W. T. STEAD
It was in the late Nineties that I first met the most talked-of
journalist of his day. Though still on the sunny side of fifty, W. T.
Stead gave the impression of age. His face, where the grizzling beard
did not hide it, was deeply lined, and his movements had that kind of
conscious alertness which, in its contrast with the self-possessed and
even lazy confidence of youth in its physical competence, is a sure
indication of advancing years. He was given to loose home-spuns, which
made his figure appear rather more clumsy than it really was. Nothing in
his negligence of dress, however, suggested the Bohemian; he might easily
have passed, at first glance, for a country tradesman of the less pompous
kind, say, a corn-and-seed merchant in a substantial way.
[Illustration: W. T. STEAD.]
The eyes, however, at once attracted attention. They were neither full
nor beautiful, and one might have known the man all his life without
remembering their precise colour; doubtless they were of some kind
of faded blue or undistinguished grey, like the eyes of millions of
other people in northern Europe. The remarkable thing about them was
negative. They struck one as the eyes of a man who used them for the
special purpose of not seeing. They at once explained what Shakespeare
meant when he likened the poet’s eye to the lunatic’s, and described
it as “in a fine frenzy rolling.” Stead’s eyes did not roll; they were
curiously and brightly still. But they did give the idea of “frenzy”
as Shakespeare used the word—that is to say, of a subjective and not an
objective vision, of a mental excitement, an irritation of the brain,
which prevented the owner seeing things as they were. Stead looked not at
but through one, just as Mrs. Jellyby looked through her visitors at the
coast of Africa five thousand miles away. Whether Stead had at this time
any actual malady of vision I know not; I seem to remember to have read
somewhere that he went in his youth in fear of blindness. But he gave
instantaneously the impression of a man who either cannot see justly or
does not want to—of one, in other words, who is much more interested in
his “view” of a thing than in the thing itself. “Views” belong, in fact,
largely to the province of myopia. That delicate stylist, Lafcadio Hearn,
had to invent a Japan of his own because he never saw the real Japan
in which he spent so many years of his life; and probably much of the
astonishing “viewiness” of modern Germany is simply due to the ravages of
the German printed character on the German professorial eyesight. Stead
was a man of views from the first; his disaster was that, while he began
by possessing views, the views ended by possessing him.
Stead was born in the middle of the nineteenth century at Embleton
Manse, Northumberland, “under the shadow,” as he put it, “of the grey
northern hills.” His father was a Congregational minister; his mother
came of a substantial farming stock. It was the case of a large family
and small means, and, like his brothers and sisters, Stead was chiefly
educated at home; all his formal schooling was gained in two years at
Silcoates, near Wakefield, an establishment for the sons of ministers.
He thus grew up without mental discipline of the more severe kind, and
his natural disposition inclined him to the desultory. An insatiable
curiosity ensured a wide range of reading; a quick brain enabled him to
grasp as much as he wanted to know; but he did not form the habit, and
there was nobody to form it for him, of systematic and thorough study;
always picking and choosing, he got much knowledge, but little sense of
the relation of things. At the same time he was steeped in Nonconformist
mysticism. It has often been observed that beliefs in their old age
tend to become the extreme opposite of what they started to be, and
nineteenth-century Nonconformity, in its loose sentimentality, often
contrasted strangely enough with the hard rationalism of an earlier date.
Here, as in secular things, Stead picked and chose, followed his own
fancies, and used his eyes to see only what he wanted to see. The germ
of that spiritual wildness which distinguished him in his later years is
to be found in his precocious interest in “revivals” and “conversions.”
At twelve he felt himself competent to be a guide to his school-fellows,
and he has himself expressed his indebtedness to Silcoates for teaching
him “three important things—Christianity, cricket, and democracy.”
