Portraits of the Nineties

by E. T. Raymond

But the same Warrington—a much more delicious snob than any in his creator’s special book on that species—could indulge in such a rhapsody on the Press as the following:

They were passing through the Strand as they talked, and by a newspaper office, which was all lighted up and bright. Reporters were coming out of the place, or rushing up to it in cabs; there were lamps burning in the editors’ rooms, and above where the compositors were at work; the windows of the building were in a blaze of gas.

“Look at that, Pen,” Warrington said. “There she is—the great engine—she never sleeps. She has her ambassadors in every quarter of the world—her couriers upon every road. Her officers march along with armies, and her envoys walk into statesmen’s cabinets. They are ubiquitous. Yonder journal has an agent, at this minute, giving bribes in Madrid, and another inspecting the price of potatoes in Covent Garden. Look! Here comes the Foreign Express galloping in. They will be able to give news to Downing Street to-morrow; funds will rise or fall, fortunes be made or lost; Lord B. will get up, and, holding the paper in his hand, and seeing the noble Marquis in his place, will make a great speech; and—and Mr. Doolan will be called away from his supper at the back kitchen; for he is the foreign sub-editor, and sees the mail on the newspaper sheet before he goes to his own.”

That was the feeling about the Press in Thackeray’s time, and it was still the feeling in the early Nineties; the sense of something almost superhuman in its intelligence. Thackeray, as a kind of gentleman, heartily scorned the newspaper people with whom he was thrown into professional contact, but he had a vast respect for the final result of all their efforts. To-day Thackeray, however gentlemanly, would not be ashamed to acknowledge being or knowing a leader-writer, but on the other hand he would sneer (as a fashionable thing to do) at the Press as an institution. Thirty years ago the actual Thackerayan view prevailed on both points, if a little weakened. There was still almost a sacredness attaching to serious print. Men were so anxious to respect the Press that they frowned on any tendencies to levity which might occasionally be found. A journal purporting to give news and views had gravity forced upon it. It is true that a great deal of licence was allowed to the comic and periodical Press, which was, on the whole, much less decorous than that of to-day. These publications, indeed, seemed to be tolerated rather on the old respectable principle that, since there must be wickedness, it is well to give it a definite outlet, so as to avoid the evils of general contamination. These papers were, so to speak, the journalistic filles de joie who, by the sacrifice of their own reputation, safeguarded the vestal innocence of the responsible sheets. In their pages the reader could, if his tastes lay that way, find all the spice, suggestiveness, and scandalous piquancy he wanted. In the great dailies all was propriety and dullness. They were the work of the shorthand reporter and the leader-writer. Home news meant Parliament, public meetings, and police court “intelligence.” Foreign news meant (to quote Mr. Balfour) the “dull and doubtful details of the European diary daily transmitted by ‘our special correspondent.’” Leaders, broadly speaking, meant comment on the speeches and the despatches.

The old journalism had a great tradition behind it. It was never, indeed, quite what its eulogists would have us believe. There never was a time when the feet of advertisers were not beautiful upon its staircases. There never was a time when the proprietor thought of his paper purely as a public institution. Indeed, the fact was rather that the proprietor was so much of a tradesman that he restricted himself to the commercial side of his venture. There were exceptions, of course, like some of the Walter family, who took a very living interest in policy. But as a rule the great newspaper plutocrat had little social ambition, and less interest in home or foreign politics. Such a man knew that he was a Conservative and a Churchman, or that he was a Liberal and a Nonconformist, or that he was a Secularist and a Radical, or that he was a “kind of a plaid.” But he did not greatly trouble about specific things political: he left that to his editor. He “set” a general policy, and then looked round for someone to carry it out: the someone soon showed whether he was going to be a success or a failure. If he were a failure, the proprietor had the misery of another trial; if he were a success, another name was added to the list of “great editors.” The proprietor occasionally asked him to dinner, much as Mr. Bungay asked his contributors to “cut mutton” with him; but for months together the editor dictated policy without a hint from above.

A man thus working for a mere salary—and that not exactly a princely one, for Mr. Mudford’s five thousand a year on The Standard was almost the plum of the profession—might, one would think, get into all sorts of bad courses in thus working practically without supervision. He might well become a drunkard, or a lazybones, or a venal scoundrel. In fact, every editor was a model of probity, and almost all the editors showed great energy and ability. Commonly they developed a most romantic loyalty to their papers and proprietors, and generally ended by dying of sheer exhaustion in their service. But this was not the Victorian editor’s only loyalty. Even more striking was his sense of what was due to the public. He felt in his very marrow the obligation to serve the public to the best of his ability, both as regarded information and counsel. If he thought the mass of the public was right from his political standpoint, then it must be kept intelligently right; if it was wrong, then it must be argued out of its error. But he held it as a cardinal principle that the public must not be merely bamboozled, still less misled by sheer lies, and knowingly he never published false or distorted information. His comments might be partial, but his news was honest. Such an editor never boasted himself as a person of special integrity; on the contrary he generally spoke in private with extreme cynicism, and was as far removed from priggishness as a man could well be. Yet few bishops, priests, or deacons held so firmly to professional duties and decencies.

