VIII
After my time on The Daily Mail, I joined The Daily Express for a few months before becoming one of the literary editors of The Daily Chronicle.
On The Express I came to know Sir Arthur Pearson before the days of his blindness, and did not admire him so much then (though I liked him) as in those later years when, by his magnificent courage, and his devoted service to all the blinded men of the war, he was one of the truly heroic figures of the world.
As a newspaper proprietor he was a man of restless energy, but narrower in his outlook, at that time, than his great rival, Harmsworth, whose methods he imitated. He was a strong adherent of tariff reform, when Joseph Chamberlain stumped the country in favor of that policy, which divided friend from friend, wrecked the amenities of social life, and started passionate arguments at every dinner table, somewhat in the same manner that the personality and policy of President Wilson caused social uproar in the United States, during the Peace Conference.
Pearson conferred on me the privilege, as I think he considered it, of recording the progress of the Chamberlain campaign, and it was the hardest work, I think, apart from war correspondence, that I have ever done. I do not regret having done it, for it took me into the midst of one of the biggest political conflicts in English history, led by one of the most remarkable men.
My task was to write each night what is called “a descriptive report,” which means that I had to give the gist of each of Chamberlain’s long speeches, with their salient points, and at the same time describe the scenes in and around the hall, besieged everywhere by vast crowds of opponents and supporters who often came into conflict, Chamberlain’s methods with his interrupters, and the incidents of the evening. Pearson often had a place on the platform, near the man for whom he had a real hero worship, and sent down little notes to me when various points of importance occurred to him. Always my article had to be finished within a few minutes of Chamberlain’s peroration, in order to get it on to the wire for London.
It was at Newport, in Wales, I remember, that I nearly blighted my young life by over-sympathy with the sufferings of a fellow mortal. This was a correspondent of The Daily Mail, who had been a most convinced and passionate free trader. He had written, only a few weeks before, a series of powerful and crushing articles against tariff reform, which had duly appeared in The Daily Mail, until Harmsworth announced one morning that he had been talking to his gardener, and had decided that tariff reform would be a good thing for England. It would be, therefore, the policy of The Daily Mail.
By a refinement of cruelty which I am sure he did not realize, his free trade agent was sent down to reveal the glories of tariffs, as expounded by Chamberlain. It went sorely to the conscience of this Scot, who asked me plaintively, “How can I resign—with wife and bairns?” At Newport his distress was acute, owing to the immense reception of Chamberlain by crowds so dense that one could have walked over their mass, which was one solid block along the line of route.
Before the speech that night he stood me a bottle of wine, which we shared, and he wept over this red liquid at the abomination of tariffs, the iniquity of The Daily Mail, and the conscience of a correspondent. What that wine was, I cannot tell. It was certainly some dreadful kind of poison. I had drunk discreetly, but upon entering the hall, I felt a weight on my head like the dome of St. Paul’s, and saw the great audience spinning round like an immense revolving Face. For two hours’ agony I listened to Chamberlain’s speech on tin plates, wrote things I could not read, and at the end of the meeting, having thrust my stuff over the counter of the telegraph office, collapsed, and was very ill. I heard afterward that the free trade Scot was equally prostrate, but he survived, and in course of time became more easy in his conscience, and a Knight of the British Empire.
Toward the end of the campaign I saw that Joseph Chamberlain was breaking. I watched him closely, and saw signs of mental and physical paralysis creeping over him. Other people were watching him, with more anxiety. Mrs. Chamberlain was always on the platform, by his side, in every town, and her face revealed her own nervous strain. Chamberlain, “Our Joe,” as his followers called him, lost the wonderful lucidity of his speech. At times he hesitated, and fumbled over the thread of his thought. When he was heckled, instead of turning round in his old style with a rapid, knock-out retort, he paused, became embarrassed, or stood silent with a strange and tragic air of bewilderment. It was pitiful toward the end. The strongest force in England was spent and done. The knowledge that his campaign had failed, that his political career was broken, as well as the immense fatigue he had undergone, and the intense effort of his persuasive eloquence, snapped his nerve and vitality. He was stricken, like President Wilson, one night, and never recovered.
