A Publisher Remembers
Just As It Happened. By Sir Newman Flower. (Cassell is.) WELLS once remarked to Sir Newman Flower, "A contented publisher is a continual feast." Sir Newman himself, in all the years in which he presided over the affairs of the great house of Cassell, had the appearance and the manner of serene contentment. His urbane, charitable arid affectionate remin- iscences disclose, with charming ingenuousness, an almost Cheeryble character. They do not make a book of great literary merit, but they are consistently and constantly interesting and agreeable.
A publisher of Sir Newman Flower's distinction encounters in the way of business a great many of the great. Cassell's list of authors, past and present, is impressive. Most of them in the past forty years have been Sir Newman's friends, as well as names on his current list. It was a good—and a heartening—experience for a young writer, in the days before the bombs fell, to go down that long, dingy, narrow courtyard off Ludgate Hill, to the offices at the sign of the Beautiful Savage, and there be as courteously welcomed as if you were H. G. W. or Louis Bromfield, or even R. L. S. himself. The climate of the office was, it is proper to suspect, Sir Newman's own. Yet this kind and soothing person had had his fights in his day. He tells of quitting the employment of Lord Northcliffe, and of a 'dramatic return to see the Chief not long before his death. He describes a stand-up quarrel with Lord Curzon, which, to those who recall Harold Nicolson's account of the redoubtable Roger Keyes's terror before Curzon, is indeed proof of fortitude.
A rich and happy life warmly remembered, and packed with incidents of an old and stabbing significance-Sir Newman tells his story vivaciously and utterly without malice. There is one especially vivid little gloss on literary history, in Sir Newman's account of himself as a boy in his teens hiding in the bracken to watch Hardy (whom he idolised) going to pay his Sunday visit to his old mother in her cottage. That has the sharpness, the sweetness, of the boy Walter Scott's encounter with Burns being lionised in an Edinburgh drawing- room. Sir Newman is especially good on Hardy, whom in later life, he knew well. He is not, I fear, so satisfactory on either Stevenson or W. E. Henley. Henley worked for some years on The Magazine of Art, which was published by Cassell's, but he did not have—as Sir Newman asserts—a club foot. He had an artificial leg, and walked with the help of a stick and a crutch. Sir Newman rounds in a pleasant sketch of Arnold Bennett ; it supplements appropriately the new and just view of Bennett, with the stress on Bennett's gener- osity and friendliness.
Kitty O'Shea, her brother Sir Evelyn Wood (who refused to believe she had the brains to write her own reminiscences), Gosse, Sir Frederick Treves, Lord Oxford, Stefan Zweig, Jellicoe, Princess Radziwill—Sir Newman's is a queerly mixed bag of acquaintance. The good publisher is like the good family lawyer, discreet, knowledgeable, kind and trustworthy. There is this difference, however : the publisher can usually tell, without offence and without disobeying his professional cctde. Perhaps Sir Newman's story would have been a little more exciting if he had been a little less discreet, if he had told a little mare of the ragamuffins, the failures and inexplicable dotties wfio from time to time trail in and out of a publisher's office ; but it Might have been less felicitous. One more word. Sir Newman has discovered a great deal about that remarkable Victorian best-seller, Seton Merriman, whose real name was Hugh Stowell Scott. Here are two other facts : he was at Loretto from October to December, 1873, under the great Dr. Almond, and his number in the School Register is 478.
JOHN CONNELL.
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