As men divinely taught, and better teaching The solid rules of Civil Government In their majestic, unaffected style Than all the oratory of Greece and Rome. In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt, What makes a Nation happy, and keeps it so, What ruins Kingdoms, and lays Cities flat.

In what concerns the intellectual rather than the moral side of life the Greek is, of course, supreme. It is hardly too much to say that intellectual progress has only pursued a steady and consistent course when men's minds have been in touch with the Greek. The sense of beauty in all the arts, intellectual and figurative, was the prerogative of the Hellenic communities, or, rather, of Athens, for only in Athens was perfection in the arts achieved. The Greek was the best, as he was the first, director and teacher. It is true that the artists of Florence, Umbria, Lombardy, and Venice equalled the Greeks in some of the arts and excelled them absolutely in the new art of painting. In Greece, painting, though it had a beauty of its own, was hardly more than exquisitely-coloured sculpture in the lowest conceivable relief. In painting the Italians were guided by a wholly different series of visual conceptions. Their understanding and use of atmosphere and mass was something of which the Greeks had formed no conception. Apart, however, from painting, the Greeks were the first to light and feed the sacred flame of Beauty.

There is a charming story of the way in which Renan emphasised this fact. Some thirty-five years ago—I well remember the period—it was the fashion, just as, in a sense, it is the fashion now, to say that the Egyptians were the real masters of sculpture, wall-painting, and metal work, that the Greeks learnt from them, and in the fine arts originated nothing. At that time it happened that the Keeper of the Egyptian antiquities at the Louvre was running this theory for all it was worth. One day he showed Renan and a party of distinguished visitors a special exhibition illustrating his contention. Notable examples of Egyptian art were produced, as proving how perfectly and finally the Egyptians treated the human figure in the round, in bas-relief, in the bronze statue, in the wooden statue, and even in earthenware. And to all the treasures displayed was added the chorus of the Professor: "And so, you see, the Greeks invented nothing." Renan assented. "Nothing. Nothing," he echoed, but added as an afterthought: "Seulement le Beau."

I have sometimes thought that these words, "Seulement le Beau," might do as the commemorative epitaph of the Greek race. But of course the Greek was a great deal more than the exponent of the beautiful. I only tell this story to make it quite clear how deep is my reverence and admiration for the Greeks, and how strongly I feel that their philosophers and their poets are lively oracles from which the human spirit may still draw perennial draughts of inspiration.

But if this is so, it will be asked, "How comes it that, with these views, you proclaim yourself an opponent to compulsory Greek and compulsory Latin in schools and universities?" My answer is, it is just because I am such an intense believer in the quickening power of the Greek mind and in the immense advantages secured by getting into touch with the Greek spirit that I desire the abolition of compulsory Greek. No civilised man should ever be out of touch with it at first hand. But this means, translated into action, no compulsory Greek grammar, no compulsory drudgery in acquiring the things which do not really belong to the Greeks but to the vapid pedants of vanished ages. I passionately desire that as many people as possible should enjoy Hellenic culture. I want to clear away the smoky mist of grammatical ineptitude which keeps men from the great books and great minds of antiquity and prevents the soul of the Greek and the soul of the Englishman—natural allies, for some strange reason—from flowing together.

It is appropriate that I should testify. Owing to having been forced to try to learn the Greek Grammar instead of reading the books written by the Greeks in a language which I could understand, I very nearly made an intellectual shipwreck. Indeed, it was only by a series of lucky accidents that I escaped complete ignorance of the Greek spirit, though retaining a certain knowledge of the grammar.

It was only after I had miserably squirmed my way through Mods., as a man may squirm through some hole in a prison wall, that I had the slightest idea of what was meant by the Greek spirit.

I closed my grammar, with all the miserable and complicated stuff about tnpto and its aorists, the enclitic and the double-damned Digamma, to open my Jowett's Plato, my Dakyns' Xenophon, and, later, Gilbert Murray's Dramatists and Mackail's Anthology. It is true that in the squirming process I have described I had to read a portion of the Anabasis and of the Odyssey and Memorabilia, as well as books of Caesar, Livy, Horace, and Virgil.

In the case of these books I acquired nothing but a distaste so deep that it has only just worn off. Only after an interval of forty years could I bear to read these kill-joys in translation. No doubt some of the fault was mine. Possibly I was born with an inability to learn languages. But if that is so it is a misfortune, not a crime for which one should be put on the rack!

By the time I realised fully the glory of Greek letters, I was a very busy man, and bitter indeed was the thought that the well-meaning persons who maintain our university system had actually been keeping me all those years from the divine wells of grace and beauty. But for them, how many more years of enjoyment might I have drawn from the Socratic Dialogues, from the Apology, and from the Republic! Think of it! It was not till four years ago that I read Thucydides and had my soul shaken by the supreme wickedness, the intellectual devilry of the Melian controversy. How I thrilled at the awful picture of the supreme tragedy at Syracuse! How I saw! How I perished with the Greek warriors standing to arms on the shore, and watching in their swaying agony the Athenian ships sink one by one, without being able to lift a hand, or cast a long or short spear to help them! Yet the watchers knew that the awful spectacle on which they gazed meant death, or a slavery worse than death, for every one of them!

Almost worse to me than the denial of Plato, the dramatists Thucydides and Homer, was the refusal to allow me to walk or hunt with Xenophon, and to saunter through his kitchen or his grounds. And all because I could not show the requisite grammatical ticket. Could anything be more fascinating than the tale of Xenophon's prim yet most lovable young wife, or the glorious picture of the boy and girl lovers with which Xenophon closes his Symposium?

My sense of a deprivation unnecessary and yet deliberate was as great in regard to Latin literature. It was only in 1919, owing to what I had almost called a fortunate illness, that I took to reading Cicero's Letters and came under an enchantment greater than that cast even by Walpole, Madame de Svign, or Madame du Deffand.