In that campaign Chamberlain converted me against himself on the subject of tariff reform, but I learned to admire the courage, and hard sledge-hammer oratory of this great Imperialist leader who represented the old jingo strain of Victorian England, in its narrow patriotism and rather brutal intolerance, ennobled, to some extent, by old loyalties and traditions belonging to the sentiment of the British folk. The very name of Joseph Chamberlain seems remote now in English history, and the mentality of the English people has outgrown that time when he was fired by that wave of Imperialism which overtook the country and produced the genius of Kipling, the aggressive idealism of Cecil Rhodes, and the Boer War, with its adventures, its Call of the Wild, its stupidity, its blatant vulgarity, its jolly good fellows, its immense revelation of military incompetence, and its waste of blood and treasure.
After that campaign, I displeased Arthur Pearson by a trivial difference of opinion. He believed firmly that Bacon wrote “Shakespeare.” I believed just as firmly that he didn’t. When he asked me to write up some new aspect of that argument, I flatly refused, and Pearson was very much annoyed. A little later I resigned my position, and for some time he did not forgive me. But years later we met again, and he was generous and kind in the words he spoke about my work. It was out in France, when he visited the war correspondents’ mess and went with us into Peronne after its capture by our troops. He was blind, but more cheerful than when I had known him in his sighted days. At least he had gained a miraculous victory over his tragic loss, and would not let it weaken him. That day in Peronne he walked into the burning ruins, touched the walls of shattered houses, listened to the silence there, broken by the sound of a gun or two, and the whirr of an aëroplane overhead. He saw more than I did, and his description afterward was full of detail and penetrating in its vision.
We met again, after the war, at a dinner in New York, when he spoke of the work of St. Dunstan’s, which he had founded for blinded men. It was one of the most beautiful speeches I have ever heard—I think the most beautiful—and there was not one of us there, in a gathering of American journalists and business men, who did not give all the homage in his heart to this great leader of the blind.
As one of the literary editors of The Daily Chronicle, I had a good deal of experience of the inside of newspaper life, and, on the whole, some merry times. The hours were long, for I used to get to the office shortly after ten, and, more often than not, did not leave till midnight. Having charge of the magazine page, which at that time was illustrated by black and white drawings, I was responsible for the work of three artists, alleged to be tame, but with a strain of wildness at times, which was manifested by wrestling bouts, when all of us were found writhing on the floor in what looked like a death struggle, when the door was opened by the office boy or some less distinguished visitor. One of them was Edgar Lander, generally known as “Uncle” in the Press Club, and in Bohemian haunts down Chelsea way. Endowed with a cynical sense of humor, a gift for lightning repartee which dealt knock-out blows with the sure touch of Carpentier, and a prodigious memory for all the characters of fiction in modern and classical works, he gave a good lead to conversation in the large room over the clock in Fleet Street where we had our workshop. Another of the artists was Alfred Priest, afterward well known as a portrait painter, and three times infamous in the Royal Academy as the painter of “the picture of the year.” He was, and is, a philosophical and argumentative soul, and Lander and he used to trail their coats before each other, in a metaphorical way, with enormous conversational results, which sometimes ended in violence on both sides. The third artist, nominally under my control, but like the others, entirely out of it, was Stephen Reid, whom I have always regarded as a master craftsman of the black and white art, which he has now abandoned for historical painting. A shrewd Scotsman also with a lively sense of humor, he kept the balance between his two colleagues, and roared with laughter at both of them.
