brooding for years, "Bums I Have Known." It has been my felicity to
have known more bums, I think, than any living man. But I fear I shall
never get that book written. And this is a pity. It is a pity because
this book would be of great value in the years to come. With our
modern passion for efficiency, and with efficiency rapidly becoming
compulsory everywhere, that colourful class of ancient lineage, the
bums, is quickly becoming _persona non grata_ to our civilisation, and
will soon be extinct. To the next generation, in all probability, the
word bum will be but an empty name. I doubt whether it would be a
feasible plan for Dr. Hornaday to undertake to preserve a small number
of this species in the Bronx Park. The bum nature, I fear, would
languish in captivity. The creature would likely lose its health, and,
worse, its spirits. It is a nomad, a child of nature. It takes no
thought for the morrow, as our modern prophets teach us to do. I
remember well an excellent bum (I mean excellently conforming to type),
one Bain, who, growing restive under restraint, lost a position which
he happened to have. I asked him what he was going to do now. There
was something sublime about that being. He had faith that the Lord
would provide. His simple reply was: "Well, the ravens fed Elijah."
Stuffed bums in the American Museum of Natural History would not be any
good. Any good, that is, as objects of study. Our children will
require to know, to see the past steadily and see it whole, the
_habits_ of bums, their manners and customs. So, as I say, my work
would be invaluable. The wastrel (as they say in England) has, of
course, been celebrated in the literature of the past from time
immemorial. I can't at the moment put my finger on any, but I have no
doubt there are bums in the pages of Homer, That Persian philosopher
who found paradise enow with a jug of wine and a book of verse beneath
a bough, Falstaff, Richard Swiveller, how they flock to the mind, they
of the care-free kidney! They are in the Books of the great Hebrew
literature. There was he that took his journey into a far country.
"Gil Blas" and all the early picaresque novels on into the pages of
"The Romany Rye" swarm with them. But what is wanting, what will be
needed, is a richly informed picture of the last of the race, those
now, like the Indian and the buffalo, fast passing away. There is only
one way in which such a book could be, or should be written.
"Peace be with the soul of that charitable and Courteous Author who
introduced the ingenious way of miscellaneous writing," wrote Lord
Shaftsbury in the opening paragraph of his "Miscellaneous Reflections."
Peace be with the souls of all those who, for the delight of the
anointed, have practised that most debonair of all the arts, the
ingenious way of miscellaneous writing! Now, as highly successful
novelists always say nowadays when interviewed for highly successful
newspapers, "I know very little about literature," but I fancy this
benign way of writing had its well-spring in those preposterous days,
now long fled, when men of reading were content to give their best
thoughts first to their friends and then--ten years or so
afterwards--to the "publick." Its period was the day of the
"wits"--those beaux of the mind.
I guess the reason it has gone by the board is that it was what would
be called "literary." And there is nothing we are so scared of to-day
as the literary. It was not those dons the critics, we are told on the
subway cards, who made Dickens immortal--it was YOU. And our foremost
magazines advertise the "un-literary essay." "Literary expression,"
that Addisonian English stuff, whose elegance pleasantly conceals the
lack of ideas beneath, is taboo in these parts. What we want is
writers who have something to say, and who say it naturally and without
any beating about the bush.
While the spell of miscellaneous writing, for those who savour it, is
the author's joyous inability, it would seem, to get any "forrader," to
stick to the point, to carry anything with a rush. See the greatest
miscellaneous writer who ever lived, as an admirable later
miscellaneous writer the late (in a literary sense) Hon. Augustine
Birrell calls him, the Rev. Laurence Sterne. See positively the most
buoyant book in all the world; I mean, of course, "The Path to Rome,"
by Hilaire Belloc. That glorious newspaper article, "Is Genius
Conscious of Its Power?" starts off, indeed, with an allusion to the
subject of genius. But the genius of this writer, of such unsurpassed
and ingratiating savagery, soon turns to its true business of getting
lost in the woods, and we take it from William Hazlitt that all in
power are a lot of crooks.
