nd had a dozen men alert
to get me special matter of the sort that draws in the unattached
reader. The chief danger on the literary side of a weekly is that it
should fall into the hands of some particular school, and this I watched
for closely. It seems impossible to get vividness of apprehension and
breadth of view together in the same critic. So it falls to the wise
editor to secure the first and impose the second. Directly I detected
the shrill partisan note in our criticism, the attempt to puff a poor
thing because it was "in the right direction," or damn a vigorous piece
of work because it wasn't, I tackled the man and had it out with him.
Our pay was good enough for that to matter a good deal....

Our distinctive little blue and white poster kept up its neat persistent
appeal to the public eye, and before 1911 was out, the BLUE WEEKLY was
printing twenty pages of publishers' advertisements, and went into
all the clubs in London and three-quarters of the country houses where
week-end parties gather together. Its sale by newsagents and bookstalls
grew steadily. One got more and more the reassuring sense of being
discussed, and influencing discussion.

5

Our office was at the very top of a big building near the end of Adelphi
Terrace; the main window beside my desk, a big undivided window of
plate glass, looked out upon Cleopatra's Needle, the corner of the Hotel
Cecil, the fine arches of Waterloo Bridge, and the long sweep of south
bank with its shot towers and chimneys, past Bankside to the dimly seen
piers of the great bridge below the Tower. The dome of St. Paul's just
floated into view on the left against the hotel facade. By night and
day, in every light and atmosphere, it was a beautiful and various view,
alive as a throbbing heart; a perpetual flow of traffic ploughed and
splashed the streaming silver of the river, and by night the shapes of
things became velvet black and grey, and the water a shining mirror
of steel, wearing coruscating gems of light. In the foreground the
Embankment trams sailed glowing by, across the water advertisements
flashed and flickered, trains went and came and a rolling drift of smoke
reflected unseen fires. By day that spectacle was sometimes a marvel of
shining wet and wind-cleared atmosphere, sometimes a mystery of drifting
fog, sometimes a miracle of crowded details, minutely fine.

As I think of that view, so variously spacious in effect, I am back
there, and this