CHAPTER XXVIII
OLD AND NEW JOURNALISTS

What we do, are, and suffer journalistically was determined for us in the Nineties. The decade was the meeting-ground of opposing forces, and the battle between them was largely fought to a decision before the end. In 1890 the old “solid” journalism—and it was very solid indeed—decidedly enjoyed pride of place; the newer journalism was not too firmly established; the newest journalism had conquered but an insignificant portion of the weekly Press, and had gained no daily representative.

Ten years later the whole scene was changed. The old journalism was manifestly stricken to death, though it took an unconscionable time to die. The newer journalism—its most typical representative was The Star—had advanced but slightly. The newest journalism—that of Alfred Harmsworth and his imitators—was in the heyday of youthful vigour, very much alive, and perpetually kicking. It is not easy to find a parallel to a change so swift, so silent, and so complete—a change, moreover, so powerful and various in its effect, for the newest journalism, with its loud and simple Imperialism, its indifference to party ties, its lack of interest in moral or religious questions, its intense concern in wealth and the manifestations of wealth, has contributed as much as anything to the digging of that great spiritual gulf which separates us from the Victorian time.

At the beginning of the Nineties the older newspaper Press seemed to enjoy all the prestige which had been its since Gladstone made a cheap Press possible. The “great dailies” were not largely circulated, as circulations now go; they were very cheaply conducted, by all modern standards of expenditure; they had few interests, apart from politics; they do not seem, to one who turns over the yellow files, conspicuously well written. But they commanded an almost idolatrous respect. The average of British mankind took his paper not much less seriously than his passbook, and rather more seriously than his Bible. The journalist himself might still, perhaps, be rather lightly regarded; there might be men still who, like George Warrington, blushed when they confessed to making an honest living out of pen and ink.

But the same Warrington—a much more delicious snob than any in his creator’s special book on that species—could indulge in such a rhapsody on the Press as the following:

That was the feeling about the Press in Thackeray’s time, and it was still the feeling in the early Nineties; the sense of something almost superhuman in its intelligence. Thackeray, as a kind of gentleman, heartily scorned the newspaper people with whom he was thrown into professional contact, but he had a vast respect for the final result of all their efforts. To-day Thackeray, however gentlemanly, would not be ashamed to acknowledge being or knowing a leader-writer, but on the other hand he would sneer (as a fashionable thing to do) at the Press as an institution. Thirty years ago the actual Thackerayan view prevailed on both points, if a little weakened. There was still almost a sacredness attaching to serious print. Men were so anxious to respect the Press that they frowned on any tendencies to levity which might occasionally be found. A journal purporting to give news and views had gravity forced upon it. It is true that a great deal of licence was allowed to the comic and periodical Press, which was, on the whole, much less decorous than that of to-day. These publications, indeed, seemed to be tolerated rather on the old respectable principle that, since there must be wickedness, it is well to give it a definite outlet, so as to avoid the evils of general contamination. These papers were, so to speak, the journalistic filles de joie who, by the sacrifice of their own reputation, safeguarded the vestal innocence of the responsible sheets. In their pages the reader could, if his tastes lay that way, find all the spice, suggestiveness, and scandalous piquancy he wanted. In the great dailies all was propriety and dullness. They were the work of the shorthand reporter and the leader-writer. Home news meant Parliament, public meetings, and police court “intelligence.” Foreign news meant (to quote Mr. Balfour) the “dull and doubtful details of the European diary daily transmitted by ‘our special correspondent.’” Leaders, broadly speaking, meant comment on the speeches and the despatches.

The old journalism had a great tradition behind it. It was never, indeed, quite what its eulogists would have us believe. There never was a time when the feet of advertisers were not beautiful upon its staircases. There never was a time when the proprietor thought of his paper purely as a public institution. Indeed, the fact was rather that the proprietor was so much of a tradesman that he restricted himself to the commercial side of his venture. There were exceptions, of course, like some of the Walter family, who took a very living interest in policy. But as a rule the great newspaper plutocrat had little social ambition, and less interest in home or foreign politics. Such a man knew that he was a Conservative and a Churchman, or that he was a Liberal and a Nonconformist, or that he was a Secularist and a Radical, or that he was a “kind of a plaid.” But he did not greatly trouble about specific things political: he left that to his editor. He “set” a general policy, and then looked round for someone to carry it out: the someone soon showed whether he was going to be a success or a failure. If he were a failure, the proprietor had the misery of another trial; if he were a success, another name was added to the list of “great editors.” The proprietor occasionally asked him to dinner, much as Mr. Bungay asked his contributors to “cut mutton” with him; but for months together the editor dictated policy without a hint from above.

