In the years from 1883 to 1887 I was working sixteen or seventeen hours a day on the Evening News, Bit by bit I found out the secret of journalistic success in London, and I may as well tell the story here. First of all, I discovered that the public did not care a row of pins for scholarly or even original leading articles. Arthur Walter praised this part of the Evening News very cordially, but I soon found that it had no effect whatever on the circulation. The first thing that gave me the clue to success was the divorce case of Lady Colin Campbell. I had met Lady Colin in Paris and admired, as every one else admired, her tall, superb figure and remarkable brunette beauty. I went to the court chiefly out of curiosity and heard her statement and cross-examination. I then begged the Evening News correspondent to give me a verbatim report, for I soon realized that no other paper would treat the case as it deserved. It was full of the most scabrous details. In successive editions that evening, I gave up the whole of the right-hand center page to it, and promised my readers, in the beginning, to give the fullest account possible of the trial. The question was how far I should report the lady's revelations.
I saw Arthur Walter in the evening, and I surprised him by telling him the details of the case; he agreed with me as to what should be published. In The Times account next morning, I found that they had drawn the line almost exactly where I had drawn it, though I had told the story at much greater length and made it much more interesting by adding detailed sketches of the chief personages. I pursued the same plan every day of the trial, making a most enthralling human story, as human as I dared in view of English convention.
The circulation of the paper almost doubled in the week, and the whole account attracted so much attention that Edmund Yates asked me to dinner, and while at dinner invited me to tell him how I had come to such extraordinary success. Everyone, he declared, was reading the Evening News for the report of the cause scandaleuse. One man, sitting almost opposite me at the table, sniffed again and again at my laughing outspokenness; it was, I learned afterwards, George Lewis-the famous solicitor.
The next day I received the proof of how envy and malevolence revenge themselves on success. George Lewis indicted the Evening News for obscene libel, and almost immediately the case came up before Mr. Justice Denman.
George Lewis read out some of the reports which I had printed and asked that I should be punished. Not wishing to put the paper to any expense, I defended the case in person, and my answer to the accusation was simply to show that I had followed with almost absolute exactness the example set by The Times, eliminating every scabrous detail just as The Times had eliminated them. "The standard of what is becoming," I said, "varies in every country and every age. I could do no better with a halfpenny paper than keep the limits established by The Times. This I have done," and I passed up my account with the account in The Times side by side, showing that we often stopped at the same word.
"What have you to say to that?" Mr. Justice Denman asked. My accuser, George Lewis, rose quickly. "I submit," said he, "that it's no answer whatever to the case. I contend that the Evening News is guilty of obscene libel, and I ask for a verdict on the strength of these reports."
"But," said Justice Denman, "if you are actuated by a respect for public morality, Mr. Lewis, why don't you select The Times rather than the less important Evening News?"
"Again, I submit," said Lewis, "that my accusation is unanswered."
Denman smiled and replied, "I give a verdict for the defendant, and wish to express my opinion that the case should never have been brought."
But I had learned my lesson. The fact that the Evening News published the longest and most detailed reports had doubled the circulation and brought the paper into the limelight. Now couldn't I go on to make the news pages more interesting? I at once set to work to get a couple of Paris papers, a couple of German papers, and used to glance through them every evening after my work of the day was supposed to have been finished.
As soon as I found either in Berlin, Rome, Madrid or Paris an interesting case, I rewrote it for the Evening News and soon saw that this was the road to success. The circulation of the paper rose rapidly, and people of some importance in journalism began to invite me out and show me favor; especially was this the case with Labouchere and Yates, whom I regarded as the two heads of the profession.
I made them both laugh heartily one evening after dinner by telling them of my progress downwards to success. I had edited the Evening News at first, I said, at the top of my thought as a scholar and a man of the world of twentyeight; nobody wanted my opinions, but as I went downwards and began to edit it as I felt at twenty, then at eighteen, then at sixteen, I was more successful; but when I got to my tastes at fourteen years of age, I found instantaneous response. "Kissing and fighting," I said, "were the only things I cared for at thirteen or fourteen, and those are the themes the English public desires and enjoys today."
It is to the present hour the true reading of successful popular journalism.
Why has the News of the World a circulation of over three millions? Simply because in it you can find most of the suggestive or sensational stories of the week. They have not found out the proper way of increasing their stock and so they are often short of good stories, but the good stories are there to be had always, as I very soon found out when my feet struck the right path.
