It was during my connection withHearth and Homethat I first met two men who greatly interested me. One of them was the newest of celebrities in American literature; the other was old enough to have been lampooned by Poe in his series of papers called "The Literati."
The one was Joaquin Miller, the other Thomas Dunn English.
Joaquin Miller
Joaquin Miller had recently returned in a blaze of glory from his conquest of London society and British literary recognition. He brought me a note of introduction from Mr. Richard Watson Gilder of theCenturyorScribner's Monthlyas I think the magazine was still called at that time. He wore a broad-brimmed hat of most picturesque type. His trousers—London made and obviouslycostly—were tucked into the most superior looking pair of high top boots I ever saw, and in his general make-up he was an interesting cross or combination of the "untutored child of nature" fresh from the plains, and the tailor-made man of fashion. More accurately, he seemed a carefully costumed stage representation of the wild Westerner that he professed to be in fact. I do not know that all this, or any of it, was affectation in the invidious sense of the term. I took it to be nothing more than a clever bit of advertising. He was a genuine poet—as who can doubt who has read him? He had sagacity and a keen perception both of the weakness and the strength of human nature. He wanted a hearing, and he knew the shortest, simplest, surest way to get it. Instead of publishing his poems and leaving it to his publisher to bring them to attention by the slow processes of newspaper advertising, he went to London, and made himself his own advertisement by adopting a picturesque pose, which was not altogether a pose, though it was altogether picturesque, and trusting the poems, to which he thus directed attention, to win favor for themselves.
In saying that his assumption of the rôle of untutored child of nature was not altogether an assumption, I mean that although his boyhood was passed in Indiana schools, and he was for a time a college student there, he had nevertheless passed the greater part of his young manhood in the wilds and among the men of the wilderness. If he was not in fact "untutored," he nevertheless owed very little to the schools, and scarcely anything to the systematic study of literature. His work was marked by crudenesses that were not assumed or in any wise fictitious, while the genuineness of poetic feeling and poetic perception that inspired it was unquestionably the spontaneous product of his own soul and mind.
In my editorial den he seated himself on my desk,though there was a comfortable chair at hand. Was that a bit of theatrical "business"? I think not, for the reason that Thomas Bailey Aldrich, the least affected of men, used nearly always to bestride a reversed chair with his hands resting upon its back, when he visited me in my office, as he sometimes did, to smoke a pipe in peace for half an hour and entertain me with his surprising way of "putting things," before "going off to suffer and be good by invitation," as he once said with reference to some reception engagement.
London had accepted Joaquin Miller's pose without qualification. Even the London comic journals, in satirizing it, seemed never to doubt its genuineness. But on this side of the water we had begun to hear rumors that this son of the plains and the mountains, this dweller in solitudes whose limitless silence he himself suggested in the lines:
"A land so lone that you wonder whetherThe God would know it should you fall dead,"
"A land so lone that you wonder whetherThe God would know it should you fall dead,"
"A land so lone that you wonder whether
The God would know it should you fall dead,"
was after all a man bred in civilization and acquainted with lands so far from lone that the coroner would be certain to hear of it promptly if death came to one without the intervention of a physician.
As he addressed me by my first name from the beginning, and in other ways manifested a disposition to put conventionalities completely aside, I ventured to ask him about one of these rumors, which particularly interested me.
"I hear, Mr. Miller," I said, "that you are my compatriot—that you are a Hoosier by birth, as I am—is it true?"
He sat in meditation for a time; then he said:
"George, I've told so many lies about my birth andall that, that there may be inconsistencies in them. I think I'd better not add to the inconsistencies."
I did not press the question. I asked him, instead, to let me have a poem forHearth and Home.
Joaquin Miller's Notions of Dress
"I can't," he replied, "I haven't a line of unsold manuscript anywhere on earth, and just now I am devoting myself to horseback riding in Central Park. I've got a seven hundred dollar saddle and I must use it, and you, as an old cavalryman, know how utterly uninspiring a thing it is to amble around Central Park on a horse trained to regard a policeman as a person to be respected, not to say feared, in the matter of speed limits and the proper side of the trail, and all that sort of thing. But that saddle and these boots must be put to the use for which they were built, so I must go on riding in the park till they grow shabby, and I can't think in meter till I get away somewhere where the trees don't stand in rows like sentinels in front of a string of tents, and where the people don't all dress alike. Do you know that is the worst tomfoolery this idiotic world ever gave birth to? It is all right for British soldiers, because there must be some way in which the officers can tell in a crowd who is a soldier and who is not, and besides, regular soldiers aren't men anyhow. They're only ten-pins, to be set up in regular order by one man and bowled over by another.
