Bryant at the end of June was wavering; that Henderson advanced his
arguments respectfully but firmly; and that Bryant of his own free will
placed the _Evening Post_ behind Hayes. After all, his old associates
in attacking Grant, the Liberal Republican leaders, flocked back to the
G. O. P. He had the resumption of specie payments close to his heart,
and was alarmed by the soft-money convictions of western Democrats;
he feared the shock to hopes of civil service reform if a horde of
office-hungry Democrats poured into Washington; and the recent conduct
of the Democratic House gave him reason to think they would do little
for tariff reduction. It was perfectly logical for the journal to stand
with the party which it had helped found and had ever since supported,
while it would have been hard to find a logical justification for
leaving it. Throughout the campaign it stood by Hayes, though with very
moderate zeal, and it rejoiced when the Electoral Commission gave him
the Presidency. Bryant later wrote that he had never before felt so
little interest in a contest for the Presidency. No one ever knew for
whom he voted on election day, for, saying with a smile that the ballot
was a secret institution, he always refused to tell; Bigelow believed
that he voted for neither candidate.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
TWO REBEL LITERARY EDITORS
Amid the eulogies which followed Bryant’s death in 1878, a dissenting
note was struck by that short-lived illustrated newspaper, the _Daily
Graphic_. After a disparaging estimate of his poetry, it remarked that
he, as one of our most celebrated literary men, should have made the
_Evening Post_ the country’s leading critical authority. “It utterly
failed to become such an authority. Indeed, it would be hard to say
what benefits the existence of the _Evening Post_ has conferred upon
literature. We say this in all kindness, and with a full knowledge that
there were difficulties in the way of creating a literary journal....”
There was force in this statement of an opportunity missed, though
the _Graphic_ exaggerated the _Post’s_ deficiencies, and failed to
consider whether they might not be due to lack of public appreciation
of anything better. The truth is that till 1881 there was no American
newspaper whose literary criticism would now be considered of high
standards. This is said with due respect to George Ripley, who after
years at Harvard, at Brook farm, and in the ministry which made him
personally intimate with most of the New England authors, joined the
_Tribune_ in 1849 and remained in its harness until his death. He
gave himself up to literary criticism with an industry equaled in our
journalistic history by that of W. P. Garrison alone. He began as a
man of wide culture; he was so devoted to study and research that in
time there were few subjects upon which he could not supply facts and
ideas of his own; he was conscientious, unprejudiced, and accustomed
to refer to first principles. Tyndall wrote that he had “the grasp of
a philosopher and the good taste of a gentleman.” His reviews were
easily the best in any American journal, and he had some assistance
from Bayard Taylor, John Hay, and other able men. But he was too mild,
while he had no thought of sending each new book to a specialist.
Through simple inattention, no regular chair was established for a
literary editor by the _Post_ till after the Civil War. In August,
1860, young William Dean Howells applied for such a place, bearing
a letter from James T. Fields of the _Atlantic_, who said: “He
chooses the _Post_ of all papers in the Union, and if you get him for
your literary work, etc., you will get a lad who will be worth his
weight, etc., etc., etc.” Bigelow’s sagacity for once failed him, and
Howells was turned away. Later an application from Park Benjamin was
rejected. There was little room for reviews during the war, and little
inclination on the part of the public to think of pure literature. But
when Bryant returned from his last trip to Europe and settled down to
translate Homer he finally saw the need for such an editor.
In April, 1867, there reached New York from the South a slight, gaunt
man of forty-three, the emaciation of whose face was partly concealed
by his heavy beard, but who was as clearly in bad health as in reduced
circumstances. He was received with honor by the city’s growing colony
of former Confederates. This was John R. Thompson, who had edited the
_Southern Literary Messenger_ for thirteen years previous to the war.
He was employed by _Albion_, a weekly devoted to English interests,
and then by its feeble successor, _Every Afternoon_. Meanwhile, E. C.
Stedman had introduced him to Bryant, while Bryant’s old friend,
William Gilmore Simms, wrote recommending him to notice and assistance.
