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 and all 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 for _Hearth and Home_.
[Sidenote: 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 badly scared 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, _never_ wear it before that hour, even at a wedding--even
at his own wedding."
[Sidenote: Dress Reform a 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 way of 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 condemned and became
again a companion in good-fellowship over the punch and pipes.
XLVII
[Sidenote: 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 rascally associate 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, the _Graphic_.
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. The _Graphic_ failed 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 the _Graphic_ enterprise were full of their
first hopefulness, they bought the good will and the subscription list
of _Hearth 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 on _Hearth 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 the remainder 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.
[Sidenote: 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 the _Atlantic_,
the _Galaxy_, _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.
[Sidenote: 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 Injun
story" 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 had no 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 with
me 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."
[Sidenote: 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
York _World_, 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 external suggestion 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.
XLVIII
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.
[Sidenote: The _Evening Post_ under Mr. Bryant]
Almost immediately I was summoned to the office of the _Evening 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
the _Evening Post_ was 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.