photographer a view of the thermal baths at Rotorua with two coy-looking Maori maids standing up to their waists in hot water, nudibus partibus, he had himself photographed, naked to the waist also, and then got the photographer to "fake" him into the picture between the Maori maids, and so had page 99it re-photographed and re-printed. He wrote on the back, "This is how I take my bath every morning in this wonderful country," and sent copies to Henry Irving and others of his London friends.

I wonder if it is possible to tell a new Toole story? This one at least I have never seen in print, and it has the merit of being thoroughly characteristic of the old actor's kindness of heart.

One night after his performance of "The Don" he was sitting with some friends in the smoking-room of his hotel. A stranger—obviously a farmer from "out-back"—came up and very diffidently introduced himself. He had that day come thirty miles in the saddle and sixty by train to see Toole on the stage "for old times' sake." Toole, of course, insisted upon a drink, and soon had the shy stranger at his ease.

"It's over thirty years since I saw you; one night in Birmingham it was when you were playing Chawles—the footman, you know."

Encouraged by Toole's courteous interest he proceeded. "I believe I can recall the very night to you: you had a funny accident which you got out of splendidly. Your plush'knickers' came undone at the left knee; you were holding a butler's tray in both hands; so you cleverly wriggled the'knicker' back into place with your right knee and the audience roared with laughter. Do you remember?"

"Shall I ever forget?" said Toole. "It was an awful incident; I remember it perfectly—at the Queen's in Birmingham, wasn't it?" and then after an intent look at the stranger's face: "I almost think I can remember your face—front stalls you page 100were sitting, weren't you?" Of course he was, and equally of course he was asked to stay—and did stay—to supper.

"I am glad you didn't give me away," said Toole to his friends when the man had gone, for they had seen the same accident happen in Christchurch only the week before. "I do hope he never finds out!"

Toole had by that time played Chawles over a thousand times, and every time that trouser-leg had come adrift! It happened first at a dress-rehearsal and he turned the accident into an amusing piece of "business."

I have no doubt the farmer returned to the back-blocks full of the story of how he had supped with Toole and how the great actor had remembered seeing him in the stalls at the Birmingham Theatre thirty years ago!