Stead, the Man: Personal Reminiscences (W. T. Stead)

Description

Foreword

As this volume has no pretensions to being a Biography but is only a sheaf of personal memories bound together with some details of W. T. Stead’s psychic work — more especially of the years wherein I was privileged to work with him — which will supplement those already otherwise recorded, I make no attempt to sketch, even in outline, his enormous activities in the many other fields which lie white to the harvest of the biographer.

However much many of his contemporaries may have disagreed with his views or his methods, posterity will find them to have been unanimous in agreement that the motive-power behind all his brilliant energies was of the highest and purest. So utterly unselfish, so full of the divine capacity to love and forgive, yet so infinitely human in his impetuous vehemence, in his fierce impassioned denunciation of all that is base and mean ; at times an enfant terrible, making one hold one’s breath in apprehension of the next denouement, at others a St. Francis in modern garb, gathering up a stray wet kitten, storm-driven on the Embankment on a wintry night, and sheltering it tenderly under his coat ; prince of journalists, apostle of peace, knighterrant of womanhood, quixotic champion of forlorn hopes and struggling causes — he has been truly called all these, and a full and complete record of his devoted life-work will be truly encyclopaedic when it arrives.

EDITH K. HARPER.