_ So he fell away from all old friends except myself and three or four
old intimates of my own, who were as sure to take to him as he to
them, and who like myself enjoyed getting hold of a young fresh
mind. Ernest attended to the keeping of my account books whenever
there was anything which could possibly be attended to, which there
seldom was, and spent the greater part of the rest of his time in
adding to the many notes and tentative essays which had already
accumulated in his portfolios. Anyone who was used to writing could
see at a glance that literature was his natural development, and I
was pleased at seeing him settle down to it so spontaneously. I was
less pleased, however, to observe that he would still occupy himself
with none but the most serious, I had almost said solemn, subjects,
just as he never cared about any but the most serious kind of music.
I said to him one day that the very slender reward which God had
attached to the pursuit of serious inquiry was a sufficient proof
that He disapproved of it, or at any rate that He did not set much
store by it nor wish to encourage it.
He said: "Oh, don't talk about rewards. Look at Milton, who only
got 5 pounds for 'Paradise Lost.'"
"And a great deal too much," I rejoined promptly. "I would have
given him twice as much myself not to have written it at all."
Ernest was a little shocked. "At any rate," he said laughingly, "I
don't write poetry."
This was a cut at me, for my burlesques were, of course, written in
rhyme. So I dropped the matter.
After a time he took it into his head to re-open the question of his
getting 300 pounds a year for doing, as he said, absolutely nothing,
and said he would try to find some employment which should bring him
in enough to live upon.
I laughed at this but let him alone. He tried and tried very hard
for a long while, but I need hardly say was unsuccessful. The older
I grow, the more convinced I become of the folly and credulity of
the public; but at the same time the harder do I see it is to impose
oneself upon that folly and credulity.
He tried editor after editor with article after article. Sometimes
an editor listened to him and told him to leave his articles; he
almost invariably, however, had them returned to him in the end with
a polite note saying that they were not suited for the particular
paper to which he had sent them. And yet many of these very
articles appeared in his later works, and no one complained of them,
not at least on the score of bad literary workmanship. "I see," he
said to me one day, "that demand is very imperious, and supply must
be very suppliant."
Once, indeed, the editor of an important monthly magazine accepted
an article from him, and he thought he had now got a footing in the
literary world. The article was to appear in the next issue but
one, and he was to receive proof from the printers in about ten days
or a fortnight; but week after week passed and there was no proof;
month after month went by and there was still no room for Ernest's
article; at length after about six months the editor one morning
told him that he had filled every number of his review for the next
ten months, but that his article should definitely appear. On this
he insisted on having his MS. returned to him.
Sometimes his articles were actually published, and he found the
editor had edited them according to his own fancy, putting in jokes
which he thought were funny, or cutting out the very passage which
Ernest had considered the point of the whole thing, and then, though
the articles appeared, when it came to paying for them it was
another matter, and he never saw his money. "Editors," he said to
me one day about this time, "are like the people who bought and sold
in the book of Revelation; there is not one but has the mark of the
beast upon him."
At last after months of disappointment and many a tedious hour
wasted in dingy ante-rooms (and of all anterooms those of editors
appear to me to be the dreariest), he got a bona fide offer of
employment from one of the first class weekly papers through an
introduction I was able to get for him from one who had powerful
influence with the paper in question. The editor sent him a dozen
long books upon varied and difficult subjects, and told him to
review them in a single article within a week. In one book there
was an editorial note to the effect that the writer was to be
condemned. Ernest particularly admired the book he was desired to
condemn, and feeling how hopeless it was for him to do anything like
justice to the books submitted to him, returned them to the editor.
At last one paper did actually take a dozen or so of articles from
him, and gave him cash down a couple of guineas apiece for them, but
having done this it expired within a fortnight after the last of
Ernest's articles had appeared. It certainly looked very much as if
the other editors knew their business in declining to have anything
to do with my unlucky godson.
I was not sorry that he failed with periodical literature, for
writing for reviews or newspapers is bad training for one who may
aspire to write works of more permanent interest. A young writer
should have more time for reflection than he can get as a
contributor to the daily or even weekly press. Ernest himself,
however, was chagrined at finding how unmarketable he was. "Why,"
he said to me, "If I was a well-bred horse, or sheep, or a pure-bred
pigeon or lop-eared rabbit I should be more saleable. If I was even
a cathedral in a colonial town people would give me something, but
as it is they do not want me"; and now that he was well and rested
he wanted to set up a shop again, but this, of course, I would not
hear of.
"What care I," said he to me one day, "about being what they call a
gentleman?" And his manner was almost fierce.
"What has being a gentleman ever done for me except make me less
able to prey and more easy to be preyed upon? It has changed the
manner of my being swindled, that is all. But for your kindness to
me I should be penniless. Thank heaven I have placed my children
where I have."
I begged him to keep quiet a little longer and not talk about taking
a shop.
"Will being a gentleman," he said, "bring me money at the last, and
will anything bring me as much peace at the last as money will?
They say that those who have riches enter hardly into the kingdom of
Heaven. By Jove, they do; they are like Struldbrugs; they live and
live and live and are happy for many a long year after they would
have entered into the kingdom of Heaven if they had been poor. I
want to live long and to raise my children, if I see they would be
happier for the raising; that is what I want, and it is not what I
am doing now that will help me. Being a gentleman is a luxury which
I cannot afford, therefore I do not want it. Let me go back to my
shop again, and do things for people which they want done and will
pay me for doing for them. They know what they want and what is
good for them better than I can tell them."
It was hard to deny the soundness of this, and if he had been
dependent only on the 300 pounds a year which he was getting from me
I should have advised him to open his shop again next morning. As
it was, I temporised and raised obstacles, and quieted him from time
to time as best I could.
Of course he read Mr Darwin's books as fast as they came out and
adopted evolution as an article of faith. "It seems to me," he said
once, "that I am like one of those caterpillars which, if they have
been interrupted in making their hammock, must begin again from the
beginning. So long as I went back a long way down in the social
scale I got on all right, and should have made money but for Ellen;
when I try to take up the work at a higher stage I fail completely."
I do not know whether the analogy holds good or not, but I am sure
Ernest's instinct was right in telling him that after a heavy fall
he had better begin life again at a very low stage, and as I have
just said, I would have let him go back to his shop if I had not
known what I did.
As the time fixed upon by his aunt drew nearer I prepared him more
and more for what was coming, and at last, on his twenty-eighth
birthday, I was able to tell him all and to show him the letter
signed by his aunt upon her death-bed to the effect that I was to
hold the money in trust for him. His birthday happened that year
(1863) to be on a Sunday, but on the following day I transferred his
shares into his own name, and presented him with the account books
which he had been keeping for the last year and a half.
In spite of all that I had done to prepare him, it was a long while
before I could get him actually to believe that the money was his
own. He did not say much--no more did I, for I am not sure that I
did not feel as much moved at having brought my long trusteeship to
a satisfactory conclusion as Ernest did at finding himself owner of
more than 70,000 pounds. When he did speak it was to jerk out a
sentence or two of reflection at a time. "If I were rendering this
moment in music," he said, "I should allow myself free use of the
augmented sixth." A little later I remember his saying with a laugh
that had something of a family likeness to his aunt's: "It is not
the pleasure it causes me which I enjoy so, it is the pain it will
cause to all my friends except yourself and Towneley."
I said: "You cannot tell your father and mother--it would drive
them mad."
"No, no, no," said he, "it would be too cruel; it would be like
Isaac offering up Abraham and no thicket with a ram in it near at
hand. Besides why should I? We have cut each other these four
years." _