It is to the present hour the true reading of successful popular journalism.
Why has the News of the World a circulation of over three millions? Simply because in it you can find most of the suggestive or sensational stories of the week. They have not found out the proper way of increasing their stock and so they are often short of good stories, but the good stories are there to be had always, as I very soon found out when my feet struck the right path.
It was, of course, extremely hard work for me to go through a dozen foreign papers every evening for perhaps a couple of stories, and besides at the best they were foreign stories-not as interesting to the English public as English stories would be. But how, how was I to get English stories?
One day, I was in the sub-editor's room and found that the reporters at all the police courts sent in flimsies with short accounts of what took place in the police courts during the day up to twelve o'clock. One of the stories told of a murder in Clerkenwell. There was no attempt at description: the common reporter had cut the incident down to some eight or ten lines, but beneath it I felt that there was a great human story. I at once jumped into a hansom, ran down to Clerkenwell, got hold of the reporter and made him take me to the scene of the tragedy. The story was appalling and intensely interesting.
A man and wife had lived together till middle age: had brought up a family of three children; comparative success had come through a little tobacco shop they kept, and with success came temptation. The father of forty-five had fallen in love with a girl of fifteen or sixteen who had come to the shop to buy tobacco. He made up to the girl and won her without the knowledge of his wife, who was wholly taken up with the household duties; but the eldest daughter, a girl of fourteen, had quick eyes and noticed that her father was going after the girl. When she saw him kissing her, she went to the mother to tell, feminine jealousy and curiosity blazing. At once the mother revenged herself on the girl. She beat her and called her names in the street until at length the father took his mistress' part and knocked his wife down. Strange to say, her head struck a cartwheel and she died the same night.
The whole story was told in court, but when I retold it in the Evening News with the chief details-a description of the jealous daughter and her account of how she had found her father out, and the father's confession — the story had an enormous vogue, and the circulation of the Evening News responded to it immediately.
I had found the way to success. Every day the London police courts are filled with love stories and sensational tragedies of all kinds. How to get them was the only question. I took six police courts as a nucleus and put an able man in charge of them with these instructions: "Whenever you get any story that promises, go immediately to the police court in question, see the reporter, get all the facts. If there is real interest in the incident, work it up, interview the principals, make a real story of it, and send it in to the paper." I advised my lieutenant to give a guinea to any police reporter who put him on to a good case. In a month I found the problem was solved. I could fill the six or seven columns of the Evening News with sensational stories of London life with the greatest ease.
After some three years' work the circulation of the paper had increased tenfold and it had begun to pay. As I had worked morning, noon and night on it without respite, I got the directors to give me a three months' holiday and went straight to Italy. In Rome I read a good deal of Italian and studied the old Roman remains, and became a friend of Prince Doria. There took place what I called the strangest occurrence in my life, which I may now tell at length.
The undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns has always had a certain fascination for me, as I imagine it has for almost everyone. Long before the discovery of the X-rays had shown that one could see through houses and bodies, I was persuaded that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in any philosophy.
The strange attraction of human beings, one to another; the fact that chemical elements only unite according to certain ascertained weights, that gases would mingle, but not become one until an electric spark was passed through them; the myriad analogies in nature suggesting likeness in the eternal disparity; unity in the infinite differences, tormented my curiosity from the time I was twenty. But every time I sought for further knowledge I was met by a blank wall.
I studied spiritualism for six or eight months and was so eloquent about it that the medium admitted me into the secret and showed me all the tricks of his foul trade. I was amused later to find that Browning had had an equally strange experience with "Sludge," the medium whom his wife had begun to believe in.
Later still I was surprised to find that Alfred Russel Wallace, a great scientist and the forerunner of Darwin, a transparently honest man, believed absolutely in all sorts of communications with what he called "the spirit world." But my unbelief persisted and persists to this day. Where is the great light?
Still, I had one experience that enormously strengthened Wallace's influence over me in this respect. Desiring complete change and recreation, I took out some Irish horses and hunted regularly on the campagna. It seemed delightful to me to hunt foxes where Paul and Peter had walked, where Caesar and Pompey had marched at the head of their legions, to take high wooden fences on a countryside peopled with the ghosts of forgotten worthies. I used to spend some hours every afternoon studying the antiquities and all the morning galloping across the campagna.
It was the double life that seduced me and gave me absolute health of both mind and body. Naturally, in the hunting field I got to know nearly all the Romans of position, and I knew most of the scholars and poets through my afternoons.
As sometimes happens, there was a blank day in our hunting. The sun was hot and strong and the dogs could take up no scent at all. The whole hunt moved from place to place, drawing every spinney blank. Once I rested beside a sprig of acacia.
I had promised to go to the Dorias to lunch and to talk afterwards to their guests about the famous picture that was in the Doria galleries, the so-called Sacred and Profane Love by Titian. Every one interested in art knows the picture. At the left, in a charming Italian landscape, is a beautiful woman dressed in the utmost splendor of those great Venetian days; and seated on a round marble well-head, close to, is another woman, quite nude, wonderfully drawn and painted, realistically realized. Some idiot had christened it Sacred and Profane Love. I read it in a different way. It seemed to me plain that it was a characteristic Renaissance story: a Venetian aristocrat proud of the beauty of his wife, asked Titian to paint her in all her splendor of raiment, and at the same time to paint her as he saw her in her nude loveliness. It was plainly one and the same woman-figure, eyes and hair unmistakably alike.
Looking forward to the luncheon and the talk, and tired with futile efforts to find a fox, I broke away from the crowd before noon and rode towards the city, towards the Porta Pia, along the wonderful road made sacred by the sufferings of Paul. As I rode into the city, I think by way of the south gate, I had to slow up and go carefully because of a crowd of three or four hundred people. When I got through the gate I saw from my horse that the center of attraction was a veiled woman seated at a plain table drawn up against the wall. The table was covered with some simple brown cloth. I said to one on the outskirts of the crowd: "What is it all about?"