Part 1 (1/2)

Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885.

by Stuart J. Reid, ed.

INTRODUCTION.

The sense of personal loss occasioned by my brother's death is still so keen and vivid that if I am to write at all about him--and my duty in that respect is clear--it must be out of the fulness of my heart. My earliest recollections of him begin when I was a child and he was a bright, self-reliant lad in the home at Newcastle, the characteristics of which are with artless realism described in the opening pages of this book. It is the simple truth to say that we grew up in an atmosphere of love and duty. Our father was a man of studious habit, pa.s.sing rich in the possession of a library of dry works on theology which his children never read, and among which they searched in vain for the fairy books and stories, or even the poetry, dear to the youthful heart. He was a faithful, rather than a gifted preacher, and I have always thought that his power--it was real and far-reaching--lay in his modest, unselfish life, and in that unfailing sympathy which kept him on a perpetual round of visits to the sick and sorrowful, year in, year out. He had a quiet sense of humour, and was never so happy as when he could steal a day off from the insistent claims of pastoral work for a ramble in the country with his boys.

Always a public-spirited man, and keenly interested in political affairs, he talked to us freely about the events of the time, and made us feel that the little affairs of our own home and immediate environment could never be seen in their true perspective until they were set against the larger life of the town, and, in a sense, of the nation. When any great event occurred he used to tell us all about it; when any great man died, if we did not know the significance of his life and the loss it meant to the country, it was not his fault. He was a quiet, rather reserved man, terribly in earnest, we thought, and with a touch of sternness about him which vanished in later life. He mellowed with the pa.s.sing years, and long before old age crept quietly upon him the prevailing note of his character was charity. He had been in early life a.s.sociated to some extent with the Press, and later had written one or two books, so that ink was in my brother's blood.

Our mother was almost his opposite in character. She was quick, almost imperious in temper, vivacious and witty of speech, full of sense and sensibility, in revolt--I see it now--against the narrow conditions of her lot, and yet bravely determined to do her best, not merely for her husband and children, but for the rather austere little community in which she was always a central figure. There was a charm about her to which all sorts and sizes of people surrendered at discretion, and she loved books more modern and more mundane than the dingy volumes on my father's shelves. She had received, what was more rare then than now, a liberal education, and, besides modern languages, had at least a moderate acquaintance with the cla.s.sics. She held herself gallantly in the dim, half-educated society of her husband's chapel, but reserved her friends.h.i.+ps--sometimes with a touch of wilfulness--for those who represented whatever there was of sweetness and light in the wider society of the town. In one respect she was absolutely in harmony with my father, and that was in her sympathy with the poor and in quiet, unparaded determination to hold out a helping hand to all that sought it.

She had imagination, and she sent it on errands of good-will. I think my brother inherited from her his alertness of mind and not a little of his quickness of apprehension.

I can remember him coming back from Bruce's school all aglow with his prizes, and I can recall, as if it were but yesterday, his audacious speeches, and the new books with which, as soon as he earned a s.h.i.+lling, he began to leaven the dull old library, much to the delectation of the other children. I can recall a rough cartoon in one of the local journals which was greeted with huge merriment in the family circle, because it represented Tom as ”Ye Press of Newcastle”--a mere boy in a short jacket perched on a stool, scribbling for dear life at the foot of a platform on which some local orator was denouncing the tyranny of the existing Government. He must then have been about seventeen, certainly not more, and he was even at that time somewhat of a youthful prodigy. Then he developed a pa.s.sion for the collection of autographs, and used to write the most alluring letters to celebrities, and astound my modest father by the replies--they were invariably written as to a man of mature life and public importance--which he had elicited from eminent people in politics and the world of letters. He, a mere youth, invited a well-known Arctic explorer to Newcastle to lecture on his perils in the frozen North, and my father bought him his first hat to go to the railway station to meet the gallant sailor, who brought his pathetic relics of Franklin to our house, where he stayed as guest. The great man's chagrin when he found that a lad scarcely out of short jackets had invited him to Newcastle vanished in the genial firelight, and in the subsequent reception of the good townsfolk. Then my brother conceived the ambitious scheme of the West End Literary Inst.i.tute, and by dint of energetic and persistent begging carried the project out, and with a high hand.

