PRESS WORK IN LONDON
Before I come to the period when I became, not only Editor, but
Proprietor, of _The Spectator_, I must give an account of some of
my experiences with other newspapers. My first newspaper article
appeared in _The Daily News_. It gave an account of the bonfires
lighted on the hill-tops round Cortina, in the Tyrol, at which place we
spent the summer of 1880, on the birthday of the Austrian Emperor. I was
an undergraduate at the time and was much delighted to find myself
described as "a correspondent" of _The Daily News_. I expect I owed
the acceptance of my descriptive article to the first sentence, which
began, "While the Austrian Kaiser is keeping his birthday with the
waters of the Ischl in his kitchens, we at Cortina, etc., etc." The
paper, however, for which I wrote chiefly during the time I was at
Oxford and in my first year after leaving Balliol was _The Saturday
Review_. The _Saturday_ in those days was famous for its "middles,"
and I was very proud to be able to get articles of this kind
accepted. I also wrote for _The Academy_ and for _The Pall
Mall_, which at that time was being edited by Lord Morley. I remember
that when going with a letter of introduction to him, he asked me
whether I had had any former experience of journalism. I told him that I
was writing "middles" for the _Saturday_. His reply was characteristic.
"Ah! When I was a young man I wrote miles of 'middles' for them"--
stretching out his hands to show the unending chain. Some of my
work also appeared in _The Academy_, then a paper manfully
struggling to represent the higher side of English literature. One
article I recall was a review of a reprint of the poems of Gay--a poet
who has come back into public notice owing to the delightful art of Mr.
Lovat Fraser, combined with the talent of the ladies and gentlemen who
so admirably represent Macheath and his minions male and female. On
looking at the article the other day, I was glad to see that I drew
attention to Gay's peculiar handling of the couplet and also to his
delight in every kind of old song and ballad. I quoted in this respect,
however, not from "The Beggar's Opera" but from the song as sung by
Silenus in Gay's Eclogues. One of these songs I have always longed to
hear or to read, owing to the fascination of its title--"The grass now
grows where Troy town stood."
After I went to _The Spectator_ the newspaper world widened in my
view. I left off writing for the _Saturday_ and the _Pall Mall_
and the _Academy_. Instead, and after I married, I took a
regular post as leader-writer on the staff of the _Standard_. I
also wrote a weekly leader for the _Observer_ for the best part of
a year. Of the _Observer_ I have only one thing to note, and that
is a saying of the Editor, Mr. Dicey, brother to my old friend,
Professor Dicey--a man for whom I have great veneration, though my lips
are happily closed in regard to him by the fact that he still lives. At
our first interview Mr. Dicey told me that in writing for the
_Observer_ I must remember that I was not writing for a weekly
paper, like the _Spectator_, but for a daily paper which, however,
only happened to come out on one day in the week. That, I always
thought, was a very illuminating and instructive remark, and it is one
which should be observed, in my opinion, by all writers in Sunday
papers. At present Sunday papers are in danger of becoming merely weekly
magazines. What the world wants, or, at any rate, what a great many
people want, is a daily paper to read on Sundays, not a miscellany,
however good. But perhaps Mr. Dicey and I were old-fashioned. Anyway,
there was a sort of easygoing, old-fashioned, early-Victorian air about
the _Observer_ Office of those days which was very pleasant. Nobody
appeared to be in a hurry, and one was given almost complete freedom as
to the way in which to treat one's subject. I was also a contributor to
the _Manchester Guardian_. For that distinguished paper I wrote
Notes for their London Letter and also a number of short reviews.
I should add that from that time till I became Editor and Proprietor of
the _Spectator_ I wrote a weekly article for _The Economist_--
a piece of work in which I delighted, for the Editor, Mr. Johnstone, was
not only a great editor, but a very satisfactory one from the
contributor's point of view. He told you exactly what he wanted written
about, and then left you to your own devices. As it happened, I
generally was in entire agreement with his policy, but if I had not
been, it would not have mattered, because he made it so very clear to
one, as an editor should, that one was expressing not one's own views,
but the views of the _Economist_. Whether they were in fact right
or wrong, they certainly deserved full consideration. Therefore, full
exposition could never be regarded as taking the wrong side.
