The Men Behind the News H BY CAMERON ROGERS ENRY WICKHAM STEED, formerly editor of the London Times, has written in "Through Thirty Years"* his memoirs of three decades of European statecraft. He starts his reminiscences with an account of his first journalistic success achieved when, clambering over the boarding, he arrived unbidden among a group of fierce nationalist professors gathered upon a platform at Jena to hear the great Bismarck speak. Suppose that he had slipped upon that boarding. The result might well have assumed the proportions of an international episode and the young Mr. Steed might have been forever banned from public and official grace. But the young Mr. Steed did not slip nor was he detected and as a result the news of the ex-chancellor's famous speech at Jena in 1892 was telegraphed to the London Times with such expedition that it beat the official report by thirty-six hours. It may be said that this minor occurrence told at the very commencement of Mr. Steed's book correctly discloses the tenor of the experiences that flocked upon the author for the next three decades. Mr. Steed, less young and finally definitely of mature years, nevertheless continued to tread sure-footedly over pathways very narrow and sometimes not a little dangerous. He never slipped and, did he not wish to be, he was never detected. Had he been in truth not a journalist diplomat but exclusively a diplomat, the ex-editor of the London Times could hardly have told us his experiences in statecraft and the policies of nations. with so able and so confident a pen. His debut in his chosen field of journalism properly takes place then, at Jena. From that time his steady advance along * "Through Thirty Years." By Henry Wickham Steed. Doubleday, Page. $7.50. the lines by which he had apparently plotted his career, is unbroken. From Germany Steed goes to Paris, observes, listens and communicates to his journal. He meets the prominent journalists, the statesmen of the day, the public characters whose opinions formed that of the people. Everywhere he is under the best auspices and everywhere he improves upon opportunity. He returns to Germany where he notes with a somewhat amused astonishment the growing hostility to England. An elderly German lady as early as 1892 had commiserated with him on the misfortune of a nation whose venerable sovereign drank whisky from a teacup, decanting it from a teapot in order that her ministers and court, surely equally befuddled with strong waters, should believe it tea. Fancy this of Victoria! Denial did no good. Nine out of ten Germans, nourished upon such lamentable pabulum, were confirmed Anglo-phobes. Half tolerantly, half contemptuously, Steed moves on. Later, in Austria he concentrates a mind now fully trained and naturally splendidly endowed, upon the problem of the Hapsburgs. He becomes in time perhaps the leading authority in Europe upon that involved and ancient dynasty, and there as in Germany and France and Italy he meets. and converses with statesmen and soldiers and monarchs to the ever-increasing development of his abilities and the glory of the London Times. MR. CHAMBERLAIN'S PREJUDICE IN ITALY he pauses for a page or so uproarious anecdotes. Not uproarious but like the raconteur, more interesting than amusing, yet none the less humorous. Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, Secretary of State for the Colonies in the Salisbury Cabinet, dining in 1900 with the Baron Sidney Sonnino at a time when 452 The Rider of the Storm the waters of diplomacy were more than a little troubled, chose as an interesting yet safe topic of conversation the fact that he, Chamberlain, had been called the apostle of the Anglo-Saxon race. "Yes, sir, I have been called the apostle of the Anglo-Saxon race and I am proud of the title. I think the Anglo-Saxon race is as fine as any on earth. Not that I despise other races. They have their several virtues and aptitudes, though I admit that the aptitudes of my own race appeal to me most strongly. There is, in fact, only one race that I despise the Jews, sir. They are physical cowards." Then such a silence as falls when the hand of death is laid upon the lips. Sonnino, possibly the ablest public character in Italy, Sonnino was the son of a Jew. Steed continued to ply Mrs. Chamberlain with small talk but directed at Chamberlain's unconscious shins a gentle but determined kick. Alas, the kick was gentle but the Colonial Secretary had come half-way to meet it. In turning towards Sonnino he had extended his left leg and the warning took instant effect upon the calf thereof and with such violence that Mr. Chamberlain leapt with pain. It was some time afterwards, we are told, that the atmosphere was entirely cleared. As the years pass into decades Steed's connection with diplomacy becomes even closer. The Great War discloses him with Northcliffe, like Castor and Pollux at Lake Regillus, sweeping in at the victorious finish, and the conclusion of the last volume, accomplished now with a noticeably retrospective mind and hand, is as dignified yet as conscious of good work well done as is fitting, the reader feels, for an ex-editor of the London Times to be. no wrong and by so doing, arrive at the kernel of his biography* of the late owner of the World, which kernel does, after all, convince us that Joseph Pulitzer, Austrian at twenty, was as thoroughly American at sixty and therewith as genuinely so in his aims, his successes and his very extensive achievements as were men like Steed and Northcliffe, truly British in theirs. This blind colossus of American journalism directing the energetic policies of the World's editorial page by means of strenuous cablegrams addressed to his writers designated as Sawpit, as Gaiter, as Gush, harrying the impulsive Cobb until that distinguished editor more than once resolved to leave the World to darkness and to Pulitzer, attacking public evils and public follies and endowing educational projects, blind but with a vision passing that of mere eyesight, ill