A GREAT JOURNALIST
By WILSON HARRIS
BY J. A. Spender's death this country loses its greatest journalist ; nor can I think of any other country that can produce a greater. That judgement may be open to challenge. Most judge- ments are. But I have held it much too long to abandon it now that he has gone.
In a sense, of course, Alfred Spender belonged to an earlier generation, though he was writing to within a fortnight of his death, partly because writing was in his blood and he had always things to say worth saying, partly to distract his mind from the racking pain that had been torturing his body in these last years. These years, these last two decades, have been the period of Spender the author, and the biographies of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith, The Public Life and Life, Yournalism and Politics have been among their harvest. But greater in relation to journalism than the last phase in relation to authorship were the years of the old green Westminster, which except for a brief initial period under E. T. Cook, Spender edited from its birth in 1893 to its lamented death thirty years later. In the ten years before the last war the West- minster, with Spender in command, F. C. Gould as .cartoonist and Charles Geake as the writer of its admirably terse and pungent Notes, touched its high-water mark. In spite of its relatively very small circulation its influence was remarkable. A Liberal Govern- ment was in power, and the great bulk of the London morning papers were Conservative. Punch once drew an entertaining picture of the Liberal stalwart picking up the papers at his club. The Times assured him the country was going to the dogs, the Telegraph was even gloomier, the Standard more sombre still. His agitation grew with every paragraph, and he had been reduced to something like collapse by the time—about i2.3o—the attendant brought in a green sheet with Spender's invariable leader (for except on his rare holidays no one else ever wrote it) on the front. It was clutched, like a lifebuoy by a drowning-man, the leader was devoured, the clouds dispersed, the sun shone, all was well. There was much more than a modicum of truth in that.
What were the qualities that made Spender a great journalist?
They were many; and all --essential elements in his equipment. To a rich background of culture, acquired at Balliol under Jowett, with Cosmo Lang, Grey and Curzon among his contemporaries, was added wide knowledge of men and affairs, the command of a clear and un- pretentious prose style, sound judgement tempered, when tempered at all, by charity, scrupulous fairness in assessments of friends and enemies, and immovable adhesion to the highest standards of his profession. In brief, it was character welded to intellect. He would, I think, not have accepted C. P. Scott's famous "Comment is free, facts are sacred," without one reserve. Comment is free only within limits. It must be based on certain principles. No commentator is free to be consciously unjust to a man or a party or a country, even an enemy country. Truth must be the controlling factor.
It was Spender's personal integrity that has always impressed me most. Not only was he incapable of anything petty or "smart," it was utterly impossible to imagine a connection between him and such things. There was no one to whom younger journalists would turn more instinctively for advice on any professional or personal question, and none of them ever appealed to his wisdom and sympathy in vain. I was once, if I may quote an example, approached by a representative of a foreign Government and asked if I would go to the other end of Europe, study a certain contro- versial question on the spot and write a book on it. I said at once that it would interest me, but that it would obviously not be a com- mercial proposition, and equally obviously I could not go at the expense of the Goverruhent in question to write on a dispute in which it was directly interested. My scruples seemed to cause some surprise, and the idea crossed my mind that the difficulty might- be solved by the Government concerned inviting a reputable publisher to get a book written on the desired subject on terms which were no business of mine, with the suggestion that I might perhaps be asked to write it, on terms to be settled between the publisher and me. I put that to Spender. "No," he said decisively. "If you didn't know -the Government was behind the publisher it would be all right. But as things are you can't do it." Such were his standards, and of course he was right. Never were fixed standards more needed than today, in journalism and many other professions. Never did journalist more religiously maintain the highest standards than Spender.
In the days of the Liberal Governments of 1906-15 Spender exerted more political influence than any other other journalist of any party, for he was the only one whom Mr. Asquith, too exclusive his relations with the Press, habitually consulted and received at times at Downing Street. Grey, moreover, his -contemporary a 13alliol, was at ffie Foreign Office, and Haldane, whom he kne well, at the War Office. In other ways he was able to mould polioy for he sat on three Royal Commissions—on Divorce, on Egypt a on the Private Manufacture of Armaments. He had travelled i oh India. He many times visited Germany, and had som embarrassing interchanges with the Kaiser, who would ask h. point-blank such questions as: "Why don't some of your Minister come here and see me, Mr. Spender? Why doesn't Grey come? He was said to have been invited to go to Washington as Arnbas sador ; that, at any rate, was seriously discussed.
That Spender was incapable of adapting himself to the demand and standards of mass-production journalism may be counted defect—or a virtue. His closing days were not his happiest, f the Westminster was gone, and there was no pulpit open to him corn parable to the pulpit he had built himself. But one felt that Spende was always far greater than such externals. He went on writing what is equally important, he went on reading ; he enjoyed th countryside he lived in ; till he Was too ill he came to the Refo Club regularly and met his friends. Always, through his pen his personality, he gave much to other people's lives. Always, divers ways, he got much himself from life. He wai made Companion of Honour in 1937. A companion of honour he ha been all his working days.
Let me add this. The injunction de mormis nil nisi bonum oft covers an appreciation going far beyond the warrant of the fa I have written nothing here that I have not frequently said Alfred Spender while he lived.
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