My life and loves Vol. 3

by Frank Harris

  When I told Lord Wolverton, a great friend of mine, how Chamberlain had cast me off, and the Fortnightly Review, because of my views against Free Trade, he immediately proposed that I should see Gladstone and put him in Chamberlain's place. "Then," the banker said, "you can have whatever money you want, and I think you will have a much greater success with Gladstone behind you than you have had with Chamberlain." That I admitted at once. So it was arranged that I should go out to Combe and meet Gladstone and have a talk.

  I went out in due course, but I was not impressed much with Gladstone's talk at the dinner. He held forth on every subject that came up, and talked well, but his eagle face and luminous eyes were finer than anything he said. He had read widely, I saw, but it seemed to me that he had thought very little for himself.

  At the end of the dinner he went off with an Eton boy and played "Beggar My Neighbor." About ten o'clock the Eton boy went up to bed, and Gladstone came over to half a dozen of us standing in front of the fireplace.

  "Did you get much out of the game?" asked his host, Lord Wolverton.

  "A great deal," said Gladstone. "The boy taught me that four knaves can beat the whole pack."

  I could not resist the temptation. "Good God," I interjected, "I should have thought that your experience, Sir, would have shown that one knave was able to do that." He glowered at me and said nothing; he evidently took my jesting remark personally, though I had not so meant it.

  Lord Wolverton told me, afterwards, that I had spoiled my chances with Gladstone. I said I thought I should survive, though I did not excuse myself for my foolish repartee.

  A little while ago (I am writing in 1926), a Captain Peter Wright got into great trouble for stating that Gladstone was always running after women in the loosest way. The story of course was contradicted by his son, Herbert Gladstone, who is now Lord Gladstone; but Herbert Gladstone's denial should not be taken seriously.

  It was common talk in the House of Commons that Gladstone was perpetually after women. It was said, too, that girls used to write him love letters, and that all such letters were brought to Mrs. Gladstone who, after reading them, tore them up, taking care that they shouldn't reach the Grand Old Man.

  I distinctly remember Sir Charles Dilke telling me that Gladstone couldn't oppose him because he was known to be still looser himself. But my belief in Gladstone's libertinism was better founded.

  But why should I prove it now? An English jury has declared its belief in Mr.

  Gladstone's goodness: what more is wanted? An Irish M. P., too, Mr. T. P. O'Connor, has asserted that in his judgment Mr. Gladstone knew nothing about Parnell's intrigue with Mrs. O'Shea till the libel suit revealed it, though Mrs. O'Shea, in her book, has stated positively that Gladstone knew all about it years before the scandal. For good reasons I agree with Mrs. O'Shea, and can only regret that Mr. T. P. O'Connor's memory was so strangely subservient to English prejudice.

  But, after all, what do the O'Connors matter when the Avorys sit as judges?

  The height of the joke was reached when Mr. Justice Avory asserted, from his knowledge of English and Italian, that Lord Milner's allusion to "Gladstone, as governed by his Seraglio," was quite innocent and conveyed "no hint that such a man was a gross sensualist." Pity that Mr. Justice Avory didn't strengthen his knowledge by a glance at Dr. Johnson's dictionary! Thanks to this judicial freak, Gladstone has received, in correct English fashion, plenary absolution, and thus hypocrisy is justified of its professors, and the sepulchre of English life has enjoyed a new coat of cheap whitewash.

  I don't pretend that my opinion has any objective validity; yet, I give it in corroboration of Captain Wright's boldness. But I should never have quarreled with Gladstone without mentioning his judgments, which reveal the essential mediocrity of the man. His heroes were Washington and Burke; the most interesting modern statesmen to him were Lord Randolph Churchill and Parnell. His favorite country after Britain was naturally the United States. Even in his chosen field of words and literary art, all his judgings were mediocre. The modern author he placed highest was Sir Walter Scott; the greatest modern masters of English prose in his opinion were Ruskin and Cardinal Newman; the best biography was Lockhart's Life of Scott, He thought Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe the four greatest writers, but he omitted Cervantes altogether, and never seems to have heard of Turgenev. Fancy putting Newman as a writer of prose above Swift or Pater, and fancy a Prime Minister who could write a review article on the genius of Marie Bashkirtseff.

