THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE
Having considered a fiction writer whom the great public rejected, let
us now consider one whom it enthusiastically acclaimed.
Richard Harding Davis was born in Philadelphia in 1864. His father was a
famous editor, and he was raised among cultured people, with every
advantage of prestige and social position. He was handsome, full of
energy, and all his life made hosts of friends. After getting through
college, he took a job with Arthur Brisbane on the New York “Evening
Sun,” where his brother tells us he underwent “considerable privation,”
his salary being only thirty dollars a week at the start, plus his
earnings from short stories. During this same period the present writer
was living in New York upon four and one-half a week, and never sure of
having that; so you see that standards of “considerable privation” vary
considerably.
Davis’s first stories dealt with a hero named Van Bibber, a scion of the
Fifth Avenue plutocracy, handsome, debonair, wearing his clothes with
irreproachable taste, and devoting his abundant leisure to the reforming
of New York; Haroun-al-Raschid brought down to date, Sir Galahad in a
dress-suit. Happy, care-free, he wanders, with innocent heart and open
purse, making things right wherever he finds them wrong. He has the
entrée behind the scenes of theatres, but not to seduce the chorus
girls--ah, nothing like that, but to rescue a sweet, innocent child and
carry her home to a cold, proud, cruel Fifth Avenue father who has
refused to acknowledge his wild oat. That done, Van Bibber roams again,
and jumps on the neck of a burglar, and kicks his pistol out of his
hand, and then gets sorry for him, and buys him a ticket to Montana,
where his wife and daughter wait for him to come and reform. Then he
wanders to the Bowery, and sees a rowdy insulting a lady; it is not
enough for him to demonstrate the natural superiority of the plutocracy
by putting this one rowdy to flight, he must crown the demonstration by
accepting a challenge from three of “the purest specimens of the tough
of the East Side waterfront,” and routing them in the presence of the
proud aristocratic beauty. The charm of the story lies in the truly
elegant insouciance with which young Van Bibber does all these
things--the manner of a juggler keeping six billiard-balls in the air.
Here, you see, is the perfect type of the ruling-class glorifier: Homer
and the Arabian Nights, Don Quixote and King Arthur, Dumas, Ouida,
Rudyard Kipling and Mrs. Humphry Ward all rolled into one. No wonder our
grandfathers were captivated, or that the innocent souls who edited
“Harper’s” and “Scribner’s” extended the freedom of their columns to
this inspired creator of plutocratic romance! It is interesting to note
that our “Dick” came from the most English place in the United States,
and looked like an Englishman and, perhaps as a matter of instinct,
dressed and talked like an Englishman. In his early writing days he
lived for a few months at Oxford, and the students of Balliol College
took him in on equal footing, an honor never before accorded to a
non-student American.
The English ruling class had taken upon itself the task of colonizing
and exploiting the rest of the world, and the American ruling class was
following suit, and Richard Harding Davis became the prophet of both.
Throughout Central America and the West Indies the process is
invariable: American capitalists bribe the governments of these
countries and get enormously valuable concessions, then they send in
engineers and other handsome young heroes clad in khaki and puttees and
with automatics in their belts. These heroes engage the natives of the
country to exploit the natural resources and ship out the wealth of the
country, to be spent upon monkey dinners at Newport and champagne
suppers in Broadway lobster palaces. Sooner or later the natives become
irritated at the sight of their natural resources being exported for
such purposes, so they revolt against the native government which has
sold them to the Yankees. Then the handsome young Yankee heroes draw
their automatics and bring up machine guns, and gloriously defend the
native government which they have bought and paid for. The ending comes
triumphantly with a Yankee gunboat in the harbor, and some marines
charging up the slope of a hill waving Old Glory, while the audience
leaps from its seats and cheers for five minutes.
“Soldiers of Fortune” was “Dick” Davis’s biggest success. It brought him
reservoirs of money, first as a serial, then as a novel, then as a
drama, and finally as a movie. His other novels were like it, in that
they dealt with members of the ruling class gloriously making or
marrying fortunes. The next was called “The Princess Aline,” and told
about a young, wealthy, handsome and aristocratic artist--so many
elements of good fortune!--who falls in love with the photograph of a
German princess. The model for this exquisite heroine was the future
Empress of Russia; but Davis did not live to write a sequel, showing the
final destiny of his heroine, her mangled body dumped into a well along
with her husband and four exquisite daughters. Recalling these novels at
the present hour, I see the international plutocracy with all its
exquisite wives and daughters, crouched trembling upon the top of a
mountain of gold and jewels, while all around them the handsome young
hired heroes peer out over the sights of machine guns at the massed fury
of the exploited millions of mankind--white, black, yellow, brown, red,
and mixed.
Davis became a war correspondent and spent his time racing over the
earth from one scene of excitement to another. I have run through the
volume of his letters and jotted down a few date lines in the order they
occur: Cuba, London, Egypt, Gibraltar, Paris, Central America, South
America, Moscow, Budapest, Havana, London, Florence, Greece, Havana,
Cape Town, Pretoria, Aix-les-Bains, Massachusetts, Madrid, London, San
Francisco, Tokio, Manchuria, Havana, the Congo, New York, London,
Santiago, Vera Cruz, Belgium, Plattsburg, Paris, Athens, Rome. If you
know the history of the world for twenty-five years beginning with 1890
you can connect each of these geographical names with a coronation, a
jubilee, a war, or other ruling-class recreation.
All through the letters runs the theme of money, the Aladdin’s tale of a
soldier of literary fortune. He gets five thousand dollars for the
serial rights of “Soldiers of Fortune” from “Scribner’s Magazine”; he
gets five hundred dollars for reporting a foot-ball game; he gets three
thousand dollars and expenses for a month’s reporting of the Cuban
struggle with Spain, and when America enters the conflict, he gets ten
cents a word from “Scribner’s Magazine” and four hundred dollars a week
and expenses from the New York “Times.”
Everywhere he goes he is, of course, a lion, and moves only in the
highest circles. His letters are full of diplomats and generals and
lords and ladies and kings and queens, together with the most famous
actors and literary lights. He is presented at Court--and by this,
needless to say, I mean the Court of their Majesties the King and Queen
of Great Britain and Ireland, and Emperor and Empress of India. And all
through the letters we note dinner-parties and banquets and
champagne-suppers and cocktails--interrupted by a siege with sciatica,
preparing us for the quick curtain, when our ruling-class hero departs
his successful life at the age of fifty-two.
New York is a place of mean and envious gossip, and one of its
diversions was telling anecdotes illustrating the snobbery and
self-importance of Richard Harding Davis. It appears that in the days of
his extraordinary prosperity he did not always recognize his former
newspaper cronies when he met them on the street. Perhaps he had noted
that so many of these former cronies took the occasion to borrow money
from him. Anyhow, I have one anecdote to contribute to the collection.
It was early in 1914, a period of great depression in my own life and
fortunes. Davis, of course, never had any depressions; he had just come
back from Cuba, where he had turned “Soldiers of Fortune” into a moving
picture film, and it was now being launched on Broadway with enormous
éclat. I happened to know the manager, and was invited to the opening
performance, where in the lobby I was introduced to the great author and
lion of the occasion. When he heard my name his face lighted up, and he
gave me a warm hand-clasp, exclaiming, “Ah, now! You write books because
you really have something to say, while I write only to make money!” It
was so different from what I expected that I was completely taken aback,
and could only make a deprecating murmur. “It is true,” he said; “I know
it, and so do you.”
The reader may say that in telling this story I do more credit to Davis
than to myself. But that is not my concern. What I have to do here is to
report the statement of America’s leading soldier of literary fortune
concerning his own work and its reason for being.