We aspired at least tacitly to a metropolitan character in our
journalism; there were no topics of human interest which we counted
alien to us anywhere in the range of politics, morals, literature, or
religion; and I was suffered my say. The writer who was more habitually
and profitably suffered his say was, I still think, a man of very
uncommon qualities and abilities. He was a journalist who could rightly
be called a publicist, earnest if things came to that, of a faithful
conscience and of a mocking skill in the chances pretty constantly
furnished us by our contemporaries, especially some of our Southern
contemporaries whom it was difficult to take as seriously as they took
themselves. When they made some violent proclamation against the North,
or wreaked themselves in some frenzy of pro-slavery ethics, we took our
pleasure in shredding the text into small passages and tagging each of
these with a note of open derision or ironical deprecation. We called it
"firing the Southern heart," in a phrase much used at the time. It was
not wise, it was not well, but it was undeniably amusing, and we carried
it to any lengths that the very intermittent supervision of our nominal
chief would allow. We may have supposed that it would help laugh away
the madness of the South which few in the North believed more than a
temporary insanity, but the uneasy honesty which always lurks somewhere
in my heart to make me own my errors must acquit my fellow-editor of the
worst excesses in this sort, so mainly literary with me. He was not only
a man of high journalistic quality, of clear insight, shrewd judgment,
and sincere convictions, but I do not believe that in the American press
of the time he was surpassed as a clear thinker and brilliant writer.
All the days of journalism are yesterdays; and the name of Samuel R.
Reed will mean nothing to these oblivious morrows, even in Ohio, but all
the more I wish to do his memory such honor as I may. We were of course
daily together in our work, and often in our walks on the Sundays which
were as other days to his steadfast agnosticism. The word was not yet,
but the thing has always been, and especially it always was in the
older West, where bold surmise of the whence and whither of life often
defied the authority of Faith, then much more imperative than now.
Reed's favorite author, whom he read as critically as if he were not his
favorite, was Shakespeare; but his far more constant reading was the
Bible, especially the Old Testament. I could not say why he read it so
much, but he may have felt in it the mystical power which commands the
imagination of men and holds them in respectful contemplation of a
self-sufficing theory of the universe such as nothing in science or
philosophy affords. He quoted it for a peculiar joy in the fitness of
its application to every circumstance; he quoted Dickens, as everybody
did then; he quoted Shakespeare a great deal more both in his talking
and in his writing; and later in his life, long after mine had parted
from it, he amused the spare moments of his journalistic leisure by a
study of Shakespeare's women whom he did not take at the generally
accepted critical appraisement.
I am tempted out of the order of these confessions to follow him to the
end which death put to the long kindness between us, and I recall with
tenderness our last meeting near New York where he was hesitating
whether to continue on his way to Europe. He had at last given up his
work in Cincinnati where he had spent the many years after the few years
we spent together in Columbus. He owned that he had worn himself out in
that work, toiling incessantly through many homicidal Cincinnati
summers, and he blamed himself for the sacrifice. He felt that he had
turned from it too late; and in fact he died at sea soon after. He
accepted his impending doom with the stoical calm which he always kept,
and which I had once seen him keep so wonderfully after the war began,
when a Southern Unionist, the formerly famous, now forgotten Parson
Brownlow of Tennessee, came to reproach him for the part which he held
that such writing as Reed's had borne in bringing on the strife. Reed
suffered the good man's passion almost with compassion, and when
Brownlow was gone he would not let me blame him, but said that he had
played a noble part in the struggle to hold his region in the Union. He
always kept a countenance of bland calm, lit by pale-blue eyes which
gave no hint of the feeling within, and if I had not loved him so much
and known him so well I might have thought the habitual smile of his
clean-shaven lip sometimes a little cruel. He let his full soft beard
grow inordinately long, and he had a way of stroking it as he slightly
smiled and crisply spoke; it was the only touch of quaintness in him at
a time when beards were self-indulgently worn in many fantastic ways. He
was the best-dressed man I knew, in fashions as little aged as possible
in their transition from the East to the West, and he was of a
carefulness in such minor morals as gloves and boots very uncommon in
our somewhat slovenly ways.
After his liking for Shakespeare and Dickens he liked the Ingoldsby
Legends, but he did not care for the poetry which I was constantly
reading and trying to write. The effect of my endeavor as it appeared in
the passionate or pessimistic verse which I contributed to Eastern
periodicals must have amused him; but perhaps he tolerated me because,
along with this poetical effusiveness in which I was grievously
sensitive to any breath of sarcasm, I had a tooth as sharp as his own in
our journalism. He was intelligently and I suppose scientifically fond
of music, since he failed of no chance to hear the best, a chance rare
in our city; and he held that the composition of grand opera was the
highest feat of the human intellect, which was to me a stumbling-block
and foolishness, though I liked dramatic singing, and indeed singing of
all kinds. We came together in our fondness for the theater, and after
our evening's work was done he sometimes turned with me into the
barnlike structure on State Street which served the pathetic need of the
drama in Columbus at that day. The place was heated in the winter for
its twenty or thirty frequenters by two huge cast-iron stoves, one on
either side of the orchestra: stoves such as I have since seen in
English cathedrals; but when the curtain rose the blast of freezing air
that swept out upon us made us shiver for the players in their bare arms
and necks and their thin hosiery and drapery. They were often such bad
players that they merited their sufferings; the prompter audibly bore a
very leading part in the performance as he still does in the Italian
theater; yet for all his efforts we one night saw Hamlet in two acts; it
was, to be sure, a very cold night, of an air eagerer and nippinger than
even that the ghost walked in at Elsinore, and we would not have had the
play longer. Yet we often saw very well given some of the old English
comedies which are now no longer well or ill given; and between the
acts, somewhere, a plain young girl, in a modest modicum of stocking,
represented the ballet by dancing the Highland Fling, always the
Highland Fling. Such plays as "The Lady of Lyons" happened now and then,
and "The Daughter of the Regiment" must have been, at least partly,
sung. We did not lack the more darkling melodrama, and there were heroic
pieces which gave the leading actor opportunities not lost upon him,
however they failed of effect with the rest of the cast. I remember how
one night a robustuous periwig-pated fellow ramped and roared up and
down the stage, but left quite cold a large group of the _dramatis
personæ_ which his magniloquence was intended to convulse with either
sympathy or antipathy; and how Reed noted with mock-thoughtful
recognition of the situation, "Can't excite those fellows off to the
left, any." I should not be able to say how killingly droll I found
this.