Both the late and the present editors of the Field, William Senior and Theodore Andrea Cook, came to our Addison Mansions receptions. That delightful man, William Senior, the “Red Spinner” of fishing journalism, and his wife came very often to us. Theodore Andrea Cook is the ideal editor for a great sporting paper like the Field, for he had not only been editor of a great daily, but he had rowed in the Oxford boat, and been a Scholar of his College, and he had captained the all-England team in the international fencing matches at the Olympic games which were held at Athens. He has also written very sound books on an unusual variety of subjects (one of which, his book on The Spiral in Nature and Art, was most widely discussed); and is one of the most delightful writers we have of travel-books on France. Of course, everything which he has written upon sport is ex cathedra.
Walter Jerrold, who lives a little higher up the river than I do, in an old house with a great garden, a very old friend, and a much older Vagabond than I, often came with his wife to us at Addison Mansions. Jerrold is a grandson of the famous wit, Douglas Jerrold. He was for more than a dozen years sub-editor of the Observer. But fortunately he found time for editing of another nature as well, which will help his own books to give him a permanent place in our literature. He is one of our best editors of nineteenth-century classics; his biographical and bibliographical introductions are the most useful of their kind—just what you would expect from the grandson of a man who was a star in the firmament of which he writes.
Clement Shorter, who married the Irish poetess, and was editor of the Illustrated London News when we met at Rudolph Lehmann’s in the “nineties,” is another editor of books as well as papers. The Brontës are his special protégés. He is the acknowledged Brontë expert, and every one has read his new book on George Borrow. He has been great at founding—he not only founded the Sketch, the Sphere and the Tatler, but he was one of the founders of the Omar Khayyam Club, beloved of Radical litterateurs, though it deals not with English politics, but English Persics. Here you are always sure of good speaking—Mr. Balfour and Mr. Asquith, and all the important Cabinet Ministers and ex-Cabinet Ministers have spoken there on occasion. I have never heard Shorter speak himself, but I understand that he is a very good political speaker, and I can picture him telling a Lincolnshire audience how wrong it is to have an income not half as great as his own, for Shorter has been deservedly prosperous. He is a great journalist—one of the pioneers of modern journalism. He was a Civil Service clerk when in 1890 he became editor of the Illustrated London News, and only a couple of years had passed before he started the Sketch, the model of a new class of paper, for the same office, and continued to edit both papers till 1900. Then he thought that he would like to have a paper of his own, and raised a hundred thousand pounds to found the Sphere and the Tatler, with which he has been associated ever since, as editor of the former and director of both. They are rightly among the most popular illustrated papers of the day, for they have reduced the handling of the personal element to a science, and Shorter always was a brilliant editor. His success has been largely due to his colossal energy and industry. He has taken a minute interest in every detail of the production of both papers.
In the midst of all his journalistic labours, Shorter has found time to write some admirable books, and has made himself with two books a specialist on Napoleon in his period of exile at St. Helena.
Herbert White, the present editor of the Standard, is one of the best informed of all the English newspaper editors about Continental politics, because he went through such an arduous schooling in Austria and Germany, and knows German as well as he knows English. He married the niece of an Austrian political leader, and after war-correspondenting in the Græco-Turkish war of 1897, represented leading English, American and French newspapers at Vienna from 1897 to 1902, and Berlin from 1903 to 1911. Besides this he has taken twenty special journalistic missions in every country of the Continent except France and Russia.
I should be accused of sycophancy if I said all I should like to say of Robertson Nicoll, of whom I saw a good deal before we were both such busy men. But there are some things about Nicoll to which nobody can be blind, besides the position of respect which he enjoys in the literary community. He makes a bona fide attempt to educate his party in politics, and his public in a spirit of commonsense and toleration instead of appealing to their prejudices, and no man has done more in the way of securing the publication of the books of unknown authors of merit, who have justified his expectations and given the world great books. Nicoll has been the sincere and enthusiastic friend of merit. I can say this without prejudice, because his firm have published nothing of mine.
Similarity of name, and their common friendship with the A. S. Boyds, makes me mention here James Nicol Dunn, whose editorship of the Morning Post was marked by such an advance in the political weight of that paper. Dunn was managing editor of the National Observer in its prime. For solid efficiency as a journalist, he had no superior in the country. It would have been a bad day for England when he left it to edit the Johannesburg Star, if it had not been so important that the chief organ of the Transvaal should be in such brave, moderate and judicious hands, at such a critical period in the history of South Africa.
T. P. O’Connor is a very old friend of mine. I met him first when we were both in America in 1888-1889, and we have been on terms of Christian names ever since. Though we differ strongly in politics, it has never affected our friendship, for T. P. is very fair to his enemies, except when he happens to have a special hatred for them. He has founded four papers—the Star, the Sun, T. P.’s Weekly and M. A. P.—but I am not sure as to how far he is still interested in any of them.
T. P. is to me a fascinating personality. He is so generous and genial. The swift recognition, the ready smile, the warm affectionate manner, have endeared him to hosts of friends, and every one recognises that he has a golden pen which invests everything he touches with interest, and an acute intelligence—acute enough to sift even the Humbert mystery and present a clear analysis of it, as witness his Phantom Millions.
He is a golfer too, and once upon a time used to play with W. G. Grace, who, it seems, in spite of his being the best cricketer that ever lived, always hits his shot along the ground except from the tee, though he drives and puts pretty well. I got this egregious piece of journalism from him when we were sitting next to each other at the dinner given by M. Escoffier, at that time, and probably still, cook at the Carlton Hotel, who gave a gourmet’s feast on the occasion of the publication of his book on cookery, published by Heinemann. Heinemann invited me. The chief thing I remember about the feast is that the wine Escoffier selected was Pommery Naturel, and that the tour de force was lamb stuffed with sage and onions to replace the usual mint sauce.