In the autumn of 1882 a little group of literary men, assembled around Richard Watson Gilder's fireside, decided to organize an Authors Club in New York. They arranged for the drafting of a tentative constitution and issued invitations for twenty-five of us to meet a little later at Lawrence Hutton's house in Thirty-fourth Street to organize the club.
We met there on the 13th of November and, clause by clause, adopted a constitution.
It was obvious in that little assemblage itself, that some such organization of authors was badly needed in New York. For, though there were only twenty-five of us there, all selected by the originating company, every man of us had to be introduced to some at least of the others present. The men of letters in New York did not know each other. They were beset by unacquaintance, prejudices, senseless antagonisms, jealousies, amounting in some cases to hatreds. They had need to be drawn together in a friendly organization, in which they could learn to know and like and appreciate each other.
The Founding of the Authors Club
So great were the jealousies and ambitions to which I have referred that early in the meeting Mr. Gilder—I think it was he—called three or four of us into a cornerand suggested that there was likely to be a fight for the presidency of the club, and that it might result in the defeat of the entire enterprise. At Mr. Gilder's suggestion, or that of some one else—I cannot be sure because all of us in that corner were in accord—it was decided that there should be no president of the club, that the government should be vested in an executive council, and that at each of its meetings the council should choose its own chairman. In later and more harmonious years, since the men of the club have become an affectionate brotherhood, it has been the custom for the council to elect its chairman for a year, and usually to reëlect him for another year. But at the beginning we had conditions to guard against that no longer exist—now that the literary men of New York know and mightily like each other.
The eligibility clause of the constitution as experimentally drawn up by the committee, prescribed that in order to be eligible a man must be the author of "at least one book proper to literature," or—and there followed a clause covering the case of magazine editors and the like.
As a reader for a publishing house, I scented danger here. Half in play, but in earnest also, I suggested that the authorship of at least one book proper to literature would render pretty nearly the entire adult male population of the United States eligible to membership in the club, unless some requirement of publication were added. My manuscript reading had seemed to me at least to suggest that, and, as a necessary safeguard, I moved to insert the word "published" before the word "book," and the motion was carried with the laughter of the knowing for its accompaniment.
The club was very modest in its beginnings. As its constituent members were mainly persons possessed of nomoney, so the club had none. For a time our meetings were held at the houses of members—Lawrence Hutton's, Dr. Youmans's, Richard Grant White's, and so on. But as not all of us were possessed of homes that lent themselves to such entertainment, we presently began meeting at Sieghortner's and other restaurants. Then came a most hospitable invitation from the Tile Club, offering us the use of their quarters for our meetings. Their quarters consisted, in fact, of a kitchen in the interior of a block far down town—I forget the number of the street. The building served Edwin A. Abbey as a studio—he had not made his reputation as an artist then—and the good old Irishwoman who cared for the rooms lived above stairs with her daughter for her sole companion. This daughter was Abbey's model, and a portrait of her, painted by his hand, hung in the studio, with a presentation legend attached. The portrait represented one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen. It was positively ravishing in its perfection. One day I had occasion to visit the place to make some club arrangement, and while there I met the young lady of the portrait. She was of sandy complexion, freckled, and otherwise commonplace in an extreme degree. Yet that exquisitely beautiful portrait that hung there in its frame was an admirably faithful likeness of the girl, when one studied the two faces closely. Abbey had not painted in the freckles; he had chosen flesh tints of a more attractive sort than the sandiness of the girl's complexion; he had put a touch of warmth into the indeterminate color of her pale red hair; and above all, he had painted intelligence and soul into her vacuous countenance. Yet the girl and the portrait were absolutely alike in every physical detail.
I have not wondered since to learn that the husbands of high-born English dames, and the fathers of English maidens have been glad to pay Abbey kings' ransoms forportraits of their womankind. Abbey has the gift of interpretation, and I do not know of any greater gift.
Dime Novels
The rear building in which we met by virtue of the Tile Club's hospitality was approached through an alleyway, or covered gallery rather, concerning which there was a tradition that two suicides and a murder had been committed within its confines.
"How inspiring all that is!" said John Hay one night after the traditions had been reported in a peculiarly prosaic fashion by a writer of learned essays in psychology and the like, who had no more imagination than an oyster brings to bear upon the tray on which it is served. "It makes one long to write romantic tragedies, and lurid dramas, and all that sort of thing," Mr. Hay went on. "I'm sorely tempted to enter upon the career of the dime novelist."
This set us talking of the dime novel, a little group of us assembled in front of the fire. Some one started the talk by saying that the dime novel was an entirely innocent and a very necessary form of literature. There John Hay broke in, and Edwin Booth, who was also present, sustained him.
"The dime novel," Mr. Hay said, "is only a rude form of the story of adventure. If Scott's novels had been sufficiently condensed to be sold at the price, they would have been dime novels of the most successful sort. Your boy wants thrill, heroics, tall talk, and deeds of derring-do, and these are what the dime novelist gives him in abundance, and even in lavish superabundance. I remember that the favorite book of my own boyhood was J. B. Jones's 'Wild Western Scenes.' His 'Sneak' was to me a hero of romance with whom Ivanhoe could in no way compare."