For forty years I was kept in ignorance of a book which painted the great world of Rome with a touch more intimate than even that of St. Simon. Cicero in his Letters makes the most dramatic moment in Roman history, the end of the Oligarchic Republic, live before one. Even Macaulay's account of the Revolution of 1688 seems tame when called in comparison.

I know that by the time some Greek or Latin scholar has got as far as this he will ask with a smile,

Why is this self-dubbed ignoramus making all this pother about being deprived of the classics? Surely he cannot have failed to realise that it is impossible to understand and appreciate the classics properly without having learnt Latin and Greek? But you cannot learn Latin and Greek without learning the grammar. He not only on his own showing has no grievance, but is giving support to those who desire that the classics should remain the centrepiece of our educational system.

For all such objections I have one, and I think a final, argument. When people ask me how I propose to enjoy Plato without knowing Greek, I ask them to tell me, in return, how they manage to enjoy reading one of the greatest poets in the world, Isaiah, without knowing Hebrew. How have they found consolation in the Psalms; how have they absorbed the worldly wisdom of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes; how have they read the lyric choruses of the Song of Solomon; how have they followed the majestic drama of the Book of Job? They read them in translations. That is the way in which they have filled their minds with the noble deeds and thoughts of the Hebrew history and Hebrew literature. That is the answer, the true answer, and the only answer.

A good, practical, commonsense proof of what I am saying is to be found in the fact that the ordinary man and also the man of brains who has gone through the good old fortifying classical curriculum, to quote Matthew Arnold once more, and who theoretically can read the great Greek and Latin authors in their own languages, and without translations, hardly reads them at all. Those who know that it is a translation or nothing will be found to be far closer and more constant readers of Plato and Thucydides. Certainly that is my case. To this day I find myself reading the Greek and Latin authors in translation when many of my friends, who took Honours Mods, and Honours Greats, would no more think of opening books which they are supposed to have read than they would attempt to read Egyptian hieroglyphics. The man with a classical education will still worry himself over an accidental false quantity or a wrongly-placed Greek accent, but it is extraordinary how seldom, unless he is a schoolmaster, you hear of him enjoying the classics or applying knowledge drawn from the classics to modern literature or to modern politics.

A further proof of this view, which I admit sounds strange, may be registered. The only man I have known who habitually read Greek in the original was Lord Cromer, and he had not had a classical education. He left a private day-school in London to go straight to Chatham, where he was prepared for entry into the artillery. And at Chatham they did not teach Greek. Therefore when, as a gunner subaltern, he went to the Ionian Islands on the staff of Sir Henry Storks, he was without any knowledge of Greek. He wanted, however, as he told me, to know modern Greek, as the language of the islands. Also, like the natural Englishman he was, to be able to talk with the Albanian hunters with whom he went shooting in the hills of the mainland. But when he had mastered enough modern Greek to read the newspaper and so forth, he began to wonder whether he could not use his knowledge to find out what Homer was like.

He very soon found out that he could read him as one reads Chaucer. From this point he went on till he made himself—I will not say a Greek scholar, but something much better—a person able to read Greek and enjoy it in the original. Throughout the period of my friendship with him, which lasted for nearly a quarter of a century, he was constantly reading and translating from Greek authors and talking about them in an intimate and stimulating way.

Once more, it is because I want people to study and to love classical literature and to imbibe the Greek spirit that I desire that the ordinary man should not be forced to grind away at Greek grammar when he might be getting in touch with great minds and great books. I am not blind, of course, to the gymnastic defence of the classics, though I do not share it. All I say is, do not let us make a knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages a sine qua non in our educational system, on the ground that such knowledge brings the ordinary man into touch with the Greek spirit. It does nothing of the kind.

But though Greek and Latin literature had thus been temporarily closed to me, I still, Heaven be praised, could enjoy the glories of my own language. When I began to read for the History School, I not only felt like a man who had recovered from a bad bout of influenza, but I began to realise that academic study was not necessarily divorced from the joys of literature, but that, instead, it might lead me to new and delightful pastures. Even early Constitutional History, though apparently so arid, opened to me an enchanting field of study. The study of the Anglo-Saxon period brought special delights. It introduced me to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and to Bede, both of them books which deserve far greater fame than they have yet received. Again, I can quite honestly say that the early part of Stubbs's Excerpts from the Laws, Charters, and Chronicles proved to be for me almost as pleasant as a volume of poetry. To my astonishment Magna Charta and the Dialogus de Scaccario were thoroughly good reading. The answer to "Quod est murdrum" was a thrilling revelation of what the Norman Conquest was and was not. I understood; and what is more delightful than that? There were even good courses, I found, in such apparently univiting a feast as "The Constitutions of Clarendon." I shall not easily forget my pleasure in discovering that the quotation "Nollumus leges Angliaemutari" on which Noodle relied in his immortal oration, is to be found in the record of the Barons' great "Palaver."



CHAPTER XII

AN OXFORD FRIENDSHIP

Though it is the rule of these memoirs not to deal at any length or detail with living people, I feel I must make an exception in regard to Sir Bernard Mallet, the first friend I made at Oxford, the closest friend of my college days, and the dearest friend of my after-life. Of course, even in his case I cannot say all that I should like to say, for I don't want to expose myself to the gibe of the wit who, reading a sympathetic notice of a living man, declared that he did not care for funeral orations on the living! Another advocate of ascetic reticence in similar circumstances is said to have remarked that it was hardly decent to use such favourable expressions except in the case of a dead man! But, though I am not going to expose myself to the accusation of gushing, I cannot give a true picture of myself without dwelling upon Mallet's influence upon me. My friendship with him was my first experience of real friendship—the relation which it is in the power of youth to establish and maintain, a relation akin to the tie of brotherhood, and one which may have, and ought to have, in it an element of devotion.

