by Frank Harris
O infinite virtue, comest thou smiling from The world's great snare uncaught?
She knows that in spite of her beauty and cleverness and her position as queen, she has been caught in the world's great snare: she knows that it would require "infinite virtue" to be successful-and all this realization of life is packed into a couple of lines. Shaw would not admit the extraordinary virtue of the passage.
Nothing to me is clearer than the fact that the highest mental effort is the creative intelligence; the greatest minds in the world are those that have created new world-figures:
Forms more real than living Man,
Nurslings of Immortality.
Shakespeare has given us Hamlet arid Cleopatra, and better still Falstaff;
Goethe, Mephistopheles, and better still, Gretchen; Cervantes, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; and Turgenev, Bazarof. No one ranks with these few creators of ever-living generic figures.
Yet it is unfair to say that Shaw has not created any character: he has given himself in twenty characters as a sharp witted man who sees things chiefly from the ludicrous side because he is not greatly gifted with body or heart.
Someone has said that "to the heart, life is a tragedy; and to the mind, it is a comedy." Shaw sees it usually as a comedy, but his Cleopatra exists for me, and the characters in Candida are something more than reproductions of his own personality; but to compare his mental faculties with the great ones is simply silly. He has done nothing comparable to Swift's best work, to say nothing of Shakespeare's.
In my portrait of Shaw I have spoken of his kindness to me at some length.
Here I wish to add that in America, too, when I asked him to write for my magazine Pearson's in New York, and begged him to tell me what I should have to pay him, he wrote me that Hearst was giving him five thousand dollars for everything he wrote, but that it was enough to know that I wanted him to write for me, to continue writing for me, for I had done him a great deal of good by giving him the pride of place on the Saturday Review.
He told a friend of mine the other day that he never felt any reverence for any one; and this amused me greatly, for it is a peculiarly Shavian trait. How could he feel reverence for any one, when the only person he really knows is Shaw; yet he is an admirable journalist, and in many ways a good and kindly man, and I enjoyed my intercourse with him on the Saturday.
How good any real power is! Some of Shaw's sayings have delighted me.
In the beginning of the war, when nearly every one had lost his head, Shaw spoke of "the British bull dog masquerading as an angel of peace"; and later he spoke of the "one hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent village idiot." Village idiot! I could have kissed him for the word.
I see that the Saturday Review has published an account of its editors and contributors on its seventy-fifth birthday. On my staff it left out Wells, Chalmers Mitchell, and D. S. McColl; and had the grotesque impudence to put a little Jew named Baumann to write about me as an editor. Baumann naturally began by saying that I had begged him to write for the Saturday Review, which is not the fact. A mutual friend, Lord Grimthorpe, begged me to help the little man; and I think I took a couple of articles from him, but he was never on the staff and never was able to rise to the ordinary level.
There is no such certain test of greatness as the dislike and denigration of the mediocre!
The Saturday Review, as I remodelled it, met with a good deal of opposition at first. Officious people by the score wrote to me, condemning Bernard Shaw as an illiterate socialist, and Wells as a sort of Jules Verne. But the circulation began to lift at once, and I was very glad of it, for very soon I came to loggerheads with the Oxford University Press.
They had published some book or other, and Professor Churton Collins brought me a review of it, in which he pointed out that in this book, issued by the University Press, there were some three hundred grave errors of fact. I published his review and immediately there was a terrible to-do; the exposure was shocking. The University Press wrote to me curtly that they wished to withdraw their advertisements. They had engaged space in the Saturday Review for some three years beforehand and, of course, they paid their bill regularly at the end of each year. I wrote to the University Press that if they had had any regard for truth, they would have written thanking me and my reviewer, but as they wished to enroll themselves among the powers of darkness and ignorance, I would allow them to withdraw their advertisements, which they accordingly did.
Shortly afterwards I got a notice from Longman's, complaining of a review of a Greek book they had published. The review was written by the first authority in England, Sir Richard Jebb. Longman's wrote that it was evidently written by some ignoramus, and as the Oxford University Press had severed their connection with the Saturday Review, the house of Longman would also like to withdraw their advertisements.
I had been thunderstruck at the unconscionable impudence of the Oxford University Press, but when I got Longman's letter as well, I went to see him. I knew him through Froude's introduction, who prized him highly. I therefore called upon Charles Longman, who told me he was sure the review was written by some incapable and envious person. I had got Professor Jebb's permission to tell him that he had written it, so at length I told Longman, in confidence, the critic's name; and we parted, apparently good friends, Longman saying he would reconsider the whole thing. A week after he wrote that I had changed the whole character of the Review and he agreed with the University Press, on the whole, and would like to withdraw his advertisements.
Their example was followed by several other publishers. In every case I gave the fools the permission to withdraw their advertisements, and at the end of a month or two saw myself face to face with the revenue of the Saturday Review diminished by three or four thousand pounds a year- the small profit I had managed to create turned into a heavy loss. What was to be done?