physically, but mentally invincibly sound, composes a figure that looms like a mountain peak, somewhat sombrely, above the lesser terrain of his contemporaries. If Pulitzer, unlike Steed, controlled the destiny of his journal and perhaps, through it, of many lives, without applied and actual experience of diplomacy and wide-spread political conditions in countries other than his own, it was, obviously enough, because his interests and his journal being where they were, there was no call for a different method. The difference between the types of one and of the other is no more than that which always exists between American and Continental statesmen or public characters of eminence. The one is as able in his own way as the other, less suave, perhaps infinitely less cultivated, but lacking neither a solid wisdom nor a broad vision. Pultizer's was a tempestuous life and his mode of living it was in itself intensely typical of the lives led by nearly all tremendously successful American men. How unlike is the impression gained of Steed, pursuing a notable career through a maze of tangled policies and situations, always calmly, always, one feels a little * "Joseph Pulitzer: His Life and Letters." By Don C. Seitz. Simon & Schuster. $5. leisurely. Pultizer died at sixty-four, worn out by his own violent energies, and with his own voice prompted the fading diminuendo of his existence. "Leise, ganz leise, ganz leise." As his biographer writes: "He who all his life had ridden upon the storm, left it as gently as the dying of the wind." MITCHELL'S CHARMING STYLE Of the three, Steed the journalistdiplomat, Pulitzer the journalist-magnate, and Mitchell the journalist and editor, title unqualified by diplomacy or finance, it is unquestionably the latter who makes the best reading. Lacking the significance of the other two, the history to be found in Steed, the dynamic personality sketched in the Seitz biography, the Mitchell Memoirs* possess to a greater extent that EDWARD P. MITCHELL, formerly one indispensable attribute of letters, editor-in-chief of the New York Sun, completes perfectly this trilogy of editorial and journalistic types. Mr. Mitchell differs from Steed in that his editing of contemporary events was achieved at his desk and like Pulitzer, in the labyrinthine subtleties of European statecraft he took neither part nor particular interest. Unlike Pulitzer, however, Mitchell did not build newspapers nor did he, spluttering and detonating, actively participate in American politics. Genially, gracefully and always interestingly, he tells us the accumulated experiences and anecdotes of half a century of American journalism, introduces us to the Homeric Dana, to Laffan, to a preposterous whimsy of a character, George Francis Train, to a score of others, and in conclusion we are left with a profound regret that the editorial page of the Sun or indeed that of any paper should be bereft of such a charming pen and wise and lovable personality. Infinitely more than with Steed we become intimately acquainted with the man himself and as he obviously rejoices in these friends of his, remarkable men, all of them, so in no less fashion do we. And his style cheers one like wine. There are, for instance, those lines wherewith he describes Mr. Dana in action. "He worked easily, rapidly, decisively, but always without any feeling of pressure or mental effort. In his technical practice there was a noticeable absence of the contortions and sputterings and squeaks of labor-pain sometimes seen and heard. when Mr. Greeley was in action." How delightful that the great Mr. Greeley should have squeaked and sputtered, but how curiously inevitable. distinguished and a charming prosody. OF VILLIERS THE WAR EAGLE a F YET another type of the journalist whose work it is that furnishes the daily news, was that king of all journalistadventurers, Frederic Villiers.† In 1851, eight years after Sir Charles Napier in one of the many campaigns of India, had captured the Province of Sind and had tersely and wittily wired the tidings back to the British War Office in the one word Peccavi, a boy was born in London who was to witness and in some measure to participate in more wars and in more fighting than any soldier of his generation or of the preceding or of the following one. Apparently uncursed with nerves or anything approaching physical fear, he was present at the battle of Plevna in 1877 and numbered among his friends Skobeleff the "White General," that Comet-like leader of horse, and Baker Pasha, the Russian's skilful enemy. Later he turned up in India and assisted in a few brushes in the passes with the Pathans, always welcomed in whatever far and lonely encampment he stumbled and always coolly at hand when the knives or the MartiniHenries went into action. For a few years of what seemed to him an inexcusably boring peace he wandered about England and the United States, in the former country being entertained by his sovereign and discoursing war and its merits with distinguished generals. As a war-artist of considerable merit his services were always at a premium with *"Memoirs of an Editor." By Edward P. Mitchell. Scribner's. $10. "Villiers: His Five Decades of Adventure." By Frederic Villiers. Harper's. $6. 