John Delane.
If, in the middle days of the last century, you had seen the figure of a certain tall young man, ruddy of complexion and powerful of build, you might have foretold a dozen successful careers for him, as squire, lawyer, or man of business, but perhaps you would not have fitted him at once with his indubitable calling. That spark of genius, for surely it was not less, flashed in the brain of John Walter, proprietor of the Times’, when he saw the second son of a neighbour of his in the country riding to hounds or conducting a successful election on his behalf. John Thadeus Delane went to Oxford and distinguished himself there rather as a bold rider - ‘Mr Delane is part and parcel of his horse,’ wrote his tutor - a tennis-player, or a boxer (for the hot Irish blood in him would rise) than as a nice scholar or a mathematician. His letters to his friend George Dasent show him something of a Philistine, with a command of vigorous and wholesome English, lending itself happily to such casual remarks as those he had to make about his studies and his sports. He did not know, for instance, ‘how I am to cram a sufficient store of divinity into my head. As the premises will only be occupied a short time with the last-named commodity, the trouble of storing it should be slight. [I must] try to secure a patent safety vehicle... This is a most glorious country - capital people, excellent horses, prime feeding, and very fair shooting.’ Such is the slang of the ‘forties, which, with its comfortable lapse from the dignity of contemporary prose, reveals a young man lazily conscious of his power, with a capacity for shooting words straight if need be, and for distorting them at will, which is the despair of lady novelists who seek to reproduce it.
Directly he had taken his degree, in 1840, he went to Printing-house Square, and was occupied with various duties about the paper. Little is said of their nature, or of the way in which he discharged them, for he had now entered that unnamed world which is crowded but unchecked; there are duties which belong to no profession, nor are the limits of work bounded so long as the brain urges on. He made himself familiar with the House of Commons, we are told, ‘summarizing the remarks of the principal speakers’. We must imagine how swiftly he took the measure of the world around him, gauging silently the capacity of his machine for reporting and perhaps for directing the turmoil. A year later, at any rate, when Mr Barnes, the editor, died, Mr Walter had no hesitation in choosing ‘the youngest member of all the staff’, whose age was then twenty-three, to succeed him. Sense and industry and ability were his, but the easy margin of strength, as of a loosely fitting coat, which may be detected in his Oxford letters, marked him, to a discriminating eye, as the man who would put forth greater power than he had yet shown, with a competent tool in his hand, or would so weld himself to his instrument that their joint stroke would be irresistible. But it is one of the mysteries that tempt us and baffle us in this biography that the transition is almost unmarked. We hear Mr Delane exclaim once, in ‘tremendous spirits’, ‘By Jove, John,... I am editor of the ‘Times”,’ but in future the editor and the Times’ are one, as in the old days the undergraduate was part of his horse. What the condition of the paper was when he came to it, or what private estimate he had formed of its scope, we are not told. But as all agree that the age of Delane was the great age, and that the paper grew with its editor, we may believe that he undertook the task without articulate reflection, conscious of a power within him that would soon fill all the space permitted it. *What I dislike about you young men of the present day is that you all shrink from responsibility,’ he was wont to laugh, when people wondered.
Much of the paper’s industry as chronicler and reporter and simple publisher was merely that of a gigantic natural force, sucking in and casting forth again its daily cloud of print impartially; and the editor was lost in its shade. But almost at once the brain of the monster, which expressed itself daily in the four leading articles, was given cause to show its quality. There was a ‘Ministerial crisis’ and Delane had not only to anticipate the rest of the world in publishing the news, but to express an opinion. No study, were there material for it, could be more fascinating than the analysis of such an opinion. Hawthorne himself might have found scope for all his imagination, all his love of darkness and mystery, in tracing it from its first secret whisper to its final reverberation over the entire land. A great Minister sends for the editor to his private room, and speaks to him; a note from someone who has picked up a word at Court is left on him; instantly, with an audacity that may land him in disaster, he fits the parts together, and instructs his leader-writer to embody them in a column of English prose; tomorrow a voice speaks with authority in Court and market and Council Chamber. But whose voice is it? It is not the voice of Mr Delane, the urbane gentleman who rides along Fleet Street on his cob, nor is it the voice of Dr Woodham, the learned Fellow of Jesus. It has the authority of Government and the sting of independence: Downing Street trembles at it and the people of England give ear to it, for such is the voice of the ‘Times’.
