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40 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
Federal Reserve Act, Ezra Pound, Congressman Charles Lindbergh,
and many other Americans criticized it as too great a concentration
of credit.
One of Pound's London enthusiasts, Miss May Sinclair, had
made the publication of "The Ballad of the Goodly Fere" possible
by introducing its author to Ford Madox Hueffer, editor of The
English Review. Soon Pound was spending much of his time in
the offices of the Review with the genial Hueffer.
The magazine had been launched in December, 1908, shortly
after Pound's arrival in London, by a group of writers incensed
because Thomas Hardy had been unable to get one of his poems
published in the established magazines. This melancholy work, "A
Sunday Morning Tragedy", is not a very exciting poem, and, no
doubt, Hueffer had been planning such a venture for months, without
a sufficient excuse to rally his supporters. His helpmate, Violet
Hunt, has described the fevered manner in which Hueffer planned
the new periodical. He summoned his friends to all-night meetings,
and the details of the venture were worked out as though they were
plotting a political conspiracy.
Then, as now, the main problem of a would-be editor was to
finance the publication. Hueffer's friend, Arthur Marwood, agreed
to put up some of the money. For the remainder of the needed
sum, says Violet Hunt, Hueffer approached the various branches
of his family on the Continent, the German Hueffers, the Dutch
Hueffers, and the French Hueffers. Hermann Hueffer, a prominent
banker in Paris, who had secured the Duke de Tancourville as a
suitable husband for his daughter, agreed to support the Review.
The initial issue of December, 1908, boasted the names of Thomas
Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John Galsworthy, Count
Tolstoi, and H. G. Wells as contributors. It is doubtful if any single
copy of a literary periodical has ever contained so much new work
by such an array of world-famous writers.
Hueffer was able to call upon them because he was their intimate
friend. His father, Franz Hueffer, had come from Germany
to edit the Tauchnitz edition of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poems.
He fell in love with, and married, the daughter of Ford Madox
Brown, an artist whose home was the meeting-place for the pre-