In May, 1868, he was appointed literary editor of the _Evening Post_, a
position which he held five years.
Thompson’s training seemed admirable for the place. He had proved
himself one of the ablest conductors of the _Southern Literary
Messenger_, which Poe had edited before him. He gave it not only his
personal services without return, but spent his small patrimony to keep
it alive. Frank R. Stockton and Donald G. Mitchell among Northern
authors received their first recognition from him, while the small band
of Southern literary men regarded the magazine as their section’s chief
exponent. When in 1859, at John P. Kennedy’s suggestion, he sought the
librarianship of the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, Longfellow and
Edward Everett were among those who wrote recommending him. During
the war, while for a time Virginia’s Assistant Secretary of State and
later editor of the Richmond _Record_, he was a kind of laureate of
the Confederacy, his spirited verses following many military events
of importance. “Ashby,” “The Burial of Latane,” and “Lee to the Rear”
are known by every Southern schoolboy, while “Music in Camp” is in
every anthology of historical verse. In 1864 he escaped to England
on a blockade runner to carry on publicity for the South, and not
only worked on the _Index_, a Confederate organ, but contributed to
_Blackwood’s_, _Punch_, the _Standard_, and other periodicals. He was a
frequent visitor at Carlyle’s home in Cheyne Row, and is mentioned in
Carlyle’s “Reminiscences”, Tennyson entertained him several times at
Farringford, and he knew Bulwer, Kingsley, and Thackeray.
He soon became one of the best-liked men on the _Post_ staff. He wrote
the extensive review of the first volume of Bryant’s translation of
the Iliad in February, 1870, and that of the second that summer; and
Bryant came to have him much at his home. There was no more charming
conversationalist in New York society. “He had read so variously,
observed so minutely, and retained so tenaciously the results of his
reading and observation,” Bryant wrote later in the _Post_, “that he
was never at a loss for a topic and never failed to invest what he was
speaking of with a rare and original interest. His fund of anecdote
was almost inexhaustible, and his ability to illustrate any subject
by apt quotation no less remarkable.” John Esten Cooke thought him an
unexcelled story-teller, and R. H. Stoddard has agreed.
He was a rebel to be loved, we are told by Watson R. Sperry, later
managing editor. “A lot of tall, straggling Virginia gentlemen,
ex-soldiers, I fancy, all of them, began to visit the office. Mr.
Thompson had a big man’s beard, a delicate body, and a sensitive,
feminine nature. He was a bit punctilious, but kindness itself.” His
careful attention to dress, verging on foppishness, was less out of
place in Bryant’s office than it would have been in Greeley’s or
Dana’s. J. Ranken Towse speaks of his personal charm, a reflection of
his experience in the best Richmond and London circles. “Though not a
marvel of erudition or critical genius, he was a pleasant, cultivated
gentleman, refined in taste and manner, genial, humorous, and
abundantly capable.”
Unfortunately, Thompson added little to the _Post’s_ literary
reputation. In large part this was because of his wretched health, for
he steadily wasted away with consumption, was much out of the office,
and maintained his energy only by following his doctor’s orders to
take large doses of whisky. Early in 1872 his condition was so bad
that when Bryant set out for Cuba, the Bahamas, and Mexico, he took
Thompson along to escape the rigor of winter. Thompson, moreover, was
an essayist and poet rather than a critic. He prepared a book upon his
European experiences which was in the bindery of Derby & Jackson when
fire destroyed it; and his letters of travel on various vacation tours,
with some editorial essays, were his best work for the paper. His most
famous poem, the translation of Nadaud’s “Carcassone,” was written
in the _Evening Post_ office--“the unfinished manuscript was kicking
around on his desk for several days,” says Sperry--but published in
_Lippincott’s_; its popularity rather irritated him.
Even had his health been sound and his critical faculties the best,
Thompson could not have made the _Post_ a good literary organ in the
present-day sense. It did not want critical or analytic reviews.