Suddenly, when he was still a young reporter, a great calamity befell the locality. The Hartley Colliery catastrophe plunged all Tyneside in gloom.

He was the youngest reporter on the local Press, but his account of the long-drawn agony of that terrible time, when two hundred brave fellows lost their lives, was the most graphic. It brought him local renown. It was published as a s.h.i.+lling pamphlet, after it had done duty in the _Newcastle Journal_, and to his credit he gave, though as poor as a church mouse, the whole of the proceeds--a sum of 40, I think--to the Relief Fund. It was a characteristic act which was not belied by the subsequent generosity of his life. All too soon--for he brought as a young reporter a breezy, new atmosphere into the family circle--he went to Preston, on the principle of promotion by merit. Then Leeds claimed him, and next he settled in London, in the short-lived happiness of his early married life, returning to Yorks.h.i.+re--this time as chief of the paper he had served so well. During his career as editor of the _Leeds Mercury_ I saw comparatively little of him. We were both busy, though in different ways; but we kept up, then and always, a brisk correspondence, and his letters, all of them brimful of public interest and family affection, are before me now. The world is a different place to me now, but ”memory is a fountain of perpetual youth” and nothing can rob me of its sweetness.

There is scarcely an incident recorded in these pages which he did not tell me at the time in familiar talk. There is much, also, that he has not set down here, all of it honourable to himself, which I could recount about those early days in Newcastle, and to a certain extent also in Leeds, where I was again and again his guest; but, as he has chosen to be silent, it is not for me to speak. Oddly enough, I never in my life heard him deliver a political speech, nor do I think he excelled in that direction. But he was admirable as a lecturer on literary subjects, and I have seen him again and again hold a large audience spellbound when his subject was Charlotte or Emily Bronte, Mrs. Carlyle, the Inner Working of an English Newspaper, the Character of General Gordon, or some other theme which appealed to him. He spoke rapidly and clearly, and between the years 1882 and 1886 gave his services without stint in this direction to the people of Leeds, Bradford, and other of the Yorks.h.i.+re towns. The ma.n.u.scripts of these lectures are before me as I write; they are all in his own hand, and they must have taken from an hour to an hour and a half in delivery. Yet one of the most important of them--it runs to between sixty and seventy closely written ma.n.u.script pages, and bears no marks of haste--was, as a note in his own hand at the outset shows, begun one day and finished the next--a proof, if any were needed, of his rapidity in work. He made many enthusiastic friends amongst the shrewd working people of the North by these deliverances.

The last twenty years of my brother's life are outside the present narrative. Two of them were spent in Leeds in ever-widening newspaper work, and the remaining eighteen in London, under circ.u.mstances he has himself described in another volume, which, for political reasons, is for the present withheld. It will appear eventually, and personally I feel no doubt whatever that it will take its place, quite apart from its self-revelation, as one of the most important and authentic records, in the political sense, of the later decades of Queen Victoria's reign. My brother's knowledge of the secret history of the Liberal party in the memorable days when Mr. Gladstone was fighting his historic battle for Home Rule, and during the subsequent Premiers.h.i.+p of Lord Rosebery, was exceptional. He was the trusted friend of both statesmen, and probably no other journalist was so absolutely in the confidence of the leaders of the Liberal party--a circ.u.mstance which was due quite as much to his character as to his capacity. It is not my intention to antic.i.p.ate the story, as he himself tells it, either of the ”Hawarden Kite” or the Home Rule split, much less to disclose his opinions--they are emphatic and deliberate--of the men who made mischief at that crisis. I leave also untouched the plain, unvarnished account he gives, on unimpeachable authority, of a subsequent and not less discreditable phase in the annals of the Liberal party. There are reasons, obvious to everyone who gives the matter a moment's thought, that render it inadvisable in the interests of the political cause with which my brother all his life was identified, and for which he suffered more than is commonly known, to yield to the very natural temptation to throw reticence to the winds.

