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 the _Evening Post_. It was the completest realization I have ever
seen of the ideal upon which the _Pall Mall Gazette_ professed 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 the _Evening
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.
[Sidenote: Old-Time Newspaper Standards]
Best of all, so far as my tastes and inclinations were concerned, the
_Evening Post_, under Mr. Bryant's and later 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 the _Evening Post's_ earnest 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 the
_Evening Post_ gave 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 the
_Evening 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 on _Hearth 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 the _Evening Post_ as 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 the _Evening Post_
should be a man whose reputation and position as a recognized man of
letters were well established, as mine were not.
[Sidenote: 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
to it, 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 could find 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
The _Evening Post_ of 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 me no 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.
XLIX
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 the _Evening 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 any of 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.
[Sidenote: 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 this
in 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:
"The British soldier trembles
When Marion's name is told."
It would never, never do, he explained, for him to publish a book with
even the smallest suggestion in it that the British soldier was a man to
"tremble" at any danger. It would simply ruin him to publish this direct
charge of cowardice against Tommy Atkins.
[Sidenote: The Irving Incident]
For the time Irving was at a loss to know what to do. Mr. Bryant was
three thousand miles away and the only way of communicating with him was
by ocean mails, carried by sailing craft at long intervals, low speed,
and uncertain times of arrival. To write to him and get a reply would
require a waste of many weeks--perhaps of several months. In his
perplexed anxiety to serve his friend, Irving decided to take the
liberty of making an entirety innocent alteration in the words, curing
them of their offensiveness to British sensitiveness, without in the
least altering their significance. Instead of:
"The British soldier trembles
When Marion's name is told,"
he made the lines read:
"The foeman trembles in his tent
When Marion's name is told."
"So far as I was concerned," said Mr. Bryant in telling me of
the matter, "what Irving did seemed altogether an act of friendly
intervention, the more so because the acquaintance between him and me
was very slight at that time. He was a warm-hearted man, who in doing a
thing of that kind, reckoned upon a slight friendship for justification,
as confidently as men of natures less generous might reckon upon a
better established acquaintance. He always took comradery for granted,
and where his intentions were friendly and helpful, he troubled
himself very little with formal explanations that seemed to him wholly
unnecessary. I had asked him to secure the publication of my poems
in England, a thing that only his great influence there could have
accomplished at that time. He had been at great pains and no little
trouble to accomplish my desire. Incidentally, it had become necessary
for him either to accept defeat in that purpose or to make that utterly
insignificant alteration in my poem. I was grateful to him for doing so,
but I did not understand his careless neglect to write to me promptly on
the subject. I did not know him then as I afterwards learned to do. The
matter troubled me very little or not at all; but possibly I mentioned
his inattention in some conversation with Coleman, of the _Evening
Post_. I cannot now remember whether I did so or not, but at any rate,
Coleman, who was both quick and hot of temper, and often a trifle
intemperate in criticism, took the matter up and dealt severely with
Irving for having taken the liberty of altering lines of mine without
my authority.
"The affair gave rise to the report, which you have perhaps heard--for
it persists--that Irving and I quarreled and became enemies. Nothing
could be further from the truth. We were friends to the day of his
death."
Inasmuch as different versions of the Irving-Bryant affair are extant,
it seems proper to say that immediately after the conversation ended I
put into writing all that I have here directly quoted from Mr. Bryant.
I did not show the record of it to him for verification, for the reason
that I knew him to be sensitive on the subject of what he once referred
to as "the eagerness of a good many persons to become my literary
executors before I am dead." That was said with reference to the irksome
attempts a certain distinguished literary hack was making to draw from
Mr. Bryant the materials for articles that would sell well whenever the
aged poet should die.
After a seance with that distinguished toady one day, Mr. Bryant came to
me, in some disturbance of mind, to ask for a volume of verse that I had
just reviewed--to soothe his spirit, he said. Then he told me of the
visitation he had had, and said:
"I tried to be patient, but I fear I was rude to him at the last. There
seemed to be no other way of getting rid of him."
