Mr. Grady took great interest in children and young people. It pleased
him beyond measure to be able to contribute to their happiness. He knew
all the boys in the _Constitution_ office, and there is quite a little
army of them employed there in one way and another; knew all about their
conditions, their hopes and their aspirations, and knew their histories.
He had favorites among them, but his heart went out to all. He
interested himself in them in a thousand little ways that no one else
would have thought of. He was never too busy to concern himself with
their affairs. A year or two before he died he organized a dinner for
the newsboys and carriers. It was at first intended that the dinner
should be given by the _Constitution_, but some of the prominent people
heard of it, and insisted in making contributions. Then it was decided
to accept contributions from all who might desire to send anything, and
the result of it was a dinner of magnificent proportions. The tables
were presided over by prominent society ladies, and the occasion was a
very happy one in all respects.
This is only one of a thousand instances in which Mr. Grady interested
himself in behalf of young people. Wherever he could find boys who were
struggling to make a living, with the expectation of making something of
themselves; wherever he could find boys who were giving their earnings
to widowed mothers—and he found hundreds of them—he went to their aid as
promptly and as effectually as he carried out all his schemes, whether
great or small. It was his delight to give pleasure to all the children
that he knew, and even those he didn’t know. He had the spirit and the
manner of a boy, when not engrossed in work, and he enjoyed life with
the zest and enthusiasm of a lad of twelve. He was in his element when a
circus was in town, and it was a familiar and an entertaining sight to
see him heading a procession of children—sometimes fifty in line—going
to the big tents to see the animals and witness the antics of the
clowns. At such times, he considered himself on a frolic, and laid his
dignity on the shelf. His interest in the young, however, took a more
serious shape, as I have said. When Mr. Clark Howell, the son of Captain
Evan Howell, attained his majority, Mr. Grady wrote him a letter, which
I give here as one of the keys to the character of this many-sided man.
Apart from this, it is worth putting in print for the wholesome advice
it contains. The young man to whom it was written has succeeded Mr.
Grady as managing editor of the _Constitution_. The letter is as
follows:
ATLANTA, GA., _Sept. 20, 1884_.
MY DEAR CLARK:—I suppose that just about the time I write this
to you—a little after midnight—you are twenty-one years old. If
you were born a little later than this hour it is your mother’s
fault (or your father’s), and I am not to blame for it. I
assume, therefore, that this is your birthday, and I send you a
small remembrance. I send you a pen (that you may wear as a
cravat-pin) for several reasons. In the first place, I have no
money, my dear boy, with which to buy you something new. In the
next place, it is the symbol of the profession to which we both
belong, in which each has done some good work, and will, God
being willing, do much more. Take the pen, wear it, and let it
stand as a sign of the affection I have for you.
Somehow or other (as the present is a right neat one I have the
right to bore you a little) I look upon you as my own boy. My
son will be just about your age when you are about mine, and he
will enter the paper when you are about where I am. I have got
to looking at you as a sort of prefiguring of what my son may
be, and of looking over you, and rejoicing in your success, as I
shall want you to feel toward him. Let me write to you what I
would be willing for you to write to him.
_Never Gamble._ Of all the vices that enthrall men, this is the
worst, the strongest, and the most insidious. Outside of the
morality of it, it is the poorest investment, the poorest
business, and the poorest fun. No man is safe who plays at all.
It is easiest _never_ to play. I never knew a man, a gentleman
and man of business, who did not regret the time and money he
had wasted in it. A man who plays poker is unfit for every other
business on earth.
_Never Drink._ I love liquor and I love the fellowship involved
in drinking. My safety has been that I never drink at all. It is
much easier not to drink at all than to drink a little. If I had
to attribute what I have done in life to any one thing, I should
attribute it to the fact that I am a teetotaler. As sure as you
are born, it is the pleasantest, the easiest, and the safest
way.
_Marry Early._ There is nothing that steadies a young fellow
like marrying a good girl and raising a family. By marrying
young your children grow up when they are a pleasure to you. You
feel the responsibility of life, the sweetness of life, and you
avoid bad habits.
If you never drink, never gamble, and marry early, there is no
limit to the useful and distinguished life you may live. You
will be the pride of your father’s heart, and the joy of your
mother’s.
I don’t know that there is any happiness on earth worth having
outside of the happiness of knowing that you have done your duty
and that you have tried to do good. You try to build up,—there
are always plenty others who will do all the tearing down that
is necessary. You try to live in the sunshine,—men who stay in
the shade always get mildewed.
I will not tell you how much I think of you or how proud I am of
you. We will let that develop gradually. There is only one thing
I am a little disappointed in. You don’t seem to care quite
enough about base-ball and other sports. Don’t make the mistake
of standing aloof from these things and trying to get old too
soon. Don’t underrate out-door athletic sports as an element of
American civilization and American journalism. I am afraid you
inherit this disposition from your father, who has never been
quite right on this subject, but who is getting better, and will
soon be all right, I think.
Well, I will quit. May God bless you, my boy, and keep you happy
and wholesome at heart, and in health. If He does this, we’ll
try and do the rest.
Your friend, H. W. GRADY.
Mr. Grady’s own boyishness led him to sympathize with everything that
appertains to boyhood. His love for his own children led him to take an
interest in other children. He wanted to see them enjoy themselves in a
boisterous, hearty, health-giving way. The sports that men forget or
forego possessed a freshness for him that he never tried to conceal. His
remarks, in the letter just quoted, in regard to out-door sports, are
thoroughly characteristic. In all contests of muscle, strength,
endurance and skill he took a continual and an absorbing interest. At
school he excelled in all athletic sports and out-door games. He had a
gymnasium of his own, which was thrown open to his school-mates, and
there he used to practice for hours at a time. His tastes in this
direction led a great many people, all his friends, to shake their heads
a little, especially as he was not greatly distinguished for
scholarship, either at school or college. They wondered, too, how, after
neglecting the text-books, he could stand so near the head of his
classes. He did not neglect his books. During the short time he devoted
to them each day, his prodigious memory and his wonderful powers of
assimilation enabled him to master their contents as thoroughly as boys
that had spent half the night in study. Even his family were astonished
at his standing in school, knowing how little time he devoted to his
text-books. He found time, however, in spite of his devotion to out-door
sports and athletic exercises, to read every book in Athens, and in
those days every family in town had a library of more or less value.
He had a large library of his own, and, by exchanging his books with
other boys and borrowing, he managed to get at the pith and marrow of
all the English literature to be found in the university town. Not
content with this, he became, during one of his vacation periods, a
clerk in the only bookstore in Athens. The only compensation that he
asked was the privilege of reading when there were no customers to be
waited on. This was during his eleventh year, and by the time he was
twelve he was by far the best-read boy that Athens had ever known. This
habit of reading he kept up to the day of his death. He read all the new
books as they came out, and nothing pleased him better than to discuss
them with some congenial friend. He had no need to re-read his old
favorites—the books he loved as boy and man—for these he could remember
almost chapter by chapter. He read with amazing rapidity; it might be
said that he literally absorbed whatever interested him, and his
sympathies were so wide and his taste so catholic that it was a poor
writer indeed in whom he could not find something to commend. He was
fond of light literature, but the average modern novel made no
impression on him. He enjoyed it to some extent, and was amazed as well
as amused at the immense amount of labor expended on the trivial affairs
of life by the writers who call themselves realists. He was somewhat
interested in Henry James’s “Portrait of a Lady,” mainly, I suspect,
because it so cleverly hits off the character of the modern female
newspaper correspondent in the person of Miss Henrietta Stackpole. Yet
there was much in the book that interested him—the dreariness of parts
of it was relieved by Mrs. Touchett. “Dear old Mrs. Touchett!” he used
to say. “Such immense cleverness as hers does credit to Mr. James. She
refuses to associate with any of the other characters in the book. I
should like to meet her, and shake hands with her, and talk the whole
matter over.”
When a school-boy, and while devouring all the stories that fell in his
way, young Grady was found one day reading Blackstone. His brother asked
him if he thought of studying law. “No,” was the reply, “but I think
everyone ought to read Blackstone. Besides, the book interests me.” With
the light and the humorous he always mixed the solids. He was fond of
history, and was intensely interested in all the social questions of the
day. He set great store by the new literary development that has been
going on in the South since the war, and sought to promote it by every
means in his power, through his newspaper and by his personal influence.
He looked forward to the time when the immense literary field, as yet
untouched in the South, would be as thoroughly worked and developed as
that of New England has been; and he thought that this development might
reasonably be expected to follow, if it did not accompany, the progress
of the South in other directions. This idea was much in his mind, and in
the daily conversations with the members of his editorial staff, he
recurred to it time and again. One view that he took of it was entirely
practical, as, indeed, most of his views were. He thought that the
literature of the South ought to be developed, not merely in the
interest of belles-lettres, but in the interest of American history. He
regarded it as in some sort a weapon of defense, and he used to refer in
terms of the warmest admiration to the oftentimes unconscious, but
terribly certain and effective manner in which New England had fortified
herself by means of the literary genius of her sons and daughters. He
perceived, too, that all the talk about a distinctive Southern
literature, which has been in vogue among the contributors of the Lady’s
Books and annuals, was silly in the extreme. He desired it to be
provincial in a large way, for, in this country, provinciality is only
another name for the patriotism that has taken root in the rural
regions, but his dearest wish was that it should be purely and truly
American in its aim and tendency. It was for this reason that he was
ready to welcome any effort of a Southern writer that showed a spark of
promise. For such he was always ready with words of praise.
He was fond, as I have said, of Dickens, but his favorite novel, above
all others, was Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables.” His own daring
imagination fitted somewhat into the colossal methods of Hugo, and his
sympathies enabled him to see in the character of Jean Valjean a type of
the pathetic struggle for life and justice that is going on around us
every day. Mr. Grady read between the lines and saw beneath the surface,
and he was profoundly impressed with the strong and vital purpose of
Hugo’s book. Its almost ferocious protest against injustice, and its
indignant arraignment of the inhumanity of society, stirred him deeply.
Not only the character of Jean Valjean, but the whole book appealed to
his sense of the picturesque and artistic. The large lines on which the
book is cast, the stupendous nature of the problem it presents, the
philanthropy, the tenderness—all these moved him as no other work of
fiction ever did. Mr. Grady’s pen was too busy to concern itself with
matters merely literary. He rarely undertook to write what might be
termed a literary essay; the affairs of life—the demands of the hour—the
pressure of events—precluded this; but all through his lectures and
occasional speeches (that were never reported), there are allusions to
Jean Valjean, and to Victor Hugo. I have before me the rough notes of
some of his lectures, and in these appear more than once picturesque
allusions to Hugo’s hero struggling against fate and circumstance.