Читать книгу Candid Chronicles: Leaves from the Note Book of a Canadian Journalist - Hector Willoughby Charlesworth - Страница 14

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For the tasks I have since set myself as a writer, I was singularly ill-equipped in the matter of education; and I have never quite solved the question in my mind of how and why I chanced to become one. But I have noted the saying somewhere that the writer invariably educates himself; by something like animal instinct he picks up here and there what he needs for his mental nourishment. That is for the most part true of most of the writers who graduate from newspaper offices, or win distinction in the trade of journalism. What I have learned has been very largely through association. I have always been an omnivorous reader, interested in almost everything, but never a very greedy one. I do not suppose that I have read more than 2,500 books in the fifty odd years of life; but they have all been books that I wanted to read and the contents of which I, often quite unconsciously, remembered.

Such education as I had in boyhood was excellent, but ceased before I was fifteen years old. There were good books at home, but we had no literary friends. My mother had an excellent and discerning literary taste, as evidenced by the fact that she chose as her favourite novelist Anthony Trollope, whose greatness as an interpreter of human life has only lately come into full recognition. This was at a time when Trollope was not deemed worthy of an equal place with Thackeray and Dickens. To-day, though his pages never attained the living power of many of those of Dickens, I think that he is generally recognized as equal to or perhaps greater than Thackeray. But Trollope is a writer best appreciated by men and women of mature years. My mother, as a young girl in Hamilton, had been the friend of two very noted newspaper writers of their day, John Tyner, and William Wallace Breckenridge. I still possess an early collected edition of Tennyson, given her by Breckenridge; and she would go about her household duties laughingly reciting passages from Shakespeare. She used to half frighten me with her satirical and lugubrious recitation of the potion scene from Romeo and Juliet, and would sometimes burlesque passages from Hamlet. She was a delightful woman, who, without beautiful features, gave an impression of beauty, by the delicate hues of her complexion, the warm tints of her auburn hair, and above all by the sweetness of her expression. She has been dead for more than a quarter of a century; but old men still speak almost with tears in their eyes of her loveliness when they first saw her with her three babies so nearly of an age. It was, as I have tried to say, a loveliness more of atmosphere than of actual definition, yet it left undying memories with all who knew her.

When she discovered my aspirations she was very ambitious for me that I excel as a writer and never deviate from standards of taste, once my course was fixed; and from her I inherit a sense of humour that has been my salvation on many occasions. But neither she nor I dreamed of the course that was my destiny, when in my fifteenth year my father decided that I should leave school to become equipped for a business career. An active man, of conflicting interests and expansive ideas, he felt his inefficiency as an office executive, and willed that I be trained to supply his deficiency in the business that then seemed to promise large results. And so one night when we were riding together in the long shadows before sunset, he asked me how I should like to be articled for three years with an English accountant who had come to Canada, and was regarded as the most expert man of his profession in this part of Canada. It was with a good deal of pride in the responsibilities that were to be mine that I consented. Thus for three years I became a slave to ledgers and figures and learned to hate them heartily.

In the preceding years I had had some good schoolmasters and several inefficient ones. Most of my education was obtained at the largest public school in the city of that day—Wellesley school—presided over by a renowned Scottish dominie, Adam Fergus Macdonald, whose memory is still green. "Mac" used the rod sparingly because he did not need to. He could frighten a culprit almost into nervous prostration by a glance from his piercing eyes and a growl from his deep voice. I think he regarded it as a mark of physical degeneracy that Canadian lads in that day did not wear kilts; and in the drill company, the best in the city schools, every boy had to wear a Scottish cap. When he discovered that I was in part of Highland ancestry my fortunes with him were made. He was a great moral force, who not only kept his subordinates up to the mark but somehow or other kept the minds of three hundred boys tolerably clean,—a rare achievement.

