Part 18

“When, Mr. Northcote, in the height of your conviction you dared to swear in your own jury, you made every member of it actual and visible to me. You may have been uttering a profounder truth than you knew--which is one of the many prerogatives of genius--when you asserted that every one of those fearful and unhappy tradesmen had that jury within him in the jury-box. As you pointed out, we are the heirs of all the ages: the prisoner and the policeman, the advocate and the judge. And he whom you caused this jury of yours to elect as their foreman showed to me how responsible and authentic that jury was. By the magic, Mr. Northcote, in which you deal, you not only evoked that foreman in the spirit, but by some miracle you clothed him in flesh. That was a terrible achievement. It was the first occasion that the redeemer of mankind was seen to be in the occupation of a seat at the court of Old Bailey.

“I have heard all the great advocates of my time. I was present on that memorable occasion when Selwyn Anstruther made his appeal on behalf of Smith. Anstruther spoke during the whole of three days; as an orator he would, with equal opportunities, have been the peer of Gladstone and John Bright. Anstruther’s tradition is such--he had killed himself with overwork by the time he was forty--that he has become almost a myth. But even this speech of his to which I allude, many phrases of which I can recall after all these years, does not compare forensically with this appeal of yours, to which we had the awful privilege of listening this afternoon.

“Nature, Mr. Northcote, as I have said, has in your case been almost wantonly lavish of her gifts. Like one who was compounded of pure wisdom, you appear to have sprung from Jupiter’s forehead completely armed. You have the voice and presence of the tribune; you add to the power of the demagogue a cool, elastic, and a subtle brain. I know not which to marvel at the more, your almost reckless courage, or that wonderful self-discipline which bends a courser so fiery to your lightest behest.

“You must bear with me in patience, Mr. Northcote, while I exhaust the stock of my superlatives; you see you have carried an old advocate away just as completely, nay, even more completely than you carried those honest laymen. This afternoon you furnished an old warrior, weary of the arena, with a few more of those priceless moments which he had not dared to hope again to enjoy. For over and above all your other qualities you have the divine gift which fuses every quality you possess. You have that sympathetic imagination which is the gift of heaven. It is a key which unlocks every bosom. The rich and the poor must alike bow before it. Things and men, Nature herself, even the universe itself, if you care to address your questions to it, can deny to you none of their secrets. The foreman of your jury, the divine mystic of the Galilean hills, was the man who was endowed with that rare jewel beyond all others; and he, as we read, carried the multitude from place to place and caused the sea to open that it might walk across.”

The voice of the judge grew lower and lower. He had spoken very rapidly, and under the impetus of an excitement almost painful in one of his years. Northcote was entranced by the vivid energy of the old man, and the tremulous emotion with which his words were charged. It seemed to be uncanny that he should be sitting there to listen. There was not a member of the bar who would have identified in the transfigured zealot who was pouring forth such strange words the personality of Bow-wow Brudenell, the irascible old blusterer who was considered to be so unsympathetic and hard to please. There was not a word, not a gesture by which the outer man who had become so “famous” with the public could be recognized. This intense mental energy, burning like a lamp behind the harsh creases in his face, seemed to have refined him and rendered him beautiful. The grand passion which Northcote had unmasked filled the young man with awe. What did his own imperious qualities amount to in the presence of this simplicity? How foolish, how divine it was! This old man, whom he had dubbed in his arrogance the type of all mediocrity, shone forth with a lustre which filled its beholder with shame.

The judge rose from his chair with an effort. Northcote also rose. The old man seized his hand with a humble gesture which yet transcended a parent’s tenderness.

“My dear boy,” he said in a whisper, “I did not call you here to listen to this unbridled praise of your own gifts. But I felt that I must speak all that was in my mind concerning you, because I love you--I love you for what you are and for what you will be. All my life I have had a passion for my profession, and I bring myself to speak these words to you, because I feel that I hold within my grasp the newer, the wiser, the grander generation which has sprung already from the loins of us effete old warriors. You, my dear boy, I dare to prophesy, will be its protagonist. There is not a prize which our profession offers which is not already in your hand. One of these days you will be called to its highest dignities. I foresee that you are likely to become a dictator. The imperious will by which you are impelled invests you with a power that soon or late will control the destinies of the state. Therefore an old public servant ventures to speak to you as he would speak to his own son were he living to hear his words.