Friendship between two young men, keen on all things political, intellectual, and literary, is rightly and necessarily founded upon talk. My friend and I were eager to know not only about each other but about everything else in the universe. Mallet's influence became at once very great upon me at a point where I much needed it. He was deeply interested, and very well-read for a boy of his age, in Political Economy. His father, Sir Louis Mallet, was not only one of the most famous and most enlightened of Civil Servants, but had made a scientific study of the theory of economics. Besides that he had acted as Cobden's official secretary when Cobden negotiated the Commercial Treaty with France, and had become deeply attached to the great Free Trader and his policy. From his father Mallet had learnt what was infinitely more important than anything he could learn in textbooks. He had learnt to look upon Political Economy not as something to be applied only to trade, but something which concerned our morals, our politics, and even our spiritual life. Though it, no doubt, involved Free Trade, what both the Mallets pleaded for was "the policy of Free Exchange" a policy entering and ruling every form of human activity, or, at any rate, everything to which the quality of value inured, and so the quality of exchangeability.

At the time when I went up to Balliol and sat down beside Mallet at the Freshmen's table in the Hall, wild and eager, shy and forthcoming, bursting with the desire to talk and to hear talk, and yet not exactly knowing how to approach my fellow-novices, I was an ardent, if theoretical, Republican and Socialist. I was, while only a schoolboy of fourteen or fifteen, a passionate admirer of Arch, the man who formed the first Agricultural Labourers' Union, and a regular reader of his penny weekly organ. It was the first paper to which I became an annual subscriber. Now, though I had noted some of the extravagances of the extremists, I was on the edge of conversion to full-blown Socialism or Communism. We did not much distinguish in those days between the two. I was especially anxious, as every young man must be, to see if I could not do something to help ameliorate the condition of working-men and to find a policy which would secure a better distribution of wealth and of the good things of the world.

Very soon, at once indeed, I confided my views to my new friend. Our conversation is imprinted upon my mind. Though, of course, I did not realise it at the time, it was destined to have a great effect upon my life. I told Mallet that I was so haunted by the miseries of the poor and the injustice of our social order that, however much I disliked it for other reasons, and however great the dangers, I was growing more and more into the belief that it would be my duty to espouse the cause of Socialism; then, be it remembered, preached by Mr. Hyndman in full and Mr. Henry George, the single-tax man, in an attenuated form. I was a Free Trader, of course, but if, as a result of the Free Trade system, the poor were getting poorer, and the rich richer, as, alas! it seemed, I was prepared to fight to the death even against Free Trade.

On this Mallet, instead of growing zealously angry with my ignorant enthusiasm, asked me very pertinently what right I had to suggest that the principles of Political Economy and Free Trade had been tested and had failed. He admitted that if to maintain them would prevent a better distribution of wealth, they must be abolished forthwith. He went on to agree also that if everything else had been exhausted, it would be right to try Socialism, provided one was not convinced that the remedy would prove worse than the disease. But he went on to explain to me, what I had never realised before, that the enlightened economists took no responsibility for the existing system. They held, instead, that the present ills of the world came, not from obeying but from disobeying the teachings of Political Economy. Everywhere Free Exchange was interfered with and violated, on some pretext or another. Even in England it would not be said that Free Exchange had been given a complete trial. It was, he went on to show, because they believed that the ills of human society could be cured, and only cured, by a proper understanding and a proper observance of the laws of economics that men like his father advocated Free Exchange so strongly and opposed every attempt to disestablish it.



We want as much as any Socialist to get rid of poverty, misery and destitution, and we believe we have got the true remedy, if only we were allowed to apply it. There would be plenty of the good things of the world for everybody, if we did not constantly interfere with production, and if we did not destroy capital, which would otherwise be competing for labour, not labour for it. By the madness of war and the preparation for war, we lay low that which prevents unemployment. We are always preventing instead of encouraging exchanges, the essential sources of wealth. Yet we wonder that we remain poor.

But the policy of Free Exchange, he went on, must not be regarded merely as a kind of alternative to Socialism. True believers in economics were bound to point out that the nostrum of the Socialists, though intended to do good, would do infinite harm if applied to the community. There was a possibility of release from the prison-house and its tortures by the way of Free Exchange, but none by the way of Socialism. That could only deepen and increase the darkness and bring even greater miseries upon mankind than those they endured at the present moment.

I listened greatly moved, and asked for more instruction. I soon realised that economics were a very different thing to what I had supposed. My father was a strong Free Trader and had talked to me on the subject, but without any great enthusiasm. He was an idealist, and in his youth had strong leanings, first to the Socialism of Owen, and then to the Christian Socialism of Maurice, Kingsley, and their friends. Though later he had dropped these views and had become a convinced supporter of Cobden and Bright in the controversy over the Factory Acts (and let me say that in this I still believe he was perfectly right), he had taken the Shaftesbury rather than the Manchester view. Right or wrong in principle, any proposal to protect women and children would have been sure to secure his support. He would rather be wrong with their advocates than right with a million of philosophers. Again, though he liked Bright, I don't think he ever quite forgave him for talking about the "residuum." My father had no sympathy with insult, even if it was deserved. With him, to suffer was to be worthy of help and comfort, and here, of course, he was right. Again, though he read his Mill, he was not deeply interested. He understood and assented to the main arguments, but he had never happened to get inspired by the idea that the way to accomplish his essential desire to improve the lot of the poor, and so to save society, was by discovering a true theory of applying the principles of Free Exchange. As Sir Louis Mallet used to say, a great deal of this misunderstanding came from the unfortunate fact that we called our policy Free Trade, and so narrowed it and made it appear sordid. If, like the French, we had called it Free Exchange, we should have made it universal and so inspiring.

Mallet's words, then, came to me like a revelation. I saw at once, as I have seen and felt ever since, that Political Economy, properly understood and properly applied, is not a dreary science, but one of the most fascinating and mentally stimulating of all forms of human knowledge. Above all, it is the one which gives real hope for making a better business of human life in the future than was ever known in the past; far better than anything the Communist theorisers can offer. Let their theories be examined, not with sentimental indulgence but in the scientific spirit, and they fade away like the dreams they are.

