THE EDITOR'S TRAGEDY.
ASTRANGE and painful tragedy has just been recorded, which should touch somewhat deeply all literary men. Mr. Alex- ander Birnie, the subject of this tragedy, appears to have been one of that class of provincial editors in whom the possession of literary capacity inspires a deep pride and sense of power. We by no means wish to attribute such feelings exclusively to our provincial brethren. The habit of tracing swift comments, often of passing hasty judg- ment, on human beings and their actions—or rather on those particu- lar phantasms of our own minds, which for the moment we assume to represent the men and their actions—inspires something of this tone in all critics of passing events ; and this is, indeed, their characteris- tic danger. But in none is this sense of empty power more likely to be intoxicating and dangerous than in those who are but half-versed in the supreme uncertainties of literature, who do not see that even the highest literary estimates of men and things are vague half-views, with much that is essential to the truth still left in shadow. To this perhaps self-elevated class of border-land literateurs Mr. Birnie apparently belonged. He had been editor of the Chester-le-Street Liberal in Durham, and there, apparently, had so far succeeded as to aspire after a more independent position. He became editor and proprietor of the Falkirk Liberal, to which he was in the habit of contributing a weekly leader, signed "The Cock of the Steeple," a nom de plume probably intended to indicate the wide intellectual survey which the editorial mind took of the town and its neighbourhood, as it looked to every quarter of the compass. Unfortunately he never taught himself to distrust wide intellectual surveys, at least in his own case, and his Falkirk Liberal failed. Leaving his wife and family still iu Chester-le-Street, he then went to Edinburgh to seek work, fell into bad living and bad company, was robbed of almost all he had, and in remorse for the injury he had thus inflicted on his wife and children, attempted suicide by an overdose of laudanum, which, however, he took in such large quan- tities as to make him sick ; and this for the time saved his life. Still the cock would not come down from his steeple. The editor had proved not only the ingratitude of the public, but on a small scale that unsoundness in his own surveys of "men and things," which might well have taught him to distrust them still more on a larger scale, and yet the pride which is so often fed by this wonderful power of writing out our glib, false views, or at best half views of human affairs, clung to him to the last. He set out on foot on his return to Chester-lc-Street, apparently with a design of killing him- self by exhaustion, certainly with a fixed resolve not to avert this fate by any concession of pride. He had but a few pence in his pocket, and a few of the cherished literary "contributions" of his own pen. He kept a journal by the way, editing as it were his last hours, and specifying with care the exact details of his suffering; and we
must say that the brief sentences which he entered during the last few days of his life are not tainted by any touch of literary affectation, but the simplest utterances of human anguish. For days, we are told, he never had his clothes off, never rested on a bed, and seldom under cover at all ; tasted no food but what his pence would buy, and drank only water. On the night of the 12th February he reached Morpeth, spent his last penny on a roll, mistook the road, became overpowered by suffering and fatigue, and crept into a stack, near Stobhill brick-works, to die. For nine days he lay there with- out either food or drink, but on the ninth found strength to creep out for water, yet would solicit no help, and, crept back again. On the twelfth day he records that he can no longer creep out for water. On the fourteenth day (February 25th) he was discovered and taken to the workhouse hospital, where he died of mortification of both legs the same night, his feet being so swollen that it was necessary to cat off his boots. The following were his last entries in the diary—entries singularly pathetic, whether we suppose them to be his last excuses to the world, or the true utterance of his own heart, or, more truly perhaps, a mixture of both : "Thursday, February 13th.—I have now laid under some straw, by a haystack, near Morpeth, last night and all day ; God knows if ever I will be able to proceed any further. I would like to have got to Chester-le- Street, to be buried there, that my poor wife, when she looked on my grave, might forgive and weep.
"Saturday, 15th.— One week my punishment has lasted. I still lie here, but very weak and much pained in the bowels.
"Sabbath, 16th.—Another day without food or drink ; cold. When will the trial be over ?
"Monday, 17th.-0 God ! grant me patience.
"Tuesday, 18th.—Alone, without a soul to see or speak to, a bit of bread, or a drop of drink for six days and nights ; how long can it be? "Wednesday, 190.—This cannot hold out long. Help, 0 Lord ! "Friday, 21st.—The ninth day without food ; got a drink of water last night.
"Sabbath, 23rd.—Eleven days ; my legs are useless. 0 God when will it end ?
"Monday, 24th.-0h, I am weary; one part of my body appears to be dead. I cannot go for a drink now. 24th February.—Seventeen days' suffering; during that time had twice a piece of bread, twelve days with- out a morsel.
"Tuesday, 25th.—Death comes on ; I wait. I meet him without fear. Jesus is all. Oh, He has saved me, yet so as by fire, these thirteen days. 0 bless Him for them ; to Him I commit my soul, my memory, my family, my all. Amen."
The strange absence, here, of that self-horror which the intention of suicide usually creates, and the curious appearance in its place of that glow of unhealthy enthusiasm—unhealthy in the agony of such a death—which lights up the poor man's reeling brain in his last hour, are singularly painful—the more so, perhaps, if they were intended for the world than if they were not. In these last days the poor editor's survey of himself can scarcely have been more complete or faithful than his intellectual surveys of Falkirk from the steeple-top. Mixed with the prayers for help and the hope of pardon there must have come many a bitter doubt, or, if not, at least many an image which would have caused doubt had his mind been clear. Yet, perhaps, after all, these brief editorials on his own fate were not much less incomplete or distorted not only than this particular editor's liberal teachings to Falkirk, but even many of the most valued products of our editorial class in general. Those precious literary contributions in his pocket that aided no doubt to nerve Mr. Birnie, in the midst of the most terrible pangs of famine, against admitting the fact of beggary, and the consequent duty of begging from his fellow-men- against how many equally stern facts of life do they not nerve the literary class to rebellion? How few men of us all can look at a fact as it is, if a literary reputation intervenes between it and our eyes ? This man is not the only beggar who has imputed to himself a literary righteousness that he had not. To us there seems some- thing representative as well as tragic about his career. The con- fusion between the pride of writing and the pride of seeing, which took his editorial imagination up to a pinnacle from which he could see, not indeed all the regions of the earth, but all the dwellings of his audience ; the overthrow of his ambition causing intoxication rather than humiliation ; the stubborn literary pride, which urged him to a double act of suicide, and kept him to the last from appeal- ing to the mercy of his fellow-men; and, finally, the triumphant re- gister of his sufferings, written in the tone of a martyr, with the eternal world so close upon him and so dimly seen—these things should have more than the interest of personal details to literary men. It recals something of poor Haydon's history. Artistic and literary pride, and the thick veil it interposes between those who entertain it and the facts of that life which they profess to see more clearly than other men, constitute one of the most painful phases of in- tellectual culture. Criticism is a blinding task. Those who glory in their own successful editing of this strange world and its events are seldom able to acquiesce in that only authorized edition of their own life which is warranted by the providence of God.
Previous page
