When I think of the beginning of that period my thought goes back to
an afternoon in New York, when, sitting in the editorial rooms of
_McClure’s Magazine_, Lincoln Steffens said to me:
“I’m going to do a series of articles for the magazine on municipal
government.”
“And what do you know about municipal government?” I asked in the tone
a man may adopt with his friend.
“Nothing,” he replied. “That’s why I’m going to write about it.”
We smiled in the pleasure we both had in his fun, but we did not talk
long about municipal government as we were to do in the succeeding
years; we had more interesting subjects to discuss just then.
I had been on a holiday to New England with my friend John D. Barry,
and had just come from Maine where I had spent a week at Kittery Point,
in the delight of long summer afternoons in the company of Mr. William
Dean Howells, whom, indeed, in my vast admiration, and I might say,
my reverence for him, I had gone there to see. He had introduced me
to Mark Twain, and I had come away with feelings that were no less
in intensity I am sure than those with which Moses came down out of
Mount Horeb. And Steffens and I celebrated them and their writings and
that quality of right-mindedness they both got into their writings,
and we had our joy in their perfect Americanism. The word had a
definite meaning for us; it occurred to us at that time because of
some tremendous though unavailing blows which Mark Twain had delivered
against our government’s policy in the Philippines, the time falling
in that era of khaki imperialism which opened in this land with the
Spanish war and too much reading of Kipling, who, if I could bring
myself to think that literature has any influence in America, might
be said to have induced us to imitate England in her colonial policy.
There comes back the picture of Mark Twain as he sat on the veranda of
the home he had that summer at Sewell’s Bridge, a cottage on a hill
all hidden among the pines; he sat there in his picturesque costume
of white trousers and blue jacket, with his splendid plume of white
hair, and he smoked cigar after cigar--he was an “end to end smoker”
as George Ade says--and as he sat and smoked he drawled a delightful
monologue about some of his experiences with apparitions and telepathy
and that weird sort of thing; he said they were not to be published
during his life, and since his death I have been waiting to see them
in print. He had just been made a Doctor of Laws by some university
in June of that year, a distinguishing fact known to a caller from
the fashionable resort of York near by, who, though somewhat hazy as
to Mark Twain’s performances in literature, nevertheless scrupulously
addressed him as “Doctor,” and every time he was thus recognized in
his new and scholarly dignity, he winked at us from under his shaggy
brows. Perhaps that was part of his Americanism, too, unless it were a
part of that universality which made him the great humorist he was,
and philosopher, too; an universality that makes Mr. Howells a humorist
as well as a novelist and a philosopher--the elements are scarcely
inseparable--though Mr. Howells’s humor is of a more delicate quality
than that of his great friend, and, as one might say, colleague, a
quality so rare and delicate and delightful that some folk seem to
miss it altogether. Perhaps it was the Americanism of these two great
men and their democracy that have won them such recognition in Europe,
where they have represented the best that is in us.
I speak of their democracy for the purpose of likening it in its
very essence to that of Golden Rule Jones and of Johnson, too, and
of all the others who have struggled in the human cause. We owe Mr.
Howells especially a debt in this land. He jeopardized his standing
as an artist, perhaps, by his polemics in the cause of realism in the
literary art, but he was the first to look about him and recognize his
own land and his own people in his fiction; that is why it is so very
much the life of our land as we know it, and to me there came long ago
a wonderful and consoling lesson, when in reading after him, and after
Tolstoy and Tourgenieff, and Flaubert, and Zola, and Valdez, and Thomas
Hardy, I discovered that people are all alike, and like all those about
us in every essential.
Lincoln Steffens did not miss the humor in Mr. Howells’s writing,
because he could not miss the humor in anything, though there was
not so much humor perhaps in another writer whom we had just then
discovered and were celebrating that day in the joy of our discovery.
