Recollections Part 9

I caused all the doc.u.ments at my disposal to be photographed on gla.s.s, and thus prepared I betook myself from my home in North Wales to London, where I found an immediate and enthusiastic helper in the person of Mr J. N. Maskelyne of the Egyptian Hall. He lent me the use of the most powerful oxyhydrogen magnifying lantern in London and prepared for me a great screen on to which the photographs could be most delicately and accurately thrown in an enormously magnified form. Until the fact of my intended demonstration was announced by the Press, I had not the remotest idea as to the intense interest with which the case was regarded by the British public.

I had caused it to be announced that anybody desiring to be present might secure a ticket of admission by forwarding to me a stamped directed envelope. The Egyptian Hall seated about 360 people, and I received applications which would certainly have enabled me to fill the vast auditorium of the Albert Hall twice over. The result was that I was enabled to make a choice, and when the night arrived the little hall was packed with the pick of the brains of London, drawn from both Houses of Parliament, from the Bench, the Bar, the diplomatic services of Europe, the Royal Academy, the learned professions generally and the Press of London. When a page of the _Bordereau_ was first thrown upon the screen side by side with the authentic handwriting of the prisoner at Devil's Island, I knew that I had my work cut out for me, for there were murmurs everywhere of "Identical!" "d.a.m.natory!" "That settles the whole question," and so on. The mood of the audience was not to be doubted for an instant, but I knew my case and I was confident. Litde by little, as demonstration succeeded demonstration, the temper changed, and at the conclusion I achieved a triumph such as I have never before or since enjoyed. I hope sincerely that I do not take more credit to myself for that night's work than I deserve, but so far as I could judge there was not one of my hearers who went away unconvinced. The Metropolitan Press woke up and in its turn awakened the yet more influential journals of the provinces, who exert an intenser as well as a narrower influence, and in a very little time there came a reverberating boom in answer from the other side of the Atlantic. Before the lecture was delivered I received many threatening letters from truculent Frenchmen, who regarded any foreign criticism of the evidence on which Dreyfus had been found guilty as an insolent a.s.sault upon the honour of the French army. Two of my correspondents threatened me with a.s.sa.s.sination if I should dare to carry out my project, and scores of them expressed themselves in terms of indignation and contempt. The most popular idea appeared to be that I was a hireling in the employ of the Jews, and that I was being very handsomely subsidized to take up the cudgels in a base and disgraceful cause. I confess that I rather wished that this idea of a subsidy were true, for in time and money I had spent considerably more than I could legitimately afford, but the truth remains that Mr Maskelyne and I stood the whole racket and that, so far as we were concerned, there might as well have been no Israel in Great Britain or outside it.

It was this incident in my career which brought me acquainted with Emile Zola, for whose work I had until that time felt a profound aversion. I do not profess to be in sympathy with that work even now, but I got to know the man and to recognise his purpose. When he published in the pages of _L'Aurore_, his famous article ent.i.tled "J'accuse," and was brought to trial on account of it, I went over to Paris, eager to meet him and to a.s.sure him that the intelligence of the world outside the boundaries of France was entirely with him. I reached Paris a day before the trial was appointed to begin, and I made my way at once to the office of the _Steele_, where I applied to my old friend, Monsieur Yves Guyot, for an introduction. He refused it flatly: "The man," he said, "is up to his eyes in responsibilities and labour. Every moment he can spare is given to consultation with Maitre Labori, who is engaged to defend him, and I must refuse in his own interest to trouble him further." It was impossible not to recognise the justice of Monsieur Guyot's plea, but when all was said and done I felt that I was there as one of the rank and file in a losing cause, and that I had something of a right to be near my leader. "I a.s.sure you," said M. Guyot, in parting from me, "that nothing will persuade Zola to receive a stranger at this time. He is one of those publicists who hate publicity, and he knows you already as one of the bitterest critics of his literary methods; it is quite hopeless to dream of bringing you together now." In my perplexity I bethought me of Monsieur Bernard Lazare who, as Zola's acknowledged champion in the Press, was in constant communication with him, and who had sent to me an enthusiastic appreciation of the effect of my London lecture. I went to see him and in one minute over the telephone an interview was arranged for six o'clock that evening. I was there to the minute, but at the entrance to the Rue de Bruxelles I was stopped by a posse of _gendarmes_ and subjected to a vigorous examination. Zola's house was like a castle in a state of siege. It became evident later on that he was under police protection and that it was felt necessary to guard him against the violence of the mob, but it appeared at first sight as if he were a pre-judged criminal whose escape it was necessary to make impossible. When the gates of the courtyard were at last opened reluctantly to me, I was ushered into a chamber which might have been one of the exhibition rooms of a dealer in _bric-a-brac_. There was a sedan chair in one corner, and it was hardly possible to move without disturbing some j.a.panese or Chinese grotesquerie in bra.s.s or porcelain.

