Up to this time, I have said very little about my financial position. I must now make this omission good. From the time of taking over the Evening News in the early eighties, I had got into touch with finance in London. I not only knew the editors of the financial papers, but was a friend of both the owners, Macrae of the Financial Times and Harry Marks of the Financial News, and through my knowledge of South Africa and sympathy with the people, I had come into close relations with a good many of the South African financiers.
I had known Cecil Rhodes ever since the Colonial Conference in '87, as I have already narrated, and through him I came to know Alfred Beit, who somewhat later made himself, through the success of the gold mines of Johannesburg, one of the most important financiers in the world. About the same time I became friendly with Albert Ochs, who was the head of the famous diamond buying house of Hatton Gardens. He had a brother, James Ochs, who conducted the Paris business, and another younger brother of less importance; but Albert Ochs, in many respects, was very like Beit-a firstrate financial head. He had inherited half a million or so from his father in the diamond business, and while keeping on the old established trade in diamonds, bought an interest in certain gold mines in Johannesburg, and so came into the wider field of international finance.
We soon became intimate; I really liked Albert Ochs, and trusted him. I had made money with him more than once by getting articles in favor of his enterprises in all sorts of papers. Later I tried time and again to bring him into a union with Beit and Rhodes, which he infinitely desired, but that's another story to be told later.
Beit seemed to dislike Ochs, and one day told me a humorous story to account for his prejudice against him.
Beit and Wernher, it appears, used to lunch together at the Holborn Restaurant, and one day Beit noticed that old Ochs, Albert's father, had got a seat at the next table and seemed to be listening attentively to the private talk that went on between himself and Wernher. At this time Beit and Wernher, too, were diamond brokers in Hatton Gardens; in fact, in time, through Rhodes's help, they took over the whole business from Kimberley and ousted all competitors, including Ochs.
When Wernher went out, old Ochs bowed very politely to Beit and asked,
"Would you mind if I come and sit with you? I'm alone."
Beit said, "I'm going very soon, but if you would care to sit here, come." Ochs came over and took Wernher's vacant seat; Beit sat and talked with him wondering what he wanted.
Suddenly Ochs said, "Is Mr. Wernher coming back?"
"No, I do not think so," Beit replied. "He has had to go off on private business."
"Oh," said Ochs, "then may I help myself to some of the potatoes he has left?"
And as soon as Beit said, "Yes," he harpooned one or two of the cold potatoes and began to eat them. "Then I understood," said Beit, "that he had not come in the hope of finding out any secret, but simply, millionaire like, to realize a small economy." It was this story, I think, that first gave me the idea of my saying, "Means and meanness go together"; for a little later still I found the same characteristic just as fully developed in Alfred Beit, as I may tell in due course.
My friendship with Albert Ochs and Beit showed me a good deal of the inside of finance, and I knew that they would let me have the money to buy a paper as soon as I put a fair proposition before them.
One day in London I heard casually that the Saturday Review had just been sold to the son-in-law of the man who made Stephen's Ink. I had gone after the Saturday years before and was assured by Mr. Beresford Hope himself that if the sale of it were ever mooted, I should have the first refusal. Now, some years after his death, I found it had been sold by his children for a paltry thousand pounds. I went down at once to the office and saw the owner, Lewis Edmunds, Q.C., who knew no more about literature than he knew about skyscrapers. He told me that the paper was not for sale, but he would be willing to consider an offer. At once I said, "All right, I will give you a pound for every reader of the Saturday Review, taking the average of the last three weeks. I will pay you ten per cent down and the balance within a fortnight."
"Will you take our figures for the sales?" he asked.
"Certainly," I replied. Forthwith he rang a bell and ordered the old bookkeeper who came in to say what the average sales had been for the last three weeks. In ten minutes the figures were on the table. The average sales were 5,600. At once I gave him my check for five hundred and sixty and a promise to pay the remainder within a fortnight, against his written undertaking to hand me over the journal-and I went out of the office the probable owner of the Saturday Review.
When I thought the matter over I realized that I possibly hadn't more than five hundred pounds in the bank, and so went out to get an extra hundred. I went to one friend after another and failed: A. was not in; B. was away on a holiday; C. would have to consult his wife as to the matter; but at last late in the evening I fell across Brandon Thomas, the actor and playwright, and told him why I had come. He said, "I will lend you one thousand pounds on condition I may have a sixth-share in the venture." I gave him the undertaking, and a couple of years afterwards he got five thousand pounds for his sixth-share.