We were demons for work, although we talked so much, and the page we produced day by day was, by general consensus of opinion, I think, the best of its kind in English journalism. We gave all our time and all our energy to the job, and I suppose there are few editors in the world, and few artists, who have ever been seen staggering down Fleet Street, as once Alfred Priest and myself might have been observed, one midnight, carrying a solid block of metal weighing something like half a hundredweight, in order that our page might appear next day. That was a full-page block with text and pictures, representing some great floods in England in which we had been wading all day. We were so late in getting back with our work that the only chance of getting it into the paper was to act as porters from the blockmakers to The Daily Chronicle press. We nearly broke our backs, but if it had been too late for the paper we should have broken our hearts. Such is the enthusiasm of youth—ill rewarded in this case, as in others, because the three artists were sacked when black and white drawings gave way to photography. Afterward Edgar Lander of my “three musketeers” lost the use of his best arm in the Great War, where, by his old name of “Uncle” and the rank of Captain, he served in France, and gave the gift of laughter to his crowd.
In those good old days of The Daily Chronicle, long before the war, there was a considerable sporting spirit, inspired by the news editor, Ernest Perris, who is now the managing editor, with greater gravity. Perris, undoubtedly the best news editor in London, was very human in quiet times, although utterly inhuman, or rather, superhuman, when there was a “world scoop” in progress. It was he who challenged Littlewood, the dramatic critic, to a forty-mile walk for a £10 bet, and afterward, at the same price, anybody who cared to join in. I was foolishly beguiled into that adventure, when six of us set out one morning at six o’clock, from the Marble Arch to Aylesbury—a measured forty miles. We were all utterly untrained, and “Robin” Littlewood, the dramatic critic, singularly like Will Shakespeare in form and figure, refused to let his usual hearty appetite interfere with his athletic contest. It was a stop for five-o’clock tea which proved his undoing, for although he arrived at Aylesbury, he was third in the race, so losing his £10, and was violently sick in the George Inn. Perris was an easy first, and I was a bad second. I remember that at the thirtieth mile I became dazed and silly, and was seen by people walking like a ghost and singing the nursery rhymes of childhood. That night when the six returned by train to London, they were like old, old men, and so crippled that I, for one, had to be carried up the steps of Baker Street Station.
Another hobby of Perris’s was amateur boxing, and I had an office reputation of knowing something of the science of that art, as I had a young brother who boxed for Oxford.
Perris, after various sparring bouts in which he had given bloody noses to sub-editors and others, challenged in mortal combat my friend Eddy, whom I have already introduced in this narrative. There had been some temperamental passages between the news editor and this young writer, so that, if the conflict took place, it would be lively. I acted as Eddy’s second in the matter, and assuming immense scientific knowledge, coached him as to the right methods of attack. At least I urged upon him the necessity of aggressive action in the first round, because if he once gave Perris a chance of hitting out, Eddy would certainly be severely damaged, for Perris is a big man with a clean-shaven face of a somewhat pugilistic type, and with a large-sized fist.
This little meeting between the news editor and his chief reporter aroused considerable interest in the office, and some betting. Quite a little crowd had collected in the sub-editorial room for the event. It was not of long duration. At the words, “Time, gentlemen,” Eddy, heroic as any man inspired by anxiety, made an immediate assault upon Perris, like a swift over-arm bowler, and by a fluke of chance, landed the news editor a fearful blow on the head. It dazed him, but Eddy was not to be denied, and continued his attack with the ferocity of a man-eating tiger, until Perris collapsed.... After that, with greedy appetite for blood, he made mincemeat of a young man named “Boy” Jones, who asked for trouble and got it.
These little episodes behind the scenes of life in Fleet Street kept up the spirits and humor of men who, as a rule, worked hard and long each day, and were always at the mercy of the world’s news, which sent them off upon strange errands in the Street of Adventure, or tied them to the desk, like slaves of the galleys.
My next experience in editorship was when I was appointed literary editor of a new daily paper called The Tribune, the history of which is one of the romantic tragedies of Fleet Street.