"But what sense is there in men dressing in that way? You and I are tall and slender, but our complexions are different. We are free American citizens. Why should anybody who invites us both to dinner, expect that we shall wear the same sort of clothes? And not only that, why should they expect us to put on precisely the same sort of garments that the big-bellied banker, who is to be our fellow-guest, is sure to wear? It's all nonsense, I tell you. It is an idea born of the uninventive genius of an inane society whose constituent members are as badlyscared at any suggestion of originality or individuality as a woman is at the apparition of a mouse in her bedchamber."
I told him I did not agree with him.
"The social rule in that respect seems to me a peculiarly sensible and convenient one," I said. "When a man is invited to anything, he knows exactly what to wear. If it be a daytime affair he has only to put on a frock coat with trousers of a lighter color; if it be an evening function a sparrowtailed coat, black trousers, a low cut vest, and a white tie equip him as perfectly as a dozen tailors could. In either case he need not give a thought to his clothes in order to be sure that his costume will be not only correct but so exactly like everybody's else that nobody present will think of it at all. It is a great saving of gray matter, and of money, too, and more important still, it sets men free. The great majority of us couldn't afford to go to any sort of function, however interesting, if we had to dress individually and competitively for it, as women do."
"Oh, of course," he answered, "the thing has its advantages, but it is dreadfully monotonous—what the children call 'samey, samey.'"
"By which you mean that it deprives one of all excuse for making himself conspicuous by his dress—and that is precisely what most of us do not want to do in any case. Besides, one needn't submit himself to the custom if he objects to it."
"That is so," he answered; "at any rate I don't."
His practice in the matter was extreme, of course. Even ten years after that he visited the Authors Club with his trousers in his boots, but at the time of my first meeting with him the rule of the "dress coat" was by no means confirmed. It was still a matter of choice with men whether they should wear it or not at evening functions,and its use at other times of day was still possible without provoking ridicule. At almost every banquet, dinner, or other evening function in those days there were sure to be a number of frock coats worn, and I remember that at the memorable breakfast given in Boston in celebration of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's seventieth birthday in 1879, there were a few guests who wore evening dress, although we sat down to the breakfast at one o'clock and separated before the sun went down. I observed the same thing at two of the breakfasts given to Mr. Edmund Gosse in New York in the early eighties. It was not until near the middle of that decade that the late William Henry Hurlbut authoritatively laid down the law that "a gentleman must never appear without evening dress after six o'clock P.M., and never,neverwear it before that hour, even at a wedding—even at his own wedding."
Dress Reform à la Stedman
I remember an incident that grew out of this once vexed question, which is perhaps worth recalling. When the Authors Club was founded in 1882, our chief concern was to make it and keep it an informal, brotherly organization of literary men by excluding from its rules and its practices everything that might impose restraint upon social liberty. We aimed at the better kind of Bohemianism—the Bohemianism of liberty, not license; the Bohemianism which disregards all meaningless formalities but respects the decencies and courtesies of social intercourse.
Edmund Clarence Stedman was an enthusiastic advocate of this policy. He was beset, he told me at the time, by a great fear that the club might go the way of other organizations with which he was connected; that it might lose its character as an association of authors in sympathy with each other's work and aspirations, and become merely an agency of fashion, a giver of banquets and receptions at which men should be always on dress parade. By wayof averting that degeneracy he proposed for one thing that the members of the club should address each other always by their first names, as schoolboys do. This proved to be impracticable in a club which included such men as Dr. Drisler, Dr. Youmans, President Noah Porter, Bishop Hurst, Parke Godwin, James Russell Lowell, and others of like dignity—together with a lot of younger men who made their first acquaintance with these in the club itself. But another of Stedman's suggestions met with ready acceptance. He proposed that we should taboo evening dress at our meetings. In playful humor he suggested that if any member should appear at a meeting of the club in that conventional garb, he should be required to stand up before all the company, explain himself, and apologize.