The purchase of the Saturday Review put me on my feet in every sense. Just as everyone had found that the step from the Evening News to the Fortnightly Review was a step up for me, so from the Fortnightly Review to the ownership and editorship of the Saturday Review was again a big step up. The losing of the Fortnightly Review did me good: it made me resolve to edit the Saturday Review as well as I could. So I sat down to plan the ablest possibly weekly: first of all, the staff must be better than the best hitherto.
I thought I had fewer prejudices than most men, and a better understanding of greatness than any editor in London, and so I set myself to pick the ablest.
To my friend Runciman I had promised the place of musical critic and my assistant. The first man I wrote to was George Bernard Shaw. He was at that time writing musical articles on the World for four pounds a week. I wrote to him that music was not the forte of the man who had written Widowers'
Houses and begged him to come to the Saturday Review and write articles on the theatre-for he was a born dramatist-and I would pay him double what he was getting.
I had in Shaw the ablest possible lieutenant-though with his communistic views, he was a peculiar man to put as first lieutenant on the conservative Saturday Review. Then I asked H. G. Wells to take over the reviewing of novels in the Saturday, and when he, too, accepted, I felt that I had made real progress.
Finally, I got D. S. McColl, who has since become the head of the Tate Gallery, to do the art criticism. McColl was one of the first in England, I think, to understand Cezanne as well as Monet and Manet; and I think I heard from his lips first of all the name of Gaugin mentioned with understanding: all through the next four years on the Saturday he tried to teach the English public the new development of French art which has since led the world.
As a master of science, I picked Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, who is now, I believe, the head of the Zoological Society. It is enough to say that Chalmers Mitchell deserved the position or any other post, for he was not only a student of science of real ability, but he wrote charmingly to boot. Always, in my mind, I thought of him as a younger Huxley; yet Huxley lives in the history of science, and I am not sure that Chalmers Mitchell has done anything which entitles him to immortality; but he certainly was one of the most notable contributors to the Saturday Review in my time, besides being of a charming, pleasant nature with the critical habit very strongly developed. Chalmers Mitchell was above middle height with spare, well-kept body and fine expressive face-a notable personality.
A little later I got Cunninghame Graham. I have left him to the last because I have always thought of him as an amateur of genius. He was picturesquely handsome and always well dressed. I came to believe that his physical advantages and his wealth alone prevented him from being one of the great writers. He has written one or two of the best short stories in English, notably Un Monsieur; and surely his travel sketches in the Argentine and elsewhere are among the best extant.
The next thing to do was to outline the policy. The Saturday Review had been called the Saturday Reviler and was evilly notorious as the most poisonous critic of all lost and all new causes. I told my contributors from the beginning that I wanted to change this character radically. I wanted the Saturday Review to become known as the finder of stars and not the finder of faults; and at once I refused to give pride and place to merely fault-finding articles, though these too are necessary when dealing with be-puffed mediocrities.
One instance will do as well as fifty. One day I picked up a new book by a new author. Almayer's Folly, by Joseph Conrad. I had not seen the name before, but a glance at the first page told me that the man was a writer. At about the same time a Mr. Low came in (a brother of Sydney Low), a very able writer. I threw him the book and said: "There seems to be good stuff in that."
He took it with him and in a few days sent me a murderous review. I got another copy of the book and read it. After reading it, I sent the review back to Low, saying it was altogether wrong: Joseph Conrad was a good writer and as a newcomer should be praised and not condemned, standing, as he did, high above the ordinary!
Then I sent the book to H. G. Wells.
After a week or two Wells blew in boisterously. "What a book," he cried, throwing it down on the table. "Thanks very much for sending it to me. That sort of stuff makes one's task as a reviewer pleasant, but I am afraid you will think my review far too long and far too eulogistic. I have written pages about Conrad, not columns, and I have praised him to the skies. Will you stand it?"
"First-rate," I cried, "just what I had hoped from you. I sent the book to a man who crabbed it. After all, a great reviewer should be a star-finder and not a fault-finder."
For some reason or other, I never met Conrad until the autumn of 1910, fifteen years later. Talking one day with Austin Harrison of the English Review, Conrad's name came up and I asked: "How does he look? What age is he?
Has he any foreign accent? Is he a great personality?" — a stream of questions.
Harrison declared that Conrad knew me, always spoke warmly of me, and ended by proposing that we should motor down to his cottage in Kent.
