Unique among all suspenses is the suspense that occupies the editorial mind between the moment of finally going to press and the moment of examining the issue on the morning of publication. Errors, appalling and disastrous errors, will creep in; and they are irremediable then. These mishaps occur to the most exalted papers, to all papers, except perhaps the "Voce della Verità," which, being the organ of the Pope, is presumably infallible. Tales circulate in Fleet Street that make the hair stand on end; and every editor says: "This might have happened to me." Subtle beyond all subtleties is the magic and sinister change that happens to your issue in the machine-room at the printers. You pass the final page and all seems fair, attractive, clever, well-designed. . . . Ah! But what you see is not what is on the paper; it is the reflection of the bright image in your mind of what you intended! When the last thousand is printed and the parcels are in the vans, then you gaze at the unalterable thing, and you see it coldly as it actually is. You see not what you intended, but what you have accomplished. And the difference! It is like the chill, steely dawn after the vague poetry of a moonlit night.
There is no peace for an editor. He may act the farce of taking a holiday, but the worm of apprehension is always gnawing at the root of pleasure. I once put my organ to bed and went off by a late train in a perfect delirium of joyous anticipation of my holiday. I was recalled by a telegram that a fire with a strong sense of ironic humour had burnt the printing office to the ground and destroyed five-sixths of my entire issue. In such crises something has to be done, and done quickly. You cannot say to your public next week: "Kindly excuse the absence of the last number, as there was a fire at the printers." Your public recks not of fires, no more than the General Post Office, in its attitude towards late clerks, recognizes the existence of fogs in winter. And herein lies, for the true journalist, one of the principal charms of Fleet Street. Herein lies the reason why an editor's life is at once insufferable and worth living. There are no excuses. Every one knows that if the crater of Highgate Hill were to burst and bury London in lava to-morrow, the newspapers would show no trace of the disaster except an account of it. That thought is fine, heroic, when an editor thinks of it.
And if an editor knows not peace, he knows power. In Fleet Street, as in other streets, the population divides itself into those who want something and those who have something to bestow; those who are anxious to give a lunch, and those who deign occasionally to accept a lunch; those who have an axe to grind and those who possess the grindstone. The change from the one position to the other was for me at first rather disconcerting; I could not understand it; there was an apparent unreality about it; I thought I must be mistaken; I said to myself: "Surely this unusual ingratiating affability has nothing to do with the accident that I am an editor." Then, like the rest of the owners of grindstones, I grew accustomed to the ownership, and cynical withal, cold, suspicious, and forbidding. I became bored by the excessive complaisance that had once tickled and flattered me. (Nevertheless, after I had ceased to be an editor I missed it; involuntarily I continued to expect it.) The situation of the editor of a ladies' paper is piquantly complicated, in this respect, by the fact that some women, not many—but a few, have an extraordinary belief in, and make unscrupulous use of, their feminine fascinations. The art of being "nice to editors" is diligently practised by these few; often, I know, with brilliant results. Sometimes I have sat in my office, with the charmer opposite, and sardonically reflected: "You think I am revolving round your little finger, madam, but you were never more mistaken in your life." And yet, breathes there the man with soul so uniformly cold that once or twice in such circumstances the woman was not right after all? I cannot tell. The whole subject, the subject of that strange, disturbing, distracting, emotional atmosphere of femininity which surrounds the male in command of a group of more or less talented women, is of a supreme delicacy. It could only be treated safely in a novel—one of the novels which it is my fixed intention never to write. This I know and affirm, that the average woman-journalist is the most loyal, earnest, and teachable person under the sun. I begin to feel sentimental when I think of her astounding earnestness, even in grasping the live coal of English syntax. Syntax, bane of writing-women, I have spent scores of ineffectual hours in trying to inoculate the ungrammatical sex against your terrors! And how seriously they frowned, and how seriously I talked; and all the while the eternal mystery of the origin and destiny of all life lay thick and unnoticed about us!
These syntax-sittings led indirectly to a new development of my activities. One day a man called on me with a letter of introduction. He was a colonial of literary tastes. I asked in what manner I might serve him.
"I want to know whether you would care to teach me journalism," he said.
"Teach you journalism!" I echoed, wondering by what unperceived alchemy I myself, but yesterday a tyro, had been metamorphosed into a professor of the most comprehensive of all crafts.
"I am told you are the best person to come to," he said.
"Why not?" I thought. "Why shouldn't I?" I have never refused work when the pay has been good. I named a fee that might have frightened him, but it did not. And so it fell out that I taught journalism to him, and to others, for a year or two. This vocation suited me; I had an aptitude for it; and my fame spread abroad. Some of the greatest experts in London complimented me on my methods and my results. Other and more ambitious schemes, however, induced me to abandon this lucrative field, which was threatening to grow tiresome.
[XI]
I come now to a question only less delicate than that of the conflict of sexes in journalism—the question of reviewing, which, however, I shall treat with more freedom. If I have an aptitude for anything at all in letters, it is for criticism. Whenever I read a work of imagination, I am instantly filled with ideas concerning it; I form definite views about its merit or demerit, and having formed them, I hold those views with strong conviction. Denial of them rouses me; I must thump the table in support of them; I must compel people to believe that what I say is true; I cannot argue without getting serious in spite of myself. In literature, but in nothing else, I am a propagandist; I am not content to keep my opinion and let others keep theirs. To have a worthless book in my house (save in the way of business), to know that any friend of mine is enjoying it, actually distresses me. That book must go, the pretensions of that book must be exposed, if I am to enjoy peace of mind. Some may suspect that I am guilty here of the affectation of a pose. Really it is not so. I often say to myself, after the heat of an argument, a denunciation, or a defence: "What does it matter, fool? The great mundane movement will continue, the terrestrial ball will roll on." But will it? Something must matter, after all, or the mundane movement emphatically would not continue. And the triumph of a good book, and the ignominy of a bad book, matter to me.