To one point only will I permit myself to make brief but significant allusion, for I cannot allow this book to go forth to the world with the knowledge that the publication of the companion volume is--through force of circ.u.mstances--for the present postponed, without at least a pa.s.sing reference to what in the authoritative biography of Mr. Gladstone is called the ”barren controversy” which arose in 1892, as to whether the present Duke of Devons.h.i.+re, in 1880, tried to form a Government. That controversy was a.s.suredly ”barren” to my brother in everything but the testimony of a good conscience. He was a.s.sailed by almost the whole Press of the country for the part which he played in it, and not least mercilessly by journalists of his own party. As he said to me himself at the time, ”If I had been Mr. Parnell, fresh from the revelations of the Divorce Court, I could not have been treated with greater contumely.” If there was one thing on the possession of which he prided himself in life more than another, it was loyalty, and seldom was political loyalty subjected to a more cruel strain. He held his peace with all the materials for his own vindication in his hand, rather than embarra.s.s Mr.

Gladstone at a great political crisis.

The letters on which he based his statements are in existence. I wished to print them, without note or comment of mine, in an Appendix to the present volume, but permission has been withheld. They cannot remain for ever in ambush, and when they are published, with my brother's full and magnanimous comments, it will be apparent to all the world how greatly he was misjudged. It is enough for the present to say that Mr. Gladstone himself admitted in a note under his own hand that the interpretation which my brother put upon the facts submitted to him _absolutely and entirely justified_ the course which he took in that controversy. Mr.

Gladstone, as Mr. Morley somewhat drily states in his biography, ”reckoned on a proper stoicism in the victims of public necessity,” and I suppose my brother was regarded as thin-skinned, but a man may be forgiven a measure of sensitiveness when his honour is impeached.

He always used to speak with grat.i.tude of the action of Lord Russell of Killowen at that period. He heard the gossip of the clubs, and was not content, like the majority of men, either to believe it or to dismiss the matter with a shrug of the shoulders. He sought my brother out at his own house, heard the whole story from his own lips--through an informal but stringent process of cross-examination--drew his own conclusions, and did more than anyone else to turn the tide of misrepresentation. Lord Russell never rested until Wemyss Reid was elected an honorary member of the Eighty Club, a distinction shared by only two or three persons, and one which did not a little to bring about, in the Liberal party at least, a quick reversal of public opinion. The chivalrous action of Lord Russell was all the more creditable as the two men at the time were only slightly acquainted. Other honours came to my brother within the next two years.

The University of St. Andrews in 1893 conferred upon him the degree of LL.D., and in the following year he was knighted ”for services to Letters and Politics.”

It is a pleasure to hark back to the literary interests which grew around the later years of my brother in London. He went thither in 1887 to take control of the business of Messrs. Ca.s.sell & Company--a position of wide influence and hard work which he retained to the last day of his life. He used to tell me that he detested the City and the irksomeness of keeping office hours, but he stuck manfully to his post, and his presence at the desk there lent a l.u.s.tre even to the traditions of a great publis.h.i.+ng house. I betray no confidences when I say that at first he found his new duties somewhat uncongenial. He had won his spurs as a journalist, he was fond of the cut and thrust of party politics, he missed the rush of public life, and he felt that perhaps he had been ill-advised in quitting the editorial saddle. But this feeling of depression quickly wore off when he set himself, with characteristic energy, to master the details of his new work, though to the last he often cast longing glances backwards to the years in which he inspired the policy of a great daily newspaper.

Before he left Leeds--and here I may say that he did not leave without substantial proof of the esteem in which he was held--he accepted two literary commissions, either of which would have satisfied most men and absorbed all their energies for a term of years.

One was the preparation of an authoritative biography of Mr. Forster, the other a similar work--less political and more literary--on the first Lord Houghton. He was, of course, in a position to speak from close personal knowledge of both men, and in each case all their private letters and papers were placed at his discretion. He found relief from the prosaic details of a business career in these congenial tasks, if such a term is applicable to what in reality were labours of love. Both were big books, and the marvel is how, with all that he had in hand at the time, he contrived to write them. But the pa.s.sion for work was the zest of his life, and it was never turned to more admirable account than in these labours. ”The Life of the Right Hon. W. E. Forster” was published in 1888, and ”The Life, Letters, and Friends.h.i.+ps of Lord Houghton” in 1890, and both met with a reception which it is hardly within my province to describe. It is enough to say that they widened his reputation, added materially to his influence, and, best of all, brought him many new and powerful friends.