  My quarrel with Gladstone was not so bad as another blunder which I must now relate. In due time I found that my knowledge of Pigott had had a great effect upon Arthur Walter. His father and Mr. MacDonald, the manager of The Times had been utterly misled by Pigott, whereas I had got to know him and had soon judged him rightly. The first consequence of The Times fiasco was that John Walter practically withdrew from the management of the paper and asked his son Arthur to take his place. Arthur, it seems, after my talk, had told his father that he thought Pigott absolutely untrustworthy. As soon as Arthur Walter got power on The Times he sent for me. He had gone down, I remember, to stay with Mrs. Walter at the Hotel Metropole in Brighton. I went down, took a room, put my belongings straight and then went up to him. I found him washing his hands before lunch.

  "I sent for you," he said, "because I think now I can offer you the editorship of The Times. I believe you would do it greatly, but I wanted to know first of all what you think of Buckle, the present editor, and what you would do with him!"

  "I would keep him on as political editor," I replied; "he seems to suit the conservative opinion that is the backbone of The Times, and I have so many new things to do that I don't want to make any break with the past that isn't absolutely necessary."

  "That's fine of you!" said Arthur Walter, "I suppose you know that Buckle wouldn't give you any place?"

  "No one, Walter," I replied, "can see above his own head, and so we must forgive Buckle, but I see little Mr. Buckle perfectly plainly, though he is about six feet high. My idea is to make a general headquarters staff to run The Times; to get picked editors on every great subject, a dozen at least, and then fifty contributing editors, the ablest men from every country in Europe."

  "Good God," said Walter. "You frighten me; what would it cost?"

  "I should give the foreign contributing editors," I said, "about two hundred pounds a year each on their promise immediately to answer by return any questions addressed to them; of course, we would pay for their contributions as well, and I would give the dozen editors in England one thousand pounds a year, plus the honor."

  "Even that," he said, "would be an added expense of twenty or thirty thousand pounds a year: how would you cover the loss?"

  "I would undertake for that single editorial page," I said, laughing, "to get three columns of advertisements in America and South Africa which would pay the twenty-five thousand pounds a year of new expenses three times over. I would make the leader page in The Times the greatest page that has ever been seen in journalism. Every line in it should be on the topmost level of thought! And I would add a financial column which would bring in more cash."

  We went in to lunch and I told him more of my ideas, and he was greatly impressed, till I came to the declaration that I would make it a penny paper so as to get over a million circulation. "My father and MacDonald have gone into that," he said, "and they both declare it is absolutely impossible."

  "That word shouldn't be in the vocabulary of The Times," I said.

  But he went on seriously, "You have no idea how carefully they have gone into the whole matter, and it would turn all my father's grey hairs white if he thought that anybody was going to do such a thing."

  "You can't afford," I said, "to leave the Daily Telegraph with a tenfold greater circulation than that of The Times. I assure you the penny paper is necessary, but I won't press it till the success of the other innovations has shown you that I am justified."

  He shook his head and beg
ged me to put the idea out of my head. Strange to say, I found that Mrs. Walter was with me in opinion. "If Mr. Harris could get a million circulation for The Times," she said, "surely all the advertisements would be immensely more valuable; and by making your own paper, as he says, you might get, if not such good paper as you have now, yet nearly as good at a cheaper rate."

  Then for the first time I learned that the paper supply of The Times was in the hands of another branch of the family, and they wouldn't consent easily to any great change.

  But I committed my great mistake when Walter began to talk of Oscar Wilde. "I hope," he said, "that you wouldn't employ him in any way on The Times." I replied that I didn't think he needed any journalistic employment: everything he did was eagerly bought up by the reviews and large publishers.