My teacher was as keen as myself. But when two young minds are striking on each other, the sparks fly. It was not long, then, before I believed myself to have mastered the essential principles of Free Exchange— principles simple in themselves, though not easy to state exactly. To apply them in a lazy and sophistically-minded world is still more difficult. Even business men and traders, who ought to know better, ignore the science on which their livelihood is wholly founded.

Thus, with a halo of friendship and intellectual freedom round me, I learned what Economics really meant, and what might be accomplished if men could only understand the nature of Exchange, and apply their knowledge to affairs.

When I see some public man floundering in the morasses of sophistry, often a quagmire of his own creation, I say to myself, "There, but for Bernard Mallet, goes John St. Loe Strachey." I should, indeed, be an ingrate if I did not acknowledge my debt.

Here is Sir Bernard Mallet's account of me at Oxford in the year 1878.

SIR BERNARD MALLET'S MEMORANDUM

I can find no diaries—or any of the letters which I must have written to my people about Oxford, so I must do what I can without their help. I daresay they would not have been much use, as I never wrote good letters, and my recollections of our first meeting are still pretty fresh. It would be odd if they were not, for our Oxford alliance was far the biggest and most important influence in my life there.

I think it must have been within two or three days of my arrival at Balliol as freshman, in October, 1878, that I found myself sitting beside you at dinner in Hall. No doubt we soon found out each other's names. Yours at once fixed my attention because, as my father was then Under Secretary of State for India and in intimate relations with your two uncles, the great Indian statesmen, Sir John and General Richard Strachey, it had long been familiar to me. This seemed to place us at once, and give me a topic to begin on. Not that conversation was ever lacking in your company! I remember to this hour the vivid, emphatic way you talked, and your appearance then—your rather pale face and your thin but strongly-built figure. I was at once greatly impressed, but I am not sure that the first impression on a more or less conventional public-schoolboy (such as I suppose I must have been) was altogether favourable! Certainly I have always thought of you as a reason for distrusting my first impression of a man! Luckily for me, however, we continued to meet. You were so alive and unreserved that you very soon posted me up in all the details of your life and family, and drew the same confidences from me; and we soon found that we had so much in common that in a very few days we fell into those specially intimate relations which lasted through our Oxford days and long after. It is not easy to analyse or account for the rapid growth of such a friendship, but on my part, I think, it was the fact of your being so different from others which at first slightly repelled, and then strangely attracted me. To begin with, you had never been at school; you knew nothing of Greek or Latin as languages, nor of cricket or football! But the want of this routine education or discipline was no disadvantage to you (except for certain serious misadventures in "Mods.!") because your personality and strong intelligence enabled you to get far more out of exceptional home surroundings than you could have got out of any school. You had kept all your intellectual freshness and originality. In English literature, from the Elizabethan downwards, you had read widely and deeply, and your wonderful memory never failed you in quotation from the poets. You ought really, with those tastes and that training, to have become a poet yourself! and till politics and journalism drew you off I often thought that pure literature would be your line. But your political instincts were even then quite as strong; you came of a family with political interests and traditions; and as a boy you had met a good many Liberal statesmen—either at the house of Lady Waldegrave, your mother's friend and country neighbour, or at Cannes, where your family used to spend the winter. But your politics had rather a poetical tinge! Shelley, Swinburne, Walt Whitman coloured your ideas—you were a democrat and republican, with a great enthusiasm for the United States and for the story of Abraham Lincoln. But you were never faddist or doctrinaire, and your practical bent showed itself in the keen interest you took in the noticing of political economy in which I used to dabble, and which we used to discuss by the hour. You seemed, without having studied text-books, to have an intuitive grasp of economic and fiscal truths which astonished me and others much better qualified to judge than I was. The real truth is that, though there were, no doubt, gaps in your mental equipment which may have horrified the dons, you were miles ahead of most of us in the width and variety of your interests, in your gift of self-expression and, in a way, in knowledge of the world. Every talk with you seemed to open up new vistas to me. I was perhaps more receptive than the usual run of public-schoolboy, as I too had had interests awakened by home surroundings and tradition. We both of us, in fact, owed a very great deal to our respective fathers, and it was a real pleasure and guide to me to be introduced later to your father and home at Sutton Court—as I know it was to you to get to know and appreciate my father.

But I must not wander from my subject, which is to try and give a faithful account of how you struck me in those days. I have said nothing yet of one of your characteristics which I think weighed with me, and impressed me more than anything else, and that was the remarkable power you had, and have always retained, of drawing out the best in others. Intellectual power or force of character (or whatever you like to call it) is so often self-centred as to lose half its value. With you, however, it was different. You always appeared to be, and I think genuinely were, quite as much interested in other people's ideas or personalities as in your own—or even more interested. You listened to them, you questioned, you put them on their mettle, you helped them out by interpreting their crude or half-impressed thoughts, and all this without a trace of flattery or patronage. By this, and by your generous over-appreciation of them, you inspired your friends with greater confidence in themselves than they would otherwise have had. In your company they were, or felt themselves, really better men. To one of my disposition, at all events, this was a source of extraordinary encouragement and help. I felt it from the first, and I cannot omit mentioning it in my attempt to describe what you were like when we met at Oxford. I am afraid it is a poor attempt, and wanting in details which contemporary records, if they had existed, could alone have supplied. But I hope you may find something in it which will suit your purpose. I don't think, after all, you have changed as much as most people in the forty-odd years I have known you!



CHAPTER XIII

OXFORD MEMORIES (Concluded)

Even at the risk of making my autobiography open to accusation that it is a kind of Strachey Anthology, I should be giving a false impression of myself and my life at Oxford if I did not say something about my poetical life at the University, for there, as in my childhood and my boyhood, poetry played a great part. I did not leave the Muses till I left their bower on the Isis. Every mood of my Oxford life was reflected in my verse. I can only record a very few of those reflections, and here, again, must look forward to some day making a collection of my poems and letting them tell their own tale—an interesting incursion, I venture to say, for those who are interested in the evolution of English verse from 1870 to 1890.