An entertaining summary or paraphrase would appeal far more to the
general reader. Moreover, there was a feeling that American literature
was a delicate organism, which needed petting and might have its
spirit broken by harsh words. Mr. Towse justly says of Thompson: “His
condemnation was apt to be expressed in terms of modified praise. He
confined himself largely to what was explanatory or descriptive, though
his articles were written fluently and elegantly, were interesting, and
had a news, if no great descriptive value.” Bryant reviewed many of
the younger poets with the same benignancy with which Howells used to
review young novelists in the Easy Chair. The first important volumes
of which Thompson wrote notices were the concluding volumes of Froude’s
England, Kinglake’s Crimean War, and Motley’s United Netherlands,
Raphael Pumpelly’s travels, Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad,” and Miss
Alcott’s “Little Women.” The notices consisted of scissors work and
tepid comment.
During the years just after the war, indeed, the _Post’s_ columns were
singularly devoid of permanent literary interest. The Cary sisters,
Miles O’Reilly, and Helen Hunt Jackson contributed verse, and there
were various occasional poems, like E. C. Stedman’s “Crete” (1867)
and Holmes’s Harvard dinner poem of 1866. Samuel Osgood, for years a
prominent minister at the Unitarian Church of the Messiah (Bryant’s
church), and a voluminous writer on historical and religious topics,
printed many essays. Charles Lanman contributed his interesting
recollections of two famous Washington editors, Gales and Seaton, of
the _National Intelligencer_, and there were others of the same small
caliber.
The most noteworthy contributions were those, almost the last of his
long career, from Bryant’s own pen. The aged poet, after the death of
his wife and the conclusion of his translations from Homer, wrote fewer
editorials, and many of these at the request of friends, in support
of a worthy charity or civic movement. But he did like to write short
essays for the editorial page, often printed in minion, on topics
ranging from macaronic verse to history and politics. Despite what
Hazlitt says of the prose style of poets, that of Bryant was always of
unmistakable distinction. When he took such a subject as the beauties
of winter as seen at Roslyn (January, 1873), the result was worthy of
permanent preservation:
A light but continuous rain fell on Saturday and froze on
everything it touched, and wetted the snow only enough to change
it on the trees from white to the clearest and most brilliant
crystal. So overloaded were they with their icy diamonds that tall
cedars bent themselves like nodding plumes, and pines and hemlocks
bowed down like tents of cloth of silver over the snowy carpet
underneath. The russet leaves of the beeches shone out like frozen
leaves of gold, and trunks and boughs and twigs of deciduous trees
were as if they had been enameled with melted glass from their very
roots to the most delicate extremities. On Sunday morning the sun
shone out upon such a landscape as this, to light up, but not to
melt, the silvery sheen and the diamond sparkle which winter had
sprinkled over all outdoors. One who breathed the exhilaration of
the air of that day, and looked upon its wonderful beauty, could
hardly find it in the heart to regret the destruction that it
caused. But all day long the overloaded trees yielded to the weight
of ice, and one who listened could hear in every direction, like
the discharge of infantry, the crashing of the falling branches. In
some cases whole trees were stripped, leaving only the shattered
trunk, a torn and broken shaft with all its glory strewn upon the
snow.
Early in 1873 it became evident that Thompson’s condition was
desperate. The _Post_ in February, upon the advice of his physician,
sent him to Colorado, a step which proved a mistake. He became rapidly
worse, started back on April 17, reached the city in a dying state,
and passed away at Isaac Henderson’s home on April 30. His funeral
in New York was attended by Bryant, Stedman, Richard Watson Gilder,
Gen. Pryor, Whitelaw Reid, R. H. Stoddard (whom he made his literary
executor, but who did nothing with his manuscripts) and others of
prominence; while in Richmond on the same day a meeting was held in his
honor by the pulpit, bar, and press in the House of Delegates. His last
incomplete review was of the poems of a Southerner, Henry Timrod. Not
until 1920 were his own poems collected in a volume sponsored by his
alma mater, the University of Virginia.
For some time his place was left unsupplied while Bryant searched for a
successor; for the editor had come to the belated conclusion that the
literary editorship should be the most important place of its kind in
America. While the search was going on, in 1875, the year the _Post_
moved into the fine Bryant Building which Henderson built for it at a
cost of $750,000, George Cary Eggleston joined the staff.
Eggleston was a successful young author of thirty-five, though by no
means so famous as his elder brother Edward Eggleston, whose “Hoosier
Schoolmaster,” appearing in book form in 1872, had sold 20,000 copies
within a year. He had crowded into these thirty-five years as much
experience as many active men get in a lifetime. Born in Indiana,
educated in Virginia, a soldier throughout the war in the Confederate
army, later a practicing lawyer in Illinois and Mississippi, he had
come to Brooklyn and in 1870 became an editorial writer on Theodore
Tilton’s Brooklyn _Union_. Soon afterward he and Edward Eggleston took
joint charge of _Hearth and Home_, and began putting life into that
moribund publication. It was in this effort that Edward Eggleston
seized upon his brother’s experiences as a schoolmaster at Riker’s
Ridge, Indiana, as a basis for his famous novel. The two were on the
high road to success when the magazine was purchased, and both took
to free lancing. George Cary Eggleston settled down to writing boys’
books and magazine articles in an orchard-framed farmhouse in New
Jersey. He had already published, first in the _Atlantic_ and then in
book form, one of the most graphic of Southern war volumes, “A Rebel’s
Recollections,” which had been warmly received.
Unfortunately, while at work in his cottage he was swindled out of all
his savings by a scoundrelly publisher, and hurried to New York to seek
editorial work again. He felt honored to be associated with Bryant;
he liked the uncompromising dignity of the _Evening Post_. It was, he
used to say, the completest realization of the ideal of the old _Pall
Mall Gazette_--a newspaper conducted by gentlemen, for gentlemen.
His work consisted of assisting Bryant, Sidney Howard Gay, Parke
Godwin, and Watson R. Sperry in writing editorials, and was congenial.
Incidentally, he helped Bryant in his search for a literary editor. He
wrote Thomas Bailey Aldrich, setting forth the dignity of the position,
the attractive salary, and the pleasant nature of the work; all of
which Aldrich acknowledged, replying: “But, my dear Eggleston, what can
the paper offer to compensate one for having to live in New York?”
While affairs were in this posture, Bryant one day entered the _Post_
library and began clambering about on a step-ladder, searching the
shelves. Eggleston, from his little den opening off the larger room,
saw him hunting, and suggested that he might be able to help find the
information wanted. “I think not,” answered Bryant in his curt, cold
way, and then added, taking down still another volume: “I’m looking
for a line that I ought to know where to find, but do not.” Asking
Bryant for the substance of the quotation, Eggleston was fortunately
able to recognize it as a half-forgotten passage in Cowley. He seized
the office copy of Cowley, turned to the page, and laid it open in
Bryant’s hand. The poet seemed surprised, and lost all interest in the
quotation. “How,” he demanded, “do you happen to know anything about
Cowley?”
Eggleston explained that as a youth upon a Virginia plantation, seized
by an overmastering thirst for literature, he had read the books in
the libraries of all the old mansions in the county. Bryant settled
himself interestedly in a chair of Eggleston’s room. The young man’s
half-written editorial for the morrow lay unfinished on the desk, but
Bryant never heeded it. For two hours he questioned Eggleston as a
candidate for the Ph.D. degree in English is now questioned at his oral
examination; inquiring as to his preferences, dislikes, and knowledge
of books and authors, and making him defend his opinions. Then he
abruptly said “Good afternoon.”
Just before noon the next day the managing editor entered Eggleston’s
room with an expression of mingled irritation and amusement. Mr. Bryant
had just been in, he reported. “He walked into my office and said to
me, ‘Mr. Sperry, I have appointed Mr. Eggleston literary editor. Good
morning, Mr. Sperry,’ and walked out again.”
Eggleston’s literary editorship, which endured until the _Post_
changed hands in 1881, was more energetic and fruitful than that
of the half-invalid Thompson, partly because he had more money to
spend. He was an ambitious, vigorous young man, who knew most of the
chief literary figures of the time--Howells, Mark Twain, Bret Harte,
Stockton, and others met when he edited _Hearth and Home_. In this
Indian summer of the old _Post_, before Carl Schurz and E. L. Godkin
took it over, there was another outburst of poetry in its pages. It
published Bryant’s “Christmas in 1875” and his “Centennial Hymn, 1876”;
Whittier’s poem to the memory of Halleck a year later; and E. C.
Stedman’s “Hawthorne.” Charles Follen Adams, author of the “Leedle
Yawcob Strauss” poems, contributed repeatedly. It is interesting to
find verse written by A. A. Adee while he was secretary of legation
in Madrid; by William Roscoe Thayer; by Edgar Fawcett, the satirical
novelist; by the late F. W. Gunsaulus, Chicago’s most famous preacher;
by Edward Eggleston and Agnes Repplier. There were also interesting
prose contributions. E. P. Roe wrote upon--gardening! Benton J. Lossing
sent some historical articles in his last years; and W. O. Stoddard,
who had been Lincoln’s secretary during the Civil War, contributed
both prose and verse. Bret Harte for a time had a connection with the
_Post_, which enabled him to appear regularly for his pay, though his
writing was most irregular; his work is not identifiable.
The literary correspondence of the journal was greatly strengthened.
Regular letters were sent from Boston by George Parsons Lathrop,
Hawthorne’s son-in-law, who during part of this period was assistant
editor of the _Atlantic_, and well known for his books. His report
(Feb. 27, 1878) of Emerson’s long-awaited delivery of his lecture on
“The Fortune of the Republic”--the sunlight streaming through a window
of Old South upon the speaker’s face, his manuscript placed on the flag
draping the pulpit, a distinguished audience hanging on his words--was
a fine bit of writing. Elie Reclus, the eminent French geographer,
wrote upon French literature, as did Edward King, while there were
Italian and London correspondents. From various American hands came
gossip about rising literary men of the day, like the following
vignette of a young lecturer named John Fiske:
His vast learning is appalling to the ordinary man.... His mind is
so clear that it is said he never copies his manuscript. He writes
slowly--the right thought following its predecessor with unerring
precision, the fit word dropping into its place; and with this
enviable faculty of composition, of understanding thoroughly, and
putting on paper just as he has in mind what he sees so clearly, he
works right on, far into the night, scarcely feeling the need which
most writers have of mental rest. He is so deliberate and to be
relied on that once seeing the man, and knowing his diligence and
habits of investigation and method of writing, you cannot entertain
a doubt that he will accomplish whatever he sets himself to do....
He is of a very simple and sincere nature; and of Saxon complexion
and hair.... He has a rosy face, auburn beard and hair--the latter
in short, crisp curls--and brown eyes as round as marbles, which,
seen through the glasses he always wears, seem to have just looked
up from some absorbing study and to be scarcely yet ready to take
in the common scenes of life. His is not a changeful countenance,
but of the same calm, self-reliant expression on all occasions, as
if he took the world philosophically and was always in good humor
with it. He is solid, inclined to the sluggish in build and motion,
and is slow of utterance, speaking in measured phrases with his
teeth half shut.
But the standard of literary criticism was very little raised by
Eggleston. Some light is thrown upon his aims by his rejoinder to a
fellow Virginian, E. S. Nadal, who in the _Atlantic_ in 1877 accused
newspaper critics of yielding to pressure from the advertisers,
and of refusing to treat harshly writers they personally knew.
Eggleston indignantly denied both allegations, remarking that he had
reviewed “several thousands of good and bad books” without thought of
advertising or personal friendship. He added that Nadal had mistaken
the function of the newspaper literary critic. It could not be so
elevated, analytic, and rigid as magazine reviewing. The newspaper
writer’s chief business was not to point out faults, but “to tell
newspaper readers what books are published, and what sort of book
each of them is, so that the reader may decide for himself what books
to buy. His work is not so much criticism as description. It is in
the nature of news and comment upon news, and the newspaper reviewer
rightly omits much in the way of adverse criticism.” Eggleston’s
successor proved how utterly fallacious was this statement.