Though _The Economist_ was less strongly Unionist than I was, I
cannot recall any occasion on which my leaders were altered by the
Editor. I can only recall, indeed, one comment made by Mr. Johnstone in
the course of some nine years. It was one that at the time very greatly
interested and amused me. It happened that Mr. Johnstone, though so
great a journalist and so sound a politician, was not a man who had paid
any attention to literature. Possibly, indeed, he did not consider that
it deserved it. When, however, the complete works of Walter Bagehot, for
many years Editor of _The Economist_, were published, Mr. Johnstone
asked me to review them for the paper. Needless to say I was delighted.
How could a young man in the 'nineties, full of interest in the
Constitution, in Economics, and in _belles-lettres_, have felt
otherwise than enthusiastic about Bagehot?
It was, therefore, with no small zest that I undertook an appreciation
of Bagehot in his own paper. I was always an immense admirer of
Bagehot's power of dealing with literary problems, and still more of
that perfection of style for which, by the way, he never received full
credit. I sought to say something which would make people "sit up and
take notice" in regard to his place in literature on this special point.
Accordingly, in praising his style, I said that it was worthy to be
compared with that of Stevenson, who at the time was held to be our
greatest master of words. Mr. Johnstone, with, as I fully admitted, a
quite unnecessary urbanity of manner, apologised to me for having
altered the article. He had, he explained, left out the passage about
Stevenson. But mark the reason! It was not because he thought the praise
exaggerated, but because he thought, and thought also that Mr. Bagehot's
family might think, that one was not properly appreciative of Bagehot's
work if one compared it to that of Stevenson! I have always been a lover
of the irony of accident in every form; but here was something which was
almost too bewilderingly poignant. I had thought, as I wrote, that
people might think I was going a good deal too far in my praise of
Bagehot, but lo and behold! my purple patch was "turned down," not
because of this but because it was held to be too laudatory of
Stevenson, and not laudatory enough of my hero!
I was, nevertheless, quite right. Bagehot's style was inimitable, and I
think if I were writing now, and with a better perspective, I should
have said not less but a good deal more in its praise. The humorous
passages in "The English Constitution" are in their way perfect, and,
what is more, they are really original. They owe nothing to any previous
humorist. They stand somewhere between the heartiness of Sydney Smith
and the dainty fastidiousness of Matthew Arnold, and yet imitate
neither. They have a quality, indeed, which is entirely their own and is
entirely delightful. One of the things which is so charming about them
is that they are authoritative without being cocksure. What could be
more admirable than the passage which points out that Southey, "who
lived almost entirely with domestic women, actually died in the belief
that he was a poet"? The pathos of the situation, and the Olympian
stroke delivered in such a word as "domestic" cannot but fill any
artisan of words with admiration. The essay, "Shakespeare and the Plain
Man," is full of such delights.
If I am told that I digress too much and that I seem to forget that I am
writing my autobiography and not an estimate of Walter Bagehot, I shall
not yield to the criticism. There is method in my madness. No, I am
prepared to contend, and to contend with my last drop of ink, that I am
justified in what I have done. If this book is worth anything, it is the
history of a mind, and Bagehot had a very great effect upon my mind,
largely through his skill in the art of presentation. Therefore it
cannot be out of place to say something about Bagehot's style. In truth,
instead of my being unduly discursive I have not really said as much as
I ought to have said on the subject.
I was also for rather more than a year a leader-writer on the
_Standard_--my only experience of true daily journalism. Of this
work I can only say that I enjoyed it very much while I was in direct
contact with Mr. Mudford, one of the greatest of English publicists, and
the man who made the _Standard_ what it was from 1874 till about
1894, one of the most important papers in the country. In those days the
_Standard_ though strongly conservative, was in no sense a
capitalist organ, nor in the bad sense a mere party organ. While it
supported the fixed institutions of the country, the Church, the Crown,
the House of Lords, and the City, it, at the same time, did it with
reason and moderation. In fact, though it was called a Tory paper, and
rejoiced in the name, it would have been called "left-centre" in any
other country. It was, it need not be said, strongly Unionist. I,
therefore, had no difficulty whatever in writing for it.