I went into the city and saw Alfred Beit, head of the great house of South African Mines. I pointed out to him that the Saturday Review went to all the best houses in England. I asked him to give me the balance sheet and yearly report of all his companies as an advertisement and I would write a note, if not an article, on each company when he sent me the balance sheet, the advertisement to cost fifty guineas. I came out of his office with his promise and the names of fifty-odd companies, so I had made up a good part of my loss in an hour.
I went to Barnato's, saw Woolfie Joel, and got a dozen of his companies on the same terms. I then went on to J. B. Robinson and got eight of his companies. In short, in that one day's work in the city I had filled the gap in my revenue made by the withdrawals of the English publishing houses, and had increased the yearly revenue of the Saturday Review by two thousand a year. I knew I could reckon on Cecil Rhodes's help to boot.
That was the reason, I think, why the book reviews of the Saturday Review from '94 on became famous for their truth, which is so much disliked by most English and American reviews.
I mentioned the whole incident just to teach people what sort of pressure is exercised by Mr. Bumble, the publisher, on his true critic. Bumble wants praise and nothing else.
Curiously enough, a little later I had a somewhat similar experience with an insurance company. I got one of the ablest insurance critics in the world to write an article on the methods of a certain company and their balance sheet-and the company wrote, withdrawing its advertisement. I thereupon let my critic loose on all the faults of their work, and the consequence was that five or six of the best insurance companies wrote to me that they would like to advertise in the Saturday Review. For the one advertisement I lost I gained several better ones. This brought me to the conclusion that the business men of England are more honest and clear-minded than those who deal with literature and publishing.
There is something in art and literature which seems to corrupt the ordinary business mind. I think the corrupting influence lies in the extraordinary difference of values, which no ordinary man can foresee or explain. A publisher gets
two books, both to his mind fairly well written and interesting; when he publishes them he finds that the worse one catches on and he sells 100,000 copies, whereas the other is a dead loss. He has given, let us say, a hundred pounds for each of them. "A" that he liked best is the failure, and "B" the success. A little later, he gets another book like "B" and finds that it is a complete failure-and so he makes up his mind that the only thing he wants to pay for is eulogy; and he prays for success because he is unable to deserve or merit it, or even to know how it should be gained.
I had one other curious experience with the Saturday Review-I found that a certain number of the best class of business people would only advertise if it had a cover on. The cost of putting a good green cover on it would only be some fifty pounds a week, whereas I could get over two hundred a week for the advertisements. I immediately put the cover on and got the advertisements, thereby improving not only the looks, but the revenue of the Review.
After I had bought the Saturday Review, I went and had a talk with Ochs, and he told me he would help me and outlined the proposition he thought suitable. I should form a company with a capital of about thirty thousand pounds that would take over and own the paper, and this I did, but I put also an addendum to his proposal, constituting five hundred deferred shares that would take no profits, but would control the appointment of the editor and staff. As I held all these five hundred shares myself, I thereby gave myself complete control of the paper. When I asked Albert Ochs for the five thousand pounds that I had to pay for the Saturday Review, he gave me four thousand pounds against shares and thought I ought to find the other thousand easily.
Now, what was the financial position of the Saturday Review when I took it over? The paper was losing money, roughly fifty or sixty pounds a week. Its circulation that once had been thirty or forty thousand had shrunk year by year, till now it was only five or six thousand a week. The income from the sales was less than a hundred pounds a week, and the income from advertisements that had been a thousand pounds a week had diminished to one hundred and fifty pounds or less.
The pay, however, of contributors, had rather increased than diminished, and everyone now expected at least three pounds for writing a column or two. By paying my staff, Shaw, Wells, McColl, Runciman and Chalmers Mitchell much more than the ordinary price, I had further increased my difficulties; but at the same time I knew dozens of young Oxford men at the bar and in journalism who were willing indeed to review books for the Saturday Review for nothing, on condition of getting the books; so instead of my contributors costing me over two hundred pounds a week, I got them down to under a hundred and so turned a loss of fifty or sixty pounds into a profit of thirty or forty pounds. The advertisement revenue I soon increased greatly, as I have told, so that the paper was clearing easily one hundred and fifty pounds a week.
I think I have explained sufficiently the financial position. I had 25,000 shares that I could sell very readily if I wanted money, and I had besides 500 deferred shares that ensured me the continuance of my position.
At this time or a little later I sold 5,000 shares to Beit for cash, and 2,000 or 3,000 more to other people who wanted an oar in the boat, and so made myself secure from the monetary point of view for some years to come.
I had only run the Saturday Review a short time when the Jameson Raid in the Transvaal shocked the world and necessitated on my part a prolonged absence from England.
CHAPTER III
The Jameson raid Rhodes and Chamberlain
Scarcely had I got the Saturday Review and taken the first steps to make it successful when the Jameson Raid took place, nominally in obedience to a call for help and protection from the English women and children in Johannesburg. I knew South Africa too well to be deluded for a moment by this shallow pretext. At once I denounced the raid and everyone who defended it. I soon found its defenders were numerous and could make their voices heard in a hundred journals from The Times down.
I saw Beit about it, and Ochs, Woolfie Joel, too, and others, and came very soon upon the proofs that the raid was instigated by Rhodes for selfish interests and would set South Africa in a blaze.