It was part of the character of these men to be anonymous. Inside their offices they were autocrats; outside they were less than nobodies; they did not properly exist at all. Delane, ubiquitous and social-minded, was the exception. The rule was rather represented by Mudford of The Standard, who would see nobody at his office, and, when a Cabinet Minister once pursued him to his private house, called to his servant from the dining-room, “Tell Lord —— I am not at home.” Mudford’s offices in Shoe Lane were fitted up with all sorts of secret passages to enable him to enter or leave without notice, and though, by a perfect intelligence service, he knew everything that was going on, he was himself as invisible as the Mikado of old. Next to the editors, the chief personages of the “great dailies” were the leader-writers. They were often socially better known as individuals than the editor. But it was considered bad form to be aware of their professional pursuits, and nobody was supposed to notice if at a certain hour a particular man, known to write for the Press, disappeared like the ghost of Hamlet’s father when the cock crew. The old leader-writer generally belonged to the class of man who, with a little more ambition and some money or great family connection, would have gone into politics. He had usually done well at his university. He knew a good many people of the “right” sort. He belonged to a good club when it was something to belong to almost any club. He was paid well. He was, on the whole, very lightly worked, and his duties were no less pleasant than easy. Small wonder, therefore, that newspapers had a large field of selection, and that leader-writers grew grey in the service of particular papers. Almost the only survival of this interesting class now active in the Press is Sir Sidney Low, the author of The Governance of England and a number of other valuable works. The technique of daily writing probably never reached a higher perfection than with him; he had a most uncanny power of producing, as fast as his pencil (for he eschewed the pen, fountain or otherwise) could travel over paper, an article strong in common sense, coherent in argument, abounding in incidental felicities of quotation and illustration, and delightful in its easy freedom and picturesqueness.

A rather heavier weight was the late Mr. S. H. Jeyes, who was for long associated with Sir Sidney Low on The Standard. Jeyes was happy in being exactly suited temperamentally to his medium. I could never think of Sir Sidney Low as a true Conservative; but the other was as good a specimen of the natural Tory as ever existed. His was not the Toryism of mental inertia, still less of stupidity, for he had a brain of the very first quality, and in spite of a tendency to indolence got through an enormous deal of work; but both his temper and his philosophy of life were wholly Conservative, and the Gladstonian Liberal, I fancy, aroused in him an almost physical repulsion. Like Carlyle, he was much more tolerant of the Mountain than of the Gironde, and a real Bolshevist would probably have affected him less unfavourably than a constitutional Socialist of the type whom the Bolshevist swallowed. He commanded a style of massive strength, and had a curiously impressive way of smashing some small antagonist in a line, much as one might settle the hash of an annoying insect, and then passing on in careless unconcern to a more important person or matter. Perhaps the mordancy of his style was increased by his studies of Juvenal, of whose satires he has left an extremely lively translation; he loved the Latin idiom, which he could use with almost as much freedom as English, and his own manner savoured of classic severity and compression. He lived just long enough to see the beginning of the end of The Standard, to which his best years had been devoted.

A feature of the old daily papers was a “light” leader on a literary or general subject; here the hand of the political leader-writer was seldom used, though Sir Sidney Low, whose range was extraordinarily wide, has done some very charming things in this genre. A famous contributor of The Standard was Alfred Austin, whom many thought better in his workaday prose than in his occasional verse. Austin seldom stirred from his place near Ashford, in Kent, and was perhaps the only leader-writer whose contributions were habitually transmitted by wire. Another charming writer of these fancy leaders was Andrew Lang. Mr. Hutchinson has dealt with him in a charming sketch in his Portraits of the Eighties, but Lang’s hand was still discoverable by the discerning in the Daily News of the earlier Nineties.

Such in the main was the “great daily”: an affair of a “great editor,” talented leader-writers, and a few highly-paid correspondents in certain big capitals. The rest of the staff were nobodies, inferior in education, in social standing, and in professional status; and there was a sort of Chinese wall, moral and sometimes even physical, between them and the aristocrats. This rigidity was unfavourable to progress, and it so happened that about the beginning of the Nineties the supply of really “great editors” fell short. Mr. Buckle, of The Times, might, indeed, be accounted such, but he had special difficulties in his way—perhaps the chief of them was the great blow of the Pigott forgeries—and among the controllers of the other “great dailies” (except the Daily Telegraph, which has always been peculiar in having a most active and vigilant proprietorial element) there was none of quite the same calibre as the Mudfords and the Delanes. There was thus a deadness about the Press which positively invited the invasion of a robust competitor.