“The material lures of your profession are powerful, but I entreat you never to consider them. Be a strong and great advocate who will take his stand only upon truth. In the infinity of your nature you are fitted to walk alone in the strait places. The temptations which will accost one of such powers will not be light ones, but if you can acquire that reverence for your calling, that mediocrities like myself have been endowed with throughout their days owing to the infinite mercy of God, that calling has nothing to fear at your hands. It will derive a new sanction from your genius. But, my dear boy, this is a terrible gift which you possess. It is a two-edged sword, and if in a moment of unwariness, such as has been known to visit the heroes of which we read, one of its sharp edges should be turned against the society in which you dwell, I beseech you to remember the other edge will be turned against yourself. He who affirms this is a humble and aged servitor of truth, and on that plea I beg you to forgive his importunity.”

All this time the judge had been holding Northcote’s hand. Towards the end his voice seemed to fail, but the pressure of his fingers increased.

“These are my last words,” he said feebly. “Guard your trust; take your stand upon truth. May God keep you. One who is old will remember you in his prayers.”

Almost involuntarily the judge placed his hands on the shoulders of the young man and pressed his lips to his forehead.

For a moment Northcote seemed petrified with bewilderment. This strange message from one who had run his course to one who was entering upon his own atrophied the powers of speech and motion. At last he tore his hand from the judge’s weakening grasp and ran from the room. In his flight he seemed to detect the sound of something dull and heavy falling behind him. Yet in the depths of his agitation and his shame he did not stay to look back.

He was soon out in the dark streets. Their coldness and commotion, their secrecy, and above all their freedom, were painfully welcome. He had hardly been able to draw breath in that arena in which he had fought his battle during so many dreadful hours. The old madness of movement, the old insensate desire for liberty overcame him again, and hungry and weary as he was he proceeded to tramp fiercely about the raw winter night.

As he marched without aim hither and thither, up one street and down another, he had no thought of the astonishing victory he had gained. The words of the judge had overcome everything else. They dealt with the future; his victory was already a part of the past. His pride was so arbitrary that it appalled and humiliated him to reflect that any man, that even an aged servitor of the truth, in the moment of renunciation of the arduous labors that had oppressed him for so many years, should have had the temerity to address words of such import to him.

From one pair of eyes at least, his talents, which had at last wrested recognition from a jealous, narrow, conventional world, had not been able to hide the dangers with which they were girt. This aged judge had pierced the secret. Those senile old eyes, alone of those in the court, had seen the pitfalls which lay beneath his triumph.

He ought to have been overwhelmingly happy in this new perambulation of the darkness. Yet the sense of humiliation was paramount. That strength upon which all his life his extravagant hopes had been nourished had proved to be even greater than he had known, but the under side of his nature, to which he had given rein in order to grasp success, opened up possibilities that were strange and awful. Truth and justice had had no meaning for the terrible genie he had called to his aid. They had been used as so many cards in a game. The judge was right: so grievous a prostitution of a noble talent was a grave public danger. On the first occasion it had been employed it had compassed a notable miscarriage of justice.

Towards ten o’clock his wanderings carried him into Leicester Square. He stayed his steps under the ghastly lights of a music hall and made the discovery that he was faint with hunger and fatigue. With a dismal sense of foreboding, which habit had rendered involuntary, he thrust his hands in those pockets which on many occasions had had nothing to yield. To his joy his search was rewarded with a sovereign and a halfpenny. As he held the coins in his fingers a strange weary feeling of gratitude stole over him. His days of bodily privation were at an end. Not again would he know what it was to need food and yet lack the wherewithal of obtaining it. After all he must not dare to deride success. Its attributes were substantial, definite, necessary.

As he crossed the square in search of a restaurant of whose merits he was aware, the large letters of the news-bill of an evening journal caught his eye. Murder Trial--Sensational Speech for the Defence--Scenes in Court--Verdict.

“Here, boy, a paper,” he said, holding out the halfpenny.

He clutched the paper greedily and crumpled it in his fist. It almost seemed as he did so that fame itself was tangible, that it was something that he could crumple in his hand.

In the eating-house he passed a glorious hour in which he devoured beefsteak and potatoes and consumed a tankard of ale. He read the account of the trial over and over again, although as rendered by the evening journal it had no meaning for him. Even the bald _résumé_ of bare facts seemed far otherwise than those as rendered to himself. He could not recognize one of the incidents. Hardly a word was intelligible to the chief actor in that crowded and pregnant drama. “Mr. Norcutt for the defence spoke for two hours fifty-eight minutes. His speech was full of Biblical quotations, and even the judge was affected by it.”

When he turned out again into the streets a newsboy came running round the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue. He was crying, “Here y’are hextry special. Sensational murder trial--sudden deff of the judge.”

Northcote bought another newspaper and opened it under a lamp. In the space reserved for the latest telegrams, these words were printed upside down, “We regret to learn that Mr. Justice Brudenell expired in his room shortly after the conclusion of the murder trial at the Central Criminal Court this evening. The cause of death is believed to be heart failure.”

