A great many persons, indeed, a great many critics, have called
Richard Harding Davis superficial. They obviously had one thing
in mind and said another. Perhaps they may have meant to say that
sometimes Mr. Davis dealt in superficialities. We lean toward Professor
Harry Thurston Peck's opinion. "Mr. Davis, in fact," he says,
"because of the predominance in him of the journalistic motive, is a
photographer rather than an artist; but he is a very skillful and adept
photographer."
No person of superficial temperament could have described with so much
humor Van Bibber's attempt to practice economy, or could have given us
the affecting conclusion of "Princess Aline," or could have written
many paragraphs of "The Exiles." No sympathetic human being who has
ever read "The Exiles" will forget the picture of the outlawed boodle
alderman in Tangier, saying to a visitor about to return to New York
with a clean conscience and a strong hunger to see the familiar sights:
"'I'll tell you what you _can_ do for me, Holcombe. Some night I wish
you would go down to Fourteenth Street, some night this spring, when
the boys are sitting out on the steps in front of the Hall, and just
take a drink for me at Ed. Lally's; just for luck. Will you? That's
what I'd like to do. I don't know nothing better than Fourteenth Street
of a summer evening, with all the people crowding into Pastor's, on one
side of the Hall, and the Third Avenue L-cars running by on the other.
That's a gay sight, ain't it now? With all the girls coming in and out
of Theiss's, and the sidewalks crowded. One of them warm nights when
they have to have the windows open, and you can hear the music in at
Pastor's, and the audience clapping their hands. That's great, isn't
it? Well,' he laughed and shook his head, 'I'll be back there some day,
won't I,' he said, wistfully, 'and hear it for myself?'"
It would be hard to find in fiction a more affecting picture done with
fewer strokes and with closer fidelity to human nature. It is a picture
which must strike the attentive reader, and particularly the attentive
New York reader, full on the heart strings.
Mr. Davis has the habit of looking at the odd things in life. Without
this habit no man can be a first-class reporter; and our author has
proved himself a first-class reporter in many parts of the world and
for many papers.
Like every well-trained reporter, Mr. Davis is continually "seeing
things." As he said to his friend Mr. Sangree, some months ago: "I
never walk one city block that I do not see twenty things to interest
me. I tire my friends sometimes by pointing them out. Their minds run
in different channels. But this ability to see things is my greatest
joy in life, incidentally my living. I cultivated it when I began
reporting, and to this day if I see a man turn in a car to look out the
window I unconsciously turn with him. He may have observed something
that escaped me--something that contains an element of human interest,
and I hold no effort wasted that may add to this general cargo of
life's impressions."
No able reporter could have worked long under Charles A. Dana and
escaped the objective habit. In fact, a story which Mr. Sangree tells
of his friend's experience on _The Evening Sun_ illustrates the point.
"At eight o' clock one spring morning," says Mr. Sangree, "the blotter
at police headquarters recorded a trifling fire on the East Side. News
being dull, Davis was sent to cover it. He found a rickety tenement
house in which fire had little more than singed the top floor. The
crowd had left, a few ashes were smouldering, and the insurance
adjusters were examining the place.
"'Nothing here,' said the policeman on watch. 'Only five hundred
dollars damage and a bum lodger asphyxiated. He's in that room.'
"The reporters peeped, saw the blackened face and rigid form, a man
unnamed and forgotten--and wrote a paragraph. _The Evening Sun_
reporter, in mousing about saw an alarm clock by the dead man's side
with the hand pointing to seven o' clock.
"'What time did you break in here?' he asked.
"'Let me see,' yawned the bluecoat; 'Seven o' clock it was. I remember
because that alarm was going off just as I got inside.'
"'That's my story,' said Davis, and he began his account, touching and
vivid, simply with: 'The man died at six-thirty. The alarm went off at
seven. It was just half an hour too late.'"
"What impressed me," said the author, discussing the story
subsequently, "was that impotent alarm clock jangling away when the
owner was dead. A man's existence had been cut off because that
fifty-cent clock could not give its alarm a few minutes earlier."
This illustrates what was meant when we said that Mr. Davis takes an
objective view of life. His experience as a reporter was invaluable
to him; and he took Dr. Hale's advice, and ended the experience at the
right time. Doubtless many good writers have been spoiled by indulging
too long in the fascinations of newspaper work.
A large part of his training as a reporter the creator of Van Bibber
obtained in his native city, during his service on the _Philadelphia
Press_, for which paper he went to work when he was a little more than
twenty. There is a portrait of him taken at the age of twenty-three,
in the disguise in which he worked while getting the information which
drove the nest of thieves out of Wood street.
While Davis was working for the _Philadelphia Press_, by the way, he
and his associates in the reporters' room fell in love with one of
Stevenson's thrilling short stories, "A Lodging for the Night." They
could not restrain their admiration; so they wrote an enthusiastic
letter to the gentle sick man off there in Samoa. And to the spokesman
of the admiring crew Stevenson replied:
_Dear Sir:_
Why, thank you very much for your frank, agreeable and natural
letter. It is certainly very pleasant that all you young fellows
wholly enjoy my work, and get some good out of it; and it was
very kind in you to write and tell me so. The tale of the suicide
is excellently droll; and your letter, you may be sure, will be
preserved. If you are to escape, unhurt, out of your present
business, you must be very careful, and you must find in your
heart much constancy. The swiftly done work of the journalist,
and the cheap finish and ready-made methods to which it leads,
you must try to counteract in private by writing with the most
considerate slowness and on the most ambitious models. And when
I say 'writing'--O, believe me, it is re-writing that I have
chiefly in my mind. If you will do this I hope to hear of you
some day.