The Adventure of Living Part 20

Who without sadness shall be sage, And gay without frivolity.

Though, of course, Socrates had more fire, more of the demon in him, one can well believe that at times, and when his circ.u.mambient irony was at its gentlest, it must have been like that of Matthew Arnold. Matthew Arnold has been called over fastidious, but I do not think that is fair.

Fastidious he no doubt was. Also he thought it his duty to rub in our national want of fastidiousness, and our p.r.o.neness to mistake nickel for silver. It must not be supposed, however, that Matthew Arnold could not endure to look upon the world as it is because of the high standard he had set up in Literature and in the Arts. In reality his was a wise and comprehensive view. He could enjoy men and things in practice even when he disapproved of them in theory. His inimitably delicate distinctions were drawn quite as much in favour of the weak as in support of the strong. Take, for example, his famous _mot_, "I would not say he was not a gentleman, but if you said so, I should understand what you meant." For example, Matthew Arnold would not have said that Sh.e.l.ley was not a poet. If, however, you had said so, he would have _very nearly_ agreed with you, and would have given all sorts of reasons to support your view. Yet, in all probability, he would at the same time have urged you not to forget that all the same he had a claim to a good place, if not a front place, in the glorious choir of Apollo.

I cannot remember any particular thing said on that occasion by Matthew Arnold, but I do remember very well how pleased and touched I was when after dinner he crossed over from his side of the table, and sitting down by me, began talking about the members of his family, whom he seemed to know that I knew. I knew Mrs. Ward; I knew his niece, Miss Arnold, Mrs. Ward's sister, soon to become Mrs. Leonard Huxley, and, last but not least, I was on the closest terms of intimacy with that most admirable of journalists, Willie Arnold of the _Manchester Guardian_. Probably because I was acting as a sort of aide-de-camp and son of the house to my father-in-law, Mr. Simpson, I did not get a connected literary talk. Besides, I felt sure that from his friendliness I should later have plenty of opportunities to ask a hundred things of his spiritual home. Little did I know how soon he was to be cut off.

These were the years which saw the deaths of Barnes, Browning, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold--years of which one was tempted to say with Wordsworth:

Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits, Or waves that own no curbing hand, How fast has brother followed brother From sunshine to the sunless land.

Browning was the other poet for whom I felt a very strong admiration and whom I had often wanted to meet. Though a friend of the Simpsons, and a visitor and diner at their house, I met him not at 14 Cornwall Gardens but at a very small dinner-party in the house of a common friend. After dinner Browning, Sir Sidney Colvin, another man, and I were left drinking our coffee and our port and smoking our cigarettes. Browning was, I believe, often inclined to talk like a man of the world about people or stocks and shares rather than about literature. But I was determined to do what I could to prevent him pushing that foible too far. Therefore I did my very best to lead the conversation on to better pastures. I had always loved Landor, and something or other gave me an opportunity to ask a question about him. Mr. Browning, I felt sure, must have known him in his last years at Florence.

I was happy in my venture and struck a vein of reminiscence of a very poignant kind. Browning told us that he did not know Landor very well, but that he saw him in the last years of his life under circ.u.mstances of a terribly pathetic kind. Landor played almost exactly the part of King Lear--though from a different reason--and got almost exactly King Lear's reward. Landor, it will be remembered, was originally a rich man. It will also be remembered that he was possessed of a very arbitrary and turbulent nature and quarrelled with many members of his family, and especially with his own children. However, they lived in a villa at Fiesole for some time, in a kind of turbulent domesticity. Landor, on leaving England, had unwisely given away his property to his children, thinking that he could rely upon them to be kind to him. But he had not trained them in the ways of kindness. He had been hot, brutal, and tyrannical to them when he had the power. When they got it they were equally brutal to him. At last his daughter determined to bear the old man's ill-temper--ill-temper, apparently, approaching to madness--no longer. He was told by Miss Landor that if he could not control himself better she would not tolerate him any longer in the villa, and would, in fact, turn him out of doors. He disobeyed her injunctions, or, as she probably put it, failed to keep his promise of better behaviour, and then, incredible as it sounds from anyone who had ever read _Lear_, she actually barred the doors of what had once been his home against the unhappy old man and drove him out to wander whither he could. If she did not physically put him out of doors, she put humiliations so unendurable upon him that, like Lear, he left the house in an agony of broken- heartedness and despair. The once-proud poet had very few friends in Florence, little or no money, and literally nowhere to go. The result was that he wandered, half-distracted, like Lear, bewailing the wound at his heart which a daughter's hand had given. Somehow, like an old, stray, and starving dog, he wandered to the Brownings' house. There, needless to say, he found rest for the body and comfort for the soul.