Information reached me that the raiders had been assembled at Pitsani by Rhodes, and everybody in South Africa knew that their real object was not to succor the Outlanders in Johannesburg, but to overthrow the government in Pretoria.
English opinion on the Jameson Raid and its ignoble end was rather undecided till the German Kaiser sent his famous telegram to Krueger, in which he practically told Krueger that if he wanted help he would give it to him. This inconceivably stupid act not only consolidated English opinion in favor of Jameson, but was the very beginning of that dislike of Germany and condemnation of the German Kaiser which later led to the Great War. Even the British Government resented the insult; it mobilized a part of the fleet and, I believe, called ships away from the Mediterranean to the North Sea. It is not too much to say that the English dislike of the Germans dates from that idiotic telegram.
After the Kaiser's telegram, I saw Arthur Walter, but found him a hot partisan of the Jameson Raiders with ears closed to any reason. At first, as I have told, he didn't like Rhodes, but Moberly Bell soon inoculated him with the pan-English patriotic enthusiasm which suited his innate conservatism.
I had thought that the loss of the American colonies would have taught the English people that interference, even with their own kin thousands of miles away, was ill-advised and apt to be dangerous. But in London in 1895 I found nine men out of ten convinced that it was necessary to "teach the Boers a lesson and put Krueger in his place." That brutal unreason was so wide spread and intense that I resolved to go to South Africa in order the better to combat this old hereditary madness.
It all reminds me that Englishmen have not grown much in one hundred and fifty years. Didn't Benjamin Franklin write to Lord Kames, somewhere about 1760, that "the foundations of the future grandeur and stability of British Empire lie in America, and though, like other foundations, they are low and little now, they are nevertheless, broad and strong to support the greatest political structure that human wisdom ever yet erected"? And it was due to Franklin that at the Treaty of Paris in 1763 Guadeloupe was restored to France, while Canada remained with England, though popular English opinion at the time wished rather to retain "the valuable sugar-islands of Guadeloupe" and give Canada to France.
If England had only the sense to profit by Franklin's foresight instead of jeering at him and insulting him, how different the course of world history would have been! As it is, Britain owes her chief possession in North America to his wisdom. In the same way, in 1896,1 found that practically the whole of British opinion, as well in England as in South Africa, was totally and lamentably perverse. I must now return to my own story.
There was no time to lose if I was to do any good, so I took ship at once and was in Cape Town before mid-January, 1896, leaving Runciman in charge of the Saturday Review as my assistant, after having begged him, on any doubtful question, to take counsel with my old friend, the Reverend John Verschoyle.
The first person I wanted to see in South Africa was Jan Hofmeyr, then Rhodes; but curiously enough the day I arrived, Sir James Sivewright came to lunch at the same hotel, and as soon as he heard of me, came up, introduced himself and gave me the benefit of his unrivaled knowledge of South Africa.
When he realized that I wanted the truth and was prepared to accept it, he let himself go freely. He spoke of Hofmeyr with affection and of Rhodes with pity. I soon found him one of the wisest and best informed of counselors. I asked him about Governor General Sir Hercules Robinson, whom I knew and liked. "Alas!" said Sivewright. "He's too wedded to Rhodes; but he's honest and capable."
At length we came to the Jameson Raid and the famous telegram from the women in Johannesburg, asking for Jameson's help. "That telegram," said Sivewright, "was written in Rhodes's office in Cape Town and sent from there to The Times." I was horrified, but he gave me the proofs of what he alleged.
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My first day in Cape Town had been astonishingly fruitful. At once I wrote an article and some notes for the Saturday Review and then, out of my affection for Arthur Walter, I wrote to him, giving chapter and verse for my belief, and begging him to modify the attitude of The Times. A little later Cecil Rhodes told me he knew I was working against him through Walter, and after that I let The Times take care of itself.
After the raid, Rhodes went up to Kimberley and the British element made his railway journey a sort of triumphal progress, but the more thoughtful spirits all condemned him. On his return to Cape Town he prepared to go back to England at once.
I had several interesting talks with him, and because he had been jolted, so to speak, out of his ordinary self-centered optimistic attitude, I came to know him better than ever before. I found he had gone entirely astray.
"What on earth could you hope to win by the raid?" I asked at length.
"I don't admit I had anything to do with it," Rhodes replied.
"Let us leave that," I answered, "but what could Dr. Jim hope to win by it?
Suppose he had got into Johannesburg; next day it would have been surrounded by five thousand Boers and in a week would have had to surrender."
"In a week a great deal might happen," said Rhodes sententiously.
"I understand," I replied. "Hercules Robinson would probably have gone north and consulted Krueger to play fair, but neither in war nor peace could your raiders have gained anything. It was an idiotic move."
"And suppose Chamberlain had taken a hand in the game?" Rhodes went on.
"You mean to say?" I cried; he nodded- "Worse and worse," I countered; "that would have meant war, a race war in South Africa with fifty thousand Boer settlers and eighty thousand English loafers; you would have needed one hundred thousand British soldiers.