CHAPTER XIV.
THE CONFESSIONS OF AN EDITOR.
Editors—Publishers—An Offer—Why I Refused it—The Pall Mall Budget—Lika Joko—The New Budget—The Truth about my Enterprises—Au Revoir!
Only the fortunate—or should we not rather say the unfortunate?—man who has made up his mind to produce a journal of his own can have the very faintest conception of the work and worry, the pains and penalties, the hopes and fears, the anxiety and exasperation, involved in the process. I have gone through it all, and perhaps something more than all by comparison with other people in the same peculiar predicament. For weeks before the promised periodical sees the light the unfortunate proprietor feels himself to be a very Atlas supporting Heaven knows how many cosmic schemes.
The first editor of my acquaintance was a little boy in knickerbockers, with a lavish profusion of auburn locks, an old-fashioned physiognomy, a wiry if diminutive frame, and a quick, nervous temperament, whose youthful eyes had beheld the suns of fourteen summers.
My last editor is one whose physique would be commonly qualified by the adjective podgy, of a full face, but with head somewhat depleted of its capillary adornments, for which deprivation it has to thank the snows of six-and-forty winters.
Our intimacy has been of long standing, for my first and last editor is one and the same being—the present writer.
From the day that I, as a little schoolboy, seated on the uncompromising school-form looked upon as a necessary adjunct to the inception of knowledge, produced in MS. and for private circulation only my first journalistic attempt, up to the present moment, I can confidently assert that during my varied experience I never was brought into contact with a more interesting set of men than those I have seen stretched upon the editorial rack.
The primary requirements which tend to make up the composition of an editor are good health, an impenetrably thick skin, and the best of humour. Secondly, he must be able to command experience, a thirst for work, and the power of application; and, thirdly, he must possess tact and discretion. A universal and comprehensive knowledge of human nature must also be his, for not only has he to be capable of judging and humouring the overstrung men and women of talent with whom he deals—those fragile, sensitive flowers from whom he extracts the honey wherewith to gratify the palate of a journalistically epicurean public—but he must also have a thorough knowledge of that public to enable him to direct those who work for him, for they, shut up in their studies and studios, may not realise that the man at the look-out has to weather the storms of public opinion, of which they reck little if it be that what they work at may be to their own liking, albeit unpalatable to those whom they seek to feed.
Like poets, editors are born, not made. An editor may make a paper, but a paper never made an editor. But as to the commercial success or failure of a periodical, the editor is absolutely a nonentity. There are two sides to the production of a periodical: one is the business side, the other the editorial. The success or failure of a periodical depends almost entirely upon the business manager.