Mrs. Browning did everything she could for Landor--took him in, fed him, put him to bed, and strove to quiet and soften his fierce and pitiful and outraged heart. Browning went on to tell how as soon as the old man was a little composed, he drove up to Fiesole to see Miss Landor--thinking that perhaps, after all, it was only a family quarrel which could be tactfully adjusted. That supposition proved entirely mistaken.

I found [said Browning] an almost exact reincarnation of the daughters of Lear in Miss Landor. She was perfectly hard and perfectly cold. She told me of her father's troublesome ways, nay, misdeeds, of how she had borne them for a long time, of how he had promised better behaviour, and of how he had broken his word again and again. At last the limit had been pa.s.sed. She could endure him in her house no longer. I argued with her [he went on] as well as I could, urged that she evidently did not realise her father's mental condition, and pointed out that whatever his past faults he was now lying in my house a dying man, and dying of a broken heart. I hoped and believed that my description of his anguish and his distraction would melt her.

Then came the most terrible part of the story. Miss Landor must, I suppose, have accompanied Browning through the garden to the gate of the villa, and there spoke her final words. Browning said something about the remorse which she would inevitably feel. Her father had, no doubt, given her great provocation, but if the end came before she had forgiven him and helped him, she would never be able to forgive herself. His words were of no avail. She had Goneril's heart. Pointing to a ditch at the side of the road, she answered, "I tell you, Mr. Browning, that if my father lay dying in that ditch, I would not lift a finger to save him."

And so Browning went back to Casa Guido. He had looked into the awful depths which Shakespeare had explored--an agony of the mind beyond words, and beyond solution. The sense of pity and terror had been raised for which even the poet's art could find no purgation.

What he said to the unhappy old man when he returned to Florence he did not tell us. Mercifully, Landor's memory was failing, and so one may hope that the waters of the Lethe brought him like Lear their blessed relief.

Strangely enough, no poet ever sang their healing virtues more poignantly than did Landor. When Agamemnon, in Landor's poem, red from Clytemnestra's axe, reaches the Shades, the Hours bring him their golden goblet. He drinks and forgets. He is no more maddened by the thought that his daughter will learn his fate. Till then he had felt:

the first woman coming from Mycenae Will pine to pour the poison in her ear.

I have set down, I believe correctly, what I heard Browning tell, but I am bound to add that it does not quite correspond with the facts given in the _Dictionary of National Biography_. Leslie Stephen in the life of Landor mentions the quarrel and the kind intervention of the Brownings, but does not make the incident nearly so tragic. Very probably indignation made Browning emphasise the bad side of the story.

Also he was telling of something which had taken place thirty years before. Finally, it is thirty-five years since I heard the conversation here recorded and indignation has also, no doubt, played its part in deepening the colours of my narration. But, though for these reasons I do not suggest that the details I have given are of biographical importance, I feel absolutely certain on two essential points: (1) Browning unquestionably compared the scene he witnessed to _Lear_ and compared it in the most striking and poignant way. (2) The words put into the mouth of Miss Landor are not any invention or addition of mine.

They made a profound impression upon me and I am sure they are the actual words I heard Browning use. He spoke them with pa.s.sion and dramatic intent, and they still ring in my ears. My memory for many things is as treacherous as that of most people, but when a certain degree of dramatic intensity is reached the record on the tablets of my mind is almost always correct and remains unchanged.

Before I leave the subject of my wife's family and friends and of the warm-hearted kindness with which they received me, I ought to say something about my father-in-law, Mr. Simpson. Though he had not his wife's charm of manner and delight in all the amenities of life and of social intercourse on its best side, he was to me a very attractive man, as well as one of very great ability. Through his shyness he made all but his intimates regard him as dull. There was in truth no dullness about him. His mind was one of great acuteness within its own very special limits. Either by nature or training, I can hardly tell which, he was exactly fitted to be what he was, that is, first a Second Wrangler at Cambridge, then a Conveyancer, and Standing Counsel to the Post Office. Though he never took silk, he was in the most exact sense a counsel learned in the law, and received the singular honour of being made a Bencher of Lincoln's Inn, although he was not a Queen's Counsel.

His special gift in the study and practice of the law was his skilful draftsmanship whether in wills, conveyances, or clauses in Acts of Parliament. His vast knowledge and his judgment as to what was the proper interpretation of the Statutes, of the rules of Equity, of the principles of the Common Law, and of the practice of the Courts, was unrivalled.

Mr. Simpson was, in private life, one of the most honourable and high- minded men that I have ever known. Most honourable men are content to be careful of other people's rights and conscious of their own duties in big things, but do not bother themselves to ask whether they have done exactly right in little things. Mr. Simpson was as particular in the minutiae of conduct as he was in great affairs. Take, for example, the way in which he regarded the duty of silence in regard to any knowledge of clients' private affairs which he had derived in the course of his professional work. He never yielded to the temptation to gossip, even about cases which were thirty or forty years old, cases which it might have been argued had become historical. This care extended not only to his own cases, but to matters which he had heard discussed in his chambers in Lincoln's Inn or in those of his brother barristers.

You could not move him by saying that everybody was dead in the case concerned, or that it would be to the credit of particular people to tell what really happened and what were the true causes and motives of the action. Nothing of this kind would affect him. He gave for his silence reasons similar to those which Dr. Lushington gave when, on his death-bed as a very old man, his family asked him to leave for historical purposes a record of the truth about Byron's quarrel with his wife. Dr. Lushington replied that even if he could do so without a breach of faith with any living person, he would not. He had a higher duty, and that was to help men and women to feel that they could unburden themselves fully to their professional advisers, and that there was no risk of those advisers in the future const.i.tuting themselves the judges of whether this or that thing should become known to the world at large.

What the client wants is the seal of the confessional. If he cannot have that, he will often refuse to speak the whole truth. But this may mean not only personal injury to those who would speak out if they could feel sure of secrecy, but might inflict injury on others, and indeed on the community as a whole. There is, I feel, no rational denial of this point of view. At any rate, this was the principle which Mr. Simpson carried out in the most meticulous way. He would only talk about the law in the abstract or upon points made in open court. He would not even go so far as to say, "I drew up that marriage settlement, or made that will, or advised this or that man to take action."

He carried his reticence beyond even professional knowledge. For example, he regarded what was said in a club smoking-room as said under the seal of secrecy, and nothing would induce him to repeat what he had heard. Strangely enough, he was a member of the Garrick Club, and I remember him once mentioning that Thackeray used to hold forth in the smoking-room to all present. Naturally I thought that he would be willing to describe some of these talks, for they had obviously made a great impression on him. He, however, was adamant in this matter. When people talked in club-rooms, he argued, they ought to have the feeling that it was like talking in their own house and to their own family. For him Clubs were "tiled" houses.

I think, myself, that he went too far here; but certainly he was erring on the right side. At the present moment the habit of certain lawyers, doctors, and businessmen, to discuss the private affairs of their clients and customers in public is much too common. No doubt most of them are careful to use a good deal of camouflage and to tell their stories as "A" "B" cases, without mentioning names. But that is not always successful. Chance and the impishness of coincidence will very often enable one to discover the most carefully camouflaged secret. I remember, as a young man, coming across an instance of this kind which very much struck me. It happened that the barrister in whose chambers I was a pupil said, very properly, to me on the first day that he supposed I understood that whatever I saw in papers in chambers must be regarded as strictly confidential. It might, he said, happen that I should see things of a highly confidential nature about someone whom I knew in Society; and he went on to tell a story of how, when he was young, two young barristers or students came across a set of papers in which two young ladies, sisters, who happened to be acquaintances of these young men, were mentioned as having a reversionary interest in a very large sum of money with only one old life between it and them. Though apparently only daughters of a struggling professional man, they would soon, it appeared, be great heiresses. The result was two proposals and two marriages! Whether they lived happily ever afterwards is not stated, but they lived, at any rate, "wealthily."

I did not condemn the principle as unsportsmanlike but I remember thinking that there must be a million chances against a barrister ever seeing papers relating to someone he knows. Yet, within two or three days, I was told to help in drafting a marriage settlement which dealt with people at whose house I was going to dance on the very night in question. To my surprise I found that my host and hostess were very rich people. Though I lived for nearly two years in Mr. Simpson's house, and for the next fourteen years, that is, till his death, I saw him constantly, I neither exchanged a bitter word with him, nor felt the slightest indignation or annoyance at anything he did or said. He was at heart one of the kindliest as well as one of the shyest and apparently most austere of men. Mathematics and law may have dried up his intellect, but they never dried up his heart.

Though he was a man of fine intellect, and had a great and deep knowledge of many subjects, I think I never saw a man who was so absolutely devoid of any interest in poetry or _Belles-Lettres_. I believe indeed that he was quite without any understanding of what poetry meant. If I had been told that he was the Wrangler who said that he could not see "what _Paradise Lost_ proved," I should not have been the least surprised. And yet the style of his writing was often remarkable for its perfect clarity and perfect avoidance of anything in the shape of ambiguity. He could say what he wanted to say in the fewest number of words and in a way in which the most ingenious person could not twist into meaning something which they were not intended to mean.