"But dime novels corrupt the morals of boys," suggested some one of the company.
"Do they?" asked Mr. Hay. Then a moment later he asked: "Did you ever read one of them?"
The interrupter admitted that he had not.
"Till you do," said Mr. Hay, "you should hesitate to pass judgment. The moral standards of the dime novel are always of the highest. They are even heroic in their insistence upon honor and self-sacrifice in behalf of the right. They are as chivalric as the code of honor itself. There is never anything unclean in the dime novel, never anything that even squints at toleration of immorality. The man beset by foes is always gallantly supported by resolute fellows with pistols in their hands which they are ready to use in behalf of righteousness. The maiden in trouble has champions galore, whose language may not always square itself with Sunday School standards, but whose devotion to the task of protecting innocence is altogether inspiring."
"What about their literary quality?" asked some one in the group.
"It is very bad, I suppose," answered Edwin Booth, "but that isn't the quality they put to the front. I have read dozens, scores, hundreds of them, and I have never challenged their literary quality, because that is something to which they lay no claim. Their strength lies in dramatic situations, and they abound in these. I must say that some of them are far better, stronger, and more appealing than are many of those that have made the fortune of successful plays."
"Do you read them for the sake of the dramatic situations, Mr. Booth?" some one asked.
"No. I read them for the sake of sleep," he replied. "I read them just as I play solitaire—to divert my mind and to bring repose to me."
The Authors Club
It was not long after that that the Authors Club secured quarters of its own in Twenty-fourth Street, and became an established social organization. For it was never a literary club, but always strictly a social one, having a literary basis of eligibility to membership. From the beginning we refused to read papers at each other, or in any other way to "improve our minds" on club evenings by any form of literary exercise. As the carpenter, who dresses lumber and drives nails and miters joints for his daily bread does not seek his evening recreation by doing those things for amusement, so we who were all hard-working men of letters, earning our living with the pen, had no mind to do as amateurs that which we were daily and hourly doing as professionals.
In the same way we decided at the outset to eschew every form of propagandism. The club has had no cause to advocate, no doctrine to promulgate, no "movement" to help or hinder. It has been and still is strictly a social club composed of men of letters, and having for its guests interesting men of all other professions. Hence it has prospered and its members have become intimates with no trace or suggestion of friction between them. I think I am safe in saying that no other organization has done so much for the amelioration of the literary life, the removal of prejudices and bitternesses and spites and jealousies, and for the upbuilding of cordial friendship among writers. I think there is no man in the club who doesn't count every other man there his friend.
The point emphasized above—that the club is a social, not a literary organization—is important. Neglect of it has led to a good deal of ill-informed and misdirected criticism. At the very beginning, on the night of the club'sorganization, we made up a list of somewhat more than a score of literary men who should be made members upon the invitation of our Executive Council without the formality of proposal and election. From that list we excluded—by unanimous vote—one man whose literary work abundantly qualified him for membership, but whose cantankerous self-satisfaction rendered him, in the general opinion, a man not "clubbable." The trouble with him was not so much that he regarded himself, as he once avowed in company that he did, as "a greater than Shakespeare," but that he was disposed to quarrel with everybody who failed to recognize the assumption as a fact.
If ours had been a literary club, he must have been admitted to membership without question. As it was a social club, we didn't want him, and three several efforts that he afterwards made to secure admission failed. The like has happened in the cases of two or three other men whose literary work rendered them eligible, but whose personal peculiarities did not commend them.
Chiefly, however, the club has been criticised for its failure to admit women to membership. Paul Leicester Ford said to me on that subject one day:
"I'll have nothing to do with your club. You arrogantly refuse to admit women, though women are doing quite as much as men in American literature."
Why Women Are Not Eligible
I explained several things to him. I reminded him that the Authors Club set up no pretension to be completely representative of American literary activity; that it was merely a club formed by gentlemen who felt the need of it, for the purpose of bringing literary men together for social intercourse over their pipes and sandwiches; that the admission of women would of necessity defeat this solitary purpose, and that their exclusion was no more a slight than that which he put upon his nearest friends whenever he gave a dinner or a theater party to whichhe could not invite everybody on his eligible list. Then I pointed out another difficulty and a supreme one. If we should admit women on the same terms of eligibility that we insisted upon in the case of men, a host of writing women would become eligible, while our own wives and daughters would in most cases be ineligible. If, in order to cover that difficulty we should admit the wives and daughters of male members, we should be obliged to admit also the husbands, sons, and fathers of our female members, so that presently we should become a mob of men and women, half or more of whom were ineligible under our original conception of the club and its reason for being. There is also the consideration that every club must and does exclude more than it includes; that in requiring New England birth or descent for membership, the New England Society excludes perhaps nine-tenths of the people of New York, while without that requirement the Society would lose its distinctive character and be no New England Society at all.