A man thus working for a mere salary—and that not exactly a princely one, for Mr. Mudford’s five thousand a year on The Standard was almost the plum of the profession—might, one would think, get into all sorts of bad courses in thus working practically without supervision. He might well become a drunkard, or a lazybones, or a venal scoundrel. In fact, every editor was a model of probity, and almost all the editors showed great energy and ability. Commonly they developed a most romantic loyalty to their papers and proprietors, and generally ended by dying of sheer exhaustion in their service. But this was not the Victorian editor’s only loyalty. Even more striking was his sense of what was due to the public. He felt in his very marrow the obligation to serve the public to the best of his ability, both as regarded information and counsel. If he thought the mass of the public was right from his political standpoint, then it must be kept intelligently right; if it was wrong, then it must be argued out of its error. But he held it as a cardinal principle that the public must not be merely bamboozled, still less misled by sheer lies, and knowingly he never published false or distorted information. His comments might be partial, but his news was honest. Such an editor never boasted himself as a person of special integrity; on the contrary he generally spoke in private with extreme cynicism, and was as far removed from priggishness as a man could well be. Yet few bishops, priests, or deacons held so firmly to professional duties and decencies.

It was part of the character of these men to be anonymous. Inside their offices they were autocrats; outside they were less than nobodies; they did not properly exist at all. Delane, ubiquitous and social-minded, was the exception. The rule was rather represented by Mudford of The Standard, who would see nobody at his office, and, when a Cabinet Minister once pursued him to his private house, called to his servant from the dining-room, “Tell Lord —— I am not at home.” Mudford’s offices in Shoe Lane were fitted up with all sorts of secret passages to enable him to enter or leave without notice, and though, by a perfect intelligence service, he knew everything that was going on, he was himself as invisible as the Mikado of old. Next to the editors, the chief personages of the “great dailies” were the leader-writers. They were often socially better known as individuals than the editor. But it was considered bad form to be aware of their professional pursuits, and nobody was supposed to notice if at a certain hour a particular man, known to write for the Press, disappeared like the ghost of Hamlet’s father when the cock crew. The old leader-writer generally belonged to the class of man who, with a little more ambition and some money or great family connection, would have gone into politics. He had usually done well at his university. He knew a good many people of the “right” sort. He belonged to a good club when it was something to belong to almost any club. He was paid well. He was, on the whole, very lightly worked, and his duties were no less pleasant than easy. Small wonder, therefore, that newspapers had a large field of selection, and that leader-writers grew grey in the service of particular papers. Almost the only survival of this interesting class now active in the Press is Sir Sidney Low, the author of The Governance of England and a number of other valuable works. The technique of daily writing probably never reached a higher perfection than with him; he had a most uncanny power of producing, as fast as his pencil (for he eschewed the pen, fountain or otherwise) could travel over paper, an article strong in common sense, coherent in argument, abounding in incidental felicities of quotation and illustration, and delightful in its easy freedom and picturesqueness.

A rather heavier weight was the late Mr. S. H. Jeyes, who was for long associated with Sir Sidney Low on The Standard. Jeyes was happy in being exactly suited temperamentally to his medium. I could never think of Sir Sidney Low as a true Conservative; but the other was as good a specimen of the natural Tory as ever existed. His was not the Toryism of mental inertia, still less of stupidity, for he had a brain of the very first quality, and in spite of a tendency to indolence got through an enormous deal of work; but both his temper and his philosophy of life were wholly Conservative, and the Gladstonian Liberal, I fancy, aroused in him an almost physical repulsion. Like Carlyle, he was much more tolerant of the Mountain than of the Gironde, and a real Bolshevist would probably have affected him less unfavourably than a constitutional Socialist of the type whom the Bolshevist swallowed. He commanded a style of massive strength, and had a curiously impressive way of smashing some small antagonist in a line, much as one might settle the hash of an annoying insect, and then passing on in careless unconcern to a more important person or matter. Perhaps the mordancy of his style was increased by his studies of Juvenal, of whose satires he has left an extremely lively translation; he loved the Latin idiom, which he could use with almost as much freedom as English, and his own manner savoured of classic severity and compression. He lived just long enough to see the beginning of the end of The Standard, to which his best years had been devoted.

A feature of the old daily papers was a “light” leader on a literary or general subject; here the hand of the political leader-writer was seldom used, though Sir Sidney Low, whose range was extraordinarily wide, has done some very charming things in this genre. A famous contributor of The Standard was Alfred Austin, whom many thought better in his workaday prose than in his occasional verse. Austin seldom stirred from his place near Ashford, in Kent, and was perhaps the only leader-writer whose contributions were habitually transmitted by wire. Another charming writer of these fancy leaders was Andrew Lang. Mr. Hutchinson has dealt with him in a charming sketch in his Portraits of the Eighties, but Lang’s hand was still discoverable by the discerning in the Daily News of the earlier Nineties.

