by Frank Harris
Everybody knows that Theodore Watts was a solicitor and practiced law for a good many years before he went over to literature. Now the usual fee of a solicitor or attorney in England is six shillings and eight pence.
"Oh, I see what Rossetti meant," I cried.
"What's that?" interjected Watts suspiciously.
"Well, you were sure, weren't you, to make the form perfect?" I queried.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"I mean," I replied, "that you had had such a lot of practice beforehand in sixes and eights."
He glared at me and then snuffled. I really feared he was going to cry and felt a little ashamed of myself. Shortly afterwards we parted; I think it was the end of our attempt at friendly relations. Afterwards we just bowed and left it at that. That the sick walrus should think of matching himself with the greatest of the world's poets seemed to me worse than absurd. I reminded myself of Shakespeare's verses: … These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd;
Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled:
Be not disturb'd with my infirmity:
If you be pleased, retire into my cell And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk, To still my beating mind.
"My beating mind"-the most tell-tale phrase in all Shakespeare.
Goethe, too, reached the highest height of poetry in Gretchen's appeal to the Madonna:
Ach neige,
Du Schmerzenreiche,
Dein Antlitz gnadig meiner Not!
Das Schwert im Herzen,
Mit tausend Schmerzen
Blickst auf zu deines Sohnes Tod.
Wer fuhlet,
Wie wuhlet
Der Schmerz mir im Gebein?
Was mein armes Herz hier banget,
Was es zittert, was verlanget,
Weisst nur du, nur du allein!
Ich bin, ach! kaum alleine,
Ich wein, ich wein, ich weine,
Das Herz zerbricht in mir.
Wohin ich immer gehe
Wie weh, wie weh, wie wehe
Wird mir im Busen hier!
After that I feel inclined to quote here the earliest English poem that I know of, which is really fine:
What if Art be slowe,
Sweetlie let it growe,
As groweth tender grasse, 'Neath God's smalle rain.
But of shoutyng, strivyng, crying, roaryng, flghtyng, Waxeth nought save dust aloft, Upon the plaine.
I went to New York in 1914 when the World War came on, determined to make my way to China and Japan and spend three or four years in getting to know the languages, art and literature of those countries; for personal reasons I didn't go, so my life is maimed, and my life work, which I had thought I would make perfect, must be completed by some one else. Therefore I end with Browning's word in Andrea del Sarto:
"And thus we half-men struggle."
This always goes in my mind with the end of that great poem: … What would one have?
In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance- Four great walls in the New Jerusalem, Meted on each side by the angel's reed, For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo and me To cover-the three first without a wife, While I have mine! So-still they overcome Because there's still Lucrezia, — as I choose.
"Again the Cousin's whistle! Go, my Love."
CHAPTER II
The Saturday review
Up to this time, I have said very little about my financial position. I must now make this omission good. From the time of taking over the Evening News in the early eighties, I had got into touch with finance in London. I not only knew the editors of the financial papers, but was a friend of both the owners, Macrae of the Financial Times and Harry Marks of the Financial News, and through my knowledge of South Africa and sympathy with the people, I had come into close relations with a good many of the South African financiers.
I had known Cecil Rhodes ever since the Colonial Conference in '87, as I have already narrated, and through him I came to know Alfred Beit, who somewhat later made himself, through the success of the gold mines of Johannesburg, one of the most important financiers in the world. About the same time I became friendly with Albert Ochs, who was the head of the famous diamond buying house of Hatton Gardens. He had a brother, James Ochs, who conducted the Paris business, and another younger brother of less importance; but Albert Ochs, in many respects, was very like Beit-a firstrate financial head. He had inherited half a million or so from his father in the diamond business, and while keeping on the old established trade in diamonds, bought an interest in certain gold mines in Johannesburg, and so came into the wider field of international finance.
We soon became intimate; I really liked Albert Ochs, and trusted him. I had made money with him more than once by getting articles in favor of his enterprises in all sorts of papers. Later I tried time and again to bring him into a union with Beit and Rhodes, which he infinitely desired, but that's another story to be told later.
Beit seemed to dislike Ochs, and one day told me a humorous story to account for his prejudice against him.
Beit and Wernher, it appears, used to lunch together at the Holborn Restaurant, and one day Beit noticed that old Ochs, Albert's father, had got a seat at the next table and seemed to be listening attentively to the private talk that went on between himself and Wernher. At this time Beit and Wernher, too, were diamond brokers in Hatton Gardens; in fact, in time, through Rhodes's help, they took over the whole business from Kimberley and ousted all competitors, including Ochs.
When Wernher went out, old Ochs bowed very politely to Beit and asked,
"Would you mind if I come and sit with you? I'm alone."
Beit said, "I'm going very soon, but if you would care to sit here, come." Ochs came over and took Wernher's vacant seat; Beit sat and talked with him wondering what he wanted.
Suddenly Ochs said, "Is Mr. Wernher coming back?"
"No, I do not think so," Beit replied. "He has had to go off on private business."
"Oh," said Ochs, "then may I help myself to some of the potatoes he has left?"
