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Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842 1885

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MEMOIRS OF
SIR WEMYSS REID
1842-1885


[Illustration: Wemyss Reid]




MEMOIRS OF
SIR WEMYSS REID
1842-1885

EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY
STUART J. REID


TO
Lady Reid,
THE DEVOTED WIFE OF
MY BROTHER,
THESE PAGES ARE INSCRIBED.




EDITOR'S 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, passing 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 passing years, and
long before old age crept quietly upon him the prevailing note of his
character was charity. He had been in early life associated 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 classics. She held herself gallantly in the dim,
half-educated society of her husband's chapel, but reserved her
friendships--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 shilling,
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 passion 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 Institute, 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 shilling 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 Yorkshire--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 Brontë, 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 Yorkshire towns. The
manuscripts 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 manuscript 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 circumstances 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 Premiership 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 circumstance which was due quite as much to his
character as to his capacity. It is not my intention to anticipate 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 circumstances--for the present postponed, without at least a passing
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 Devonshire, in 1880, tried to form a Government. That
controversy was assuredly "barren" to my brother in everything but the
testimony of a good conscience. He was assailed 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 embarrass 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 gratitude 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. Cassell & 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 lustre even to the traditions of a great publishing
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 passion 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 Friendships 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 Principal 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
assistant in its direction, Mr. Barry O'Brien, whose intimate knowledge
of the trend in Irish politics was invaluable. I shall not anticipate 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 manuscript. 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 editorship. 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
association 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 circumstances 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 circumstance 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.
Lord Rosebery has written me a letter, and I have his permission to quote
from it:--"I can only dwell on the sterling notes of courage and
friendship. As to the first, he had taken part in many controversies,
which it is now unnecessary to revive, and borne himself gallantly in
them. But before his life ended he was to display a rarer quality. In
September, 1903, he wrote to me that he could only count on a few weeks
longer of life--that he was condemned by all doctors.... He partially
recovered from that attack, though from that day he was doomed to speedy
death. I saw him in February for the last time, not long before the end.
He told me, as he always did, that he did not feel amiss, but that his
doctors all unanimously condemned him to a short shrift; that his friend
Sir Frederick Treves was putting him under a new treatment, from which he
hoped to derive some benefit; but that, whatever happened, he should go
on writing as if nothing were wrong until the end came. That did not long
tarry. In the evening of Thursday, February 23rd, he was taken ill, and
before ten o'clock on Sunday morning he was dead. During the seventeen
months which elapsed from the time of the doom pronounced by his
physicians until its fulfilment, Wemyss Reid so demeaned himself that
none could have penetrated his secret. He was as gay and high in spirit,
as strenuous in work, as thoughtful for others, as ever; so that those
who knew the fatal truth could not bring themselves to believe it. He was
at work for the _Nineteenth Century_ the day before he was taken
with his final attack. But he himself, cheerful and smiling, never lost
the certainty that death hung over him by a thread.

"So much for his courage; and now for the other note that I would
touch--his friendship. His ideal of friendship was singularly lofty and
generous. He was the devoted and chivalrous champion of those he loved;
he took up their cause as his own, and much more than his own; he was the
friend of their friends and the enemy of their enemies. No man ever set a
higher value on this high connection, which, after all, whether brought
about by kinship, or sympathy, or association, or gratitude, or stress,
is under Heaven the surest solace of our poor humanity; and so it
coloured and guided the life of Wemyss Reid. His chief works were all
monuments to that faith; it inspired him in tasks which he knew would be
irksome and which could scarcely be successful, or which, at least, could
ill satisfy his own standard. This is a severe test for a man of letters,
but he met it without fail.... All this seems lame and tame enough when I
read it over. But it was true and vivid when Wemyss Reid was living, and
giving to his friends the high example of a brave and unselfish life.
Among them, his memory will be a precious fact, and an inheritance long
after any obituary notice is forgotten. It will live as long as they
live; he would scarcely have cared to be remembered by others." Lord
Rosebery's kindness to my brother--it was constant, delicate, and
unwavering--can never be forgotten by any of his relatives. He was the
first visitor to the house of mourning on Sunday, February 26th; he came
in haste, with the hope that he might still be in time to see my brother
alive.

Here, perhaps, is the place to mention some other of his friends: I mean,
of course, those with whom he was most intimate in his closing years. It
may be I have forgotten some; if so, I need scarcely add that it is
without intention. But I do not like to end without at least recalling
his close relations with Lord Burghclere, Mr. Bryce, Sir Henry Fowler,
Mr. Edmund Robertson, Sir Henry Roscoe, Sir Norman Lockyer, Sir Frederick
Treves, Sir John Brunner, Principal Fairbairn, Dr. Guinness Rogers, the
Rev. R. H. Hadden, Mr. W. H. Macnamara, Mr. Douglas Walker, Mr. J. C.
Parkinson, Mr. G. A. Barkley, Mr. Charles Mathews, Mr. J. A. Duncan, Mr.
Edwin Bale, Mr. Barry O'Brien, Mr. Herbert Paul, Mr. J. A. Spender, and
last, but certainly not least, Mr. Malcolm Morris, who was with him at
the end. James Payn, William Black, Sir John Robinson represent the
losses of the last few years of his life; all of them were men with
whom--literature and politics apart--he had much in common.

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