  "I wonder that you go about with him," said Walter. "You are getting a bad name through it."

  "Really," I said, "I never heard that his disease was catching. Genius is not infectious."

  "In the last six months," Walter went on, "I have received hundreds of letters, signed and anonymous, talking about your connection with him and your perpetual defense of him."

  This struck me as extraordinary. I had, then, no idea of the number of anonymous correspondents in London; I learned the vile effects of envy very slowly, for I never felt envious of any one in my life.

  "I defend every able man I meet," I said carelessly; "they all have a hard time of it in life and it is a sort of duty to stick up for them."

  "As long as you don't employ him," said Walter, "I don't mind, but I thought I ought to tell you that you could do nothing more unpopular than to defend him."

  "I always defend my friends," I said.

  Walter seemed a little shocked, a little pettish, too, I thought, not to say petty.

  About a fortnight later, Walter told me that he had asked Moberly Bell, their correspondent in Egypt, to come to London to help him. "I couldn't face your innovations, Harris, especially in regard to the price of the paper."

  I suppose I was too cocksure, and so frightened him.

  I record my failures here as openly as my successes. If I had been a little more of a diplomatist I could have won Arthur Walter easily, for he had good brains and a good heart and only wanted the best. I have always blamed myself for my failure.

  CHAPTER XII

  The Fortnightly review

  When I lost the Evening News in 1887, I saw Arthur Walter on the matter, and soon afterwards had a talk with Frederic Chapman, of Chapman and Hall, publishers of the Fortnightly Review. Chapman had told me that Escott, the acting editor of the Fortnightly Review, had made trouble with The Times by giving them an article which he said was by Gladstone; and when they asked him for the proof, because Gladstone denied it, Escott pretended that he had never made the statement. In consequence, for some months, The Times refused to mention the Fortnightly Review. Chapman wanted to know if I were appointed editor, would this be made right; Arthur Walter assured him that it would.

  I have already told how I came to know Arthur Walter of The Times; all through the years from 1885 to 1895 or '96, our intimacy continued. I used to stay with him at his country place near Finchampstead three or four times each summer, and during the winter we met at lunch or dinner once or twice every week. We often spent the evening playing chess: I used to let him win a fair proportion of the games, for success pleased him intensely. I often thought that in the same spirit Gattie, the amateur champion, used now and then to let me win, but not often, for his supremacy forbade it.

  Arthur Walter was older than I was and was greatly surprised when he found I was a good Grecian: he himself had won first honors in Mods at Oxford. He tested my scholarship, I remember, in all sorts of queer ways: for example, he once cited a phrase of Thucydides, which set forth that the whole world was the grave of famous men, and he liked my simple rendering. At another time he showed me the end of a chapter of Tacitus, in which the Roman historian says, At this time, news came to Rome that fifty thousand Jews, men, women and children, had been put to death in the streets o] Syracuse. "His comment is Vili damnum. How do you translate it?" Arthur Walter wanted to know.

  "A cheap loss?"

  "A good riddance," I proposed, and he was delighted. "The exact value," he declared.

  When Arthur Walter said that he thought me fit for any editorship, even for that of The Times, Chapman asked me to call upon him the next day and told me that I could take over the editorship of the Fortnightly Review whenever I pleased. Escort was ill at the time; he had broken down in health. I said I would take over the Review on condition that the first year's salary went to Escott, as I knew that he was not well off. This was arranged, and I was formally installed as editor of the Fortnightly Review.

  Shortly afterwards Chapman told me that John Morley wished to see me, and in a minute or two brought him in. Morley had been editor of the Review for some fifteen years, was a link with the founders, Lewes and George Eliot and Herbert Spencer. In popular opinion his editorship was summed up in the fact that he had always spelled God with a small "g." We chatted pleasantly for a few minutes, when he said, "You know, I feel very guilty. I have been, lately, too much of a politician and too little of an editor. In those two boxes over there," and he pointed to two large boxes in the corner of the room, "are the proof of my laziness. In this one," he pointed to one of them, "I put the articles which I didn't feel at all inclined to accept; in that other one, the articles which I could use at any time if I wished to."