Such in the main was the “great daily”: an affair of a “great editor,” talented leader-writers, and a few highly-paid correspondents in certain big capitals. The rest of the staff were nobodies, inferior in education, in social standing, and in professional status; and there was a sort of Chinese wall, moral and sometimes even physical, between them and the aristocrats. This rigidity was unfavourable to progress, and it so happened that about the beginning of the Nineties the supply of really “great editors” fell short. Mr. Buckle, of The Times, might, indeed, be accounted such, but he had special difficulties in his way—perhaps the chief of them was the great blow of the Pigott forgeries—and among the controllers of the other “great dailies” (except the Daily Telegraph, which has always been peculiar in having a most active and vigilant proprietorial element) there was none of quite the same calibre as the Mudfords and the Delanes. There was thus a deadness about the Press which positively invited the invasion of a robust competitor.

The first who made a burst into that silent sea was Mr. T. P. O’Connor with The Star; Mr. W. T. Stead’s experiments with the Pall Mall Gazette were not of long duration, and the enterprise of The Echo, one of the earliest pioneers of popular journalism, was not specially distinctive. The Star may be taken as typical of the newer journalistic school of the early Nineties. In those days it was a strange blend of seriousness and flippancy. To the rather stodgy decorum of the old-established papers it opposed a curiously insincere rowdyism. I say “insincere,” but perhaps the better adjective would be “forced.” The Star was really not at all vulgar. On its literary side it stood for the very opposite of vulgarity; the true vulgarity was on the side of the staid and respectable critics. And in politics it was mainly for all that was honest and of good report; one might smile at the enthusiasms of a purely Cockney print for “Home to the village and back to the land,” but one could not accuse it of an unworthy or trivial outlook. But it tried with extraordinary strenuousness to give the impression of vulgarity. In dealing with the gravest matters it affected a riot of titular fantasy tending to scandalise the steady-going. On the whole, it clung to the narrow range of subjects affected by the older papers, but it dished up the meetings and despatches piping hot and with a sauce piquante of “bright” headline. The news of the “Wife Murder at Stepney” might be substantially the same as in the ordinary paper, but The Star sought to induce cheerfulness by heading the paragraph “Bullets for Mother.” A criminal who cut his throat while trying to escape from the police was described as “A Scarlet Runner.” But this jocularity was often too abstruse to be really popular. The Star was staffed chiefly by clever and rebellious young men, most of whom have since done well for themselves and perhaps for others, and they were incorrigible in inferring, not only much mental alertness in their readers, but a considerable acquaintance with the dead languages and the French and English classics. Thus, if there happened to be a strike of bakers settled by compromise, the glad news was pretty sure to be announced under the headline “Dough ut des,” which might have delighted a frivolous man of education, but could hardly have failed to leave the ordinary proletarian (supposed to be the main support of the paper) in a state of angry mystification. Suppose, also, that some gorgeous Maharajah happened to come over to one of the recurrent royal pageants, dropping diamonds wherever he went—“Lo! The Rich Indian,” the predestined headline, might tickle an idle man who remembered the original quotation and recalled the rest of the couplet. But to the brewer’s drayman it would seem a mere gratuitous silliness. It was this disastrous cleverness, perhaps more than anything else, which prevented the ultimate victory resting with the newer journalism, and left the way open to the newest school.