XXXI

MEDIOCRITY VERSUS GENIUS

Northcote could confess no surprise. But it struck him with a sense of drama, the thrill of the unexpected which underlies the impact of the common, that he should not have discerned the end of this aged man to be so near. The sounds he had heard as he rushed from the room must have been caused by that venerable figure falling to the floor. Sharply, however, as he felt the knife of reality in all its brutal power, he yet refrained from speculating upon the scope of its present operation. He was now tired out; his brain was heavy. He pushed on straight to his attic, climbed the dark stairs, and in a little while was curled under a blanket with a merciful sleep blotting out the actual.

He was summoned peremptorily from oblivion by the noise made by the old charwoman in drawing back the curtains which divided his garret into two apartments.

“Quarter to eight, sir.”

“Ay, ay,” he muttered, stretching his limbs and brushing the sleep from his eyes. His slumber had been that of abject weariness; deep, dreamless, undisturbed. He jumped out of bed, slipped on a dressing-gown that hung in rags, and felt himself to be once more the complete and valiant man.

When he sat down to breakfast he sent out the old woman to procure the morning journals. Throughout the operation of dressing, his mind, inflamed with conquest as it was, was filled with thoughts of the judge. In spite of its length, his career on the bench had only been a qualified success; he had never lacked adverse criticism. In the eyes of many he had never been quite strong enough for his position.

Upon the arrival of the newspapers, Northcote turned first to the obituary notices, rather than to the accounts of the trial in which his own personal triumph would be displayed. Following the custom of bestowing even more indiscriminate eulogy upon mediocrity when it is dead than it receives when it is living, the newspapers vied with one another in descanting upon Sir Joseph Brudenell’s services to the public, and his qualities of heart and mind. It brought immense relief to Northcote that this was the case. He was in no mood to suffer disparagement of that venerable figure.

The _Age_ had a leading article upon the trial, and it was soon apparent to the advocate that its hostility towards himself was very marked. It said: “We venture to think that a more singular speech was never heard in a court of justice. It is not our province to advance opinions which encroach upon the right of counsel to settle for themselves what is proper and what is improper in the means they may adopt to safeguard the interests of an accused person, particularly in cases of this nature. But it does seem to us, and we believe this view is shared by the majority of competent persons who were present in court, that the course adopted by the counsel for the defence, if it were to become general, would constitute a grave public danger. Mr. Northcote is a young advocate, whose reputation is yet in the making; and in yielding to the call of his ambition, he adopted a means for the display of his forensic skill the propriety of which we venture seriously to call in question. Had Mr. Justice Brudenell--whose tragically sudden death (to which we refer on page 9) occurred within an hour of the rising of the court--been in the complete enjoyment of that mental and bodily vigor which during a period of twenty-five years he had taught the public to look for in the performance of his avocations, we are sure that, to use a mild term, such a travesty as that with which Mr. Northcote assailed the ears of the jury would not have been allowed to invade a British Court of Judicature. We are sure it would have been stopped peremptorily at the outset. As it was, a concatenation of unforeseen circumstances vouchsafed to the counsel for the defence a license of which he availed himself to the full. And the result we can only regard as lamentable.

“The youth and the limited experience of the counsel for the defence are entitled to be urged on his behalf; while the physical condition of the judge which resulted, almost immediately this extremely painful case had concluded, in his tragically sudden death, removes from his shoulders the least onus for what was allowed to take place. But at the same time it is to be urged upon ambitious members of the junior bar that yesterday’s precedent is not one to be followed with impunity. Whatever the exigencies of the moment may dictate to young counsel in course of a trial for a capital offence, public opinion will not permit the introduction of the doctrines of Nietsche into a British Court of Justice. The parody which was perpetrated yesterday upon religion at the Central Criminal Court must have been peculiarly repugnant to every reverently constituted mind, while its effect upon the verdict can only be characterized as a total failure of justice. Again the effect upon the advocate who permitted himself to indulge in an occupation so perilous was demonstrated in a remarkable and dramatic manner at the conclusion of his address. The reference he was led into making, for which afterwards he was impelled to make an unreserved apology, to the miscarriage of justice which occurred in the case of the unfortunate man John Davis a year ago, a reference which took the form of an impeachment of the learned judge himself, and of Mr. Weekes, K. C., the senior counsel for the Crown, can only be characterized as a gross breach of taste, and an equally gross disregard of those higher tenets of humanity which Mr. Northcote in addressing the jury put to a use so questionable.”

“Well done, old Blunderer,” said the recipient of this castigation, his mouth full of buttered toast, and attempting the delicate feat of propping against the teapot the instrument with which it had been administered. “In the performance of your ‘daily avocations,’ my dear old friend, you are to be admired. The ‘doctrines of Nietsche’ is distinctly good. Whatever will happen to us in this country when you can no longer be bought for threepence I am sure I don’t know.”