He was indeed a super-draftsman. But that is a gift which every man of letters who is worthy of his salt ought to salute with reverence.

My treatment of many things in this book has been inadequate owing to want of s.p.a.ce, but in no case has it been so inadequate as that of London of the 'nineties. But my complaint here is, of course, a complaint common to every biography.

Biographers, I am told, always write in this strain. They begin by declaring that they have nothing to say and end by wailing over the insufficiency of the s.p.a.ce allowed them.

CHAPTER XX

THE ETHICS OF JOURNALISM

When I became not only sole Proprietor of _The Spectator_ but also Editor-in-Chief, Chief Leader-writer, and Chief Reviewer, it was natural that I should confront myself with the problem of the position and use of the journalist--in a word, that I should ask myself what I was doing.

Should I accept and be content with the ordinary outlook of the journalist on his profession, or should I in any particular strike out a new line, or an extension of an old one for myself?

At that time, i.e. in 1898, the air was full of talk as to the functions and duties of the journalist, for journalism was emerging from its period of veiled power and was beginning to fill a much larger s.p.a.ce in the public mind. But in my case this was not the whole of the opportunity. By a singular set of circ.u.mstances I found myself in the unique position just described. Townsend and Hutton, it is true, were joint Editors and joint Proprietors; but the sense of responsibility of each to the other was a strong check. I, however, as sole Proprietor and sole Editor, could do exactly what I liked. I could decide, without reference to anyone else, the policy to be adopted. Further, as Chief Leader-writer, I was the man who had to carry out the policy adopted. I had, that is, the function of making the decisions immediately operative. This is more important in fact than it is in theory. In theory an Editor's word--subject to the Proprietor's veto--is final. He gives his instructions to the leader-writer, and the leader-writer, presuming that he is not a fool or a headstrong egoist or a man determined to flout his Editor's wishes, obeys them. That is the theory.

But there are several mitigating circ.u.mstances. In the first place, it is often difficult for an Editor to make his policy quite clear to his staff. Next, the leader-writer, no matter how strong his intention to obey his instructions and to enter into the spirit of his chief, may fail to do so, from want of that complete clarity of mind that comes only with personal conviction. If not his own view, his own understanding of the facts is apt to get in the way and prevent him carrying out his duties exactly as his chief meant him to perform them, and exactly as he himself wishes to perform them.

Again, by a sort of law of reversed effort, the leader-writer may be too anxious to carry out his chief's wishes and so may distort the Editor's view. There is yet another way in which a loss of power may occur. If the Editor had himself been writing, he would have seen as he wrote that this or that particular line of policy that he had adopted was not tenable, and therefore he would have altered that line. The conscientious leader-writer may, however, resist this conversion by circ.u.mstantial argument. He may feel:

This seems to me to be all wrong, but I have got to make the best of it. Otherwise I shall be taking the responsibility, which I do not want to take, of altering my Chief's instructions.

He said, "Defend the Government's action," so defend it I must.

But the Editor himself may be in a similar position. If he has an active Proprietor who gives regular and specific instructions, he is not really the Editor but only the Proprietor's mouthpiece. In that case, he, too, can, as it were, avoid a great deal of the feeling of personal responsibility. He may say,

I do not like this view. But, after all, it is the matter for the Proprietor, and he may have good reasons for his decision.

Anyway, I cannot in a matter of this kind attempt to dictate to him, because if a mistake is made, he will have to stand the racket. After all, I may be wrong as to the policy we should pursue, and if I am, then I shall be doing what I do not want to do, that is, gravely injuring somebody else's property and position. A man may make great sacrifices and run great risks with his own property, but I don't want to be told later that I was the man who insisted on taking his own line against the opinion of his chief with the result that a fatal blow was given to the position of the paper, I don't feel justified in risking another man's property.

The Editor, in fact, is very much in the position of the leader-writer.

