My life and loves Vol. 3

by Frank Harris

  Exposed to this higher test as man of letters, Morley failed utterly, in spite of his success as a politician.

  Yet it is understood that his life had noble elements in it. His character was much finer than his mind, and he was trusted and esteemed by his political associates in singular measure, in spite of a certain doctrinaire strain of pedantry and outspokenness. Had it not been for his learning, of which they stood in awe, his fellow ministers would probably have called him "Honest John."

  When I took over the Fortnightly Review, Chapman and Hall were to pay me five hundred pounds a year for editing it and ten per cent of the net profits. If I doubled the circulation, I was to get fifteen per cent of the net profits. I told Chapman I should double the circulation in the first year, and practically did it, but I took nothing out of the Fortnightly Review. I used to spend all my salary in paying the contributors more highly, especially the contributors of poetry. It had been customary to pay not more than two pounds a page for any poem, but I gave Matthew Arnold, and Swinburne, too, twenty-five pounds a page, which came out of my salary.

  As editor of the Fortnightly, I found it very easy at first to get on with Frederic Chapman, but his directors were for the most part stupid, brainless business men. I remember when I wrote my first stories, Mantes the Matador and The Modern Idyll; I brought them to Chapman and asked him to read them. He read them and said they were all right, but when I published The Modern Idyll in the Review, there was a huge to-do in the press. The Spectator condemned the story, passionately. I thought it was Hutton, the chief owner, with his high church prejudices, that had condemned it, but when I went and called upon him, I found it was his partner, Townsend, an utter atheist, who had played critic. He told me he thought the story terrible.

  A nonconformist dignitary, the Reverend Newman Hall, I think, wrote, condemning the story root and branch and making a great fuss about it. The end of it was that the directors of the Fortnightly Review met together and asked me not to insert any more of my stories in the Review. At once I tore up my agreement with them and told them to find another editor as soon as they could.

  At the same time Frederic Chapman told Meredith, who was then the reader of novels for Chapman and Hall, of the way the directors had condemned me, and Meredith came up to London to protest. I met him for the first time in Chapman's office-to me a most memorable experience. He was one of the handsomest men I have ever seen, a little above middle height, spare and nervous; a splendid head, all framed in silver hair; but perhaps because he was very deaf himself, he used to speak very loudly. "We mustn't allow these directors to stand in our light," he cried. "I will talk to them and tell them they have never had as good a story in the Fortnightly Review as Mantes." And he did talk to them to some purpose, for they withdrew their condemnation of my stories and begged me to reconsider my resignation, which I did.

  A few months after I had taken over the Review I had a dispute with Henry James, which may be worth recording here. Between 1890 and 1905 I used to meet him in London from time to time. I think it was Lady Brooke of Sarawak who first introduced me to him at a garden party. The Ranee was one of his most devoted admirers; she had a peculiar sense of certain literary values, or perhaps I should say, of certain men of letters. To me James was only a name; I had read none of his works, except some essays or travel-sketches in France, which were mildly interesting to me by virtue of the subject, though commonplace enough in treatment. The book reminded me of a couple of Tauchnitz volumes of sketches in Italy by W. Dean Howells, and ever afterwards I coupled the two men in my mind as absolutely negligible.

  I do not attempt to put forth this summary judgment as fair criticism or even as a considered opinion; I give it merely as an instance of my off-hand rejection of any values in literature that did not strike me as of the highest.

  Henry James almost immediately confirmed my somewhat contemptuous opinion of his intelligence by praising my predecessor on the Fortnightly Review excessively.

  "It must have been a privilege," he said, "to follow such an editor. I regard Mr.

  Morley and Leslie Stephen as about the first men of letters in England. You agree with me, don't you?"

  "Indeed I don't," I cried. "What! With Browning, Swinburne, Tennyson and Arnold living, to say nothing of Meredith?"