However, when the young man had finished his breakfast, and he had read the article again, he did not view it with quite the same air of detachment with which he had contemplated it at first. By nature he was immensely impatient of criticism. He accepted his own superiority to all the rest of the world without question, but like an arbitrary despot, he could not suffer the power of which he felt so secure to suffer misinterpretation, or the motives that impelled it to be called in question. His pride, after all, was of a ferocious and aggressive kind. The old judge’s appeal had humiliated him bitterly. This newspaper article filled him with the fury that it would have filled Voltaire.

“I see what it is,” he said, filling his pipe. “They are all in the ring, and they are afraid a rank outsider is going to break it. And so he shall!”

He finished with a volley of oaths.

The next moment tears had sprung to his eyes. Tears of chagrin, rage, disgust, of resentment against himself. How dare he be so arrogant when the words of the honest old man, spoken while the hand of death was upon him, were still in his ears. Mediocrity had its function, its reason to be. Until he had grasped that elementary truth he could never emerge, clad in valor and completeness, upon that high platform which nature had designed him to occupy. “Cad” Northcote had been the name bestowed upon him at school by his humbler but honester fellows: the same term of opprobrium had now been applied to him in a more public manner.

It was unworthy that he should ascribe the bitter antagonism he had raised against himself to the eternal feud of mediocrity versus genius. That fine gentleman, the old judge, was incapable of bearing false testimony. Outface it as he might, the flaw was in himself. It had been there from the beginning. The genie in which his intellectual pride was centred was the seat of the canker. Every time he employed it he must be aware of his fatal gift. It was a sinister talisman, or, in the words of the judge, a two-edged sword. Better a thousand times not to be distinguished from the mediocrity he was never weary of despising, than to be at the mercy of a genius that would compass his destruction.

He took up another newspaper, and turned his attention to an article entitled: “‘Bow-wow’ Brudenell, by an Old Friend.” In the course of a column of appreciation it said: “Public life is the poorer to-day by a memorable figure. Mr. Justice Brudenell had achieved an odd sort of fame. It rested upon his idiosyncrasies upon the bench; upon the curious, irascible, barking delivery he affected, which earned him the name by which he was always spoken of in the circles in which he moved. In the judgment of his profession he was hardly considered to be a ‘strong’ judge, nor was he widely popular; yet although he had detractors, he was always listened to with respect. His queer little tricks of manner and his somewhat formidable aspect created an impression in the public mind which cannot be said to have been wholly in his favor. Yet none could have told from his demeanor on the bench what the man was at heart. It would require the pen of a Charles Lamb to limn him in his quiddity. To his private friends he was a perpetual delight and stimulus; he stood for all that was worthiest in the human character. He kept a too fearful conscience ever to be truly eminent in public life, but no kinder, humbler, humaner gentleman ever walked the earth than Joseph Brudenell.

“It is to be feared that the closing days of this good man’s life were darkened by tragedy. The present writer was sitting with him in the smoking-room of a club, when a fellow member, an occupant of the Episcopal bench, carried over to him the evening paper containing the confession of the man Burcell in whose stead John Davis had suffered the extreme penalty a few days before. It would engage the pen of a dramatist to portray the self-righteousness of the bishop and the horror and bewilderment of the judge. ‘It has overtaken me at last,’ said the old judge, covering his eyes as though he had been poor blind Œdipus. ‘This is the shadow that has darkened my life during twenty-five years.’

“His distress will never be forgotten by those who witnessed it. From that hour he was never the same. The tragic suddenness of his end was not unforeseen by those who knew him best. Yet to the last he was the same gentle, courteous compound of scholarship and refinement. In no sense could he ever have been looked upon as brilliant. No epigrams, no pregnant sayings, no flashes of wit are recorded of him; upon the bench he was too much in earnest even to be genial. Every cause that came before him appeared to engage the very blood of his veins and the whole life of his intellect. It was a ruthless kind of irony that fixed upon such shoulders as these the responsibility for as grave a miscarriage as ever darkened the annals of English justice.

“In his private life he had known great sorrows. His only son was drowned twenty years ago while a freshman at Oxford. Had he lived, he was destined for that profession for which his father had so profound a reverence. Nothing could have been more exquisite than Joseph Brudenell’s childlike devotion to his calling, yet he was always haunted by the consciousness that the ideals he had set up were beyond his grasp. This son was to have been the truer, the wiser, the stronger, the more penetrating man; yet it was never to be. The accident that deprived him of this enlarged and completer edition of himself added something to his latter years that his faithful circle of old friends found wistful and affecting. And only last week he lost the devoted daughter who had been the stay of his declining years.