Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

by J. Comyns Carr

This same editor, on the other hand, was often a source of annoyance to us. Our time was short for the work we had to do during the morning, and we resented the constant pencil-notes which he used to send up from the room below, or the repeated calls up the speaking-tube, the whistle of which stood next to Purnell’s desk.

One day we determined to mark our disapproval of this vexatious and harassing policy. We were accustomed sometimes, when money was short, to be content with a lunch of cocoa and biscuits prepared by ourselves. A kettle on this occasion stood puffing on the fire, and when the whistle of the speaking-tube had gone for about the thirtieth time, a demoniacal idea of vengeance entered into the mind of Purnell. The call this time was for me, and Purnell having answered that I was coming to speak in answer, went with stealthy steps towards the fireplace and seizing the kettle poured the whole of its contents down the tube.

It is not perhaps wonderful that this resulted in something like a crisis in the internal arrangements of the office, and very nearly ended in the dismissal of the entire literary staff.

Another comrade of those days, though he rarely wrote in the Globe, was Camille Barrère, now the distinguished Ambassador of the French Republic at Rome. Barrère and I were for many years close allies. I had assisted him in his first essay in English journalism when he contributed to the Pall Mall Gazette a series of articles on the Commune, with which he had been in some sense associated. He was always a brilliant and gifted creature, and his rapid advancement from the hour when he was first befriended by Gambetta could never have been any surprise to those who knew him well.

At that time, like the rest of us, he was having a hard struggle for life. We were together on the Echo, and together on the Pall Mall Gazette, and I can remember in the old days of the Arts Club how often we sat and planned vague, large schemes for the reorganisation of journalism, which should yield us more complacent editors and a rate of higher remuneration, which we fancied our merits deserved.

Barrère had passed some of his earlier years in England, and his knowledge and power over our tongue were remarkable, but now and then some small idiomatic fault would slip out unawares, and one day, when he had just received what he considered an inadequate cheque from the Echo, he cried out indignantly that he “would like to wring the throat of Arnold.”

Unlike poor Purnell, the choice of a topic never presented any difficulty to him. Almost any subject served him for a light and graceful essay, and the fertility of his invention in this regard was more than remarkable. Happily for his own sake, and for the sake of the nation which he has served with so much distinction, he need no longer rack his brains, as in the old days, for the material that would fill a column in the Echo; and though it is many years since we met, I know, through many messages that I have received from him, that he looks back with kindly remembrances to those times when we struggled side by side.

It is a strange thing about a journalist’s career, when it is successful, that at the first it seems so hard to get the work to do, and then later so hard to do the work that comes. In those early days every new opening was only won after a struggle, yet within a very few years I found myself almost overwhelmed by the tasks that were laid upon me.

From the Globe I passed to the Pall Mall Gazette, where I succeeded Professor Colvin as its Art Critic; from the Pall Mall to the Saturday Review and the Examiner; and then a little later I joined the staff of the World, which had recently been founded by Edmund Yates.

These different changes of occupation brought many new friends and many new editors, but of all those under whom I have served I think I should signalise Mr. Frederic Greenwood as by far the most inspiring to his contributors. Not that to be numbered among Mr. Greenwood’s contributors always implied a peaceful career; he was an autocratic commander, whose powerful personality loved to assert itself in every department of his paper, and he and I in those days had sharp encounters with regard to that particular arena of art criticism over which I thought I was entitled to exercise independent control.