It was, of course, extremely hard work for me to go through a dozen foreign papers every evening for perhaps a couple of stories, and besides at the best they were foreign stories-not as interesting to the English public as English stories would be. But how, how was I to get English stories?
One day, I was in the sub-editor's room and found that the reporters at all the police courts sent in flimsies with short accounts of what took place in the police courts during the day up to twelve o'clock. One of the stories told of a murder in Clerkenwell. There was no attempt at description: the common reporter had cut the incident down to some eight or ten lines, but beneath it I felt that there was a great human story. I at once jumped into a hansom, ran down to Clerkenwell, got hold of the reporter and made him take me to the scene of the tragedy. The story was appalling and intensely interesting.
A man and wife had lived together till middle age: had brought up a family of three children; comparative success had come through a little tobacco shop they kept, and with success came temptation. The father of forty-five had fallen in love with a girl of fifteen or sixteen who had come to the shop to buy tobacco. He made up to the girl and won her without the knowledge of his wife, who was wholly taken up with the household duties; but the eldest daughter, a girl of fourteen, had quick eyes and noticed that her father was going after the girl. When she saw him kissing her, she went to the mother to tell, feminine jealousy and curiosity blazing. At once the mother revenged herself on the girl. She beat her and called her names in the street until at length the father took his mistress' part and knocked his wife down. Strange to say, her head struck a cartwheel and she died the same night.
The whole story was told in court, but when I retold it in the Evening News with the chief details-a description of the jealous daughter and her account of how she had found her father out, and the father's confession — the story had an enormous vogue, and the circulation of the Evening News responded to it immediately.
I had found the way to success. Every day the London police courts are filled with love stories and sensational tragedies of all kinds. How to get them was the only question. I took six police courts as a nucleus and put an able man in charge of them with these instructions: "Whenever you get any story that promises, go immediately to the police court in question, see the reporter, get all the facts. If there is real interest in the incident, work it up, interview the principals, make a real story of it, and send it in to the paper." I advised my lieutenant to give a guinea to any police reporter who put him on to a good case. In a month I found the problem was solved. I could fill the six or seven columns of the Evening News with sensational stories of London life with the greatest ease.
After some three years' work the circulation of the paper had increased tenfold and it had begun to pay. As I had worked morning, noon and night on it without respite, I got the directors to give me a three months' holiday and went straight to Italy. In Rome I read a good deal of Italian and studied the old Roman remains, and became a friend of Prince Doria. There took place what I called the strangest occurrence in my life, which I may now tell at length.
The undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns has always had a certain fascination for me, as I imagine it has for almost everyone. Long before the discovery of the X-rays had shown that one could see through houses and bodies, I was persuaded that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in any philosophy.
The strange attraction of human beings, one to another; the fact that chemical elements only unite according to certain ascertained weights, that gases would mingle, but not become one until an electric spark was passed through them; the myriad analogies in nature suggesting likeness in the eternal disparity; unity in the infinite differences, tormented my curiosity from the time I was twenty. But every time I sought for further knowledge I was met by a blank wall.
I studied spiritualism for six or eight months and was so eloquent about it that the medium admitted me into the secret and showed me all the tricks of his foul trade. I was amused later to find that Browning had had an equally strange experience with "Sludge," the medium whom his wife had begun to believe in.
Later still I was surprised to find that Alfred Russel Wallace, a great scientist and the forerunner of Darwin, a transparently honest man, believed absolutely in all sorts of communications with what he called "the spirit world." But my unbelief persisted and persists to this day. Where is the great light?
Still, I had one experience that enormously strengthened Wallace's influence over me in this respect. Desiring complete change and recreation, I took out some Irish horses and hunted regularly on the campagna. It seemed delightful to me to hunt foxes where Paul and Peter had walked, where Caesar and Pompey had marched at the head of their legions, to take high wooden fences on a countryside peopled with the ghosts of forgotten worthies. I used to spend some hours every afternoon studying the antiquities and all the morning galloping across the campagna.
It was the double life that seduced me and gave me absolute health of both mind and body. Naturally, in the hunting field I got to know nearly all the Romans of position, and I knew most of the scholars and poets through my afternoons.