  "Of course," he broke in, "these poets come first; but I meant to speak of prose writers; men whom the French would call 'men of letters.' "

  "It's ridiculous," I persisted, "even to mention such men as Morley and Stephen in the front rank; they are nothing but academic mediocrities; neither of them has ever written a word that can live."

  "I'm afraid I cannot agree with you," he rejoined, with courteous distaste.

  "Only creative artists are in the front class," I insisted; "Morley and Stephen are only hodmen and incapable of conception."

  After this James appeared to avoid me and I had no desire to push the acquaintance. Neither his appearance nor personality attracted me: he was above middle height and inclined to stoutness; a heavy face, the outlines obscured by fat; the eyes medium-sized windows, rather observant, perhaps, than reflective; the voice colorless, conventional; manners also conventional.

  James was always well-dressed, too, in a conventional way. I remember thinking afterwards with some insolence that his well-formed, prominent, rather Jewish-looking nose was the true index of his character. The rudder of the face, I always call the nose; and in James's make-up there was manifestly more steering-power of control than motive power of passion or enthusiasm; not a man to interest me in any degree.

  James's so-called obscurity was never an offence to me; indeed, this charge against an author is invariably a spur. After forcing myself once to read and understand Kant, I profess to be able to find a meaning in any book where there is a meaning to be found, and so I set myself to unravel several of James's obscurities. The knots were soon loosed, but alas! I had nothing for my pains. "Much ado about nothing," I said to myself, and tossed the book aside, never again to be re-opened.

  The admirers of James, too, I soon discovered, were all people of no importance as judges of literature; would-be geniuses, for the most part, or society women. Consequently, he was soon definitely classed in my estimation-another Howells without a trace of talent, devoted to the painting of commonplace Americans with painstaking industry. But I was fated to be disturbed in this comfortable belief.

  One day Max Beerbohm lunched with us and afterwards we went for a walk in Richmond Park. Of a sudden he mentioned a book of Henry James and asked me had I read it.

  "Thank God," I replied, "I have always something better to do than waste my time on James."

  "You're mistaken, I think," said Max. "He's interesting to me, gets effects through those elaborate sentences that you could hardly get otherwise."

  "You don't mean there is any real worth in him," I exclaimed. "I can't believe it; but if you say so, I'll have another look at him. What books of his do you like especially?"

  Max mentioned two; I've forgotten what they were; even his praise could not overcome my settled distaste and repugnance. Nevertheless, his opinion remained with me and I record it willingly, though it could never alter my feeling that the man who admires the hodmen cannot be among the masters.

  One day someone sent me a thin book of James's, begging me to read it and to give some account of what he thought a master-work. Mindful of Max's appreciation, I sat down and swallowed the draught. It was a story of two children, a little boy and girl, who had been corrupted, if I remember aright, by some teacher or governess. They were a foul pair, carefully presented: lifelike, but not alive, a study in child viciousness-worse than worthless, because not even natural. I never read another line of Henry James.

  But one evening I met him, sat opposite to him, indeed, at some big public dinner. After the first greeting I paid no attention to him and talked chiefly to a man at my side, who showed some liking for letters. I don't know how it came about, but the talk fell on Sainte-
Beuve. My acquaintance took him for granted as a great critic.

  "Not a critic of any value," I declared, "a more over-rated man it would be difficult to find."

  "How do you account for it," asked Henry James across the table, "that Arnold and others speak of his judgments with such respect. Who would you put above him as a critic?"

  "All the creators," I replied, "but of course Goethe and Balzac, the only critics I take any interest in."

  "I never heard Sainte-Beuve run down before," retorted James; "the French writers all admire him."

  "I beg your pardon," I replied. "Balzac called him 'Sainte-Beuve le petit,' and as the 'petty Sainte-Beuve' he's destined to be known. The honor of a critic is to pick out the great men among his contemporaries and help them to recognition and to fame. What did Sainte-Beuve do? He denied genius to Victor Hugo and told Balzac that the flood of impurities in his books turned them into sewers; of La Cousine Bette, he said, 'Those infamous Marneffes infect the whole work with mephitic odors.' Flaubert he compared with Eugene Sue and declared that it was a pity he could not write as well as George Sand! The Goncourts, too, and Theophile Gautier and Baudelaire he always disfavored and depreciated. All the great ones of his day came under his ban. The truth is, he was a small man and could only judge fairly those smaller than himself; no one can see above his own head."

