profits. I told Chapman I should double the circulation in the first year, and practically did it, but I took nothing out of the Fortnightly Review. I used to spend all my salary in paying the contributors more highly, especially the contributors of poetry. It had been customary to pay not more than two pounds a page for any poem, but I gave Matthew Arnold, and Swinburne, too, twenty-five pounds a page, which came out of my salary.
As editor of the Fortnightly, I found it very easy at first to get on with Frederic Chapman, but his directors were for the most part stupid, brainless business men. I remember when I wrote my first stories, Mantes the Matador and The Modern Idyll; I brought them to Chapman and asked him to read them. He read them and said they were all right, but when I published The Modern Idyll in the Review, there was a huge to-do in the press. The Spectator condemned the story, passionately. I thought it was Hutton, the chief owner, with his high church prejudices, that had condemned it, but when I went and called upon him, I found it was his partner, Townsend, an utter atheist, who had played critic. He told me he thought the story terrible.
A nonconformist dignitary, the Reverend Newman Hall, I think, wrote, condemning the story root and branch and making a great fuss about it. The end of it was that the directors of the Fortnightly Review met together and asked me not to insert any more of my stories in the Review. At once I tore up my agreement with them and told them to find another editor as soon as they could.
At the same time Frederic Chapman told Meredith, who was then the reader of novels for Chapman and Hall, of the way the directors had condemned me, and Meredith came up to London to protest. I met him for the first time in Chapman's office-to me a most memorable experience. He was one of the handsomest men I have ever seen, a little above middle height, spare and nervous; a splendid head, all framed in silver hair; but perhaps because he was very deaf himself, he used to speak very loudly. 'We mustn't allow these directors to stand in our light,' he cried. 'I will talk to them and tell them they have never had as good a story in the Fortnightly Review as Mantes.' And he did talk to them to some purpose, for they withdrew their condemnation of my stories and begged me to reconsider my resignation, which I did.
A few months after I had taken over the Review I had a dispute with Henry James, which may be worth recording here. Between 1890 and 1905 I used to meet him in London from time to time. I think it was Lady Brooke of Sarawak who first introduced me to him at a garden party. The Ranee was one of his most devoted admirers; she had a peculiar sense of certain literary values, or perhaps I should say, of certain men of letters. To me James was only a name; I had read none of his works, except some essays or travel-sketches in France, which were mildly interesting to me by virtue of the subject, though commonplace enough in treatment. The book reminded me of a couple of Tauchnitz volumes of sketches in Italy by W. Dean Howells, and ever afterwards I coupled the two men in my mind as absolutely negligible.
I do not attempt to put forth this summary judgment as fair criticism or even as a considered opinion; I give it merely as an instance of my off-hand rejection of any values in literature that did not strike me as of the highest.
Henry James almost immediately confirmed my somewhat contemptuous opinion of his intelligence by praising my predecessor on the Fortnightly Review excessively.
'It must have been a privilege,' he said, 'to follow such an editor. I regard Mr.
Morley and Leslie Stephen as about the first men of letters in England. You agree with me, don't you?'
'Indeed I don't,' I cried. 'What! With Browning, Swinburne, Tennyson and Arnold living, to say nothing of Meredith?'
'Of course,' he broke in, 'these poets come first; but I meant to speak of prose writers; men whom the French would call 'men of letters.' '
'It's ridiculous,' I persisted, 'even to mention such men as Morley and Stephen in the front rank; they are nothing but academic mediocrities; neither of them has ever written a word that can live.'
'I'm afraid I cannot agree with you,' he rejoined, with courteous distaste.
'Only creative artists are in the front class,' I insisted; 'Morley and Stephen are only hodmen and incapable of conception.'
After this James appeared to avoid me and I had no desire to push the acquaintance. Neither his appearance nor personality attracted me: he was above middle height and inclined to stoutness; a heavy face, the outlines obscured by fat; the eyes medium-sized windows, rather observant, perhaps, than reflective; the voice colorless, conventional; manners also conventional.