We did so the very next Sunday.
Conrad met us most cordially, was eager to record that the review in the Saturday Review had given him reputation. I had thought from his photograph that his forehead was high and domed, but it was rather low and sloped back quickly. He was a little above middle height and appeared more the student than a sea-captain. Both he and his wife were homely, hospitable folk, without a trace of affectation. But Harrison's presence prevented any intimacy of talk, and the nearest I got to Conrad was when I asked him for a recent book, The Mirror of the Sea. He stipulated that I should send him my latest in exchange, and under the dedication to me he wrote the first and last verses of Baudelaire's magnificent poem comparing man to the sea. He repeated the last line:
O lutteurs eternels, o freres implacables, with a note of bitter sadness I thought characteristic. His French, I noticed, was impeccable.
Since then I have read most of Conrad's books, but I have never rated him at all as highly as Wells did.
What a crew of talent to get together on one paper before they were at all appreciated elsewhere. Wells and Shaw, Chalmers Mitchell, D. S. McColl, and Cunninghame Graham. I think the best staff ever seen on any weekly paper in the world; and that on a paper which was practically bankrupt when I took it over; and yet all these men remained with me for the three or four years of my editorship.
Wells impressed me as about the best mind that I had met in my many years in England: a handsome body and fine head. I had hoped extraordinary things from him, but the Great War seems to have shaken Mm, and his latest attempt to write a natural history of the earth chilled me. A history of humanity to the present time in which Shakespeare is not mentioned and Jesus is dismissed in a page carelessly, if not with contempt, shocks me. Yet as Browning said, Thus we half-men struggle.
I can hardly mention Wells at this time without speaking of Bernard Shaw: I had known Shaw before I took over the Fortnightly. I had heard him speak in the East End and had thought his communism shallow, for it left out individualism, which is at least as important a force. But after getting him to work for me as dramatic critic on the Saturday, I met him almost every week.
I saw at once that he had a good mind: one of the best of his time indeed; but somehow or other his extremely slight body and his vegetarianism became to me typical of the man.
His plays, too, are all full of Shaw. In one play Shaw assumes a dozen different names; but the characters are all Shaw. His is an acute intelligence, delighting in reasoning and argument, but never going deep, seldom indeed reaching creation of any value. When I think of Bernard Shaw, I am always reminded of Vauvenargues' fine word: "All great thoughts come from the heart." All Shaw's thoughts come from the head.
The other day I was amused by a criticism of Shaw by a Mr. James Agate who is, I believe, the dramatic critic of the Sunday Times. He lays it down that Mr.
Shaw is not able to create a human being. "All the Shavian creations," he says "are like Martians or Selenites or other fantastic creatures with enormous brains and no bodies and consequently no appetites." Yet he goes on to assert that "There more fundamental brains in any single play of Shaw's than in the whole of Shakespeare's output." To me this is worse than fantastic silliness.
But I remember that Shaw, many years ago, told me, and he has written it somewhere, that it humiliated him to compare his brains with Shakespeare's;
I told him roundly I could give him a dozen instances where Shakespeare has used more brains in two or three lines than is to be found in all Shaw's work.
He challenged me for an instance, and I gave him one: Shakespeare's Cleopatra is with Antony in Egypt, and Antony goes to meet Caesar.
Cleopatra feels instinctively that no one can fight Caesar successfully; dreading Caesar's power, she fled from Actium; but at the end of the day Antony returns in triumph and says that he has beaten Caesar to his camp; he cries to her … leap thou, attire and all, Through proof of harness to my heart, and there Ride on the pants triumphing! leap thou, attire and all, And her reply is Lord of Lords!
O infinite virtue, comest thou smiling from The world's great snare uncaught?
She knows that in spite of her beauty and cleverness and her position as queen, she has been caught in the world's great snare: she knows that it would require "infinite virtue" to be successful-and all this realization of life is packed into a couple of lines. Shaw would not admit the extraordinary virtue of the passage.
Nothing to me is clearer than the fact that the highest mental effort is the creative intelligence; the greatest minds in the world are those that have created new world-figures:
Forms more real than living Man,
Nurslings of Immortality.
Shakespeare has given us Hamlet arid Cleopatra, and better still Falstaff;
Goethe, Mephistopheles, and better still, Gretchen; Cervantes, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; and Turgenev, Bazarof. No one ranks with these few creators of ever-living generic figures.