Mr. Ford was so far convinced that he authorized me to propose his name for membership, but before I had opportunity to do so, the tragedy that ended his life had befallen.
The club has found ways of marking its appreciation of the literary equality of women without destroying its own essential being. In February and March of each year it gives four afternoon receptions to women. In so far as it can find them out, the club's Executive Council invites to all of these receptions, besides the wives and daughters of its own members, every woman in the land whose literary work would render her eligible to membership if she were a man. In addition to this, every member of the club has the privilege of inviting any other women he pleases.
I do not think the club is deficient in gallantry, nordo I find any such thought prevalent among the pleasing throng of gentlewomen who honor us by accepting our invitations.
Our first quarters were meagerly furnished, of course. It took every dollar we had to furnish them even in the plainest way. There was neither a sofa nor an upholstered chair in our rooms. Cheap, straight-backed, cane-seated chairs alone were there. One night when General Sherman was a guest, some one apologized for our inability to offer him a more comfortable seat. The sturdy old soldier always had an opinion ready made to suit every emergency.
"Comfortable?" he responded. "Why, what do you call these chairs if they are not comfortable? I don't believe in cushions. They are unnatural; they are devices of self-indulgence and luxury. The law ought to forbid their existence. They make men limp and flabby when they ought to be strong and vigorous and virile. The best chair in the world is one with a raw bull's hide for a seat, and with leathern thongs to tighten it with when it stretches. Next best is the old-fashioned, wooden-bottomed kitchen chair that cost forty cents when I was a boy. I don't suppose they make 'em now. People are too luxurious to know when they are well off."
Presently some one spoke to him of his "March to the Sea," and he instantly replied:
"It's all romantic nonsense to call it that. The thing was nothing more nor less than a military change of base—a thing familiar to every student of tactics; but a poet got hold of it, nicknamed it the 'March to the Sea,' and that's what everybody will call it, I suppose, till the crack of doom, unless it is forgotten before that time."
Perhaps the hard-fighting veteran's appreciation of the romantic aspect of great achievements was less keen thanthat of a company of creative writers. Perhaps his modesty got the better of him.
The First "Watch Night"
It happened early in the history of the Authors Club that the regular meeting night fell one year on the thirty-first of December. At first it was suggested that the date be changed, but some one remembered the old custom of the Methodists who held "Watch Night" meetings, seeing the old year out and the new year in with rejoicing and fervent singing. Why shouldn't we have a "Watch Night" after our own fashion? The suggestion was eagerly accepted. No programme was arranged, no order of exercises planned. Nothing was prearranged except that with friendship and jollity and the telling of stories we should give a farewell to the old year and a welcome to the new.
Fortunately, Mark Twain was called upon to begin the story telling, and he put formality completely out of countenance at the very outset. Instead of standing as if to address the company, he seized a chair, straddled it, and with his arms folded across its back, proceeded to tell one of the most humorous of all his stories. Frank Stockton followed with his account of the "mislaid corpse" and before the new year had an hour or two of age, there had been related enough of exquisitely humorous incident—real or fanciful—to make the fortune of two or three books of humor.
At midnight we turned out the gas and sang a stanza or two of "Auld Lang Syne" by way of farewell to the old year. Then, with lights all ablaze again, we greeted the new year in the familiar "He's a jolly good fellow."
Max O'Rell was my guest on one of these occasions, and in one of his later books he gave an account of it. After recording the fact that "at precisely twelve o'clock the lights are turned out," he added a footnote saying in solemn fashion: "A clock isborrowed for the occasion."
I saw a good deal of that witty Frenchman during his several visits to America. I wrote an introduction to the American edition of his "John Bull, Jr.," and it served to protect that work with a copyright entry.
He never paid me a cent for the service.
That was because I refused to accept the remuneration he pressed upon me.
I offer that as a jest which he would have appreciated keenly.
He was a man of generous mind, whose humor sometimes impressed others as cynical, a judgment that I always regarded as unjust, for the reason that the humorist must be allowed a certain privilege of saying severer things than he really feels, if he is to be a humorist at all. When Max O'Rell says of a certain type of stupid British boy of the "upper class," that he ultimately enters the army and fights his country's enemies, and then adds: "And whether he kills his country's enemy or his country's enemy kills him, his country is equally benefited," he does not really mean what he says. He once confessed to me that he had had an abiding affection for every such boy, but that the temptation to make a jest at his expense was irresistible in the case of a writer whose bread and butter were dependent upon his ability to excite smiles.
In the same way, as everybody must have observed, the humor that has made the reputation of many newspaper editors is largely leveled at women in their various relations with men and at the sacred things of life. Much of it would be cruelly unjust if it were seriously meant, as ordinarily it is not.
I have sometimes wondered whether the injustice did not outweigh the humor—whether the smile excited by the humor was worth the wound inflicted by the injustice.