  "That's your judgment," exclaimed James rather rudely.

  "Mine today," I shot back, "but everyone's tomorrow. Truth makes converts."

  In this year, 1926, Sainte-Beuve's posthumous work, Mes Poisons, has appeared, fifty years after his death, and even his French admirers have been shocked by his venomous misjudgings.

  After Meredith had come to my aid on the Review, everything went on merrily for a long time. I thought more of Meredith than a dozen Jameses.

  Five or six years later London, and Paris, too, were shocked by bombs thrown in Paris by Henri and Ravachol. I published in the Fortnightly Review a personal article on both men, from a friend, praising Henri as one of the sweetest and noblest of human beings. Chapman told me that he was shocked, and I became aware about the same time that Oswald Crawfurd, who had been in the English Embassy at Lisbon, and had now returned and become a great man, was intriguing against me. But I had doubled the circulation of the Review, and Walter and others admitted that I was editing it very ably; consequently, I had no fear of my position.

  Chapman had become a little difficult to work with. He was naturally a conservative businessman of the old-fashioned English type. He hated poetry and thought it should be paid for at the ordinary rates. When he found that I was giving my salary in payment to his contributors, I fell in his esteem. To give Swinburne fifty pounds for a poem seemed to him monstrous; and when I bought certain articles dearly, he wouldn't have them at any price. And if he disliked art and literature, he hated the social movement of the time with a hatred peculiarly English; he looked upon a socialist as a sort of low thief, and pictured a communist as one who had his hand always in his neighbor's pocket. My defense of Henri and Ravachol shocked him to the soul. And without Chapman's sympathy, I couldn't make of the Review what I wanted to make of it. Chapman wouldn't have Davidson's Ballad of a Nun; he cut it out of the number when he saw it in proof, though it was paid for; and Bernard Shaw was anathema to him. Gradually, as I grew, my position as editor of the Fortnightly became less pleasant to me. I was like a boy whose growth was being hindered by too narrow garments.

  One day Chapman wanted to know why I had never asked for the ten per cent arrears of profits that had accumulated for five or six years or more. I told him I did not care anything about the money; he told me the directors thought there should be a settlement and asked me what I would take? I said,

  "If it is to get rid of me, you must pay me in full. If you are satisfied with me, give me anything you like, I do not care. I am not doing the Fortnightly Review for the money." Accordingly, he offered me, I think, about one-third of what I was entitled to, some five hundred pounds, telling me that he had no intention of getting rid of me. I accepted his offer, gave him a full quittance, and two months later the directors gave me notice: at the end of six months they would get another editor. I was shocked! I soon found out that Crawfurd expected to be made editor. I met him one day in the office and told him point blank that if he were appointed editor, I would expose the whole intrigue, and would show how I had been cheated of a thousand pounds. "I do not care who succeeds me in the editorship," I said, "but you shall not profit by the traitorism," and I told Chapman the same thing.

  I had never had such a blow in my life. I had never lost a position before that I cared to keep, and at first I was overwhelmed at the idea of being supplanted on the Fortnightly. I went up the river to Maidenhead for a sort of holiday that summer but could not take my thoughts off my humiliation. I had sleepless nights and days of misery and regret. I was really making myself ill and had come to the brink of a nervous breakdown when Willie Grenfell, now Lord Desborough, without knowing of my trouble, took pity on me and began giving me lessons in punting. His companionship and kindness lifted me out of the slough of despond and postponed the evil day.

  This was the occasion of my first meeting with Stead, the famous editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. He had recently founded the Review of Reviews. He asked me to call on him and wanted to know the reason of my leaving the Fortnightly. I told him the facts on his promising to say nothing special about Oswald Crawfurd, who had practically dispossessed me. He promised, and two or three days afterwards sent me an article detailing everything I had said and more. I refused to allow it to appear, and he finally inserted a colorless statement.

