Books beget books, even when they are books of autobiography. Not that the writer of reminiscence will admit as much. He is—if you believe him—the victim of an irrepressible impulse, or he has at length (usually at great length) yielded to the solicitations of a large circle of acquaintances. I am impelled to my present enterprise by no sense of my own aptitude, nor have my discerning friends urged that some record of my experiences would supply a long-felt want. My book—like a great many other books—owes its existence to a book that went before it. In other and plainer words, if Mr. Philip Gibbs had not written his novel entitled “The Street of Adventure,” this present collection of reminiscences would never have been attempted. And I should, perhaps, apologize to Mr. Gibbs for saddling him with the awful responsibility. The novel to which allusion has been made—and a very excellent one it is—suddenly, but with much distinctness, suggested my course. The muck-rake of reminiscence is deliberately taken up because I represent a condition of Press life that has apparently ceased to exist. If one accepts the statements of Mr. Gibbs—and there is every reason why one should—the Fleet Street of to-day bears no sort of resemblance to the Fleet Street of yesterday. If I describe the London Press and the London Pressman of less than two decades ago, I am describing a state of things that has been reformed off the face of the earth, and a race of men extinct as the Dodo.

To an old member of the Press this is the real significance of “The Street of Adventure,” for the story describes—with entire candour and accuracy; one can entertain no doubt about that—the working of the Metropolitan Press and its personnel as they exist at this the dawn of the century. I have read chapter after chapter of the story with a growing sentiment of astonishment and dismay. The accomplished author describes, at first hand, a conjuncture of men and conditions so different to that existing in my time that I completely fail to recognize in this picture of the present a single salient characteristic of the past. Had the writer discovered for us evidences of a natural progress of evolution, a survival of fitness, an institution rising on stepping-stones of its dead self to higher things, this book had never been conceived. But this melancholy tale suggests a sad and sudden deterioration, the inauguration of a period of decadence, the setting in of a newspaper rot. It is in the belief that a certain interest must centre about times that have gone beyond recall, and round the names of the men whose successors are ruthlessly painted for us in the pages before me, that I address myself to the task of fixing the random recollection of some twenty jocund years.

During the seventies and eighties I knew my Fleet Street well. I worked among its presses; was on intimate terms with many of its most famous habituÉs; revelled in its atmosphere; and, in a word, lived its strenuous but happy life. And I would wish no better now—could such things be—than to live it all over again: granted, of course, that I lived it under the same conditions and among the same companions. Under the conditions and among the companions described in “The Street of Adventure,” a survivor of the seventies or eighties would find life intolerable. For the conditions, as described, are degrading, and the companionship unwholesome and depressing. It is impossible to catch the new atmosphere, to visualize the new journalist. And any nascent desire I may once have cherished to visit the scenes of my ancient labours has been effectually quenched by the perusal of these squalid records.

The time occupied in the unfolding of the drama which marks our author’s starting-point commences with the founding of an important daily paper, and ends with the foundering of the same. The dramatis personÆ belong entirely to the staff of the wonderful party organ, with the proprietor, shadowy but maleficent, brooding over the adventure like a gloomy and heartily detested Fate. In making the acquaintance of the members of the staff I am being introduced to a new race. I recognize nothing in character, equipment, or even in physique, that for a moment recalls the figures of the past. For “there were giants on the earth in those days.” The characters represented here are anÆmic, neurotic, hysterical. Their professional avocation brings them into competition with women, and the conditions of their service involves working with them as colleagues and accepting them as comrades. This intimate professional association may account for the hysterics—to some extent. But it does not account for the infinite joylessness which is the dominant note of the record. The various characters seem to move in a fuliginous cloud beyond which they are always scenting disaster. Should the disaster ensue, they are as men and women without hope. When, in effect, the dreaded calamity does overtake them—not without due notice—they are like mountain sheep in a thunder-storm: awe-stricken and helpless. We of a brisker time might, under similar circumstances, have imitated sheep in that we would have had recourse to our “damns.” But the gentlemen of “The Street of Adventure” have not spirit enough even for that. To change the figure: Their ship has foundered; they abandon themselves to their fate, for not one of them can swim.