Habitual Humorists
The professional humorist, whether with pen, pencil, or tongue, is the victim of a false perspective. He is sointent upon his quip or quibble or jest, that he loses sight of more serious things. He does not hesitate to sacrifice even truth and justice, or the highest interest of whatever sort, for the sake of "making his point." He perhaps mistakenly believes that his reader or the person studying his caricature will regard his jest lightly and without loss of respect for the more serious things that lie behind. As a matter of fact, this rarely happens. The reader of the jest accepts it as a setting forth of truth, or at any rate is affected by it in some such fashion.
On the whole, therefore, I cannot help regarding the confirmed humorist in literature or art as a detrimental force.
I do not mean to include in this condemnation such genial literary humorists as Charles Battell Loomis, and Frank R. Stockton, and Charles Dudley Warner, who made things funny merely by looking at them with an intellectual squint that deceived nobody and misled nobody. I refer only to the habitual jokers of the newspapers and the like,—men who, for a wage, undertake to make a jest of everything that interests the popular mind, and who, for the sake of their jest, would pervert the Lord's Prayer itself to a humorous purpose. These people lose all sense of propriety, proportion, perspective, and even of morality itself. They make their jests at so much per line, and at all hazards of truth, justice, and intelligence.
In literature these mountebanks impress me as detrimental impertinents—in conversation they seem to me nuisances. I cannot forget one occasion on which the late Bishop Potter and a distinguished judge of the Supreme Court were discussing a question of the possibility of helpful reform in a certain direction. There was a humorist present—a man whose sole idea of conversation was sparkle. He insisted upon sparkling. He interruptedthe gravest utterances with his puns or his plays upon words, or his references to humorous things remembered. The thing became so intolerable that some one present slipped his arms into those of the Bishop and the Judge, and led them away with the suggestion that there was a quiet corner in the club where he would like to seat them and hear the rest of their conversation. As they turned their backs on the humorist and moved away, the Bishop asked:
"What did you say the name of that mountebank is?"
The Judge replied:
"I knew at the time. I'm glad to have forgotten it."
"It is just as well," answered the Bishop. "There are many things in this life that are better forgotten than remembered."
There is one thing worthy of note in connection with the Authors Club. Almost from the hour of its inception it has furnished the country with a very distinguished proportion of its most eminent diplomats and statesmen. To mention only a few: James Russell Lowell, Andrew D. White, David Jayne Hill, William L. Wilson, Carl Schurz, General Horace Porter, John Hay, Theodore Roosevelt, Oscar S. Straus, Edward M. Shepard, and a dozen others easily mentioned, may be cited as illustrations of the extent to which a club of only about 180 members in all has been drawn upon by the national government for its needs in diplomacy and statesmanship.
The Authors Club idea of a watch night meeting has been borrowed by a number of other organizations, but I think in none of them has it become so well recognized an event of the year. At any rate, it throngs our rooms to the point of suffocation on the night of every thirty-first of December.
Another habit of the club has been for a considerable number of members and guests to linger after its regularmeetings until the small hours of the morning, telling stories or discussing matters of intellectual interest. This has become a feature of the club meetings since Charles Henry Webb—better known in literature as "John Paul"—said one night at two o'clock:
"Upon my soul, the Authors Club is one of the very pleasantest places I know—afterthe authors have gone home."
"Liber Scriptorum"
Soon after the club took its quarters in Twenty-fourth Street, three of us—Rossiter Johnson, John D. Champlin, and myself—were impressed with the need of more funds and better furnishings. We suggested the publication of a unique book, as a means of securing the funds and providing the furnishings. Our plan contemplated a sumptuous volume, in an edition limited to two hundred and fifty-one copies—one for the club, and the rest for sale at one hundred dollars a copy. We proposed that the members of the club should furnish the poems, stories, and essays needed; that each of them should agree never to publish his contribution elsewhere, and that each poem, story, or essay should be signed by its author in pen and ink in each copy of the book.
We were met with prompt discouragement on every hand. The older men among the members of the club were confident that we could never secure the papers desired. Our friends among the publishers simply knew in advance and positively, that even if we could make the book, we could never sell it. Mr. Joe Harper offered to bet me a hat that we could never sell twenty-five of the two hundred and fifty copies. I lived to wear that hat and rejoice in it, for we not only made the book—"Liber Scriptorum"—but we realized something more than twenty thousand dollars on its sale, as a fund with which to provide leather-covered morris chairs, soft rugs,handsome bookcases, and other luxuries for our friends the doubters to rejoice in.
Authors are supposed to be an unbusinesslike set, who do not know enough of affairs to manage their personal finances in a way to save themselves from poverty. Perhaps the judgment is correct. But the Authors Club is the only club I know in New York which has no dollar of debt resting upon it, and has a comfortable balance to its credit in bank.
The case is not singular. It has been written of William Pitt that while he was able to extricate the British exchequer from the sorest embarrassment it ever encountered, he could not keep the duns from his own door.