These things being so, I realised that the responsibility for whatever was done in _The Spectator_ was going to be my responsibility in a very special degree. I could not plead consideration for anyone else's need if I had to defend _The Spectator's_ position. Therefore, I must be not only specially careful as to what I did from day to day, but I must think out for myself an answer to the journalistic interrogatory "_Quo vadis_?" What is the journalist's function in the State, and how am I to carry it out? The formula for the discharge of the journalist's functions, which I ultimately came to consider to be true in the abstract and capable of being translated into action, was, curiously enough, the formula of a man whose judgment I profoundly distrusted, whose work as a journalist I disliked, and who as a man was to me exceedingly unsympathetic. It was that of Mr. Stead, the erratic Editor first of the _Pall Mall_ and then of the _Review of Reviews_. The journalist, he declared, was "the watch-dog of society." Stead, though a man of honest intent and very great ability, was also a man of many failings, many inept.i.tudes, many prejudices, and many injustices--witness the att.i.tude he adopted in his last years towards Lord Cromer. Further, there was an element of commonness in his mental att.i.tude as in his style. But with all this, he had a very considerable _flair_, not only in the matter of words, but in ideas. Though the phrase was not used in his time, he was a pastmaster in the art of making "slogans." This, of the watch-dogs in the case of the Press, was one of his best. It exactly fitted the views which I was gradually developing in regard to the journalist's functions. In the course of my twelve years' apprenticeship at _The Spectator_, _The Economist_, _The Standard,_ and the other journals for which I wrote, I made it my business to study the work of my colleagues.

I soon saw that the men who did the best and most useful work were the watch-dogs; the men who gave warnings. But I also very soon found out that in practice the part is one which cannot be played if the performer wants to have a pleasant time in the world, or to make himself generally liked by his fellow-men. A watch-dog is never popular. How could he be?

People do not like to be disturbed, and to be warned generally means a loud noise and often a shock to delicate nerves. Besides, it generally ends in asking people not to do something they are strongly tempted to do. The bark of the watch-dog is, in a rough-and-ready way, much too much like the voice of conscience to be agreeable to the natural man.

Though sometime after he may be very grateful to the watch-dog for his bark, when he first hears it he is inclined to say:

Oh! drat that dog. I wish he'd shut up. There he is barking away, and it is probably only the moon, or some harmless tramp, or a footstep a mile away down the road, for the brute's power of hearing is phenomenal. Yet if he goes on like that I must pay some attention, or else there'll be an awful row with the Boss to-morrow morning if anything was stolen or any damage done. The creature's spoilt my night, anyway; I must get up and see what's going on.

The result is that the tired householder paddles about the house in carpet slippers, grumbling about this folly of thinking that anyone could be so unjust or unfair as to attack a well-meaning man like him.

It would be an infamy to think of any such scheme. "I want my neighbours to trust me, and they will never do that unless I trust them. So I will have another gla.s.s of port and get to bed, and, if that infernal dog will allow me, go to sleep."

"All's Well" is always a more popular motto for life than "Beware!" It is not only the householder who dislikes the watch-dog. There are people who have more sinister motives than a love of peace for disliking the watch-dog. Those who like to have a night out occasionally without comment from the Master; and those who think it only fair that certain perquisites should be smuggled out of the house by the charwoman and others without any fuss, "cannot abide" the dog and its horrid way of barking at a shawl thrown over a large plaited basket.

n.o.body [they argue] wants to see the master robbed, but there is a great difference between robbery and having things a little easy now and then, and no tiresome questions asked.

If we are all to be deprived of our night's rest by that dog, there will be no end of trouble, and if it goes on much further we shall have to see about getting rid of him, or else changing him for a dog that is more reasonable.

But that is not the whole of the trouble. Not only is the watch-dog generally disliked, but he is in danger of being turned from what he ought to be, into a gruff old grumbler. You cannot go on perpetually barking out warnings without getting a hoa.r.s.e note into your voice, and that makes you compare very ill with the parlour dog and his charming manners, or with the sporting dogs who go out and attend their masters at their pleasures. The working dogs, too, such as those of the shepherd, are far more popular and far more picturesque.

Finally, the watch-dog is often misunderstood because he has got a very narrow gamut of notes. His bark is taken as an angry warning, when all he means to say is: "This is a new man and a new policy, and you had better look into it and see whether it is all right. I should not be doing my duty if I did not warn you to look out." Then if the new-comer turns out to be a harmless or useful person, the watch-dog is blamed because he did not recognise merit on the instant.

But if acting as watch-dog is a disagreeable job, as it most undoubtedly is, it has its compensations. Journalism of which the mainspring is the gaining of pleasure may easily degenerate into something akin to the comic actor's function. Stevenson in a famous pa.s.sage compared the writers of _belles-lettres_ to "_filles de joie._" That was not, I think, appropriate to the artists in words, but at any rate it is a condition into which the journalist who knows nothing of the watch- dog's duties can easily descend. Our danger is to fall into a kind of intellectual prost.i.tution, and from this the duty of barking keeps us free.