Alas, even rudeness had not baffled the bore; for when Mr. Bryant died
the pestilent person published a report of that very interview, putting
into the poet's mouth many utterances directly contrary to Mr. Bryant's
oft-expressed opinions.
L
[Sidenote: Mr. Bryant's Tenderness of Poets]
Exigent and solicitous as he was with reference to every utterance in
the _Evening Post_ concerning literature, Mr. Bryant never interfered
with my perfect liberty as literary editor, except in the one matter of
the treatment of poets and poetry.
"Deal gently--very gently, with the poets," he said to me at the
time of my assumption of that office. "Remember always, that the very
sensitiveness of soul which makes a man a poet, makes him also peculiarly
and painfully susceptible to wounds of the spirit."
I promised to bear his admonition in mind, and I did so, sometimes
perhaps to the peril of my soul--certainly at risk of my reputation
for critical acumen and perhaps for veracity. One day, however, I
encountered a volume of verse so ridiculously false in sentiment,
extravagant in utterance, and inane in character, that I could not
refrain from poking a little fun at its absurdity. The next day Mr.
Bryant came to see me. After passing the time of day, he said:
"Mr. Eggleston, I hope you will not forget my desire that you shall deal
gently with the poets."
I replied that I had borne it constantly in mind.
"I don't know," he answered, shaking his head; "what you said yesterday
about X. Y. Z.'s volume did not seem to me very gentle."
"Considered absolutely," I replied, "perhaps it wasn't. But considered
in the light of the temptation I was under to say immeasurably severer
things, it was mild and gentle in an extreme degree. The man is not a
poet, but a fool. He not only hasn't the smallest appreciation of what
poetry is or means, but he hasn't the ability to entertain a thought of
any kind worthy of presentation in print or in any other way. I should
have stultified myself and the _Evening Post_ if I had written more
favorably of his work than I did. I should never have thought of writing
of it at all, but for the _Evening Post's_ rule that every book offered
here for review must be mentioned in some way in the literary columns.
Here is the book. I wish you would glance at the alleged poems and
tell me how I could have said anything concerning them of a more
considerately favorable character than what in fact I printed."
He took the book from my hand and looked it over. Then he laid it on my
desk, saying:
"It is indeed pretty bad. Still, I have always found that it is possible
to find something good to say about a poet's work."
A little later a still worse case came to my lot. It was a volume of
"verse," with no sense at all in it, without even rhythm to redeem it,
and with an abundance of "rhymes" that were not easily recognizable even
as assonances. It was clumsily printed and "published" at some rural
newspaper office, and doubtless at the expense of the author. Finally
the cover attempt at decoration had resulted in a grotesque combination
of incompatible colors and inconsequent forms. In brief, the thing was
execrably, hopelessly, irredeemably bad all over and clear through.
I was puzzling over the thing, trying to "find something good to say" of
it, when Mr. Bryant came into my den. I handed him the volume, saying:
"I wish you would help me with a suggestion, Mr. Bryant. I'm trying to
find something good that I can say of that thing, and I can't--for of
course you do not want me to write lies."
"Lies? Of course not. But you can always find something good in every
volume of poems, something that can be truthfully commended."
"In this case I can't regard the sprawlings of ill-directed aspiration
as poems," I replied, "and it seems to me a legitimate function of
criticism to say that they are not poems but idiotic drivel--to
discriminate between poetry in its unworthiest form and things like
that. However, the man calls his stuff poetry. I wish you would help me
find something good that I may say of it without lying."
[Sidenote: Commending a Cover]
He took the book and looked through it. Finally he said:
"It is pretty sorry stuff, to be sure. It is even idiotic, and it
doesn't suggest poetic appreciation or poetic impulse or poetic perception
on the part of its author. Still, the man aspires to recognition as a
poet, and he is doubtless sensitively conscious of his own shortcomings.
Let us deal gently with him."
"But what can I say, Mr. Bryant?"