Its founder and proprietor was a very tall, handsome, and melancholy young man named Franklin Thomasson, who came from that city of Bolton in the Black Country where I had been managing editor of the Tillotson Syndicate. He had the misfortune of being one of the richest young men in England, as the son of an old cotton spinner who had built up the largest cotton mills in Lancashire. It was, I believe, a condition of his will that his son should establish a London journal in the Liberal interest. Anyhow, Franklin Thomasson, who was an idealist of that faith, started The Tribune as a kind of sacred duty which he had inherited with his money. He appointed as his editor-in-chief a worthy old journalist of an old-fashioned type, named William Hill, who had previously been a news editor of The Westminster Gazette, an excellent evening paper with only one defect—it did not publish news. At least, it was not for any kind of news that people bought it, but entirely for the political philosophy of its editor, J. A. Spender, who was the High Priest of the Liberal Faith, and for the brilliant cartoons of “F.C.G.,” who did more to kill Chamberlain and tariffs than any other power in England.
There were many people of knowledge and experience who warned Franklin Thomasson of the costly adventure of a new daily paper in London. Augustine Birrell, disastrous failure as Chief Secretary for Ireland, but distinguished for all time as a genial scholar and essayist, was one of them. I went to see him with William Hill, and toward the end of the interview, in which he was asked to become a kind of literary godfather to the new venture, he said to Franklin Thomasson, with a twinkle in his eyes,
“My dear Thomasson, I knew your father, and had a high respect for him. For his sake I advise you that if you pay £100,000 into my bank as a free gift, and do not start The Tribune, you will save a great deal of money!”
It was a prophecy that was only too truly fulfilled, for before Thomasson was through his troubles, he had lost £300,000.
A very brilliant staff of assistant editors and reporters was engaged by William Hill—many of the most brilliant journalists in England, and some of the worst. Among them (I will not say in which category) was myself, but at the first assembly of editors before the publication of the paper, I received a moral shock.
I encountered a next-door-neighbor of mine, named Hawke, who had been a colleague of mine on The Daily Chronicle.
I greeted him with pleasure, and surprise.
“Hullo, Hawke, what are you doing here?”
“I’m literary editor,” he said. “What are you?”
“That’s funny!” I replied. “I happen to be literary editor of this paper!”
William Hill had appointed two literary editors, to be perfectly on the safe side. He had also appointed two news editors. Whether the two news editors settled the dispute by assassination, I do not know. Only one functioned. But Hawke and I agreed to divide the job, which we did in the friendliest way, Hawke controlling the reviews of books, and I editing the special articles, stories, and other literary contents of the paper.
It was started with a tremendous flourish of trumpets in the way of advance publicity. On the first day of publication, London was startled by the appearance of all the omnibus horses and cart horses caparisoned in white sheets bearing the legend “Read The Tribune.” Unfortunately it was a wet and stormy day, and before an hour or two had passed, the white mantles were splashed with many gobs of mud, and waved wildly as dirty rags above the backs of the unfortunate animals, or dangled dejectedly about their legs. A night or two before publication, a grand reception was given, regardless of expense, to an immense gathering of political and literary personalities. The walls of The Tribune office were entirely covered with hothouse flowers, and baskets of orchids hung from the ceilings. Wine flowed like water, and historical truth compels me to confess that some members of the new staff were overcome by enthusiasm for this rich baptism of the new paper. One young gentleman, very tall and eloquent, fell as gracefully as a lily at the feet of Augustine Birrell. Another, when the guests were gone, resented some fancied impertinence from the commissionaire, and knocked him through the telephone box. One of the office boys, unaccustomed to champagne, collapsed in a state of coma and was put in the lift for metal plates and carried aloft to the machine room. Long after all the guests had gone, and Franklin Thomasson himself had returned home, another gentleman in high authority on the organizing side was so melted with the happy influences of the evening that his heart expanded with human brotherly love for the night wanderers of London who had been attracted by the lights and music in The Tribune office, and he invited them to carry off the baskets of orchids in the hall, as a slight token of his affection and sympathy. Indeed, his generosity was so unbounded that he made them a gift of the hall clock—a magnificent timepiece with chimes like St. Paul’s Cathedral—and they were about to depart with it, praising God for this benevolence, when Franklin Thomasson, who had been summoned back by telephone, arrived on the scene to save his property and restore discipline.
