SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS.
MR. HENRY G. WREFORD, for fifty years the Times' correspondent in Southern Italy, died this week, full of years, and deserves something more than a passing word of comment. He was one of the few genuine heroes of the pen, the men who reflect lustre on the most ephemeral and least honoured of all serious professions. There have been and are among special correspondents plenty of brave men, who have behaved like volunteers in a forlorn-hope, and have faced death in the performance of duty with a daring unin- spired by the hope of honours or by that feeling of fidelity to a flag which, with so many otherwise commonplace natures, has operated like a religion ; but Mr. Wreford had a courage which was in some respects beyond them all. He had con- tracted, early in his service with the Times, a deep pity for the people of Naples, who repaid him at first with incessant insult, and a deep horror of the foul Bourbon Court, that "negation of God erected into a system," as Mr. Gladstone described it, which at that time tyrannised over their destinies. Most Englishmen, Mr. Gladstone perhaps excepted, have for- gotten it ; but there has never existed elsewhere in Europe anything like this Government, which defended itself with Swiss mercenaries, used as instruments the wretched lazzaroni of the capital, and ruled the respectable classes like a Pasha in Algiers or Tunis, punishing the slightest opposition by imprisonment, often lifelong, in dungeons which were, without aid from rhetoric, describable as mere wells. Unless an Ambassador, no man's life or liberty was safe if he were denounced by one of a myriad spies; and for years even the pleasure-lovers of Europe avoided the delicious Kingdom like a lazar-house. Mr. Wreford set himself to bring European opinion to bear on this den of horrors, and for seventeen years he persevered unflinchingly in his work. He was recog- nised after a little while as one of the most " dangerous " of opponents, as a man who was turning all Europe against the King's Government; and the devotees of that horrible Court swore to have their revenge. He was shadowed per- petually by spies ; men suspected of sending information to him were treated like criminals ; he was menaced with ruin by expulsion ; and the populace were excited against him till it was unsafe for him to enter Naples. Darker threats, too, were levelled against him by the zealots of the Court party. He himself showed the writer once proof positive that men who could not have been punished had proposed his assassina- tion; that two plans at least for kidnapping him had been matured; and that on one occasion a plot for drowning him had been within an ace of success. Daring one gloomy six months he held his life, as he believed, only from hour to hour, and owed it, as he thought, mainly to the protection of the British Minister, and one or two persons in a foreign Embassy. In reality he owed it, as after hearing his narrative the writer could not but recognise, to King Ferdinand, who was not the vulgar tyrant Englishmen believed, but a cool, shrewd cynic, who despised his subjects and most of his own agents, who was full of courage—a quality in him which Mr. Gladstone once recognised publicly after his death—and who was so completely King of the old Bourbon type, that he would not stoop to crime against a poor devil of a foreign correspondent who owed him no allegiance. Had Mr. Wreford been a Neapolitan, he would have died in torture. The King, however, who was by far the best-informed man in his dominions, understood perfectly well that the Kingdom -of the Two Sicilies alone among European Kingdoms lay at the mercy of the British Fleet ; that two men-of-war would .cut him off from Sicily, and one call Naples into insurrection; that he was coldly disliked by the very Powers which pro- tected him ; and that, if Switzerland recalled her children, he would be left face to face with subjects who might adulate but could not defend him. He wanted no duel to the death with either the Times or the British Parliament, and as be was a dreaded master, Mr. Wreford just escaped. During the whole of this period, half an ordinary genera- tion, Mr. Wreford, though by no means a man of the soldier type, but rather a retiring and sensitive civilian, with a habit of depression—he had been, we rather think, at one time a Nonconformist minister—held unswervingly on his way, never concealing any truth he knew, and striking some-
times fearful blows at a system which latterly he came to hate almost beyond reason. His courage may have been of the passive type, but he faced death, or worse, unfalteringly through years of feeble health, for the sake of men who gave him nothing back, not even their applause. He behaved, in fact, for years as one of the bravest of mankind, and when at last the evil despotism fell in a night as if struck down by the God it had despised, the ease of its fall was in great part due to the horror of it which he had patiently spread through Europe, and which had at last reacted on the Monarchy itself. He was a plain man, though a cultivated one, simple in thought and in the expression of his thought, with perhaps a faint vanity in his own skill in gathering information ; but he did a knight's service for Italy and for the world.