The first thing to be recorded in this epitome of my biographica poetica is my intense delight at finding in Oxford people of my own age who cared for poetry as I did, and the same kind of poetry. It is true that most of my friends with a poetic bent wore their rue with a difference, but that did not matter. Though they practised a different rite, they were all sworn to the great mystery of the Muses. Men like Beeching, Mackail, Nichols, Warren, and also Willie Arnold, who, though not an undergraduate, very soon became one of my close friends, never failed, and this is the test, to be delighted in any new discovery in verse with which I was for the moment intoxicating myself.

I was always irregular in my tastes. If I liked a piece of verse, I liked it with passion and praised it inordinately; again I was apt to be as absolute in my dislike. I was a kind of poaching gipsy of literature. I had not only a willingness to eat any wild thing from a hedgehog to a beechnut or a wild raspberry, but also an uncanny power of finding out literary game, raising it, and trapping it, not by the stately methods of the scholar but by some irrational and violent intuition. Instead of reading slowly, patiently, and laboriously, as no doubt I ought to have read, i.e., as my tutors would have liked me to read, I used to dive headlong into some poet, old or young. Even if I could only "get at him" for an odd half-hour, I could bring back with me something worth keeping, something which would sing in my head and be forced into the ears of my friends for many days, and sometimes many weeks.

This habit of what one might call random and sudden quotation was amusingly hit off by a friend of mine, Fry, son of the late Lord Justice Sir Edward Fry. In a neat little verse after the manner of Beeching's and Mackail's celebrated verses on the Balliol Dons—verse modelled, it may be noted, on the pageant of Kings and Queens in Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, Fry thus delineated me:

I am Strachey, never bored By Webster, Massinger or Ford; There is no line of any poet Which can be quoted, but I know it.

In the first couplet I have to own a true bill. Even if my friends were bored, though I was not, which I now feel must have often been the case, they certainly never showed it. I seemed to be given a kind of privilege or license to quote as much as ever I liked.

I expect, however, that the Dons were not quite as easy-going. If I quoted something that seemed to me apposite at the end of a lecture, or when I was seeing my tutor over an essay, I noticed with an innocent wonderment that they were apt to appear shocked. Probably I made them feel nervous. Either they had not heard the lines before, and, therefore, very likely thought that I was trying to get a score off them by inventing some tag of rhymes which I could afterwards say they took for genuine, or, on the other hand, if they did know the lines, I made some blunder in quoting them which painfully added to a conviction already formed that I was a wild, inconsequent, and shallow-minded boy whose only idea was to "show off" and strut about in borrowed plumes. After all, even if that was a mistaken diagnosis it was not an unnatural one.

I was an unsettling and unclassifiable influence in a place that liked orderly classification. The Dons, I make no doubt, felt about me as did Lance about his dog. He who undertakes to be an undergraduate should be an undergraduate in all things, and not a kind of imitation Bohemian verse-writer, bawling his creaking couplets through the College Hall. They knew the type of scholar who could write good Greek verse, and even English verse. They also knew, and in a way respected, the athlete, the hunting man, or "the magnificent man" who kept two hunters and a private servant, and spent at the rate of a couple of thousands a year. But here was a creature who did not fit into any of these categories, and who was painfully irregular without being vicious or extravagant, or drunken, or abnormally rowdy. I was, in fact, a mental worry. I could not be fitted neatly into Oxford life.

I have mentioned Fry's rhyme about me. I must also mention Beeching's verse, or at any rate the first couplet—the rest, though friendly enough, was not worthy of the opening:

Spoken jest of Strachey, shall it Fail to raise a smile in Mallet?

I was, of course, pleased to be thus associated with my friend, though honesty compels me to say that I laughed quite as much, or even more, at Mallet's jests than he did at mine. Still for the rhyme's sake (I have always sympathised with the rhymer's difficulties), it was necessary to put the joke on the other leg.

At Balliol in the late 'seventies' and early 'eighties' we were a nest of singing-birds. I well remember the present Sir Rennell Rodd coming into my rooms when I was a freshman and asking me whether I would contribute to a little collection of poems which he and a group of his friends were bringing out, the group, by the way, including the present Lord Curzon. I shyly assented; but there was a difficulty. They wanted something short and lyrical, and most of my verses were either too long, or else, I thought, too immature to be published. In the end, Rodd carried off with him the following lyric—a work in regard to which I felt no pride of parentage either then or now, and only quote because it was made the occasion for a very neat parody by Mackail. Here is the poem:

My lute Lies mute, My lyre is all unstrung, And the music it once flung Dies away. In the day I have no power to sing, Nor doth the night-time bring Any song. All is wrong, Now my lady hath no care For my heart and for my prayer.

The parody was quite delightful, and I can well remember the intense joy with which I heard of it and my surprise that the author thought it necessary to apologise for it. He apparently thought I might be hurt. It ran something like this:

My scout Is out. My scout is never in. I am growing very thin, And pale— etc., etc.

Our verse efforts, though not very good in themselves, had a good result.

A rival clique of poets, led by Mackail and Beeching, put forward a little pamphlet of their own, full of what was really exquisite verse of the Burne-Jones, Morris, Swinburne type. In the following term, however, the two poetic schools amalgamated under a common editorship, adopting the name of Waifs and Strays as their title. To almost every issue of the Waifs and Strays I contributed, though I think my Editors sometimes were rather horrified at my sending in so much blank verse, and blank verse of what the Elizabethans called a "licentious" type, that is, not governed by strict rules.

Besides this, my poems were apt to be too long. I had a friendly conflict over them with Beeching. It showed, however, the open- mindedness of the Morrisean editors that my poetry, though so entirely different to their own, was not only accepted but that they showed great sympathy with my experiments in unrhymed measures.

