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

by J. Comyns Carr

But those differences are long forgotten, and the remembrance that survives is of a keen and ardent intelligence that communicated its own warmth of purpose to all who served under his banner.

Very different in type was Mr. Harwood, the editor of the Saturday Review. On the quiet evenings that I sometimes passed at his house in Regent’s Park, when he would spend most of the time after dinner in playing on his violoncello, it seemed hardly possible to realise that he was the capable conductor of what was even then a mighty organ of public opinion.

I suppose that hardly any British journal has ever boasted among its contributors so many eminent men in so many varied ways of life as one could see gathered at the great annual dinner of the Review in the “Trafalgar” at Greenwich, presided over by Mr. Beresford Hope.

Mr. Harwood had succeeded Mr. Cook, and had inherited many of the traditions of the great founder of the Review. His editorial office at the time I joined him was situated in The Albany, where he was assisted as sub-editor by my old friend, Mr. Walter Herries Pollock, who afterwards succeeded to the editorial chair.

I did little of the more serious work upon the paper, my duties, as a rule, being confined to those middle articles, as they were called, which formed at that time one of its salient features. I suppose the aptitude for finding and treating such lighter subjects was not too common; at any rate, I know that my contributions of that sort always met with a generous welcome, and Mr. Harwood himself, despite his grave exterior, was sometimes singularly happy in the choice of subjects for fit treatment in this lighter vein.

A young man who has gained an entry into the journalistic world can sometimes get through a prodigious amount of work, and at the time I am speaking of it often happened that within the week, besides my morning duties upon the Globe, I would furnish one, and sometimes two, articles to the Saturday Review, an article to the Examiner, another to the World, and, in addition, three or four columns of art criticism to the Pall Mall Gazette, apart from regular work in the same department for the Manchester Guardian, and occasional articles in other daily or weekly journals.

Mr. Edmund Yates, the founder and editor of the World, had given me a generous welcome from the first, and I recall an incident in connection with a series of articles I had done for him which at the time filled me with no little pride. In this series I had dealt week by week with the more important organs of the British press, and I was fortunate enough to win for these papers a considerable amount of attention. But, for the time, Edmund Yates had carefully withheld the secret of their authorship, and one day when I was visiting my old master at Bruce Castle School the subject came into our conversation, and he told me that the report was about that they were written by a prominent leader-writer of the Times.

At this my pride could no longer contain itself, and his incredulity and astonishment when I announced myself as the author gave me a moment of the keenest pleasure.

Yates had many enemies in those days, and the new features which he had introduced into English journalism were in many quarters profoundly resented. But he was generous and warm-hearted to his friends, and beneath those lighter gifts which made for immediate success he possessed a deep, sincere love of literature. It was at his house that I first met the late Mr. Archibald Forbes, a man of rare force and grit, and possessed, as a writer, of a style of trenchant sincerity and power that in my opinion placed him easily at the head of that great race of special war-correspondents which may be said to have been founded by the late Sir William Russell. None of them all, however, could equal Sir William in social grace and readiness of wit. His store of anecdotes garnered from a rich experience of many men and many lands seemed ever inexhaustible and ever new.

Forbes was of a widely different type. His experience had been won in a harder school, but his rapid and vivid powers of expression, his ability to set forth in picturesque presentment events which had only just happened, were, I think, altogether unrivalled. When it is remembered that many of these descriptions were sent rushing over the wires at the close of a day when other men of less energy would have been exhausted after many hours spent in the saddle, and when it is observed with what potent directness of narrative, often rising to real greatness of style, the story he had to tell was presented to his readers, it will be conceded, I think, that he had no equal in the particular branch of journalistic literature to which he had devoted himself.