The newer journalism, however, set many of the fashions that still prevail to-day. It broke up the old anonymity of the Press. Few people would have been able at that time to say who edited The Times, The Standard, or The Morning Post, who wrote those charming things on golf and Shakespeare and the musical glasses, or who was responsible for exalting “The Bells” or decrying “Ghosts.” But everybody knew that Mr. T. P. O’Connor started The Star, that Mr. Bernard Shaw “did” the music for it, that Mr. A. B. Walkley “did” the drama, and that Mr. Ernest Parke, after a very short time, inherited Mr. O’Connor’s mantle. The name of Mr. Parke at once suggests what was perhaps the feature which most strongly differentiated the journalism of the early Nineties, new or old, from that which was seen clearly to be most successful at the end of the decade. I mean its unashamed preaching, its conviction that it had a mission, and its content to risk being a bore if only the mission could succeed. Ernest Parke was—I speak of him in the past tense, though he happily remains in the present, because, while he is still hale and vigorous, his massive and once golden head is no longer a common object of the Fleet Street landscape—a journalist of a type now hardly existent. To begin with, he was an extraordinary judge of ability of any kind, and managed to surround himself, at singularly low cost for the most part to his principals, with young men who have since either earned distinction in letters or have gone to form the cadres of all the chief newspaper staffs of London. In the second place he contrived to maintain all the realities of the sternest discipline with all the forms of anarchy. The shyest new arrival soon fell into the habit of calling him by his surname, and making jokes (not excluding practical jokes) at his expense. Yet the terror of being found out by him in any slackness or stupidity lay on the oldest inhabitant as much as on the rawest recruit. He contrived to give the journalistic calling all the zest of a joke with all the earnestness of a religious vocation. His interests were singularly wide. Himself very far removed from the scholarly, he had the keenest appreciation of all the newest things in literature and the arts, and there was no better rough judge of good, sound writing. On the other hand, he had the capacity of feeling deeply on all sorts of odd things to which the bookish man is commonly indifferent. He could work himself up—or perhaps he did not need working up—into a state of frenzy over the “guzzling” and junketing propensities of various public or semi-public bodies in the City of London. He waged deadly war against all ill-treatment of animals. A workhouse “scandal” would move him to extraordinary indignation. A police court sentence which appealed to him as unjust or cruel would rouse all the generous Quixote as well as all the original savage in him. But he did not, by any means, think parochially—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, if he thought parochially, he made the whole world his parish. Something happening in Russia would excite him no less, in given circumstances, than something happening in Mile End. He kept his eye as vigilantly on the iniquity of the Turk as on the shiftiness of a minor Minister or the advertisements of a bucket-shop fraud. The memory of his long duel with the Rockefellers over “low-flash oil” still lingers with the older inhabitants of Fleet Street. I happened to be out of England for some years while this crusade was proceeding. My last uncloudy impression of the Old Country was a placard at Southampton with some such words as “Nearing Victory over Low-Flash,” and my first clear impression on my return was another placard at Tilbury (a rather depressed-looking and washed-out placard) bearing the legend “Another Low-Flash Horror—How long, Oh Lord, how long?”—or words to that effect.

A vague and even rather bewildered kindness of heart, a noble indignation against any sort of oppression, corruption, or insolence, a general sympathy with the under-dog anywhere and everywhere—these Ernest Parke had in common with a number of men who, lacking the essential sanity which was at the bottom of his very English temperament, drifted into mere faddism, humanitarian eccentricity, and anti-nationalism: the sort of men who, to quote Mr. Chesterton, would first ask us to eat nothing but vegetables, then tell us that it was wicked to consume even grass, and finally ask, in a flush of noble sentiment, “Why should salt suffer?” But Mr. Parke may well serve as the representative of a whole class of editors, flourishing in the Nineties, who were not afraid to be bores, and (by some miracle) succeeded in escaping the usual fate of the bore. In ordinary life the man who insists on expounding his view of a certain set of questions is shunned like the plague: business interest, blood relationship, deep-seated esteem suffice not to win him toleration. A boring newspaper is easier to avoid than a boring individual; the remedy is simply not to buy it. The only conclusion, therefore, is either that the public of that day enjoyed “damned iteration,” or that the “damned iteration” was done with great art. The contrast between the preaching journalism of the Nineties and the preaching journalism of to-day cannot be better exemplified than by the history of two agitations. In the Nineties there was an agitation against the Turk. The British public was called on to express its feeling concerning a great massacre of Armenians. It was invited to condemn “the dripping sword of Abdul the Damned.” Now the Armenians, though an ill-used, were a very far-away people; not one out of a thousand Englishmen had ever seen an Armenian, or even framed any clear picture of the nature or geographical disposition of an Armenian. Yet, after some weeks of newspaper agitation, the whole country was ringing with indignation against the Sultan, and Lord Rosebery’s retirement was hastened by the incompatibility between his views on these massacres and those of the great majority of the Liberal Party.

Contrast this agitation with that concerning recent Irish administration. Ireland lies a few hours from England, and vast numbers of Englishmen have friends among the Irish. The Irish question is not a remote affair of foreign politics, but is most intimately connected with all our great interests, as well as all our party feuds and intrigues. Whatever be the exact truth about the situation, it is certain that the state of Ireland has long been worse than it has ever been within living memory, and it is equally certain that for a hundred years no such allegations have been made against a British Government in regard to Ireland as the allegations that are made to-day. But the newspapers which have the clearest political interest in agitation do not agitate. Apparently they are not without the wish to agitate, for they occasionally publish strongly-worded articles. What they have lost is less the spirit than the knack of agitation. That knack consists in merciless and unremitting repetition, in what the ordinary man calls “rubbing it in.” The facts have to be made clear, not once or twice, but seventy times seven. The public has to be given no chance of forgetting and no excuse for misunderstanding. The paper that would succeed in agitation must, in short, be prepared to make itself a very serious bore. It must be prepared to lose something in order to gain something. It must be ready to sacrifice any reputation it may have with office boys and millinery hands, who are not and cannot be made interested in politics. It must even reconcile itself to the loss of a nice balance of headlines on its main news page. Now the modern editor is far too much of an artist to make these sacrifices. He is prepared to give Ireland some sort of show if Ireland happens to be much in the picture. But even then the eternal test match and the never-remitting golf championship cannot be banished to the sporting page, and prominence simply must be found for the pathetic little story about the “Thousand Million Dollar Baby,” while the demands of local interest compel due attention to “Spooks in a Norfolk Rectory,” and “Cat at an Eastbourne Whist Drive.” So Ireland’s tale of woe flows through the paper like an Australian river. It is easily traceable to the extent of a column; with some little difficulty one finds an inch and a half of it under “Rembrandt for Ninepence” two columns away; the mystery thickens when, referred to “continuation on page seven,” one finds nothing there but a company meeting and “Are we Immodest?” (continued from page eight); but finally the residue of the Irish revelations is, by a lucky chance, run to ground on the City page between “Butter Quiet” and “Copper Uneasy.” This is what happens when Ireland is uppermost. At other times just nothing happens. When Ireland does not deserve an important headline Ireland does not get one, and the perfunctory paragraph is relegated to some back page, where a provincial tennis match crowds it out.