Oxford memories are among the pleasantest things in the world; they are the last chapter, or last chapter but one, in the book of youth. But I must soon roll up the enchanted manuscript, come to sterner things, and leave many serene hours unnumbered. Especially do I regret to pass over the long days spent on the river in a four, with a cox and a good luncheon and tea hamper in the stern, and a sixth man in the bows. Those, indeed, were sweet hours and the fleetest of time. Mallet, I, and Warren were usually the nucleus of the party. To ourselves we added another three. Among these was sometimes Grant Duff, sometimes Horatio Brown, who, though he had left Oxford at that period, was often "up for a month or two"; sometimes, too, Portsmouth Fry, and one or other of Mallet's Clifton College friends. Again, sometimes Mallet's brother Stephen, or my brother Henry, joined the pursuit of the golden fleece.

I was always for pushing on in order to experience something or discover something. As Pepys used to say, "I was with child to see something new." Once, by incredible exertion, I managed to get my boatload as far up the river as Lechlade. The place, I need hardly say, was chosen by me not for geographical reasons or because of the painted glass, but solely and simply because of Shelley's poem. I longed to go to the actual source of the river, to Thames-head itself, but in this I never succeeded. Mallet was always for milder measures, and for enjoying the delights of the infant Thames at Bablock Hythe, or some place of equal charm and less exertion. Like the poet in Thomson, as I frequently reminded him, he

Would oft suspend the dashing oar To bid his gentle spirit rest.

He would demand, or take, an "easy" on the slightest pretext. A water- lily, the dimness of his eyeglass, the drooping of the sunlight in the West, the problem of whether some dingy little bird was a kingfisher or a crested wagtail, demanded consultation and a pause in our toil. Occasional rests, he proved, were a wise, nay, necessary precaution with a heavy old tub manned by indifferent oarsmen. I, on the other hand, would have violently explored the Thames in a man-o'-war's barge if I could have done it no other way.

We talk of the charm of the open road, but what is it to the charm of the open river, especially when the stream gets narrow? There, if anywhere, reigns the Genius of the Unexpected. You push your boat round some acute angle of water, with willows and tall rushes obscuring your course, and then suddenly shoot out into the open, with a view, perhaps, of an old church or manor-house, or of stately fields and trees—things which a boy feels may be the prelude to the romance of his life. So strong with me, indeed, was this feeling that fate was waiting round the corner, not to stick a knife into me, but perhaps to crown me, that when I wrote my unfinished novel, I began with a boatload of undergraduates shooting out of the Thames up a tunnel of green boughs made by a canalised brook, into a little lake in front of an exquisite grey Elizabethan house. There the heroine and an aged parent or guardian were surprised taking tea upon a bank studded with primroses and violets. How an aged parent or guardian consented to have tea out-of-doors in violet- time was not explained! But if I do not take care I shall go the way of those orators who take up the whole of their speeches in explaining that they have not time to say anything. Therefore, farewell to the glories and delights of the Thames.

Whether, in point of fact, I was a bad son of Oxford, or she a disdainful, indifferent, or careless mother, I neither know nor desire to know. It is enough for me, as I have said already, that I loved her young and love her now, love her for her faults as much as for her virtues, but love her most of all for her beauty and her quietness, and for the golden stream of youth which runs a glittering torrent through her stately streets and hallowed gardens, her walks between the waters, and her woodlands. The punctual tide of young hearts ebbs and flows as of yore in a thousand college rooms—true cells of happiness. It informs and inspires every inch of Oxford. It murmurs in her libraries and in her galleries and halls. The pictures of the men of the past—often England's truest knights of the eternal spirit—look gravely from their deep-set frames.

But what is the use of a biography if it is general and not particular? I may too often yield, like most people, to the temptations of a vague rhetoric, but not here. Every loving thought of Oxford has for me stamped upon it a specific and an originating example. When I think of the faces looking down on me from the walls, and of how ardently I used to wish that I might call my academic grandsires "my home and feast to share," I picture myself back in Oxford, listening to a lecture in the Hall of University. I see above me and above the wainscot Romney's (or is it Gainsborough's?) picture of "the generous, the ingenuous, the high-souled William Wyndham." I recall the delight with which I thought of that fascinating and impulsive creature. He had sat where I was sitting, and had dreamed like me in that very Hall the dreams of youth.

I keep in mind yet another specific example of how I linked myself to the past. I remember, when dining in Christ Church Hall with a friend, that I had the good luck to find myself opposite Lawrence's picture of Eden, afterwards Lord Auckland, the young diplomatist. He is dressed, if I remember rightly, in a green velvet coat of exquisite tint and texture. I daresay if by chance a reader looks up the two pictures he will find that under the spell of memory they have assumed beauties not their own. But what does that matter? They were to me, at twenty, an inspiration. They are still, at sixty, a dream of delight.

Yet, intense as was my joy, when I return to Oxford and see my son sharing the old pleasures, though with a difference, I can honestly say, "Non equidem invideo miror magis"—"I do not envy, but am the more amazed." I hope, nay, am sure that my son can retort with sincerity from this shepherd's dialogue turned upside down, "O fortunate senex; ergo tua rura manebunt"—"Oh, happy old man; therefore your little fields and little woodlands at Newlands shall still flourish and abound."

As my father taught me by his example long ago, I can be supremely happy in my remembrances, and yet even happier at my own end of the continuum. One has a right to be Hibernian in an Einstein world. After all, have I not a right to be? I, who have always been an explorer at heart, am getting near the greatest exploration of all. There are only two or three more bends of the stream, and I shall shoot out into that lake or new reach, whichever it may be. I may have a pleasant thrill of dread of what is there, but not of fear. The tremendous nature of that magnificent unknown may send a shiver through my limbs, but it is stimulating, not paralysing.

Therefore, though I enjoy the past in retrospect, I open my arms with a lover's joy to the future that is rushing to meet me. The man who cannot enjoy that which is in front of him has never really enjoyed the past. He is so much engaged in whimpering over what he has lost, that he misses the glory of what is to come. Heaven be praised that sons have morning when fathers have night, and may the fountain of perpetual youth always send its best, its clearest, its most musical rivulets through the High, the Broad, and the Corn.

