After Meredith had come to my aid on the Review, everything went on merrily for a long time. I thought more of Meredith than a dozen Jameses.
Five or six years later London, and Paris, too, were shocked by bombs thrown in Paris by Henri and Ravachol. I published in the Fortnightly Review a personal article on both men, from a friend, praising Henri as one of the sweetest and noblest of human beings. Chapman told me that he was shocked, and I became aware about the same time that Oswald Crawfurd, who had been in the English Embassy at Lisbon, and had now returned and become a great man, was intriguing against me. But I had doubled the circulation of the Review, and Walter and others admitted that I was editing it very ably; consequently, I had no fear of my position.
Chapman had become a little difficult to work with. He was naturally a conservative businessman of the old- fashioned English type. He hated poetry and thought it should be paid for at the ordinary rates. When he found that I was giving my salary in payment to his contributors, I fell in his esteem. To give Swinburne fifty pounds for a poem seemed to him monstrous; and when I bought certain articles dearly, he wouldn't have them at any price. And if he disliked art and literature, he hated the social movement of the time with a hatred peculiarly English; he looked upon a socialist as a sort of low thief, and pictured a communist as one who had his hand always in his neighbor's pocket. My defense of Henri and Ravachol shocked him to the soul. And without Chapman's sympathy, I couldn't make of the Review what I wanted to make of it. Chapman wouldn't have Davidson's Ballad of a Nun; he cut it out of the number when he saw it in proof, though it was paid for; and Bernard Shaw was anathema to him. Gradually, as I grew, my position as editor of the Fortnightly became less pleasant to me. I was like a boy whose growth was being hindered by too narrow garments.
One day Chapman wanted to know why I had never asked for the ten per cent arrears of profits that had accumulated for five or six years or more. I told him I did not care anything about the money; he told me the directors thought there should be a settlement and asked me what I would take? I said,
'If it is to get rid of me, you must pay me in full. If you are satisfied with me, give me anything you like, I do not care. I am not doing the Fortnightly Review for the money.' Accordingly, he offered me, I think, about one-third of what I was entitled to, some five hundred pounds, telling me that he had no intention of getting rid of me. I accepted his offer, gave him a full quittance, and two months later the directors gave me notice: at the end of six months they would get another editor. I was shocked! I soon found out that Crawfurd expected to be made editor. I met him one day in the office and told him point blank that if he were appointed editor, I would expose the whole intrigue, and would show how I had been cheated of a thousand pounds. 'I do not care who succeeds me in the editorship,' I said, 'but you shall not profit by the traitorism,' and I told Chapman the same thing.
I had never had such a blow in my life. I had never lost a position before that I cared to keep, and at first I was overwhelmed at the idea of being supplanted on the Fortnightly. I went up the river to Maidenhead for a sort of holiday that summer but could not take my thoughts off my humiliation. I had sleepless nights and days of misery and regret. I was really making myself ill and had come to the brink of a nervous breakdown when Willie Grenfell, now Lord Desborough, without knowing of my trouble, took pity on me and began giving me lessons in punting. His companionship and kindness lifted me out of the slough of despond and postponed the evil day.
This was the occasion of my first meeting with Stead, the famous editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. He had recently founded the Review of Reviews. He asked me to call on him and wanted to know the reason of my leaving the Fortnightly. I told him the facts on his promising to say nothing special about Oswald Crawfurd, who had practically dispossessed me. He promised, and two or three days afterwards sent me an article detailing everything I had said and more. I refused to allow it to appear, and he finally inserted a colorless statement.
Stead was an extraordinary specimen of the lower middle-class type of Englishman-without classical education, without any understanding of any other language or people, save his own. He had a great energy, however, and a very complete realization of all the forces in England, particularly the forces of religious prudishness and nonconformity. In the Pall Mall Gazette he got up a crusade against the lust of what he called 'The Modern Babylon,' and by silly exaggeration managed to get himself into prison for six or eight weeks. He fell foul, too, of Sir Charles Dilke; declared that any one who was unfaithful to his wife was not fit to be in the House of Commons. Of course, I took up arms against him on this point and asserted that Dilke was one of the ablest of our politicians. I wanted to know why Stead would deprive England of his undoubted public services in order to drive him into private life, where he had failed quite lamentably. But Stead stuck to his cursing and got all the powers of nonconformity on his side in order to hound Dilke out of public life.