Now, in the times of which I am about to record a few personal impressions, total disaster of the kind described here was impossible. That is to say, collapse of a newspaper did not involve the endowment of the individual members of its staff with the key of the street. For although the failure of a journal—and I have watched over the last hours of more than one or two of them—might mean a temporary crippling and a serious curtailment of income to certain members of the staff, it never involved a drought in all the springs of income. For even the most important writers on the staff of a daily newspaper had other irons in the fire. Indeed, the more important the writer, the greater the number of fires offered for the accommodation of his irons. But the adventurers in this new Fleet Street are represented as being bound body and soul to a single proprietor. They are in thrall to one insistent master. In the morning they are expected to report themselves at the office, and are then to take their places in a sort of common-room waiting for orders, much as messenger-boys at their call-centres lounge around waiting for their “turn.”

The atmosphere, as I endeavour to catch it from these illuminating pages, is that of a barracks—barracks provided for an army where women serve in the ranks. One by one the anxious, nervous waiters are sent on their several missions. Their tasks are not of a very cheerful or inspiring kind. Crime-hunting, according to Mr. Gibbs, appears to be a tremendous “feature” in the journals of the period, and the crime-hunter, as observed by him, is the most virile (perhaps I had rather say the least effeminate) of these queer adventurers. He, at all events, “lives up” to his mission, and even provides his home with an object-lesson in the social strata through which he works in search of his quarry, for he has taken under his “protection” a member of the criminal classes, and established her as mistress of his flat in Battersea. Pretty well this for one of the most distinguished members of the staff of a leading Metropolitan journal! and quaint reading for those who belong to other times, and illustrated—I am happy to think—other manners. If, however, the ladies and gentlemen of the newspaper staff of the period are depicted as eccentric in both conduct and appearance, their conversation when they forgather in their gaollike common-room, or in their favourite taverns, is neither bright nor edifying. They interchange some cheap philosophical reflections, and occasionally employ a preciosity of diction which, introduced in the eighties, was laughed out of Fleet Street by the men of that bustling time. Beyond these exchanges of conversational mock-jewellery, their talk is all of “shop.” And deadly dull it is. The poor creatures never deviate into fun. Their young lives are coloured by a sense of apprehension and oppression. To them the newspaper is an awful mother. Yet her death means the sealing-up of the founts by which they live. And all their thoughts are grey and melancholy in anticipation of the imminent catastrophe. When eventually the long-anticipated doom is announced, the sensation of the reader is that of relief. The chapter in which the disaster is set forth is, as a piece of writing, so forcible and so convincing that one is driven to the conclusion that the writer is describing an actual occurrence. And the victims? Does their conduct under the final stroke evoke our sympathy as their apologist evidently means that it should? Personally I am conscious of no sentiments other than those of pity and contempt. When the proprietor makes the announcement that he has gone the limit, and that no further issue of his costly and ill-fated paper will be made, some of the men are described as weeping; all are more or less hysterical. The busy builders of an overturned ant-heap arouse our admiration by their courage and capacity and resource. The pitiable creatures who crawl out into the night from the crumbling press-heap of Fleet Street can but provoke a gibe. Some of them seek the oblivion purchasable in public-houses—for the journalist in “The Street of Adventure” understands a tavern only as a place in which to get drunk—others seek consolation in the flats of the lady members of the staff, an expedient more sober at once and more economical. I quit their society with pleasure. They belong to a marrowless, joyless, invertebrate breed; seedy, selfish, but superior persons, affording at all times a safe medium for maleficent mind-microbes on the prowl after a reliable culture.

If “The Street of Adventure” supplies a cinematographic record of the London journalistic life of to-day, it should be well worth while, I think, to compose some account of the very different conditions prevailing on the Press less than two decades ago; to present some fairly recognizable sketches of the gentlemen of the Press who bore the burden and heat of that day; to indicate the manner in which our cheery duties were discharged; and—a more difficult matter—to render, if possible, something of the atmosphere of the period. My own experience, roughly speaking, covers a period of twenty years. It extends from 1870 to 1890. The mere record of a few of the names of those with whom at one time or another I became associated indicates at once the great gulf fixed between the Then and the Now. There were, among others, George Augustus Sala, Godfrey Turner, “Scholar” Williams, Edmund Yates, Gilbert Venables, Tom Purnell, Archibald Forbes, Captain Hamber, George Henty, John Augustus O’Shea, Edmund O’Donovan, Hilary Skinner, Charles Williams, Henry Pearse, John Lovell. In the mere matter of physique this short catalogue suggests another age of journalists. Imagine these men, or any one of them, being thrown into hysterics by the failure of a newspaper to pay its way. Fancy Forbes in tears over the Daily News reduced to a halfpenny! Or Edmund O’Donovan, on the morrow of his proprietor’s financial ruin, seeking balm for his wounded spirit in the flats of lady colleagues!

