arrogant pretenses, and the falsehoods are in many ways insulting not
only to the persons whom they directly affect, but to the intelligence
and manhood of the casual observer who happens to have an honest and
sincere mind. When I was over there I was for a time the guest of a
wealthy manufacturer, a man of education, refinement, and culture, whose
house in the country was an altogether delightful place to visit and
whose personality I found unusually pleasing. One day as he and I were
walking through his grounds a man came up on horseback and my host
introduced us. It seems he was the head of one of the great 'county
families,' as they call themselves and are called by others. He
explained that he was on his way to my host's house to call upon me,
wherefore we turned back in his company. During the call he asked me to
be his guest at dinner on a day named, and I accepted, he saying that
he would have a number of 'the best county people' to meet me. As the
evening of the dinner day approached, I asked my host: 'When shall we
dress for the dinner?' He looked at his watch and replied: 'It is time
for _you_ to begin dressing now.' I observed the stress he laid upon
the word 'you' and asked: 'Isn't it time for you, also?'
"'Oh, I am not invited,' he replied.
"'Not invited? Why, what can you mean?' I asked.
"'Why, of course I'm not invited. Those are county people and I am only
a manufacturer--a man in trade. They would never think of inviting me to
dinner.'
"I was surprised and shocked.
"'Do you mean to tell me,' I asked, 'that that man came into your house
where I am a guest, and invited me to dinner, to meet his friends,
without including you, my host, in the invitation?'
"'Why, yes, of course,' he replied. 'You must remember that they are
county families, aristocrats, while I am a man in trade. They would not
think of inviting me, and I should never expect it.'
"I was full of disgust and indignation. I asked my host to let one of
his servants carry a note for me to the great man's house.
"'But why?' he asked. 'You will be going over there yourself within the
hour.'
"'I am not going,' I replied. 'I will not be a party to so gross
an affront to my host. I shall send a note, not of apology but of
unexplained declination.'
"I did so, and as soon thereafter as I could arrange it, I quitted
England in disgust with a social system so false, so arbitrary, and
so arrogant that one may not even behave like a gentleman without
transgressing its most insistent rules of social exclusiveness.
"The worst of the matter was the meek submissiveness of my host to
the affront put upon him. He was shocked and distressed that I should
decline to go to the dinner. He could not understand that the smallest
slight had been put upon him, and I could not make him understand it.
That showed how completely saturated the English mind is with the virus
of arbitrary caste. I am told that there has been some amelioration of
all this during recent years. I do not know how much it amounts to.
But did you ever hear an English _grande dame_ crush the life out of
a sweet and innocent young girl by calling her 'that young person'?
If not, you cannot imagine what measureless contempt can be put into
a phrase, or how much of cruelty and injustice may be wrought by the
utterance of three words."
LIII
[Sidenote: The Newspaper Critic's Function]
During my service as a literary editor, I held firmly to the conviction
that the function of the newspaper book reviewer is essentially a news
function; that it is not his business to instruct other people as to how
they should write, or to tell them how they ought to have written, but
rather to tell readers what they have written and how; to show forth the
character of each book reviewed in such fashion that the reader shall be
able to decide for himself whether or not he wishes to buy and read it,
and that in the main this should be done in a helpful and generously
appreciative spirit, and never carpingly, with intent to show the
smartness of the reviewer--a cheap thing at best. The space allotted
to book reviews in any newspaper is at best wholly insufficient for
anything like adequate criticism, and very generally the reviewer is
a person imperfectly equipped for the writing of such criticism.
In accordance with this conception of my functions, I always held the
news idea in mind. I was alert to secure advance sheets of important
books, in order that the _Evening Post_ might be the first of newspapers
to tell readers about them.