So one born under the miscellaneous writer's star who purposed to write
on, say, bums he had known would quite likely begin with a disquisition
upon the importance of a good shape of human ear, and very naturally
would conclude, with some warmth, with a denunciation of tight
trowsers. And he would, of course, wander by the way into pleasant
reminiscences of his childhood--how, for instance, the child gets his
idea of what a native is from the cuts in his geography book. I well
remember the first time I was alluded to in my presence as a native. I
was very indignant. I knew what natives looked like from the cuts I
had pored over. They were a fine, spirited race, very picturesquely
attired, mostly in bows and arrows, and as creatures of romance I
admired them greatly. Persons such as I and my parents were generally
depicted in this connection as fleeing from them. And it did strike me
as an ignoramus kind of thing that I should be called a native. When I
was reasoned with to the effect that I was a native of Indiana, my
resentment but grew. There were no natives in Indiana.
Speaking of efficiency reminds me of the real estate business. I have
recently come somewhat into contact with this business and I have
observed certain outstanding facts about it which I have not seen
commented upon before. To set up in the real estate business one thing
above all else is necessary, that is uncommon familiarity with the word
"imagination." If you are thinking of buying a lot you will meet a
tall, fair man, or a short, dark man (as the case may be), but in any
case as unimaginative-looking a man as you could readily imagine. From
this person you will learn that the thing at the bottom of every great
fortune was imagination. If the location of the lot which you view
strikes you as rather a desolate and barren-looking part of the world
the trouble is not with the location but with you. Forty-second Street
looked worse than that at one time. Thus, I imagine, if you have
sufficient imagination you buy the lot.
It is a remarkable thing that the most startling spectacle in New York
has never struck any one but myself. Forty-second Street puts me in
mind of this. If you were a native of the Sandwich Islands and had
never before been in town and were standing at the South-East corner of
Broadway and Fulton Street at nine o'clock in the morning and were
facing West, you would cry out aghast at this sight: You would see the
quiet, old world grave-yard of St. Paul's Chapel, the funereal stone
urn upon its stone post marking the corner and the leaning headstones
beyond. There is no trumpet sound. But from a mouth at the
grave-yard's side the earth belches forth a host which springs quick
into the new day. It is a remarkable spectacle to contemplate, fraught
with portent and symbol, though the mouth is a subway kiosk, my
Sandwich friend.
Now, there are men who walk about London just as some men collect
books. They are amateurs of London. Year by year they add precious
souvenirs to their rich collections, the find of an old passage way
here, there the view when the light is quite right from one precise
spot, say, on Waterloo Bridge. Sometimes, indeed, they write books
about their hobby, more or less useful to the neophyte: as "A
Wayfarer's London," or "A Wanderer in London," or "Ghosts of
Piccadilly," or some such thing; but more frequently they are of the
highest type of amateur, the connoisseur who will gladly share his joy
in his treasures with a cultivated friend but has nothing of his love
to sell. I doubt whether there are any such amateurs of New York, any
who for thirty years and more have walked our streets as an
intellectual sport with unabated zest. London, of course, has the drop
on us in the matter of richness of material for this sort of collector,
but there is plenty to bag at home. Not far from the corner of
Broadway and Fulton Street, I recollect, is a queer place called
Vandewater Street.
Some twenty years or so ago you used to go to melodramas, real
melodramas. There are aesthetic revivals of melodrama in Boston, I
hear. There was nothing aesthetic about the ones I mean, and the
enjoyment of them was untainted by the malady of thought. Come along
now. We'll dive through Park Row and turn here down Frankfort Street.
Few do turn down Frankfort Street, and I fear its admirable points are
unappreciated. For one thing, it goes down, down, down a very steep
incline; which is a spirited thing for a street to do, I think. And it
is very narrow, at the beginning, with sidewalks that hug the walls,
and is always in shadow, so that it has a fine, wild, villainous look.
Horses climbing it always come with a plunge and a grinding of sparks.
And the roar from the cobble stones is deafening, very stimulating to
the imagination. The atmosphere is one of typefounders, leather,
hides, and oyster houses.
