younger Huxley; yet Huxley lives in the history of science, and I am not sure that Chalmers Mitchell has done anything which entitles him to immortality; but he certainly was one of the most notable contributors to the Saturday Review in my time, besides being of a charming, pleasant nature with the critical habit very strongly developed. Chalmers Mitchell was above middle height with spare, well-kept body and fine expressive face-a notable personality.
A little later I got Cunninghame Graham. I have left him to the last because I have always thought of him as an amateur of genius. He was picturesquely handsome and always well dressed. I came to believe that his physical advantages and his wealth alone prevented him from being one of the great writers. He has written one or two of the best short stories in English, notably Un Monsieur; and surely his travel sketches in the Argentine and elsewhere are among the best extant.
The next thing to do was to outline the policy. The Saturday Review had been called the Saturday Reviler and was evilly notorious as the most poisonous critic of all lost and all new causes. I told my contributors from the beginning that I wanted to change this character radically. I wanted the Saturday Review to become known as the finder of stars and not the finder of faults; and at once I refused to give pride and place to merely fault-finding articles, though these too are necessary when dealing with be-puffed mediocrities.
One instance will do as well as fifty. One day I picked up a new book by a new author. Almayer's Folly, by Joseph Conrad. I had not seen the name before, but a glance at the first page told me that the man was a writer. At about the same time a Mr. Low came in (a brother of Sydney Low), a very able writer. I threw him the book and said: 'There seems to be good stuff in that.'
He took it with him and in a few days sent me a murderous review. I got another copy of the book and read it. After reading it, I sent the review back to Low, saying it was altogether wrong: Joseph Conrad was a good writer and as a newcomer should be praised and not condemned, standing, as he did, high above the ordinary!
Then I sent the book to H. G. Wells.
After a week or two Wells blew in boisterously. 'What a book,' he cried, throwing it down on the table. 'Thanks very much for sending it to me. That sort of stuff makes one's task as a reviewer pleasant, but I am afraid you will think my review far too long and far too eulogistic. I have written pages about Conrad, not columns, and I have praised him to the skies. Will you stand it?'
'First-rate,' I cried, 'just what I had hoped from you. I sent the book to a man who crabbed it. After all, a great reviewer should be a star-finder and not a fault-finder.'
For some reason or other, I never met Conrad until the autumn of 1910, fifteen years later. Talking one day with Austin Harrison of the English Review, Conrad's name came up and I asked: 'How does he look? What age is he?
Has he any foreign accent? Is he a great personality?' — a stream of questions.
Harrison declared that Conrad knew me, always spoke warmly of me, and ended by proposing that we should motor down to his cottage in Kent.
We did so the very next Sunday.
Conrad met us most cordially, was eager to record that the review in the Saturday Review had given him reputation. I had thought from his photograph that his forehead was high and domed, but it was rather low and sloped back quickly. He was a little above middle height and appeared more the student than a sea-captain. Both he and his wife were homely, hospitable folk, without a trace of affectation. But Harrison's presence prevented any intimacy of talk, and the nearest I got to Conrad was when I asked him for a recent book, The Mirror of the Sea. He stipulated that I should send him my latest in exchange, and under the dedication to me he wrote the first and last verses of Baudelaire's magnificent poem comparing man to the sea. He repeated the last line:
O lutteurs eternels, o freres implacables, with a note of bitter sadness I thought characteristic. His French, I noticed, was impeccable.
Since then I have read most of Conrad's books, but I have never rated him at all as highly as Wells did.
What a crew of talent to get together on one paper before they were at all appreciated elsewhere. Wells and Shaw, Chalmers Mitchell, D. S. McColl, and Cunninghame Graham. I think the best staff ever seen on any weekly paper in the world; and that on a paper which was practically bankrupt when I took it over; and yet all these men remained with me for the three or four years of my editorship.
Wells impressed me as about the best mind that I had met in my many years in England: a handsome body and fine head. I had hoped extraordinary things from him, but the Great War seems to have shaken Mm, and his latest attempt to write a natural history of the earth chilled me. A history of humanity to the present time in which Shakespeare is not mentioned and Jesus is dismissed in a page carelessly, if not with contempt, shocks me. Yet as Browning said, Thus we half-men struggle.
I can hardly mention Wells at this time without speaking of Bernard Shaw: I had known Shaw before I took over the Fortnightly. I had heard him speak in the East End and had thought his communism shallow, for it left out individualism, which is at least as important a force. But after getting him to work for me as dramatic critic on the Saturday, I met him almost every week.
I saw at once that he had a good mind: one of the best of his time indeed; but somehow or other his extremely slight body and his vegetarianism became to me typical of the man.
His plays, too, are all full of Shaw. In one play Shaw assumes a dozen different names; but the characters are all Shaw. His is an acute intelligence, delighting in reasoning and argument, but never going deep, seldom indeed reaching creation of any value. When I think of Bernard Shaw, I am always reminded of Vauvenargues' fine word: 'All great thoughts come from the heart.' All Shaw's thoughts come from the head.
The other day I was amused by a criticism of Shaw by a Mr. James Agate who is, I believe, the dramatic critic of the Sunday Times. He lays it down that Mr.
Shaw is not able to create a human being. 'All the Shavian creations,' he says 'are like Martians or Selenites or other fantastic creatures with enormous brains and no bodies and consequently no appetites.' Yet he goes on to assert that 'There more fundamental brains in any single play of Shaw's than in the whole of Shakespeare's output.' To me this is worse than fantastic silliness.
But I remember that Shaw, many years ago, told me, and he has written it somewhere, that it humiliated him to compare his brains with Shakespeare's;
I told him roundly I could give him a dozen instances where Shakespeare has used more brains in two or three lines than is to be found in all Shaw's work.
He challenged me for an instance, and I gave him one: Shakespeare's Cleopatra is with Antony in Egypt, and Antony goes to meet Caesar.
Cleopatra feels instinctively that no one can fight Caesar successfully; dreading Caesar's power, she fled from Actium; but at the end of the day Antony returns in triumph and says that he has beaten Caesar to his camp; he cries to her … leap thou, attire and all, Through proof of harness to my heart, and there Ride on the pants triumphing! leap thou, attire and all, And her reply is Lord of Lords!
O infinite virtue, comest thou smiling from The world's great snare uncaught?
She knows that in spite of her beauty and cleverness and her position as queen, she has been caught in the world's great snare: she knows that it would require 'infinite virtue' to be successful-and all this realization of life is packed into a couple of lines. Shaw would not admit the extraordinary virtue of the passage.
Nothing to me is clearer than the fact that the highest mental effort is the creative intelligence; the greatest minds in the world are those that have created new world-figures:
Forms more real than living Man,
Nurslings of Immortality.
Shakespeare has given us Hamlet arid Cleopatra, and better still Falstaff;
Goethe, Mephistopheles, and better still, Gretchen; Cervantes, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; and Turgenev, Bazarof. No one ranks with these few creators of ever-living generic figures.
Yet it is unfair to say that Shaw has not created any character: he has given himself in twenty characters as a sharp witted man who sees things chiefly from the ludicrous side because he is not greatly gifted with body or heart.
Someone has said that 'to the heart, life is a tragedy; and to the mind, it is a comedy.' Shaw sees it usually as a comedy, but his Cleopatra exists for me, and the characters in Candida are something more than reproductions of his own personality; but to compare his mental faculties with the great ones is simply silly. He has done nothing comparable to Swift's best work, to say nothing of Shakespeare's.
