In my portrait of Shaw I have spoken of his kindness to me at some length.
Here I wish to add that in America, too, when I asked him to write for my magazine Pearson's in New York, and begged him to tell me what I should have to pay him, he wrote me that Hearst was giving him five thousand dollars for everything he wrote, but that it was enough to know that I wanted him to write for me, to continue writing for me, for I had done him a great deal of good by giving him the pride of place on the Saturday Review.
He told a friend of mine the other day that he never felt any reverence for any one; and this amused me greatly, for it is a peculiarly Shavian trait. How could he feel reverence for any one, when the only person he really knows is Shaw; yet he is an admirable journalist, and in many ways a good and kindly man, and I enjoyed my intercourse with him on the Saturday.
How good any real power is! Some of Shaw's sayings have delighted me.
In the beginning of the war, when nearly every one had lost his head, Shaw spoke of 'the British bull dog masquerading as an angel of peace'; and later he spoke of the 'one hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent village idiot.' Village idiot! I could have kissed him for the word.
I see that the Saturday Review has published an account of its editors and contributors on its seventy-fifth birthday. On my staff it left out Wells, Chalmers Mitchell, and D. S. McColl; and had the grotesque impudence to put a little Jew named Baumann to write about me as an editor. Baumann naturally began by saying that I had begged him to write for the Saturday Review, which is not the fact. A mutual friend, Lord Grimthorpe, begged me to help the little man; and I think I took a couple of articles from him, but he was never on the staff and never was able to rise to the ordinary level.
There is no such certain test of greatness as the dislike and denigration of the mediocre!
The Saturday Review, as I remodelled it, met with a good deal of opposition at first. Officious people by the score wrote to me, condemning Bernard Shaw as an illiterate socialist, and Wells as a sort of Jules Verne. But the circulation began to lift at once, and I was very glad of it, for very soon I came to loggerheads with the Oxford University Press.
They had published some book or other, and Professor Churton Collins brought me a review of it, in which he pointed out that in this book, issued by the University Press, there were some three hundred grave errors of fact. I published his review and immediately there was a terrible to-do; the exposure was shocking. The University Press wrote to me curtly that they wished to withdraw their advertisements. They had engaged space in the Saturday Review for some three years beforehand and, of course, they paid their bill regularly at the end of each year. I wrote to the University Press that if they had had any regard for truth, they would have written thanking me and my reviewer, but as they wished to enroll themselves among the powers of darkness and ignorance, I would allow them to withdraw their advertisements, which they accordingly did.
Shortly afterwards I got a notice from Longman's, complaining of a review of a Greek book they had published. The review was written by the first authority in England, Sir Richard Jebb. Longman's wrote that it was evidently written by some ignoramus, and as the Oxford University Press had severed their connection with the Saturday Review, the house of Longman would also like to withdraw their advertisements.
I had been thunderstruck at the unconscionable impudence of the Oxford University Press, but when I got Longman's letter as well, I went to see him. I knew him through Froude's introduction, who prized him highly. I therefore called upon Charles Longman, who told me he was sure the review was written by some incapable and envious person. I had got Professor Jebb's permission to tell him that he had written it, so at length I told Longman, in confidence, the critic's name; and we parted, apparently good friends, Longman saying he would reconsider the whole thing. A week after he wrote that I had changed the whole character of the Review and he agreed with the University Press, on the whole, and would like to withdraw his advertisements.
Their example was followed by several other publishers. In every case I gave the fools the permission to withdraw their advertisements, and at the end of a month or two saw myself face to face with the revenue of the Saturday Review diminished by three or four thousand pounds a year- the small profit I had managed to create turned into a heavy loss. What was to be done?
I went into the city and saw Alfred Beit, head of the great house of South African Mines. I pointed out to him that the Saturday Review went to all the best houses in England. I asked him to give me the balance sheet and yearly report of all his companies as an advertisement and I would write a note, if not an article, on each company when he sent me the balance sheet, the advertisement to cost fifty guineas. I came out of his office with his promise and the names of fifty-odd companies, so I had made up a good part of my loss in an hour.
I went to Barnato's, saw Woolfie Joel, and got a dozen of his companies on the same terms. I then went on to J. B. Robinson and got eight of his companies. In short, in that one day's work in the city I had filled the gap in my revenue made by the withdrawals of the English publishing houses, and had increased the yearly revenue of the Saturday Review by two thousand a year. I knew I could reckon on Cecil Rhodes's help to boot.
That was the reason, I think, why the book reviews of the Saturday Review from '94 on became famous for their truth, which is so much disliked by most English and American reviews.
I mentioned the whole incident just to teach people what sort of pressure is exercised by Mr. Bumble, the publisher, on his true critic. Bumble wants praise and nothing else.
Curiously enough, a little later I had a somewhat similar experience with an insurance company. I got one of the ablest insurance critics in the world to write an article on the methods of a certain company and their balance sheet-and the company wrote, withdrawing its advertisement. I thereupon let my critic loose on all the faults of their work, and the consequence was that five or six of the best insurance companies wrote to me that they would like to advertise in the Saturday Review. For the one advertisement I lost I gained several better ones. This brought me to the conclusion that the business men of England are more honest and clear-minded than those who deal with literature and publishing.
There is something in art and literature which seems to corrupt the ordinary business mind. I think the corrupting influence lies in the extraordinary difference of values, which no ordinary man can foresee or explain. A publisher gets two books, both to his mind fairly well written and interesting; when he publishes them he finds that the worse one catches on and he sells 100,000 copies, whereas the other is a dead loss. He has given, let us say, a hundred pounds for each of them. 'A' that he liked best is the failure, and 'B' the success. A little later, he gets another book like 'B' and finds that it is a complete failure-and so he makes up his mind that the only thing he wants to pay for is eulogy; and he prays for success because he is unable to deserve or merit it, or even to know how it should be gained.
I had one other curious experience with the Saturday Review-I found that a certain number of the best class of business people would only advertise if it had a cover on. The cost of putting a good green cover on it would only be some fifty pounds a week, whereas I could get over two hundred a week for the advertisements. I immediately put the cover on and got the advertisements, thereby improving not only the looks, but the revenue of the Review.
After I had bought the Saturday Review, I went and had a talk with Ochs, and he told me he would help me and outlined the proposition he thought suitable. I should form a company with a capital of about thirty thousand pounds that would take over and own the paper, and this I did, but I put also an addendum to his proposal, constituting five hundred deferred shares that would take no profits, but would control the appointment of the editor and staff. As I held all these five hundred shares myself, I thereby gave myself complete control of the paper. When I asked Albert Ochs for the five thousand pounds that I had to pay for the Saturday Review, he gave me four thousand pounds against shares and thought I ought to find the other thousand easily.
Now, what was the financial position of the Saturday Review when I took it over? The paper was losing money, roughly fifty or sixty pounds a week. Its circulation that once had been thirty or forty thousand had shrunk year by year, till now it was only five or six thousand a week. The income from the sales was less than a hundred pounds a week, and the income from advertisements that had been a thousand pounds a week had diminished to one hundred and fifty pounds or less.
The pay, however, of contributors, had rather increased than diminished, and everyone now expected at least three pounds for writing a column or two. By paying my staff, Shaw, Wells, McColl, Runciman and Chalmers Mitchell much more than the ordinary price, I had further increased my difficulties; but at the same time I knew dozens of young Oxford men at the bar and in journalism who were willing indeed to review books for the Saturday Review for nothing, on condition of getting the books; so instead of my contributors costing me over two hundred pounds a week, I got them down to under a hundred and so turned a loss of fifty or sixty pounds into a profit of thirty or forty