Yet it is unfair to say that Shaw has not created any character: he has given himself in twenty characters as a sharp witted man who sees things chiefly from the ludicrous side because he is not greatly gifted with body or heart.
Someone has said that "to the heart, life is a tragedy; and to the mind, it is a comedy." Shaw sees it usually as a comedy, but his Cleopatra exists for me, and the characters in Candida are something more than reproductions of his own personality; but to compare his mental faculties with the great ones is simply silly. He has done nothing comparable to Swift's best work, to say nothing of Shakespeare's.
In my portrait of Shaw I have spoken of his kindness to me at some length.
Here I wish to add that in America, too, when I asked him to write for my magazine Pearson's in New York, and begged him to tell me what I should have to pay him, he wrote me that Hearst was giving him five thousand dollars for everything he wrote, but that it was enough to know that I wanted him to write for me, to continue writing for me, for I had done him a great deal of good by giving him the pride of place on the Saturday Review.
He told a friend of mine the other day that he never felt any reverence for any one; and this amused me greatly, for it is a peculiarly Shavian trait. How could he feel reverence for any one, when the only person he really knows is Shaw; yet he is an admirable journalist, and in many ways a good and kindly man, and I enjoyed my intercourse with him on the Saturday.
How good any real power is! Some of Shaw's sayings have delighted me.
In the beginning of the war, when nearly every one had lost his head, Shaw spoke of "the British bull dog masquerading as an angel of peace"; and later he spoke of the "one hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent village idiot." Village idiot! I could have kissed him for the word.
I see that the Saturday Review has published an account of its editors and contributors on its seventy-fifth birthday. On my staff it left out Wells, Chalmers Mitchell, and D. S. McColl; and had the grotesque impudence to put a little Jew named Baumann to write about me as an editor. Baumann naturally began by saying that I had begged him to write for the Saturday Review, which is not the fact. A mutual friend, Lord Grimthorpe, begged me to help the little man; and I think I took a couple of articles from him, but he was never on the staff and never was able to rise to the ordinary level.
There is no such certain test of greatness as the dislike and denigration of the mediocre!
The Saturday Review, as I remodelled it, met with a good deal of opposition at first. Officious people by the score wrote to me, condemning Bernard Shaw as an illiterate socialist, and Wells as a sort of Jules Verne. But the circulation began to lift at once, and I was very glad of it, for very soon I came to loggerheads with the Oxford University Press.
They had published some book or other, and Professor Churton Collins brought me a review of it, in which he pointed out that in this book, issued by the University Press, there were some three hundred grave errors of fact. I published his review and immediately there was a terrible to-do; the exposure was shocking. The University Press wrote to me curtly that they wished to withdraw their advertisements. They had engaged space in the Saturday Review for some three years beforehand and, of course, they paid their bill regularly at the end of each year. I wrote to the University Press that if they had had any regard for truth, they would have written thanking me and my reviewer, but as they wished to enroll themselves among the powers of darkness and ignorance, I would allow them to withdraw their advertisements, which they accordingly did.
Shortly afterwards I got a notice from Longman's, complaining of a review of a Greek book they had published. The review was written by the first authority in England, Sir Richard Jebb. Longman's wrote that it was evidently written by some ignoramus, and as the Oxford University Press had severed their connection with the Saturday Review, the house of Longman would also like to withdraw their advertisements.
I had been thunderstruck at the unconscionable impudence of the Oxford University Press, but when I got Longman's letter as well, I went to see him. I knew him through Froude's introduction, who prized him highly. I therefore called upon Charles Longman, who told me he was sure the review was written by some incapable and envious person. I had got Professor Jebb's permission to tell him that he had written it, so at length I told Longman, in confidence, the critic's name; and we parted, apparently good friends, Longman saying he would reconsider the whole thing. A week after he wrote that I had changed the whole character of the Review and he agreed with the University Press, on the whole, and would like to withdraw his advertisements.
Their example was followed by several other publishers. In every case I gave the fools the permission to withdraw their advertisements, and at the end of a month or two saw myself face to face with the revenue of the Saturday Review diminished by three or four thousand pounds a year- the small profit I had managed to create turned into a heavy loss. What was to be done?
I went into the city and saw Alfred Beit, head of the great house of South African Mines. I pointed out to him that the Saturday Review went to all the best houses in England. I asked him to give me the balance sheet and yearly report of all his companies as an advertisement and I would write a note, if not an article, on each company when he sent me the balance sheet, the advertisement to cost fifty guineas. I came out of his office with his promise and the names of fifty-odd companies, so I had made up a good part of my loss in an hour.