Usually the publishers were ready and eager to give the _Evening Post_
these opportunities, though the literary editors of some morning
newspapers bitterly complained of what they regarded as favoritism when
I was able to anticipate them. On one very notable occasion, however,
great pains were taken by the publishers to avoid all grounds of
complaint. When Tennyson's "Harold" was published in 1876, there had
been no previous announcement of its coming. The greatest secrecy,
indeed, had been maintained. Neither in England nor in America had any
hint been given that any poem by Tennyson was presently forthcoming. On
the day of publication, precisely at noon, copies of "Harold" were laid
upon the desks of all the literary editors in England and America.
My book reviews for that day were already in type and in the forms. One
hour later the first edition of the paper--the latest into which book
reviews could go--must go to press. I knew that my good friends, the
literary editors of the morning newspapers, would exploit this great
literary news the next morning, and that the evening papers would have
it in the afternoon following. I resolved to be ahead of all of them.
I hurriedly sent for the foreman of the composing room and enlisted his
cooperation. With the aid of my scissors I got two columns of matter
ready, consisting mainly of quotations hastily clipped from the book,
with a connective tissue of comment, and with an introductory paragraph
or two giving the first news of the publication of an important and very
ambitious dramatic poem by Tennyson.
At one o'clock the _Evening Post_ went to press with this literary
"beat" displayed upon its first page. It proved to be the first
announcement of the poem's publication either in England or in America,
and it appeared twelve or fifteen hours in advance of any other
publication either by advertisement or otherwise.
[Sidenote: Mr. Bryant and His Contemporaries]
On that occasion I tried to draw from Mr. Bryant some expression of
opinion regarding Tennyson's work and the place he would probably occupy
among English poets when the last word should be said concerning him.
I thought to use the new poem and a certain coincidence connected with
it--presently to be mentioned--as a means of drawing some utterance
of opinion from him. It was of no avail. In reply to my questioning,
Mr. Bryant said:
"It is too soon to assign Tennyson to his permanent place in literature.
He may yet do things greater than any that he has done. And besides, we
are too near to judge his work, except tentatively. You remember Solon's
dictum--'Call no man happy until death.' It is especially unsafe to
attempt a final judgment upon the works of a poet while the glamor of
them is still upon us. Moreover, I have never been a critic. I should
distrust any critical judgment of my own."
That reminded me that I had never heard Mr. Bryant express his opinion
with regard to the work of any modern poet, living or dead. The nearest
approach to anything of the kind that I can recall was in a little
talk I had with him when I was about leaving for Boston to attend the
breakfast given in celebration of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's seventieth
year. The subject of Holmes's work arose naturally, and in talking of it
Mr. Bryant said:
"After all, it is as a novelist chiefly that I think of him."
"You are thinking of 'Elsie Venner'?" I asked.
"No,--of 'The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,'" he answered. "Few
persons care for anything in that except the witty wisdom of it, and I
suppose Dr. Holmes wrote it for the sake of that. But there is a sweet
love story in the book--hidden like a bird in a clump of obtrusively
flowering bushes. It is a sweet, wholesome story, and the heroine of it
is a very natural and very lovable young woman."
The coincidence referred to above was this. Almost exactly at the time
of the publication of Tennyson's "Harold," some American whose name I
have forgotten, to my regret, brought out a dramatic poem on the same
subject, with the same hero, and in a closely similar form. It was
entitled "The Son of Godwin," and, unless my memory plays me a trick,
it was a work of no little merit. It was completely overshadowed, of
course, by Tennyson's greater performance, but it had enough of virility
and poetic quality in it to tempt me to write a carefully studied
comparison of the two works.
While Mr. Bryant shrank from the delivery of opinions concerning the
moderns, his judgments of the older writers of English literature were
fully formed and very positive. He knew the classic literature of our
language--and especially its poetic literature--more minutely, more
critically, and more appreciatively than any other person I have ever
known, and he often talked instructively and inspiringly on the subject.
On one of those periodically recurring occasions when the Baconian
authorship of Shakespeare's works is clamorously contended for by
ill-balanced enthusiasts, Mr. Bryant asked me if I had it in mind to
write anything about the controversy. I told him I had not, unless he
particularly wished me to do so.