I had been operating my little literary shop successfully for three or four years after quitting theEvening Post, when Mr. Parke Godwin came to me to say that he and some friends were about buying a controlling interest in the newspaper calledThe New York Commercial Advertiser, and that he wanted me to join his staff. I told him I had no desire to return to journalism, that I liked my quiet literary life at home, and that I was managing to make enough out of it to support my family.
He replied that at any rate I might undertake the literary editorship of his newspaper; that it would involve no more than a few hours of office attendance in each week, and need not interfere in any way with my literary undertakings of other kinds.
I had a very great personal regard for Mr. Godwin; a very great admiration for his character, and an abiding affection for him as a man. When he pressed this proposal upon me, insisting that its acceptance would relievehim of a burden, I decided to undertake what he wanted. I was the readier to do so for a peculiar reason. In those days pretty nearly all books, American or English, were first offered to the Harpers, and I had to examine them all, either in manuscript, if they were American, or in proof sheets if they were English. Consequently, whether they were published by the Harpers or by some one else, I was thoroughly familiar with them long before they came from the press. I foresaw that it would be easy for me to review them from the acquaintance I already had with their contents.
In Newspaper Life Again
I was resolutely determined not to be drawn again into the newspaper life, but I foresaw no danger of that in making the literary arrangement suggested.
Accordingly, I became literary editor of theCommercial Advertiserunder Mr. Godwin's administration as the editor-in-chief of that newspaper. The paper had never been conducted upon the lines he proposed or upon any other well-defined lines, so far as I could discover, and I foresaw that he had a hard task before him. All the reputation the paper had was detrimental rather than helpful. I was eager to help him over the first hurdles in the race, and so, in addition to my literary duties I not only wrote editorials each day, but helped in organizing a news staff that should at least recognize news when it ran up against it in the street.
Mr. Godwin was himself editor-in-chief, and the vigor of his utterances made a quick impression. But his managing editor lacked—well, let us say some at least of the qualifications that tend to make a newspaper successful. Mr. Godwin was an exceedingly patient man, but after a while he wearied of the weekly loss the paper was inflicting upon him. In the meanwhile, I discovered that my attention to the newspaper was seriously interfering with my literary work, and that the fifty dollars a weekwhich the paper paid me did not compensate me for the time I was giving to it at the expense of my other undertakings. I wrote to Mr. Godwin, recommending a very capable young man to take my place, and asking to be released from an engagement that was anything but profitable to me.
For reply I had a prompt letter from Mr. Godwin asking me to see him at his home. There he asked and urged me to become managing editor of the paper from that hour forth. He told me he was losing money in large sums upon its conduct, and appealed to me to come to his rescue, urging that he was "too old and too indolent" himself to put life into the enterprise.
The question of salary was not mentioned between us. He appealed to me to help him and I stood ready to do so at any sacrifice of personal interest or convenience. But when the board of directors of the corporation met a month later, he moved an adequate salary for me and suggested that it should be dated back to the day on which I had taken control. A certain excessively small economist on the board objected to the dating back on the ground that no bargain had been made to that effect and that he was "constitutionally opposed to the unnecessary squandering of money."
Instantly Mr. Godwin said:
"The salary arranged for our managing editor is the just reward of the service he is rendering. He has been giving us that service from the hour of his entrance upon office. He is as justly entitled to compensation for that time as for the future. Either the board must pay it or I will pay it out of my own pocket. We are neither beggars nor robbers, and we take nothing that we do not pay for." There spoke the great, honest-minded man that Parke Godwin always was.
It was a difficult task I had undertaken. There weremany obstacles in the way. The chief of these was pointed out by Mr. John Bigelow when he said to me:
"You're going to make yours a newspaper for the educated classes. It is my opinion that there are already too many newspapers for the educated classes."
I am disposed to think the old journalist and statesman had a prophetic vision of the early coming time when success in newspaper editing would be measured by the skill of newspaper proprietors in making their appeal to the uneducated classes—to the million instead of the few thousands.
An Editor's Perplexities
A more perplexing difficulty beset me, however. I had a definitely fixed and wholly inadequate sum of money to expend weekly in making the paper, and when I came to look over my payroll I found that the greater part of the sum allowed me went to pay the salaries of some very worthy men, whose capacity to render effective service to a "live" modern newspaper was exceedingly small. I had sore need of the money these men drew every week, with which to employ reporters who could get news and editors who knew how to write. The men in question held their places by virtue of Mr. Godwin's over-generous desire to provide a living for them.
I represented the case to him in its nakedness. I told him frankly that whatever he might be personally able to afford, the newspaper's earnings at that time did not justify the maintenance of such a pension roll. Either I must discharge all these men and use the money that went to pay their salaries in a more fruitful way, or I must decline to go on with the task I had undertaken.
He solved the problem by calling the board together, resigning his editorship, and making me editor-in-chief, with unrestricted authority.