I went to Barnato's, saw Woolfie Joel, and got a dozen of his companies on the same terms. I then went on to J. B. Robinson and got eight of his companies. In short, in that one day's work in the city I had filled the gap in my revenue made by the withdrawals of the English publishing houses, and had increased the yearly revenue of the Saturday Review by two thousand a year. I knew I could reckon on Cecil Rhodes's help to boot.
That was the reason, I think, why the book reviews of the Saturday Review from '94 on became famous for their truth, which is so much disliked by most English and American reviews.
I mentioned the whole incident just to teach people what sort of pressure is exercised by Mr. Bumble, the publisher, on his true critic. Bumble wants praise and nothing else.
Curiously enough, a little later I had a somewhat similar experience with an insurance company. I got one of the ablest insurance critics in the world to write an article on the methods of a certain company and their balance sheet-and the company wrote, withdrawing its advertisement. I thereupon let my critic loose on all the faults of their work, and the consequence was that five or six of the best insurance companies wrote to me that they would like to advertise in the Saturday Review. For the one advertisement I lost I gained several better ones. This brought me to the conclusion that the business men of England are more honest and clear-minded than those who deal with literature and publishing.
There is something in art and literature which seems to corrupt the ordinary business mind. I think the corrupting influence lies in the extraordinary difference of values, which no ordinary man can foresee or explain. A publisher gets two books, both to his mind fairly well written and interesting; when he publishes them he finds that the worse one catches on and he sells 100,000 copies, whereas the other is a dead loss. He has given, let us say, a hundred pounds for each of them. "A" that he liked best is the failure, and "B" the success. A little later, he gets another book like "B" and finds that it is a complete failure-and so he makes up his mind that the only thing he wants to pay for is eulogy; and he prays for success because he is unable to deserve or merit it, or even to know how it should be gained.
I had one other curious experience with the Saturday Review-I found that a certain number of the best class of business people would only advertise if it had a cover on. The cost of putting a good green cover on it would only be some fifty pounds a week, whereas I could get over two hundred a week for the advertisements. I immediately put the cover on and got the advertisements, thereby improving not only the looks, but the revenue of the Review.
After I had bought the Saturday Review, I went and had a talk with Ochs, and he told me he would help me and outlined the proposition he thought suitable. I should form a company with a capital of about thirty thousand pounds that would take over and own the paper, and this I did, but I put also an addendum to his proposal, constituting five hundred deferred shares that would take no profits, but would control the appointment of the editor and staff. As I held all these five hundred shares myself, I thereby gave myself complete control of the paper. When I asked Albert Ochs for the five thousand pounds that I had to pay for the Saturday Review, he gave me four thousand pounds against shares and thought I ought to find the other thousand easily.
Now, what was the financial position of the Saturday Review when I took it over? The paper was losing money, roughly fifty or sixty pounds a week. Its circulation that once had been thirty or forty thousand had shrunk year by year, till now it was only five or six thousand a week. The income from the sales was less than a hundred pounds a week, and the income from advertisements that had been a thousand pounds a week had diminished to one hundred and fifty pounds or less.
The pay, however, of contributors, had rather increased than diminished, and everyone now expected at least three pounds for writing a column or two. By paying my staff, Shaw, Wells, McColl, Runciman and Chalmers Mitchell much more than the ordinary price, I had further increased my difficulties; but at the same time I knew dozens of young Oxford men at the bar and in journalism who were willing indeed to review books for the Saturday Review for nothing, on condition of getting the books; so instead of my contributors costing me over two hundred pounds a week, I got them down to under a hundred and so turned a loss of fifty or sixty pounds into a profit of thirty or forty pounds. The advertisement revenue I soon increased greatly, as I have told, so that the paper was clearing easily one hundred and fifty pounds a week.
I think I have explained sufficiently the financial position. I had 25,000 shares that I could sell very readily if I wanted money, and I had besides 500 deferred shares that ensured me the continuance of my position.
At this time or a little later I sold 5,000 shares to Beit for cash, and 2,000 or 3,000 more to other people who wanted an oar in the boat, and so made myself secure from the monetary point of view for some years to come.
I had only run the Saturday Review a short time when the Jameson Raid in the Transvaal shocked the world and necessitated on my part a prolonged absence from England.