Very few people, I fancy, could tell you where there is a portcullis in
New York just like the one at a gateway in The Tower. But if you snook
around the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge you'll find one, with a
winding stair disappearing beyond it, and mounting, presumably, to a
dungeon. Newswomen, I think, are pleasanter to see than newsboys.
There is a newsgirl who minds a stand here at the corner of Rose and
Frankfort Streets who is charming as a type of 'Arriet. She always
wears an enormous hat. A fine thing for a 'Arriet to do, I think.
Sometimes the stand is minded by her mother. (I take it, it is her
mother.) An old body who always has her head wrapped in a knitted
affair. A fine thing for an old body to do, I think. Phil May would
have delighted in Frankfort Street. So would Rembrandt. Here comes an
elderly person, evidently George Luk's "My Old Pal," who is balancing a
large bundle of sticks on her head. Across the way is a Whistler
etching; Whistler did not happen to etch it; but it is a Whistler
etching all the same. You look up a frowsy little courtyard, the walls
of which are more graceful than plumb, and you see a horse's head
sticking out into the etching. Also, across the way the "k" has
dropped out of steak on the window of a chop-house. The public-houses
down this way, many of them, are very low places. The thing to do in
this world is to get as much innocent pleasure out of the spectacle as
possible.
Well, the streets here twist about beneath the Bridge, so that you do
not know what's beyond the turning. People going and coming through
the arches are silhouettes. Overhead it is like the grumbling of a
thunder storm. Wagons going over the stones rattle tremendously, and
they carry lanterns swung beneath to be lighted at night. The streets
have fine names: there is Gold Street, and then Jacob Street.
Frankfort Street widens out and becomes a generous thoroughfare, all in
sunlight. There is a huge, gay hoarding to the right as you go down.
On your left you see one of the towers of the Bridge rising high in the
air. Directly ahead the "JL" crosses the way!
Now comes the point which I have been getting at. You dip and turn
into Vandewater Street. Under the Bridge at once you go, where all
sounds are weird, hollow sounds, and then out again. The atmosphere
has been becoming more and more charged with the character of the
printing business. Now may be felt the tremour and heard the sound of
moving presses. Printing houses, dealers in "litho inks," linotype
companies, paper makers, "publishers and jobbers of books," "photo
engraving" establishments are all about. Here is a far-famed
publishing house the sight of which takes you back with a jump to your
boyhood, your youthful, arrant, adventurous reading. Those were the
happy days when the flavour of Crime was like ginger i' the mouth.
Perhaps the recollection of this affects your thoughts now, and makes
your mind more active than want.
All the people going through Vandewater Street appear to be
compositors. Fine, strapping, romantic people, compositors, smeared
with ink! Though there are other interests in this street besides
printing. There is a big schoolhouse with every window in it broken;
grand, desolate look to it! There is a delightful sign which says:
"Horse collars, up stairs." There are little homes toward the end of
the street--it is one block long--little, old, two-story, brick
dwelling houses, in charmingly bad repair, with fire escapes, little
stairs twisting up to the doors and iron railings there, and
window-boxes at the windows.
As you turn at Pearl Street to go back again something comes over you.
It is melodrama that comes over you. The vista of this queer, cold,
lonesome, hard little street, down by the great city's river front, was
painted, or something very like it was painted, on back curtains long
ago. The great, gloomy pile of the Bridge rises before over all. To
make it right there should be a scream. A female figure with hair
streaming upward should shoot through the air to black waters below,
where there is a decrepit boat with a man in a striped jersey pulling
at the oars.
V
THAT REVIEWER "CUSS"
There are very young, oh absurdly young! reviewers; and there are
elderly reviewers, with whiskers. There are also women reviewers.
Absurdly young reviewers are inclined to be youthful in their reviews.
Elderly reviewers usually have missed fire with their lives, or they
wouldn't still be reviewers. The best sort of a reviewer is the
reviewer that is just getting slightly bald. He is not a
flippertigibbet, and still an intelligent man--if he is a good reviewer.