  Stead was an extraordinary specimen of the lower middle-class type of Englishman-without classical education, without any understanding of any other language or people, save his own. He had a great energy, however, and a very complete realization of all the forces in England, particularly the forces of religious prudishness and nonconformity. In the Pall Mall Gazette he got up a crusade against the lust of what he called "The Modern Babylon," and by silly exaggeration managed to get himself into prison for six or eight weeks. He fell foul, too, of Sir Charles Dilke; declared that any one who was unfaithful to his wife was not fit to be in the House of Commons. Of course, I took up arms against him on this point and asserted that Dilke was one of the ablest of our politicians. I wanted to know why Stead would deprive England of his undoubted public services in order to drive him into private life, where he had failed quite lamentably. But Stead stuck to his cursing and got all the powers of nonconformity on his side in order to hound Dilke out of public life.

  One incident is so illustrative of English public life and of the effect of ignorant democratic opinion upon even the most eminent statesman, that I must tell it here. Dilke came to see me one day and told me that in the beginning of the row over the divorce suit, he had written to Gladstone, putting himself absolutely in his hands: "If you think it would be good for the Party," he wrote, "I'll give up Parliament and political life altogether; tell me your real wishes and I assure you now, I will honor them."

  "Gladstone," he said, "wrote me in reply a most charming letter, saying that he would be very sorry to lose my great ability and that he didn't think, as a leader of the Party, he had any right to play censor of morals. 'At all times,' he added, I am proud of your support.' "

  A little later Stead got a crowd of women to go to Gladstone and petition him to get rid of Dilke. Thereupon the Great Old Man wrote to Dilke, asking him to return his letter, and Dilke told me that he was going to return it.

  "If you do," I said, "you will be slung overboard; please say that you value it so much that you couldn't possibly return it, but send him a copy of it."

  Gladstone's next reply to the wild women was astonishingly characteristic.

  I have lost my notes of it, but I remember high platitudes and his significant refusal to take any action against a colleague; but if Gladstone had had his letter back, I think the G.
O. M. would have thrown Dilke to the wolves.

  In my mind, I have always compared Stead in England with Bryan in America, and I was rather relieved when he went down in some shipwreck and we were rid of him-just as I was glad that Bryan died during the Dayton trial, a disgrace to American civilization.

  There is one bright spot in my memory of Stead: I was talking once to Mrs. Frankau about him, who was one of the wittiest women in London, and one of the most charming. She told me, laughingly, how she had made up to Stead and encouraged him, till one day he fell on his knees before her and put his arms round her, and she said to herself: "At last!" — when he suddenly told her that he was going to pray that she might always be faithful to her husband. I laughed till I cried at the unexpected foolish appeal.

  Stead was regarded in English journalism as a great power for good, though in reality he was an influence from the dark, backward of time and shortsighted in his jingoism, as will appear when I come to the Jameson raid and his persistent defence of Rhodes.

  But now I was all at a loose end and suffering for the first time in my life with nerves. I often sat in the corner and cried. I was unable to control myself, could not get better, and was very near an absolute breakdown. And the fatal day when I should be out of work was coming nearer and nearer. Sometimes I began to feel that I should go out of my mind. Neither the exercise in the open air with Willie Grenfell, nor the regular quiet life did me any good. At last, almost in despair, I left Maidenhead and returned to London.

  A trifling incident here may be of some value to neuropaths. I had been working hard all the time and late one night had to go home by train. I drove to Waterloo; the porter opened the door to me and I got into the usual carriage. I hadn't asked him whether it was my train or not, but I wanted to ask him, and suddenly found that I couldn't remember my station-blank fear came upon me and the dreadful apprehension washed out all memory. I couldn't even recall my own name: for one moment I was falling into the abyss of despair-without memory life would be impossible!