With all the gentleness I could bring to bear I detached the barnacles and freed myself to make a newspaper. Ihad the good fortune in all this to have the support of Mr. Godwin's two sons, who were large stockholders in the newspaper, and of Mr. Henry Marquand, who was also the owner of an important interest.
I had also the good fortune to secure the services of some reporters and some editorial assistants whose energies and capacities were of the utmost value to me.
Many of them are dead now—as, alas! most other persons are with whom I have been closely associated. But those of them who are living have made place and reputation for themselves in a way that justifies the pride I used to feel in their abilities, their energies, and their conscientious devotion to duty when they worked with me. Indeed, as I contemplate the careers of these men, most of whom came to me as "cubs" fresh from college, I am disposed to plume myself not only upon my sagacity in discovering their untried abilities, but also upon the tutelage I gave them in journalism. The eagerness with which other newspapers have since sought them out for important employments, and the rapidity of their promotion on those other newspapers have always been a source of pride to me—pride which is not, I think, vainglorious or unduly personal.
Perhaps the reader will permit me here to pay tribute to those loyal men who so willingly stood by me when the most that I was permitted to pay them was less than one-half—sometimes less than one-third what they might have earned upon other newspapers.
Some of My Brilliant "Cubs"
Among them was Charles E. Russell, who has since earned high literary place for himself. Another was Timothy Shaler Williams, who has since been lured from literature, for which his gifts were great, to affairs, and who for many years has been president of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company. I had Earl D. Berry for my managing editor, and I could have had none more capable.In the news department were De François Folsom—dead long years ago—Edward Fales Coward, who has since made a distinguished place for himself; Hewitt, the author of Dixey's song, "So English, You Know"; Sidney Strother Logan, one of the shrewdest news explorers I have ever known,—dead years ago, unfortunately,—and George B. Mallon, who came to me fresh from college and whose work was so good as to confirm my conviction that even in a newspaper's reporting room an educated mind has advantages over mere native shrewdness and an acquaintance with the slang and patter of the time. Mr. Mallon's work was so good, indeed, that I personally assigned him to tasks of peculiar difficulty. The New YorkSunhas since confirmed my judgment of his ability by making him its city editor, a post that he has held for seven years or more.
Another of my "cubs" was Henry Armstrong, whose abilities have since won for him a place on the brilliant editorial writing staff of theSun. Still another was Henry Wright, who is now editor-in-chief of the paper on which he "learned his trade,"—though the paper has since changed its name to theGlobe. Another was Nelson Hirsh, who afterwards became editor of theSunday World.
On my editorial staff were Henry R. Elliot—dead now,—James Davis, who carried every detail of a singularly varied scholarship at his finger-tips, ready for instant use, and whose grace as a writer, illuminated as it was by an exquisitely subtle humor, ought to have made him famous, and would have done so, if death had not come to him too soon.
Doubtless there were others whom I ought to mention here in grateful remembrance, but the incessant activities of the score and more of years that have elapsed since my association with them ended have obliterated many detailsfrom my memory. Let me say that to all of them I render thanks for loyal and highly intelligent assistance in the difficult task I then had to wrestle with.
With a staff like that we were able to get the news and print it, and we did both in a way that attracted attention in other newspaper offices as well as among newspaper readers. With such writers as those mentioned and others, the editorial utterances of the paper attracted an attention that had never before been accorded to them.
So far as its books of account gave indication, theCommercial Advertiserhad never earned or paid a dividend. At the end of the first year under this new régime it paid a dividend of fifty per cent. At the end of its second year it paid its stockholders one hundred per cent. The earnings of the third year were wisely expended in the purchase of new presses and machinery. Before the end of the fourth year I had resigned its editorship to become an editorial writer onThe World.
I intensely enjoyed the work of "making bricks without straw" on theCommercial Advertiser—by which I mean that with a staff of one man to ten on the great morning newspapers, and with one dollar to expend where they could squander hundreds, we managed not only to keep step but to lead them in such news-getting enterprises as those incident to the prosecution of the boodle Aldermen and Jake Sharp, the Diss de Barr case, and the other exciting news problems of the time.
The strain, however, was heart-breaking, and presently my health gave way under it. A leisurely wandering all over this continent restored it somewhat, but upon my return the burden seemed heavier than ever—especially the burden of responsibility that made sleep difficult and rest impossible to me.
In the meanwhile, of course, my literary work had been sacrificed to the Moloch of journalism. I had canceledall my engagements of that sort and severed connections which I had intended to be lifelong. In a word, I had been drawn again into the vortex of that daily journalism, from which I had twice escaped. I was worn, weary, and inexpressibly oppressed by the duties of responsible editorship—a responsibility I had never sought, but one which circumstances had twice thrust upon me.