We laughingly adopted the rule, and the first person who fell a victim to it was Stedman himself. About ten o'clock one night he entered the club in full dinner dress. Instantly he was arraigned and, standing in the midst of what he called "the clamorous mob," entered upon his explanation. He had come, he said, directly from a philistine dinner at which the garb he wore was as inexorably necessary as combed hair or polished boots or washed hands; his home was far away, and he had been forced to choose between coming to the club in evening dress and not coming at all. Of the two calamities he had chosen the former as the primrose path—a path he had always followed instead of the stormy and thorny one, he said, whenever liberty of choice had been his. Then by way of "fruits meet for repentance," he drew from his pocket a black cravat and in the presence of the club substituted it for the white one he had been wearing. At that time no other than a white cravat was permitted with evening dress, so that by this substitution of a black one, he took himself out of the category of the condemnedand became again a companion in good-fellowship over the punch and pipes.
Beginnings of Newspaper Illustration
It was during the early seventies that the inevitable happened, or at least began to happen, with regard to newspaper illustration. The excessive cost of illustrating periodicals by wood engraving, and the time required for its slow accomplishment, together with the growing eagerness of the people for pictures, set a multitude of men of clever wits at work to devise some cheaper and speedier process of reproducing drawings and photographic pictures. I myself invented a very crude and imperfect process of that kind, which I thought susceptible of satisfactory development. I engaged a certain journalist of irregular habits and large pretensions, who was clever with his pencil, to join me in the development and exploitation of the process, he to furnish such drawings of various kinds as I needed, and I to experiment in reproduction. Of course I had to explain my process to him, and he, being a shrewd young man whose moral character was far less admirable than his always perfect costume, mastered my secret and sold it for a trifling sum to a man who promptly patented it and, with a few changes which I had not the cleverness to make, brought it into use as his own.
I said some ugly things to my dishonest coadjutor, whose manner of receiving them convinced me that he was well used to hear himself characterized in that way. Then I laughed at myself, went home and read about Moses and the green spectacles, in "The Vicar of Wakefield," and so calmed my spirit.
But mine was an extremely unsatisfactory process, even after the inventor who had bought it from my rascallyassociate had improved it to the limit of his capacity, and there were far cleverer men at work upon the same problem. By 1874 one of them had so far succeeded that an enterprising firm, owning his patents, decided to set up in New York a daily illustrated newspaper, theGraphic.
The failure of the enterprise was freely predicted from the beginning, and in the end failure came to it, but not for the reasons given by the prophets. TheGraphicfailed chiefly because it never had an editor or manager who knew how to make a newspaper. An additional cause of its failure was its inability to get itself into that great news-gathering trust, the Associated Press, whose agents, local and general, covered the whole country and the whole world with a minuteness that no single newspaper could hope to approach.
But while the projectors of theGraphicenterprise were full of their first hopefulness, they bought the good will and the subscription list ofHearth and Home, in order to make of that periodical the weekly edition of their illustrated daily newspaper.
This left me "out of a job," but altogether happy. I was very tired. I had had but one week's vacation during my arduous service onHearth and Home. I had removed to an old Dutch farmhouse in New Jersey because of the impaired health of one dear to me. I had become a contributor to all the great magazines of that time, and a writer of successful books. I was pleased, therefore, to be freed from the Sisyphean labors of the editorial office. I decided to give up newspaper work in all its forms and to devote my future years to literature alone. I retired to my library, the windows of which were overhung by sweet-scented lilacs and climbing roses, beyond which lay an orchard of varied fruits surrounding the old farmhouse. There, I thought I would pass theremainder of my days—that phrase felt good in the mind of a work-weary man of thirty-four or about that—in quiet literary work, unvexed by intruding exigencies of any kind. Of course I would write editorials for those great metropolitan dailies for which I was accustomed to do that sort of work from time to time as impulse and opportunity permitted, but I was resolved never again to undertake editorial responsibility of any kind.