Now the editor of the Nineties had none of this excessive respect for the momentary and this strange disregard for continuity. Nor was he in the smallest degree concerned about the symmetry of his news page. His main idea was to make an impression, and an impression he certainly made. The truth is that he felt himself less an artist in newspaper technique than a prophet; often a Nonconformist by extraction, sometimes a secularist of that Victorian type which was really more religious than the orthodox, he was consumed with the idea that it was his business to put the world right, and if he thought the world could be put a little more right by letting an article run to five good columns, he could not bring himself to hack it into two poor columns. He would rather leave out something about a dog swallowing a will.

Curiously enough, the only newspapers which have not lost the knack of propaganda are those which, in their origin, represented the revulsion against propagandist journalism, and set out to supply simply “what the public wants.” What I have called the newest journalism of the Nineties (that is, the most solidly established journalism of to-day) has none of the moral fervour of the Parkes and Steads. But it understands as well as they did the importance of “rubbing it in”; and modern history might well have run a far different course had such mastery of method been associated with a more stable political philosophy.

This newest journalism is the child of two men—Alfred, Viscount Northcliffe, and Mr. Kennedy Jones, M.P. The soul of it belongs to the one, the body of it was moulded by the other. There were immediate imitators, careful but uninspired, like Sir Arthur Pearson, and in the long run all sorts of old papers abjectly copied the methods which had brought them discomfiture. Other magnates, endowed with more character, adopted the spirit while imparting to their productions a rather more masculine note. But on the whole the great revolution in the Press since the Nineties took its form from the personality of these two men. The journalism represented by The Star was half a joke and half a crusade, with a commercial side to it. It was meant to pay, and no doubt did pay up to a point; but its main motive was hardly a purely commercial motive. The newest journalism, on the other hand, was frankly businesslike: it set out to industrialise Bohemia, and succeeded. It was as businesslike as a tea-shop: indeed, its progress was very like that of the great tea-shop concerns. The tea-shops started with the lightest of refreshments; the newest journalism started with the lightest of reading. The tea-shop concerns went on extending and experimentalising until they embraced every branch of the trade; they bought up old concerns and started new ones; but to every acquisition and departure they imparted something of their own original character. It was the same with the newest journalism. Starting on crackers and sherbert, it worked its way to fifteen-course dinners and vintage wines. But it has retained throughout a certain singularity; and that singularity is the complete standardisation of things of the spirit. The newer journalism carelessly made a joke, sniggered over it, and then forgot all about it. The very new journalism, on the contrary, treated a joke as a very serious thing, in which it was right—a joke is a very serious thing. It decided against certain classes of jokes. There must not be jokes about Nonconformists: many advertising agents are Nonconformists. There must not be jokes about Jews: many Jews are wealthy and prone to advertising; was not the first advertisement on record that of a Frankfort Jew? Jokes against “aliens” are, of course, permissible. On the whole, there must not be jokes about the Church of England, though that is a less serious matter. There must not be “unpleasant” jokes; otherwise the babies’ foods and the condensed milks will not come into the advertising columns. Finally, by a process of exhaustion, the right kinds of jokes are reached, and by due experiment (prize competitions and the like) conducted with all the seriousness of a Home Office analysis, it is found which particular kind of joke brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number. This discovery made, the joke is made the subject of mass production, and vast stocks are poured out until the bookstall agents recommend a change. It is much the same with news; the experts can tell within five hundred the circulation effect of an ordinary murder, a “mystery,” a “poison mystery,” a “poison mystery” with a “money motive,” a “poison mystery” with a “love motive,” a divorce case with two eminent co-respondents and no particular point, and a divorce case with one quite undistinguished co-respondent and a strong “heart interest.” The business mind only begins to haver when it reaches the rarefied atmosphere of high politics. It inclines to the view that, war apart, foreign news is only useful to give a certain distinction to a paper, but that home politics may occasionally furnish the raw material for a really effective “stunt.”