  At this time Morley must have been forty-five years of age; of spare figure, some five feet ten in height; clean-shaven, with large rudder-nose, firm drawn-in lips of habitual prudent self-restraint; thoughtful, cold grey eyes, large forehead-"A bleak face," I said to myself, seeking for some expressive word. Manifestly, I was not much to his taste. I was as frank and outspoken as he was reserved, and while he had already climbed a good way up the ladder, I thought nothing of the ladder and despised the climbing. Moreover, his gods were not my gods, and he was as unfeignedly proud of his Oxford training as I was contemptuous of all erudition.

  It is very difficult, indeed, for men to measure the juniors who are taking their places. We can all see youthful shortcomings and promise is infinitely harder to estimate than performance. Perhaps we could judge them best through then: admirations that are not learned or academic and, therefore, in so far original. Morley did not give himself the trouble to see me fairly. But, then, why should he? There were long odds against my being worth knowing, and he was courteous.

  I remember he showed me an article with a Greek quotation in it. "I haven't corrected it, Mr. Harris," he said, "nor looked at the accents; I suppose you will do that," courteously giving me credit for sufficient knowledge.

  I said something about accents being easy to me after having learned modern Greek in Athens.

  "Really," he exclaimed, seemingly surprised, "that must have been an interesting experience. Hasn't the pronunciation changed with the changes in language?"

  "The scholars all try to pronounce in the old way," I replied. "Lots of professors and students today in the University of Athens plume themselves on speaking classic Greek."

  "Astonishing," he exclaimed. "You must tell me about it some day. Very interesting." But the day never came, for if politics soon absorbed him, life and literature absorbed me.

  I had been curious about Morley's editorship, and so I went through both boxes, returning nearly all the manuscripts to their owners and excusing myself as hardly responsible for the delay; but in the rejected box I came upon two papers which interested me. The one was by Mrs. Lynn Linton on "The Modern Girl," which was charmingly written. Of course I wrote to Mrs.

  Lynn Linton about it, regretting the delay in dealing with it. She came to see me and we became friends at once. I ought to have known her previous work, but as a matter of fact, I didn't. She had married Linton, an engraver of real talent, and he had left her; and she developed a faculty of writing that pu
t her in the front rank of the women of the day. She was kindly, and we remained friends for years, till I took up the habit of going abroad every winter and we gradually lost sight of each other.

  The other manuscript which struck me as excellent had a curious title, "The Rediscovery of the Unique," signed by some one totally unknown to me-H.

  G. Wells! I have already told about it in a portrait of Wells, and have told, too, of our later connection, when I got him to review stories for me on the Saturday Review.

  Morley, by his rise to place and power as a politician, enables us to judge how much higher the standard of intellect is in literature than in politics. For Morley was in the first flight of politicians: Secretary for Ireland and afterwards for India, always a considerable figure, though he entered the arena late in life and without the wealth needed for supreme success. In literature, on the other hand, Morley never played a distinguished part. He could not even shine with reflected lustre. In vain he wrote the lives of Cobden and of Gladstone with all the advantages of intimate first-hand knowledge and all the assistance gladly proffered by the family and by distinguished contemporaries. His work remains fruitless, academic, jejune, divorced from life, unillumined by genius, unconsecrated by art. A bleak face and a bleak mind!

  The truth is, the politician, like the banker or barrister, has only to surpass his living competitors, the best in the day and hour, in order to win supremacy.

  We cannot compare the Gladstones closely with the Cannings, any more than we can compare the Washingtons with the Lincolns. Men of letters and artists, however, fall into a far higher and more severe competition. Shaw writes a play, Kipling a short story: they easily outstrip most of their contemporaries; but Shaw's best play is at once compared with the best of Moliere or Shakespeare or Ibsen, and Kipling has to stand comparison with the best of Turgenev or Maupassant, the greatest, not of a generation, but of all time.