I waited here alone for half an hour and then in came Zola with both hands hospitably outstretched. "Vous parlez Francais?" he began, "Bien!"

and with that he thrust me to a sofa and talked as I never heard man talk before. "We know all," he said, by way of exordium, "all, all, all!

and here is the history of this lamentable case." That half-forgotten American chronicler of English manners--Mr N. P. Willis--somewhere described Disraeli as "talking as a racehorse runs." That was Zola's way that evening; he threw himself headlong into his narrative and he talked with head and feet and arms and shoulders. His speech was almost incredibly brilliant and painted, but I have very often thought since then that in the constant preoccupation of his mind with this one theme and the constant repet.i.tion of the strongest points he had to make, he had acquired, as it were, the faculty of threading all his conversational pearls upon a single string, and that he was, in fact, presenting himself to his latest audience with a discourse which was already finished and polished at Adunguen. He gave me a description of the scene of Dreyfus's public degradation on the Champ de Mars which was like a chapter of Carlyle's _French Revolution_ at first hand. It was crammed with detail and so intensely dramatic that it made the scene live over again. I asked him at last in surprise: "But surely you were not there?" "No," he explained eagerly, "I was not there, but you know my method; I have had the scene described by a thousand eye-witnesses, and at last I have reconstructed it for myself." He told me of the prospect for the defence and described the man upon whom the burden would mainly rest--"un veritable geant," he told me with a voice to rally an army in retreat.

I met Maitre Labori in Court next morning and admired the cool intrepidity of his defence, though it was only when he came to address the jury that he gave us a real touch of his quality. I know little of the French method of judicial procedure, but anything more transparently hollow than the pretence of justice which was offered to Emile Zola it would not be easily possible to conceive. Whenever the defending counsel put a question to any one of the witnesses for the prosecution which bade fair to touch the marrow of the case, Monsieur Delegorgue consulted with his colleagues and invariably closed the consultation by saying: "La question ne sera pas pa.s.see." In that case it was Labori's habit to answer: "I shall have to enter an interpolation," which he did, to the effect that the progress of the case was arrested for a s.p.a.ce of anything from five minutes to a quarter of an hour, until he had drawn up his formal protest. Meanwhile the courtyard of the Palais de Justice was rigorously closed against all who could not establish a right to entry, but outside the railings a great mob continually surged, and at such times as they could escape from their scholastic labours an army of students marched up and down singing: "Conspuez Zola!" to a tune roughly based on the air of "La Donna e mobile." Evening after evening Zola and his defenders had to escape from the court under the shelter of a cavalry escort, and on occasion the crowd made an ugly rush in its effort to get at them.

I was standing near the locked gate in the great courtyard awaiting the outcoming party, when I witnessed an episode which was very prettily ill.u.s.trative of one aspect of the popular mind. In the crowd outside, close to the railings, stood a big man and a little one. I don't know whether I was in at the beginning of the altercation, or if it had been led up to in any way, but what I heard and saw was this. "Tu es juif, n'est ce pas?" said the big man, with a sort of bullying jocundity.

"Mais oui, monsieur," the little man a.s.sented. "Ah!" said the other, "you wear your nose too long for your face." With that simple but sufficing explanation, the big man hit the little man on the obnoxious feature and felled him to the pavement. There was a bit of a student rush at that moment, and the crowd went over the prostrate figure, but a detachment of the _gardes de ville_ which happened to be near at hand, went in and rescued him, and he was borne away all muddy and tattered and bleeding.