It is easy to submit to the fascination of the idea, and to conceive a monster in Printing-house Square without personality but with an infallible knowledge of persons, ruthless as a machine and subtle as a single brain. And there are facts in this book which seem to justify the most extravagant statement that we can make. There is, of course, the romantic story of the ‘Times’ and the repeal of the Corn Laws; we read also how Louis Philippe and Guizot thought it worth their while to impede the paper’s correspondence; how the Czar heard of the Ultimatum of 1854 through the Times’ and not through the Foreign Office; how it was objected in the House of Lords that Cabinet secrets were made public, and the Times’ answered, ‘We are satisfied that it was useful to the public and to Europe’; how the Times’ foretold the Indian Mutiny, and was the first to reveal the state of the army in the Crimea; how the Times’ was foremost with the Queen’s Speech and with texts and resignations innumerable; making Ministries, deciding policies, exalting statesmen, and casting them down. The list might be lengthened, but surely without avail; for already there is some risk lest we grow beyond our strength and forget, what these volumes should recall, the character, the individual will, directing this giant force and placing its blows in such tender quarters His contemporaries certainly did not forget, for it was the independence of the paper that was chiefly valuable, or dangerous, as fortune chanced, and the spirit that preserved it from the blunt blow and shapeless mass of a machine was of course the spirit of Mr Delane. Together with these triumphs of organization we read of other triumphs that are no less remarkable. Prime Ministers and Secretaries of State lay aside (with relief one guesses) their impassive public countenance, and entrust Mr Delane not only with State secrets, but with private prejudices of their own. Here was one with greater knowledge than the best instructed of Ministers, with whom no secrecy availed, who was moreover so sequestered from the public eye that you might approach him without reserve, as patients their physician, or penitents their confessor. A letter from Lord Palmerston begins, ‘I am told you disapprove...’ and goes on to justify his action with allusions to foreign politics and the gout which, though each had a share in his behaviour, would not have been used to explain it either to the public or to his friends.
The anonymity which Delane took such care to preserve was no doubt of the utmost value in the conduct of the paper, investing it with an impersonal majesty; but there is reason to think that it came from no mere professional policy but was a deeply seated instinct in the character of the man. He was infinitely receptive, and so far ‘anonymous’ by nature that the broad columns of the Times’, filled with the writing of other men but sharpened and guided by himself, expressed all of him that he chose to express. When he left his rooms in the morning he rode about London, followed by a groom, calling at the House of Commons or at Downing Street, and took his lunch with one great lady and his tea with another. He dined out almost nightly, and met frequently all the great nobles and celebrities of the time. But his demeanour, we are told, was inscrutable; he was of opinion that society
should be exclusive; and his attitude generally was one of ‘observant silence’. He never mentioned the Times’ after he had left the office, though the paper was always in his thoughts. At length, when he had stored his mind with observations, he returned to Printing-house Square, and, with his energies at full play and his staff circling round him, shaped the course of the paper in accordance with his own view until it was three or four in the morning and he must rest before the labours of the day. And yet, in spite of his silence - his broad way of looking at tendencies and institutions rather than at individuals - men and women, we read, gave him their confidences. They were sure of able consideration from a man who had infinite experience of men, but, as it appears from his letters, they were sure also of a massive integrity which inspired absolute trust, both that he would respect your secret, and that he would respect more than you or your secret, what was right. His letters, however, can seldom be said to add anything that the columns of the Times’ have not already supplied; but they are token again of the liberal truth of his phrase, when there was talk of his retirement, ‘All that was worth having of [my life] has been devoted to the paper.’
There was not sufficient space between his professional life and his private life for any change of view or difference of code. We may find in that fact some clue to the amazing authority which he wielded, for it is easy to see that if you disproved some opinion of his or disparaged some method you aimed a blow at the nature of the man himself, the two being of one birth. When he travelled abroad and visited towns famous for their beauty or their art he was unconscious of their appeal, but was inclined to adopt on such occasions the attitude of a portly gentleman with pretty children. Perhaps he had noticed some new factory or some stout bridge from the train window, and had found in it the text of a leading article. He travelled much, and visited any place that might become the centre of action; and in time of peace he went on pilgrimage through the great houses of England, where the nerves of the country come nearest to the surface. It was his purpose to know all that could be known of the condition and future of Europe, so far as certain great signs reveal it, and if he ignored much there was no wiser or more discriminating judge of the symptoms he chose to observe.
One quality seems to mark his judgments and to add to their value - they are so dispassionate. The indifference he always showed to what was thought of him came, naturally, from his well-founded trust in himself; but there was another reason for it, once or twice hinted in the course of this book, and once at least outspoken. The paper was more to him than his own fortunes, and, thus divested of personality, he came to take a gigantic and even humorous view of the whole, which sometimes seems to us sublime, sometimes callous, and sometimes, when we read certain phrases near the end, very melancholy. He was the most attentive observer of the political life of his age, but he took no part in it. When he was attacked he gave, with one exception, no answer. His anonymity, his reticence - no man was to take his portrait or to make him look ridiculous - are allied surely with the casual bluntness of speech and indifference to praise or blame which gave his opinion its peculiar weight. ‘Something like consternation prevailed at the War Office and at the Horse Guards when it became known that Delane intended to be present upon Salisbury Plain.’ But could he have cared so much for the world, for politics, for the welfare of numbers had he not been indifferent to his personal share in it? or again, would he so soon have tired of the scene had some part of it touched him more nearly? Again and again the phrase recurs. The New Year found me, as the last had done, alone at Printing-house Square,’ and the loneliness deepened as life drew on until we find such a sentence as this: “Nobody now [his mother being dead] cares about me or my success, or my motives, and that weariness of life I had long felt has been gaining on me ever since... I have much to be thankful for, [but] I have become so indifferent to life... weary both of work and idleness, careless about society and with failing interests.’ But it would be unwise to allow such a sentence to set its seal upon the rest, or to colour too sadly that colossal erection of courage and devotion which he called ‘the Paper”; his success only was tinged with ‘a browner shade’ than it might otherwise have worn.
