The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II

by William James Stillman

RETURN TO JOURNALISM

Miss Spartali and I were married in the Spring of 1871, and in justice to her I came to the hazardous decision to make my home in England, and there to devote myself to general literature and correspondence with America. As my financial condition at that moment, thanks to the various contributions to it, was better than it had ever been before, I had the courage needed to face the great change in my life. I brought with me from Lowell a letter to Leslie Stephen, whose friendship has ever since been one of the pleasantest things in my English life. Mrs. Stephen, the elder daughter of Thackeray, was to us an angel of goodness, and never since has the grateful recognition of her loving hospitality in thought and deed diminished in my mind. Our debt to her was a debt of the heart, and those are never paid. Her sister, later Mrs. Ritchie, added much to the obligations of our early life in London, and still remains our friend. Mr. Stephen gave me an introduction to the "Pall Mall Gazette," then under the charge of Greenwood, and I contributed in incidental ways to its columns; and with contributions to "Scribner's" and other magazines it seemed that we might forgather, and we decided to bring the children out.

An article on the Cretan insurrection, printed while I was still in the island, had led the way to an acquaintance with Froude, in whose magazine it appeared, and I had been put on the staff of the "Daily News," which had printed a contribution on the Greek question as a leading article; so that, on the whole, the venture did not seem too rash for a man who never looked far ahead for good fortune. My friendship with Froude lasted as long as he lived. He was a warm and sincere friend, always ready with word or deed to help one who needed it, and one of the men for whom I retain the warmest feeling of all I knew at this epoch of my life. In New York I had made an arrangement with Dr. Holland to hold the literary agency for "The Century" (then "Scribner's") for England, and on returning to London we took a small furnished house at Notting Hill Way, where our daughter Effie was born. In the following spring we moved out to Clapham Common, to be near the parents of my wife, and in the comparative quiet of that then delightful neighborhood we gave our experiment full scope. The life as a literary life was ideal, but as a practical thing it failed. Here I had the pleasure of extending hospitality to Emerson on his way to Egypt, and Lowell on the way to Madrid. To make the acquaintance of Lowell we had Professor and Mrs. Max Müller to meet him at dinner, and Tom Taylor was of the company, he living as a near neighbor.

But Russie's condition was a shadow over my life, growing deeper every day. Though he had been discharged from Boston as incurable, we put him under the care of one of the best of English surgeons, and one of the kindest-hearted men I have ever known, the late Mr. John Marshall, one of the warm and constant friends I had made through my relations with Rossetti, of whom Marshall was a strong admirer. Though his charges were modified to fit our estate, they aggregated, with all his moderation, to a sum which I could ill support; but to save, or even prolong Russie's life, I would have made any sacrifice. He was then not far from nine, and, though crippled by his disease, with his once beautiful face haggard with pain and no longer recognizable by those who had known him in his infancy, he was to me still the same,—a dear and loving child, the companion of my fortunes at their worst; and his devotion to me was the chief thing of his life. I had carried him in my arms at every change of vehicle in all the journeys from Athens to Boston and from Boston to London again, and to him I was all the world; to me he was like a nursling to its mother, the first thought of every day, an ever-present care, and his long struggle with death was an inseparable sadness in my existence. I remarked to Lowell one day that I feared he would die, and Lowell replied, "I should be afraid he would not die." The seeming cruelty of the expression struck me like a sentence of death, and momentarily chilled my feeling towards Lowell; but the incident made me understand some things in life as I could not have otherwise understood them, enabling me to take a larger view of our individual sorrows. There is no doubt that to Russie's sufferings and death I owe a large part of my experience of the spiritual life, and especially a comprehension of the secret of the mother's heart, so rarely understood by one of the other sex.

But my unfailing facility for getting into hot water was not to find an exception in London. As agent for "Scribner's" I had to secure contributions from English authors, not so easy then as now. Amongst other items I was instructed to secure a story from a certain author, and I contracted with her for the proof sheets of her next novel, about to be published in England in the—Magazine, the price to be paid for the advance proofs being £500, if I remember rightly. There was then no international copyright with America, but a courtesy right between publishers, with a general understanding amongst the trade that the works of an author once published by a house should be considered as belonging by prescription to it. On the announcement by "Scribner's" of the coming publication of this author's novel, the firm who had published her prior works announced that they would not respect the agreement with the author, but would pirate the story. As the result of the quarrel, "Scribner's" resigned the story to its rival on payment to the lady of the sum agreed on. But now appeared an utterly unsuspected state of things: the—Magazine had already sold the proof sheets of the story to a third American house, and an exposé of the situation showed that English publishers had been in the practice of selling the advance proofs of their most popular works of fiction to the American houses, and recouping the half of the price paid the authors.

On the heels of this discovery by the public, there happened one of the periodical outbreaks of English journalism against the "American" system of literary piracy, and simultaneously the visit of a committee of the American publishers deputed by the government of the United States to study out an arrangement for a treaty of international copyright on the basis of equality of right and privileges in both countries of the authors of both countries, but with no recognition of publishers' rights or privileges. The English government, taking advice from a committee of authors and publishers, in which the interest of the publishers was dominant, declined the offer of the American form of treaty, insisting on the protection of publishers' rights, and the negotiations fell through, with great increase of the outcry in the English press. Being in communication with Mr. William H. Appleton, the head of the American committee, and in possession of the facts of the case as regarded the courtesy right, I wrote to the English papers, putting the American view of the matter, and the facts, dwelling on the hitherto unknown point that the depredations on the authors' interests were committed by the English publisher, who sold to the American the wares the latter was accused of stealing, whereas the fact was that he bought and paid equally for the right of publication, while the English publisher continued to reprint American books without the least regard for analogous transatlantic rights.

The consequences to me were variously disastrous. In the first place I was deluged with applications from authors of still unestablished transatlantic reputation to secure for them offers from "Scribner's" for the advance sheets of their books. In the second I was treated to a torrent of abuse as "the friend of piracy" ("Daily News" leading article), and for some days not a single London paper would print a word of reply or explanation from me. The "Echo" was the first to do me the justice of printing a defense, and it was followed by the "Times," which printed my letter and one from Mr. Appleton; but of the authors who, having a transatlantic reputation, had profited by the "courtesy right," only Mr. Trollope came forward to sustain me with the statement that he had received more from the Harpers—his American publishers—than from his English publishers. The author whose novel had been the occasion of the original trouble, grateful for what I had done in her case, declared that the English authors ought to make me a testimonial (or perhaps it was a monument she suggested), but from no other source did I receive a word of thanks. And the third consequence was that the "Pall Mall Gazette" dropped me "like a hot potato." As my monthly cheques had reached the sum of ten pounds, and were slowly increasing, the inroad on my income arising from my crusade against publishing abuses was a serious item in my outlook.

As misfortunes never come alone, this was followed by my supersession, as literary agent of "Scribner's," by Mr. Gosse, who had been making a visit to New York. It was in curious coincidence with these disasters that I addressed (with a letter of introduction from Madame Bodichon, who always was the kindest of friends to me) a distinguished lady member of the staff of an evening paper, with a request to help me to get work on it, and was told distinctly that she did not favor the entry of foreigners on the staff, as English writers had too much competition amongst themselves, and "the crumbs from the table" should be reserved for them, so that while I had opened the door for English writers in my native land, to the disadvantage of myself and my compatriots, I was to be excluded from the English market as a foreigner. My old friend the editor of the "Daily News," had, during my absence in America, been appointed to the "Gazette," and the new Pharaoh "knew not Joseph." And so we decided to throw up the sponge and go back to America, though even there the new influx of English competitors (for which I was in part responsible) had made our chance less brilliant. My father-in-law offered us, if we withdrew from our decision, to settle £400 a year on my wife. With this aid we felt that we might carry through; and to her the change from English life, surrounded by old friends and an artistic atmosphere, to the strange and comparatively cruder surroundings of America, was to be avoided at any possible price, and I had no right to hesitate.

The great Exhibition of Vienna, in 1873, found the New York "Tribune" unprovided in time for its correspondence, and the European manager, my friend G.W. Smalley, proposed to me to go out for the paper. There were three months still to the opening, but the preparation of the groundwork of a continuous correspondence, on an occasion to which the American public attached much importance, was a matter of gravity, and the time was not too long. The editor had neglected the matter, owing to considerations which deluded him, and I was just in time to forestall the worst effects of a scandal which made its noise in its day. The chief commissioner, General Van Buren, had had associated with him, through influences which need not be cited, several under-commissioners who were Jews, formerly of Vienna, and of course obnoxious to the society, official and polite, of the Austrian capital, and who were exercising a most unfortunate influence on the prospects of the American exhibitors. In addition to this, they had entered into a system of trading in concessions for their personal advantage, the competition being very keen, especially in the department of American drinks, and their dealings with the competitors had excited great indignation in certain quarters. One of the disappointed applicants, whose concession had been unjustly annulled in favor of a higher bidder, came to me for advice. I at once instituted a rigorous though secret inquiry, and collected a body of evidence of corrupt practices, which I laid before the American minister, Mr. Jay, with a demand that it should be communicated to the government. Mr. Jay at first declined to take cognizance of the matter, and accused me of doing what I did with political partisan bias, Van Buren being a prominent politician. I assured him that I did not even know to which party Van Buren belonged; but, what probably moved him more was my assurance that the affair was not going to be whitewashed, that if it was not corrected quietly I was determined to make a public exposure, and that whoever tried to whitewash it would need a whitewashing himself, whereupon he decided to take, under oath, the evidence I had laid before him and send it to Washington, which he did.

The result was a cable dismissal of the entire commission and the nomination in their places of several American gentlemen who had come to Vienna to witness the opening of the Exhibition, amongst whom were two of my warmest personal friends. They immediately offered me the official position of secretary to the commission, which I declined. Having enlisted on the "Tribune," and considering myself held "for the war," I could not desert, though the inducement was very strong, for I should not only have been better paid than by the "Tribune," but should have been practically director of the Exhibition, so far as the American department was concerned. The exposure of the old commission which I sent the "Tribune" was printed reluctantly, for Van Buren was a personal friend of the editor-in-chief; but as I had taken the pains to make the substance of it common property so far as the other correspondents were concerned, it could not be suppressed.