"That's fine of you!" said Arthur Walter, "I suppose you know that Buckle wouldn't give you any place?"
"No one, Walter," I replied, "can see above his own head, and so we must forgive Buckle, but I see little Mr. Buckle perfectly plainly, though he is about six feet high. My idea is to make a general headquarters staff to run The Times; to get picked editors on every great subject, a dozen at least, and then fifty contributing editors, the ablest men from every country in Europe."
"Good God," said Walter. "You frighten me; what would it cost?"
"I should give the foreign contributing editors," I said, "about two hundred pounds a year each on their promise immediately to answer by return any questions addressed to them; of course, we would pay for their contributions as well, and I would give the dozen editors in England one thousand pounds a year, plus the honor."
"Even that," he said, "would be an added expense of twenty or thirty thousand pounds a year: how would you cover the loss?"
"I would undertake for that single editorial page," I said, laughing, "to get three columns of advertisements in America and South Africa which would pay the twenty-five thousand pounds a year of new expenses three times over. I would make the leader page in The Times the greatest page that has ever been seen in journalism. Every line in it should be on the topmost level of thought! And I would add a financial column which would bring in more cash."
We went in to lunch and I told him more of my ideas, and he was greatly impressed, till I came to the declaration that I would make it a penny paper so as to get over a million circulation. "My father and MacDonald have gone into that," he said, "and they both declare it is absolutely impossible."
"That word shouldn't be in the vocabulary of The Times," I said.
But he went on seriously, "You have no idea how carefully they have gone into the whole matter, and it would turn all my father's grey hairs white if he thought that anybody was going to do such a thing."
"You can't afford," I said, "to leave the Daily Telegraph with a tenfold greater circulation than that of The Times. I assure you the penny paper is necessary, but I won't press it till the success of the other innovations has shown you that I am justified."
He shook his head and begged me to put the idea out of my head. Strange to say, I found that Mrs. Walter was with me in opinion. "If Mr. Harris could get a million circulation for The Times," she said, "surely all the advertisements would be immensely more valuable; and by making your own paper, as he says, you might get, if not such good paper as you have now, yet nearly as good at a cheaper rate."
Then for the first time I learned that the paper supply of The Times was in the hands of another branch of the family, and they wouldn't consent easily to any great change.
But I committed my great mistake when Walter began to talk of Oscar Wilde. "I hope," he said, "that you wouldn't employ him in any way on The Times." I replied that I didn't think he needed any journalistic employment: everything he did was eagerly bought up by the reviews and large publishers.
"I wonder that you go about with him," said Walter. "You are getting a bad name through it."
"Really," I said, "I never heard that his disease was catching. Genius is not infectious."
"In the last six months," Walter went on, "I have received hundreds of letters, signed and anonymous, talking about your connection with him and your perpetual defense of him."
This struck me as extraordinary. I had, then, no idea of the number of anonymous correspondents in London; I learned the vile effects of envy very slowly, for I never felt envious of any one in my life.
"I defend every able man I meet," I said carelessly; "they all have a hard time of it in life and it is a sort of duty to stick up for them."
"As long as you don't employ him," said Walter, "I don't mind, but I thought I ought to tell you that you could do nothing more unpopular than to defend him."
"I always defend my friends," I said.
Walter seemed a little shocked, a little pettish, too, I thought, not to say petty.
About a fortnight later, Walter told me that he had asked Moberly Bell, their correspondent in Egypt, to come to London to help him. "I couldn't face your innovations, Harris, especially in regard to the price of the paper."
I suppose I was too cocksure, and so frightened him.
I record my failures here as openly as my successes. If I had been a little more of a diplomatist I could have won Arthur Walter easily, for he had good brains and a good heart and only wanted the best. I have always blamed myself for my failure.
CHAPTER XII
When I lost the Evening News in 1887, I saw Arthur Walter on the matter, and soon afterwards had a talk with Frederic Chapman, of Chapman and Hall, publishers of the Fortnightly Review. Chapman had told me that Escott, the acting editor of the Fortnightly Review, had made trouble with The Times by giving them an article which he said was by Gladstone; and when they asked him for the proof, because Gladstone denied it, Escott pretended that he had never made the statement. In consequence, for some months, The Times refused to mention the Fortnightly Review. Chapman wanted to know if I were appointed editor, would this be made right; Arthur Walter assured him that it would.
I have already told how I came to know Arthur Walter of The Times; all through the years from 1885 to 1895 or '96, our intimacy continued. I used to stay with him at his country place near Finchampstead three or four times each summer, and during the winter we met at lunch or dinner once or twice every week. We often spent the evening playing chess: I used to let him win a fair proportion of the games, for success pleased him intensely. I often thought that in the same spirit Gattie, the amateur champion, used now and then to let me win, but not often, for his supremacy forbade it.
Arthur Walter was older than I was and was greatly surprised when he found I was a good Grecian: he himself had won first honors in Mods at Oxford. He tested my scholarship, I remember, in all sorts of queer ways: for example, he once cited a phrase of Thucydides, which set forth that the whole world was the grave of famous men, and he liked my simple rendering. At another time he showed me the end of a chapter of Tacitus, in which the Roman historian says, At this time, news came to Rome that fifty thousand Jews, men, women and children, had been put to death in the streets o] Syracuse. "His comment is Vili damnum. How do you translate it?" Arthur Walter wanted to know.
"A cheap loss?"
"A good riddance," I proposed, and he was delighted. "The exact value," he declared.
When Arthur Walter said that he thought me fit for any editorship, even for that of The Times, Chapman asked me to call upon him the next day and told me that I could take over the editorship of the Fortnightly Review whenever I pleased. Escort was ill at the time; he had broken down in health. I said I would take over the Review on condition that the first year's salary went to Escott, as I knew that he was not well off. This was arranged, and I was formally installed as editor of the Fortnightly Review.
Shortly afterwards Chapman told me that John Morley wished to see me, and in a minute or two brought him in. Morley had been editor of the Review for some fifteen years, was a link with the founders, Lewes and George Eliot and Herbert Spencer. In popular opinion his editorship was summed up in the fact that he had always spelled God with a small "g." We chatted pleasantly for a few minutes, when he said, "You know, I feel very guilty. I have been, lately, too much of a politician and too little of an editor. In those two boxes over there," and he pointed to two large boxes in the corner of the room, "are the proof of my laziness. In this one," he pointed to one of them, "I put the articles which I didn't feel at all inclined to accept; in that other one, the articles which I could use at any time if I wished to."