From Adam Fergus Macdonald's principality I passed on to another, that of Archibald MacMurchy, father of a distinguished family, at what he loved to term "The Old Grammar School". It was more vulgarly known as Jarvis St. Collegiate Institute, but Dr. MacMurchy never employed that modern appellation; and he was proud of the fact that from its portals youths had been going forth to battle with life in a new world since 1805. I never knew a teacher who spoke so little. He had brought gesture in discourse to its fullest development; and after gazing sorrowfully and intently at a misdemeanant would simply point to the "imposition" book and say, "Two hundred lines", and jot down a memo to see that the task was not forgotten. When I entered the "Old Grammar School" the older boys were full of tales of a teacher of English literature who had retired at the end of the preceding term; of the order he kept; of the way he scarified the conceited; of his rough and ready methods of sex education, where he thought admonition necessary. The ways of "Sam" Hughes were an ever-popular theme; and the boys could not understand why he should want to go away and be a country editor. Needless to say, this hero was destined to fame as General Sir Sam Hughes. He was not then so eminent in military circles as his chum, the chief instructor in mathematics, Major Fred Manley of the Royal Grenadiers, who had had a fine record for efficiency in the Northwest Rebellion. Major Manley or "Fred", as he was known behind his back, was a capital teacher, with a humorous twinkling eye, who kept perfect order by making fun of any boy who became "fresh". Good teachers never need to use the cane, and Major Manley was one of these; but there were teachers more nervous and less efficient whose weaknesses were known to all the boys, and whose lives they made a torment. The most serious speech I ever heard Manley make was one impressing on them the cruelty of such tactics. And indeed the boys did in the end torment some of these less efficient teachers out of their positions. One, a man of high scholastic attainments and a Master of Arts, afterwards ended his days, untimely, as keeper of a small grocery store. It was for this man and another that Manley pleaded mercy among the boys he could influence, but the cruelty of youth is incorrigible.

The dearest memories of my schoolboy days, however, centre around the successor of Sam Hughes as chief instructor in English and Literature, William Huston, M.A. Huston, a native of Whitby, would have been recognized as Canada's greatest teacher. He was then (1886-7) but twenty-four or twenty-five, but appeared much older; with bristling eye-brows and eyes that twinkled with good humour behind heavy glasses. Tall and raw-boned, he looked as if his clothes had been blown on to him in a windstorm, but his magnetism was of a most compelling quality. Despite his youth, his career had already been most distinguished. He had come within one mark of winning the Gilchrist Scholarship of the University of London, a most coveted honour, and had been Principal of the old Quaker college at Pickering. A year or so after I left school he was appointed Principal of Woodstock College, where he was rapidly winning fame when his career was cut short by death at the age of thirty.

Huston was able to fascinate boys with the intricacies and irregularities of English grammar; and he opened a new world to me, and I have no doubt to many others, by his power of literary criticism and exposition. Though it was not directly under his department, he touched on the classic origins of all imaginative literature: he would tell the story of Ulysses and other classic romances and pull the curtain aside to reveal far vistas of beauty in the whole realm of poetry. His tastes were by no means antiquated. He expounded the metrical beauties of Swinburne's Forsaken Garden, and it was from him I first learned of Robert Louis Stevenson, when he told us to advise our parents to buy the new novel, Kidnapped.

Looking back, it seems marvellous how much he taught us in the single hour of each day that we enjoyed his society; and to me the year I spent under him was priceless. Under Huston I took in and stored away a host of impressions and enthusiasms, which were presently to burst into active impulses and shape the course of my future life.

I cannot tell just when in those adolescent years, while I was toiling over ledgers in the laborious but not always tedious business of learning to be an auditor, the feeling was borne in on me that I must become a writer. I found I was woefully ignorant. All of a sudden as it were, I found myself possessed of a desire to acquire familiarity with all literatures and all arts, and in time to become one of the great company of letters. There is a phrase which I encountered many years later, but which has ever since haunted me, because it perfectly embodies feelings which have been mine since my seventeenth year. It is to be found in the essay on Mazzini by that great modern but little known master of the English tongue, Frederick Myers, in which he says (without slightly difficult application) that anyone who does not feel such aspirations is but "the empty-handed heir of the ages",—and this has been the gospel of my inner life.