Accident's Part in Literary Life
As illustrative of the part that accident or unforeseen circumstance plays in determining the career of a working man-of-letters, I may relate the story of how I became at that time a writer of boys' fiction as a part of my employment. I was writing at the time for theAtlantic, theGalaxy,Appleton's Journal, and other magazines, and my time was fully occupied, when there came to me a letter asking me upon what terms I would furnish a serial story of adventure for a magazine that made its appeal to boys and girls. Why the editor had thought of me in that connection I cannot imagine. I had never written a boys' story—long or short. I had never written a story of adventure of any sort. I said so in my reply declining to consider the suggestion. A second letter came promptly, urging me to reconsider and asking that I should at any rate name the terms on which I would do the work. Thinking that this opened an easy and certain road of escape, I decided to name terms that I was confident my editor-correspondent would regard as wholly beyond consideration. I wrote him that I would do the story if he would pay me, for serial rights alone, the same price per thousand words that the great magazines were paying me, I to retain the right of book publication, and to have, without charge, the plates of any illustrations the magazine might make for use with my text.
Having thus "settled the matter," as I supposed, I dismissed the subject from my mind as a thing done for.Twenty-four hours later there came a telegram from the editor, saying:
"Terms accepted. Write story. Contracts go by mail for execution."
Those ten telegraphic words determined my career in an important particular. Also they appalled me. They put me under a contract that I had never thought of making. They placed me under obligation to do a species of literary work which I had never dreamed even of trying to do, and for which I felt myself utterly unfit. It was not only that I had never written a boys' story or thought of writing one; I had never acquainted myself with that sort of literature; I "knew not the trick of it," as the poor fellow in "Hamlet" says when urged to play upon a pipe. Nevertheless, I must do the thing and that immediately, for the correspondence had named a date only three weeks off for the delivery of the first instalment of the manuscript.
There was no way of escape. I must set to work upon the story. But what should it be about? Where should its scene be laid? What should be its plot and who its personages? I had not so much as the shadowy ghost of an idea, and during the next twenty-four sleepless hours all my efforts to summon one from the vasty deep or elsewhere brought no result.
My First Boys' Book
While I was thus searching a mind vacant of suggestion, my two little boys climbed upon my knees and besought me to tell them "an Injun story." I was in the habit of entertaining their very juvenile minds with exceedingly juvenile fictions manufactured on the spur of the moment, fictions without plot, without beginning or ending of any recognizable sort. Sometimes these "stories" were wholly imaginary; sometimes I drew upon some boyish experience of my own for a subject. This time the specific demand of my exigent little masters for "an Injunstory" led me to think of the Creek War in Alabama and Mississippi. It so happened that some years before the time of this story telling, I had lived for a good many weeks among the Cherokees, Muscogees, and Choctaws in the Indian Territory, hunting with them by day and sleeping with them around a camp-fire by night. I had in that way become interested in their very dramatic history, and on my return to civilization I had read all the literature I could find on the subject of the war in which their power in our Southern states was overthrown, and they themselves, taken by the neck and heels, as it were, out of the very hopefully advancing civilisation they had in part borrowed but in greater part wrought out for themselves, and thrown back into the half-savage life from which they had struggled to escape.
As I told my little fellows the story they wanted, it occurred to me that here was my subject and inspiration for the larger story I had agreed to write. Within a week or two "The Big Brother" was done and its manuscript delivered.
Its serial publication was never completed. When about half the chapters had been printed, the new and ambitious juvenile magazine,St. Nicholas, bought and suppressed the periodical that was publishing it. The Putnams brought my story out in book form, and its success prompted them to ask me for further boys' books, and as the subject of the Creek War was by no means exhausted, I drew upon it for the materials of "Captain Sam" and "The Signal Boys," thus making a trilogy that covered the entire period between the massacre at Fort Mims and the battle of New Orleans.
Then I decided that my wholly unintended incursion into the field of youths' fiction should end there. I had never intended to write literature of that kind, and now that I had exhausted the subject of the Creek War, I hadno impulse to hunt for other themes for such use. Besides, I had by that time become absorbed in newspaper work again, and had no time for the writing of books of any sort.
It was not until the eighties that I wrote another book of juvenile fiction, and that also came about by accident rather than intention. I had again given up newspaper work, again meaning never to return to it. I was conducting a literary shop of my own in Brooklyn, writing for the magazines, reading for the Harpers, editing the books of other people whose work needed that sort of attention, and doing other things of the kind.
One night I was entertaining the younger of the two boys who had suggested the subject of my first work in juvenile fiction. I was telling him of some adventures of my own and others' on the Carolina coast, when suddenly he asked: "Why can't we put all that into a story book?" That evening I received a letter from Mr. George Haven Putnam, saying that while my three "Big Brother" books were still selling pretty well, it would stimulate them helpfully if I could add a new one to the series. In brief, he wanted me to write a new boys' story, and the proposal fitted in so nicely with the suggestion of my little boy that I called the child to me and said:
"I think we'll write that story book, if you'll help me."