One incident is so illustrative of English public life and of the effect of ignorant democratic opinion upon even the most eminent statesman, that I must tell it here. Dilke came to see me one day and told me that in the beginning of the row over the divorce suit, he had written to Gladstone, putting himself absolutely in his hands: 'If you think it would be good for the Party,' he wrote, 'I'll give up Parliament and political life altogether; tell me your real wishes and I assure you now, I will honor them.'
'Gladstone,' he said, 'wrote me in reply a most charming letter, saying that he would be very sorry to lose my great ability and that he didn't think, as a leader of the Party, he had any right to play censor of morals. 'At all times,' he added, I am proud of your support.' '
A little later Stead got a crowd of women to go to Gladstone and petition him to get rid of Dilke. Thereupon the Great Old Man wrote to Dilke, asking him to return his letter, and Dilke told me that he was going to return it.
'If you do,' I said, 'you will be slung overboard; please say that you value it so much that you couldn't possibly return it, but send him a copy of it.'
Gladstone's next reply to the wild women was astonishingly characteristic.
I have lost my notes of it, but I remember high platitudes and his significant refusal to take any action against a colleague; but if Gladstone had had his letter back, I think the G. O. M. would have thrown Dilke to the wolves.
In my mind, I have always compared Stead in England with Bryan in America, and I was rather relieved when he went down in some shipwreck and we were rid of him-just as I was glad that Bryan died during the Dayton trial, a disgrace to American civilization.
There is one bright spot in my memory of Stead: I was talking once to Mrs. Frankau about him, who was one of the wittiest women in London, and one of the most charming. She told me, laughingly, how she had made up to Stead and encouraged him, till one day he fell on his knees before her and put his arms round her, and she said to herself: 'At last!' — when he suddenly told her that he was going to pray that she might always be faithful to her husband. I laughed till I cried at the unexpected foolish appeal.
Stead was regarded in English journalism as a great power for good, though in reality he was an influence from the dark, backward of time and shortsighted in his jingoism, as will appear when I come to the Jameson raid and his persistent defence of Rhodes.
But now I was all at a loose end and suffering for the first time in my life with nerves. I often sat in the corner and cried. I was unable to control myself, could not get better, and was very near an absolute breakdown. And the fatal day when I should be out of work was coming nearer and nearer. Sometimes I began to feel that I should go out of my mind. Neither the exercise in the open air with Willie Grenfell, nor the regular quiet life did me any good. At last, almost in despair, I left Maidenhead and returned to London.
A trifling incident here may be of some value to neuropaths. I had been working hard all the time and late one night had to go home by train. I drove to Waterloo; the porter opened the door to me and I got into the usual carriage. I hadn't asked him whether it was my train or not, but I wanted to ask him, and suddenly found that I couldn't remember my station-blank fear came upon me and the dreadful apprehension washed out all memory. I couldn't even recall my own name: for one moment I was falling into the abyss of despair-without memory life would be impossible!
I resolved to sleep and settled down in my corner. Just as the train started a man jumped in. 'Is this the Richmond train?' he asked. 'I was told it was; but I am uncertain.'
'Ask the porter,' I barked, 'and leave me alone.'
'Good God!' he cried, and at the next station left the train, evidently thinking he was in the carriage with a madman. This amusement gave me sleep, I think, for I woke up three stations beyond mine; at Richmond I got out and found a cab and told the driver to drive me back to Putney and ring the bell and deposit me at my door, and I would pay him double. I curled up in the corner of the cab and fell asleep again, and when I reached my home I was in my right senses with my memory back again; but the fear has always been with me since. Sleep is the best nerve sedative.