Book reviews are in nearly all the papers. Proprietors of newspapers
don't read these things: they think they are deadly stuff. Many
authors don't: because they regard them as ill-natured and exceedingly
stupid. Book clerks don't read them much: for that would be like
working overtime. Business men infrequently have time for such
nonsense. University professors are inclined to pooh-pooh them as
things beneath them. Still somebody must read them, as publishers pay
for them with their advertising. No publishers' advertising, no book
reviews, is the policy of nearly every newspaper; and the reviews are
generally in proportion to the amount of advertising. Now publishers
are sagacious men who generally live in comfortable circumstances, and
who occasionally get quite rich and mingle in important society. They
set considerable store by reviews; they employ publicity men at good
wages who continually supply reviewers with valuable information by
post and telephone; they are fond of quoting in large type remarks from
reviews which please them; and sometimes, at reviews they don't like,
they stir up a fuss and have literary editors removed from office.
Yes, reviews have much power. They are eagerly read by multitudes of
people who write very indignantly to the paper to correct and rebuke
the reviewer when, owing to fatigue, he refers to Miss Mitford as
having written "Cranford," or otherwise blunders. They are the wings
of fame to new authors. They can increase the sale of a book by saying
that it should not be in the hands of the young. They are tolerated by
the owners of papers, who are very powerful men indeed, engaged in the
vast modern industry of manufacturing news for the people, and in
constant effort to obtain control of politics. Reviewers are paid
space rates of, in some instances, as much as eight dollars a column,
with the head lines deducted. When there is no other payment they
always get the book they review free for their libraries, or to sell
cheap to the second-hand man. Reviewers are spoken of as "the
critics"--by simple-minded people; when their printed remarks are
useful for that purpose, the remarks are called "leading critical
opinions"--by advertisements; and reviewers are sometimes invited to
lunch by astute authors, and are treated to pleasant dishes to cheer
them, and given good cigars to smoke.
Occasionally somebody ups and discusses the nature of our literary
journalism and what sort of a creature the reviewer is. Dr. Bliss
Perry was at this not long ago in the _Yale Review_. Editor for a
couple of decades of our foremost literary journal, and now a professor
in one of our great universities, Dr. Perry certainly knows a good deal
about various branches of the book business. His highly critical
review of the reviewing business has somewhat the character of a
history that a great general might write of a war. A man who had
served in the trenches, however, would give a more intimate picture,
though of course it would not be as good history.
I will give an intimate picture of the American reviewer at work
to-day: the absurdly young, the slightly bald, and the elderly with
whiskers; and of his hard and picturesque trade.
There was an old man who had devoted a great many years to a close
study of engraved gems. He embodied the result of his elaborate
researches in a learned volume. I never had a gem of any kind in my
life; at the time of which I write I did not have a job. A friend of
mine, who was a professional reviewer, and at whose house I was
stopping, brought home one day this book on engraved gems, and told me
he had got it for me to review. "But," I said, "I don't know anything
about engraved gems, and" (you see I was very inexperienced) "I can
write only about things that particularly interest me." "You are a
devil of a journalist," was my friend's reply; "you'd better get to
work on this right away. You studied art, didn't you? I told the
editor you knew all about art. And he has to have the article by
Thursday."
He instructed me in certain elementary principles of the art of
successful reviewing; such, for example, as getting your information
out of the book itself; and he cautioned me against employing too many
quotation marks, as the editor did not like that.
My review, of a couple of columns, cut a bit here and there by the
literary editor, appeared in a prominent New York paper. Speaking
quite impartially, simply as now a trained judge of these things, I
will say that it was a very fair review: it "gave the book," as the
term is. I discovered that I had something of a talent for this work;
and so it was that I entered a profession which I have followed, with
divers vicissitudes, for a number of years.
I became good friends with that literary editor, and began to
contribute regularly week by week to his paper. He liked my style, and
always gave me a good position in the paper. He liked me personally,
and always put my name to my reviews; which was a thing against the
rule of the paper--that being that only articles by celebrated persons
were to be signed.