The victory of the newest journalism over the old and the rather new is only part of the general victory of standardisation and mass production over the older and more individual enterprise. Everybody knows all about what it has given the public—how it has placed every village much on a news equality with the great towns, how it has given vastly increased and diversified news services, how it has spread the habit of reading (if not of thinking) over great classes which never glanced at a book or a newspaper. It is not my business to discuss all this, which belongs to the new century. More to the present purpose is to indicate what it has destroyed, but what was still living and vigorous in the Nineties.

In the first place, it has destroyed that singular thing called editorial responsibility, to which I alluded above. In the second, it has given the newspaper the flickering unsteadiness of a cinema film, instead of the fixity appropriate to the printed page; the paper amuses and interests more, but instructs and leads far less. In the third, it has undoubtedly debased the taste for really good and especially for really thoughtful writing. But, above all, it has tended to render obsolete the prophet in print, the man who feels a vocation to right wrongs, to preach crusades, or to insist, in season and out, on the importance of principle. Such men are now scarcely found in modern daily journalism, and if they were never so numerous they would find difficulty in getting a hearing. They linger, with increasing difficulty, on the weekly papers; they seem doomed to eventual extinction; but when they go the world will be the poorer for their loss. In the Nineties a notable specimen of this kind of man, notable but perhaps scarcely brilliant, was Sir Thomas Wemyss Reid, the first conductor of The Speaker, which attempted to be to Gladstonian Liberalism what The Spectator was to Unionism. His warm friend, Lord Rosebery, has paid him as noble a tribute as journalist ever earned from man of affairs. “His ideal of friendship,” says Lord Rosebery, “was singularly lofty and generous. He was the devoted and chivalrous champion of those he loved; he took up their cause as his own, and much more than his own; he was the friend of their friends, and the enemy of their enemies. No man ever set a higher value on this high connection, which, after all, whether brought about by kinship, or sympathy, or association, or gratitude, or stress, is, under Heaven, the sweetest solace of our poor humanity; and so it coloured and guided the life of Wemyss Reid. His chief works were all monuments to that faith; it inspired him in tasks which he knew would be irksome, and which could scarcely be successful, or which at least could ill satisfy his own standard. This is a severe test for a man of letters, but he met it without fail.” It was perhaps this sympathy, as well as his discrimination, which enabled Reid to gather round him so brilliant a group of contributors; among them were Mr. John (now Lord) Morley, Mr. J. A. Spender (the present editor of the Westminster Gazette), Mr. Herbert Paul, Mr. James (now Lord) Bryce, Sir Alfred Lyall, Mr. Augustine Birrell, Mr. Frederic Harrison, Mr. James Payn, Mr. Henry James, Mr. (now Sir) J. M. Barrie, and Mr. A. B. Walkley.

Wemyss Reid detested above all things what was then called the new but what I have called the newer journalism; he would have hated still more the newest journalism; and he gave John Morley advice (which was at the time rather resented) to keep strict control over the activities of W. T. Stead. He did not believe in government by newspaper, and Stead’s essay in connection with the mission of General Gordon more than ever convinced him that the proper function of the Press was rather to check Ministers than to dictate their policy. His Speaker was ultimately not a success, and if he is noted here it is chiefly because the journalistic ideas for which he stood, as well as his politics, are still represented by one of the most brilliant of his younger colleagues, Mr. J. A. Spender, who now directs the Westminster Gazette, and there exemplifies his old chief’s horror of sensationalism and love of balance.

CHAPTER XXIX
SOME ACTORS

Theatrically the Nineties were less interesting than the preceding decade. The Eighties saw the great glories both of the Savoy and the Lyceum; they might be likened to a glorious May and a blazing June; the Nineties were rather a tired late summer fading into an inglorious autumn. There was little new, and the old was not quite at its best.