Democracy he then associated partly with Gladstonian Liberalism, and
partly with Oliver Cromwell, on whom he composed, while still at school,
a warm panegyric which won him a prize of a guinea. Christianity was
best illustrated, in his opinion, by the seventeenth-century Puritans,
who would assuredly have put him in the pillory for his earliest views,
and burned or hanged him for his later addiction to the occult. This
early enthusiasm for Cromwell is interesting as an indication of the
curious fashion in which ideas developed in the almost unhealthily
fertile soil of Stead’s brain. He began by worshipping Cromwell as the
great Puritan in religion and the great democrat (it is extraordinary
how men deceive themselves when they want to) in politics. Then, since
everything in Cromwell must be admirable, he began to admire Cromwell as
a great Imperialist, and so insensibly developed, to the horror of his
early Quaker employers at Darlington, into an Imperialist himself. It is
doubtful whether thought, in the strict sense, had any part in bringing
Stead to this or any other conviction. When he had got an idea into his
head he could, of course, bring a very active and ingenious brain to the
task of developing it. But the idea itself had its source in his taste or
his emotions, if it did not arrive by sheer chance. In some respects he
might be described as a _gamin_ Carlyle. He had much of Carlyle’s faculty
of smelling men and things, so to speak, across long distances of space
and time; Carlyle was all nose and tongue: his nose enabled him to scent
his heroes, and his tongue persuaded incautious people that they were
demigods. To be just, they were generally great men. But even Carlyle
sometimes went wrong, as the best hound will do; and Stead, less gifted,
went wrong much more often. Lord Morley, while paying high tribute to his
“invaluable” qualities as a colleague, hints at “passing embarrassments.”
Such a man was, in truth, ill adapted to run in harness with people more
normally gifted. He had all sorts of superstitions, and it might almost
be said that an article of his would depend on his opening his Bible at
one page and his Bluebook at another.
Mr. Spender, of the _Westminster Gazette_, recently declared that no
man would have repudiated more hotly than Stead the suggestion that
journalism was merely a branch of commerce. And in some sense none
could more truly say that he regarded his profession as “a vacation
abounding in opportunities, but weighted by solemn responsibilities.”
He had a real passion for what he thought was the right; he showed
fine courage in taking up unpopular causes; he sacrificed much for
great ideals, and still more for small eccentricities. But the man
was a most singular combination of the business man and the mystic.
Those who worked with him had much the same sort of shock we feel in
reading the speeches of seventeenth-century Puritan statesmen, who (to
quote Macaulay) talked in Committee of Ways and Means about seeking the
Lord. He might be led to consider a technical problem through reading
the Book of Proverbs, or going to a spiritualistic séance. But to the
problem itself he brought the coldest common sense. He could engineer a
“stunt,” as the modern slang goes, as well as the most cynical living
professor of that art. Such a “stunt” was the cry that sent Gordon to
Khartoum. And even when, as in the “Modern Babylon” articles, his heart
was fully engaged, his method was only distinguishable from that of a
later date by the superiority of his intelligence and his firm sense of
the importance of whatever he happened to say. His egotism was wonderful
and almost touching in its _naïveté_. Lord Morley visited him during his
imprisonment in Holloway, and found him in a “strangely exalted mood.”
“As I was taking my exercise this morning in the prison yard,” he said,
“I asked myself who was the man of most importance now alive? And I
could only find one answer—the prisoner in this cell.” Yet ten minutes
later he might easily have been criticising the “make-up” of a paper,
or discussing the financial possibilities of an abridged edition of the
classics, with Gibbon in twenty pages, _The Republic_ in five, and _Uncle
Remus_ in fifty.
The beginning of the Nineties saw Stead, with the publication of the
_Review of Reviews_, at the very height of his professional prestige.
He had, by his “two keels to one” campaign, established a claim on
the regard of political realists. He had, by his efforts to interest
European monarchs in schemes for the preservation of peace, won the
esteem of those idealists who had perhaps suspected him in his capacity
of Imperialist. He enjoyed, on the one hand, the worship of every
Nonconformist in England, and, on the other, the friendship of Cecil
Rhodes. He exercised, in the sum, an enormous influence on the masses. He
could make an author; he could almost unmake a statesman. There seemed to
be little limit to the development of one whom Lord Morley has described
as “for a season the most powerful journalist in the island.” But just at
this period that eccentricity which had always been a large element in
his character assumed the proportions of a disease. In 1890 he met a Miss
Julia A. Ames, connected with a newspaper in Chicago—“a highly religious
woman, a Methodist, very level-headed, and possessing a great amount of
common sense.” With Miss Ames Stead was strangely impressed, and after
her death in America he essayed communication by “automatic writing”
with her spirit. In this, he was convinced, he attained success, and in
1893 he started a paper called _Borderland_, chiefly for the purpose of
giving the world the “letters of Julia.” He devoted much time and money
henceforth to spiritualism in its various forms, and “Julia’s Bureau” was
established “to enable those who had lost their dead, who were sorrowing
over friends and relatives, to get into touch with them again.”