It will hardly be given to special correspondents again to do Mr. Wreford's kind of work, for in a silent and unnoticed way their whole position has changed. Those who scold at these gentlemen for their new method—we have done it -ourselves—hardly recognise the new conditions under which they are compelled to work, and which must often be to them- selves almost unendurably oppressive. The ideal corre- spondent of course, once seated in a European capital, should be at once an informal Ambassador, as the Times' men were for years, and an accurate painstaking historian. He should make himself popular enough to hear everything early ; he should be able to give everything its proper proportion ; and he should have the broad and passionless survey of a kistorian, careful only that his readers should go away really understanding the significance of what it is he has to narrate. The first duty can be still performed exceedingly well. Very little occurs in France of any importance of which M. de Blowitz, for instance, is not informed as rapidly and as completely as any second-class Minister ; and though he sometimes incurs ridicule by obtruding his personality, he is an invaluable channel of communication between two countries which have often a difficulty in comprehending each other's motives. So is Mr. Smalley, the London correspondent of the New York Tribune; and there are four or five less-known men whose names it might be impertinent to give, who gain at least as much information as any of the correspondents of old. We dare say, too, their sense of proportion is as good as ever, for though their predecessors left out much of the Court Circular rubbish which now deluges all papers, and disregarded the "commercial" projects now so carefully re- corded, they had very often fads of their own to which they devoted disproportionate space, and which are suppressed now because, to speak plainly, employers will not stand drawing heavy cheques to pay for their transmission. It is on the his- torian'sside that correspondents now fail, and, we fear, cannot in future help failing. However apt at compression a man may be, he still, if he is to make an interesting narrative, requires some space ; a great debate, for example, cannot be adequately outlined in leas than a column, and usually requires two. Now, a special correspondent is crippled as to space at almost every turn. He has, to begin with, to pay for every word; and rich as successful journals now are, they are still mercantile specula- tions, and it is absolutely necessary that the bill for telegrams should be kept within some reasonable limits, and bear some proportion to the total expenditure. Then space is invaluable to a newspaper proprietor. The English have no five-farthing coin, they will not pay three-halfpence for a paper, as Americans will—at least, that is a governing superstition with their owners—and the penny is just too little to make them independent of advertisements, which, again, to pay sufficiently, want room. And finally, there is the change in the public taste, which tends in every kind of literature markedly towards abbreviation. Snippets sell. People read many papers instead of one ; they dislike long narratives, as the House of Commons dislikes long speeches; and they will hardly read long explanations even of matters they want very much to see explained. We dislike the new system exceedingly, believing that it tends to hurried views and imperfect discussion ; but we question whether the Daily Chronicle is not right, and whether even the traditional length of the regular " leader " will long continue to hold its own. It is being discontinued in the provinces, we note, and the provincial newspaper managers are very acute in recognising their own interest, though they are spoiling their "London correspondence" by too great a variety of intelligence. We hardly see how a modern corre- spondent, unless he is left, as M. de Blowitz apparently is, to spend what he likes, is to remain a historian at all, and often admire the artistic skill and fine command of compression by which some sort of historic continuity is frequently maintained. It is next to impossible to record a debate at all adequately— for example, the debates on the Prussian Education Bill, a measure of the first importance, can hardly be said to have been reported to England at all—and there is a marked and quite new failure to describe the characters and positions of leading statesmen. They are names merely to the British public, even in cases, like that of Count Eulenberg, when the statesman may speedily rise to the very top, and become a personage of the most direct importance to every politician in the world. We suppose, when telephonic communication is a little more advanced, this necessity for shortness will be modi- fied, but at present we do not see how the special correspondent can perform his ancient function in the older way. It is a pity, for he was a most valuable agent in the formation of European opinion—take, for instance, the Times' correspondence about Hungary daring the long struggle of that Kingdom—and no one appears at all calculated to replace him. We have not got a dozen Grant Duffs to keep us all level with European history, and we do not know whether, with its new impatience, the public would listen to them if we had. The " letter " must be sent by telegraph, and must therefore be brief ; the art of condensation supersedes the art of style ; and the best, or at least the most profitable, correspondent, is the man who knows most, and can make his message tell most in fewest words. The new function requires great ability of a kind, but it is not the old kind, and we can fancy newspaper pro- prietors disliking an " earnest " man for such a post, and searching the profession with a microscope to pick out correspondents who resemble, to put it briefly, Ambassadors like Lord Dnfferin, men sure to hear from all sides, sure to see the important points, and sure also, unless England is directly concerned, to regard all " views" with a trace of serene disdain. Lord Granville would to-day be an ideal "special correspondent."
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