"On the contrary," he answered; "I particularly wish otherwise. It is
a sheer waste of good brain tissue to argue with persons who, having
read anything avowedly written by Bacon, are still able to persuade
themselves that the least poetical and most undramatic of writers could
have written the most poetical and most dramatic works that exist in
any language."
"It seems to me," I answered, "that the trouble with such persons is
that they are futilely bothering their brains in an attempt to account
for the unaccountable. Shakespeare was a genius, and genius is a thing
that can in nowise be measured, or weighed, or accounted for, while
genius itself accounts for anything and everything it may do. It is
subject to no restrictions, amenable to no law, and restrained by no
limitations whatsoever."
"That is an excellent way of putting an obvious truth," he answered.
"I wish you would write it down precisely as you have uttered it orally,
and print it as the _Evening Post's_ sole comment upon the controversy."
Then he sat musing for a time, and after a while added:
"Genius exists in varying degrees in different men. In Shakespeare it
was supreme, all-inspiring, all-controlling. In lesser men it manifests
itself less conspicuously and less constantly, but not less positively.
No other poet who ever lived could have written Coleridge's 'The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner,' yet Coleridge could no more have written 'Hamlet'
or 'Macbeth' or 'The Merry Wives of Windsor' than any child in pinafores
could. When poetry is genuine, it is inspired, as truly as any sacred
Scripture ever was. Without inspiration there may be cleverness, beauty,
and grandeur in metrical composition, but genuine poetry is the result
of inspiration always, and inspiration is genius."
"Whence comes the inspiration?" I ventured to ask, hoping to draw
something further from him.
"I do not know," he answered. "Whence comes the color of the rose or
the violet or the dandelion? I am not a theologian, to dogmatize about
things that are beyond the ken of human intelligence. I only know that
the inspiration is there, just as I know that the colors of the flowers
are there--in both cases because the thing perceived is obvious."
[Sidenote: Genius and "Thanatopsis"]
One day I asked Mr. Bryant about "Thanatopsis." When I made my first
acquaintance with that poem in a school reader, it was printed with
some introductory lines in smaller type, and I had never been able to
discover the relation of those lines to the poem or to the thought that
inspired it.
In answer to my questions Mr. Bryant explained that the lines in
question really had no relation to the poem and no possible connection
with it.
"I was a mere boy," he said, "when 'Thanatopsis' was written. It bore no
title in my manuscript--that was supplied by an editor who knew Greek,
a language of which I did not then know even the alphabet. My father
got possession of the poem, took it to Boston, and had it published,
all without my knowledge. With the manuscript of it he found some other
lines of mine and assumed that they belonged to the poem, as they did
not. The editor printed them at top in smaller type, and they got into
the schoolbooks in that way. That is the whole story."
LIV
During my service on the _Evening Post_, I made a curious blunder which
circumstances rendered it necessary for others to exploit. The thing
grievously annoyed me at the time, but later it only amused me as an
illustration of a psychological principle.
Mr. Richard Grant White, writing in some newspaper or magazine in
opposition to the proposed adoption of the metric system of weights and
measures, had made an amusing blunder. He wrote that the old system was
so fixed in men's minds as to admit of no possible mistake. He added
something like this:
"Nobody has any difficulty in remembering that two gills make one pint,
two pints one quart, four quarts one gallon, etc."
I cannot pretend to quote his utterance exactly, but that is the
substance of it, the marrow of the matter being that in the very act of
showing that nobody could have the least trouble in remembering the table
of liquid measure, he himself got it wrong.
[Sidenote: A Case of Heterophemy]
The derisive comments of all the newspapers upon his blunder may be
easily imagined. For reply he invented a word of Greek derivation,
"heterophemy." He contended that it was a common thing for one to speak
or write one thing when quite another thing was in his mind, and when
the speaker or writer perfectly knew the thing he sought to say. He
explained that when the mind has once slipped into an error of that kind
it is usually unable, or at least unlikely, to detect it in the revision
of proofs, or in any other survey of the utterance. His exposition was
very learned, very ingenious, and very interesting, but it had no effect
in silencing the newspaper wags, who at once adopted his newly-coined
word, "heterophemy," and made it the butt of many jests.