Almost the first thing that I did when the realization of the inadequacy of my knowledge and of the countless untrodden paths of beauty that lay before me, was to procure a copy of John Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding and read it carefully, and I think understandingly. It was a tough task for a lad in his seventeenth year, who had never been studious and had very little leisure. Locke's close reasoning and precision of style, remarkable for an English writer of the pre-Addisonian epoch, is no doubt simple enough for the average student, but there was nothing in my experience to prepare me for metaphysical and philosophic discourse, save a certain schoolboy aptitude for Euclid. But in the month when I was grappling with Locke, reading and re-reading to make sure that I was following his meanings, I could feel the muscles of my mind expand, and my confidence grow, just as the person who is learning to play golf or to swim finds new uses for untried muscles in his body and rejoices therein. I never followed up metaphysical reading, though in the next three or four years I dipped into most of the philosophers, and was fascinated with the doctrines of Spinoza and Hegel. Mill's Logic, which I tackled two years after Locke, rather repelled me, though his treatise on Liberty fixed certain political principles of mine; and I could wish that on this continent more people accepted John Stuart Mill, and fewer, Billy Sunday, as a prophet.

Though the desire for mental exercise took me to the philosophers, I can now see plainly that it was the artistic and imaginative aspects of literature, the phases of it which tend to blend with other arts, that really attracted me most. The reading room of the public library not far from the office became my University. There by judicious arrangement of the time I took for luncheon, and by not stopping on the street to talk to anyone, I could have a full forty minutes intensive reading. And I acquired a personal love for translations of Goethe and Heine. Heine's Atta Troll, epic of a captive bear who ran away and joined her companions in the woods, with its mordant championship of intellectual liberty, especially appealed to my mind,—which was like that of all ardent youths, rebellious against the trammels of its surroundings. I have not looked into Atta Troll for years, but it is a great allegory and a moral tract.

It must have been somewhere about the same time that I acquired an enthusiasm for Plato, not so much for the dialogues which deal with the religious views of Socrates—though the Apologia is great as thought, great as poetry, and, in a sense, great as drama—as for the dialogues which analyse the emotions of love and the emotions of beauty. These won my enduring affection—the Banquet, which as translated by Shelley is a masterpiece of glowing English prose; and the Phaedrus, one of the most gracious of the Carey translations.

My sudden plunge in the great world of literature was so replete with adventure that I had little time for thoughts of girls and sports, the normal aptitudes of healthy youths. I take no especial pride in that fact. Lovely and charming girls are after all the greatest thing in human existence. It was lucky for me that the location of my home, by this time far out in the suburbs, compelled me to walk a great deal; and I was also fortunate that when mentally lax I could always saddle a horse, and amble peacefully along the beautiful by-ways of York county in those days when the motor car was merely the dream of a few inventors. One of the most glorious of physical sensations is to ride on country roads on a warm June night, and savour the odour of the unseen shrubs and flowers in the farm gardens. To the sensitive, every changing month from May to October has its own specific odours, young grass at one time, new cut hay at another, ripened apples at another. And it was natural that my first impulse when I started to write should take the form of nature poetry.

It is with some pride that I recall that while I was living this exhilarating life of mental adventure and sensuous delight,—intensely happy and intensely melancholy, often in one and the same hour,—I was not lazy and stupid in the prosaic business of accountancy. Excitement had been added to the game (for the game of double entry book-keeping can be quite as fascinating as cross-word puzzles, for example) by the fact that my chief had become a public assignee, and in the ledgers and day-books that came to our hands we had to unravel the sordid mysteries of many insolvencies.