James was always well-dressed, too, in a conventional way. I remember thinking afterwards with some insolence that his well-formed, prominent, rather Jewish-looking nose was the true index of his character. The rudder of the face, I always call the nose; and in James's make-up there was manifestly more steering-power of control than motive power of passion or enthusiasm; not a man to interest me in any degree.
James's so-called obscurity was never an offence to me; indeed, this charge against an author is invariably a spur. After forcing myself once to read and understand Kant, I profess to be able to find a meaning in any book where there is a meaning to be found, and so I set myself to unravel several of James's obscurities. The knots were soon loosed, but alas! I had nothing for my pains. 'Much ado about nothing,' I said to myself, and tossed the book aside, never again to be re-opened.
The admirers of James, too, I soon discovered, were all people of no importance as judges of literature; would-be geniuses, for the most part, or society women. Consequently, he was soon definitely classed in my estimation-another Howells without a trace of talent, devoted to the painting of commonplace Americans with painstaking industry. But I was fated to be disturbed in this comfortable belief.
One day Max Beerbohm lunched with us and afterwards we went for a walk in Richmond Park. Of a sudden he mentioned a book of Henry James and asked me had I read it.
'Thank God,' I replied, 'I have always something better to do than waste my time on James.'
'You're mistaken, I think,' said Max. 'He's interesting to me, gets effects through those elaborate sentences that you could hardly get otherwise.'
'You don't mean there is any real worth in him,' I exclaimed. 'I can't believe it; but if you say so, I'll have another look at him. What books of his do you like especially?'
Max mentioned two; I've forgotten what they were; even his praise could not overcome my settled distaste and repugnance. Nevertheless, his opinion remained with me and I record it willingly, though it could never alter my feeling that the man who admires the hodmen cannot be among the masters.
One day someone sent me a thin book of James's, begging me to read it and to give some account of what he thought a master-work. Mindful of Max's appreciation, I sat down and swallowed the draught. It was a story of two children, a little boy and girl, who had been corrupted, if I remember aright, by some teacher or governess. They were a foul pair, carefully presented: lifelike, but not alive, a study in child viciousness-worse than worthless, because not even natural. I never read another line of Henry James.
But one evening I met him, sat opposite to him, indeed, at some big public dinner. After the first greeting I paid no attention to him and talked chiefly to a man at my side, who showed some liking for letters. I don't know how it came about, but the talk fell on Sainte-Beuve. My acquaintance took him for granted as a great critic.
'Not a critic of any value,' I declared, 'a more over-rated man it would be difficult to find.'
'How do you account for it,' asked Henry James across the table, 'that Arnold and others speak of his judgments with such respect. Who would you put above him as a critic?'
'All the creators,' I replied, 'but of course Goethe and Balzac, the only critics I take any interest in.'
'I never heard Sainte-Beuve run down before,' retorted James; 'the French writers all admire him.'
'I beg your pardon,' I replied. 'Balzac called him 'Sainte-Beuve le petit,' and as the 'petty Sainte-Beuve' he's destined to be known. The honor of a critic is to pick out the great men among his contemporaries and help them to recognition and to fame. What did Sainte-Beuve do? He denied genius to Victor Hugo and told Balzac that the flood of impurities in his books turned them into sewers; of La Cousine Bette, he said, 'Those infamous Marneffes infect the whole work with mephitic odors.' Flaubert he compared with Eugene Sue and declared that it was a pity he could not write as well as George Sand! The Goncourts, too, and Theophile Gautier and Baudelaire he always disfavored and depreciated. All the great ones of his day came under his ban. The truth is, he was a small man and could only judge fairly those smaller than himself; no one can see above his own head.'
'That's your judgment,' exclaimed James rather rudely.
'Mine today,' I shot back, 'but everyone's tomorrow. Truth makes converts.'
In this year, 1926, Sainte-Beuve's posthumous work, Mes Poisons, has appeared, fifty years after his death, and even his French admirers have been shocked by his venomous misjudgings.