The Dread Task of the Editor
I wonder if the reader can understand or even faintly imagine what all this means. I wonder if I can suggest some shadow of it to his mind. Think of what it means to toil all day in the making of a newspaper, and to feel, when all is done that the result is utterly inadequate. Think of what it means to the weary one to go home with the next day's task upon his mind as a new burden, and with the discouraging consciousness that all he has done on one day's issue is dead so far as the next day is concerned. Think what it means to a sensitive man to feel that upon his discretion, his alertness, his sagacity, depends not only the daily result of a newspaper's publication, but the prosperity or failure of other men's investments of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
For the value of a newspaper depends from day to day upon its conduct. It is a matter of good will. If the editor pleases his constituency, the investment of the owners remains a profitable property. If he displeases that constituency the newspaper has nothing left to sell but its presses and machinery, representing a small fraction of the sum invested in it.
That responsibility rested upon me as an incubus. All my life until then I had been able to sleep. Then came sleeplessness of a sort I could not shake off. At my usual hour for going to bed, I was overcome by sleep, but after five minutes on the pillows there came wakefulness. I learned how to fight it, by going to my library and resolutely sitting in the dark until sleep came, but the processwas a painful one and it left me next morning crippled for my day's work.
In the meanwhile, as I have said, I enjoyed my work as I suppose a man condemned to death enjoys the work of writing his "confessions." I enjoyed my very intimate association with Henry Marquand, one of the most companionable men I ever knew, for the reason that his mind was responsive to every thought one might utter, and that there was always a gentle humor in all that he had to say. He had a most comfortable schooner yacht on board which I many times saved my life or my sanity by passing a Sunday outside on blue water, with nothing more important to think of than the cob pipes we smoked as we loafed in our pajamas on the main hatch.
Marquand had a habit of inviting brilliant men for his guests, such men as Dr. Halsted, now of Johns Hopkins; Dr. Tuttle, who has since made fame for himself; Dr. Roosevelt, who died a while ago; James Townsend, Dr. William Gilman Thompson, then a comparatively young man but now one of the supreme authorities in medical science, and others of like highly intellectual quality. Now and then there were "ladies present," but they were an infrequent interruption. I don't mean that ungallantly. But rest and women do not usually go together.
It was our habit to board the yacht down Staten Island way on Saturday afternoon, sail out to the lightship and back, and anchor in the Horseshoe for dinner and the night. On Sunday we sailed out toward Fire Island or down toward Long Branch, or wherever else we chose. We were intent only upon rest—the rest that the sea alone can give, and that only the lovers of the sea ever get in this utterly unrestful world of ours.
On deck in the afternoon and evening, and in the saloon at dinner and other meals, we talked, I suppose, of intellectual things. At sea we rested, and smoked, andwere silent, and altogether happy. I have always enjoyed the sea. I have crossed the ocean many times, and I have sailed in all sorts of craft over all sorts of seas, with delight in every breath that the ocean gave to me; but I think I may truly say that no other voyage I ever made gave me so much pleasure as did those little yachting trips on the "Ruth" in company with men whose very presence was an intellectual inspiration.
Parke Godwin
But the most abiding recollection I have of my service on theCommercial Advertiseris that which concerns itself with Parke Godwin. He was a man of great thought impulses, only half expressed. That which he gave to the world in print was no more than the hem of his intellectual garment. A certain constitutional indolence, encouraged by his too early acquisition of sufficient wealth to free him from the necessity of writing for a living, prevented him from giving to the world the best that was in him. He would have a great thought and he would plan to write it. Sometimes he would even begin to write it. But in the end he preferred to talk it to some appreciative listener.
I remember one case of the kind. He had several times invited me to visit him at his Bar Harbor summer home. Always I had been obliged by the exigencies of my editorial work to forego that delight. One summer he wrote to me, saying:
"I wonder if you could forget theCommercial Advertiserlong enough to spend a fortnight with me here at Bar Harbor. You see, I don't like to issue invitations and have them 'turned down,' so I'm not going to invite you till you write me that you will come."
In answer to that invitation I passed a fortnight with him. From beginning to end of the time he forbade all mention of the newspaper of which he was chief owner and I the responsible editor. But during that time he"talked into me," as he said at parting, a deal of high thinking that he ought to have put into print.
His mind had one notable quality in common with Emerson's—the capacity to fecundate every other mind with which it came into close contact. One came away, from a conference with him, feeling enriched, inspired, enlarged, not so much by the thought he had expressed as by the thinking he had instigated in his listener's mind.
It was so with me on that occasion. I came away full of a thought that grew and fruited in my mind. Presently—an occasion offering—I wrote it into a series of articles in the newspaper. These attracted the attention of Dr. William M. Sloane, now of Columbia University, then professor of history at Princeton and editor of thePrinceton Review. At his instigation I presented the same thought in hisReview, and a little later by invitation I addressed the Nineteenth Century Club on the subject. I called it "The American Idea." In substance it was that our country had been founded and had grown great upon the idea that every man born into the world has a right to do as he pleases, so long as he does not trespass upon the equal right of any other man to do as he pleases, and that in a free country it is the sole function of government to maintain the conditions of liberty and to let men alone.
