IN MY FIRST YEAR on the Evening News I was reaching success and my employers were more than satisfied with me. I had reduced the loss by more than one half; indeed, I was able to predict that in my second year the loss would be down to?. 15,000 instead of?. 40,000; and the circulation had risen from eight to twenty thousand daily. I was working as hard as ever. In the office at eight every morning, I never left it, except for an hour at lunch, till seven at night; yet I had begun to accept dinner invitations and luncheons on Sunday. Once every week Mrs. Jeune, soon to become Lady Jeune through the knighting of her husband, the well-known judge, invited me to one of her delightful dinners and receptions where one met all the celebrities, from the parliamentary leaders to the choice spirits in art and literature and life.
In the second year, too, I came to know her great rival as a hostess, Lady Shrewsbury, who was a little more exclusive. I have told in my life of him how I met Oscar Wilde at Mrs. Jeune's and the immense impression he made on me; there, too I met Russell Lowell and Thomas Hardy and a host of more or less distinguished writers and politicians, some of whom I have already described in my Contemporary Portraits. But here I shall write only of those who had great influence on me and my development; and among them I must always rank Pater and Matthew Arnold, especially Arnold, to whom I was drawn by that love of ideal humanity which explained all his strictures on English life and English manners.
Matthew Arnold was a delightful companion, full of quaint fancies and willing, usually, to laugh at himself. I remember telling him of Oscar's jibe at his niece's, Mrs. Humphrey Ward's, first novel. He said that "You, Sir, supplied the 'Literature' and she was determined to contribute the 'Dogma.'" Arnold laughed like a schoolboy. "She's very serious," he said.
"I wonder why women are so much more serious than men?" On his return from lecturing in the United States, he told me with humorous enjoyment that most of his success was due to the fact that many people took him for Edwin Arnold. "Yes, yes," he laughed, "it was The Light of Asia that became The Light of the World to me and illumined my path. Thyrsis was unknown, my poetry unconsidered there. Luckily the trip was successful and relieved me from monetary care; America was very kind to me, though occasionally it chastened my conceit. As you predicted, they invited me to study elocution!"
I heard him once make a speech on "Schools" or "Schooling" somewhere in Westminster: it was all good, but not inspiring, and out of pure mischief I wanted to get to the deepest in him, his shortcomings as a critic. He did not appear to understand French poetry at all deeply. When I praised La Legende des Siecles by Hugo to him or the Sagesse of Verlaine, he did not seem to care for them, so I talked of Emerson as a great poet like Whitman, but he would not have it. I began by quoting So take thy quest through Nature, It through thousand natures ply Ask on thou clothed Eternity Time is the false reply.
"But is that poetry?" Arnold doubted. "I can't believe it somehow." "Think of his Humble Bee," I cried, "and deny him if you can," and I quoted again, Aught unsavoury or unclean Hath my insect never seen But violets and bilberry bells Maple sap and daffodils Grass with green flag half-mast high;
Succory to match the sky,
Columbine with horn of honey
Scented fern and acrimony
Clover, catchfly, adder's tongue
And brier-roses dwelt among,
All besides was unknown waste
All was picture as he passed.
Wiser far than human seer
Yellow-breeched philosopher.
"That surely has the true note!"
"It has, it has indeed," Arnold hesitated reluctantly, "but we are all poets at odd moments."
"Only at odd moments, I should say!" was my reply, for he was merely evading the issue, but he shook his head.
"I think the Humble Bee worthy to be ranked with the Skylark of Shelley," I went on. "Not for music, of course, but it has homely poetic virtues of its own, and some day it will be known and loved. I seldom praise Emerson," I added,
"because he quarrelled with Whitman and stood for convention as against freedom of speech."
"I'm afraid that I too am in favour of the conventions," said Arnold. "Speech can easily be too free, can't it?"
"I hate English prudery," I replied, "and English hypocrisy. Life in England is like life in an English Sunday school, with a maiden-lady as a teacher and an atmosphere of deadly dullness. Shall we never get to the larger freedom of Dante, if not that of Goethe?"
"Was Dante ever free in that sense?" asked Arnold.
"Surely," I replied, "some of his humour is the jolly humour of a naughty little boy who puts out his tongue at you and worse."
"Really?" doubted Arnold. "I remember nothing like that in Dante!"
"Here is one verse," and I quoted from the end of the twenty-first canto of the Inferno:
Per l'argine sinistro volta dienno
Ma prima avea ciascun la lingua stretta
Co'denti verso lor duca, per cenno:
Ed egli avea de cul fatto trombetta.
"And he had made a trumpet of his behind!"
"How strange," laughed Arnold. "I never noticed it. I must have read over it!