He enthusiastically agreed. I can best tell the rest of that book's story by quoting here from the brief prefatory dedication I wrote for it when it was published in 1882, under the title of "The Wreck of the Redbird":
"I intended to dedicate this book to my son, Guilford Dudley Eggleston, to whom it belonged in a peculiar sense. He was only nine years old, but he was my tenderly loved companion, and was in no small degree the creator of this story. He gave it the title it bears; he discussed withme every incident in it; and every page was written with reference to his wishes and his pleasure. There is not a paragraph here which does not hold for me some reminder of the noblest, manliest, most unselfish boy I have ever known. Ah, woe is me! He who was my companion is my dear dead boy now, and I am sure that I only act for him as he would wish, in inscribing the story that was so peculiarly his to the boy whom he loved best, and who loved him as a brother might have done."
One Thing Leads to Another
It was eighteen years after that that I next wrote a work of fiction for youth, and again the event was the result of suggestion from without. "The Wreck of the Redbird" seems to have made a strong impression upon Elbridge S. Brooks, at that time the literary editor of the Lothrop Publishing Company of Boston, and in the year 1900 he wrote to me asking on what terms I would write for that firm "a boys' story as good as 'The Wreck of the Redbird.'" I had no story in mind at the time. For eighteen years my attention had been absorbed by newspaper work and by literary activities of a sort far removed from this. Moreover, I was at the time working night and day as an editorial writer on the staff of the New YorkWorld, with a good deal of executive duty and responsibility added. But the thought of calling a company of boy readers around me again and telling them a story appealed to my imagination, and, as the terms I suggested were accepted, I employed such odd moments as I could find between other tasks in writing "The Last of the Flatboats." Its success led to other books of the kind, so that since this accidental return to activities of that sort, I have produced six books of juvenile fiction in the intervals of other and more strenuous work.
Perhaps an apology is needed for this setting forth of affairs purely personal. If so, it is found in the fact that the illustration given of the part that accident and externalsuggestion play in determining the course and character of a professional writer's work, seems to me likely to interest readers who have never been brought into close contact with such things. I have thought it of interest to show visitors through the literary factory and to explain somewhat its processes.
After a year and a half of leisurely work in the old orchard-framed, New Jersey farmhouse, I was suddenly jostled out of the comfortable rut in which I had been traveling. A peculiarly plausible and smooth-tongued publisher, a gifted liar, and about the most companionable man I ever knew, had swindled me out of every dollar I had in the world and had made me responsible for a part at least of his debts to others. I held his notes and acceptances for what were to me large sums, and I hold them yet. I held his written assurances, oft-repeated, that whatever might happen to his business affairs, his debt to me was amply and effectually secured. I hold those assurances yet—more than thirty-five years later—and I hold also the showing made by his receiver, to the effect that he had all the while been using my money to secure a secret partner of his own, a highly respectable gentleman who in the course of the settlement proceedings was indicted, convicted, and sent to prison for fraud. But the conviction did not uncover any money with which the debt to me might he liquidated in whole or in part, and the man who had robbed me of all I had in the world had so shrewdly managed matters as to escape all penalties. The last I heard of him he was conducting one of the best-known religious newspapers in the country, and winning laurels as a lecturer on moral and religious subjects,and especially as a Sunday School worker, gifted in inspiring youth of both sexes with high ethical principles and aspirations.
When this calamity befel I had no ready money in possession or within call, and no property of any kind that I could quickly convert into money. I was "stripped to the buff" financially, but I knew my trade as a writer and newspaper man. It was necessary that I should get back to the city at once, and I had no money with which to make the transfer. In this strait I sat down and wrote four magazine articles, writing night and day, and scarcely sleeping at all. The situation was not conducive to sleep. I sent off the articles as fast as they were written, in each case asking the editors for an immediate remittance. They were my personal friends, and I suppose all of them had had experiences not unlike my own. At any rate they responded promptly, and within a week I was settling myself in town and doing such immediate work as I could find to do, while looking for better and more permanent employment.