About that time Mr. Alexander H. Stephens published in one of the
more dignified periodicals of the time--the _North American Review_,
perhaps--a very learned essay in which he sought to fix the authorship
of the letters of Junius upon Sir Philip Francis. Mr. Stephens brought
to the discussion a ripe scholarship and a deal of fresh and original
thought that gave importance to his paper, and I reviewed it in the
_Evening Post_ as carefully and as fully as if it had been a book.
I was deeply concerned to have my review of so important a paper in all
respects the best I could make it, and to that end I read my proofs
twice, with minute attention, as I thought, to every detail.
The next day, if I remember correctly, was Sunday. At any rate, it was
a day on which I remained at home. When I opened my morning newspapers,
the first thing that attracted my attention was a letter in one of them
from Richard Grant White, of which my article was the subject. Here, he
said, was a conspicuous and unmistakable example of heterophemy, which
could not be attributed to ignorance or inattention or anything else,
except precisely that tendency of the human mind which he had set forth
as the source of mistakes otherwise unaccountable. He went on to say
that mine was an article founded upon adequate scholarship and evidently
written with unusual care; that its writer obviously knew his subject
and had written of it with the utmost attention to accuracy of statement
in every detail; that he had evidently read his proofs carefully as not
a slip appeared in the printed copy of the article, not even so much
as a typographical error; and yet that in two or three instances this
careful critic had written "Sir Philip Sidney" instead of "Sir Philip
Francis." He pointed out that these slips could not have been due to any
possible confusion in my mind of two Sir Philips who lived two hundred
years apart, chronologically, and whose careers were as wholly unlike
as it was possible to conceive; for, he pointed out, my article itself
bore ample witness to my familiarity with Sir Philip Francis's history.
Here, Mr. White insisted, was the clearest possible case of heterophemy,
untainted by even a possible suspicion of ignorance or confusion of mind.
Further, he urged, the case illustrated and confirmed his contention
that, having written a word or name or phrase not intended, the writer
is extremely unlikely to discover the slip even in the most careful
reading of proofs. For in this case every appearance indicated a careful
proofreading on the part of the author of the article.
When I read Mr. White's letter I simply could not believe that I had
made the slips he attributed to me. Certainly there was no confusion in
my mind of Sir Philip Francis with Sir Philip Sidney. I was familiar
with the very different histories of the two altogether dissimilar men,
and it seemed inconceivable to me that I had written the name of the
one for that of the other even once in an article in which the right
name was written perhaps a dozen times.
[Sidenote: Richard Grant White's Triumph]
It was a troubled and unhappy "day off" for me. I had no copy of the
_Evening Post_ of the preceding day in the house, and a diligent inquiry
at all the news-stands in the remote quarter of Brooklyn in which I
then lived, failed to discover one. But as I thought of the matter in
troubled fashion, I became more and more convinced that Mr. White had
misread what I had written, in which case I anticipated a good deal of
fun in exposing and exploiting his error. As the day waned I became
positively certain in my mind that no such mistake had been made, that
no mention of Sir Philip Sidney could by any possibility have crept into
my article concerning Sir Philip Francis.
But when I arrived at the office of the _Evening Post_ next morning, I
found the facts to be as Mr. White had represented them. I had written
"Sir Philip Francis" throughout the article, except in two or three
places, where the name appeared as "Sir Philip Sidney." I was so
incredulous of the blunder that I went to the composing room and secured
my manuscript. The error was there in the written copy. I asked the
chief proofreader why he had not observed and queried it in view of the
fact that my use of the name had been correct in most instances, but he
was unable to offer any explanation except that his mind had accepted
the one name for the other. The foreman of the composing room, a man of
education and large literary knowledge, had read the proofs merely as a
matter of interest, but he had not observed the error. I had no choice
but to accept Mr. Richard Grant White's interpretation of the matter
and call it a case of heterophemy.