Goethe of course was free, but Goethe put his worst things in Faust in asterisks instead of plain words."
"Yet we know from Eckermann," I said, "that Goethe used the plain words and even wrote very naughty plays and poems." Arnold was too English, I think, in feeling to take up the gauntlet.
I tried to get him to write for me for the Fortnightly Review and he sent me a poem, a threnody on a favorite dog that has its place in English poetry. He was indeed marvellously gifted, and I always resented the fact that the English had used one of their noblest spirits as an inspector of schools. If Arnold had been honoured from thirty to sixty, as he should have been, had men been willing to pay gold to hear him talk on any subject, he would have given us even more than he did. This is to be the chief mystery of life, why men accord so little love and honour to the real guides during their lifetime.
Arnold should have been put in a high place and listened to with reverence by the ablest politicians and men of letters, but he was simply disregarded, and how he kept his sunny good humour in the universal indifference was a puzzle to me.
I always felt him superior in range and Tightness of thought to any of his contemporaries. There was in him also a depth of melancholy; yet in the intercourse of life he was invariably optimistic. In this, as in many ways, he resembled Anatole France. He had perfect manners, too, like the great Frenchman-met everyone on the pure human level, preferred to talk on high themes, yet used banter charmingly with the barbarians.
He loved to find the best in everyone and gloss over faults, was the first to praise Oscar Wilde to me when everyone condemned him as an eccentric poseur. "A fine intelligence and most wonderful talker," he said. It was because Matthew Arnold seemed to me to reach ideal manhood, was indeed free of faults or mannerisms, that I was always probing to discover his shortcomings.
One day I could not help trying to get to the ultimate of his thought. I used his famous definition of the "Something not ourselves that makes for righteousness" to draw him out. "That 'not ourselves,'" I said, "always seems to me wrong. The only thing in the world that makes for righteousness is the holy spirit of man."
"What about sunsets and flowers and the song of birds?" he replied with a quaint half-smile, "and the music of the spheres. Will you deny them all?"
He had caught me: I could only smile back at him; yet surely the soul of the Divinity is in us men and revealed most completely in our noblest. We cannot read the riddle of nature. Not on the walls of our cell shall the reconciling word be found, but in the heart of man grown tired of bearing:
The weary weight of this unintelligible world.
I had just come to think of Matthew Arnold as the most perfect man of letters I had ever met, when the shocking news came that like his father, he had died of heart failure. He sprang over a gate or fence, fell forward and never spoke again. What a tragedy is the untimely end of so great and sweet a nature.
As I came to know it, life in London grew richer and richer to me. Every dinner at Mrs. Jeune's or Lady Shrewsbury's became an event.
And when I mention Mrs. Jeune as hostess, I must not forget the Arthur Walters, who were more than kind to me from the beginning. Every summer from 1884 to 1895 I went to stay more than once at their country place at Finchampstead for weeks at a time. There I met Hurlbert and Sir Ernest Cassell and his daughter and other notorious people; and both Arthur and Mrs. Walter became dear to me out of their abounding human kindness.
I tried again and again to get Arthur Walter to see Parnell as he was, but all my efforts were in vain. He was always resolved to regard Parnell as a revolutionary and Irish hater of England.
On the other hand, I had a certain admiration for Parnell and some liking. It was Verschoyle who gave me the first idea of him as a great fighter. He told me a story of his youth in the Shelbourne hotel in Dublin. One day Verschoyle and some of his family were in the hotel and at the next table a tall man was talking what they considered treason. At length Verschoyle's cousin, a notorious athlete and boxer, got up, went over to the next table and said, "If you want to talk treason, you had better get a private room, for I won't listen to it in public."
"Mind your own business," said the tall man, getting up, and the next moment they were hard at it. Verschoyle said, "I was utterly astonished to find that my cousin did not win. The tall man was just as good as he was or a little better. There was the dickens of a fight. When the waiters came in and the police and separated them, we found that the man's name was Parnell, Charles Parnell."
The first time I met Parnell with Mrs. O'Shea was at a dinner given by dear old Justin McCarthy. It must have been pretty early in Parnell's acquaintance with Mrs. O'Shea, for she was seated opposite to him, and Parnell scarcely ever took his eyes from her face. At this time she seemed to me a sonsy, nice looking woman of thirty-three or thirty-five with pretty face and fine eyes, very vivacious, very talkative, full of good-humoured laughter.
Now and then, picturing a woman, she exaggerated, I thought, her Irish brogue with some artistry to bring out a characteristic; evidently a lively, clever woman and excellent company. All the while she talked, the dour, silent, handsome man opposite devoured her with his flaming eyes. I remember saying in fun to Justin afterwards, "If she were as much in love with him, as he is with her, it would indeed be a perfect union."