But, though my memories of Oxford are so vivid and so happy, they are also, as must in the end be all things human, enwoven with tears. It was there that my eldest son died. I cannot do more than record the bare fact. Yet I cannot write of Oxford as if he had never been. The shadow that falls across my page could not be gainsaid.



CHAPTER XIV

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.



CHAPTER XV

THE "CORNHILL"

My editorship of the Cornhill, to which I always look back with great pleasure, came as a complete surprise to me. Among the many new friends my marriage brought me was Mr. George Smith, the head of the firm of Smith & Elder, a man very well known in the London of the 'fifties, 'sixties, and 'seventies as the most enterprising of publishers, the discoverer of Charlotte Bronte, the friend and adviser of Thackeray, and, above all, the founder of the first cheap, popular, literary magazine, the Cornhill. It was in the editorship of the Cornhill that Thackeray found pecuniary if not editorial ease, and during the first ten years of its life it was the natural home of much of the best writing of the time. Tennyson on one side of the republic of Parnassus and Swinburne on the other were contributors to its pages. But pre-eminently it was the place to which was drawn the best fiction of the age. The planning, the enterprise, and very often the inspiration of the Cornhill came from Mr. George Smith. Though primarily a man of business, he had an extraordinary flair for literature. He was the last person in the world to have claimed the title of a man of letters, or, again, that of critic, and yet he had an appreciation of good literature and a capacity for finding it in unlikely places which was sometimes almost uncanny. Just as some of the greatest connoisseurs in the Arts know a good picture or an important piece of china when they see it, though they are often ignorant of the history or of the technique of any art, so Mr. George Smith had an almost unfailing eye for good copy when it came his way.

Nowadays, there is comparatively little difficulty in running a literary monthly on sound lines either here or in America. But that is because the world has learnt Mr. George Smith's lesson. All can raise the flower now, for all have got the seed, but at the beginning of the 'sixties the Cornhill had the quality of originality. It exactly hit the popular taste; and in a very short time it was selling by the hundred thousand, a tremendous achievement at that epoch. But though the Cornhill did so well and though Mr. George Smith's energies remained as great as ever up till his death, the magazine had to own the fate of many publications of its kind before and since. It met with competition, and I cannot help thinking that it also suffered from its proprietor getting interested in other things, especially in his magnificent and public-spirited venture—for such it was, rather than a business venture—the National Dictionary of Biography. Mr. George Smith himself always looked upon the National Dictionary as a piece of public service, and he put a great deal of his own time and energy into it. The Cornhill, though always maintaining a high literary standard, greatly altered its character after Mr. Leslie Stephen's editorship came to an end. Its price was altered to sixpence, and for a time it was purely a magazine of fiction, in which the firm of Smith & Elder ran in serial form novels of which they had bought the book rights. There were, besides the two serial novels, only a few short stories and light essays, but these were only a kind of stuffing for the fiction.

In the year '96, however, it occurred to Mr. Smith that it would be interesting to revive the Cornhill and show that there was still life and force in the magazine which had published some of Thackeray's best essays, and his later novels—the magazine in which had appeared novels like Romola, with Leighton's illustrations, and in which Louis Stevenson had given to the world those first and most delightful of his essays, afterwards collected in Virginibus Puerisque. Once more, determined George Smith, it should become the home of good literature as a whole, and not merely of readable fiction.

For his new series—the price reverted to sixpence—Mr. Smith wanted a new editor. He was not one of those people who waste time over that mysterious process known as "sounding" people, a process that seems to connote a great deal of farsightedness, caution, arid discrimination in the sounder, but which, as a matter of fact, is almost always a cloak for indecision. That was not Mr. George Smith's way. He wrote me a plain, straightforward letter, telling me what his plans for the Cornhill were, adding without any flummery that he thought I was the man to give what he wanted, and asking me whether I would become Editor. I got the letter during my first visit to Cairo, in November, 1895. I at once replied that if my chiefs at The Spectator saw no objection, I should be delighted to try my hand. My chiefs saw no objection, and I set to work.

When I say "delighted," I am using the term in no conventional sense. My head had long been filled with plans for the editing of a literary magazine, and here was the chance to bring them to fruition. Besides, as every young man should, I longed for something in which I should have a show of my own and be able to try every sort of experiment—a thing which you can only do when you are either starting a new paper, or making, as was to be the case with the new series of the Cornhill, an entirely new departure.

If I remember rightly, I actually stipulated with Mr. George Smith for a free hand, but the stipulation was quite unnecessary. I saw during my first talk with him that a free hand was exactly what he intended to give me. No editor ever had a more delightful proprietor. Though he was, I suppose, very nearly forty years my senior, he was as young as I was, quite as full of enterprise, quite as anxious to make new departures, and quite as willing to run risks and to throw his cap over the hedge. Nominally I had to deal with Mr. Reginald Smith, one of the partners in the firm and the son-in-law of Mr. George Smith. (It was a mere accident that a Smith had married a Smith.) Reginald Smith was a good scholar, had done very well at Eton, at Cambridge, and had gone to the Bar, but he had not got his father-in-law's fire or his flair for literature, nor, again, his father-in-law's boldness. I was on the best of terms with him and he was the most kind and friendly of publishers. It often happened, however, in going over my plans for the new Cornhill, he thought this or that proposal on my part might prove too expensive, too risky, too radical, or too unconventional. In such cases he always said that we had better take the decision to Mr. George Smith. On the first occasion I was a little alarmed as to what the result might be. I felt that Mr. Smith might naturally support his son- in-law in the direction of caution, and that the appeal to Caesar might go against me. The first example, however, was enough to convince me that my anxieties had no foundation. I remember well how Mr. Smith at once out-dared my daring, saying that he entirely agreed with me, and not only thought that I ought to have my way, but enthusiastically declared that it was the best way. After that I had no more trouble, and it was I who in future suggested an appeal to the head, for I knew that the result would always be a decision on the side of enterprise. Mr. George Smith was never the man to be frightened by such phrases as "dangerous innovation which might be very much resented by the readers" Dangerous innovations were just what he liked, the things out of which he had made his fame and his money, and he backed them to the end like the true sportsman that he was.