454 Journalism Plus Romance the London journals and at the first darkening of the skies with the war-cloud Villiers made off toward the red center of things with all possible dispatch. The Balkans were particularly fertile in the form of activity that he loved and his martial, almost Gascon distinction of port became so well-known an adjunct, even a forerunner, of war, that the monarchs of those near-eastern nations it was said, were wont to prepare for trouble at a rumour of his appearance in their capitals. Villiers, the War Eagle, became a character well-known to the soldiers of many regiments in many armies, soldiers who fell in battles from Plevna to the Marne, along the steaming sandy wastes of Tel-elkebir, and Abu Klea, and Omdurman, but unlike them, he went on forever, missing death by inches, to die after witnessing the greatest of all wars, peacefully in the peace times that he hated, of old age and a certain weariness of life. A A FIGURE OF PURE ROMANCE SA figure of pure romance, to be which was after all his metier, Villiers ranks as highly as do Steed and Pulitzer and Mitchell in their chosen fields. As an artist it is possible that he was a mediocrity, as a correspondent only moderately able, but as an adventurous and fearless observer of mankind at war, as a character in which D'Artagnan and Sir John Hawkwood shared equally attractive parts, Villiers the War Eagle was alone in excellence. One would only wonder why he preferred the periphery of engagements to official action and the Queen's coat, save that, though of warrior fibre, he transcended the mere military in his spirit of sheer joy in excitement and the clash of arms. There were too many wonderful wars to go to for him to tie himself down to the army of any one nation, and besides all those that he attended he enjoyed to the full in the middle of their every action. It was one of Villiers' distinctions to serve as the model for Rudyard Kipling's Dick Heldar in "The Light that Failed." And it would seem, not only for Heldar, but in some measure for Torpenhow, the Nilghai, and for Keneu, called as may Villiers be called "The Great War Eagle.' Kipling's description of the fight at dawn when the spearmen of Osman Digna, mad-drunk with bhang and visions of their prophet's Paradise of Peris, destroyed the time-honored impregnability of a British Square, is based in every respect upon the actual experience of Villiers. Then, too, he saw Burnaby of Khiva fame and one of the last and most renowned of England's "beaux sabreurs" go down at Abu Klea before the emirs of the Mahdi, as they with the horsemen of the Baggara, swept in upon the squares. At sixty-three Villiers was in France and running with singularly unselfconscious intrepidity the chance of demolition by shells the like of which even his incomparable experience knew nothing. Another war, the greatest war of the lot; one can imagine him thanking God for having allowed him to live to see it, this rose, this very jewel among wars. For those who desire to believe that behind this and that report of troubles in the Balkans, in Morocco or in the remoter corners of the East, there exists a romance as glamorous as that which surrounds the names of Roland, of Bayard, or of Hiram the just, Villiers is the man for them, the one figure in the journalism of the last fifty years who will utterly convince them that what they had always hoped was true is indeed so. There are, obviously enough, others beside these men who have been active and notable influences behind the news of this and other countries. There were Watterson and Whitelaw Reid and Kohlsaat and in England the fascinating and forceful figure of Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe. Each possessed his sphere wherein his was the domination and his the authority but these spheres have all of them been parts and parts only of the one central body-journalism. The men behind the news, like the builders of great empires, complete their work and go, but the news like an empire that is wellconstructed, continues from generation to generation to perform its indispensable functions. THE WORLD'S WORKSHOP So many of the interesting things in the making of a magazine and the publishing of books never get past the editors' desks that we have decided to devote a few pages every month to sharing some of them with our readers. These include an acquaintance with writers, letters from readers, and a miscellany of other things that may interest others as much as they interest us.-THE EDITORS. This letter from St. Michaels, Maryland, sums up the case for the defense in a fashion suggestive not only of considerable reading but also of a knowledge of forensic debate. The writer most assuredly idles not her time away. Why Is the School Marm Little Read? Because she has to use her time and brain making records and reports, working out scientific tests, holding meetings of patrons and community clubs, correcting pupils' work, giving demonstration lessons to illustrate the new method of Professor X, and a little later, giving demonstrations to show that the X method is psychological and unpedagogical and the "new" method of Professor Y is psychological and pedagogically correct-and in turn demonstrate that Professor Y is wrong and Professor Z is right and so on until she gets back to Professor A and starts round again. Then she must hold entertainments to raise money for school purposes, hold conferences with individual parents and bring in absentees that the attendance officer cannot manage in order that her school may not be discredited. Besides there are professional books and school journals to be read, correspondence and summer school courses to be taken and supervisors and other officials to be propitiated. The trouble with the school marm is not that the salary is insufficient, but that the race has not produced enough superhumans to fill all school positions. When science has done her perfect work-perhaps a hundred generations hence, there may have been evolved a class of beings who can meet all these demands and also be well read. Tyler Dennett, author in this issue of the article "Could T. R. Have Stopped the War?" is an authority on subjects chiefly of Oriental or Near Eastern connection. He has traveled widely and is in close touch with problems of national or international significance. He now lectures on American history at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Washington, D. C. To the WORLD'S WORK for March Chester H. Rowell will contribute his fourth article on American Government, and Sir Philip Gibbs the second of his series on the Europe of to-day. Rollin Lynde Hartt's third article on "Prohibition As It Is," and the first instalment of R. O. Marsh's story of the White Indians will appear, and Arthur Chapman's story of the Colorado Tunnel, |