But kindly Justin would not admit the liaison. "He's attracted," he said. "I think we all are. She's an interesting woman." Soon, however, everybody knew that they were lovers and lost in a mutual passion. Parnell was tall and well-made, but he seemed to me too slight to be very strong; but Mrs. O'Shea, whom I questioned on the subject, told me his mere physical strength had astonished her time and again, and she did not dwell on it at all unduly.
Parnell was of the stuff of great men through greatness of character, but as a political leader he was curiously ill-read and ill-informed. Time and again I am compelled to draw attention to the ignorances of English politicians. Even the example of Bismarck and the astounding growth of modern Germany have taught them nothing.
I always felt there was an insane streak in Parnell, though Mrs. O'Shea never hints at such weakness in the two great volumes she dedicated to their love story. His superstitions showed, I thought, mental weakness. I remember walking with him once to his house to dinner. At the door he stopped and would not enter. Muttering something under his breath, he said, "Do you mind walking a little more before going hi?" I didn't mind a scrap, though already we were somewhat late, but after a turn he was still dissatisfied and went on for another stroll. This time he was successful. "I hate four and eight," he said, "but when my last step brings me to the count of nine, I'm happy.
Seven, even, will do, but nine's a symbol of real good luck and I can go in rejoicing!" And with a smiling face in he went.
But he knew no economics and had no idea of any remedy for Irish poverty. If he had ever won to complete power in Ireland, he would certainly have disappointed his followers.
In these first two or three years in London something happened of incalculable importance to my whole life, and the lesson came to me without any warning. I had grown accustomed to go on Saturday and Sunday to Lord Folkestone's to lunch, and after lunch Lady Folkestone used to give us coffee in the drawing-room. With the coffee there was always a pretty liqueur decanter full of cognac-really good fine Champagne. One day Lord Folkestone came away with me after lunch and said, "I wonder will you forgive me, Frank, if I tell you something purely for your good?"
"I should hope so," I replied. "I can't conceive of anyone telling me something for my good that I'd resent."
"I'm glad to hear you say that," he rejoined. "I'm much older than you know; life has taught me certain things, but I am a bad hand at beating about the bush, so I will tell it you straight off. I noticed yesterday that you drank five or six glasses of cognac with your coffee. Now no one can do that without ruining his constitution. You took enough today to make most people drunk; you showed no sign of it, but it will certainly have its effect. When you consider it, I think you will know it's sheer affection that makes me tell you this."
"I'm sure of it," I said, but I spoke only from my lips, for I was mortally hurt and angry; a little while later we separated and I went on home. I took the affair terribly to heart; I could not but recognize the kindness of Lord Folkestone, the sympathy that had prompted his warning, but my vanity was so great that it hurt me desperately. That evening I came to a saner view. The best thing I can do, I said to myself, is to take the warning to heart. The way to prove that I have self-control is to show it. For one year, then, I won't drink a drop of wine or spirits. I'll stop everything.
Within a week I recognized how right Lord Folkestone had been to warn me.
My whole outlook began to alter. I saw many things more quickly than I had seen them before, and I noticed that not only had I been getting stouter, but that I had been getting more lazy and more self-satisfied.
I began to take exercise and found it at first extremely hard to walk five miles in an hour or to run a quarter of a mile without ill effects, but soon I began to get back to my former strength and health. In three or four months I found out a great many things-found that health of mind and quickness of wit depended, too, on health of body in my case. In three months I began to do my work easier, all work; and as I did away with the drink, the fat literally fell from me. I lost a couple of stone in three or four months and began to walk everywhere instead of driving, and took long walks on Sundays instead of lazy excursions in a carriage.
Before the end of the year I told Lord Folkestone that I owed him more than I owed anyone in the world for his kind warning. "It is eleven months since you warned me," I said, "and I am resolved to go on for another year and drink nothing this next year too."
He was delighted. "You don't know how much better you look," he said. "We have all remarked that you have gone back to the old energy and vigour that you used to have. I am more than glad, but I found it very difficult to tell you. I was so afraid of losing your friendship." I took up his hand and kissed it-one of the few men's hands I have kissed in my life.
Most of this early time in London was brightened by occasional meetings with Oscar Wilde. As I have told in my book about him, I was introduced to him at Mrs. Jeune's; and I was surprised first of all by the kindness of his literary and artistic judgments and then by his wit and humour. "Did I know Frank Miles?" he asked shortly after we first met. "We are living together; he's one of the finest artists of this time," and nothing would do but we must look out Miles in order that I should be introduced to him then and there.
