As a journalist he was distinguished by incorruptibility of no common sternness. Though he had always spoken as a Liberal at Oxford (very likely out of malice, because all his friends were Conservatives), he was one of the pillars of Conservative journalism. He knew all the chiefs of the Conservative party, and enjoyed great influence with them. He was so rugged and unbending. I never knew a harder editor to “work.” He wrote a Spartan life of Chamberlain, for whom he had a great admiration, except in the matter of Tariff Reform.
He married an old friend of ours, the beautiful Viva Sherman, an American nearly related to the Senator-Vice-President and the General. Both before and after his marriage he was a frequent visitor at our house, and we often met at Ranelagh and elsewhere. He enjoyed a discussion with Norma Lorimer. Her wit provoked his, and their conversations were most brilliant to listen to.
At last poor Jeyes was struck down with cancer—aggravated, I believe, by cigar-smoking, in which he was a noted connoisseur. He bore it with magnificent fortitude, and for a long time kept it a secret. Even I did not know that he had been mortally ill till he was dead. But I was one of the three old Oxford friends who stood by his grave—his oldest friend, except H. B. Freeman, who read the service. Sidney Low was the other. Charles Boyd was there too, but he belonged to a much younger generation.
If Jeyes had known that his life would be so short, he would perhaps have devoted more time to book-writing. It is a pity—except for his country and the Conservative party—that he gave up so much of his life to necessarily ephemeral journalism. I always heard that but for a flaw in a will he would have been owner of one of the greatest provincial journals in England.
Peace be to his ashes. He was a merry soul, and if the theosophists are right about our astral bodies meeting the spirits of the departed, there is no one with whom I should so much enjoy an astral conversation as Jeyes. He would be such a volatile spirit. I can imagine the naïveté with which he would describe his experiences.
The Rev. Herbert Bentley Freeman—the Rector of Burton-on-Trent—a cousin of the historian, and a descendant, I believe, of the mighty Bentley of Phalaris renown, came up to Trinity from Uppingham in the same term as Jeyes. Freeman and A. A. Baumann, who was afterwards Conservative M.P. for Peckham, were the two most brilliant speakers at the Union in my day. The undergraduates said that both wrote their speeches beforehand, and learned them by heart and practised their delivery.
Years afterwards I met Baumann when he had given up his safe seat at Peckham and unsuccessfully contested a seat in the North, I think at Manchester.
“What made you give up Peckham?” I asked. “They would have gone on electing you there as long as you lived.”
“My dear chap, life isn’t worth living when you are member for Peckham. I live in South Kensington, and while I was member for Peckham I used to find my hall full of constituents by the time I came down for breakfast, and by lunch-time you’d have thought that I was having an auction of my furniture.”
But of all the men who were at Oxford with me, no one has been so prominent, then and now taken together, in intellectual circles as W. L. Courtney. Courtney was then a rather young New College don, who had the distinction of being married to an extremely smart-looking wife. That would have been a distinction by itself in the Oxford of that day, for few were married in a way suitable to impress undergraduates. Added to that, he cut the most eminent figure in athletics of any don in Oxford. He was the treasurer of the University Boat Club, while the dons respected him as the ablest man in Oxford at philosophy. I was not there when he gave it all up to come to London and be literary editor of the Daily Telegraph and editor of the Fortnightly Review, but I can imagine the consternation which fell upon that ancient seat of learning when their bright particular star, the admiration alike of don and undergraduate, “chucked it,” as they say, for journalism. Of course he did wisely, for in an incredibly short space of time he had as distinguished a position in London as he had had at Oxford. His influence on literature has been immense. He has stood for the combination of scholarliness and up-to-dateness. His own books range from essays on the verge of fiction to some of the most important works on philosophy published in his generation. Incidentally, the creator of Egeria is our best dramatic critic, and a writer of plays.