“Extract from the Recess Diary of Toby, M. P.
“Been reading ‘Fifty Years of Fleet Street’ just issued by Macmillan. Purports to be the ‘Life and Recollections of Sir John Robinson,’ the man who made, and for a quarter of a century maintained at high level, the Daily News. The story is written by Mr. F. M. Thomas, who has added a new terror to death. There are biographies of sorts ranging in value with the personality of the subject and the skill of the compiler. The former occasionally suffers from the incapacity of the latter. But at least his individuality is scrupulously observed. Like Don José, what he has said he has said, his observations and written memoranda not being mixed up with what his biographer thinks he himself thought, uttered, and recorded. Mr. Thomas goes about the biographer’s business in fresh fashion, complacently announced by way of introduction to the volume. ‘I have not thought it necessary or desirable,’ he writes, ‘to indicate in all cases what is his (Sir John Robinson’s) and what is my own. If there is anything amusing or entertaining in these pages, I am quite content that my dear old chief should have the credit of it. The dulness I take upon myself.’ Here be generosity! Here magnanimity! It is true that in the performance of his task Mr. Thomas occasionally falls from this high estate. More than once he airily alludes to ‘our diary’ and ‘our notes,’ as if he had prepared them in collaboration with his chief. Possibly conscious for a moment of this indiscretion, and reverting to more generous mood, he, approaching a particular narrative, introduces it with the remark, ‘the incident may be given in the diarist’s own words.’ The procedure is perhaps not unusual with earlier biographers. With Mr. Thomas the relapse is rare. When he does let the hapless subject speak for himself, he is relegated to small type. For the rest, it is Mr. Thomas who loquitur, retelling poor Robinson’s cherished stories as if they were his own, sometimes with heavy hand brushing off the bloom. Even in these depressing circumstances there is no mistaking Robinson’s sly humour, his gift of graphic characterization. The worst of it is that, happening in the very same page upon some banal remark, some pompous platitude, the alarmed reader, recognizing Mr. Thomas, hastily turns over half-a-dozen pages, and possibly misses a handful of the genuine ore. These are hard lines, unjust to Robinson, unfair to the public. It is plain to see, from the few unmutilated extracts from Robinson’s manuscript which illuminate the book, that the materials at hand for a delightful biography were abundant. For nearly forty years the manager of the Daily News lived in the very heart of things. He was behind most scenes of public life, was more or less intimately acquainted with the principal personages figuring in it. His sympathies were bountifully wide, his observation alert, his sense of humour keen. He loved his newspaper work with almost passionate affection. For him fifty years of Fleet Street were worth a cycle of Cathay. That he habitually made notes of what he saw and heard with the view to publication in biographical form is undoubted. Mr. Thomas, impregnable in the chain armour of complacency, positively admits it. ‘Robinson,’ he says, ‘did leave some diaries—our diaries—more or less fragmentary, and a number of thick, closely-written volumes of jottings in his own handwriting, descriptive of events of which he had been an eyewitness and people he had seen and known.’ Where is this treasure trove? Presumably portions the biographer was good enough to regard as worth adapting are filtered through the wordy pages of larger type. Happily the material is so good, its original literary form so excellent, that even this unparalleled atrocity cannot quite spoil the book. We who knew Robinson on his throne in Bouverie Street and at the well-known table in the dining-room of the Reform Club, rich in recollections of William Black, Payn, and Sala; who watched him enjoying himself like a boy at theatre first nights; who recognized his rare capacity as a newspaper man; who knew the kind heart hidden behind a studiously cultured severity of manner in business relations—we, perhaps jealously, cherish his memory, and regret the surprising chance that has made possible this slight upon it.”
The defence admitted that the defendant Lucy wrote, and that the other defendants published, the words complained of, and pleaded that the words were incapable of a defamatory meaning; and further, that they were written for publication and were published as a criticism and fair comment upon the plaintiff’s book without any malice towards the plaintiff, and were a fair and bona fide criticism and comment upon the book which was a matter of public interest.
At the trial the plaintiff’s case was, first, that the language of the review itself was such as to furnish evidence that the writer was not in truth criticising the book, but was maliciously attacking the author; and, secondly, that there was evidence outside the review that the defendant Lucy, in writing the criticism, was actuated by malice towards the plaintiff. As extrinsic evidence of malice the plaintiff relied upon the strained relations between Lucy and himself before the criticism was published; on the fact that the criticism was published as a separate article under the heading “Mangled Remains,” and was not included in that part of the journal usually devoted to reviews of books under the heading “Our Booking Office”; and on the answers and demeanor of Lucy in the witness-box at the trial. At the close of the plaintiff’s case counsel for the defendants submitted that there was no case to go to the jury, upon the grounds that the article was incapable of a defamatory meaning, and that there was no evidence that it exceeded the limits of fair comment.
The learned judge declined to withdraw the case from the jury, who found a verdict for the plaintiff with 300l. damages.
The defendants appealed.[[519]]
Cur. adv. vult.
June 25. Collins, M. R., read the following judgment: This is an appeal by the defendants from the verdict and judgment for the plaintiff in an action of libel, tried before Darling, J., and a special jury, based on a critique of a book written by the plaintiff. The critique was written by the defendant Lucy, and appeared in Punch, of which the first defendants are the publishers. The defence was fair comment. The learned judge refused to withdraw the case from the jury, who found for the plaintiff, with 300l. damages. The defendants do not complain of misdirection other than that involved in holding that there was any evidence fit for the consideration of a jury. They ask for judgment on the ground that there was nothing in the article which any reasonable jury could find to fall outside the limits of fair comment, or in the alternative they ask for a new trial on the ground that the verdict was against the weight of evidence.
The defendants pressed us strongly with the case of McQuire v. Western Morning News Co., [1903] 2 K. B. 100, a decision of this court in an action for libel in respect of an article criticising adversely a play of which the plaintiff was the author, where the court set aside a verdict and judgment for the plaintiff on the ground that there was no evidence on which a rational verdict for the plaintiff could be founded. There were, however, two distinctions between that case and the present. There was admittedly in that case no evidence of actual malice unless it could be inferred from the terms of the article itself, and there was some reason for supposing that the direction was misleading. In the present case the plaintiff’s counsel strenuously contended that there was extrinsic evidence of malice in the proved relations of the parties before the action; the special manner in which the particular article appeared in Punch; and in the expressions which fell from the defendant Lucy, coupled with his demeanor in the witness-box, and they relied also on the terms of an apology subsequently printed as fortifying their contention. They urged besides that the language of the article itself raised a question for the jury as to its meaning, and that upon their view of its meaning would depend the question whether it exceeded the bounds of fair comment or not. The question, therefore, for our decision is whether there was any evidence upon which a rational verdict for the plaintiff could be founded. If so, the learned judge was bound to leave it to the jury. I have already said that extrinsic evidence of malice, which I have attempted to summarize, was allowed to go to the jury. The defendants contended that this evidence amounted to nothing, and that no reasonable jury could act upon it, but they also raised a contention which alone, as it seems to me, gives any importance to this case. Their point was that if the article itself, apart from the extrinsic evidence, did not raise a case for the jury that the bounds of fair comment had been overstepped, proof of actual malice on the part of the writer could not affect the question or disturb his immunity. This is a formidable contention. It involves the assertion that fair comment is absolute, not relative, and must be measured by an abstract standard; that it is a thing quite apart from the opinions and motives of its author and his personal relations towards the writer of the thing criticised. It involves the position also that an action based on a criticism is wholly outside the ordinary law of libel, of which malice, express or implied, has always been considered to be the gist.