Almost before he had finished writing the second of these books, at the instance of Mr. Bryce (with whom his relations were always most close and cordial) and other well-known men in the Liberal party, he, in conjunction with Sir John Brunner, founded the _Speaker_, a weekly journal which was started on similar lines to the _Spectator_, but devoted to the advocacy of the Home Rule cause, and broadly of the policy of Mr. Gladstone. The first number was published on January 4th, 1890, and from that time until October, 1899, he alone was responsible for its editorial control. He gathered around him a brilliant staff of contributors; he used laughingly to say that he was over-weighted by them, and, if I may venture a criticism, he gave them too free a hand.

Contemporary politics were discussed amongst others by Mr. Morley, Mr.

Bryce, Mr. J. A. Spender, and Mr. Herbert Paul. Literary criticism, economic questions, and other phases of public affairs, were handled by Sir Alfred Lyall, Mr. Birrell, Mr. Frederic Harrison, Mr. James Payn, Mr.

Henry James, Mr. J.M. Barrie, Mr. Quiller-Couch, Mr. Sidney Webb, Mr. L.

F. Austin, Mr. A. B. Walkley, and a score of young writers; whilst men like the late Lord Acton and Princ.i.p.al Fairbairn, and occasionally Mr.

Gladstone himself, lent further distinction to its pages. No one worked harder in those days for the _Speaker_ than my brother's ever loyal a.s.sistant in its direction, Mr. Barry O'Brien, whose intimate knowledge of the trend in Irish politics was invaluable. I shall not antic.i.p.ate by any comments of my own the vivid and always genial pen-and-ink pictures which are given of the chief members of the _Speaker_ staff in that part of the Memoirs which yet remains unprinted.

I prefer to fall back in this connection on a little bit of reminiscence, printed in one of the daily papers on the morrow of my brother's death.

It was written by Mr. L. F. Austin, who alas! has so quickly followed him to the grave. ”Some months ago, feeling himself under sentence of death, Sir Wemyss Reid applied his leisure to the task of completing his Memoirs. 'Here is a chapter that may interest you,' he said to me one day, producing a roll of ma.n.u.script. It did interest me very much, and when it comes to be published it will be read with no little emotion by the men who formed the regular staff of the _Speaker_ under Sir Wemyss Reid's editors.h.i.+p. He deals with us all in turn in a spirit of the kindliest remembrance and simple goodwill; and as I read those pages, I felt they were his farewell to some of the men who have good reason to think of him as the staunchest of friends.” I was in very close a.s.sociation with my brother during the whole of the ten years in which he retained control of the _Speaker_, and took my full share of the work. They were for him years of strenuous and unremitting toil, but he used to say that there were few greater rewards for a man of his temperament than to be in the thick of the political movement, and to be in the front rank of the fighters. He adopted as his motto in life ”Onwards”--the watchword of his old school at Newcastle, emblazoned on the back of the prizes which he took in far-off days; and from first to last he lived up to it. Brusque he sometimes was, decisive always; perhaps he was too easily ruffled in little affairs, but he was magnanimous to the point of self-sacrifice in great. After quitting, under circ.u.mstances entirely honourable to himself, the editorial chair of the _Speaker_, my brother, who for years previously had been an occasional contributor to the pages of the _Nineteenth Century_, contributed regularly to that review a political survey of the month.

Some of his best work was put into these articles, and the last of them was written under great physical stress, and appeared almost simultaneously with the announcement of his death. It was the last task to which he put his hand, and the wish of his life was granted: he died in harness.

It is not too much to say that neither his interest nor his influence in political affairs suffered the least abatement in the six closing years of his life, which bridged the distance between his relinquishment of the _Speaker_ and the hour when he finally laid down his pen. The withheld portion of this Autobiography makes that abundantly clear, for, as in a mirror, it reflects the secret history of the Liberal party. His relations with Lord Rosebery, both during and after that statesman's brilliant but difficult Administration, were singularly intimate and cordial--a circ.u.mstance which invests with peculiar interest the final chapters which he wrote. They throw a dry light on the political intrigues which occurred after Mr. Gladstone's retirement; they reveal the difficulties--both open and unsuspected--which beset his successor.