Frank Miles was at this time, in the early eighties, a very pleasant, handsome, young fellow who made a sympathetic impression on everyone. I went to see them in Chelsea and bought a drawing of Lily Langtry by Miles that I thought wonderful: the same head, life-size, twice-once in profile and the other almost full face.
What has become of it I really don't know. In a year or two I discovered in it Miles's limitations as an artist: it was pretty and well drawn, but hardly more.
Miles declared that he had discovered and immortalized Mrs. Langtry, and at once Oscar stuck in gravely: "A more important discovery than America, in my opinion; indeed, America wasn't even discovered by Columbus: it has since been detected, I understand," and we all laughed. His fun was irresistible.
Partly through the apotheosis of Mrs. Langtry, the Prince of Wales was a frequent visitor in their house; and Miles had commissions from every pretty woman in society, including the famous Mrs. Cornwallis West. What a charming, artistic home it was: Oscar and Miles invited me to tea and we were waited on by a pretty girl about sixteen years of age, most fantastically attired, whom they called Miss Sally. Sally Higgs soon became famous for her rare beauty and was painted by Leighton (afterwards Lord Leighton) as Daydreams and by Marcus Stone, the Academician, and a host of others.
Sally was astonishingly pretty and charming to boot. I heard of her often afterwards; a couple of years later she married a boy just down from Eton, the son of a rich man. The father shipped the boy to the States and gave Sally a couple of pounds a week as solatium, but she soon found a rich protector and indeed never had any pecuniary difficulty, I imagine, in her whole sunny life.
Sally, as I soon realized, was a born Bohemian and not troubled with any socalled moral scruples, though she was always gay and carefree. She assured me that Miles only liked her face and "Mr. Wilde says nice things to me and is a perfect gentleman and that's all."
Miles was the son of a canon and a country rector who made him a good allowance and at first encouraged his intimacy with Oscar, but later rumours of Oscar's proclivities reached him, and his first book of poems confirming the canon's doubts, he insisted that the two friends should part. "My son must not be contaminated!" Much against his will, as Miles told me, he had to tell Oscar his father's decision.
Wilde went almost crazy with rage. "D'ye mean that we must part after years together because your father's a fool?" Miles could only say that he had no alternative and at once Oscar retorted, "All right, I'll leave the house at once and never speak to you again," and upstairs he went, packed his things and left: he was proud to a fault. Sally told me he never returned; and almost immediately Miles's vogue appeared to pass. I saw him from time to time in London but he quickly dropped out of social life and I was horrified to hear some years later that he had lost his wits and ended his days in a mad-house.
When I told Oscar he still cherished his anger. "He had no wits to lose, Frank," he said. "He was an early creation of mine, like Lily Langtry, and they pass out of one's life as soon as they are realized." But I always had a soft spot in my heart for Sally, though I could not but believe that Miles was something more than a mere friend to her, which shielded her from me.
It was his faculty of enthusiastic praise which distinguished Oscar Wilde in those first years and made his reputation, as I have said in my Life of him. Mrs.
Langtry I had met in Brighton and taught to skate at the West Street rink, never dreaming that she would reign in London a year or so later as a peerless beauty. Oscar and Miles discovered her, but it was the Prince of Wales's admiration that gave her position and vogue. Oscar told everyone she was "the loveliest thing that had ever come out of Greece," and when one corrected him with "out of Jersey," he passed it off with "a Jersey Lily, if you please, the perfect type of flower."
Oscar's humour, however, was his extraordinary gift and sprang to show on every occasion. Whenever I meet anyone who knew Oscar Wilde at any period of his life, I am sure to hear a new story of him-some humorous or witty thing he had said.
The other day I saw a man who had met Wilde in New York after his first lecture tour. He told him he hoped it had been a success, and Oscar answered him gravely, but with dancing eyes.
"A great success! My dear man, I had two secretaries, one to answer my letters, the other to send locks of hair to my admirers. I have had to let them both go, poor fellows: the one is in hospital with writer's cramp, and the other is quite bald."
Oscar and I went together once to Whitechapel to hear Matthew Arnold lecture on Watts's picture, entitled Life, Death and Judgment. "What Puritans Englishmen all are," said Oscar as we came away. "The burden of Arnold's song:
I slept and dreamed that life was beauty I woke and found that life was duty:
Yet he's a real poet, Frank, an English saint in side-whiskers!" It was irresistibly comic.
Another time we went to hear Walter Pater lecture; he talked wonderfully but continually fell into a low conversational tone as he read his address.
"Speak up. Speak up, please. Louder! We can hear nothing!" resounded through the house time and again.
