In the articles about Mr. Davis that have appeared since his death, the
personality of the man seems to overshadow the merit of the author. In
dealing with the individual the writers overlook the fact that we have
lost one of the best of our story-tellers. This is but natural. He
was a very vivid kind of person. He had thousands of friends in all
parts of the world, and a properly proportionate number of enemies, and
those who knew him were less interested in the books than in the man
himself--the generous, romantic, sensitive individual whose character
and characteristics made him a conspicuous figure everywhere he
went--and he went everywhere. His books were sold in great numbers,
but it might be said in terms of the trade that his personality had a
larger circulation than his literature. He probably knew more waiters,
generals, actors, and princes than any man who ever lived, and the
people he knew best are not the people who read books. They write them
or are a part of them. Besides, if you knew Richard Davis you knew his
books. He translated himself literally, and no expurgation was needed
to make the translation suitable for the most innocent eyes. He was
the identical chivalrous young American or Englishman who strides
through his pages in battalions to romantic death or romantic marriage.
Every one speaks of the extraordinary youthfulness of his mind, which
was still fresh at an age when most men find avarice or golf a
substitute for former pastimes. He not only refused to grow old
himself, he refused to write about old age. There are a few elderly
people in his books, but they are vague and shadowy. They serve to
emphasize the brightness of youth, and are quickly blown away when the
time for action arrives. But if he numbered his friends and
acquaintances by the thousands there are other thousands in this
country who have read his books, and they know, even better than those
who were acquainted with him personally, how good a friend they have
lost. I happened to read again the other day the little collection of
stories--his first, I think--which commences with "Gallegher" and
includes "The Other Woman" and one or more of the Van Bibber tales.
His first stories were not his best. He increased in skill and was
stronger at the finish than at the start. But "Gallegher" is a fine
story, and is written in that eager, breathless manner which was all
his own, and which always reminds me of a boy who has hurried home to
tell of some wonderful thing he has seen. Of course it is improbable.
Most good stories are and practically all readable books of history.
No old newspaper man can believe that there ever existed such a "copy
boy" as Gallegher, or that a murderer with a finger missing from one
hand could escape detection even in a remote country village. Greed
would have urged the constable to haul to the calaboose every stranger
who wore gloves. But he managed to attach so many accurate details of
description to the romance that it leaves as definite an impression of
realism as any of Mr. Howells's purposely realistic stories. The scene
in the newspaper office, the picture of the prize-fight, the mixture of
toughs and swells, the spectators in their short gray overcoats with
pearl buttons (like most good story-tellers he was strong on the
tailoring touch), the talk of cabmen and policemen, the swiftness of
the way the story is told, as if he were in a hurry to let his reader
know something he had actually seen--create such an impression of truth
that when the reader finishes he finds himself picturing Gallegher on
the witness-stand at the murder trial receiving the thanks of the
judge. And he wonders what became of this precocious infant, and
whether he was rewarded in time by receiving the hand of the sister of
the sporting editor in marriage.
To give the appearance of truth to the truth is the despair of writers,
but Mr. Davis had the faculty of giving the appearance of the truth to
situations that in human experience could hardly exist. The same
quality that showed in his tales made him the most readable of war
correspondents. He went to all the wars of his youth and middle age
filled with visions of glorious action. Where other correspondents saw
and reported evil-smelling camps, ghastly wounds, unthinkable
suffering, blunders, good luck and bad luck, or treated the subject
with a mathematical precision that would have given Clausewitz a
headache, Davis saw and reported it first of all as a romance, and then
filled in the story with human details, so that the reader came away
with an impression that all these heroic deeds were performed by people
just like the reader himself, which was exactly the truth.
It is a pity that the brutality of the German staff officers and the
stupidity of the French and English prevented him from seeing the
actual fighting in Flanders and Picardy. The scene is an ugly one, a
wallow of blood and mire. But so probably were Agincourt and Crecy
when you come to think of it, and Davis, you may be sure, would have
illuminated the foul battle-field with a reflection of the glory which
must exist in the breasts of the soldiers.
The fact is, he was the owner of a most enviable pair of eyes, which
reported to him only what was pleasant and encouraging. A man is
blessed or cursed by what his eyes see. To some people the world of
men is a confused and undecipherable puzzle. To Mr. Davis it was a
simple and pleasant pattern--good and bad, honest and dishonest, kind
and cruel, with the good, the honest, and the kind rewarded; the bad,
the dishonest, and the cruel punished; where the heroes are modest, the
brave generous, the women lovely, the bus-drivers humorous; where the
Prodigal returns to dine in a borrowed dinner-jacket at Delmonico's
with his father, and where always the Young Man marries the Girl. And
this is the world as much as Balzac's is the world, if it is the world
as you see it.