As sometimes happens, there was a blank day in our hunting. The sun was hot and strong and the dogs could take up no scent at all. The whole hunt moved from place to place, drawing every spinney blank. Once I rested beside a sprig of acacia.
I had promised to go to the Dorias to lunch and to talk afterwards to their guests about the famous picture that was in the Doria galleries, the so-called Sacred and Profane Love by Titian. Every one interested in art knows the picture. At the left, in a charming Italian landscape, is a beautiful woman dressed in the utmost splendor of those great Venetian days; and seated on a round marble well-head, close to, is another woman, quite nude, wonderfully drawn and painted, realistically realized. Some idiot had christened it Sacred and Profane Love. I read it in a different way. It seemed to me plain that it was a characteristic Renaissance story: a Venetian aristocrat proud of the beauty of his wife, asked Titian to paint her in all her splendor of raiment, and at the same time to paint her as he saw her in her nude loveliness. It was plainly one and the same woman-figure, eyes and hair unmistakably alike.
Looking forward to the luncheon and the talk, and tired with futile efforts to find a fox, I broke away from the crowd before noon and rode towards the city, towards the Porta Pia, along the wonderful road made sacred by the sufferings of Paul. As I rode into the city, I think by way of the south gate, I had to slow up and go carefully because of a crowd of three or four hundred people. When I got through the gate I saw from my horse that the center of attraction was a veiled woman seated at a plain table drawn up against the wall. The table was covered with some simple brown cloth. I said to one on the outskirts of the crowd: "What is it all about?"
"A famous sorceress and soothsayer," he said, "who tells you the future," and he crossed himself as he spoke.
Just then a girl went up to the woman, put down some silver, and showed her hands. I laughed. It seemed strange to me that there in Rome, the city of a thousand miracles, the heart of a dozen civilizations, this poor cheat should have won through all the centuries of skepticism.
"A good way of getting rid of small change," I remarked, smiling, and some Italians echoed me, laughing. Suddenly the sorceress spoke:
"If that foreigner on the horse would come down and dare the test he would find that I could tell him new truths. I can unfold the future to him."
"It is the past I would like to know about," I answered. "If you can tell me about the past I'll believe your predictions."
"Come down," she said, "I'll tell you about the past as well as the future."
I looked at my watch and saw that I had half an hour to spare. There was an Italian boy already at my horse's head, promising to hold the cable-tow, so I
dismounted and went through the crowd to the sorceress. I offered her a gold coin but she waved it aside. "Do not pay until you are convinced."
I said, "Please understand that I want to know about the past."
"What about the past?" she asked.
"Oh, the most important thing to me in it."
"That's easy," she replied. "Give me both your hands, please. The left one shows what your natural proclivities are, the right how they have been modified by the experiences of your life."
I held out both my hands and stood feeling rather a fool to be wasting my time on such nonsense.
"The most peculiar thing in your life," she said, "up to date, is the love and admiration you had for a man, an American."
"Perhaps you can tell me the man's name," I suggested.
"I will spell it for you," she said, "you begin."
"Begin you-" said I, and she answered, "S-m-i-t-h-Smith."
For a moment I was dumbfounded. How could she know anything about my life in Kansas University?
"What was he like?" I asked.
To my amazement she described him.
"He had a great influence on you," she went on, "made you a student and writer. Am I right?"
"Perfectly right," I said, "but how you got the information I do not know.
Whatever you tell me about the future I shall think of and consider ripely."
"The movement of your life," she said, "goes steadily upward, and you will realize all your ambitions. You will win money and fame, and have a very happy and full life. But the curve in later life begins to go down, and I cannot see the end; there is a sea of blood."
"What do you mean," I cried, "blood cause by me?"
"Oh, no, blood over half the world-a sea of blood."
"Am I in it?" I asked. "I will say no more," she replied. "I oughtn't to tell you anything more."
I laughed. "It is a very dramatic ending. Of course if you think you ought not to tell me, you won't."
"Still you have no belief in it?" she asked, looking at me with sad eyes. None,"
I said, "not a vestige of belief, not in my success nor in the sea of blood."
She nodded her head several times as if in thought and then with a sigh, she said: "I can make you believe it all."
"There I defy you," I laughed. "I do not think I would believe you if it occurred; if in the years to come all you have said turned out to be true, I still should not believe."
"You will leave Rome this evening and go across the seas to England," she cried suddenly.