TheEvening Postunder Mr. Bryant
Almost immediately I was summoned to the office of theEvening Post, where I accepted an appointment on the editorial staff. Thus I found myself again engaged in newspaper work, but it was newspaper work of a kind that appealed to my tastes and tendencies. Under Mr. Bryant theEvening Postwas an old-fashioned newspaper of uncondescending, uncompromising dignity. It loathed "sensation" and treated the most sensational news—when it was obliged to treat it at all—in a dignified manner, never forgetting its own self-respect or offending that of its readers. It resolutely adhered to its traditional selling price of five cents a copy, and I am persuaded that the greater number of its constituents would have resented any reduction, especially one involving them in the necessity of giving or taking "pennies" in change.
It did not at all engage in the scramble for "news." It belonged to the Associated Press; it had two or three reporters of its own, educated men and good writers, who could be sent to investigate and report upon matters of public import. It had a Washington correspondent and such other news-getting agents as were deemed necessary under its rule of conduct, which was to regard nothing as published until it was published in theEvening Post. It was the completest realization I have ever seen of the ideal upon which thePall Mall Gazetteprofessed to conduct itself—that of "a newspaper conducted by gentlemen, for gentlemen."
It could be trenchant in utterance upon occasion, and when it was so its voice was effective—the more so because of its habitual moderation and reserve. Sometimes, when the subject to be discussed was one that appealed strongly to Mr. Bryant's convictions and feelings, he would write of it himself. He was an old man and one accustomed to self-control, but when his convictions were stirred, there was not only fire but white-hot lava in his utterance. The lava streams flowed calmly and without rage or turbulence, but they scorched and burned and consumed whatever they touched. More frequently great questions were discussed by some one or other of that outer staff of strong men who, without direct and daily contact with the newspaper, and without salary or pay of any kind, were still regarded by themselves and by the public as parts of the great intellectual and scholarly force in conduct and control of theEvening Post—such men, I mean, as Parke Godwin and John Bigelow—men once members of that newspaper's staff and still having free access to its columns when they had aught that they wished to say on matters of public concern.
Old-Time Newspaper Standards
Best of all, so far as my tastes and inclinations were concerned, theEvening Post, under Mr. Bryant's andlater Mr. Parke Godwin's control, regarded and treated literature and scholarship as among the chief forces of civilized life and the chief concerns of a newspaper addressing itself to the educated class in the community. Whatsoever concerned literature or scholarship, whatsoever was in any wise related to those things, whatever concerned education, culture, human advancement, commanded theEvening Post'searnest attention and sympathy. It discussed grave measures of state pending at Washington or Albany or elsewhere, but it was at no pains to record the gossip of great capitals. Personalities had not then completely usurped the place of principles and policies in the attention of newspapers, and theEvening Postgave even less attention to such things than most of its contemporaries did. The time had not yet come among newspapers when circulation seemed of greater importance than character, when the details of a divorce scandal or a murder trial seemed of more consequence than the decisions of the Supreme Court, or when a brutal slugging match between two low-browed beasts in human form was regarded as worthy of greater newspaper space than a discussion of the tariff on art or the appearance of an epoch-making book by Tennyson or Huxley or Haeckel.
In brief, the newspapers of that time had not learned the baleful lesson that human society is a cone, broadest at bottom, and that the lower a newspaper cuts into it the broader its surface of circulation is. They had not yet reconciled themselves to the thought of appealing to low tastes and degraded impulses because that was the short road to multitudinous "circulation," with its consequent increase in "advertising patronage."
Most of the newspapers of that time held high standards, and theEvening Post, under Mr. Bryant's control, was the most exigent of all in that respect.
Another thing. The "book notice" had not yet taken the place of the capable and conscientious review. It had not yet occurred to editors generally that the purpose of the literary columns was to induce advertisements from publishers, and that anybody on a newspaper staff who happened to have nothing else to do, or whose capacities were small, might be set to reviewing books, whether he happened to know anything about literature or not.
It was the custom of the better newspapers then, both in New York and elsewhere, to employ as their reviewers men eminent for literary scholarship and eminently capable of literary appreciation. Among the men so employed at that time—to mention only a few by way of example—were George Ripley, Richard Henry Stoddard, E. P. Whipple, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Charles Dudley Warner, R. R. Bowker, W. C. Wilkinson, Charles F. Briggs, and others of like gifts and accomplishments.