It was to me a discovery of the greatest charm, a charm that lasts to
this day in everything the man has written, that charm of the sea and
of ships, the romance and poetry of it all which I had felt ever since
as a boy I found a noble friend in Gus Wright, an old sailor whose name
I cannot speak even now without a quickening of the spirit because of
the glamour that invested him when I sat and looked at him and realized
that he had hunted whales in the South Pacific and had sailed the Seven
Seas. I wish I had written him into the first of these papers, where he
belongs; he made two miniature vessels for me, one a full rigged ship,
the other a bark--dismantled now, both of them, alas, and long since
out of commission....
“You go down to the wharves along the East River,” Steffens was saying,
“and you’ll see a ship come in, and after she has been made fast to
her wharf, an old man will come out of the cabin, light his pipe, and
lean over the taffrail; he’ll have a brown, weather-beaten face, and
as he leans there smoking slowly and peacefully, his voyage done, his
eye roving calmly about here and there, you’ll look at him, and say to
yourself, ‘Those eyes have seen everything in this world!’”
It was a rather big thought when you dwelt on it.
“He’s seen everything in the world,” Steffens went on, “but he can’t
tell what he’s seen. Now Conrad has those eyes, he has seen everything,
and he can tell it.”
It was Joseph Conrad, of course, of whom we were talking, the great
Pole who even then had come to a mastery of our language that might
shame most of his contemporary writers in it. I would not give “Lord
Jim” for all the other sea stories that were ever written, not even
if all the novels of Cooper and Scott and Stevenson and Dickens were
thrown in. For Joseph Conrad can see all that the old sailor Steffens
was imagining that day could see, and far more besides; he can see
into the human soul. He had not written “Lord Jim” at that time, or if
he had, I had not read it, nor had Steffens written his books about
municipal government, to get back to the subject; too often, I fear,
have I been thinking about some book of Joseph Conrad when I should
have been thinking of municipal government.
I did not know much about municipal government in those days, except
what I had learned in Jones’s campaigns and that theoretical knowledge
I had obtained in the courts as his attorney, and I had, I fear, the
same indifference to the subject most of our citizens have. I should
have preferred any time to talk about literature and I should prefer to
do so now, since that is really so much more interesting and important.
But the fact that we knew nothing about it in those days was not
unusual; nobody knew much about it except that Mr. James Bryce had said
that it was the most conspicuous failure of the American Commonwealth,
and we quoted this observation so often that one might have supposed we
were proud of the distinction. Certainly few in America in those days
understood the subject in the sense in which it is understood in some
of the British cities, like Glasgow, for instance, whose municipal
democracy is so far ahead of ours, or in the German cities where
municipal administration is veritably a science. But in Steffens’s case
a lack of knowledge was in itself a qualification, since he had eyes,
like the old sailor, and, like Joseph Conrad, the power to tell what he
saw. That is, Steffens had vision, imagination, and if the history of
the city in America is ever written he will fill a large place on its
page.
I marvel when I reflect that he could see so clearly what most had
not even the sensitiveness to feel. He went at his task quite in the
scientific spirit, isolating first that elementary germ or microbe, the
partizan, the man who always voted the straight ticket in municipal
elections, the most virulent organism that ever infested the body
politic and as unconscious of its toxic power as the bacillus of yellow
fever. Then he discovered the foul culture this organism blindly
breeds--the political machine, with its boss. But he went on and his
quest led him to the public service corporation, the street railway
company, the gas company, the electricity company, and then his trail
led him out into the state, and he produced a series of studies of
politics in the American cities which has never been equaled, and so
had a noble and splendid part in the great awakening of our time.
As long as his writings exposed only the low and the vulgar
politicians, ward heelers and bosses, and the like, he was quite
popular; I believe he was even asked to deliver addresses before clubs
of the _dilettante_, and even in churches, for the righteous were
terrible in their wrath. But when he went more deeply, when he exposed
the respectable connections of the machine politicians, some of his
admirers fell away, and stood afar off, like certain disciples of old.
The citizen was delighted when some city other than his own was under
the scrutiny of the sharp eyes that gleamed behind those round glasses,
but when he drew near for a local study, there was an uplifting of
the hands in pious horror. Cincinnati applauded the exposure of
Minneapolis, and St. Louis was pleased to have Philadelphia reformed.
Reform is popular so long as someone else is to be reformed.