It was, of course, only a few Bohemian souls who were carried away by the excitement of that baptismal night. Generally speaking, the staff of The Tribune was made up of men of high and serious character, whose chief fault, indeed, was to err rather much on the side of abstract idealism and the gravity of philosophical faith.
We produced a paper which was almost too good for a public educated in the new journalism of the Harmsworth school, with its daily sensations, its snippety articles, its “stunt” stories. We were long, and serious, and “high-brow,” and—to tell the truth—dull. The public utterly refused to buy The Tribune. Nothing that we could do would tempt them to buy it. As literary editor of special articles and stories, I bought some of the most brilliant work of the best writers in England. I published one of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories—a gem—but it did not increase the circulation of The Tribune by a single copy. I published five chapters of autobiography by Joseph Conrad—a literary masterpiece—but it did not move the sales. I persuaded G. K. Chesterton to contribute a regular article; I published the work of many great novelists, and encouraged the talent of the younger school; but entirely without success. It was desperately disappointing, and I am convinced that the main cause of our failure was the surfeit of reading matter we gave each day to a public which had no leisure for such a mass of print, however good its quality. The appearance of the paper, owing to the lack of advertisements, was heavy and dull, and any bright and light little articles were overshadowed among the long, bleak columns.
A new editor, belonging to the Harmsworth school, a charming little man named S. G. Pryor, succeeded William Hill, but his attempts to convert The Tribune into a kind of Daily Mail offended our small clientele of serious readers, without attracting the great public.
After two years of disastrous failure, Franklin Thomasson, who by that time had lost something like £300,000, decided to cut his losses, and the news leaked out among his staff of over eight hundred men that the ship was sinking. It was a real tragedy for those men who had left good jobs to join The Tribune, and who saw themselves faced with unemployment, and even ruin and starvation for their wives and families. Some of us made desperate endeavors to postpone the sentence of death by introducing new capital.
One of my colleagues journeyed to Dublin in the hope of persuading Augustine Birrell to obtain government support for this Liberal organ.
He sent a somewhat startling telegram to Birrell at Dublin Castle.
“The lives of eight hundred men with their wives and children depend on the interview which I beg you to grant me to-day.”
Birrell was surprised, and granted the interview.
“Mr. Birrell,” said my grave and melancholy friend, placing a hat of high and noble architecture on the great man’s desk, “is The Tribune going to die?”
“Sir,” said Mr. Birrell, twinkling through his eyeglasses, “may The Tribune die that death it so richly deserves.”
I succeeded in holding up the sentence of doom for another fortnight, by the sportsmanship of a gallant old lady named the Countess of Carlisle. We had been conducting a temperance crusade which had earned her warm approval, and for the sake of that cause and her Liberal idealism, she offered to guarantee the men’s wages until the paper might be sold.
But it was never sold. The fatal night came when Franklin Thomasson, white and distressed, but resolute, faced his staff with the dreadful announcement that that was the last night. One man fainted. Several wept. Outside the printers waited in the hope that at this twelfth hour some stroke of luck would avert this great misfortune. To them it was a question of bread and butter for wives and babes.
That luck stroke did not happen.
With several colleagues I waited, smoking and talking, after the sentence had been pronounced. It seemed impossible to believe that The Tribune was dead. It was more than the death of an abstract thing, more than the collapse of a business enterprise. Something of ourselves had died with it, our hopes and endeavors, our work of brain and heart. A newspaper is a living organism, threaded through with the nerves of men and women, inspired by their spirit, animated by their ideals and thought, the living vehicle of their own adventure of life. So The Tribune seemed to us then, in that last hour, when we looked back on our labor and comradeship, our laughter, our good times together on “the rag,” as we had called it.
Long after midnight I left the office for the last time, with that friend of mine who had gone to Augustine Birrell, a tall, melancholy-mannered, Georgian-looking man, whose tall hat was a noble specimen of old-fashioned type.
The brilliant lights outside the office suddenly went out. It was like the sinking of the ship. My friend said, “Dead! Dead!” and lifted his hat as in the presence of death.