Oddly enough, it was said, and I think with truth, that Mr. Gladstone
always read the leaders in the _Standard_ and that it was his
favourite paper. He had, no doubt, a strong vein of Conservatism in his
nature. Though he thought it his duty to be a Liberal, when he gave
himself a holiday, so to speak, from party feelings, what he reverted to
was almost exactly the _Standard_ attitude towards the great
institutions I have just named. A propos of this I cannot resist a most
illuminating story of Mr. Gladstone, which I once heard told by Mr.
George Wyndham, the Irish Secretary. Mr. Wyndham commanded the Cheshire
yeomanry, after Mr. Gladstone had gone into retirement, and had his
regiment under canvas for training at the Park at Hawarden. Being an old
House of Commons friend, he went several times to dine. On one of these
occasions he was alone with Mr. Gladstone after dinner. While sipping
his port, the great man unbosomed himself on the political situation of
the future in language which, as Mr. Wyndham pointed out, approximated
to that of an old country squire--language which seemed astonishing from
the mouth of one who had only a few months before been the leader of the
Liberal and Radical Party.
Mr. Gladstone began with a panegyric of the English squires and
landlords, and then went on to say that he feared that in the coming
time the country-gentlemen of England who had done so much for her would
have a hard and difficult time. "But," he went on, "I pray Heaven, Mr.
Wyndham, that they will meet these trials and difficulties with a firm
and courageous spirit. They must not weakly yield the position to which
they have attained and which they deserve." I can remember no more of
Mr. Gladstone's speech, but it was all to the effect that the country-
gentleman must stand up against the rising tide of democracy. No wonder,
then, that Mr. Gladstone liked the _Standard_, even though it very
often attacked him in the strongest language.
Another person said to be a regular reader of the _Standard_, and I
should add rightly said to be, was Queen Victoria. The Queen, as Lord
Salisbury said at the time of her death, understood the English people
exactly, and especially the English middle-class. Therefore she would
have been wise to have read the _Standard_ as the representative
and interpreter of that class even if she had not liked the paper on its
merits. As a matter of fact, however, its note happened to be pitched
exactly to suit her. Her admiration was not politic, but personal.
Here I may note an interesting example of how little the person who has
had no first-hand experience of journalism understands the journalist's
trade and how often he or she is amazed at what I may call our simple
secrets. It happened that while I was writing leaders for the
_Standard_, which was twice a week, _i.e._, on Wednesday nights
and on Sunday nights, the news came in of the death of Lady Ely,
a lifelong personal friend of the Queen. Lady Ely had been with her
almost from girlhood and held up to the last, if not actually a Court
appointment, a position which brought her into constant personal contact
with the Queen. She was, in fact, the last of the Queen's women
contemporaries who were also close friends. This fact was common
knowledge, and Mr. Mudford in one of his notes, which were written in a
calligraphy the badness of which it is almost impossible to describe
without the aid of a lithographic print, wrote to me shortly, telling me
of the death and asking me to write that night a leader on Lady Ely. He
pointed out how great the loss was to the Queen, and how much,
therefore, she must stand in the need of sympathy. I don't suppose I had
ever heard of Lady Ely before, for ever since I came to London she was
living in retirement, and was not only not written about in the press,
but was very little talked about in general society. Further, I had only
the ordinary knowledge about the Queen, at that time much scantier than
it is now. It might be supposed that with this amount of ignorance it
would have been impossible to write a column and a half on the death of
an old lady who may be said to have had no public life at all, and whose
private life, even if it had been known, would have been either too
trivial or too intimate to be written about in a newspaper.
All the same, the task was not one which any journalist worth his salt,
that is, any journalist with imagination, would find difficult to
accomplish. What I did, and all it was necessary to do, was to envisage
a great lady devoted to the Queen from the time the Queen was married,
and also receiving in exchange the Queen's devotion to her. These two
women, now grown old, one in the service of her country and the other in
the service of her friend, had gradually seen, not only their nearest
and dearest drop away, but almost the whole of their own generation.