When he was middle-aged he bought himself a tract of common near Ascot, and busied himself in reclaiming the land and in playing the farmer. It is easy to see him there, looking much like a country squire with the interests of his crops at heart, as he rode about and drew in great draughts of the open air. From the clods of earth and the watery English sky he received a passive satisfaction, and came perhaps to enjoy an easier intercourse with these dumb things than with human beings.
Body and Brain.
One might read the lives of all the Cabinet Ministers since the accession of Queen Victoria without realizing that they had a body between them. To imagine any of the statues in Parliament Square running, climbing, or even in a state of nudity is not only impossible but also unseemly. The life, dignity, character of statesmen is centred in the head; the body is merely a stalk, smooth, black and inexpressive, whether attenuated or obese, at the end of which flowers a Gladstone, a Campbell-Bannerman, or a Chamberlain. But you have only to look at a photograph of Theodore Roosevelt to see that he and his body are identical. The little round pugnacious head with the eyes screwed up as if charging an enemy is as much part of his body as a bull’s head is part of his body. Decency requires that the man’s body shall be cut off from his head by collar, frock coat and trousers, but even under that disguise we still see, without any sense of unseemliness, bones, muscles, and flesh.
As Mr Thayer remarks in the course of his witty and sensible biography, very little is yet known of the interaction between mind and body. The mind in biography as in sculpture is treated as a separate and superior organ attached to an instrument which is, happily, becoming obsolete. If Cabinet Ministers exercise their bodies for a few hours it is only in order to clarify their brains. But Roosevelt, though given by nature a sickly and asthmatic body which might have claimed the pampered life of a slave, always treated his body as a companion and equal. Indeed, his education until he left college was more the education of the body than of the mind. It was not until he had wrought a light weak frame into a tough thick body capable of immense endurance that his brain came into partnership. If he used his brain at all it was not to think about books but about animals. He was taken on a tour through Europe as a small boy, but what did he see? Only that there are flocks of aquatic birds on the banks of the Nile, and that in Cairo there is a book by an English clergyman that tells you a great deal about them. In Venice he wrote in his diary, ‘We saw a palace of the doges. It looks like a palace you could be comfortable and snug in (which is not usual).’ The poor boys have been dragged off to the orful picture galery’ wrote his little sister. Roosevelt had no artistic sense either as boy or man, so that we are not able to consider the effect upon an artist of owning a body. But directly the body and mind came into partnership it was plain that for political purposes no combination is more powerful.
American politics in the ‘eighties appear to an English reader as a rough-and-tumble shindy of public house loafers in which the only serviceable weapon is a strong right arm. When Roosevelt said on leaving college ‘I am going to try to help the cause of better government in New York; I don’t exactly know how,’ his ambition seemed to his friends ‘almost comic’. Politics were not for ‘gentlemen’. Jake Hess, the Republican Boss, and his heelers were equally amused. What business had a youth of the ‘kid glove and silk stocking set’ among such as them? After a little experience of him they owned that he was ‘a good fellow’ - ‘a good mixer’. Both friends and enemies were wont to expatiate upon his luck. Directly Roosevelt was safely shelved for life as Vice-President, President McKinley was shot dead. The greatest prize in the United States fell into his hands without an effort. That was the sort of thing that always happened to Roosevelt. But it is impossible to feel that his progress had anything accidental about it. Fortune, indeed, sho
wed her self quite ready to suppress him had he been made of suppressive material. The year 1883 found him out of politics, alienated from many of his best friends, and bereaved of his wife. Intellectually and emotionally he was disillusioned and disheartened. Then flooded in to his rescue that strange passion for using muscles and breathing fresh air and throwing oneself naked upon nature and seeing what happens next which cannot be called intellectual but which is certainly not merely animal. He became a ranchman. His companions were uncivilized; his duties were those of a primitive man. He lived with horses and cattle and at any moment might have to shoot or be shot. The same thing happened with the desperadoes of Little Missouri as had happened with Boss Hess and his heelers. They began by despising his spectacles and ended by thinking him the same kind of man as themselves. When he was President of the United States a cowboy came up to him and said, ‘ “Mr President, I have been in jail a year for killing a gentleman.”
“How did you do it?” asked the President, meaning to inquire as to the circumstances. “Thirty-eight on a forty-five frame,” replied the man, thinking that the only interest the President had was that of a comrade who wanted to know with what kind of tool the trick was done.’ No other President, it is said, from Washington to Wilson would have drawn that answer.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 518