The idea seemed to be successful in its appeal to men's intelligence at that time, but many years later—only a year or so ago, in fact—I put it forward in a commencement address at a Virginia College and found it sharply though silently antagonized by professors and trustees on the ground that it seemed to deny to government the right to enact prohibitory liquor laws, or otherwise to make men moral by statute. The doctrine was pure Jeffersonianism, of course, and the professors and trustees sincerely believed themselves to be Jeffersonians. But thedoctrine had gored their pet ox, and that made a difference.
Some Recollections of Mr. Godwin
One day Mr. Godwin expressed himself as delighted with all I had written on the American Idea. I responded:
"That is very natural. The idea is yours, not mine, and in all that I have written about it, I have merely been reporting what you said to me, as we stood looking at the surf dashing itself to pieces on the rocks at Bar Harbor."
"Not at all," he answered. "No man can expound and elaborate another man's thought without putting so much of himself into it as to make it essentially and altogether his own. I may have dropped a seed into your mind, but I didn't know it or intend it. The fruitage is all your own. My thinking on the subject was casual, vagrant, unorganized. I had never formulated it in my own mind. You see we all gather ideas in converse with others. That is what speech was given to man for. But the value of the ideas depends upon the use made of them."
Mr. Godwin had been at one time in his life rather intimately associated with Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot and statesman. As all old newspaper men remember, Kossuth had a habit of dying frequently. News of his death would come and all the newspapers would print extended obituary articles. Within a day or two the news would be authoritatively contradicted, and the obituaries would be laid away for use at some future time. On one of these occasions Mr. Godwin wrote for me a singularly interesting article, giving his personal reminiscences of Kossuth. Before I could print it despatches came contradicting the news of the old Hungarian's death. I put Mr. Godwin's manuscript into a pigeonhole and both he and I forgot all about it. A year or so laterKossuth did in fact die, and in looking through my papers to see what I might have ready for printing on the subject, I discovered Mr. Godwin's paper. It was not signed, but purported to be the personal recollections of one who had known the patriot well.
I hurried it into print, thus gaining twelve or fourteen hours on the morning newspapers.
The next morning Mr. Godwin called upon me, declaring that he had come face to face with the most extraordinary psychological problem he had ever encountered.
"The chapter of Kossuth reminiscences that you printed yesterday," he said, "was as exact a report of my own recollections of the man as I could have given you if you had sent a reporter to interview me on the subject; and the strangest part of it is that the article reports many things which I could have sworn were known only to myself. It is astonishing, inexplicable."
"This isn't a case of talking your thought into another person," I answered, referring to the former incident. "This time you put yourself down on paper, and what I printed was set from the manuscript you gave me a year or so ago."
This solved the psychological puzzle and to that extent relieved his mind. But there remained the further difficulty that, cudgel his brain as he might, he could find in it no trace of recollection regarding the matter.
A Mystery of Forgetting
"I remember very well," he said, "that I often thought I ought to write out my recollections of Kossuth, but I can't remember that I ever did so. I remember taking myself to task many times for my indolence in postponing a thing that I knew I ought to do, but that only makes the case the more inexplicable. When I scourged myself for neglecting the task, why didn't my memory remind me that I had actually discharged the duty? And now that I have read the reminiscences in print, why am Iunable to recall the fact that I wrote them? The article fills several columns. Certainly I ought to have some recollection of the labor involved in writing so much. Are you entirely certain that the manuscript was mine?"
I sent to the composing room for the "copy" and showed it to him. As he looked it over he said:
"'Strange to say, on Club paper.' You remember Thackeray's Roundabout paper with that headline? It has a bearing here, for this is written on paper that the Century Club alone provides for the use of its members. I must, therefore, have written the thing at the Century Club, and that ought to resurrect some memory of it in my mind, but it doesn't. No. I have not the slightest recollection of having put that matter on paper."
At that point his wonderfully alert mind turned to another thought.
"Suppose you and I believed in the occult, the mystical, the so-called supernatural, as we don't," he said, "what a mystery we might make of this in the way of psychical manifestation—which usually belongs to the domain of psycho-pathology. Think of it! As I chastised myself in my own mind for my neglect to put these things on paper, your mind came under subjection to mine and you wrote them in my stead. So complete was the possession that your handwriting, which is clear and legible, became an exact facsimile of mine, which is obscure and difficult. Then you, being under possession, preserved no memory of having written the thing, while I, knowing nothing of your unconscious agency in the matter, had nothing to remember concerning it. Isn't that about the way the mysticists make up their 'facts' for the misleading of half-baked brains?"
In later years I related this incident to a distinguished half-believer in things mystical, adding Mr. Godwin'slaughingly conjectural explanation of it, whereupon the reply came:
"May not that have been the real explanation, in spite of your own and Mr. Godwin's skepticism?"
I was left with the feeling that after all what Mr. Godwin had intended as an extravagant caricature was a veritable representation of a credulity that actually exists, even among men commonly accounted sane, and certainly learned. The reflection was discouraging to one who hopes for the progress of mankind through sanity of mind.