Thus they stood very much alone in the world. Sovereigns by their nature
are always lonely, and this loneliness was intensified in the case of
the Queen by the premature death of Prince Albert and by that inability
of sovereigns to make intimate friends, owing, not only to the seclusion
which life in a palace entails, but to the busy-ness of their lives.
This being so, the breaking by death of a friendship formed when life
was easier to Queen Victoria than it was after the death of the Prince
Consort was an irreparable loss. In a very special degree the Queen
needed sympathy of all who had minds to think or hearts to feel.
Such considerations were as easy to put on paper as they were true. To
draw a picture of the unknown Lady Ely seems more difficult, but, after
all, one felt sure that to have remained the intimate and trusted friend
of the Queen she must have had great qualities, for the Queen did not
give her confidence lightly. The separation of the two friends and the
intensification of the Queen's loneliness was therefore bound to touch
the heart of anyone who heard "the Virgilian cry" and felt "the sense of
tears in mortal things."
I am not ashamed to say that though by nature little disposed towards
the attitude of the courtier, I wrote my modest tribute of regret _ex
animo_. I was not only not writing a conventional article of
condolence, not even writing dramatically, but sincerely. When, however,
the leader was finished, I, of course, thought very little more of the
matter, but passed on to consider, after the way of my profession,
subjects so vital or so trivial as the best means of supporting Mr.
Balfour in his law-and-order campaign in Ireland, maintaining the cause
of Free Trade (the Standard was always a Free Trade paper), or
discussing such topics as "Penny Fares in Omnibuses," or "The
Preservation of the Ancient Monuments of London," or "Should Cats be
Taxed?" It was therefore with some astonishment that I received a
message from Mr. Mudford saying that the Queen had sent one of her
Private Secretaries to enquire on behalf of Her Majesty the name of the
writer of the article on Lady Ely. The Queen, said her Envoy, had been
very touched and struck by the article and felt sure that it must have
been written by someone who knew Lady Ely. It exactly represented her
life and character, and her special devotion to the Queen. The Queen
also appeared much struck by the representation of her own feeling
towards her friend.
Mr. Mudford, of course, gave my name. I have often thought with some
curiosity that the Queen must have been rather bewildered to find the
complete remoteness of the writer from her friend and herself. The Queen
had a very limited literary sense and, we may be sure, failed altogether
to realise how the nerves and sinews work in that strange creature the
journalist. She can hardly have been otherwise than disappointed in
finding that it was not some old friend of her own, or some friend of
her friend, but a person of whom she knew nothing--and with a name which
must have left her quite cold, even though with her knowledge of India
and her own family that name was not actually unfamiliar. My uncle, Sir
John Strachey, after the murder of Lord Mayo, was for six or seven
months Viceroy of India, pending the appointment of a successor. She
also, no doubt, had known the name of another Indian uncle, Sir Richard
Strachey.
But though Mr. Mudford was very sympathetic to the new journalist on his
staff, the arrangement did not last long. After I had been there about
six months, Mr. Mudford went into greater retirement than even before,
and practically left the whole conduct of the paper to his subordinate,
Mr. Byron Curtis, a journalist whom I can best describe by saying that
he was of the kind delineated by Thackeray. Though we had no open
quarrel I found it difficult to work with Mr. Curtis, and he, on the
other hand, was by no means satisfied with my work. He used to say to
me, "Please do remember, Mr. Strachey, that we don't want academic stuff
such as you put into the _Spectator_ and as they appear to like.
What we want is a nice flow of English." "A nice flow of English" with
Mr. Curtis meant what I may call the barrel-organ type of leader--
something that flowed like water from a smooth-running pump. This I
admit I could never manage to produce. Mr. Curtis's standard of style
was solely governed by the question of the repetition of the same word.
It was an unforgivable sin to repeat a substantive, adjective, or verb
without an intervening space of at least four inches. This, of course,
leads to that particular form of "journalese" in which a cricket-ball
becomes a "leathern missile" and so forth. Apropos of this I remember a
good Fleet Street story. An Editor, enraged with a contributor, tore up
an article on grouse, with the exclamation, "Look here! You have
actually used the word 'grouse' twenty times in your first paragraph!
