At this time Morley must have been forty-five years of age; of spare figure, some five feet ten in height; clean-shaven, with large rudder-nose, firm drawn-in lips of habitual prudent self-restraint; thoughtful, cold grey eyes, large forehead-"A bleak face," I said to myself, seeking for some expressive word. Manifestly, I was not much to his taste. I was as frank and outspoken as he was reserved, and while he had already climbed a good way up the ladder, I thought nothing of the ladder and despised the climbing. Moreover, his gods were not my gods, and he was as unfeignedly proud of his Oxford training as I was contemptuous of all erudition.
It is very difficult, indeed, for men to measure the juniors who are taking their places. We can all see youthful shortcomings and promise is infinitely harder to estimate than performance. Perhaps we could judge them best through then: admirations that are not learned or academic and, therefore, in so far original. Morley did not give himself the trouble to see me fairly. But, then, why should he? There were long odds against my being worth knowing, and he was courteous.
I remember he showed me an article with a Greek quotation in it. "I haven't corrected it, Mr. Harris," he said, "nor looked at the accents; I suppose you will do that," courteously giving me credit for sufficient knowledge.
I said something about accents being easy to me after having learned modern Greek in Athens.
"Really," he exclaimed, seemingly surprised, "that must have been an interesting experience. Hasn't the pronunciation changed with the changes in language?"
"The scholars all try to pronounce in the old way," I replied. "Lots of professors and students today in the University of Athens plume themselves on speaking classic Greek."
"Astonishing," he exclaimed. "You must tell me about it some day. Very interesting." But the day never came, for if politics soon absorbed him, life and literature absorbed me.
I had been curious about Morley's editorship, and so I went through both boxes, returning nearly all the manuscripts to their owners and excusing myself as hardly responsible for the delay; but in the rejected box I came upon two papers which interested me. The one was by Mrs. Lynn Linton on "The Modern Girl," which was charmingly written. Of course I wrote to Mrs.
Lynn Linton about it, regretting the delay in dealing with it. She came to see me and we became friends at once. I ought to have known her previous work, but as a matter of fact, I didn't. She had married Linton, an engraver of real talent, and he had left her; and she developed a faculty of writing that put her in the front rank of the women of the day. She was kindly, and we remained friends for years, till I took up the habit of going abroad every winter and we gradually lost sight of each other.
The other manuscript which struck me as excellent had a curious title, "The Rediscovery of the Unique," signed by some one totally unknown to me-H.
G. Wells! I have already told about it in a portrait of Wells, and have told, too, of our later connection, when I got him to review stories for me on the Saturday Review.
Morley, by his rise to place and power as a politician, enables us to judge how much higher the standard of intellect is in literature than in politics. For Morley was in the first flight of politicians: Secretary for Ireland and afterwards for India, always a considerable figure, though he entered the arena late in life and without the wealth needed for supreme success. In literature, on the other hand, Morley never played a distinguished part. He could not even shine with reflected lustre. In vain he wrote the lives of Cobden and of Gladstone with all the advantages of intimate first-hand knowledge and all the assistance gladly proffered by the family and by distinguished contemporaries. His work remains fruitless, academic, jejune, divorced from life, unillumined by genius, unconsecrated by art. A bleak face and a bleak mind!
The truth is, the politician, like the banker or barrister, has only to surpass his living competitors, the best in the day and hour, in order to win supremacy.
We cannot compare the Gladstones closely with the Cannings, any more than we can compare the Washingtons with the Lincolns. Men of letters and artists, however, fall into a far higher and more severe competition. Shaw writes a play, Kipling a short story: they easily outstrip most of their contemporaries; but Shaw's best play is at once compared with the best of Moliere or Shakespeare or Ibsen, and Kipling has to stand comparison with the best of Turgenev or Maupassant, the greatest, not of a generation, but of all time.
Exposed to this higher test as man of letters, Morley failed utterly, in spite of his success as a politician.
Yet it is understood that his life had noble elements in it. His character was much finer than his mind, and he was trusted and esteemed by his political associates in singular measure, in spite of a certain doctrinaire strain of pedantry and outspokenness. Had it not been for his learning, of which they stood in awe, his fellow ministers would probably have called him "Honest John."
When I took over the Fortnightly Review, Chapman and Hall were to pay me five hundred pounds a year for editing it and ten per cent of the net profits. If I doubled the circulation, I was to get fifteen per cent of the net profits. I told Chapman I should double the circulation in the first year, and practically did it, but I took nothing out of the Fortnightly Review. I used to spend all my salary in paying the contributors more highly, especially the contributors of poetry. It had been customary to pay not more than two pounds a page for any poem, but I gave Matthew Arnold, and Swinburne, too, twenty-five pounds a page, which came out of my salary.
As editor of the Fortnightly, I found it very easy at first to get on with Frederic Chapman, but his directors were for the most part stupid, brainless business men. I remember when I wrote my first stories, Mantes the Matador and The Modern Idyll; I brought them to Chapman and asked him to read them. He read them and said they were all right, but when I published The Modern Idyll in the Review, there was a huge to-do in the press. The Spectator condemned the story, passionately. I thought it was Hutton, the chief owner, with his high church prejudices, that had condemned it, but when I went and called upon him, I found it was his partner, Townsend, an utter atheist, who had played critic. He told me he thought the story terrible.
A nonconformist dignitary, the Reverend Newman Hall, I think, wrote, condemning the story root and branch and making a great fuss about it. The end of it was that the directors of the Fortnightly Review met together and asked me not to insert any more of my stories in the Review. At once I tore up my agreement with them and told them to find another editor as soon as they could.
At the same time Frederic Chapman told Meredith, who was then the reader of novels for Chapman and Hall, of the way the directors had condemned me, and Meredith came up to London to protest. I met him for the first time in Chapman's office-to me a most memorable experience. He was one of the handsomest men I have ever seen, a little above middle height, spare and nervous; a splendid head, all framed in silver hair; but perhaps because he was very deaf himself, he used to speak very loudly. "We mustn't allow these directors to stand in our light," he cried. "I will talk to them and tell them they have never had as good a story in the Fortnightly Review as Mantes." And he did talk to them to some purpose, for they withdrew their condemnation of my stories and begged me to reconsider my resignation, which I did.
A few months after I had taken over the Review I had a dispute with Henry James, which may be worth recording here. Between 1890 and 1905 I used to meet him in London from time to time. I think it was Lady Brooke of Sarawak who first introduced me to him at a garden party. The Ranee was one of his most devoted admirers; she had a peculiar sense of certain literary values, or perhaps I should say, of certain men of letters. To me James was only a name; I had read none of his works, except some essays or travel-sketches in France, which were mildly interesting to me by virtue of the subject, though commonplace enough in treatment. The book reminded me of a couple of Tauchnitz volumes of sketches in Italy by W. Dean Howells, and ever afterwards I coupled the two men in my mind as absolutely negligible.