won Arthur Walter easily, for he had good brains and a good heart and only wanted the best. I have always blamed myself for my failure.
CHAPTER XII
When I lost the Evening News in 1887, I saw Arthur Walter on the matter, and soon afterwards had a talk with Frederic Chapman, of Chapman and Hall, publishers of the Fortnightly Review. Chapman had told me that Escott, the acting editor of the Fortnightly Review, had made trouble with The Times by giving them an article which he said was by Gladstone; and when they asked him for the proof, because Gladstone denied it, Escott pretended that he had never made the statement. In consequence, for some months, The Times refused to mention the Fortnightly Review. Chapman wanted to know if I were appointed editor, would this be made right; Arthur Walter assured him that it would.
I have already told how I came to know Arthur Walter of The Times; all through the years from 1885 to 1895 or '96, our intimacy continued. I used to stay with him at his country place near Finchampstead three or four times each summer, and during the winter we met at lunch or dinner once or twice every week. We often spent the evening playing chess: I used to let him win a fair proportion of the games, for success pleased him intensely. I often thought that in the same spirit Gattie, the amateur champion, used now and then to let me win, but not often, for his supremacy forbade it.
Arthur Walter was older than I was and was greatly surprised when he found I was a good Grecian: he himself had won first honors in Mods at Oxford. He tested my scholarship, I remember, in all sorts of queer ways: for example, he once cited a phrase of Thucydides, which set forth that the whole world was the grave of famous men, and he liked my simple rendering. At another time he showed me the end of a chapter of Tacitus, in which the Roman historian says, At this time, news came to Rome that fifty thousand Jews, men, women and children, had been put to death in the streets o] Syracuse. 'His comment is Vili damnum. How do you translate it?' Arthur Walter wanted to know.
'A cheap loss?'
'A good riddance,' I proposed, and he was delighted. 'The exact value,' he declared.
When Arthur Walter said that he thought me fit for any editorship, even for that of The Times, Chapman asked me to call upon him the next day and told me that I could take over the editorship of the Fortnightly Review whenever I pleased. Escort was ill at the time; he had broken down in health. I said I would take over the Review on condition that the first year's salary went to Escott, as I knew that he was not well off. This was arranged, and I was formally installed as editor of the Fortnightly Review.
Shortly afterwards Chapman told me that John Morley wished to see me, and in a minute or two brought him in. Morley had been editor of the Review for some fifteen years, was a link with the founders, Lewes and George Eliot and Herbert Spencer. In popular opinion his editorship was summed up in the fact that he had always spelled God with a small 'g.' We chatted pleasantly for a few minutes, when he said, 'You know, I feel very guilty. I have been, lately, too much of a politician and too little of an editor. In those two boxes over there,' and he pointed to two large boxes in the corner of the room, 'are the proof of my laziness. In this one,' he pointed to one of them, 'I put the articles which I didn't feel at all inclined to accept; in that other one, the articles which I could use at any time if I wished to.'
At this time Morley must have been forty-five years of age; of spare figure, some five feet ten in height; clean-shaven, with large rudder-nose, firm drawn-in lips of habitual prudent self-restraint; thoughtful, cold grey eyes, large forehead-'A bleak face,' I said to myself, seeking for some expressive word. Manifestly, I was not much to his taste. I was as frank and outspoken as he was reserved, and while he had already climbed a good way up the ladder, I thought nothing of the ladder and despised the climbing. Moreover, his gods were not my gods, and he was as unfeignedly proud of his Oxford training as I was contemptuous of all erudition.
It is very difficult, indeed, for men to measure the juniors who are taking their places. We can all see youthful shortcomings and promise is infinitely harder to estimate than performance. Perhaps we could judge them best through then: admirations that are not learned or academic and, therefore, in so far original. Morley did not give himself the trouble to see me fairly. But, then, why should he? There were long odds against my being worth knowing, and he was courteous.
I remember he showed me an article with a Greek quotation in it. 'I haven't corrected it, Mr. Harris,' he said, 'nor looked at the accents; I suppose you will do that,' courteously giving me credit for sufficient knowledge.
I said something about accents being easy to me after having learned modern Greek in Athens.
'Really,' he exclaimed, seemingly surprised, 'that must have been an interesting experience. Hasn't the pronunciation changed with the changes in language?'
'The scholars all try to pronounce in the old way,' I replied. 'Lots of professors and students today in the University of Athens plume themselves on speaking classic Greek.'
'Astonishing,' he exclaimed. 'You must tell me about it some day. Very interesting.' But the day never came, for if politics soon absorbed him, life and literature absorbed me.
I had been curious about Morley's editorship, and so I went through both boxes, returning nearly all the manuscripts to their owners and excusing myself as hardly responsible for the delay; but in the rejected box I came upon two papers which interested me. The one was by Mrs. Lynn Linton on 'The Modern Girl,' which was charmingly written. Of course I wrote to Mrs.
Lynn Linton about it, regretting the delay in dealing with it. She came to see me and we became friends at once. I ought to have known her previous work, but as a matter of fact, I didn't. She had married Linton, an engraver of real talent, and he had left her; and she developed a faculty of writing that put her in the front rank of the women of the day. She was kindly, and we remained friends for years, till I took up the habit of going abroad every winter and we gradually lost sight of each other.
The other manuscript which struck me as excellent had a curious title, 'The Rediscovery of the Unique,' signed by some one totally unknown to me-H.
G. Wells! I have already told about it in a portrait of Wells, and have told, too, of our later connection, when I got him to review stories for me on the Saturday Review.
Morley, by his rise to place and power as a politician, enables us to judge how much higher the standard of intellect is in literature than in politics. For Morley was in the first flight of politicians: Secretary for Ireland and afterwards for India, always a considerable figure, though he entered the arena late in life and without the wealth needed for supreme success. In literature, on the other hand, Morley never played a distinguished part. He could not even shine with reflected lustre. In vain he wrote the lives of Cobden and of Gladstone with all the advantages of intimate first-hand knowledge and all the assistance gladly proffered by the family and by distinguished contemporaries. His work remains fruitless, academic, jejune, divorced from life, unillumined by genius, unconsecrated by art. A bleak face and a bleak mind!
The truth is, the politician, like the banker or barrister, has only to surpass his living competitors, the best in the day and hour, in order to win supremacy.
We cannot compare the Gladstones closely with the Cannings, any more than we can compare the Washingtons with the Lincolns. Men of letters and artists, however, fall into a far higher and more severe competition. Shaw writes a play, Kipling a short story: they easily outstrip most of their contemporaries; but Shaw's best play is at once compared with the best of Moliere or Shakespeare or Ibsen, and Kipling has to stand comparison with the best of Turgenev or Maupassant, the greatest, not of a generation, but of all time.
Exposed to this higher test as man of letters, Morley failed utterly, in spite of his success as a politician.
Yet it is understood that his life had noble elements in it. His character was much finer than his mind, and he was trusted and esteemed by his political associates in singular measure, in spite of a certain doctrinaire strain of pedantry and outspokenness. Had it not been for his learning, of which they stood in awe, his fellow ministers would probably have called him 'Honest John.'
When I took over the Fortnightly Review, Chapman and Hall were to pay me five hundred pounds a year for editing it and ten per cent of the net profits. If I doubled the circulation, I was to get fifteen per cent of the net