I can imagine nothing more calculated to disgust an idealistic youth with business, then an experience in an assignee's office, especially in a period when commerce is generally unsettled, as it was in Canada in the period of 1890. The clear proof of the shabby tricks and subterfuges men of repute had resorted to in the vain hope of keeping their businesses afloat; the deceptions they had practiced even on trusting friends and relatives; the worries, as painful as a malignant growth, they had endured—all these things were clear before my mind. I believe that modern banking science, when truly practised (as it sometimes is not), and the gradual elimination of the credit system has done something to remedy matters for men of honest intentions, but the inner anatomy of business in 1890 certainly offered no very alluring prospect to a lad privileged to peer into it, as I was. I used to think despairingly, "Am I to be fettered to this sort of thing for life?"

Then circumstances arose that, in spite of myself, upset the plans which had been made for me. My father ever since 1880 had foreseen that Quebec was the natural home of the shoe industry, owing in the main to its freedom from labour troubles and for other reasons as well. He had desired to move his industry thither, but his partners would not consent. The ability of Quebec to produce more cheaply had in the end compelled abandonment of the manufacturing side of his business, in which crisis his creditors behaved with splendid magnanimity,—not at all like the creditors in novels,—and he had attempted to carry on as a jobber. But here again, in an era of falling prices, the men whose goods he was handling found it convenient to unload and undersell him at the factory. Therefore he closed up while there was still a chance to avoid disaster; and the object which was in view when I was articled as a student of accountancy, disappeared. When the three years of my time as an articled clerk expired, my chief offered me a position to stay with him and run the routine of the office at a rising stipend. But this ended in a more tragic way. He was an accountant of amazing penetration, whose ability to see through a bad mess led to his being frequently called in consultation by other assignees and liquidators; but his judgments in dealing with his fellow beings were child-like. His youth had been one of drudgery in the black towns of the North of England, and when prosperity came to him it was too much for him. He developed a fatal connoisseurship in whiskey and an overweening desire to learn to play the game of poker. There were plenty of rascals about willing to teach him. The first signs of disintegration came when I, who looked after the banking of the firm, would discover in going through the checks at the end of the month withdrawals not only from his own personal account, but on the trust accounts of the various insolvent estates in our charge. I would ask about them, and he would nervously assure me that everything would be all right. There could be one end to this. Late on a winter afternoon in 1891 he called me into his room, said that he knew I was worried, but that money was coming from England that would amply cover all claims, but that he was feeling unwell and thought he would take a brief vacation. Next morning I found he had absconded. His creditors, largely already creditors of estates in his hands, knew it was not worth while bringing him back. He tried to make a living as a newspaper man by use of his shorthand in Buffalo,—apparently he feared exposure if he applied for an accountant's position there, since references would be asked—and in the end committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a railway train.

For two years I had been scribbling privately; and in order to avoid the impression that I was not attending to business, as well as from sheer diffidence, I had been sending verse and prose sketches anonymously to the young weekly newspaper, the Toronto Saturday Night, then conducted by Mr. E. E. Sheppard. I sometimes signed my initials and sometimes the pen-name "Touchstone", which I chose because of one of the jester's saying, "Call me not fool till Heaven hath sent me fortune." A week or so before the disappearance of my chief in the assignee's office, an item appeared as the very first paragraph on the front page of Saturday Night in which Mr. Sheppard, or "Don" as he signed himself, requested that the contributor who called himself "Touchstone" call on him or send him his address. My elation was naturally tremendous, and I went to see him. In after years he told me that he had expected to meet a man of about thirty-eight (his own age) instead of one twenty years younger. But after making some inquiries and sending for my father, he finally offered me the post of assistant editor in succession to the late Duncan A. McKellar, who was going away to New York to try his fortunes in company with his pal, the late Peter McArthur. The stipend he offered to begin on was so low that I could not have afforded to accept it, had the crisis I have spoken of not occurred almost at the same time. I had one other option: the Timothy Eaton Company was just at that time entering on the marvellous career of expansion which constitutes one of the greatest of business epics, and needed trained office men to grow up with the business. I had a chance to start there on somewhat better terms, but was already too deeply bitten with the hope of becoming a writer to accept. Thus for good or ill, in the second week of March, 1891, being some months less than nineteen, I became a newspaper man.