And as soon as Beit said, "Yes," he harpooned one or two of the cold potatoes and began to eat them. "Then I understood," said Beit, "that he had not come in the hope of finding out any secret, but simply, millionaire like, to realize a small economy." It was this story, I think, that first gave me the idea of my saying, "Means and meanness go together"; for a little later still I found the same characteristic just as fully developed in Alfred Beit, as I may tell in due course.
My friendship with Albert Ochs and Beit showed me a good deal of the inside of finance, and I knew that they would let me have the money to buy a paper as soon as I put a fair proposition before them.
One day in London I heard casually that the Saturday Review had just been sold to the son-in-law of the man who made Stephen's Ink. I had gone after the Saturday years before and was assured by Mr. Beresford Hope himself that if the sale of it were ever mooted, I should have the first refusal. Now, some years after his death, I found it had been sold by his children for a paltry thousand pounds. I went down at once to the office and saw the owner, Lewis Edmunds, Q.C., who knew no more about literature than he knew about skyscrapers. He told me that the paper was not for sale, but he would be willing to consider an offer. At once I said, "All right, I will give you a pound for every reader of the Saturday Review, taking the average of the last three weeks. I will pay you ten per cent down and the balance within a fortnight."
"Will you take our figures for the sales?" he asked.
"Certainly," I replied. Forthwith he rang a bell and ordered the old bookkeeper who came in to say what the average sale
s had been for the last three weeks. In ten minutes the figures were on the table. The average sales were 5,600. At once I gave him my check for five hundred and sixty and a promise to pay the remainder within a fortnight, against his written undertaking to hand me over the journal-and I went out of the office the probable owner of the Saturday Review.
When I thought the matter over I realized that I possibly hadn't more than five hundred pounds in the bank, and so went out to get an extra hundred. I went to one friend after another and failed: A. was not in; B. was away on a holiday; C. would have to consult his wife as to the matter; but at last late in the evening I fell across Brandon Thomas, the actor and playwright, and told him why I had come. He said, "I will lend you one thousand pounds on condition I may have a sixth-share in the venture." I gave him the undertaking, and a couple of years afterwards he got five thousand pounds for his sixth-share.
The purchase of the Saturday Review put me on my feet in every sense. Just as everyone had found that the step from the Evening News to the Fortnightly Review was a step up for me, so from the Fortnightly Review to the ownership and editorship of the Saturday Review was again a big step up. The losing of the Fortnightly Review did me good: it made me resolve to edit the Saturday Review as well as I could. So I sat down to plan the ablest possibly weekly: first of all, the staff must be better than the best hitherto.
I thought I had fewer prejudices than most men, and a better understanding of greatness than any editor in London, and so I set myself to pick the ablest.
To my friend Runciman I had promised the place of musical critic and my assistant. The first man I wrote to was George Bernard Shaw. He was at that time writing musical articles on the World for four pounds a week. I wrote to him that music was not the forte of the man who had written Widowers'
Houses and begged him to come to the Saturday Review and write articles on the theatre-for he was a born dramatist-and I would pay him double what he was getting.
I had in Shaw the ablest possible lieutenant-though with his communistic views, he was a peculiar man to put as first lieutenant on the conservative Saturday Review. Then I asked H. G. Wells to take over the reviewing of novels in the Saturday, and when he, too, accepted, I felt that I had made real progress.
Finally, I got D. S. McColl, who has since become the head of the Tate Gallery, to do the art criticism. McColl was one of the first in England, I think, to understand Cezanne as well as Monet and Manet; and I think I heard from his lips first of all the name of Gaugin mentioned with understanding: all through the next four years on the Saturday he tried to teach the English public the new development of French art which has since led the world.
As a master of science, I picked Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, who is now, I believe, the head of the Zoological Society. It is enough to say that Chalmers Mitchell deserved the position or any other post, for he was not only a student of science of real ability, but he wrote charmingly to boot. Always, in my mind, I thought of him as a younger Huxley; yet Huxley lives in the history of science, and I am not sure that Chalmers Mitchell has done anything which entitles him to immortality; but he certainly was one of the most notable contributors to the Saturday Review in my time, besides being of a charming, pleasant nature with the critical habit very strongly developed. Chalmers Mitchell was above middle height with spare, well-kept body and fine expressive face-a notable personality.
A little later I got Cunninghame Graham. I have left him to the last because I have always thought of him as an amateur of genius. He was picturesquely handsome and always well dressed. I came to believe that his physical advantages and his wealth alone prevented him from being one of the great writers. He has written one or two of the best short stories in English, notably Un Monsieur; and surely his travel sketches in the Argentine and elsewhere are among the best extant.
The next thing to do was to outline the policy. The Saturday Review had been called the Saturday Reviler and was evilly notorious as the most poisonous critic of all lost and all new causes. I told my contributors from the beginning that I wanted to change this character radically. I wanted the Saturday Review to become known as the finder of stars and not the finder of faults; and at once I refused to give pride and place to merely fault-finding articles, though these too are necessary when dealing with be-puffed mediocrities.