Why cannot you call them something else?" "But," said the contributor,
"what else can I call them? They are grouse, and that is the only name
they have got. What would you want me to say?" "Oh! hang it all! Don't
make excuses. Why, can't you call them 'the feathered denizens of the
moor'?"
In any case, Mr. Curtis and I found it impossible to work together. The
process of separation was speeded up by the fact that I did not find
night-work suit me. All the same, I very much liked going down to the
policeman on night-duty. What was trying was to be up all night for two
nights in the week, and to lead a normal life during the other five.
That tended to throw one's working days quite out of gear. To adopt two
ways of life was a failure. All the same, I am always glad when I pass
down Fleet Street to be able to say to myself, "I too once lived in
Arcadia," and knew the pleasant side of the life. There was something
peculiarly delightful, when one's leader was finished, in lighting a
pipe or a cigar and stretching out one's legs and feeling really at
leisure. There is only real leisure in the middle of the night, that is
between one and five. There are no appointments, no meals, no duties, no
plans, no dependence on other people's arrangements. One is as free in
one's complete isolation as a Trappist monk. If one sees a friend in
Fleet Street or Shoe Lane at three, he will be as free as you.
Such a friend was Mr. Joseph Fisher, then the understudy of Mr. Byron
Curtis. Mr. Fisher, who is an Ulster-man, later became the Editor of
_The Northern Whig_, and I am happy to say is still alive. He has
done excellent work in defending the interests of the Loyalists and
Protestants of the North.
That, I think, is the full record of my regular newspaper activities,
except for one particular. I have not mentioned the fact that I edited
the official organ of the Liberal Unionist Party for about two years--a
monthly, entitled The _Liberal Unionist_. The paper was started
during the election of 1886. The work was interesting, if not
particularly well paid, and brought me into contact with most of the
leaders of the Unionist Party--Lord Hartington, Mr. Chamberlain, Mr.
Goschen, the Duke of Argyll, Mr. Arthur Elliot, and Mr. Henry Hobhouse,
to name only a few of my colleagues on the Liberal Unionist Central
Committee. I never had any difficulties with them. They gave me a free
hand, and in return I gave them what I think was good value. As my work
enlarged I found I wanted help in _The Liberal Unionist,_ and
secured an admirable helper in Mr. C. L. Graves. This was the beginning
of our private and journalistic friendship, and, though I must not break
my rule of not dealing with living people, I may say here what a kind
and loyal helper he has always been to me, not only in _The Liberal
Unionist_ but for many years in _The Spectator_. All who know
him, and especially his associates on _Punch,_ will, I feel sure,
agree with me that no man was ever a more loyal colleague. No man has
ever succeeded better than he in combining scholarship and vivacity in
humorous and satiric verse.
While carrying on the activities I have mentioned above, I also from
time to time wrote for the magazines--for the _Edinburgh
Quarterly,_ for the _National,_ the _Nineteenth Century,_
the _Contemporary,_ and once or twice, I think, in the
_Fortnightly._ I even perpetrated a short story in a magazine now
deceased--a story which, by the way, if I had time to adapt it, might, I
think, make an excellent cinema film. The title was good--"The Snake
Ring." It was a story of a murder in the High Alps, when the High Alps
were not so much exploited as they are now. There were adventures in
sledging over mountain passes in mid-winter, and wonderful mountain
Palazzi, with gorgeous seventeenth-century interiors, in lonely snowed-
up villages in inaccessible valleys. As a rule, however, my
contributions to the magazines were of a serious kind. Very soon after I
left Oxford, I wrote my first article in the _Quarterly_. This was
followed by several more, for the old Editor, Dr. Smith, took a strong
liking to my work. Dr. Smith was a man of real learning and a true
journalist. Though it was the custom to laugh at his "h's," or rather,
his occasional want of them, he was very much liked in society. As a boy
I had made his acquaintance, I remember, at Lady Waldegrave's, though
this chance meeting had nothing to do with the acceptance of my first
article. Henry Reeve of the _Edinburgh_ also on several occasions
asked me to write the political article in the _Review_. That was a
pleasure. I was given a free hand, and I had the agreeable sense that I
was sitting in the seats of the mighty, of Sydney Smith and of Macaulay.