"Oh, that's a shockingly bad guess," I replied. "I have my rooms in Rome for months: I have horses here and do not intend to leave until spring is changing into summer. Three months at least I shall stay here."
"You will leave Rome this evening," she repeated, "for London. And in the train you will know that the soothsayer spoke truth."
To cut the matter short, I asked her what I owed her.
"What you please," she answered. "Nothing if you do not believe."
I took out a couple of gold coins.
"I believe the first part of what you said," I told her. "It was extraordinary. But nothing like you say is ever going to happen to me."
"Tonight you will know more," she replied.
I bowed and walked through the crowd to my horse and went off to the lunch.
I gave my little talk to perhaps a hundred people in the Doria gallery. I had just finished and was being congratulated by the British ambassador and Doria, when a servant came up and said to Doria, "A telegram for Mr. Harris."
With their permission I opened it and found that I was summoned back to London immediately-"Important!" The signature was that of a friend, Lord Folkestone, who would not have sent me such a telegram without absolute need. I showed the telegram to Doria, and, absorbed in the question of what could have happened, I hurried off to my hotel, sent a messenger to get my ticket, packed my clothes, settled my bill and caught the night express to London, getting a sleeping compartment all to myself. An hour later I went into the diner. In glancing out of the window into the gloom I saw that we were just leaving the campagna.
The whole scene of noon came back to me in a flash. Here I was against all probability going to London, as the soothsayer had predicted.
How could she have known? How much truth was there in it all? What did she mean by the "sea of blood" at the end? "A sea of blood," her words were,
"a sea of blood over half the world."
A couple of months later I was free again. I returned to Rome and did everything I could think of to find my soothsayer, but in vain. When I inquired of the police, they told me that the soothsayers and similar folk in Rome were legion. Could I give any description?
I never heard of her again. I leave the story now to my readers as a problem. It is the one fact in my life which I am unable to explain in any way.
I must now relate how I lost the editorship of the Evening News. All the while I was in Rome I received weekly statements from the Evening News and knew that it was going on all right, but without improving under the assistant whom I had picked, an Irishman named Ruble.
When I reached England, Lord Folkstone told me that Mr. Kennard. the banker and director who supplied most of the money, had come to have a great opinion of Rubie, my assistant; thought he could do the work quite as well as I could, and, in fact, intended to make a row about my having prolonged my holiday in order to put Rubie in my place as managing editor. I was astonished and amused. I knew that Rubie could not do the paper at all, and I had really worked with all my heart and soul at it, and hadn't taken breathing time or a holiday in the three years.
I meant to take up the whole problem of journalism in a big way when I came back. I wanted to group all the police courts in London in sixes under able heads, and so fill up the whole paper from one end to the other with astonishing stories of London life. I dreamed of a morning paper as well and a million circulation for each; and I would have done it all, but when I came back, I found that success had turned Kennard's head. He would have to pay me a share of the profits; he would always have me as a master in his paper; and as I had prolonged my holiday without leave, I had given him the opportunity he needed. I was to be discharged-decently because of Lord Folkestone-still, to be got rid of.
We had a board meeting at the Evening News and Kennard said he wanted to act quite fairly: he thought that I had made the paper successful, and he was quite willing to give me a thousand pounds as a solatium.
One incident is perhaps worth relating here: I brought some friends together who offered Coleridge Kennard some forty thousand pounds for the paper- more than all the money spent on it during my editorship; he refused the offer. I thereupon accepted his offer of a thousand pounds and got up to leave the board room. At this Lord Folkestone rose also, reminded Coleridge Kennard that he had put a good many thousands of pounds in the paper, that he had selected me as editor, and declared now that he was perfectly satisfied with my work. He preferred, he said, to leave the paper with me and lose whatever money he had put into it. In the most charming way, he added,
"Come on, Frank, they do not want us," and took me out to his mail-phaeton.
Three months after I left the Evening News Kennard met me at the corner of Grosvenor Street and begged me to come back to my old position on the News. He told me that the circulation of the paper had fallen off in the most extraordinary way. I smiled at him. "I warned you, Kennard," I said, "that things quickly built up would fall down nearly as quickly, but I am quite happy in the editorship of the Fortnightly Review and I will not go back."
Two months later Kennard confessed to me that he had sold the Evening News for a paltry two thousand five hundred pounds to Harms-worth: he had lost some thirty-eight thousand by discharging me.