At length he had finished and came down to join us. Of course we both praised his essay to the skies, and indeed it was exceedingly good from beginning to end, thoughtful and wonderfully phrased; but Pater had been alarmed by the frequent admonitions. "I'm afraid I was not heard perfectly," he said, trying to excuse himself. We reassured him, but he came again to the point. "Was I heard?"
"Overheard now and then," replied Oscar, laughing, "but it was stupendously interesting." "Overheard now and then" was surely the wittiest and most charming description possible.
I have often been asked since to compare Oscar's humour with Shaw's. I have never thought Shaw humorous in conversation. It was on the spur of the moment that Oscar's humour was so extraordinary, and it was this spontaneity that made him so wonderful a companion. Shaw's humour comes from thought and the intellectual angle from which he sees things, a dry light thrown on our human frailties.
If you praised anyone enthusiastically or over praised him, Oscar's humour took on a keener edge. I remember later praising something Shaw had written about this time, and I added, "The curious thing is, he seems to have no enemies."
"Not prominent enough yet for that, Frank," said Oscar, "Enemies come with success; but then you must admit that none of Shaw's friends like him," and he laughed delightfully. Ah, the dear London days when meeting Wilde had always an effect of sunshine in the mist!
Success came to me in my work and it came, I must confess, through the gambling spirit so powerful in England. I had learned quickly on the Evening News that the London public, which wanted to know the results of this or that great horse race, was more easily won than any other public. So I was forced to study the sport which had little attraction for one so dreadfully shortsighted as I was. While interesting myself in it, I came to see that the "starting prices" were the chief factor in the gambling. One day, I think it was in 1885 or 1886, I heard that there was a great dispute about the starting prices. One morning paper, the Sporting Life, gave one set of prices and the other, the Sportsman, gave a different set. At once I called on one editor and offered to publish his "starting prices" in a special edition of the Evening News at eleven or twelve o'clock each morning, giving his paper full credit; indeed, publishing his paper's name above the prices. Of course he was to supply me with "copy" fairly early. He consented at once and gladly, even went out of his way to praise the Evening News. On leaving him, I hastened hot-foot to the rival sheet and got that editor, too, to pledge himself to give me the day's "starting prices" as early as possible, if I gave his paper credit for the news.
With both editors I signed a contract for, I think, two or three years.
Next morning, when the early edition of the Evening News appeared with both starting prices, I was not left long in doubt as to the value of my news.
Instead of selling three or four thousand copies, we sold twenty thousand; and in a week this early edition sold more than all the other editions put together; and our advertisement revenue more than doubled itself in a month. I saw that with good machines I could make the paper pay immediately and pay enormously. How was I to get the 15,000, or 20,000 necessary to equip the paper with proper up-to-date machines?
About this time or a little later I had a great experience. A young fellow came from Birmingham with the idea of founding a halfpenny morning paper. He had only?. 5,000 but he thought it should be enough, and he came to me to make terms for printing and publishing his offspring. My estimate was by far the cheapest he had had. He was very anxious to know that I would not put the price up on him later. I was greatly interested and said I had thought of starting a morning edition of the Evening News and would talk the matter over with him. He took fire at my idea of making each item of news a sort of story in the American fashion, and finally asked me would I help him with the editing. I said I'd be delighted to go in with him, but I did not think 5,000 would go far. He said it ought to go a couple of months and by that time he ought to have a circulation of 50,000; and with a circulation of 50,000, he could get 50,000 more for the venture in Birmingham. "All right," I said, "if you can get the further money, we can get the 50,000 circulation in three months." And so the Morning Mail was started; within two months we had 50,000 circulation.
We had already received notice from The Times that they had a weekly paper called The Mail and that our Morning Mail infringed their copyright; and they began an action claiming 20,000 damages. I sent my friend off to Birmingham and went myself to see Arthur Walter of The Times. I told him the action was ridiculous-a morning paper, a halfpenny paper in London had neither the shape nor look of the weekly edition of The Times, which they called The Mail. Arthur Walter told me that he agreed with me, but
that his father was very angry over the matter and that he could do nothing.
A week later my friend came back from Birmingham and told me that The Times action had prevented him getting any money and he would have to close the paper up unless I could finance it.
I spoke to Lord Folkestone about it and soon convinced him that a halfpenny morning paper must beat all the penny papers out of the field. Success and a great fortune were before us, offering themselves, so to speak. He caught fire at the idea of a Conservative morning halfpenny paper that might have a sale of a million and be as influential as The Times. He declared he would speak to Lord Salisbury about it; but first, with his inborn loyalty, he thought we ought to propose the scheme to Coleridge Kennard. Accordingly Kennard was brought into counsel.
By this time I had got to know all the Kennard family pretty well. Mrs.
Kennard was a tall, fine-looking woman without much individuality, I thought; the son, Hugh, was in the Guards and soon afterwards got married; the daughter, Merry, was charming, both kind and affectionate and very pretty. Hugh confided in me one evening; wanted to know if the Evening News could be made a pecuniary success or not. I assured him it could, but would take a year or so. Now I saw him again and set all his doubts at rest, but Coleridge, the father, seemed peevish to me. He didn't want a fortune, he said; he wanted the loss to cease. "It's costing heavily and the hopes you held out," he said to Lord Folkestone, "don't seem likely to be realized!" He soon let me know that his hope was that he might be made a baronet. "I don't care for it for myself especially," he said, "but I want it for my son and I've spent 70,000 pounds to get it, though I was told at the beginning that 40,000 would more than suffice." I came thus face to face with the fact that every title had its price.
Kennard hated the Morning Mail and would not hear of putting up the?. 20,000 needed for new machinery, so I persuaded Folkestone to go to Lord Salisbury, the leader of the Conservative Party, and put the matter before him, or rather to let me see him. A day or two later Lord Salisbury sent for me and I called on him in Arlington Street and talked to him for an hour. To me it was evident that The Times would soon have to reduce its price from threepence to a penny or better still to a halfpenny, for the many must be our masters if they were organized; and I went on to show him by figures that it was only the want of machinery that prevented me from getting a circulation of hundreds of thousands in a month or two. He was interested and put probing questions to me. As a young man he had been poor, and even after his marriage had earned his living as a journalist on the Saturday Review, and this vital discipline had made him. But when I told him of my experience in founding the Morning Mail and said that I could get a circulation of a million within six months and make a quarter of a million pounds a year out of the paper, he told me that all I had said had been very interesting, but there was an effect of "foreshortening" in all my enthusiasm. He thought it would take many years to get a million circulation; still he would help me.
He would ask the Whips to call a meeting of the Conservative party and allow me to address them in the Carlton Club, and if I could get advances from them of the 15,000 or 20,000 pounds I wanted, he would be very glad and more. He said at the end, "I will back the project as far as I can. I think it very possible you will be successful."
In due time I heard from the Whips and one afternoon I went down and talked about the new halfpenny morning paper to three hundred members of the Conservative party in the Carlton Club. They subscribed-at least they put down the moneys they would be willing to be responsible for — and the Whips came to see me, saying they had put down something like 5,000 pounds. I got up at once and said, "That lets me out. I will have nothing to do with the attempt to make bricks without straw; but within ten years some of you will be very sorry that you did not put money in the first halfpenny morning paper proposed to you. When you find in twenty years or so from today a halfpenny paper more influential than The Times and making half a million yearly, you will wonder why you did not take a flutter, at least, in it." I was cheered by one or two people, but I was disgusted at the idea that I had put the price as low as I could, and that I had got hardly more than one quarter of what I wanted.
The first Whip came to me and said, "You ought to take the money and come back in six months and they would give you much more. You can get all you want; why throw the handle after the blade?"
"I have come to the parting of the ways," I replied. "I was and am eager to go on with the work, but to go on crippled for a few thousand pounds and to beg and beg and make the plans obvious and expatiate on the proven is not my game; I had rather give it all up. I am going to Rome for six months' holiday."
A big man came to me while I was talking to the Whip and said, "You know you interested me profoundly. My name is Henniker Heaton. I made my money on a paper in Sydney, Australia, and I think you and I might talk business."
"I shall be delighted," I said, "but it must be very soon, for I am going to Rome unless I get 20,000 pounds down." He said he would come and see me in the office, and he came, and I more or less took to him, but he wanted time to consider the matter and I wasn't going to give him any time. Again and again Walter of The Times had told me that if I would take a position on The Times he would give it to me; but I had done three years of extremely hard work and in the three years had hardly grown at all intellectually. I wanted some new mental nourishment, wanted to see Rome and study it, and read Ranke and Mommsen and study them and try to grow a little. For travel and reading were already the bread and meat of my mind.
This idea made Henniker Heaton grin. He thought making money and getting a position was the only thing in the world, and the moment I discovered this in him, I had no more interest in what he said. I went to see Lord Folkestone and after a talk with him I called a meeting of the directors of the Evening News and got four months' vacation, and forthwith left for Rome. Oh! I was to blame. Success had come to me too easily in London. I ought to have taken the Whip's advice and gone on with the paper. I should have got all the money I needed and made the Morning Mail the success the Daily Mail became ten years later, and founded my future on a secure basis of hundreds of thousands of pounds income. But I had won so easily that I took no account of money or the power that money gives, and I went away casually to the most delightful holiday in Rome, which led to my severing my connection not only with the Morning Mail, but also the Evening News, as I shall tell in due course.
It was in 1887,1 think, that a little Jew called Leopold Graham came to the Evening News office with some piece of city news. He had no notion of writing and was poorly educated, but he had a smattering of common French phrases and a real understanding of company promoting and speculative city business. He interested me at once and we became friendly, if not friends.
He told me he was working with Douglas Macrae on the Financial Times and there he had met Horatio Bottomley, whom he described as one of the wiliest men in the city of London. I was interested in the competition between the Financial Times and the Financial News, directed by the Jew, Harry Marks. I had got to like Marks; he had had his education as a journalist in New York and was an interesting personality: a man of good height and figure and strong face without marked Jewish features. We became friendly almost at once, though as soon as I took to reading the News I saw that Marks had few scruples and many interests.
Macrae made the impression on me of being a harder worker even than Marks, and perhaps a little more scrupulous. I shall never forget how Macrae pressed me one day early in our acquaintance to lunch with him in his office.
He could give me a good chop, he said, and a first-rate bottle of "fizz," and as the business we were talking over promised well, I consented. At once he called for "Harmsworth, Alfred Harmsworth," and a youth of perhaps twenty or so came into the room, a good-looking fellow whom Macrae commissioned to cook half a dozen chops and to get besides a salad and a Camembert cheese. It was all procured swiftly and deftly put on the table and we lunched fairly well. I hardly noticed Alfred Harms-worth at all.
Bottomley made a far deeper impression on me than any other journalist: he was nearer my own age and Graham had already praised his ability to me enthusiastically-and Ikey was no fool. Bottomley was a trifle shorter even than I was, perhaps five feet four or five, but very broad and even then, when only seven and twenty, threatened to become stout. He had a very large head, well-balanced, too, with good forehead and heavy jaws; the eyes small and grey; the peculiarity of the face a prodigiously long upper lip: he was clean-shaven and his enormous upper lip reminded me at once of the giant Charles Bradlaugh. When I mentioned the fact to Graham afterwards, he replied at once, "Some say he's an illegitimate son of Bradlaugh. In any case, he has the most profound esteem and liking for him, thinks him one of the greatest men of this time."
"He's not far wrong," was my comment. At the time, I was too busy with my own work on the Evening News to pay much attention to financial journalism, and some time elapsed before I got to know any of them at all intimately.
In 1888 or '89 Graham told me that Bottomley had bought the Hansard Union and was going to bring out a great company. Everyone knew the name of Hansard as publishers of the debates in Parliament, and like most other people, I had imagined that Hansard had some official status or rights. To my astonishment I learned that Hansard was merely a printing and publishing firm to which Parliament had given the contract to publish a complete account of its proceedings. Graham made me see that a big public company with this well known name and function would certainly be supported enthusiastically by the investing public. One day Graham brought Bottomley to see me. We lunched together, I think, at the Cafe Royale, and almost at once Bottomley told me of the Hansard Union Company. "An assured success," he declared, and then asked me point blank if I could get Lord Folkestone and Coleridge Kennard to be directors. I told him I'd think it over. Off-hand he said to me, "Get me those two names as directors and I'll give you a cheque for?. 10,000."
"Big pay," I ejaculated, "and I love big figures. But tell me, what have you paid for all the companies you're going to amalgamate and what is the capitalization?" Without demur and with astonishing exactitude he gave me all the figures. I took notes and afterwards I said, "Practically, you are buying all the businesses for?. 200,000 and are selling them to the company for a million?"
"I may add a quarter of a million debentures," he rejoined coolly. Needless to say, he added, the quarter of a million alone left him a swinging profit. Next day I put the thing before Folkestone. He said, "If you advise it, Frank, I'll do it: why not?" I told him that in my opinion the venture was overcapitalised and must fail, and he said at once, "That finishes it, Frank, so far as I am concerned; but tell me what Coleridge Kennard says." Coleridge Kennard, when I put the matter before him, said that the capitalization mattered nothing to him: everyone knew that one sold at a profit, if one could. I gave Bottomley Coleridge Kennard's name but refused to take any money for it.
In a couple of years what I foresaw happened. At first the amalgamated companies paid large dividends-if I recollect aright, two in the very first year-and then the whole thing fell into bankruptcy and people spoke of it as "Bottomley's swindle." The failure came too soon, the ruin was too big; it shocked business people. Very soon it was brought before the courts and The Queen vs. Bottomley was the chief event of the day. I went to hear the criminal trial and was never more amused in my life or more interested. It came before Mr. Justice Hawkins, who was known as the "hanging judge," certainly the severest judge in half a century in London. What chance did Bottomley stand before such a tribunal? I was to learn what brains could do.
At first the case went badly for Bottomley. It was very clear that the business had been overcapitalised and hundreds of thousands of pounds must have gone into Bottomley's pocket. But as soon as he stood up to address the court, all this faded to irrelevance. From the beginning by sheer genius he took the bull by the horns. "I'm glad," he began, "heart-glad that I'm before Mr. Justice 'awkins. He has the name of being a severe judge, but his ability was never questioned; it's his ability I rely on today in my hour of need, his power of getting to the bottom of a complicated business."
From such compliments he went on to a detailed history of the purchase of the various companies. Time and again when he told of acquiring a new company, he drew the attention of the Judge pointedly to the fact that, though the price might seem high, this new business helped to complete and sustain the larger fabric he had in mind. "I want to make my idea clear to you, my Lud!" was the burden of his long, quiet and eminently persuasive exposition. His show of frankness was as wonderful as his detailed knowledge.
Before he had finished, even the barristers in the court were won over to admiration: a Q.C. said, "I've never listened to so complete a statement." One and all forgot that Bottomley had lived for months with every business he had to describe; nothing was astonishing to me, save the point-blank compliments to the Judge he lavished in and out of season. Long before the end of the trial he had converted one of the strongest judges on the bench into his advocate and assistant. Bottomley not only won his case, but turned the judge into his personal friend, who believed not only in his ability but in his integrity. Some time afterwards Mr. Justice Hawkins gave Bottomley the wig and gown he had worn all his life as a Judge. The whole incident is unique in the history of the English bench and proves Bottomley's astounding cleverness as nothing else could. Clearly, he was a man of genius.
But if the lights were high, the shadows were heavy. If he had guided the amalgamated businesses for five years, he might have earned the half million or so he made out of the amalgamation, but to drop his bantling almost as soon as it came to the birth showed cynical contempt, I thought, for public opinion, and indeed for anything but money. Moreover, his long speech at the trial discovered time and again an ignorance of grammar and a cockney incapacity to pronounce the letter h, which was astonishing in so able a man.
The same Q.C. who had praised his long exposition turned to me at the end with the remark, "A d… d clever outsider!"
I always thought that if Bottomley had gone for a couple of years to Germany or to France for hard serious study he might have been one of the masters and guides of the new time, but his ignorance kept his appeal always on a low level and directed it to the all but lowest class.
He wasn't much more ignorant than Lord Randolph Churchill, but Churchill didn't drop his h's, and if he had, the English would have taken it as an amiable eccentricity in the son of a Duke.
Look at Horatio Bottomley! What is the characteristic of that short, stout, broad figure, that heavy jowl and double chin? Surely greed. He was greedy of all the sensual pleasures, intensely greedy; even at thirty he ate too much and habitually drank too much. To see him lunching at Romano's with two or three of his intimates, usually subordinates, with a pretty chorus girl on one side and another siren opposite, while the waiter uncorked the fourth or fifth bottle of champagne, was to see the man as he was. He was greedy, too, of power, and vain as a peacock, wanted always to have a paper at his command, and of the half dozen he owned never brought one to success, save John Bull, which was a success simply through the blind patriotism excited by the World War.
He went into Parliament, and I remember that he told me once in a moment of expansion that he would yet be Chancellor of the Exchequer. Rhodes a little later made much the same confession to me, and Rhodes had a better chance by far than Bottomley, for he had founded himself upon a great fortune, and though nearly as ignorant as Bottomley, he didn't drop his h's and had all the outward marks of a better class education. I told Rhodes he would hardly succeed, and I didn't disguise from Bottomley that he had no earthly chance. "There are half a dozen men of real ability in the House of Commons," I said, "of ability to be compared to yours; Hicks-Beach, for example, is of high character and has besides a touch of genius; Balfour has extraordinary charm of person and mind and much reading to boot;
Chamberlain, too, has real ability and a great fortune acquired within ordinary rules: these three will all be against you with a savage injustice of antagonism, for they all look on the prizes of a political life as their appanage.
On the other side, you have Gladstone, who is an aristocrat at heart, and Dilke ditto, and Parnell, and Redmond, and Healy: all will be down on you, for you neither represent nor care for their democratic gospel or their personal ambitions. Then there are John Burns and Cunninghame Graham, who will hate you because of your indifference to ideal causes. In fact, all the leaders of all the parties will turn the cold shoulder to you, and to get to the top from your stand-point seems to me utterly impossible."
"You think you could do it?"
"I have not so many handicaps," I retorted, "but I'm beginning to doubt whether the driving power of desire is there."
"That's in me," he said smiling, and set his great jaw; and I could not but agree.