Mr. Bryant himself had exercised this function through long years that won distinction from his work for his newspaper. As advancing years compelled him to relinquish that toil, he surrendered it cautiously into other hands, but in whatever hands it might be, Mr. Bryant followed it more minutely and with a more solicitous interest than he gave to any other part of the newspaper.
At the time when I joined the staff there was a sort of interregnum in the literary department. John R. Thompson, who had held the place of literary editor for some years, was dead, and nobody had been found who could fill the place to Mr. Bryant's satisfaction. There were men who wrote with grace and discretion, and whose familiarity with current literature was adequate, but Mr. Bryant objected that they were altogether men of the present, that they knew little or nothing of the older literature of our language, and hence, as he contended,had no adequate standards of comparison in their minds. Of one who essayed the work he said that his attitude of mind was too flippant, that he cared more for what he himself wrote about books under review than for what the authors of those books had written. Another, he said, lacked generosity of sympathy with halting but sincere literary endeavor, and so on with others.
My own editorial work was exigent at the time and there was added to it the task of finding a satisfactory person to become literary editor. I knew Mr. Bryant very slightly at the time, and I doubt that he knew me at all, in person, but he knew how wide my acquaintance among literary men had become in the course of my experience onHearth and Home, and he bade the managing editor, Mr. Watson R. Sperry, make use of it in the search. In common with most other men in the newspaper business, I regarded the position of literary editor of theEvening Postas the most desirable one in American journalism. I frankly told Mr. Sperry that I should myself like the appointment if Mr. Bryant could in any wise be satisfied of my fitness. I was at the time writing all the more important book reviews by way of helping in the emergency.
Mr. Sperry replied that Mr. Bryant had already suggested my appointment, as he was pleased with my work, but that he, Mr. Sperry, did not want to spare me from certain other things that I was doing for him, and further, that he thought the literary editor of theEvening Postshould be a man whose reputation and position as a recognized man of letters were well established, as mine were not.
Aldrich's View of New York
I agreed with him in that opinion and went on with my quest. Among those to whom I wrote was Thomas Bailey Aldrich. I set forth to him as attractively as I could, the duties of the place, the dignity attaching toit, the salary it carried, and everything else of a persuasive sort that I could call to mind.
For reply Mr. Aldrich wrote that the position was one in every way to be coveted, and added:
"But, my dear Eggleston, what can the paper offer to compensate one for having to live in New York?"
Years afterward I tried to extract from him some apology to New York for that fling, but without success.
One day, while I was still engaged in this fruitless search, Mr. Bryant entered the library—off which my little den opened—and began climbing about on a ladder and turning over books, apparently in search of something.
I volunteered the suggestion that perhaps I could assist him if he would tell me what it was he was trying to find.
"I think not," he answered, taking down another volume from the shelves. Then, as if conscious that his reply might have seemed ungraciously curt, he turned toward me and said:
"I'm looking for a line that I ought to know where to find, but do not."
He gave me the substance of what he sought and fortunately I recognized it as a part of a half-remembered passage in one of Abraham Cowley's poems. I told Mr. Bryant so, and while he sat I found what he wanted. Apparently his concern for it was gone. Instead of looking at the book which I had placed in his hands open at the desired page, he turned upon me and asked:
"How do you happen to know anything about Cowley?"
I explained that as a youth, while idling time away on an old Virginia plantation, where there was a library of old books, as there was on every other ancestral plantation round about, I had fallen to reading all I couldfind at home or in neighboring houses of the old English literature, of which I had had a maddening taste even as a little boy; that I had read during those plantation summers every old book I could find in any of the neglected libraries round about.
By Order of Mr. Bryant
My work for the day lay unfinished on my desk, but Mr. Bryant gave no heed to it. He questioned me concerning my views of this and that in literature, my likes and dislikes, my estimates of classic English works, and of the men who had produced them. Now and then he challenged my opinions and set me to defend them. After a while he took his leave in his usual undemonstrative fashion.
"Good-afternoon," was absolutely his only word of parting, and after he had gone I wondered if I had presumed too much in the fearless expression of my opinions or in combating his own, or whether I had offended him in some other way. For I knew him very slightly then and misinterpreted a reticence that was habitual with him—even constitutional, I think. Still less did I understand that during that talk of two hours' duration he had been subjecting me to a rigid examination in English literature.