Perhaps it was the discovery by a large class of a new pleasure that chiefly contributed to make the theatre of thirty and forty years ago an institution only second in interest to politics. The theatre-going habit has now become general; the theatre itself tends to be a specialist interest—like sport. Certain classes of young people have their pet pieces and actors, and perhaps lavish on them just as much worship as their grandfathers and grandmothers did on Irving and Ellen Terry, on Grossmith and Jessie Bond, on Hare, and Wyndham, and Toole. But no actor or actress commands the same general adoration that was rendered to the great stage people of the golden age when the cinema and the standardised music-hall were still unborn. The most splendid first night is only an item in the morning’s news. In the old days it competed seriously with a despatch from the Front or the speech of a Prime Minister. I can well remember the appearance of the daily papers on the morrow of a new Gilbert and Sullivan opera. The sketch of the plot and extracts from the libretto occupied perhaps three columns; another couple of columns were devoted to the score; perhaps another one and a half to the dresses and the “brilliant house.” It is true that we have no Gilbert and Sullivan to-day. But if both were with us in the happiest inspiration of their whole collaboration it is inconceivable that they should occupy such a space in the public eye. The viands of the Eighties and Nineties may be equalled again; after all, with the solitary exception of light opera, they were not specially wonderful. It is the appetite that we seek in vain. The English people were then, theatrically speaking, children, and had the zest of the child. They have since grown up, and, while leaning more on stronger drink, find the tipple less exhilarating.

How much of the earlier glories of the Lyceum were due to the fascination exerted by Miss Ellen Terry, and how much to the genius of Henry Irving, must always remain a matter of opinion. But concerning Irving’s greatness there can be only one view. There were all sorts of things he was not. He was not a good judge of a play; whenever he forsook the straight path of Shakespeare he tended woefully to the pretentious or the trivial. He was in some ways not even a good actor; his mannerisms were often unpleasing, and his declamation was sometimes absurd. He was not, probably, a man of very high general intellect. But one thing Irving undoubtedly was: he was great—as great in his own line as Gladstone in Gladstone’s. He dominated the stage as no other man did in his time, or has done since, and he raised the whole public conception of the profession to a level before undreamed of. The diaries of Macready are full of lamentations concerning the hard fate which condemned an authentic public school boy to a degrading servitude. When Irving sent his own boys to Marlborough the arrangement seemed perfectly natural, and when they left nobody was astonished that they should follow their father’s instead of the more “reputable” careers which Macready eyed with envy.

This elevation of the stage was very largely Irving’s personal work, and it was a work which no common man could have achieved. Irving was a most uncommon man. Though natural and unaffected in private, he impressed everybody with whom he came in contact, and was almost more eloquent in his silences than in his speech, excellent as that was. He was a quite incomparable host, and no man ever received so various a society: nearly everybody who was anybody knew Irving. The Emperor Frederick and Mr. Gladstone were among the many distinguished people who at one time or another “went behind” at the Lyceum, and the list of those who partook of Irving’s “chicken and champagne”—to quote a long-lived remark of a rather ill-natured critic—would swell to the limits of a select “Who was Who.” For instance, at the Diamond Jubilee in 1897 he entertained all the Colonial Premiers, Indian Princes, and visitors from overseas who had been mentioned in the official lists!

All this lavish hospitality meant the spending of money, and money could only come by labour. As he went on, Irving put a greater and greater strain on his nervous system, and, made of steel as he seemed in his prime, he suffered heavily in later years for his prodigal expenditure of energy. His luck turned about the middle of the Nineties; a seemingly slight accident cast him aside for best part of three months, involving a heavy loss; a year later he suffered heavily by the burning of his stage properties; still another year, and he was stricken with an illness which left a permanent mark on his physique and his spirit. For some years an overpowering depression rested on him, a sense of tragic disappointment, and it was only when he had reached the confines of old age that his old serenity returned. But even in the heyday of his success he never showed more essential gallantry than in the last fight against embarrassment, infirmity, and (in a sense) solitude. He had not been spoiled by his successes, and he remained above his reverses. He should have died, considering the vast sums he received, a rich man—his last tour in America yielded him, for example, a net profit of over £32,000—but, if he was “unsatisfied in getting,” he was too princely in bestowing to save money. Himself temperate, sparing in diet, satisfied with moderate lodgment, without vices or personal extravagances, and no gambler, he literally showered money on all pursuits and projects tending to increase the finish of his own productions or to improve the standing of the stage in the eyes of the world. He was the first to translate into terms of gorgeous expense Mr. Crummies’s faith in “real water—splendid tubs.” In his plays no detail was omitted. For Becket he obtained the services of a high Roman Catholic dignitary to secure that the cathedral scenes, while impressively realistic to the general, should not offend the religious susceptibilities of the understanding. This devotion to stage upholstery set a vicious fashion of subordinating the picture to the frame, the actor to the scenery, and in the end it nearly ruined Irving. But it had its due effect in raising the stage in public estimation; clearly anything which wanted so much capital could not be quite disreputable.

Irving was survived nearly a year by his old friend Toole. Like Irving, Toole started as a London clerk, but, while Irving to the last retained some small trace of his native province, Somersetshire, Toole was wholly Cockney. The pair met at Edinburgh in 1857, and the friendship then formed lasted undiminished till Irving’s death. When Toole was told the news he said quietly, “Then let me die too.” Toole’s chief triumphs came before the Nineties, and the young people who saw him for the few years before his retirement could hardly comprehend the legend that had gathered round his name. Still less could they appreciate the stories of his rather naïve fooling in private. But then, all humour is a mystery, and people who “sneer when you inform them that a door may be a jar” will roar their sides out at something no more complex, but more modish.

Irving, much as he had to do with the making of the modern stage, smacked a good deal of the floridity of an earlier period. Sir John Hare was more typical of modern finish; his acting in A Pair of Spectacles set a standard that may often have been equalled by the polished comic actors of to-day, but has hardly been excelled. Hare got so much in the habit of playing old gentlemen’s parts that he had the credit of being much more advanced in years than he really was. He was once at dinner where Mr. Gladstone was also a guest. “Who is that?” whispered Gladstone to his hostess. “Hare? Oh, yes, yes, yes. I once met his father, the manager of the Garrick.”

Hare belonged to a distinctly higher social class than either Irving or Toole. So also did Sir Charles Wyndham. The son of a London doctor, he had received a first-rate education, and practised for some time as a doctor before going on the stage. A handsome person, great vivacity, and a well-bred lightness of touch made him a king of comedy, and his tradition is still one of the strongest inspirations in the modern theatre.

No account of the entertainers of the Nineties would be complete without reference to a form of amusement which, though it still exists in a small way, was in its biggest way thirty years ago. Its chief exponents were Corney Grain and George Grossmith. The German Reed entertainments have now a very far-away sound; the sight of the name gives the same sort of feeling as the sign over some old-fashioned confectioners’, “Routs Catered For.” Yet German Reed was very much alive in its time. It could not be otherwise with the aid of so very vital a person as the gigantic Corney Grain. Grain, who was intended for the Bar, reached the stage by easy stages of amateurism and semi-professionalism, and his career was complicated by a difficulty of classification. At first the Press would barely notice him, because the musical critics said he was not Music, and the dramatic critics said he was not Drama, and everybody agreed that he was not Art. The German Reed entertainment, however, at last found its public—a very peculiar one, very proper, very middle-class, and very much intrigued with what were supposed to be the ways and humours of a superior order of society. It is a public now very largely extinct; people want either stronger or more delicate meat. But those days were different. They were the days when nigger minstrels were a considerable “financial proposition.” I remember well the Press agent of one famous troop complaining to a Brighton newspaper that they had received scant notice during the visit of Sarah Bernhardt. “If it were a circus I could understand, but fancy playing second fiddle to that Frenchwoman!” he remarked in high dungeon. Both with the minstrels and with German Reed people could be sure of a due censorship of jokes and songs; they could enjoy all the luxury of wickedness without wickedness itself. “Thank you, Mr. Grain,” said a bishop once at the end of a performance, “I have been not only amused, but—edified.”

George Grossmith also tended to edification. In physique he was the exact opposite of Corney Grain, wizen and under-sized, and once when they appeared together—the rivals were very excellent friends—Grain ended a scene by picking up Grossmith and carrying him off the stage like a baby. George Grossmith was the son of one of those curious men who supply the newspapers with police court reports; the business is largely hereditary, and in this case the son began life as assistant to his father. Police courts, however, rarely sit late, and the “liners” have considerable leisure to follow any other occupation. Grossmith père was already established as a lecturer and entertainer, and it was quite natural that the two sons—George and Weedon—should follow in his footsteps. In the late Seventies George attracted the notice of Sir Arthur Sullivan, and as a result had a run of twelve years in Savoy Opera. Gilbert was at first violently opposed to the introduction, but had to acknowledge that it was a great success, though he could never refrain from an occasional tilt at what he considered the vulgarities of Grossmith’s style. In a certain part Grossmith received a box on the ear from one of the female characters, and used to fall head over heels on the stage. “I should be very much obliged if you would omit that piece of business, Mr. Grossmith,” suggested Gilbert. “Why? I get a tremendous laugh with it,” pleaded the actor. “So you would if you sat down on a pork pie,” retorted Gilbert, who could never bear that applause should be diverted from his “book” by mere “gag.”

It was just at the end of the Eighties that Grossmith left the Savoy for the business of “society entertainer” on the Corney Grain plan. He made an immediate success, the best tribute to which may be quoted; it was that of a girl at a Yorkshire seaside place: “Oh, how we did laugh! It was laugh, laugh, laugh! All the people kept laughing, and then we laughed. Then the people laughed again, and so did we, and when we got home we laughed more than ever, for none of us knew what we had been laughing at.” But for that happy weakness of human nature, fewer professional funny men would pay super-tax.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

In a work like the present, where personal impressions are so largely mingled with the results of general and special reading, it is not easy to give the authority for every statement. Specific borrowings are indicated in the text. The author, however, would like to add an acknowledgment of his general obligation to the following: