3 1822
884
LIBRARY ^
UNIV •'{•-•:TY OP SAN DIEGO )
presented to the
LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA • SAN DIEGO by
FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY
MR. JOHN C. ROSE
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3 1822 01130 1884
-A/3
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
Among the Men Who Have Written FAMOUS BOOKS
Book Lovers' Series
Little Pilgrimages Among the Men Who Have Written Famous Books
Little Pilgrimages Among the Women Who Have Written Famous Books
L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
200 Summer Street Boston, Mass.
Reproduced, by permission, from " A Pair of Patient Lovers."— Copyright. 1901, l,y Harper & Brothers.
WILLIAM DEAN HOW ELLS.
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
Among the Have*
BOOKS
b> '
HARKINS ^
Illustrated
Rn""*'"»i>>>v f* ,.
'
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
Among the Men Who Have Written FAMOUS BOOKS
by E. F. HARKINS
Illustrated
BOSTON
L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
MDCCCCII
Copyright, 1901, by L. C. Page fy Company (Incorporated)
All rights reserved
Typography by Heintzemann Pres,
The Heintzemann Press Boston
Presswork by The Colonial Press C. H. Simonds & Go. Boston
PREFACE
THE aim of this book is to present to the reading public sketches of some of its American literary heroes. There are heroes young and old ; but in literature, especially, age has little to do with favorites. At the same time, it will be noted that the subjects of these sketches occupy places in or near the centre of the literary stage. The lately dead, like Maurice Thompson; the hero of the last generation, like Edward Everett Hale; the young man who has made his first successful flight — these do not come within the scope of the present work. So, if some reader miss his favorite, let him understand that at least there was no malice in the exclusion.
A part of the aim has been to present the
PREFACE
social or personal as well as the professional side of the authors. Many of the anecdotes commonly told of well-known novelists are apocryphal or imaginary. Care, therefore, has been taken to separate the wheat from the chaff. Wherever it was possible, preference has been given the statements of the authors themselves.
The sketches are arranged chronologically, that is, in the order of the authors' first publications. No other arrangement, indeed, would seem fair among so gifted and popular a company, writing for a public that dis criminates while it encourages and enjoys.
CONTENTS
Page
Preface 5
William Dean Ho wells 11
Bret Harte 27
Mark Twain 43
" Lew " Wallace 59
George W. Cable 75
Henry James 91
Francis Richard Stockton 107
Joel Chandler Harris 123
S. Weir Mitchell 139
Robert Grant 155
F. Marion Crawford 169
James Lane Allen 185
Thomas Nelson Page 201
Richard Harding Davis 215
John Kendrick Bangs 231
Hamlin Garland 247
Paul Leicester Ford 263
Robert Neilson Stephens 279
Charles D. G. Roberts 299
Winston Churchill 317
Page
William Dean Howells Frontispiece
Bret Harte 27
Mark Twain 43
« Lew " Wallace 59
George W. Cable 75
Francis Richard Stockton 107
Joel Chandler Harris 123
S. Weir Mitchell 139
Robert Grant 155
F. Marion Crawford 169
James Lane Allen 185
Thomas Nelson Page 201
Richard Harding Davis 215
John Kendrick Bangs 231
Hamlin Garland 247
Paul Leicester Ford 263
Robert Neilson Stephens 279
Charles G. D. Roberts 299
Winston Churchill 317
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
7| /JTR. HOWELLS has reached that / m/i point of life and success where -^- ' -*~ he can afford to sit down and look back. But he is not that sort of man. He will probably continue to work and to look forward until, in the words of Hamlet, he shuffles off this mortal coil.
William Dean Howells was born in Mar tin's Ferry, Belmont County, Ohio, March 1, 1837. He has therefore reached the ripe age of sixty-four. When he was three years old his father moved from Martin's Ferry to Hamilton and bought The Intelli gencer, a weekly paper. Nine years after ward he sold The Intelligencer and moved to Dayton, becoming proprietor of the Dayton Transcript. This paper had been a
11
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
semi-weekly, but Mr. Howells changed it to a daily ; and his son William went to work for him. It was William's business to rise at four in the morning and sell the paper about town. But the Transcript proved a failure, so the Howells family left Dayton and moved into the country on the banks of the Miami, where for a year a log-cabin was their home.
Mr. Howells tells a characteristic story of those struggling days, " When I was a boy," he said some years ago, " I worked on my father's paper. Among other things, I set type. Those were days of great struggle for all of us. The paper was not profitable, and ours was a large family. My tastes and ambitions were all literary, and I wanted to write a story. Instead of writing it and then setting it up in type, I composed it at the case and put it in type as I invented it. We printed a chapter of 12
it weekly in the paper, and so it was pub lished as fast as I got it up. I tried to get three or four chapters ready in advance, but I could not do it. All I could possibly accomplish was to have one installment ready every time the paper went to press. This went on for a long while, and that story became a burden to me. It stretched out longer and longer, but I could see no way to end it. Every week I resolved that that story should be finished in the next week's paper ; every week it refused to be finished. Finally I became positively panic stricken, and ended it somehow or other. The experience discouraged me to some extent. I made up my mind that I could not invent."
In 1851, when William was fourteen, the family moved from the country to Colum bus, where his father got employment as a clerk in the House of Representatives, and
13
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
also as a compositor on the Ohio State Journal. William went to work as a re porter on the Journal. Five years later he became the Columbus correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette. In 1859 he took the position of news editor of the Ohio State Journal. Later that same year Ho wells senior, from whom the son evidently in herited his industry and ambition, bought the Ashtabula Sentinel and transferred the property to Jefferson, whither the family moved. William took the position of sub editor of the Sentinel.
From time to time poems by young Howells had appeared in the Ohio news papers. Some of his verses, too, had even been published by The Atlantic Monthly. In 1860, in collaboration with John J. Piatt, he published his first volume of verse -"Poems by Two Friends." In 1860, also, Howells's " Life of Abraham Lincoln " 14
WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS
was published. With the earnings of this immediately popular work our author jour neyed to the East by way of Canada. In Boston he first met James Russell Lowell, who was then editor of TJie Atlantic Monthly. Afterward he visited the publishers, Messrs. Ticknor and Fields, primarily in connection with one of his poems which The Atlantic then had in hand, " The Pilot's Story." Mr. Fields introduced Howells to Mr. Tick nor, " who, I fancied," says Howells in his " Literary Friends and Acquaintance," "had not then read my poem ; but he seemed to know what it was from the junior partner, and he asked me whether I had been paid for it. I confessed that I had not, and then he got out a chamois-leather bag, and took from it five half-eagles in gold and laid them on the green cloth top of the desk, in much the shape and of much the size of the Great Bear. I have never since
15
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
felt myself paid so lavishly for any literary work, though I have had more for a single piece than the twenty-five dollars that dazzled me in this constellation. The pub lisher seemed aware of the poetic character of the transaction ; he let the pieces lie a moment, before he gathered them up and put them into my hand, and said, ' I al ways think it is pleasant to have it in gold.' "
While making his residence in Boston, Howells met Oliver Wendell Holmes, Haw thorne and Emerson. Emerson rather dis couraged him by remarking as they were saying good-bye to each other, that one might very well give a pleasant hour to poetry " now and then."
When the young Ohioan met Mr. Fields again he proposed himself as assistant editor of The Atlantic Monthly. Mr. Fields re plied that if the post had not just been 16
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
filled the intrepid poet certainly should have had it.
" He was charmingly kind," writes Mr. Howells of the interview ; " he entered with the sweetest interest into the story of my economic life, which had been full of changes and chances already. But when I said very seriously that I was tired of these fortuities, and would like to be settled in something he asked with dancing eyes,
" 'Why, how old are you? '
" ' I am twenty-three,' I answered, and then the laughing fit took him again.
" ' Well,' he said, ' you begin young, out there ! ' "
From 1861 to 1865, during the War of the Rebellion, Mr. Howells was United States Consul at Venice, which position was a reward for his life of Lincoln. In Venice he wrote occasionally for American newspapers; and there he also wrote the
17
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
articles of which, eventually, his delightful " Venetian Life" and " Italian Journeys" were composed.
Returning to this country, he re-entered the newspaper world, working mostly for the New York Tribune and the New York Times ; and he also became a regular con tributor to The Nation. In 1866 he achieved his great ambition, Mr. Fields appointing him assistant editor of The Atlantic Monthly. From that year until 1886, when he moved to New York, he lived on terms of enviable intimacy with the group of great writers which made Boston the one brilliant literary centre the country has ever seen.
However, this success did not come until after many defeats. Mr. Howells's letters from Venice were published regularly in the Boston Advertiser ; but elsewhere, for the most part, the young author had met little encouragement. It was only just be- 18
WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS
fore he left Venice, when Lowell, then, with Prof. Charles Eliot Norton, joint editor of the North American Review, accepted How- ells's article on " Recent Italian Comedy," that the cloud broke. Lowell accepted the manuscript in "one of his loveliest letters," as Mr. Howells says. " His message" the author confesses, " came after years of thwarted endeavor, and reinstated me in the belief that I could still do something in literature. To be sure, the letters in the Advertiser had begun to make their impres sion ; among the first great pleasures they brought me was a recognition from my dip lomatic chief in Vienna ; but I valued my admission to the North American peculiarly because it was Lowell let me in, and be cause I felt that in his charge it must be the place of highest honor." Financially, the encouragement was slight. The North American was " as poor as it was proud";
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LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
and it paid Howells for his article at the rate of only two dollars a page. From the Advertiser he had been paid at the rate of about a dollar a thousand words. It was on March 19, 1866, his twenty-ninth birth day, that the vagrant author began his work on The Atlantic at a salary of fifty dollars a week.
" The whole affair," Mr. Howells writes, "was conducted by Fields with his unfailing tact and kindness, but it could not be kept from me that the qualification I had as practical printer for the work was most valued, if not the most valued, and that as proof-reader I was expected to make it avail on the side of economy. Somewhere in life's feast the course of humble-pie must always come in ; and if I did not wholly relish this bit of it, I dare say it was good for me, and I digested it perfectly."
It was a most delicate position which he 20
WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS
occupied on The Atlantic from 1866 to 1872, when Fields withdrew and Mr. Howells became sole editor. In the begin ning, as he says himself, he ventured to distinguish mediocrity in some verses by Whittier. "He sent me a poem," says Howells, " and I had the temerity to return it, and beg him for something else. He mag nanimously refrained from all show of offence, and after a while, when he had printed the poem elsewhere, he gave me another. By this time, I perceived that I had been wrong, not as to the poem returned, but as to my function regarding him and such as he. I had made my reflec tions, and never again did I venture to pass upon what contributors of his quality sent me. I took it, and printed it, and praised the gods ; and even now I think that with such men it was not my duty to play the censor in the periodical which they had
21
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
made what it was. They had set it in authority over American literature, and it was not for me to put myself in authority over them. Their fame was in their own keeping, and it was not my part to guard it against them."
At another time, when a choice was accidentally enforced between a poem by Holmes and a poem by Emerson, Mr. How- ells had the courage to request Emerson that his poem might be held over for the next number. Emerson wrote back to " return the proofs and break up the forms." " I could not go to this iconoclastic extreme with the electrotypes of the magazine," says Mr. Howells, " but I could return the proofs. I did so, feeling that I had done my possible, and silently grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds."
From 1872 until 1880 Mr. Howells was sole editor of The Atlantic ; and the rich 22
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
social and literary experience which he gained during that term he has embodied in that most delightful of American book men's chronicles, " Literary Friends and Acquaintance."
Mr. Howells's first piece of fiction, "Their Wedding Journey," was published in 1872, the year that he became sole editor of The Atlantic. Seven years ago in a newspaper interview, Mr. Howells made this statement in regard to this work : " I wrote ' Their Wedding Journey' without intending to make it a piece of fiction or considering it to be one after I had finished it. It was simply a book of American travel, which I hoped to make attractive by a sugar coating of romance. I was very familiar with the route over which I had taken the bridal couple, and I knew it was beautiful, and, like most American scenery, was not appre ciated. The book was more of a success
23
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
than I expected it to be. I attributed its success to the descriptions of American scenery and places. I gave it to a family friend and asked her to mark those parts of it which she thought real incidents. I was very much astonished and greatly pleased to find, when she returned it, that she had marked some passages which were purely invention. This made me ask myself if I might not hope to write a novel some day." The question was evidently answered in the affirmative, for after 1872 Mr. Howells's output of fiction became regular and pro fuse. His novels have all been more or less popular. He is fondest himself of "A Modern Instance," we are told ; and he re gards " A Hazard of New Fortunes " as his best novel. It may safely be said that the book which it was the greatest pleasure to him to write is " Literary Friends and Acquaintance," published late last year. 24
WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS
Altogether his works number about seventy- five. Mr. Howells is a plodder. " I be lieve," he once said to an interviewer, " in the inspiration of hard work." As a rule all successful authors have held this belief.
Mr. Howells resigned from The Atlantic in 1880 to engage in general literary work. Six years later he formally transferred his allegiance from Boston to New York by ac cepting charge of " The Editor's Study " in Harper s. Afterward, for a time, he was editor of The Cosmopolitan. Late in 1900 he resumed his editorial connection with Harper's.
Although admired the world over, and dignified with the title of Doctor of Laws, which he got from Yale in 1871, Mr. Howells is hospitable and genial, just as Dr. Holmes was ; and many young writers with more or less glittering names owe much to his counsel and his encouragement.
25
BKKT HAKTE.
BRET HARTE
HARTE has been called the writer of the best short stories in the English language. A literary court of arbitration would doubtless find that the best of his short stories are without superiors. It should not be forgotten that the reading public is still under the magic spell which Mr. Harte wove more than a third of a century ago with " The Luck of Roaring Camp," " Plain Language from Truthful James," " Tennessee's Partner," " Higgles" and the other works which first called attention to the author's still unques tioned genius. " The Luck of Roaring Camp" and " Under the Redwoods" mark the present extremes of one of the most romantic chapters in our literary history.
27
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
Some years ago, when the popular writer and his wife were spending the summer at Newport, a woman said confidentially to Mrs. Harte, " What is your husband' s real name ? ' ' It evidently did not seem natural to the inquirer than an author could always have borne such a crisp and striking name ; and the same idea, that the name must be sim ply a happy pseudonym, has, we believe, struck many others. The idea is partly wrong and partly right. Francis Brett Harte was his name originally. That form was changed to Francis Bret Harte, then to F. Bret Harte, and finally to the attractive form which long ago endeared itself to the whole English-reading world. For it is well known, undoubtedly, that the Bret Harte stories are quite as popular in Eng land and in the British colonies as in the United States ; that Germany yields to none in her admiration for them ; and that one of 28
BRET HARTE
them, " Gabriel Conroy," has been printed in at least fourteen languages. Indeed, a quarter of a century ago the name of Bret Harte was as powerful the world over as was Mr. Kipling's a few years since. Per haps the felicitous brevity of the name was one of the elements of that power.
Bret Harte was born in Albany, N. Y., on August 25, 1839. His father was at that time a teacher in the Albany Female Seminary. Bret was still in boyhood when his father died. The boy, who had received an ordinary public school education, went to California with his mother in 1854. The Golden State was then one enormous min ing-camp. The laws were largely unwritten. A passion either for gold or for adventure had taken possession of thousands of persons and thrown them together in one of the wildest parts of the world. In this excit ing school of life young Harte studied his
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LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
first lessons of life. For three years he was thrown hither and thither, with his eyes and his ears wide open, and with his mind spong ing up the lively incidents which, through his skillful pen, have since become the idyls of the pioneer West, with all its vice and virtue, its heroes and cravens, its showy wealth and its heart-touching poverty. For a year he was an express rider, with a route lying among the ravines and gulches of the northern part of the State; and what he had not learned by his own observation he learned during this period from other obser vers. This was the time when Yuba Bill and the other heroic road-agents took form in his imagination. At another time he picked up the trade of compositor in a newspaper office in Eureka; and at still another time he went out prospecting, and there was a sign of later days in the fact that before the three years of his uncertainty came to an 30
BRET HARTE
end he taught school for a short while. It was then that, for the first time, he indulged the literary instincts awakened by his ex perience in the newspaper office in Eureka. This budding age is outlined in " M'liss."
In 1857 the young man settled down in San Francisco as a compositor in the office of the Golden Era, a weekly periodical. A few round-about-town sketches called " A Boy's Dog," " Side walkings," and " In a Balcony," submitted most humbly and re spectfully to the editor, brought to the am bitious printer the reward of an invitation to join the editorial staff. With the accept ance of the invitation began a most brilliant literary career. We are indebted to a friend of the author's for the statement : " Those were busy days, and much of the matter ground out in that time of probation is as pregnant with genius and wit as any that he has seen fit to retain in his complete
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LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
edition." But the edition is not yet com plete, we may remark.
When, not long afterward, a weekly called The Californian was established in San Francisco, the new writer went over to it enthusiastically. In the columns of this periodical and of some of the daily papers appeared the poems and the sketches which rounded out Mr. Harte's " time of probation." The Californian was the means of acquaint ing him with Mark Twain, also a new figure on the literary horizon. Indeed, it has been said by men who knew the little group of enthusiasts connected with The Californian that it was Harte who induced the Missis sippi pilot first to put to use his genius as a humorist.
This catch-penny work of the days of
The Californian was profitable to Harte
simply as experience. Like many another
story-teller, he came to the conclusion that
32
BRET HARTE
steady employment, with a few leisure hours in the day, would do more to advance him than anything else, and so he found work, first in the United States Surveyor General's office, then with the United States Marshal, and later in the mint. Shortly before going to the mint he was introduced to Easterners by a sketch in The Atlantic Monthly, " The Legend of Monte Diablo," which introduction was due largely to the patronage of Jessie Benton Fremont, one of the most cultivated women in Cali fornia. His secretaryship at the mint, which began in 1864, led to a very produc tive period, some of the fruits of which are " John Burns of Gettysburg," " The Plio cene Skull," " The Society on the Stanis- low " and the remarkable " Condensed Novels," in the writing of which, as one of the old-time critics remarked "a new set of faculties was required."
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LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
At this point naturally comes in the question, What was Bret Harte's first book ? The question was answered last year by the author himself, in this statement : " When I say that my first book was not my own, and contained beyond the title page not one word of my own composition, I trust that I shall not be accused of trifling with par adox, or tardily unbosoming myself of plagiary. But the fact remains that in pri ority of publication the first book for which I became responsible, and which probably provoked more criticism than anything I have written since, was a small compilation of California poems indited by other hands. There was an ominous calm when the book reached the market. Out of it the bolt fell. A well-known mining weekly, which I will poetically veil under the title of the Red Dog Jay S~awk,~was the first to swoop down upon the tuneful and unsus- 34
BRET HARTE
pecting quarry as follows : ' The hog wash and " purp " stuff ladled out from the slop
bucket of Messrs. and Company, of
'Frisco, by some lop-eared Eastern appren tice and called " A Compilation of Califor- nian Verses," might be passed over as far as criticism goes. A club in the hands of any able-bodied citizen of Red Dog and a steamboat ticket to the bay, cheerfully con tributed from this office, would be all sufficient. But when an imported green horn dares to call his flapdoodle mixture " Calif ornian," it is an insult to the State that has produced the gifted Yellow Ham mer, whose lofty flights have from time to time dazzled our readers in the columns of the Jay Hawk. That this complacent editorial jackass, browsing among the dock and the thistles which he has served up in this volume, should make allusion to Cali fornia's greatest bard, is rather a confession
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LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
of idiocy than a slur upon the genius of our esteemed contributor.' '
There were other bolts quite as forceful, but as a sample of the literary criticism found in California in the great mining days, and also of the reins that kept editor ial enterprise in check, the foregoing will suffice.
In 1868, while Mr. Harte was still work ing in the mint and quietly hitching his literary wagon to a star, Mr. Roman, an am bitious San Francisco publisher, projected The Overland Monthly, a periodical that has had considerable influence on the liter ary growth of the far West. He invited the secretary of the mint to be its editor. The invitation was accepted, and the editor- to-be at once went to work on a story for the first number, which was to appear in July. The scheme of the magazine was thoroughly Eastern, but the editor decided 36
BRET HARTE
that, for the honor of the West, his story should have a strong local flavor. He called it " The Luck of Roaring Camp," and, with out a thought of any impropriety, had it put into type. For the sake of accuracy we take the liberty of relating the conse quences as they were related in the old days :
" The first intimation that it was likely to arouse criticism of any kind, good or bad, came to him in the form of a protest from the young woman who read proof on the paper. She sent word to him that if matter as indecent as ' The Luck of Roaring Camp' was to be printed in The Overland Monthly she could not retain her place as an employee of the paper. Harte read the story over again in proof to see where the indecencies were, but could find none. Then he took it to the owner of the paper, and asked his opinion of it. The owner took it home and
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LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
read it to his wife. It made her cry, and she thought it was a powerful production, but she agreed with the proof-reader that it was too daring in its conception, and too frank in its details even for the not-over par ticular society which inhabited California. Harte heard her judgment with amazement. He was utterly unable to see anything im proper in the story. Finally the owner of the paper so far went over to the side of the story's critics as to say that he thought the story would have to be left out. Harte took a day and a night to think the matter over, and then he announced his own decision. He said that if the story was left out of that month's issue of The Overland Monthly he would himself insist on being left out of all connection with the paper in the future. There was no quarrel. He simply was certain that his judgment was good, and felt that if it was considered bad on this 38
BRET HARTE
occasion by the owner, he would never be able to suit him in the future. Finally, after the matter had been placed on this definite basis, the owner made up his mind to let the story run." We have met the account of the momentous difficulty in a slightly different form, but the account which we have repeated may be accepted as substantially correct.
" The Luck of Roaring Camp " did not please the Californians, and it seemed for some time as if the censure of the feminine critics would be justified popularly ; but when the flattering opinions of the Eastern readers were reported, the gold hunters changed their minds. No doubt they were astonished to hear that a Boston publishing house, at that time the most powerful organization of its kind in the land, had offered to accept anything the author might offer at his own terms.
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LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
Harte was busy sending provisions to the snowbound camps in the Sierras in the fall of 1868, so that his next story, " The Out casts of Poker Flat," made its appearance as late as January, 1869. That same year, too, " Plain Language from Truthful James," popularly known as "The Heathen Chinee," came to delight the reading public ; and since that time Bret Harte's fame has re mained more or less brilliant.
For a time he filled the chair of Modern Literature in the University of California. In 1871 he came East. The journey was a triumph. Nothing like it ever occurred before, or has occurred since. Once in the East, The Atlantic Monthly agreed to pay him one thousand dollars a month for a poem and a short story; but the author soon found the agreement irksome. He lectured and wrote at his leisure in this country until 1878, when he was appointed 40
BRET HARTE
United States Consul at Crefeld, Germany, and two years later he was sent to Glasgow. His term there closed in 1885, and ever since he has made London his home.
However, he has always been Calif ornian in his stories. His latest offering, " Under the Redwoods," is as reflective of the grow ing days of the West as are early master pieces like " Tennessee's Partner " and " Miggles." His star may be a trifle lower in the heavens than it was when he went abroad, but it is still of the first magnitude.
41
MAHK TWAIN. (S. L. Clemens.)
MARK TWAIN
7j /fARK TWAIN'S real name is / i/i Samuel Langhorne Clemens. -*- ' -*- There is a story to the effect that one of his ancestors, by name Gregory Clement, an adherent of Cromwell, added his voice to the condemnation of Charles I. and was beheaded for it by Charles II. However, it is neither as Clement nor as Clemens that the most celebrated of con temporaneous American authors is, or has been, popularly known, but by the pen-name of Mark Twain, which he adopted when he was piloting on the Mississippi, more than forty years ago.
In fun or in earnest — it is hard to fathom his moods — Mr. Clemens said lately that he was working on an autobiog-
43
raphy which must not be opened until he has been in his grave for a century. So far as the main facts are concerned, how ever, the humorist's autobiography is al ready an open book. It has been chronicled piece by piece in a hundred magazines and in a thousand newspapers since 1868, when " Innocents Abroad " appeared, up to the present day. Probably no other living author has been so beset by the requests of editors and the importunities of reporters ; and assuredly no other living author has been more amiable or more liberal in his responses. No, a good portion of the auto biography of Mr. Clemens, or Mark Twain, — we shall use each name impartially, — will be submitted to the public within a hundred hours after his death — and may that inevitable conclusion be far, far off!
As a man and as a writer Mr. Clemens has invariably carried the colors of the 44
MARK TWAIN
typical American. A stern sense of duty and of honor, a seldom absent sense of humor, inexhaustible energy, dauntless pluck, unfeigned simplicity and abiding sympathy and fidelity, are the salient char acteristics of the typical American — of Mr. Clemens. At the same time, above and beyond the writer's unexcelled powers of observation and richness of imagination is his fine sense of artistry. " Mark Twain's humor will live forever," Mr. Howells is reported to have said some years ago, " be cause of its artistic qualities. Mark Twain portrays and interprets real types, not only with exquisite appreciation and sympathy, but with a force and truth of drawing that makes them permanent." So fastidious a critic as Prof. Barrett Wendell has lately dwelt on the constant and irresistible charm of Huckleberry Finn.
Mr. Clemens was born in a little Mis-
45
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
souri village named Florida on Nov. 30, 1835. His father, John Marshall Clemens, of a good Virginia family, was one of the pioneers who, early in the century, crossed the Alleghanies and sought new fortunes in the unsettled West. His mother, whose maiden name was Elizabeth Lampton, also, like her husband, came of good English stock. Her forefathers had plunged into the wilds with Daniel Boone ; and she her self has been described as " one of those beautiful, graceful, and vivacious Kentucky girls who have contributed so much to the reputation of that fortunate State." A cousin of Mr. Clemens, by the way, who was one of the humorist's playmates sixty years ago, is the Rev. Eugene Joshua Lamp- ton, who, by some of the people in Mis souri, is called " the Bishop of the diocese." Elder Lampton is the possessor of the original subscription list which Mr. Clemens 46
MARK TWAIN
carried when he was a newspaper boy in Hannibal. But this is reaching ahead a little.
They say that Mr. Clemens's mother was not only remarkably winsome but remark ably intelligent. When the author was a youngster one of his relatives said of him: " He's a perfect little human kaleidoscope." " Yes," added another, " and he gets that from his mother." Samuel's mother could " write well," which was no small accom plishment in the south-west in the thirties.
When Samuel was about nine years old his father decided to move to Hannibal, in the same State. The prime cause of this immigration was the failure of the elder Clemens to make Salt River navigable; hence, as one writer has suggested, the prob able origin of the old synonym for disaster, " gone up Salt River."
Young Clemens was sent to school in
47
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
Hannibal. Some of his schoolmates are living in the old town to-day. He seems to have enjoyed the rule of two teachers, Miss Newcomb and Miss Lucy Davis. Phy sically, he was not a strong boy, but intel lectually he seems always to have been more than a match for any boy of his age. He had two brothers, Orion, who was con siderably older, and Henry, who was the youngest of them all. Samuel attended school until his father died in 1847. The death of the father, who had just been elected county judge, was a hard blow to the family. After the death of his father, the subject of our sketch went to work for the local newspaper as a carrier. After ward he served as " devil " and type-setter, and then, having completed his apprentice ship and thinking to better himself else where, he set off on foot for the East. Doing odd jobs at the case and the press, 48
MARK TWAIN
he finally reached Philadelphia. Thence he went to New York. But the East did not please him, and at seventeen he was back in Hannibal.
He was now on his uppers, as the phrase is, and, in addition to its adventurous side, the financial side of steamboat life on the Mississippi magnetized him. There, for instance, was the pilot, the guide of the great smoking craft, a man who knew everything thought worth knowing, a man looked up to by every merchant, every traveler and every desperado. Samuel determined to become a pilot, and the picturesque Capt. Horace E. Bixby took him under his wing. In his " Life on the Mississippi" Mark Twain de scribes with all his eloquence the interesting and exciting life of a pilot on the treacher ous river. And was not the pilot's a great and attractive post for a young man ? " If you will take," says Mark, "the longest
49
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
street in New York, and travel up and down it, conning its features patiently until you know every house and window and door and lamp-post and big and little sign by heart, and know them so accurately that you can instantly name the one you are abreast of when you are set down at random in that street in the middle of an inky-black night, you will then have a tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness of a pilot's knowl edge who carries the Mississippi River in his head. And then if you will go on until you know every street-crossing, the charac ter, size and position of the crossing-stones, and the varying depth of mud in each of those numberless places, you will have some idea of what the pilot must know in order to keep a Mississippi steamer out of trouble. Next, if you will take half of the signs on that long street and change their places once a month, and still manage to 50
MARK TWAIN
know their new positions accurately on dark nights, and keep up with these repeated changes without making any mistakes, you will understand what is required of a pilot's peerless memory by the fickle Mississippi."
The life on the river, with its ever-chang ing dramatic and entertaining incidents, awoke the young man's sleeping imagination — gave him a strong desire to put to use the modest literary methods which he had acquired as an itinerant printer. Mr. Howells, too, it will be noticed, first had the passion for authorship aroused in him by the types and the presses.
The first sketches which Mr. Clemens sent to the local papers were signed " losh," a meaningless signature, which quickly made the young author desire something better. The improvement came to him when one day he heard a " big black negro" who was taking soundings call out " Mark twain ! "
51
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
which meant that there were two fathoms of water. The call struck the pilot's fancy, and he kept it in mind for future use.
Mr. Clemens served in the pilot-house — one of the best school-houses in the world, it may be said — until the war broke out. Then he ran blockades for a while, and for two weeks he carried a gun in the Confed erate army, under General Harris. The two weeks' service cooled his ardor, and he went farther west with his brother Orion, who, as a sympathizer with the Union side, had received an appointment as Secretary of the Territory of Nevada. Samuel was to act as his brother's secretary, but as in this office he did nothing and earned nothing, he, after an attempt at prospecting, joined the staff of the Virginia City Enterprise. It was as the Enterprises correspondent at the capital of the Territory, Carson City, that Mr. Clemens first used the striking 52
MARK TWAIN
pseudonym " Mark Twain." But he had no taste for routine work ; or, rather, his manner of garnishing, often with his sting ing satire, his routine work, did not suit the taste of the editor of the Enterprise, and at the end of six months Mark Twain stamped the dust of Nevada from his shoes and struck out for California, where he readily secured employment on the Union. In the spring of 1865 he took an interest with Bret Harte in a short-lived weekly called The Calif or- nian, and some of the humorous articles which he wrote for that publication were widely copied in the East. Later the Union sent him to the Hawaiian Islands to describe the sugar industry. His work as a corres pondent was very successful, and so was the lecture tour which he made in California when he returned.
Major Pond, by the way, relates that Mark Twain committed his lecture to mem-
53
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
ory and was entirely confident of success; still, desiring to forestall even the possibility of failure, he arranged with some friend of his — Major Pond has forgotten her name — to sit in a box and start the applause if he should look in her direction and stroke his mustache. " Instead of failing, how ever," the Major reports, " the lecture started propitiously, and that caused Mark to forget his instructions to the lady. By and by, unconsciously, when the audience was filled to the neck with pleasure and sore with laughter, he unwittingly turned to the box where his friend sat and pulled his mustache. At the time he was saying nothing particularly good or funny, but the anxious lady took his action for the signal, and almost broke her fan on the edge of the box in a fury of applause." It took all the nerve which Mark had accumulated among the gamblers and crevasses of the 54
MARK TWAIN
Mississippi to pass through the embarrass ment.
In 1867 Mr. Clemens published his first book, " The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches," of which about four thousand copies were sold. That same year he went to Europe with the excursionists aboard the Quaker City.
This excursion proved to be the turning point in his career. He had a commission to write sketches of the journey for the A Ha Calif ornian. The sketches were duly published, and were then collected and offered to a publisher for marketing in book form. The material did not appeal to the publisher; it was startlingly uncut and undried. But Mark was insistent, and by and by the book appeared under the title of " Innocents Abroad." That book estab lished Mark Twain's reputation as a humor ist. During the thirty-three years which
55
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
have intervened between that day and the present, Mark Twain's reputation has been maintained at a matchless height. No one has been deemed worthy by the reading public — which, after all, is the Supreme Court in literary matters — to be called his rival. And since the publication of " Innocents Abroad " Mark Twain's career has been public property, with no signs, no fences, not even a dog therein to bark at night.
Mark Twain's career stands unequalled in the literary history of America. He has been honored as an author and as a lecturer in almost every part of the world. He made a fortune and lost it ; and now he is making another.
The literary historian must record in
his case the prodigious achievement of an
author remaining for at least thirty-three
years — and who knows how many more
56
MARK TWAIN
will follow ? — in almost steady demand in print and on the platform.
But in more than a literary sense was that excursion to Europe on the Quaker City the turning-point in Mark Twain's career, for it was on that memorable jour ney that he met Miss Olivia L. Langdon of Elmira, N. Y., who afterward became his wife ; who is the subject of the most elo quent words which he ever penned, and who, if we are to believe their long-termed friend, Major Pond, " makes his works so great."
57
"LEW" WALI.ACK.
"LEW" WALLACE
>^yEN. "LEW" WALLACE is the I -— - author of the most popular story ^^ ever written by an American. "Ben Hur" has been translated into every language which can boast of a literature. In the summer of 1900 it was estimated that nine hundred thousand copies of the book had been sold. It is safe to say that by this time the million mark has been reached. This literary phenomenon is enlarged by the fact that " Ben-Hur " has never appeared in a cheap, that is, a paper-covered, edition. The General has been urged repeatedly to authorize the publication of such an edition, but his refusal has been firm from the first. A friend of his who once heard the author repeat his refusal, exclaimed : " Good for
59
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
you 1 " It is a question whether this friendly enthusiasm served any high pur pose. If, as has often been reported, " Ben Hur " has converted many readers to Chris tianity, then its circulation might well be furthered in every way possible.
We mention this circumstance because of the half-sacred nature which, not simply in the minds of emotional readers but also in the mind of the stern-charactered author himself, the book has been gradually assum ing. A few years ago General Wallace, while on a lecture tour among the big cities, related how " Ben Hur " was con ceived and brought forth. He frankly admitted that prior to its conception, his religious views were unstable. But as the ideas took hold of him, as chapter followed chapter, as the central figure emerged under his pen from the mist of the early years in Bethlehem into the divine glow of the later 60
"LEW" WALLACE
years around Jerusalem, his own life under went changes, until at length, when the work was done, he stepped forth a militant Christian for the first time in his life. We have heard many authors describe the man ner in which their books were born, but Lew Wallace's description of the birth of " Ben Hur," for impressiveness and for entertainment, stands alone.
If the General had done nothing else but write the tale of Christ his fame would be certain of outlasting generations. But, as a matter of fact, the wonderful book repre sents only one of his many qualifications to sit among the Immortals, as we shall see presently.
The author was born in Brookville, Ind., on April 10, 1827. His father was David Wallace, who, after graduation from West Point and a two years' service in the army, adopted the profession of law and went to
61
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
live in the little Indiana town. Six years after Lewis was born his father was elected lieutenant governor by the Whigs, and three years later he was elected governor. From 1841 to 1843 Governor Wallace rep resented his district in Congress. His political career was brought to a close simply, it is said, because he voted for an appropriation to assist Professor Morse to establish telegraph communication between Baltimore and Washington. Lewis's mother was Esther Test, a daughter of a well-known Indiana judge, who is described as a wom an of marked beauty and culture, and to whom may be traced the son's artistic and literary genius. She died in 1837, but her children were fortunate to be reared and trained by a woman of extraordinarily strong character, Zerelda Saunders, the daughter of an Indianapolis doctor, who, when she had devotedly completed her performance 62
"LEW" WALLACE
of the none too attractive duties of a step mother, worked for the causes of temper ance and equal suffrage, according to a wo man who knew her well, with " eloquence, dignity, enthusiasm and conscientiousness." General Wallace avoided school. Thus he missed the basis which erudition de mands, but he at least improved his passion for art and for literature. What he enjoyed most was to stroll out of town to the wild- grown fields and woods, and there he would read his favorite books and study nature. Not one of our authors knows nature more intimately. In fact, in those juvenile days he thought seriously of becoming an artist ; and though, if the thought had ever been realized, literature would have lost much, still art might have gained in equal propor tion. For at the General's home in Craw- fordsville are some excellent examples of his skill with the brush. One of his notable
63
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
pictures represents the conspirators con cerned in the assassination of President Lincoln. Another equally remarkable work of art is his portrait of the Sultan of Tur key. Many of the General's friends have valuable samples of his artistic genius.
We mention these facts to show that there was once good ground for the author's am bition to be an artist. Yet at the age of eighteen, just when one would expect such a talent to exert itself irresistibly, young Wallace enlisted to fight against Mexico. He was made a second lieutenant and ordered to guard the stores at the mouth of the Rio Grande. In Mexico he found the material for " The Fair God," his first novel, on which he worked occasionally for twenty years. At the end of the Mexican war he returned to Indiana to study law, in which respect, it will be noticed, he followed in the foot steps of his father. Three years after his 64
LEW" WALLACE
admission to the bar he married SusanElston, of Crawfordsville, herself of no mean literary gifts, as her three collections of charming sketches, "The Land of the Pueblos," "The Storied Sea," and " The Repose in Egypt," attest. The Wallaces lived in Crawfordsville until the outbreak of the War of the Rebel lion. Thereupon the young lawyer went straight to Indianapolis and offered his ser vices to the governor. For a while he served as adjutant-general. Then he took the colonelcy of a regiment of zouaves, and with such vigor and success that early in September, 1861, he was bre vetted brigadier- general. For gallantry at Fort Donelson he was afterwards bre vetted major-general. At the close of the war he was one of the most distinguished soldiers in the land. As a recognition of his great services — in July, 1864, according to Secretary Stanton and General Grant, he had saved Washington
65
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
from destruction — he was appointed to the commission which tried the assassins of Lincoln. That duty done, he returned to Crawfordsville.
This return home signalized the real be ginning of his literary career. He was now not far from forty years of age, and he was not content to live on his military reputa tion. Law had little power over him. So he turned to the manuscript which had been growing slowly for many years ; and 1873 saw the publication of " The Fair God," the souvenir of the author's service in the Mexican war. Compared with the average romance, " The Fair God" possesses excep tional power and originality. " Ben-Hur" appeared in 1880 ; but it must not be sup posed that General Wallace gave this second book his exclusive attention for the seven years that had passed. It was half written when, in 1878, President Hayes appointed 66
"LEW" WALLACE
the distinguished Indianian Governor of New Mexico. The visitor at the Wallace home stead in Crawfordsville will be shown the beech tree in the shade of which the work was done. To the way in which he works we shall turn later. The concluding half of the tale was written at spare moments in the governor's palace in Santa F6", which Mrs. Wallace has described as "the last rallying-place of the Pueblo Indians."
At first the more captious of the critics accented their discovery that " Ben-Hur ' showed no rhetorical improvement over " The Fair God "; and, though they were right, they erred sadly in trying to measure the book with narrow rules. It has defects, as the most sympathetic critic must admit ; but the impartial critic must also admit that in boldness and grandeur of conception and in vigor and beauty of style, the story stands unequalled in American literature,
67
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
and, in parts, unexcelled in the romantic literature of any nation. Here and there are unbalanced sentences, graceless phrases, misplaced words, and interpolations that detract from the unity of effect desirable in all works of art ; but here and there, too, especially in the chapters descriptive of the Grove of Daphne and of the chariot race, is a vivid power at once more charming and more thrilling than anything to be found in any other English novel. "A great historical romance," as one of our critics remarked many years ago, " is not to be made with reference to the square and the compass. It must be a vivid historical impression, and at the same time a wisely considered story of life." " Ben-Hur" adequately fulfills these two fundamental conditions. Moreover it perfectly fulfills, delicately yet impressively, the great moral purpose which the author imposed upon himself. As we recall the 68
"LEW" WALLACE
author's narrative of the writing of the tale, this moral purpose, beginning gently, grad ually acquired a force that mastered him completely. It was like a flood that first trickles through the seam in the dam, and then, gathering in volume, sweeps all before it. The characters themselves, from Christ to the faithful steward, display the highest flight of imagination to be found in any American novel. Indeed, many of the land scape features themselves are so wonderfully vivid that the same praise awarded Tom Moore for his imaginative descriptions of the East may judiciously be extended to General Wallace. We have heard the Gen eral say that a scene which he had regarded as purely fictitious or imaginative appeared in surprising reality when, years after the book was published, he first visited Palestine. Of the tremendous sensation which " Ben- Hur " made when it appeared, and of the
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
phenomenal success which it has maintained even down to the present time, it is, we presume, unnecessary to speak. The author, as we noted before, has guarded its fame diligently, jealously ; in fact, although Lawrence Barrett urged him years ago to allow the book to be dramatized, he did not yield to solicitation in this form until 1900. This circumstance reminds us that the General once wrote a play called " Commo- dus," but its multiplicity of leading char acters has kept it in his desk. It would bankrupt any manager in America, they told hun. " The Prince of India," the ro mance published in 1893, suffered, as it must have suffered, by comparison with " Ben-Hur." Judged by itself, it is delight ful. It exemplifies the writer's remarkable creative force and his ever-youthful enthu siasm. Probably the last notable work from the General's pen will be the auto- 70
"LEW" WALLACE
biography on which he has been at work for the last few years.
General Wallace's diplomatic experience at Constantinople is worthy of a chapter, but we must content ourselves with saying that it added' brilliancy to the honors which he had earned as a soldier and as an author. Of late the General has been living a semi- pastoral life at his estate in Indiana. He has himself described his daily habits :
" I begin to write at about 9 A.M. Keep at work till noon. Resume about 1.30 P.M., and leave my studio about 4. I then ex ercise for two hours. I walk or ride horse back, according to the weather. When it rains I put on a heavy pair of boots and trudge five to seven miles across the coun try. I usually ride about a dozen miles. To this habit of taking regular exercise I attribute my good health. I eat just what I want and as much as I want. When
71
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
night comes I lie down and sleep like a child, never once waking until morning. I usually retire at 9.30 and rise at 7.30, aim ing to secure nine hours' sleep. I smoke at pleasure, a pipe or a cigar, but never a cigarette, which I consider the deadliest thing a person can put in his mouth. The amount of work I produce in a day varies greatly. Sometimes I write four hundred and sometimes twelve hundred words. What I write to-day in the rough, to-mor row I revise, perhaps reducing it to twenty words, perhaps striking out all the day's work and beginning at the same point once more. That constitutes my second copy. When proofs come from the publisher another revision takes place. It consists chiefly of condensation and expurgation." He was asked once what he considered the secret of his success. " Work," he answered, " and, as an author, the doing it 72
"LEW" WALLACE
myself with my own hand, not by means of a typewriter, or amanuensis or stenogra pher. To work I would add universal reading."
" Who is your favorite novelist ? " the questioner went on.
" Sir Walter Scott."
" What is your favorite novel? "
" ' Ivanhoe.' "
" And your favorite poem ? "
« ' Idylls of the King.' "
"What do you consider the sublimest poetry in the world? "
" You will find it in the Psalms and Job, in Homer, in Milton and in Shakespeare."
" Who, in your judgment, are the three greatest warriors the world has produced ? "
"Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon."
" Who, in your opinion, were the greatest American statesmen ? "
" George Washington, Alexander Ham-
73
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
ilton, and James Madison. Alexander Hamilton is, in my judgment, the father of the American Constitution. But that Con stitution would never have been adopted save for the support given it by the great name of George Washington."
We have said, after all, far too little of this distinguished man, but all that we might say would hardly give the right em phasis to the greatness of his manifold deeds and to the charm of his personal character.
74
GEORGE W. CABLE.
GEORGE W. CABLE
"W~^v URING his visit to this country a m m few years ago Mr. J. M. Barrie •** — said to the students at Smith College that no American novelist merits a higher rank than Mr. George W. Cable. True as, in the abstract, this foreign esti mate of Mr. Cable's worth is, it would awaken a rather feeble echo among the devourers of our colonial literature. Yet one of the Southerner's characteristic stories, " The Grandissimes," for instance, or " Pos- son Jone," or "Madame Delphine," is deserving of a recommendation to the live liest admirer of eighteenth century heroes and heroines.
At bottom, there is much in common be tween Mr. Barrie and Mr. Cable, and this
75
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
circumstance may account for the Scotch man's enthusiastic utterance at Smith Col lege. Each has a poetical love for nature ; each has portrayed a picturesque corner of the world with the kindest intention, the broadest sympathy and the choicest skill ; each has been the object of misunderstand ing at home and of warm admiration abroad, and each has led where others may only follow. It is perfectly natural that two such lovable and loving men should clasp hands across the sea.
We must admit that the writer who has pictured New Orleans as vividly as Balzac pictured his beloved Paris was better known, say, ten years ago, than he is to-day. Then he had fewer distractions than he has to-day. Then he had reached the climax of his liter ary productivity. Then he was personally endearing himself to his fellow-countrymen with his inimitably delightful recitations 76
GEORGE W. CABLE
and songs. There have been authors who drew larger audiences, and who, to use a homely phrase, made more noise on their tours, but there has never been an author whose readings from his works gave sweeter pleasure ; and, as for his manner of singing the Creole folksongs, it was indescribably charming. Mr. John Fox, Jr., is the only other American author who has ventured to sing folk-songs publicly ; and we may say, without fear of suggesting the odious com parison, that the younger man has been very successful, too.
" Many years ago, " Mr. Cable once said, " when I discovered that these folk-songs of the slaves of former Louisiana Creoles had a great charm of their own and were pre served by tradition only, I was induced to gather them and reduce them to notation. I found that others were so strongly inter ested in the songs that, without pretending
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to any musical authority or original charm of voice, I was tempted to sing one or two of them before public audiences. The first time I did so was in Boston, and since then I have rarely been allowed to leave them out of my entertainment, when the length of my literary program left room for them." But we must look back farther. To start at the very beginning, George Washington Cable was born in New Orleans on October 12, 1844. His father was of Virginian de scent ; his mother of New England. They were married in Indiana ten years before George was born, and they moved to New Orleans after the hard times of 1837. The father died hi 1859, and then George, at the age of fifteen, went to work to help sup port the family. He was a very small boy for his age ; and indeed it is related that in 1863, when the family was sent outside the Union lines for refusing to take the oath of 78
GEORGE W. CABLE
allegiance, his sisters had no difficulty in obtaining permission to have their "little brother " accompany them. The " little brother," however, was not so harmless as he looked. He volunteered to fight for the Confederacy, and was mustered into the Fourth Mississippi Cavalry, then in Gen. Wirt Adams's brigade. For a time after the war he rolled cotton on the New Orleans levees and carried a surveyor's chain along the banks of the Atchafalaya ; and by and by he found a place on the New Orleans Picayune. He is therefore to be counted among the authors whose literary career started in the reporter's room. His strong taste for culture and his zeal for the public welfare soon made an outlet for themselves in short articles touching on current topics ; and, though the articles were much enjoyed by the readers of the Picayune, the young writer before long felt the distaste for news-
T9
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
paper work which, early or late, comes to almost every journalist with high literary aims. Journalism is the best school of ex perience in the world, but it can be attended too long.