The sport of Jew-baiting went on quite merrily all over Paris at this time, and on the Place Bouge, on the Sunday afternoon on which M. Henri Rochefort elected to surrender himself to the prison authorities, there was at least a score of merry little chases in which a hundred or so of whooping and roaring citizens would pursue some member of the unpopular race until he found refuge amongst the soldiery or the police, when he was hustled on to take his chance amidst another portion of the crowd.

There was more horse-play than anger in all this, and cases in which serious mischief was inflicted were rare. But the mob was in a highly explosive state for all that, and any st.u.r.dy attempt at resistance or self-defence might at any moment have led to bloodshed.

The surrender of M. Rochefort was really, when all things are considered, one of the drollest spectacles I have ever seen. That venerable political firebrand had been adjudged guilty of contempt of court and had been sentenced to seven days' imprisonment as a first-cla.s.s misdemeanant. He was mulct in some inconsiderable fine as well, and he was allowed to suit his own convenience and fancy as to the time and manner of surrender. He chose to present himself to his gaolers on a Sunday, and to arrive in an open carriage at the head of a small procession. All Paris turned out to see him. There were fifteen thousand troops along the line of route, and fifty thousand more of all arms quartered near at hand. Why there should have been any necessity for the collection of such a force, or for the provocation of a possible riot under the conditions, it was difficult to see. The crowd groaned and cheered with tremendous enthusiasm, and when at last somebody waved a tri-colour flag from an upper window, it went roaring mad with cries of _Vive Rochefort! Vive la France! Vive Fannie!_ In the end it dribbled away quite peacefully, overflowing into all the neighbouring cabarets, or trailing off homeward through the dusk and mud. Here and there a street orator found his chance and gathered a crowd about him, but these were quietly moved on by the police, and before seven o'clock, that part of Paris had resumed its normal aspect. I tried hard to discover some intelligible reason for this curious outburst of popular feeling, but I could find none except that the condition of the popular mind was such that almost any excuse for gathering in crowds, and indulging in noisy cheers and groans, was welcome as a sort of safety valve.

Whilst that travesty of a trial was going on, and every suggestion in favour of the accused was being trampled on, and every one of the chartered liars who had sworn falsely for the honour of the army was being bolstered by the authority of the court, I had many opportunities for conversation with Zola, and in the course of one of them, he offered me an almost pa.s.sionate justification of his literary methods. He did not complain, he said, that he had been misunderstood; he had been charged with being a p.o.r.nographist and with revelling in filth and horror for their own sake. "It is not so," he declared, "but look you! I love and revere this beautiful and n.o.ble France, and I believe that she has yet a splendid destiny before her. At this moment she seems to lie dead and drowned beneath a river of lies, but she will yet revive and justify herself. I picture her," he went on, marching up and down the room, "as a great suffering angel stricken down by a disease which only a cruel cautery can cure. It has been the aim and effort of my life to apply that cautery, and if I am fated to be remembered in the future, the future will do me justice." All this left me as far as ever from an approval of the methods he defended, but it was absolutely impossible to doubt his sincerity.

Two English journalists, who were at that time resident in Paris and who felt strongly at the time that the notorious Major Esterhazy was a much maligned and injured man, engineered an interview between him and myself. The major, it appeared, was extremely anxious to be rightly understood by the British public. He complained that on several occasions he had consented to be interviewed by the London Press and that in each case his statements had been maliciously distorted. He asked me if I would represent him truly and would allow him to tell his story without comment. I made the promise and, of course, I kept it, but as a matter of fact he had no case to offer. He described the general staff of the French army as _un tas de scelerats_, and he alleged that he had been hounded down by his enemies and betrayed by those who had pretended to be his friends. As he talked he leant forward in his chair, tapping the parquet nervously with his walking-stick, and every now and then sending a curiously furtive glance in my direction, for all the world as if he were asking in his own mind: "Have you found me out yet?"

"I would ask nothing better," he told me, "than to put myself at the head of my regiment and to march my men through Paris, and to shoot down every Jew who lives in it. I would shoot them down like rabbits, 'sans rancune et sans remords.'" He flashed that strange furtive glance at me and took his walking-stick in both hands: "I have a dream," he went on, "it comes to me often. I see myself in a room where the walls are white and the ceiling is white and the floor is white, and all my enemies are there before me. I rush amongst them with this stick only and I strike, and I strike, and I strike until the walls are red and the ceiling is red and the floor is red. Ah! I shall have my turn one day." I wired all this meaningless farrago to the _Daily News_ that night, but with much more nonsense to the same effect, and on the following day it was all duly printed. I mention this little fact for a reason. In M. Anatole France's novel, _L'Anneau d'Amethyste_, which appeared much later than the account of my interview with Esterhazy, a character is introduced who talks precisely in that gentleman's manner and who, amongst other things, relates that identical dream; from which one gathers that he must have told it more than once. It was most probably a habit of his, for all his phrases had a manufactured air, and he seemed much more like an actor reciting a familiar part than as if he spoke on the spur of the moment. Later on, as everybody knows, he sold a confession in which he proclaimed himself the author of the _Bordereau_. Later still he repudiated the confession, though by that time there was no doubt in any sane man's mind that it was true. So long as the _affaire Dreyfus_ is remembered, Esterhazy will in all likelihood be regarded as a villain of the very deepest dye; but so far as I can make him out, he suffered merely from a total absence of moral and mental responsibility. He seems really to have persuaded himself that he was an ill-used man, and until circ.u.mstances became too strong for him, to have acted in accordance with his own queer code of honour.

I have listened to many 'great speakers in my time, but never to one who displayed such fire and force and fluency and so wide an emotional range as Maitre Labori. When he arose to address the jury for the defence, he seemed to hurl himself into his subject with every fibre of soul and body. He gesticulated with all the vehemence of a man engaged in a deadly bout with the rapier, and the impetuous torrent of his speech dashed on as if nothing could arrest it. I remember thinking to myself that twenty minutes of this would bring him to the limit of his forces, but he went on for hours, as if he were incapable of fatigue. At one point of his speech he used the words: "Un heros comme Zola." There were some two hundred privileged spectators of the scene, all squeezed into a sort of pen at the extreme end of the court, and nearly everyone of them held a latchkey in readiness, so that he might whistle down it if the orator afforded any opportunity for derision. A shrill scream of sound rose as Labori uttered the words. He paused and faced squarely round upon his interrupters, turning his back on the tribunal. The clamour lasted for a minute and then died away, and then with a cold incisiveness, in strange contrast with his previous manner, he addressed the crowd. "I repeat the phrase--a hero like Zola. I tell you that his courage, his honesty and his devotion will be held in reverence by his countrymen long after you have sunk into your unremembered and unhonoured graves." He towered there in silence for a full half minute and there was not so much as a murmur of reply. "Eh bien!" he said, "je resume," and turning round to the tribunal he took up his speech at the point at which it had been arrested. The rebuke was enough; he was interrupted no more.

Zola read a statement in his own defence and was in a condition of pitiable nervous agitation from the beginning of it to the end. The foolscap pages he held in his hand quivered as if they were stirred by the hot air rising from a stove, and in his anxiety to be heard throughout the court he pitched his voice too high. In the middle of his address it cracked harshly and the packed crowd at the end of the court broke into derisive laughter. He too turned upon the scoffers, but not as Labori had done before him. He was not on his own ground as the great advocate had been, and he seemed to search for words that would not come. The incident, however, seemed to brace him for a while and for a minute or two he read in a firmer tone, though that pathetic tremor of the papers he held still went on and sometimes seemed to make it difficult for him to read.

When at last the tragic farce was over, the foregone conclusion arrived at and the sentence of fine and imprisonment p.r.o.nounced, I found Zola alone at home in a state of profound dejection. "I don't pity myself,"

he said. "I am not to be pitied but this poor France, ce pauvre France."

He returned to the words again and again. "I thought," he said, "that one had only to light the torch of Truth and to throw it into that pit of darkness to make everything clear, but they have stifled the flame with lies. It is finished, it is all finished." I ventured to tell him that I could not and would not believe it, that the verdict of the Court of Ca.s.sation was the merest nothing in comparison with the verdict of the world which he had beyond doubt secured. France would come to reason yet. He refused to be cheered, and saying that he was in need of rest, bade me goodnight dispiritedly and went to bed. Now that the trial was over I had no further business to detain me in Paris, but I saw him by appointment next day before I left for London. He was in full fighting trim again. "We shall do something yet," he said; "despair wins no battles and there are still honest men in France." I made a farewell call on Maitre Labori and found him so husky that he could barely speak, but he poured scorn on the idea that he had worn his voice by the prodigious effort of that sustained relation. He had been so imprudent as to drive home in the humid air of a January evening and he had caught a cold. For his own part he was quite sanguine of ultimate success--not sanguine only, but a.s.sured. "We shall win yet," he prophesied confidently. "No cause ever failed in the long run which had such an array of truth behind it." He might well have added that no cause ever succeeded which had behind it such a battalion of lies and liars as was ranked upon the other side.

CHAPTER XVI

A Few Letters--J. M. Barrie--George Meredith--Advice on Going to America--A Statue to Washington--Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Rt. Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, M.P.--Robert Louis Stevenson--Mr Edmund Gosse on the Neo-Scottish School-- _My Contemporaries in Fiction_--Sir A. Conan Doyle--Mr.

Joseph Hocking--Robert Buchanan--Mr. E. Marshall Hall, K.C.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Meredith1]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Meredith2]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Meredith3]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Meredith4]

_Copy of Letter to David Christie Murray. 15th December 1893._

My Dear Christie Murray,--Your book (my book) followed me up here, where I had to come unexpectedly two days after our dinner. It is delightful. I accept your challenge, and do hereby undertake to talk to you at tremendous length the first time we meet again about the making of another novelist. Not that he, worse luck, has had anything like such varied experiences. I hope you will go on with the second volume you promise. You will find a capital chapter for it in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ Xmas number. I thought that dog worth all the Xmas tales I have read this year. Its death is almost unbearably pathetic, and so comic all the time. The ill.u.s.trator rose to his chances in one picture, when Punch struts past the bull-dog. The one thing I wonder at is what you say of acting, I would argue that everyone with imagination must find delight in the stage, but I can't understand the author of _Aunt Rachel_ having a desire, or rather a pa.s.sion, to exchange a greater art for a smaller one. It is not smaller, you hold. But surely it is, as the pianist is less than the composer. I need not tell you again what it is to me to have the dedication. The whole arrangement of this house has been altered to give the book its place of honour, the positions of hundreds of books has been altered, the bringing of a small bookcase into a different room led to the alteration of heavy furniture in the other room, a sofa is where was a cupboard, flowerpots have been brought inside, and red curtains have given place to green. This is a fact.

I hope you are flourishing, and with best regards to Mrs.

Murray,--Yours ever,

(Sgd.) J. M. Barrie.

_Letter of Advice sent by a Distinguished American to David Christie Murray prior to a visit to America on a Lecturing Tour_.

Friday, 7th September.

My Dear Old Friend,--I am sending.... some letters for you by this same post. They are to three splendid fellows, full of power to help you, and certain to be eager to use it

If I could have seen you personally, I had it in mind to say many things which don't lend themselves to pen and ink. Some of them perhaps can be put down with a minimum of awkwardness.

You are primarily, in the American mind, an eminent novelist. They have read you (in printed cheap editions) by the score of thousands. They think of you as a cousin of d.i.c.kens, Thackeray, Reade and the rest. Now that is your role marked out for you by G.o.d. Stick to it, wear reasonably conventional clothes, cultivate an intelligently conventional aspect, and do not for your life say anything about the stage or the latter-day hard luck you have had, or anything else which will not commend itself to a popular sense which, although artistic on one side is implacably Philistine on the other. They have a tremendous regard for Reade. Carry yourself as if you were the undoubted inheritor of the Reade traditions. Think how Reade himself would have borne himself--then strike out from it all the b.u.mptious and aggressive parts--and be the rest.

Two things destroy a man in America. One is the suggestion of personal eccentricity, Bohemianism, etc. The other is a disposition for criticism and controversy on their own subjects. The latter is the more dangerous of the two. It is a people devoured by the newspaper habit, like the Irish or the old Greeks of the Areopagus. They ask every few minutes "What is the news?" Thousands of smart young men are hustling about fifteen hours a day to answer that ceaseless question. If it occurs to any one of them anywhere to say: "Well, here is a c.o.c.ky Englishman who is over here to make some money, but who is unable to resist the temptation to harangue us on our shortcomings"--just that minute you are d.a.m.ned--irrevocably d.a.m.ned. That one sniff of blood will suffice. The whole pack will be on your shoulders within twenty-four hours.

Yet, don't mistake me. These same newspaper men are nice fellows, kindly to a fault, if you avoid rubbing them the wrong way. Swear to yourself that you will be genial and affable with every human soul you meet, and that you will never be betrayed into an argument--on _any American subject_, mind--with any living being, from the bartender up. It is not so hard a rule, old man, and observing it vehemently day and night will make all the wide difference to you between miserable failure and a fine and substantial success.

You will meet two cla.s.ses of men--scholarly men like my friends, who will take you to clubs where writers, thinkers, students, etc., congregate, and less scholarly but not less likeable ordinary newspaper men. Live your life as much as possible among these two cla.s.ses. You will catch swiftly enough the shades of difference between the two. It is the difference between, say, the Athenaeum and the Savage. Only there is next to no caste spirit, and points of similarity or even community crop up there between the two which couldn't be here. The golden key to both is unvarying amiability.

You are better calculated than most men I know to charm and captivate them all. They will delight in your conversation and in you, and they will see to it that you have a perfect time and coin money--if only you lay yourself out to be uniformly nice to them, and watch carefully to see that you seem to be doing about as they do.

A good many minor people--hotel baggagemen, clerks, etc., tram conductors, policemen and the like--will seem to you to be monstrously rude and un.o.bliging. You will be right; they are undoubtedly G.o.d-d.a.m.ned uncivil brutes. That is one of the unhappy conditions of our life there. _Don't_ be tempted even to wrangle with them or talk back to them. Pa.s.s on, and keep still. If you try to do anything else, the upshot will be your appearing somewhere in print as a d.a.m.ned Britisher for whom American ways are not good enough. The whole country is one vast sounding board, and it vibrates with perilous susceptibility in response to an English accent.

Don't mention the word Ireland. Perhaps that is most important of all. You will hear lots of Americans--good men, too--d.a.m.ning the Irish. Listen to this, and say nothing, unless something amiable about the Irish occurs to you.

Because here is a mysterious paradox. The America always d.a.m.ns the Irishman. It is his foible. But if an Englishman joins in, instantly every American within earshot hates him for it. I plead with you to avoid that pitfall. The bottom of it is paved with the bones of your compatriots.

So I could go on indefinitely, but I have already taxed your patience. Briefly then--

1. Express no opinions on American subjects, political, social or racial-save in praise.

2. Be polite and ready to talk affably wit everybody; men who speak to you in a railway train, or the bar tender or the bootblack, quite as much as the rest.

3. Avoid like poison eccentricities of dress and all contact with actors an theatrical people.

4. Rebuff no interviewer. Be invariably affable and reserved with him talk literature to him, and reminicences of Reade, Matthew Arnold, Dean Stanley, anybody you like especially mention things in America which you like, and shut-up about what you don't like.

5. Keep appointments to a minute. No one else will, but they respect immensely in others.

6. Bear in mind always that people think of you as a big novelist, and will be only too glad to treat you at your own valuation, gently exhibited or rather suggested by courteous reserve. There is nothing they won't do for you, if only you impress them as liking them, and appreciating their kindliness, and being studious of their sensibilities.

Take this all, my dear Christie, as from one who sincerely wishes you well, and believes that you can and should do well. It lies absolutely in your own hands to make a fine personal and professional reputation in America, and to come back with a solid bank account and a good, clear, fresh start. You have lots of years before you; lots of important work; lots of honest happiness. You were started once fair on the road to the top of the tree. Here is the chance to get back again on to that road. I am so fearfully anxious that you should not miss it, that I take large liberties in talking to you as I find I have done. Write to me at Attridge's Hotel, Schull, County Cork, where I shall be from 14th to 20th September, to tell me that you are not offended. Or if you are offended, still write to me. And I should prize highly the chance of hearing from you from the other side, after you have started in.