One instance will do as well as fifty. One day I picked up a new book by a new author. Almayer's Folly, by Joseph Conrad. I had not seen the name before, but a glance at the first page told me that the man was a writer. At about the same time a Mr. Low came in (a brother of Sydney Low), a very able writer. I threw him the book and said: "There seems to be good stuff in that."
He took it with him and in a few days sent me a murderous review. I got another copy of the book and read it. After reading it, I sent the review back to Low, saying it was altogether wrong: Joseph Conrad was a good writer and as a newcomer should be praised and not condemned, standing, as he did, high above the ordinary!
Then I sent the book to H. G. Wells.
After a week or two Wells blew in boisterously. "What a book," he cried, throwing it down on the table. "Thanks very much for sending it to me. That sort of stuff makes one's task as a reviewer pleasant, but I am afraid you will think my review far too long and far too eulogistic. I have written pages about Conrad, not columns, and I have praised him to the skies. Will you stand it?"
"First-rate," I cried, "just what I had hoped from you. I sent the book to a man who crabbed it. After all, a great reviewer should be a star-finder and not a fault-finder."
For some reason or other, I never met Conrad until the autumn of 1910, fifteen years later. Talking one day with Austin Harrison of the English Review, Conrad's name came up and I asked: "How does he look? What age is he?
Has he any foreign accent? Is he a great personality?" — a stream of questions.
Harrison declared that Conrad knew me, always spoke warmly of me, and ended by proposing that we should motor down to his cottage in Kent.
We did so the very next Sunday.
Conrad met us most cordially, was eager to record that the review in the Saturday Review had given him reputation. I had thought from his photograph that his forehead was high and domed, but it was rather low and sloped back quickly. He was a little above middle height and appeared more the student than a sea-captain. Both he and his wife were homely, hospitable folk, without a trace of affectation. But Harrison's presence prevented any intimacy of talk, and the nearest I got to Conrad was when I asked him for a recent book, The Mirror of the Sea. He stipulated that I should send him my latest in exchange, and under the dedication to me he wrote the first and last verses of Baudelaire's magnificent poem comparing man to the sea. He repeated the last line:
O lutteurs eternels, o freres implacables, with a note of bitter sadness I thought characteristic. His French, I noticed, was impeccable.
Since then I have read most of Conrad's books, but I have never rated him at all as highly as Wells did.
What a crew of talent to get together on one paper before they were at all appreciated elsewhere. Wells and Shaw, Chalmers Mitchell, D. S. McColl, and Cunninghame Graham. I think the best staff ever seen on any weekly paper in the world; and that on a paper which was practically bankrupt when I took it over; and yet all these men remained with me for the three or four years of my editorship.
Wells impressed me as about the best mind that I had met in my many years in England: a handsome body and fine head. I had hoped extraordinary things from him, but the Great War seems to have shaken Mm, and his latest attempt to write a natural history of the earth chilled me. A history of humanity to the present time in which Shakespeare is not mentioned and Jesus is dismissed in a page carelessly, if not with contempt, shocks me. Yet as Browning said, Thus we half-men struggle.
I can hardly mention Wells at this time without speaking of Bernard Shaw: I had known Shaw before I took over the Fortnightly. I had heard him speak in the East End and had thought his com
munism shallow, for it left out individualism, which is at least as important a force. But after getting him to work for me as dramatic critic on the Saturday, I met him almost every week.
I saw at once that he had a good mind: one of the best of his time indeed; but somehow or other his extremely slight body and his vegetarianism became to me typical of the man.
His plays, too, are all full of Shaw. In one play Shaw assumes a dozen different names; but the characters are all Shaw. His is an acute intelligence, delighting in reasoning and argument, but never going deep, seldom indeed reaching creation of any value. When I think of Bernard Shaw, I am always reminded of Vauvenargues' fine word: "All great thoughts come from the heart." All Shaw's thoughts come from the head.
The other day I was amused by a criticism of Shaw by a Mr. James Agate who is, I believe, the dramatic critic of the Sunday Times. He lays it down that Mr.
Shaw is not able to create a human being. "All the Shavian creations," he says "are like Martians or Selenites or other fantastic creatures with enormous brains and no bodies and consequently no appetites." Yet he goes on to assert that "There more fundamental brains in any single play of Shaw's than in the whole of Shakespeare's output." To me this is worse than fantastic silliness.
But I remember that Shaw, many years ago, told me, and he has written it somewhere, that it humiliated him to compare his brains with Shakespeare's;
I told him roundly I could give him a dozen instances where Shakespeare has used more brains in two or three lines than is to be found in all Shaw's work.
He challenged me for an instance, and I gave him one: Shakespeare's Cleopatra is with Antony in Egypt, and Antony goes to meet Caesar.
Cleopatra feels instinctively that no one can fight Caesar successfully; dreading Caesar's power, she fled from Actium; but at the end of the day Antony returns in triumph and says that he has beaten Caesar to his camp; he cries to her … leap thou, attire and all, Through proof of harness to my heart, and there Ride on the pants triumphing! leap thou, attire and all, And her reply is Lord of Lords!