There are blunders made that are not so easily accounted for. A leading
New York newspaper once complained of Mr. Cleveland's veto messages as
tiresome and impertinent, and asked why he persisted in setting forth
his reasons for disapproving acts of Congress, instead of sending them
back disapproved without reasons.
The _Evening Post_ found it necessary to direct the newspaper's
attention to the fact that the Constitution of the United States
expressly requires the President, in vetoing a measure, to set forth
his reasons for doing so. In a like forgetfulness of Constitutional
provisions for safeguarding the citizen, the same newspaper complained
of the police, when Tweed escaped and went into hiding, for not
searching every house in New York till the malefactor should be found.
It was Parke Godwin who cited the Constitution in answer to that
manifestation of ignorance, and he did it with the strong hand of a
master to whom forgetfulness of the fundamental law seemed not only
inexcusable, on the part of a newspaper writer, but dangerous to liberty
as well.
Perhaps the worst case I ever knew of ignorance assuming the critical
functions of expert knowledge, was one which occurred some years later.
William Hamilton Gibson published a superbly illustrated work, which won
commendation everywhere for the exquisite perfection of the drawings,
both in gross and in minute detail. A certain art critic who had made
a good deal of noise in the world by his assaults upon the integrity
of art treasures in the Metropolitan Museum, assailed Gibson's work in
print. Finding nothing in the illustrations that he could criticise,
he accused Gibson of sailing under false colors and claiming credit for
results that were not of his creation. He said that nearly everything
of value in the illustrations of Gibson's book was the work not of the
artist but of the engraver who, he declared, had "added increment after
increment of value" to the crude original drawings.
[Sidenote: The Demolition of a Critic]
In a brief letter to the newspaper which had printed this destructive
criticism without its writer's name appended to it, Mr. Gibson had only
to direct attention to the fact that the pictures in question were
not engravings at all, but slavish photographic reproductions of his
original drawings, and that no engraver had had anything whatever to do
with them.
The criticism to which so conclusive a reply was possible was anonymous,
and its author never acknowledged or in any way sought to atone for the
wanton wrong he had sought to inflict under cover of anonymity. But his
agency in the matter was known to persons "on the inside" of literature,
art, and journalism, and the shame of his deed rankled in the minds of
honest men. He wrote little if anything after that, and the reputation
he had made faded out of men's memory.
LV
When Mr. Bryant died, Mr. Parke Godwin assumed editorial control of the
_Evening Post_, and his attention promptly wrought something like a
miracle in the increased vigor and aggressiveness of its editorial
conduct. Mr. Godwin was well advanced in middle life at that time; he
was comfortably provided with this world's goods, and he was not anxious
to take up again the strenuous journalistic work in which he had already
achieved all there was to achieve of reputation. But in his own interest
and in the interest of Mr. Bryant's heirs, it seemed necessary for him
to step into this breach. Moreover, he had abated none of his interest
in public affairs or in those things that make for culture, enlightenment,
and human betterment. He had never ceased to write for the _Evening
Post_ upon matters of such kind when occasion called for strong, virile
utterance.
In his declining years Mr. Bryant had not lost interest in these things,
but he had abated somewhat his activity with reference to them. He had
more and more left the conduct of the newspaper to his subordinates,
trusting to what he used to call his "volunteer staff"--Parke Godwin,
John Bigelow, Samuel J. Tilden, and other strong men, to furnish
voluntarily all that was needed of strenuosity in the discussion of
matters closely concerning the public weal. I do not know that Mr.
Tilden was ever known to the public even as an occasional writer for the
_Evening Post_. He was a man of singularly secretive temperament, and
when he wrote anything for the _Evening Post_ its anonymity was guarded
with a jealousy such as I have never known any other person to exercise.
What he wrote--on the infrequent occasions of his writing at all--was
given to Mr. Bryant and by him handed in with instructions for its
publication and without a hint to anybody concerning its authorship.
It was only by accident that I learned whence certain articles came, and
I think that knowledge was not usually shared with any other member of
Mr. Bryant's staff.