class="tdr">face p. 30

MEMOIR.

Arthur Giffard Whiteside Johnstone was born December 3rd, 1861, the fourth son of the Rev. Edward Johnstone and Frances Mills. His father was then taking the duty at Colton in Staffordshire, but in the following year accepted the living of Warehorne in Kent; this he resigned in 1866 and went to live at St. Leonards. Mr. Johnstone died in 1870, and the direction of Arthur's education fell entirely upon his mother. Mrs. Johnstone gave her life to good works and to the care of her children, one of whom was an invalid. Arthur looked on her as a saint, and the thought held up his belief in humanity during the somewhat long struggle when his powers and aims were uncertain, and when he had to observe excessive dulness, dreariness, and meanness at close quarters. He was also beholden to her for the gift that was at last to determine his career. She was a good musician, and it was from her that Johnstone inherited his fine taste and received his first instruction in music. Later he studied under Mr. W. Custard, a local organist. The atmosphere of his home was religious—extreme Anglican approaching to Roman Catholic. Johnstone, though he became by reaction anti-clerical, continued to appreciate the value of religion, chiefly through art and music, as his letters and criticisms show. But his bent was secular as well as artistic; a high Anglican school and a high Anglican college were therefore not a pasture in which he could thrive. His spirit was foreign to theirs. It says much for his strength of mind, that these institutions left him able to admire certain forms of Christian art.

In 1874 he went to Radley and remained there four years, doing neither well nor ill, stifled rather in the ecclesiastical atmosphere of the school, caring little for games, and out of sympathy with the public school spirit. He therefore lived his own life, learnt to protect himself by ingenious tact and reserve, and read irregularly what he liked. Though not specially built for athletics he was by no means lacking in bodily arts and dexterities. When quite young he was a first rate billiard-player, a good skater, and at lawn tennis well above the average. His chief accomplishment was an odd one which never left him. During these early years he made a constant pastime of conjuring, and devoted to it much of his leisure and some of his business hours. He even gave elaborate entertainments in public, from the age of fourteen. On one occasion when he was only seventeen he was able to apply his skill to a really practical use. He was going by train to give a performance and happened to enter a compartment where there was a gang of card sharpers. They drew him into playing "Nap" with them; soon he began losing and knew that he was being cheated. They were using the ordinary conjuror's cards with plain white backs, of which he had a supply in his pocket. He soon found an opportunity of replacing their pack with one of his own, won back his losses with schoolboy satisfaction, and changed carriages at the first stopping-place, leaving the experts to solve the mystery for themselves. His self-possession in public and private, the mature and slightly initiate air that became less marked as he grew older, were probably due to these performances. They served in his real education. The intellectual side of what is usually common showman's art attracted him. The psychology of the conjuror's victim, amused and angry, straining all his wits on the wrong point; the festal atmosphere, or Stimmung, of inattentive youth and good temper necessary for success, the real poverty of intricate mechanical appliance compared with skill and patter—of these things he would talk in youth with an Edgar-Poe-like elaboration and solemnity, no doubt as well as any man in England. The best of these exhibitions was when Johnstone was professing to explain to a few friends a trick of his own doing. There came first, in long and well-cut sentences, a kind of metaphysic of conjuring; an account of those principles of delusion that were inapplicable in the present instance; exposure of the vulgar and obvious methods, which seemed to the crowd the same as those subtler ones which merely satisfied the conscience of the artist; and lastly, on the verge of the "explanation," a long parenthesis or a touch of coldness and abstraction, not to be interrupted, which ended, if at all, not in any explanation whatever, but in a last performance of the trick. Johnstone made a point of seeking acquaintance with the chief professors of manual illusion who visited England. He well knew, of course, the methods of signalling to counterfeit clairvoyance; and in one case, that of "Little Louie," whose show at the Westminster Aquarium was the best public marvel of the sort, he was convinced that the performers only eked out by signalling and other tricks the failures of some genuinely supernormal power of the "telepathic" kind which they themselves did not fully understand. We say thus much about legerdemain, as it was long our friend's quaint and picturesque substitute for the less original forms of young men's amusement. It gave a good deal of pleasure to other people, and he needed amusement, for his life was not to be easy.

Johnstone left Radley at the end of the summer term 1878, and for the next two years worked under Messrs. Wren and Gurney for the Indian Civil Service, the limit of entrance then being nineteen years. It must be admitted that he made no serious attempt to succeed, and that here, as at Oxford later, the prospect of an examination proved to be the reverse of an incentive to work. Perhaps it was fortunate for him that he failed, for though he would have found a great interest in the natives (and extended his répertoire of tricks) he would have been repelled by the average Anglo-Indian; besides, his abilities did not lie in the direction of legal and political administration. In October, 1880, Johnstone came up to Keble College, Oxford, and he quickly had a small circle round him. Among his friends were R. A. Farrar, son of the well-known Dean, and G. H. Fowler, the biologist, of his own College; Winter, of St. John's, the best musician among undergraduates; his biographers; and, later, Prof. York Powell, who instantly detected his ability and force of nature. Amongst the dons of Keble, Johnstone cared for two. One was the Warden, the Rev. E. S. Talbot, now Bishop of Southwark, who behaved with tact, and encouraged as far as he might a mind of no pattern type, which would not bring the College any regulation honours; the other was the Rev. J. R. Illingworth, the best writer of the school, and since known as a philosophical preacher. Ascetic, but thoroughly humane, Mr. Illingworth attracted Johnstone by his honesty and fineness of temper. But these clergymen, after all, dwelt in their own world, not in his. Until he met York Powell, Johnstone had found no older man from whom he could learn without cautions and reservations, and who struck him as a master-mind and a perfectly free spirit. The two men signally valued each other's conversation; they had many delicate qualities in common—the kind of delicacy only found in Bohemians of experience who have kept their perceptions at the finest edge. Powell materially helped Johnstone more than once by letting persons of consequence know what he thought of his younger friend. Even in Powell's record there was