When I went to the prison next day I, for the first time, bottomed the depths of human stupidity. The wretched man was pinioned and led up to the scaffold. I pray God I may never see such a sight again. The man was just one shake of horror. The prison chaplain, who had primed himself rather too freely with brandy--it was his first experience of this duty--walked in front of the prisoner reciting the "Prayers for the Dead." The poor condemned wretch, who was gabbling one sentence without ceasing, and who was so terribly afraid as to be cognisant of nothing save the fact that he _was_ afraid, had nineteen creaking black steps, newly-tarred, to mount on reaching the scaffold. He turned to the warder and muttered "I can't get up," but the latter slapped him on the back with the utmost _bonhomie_, and said, "You'll get up all right." He did get up and they hanged him. On the evening of the same day I read the amazing proclamation in the evening papers that "the prisoner met his fate with fortitude." Yet I never in my life saw anything so utterly abject as that man's terror. I have since then come to the belief that the average man has learned the measure of expression of emotion by what he sees in the theatre. In the theatre a man has to make his emotions visible and audible to a large number of people. But in real life deep emotion is silent--I have always found it so. This was my first lesson in this particular direction, and I came to the conclusion that the average observer has no faculty for reading the expression of human emotion at all. Only for the sake of that reflection have I ventured upon this really gruesome story.
Somewhere about this time there appeared in Birmingham the first illustrated provincial newspaper ever issued in England. It was called the _Illustrated Midland News_, and its editor-in-chief was Mr Joseph Hatton. France and Germany were at death-grips with each other, and I wrote many sets of war verses for the new venture, and made something like the beginning of a name. It was at this time that I first experienced an agony which has since recurred so often that by dint of mere repetition it has worn itself away to nothing. I encountered my first misprint, a thing bad enough, in all conscience, to the mere prose-writer, but to the ardent youngster who really believes himself to be adding to the world's store of poetry, a thing wholly intolerable and beyond the reach of words. Brooding over the slaughtered thousands of Sedan, I wrote what, at the time, I conceived to be a poem.