By the nature of his calling the journalist is thrown much into contact with those outside his profession. The descriptive writer and special correspondent touches life at all points. A memorable struggle in the Commons House; the more lurid impact of armies; coronations; first nights at the theatre; command nights at the opera; the funerals of statesmen; prize-fights—the thousand pageants that make up the passing show called “public life”—these were approached by the Press correspondents, not in the spirit of nervous despondency described as characterizing the attitude of the puppets of Mr. Gibbs. My contemporaries went to work in an optimistic mood, mixed with the pageant with an air of cheery familiarity, and recorded their impressions in articles which would be considered nowadays as too picturesque, too vigorous, and too literary in style. Their functions brought them into pleasant contact with the heroes of whom they sung. They were given to looking at things from the inside as well as from the outside. They made friendships among the Parliament men, the pugilists, the pulpiteers, and the players, of whose exploits they were the chartered chroniclers. If an acquired familiarity with social functions of every sort could constitute a Society man, then the journalist of my period should—after a long and exhausting experience—possess all the gifts and graces of that ineffable being. And at the least his retrospect should be of the most pleasant description. He will recall with delight his experience of the dandies and the dullards, the wits and the wantons, with whom he came in contact during his excursions in those higher altitudes. Actors and actresses were, of course, his ordinary prey. Among the stars of the dramatic firmament he revolved in an amity now and then disturbed by some notice less fulsome than the object of it may have deemed acceptable. But on the whole the terms existing in my time between Press and Stage were those of immense consideration each for each. That the love of each for each has grown more ardent in these later days may be attributable to the prodigious increase in the advertising orders received by newspaper managers from the managers of playhouses. Painters were less amenable. Them you had to meet socially. They had the least possible respect for the professional journalist’s opinion of pictures. They affected to ignore newspaper criticism of their exhibited works, or, if they were thrust upon them, shuddered as they read. Artists in black-and-white found their way to Fleet Street, but their dealings were confined to the illustrated papers. The first time that a drawing appeared in a daily paper was, if I remember rightly, when the Daily Telegraph published what it called “a portrait sketch” of Lefroy the murderer, a publication which led, it may be remembered, to the arrest of that miscreant. To-day the black-and-white artist is in the ascendant, and I entertain a pious hope that the day is not far off when its critics will habitually say of a newspaper, not that it is well or ill “written,” but that it is well or ill “drawn.”This book will be largely anecdotal. I may therefore be permitted at this point—irrelevantly and parenthetically—to introduce a reminiscence of Oscar Wilde which the mention of Lefroy recalls to me; I might forget it later. I was sitting at Romano’s in the company of that clever and ill-fated genius shortly after the trial of Lefroy. Wilde was amusing the company with his affectations and paradoxes. “If,” he said, in his ineffably superior way—“if I were not a poet, and could not be an artist, I should wish to be a murderer.” “What!” exclaimed one of us, “and have your portrait-sketch in the Daily Telegraph?” “Better that,” cooed Wilde, “than to go down to the sunless grave unknown.” On the same occasion the merits of Irving—then attracting the town—came up for discussion. Wilde was a warm supporter of the actor’s methods, and indulged in a strain of exaggerated praise over the performance then holding the boards at the Lyceum. “But what about his legs?” inquired an irreverent listener. “Irving’s legs,” answered Wilde, with the manner of a man who is promulgating some eternal truth—“Irving’s legs are distinctly precious, but his left leg is a poem!”

Having permitted myself this moment of “comic relief,” I proceed to state the plan which I propose to follow in the following pages. I disclaim any title to the office of auto-biographer. I am nobody. My own twenty years’ experience is nothing. The interest of my reminiscences centres entirely in those others among whom my lot was cast. So, having in the three following chapters described the stages over which I drifted into journalism, I shall in the succeeding chapters abandon any chronological arrangement of narrative, and group in each section certain events, individuals, enterprises, and incidents. And the interest I hope to enhance by the introduction of incidents and anecdotes that have come under my personal observation and been uttered in my own hearing.

As I essay to challenge my memory of that pleasant past, the first results are not satisfactory. The pictures are confused in composition and blurred in general effect. After a little patient waiting—much in the manner of our late friend Stead in Julia’s bureau—the blurred pictures acquire other characteristics. The second effect is kaleidoscopic. The retrospect is full of movement and colour. At last the kaleidoscopic effects become mere atmosphere, and one by one, or in groups, the dramatis personÆ take their places on the stage. And the curtain rises on the play.