There is nothing, perhaps, more interesting and more attractive than the planning and putting together of the first number of a magazine. I had a blank sheet of paper upon which to draw up my Table of Contents, except for an instalment of a novel. What I was determined to make the Cornhill under my editorship was a place of belles-lettres. And besides good prose, if I could get it, I wanted good poetry. In the prose I naturally aimed at short stories, memoirs (as long as these were really worth having) and inspiring literary and historical criticism. I always felt that there was very good copy to be found in anniversary studies, that is, studies of great men whose births or deaths happened to fall within the month of publication and so might reasonably be supposed to be in the public mind. Another direction in which I felt sure there was good copy, if I could get the right man to do it in the right way, was in the great criminal trials of former ages. Every journalist knows that a trial sells his paper better than any other event. The daily newspaper could always forestall the magazine in the matter of trials of the day, but there remained open to me the whole field of State trials.

Besides these features, I realised how much the ordinary Englishman likes natural history, if it is dealt with in the proper way, and likes also to hear of what is newest and most taking in the worlds of science and philosophy and in the things of the spirit generally. These, perhaps, were fairly obvious features, but there was one other in which I may claim a certain originality. In the 'nineties we were all talking and writing about "human documents," by which we meant memoirs, autobiographies, and, above all, diaries which, when written, were not meant to see the light, and in which the naked human heart was laid bare for inspection. It occurred to me that, though I could not get, except by some accident, a human document of this kind, it might be rather fun to manufacture one. I could not get a Marie Bashkirtseff to intrigue my readers as the young Russian lady in question had intrigued Mr. Gladstone and the rest of us, but I thought I could get hold of some one who could write a similar sort of diary, which, though it might not be so introspective, would be a good deal more witty. I therefore turned over in my mind the people I could ask to write a "journal intime." While I was in bed, experiencing the mental state that Sir Walter Scott used to call "simmering," i.e., thinking about my work in a half- hypnotic condition, I remember that the idea occurred to me. The man to do what I wanted was, I suddenly felt, the wisest and wittiest of my Balliol contemporaries, Dean Beeching. But he was not then a Dean, or even a Canon or a Reader at Lincoln's Inn, but simply a country clergyman. I wrote at once to him, telling him that I had become Editor of the new Cornhill, and asking him to write for me, under the seal of secrecy, a monthly article in Diary form, which was to be called "Pages from a Private Diary" In it he was to put all the best things he could think of in the way of good stories, criticism of matters old and new, comments upon life, literature, and conduct, accounts of historical figures and historical events, all informed with verve and interest and all presented in that inimitable style, half-serious, half- quizzical, of which Beeching was a master.

Beeching wrote back to tell me how much he liked the idea, and how sure he was that he could not do anything of the kind worth my taking. It was quite beyond him. I replied that this was nonsense, that I was quite sure from his answer that he understood exactly what I wanted, that he could do it, and that I should want the first instalment by the middle of May. I further charged him solemnly that he was not to write the thing like an essay but that he must make it a real diary, writing it day by day, and making it in this way genuine reality and not an essay with dates in it. In the end he consented to try his best. He realised at once that it would be quite necessary to keep the diary as a true diary—that is, write it spasmodically. I then again enjoined the utmost secrecy upon him, saying that it was not only a case of "omne ignotum pro magnifico," but also that secrecy was the best possible advertisement. I knew that his copy would be extraordinarily attractive, and I wanted people at London dinner-parties and in club smoking-rooms to ask each other, "Have you guessed yet who the Cornhill diarist is?" I may say that my prophecy was exactly fulfilled, for not only did the Private Diary get a great deal of praise on its merits, which were truly memorable, but also on what I may call "guessing competition" grounds—a vice or a virtue of human nature which I was quite determined to exploit for all it was worth. I still recall my excitement when Beeching's copy arrived. It was written in a beautifully neat hand (we did not type much in those days) and accompanied by a heart-broken letter in regard to the author and his supposed failure. I had only to read two pages to see that, with his wonderful instinct for humour as well as his scholarship and knowledge of English and classical literature, he had given me exactly what I wanted. I wrote at once to him, telling him what I thought of the Diary and that there was to be no talk of his abandoning it. I should expect it regularly once a month, for at least nine months or a year. Once more I enjoined secrecy. The "Pages from a Private Diary" were, of course, afterwards republished and did exceedingly well as a book. They may still be read with pleasure by anyone who cares for good literature and a good laugh. All I need add about the Diary is that I told Beeching to envisage himself, not as a country clergyman, for that would give away the secret, but as a retired Anglo-Indian who had come to live in a village in the south of England. This kind of man might be as interested in the villagers as he was in history and literature, and would be able to look upon them with new eyes. A little anti-clericalism might, I suggested, put the reader off the track and help maintain the secret. In a word, I rather suggested the idea of a Berkshire Xenophon, a man who had fought battles in his own day, but was now studying economics or philosophy amid rural scenes. Nobly did Beeching respond. I think in the first instalment, if not, in the second, he told a delightful story of a Berkshire labourer looking over a sty at a good litter of Berkshire grunters and remarking, "What I do say is this. We wants fewer of they black parsons and more of they black pigs." Be that as it may, no person of discernment ever wanted fewer Beechings, or fewer pages from his Private Diary.

Another innovation which I was very keen to follow up, and in which I was backed by Mr. George Smith, was the habit of placing an editorial note to most of the articles, in which I said something as to what the writer was at and conveyed a suggestion (a very proper thing for an editor to do) that the article was of unusual merit and deserved looking into, and so on. For example, in the case of the "Pages from a Private Diary" I put the following: