unity of tone which Garrison gave it. All reviews and nearly all
general articles were anonymous. Godkin and Garrison held that an
article by a named writer was not appreciated on its merits; that if
he was famous, the veriest twaddle from his pen was devoured, while if
he was obscure, nothing he wrote was read. The reviewers hence felt
no temptation to air personal idiosyncrasies, and were the more ready
to assume the _Post’s_ general point of view. Mr. Garrison chose his
reviewer with the greatest care, and left him almost perfect freedom to
say what he thought, secure in his discretion. For reasons of space he
frequently had to use the blue pencil drastically, but though he called
himself The Butcher he used it with tact.
When the _Evening Post_ had a special titbit in the literary columns
its rule of anonymity must have seemed a disadvantage. Thus in 1883
it published an article upon the death of Trollope, which even then
would have made a greater impression upon readers had they known
that its author was James Bryce. Bryce described the creator of Mrs.
Proudie from personal acquaintance--“a genial, hearty, vigorous man,
a typical Englishman in his face, his talk, his ideas, his tastes.
His large eyes, which looked larger behind his large spectacles, were
full of good-humored life and force; and though he was not witty nor
brilliant in conversation, he was what is called very good company,
having traveled widely, known all sorts of people, and formed positive
views on nearly every subject, which he was always ready to promulgate
and maintain. There was not much novelty in them ... but they were
worth listening to for their solid sense, and you enjoyed the ardor
with which he threw himself into a discussion.” He had, Bryce added,
no successor. Howells and James, though true artists, had not yet laid
hold upon the general public; Miss Broughton’s fine promise had not
ripened; and “Mr. George Meredith, a strong and peculiar genius, who
has a great fascination for those who will take the pains to follow
him, remains unknown to the vast majority of novel readers.”
When Gladstone died, Bryce’s review of his career in the _Post_ was
signed. But it was regrettable that, after the demise of Darwin, the
editors did not sign his name to his very interesting personal sketch
of the great scientist:
I saw him at his home in Down last summer, and could not remember
to have ever before seen him so bright, so cheerful, so full of
talk. Feeble as his health had long been, he looked younger than
his age, and had a freshness, an alertness of mind and eye, an
interest in all passing affairs, which one seldom sees in men who
are well past seventy. It was hard to believe that one was in the
presence of so great and splendid a genius, for his manner was
simple and natural as a child’s. He did not speak with any air of
authority, much less dogmatism, even on his own topics; and on
other subjects, politics for instance, he talked as one who was
only anxious to hear what others had to say and resolve his own
doubts. One remark struck particularly the two friends who had
come to see him. He mentioned that Mr. Gladstone had, some months
before, while spending a Sunday in the neighborhood, walked over
to call on him; and speaking with lively admiration of the Prime
Minister’s powers, he added: “It was delightful to see so great a
man so simple and natural. He talked to us as one of ourselves;
you would never have known what he was.” We looked at one another,
and thought that there were other great men of whom this was no
less true, and in whom such self-forgetful simplicity was no less
beautiful.
Nearly all the _Post’s_ obituary essays upon great American
authors--Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Mrs. Stowe, and others--came
from the chatty and interesting if not highly acute pen of Thomas
Wentworth Higginson. The Paris correspondent was Auguste Laugel, who
furnished a dozen letters every half-year upon politics and literature.
Much English correspondence came from the noted jurist and Oxford
teacher, A. V. Dicey, who reviewed many of the important English
histories, biographies, and political works before they were published
in America. Occasional long reviews were furnished by other Englishmen,
as Leslie Stephen and Alfred Russell Wallace.
The best appraisals of current fiction were those contributed in the
eighties by W. C. Brownell, whose estimates of important books like
Henry James’ “Portrait of a Lady” were almost perfect in their sanity,
penetration, and literary grace. Unfortunately, he wrote rarely, and
most reviews came from less distinguished hands. The _Evening Post_ was
always fervent in its admiration of Henry James’s earlier manner, and
it never took a patronizing tone toward Mark Twain, but it was long a
bit suspicious of Howells, admitting his power but regarding his work
as ugly. Brownell enthusiastically described “The Portrait of a Lady”
as superior in moral quality to George Eliot, but the reviewers of
Howells disliked his realism. The verdict upon “Silas Lapham” was that,
except in its fine literary form, the novel had no beauty. “There is no
inspiration for any one in the character of Silas Lapham. It rouses no
tender or elevating emotion, stirs no thrill of sympathy, suggests no
ideal of conduct, no notion that the world at large is or can be less
ugly than Lapham himself. If it is to be conceded that Mr. Howells and
his school are great artists in the highest reaches of their art, then
the language is in sore need of words to define Sir Walter Scott and
Thackeray.” However, the writer admitted that the portrait of Lapham
had a vividness and completeness unapproached in contemporary English
fiction.
The essays and reviews of widest interest were probably those upon
distinctly literary topics, and here the pens of George L. Kittredge,
Thomas R. Lounsbury, Basil L. Gildersleeve, Charles Eliot Norton, and
George E. Woodberry were especially in evidence. They wrote with charm
upon a wide variety of books, and frequently with a special knowledge
and interpretative insight that made their essays almost permanently
significant. The most active reviewer of history and political
biography was Gen. Jacob D. Cox, the works he treated ranging from the
massive histories by Rhodes and Von Holst to lives of minor Civil War
leaders. Cox himself wrote several books on the rebellion, and after
the death of John C. Ropes--also a contributor--was easily the highest
American authority upon its battles and strategy. Two other historians
who assisted were Lea and Goldwin Smith. Wm. Graham Sumner wrote much
on economics.
It is evident that the _Evening Post’s_ literary strength counted
as a marked addition to its new value. Some books are not news, but
most are; and if in no other American journal was there so little
news of sensation, in none was there so much news of ideas. An
outstanding review like that which J. D. Cox wrote of Bryce’s “American
Commonwealth” or Gamaliel Bradford of Woodrow Wilson’s “Congressional
Government” was news in the best sense. From all the important foreign
capitals, not merely London and Paris, came constant news of the new
publications, new intellectual movements, and new events in letters,
art, and science. Until her death that remarkable Englishwoman,
Jessie White Mario, wrote from Italy. The first American news of the
production of Ibsen’s “Ghosts” and the stir it caused was furnished in
a long letter from Berlin in January, 1887, by C. H. Genung. Perhaps
the outstanding illustration of this alertness of the _Evening Post_ to
intellectual news is its clear reflection throughout the eighties of
the discovery of Russian literature by the Western world. It and the
_Nation_ did far more than all other periodicals combined to introduce
Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Dostoievsky to the American public. As
it remarked in 1886, when it published articles upon “Anna Karenina,”
“Childhood and Youth,” “Crime and Punishment,” and “The Insulted and
Injured,” the appearance of this new literature recalled the wonder
of English readers when, in the time of Scott and Coleridge, German
literature was first opened to them. Isabel Hapgood was long the
St. Petersburg correspondent, while Auguste Laugel was in personal
communication with not only De Vogué and other students of Russian
letters, but with Turgenev.
The campaign which Bryant had carried on for an international copyright
law was tirelessly maintained by Godkin and Garrison. After a time it
appeared that cheap piracy was about to accomplish what argument had
never done; that the disreputable pirates were ruining the business of
respectable piracy, as carried on by Harper’s and others. The latter
paid a popular English author for the right to issue an authorized
version, but within a week some printer who had paid nothing might
be out with a cheaper edition which displaced the other. More and
more publishers, therefore, joined in the crusade. Late in Arthur’s
Administration the judiciary committee of the House reported that
the justice of an international copyright law was unquestionable,
and Arthur, in his last annual message, urged the subject upon the
attention of Congress. But as Godkin wrote, some clergyman was always
ready to start up and announce that books were a property that God had
meant to be stolen, and that it was only an oversight that they had not
been excepted by name from the Ten Commandments; while some Western
paper was always ready to prove that a copyright bill held a hidden
villainy in behalf of the pampered noblemen who wrote and published
books in England.
Godkin, growing deeply interested as the eighties passed, wrote with
a vehemence which George Haven Putnam describes as invaluable in
impressing most thoughtful citizens and legislators, but which actually
antagonized some others, and which ultimately led to a _cause célébre_.
Prominent among the opponents of international copyright was the Rev.
Dr. Isaac K. Funk, a leader of the Methodists and Prohibitionists, who
gradually built up the great publishing business of Funk & Wagnalls.
Dr. Funk mistakenly came to believe that a majority of Godkin’s blows
were aimed at his head, and he resented the fact that among all the
exponents of piracy he should be singled out as a shining mark. In due
time the editor, commenting on Funk’s alleged piracy of an important
English work, rather overstepped the mark and laid himself open to
legal counterattack. Dr. Funk promptly brought suit for defamation
and injury in the amount of $250,000. There was some consternation at
the _Evening Post_ office, where Godkin’s attack was deemed legally
indefensible, and Joseph H. Choate, who was retained to defend the
editor, shared it. Indeed, he told Mr. Godkin that he could hardly
expect to bring him off scot-free, but would try to hold the penalty to
a nominal sum.
But by characteristic adroitness and audacity, especially in
cross-examining Dr. Funk, Choate made his conduct of the case a
notable triumph. Mr. Godkin’s attacks had extended over a number of
years. Nevertheless, Choate showed that during all this time Dr.
Funk had repeatedly been asked to officiate in Methodist pulpits,
that he had been honored by his denomination in other ways, that the
Prohibitionists had nominated him for Congress and the Governorship,
and that it was not improbable that he would some day receive their
nomination for the Presidency. All these honors had come at the time
when the attacks by the _Post_ had been most intense.
“Now,” said Choate to Dr. Funk, “now, sir, will you please make clear
to his honor, and to the gentlemen of the jury, just in what manner
your character and your relations with your friends and your associates
and the public at large have suffered injury from the so-called
brutal attacks of my client?” To this challenge Dr. Funk did not know
how to reply. In his final address to the jury Choate carried the
war into the enemy’s territory with staggering effect. It happened
that Dean Farrar’s life of Christ had been first brought out here
in an authorized edition by E. P. Dutton & Co., and had immediately
been pirated by Dr. Funk, although Dutton’s had paid the author a
substantial sum. “I have never been a doctor of divinity,” remarked
Choate; “I never expect to be one. I cannot tell, therefore, just how
a doctor of divinity feels; but to me, an outsider and a layman, there
is something incongruous in the idea of a doctor of divinity going into
business for gain and beginning his operations by stealing the Life of
his Saviour.” Partly because of the lack of evidence of any real injury
to Dr. Funk, partly because of Choate’s shrewd thrust, the jury’s
verdict was in favor of Godkin, and the costs were assessed upon Dr.
Funk.
The ultimate partial victory for international copyright in March,
1891, just as Congress was ending its session, left the _Evening Post_
dissatisfied. It admitted that the law was a triumph for honesty, and
that it put an end to the Algerine system of fostering the national
intelligence. “But if we said that it was a measure to be proud of, we
should be going far beyond the truth. The obligation under which it
places the foreign author of having his book ‘manufactured’ in this
country, as a condition of protection for it, is a piece of tariff
barbarism which is enough to make one hang one’s head.” Unfortunately,
the manufacturing clause, after thirty years, is still retained in our
copyright legislation.
Mr. Towse’s promotion from a reportership to the dramatic editorship
was no accident, for by training and taste he was admirably fitted
for the position. He had been taken regularly to the theater from his
eighth birthday, had seen Charles Kean play, and recalls a performance
at the old Adelphi in London in April, 1853. As a boy he was a constant
and sometimes surreptitious attendant in the pit of the Old Drury,
Haymarket, and other theaters. The Haymarket at the time was the
recognized home of polite comedy in London, and there Mr. Towse saw
admirable performances of Shakespeare, Sheridan, and Goldsmith, as
well as E. A. Sothern as Lord Dundreary before the part had been made
the piece of broad buffoonery which it later became in America. The
Adelphi was the home of melodrama, well played. But the performances
which made the chief impression upon the boy were those of the famous
actor-manager Samuel Phelps, who in the fifties and early sixties
raised Sadler’s Wells Theater, in the shabby and despised suburb of
Islington, into a famous shrine of dramatic art, and who later appeared
in other London theaters. Phelps is pronounced by Mr. Towse to have
been beyond doubt the most versatile actor of the nineteenth century.
The outstanding merits of the London stage of this period lay in
the fact that it rested upon the old stock companies, in which the
standards of acting were far more uniformly high than those which
obtained after the introduction of the star system. The actors and
actresses had been reared in a school of hard work, small pay, and
rigid insistence upon the difference between a mere performance and
a characterization. All had served a long apprenticeship, and gained
such a comprehensive knowledge of their craft that they knew how to
acquit themselves creditably in comedy, tragedy, or melodrama. Mr.
Towse recalls their striking diversity and authority of gesture,
their distinction of speech, their easy adaptation of manner to the
character, and remarkable power of emotional expression. Versatility
was unescapable. At Sadler’s Wells, for instance, all Shakespeare’s
plays except two were produced during Phelps’s seventeen years of
management, along with the other Elizabethan dramatists, and many plays
by later or contemporary authors--Colman, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Knowles,
Bulwer, and so on; there being a change of bill at least twice or
thrice a week.
When Mr. Towse began to review plays for the _Evening Post_ in the
early seventies, he found in New York still several very flourishing
stock companies, though the theater was rapidly entering upon a
transition to the star-and-circuit system. Their proficiency was like
that of the British companies, although, being fewer, they did not
supply so many all-round actors. A number of the best of the players
had disappeared or were disappearing. James K. Hackett, Junius Brutus
Booth, and J. W. Wallack were gone, Edwin Forrest and Charlotte Cushman
were meditating their farewells, and Edwin Booth was in a period of
temporary eclipse. The speculative manager, almost wholly ignorant
of anything about the theater but its money-making possibilities,
was beginning to arise and foreshadow the day when he would make the
typical New York production one in which one or two fairly able players
would be supported by a parcel of supernumeraries.
But the performances at Wallack’s in the seventies and eighties
were found by Mr. Towse to compare favorably with those given by
the Haymarket company in London. He saw John Gilbert in a number of
striking characterizations, notably Sir Harcourt Courtly, Sir Peter
Teazle, and Sir Anthony Absolute, while Lester Wallack played admirably
in other parts; and two other performers of note were Charles and
Rose Coghlan. Augustin Daly’s company gave many brilliant, if uneven,
performances in the late seventies and early eighties, and included a
number of players of trained skill: Charles Fisher, Fanny Davenport,
John Drew, Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, Ada Rehan, and others. When “Romeo and
Juliet” was presented in 1877, with Adelaide Neilson as Juliet, Mr.
Towse gave her at once a place among the very great Juliets. The Union
Square Company was almost wholly limited to melodrama, but within that
field it was the best in the country, and probably in the world. With
it Clara Morris achieved some remarkable successes. In later years Mr.
Towse recalls her as playing with Tommaso Salvini, whom he thinks “not
only incomparably the greatest actor and artist I have ever seen, but
one who has never had an equal, probably, since the days of Garrick.”
It is by the standards thus acquired in studying the old British and
American stock companies that Mr. Towse has measured the present-day
stage--standards of the utmost severity, which he believes show
a steady and lamentable fall in the general level of acting. He
has always been ready to admit the high merit of a good many, and
the genius of a few, stars; but from the time of Edwin Booth, who
encouraged the star system by his failure to insist upon good
supporting casts, until to-day, he has condemned the indifference shown
to the subordinate rôles. The lack of taste and artistic conscience
among most of the managers of our time he equally deplores. His
standards of criticism are severe from not only the histrionic and
literary standpoints, but from the moral standpoint. Convinced that
the theater is one of the most important educational influences,
good or bad, within the resources of modern civilization, he insists
upon drawing a clear line between inspiring and ennobling plays, and
vicious plays. No other critic in England or America has a background
of experience approaching Mr. Towse’s, and none writes with more
responsibility and weight.
Mr. Finck, on the other hand, has had the advantage of finding New
York’s music improving from decade to decade, until the city is one of
the world’s greatest music centers. When he joined the _Evening Post_,
operatic singers and audiences were divided into two hostile camps,
the Italian and German--both accepting the French as allies. Companies
which gave German opera sneered at the Italian; companies which, like
Mapleson’s at the Academy of Music, gave Italian opera, ignored all
Germans save those who, like Gluck and Mozart, wrote more or less in
the Italian manner. The revolution which erased this narrow hostility
was effected, in the main, by the growth of Wagner’s popularity among
operatic performers until it became irresistible.
From the beginning Mr. Finck was a champion of the German opera which
Mapleson systematically slighted. During the summer of 1882 he sent the
_Post_ from Bayreuth a series of highly interesting letters upon the
Wagner performances there. He described old Wagner, almost seventy,
as busy half the day overseeing the productions; pleased as a child
whenever the effects were especially fine, and once even shouting to
Frau Cosima across the whole auditorium, “You see, my dear little wife,
that we can get up something together, after all.” Mr. Finck poked fun
unmercifully at the more florid Italian operas, and assisted greatly
in driving pieces like Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” from the stage. In
October, 1883, he was able to hail the opening of the new Metropolitan,
with a company that, including Campanini and Mme. Nilsson, was willing
to do full justice to the Germans; and when in the spring of 1887 he
reviewed the third season of German opera, he could rejoice that of
sixty-two performances Wagner had received thirty-two.
Conservative and dignified though it was, in every direction the
_Evening Post_ had a marked growth during the eighties and nineties.
It found its first sporting editor in Charles Pike Sawyer, who joined
the staff in the spring of 1886. It soon had a real estate editor. Its
steady expansion led to the abandonment, on Oct. 31, 1887, of the folio
shape in which it had always appeared since 1801. The blanket sheet was
unmanageable; it could not be stereotyped, so that the printing had
to be done direct from the locked type; and it gave too little space.
As Godkin said, the change was a contribution to the anti-profanity
movement. The sturdiness of the _Post_ is evinced by the fact that in
occasional years its profits were large, and that for the whole period
the balance was decidedly upon the right side of the ledger; from 1881
to 1915, the net profits on the capital invested were about two per
cent. a year. This was in spite of the fact that Henry Villard did not
expect it to be a money-making business, the fact that its business
managers were not aggressive, and the fact that Mr. Godkin’s editorial
fearlessness and bluntness inevitably made enemies. Near the end of his
editorship, Godkin’s attacks upon the smallness of the hundred-dollar
tariff exemption for travelers returning from abroad involved him in a
dispute with mercantile interests in New York. He made some untactful
remarks concerning small tradesmen, and the result was a boycott of the
paper, involving most of the department stores, which cost it large
sums. Henry Villard accepted this blow in an admirable spirit, and it
was determined that it would not be allowed to hamper the management in
any of its activities.
Mr. Godkin once said he had never known any other man capable of the
generosity Mr. Villard showed with the _Evening Post_. The owner never
sought to influence the paper; he rarely entered the office unless
invited; and he submitted without a word to attacks by the financial
editor upon his railway policies. Throughout his life and for years
after his death Mrs. Villard, who became the owner, upheld the editors
even when Mr. Godkin assailed causes near her heart, like woman
suffrage, and made large financial sacrifices to sustain the paper.
Taking its editorial page, its criticism, and its news together, the
_Evening Post_ of the period under review was quite indispensable to
New Yorkers of culture. One was as certain to see it in any home of
intelligence and means as he was certain to find a set of Shakespeare.
It is interesting to note how our writers have singled it out as an
essential piece of furniture in any household of refinement. Edith
Wharton shows us old Mr. van der Luyden immersed at his Skuyterscliff
mansion in the _Evening Post_; Joseph Hergesheimer lays it beside the
study of Beethoven and the Tanagra figurine on Howat Penny’s study
table. The news was not superabundant, but it was well proportioned and
thoroughly reliable. The financial columns were without an equal. The
criticism of books, drama, music, and art was the best in the country.
The editorial views might seem congenial or repugnant, but one simply
had to know what Mr. Godkin was saying.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
HORACE WHITE, ROLLO OGDEN, AND THE “EVENING POST” SINCE 1900