This is a point sometimes questioned. It seems to me that it is a good
thing for the reviewer to have his work signed, particularly for the
young reviewer, whose yet ardent spirit craves a place in the sun. It
contributes to his pleasant conception of reviewing as a fine thing to
do. It makes him more alive than the anonymous thing. He meets people
who brighten at the recollection of having read his name. I know a man
who was a very witty reviewer (when he was young); that fellow used to
get love letters from ladies he had never seen, just like a baseball
pitcher, or a tenor; there was a rich man who ate meals at the Century
Club had him there to dinner, because he thought him funny; he got a
note from a Literary Adviser asking him for a book manuscript; and two
persons wrote him from San Francisco. I myself have had courteous
letters thanking me from authors here and in England. That fellow of
whom I just spoke undoubtedly was on the threshold of a brilliant
career; he was full of courage and laughter, though very poor. Then a
great man offered him a Position as a literary editor. His name ceased
to be seen; I heard of him after a year, and it was said of him that he
was dreadfully bald and had a long beard, I mean of course
metaphorically speaking.
Whether signed reviewers are conducive to honesty I am not sure. There
was a man (I know him well) wrote a book on Alaska or some such place,
claimed he had been there. There was another man, his friend, who was
a reviewer. Now the Alaskaian said to the critic: "Why don't you get
my book from the paper? I'll write the review--I know more about the
book than anybody else, anyway; and you sign it and get the money."
And this was done; and it was an excellent review; and the paper (which
you read every day) was no wiser.
The literary editor who signed my reviews for me was a youth of an
independent turn of mind. He encouraged the expression in reviews of
exactly what one thought; he liked an individual note in them; he had
an enthusiasm for books of literary quality, somewhat to the neglect of
other branches of the publishing business; he gathered about him a
group of writers of a spirit kindred to his own; and he was rapidly
moulding his department of his paper into a thing, perhaps a plaything,
of life and colour.
But he lacked commercial tact. He wanted to make something like the
English lighter literary journals. He offended the powers behind the
man higher up. I saw him last on a Wednesday; he outlined his plans
for the future. On Friday, I know he "made up" his paper. Saturday I
looked for him, but he had gone from that place. There was in it a
dried man of much hard experience of newspapers, who reigned in that
youth's stead. The wrath of authority grinds with exceeding quickness.
This which I have written is history, as many excellent of mind know,
and should be put into a book: for it reveals how close we came to
having in this country a Literary Doings that could be read for
pleasure. I continued to learn the business.
Sometimes reviewers are poets also. I know fifteen. Sometimes they
are Irishmen. Sometimes both. I knew one who was one of those Celtic
Poets. His name had all the colour of the late Irish literary
movement. That is, after he became a man of letters; before that it
was Bill Somethingorother. He was an earnest person, without humour
(strange for an Irishman!), eloquent, very pronounced in his opinions;
and he had never read anything at all (outside of Columbia University)
before he was called to the literary profession. Later he went into
politics, and became something at Washington. Some reviewers, again,
are lexicographers. I know about a dozen of these, ranging in age from
twenty-seven years to seventy. When they had finished writing the
dictionary, they joined the army of the unemployed, and became
reviewers. I am acquainted with one reviewer who has been everything,
almost, under the sun--a husband, a father, and a householder; he has
been successively a socialist, an aesthete, a Churchman, and a Roman
Catholic. He is an eager student of the universe, a prodigiously
energetic journalist, a lively and a humorous writer, a person of
marked talent. He will be thirty shortly.
Sometimes reviews are charmingly written by veteran literary men, such
as, for instance, Mr. Le Gallienne, and Mr. Huneker. Dr. Perry
mentions among reviewers a group of seasoned bookmen, including Mr.
Paul Elmer More and Professor Frank Mather, Jr. Mr. Boynton is another
sound workman. On the other hand, by some papers, books are
economically given out for review to reporters. And again (for the
same reason), to editorial writers and to various editors. In
America, you know, practically everybody connected with a newspaper is
an editor. The man who sits all day in his shirt sleeves smoking a
corncob pipe, clipping up with large scissors vast piles of newspapers,
is exchange editor. There was a paper for which I worked from morn
till dewy eve, reviewing hooks, where we used to say that we had an
elevator editor and a scrub editor, and a nice charwoman she was.