Inevitably this preoccupation with the occult reacted on Stead’s
reputation as a thinker on more mundane matters, and the end of the
century found a new generation of writers wondering why he still
commanded, if not the old homage, at least the interest of a large
public. The truth was that, though much that Stead stood for had gone
out of fashion, and though the “spook” business was never in fashion in
any popular sense, he did to the end represent certain permanent British
habits of mind. Thus he was thoroughly British in his irresponsible
knight-errantry. I have never been able to understand how _Don Quixote_
came to be written by a Spaniard; the Don is intrinsically as English
as Mr. Pickwick, and I am persuaded that it is not a Spaniard, but an
Englishman, who best understands him; one may go further and say that the
English reader understands him better in the reading than the Spanish
author did in the writing. There was a good deal of Quixote in Stead,
and that made for his popularity. He wandered from question to question,
and from capital to capital, interfering with matters in which he had
strictly no concern, and rousing the tumult he loved. Then, when the
bright eyes of his lady Dulcinea had been sufficiently honoured, he
rode off to other adventures, splendidly unconscious that the affair
after all might not have been disposed of, might even have been made
more difficult, by his chivalrous intervention. The Englishman of that
time was partial to such championship of the afflicted and distressed.
Feeling a responsibility for the morals of the rest of the world, he
preferred, like a good business man, to discharge it as cheaply as
possible, and as leading articles (at the most extravagant valuation)
are considerably cheaper than squadrons and army corps, the tendency was
to exaggerate a little the thunders of the Press. It was then an article
of faith that foreign military ambition was mainly restrained by fear
of _The Standard_, and that foreign striving after liberty was mainly
sustained by the _Daily News_. Thus it was natural that the spectacle of
Stead lecturing Kaiser, Czar, and Sultan should in some degree stir the
pulses of many Englishmen. It was an assertion of our superiority; no
representative of a responsible foreign journal lectured Queen Victoria.
Equally natural was it that Stead himself, finding the Czar indomitably
polite, should infer that he was a sincere friend of peace, and feel
easier about the Finns, or, discovering that the Sultan kept the _Review
of Reviews_ on file, should be inclined to believe that he had done
a real service to Macedonia. Every journalist has something in him of
Mr. Pott, who believed that his articles in the _Eatanswill Gazette_
exercised a decisive influence on national politics. Stead sometimes
seemed to think that taking a holiday was equivalent to going on a
crusade.
Another point on which Stead was in harmony with average sentiment
was his combination of thorough-going Imperialism with thorough-going
anti-militarism. All for omelettes, but unalterably opposed to the
breaking of eggs, he went only a step further than the many who liked
omelettes so long as no eggs were broken except those which might be
picked up cheaply at a “Queen’s shilling” apiece. He quarrelled with
Rhodes over the Boer War—and so his name was struck out of the famous
will—but really Rhodes was not so very far apart from himself; Rhodes,
like Stead, lacked the logic of Imperialists like Lord Milner, who
not only recognised the price of Empire, but wanted to have it (by
conscriptive decree) always ready in the bank. Stead, no doubt, would in
any case have opposed the Boer War as a war; why he should have gloried
in the Boers as Boers was less obvious. But in Kruger, no doubt, he
fancied some resemblance to Cromwell, and the Commandoes, with their
Bibles and “infallible artillery,” reminded him of the New Model.
Stead never took much of the Puritan theology, and it had probably all
volatilised in the course of his feverish life; but instincts are more
stubborn than opinions, and “Brother Boer” was also a brother Puritan.
The furious attack on Rhodes, whom he had previously admired highly, also
on Cromwellian grounds, was treated with high magnanimity. “I want you
to understand,” said Rhodes, meeting him in 1900, “that if in future you
should unfortunately feel yourself compelled to attack me personally as
vehemently as you have attacked my policy, it will make no difference
to our friendship. I am too grateful for all I have learned from you
to allow anything that you may write or say to make any change in our
relations.” The man who could speak thus was assuredly a great one. The
man to whom it was said could not have been small.