TheEvening Postof that afternoon published my review of an important book, which I had tried to treat with the care it deserved. I learned afterwards that the article pleased Mr. Bryant, but whether or not it had any influence upon what followed I do not know. What followed was this: the next day a little before noon, Mr. Sperry came into my den with a laugh and a frown playing tag on his face.
"Mr. Bryant has just been in," he said. "He walked into my room and said to me: 'Mr. Sperry, I have appointed Mr. Eggleston literary editor. Good-morning, Mr. Sperry.' And with that he left again, giving meno time to say a word. In a way, I'm glad, but I shall miss you from your other work."
I reassured him, telling him I could easily do those parts of that other work for which he most needed me, and so the matter was "arranged to the satisfaction of everybody concerned," as the dueling people used to say when two blustering cowards had apologized instead of shooting each other.
Thus began an acquaintance with Mr. Bryant that quickly became as intimate as I suppose any acquaintance with him ever did—or at any rate any acquaintance begun after the midyears of his life. Once in a while I passed a Sunday with him at his Roslyn home, but chiefly such converse as I enjoyed with him was held in the office of theEvening Post, and of course it was always of his seeking, as I scrupulously avoided intruding myself upon his attention. Our interviews usually occurred in this way: he would enter the library, which communicated with my little writing room by an open doorway, and after looking over some books, would enter my room and settle himself in a chair, with some remark or question. The conversation thus began would continue for such time as he chose, ten minutes, half an hour, two hours, as his leisure and inclination might determine.
It was always gentle, always kindly, always that of two persons interested in literature and in all that pertains to what in the culture-slang of this later time is somewhat tiresomely called "uplift." It was always inspiring and clarifying to my mind, always encouraging to me, always richly suggestive on his part, and often quietly humorous in a fashion that is nowhere suggested in anyof Mr. Bryant's writings. I have searched them in vain for the smallest trace of the humor he used to inject into his talks with me, and I think I discover in its absence, and in some other peculiarities of his, an explanation of certain misjudgments of him which prevailed during his life and which endure still in popular conception.
Mr. Bryant's Reserve—Not Coldness
The reader may perhaps recall Lowell's criticism of him in "A Fable for Critics." The substance of it was that Mr. Bryant was intensely cold of nature and unappreciative of human things. I wish to bear emphatic witness that nothing could be further from the truth, though Lowell's judgment is the one everywhere accepted.
The lack of warmth usually attributed to Mr. Bryant, I found to be nothing more than the personal reserve common to New Englanders of culture and refinement, plus an excessive personal modesty and a shyness of self-revelation, and self-intrusion, which is usually found only in young girls just budding into womanhood.
Mr. Bryant shrank from self-assertion even of the most impersonal sort, as I never knew any other human being to do. He cherished his own opinions strongly, but he thrust them upon nobody. His dignity was precious to him, but his only way of asserting it was by withdrawal from any conversation or company that trespassed upon it.
Above all, emotion, to him, was a sacred thing, not to be exploited or even revealed. In ordinary intercourse with his fellow-men he hid it away as one instinctively hides the privacies of the toilet. He could no more lay his feelings bare to common scrutiny than he could have taken his bath in the presence of company.
In the intimate talks he and I had together during the last half dozen years of his life, he laid aside his reserve, so far as it was possible for a man of his sensitive nature to do, and I found him not only warm in his human sympathies, but even passionate. If we find little of thisin his writings, it is only because in what he wrote he was addressing the public, and shyly withholding himself from revelation. Yet there is passion and there is hot blood, even there, as who can deny who has read "The Song of Marion's Men," or his superb interpretation of Homer?
There is a bit of literary history connected with "The Song of Marion's Men," which may be mentioned here as well as anywhere else. The venerable poet one day told me the facts concerning it.
When Mr. Bryant issued the first collected edition of his poems, English publication was very necessary to the success of such a work in America, which was still provincial. Accordingly Mr. Bryant desired English publication. Washington Irving was then living in England, and Mr. Bryant had a slight but friendly acquaintance with him. It was sufficient to justify the poet in asking the great story teller's friendly offices. He sent a copy of his poems to Irving, asking him to secure a London publisher. This Irving did, with no little trouble, and in the face of many obstacles of prejudice, indifference, and the like.
When half the book was in type the publisher sent for Irving in consternation. He had discovered, in "The Song of Marion's Men," the lines: