[102]CHAPTER IXFLEET STREET

[102]CHAPTER IXFLEET STREETI don’tknow why, but for many years there has been (and I am told there still is) a kind of silent conspiracy to keep out of Fleet Street as many aspirants to journalism as possible. They are discouraged by extravagant stories of the fierce competition that reigns there, by tragic yarns of men of great gifts who walk about The Street in rags. I myself was discouraged in this way and I found myself, on the verge of middle age, still hesitating in Manchester. It is true, I did not enter journalism until I was in my thirties, and I did not know the ropes. I did not know London either. Also, I was married and had children to educate and could not afford to take risks and make of life the grand adventure I have, in my heart, always known it to be.So I hung on in Manchester, writing musical criticism forThe Manchester Courierand contributing occasional articles and verses toThe Academy,The Contemporary Review,The Cornhill,The English Review,The Musical Times, and many other magazines, and there is scarcely a London daily of repute for which at one time or another I did not write. But still I could find no opening in Fleet Street. The truth is, there is no regular means of finding openings in Fleet Street. If an editor is in want of a dramatic critic, a musical critic, a leader writer, or a descriptive reporter, he never advertises for one. He always knows someone who knows somebody else who is just the man for the job.So one day I said to myself: “I will go to London at all[103]costs. I will take a room in Bloomsbury and risk it.” By a happy accident I received, a few days later, a note from Rutland Boughton, the well-known composer, telling me that he was relinquishing his post as musical critic ofThe Daily Citizen, that ill-fated paper so courageously edited by Frank Dilnot. Boughton suggested I should apply for the vacancy. I did apply. I wrote to Dilnot and received no answer. I chafed a fortnight and then telegraphed, prepaying a reply. “No vacancy at present” was the message I received. So I took the next train to London and bearded Dilnot in his den. “Yes, I’ll take you,” he said, “if you’ll come for two pounds a week. But, if you’re the real stuff, you’ll receive much more.” As I knew that I was, indeed, the real stuff, “I’ll come,” said I. “When can I start?”I went back to Manchester and saw W. A. Ackland, the managing editor ofThe Manchester Courierand the kindest of men, expecting to receive from him a cold douche. But no! To my amazement, he encouraged me most heartily, and kept me on his staff, bidding me write a weekly article for him from London. This I did till the outbreak of the war, writing a lot of material also for his London letter.During my first year in London I made six hundred and forty pounds. And I spent it. I spent it in eager examination of, and participation in, the many activities that the life of a great metropolis affords. Very soon—within six months—I found myself in the happy position of being able to refuse work that was offered me, for I did not wish to work all my waking hours. I wanted to play. I did play. I made many friendships. I talked a great deal, played the piano two or three hours a day, caroused, ragged in Chelsea, and lived every hour of my life.It may be thought that six hundred and forty pounds per annum is no great sum. Nor is it. But does a doctor, a barrister, a solicitor, or any other professional man earn so much, without capital or influence, during his first year[104]in London? Or in his second? Or third? Money-making in Fleet Street up to about seven hundred and fifty pounds a year is the easiest thing in the world for a man who has any talent at all for writing, especially if that talent be combined with versatility. The journalist is rarely intellectual; as a rule, he is merely ready and glib. I am ready and glib myself.So I am not among those who feel inclined to discourage him who hankers after Fleet Street. No matter if you live in the waste regions of Sutherland, if you have proved yourself by inducing a number of editors of repute to take your stuff, go in and win! Really, it is very easy..             .             .             .             .             .             .             .The men of Fleet Street are the best fellows in the world. Roughly, they may be divided into two classes: those who “go steady,” with their eye always on the main chance, with every faculty strained to enable them to “get on” in the world; and those happy-go-lucky people who make money easily and spend it recklessly, so excited by life that they cannot pause to contemplate life, so happy in their labour and in their play that they cannot conceive a day may come when work will be irksome and playing a half-forgotten dream. There are, of course, other divisions into which journalists may be separated. There is, for example, the devoted band of brilliant young men who work for Orage inThe New Age—a paper that cannot, I am sure, pay high rates. (What those rates are I do not know, for I could never induce Orage to print a single thing I wrote for him.) Then there are the hangers-on of journalism: people who review books in the time spared from their labours as university professors, struggling barristers, parish priests and so on. Many of these people, led by vanity or some other concealed motive, offer to work without payment.The men who “go steady” are the editors, the leader-writers, the news editors, the literary editors, etc. For[105]the most part they are men who have to keep late hours and clear heads, for important news may reach the office at midnight and instant decisions regarding the policy that the paper has to assume in regard to that news have to be made. A great political speech may be made in Edinburgh; a startling murder trial may close in Liverpool; a famous man may die in Paris; a strike may break out in the Potteries: in short, anything may happen. What attitude is the paper going to take up? What precise shade of opinion is going to be expressed about that political speech? What is to be said about the degree of justice that the workers in the Potteries can claim for their action? These matters have to be decided instantly, for they have to be written about instantly, and perhaps you who read the leading article next morning rarely stop to consider the conditions—the incredibly difficult conditions—under which it has been written. For this kind of work real, genuine ability is required: a very wide and accurate knowledge of affairs, rapidity of thought, a fluent and eloquent pen and a mind so sensitive that it can, without effort, reflect to a nicety the precise policy of the paper upon whose work it is engaged.There is a story, and I think the story is true, of a new and inexperienced reporter who was given a trial on the staff of a very famous “halfpenny” paper. He was not a success, for he bungled everything that was given him to do, and he had not an idea in his head concerning the invention and manufacture of stunts. So he was tried as a book-reviewer, and again failed miserably. They made a sub-editor of him, and once more he was slow and inaccurate. Said the news editor to the editor-in-chief: “I’m afraid I shall have to get rid of Jones; he’s tried almost everything and failed.” “Oh! has he?” returned the editor-in-chief. “Well, put him on to writing leaders.”But even the halfpenny Press has, in recent years, come to regard its leader columns as one of the most important[106]parts of its papers. Of this kind of work I have had little experience. A position as writer of “leaderettes” was offered me onThe Globe, but I was not a success, for I was at the same time writing a great deal of stuff forThe Daily Citizen, and, as both papers were equally violent in antagonistic political and social fields, I soon found myself writing solidly and regularly against my own convictions. It is true that a journalist, like a barrister, is generally but a hireling paid to express certain views, but there are few men so intellectually backboneless and ethically flabby that they can, day after day, say both yes and no to the various problems that face them..             .             .             .             .             .             .             .I suppose there are few professions in which one learns more about the seamy side of human nature than one does in journalism. The one appalling vice of eminent men is vanity. Musicians, actors, authors, politicians—even judges and preachers—appear to be so constituted that they cannot live and be happy without publicity. From what source, do you think, originate those chatty little paragraphs concerning famous men and women that you find in every evening newspaper and in many weeklies? They originate from the fountain-head. If the novelist does not himself send the paragraph to the paper, his publisher does; if the actor has not written that “snappy” par., he has given his manager the material for it. At one time I wrote a weekly column of theatrical gossip for a well-known daily, and I can, without exaggeration, say that most of our famous actors and actresses did my work for me. I used scissors and paste, corrected their grammatical errors (and mistakes in spelling!), coloured the whole with my personality—and there the column was ready for the printer! Sometimes I would receive letters from notorious mimes expostulating with me because I had not mentioned their names for a month or two. Others wrote and thanked me for praising them. One[107]lady whom I have never seen, either on the stage or off, sent me a silver pencil-case, with a letter containing the material for a very personal sketch. I put the pencil in my pocket and the sketch in the newspaper. Quite recently I was shown an article signed by a famous lady, containing a bogus account of how she had received a strange proposal of marriage. The article had been invented and written by an acquaintance of mine, but the signature was the lady’s.But more egregious than the vanity of actors is the vanity of fashionable preachers. To them notoriety is the very breath of their nostrils. They have no “agents,” so they are compelled to advertise themselves without camouflage. And they do it shamelessly. I will not mention names, but at least half the fashionable preachers in London, no matter what their denomination, are guilty of constant and most resourceful self-advertisement. A little, a very little, jesuitical reasoning is sufficient to satisfy their consciences that this is done, not out of vanity, but from a desire to bring a still larger congregation to the fount of wisdom itself.... They are the fount of wisdom.On only two occasions have I approached an author with a request for an interview and been refused. But I have taken care never to approach such men as Thomas Hardy, John Galsworthy and a few others who regard their profession with too much respect to lend themselves to a practice which, at its best, is undignified, and which, at its worst, is a method of mean self-glorification..             .             .             .             .             .             .             .Of “ghosting” I have done a little and seen much. I know well a very prosperous musical composer of talent who has paid me to write many articles that he has signed with his own name. You call me an accomplice? But then it was nothing to me what he did with my articles when I had written them. Believe me, the practice is[108]very common. The man who signs the articles furnishes the ideas: the ghost merely expresses them.The same musical composer was commissioned a few years ago to write an orchestral work for an important musical festival. We will call him Birket. Either Birket was too busy to write the work or he felt he had not the ability to do it; whatever the reason, he went to a friend of mine—a man of far superior gifts to his more famous colleague—and offered him a certain sum to do the work for him. My friend—Foster will do for his name—consented, and the work was duly performed at the festival, conducted by Birket, and I attended in my capacity as musical critic.How eminent men who are not writers do itch to see themselves in print! It is not enough that their speeches are reported, their paintings and musical compositions criticised, their sentences recorded by every daily newspaper, their acting, singing and what not lauded to the skies: they must themselves write: or, if they cannot write, it must appear to the public that they have written. Why? Just vanity. That word “vanity” will explain nine-tenths of the seemingly inexplicable things in the conduct of most of our public men. A man accepts a knighthood because, as a rule, he is vain; he refuses it for the same reason; he advertises that he has refused it because he is vain; and, because he is vain, he refuses to advertise that he has refused it..             .             .             .             .             .             .             .A great deal has been written about the romance of Fleet Street. But romance is in a man’s mind and heart, and it is true that many romantically minded men go to Fleet Street. Fleet Street gives us a sense of importance, a sense of too much importance. We like to feel that we are powerful, but only a mere handful of men in The Street have power that is worth while. What we of the rank and file write is soon forgotten, for newspaper readers are, for[109]the most part, people who devour print greedily, neither masticating nor assimilating the things they devour. Newspapers confuse the mind and bring it to a state of drugged apathy. Did you ever meet a really voracious reader of newspapers who possessed the gift of sifting and weighing evidence, or one who had an accurate memory, or one who could think clearly and logically, or one who was not bewildered and befogged by mere words?But even if we men in Fleet Street have no real power, we have what is much the same thing: we have the illusion of power. We come into close contact with people much more important than ourselves, and some of these people fawn on us, for we are the necessary intermediaries between themselves and the public.But romance? Why is Fleet Street romantic? Well, as I have already said, it is because so many journalists themselves are romantic.... But I wonder if that reallyisthe reason, and as I wonder I begin to think that though it is true one meets adventurous, talented and original people by the score in newspaper offices, yet, after all, it is not they who make journalism seem full of savour, of rich delight, of unexpectedness and excitement, of high romance. No; it is writing itself that is romantic: mere words and the colour and music of words; the smell of printers’ ink; the wet feel of a paper fresh from the press; the sounds of telephone bells and of machinery; the joy of expressing oneself; the lovely, great joy of signing one’s name to an article and knowing that in twenty-four hours it will have been read or glanced at by perhaps half-a-million people.... But it seems to me as I write that I am utterly failing to communicate to you who read the romantic nature of journalism. To you it is, perhaps, merely a slipshod profession, a profession in which there is something sordid and vulgar and as unromantic as Monday morning. To me a man who writes with distinction is the most interesting creature in the world: I[110]cannot know too much about him; I can never tire of his talk. Actors bore me. So do politicians, lawyers, men of science, those who are professionally religious, doctors, musicians. But writers and financiers—especially Jewish financiers—are to me full of subtlety; their souls are elusive, and their minds are cunning past all reckoning. It is frequently said that the art of writing is possessed by most people. The art of writing correctly may be, but the “correct” writer is frequently not a writer at all, for he cannot compel people to read him. A writer without readers is not a writer; he is simply a man who murmurs to himself very laboriously. But the writer who can claim thousands of readers—I mean even such writers as Mr Charles Garvice and the lady who inventedThe Rosary—are in essentials more highly endowed with the true writer’s gifts than many mandarins who live cloistered in Oxford and Cambridge. And I say this in spite of the fact that I have never been able to read more than ten consecutive pages of any book of Mr Garvice’s that I have picked up, and thatThe Rosaryseems to me a story of such amazing flapdoodleismthat——.             .             .             .             .             .             .             .Arnold Bennett says somewhere that living in the theatrical world is like living a story out ofThe Arabian Nights. To me Fleet Street is more amazing than the bazaars of Cairo, more mysterious than the hermaphroditic Sphinx. And perhaps one of the most amazing things about Fleet Street is the easy way in which many men earn money.Some years ago I was on the staff of a paper where I had for a colleague a dark blue-eyed young man who was our crime specialist. He had just come from the provinces, and had not even a rudimentary notion of how to write. He knew he couldn’t write; he boasted of it. And he cared nothing for newspapers or books or anything even remotely connected with literature. But he had an[111]amazing talent for sniffing out crime. I remember a great jewel robbery which he got wind of half-a-day before anyone else, and, in a way known only to himself, he obtained full particulars of the affair, writing a half-column “story” before any other paper in the kingdom even knew there was a story to write. He entertained me vastly, and I used to go with him sometimes at night when he called at Scotland Yard for news. Scotland Yard never gives away news unless it is in its own interest to do so. But I am very much inclined to believe that it was somewhere in Scotland Yard that he obtained his most valuable information. We would walk down wide corridors there together, sit ten minutes in a waiting-room, interview an official who invariably said: “Nothing doing to-night,” and come away. But that was quite enough for my friend. “I must go to Poplar straight away,” he would say, as we came away; or perhaps: “I can just catch the last train to Guildford”; or “There is nothing at all in the rumour of that murder in Battersea.” I used to look at him in amazement and exclaim: “But how do youknow?” “Ah!” he would reply; “they say that walls have ears. But much more frequently they have tongues.”This man was paid three pounds a week by our editor. Three times out of four he was ahead of every other paper in his news, and I was not in the least surprised when one day, after he had been in London only two months, he came to me and said: “Next week I am leaving you. I am going toThe Morning Trumpet; they’re giving me five hundred pounds a year.” Five months later he was getting a thousand pounds a year from a paper that never hesitates to pay handsomely for “stunts.”I caught fire from my friend’s enthusiasm, and late one night, just when I had finished a long notice of a new play, I overheard the night editor regretting to one of the sub-editors that news of a particularly horrible murder in[112]Stepney had just reached the office when all the reporters were out on duty. “Let me go!” I urged. “But you are in evening dress,” he objected. “Never mind; send me off.” And ten minutes later I was being rushed in a taxi-cab at full speed to Stepney. I found the scene of the murder—a mean little house in a mean little street. Outside the house was a crowd of eager loafers, a score of reporters, and as many policemen, who, refusing to be bribed, kept us all in the street without news. However, such was my enthusiasm that I alone of all the reporters got into the house and into the cellar where the wretched woman had been butchered to death three hours earlier. I drew a hasty plan of the underground floor, interviewed a sister of the murdered woman, obtained full particulars, and then jumped into the taxi-cab to return to the office. Within an hour of leaving my desk I was back again, and in another twenty minutes I had ready as vivid and thrilling a “story” as ever I hope to write. Knowing that the paper was on the point of going to press, I did not, as I ought to have done, hand my copy to one of the sub-editors, but took it straight to the machines. Whilst I was waiting for a proof, I was summoned to my editor’s room. He was frowning, and he looked very much perturbed.“By the merest chance, Cumberland,” he said, sternly, “I have been the means of saving the paper from heavy penalties for contempt of court.” He paused and bit his lip. “I suppose you think your murder story a most brilliant piece of work.”“Well, I certainly was under that impression, sir,” I began, “but it wouldseem——”“Seem!” he thundered. “You’ve got the facts, it’s true, but then all my reporters have to get the facts. The gross blunder you’ve made is, first of all, in saying that the suspected man has spent practically all his life in prison—contempt of court of the vilest description. Secondly,[113]you’ve said——” He enumerated no fewer than five blunders I had made. “But, worst of all,” he concluded, “you took it upon yourself to give your copy direct to the printers after midnight, thus breaking the strictest rule of this office.”It was true. In my exciting enthusiasm I had forgotten this Persian rule.“Fortunately, I came in just in time to stop your stuff. You’d better, I think, confine yourself exclusively to your dramatic criticism.”Nevertheless, he offered me, two days later, ten pounds a week to give up my dramatic criticism and general articles (for which I was at that time getting only five pounds) and devote myself to reporting—an offer which I refused, as the work would have exhausted all my time..             .             .             .             .             .             .             .It was at about this time that the idea occurred to me that a certain monthly magazine for which I had been writing regularly might, if asked, pay me at a higher rate than that which, till then, they had been giving me. So I dressed myself very carefully (clothesdohelp, don’t they?) and drove up to the office in a smart hansom.“I have called about my articles,” I began, rather brusquely, to the editor, a scholarly man who knew far more about Elizabethan literature than he did about human nature. “I have found just lately that I am so busy that I have resolved to give up some of my work. Your magazine is one of those with which I am anxious to retain my connection, partly because my relationship with you has always been so pleasant.”And I stopped. It is not everyone who knows the right place at which to stop in conversations of this kind. “My relationship with you has always been so pleasant” was, most indubitably, the right place.He tried to force me into further talk by remaining[114]silent himself. A clock ticked: a clock always does tick on these occasions. He coughed. I looked steadily towards the window. For a full minute there must have been silence: to me it seemed an hour; to him I have no doubt it seemed eternity.“I think, Mr Cumberland, we shall be able to come to a satisfactory arrangement,” he said, when eternity had passed. “What do you say to such-and-such an amount?”And he staggered me by mentioning a sum exactly treble the amount I had been receiving for the last two years.As I walked into the Strand, I felt a mean and disagreeable bargain-driver, but after I had lunched at Simpson’s, I said to myself: “What a fool you were not to go to see him twelve months ago!”But though many people equally as obscure as myself earn a thousand pounds a year by their pens, you must not imagine that all the men who are famous writers do likewise. By no means always does it happen that a man combines literary genius and the power of earning money, and there are many men rightly honoured in our own day whose earnings do not involve them in the payment of income tax. The faculty of making money, no matter whether it is made out of the sale of pills or poems, tripe or tragedies, is innate. No man by taking thought can add a thousand pounds a year to his income, for money is not made by thought but by intuition.I know a man in Chelsea who earns fifteen hundred pounds a year by writing what, in my schoolboy days, we called (and perhaps they are still called) “bloods.” He knocks off a cool five thousand words a day every day for three weeks, and then takes a week’s holiday—boys’ “bloods,” servant-girls’ novelettes, children’s fairy tales and newspaper serials. He is a cheerful, energetic man, whose hobbies are bull-dogs and Shakespeare, and he has[115]five different pen-names. For the matter of that, I use three different pseudonyms, my reason for doing this being that the editor ofThe Spectator, say, might not accept my work if he knew I was writing at the same time forThe English Review(I have written for both publications), and I am doubtful ifThe Morning Postwould have printed a single word of mine if the editor had been aware that I was having a thousand words a day printed inThe Daily Citizen. Some editors like what they call “versatility of thought,” others (I think rightly) distrust it.But I can very well believe that this gossip about money appears to you very sordid. Well, so it is. My final paragraph shall not be permitted to mention, or even hint at, hard cash..             .             .             .             .             .             .             .Once again I return to my statement that Fleet Street is romantic because many of the people in it are romantic. But what is a romantic person? Alas! I cannot define one. Perhaps a romantic person is he whose soul is mysterious and elusive and whose mind is perturbed and exalted by a poetic vision of life. He must care little for the things that Mr Samuel Smiles and the “get on or get out” school value so much.... No. That will not do at all, for a great many men and women who have cared a great deal for money and worldly power were romantic. Nero, for example, and Cleopatra, and Shakespeare, and Queen Elizabeth, and LordVerulam——But though a romantic man may be difficult to define, he is very easy to recognise. Ivan Heald was incorrigibly romantic. But perhaps the most romantically minded man I met in Fleet Street was the journalist who went with me to Athens in the very early spring of 1914. He had no right in Fleet Street, for he was essentially a man who preferred to do things rather than write about them. But half the men in London journalism have drifted there not so much because they have a natural aptitude for the[116]work but because they are born adventurers, and the great adventure of Fleet Street is bound to cross the path of most roving men one day or another.Years ago there lived in London a man who wrote books and magazine stories under the name of Julian Croskey. He had been in the Civil Service in Shanghai, had helped to finance and organise a rebellion, and had been turned out of China, whence he came to England to write. In 1901 I began a correspondence with Croskey, who, in the meantime, had gone to Canada and was living alone on a river island. Though we corresponded for years, we never met, and after a time his letters began to show signs of megalomania. But there was such genius in his letters, such brooding energy, such hate of life, and, at times, such an uncanny suggestion of terrific power, that I treasured every word he wrote to me, and, when his letters ceased, something vital and something almost necessary to me passed out of my life. I do not like to believe that he ceased writing to me because I no longer interested him. I hope he still lives. I hope he will read this book. Some day his letters must be published, for they constitute a problem in psychology at once fascinating, mysterious and demonic. And this man whom I never met remains to me the most romantic of all men I have met in the spirit.

I don’tknow why, but for many years there has been (and I am told there still is) a kind of silent conspiracy to keep out of Fleet Street as many aspirants to journalism as possible. They are discouraged by extravagant stories of the fierce competition that reigns there, by tragic yarns of men of great gifts who walk about The Street in rags. I myself was discouraged in this way and I found myself, on the verge of middle age, still hesitating in Manchester. It is true, I did not enter journalism until I was in my thirties, and I did not know the ropes. I did not know London either. Also, I was married and had children to educate and could not afford to take risks and make of life the grand adventure I have, in my heart, always known it to be.

So I hung on in Manchester, writing musical criticism forThe Manchester Courierand contributing occasional articles and verses toThe Academy,The Contemporary Review,The Cornhill,The English Review,The Musical Times, and many other magazines, and there is scarcely a London daily of repute for which at one time or another I did not write. But still I could find no opening in Fleet Street. The truth is, there is no regular means of finding openings in Fleet Street. If an editor is in want of a dramatic critic, a musical critic, a leader writer, or a descriptive reporter, he never advertises for one. He always knows someone who knows somebody else who is just the man for the job.

So one day I said to myself: “I will go to London at all[103]costs. I will take a room in Bloomsbury and risk it.” By a happy accident I received, a few days later, a note from Rutland Boughton, the well-known composer, telling me that he was relinquishing his post as musical critic ofThe Daily Citizen, that ill-fated paper so courageously edited by Frank Dilnot. Boughton suggested I should apply for the vacancy. I did apply. I wrote to Dilnot and received no answer. I chafed a fortnight and then telegraphed, prepaying a reply. “No vacancy at present” was the message I received. So I took the next train to London and bearded Dilnot in his den. “Yes, I’ll take you,” he said, “if you’ll come for two pounds a week. But, if you’re the real stuff, you’ll receive much more.” As I knew that I was, indeed, the real stuff, “I’ll come,” said I. “When can I start?”

I went back to Manchester and saw W. A. Ackland, the managing editor ofThe Manchester Courierand the kindest of men, expecting to receive from him a cold douche. But no! To my amazement, he encouraged me most heartily, and kept me on his staff, bidding me write a weekly article for him from London. This I did till the outbreak of the war, writing a lot of material also for his London letter.

During my first year in London I made six hundred and forty pounds. And I spent it. I spent it in eager examination of, and participation in, the many activities that the life of a great metropolis affords. Very soon—within six months—I found myself in the happy position of being able to refuse work that was offered me, for I did not wish to work all my waking hours. I wanted to play. I did play. I made many friendships. I talked a great deal, played the piano two or three hours a day, caroused, ragged in Chelsea, and lived every hour of my life.

It may be thought that six hundred and forty pounds per annum is no great sum. Nor is it. But does a doctor, a barrister, a solicitor, or any other professional man earn so much, without capital or influence, during his first year[104]in London? Or in his second? Or third? Money-making in Fleet Street up to about seven hundred and fifty pounds a year is the easiest thing in the world for a man who has any talent at all for writing, especially if that talent be combined with versatility. The journalist is rarely intellectual; as a rule, he is merely ready and glib. I am ready and glib myself.

So I am not among those who feel inclined to discourage him who hankers after Fleet Street. No matter if you live in the waste regions of Sutherland, if you have proved yourself by inducing a number of editors of repute to take your stuff, go in and win! Really, it is very easy.

.             .             .             .             .             .             .             .

The men of Fleet Street are the best fellows in the world. Roughly, they may be divided into two classes: those who “go steady,” with their eye always on the main chance, with every faculty strained to enable them to “get on” in the world; and those happy-go-lucky people who make money easily and spend it recklessly, so excited by life that they cannot pause to contemplate life, so happy in their labour and in their play that they cannot conceive a day may come when work will be irksome and playing a half-forgotten dream. There are, of course, other divisions into which journalists may be separated. There is, for example, the devoted band of brilliant young men who work for Orage inThe New Age—a paper that cannot, I am sure, pay high rates. (What those rates are I do not know, for I could never induce Orage to print a single thing I wrote for him.) Then there are the hangers-on of journalism: people who review books in the time spared from their labours as university professors, struggling barristers, parish priests and so on. Many of these people, led by vanity or some other concealed motive, offer to work without payment.

The men who “go steady” are the editors, the leader-writers, the news editors, the literary editors, etc. For[105]the most part they are men who have to keep late hours and clear heads, for important news may reach the office at midnight and instant decisions regarding the policy that the paper has to assume in regard to that news have to be made. A great political speech may be made in Edinburgh; a startling murder trial may close in Liverpool; a famous man may die in Paris; a strike may break out in the Potteries: in short, anything may happen. What attitude is the paper going to take up? What precise shade of opinion is going to be expressed about that political speech? What is to be said about the degree of justice that the workers in the Potteries can claim for their action? These matters have to be decided instantly, for they have to be written about instantly, and perhaps you who read the leading article next morning rarely stop to consider the conditions—the incredibly difficult conditions—under which it has been written. For this kind of work real, genuine ability is required: a very wide and accurate knowledge of affairs, rapidity of thought, a fluent and eloquent pen and a mind so sensitive that it can, without effort, reflect to a nicety the precise policy of the paper upon whose work it is engaged.

There is a story, and I think the story is true, of a new and inexperienced reporter who was given a trial on the staff of a very famous “halfpenny” paper. He was not a success, for he bungled everything that was given him to do, and he had not an idea in his head concerning the invention and manufacture of stunts. So he was tried as a book-reviewer, and again failed miserably. They made a sub-editor of him, and once more he was slow and inaccurate. Said the news editor to the editor-in-chief: “I’m afraid I shall have to get rid of Jones; he’s tried almost everything and failed.” “Oh! has he?” returned the editor-in-chief. “Well, put him on to writing leaders.”

But even the halfpenny Press has, in recent years, come to regard its leader columns as one of the most important[106]parts of its papers. Of this kind of work I have had little experience. A position as writer of “leaderettes” was offered me onThe Globe, but I was not a success, for I was at the same time writing a great deal of stuff forThe Daily Citizen, and, as both papers were equally violent in antagonistic political and social fields, I soon found myself writing solidly and regularly against my own convictions. It is true that a journalist, like a barrister, is generally but a hireling paid to express certain views, but there are few men so intellectually backboneless and ethically flabby that they can, day after day, say both yes and no to the various problems that face them.

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I suppose there are few professions in which one learns more about the seamy side of human nature than one does in journalism. The one appalling vice of eminent men is vanity. Musicians, actors, authors, politicians—even judges and preachers—appear to be so constituted that they cannot live and be happy without publicity. From what source, do you think, originate those chatty little paragraphs concerning famous men and women that you find in every evening newspaper and in many weeklies? They originate from the fountain-head. If the novelist does not himself send the paragraph to the paper, his publisher does; if the actor has not written that “snappy” par., he has given his manager the material for it. At one time I wrote a weekly column of theatrical gossip for a well-known daily, and I can, without exaggeration, say that most of our famous actors and actresses did my work for me. I used scissors and paste, corrected their grammatical errors (and mistakes in spelling!), coloured the whole with my personality—and there the column was ready for the printer! Sometimes I would receive letters from notorious mimes expostulating with me because I had not mentioned their names for a month or two. Others wrote and thanked me for praising them. One[107]lady whom I have never seen, either on the stage or off, sent me a silver pencil-case, with a letter containing the material for a very personal sketch. I put the pencil in my pocket and the sketch in the newspaper. Quite recently I was shown an article signed by a famous lady, containing a bogus account of how she had received a strange proposal of marriage. The article had been invented and written by an acquaintance of mine, but the signature was the lady’s.

But more egregious than the vanity of actors is the vanity of fashionable preachers. To them notoriety is the very breath of their nostrils. They have no “agents,” so they are compelled to advertise themselves without camouflage. And they do it shamelessly. I will not mention names, but at least half the fashionable preachers in London, no matter what their denomination, are guilty of constant and most resourceful self-advertisement. A little, a very little, jesuitical reasoning is sufficient to satisfy their consciences that this is done, not out of vanity, but from a desire to bring a still larger congregation to the fount of wisdom itself.... They are the fount of wisdom.

On only two occasions have I approached an author with a request for an interview and been refused. But I have taken care never to approach such men as Thomas Hardy, John Galsworthy and a few others who regard their profession with too much respect to lend themselves to a practice which, at its best, is undignified, and which, at its worst, is a method of mean self-glorification.

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Of “ghosting” I have done a little and seen much. I know well a very prosperous musical composer of talent who has paid me to write many articles that he has signed with his own name. You call me an accomplice? But then it was nothing to me what he did with my articles when I had written them. Believe me, the practice is[108]very common. The man who signs the articles furnishes the ideas: the ghost merely expresses them.

The same musical composer was commissioned a few years ago to write an orchestral work for an important musical festival. We will call him Birket. Either Birket was too busy to write the work or he felt he had not the ability to do it; whatever the reason, he went to a friend of mine—a man of far superior gifts to his more famous colleague—and offered him a certain sum to do the work for him. My friend—Foster will do for his name—consented, and the work was duly performed at the festival, conducted by Birket, and I attended in my capacity as musical critic.

How eminent men who are not writers do itch to see themselves in print! It is not enough that their speeches are reported, their paintings and musical compositions criticised, their sentences recorded by every daily newspaper, their acting, singing and what not lauded to the skies: they must themselves write: or, if they cannot write, it must appear to the public that they have written. Why? Just vanity. That word “vanity” will explain nine-tenths of the seemingly inexplicable things in the conduct of most of our public men. A man accepts a knighthood because, as a rule, he is vain; he refuses it for the same reason; he advertises that he has refused it because he is vain; and, because he is vain, he refuses to advertise that he has refused it.

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A great deal has been written about the romance of Fleet Street. But romance is in a man’s mind and heart, and it is true that many romantically minded men go to Fleet Street. Fleet Street gives us a sense of importance, a sense of too much importance. We like to feel that we are powerful, but only a mere handful of men in The Street have power that is worth while. What we of the rank and file write is soon forgotten, for newspaper readers are, for[109]the most part, people who devour print greedily, neither masticating nor assimilating the things they devour. Newspapers confuse the mind and bring it to a state of drugged apathy. Did you ever meet a really voracious reader of newspapers who possessed the gift of sifting and weighing evidence, or one who had an accurate memory, or one who could think clearly and logically, or one who was not bewildered and befogged by mere words?

But even if we men in Fleet Street have no real power, we have what is much the same thing: we have the illusion of power. We come into close contact with people much more important than ourselves, and some of these people fawn on us, for we are the necessary intermediaries between themselves and the public.

But romance? Why is Fleet Street romantic? Well, as I have already said, it is because so many journalists themselves are romantic.... But I wonder if that reallyisthe reason, and as I wonder I begin to think that though it is true one meets adventurous, talented and original people by the score in newspaper offices, yet, after all, it is not they who make journalism seem full of savour, of rich delight, of unexpectedness and excitement, of high romance. No; it is writing itself that is romantic: mere words and the colour and music of words; the smell of printers’ ink; the wet feel of a paper fresh from the press; the sounds of telephone bells and of machinery; the joy of expressing oneself; the lovely, great joy of signing one’s name to an article and knowing that in twenty-four hours it will have been read or glanced at by perhaps half-a-million people.... But it seems to me as I write that I am utterly failing to communicate to you who read the romantic nature of journalism. To you it is, perhaps, merely a slipshod profession, a profession in which there is something sordid and vulgar and as unromantic as Monday morning. To me a man who writes with distinction is the most interesting creature in the world: I[110]cannot know too much about him; I can never tire of his talk. Actors bore me. So do politicians, lawyers, men of science, those who are professionally religious, doctors, musicians. But writers and financiers—especially Jewish financiers—are to me full of subtlety; their souls are elusive, and their minds are cunning past all reckoning. It is frequently said that the art of writing is possessed by most people. The art of writing correctly may be, but the “correct” writer is frequently not a writer at all, for he cannot compel people to read him. A writer without readers is not a writer; he is simply a man who murmurs to himself very laboriously. But the writer who can claim thousands of readers—I mean even such writers as Mr Charles Garvice and the lady who inventedThe Rosary—are in essentials more highly endowed with the true writer’s gifts than many mandarins who live cloistered in Oxford and Cambridge. And I say this in spite of the fact that I have never been able to read more than ten consecutive pages of any book of Mr Garvice’s that I have picked up, and thatThe Rosaryseems to me a story of such amazing flapdoodleismthat——

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Arnold Bennett says somewhere that living in the theatrical world is like living a story out ofThe Arabian Nights. To me Fleet Street is more amazing than the bazaars of Cairo, more mysterious than the hermaphroditic Sphinx. And perhaps one of the most amazing things about Fleet Street is the easy way in which many men earn money.

Some years ago I was on the staff of a paper where I had for a colleague a dark blue-eyed young man who was our crime specialist. He had just come from the provinces, and had not even a rudimentary notion of how to write. He knew he couldn’t write; he boasted of it. And he cared nothing for newspapers or books or anything even remotely connected with literature. But he had an[111]amazing talent for sniffing out crime. I remember a great jewel robbery which he got wind of half-a-day before anyone else, and, in a way known only to himself, he obtained full particulars of the affair, writing a half-column “story” before any other paper in the kingdom even knew there was a story to write. He entertained me vastly, and I used to go with him sometimes at night when he called at Scotland Yard for news. Scotland Yard never gives away news unless it is in its own interest to do so. But I am very much inclined to believe that it was somewhere in Scotland Yard that he obtained his most valuable information. We would walk down wide corridors there together, sit ten minutes in a waiting-room, interview an official who invariably said: “Nothing doing to-night,” and come away. But that was quite enough for my friend. “I must go to Poplar straight away,” he would say, as we came away; or perhaps: “I can just catch the last train to Guildford”; or “There is nothing at all in the rumour of that murder in Battersea.” I used to look at him in amazement and exclaim: “But how do youknow?” “Ah!” he would reply; “they say that walls have ears. But much more frequently they have tongues.”

This man was paid three pounds a week by our editor. Three times out of four he was ahead of every other paper in his news, and I was not in the least surprised when one day, after he had been in London only two months, he came to me and said: “Next week I am leaving you. I am going toThe Morning Trumpet; they’re giving me five hundred pounds a year.” Five months later he was getting a thousand pounds a year from a paper that never hesitates to pay handsomely for “stunts.”

I caught fire from my friend’s enthusiasm, and late one night, just when I had finished a long notice of a new play, I overheard the night editor regretting to one of the sub-editors that news of a particularly horrible murder in[112]Stepney had just reached the office when all the reporters were out on duty. “Let me go!” I urged. “But you are in evening dress,” he objected. “Never mind; send me off.” And ten minutes later I was being rushed in a taxi-cab at full speed to Stepney. I found the scene of the murder—a mean little house in a mean little street. Outside the house was a crowd of eager loafers, a score of reporters, and as many policemen, who, refusing to be bribed, kept us all in the street without news. However, such was my enthusiasm that I alone of all the reporters got into the house and into the cellar where the wretched woman had been butchered to death three hours earlier. I drew a hasty plan of the underground floor, interviewed a sister of the murdered woman, obtained full particulars, and then jumped into the taxi-cab to return to the office. Within an hour of leaving my desk I was back again, and in another twenty minutes I had ready as vivid and thrilling a “story” as ever I hope to write. Knowing that the paper was on the point of going to press, I did not, as I ought to have done, hand my copy to one of the sub-editors, but took it straight to the machines. Whilst I was waiting for a proof, I was summoned to my editor’s room. He was frowning, and he looked very much perturbed.

“By the merest chance, Cumberland,” he said, sternly, “I have been the means of saving the paper from heavy penalties for contempt of court.” He paused and bit his lip. “I suppose you think your murder story a most brilliant piece of work.”

“Well, I certainly was under that impression, sir,” I began, “but it wouldseem——”

“Seem!” he thundered. “You’ve got the facts, it’s true, but then all my reporters have to get the facts. The gross blunder you’ve made is, first of all, in saying that the suspected man has spent practically all his life in prison—contempt of court of the vilest description. Secondly,[113]you’ve said——” He enumerated no fewer than five blunders I had made. “But, worst of all,” he concluded, “you took it upon yourself to give your copy direct to the printers after midnight, thus breaking the strictest rule of this office.”

It was true. In my exciting enthusiasm I had forgotten this Persian rule.

“Fortunately, I came in just in time to stop your stuff. You’d better, I think, confine yourself exclusively to your dramatic criticism.”

Nevertheless, he offered me, two days later, ten pounds a week to give up my dramatic criticism and general articles (for which I was at that time getting only five pounds) and devote myself to reporting—an offer which I refused, as the work would have exhausted all my time.

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It was at about this time that the idea occurred to me that a certain monthly magazine for which I had been writing regularly might, if asked, pay me at a higher rate than that which, till then, they had been giving me. So I dressed myself very carefully (clothesdohelp, don’t they?) and drove up to the office in a smart hansom.

“I have called about my articles,” I began, rather brusquely, to the editor, a scholarly man who knew far more about Elizabethan literature than he did about human nature. “I have found just lately that I am so busy that I have resolved to give up some of my work. Your magazine is one of those with which I am anxious to retain my connection, partly because my relationship with you has always been so pleasant.”

And I stopped. It is not everyone who knows the right place at which to stop in conversations of this kind. “My relationship with you has always been so pleasant” was, most indubitably, the right place.

He tried to force me into further talk by remaining[114]silent himself. A clock ticked: a clock always does tick on these occasions. He coughed. I looked steadily towards the window. For a full minute there must have been silence: to me it seemed an hour; to him I have no doubt it seemed eternity.

“I think, Mr Cumberland, we shall be able to come to a satisfactory arrangement,” he said, when eternity had passed. “What do you say to such-and-such an amount?”

And he staggered me by mentioning a sum exactly treble the amount I had been receiving for the last two years.

As I walked into the Strand, I felt a mean and disagreeable bargain-driver, but after I had lunched at Simpson’s, I said to myself: “What a fool you were not to go to see him twelve months ago!”

But though many people equally as obscure as myself earn a thousand pounds a year by their pens, you must not imagine that all the men who are famous writers do likewise. By no means always does it happen that a man combines literary genius and the power of earning money, and there are many men rightly honoured in our own day whose earnings do not involve them in the payment of income tax. The faculty of making money, no matter whether it is made out of the sale of pills or poems, tripe or tragedies, is innate. No man by taking thought can add a thousand pounds a year to his income, for money is not made by thought but by intuition.

I know a man in Chelsea who earns fifteen hundred pounds a year by writing what, in my schoolboy days, we called (and perhaps they are still called) “bloods.” He knocks off a cool five thousand words a day every day for three weeks, and then takes a week’s holiday—boys’ “bloods,” servant-girls’ novelettes, children’s fairy tales and newspaper serials. He is a cheerful, energetic man, whose hobbies are bull-dogs and Shakespeare, and he has[115]five different pen-names. For the matter of that, I use three different pseudonyms, my reason for doing this being that the editor ofThe Spectator, say, might not accept my work if he knew I was writing at the same time forThe English Review(I have written for both publications), and I am doubtful ifThe Morning Postwould have printed a single word of mine if the editor had been aware that I was having a thousand words a day printed inThe Daily Citizen. Some editors like what they call “versatility of thought,” others (I think rightly) distrust it.

But I can very well believe that this gossip about money appears to you very sordid. Well, so it is. My final paragraph shall not be permitted to mention, or even hint at, hard cash.

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Once again I return to my statement that Fleet Street is romantic because many of the people in it are romantic. But what is a romantic person? Alas! I cannot define one. Perhaps a romantic person is he whose soul is mysterious and elusive and whose mind is perturbed and exalted by a poetic vision of life. He must care little for the things that Mr Samuel Smiles and the “get on or get out” school value so much.... No. That will not do at all, for a great many men and women who have cared a great deal for money and worldly power were romantic. Nero, for example, and Cleopatra, and Shakespeare, and Queen Elizabeth, and LordVerulam——

But though a romantic man may be difficult to define, he is very easy to recognise. Ivan Heald was incorrigibly romantic. But perhaps the most romantically minded man I met in Fleet Street was the journalist who went with me to Athens in the very early spring of 1914. He had no right in Fleet Street, for he was essentially a man who preferred to do things rather than write about them. But half the men in London journalism have drifted there not so much because they have a natural aptitude for the[116]work but because they are born adventurers, and the great adventure of Fleet Street is bound to cross the path of most roving men one day or another.

Years ago there lived in London a man who wrote books and magazine stories under the name of Julian Croskey. He had been in the Civil Service in Shanghai, had helped to finance and organise a rebellion, and had been turned out of China, whence he came to England to write. In 1901 I began a correspondence with Croskey, who, in the meantime, had gone to Canada and was living alone on a river island. Though we corresponded for years, we never met, and after a time his letters began to show signs of megalomania. But there was such genius in his letters, such brooding energy, such hate of life, and, at times, such an uncanny suggestion of terrific power, that I treasured every word he wrote to me, and, when his letters ceased, something vital and something almost necessary to me passed out of my life. I do not like to believe that he ceased writing to me because I no longer interested him. I hope he still lives. I hope he will read this book. Some day his letters must be published, for they constitute a problem in psychology at once fascinating, mysterious and demonic. And this man whom I never met remains to me the most romantic of all men I have met in the spirit.

[117]CHAPTER XHALL CAINEMyacquaintance with Hall Caine began in a semi-professional way. Whilst still a schoolboy, I was commissioned byTit-Bitsto write a three-column interview with him. I wrote to the novelist for an interview. Perhaps the rawness of my letter aroused the suspicion that I was too young to write adequately about him even in a paper of the standing ofTit-Bits; at all events he refused the interview, but very kindly said that, if I was contemplating a visit to the Isle of Man, he would be pleased if I would call on and lunch with him as an unprofessional visitor. At that time, being young and ardent, I was a young and ardent admirer of his, and I believe I told him so in my letter that requested the interview.If I went to him as an admirer I came away from that first visit to Greeba Castle a worshipper. In those days he was (but he still is!) an astounding personality. He came into the room quietly and, having shaken hands and sat down by my side, said: “An exquisite day for your walk from St John’s.” So impressively was this spoken, and there was such a fire in his eyes as he said it, such a weight of meaning in his manner, that I felt as though something secret and wonderful had been revealed to me. I wanted to say: “How true!” What I did say was: “Yes; isn’t it?” He asked me a few questions about myself and then spoke about general matters. He probably said quite trivial, kindly things, but at the time they[118]were uttered, and for a little while afterwards, they seemed rich and full of wisdom.After lunch he showed me the MSS. of some of his books. I remember the MS. ofThe Bondman. It was written in a small, curiously artistic handwriting on half sheets of notepaper, which had been pasted on to much larger sheets handsomely bound. I handled the book as reverently as the young ladies of early days caressed the pages of the great Martin Tupper. There were many “blots” in the MS.—many alterations, excisions and additions, and it was clear, even from a cursory examination, that Mr Hall Caine was a hard and conscientious worker. Upon this and other books he left me to browse for an hour whilst he went to receive other callers—all of them strangers to him—who were just arriving.Some of those visitors, as I discovered later, were a rather extraordinary crew: men and women from Lancashire and Yorkshire: I meanabsolutelyfrom Lancashire and Yorkshire: men and women who had made a little money and who had unbounded respect for people who had made a little more: men and women who were sound and good, but not quite educated and who were either like fish out of water, gasping and floundering spasmodically, or positively frightfully at their ease. I recollect a tall and handsome lady who prodded everything with a green parasol, and two men who, not too furtively, made elaborate efforts to estimate the amount of the author’s income.We had tea on a terrace in the grounds and in the evening I was driven back to St John’s, all the other callers returning to Douglas.The impression left by Mr Hall Caine’s personality on my mind by that and many subsequent visits was overwhelming. He was vivid, alive, and full of smouldering fires; short and vehement; his eyes were large and bright; his voice beautiful and capable of a thousand[119]inflections—an actor’s voice; his temperament also an actor’s; his point of view an actor’s. But he never did act; invariably he was tragically (and, I must add, sometimes pathetically) sincere. He had humour, but he could not laugh at himself. His dress was eccentric; he wore a flapping hat, breeches and a jacket made of thick, everlasting, hand-made cloth. A big tie bulged and billowed somewhere about his neck. He told me on one occasion that chars-à-bancs full of trippers from Douglas continually passed along the Douglas-Peel road and that when the trippers caught a sight of him they would sometimes hail him with cries of derision and shouts of laughter.“At those moments,” he said, “I am always most dignified. I raise my hat to them and bow and their laughter immediately ceases.”That I could well believe, for there is something commanding in his personality, something well calculated to quell insolence.A desultory correspondence and a few casual visits followed during the next three or four years, and when I was in my very early twenties I persuaded Messrs Greening & Company to invite me to write a book on Hall Caine for a popular series (English Writers of To-day, it was called) they were at that time issuing. Mr Caine, upon being approached by me, put no hindrance in my way, but, on the contrary, consented to give me some assistance in the way of providing me with information and a few letters received by him from eminent men. I spent several week-ends at Greeba Castle and found in Mrs Caine, always charming and ideally gifted with tact, a delightful hostess. My book was quickly written. It was a feeble, bombastic and ridiculous performance. A friend of mine (I thought he was an enemy) called it “a prolonged diarrhœa of the emotions.” In this book Hall Caine took a very kindly interest, and he provided me with autograph letters written by Ruskin, Blackmore, T. E. Brown and[120]Gladstone to insert in my book. But I was, of course, the sole author of the work, and Mr Caine had nothing to do with it save to put me right on matters of fact and to tone down some of my exuberant and sentimental praise. The silly volume, because of its subject, attracted a good deal of attention, both in this country and in America, though it was not published in the States.The Philadelphia Daily Eagle, for example, on the day the book was published, printed a eulogistic cablegram review of it from London. But, for the most part, my monograph was mercilessly slated. Hall Caine, in addition, was abused for consenting to be the subject of it, and I was abused for having chosen him for my subject. One paper headed its review “Raising Caine.”The truth is, at this time (1901) Mr Hall Caine, though extraordinarily popular with the public, was not much liked by a certain section of the Press. His success was envied by some, perhaps; his recognition of his own worth was fiercely and almost universally resented; and his almost unconscious habit of advertising himself—though he did not indulge this habit more than most popular novelists—could not be tolerated. Mr Caine used frequently to deplore his only too palpable unpopularity with the Press, and once or twice he asked me to explain it. His own theory was that he had a few powerful enemies who took advantage of every occasion to disseminate lies about him, but who these enemies were he never stated. As a matter of fact, he occasionally said injudicious things to reporters which, in cold print, appeared not only self-satisfied but vainglorious. A long and very well written article by Mr Robert H. Sherard, in (I believe)The Daily Telegraphcaused him a good deal of anxiety.Not often does one find a man of Hall Caine’s very special gifts endowed with the abilities of a financier. He is as quick and as clever at driving a bargain as a[121]Lancashire or Yorkshire mill-owner. There have always been and, I suppose, always will be a large percentage of writers who are constitutionally incapable of looking after their own affairs; they can produce, but they cannot sell. Mr Hall Caine does not belong to these. He, more than any man, contributed to the breakdown of the three-volume novel system. It was he who helped to formulate the Canadian Copyright Laws. With the assistance of Major Pond (who in these days remembers the great Major Pond?) he made tens of thousands of dollars by lecturing to the Americans. He had the acumen and the courage to issue one of his longest novels in two volumes at two shillings net each. He was the first eminent novelist to make a practice of publishing his works in the middle of the August holidays—the supposed “dead” season in the publishing world. He has bought farms in the Isle of Man and made them pay. He has had commercial interests in seaside boarding-houses and has shown a bold but wise enterprise in many of his investments. In other words he has, to his honour, continually exhibited abilities that not one artist in a hundred possesses..             .             .             .             .             .             .             .I have rarely seen Hall Caine in a light-hearted mood, but I have been with him in more than one hour of black depression.Vividly do I remember spending a few days at Greeba Castle shortly after the time when the publication of a story of his, that was running serially in a ladies’ paper, was suddenly and dramatically stopped by the editor of that paper on the score of its alleged immorality. The story was about to be produced in book form and, of course, the editor’s action had provided a fine advertisement; this fact, however, did not appear to console the novelist in the least. The most sensitive of men, he was crushed by this very public charge of writing immoral literature.[122]For myself, when he told me all the circumstances, I merely laughed. He glanced at me sideways.“You are amused?” he asked. “I wonder why.”“Because you are allowing yourself to be made miserable by a most trivial event.”“You call it trivial that the whole world should think me a man of immoral mind?”“The whole world? Why, the world doesn’t trouble itself about the matter in the least. Only one man accuses you of immoral writings; that man is the editor of the paper. What on earth does his opinion matter to you?”“But his opinion will be widely read and will be widely believed.”“Will be believed, you should have added, by people who allow another man to form their opinions for them. What dotheymatter?”He sighed.“But theydomatter,” said he, rather forlornly. “I hate to think of people out there”—he waved a vague arm in the direction of the kitchen garden—“thinking evil thoughts and saying evil things of me.”“‘They say. What do they say? Let them say,’” I quoted.We paced up and down the terrace, his eyes fixed on the ground. At length:“I wonder what you would think of the chapter in question,” he said musingly. “You have read the story as far as it has been printed. Well, I will give you the final chapters to read.”We went to his room and he handed me a few pages of printed copy. I read them.“Well?” inquired he, when I had finished.“It is passionate, it is sexual,” said I, “but to call it immoral is to call black white.”“You really believe that?” he asked, a little anxiously.[123]“I do. I assure you I do.”But the black cloud of self-distrust and misery would not be dissipated, and that night, after dinner, we sat over a slow fire, though it was early in August, and talked long and rather sadly of Rossetti, of T. E. Brown and of things that had been said by Peel fishermen..             .             .             .             .             .             .             .Another occasion, when I was with the novelist on a day of some anxiety, is equally clear in my memory. I may say at this point that Hall Caine was invariably in a condition of some mental strain a few days before and after the publication of one of his stories. He was a little apprehensive of the reviewers, and he was always afraid lest the public should not remain faithful to him. In this connection I remember him saying to me once: “I can imagine no fate more tragic than for a novelist at middle age, when he believes his powers to be at their highest, to lose his hold upon his public.”He would, I think, deny that he cares what the reviewers may say; nevertheless, my experience of him tells me that he does care. In his early life as a novelist he was, perhaps, overpraised; certainly he but very rarely felt the lash of the critic’s whip. So that when the critics began to condemn the work of the man they had once praised, he was not disciplined to bear their condemnation philosophically. Every taunt wounded him, every thrust went home, every sneer was a stab.But on the occasion about which I am now writing he was not depressed so much in anticipation of what the reviewers might say as on account of the competition of another novel which had been issued a few days previous to the date fixed for the publication of a new book of his own. That novel was Lucas Malet’sThe History of Sir Richard Calmady, published, if my memory does not betray me, by Messrs Methuen.[124]The first question he asked me one morning before breakfast was:“Have you readSir Richard Calmady?”“Yes,” I answered.“Well?” exclaimed he, a little impatiently, “well, what do you think of it?”“An amazingly clever performance, but very horrible.”“Yes, isn’t it?” he cried eagerly. “Horrible! Ghastly! And yet, they tell me, people are reading it.”“Partly for that reason, no doubt.”“But the public, the people, the great reading public—surely they will not respond to the appeal of a book of that nature?”“The public, you must remember, has many hearts; it may well give one to Sir Richard Calmady.”“Butmypublic?”“Yes; even your public.”He brooded a little.“I am told that Lucas Malet’s publishers believe in the book,” he said, after a longish pause, “and are prepared to spend a small fortune in pushing it. And that, of course, means that it will interfere with, and perhaps seriously injure, the sales of my own story. But it seems to me that the public—therealpublic—will never read a novel that has for its chief attraction a man with no legs.”I suggested that he should postpone the publication of his book until the rage forSir Richard Calmadyhad died down. But no! This would not suit him. He must catch the real holiday season at its full tide. August was the best month in the year, and the first week the best week in the month, and the fifth day the best day of the week.Hall Caine always shows great perspicacity in selecting the date of publication for his books; he will never allow it to synchronise with any other big event. Moreover, his book must be born to an expectant world; it must be well[125]advertised beforehand. Unlike other writers, he does not work hard at a book, finish it and then hand it over to a publisher to deal with more or less as he thinks fit. In a sense, he is his own publisher, and as a rule he interests himself in the sale of a new work of his own, in its distribution, its printing and binding, etc., as much as the actual publisher himself..             .             .             .             .             .             .             .It used to be a popular belief—but Arnold Bennett has done much to kill it—that an author laughs and cries with the creatures of his imagination, that he lives and dreams with them, and that when his book is finished, and the time comes for him to part from them, he does so with pain that is little short of anguish. So far as most authors are concerned, this is exactly opposite to the real facts. Before an author is half-way through his novel he is heartily sick of his characters; his beautiful heroine is an unmitigated nuisance and his hero an incredible bore. He is only too thankful to reach the end of the last chapter and leave his puppets for ever.But this is not so with Hall Caine. His novels, as you know, do not err on the side of brevity, and though it is possible you may tire of his heroine, you may be absolutely certain that her creator never does. To this novelist the creatures of his imagination are, in one sense, more real than the material beings around him. He is wholly dominated by his imagination. His brain is peopled by creatures of his own fancy. His emotions are engaged on behalf of people who do not exist. His consciousness is confined to the little world he has created for himself and he is saturated with and submerged by fancies that his imagination has bred.I shall never forget coming across him early one morning in the little shaded footway that winds among trees in the castle grounds to the main drive. His eyes were dim, and he had not perfect control of his voice.[126]“I have been finishing my book,” he said, referring toThe Eternal City, “and I wept as I wrote.”I have been with him on several occasions when he has been finishing his books, and I have always found him in alternating moods of exhaustion and emotional excitement. Whatever else may be charged against him, it cannot with truth be said that he does not put his whole soul into his work..             .             .             .             .             .             .             .As a man he is the most loyal of friends and the most loyal of enemies. He can hate bitterly. I have heard him eloquent in his hate. I have heard him hate W. T. Stead and Frank Harris, and nothing could have exceeded his bitterness. But he does not nurse his hatred, and he is a man quick to forgive.I cannot close this chapter without a word concerning his generosity. By “generosity” I do not mean only that he is free with money, but that he will give his time, the work of his brain, his advice and even himself for any good cause and for any man in need. To struggling authors he is the very soul of generosity. He struggled himself. Born on a coal barge in Runcorn, largely self-educated, having experienced the anxiety of straitened means and hope deferred, he has known intimately the hardships of life, and will do all in his power to shield others from them. On several occasions I have met people—mostly young men—who have come to him for help and advice in beginning a literary career. He is never extravagant in his praise of their work, but if he finds merit in it he is always warmly encouraging. Years before I met him face to face, when I was a boy of fourteen, I sent him a long poem I had written in the Spenserian stanza, and the first letters I received from him were careful and most helpful criticisms of this juvenile literary effort. I had written to him as an entire stranger and without any introduction whatever. In my youth[127]and egotism I had taken his replies as a matter of course; it was only later that I recognised the most kindly spirit that prompted a busy and often harassed man to give his time and energy to a boy whose work can have had very little to recommend it.

Myacquaintance with Hall Caine began in a semi-professional way. Whilst still a schoolboy, I was commissioned byTit-Bitsto write a three-column interview with him. I wrote to the novelist for an interview. Perhaps the rawness of my letter aroused the suspicion that I was too young to write adequately about him even in a paper of the standing ofTit-Bits; at all events he refused the interview, but very kindly said that, if I was contemplating a visit to the Isle of Man, he would be pleased if I would call on and lunch with him as an unprofessional visitor. At that time, being young and ardent, I was a young and ardent admirer of his, and I believe I told him so in my letter that requested the interview.

If I went to him as an admirer I came away from that first visit to Greeba Castle a worshipper. In those days he was (but he still is!) an astounding personality. He came into the room quietly and, having shaken hands and sat down by my side, said: “An exquisite day for your walk from St John’s.” So impressively was this spoken, and there was such a fire in his eyes as he said it, such a weight of meaning in his manner, that I felt as though something secret and wonderful had been revealed to me. I wanted to say: “How true!” What I did say was: “Yes; isn’t it?” He asked me a few questions about myself and then spoke about general matters. He probably said quite trivial, kindly things, but at the time they[118]were uttered, and for a little while afterwards, they seemed rich and full of wisdom.

After lunch he showed me the MSS. of some of his books. I remember the MS. ofThe Bondman. It was written in a small, curiously artistic handwriting on half sheets of notepaper, which had been pasted on to much larger sheets handsomely bound. I handled the book as reverently as the young ladies of early days caressed the pages of the great Martin Tupper. There were many “blots” in the MS.—many alterations, excisions and additions, and it was clear, even from a cursory examination, that Mr Hall Caine was a hard and conscientious worker. Upon this and other books he left me to browse for an hour whilst he went to receive other callers—all of them strangers to him—who were just arriving.

Some of those visitors, as I discovered later, were a rather extraordinary crew: men and women from Lancashire and Yorkshire: I meanabsolutelyfrom Lancashire and Yorkshire: men and women who had made a little money and who had unbounded respect for people who had made a little more: men and women who were sound and good, but not quite educated and who were either like fish out of water, gasping and floundering spasmodically, or positively frightfully at their ease. I recollect a tall and handsome lady who prodded everything with a green parasol, and two men who, not too furtively, made elaborate efforts to estimate the amount of the author’s income.

We had tea on a terrace in the grounds and in the evening I was driven back to St John’s, all the other callers returning to Douglas.

The impression left by Mr Hall Caine’s personality on my mind by that and many subsequent visits was overwhelming. He was vivid, alive, and full of smouldering fires; short and vehement; his eyes were large and bright; his voice beautiful and capable of a thousand[119]inflections—an actor’s voice; his temperament also an actor’s; his point of view an actor’s. But he never did act; invariably he was tragically (and, I must add, sometimes pathetically) sincere. He had humour, but he could not laugh at himself. His dress was eccentric; he wore a flapping hat, breeches and a jacket made of thick, everlasting, hand-made cloth. A big tie bulged and billowed somewhere about his neck. He told me on one occasion that chars-à-bancs full of trippers from Douglas continually passed along the Douglas-Peel road and that when the trippers caught a sight of him they would sometimes hail him with cries of derision and shouts of laughter.

“At those moments,” he said, “I am always most dignified. I raise my hat to them and bow and their laughter immediately ceases.”

That I could well believe, for there is something commanding in his personality, something well calculated to quell insolence.

A desultory correspondence and a few casual visits followed during the next three or four years, and when I was in my very early twenties I persuaded Messrs Greening & Company to invite me to write a book on Hall Caine for a popular series (English Writers of To-day, it was called) they were at that time issuing. Mr Caine, upon being approached by me, put no hindrance in my way, but, on the contrary, consented to give me some assistance in the way of providing me with information and a few letters received by him from eminent men. I spent several week-ends at Greeba Castle and found in Mrs Caine, always charming and ideally gifted with tact, a delightful hostess. My book was quickly written. It was a feeble, bombastic and ridiculous performance. A friend of mine (I thought he was an enemy) called it “a prolonged diarrhœa of the emotions.” In this book Hall Caine took a very kindly interest, and he provided me with autograph letters written by Ruskin, Blackmore, T. E. Brown and[120]Gladstone to insert in my book. But I was, of course, the sole author of the work, and Mr Caine had nothing to do with it save to put me right on matters of fact and to tone down some of my exuberant and sentimental praise. The silly volume, because of its subject, attracted a good deal of attention, both in this country and in America, though it was not published in the States.The Philadelphia Daily Eagle, for example, on the day the book was published, printed a eulogistic cablegram review of it from London. But, for the most part, my monograph was mercilessly slated. Hall Caine, in addition, was abused for consenting to be the subject of it, and I was abused for having chosen him for my subject. One paper headed its review “Raising Caine.”

The truth is, at this time (1901) Mr Hall Caine, though extraordinarily popular with the public, was not much liked by a certain section of the Press. His success was envied by some, perhaps; his recognition of his own worth was fiercely and almost universally resented; and his almost unconscious habit of advertising himself—though he did not indulge this habit more than most popular novelists—could not be tolerated. Mr Caine used frequently to deplore his only too palpable unpopularity with the Press, and once or twice he asked me to explain it. His own theory was that he had a few powerful enemies who took advantage of every occasion to disseminate lies about him, but who these enemies were he never stated. As a matter of fact, he occasionally said injudicious things to reporters which, in cold print, appeared not only self-satisfied but vainglorious. A long and very well written article by Mr Robert H. Sherard, in (I believe)The Daily Telegraphcaused him a good deal of anxiety.

Not often does one find a man of Hall Caine’s very special gifts endowed with the abilities of a financier. He is as quick and as clever at driving a bargain as a[121]Lancashire or Yorkshire mill-owner. There have always been and, I suppose, always will be a large percentage of writers who are constitutionally incapable of looking after their own affairs; they can produce, but they cannot sell. Mr Hall Caine does not belong to these. He, more than any man, contributed to the breakdown of the three-volume novel system. It was he who helped to formulate the Canadian Copyright Laws. With the assistance of Major Pond (who in these days remembers the great Major Pond?) he made tens of thousands of dollars by lecturing to the Americans. He had the acumen and the courage to issue one of his longest novels in two volumes at two shillings net each. He was the first eminent novelist to make a practice of publishing his works in the middle of the August holidays—the supposed “dead” season in the publishing world. He has bought farms in the Isle of Man and made them pay. He has had commercial interests in seaside boarding-houses and has shown a bold but wise enterprise in many of his investments. In other words he has, to his honour, continually exhibited abilities that not one artist in a hundred possesses.

.             .             .             .             .             .             .             .

I have rarely seen Hall Caine in a light-hearted mood, but I have been with him in more than one hour of black depression.

Vividly do I remember spending a few days at Greeba Castle shortly after the time when the publication of a story of his, that was running serially in a ladies’ paper, was suddenly and dramatically stopped by the editor of that paper on the score of its alleged immorality. The story was about to be produced in book form and, of course, the editor’s action had provided a fine advertisement; this fact, however, did not appear to console the novelist in the least. The most sensitive of men, he was crushed by this very public charge of writing immoral literature.

[122]For myself, when he told me all the circumstances, I merely laughed. He glanced at me sideways.

“You are amused?” he asked. “I wonder why.”

“Because you are allowing yourself to be made miserable by a most trivial event.”

“You call it trivial that the whole world should think me a man of immoral mind?”

“The whole world? Why, the world doesn’t trouble itself about the matter in the least. Only one man accuses you of immoral writings; that man is the editor of the paper. What on earth does his opinion matter to you?”

“But his opinion will be widely read and will be widely believed.”

“Will be believed, you should have added, by people who allow another man to form their opinions for them. What dotheymatter?”

He sighed.

“But theydomatter,” said he, rather forlornly. “I hate to think of people out there”—he waved a vague arm in the direction of the kitchen garden—“thinking evil thoughts and saying evil things of me.”

“‘They say. What do they say? Let them say,’” I quoted.

We paced up and down the terrace, his eyes fixed on the ground. At length:

“I wonder what you would think of the chapter in question,” he said musingly. “You have read the story as far as it has been printed. Well, I will give you the final chapters to read.”

We went to his room and he handed me a few pages of printed copy. I read them.

“Well?” inquired he, when I had finished.

“It is passionate, it is sexual,” said I, “but to call it immoral is to call black white.”

“You really believe that?” he asked, a little anxiously.

[123]“I do. I assure you I do.”

But the black cloud of self-distrust and misery would not be dissipated, and that night, after dinner, we sat over a slow fire, though it was early in August, and talked long and rather sadly of Rossetti, of T. E. Brown and of things that had been said by Peel fishermen.

.             .             .             .             .             .             .             .

Another occasion, when I was with the novelist on a day of some anxiety, is equally clear in my memory. I may say at this point that Hall Caine was invariably in a condition of some mental strain a few days before and after the publication of one of his stories. He was a little apprehensive of the reviewers, and he was always afraid lest the public should not remain faithful to him. In this connection I remember him saying to me once: “I can imagine no fate more tragic than for a novelist at middle age, when he believes his powers to be at their highest, to lose his hold upon his public.”

He would, I think, deny that he cares what the reviewers may say; nevertheless, my experience of him tells me that he does care. In his early life as a novelist he was, perhaps, overpraised; certainly he but very rarely felt the lash of the critic’s whip. So that when the critics began to condemn the work of the man they had once praised, he was not disciplined to bear their condemnation philosophically. Every taunt wounded him, every thrust went home, every sneer was a stab.

But on the occasion about which I am now writing he was not depressed so much in anticipation of what the reviewers might say as on account of the competition of another novel which had been issued a few days previous to the date fixed for the publication of a new book of his own. That novel was Lucas Malet’sThe History of Sir Richard Calmady, published, if my memory does not betray me, by Messrs Methuen.

[124]The first question he asked me one morning before breakfast was:

“Have you readSir Richard Calmady?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Well?” exclaimed he, a little impatiently, “well, what do you think of it?”

“An amazingly clever performance, but very horrible.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” he cried eagerly. “Horrible! Ghastly! And yet, they tell me, people are reading it.”

“Partly for that reason, no doubt.”

“But the public, the people, the great reading public—surely they will not respond to the appeal of a book of that nature?”

“The public, you must remember, has many hearts; it may well give one to Sir Richard Calmady.”

“Butmypublic?”

“Yes; even your public.”

He brooded a little.

“I am told that Lucas Malet’s publishers believe in the book,” he said, after a longish pause, “and are prepared to spend a small fortune in pushing it. And that, of course, means that it will interfere with, and perhaps seriously injure, the sales of my own story. But it seems to me that the public—therealpublic—will never read a novel that has for its chief attraction a man with no legs.”

I suggested that he should postpone the publication of his book until the rage forSir Richard Calmadyhad died down. But no! This would not suit him. He must catch the real holiday season at its full tide. August was the best month in the year, and the first week the best week in the month, and the fifth day the best day of the week.

Hall Caine always shows great perspicacity in selecting the date of publication for his books; he will never allow it to synchronise with any other big event. Moreover, his book must be born to an expectant world; it must be well[125]advertised beforehand. Unlike other writers, he does not work hard at a book, finish it and then hand it over to a publisher to deal with more or less as he thinks fit. In a sense, he is his own publisher, and as a rule he interests himself in the sale of a new work of his own, in its distribution, its printing and binding, etc., as much as the actual publisher himself.

.             .             .             .             .             .             .             .

It used to be a popular belief—but Arnold Bennett has done much to kill it—that an author laughs and cries with the creatures of his imagination, that he lives and dreams with them, and that when his book is finished, and the time comes for him to part from them, he does so with pain that is little short of anguish. So far as most authors are concerned, this is exactly opposite to the real facts. Before an author is half-way through his novel he is heartily sick of his characters; his beautiful heroine is an unmitigated nuisance and his hero an incredible bore. He is only too thankful to reach the end of the last chapter and leave his puppets for ever.

But this is not so with Hall Caine. His novels, as you know, do not err on the side of brevity, and though it is possible you may tire of his heroine, you may be absolutely certain that her creator never does. To this novelist the creatures of his imagination are, in one sense, more real than the material beings around him. He is wholly dominated by his imagination. His brain is peopled by creatures of his own fancy. His emotions are engaged on behalf of people who do not exist. His consciousness is confined to the little world he has created for himself and he is saturated with and submerged by fancies that his imagination has bred.

I shall never forget coming across him early one morning in the little shaded footway that winds among trees in the castle grounds to the main drive. His eyes were dim, and he had not perfect control of his voice.

[126]“I have been finishing my book,” he said, referring toThe Eternal City, “and I wept as I wrote.”

I have been with him on several occasions when he has been finishing his books, and I have always found him in alternating moods of exhaustion and emotional excitement. Whatever else may be charged against him, it cannot with truth be said that he does not put his whole soul into his work.

.             .             .             .             .             .             .             .

As a man he is the most loyal of friends and the most loyal of enemies. He can hate bitterly. I have heard him eloquent in his hate. I have heard him hate W. T. Stead and Frank Harris, and nothing could have exceeded his bitterness. But he does not nurse his hatred, and he is a man quick to forgive.

I cannot close this chapter without a word concerning his generosity. By “generosity” I do not mean only that he is free with money, but that he will give his time, the work of his brain, his advice and even himself for any good cause and for any man in need. To struggling authors he is the very soul of generosity. He struggled himself. Born on a coal barge in Runcorn, largely self-educated, having experienced the anxiety of straitened means and hope deferred, he has known intimately the hardships of life, and will do all in his power to shield others from them. On several occasions I have met people—mostly young men—who have come to him for help and advice in beginning a literary career. He is never extravagant in his praise of their work, but if he finds merit in it he is always warmly encouraging. Years before I met him face to face, when I was a boy of fourteen, I sent him a long poem I had written in the Spenserian stanza, and the first letters I received from him were careful and most helpful criticisms of this juvenile literary effort. I had written to him as an entire stranger and without any introduction whatever. In my youth[127]and egotism I had taken his replies as a matter of course; it was only later that I recognised the most kindly spirit that prompted a busy and often harassed man to give his time and energy to a boy whose work can have had very little to recommend it.

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