Cable resisted the fascinations of journal ism firmly and wisely. At the height of his success he left the Picayune and went into the counting-room of a cotton house. He had a good eye for the picturesque fea tures of daily life, the features met com monly in the daily papers, and at his leisure he wrote a few short stories based on New Orleans characters. One day these stories, which he had made no attempt to sell, came into the hands of an agent of the old Scribner's Monthly, who happened to visit Louisiana in connection with the well-re membered Great South papers. This agent, by name Edward King, praised the stories, and, at the author's request, sent one of 80
GEORGE W. CABLE
them to New York. The story, for some reason, came back ; but the next one sent, " Sieur George," brought a note of accept ance and encouragement from Richard Watson Gilder, Doctor Holland's associate. A few years later a volume of these Lou isiana sketches was published under the title of " Old Creole Days." It was immediately recognized as a notable addition to our short story literature. Nevertheless, the author stuck to his desk in the counting-room. Many another ambitious young writer, in the cir cumstances, would have given up his position and leaned entirely upon his pen. Young Cable had a cool head. He knew that he was moving forward handsomely, and that if he yielded to the excitement of the situ ation for a moment he might fall back. So his pen rusted for two years, when he ac cepted an order for a serial story. This turned out to be " The Grandissimes," a
81
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
clear and entertaining exposition of the author's views of the old-fashioned Southern life, a happy mingling of fact and fiction, of fun and sobriety, of calm appreciation of the Louisiana aristocracy and a warm toler ation of the struggles of the poor negro slaves. Of course, this attitude added noth ing to the author's popularity among South erners.
To illustrate this, a Southern woman, who happened to visit Northampton, where of late Mr. Cable has made his home, was asked if she ever read his stories. " Of course not," she indignantly answered ; " I would n't think of looking at them." However, she was persuaded to look at them after a while ; and it is a peculiar tribute to their delicate yet powerful charm that the woman expressed regret that she had misconceived his work and opposed his ideas.
" The Grandissimes" was so successful 82
GEORGE W. CABLE
that the publishers are said to have sent the author a check for five hundred dollars more than the contract price. This first long talc was followed by another much the same in vein and in atmosphere, *' Madame Del- phine," which is the story-teller's own favor ite. The subject and the style are equally delightful.
In 1879, when Mr. Cable was thirty-five years old, the business house in which he had worked tp keep his feet on earth dis solved, and the clerk had to choose between returning to journalism and devoting him self entirely to literature. By this time he seems to have been more self-reliant and more confident. At any rate, he chose lit erature. The first thing he did was to decline to write for more than one publisher. It must be said again that a steadier head never produced a story.
A strong sense of duty, in fact, early es-
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
tablished control of his work. His interests were not permitted to grow narrow. He realized that he possessed exceptionally abundant resources for the production of miscellaneous literature touching on the development of the middle South, and he determined to make the most of his posses sions. In 1880, for example, we find him engaged in a special article on New Orleans for the Census Bureau, and his native city was also the theme of an article which he wrote for the "Encyclopedia Britannica." One of his critics has said: "Since Haw thorne's Custom House reports, few pages of the Government documents have been en riched by so discriminating a pen as in the exhaustive census monograph upon the past and present of the Southern metropolis." This paper led to a series of articles entitled " The Creoles of Louisiana," written for The Century, in which the reader will note an 84
GEORGE W. CABLE
artistic combination of dry history and vivid imagination.
That such a painstaking, conscientious, du tiful writer should ever be charged with fall ing into an anachronism may seem preposter ous ; but although the charge has been made, we find no instance in which it has been sus tained. A writer who once visited him brushed the charge aside vigorously : " Mr. Cable's plan of work," he said, " is unusually methodical, for his counting-room training has stood him in good stead. All his notes and references are carefully indexed and jour- nailed, and so systematized that he can turn, without a moment's delay, to any authority he wishes to consult. In this respect, as in many others, he has not, perhaps, his equal among living authors. In making his notes, it is his usual custom to write in pencil on scraps of paper. These notes are next put into shape, still in pencil, and the third
85
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
copy, intended for the press, is written in ink on note-paper — the chirography exceed ingly neat, delicate and legible. He is always exact, and is untiring in his re searches .... Before attempting to write upon any historical point, he gathers to gether all available material without reck oning time or trouble ; and, under such conditions, nothing is more unlikely than that he should be guilty of error."
The business life which fortunately im posed so valuable a system upon him inci dentally inspired his second novel, " Dr. Sevier," many of the scenes in which are faithful pictures of his own experiences as a youth. As in the historical sketches, so in this second novel the poetic imagination of the author fairly rivals his grasp of the prosaic relations existing between man and man. But such relations were supremely vital from his viewpoint, and his third novel, 86
GEORGE W. CABLE
" Bonaventure," was written in moments stolen from the discussion of the questions of elections, prison systems, and the future of the negro. The reader will note in the hero of this story the personification of the practical strengthening and yet spiritualiz ing gospel which the author has enunciated in his private and public religious work. For it is important to chronicle that Mr. Cable has done as much to Christianize sev eral communities as the most energetic min ister would be expected to do ; and from his scrupulous performance of not merely the ordinary Christian duties but also of duties self-imposed, he has never allowed literature or society to beguile him.
Naturally his social and political studies drew many invitations to address public meetings. It was at Johns Hopkins Uni versity, while lecturing on literary art, that, upon the suggestion of President Oilman,
87
LITTLE PILGRIMAGES
he ventured for the first time to read selec tions from his own stories. The delight of the audience was no less a surprise to him than the realization of his own elocutionary skill. This he set about to cultivate, and with such success that for years afterward he was enthusiastically welcomed to the great cities. It was once estimated that in his busiest years on the platform he traveled more than ten thousand miles every twelve months.
For various reasons, particularly that he might be able to write of the South impar tially and that he might be nearer the liter ary market, he moved to Simsbury, Conn., in 1884, and the next year to Northampton, Mass., where he has lived ever since. But he has never lost sight of his native concern in the progress of the South ; and as for his philanthropy, in Northampton it has spread wider and wider. 88
GEORGE W. CABLE
There, on the edge of one of the quietest and loveliest towns in Massachusetts, he has had built for himself a home suited to all his excellent tastes, and there he lives, intent always on making someone happy, and writ ing simply enough to maintain the brilliancy and popularity of his name.
89
HENRY JAMES
f yENRY JAMES has been at
m t pains, lately, to put a stop to a
-^ report that he proposes to return
to America, yet by descent and at heart he
is undoubtedly as loyal an American as his
neighbor in England, Bret Harte. Even
a cosmopolite may be patriotic.
Mr. James has been called the first American cosmopolitan author. It is an un usually interesting fact that, like Mr. Harte, who also lives in England, James was born in Albany, N. Y., the date of his birth being April 15, 1843. His grandfather, William James, who made a fortune in the Syracuse salt works, had settled in Albany soon after his immigration from Ireland. His millions were divided among eleven children, one of
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whom was Henry James, Sr., the novelist's father. This branch of the James family moved to Germany when our author was a boy ; and there he and his brothers and sister were educated for some years. It used to be said that, like his distinguished contempo raries, Howells and Aldrich, James never en joyed the advantages of a college education ; but it is a fact, nevertheless, that the James children were thoroughly educated. Henry James, Sr., intellectually, was a remarkable man, and Miss Walsh of New York, whom he married, has been described as " his com plement in the possession of sterling practi cal qualities and the sustaining common sense of woman." Besides, there were the educa tional advantages of travel which the James children enjoyed. When the Jameses re turned to this country they settled in Cam bridge. It was there that Howells made the acquaintance of the elder James. 92
HENRY JAMES
We are tempted to quote extensively from Howells's memories of Henry James, Sr., but we shall confine our quotation to a single paragraph:
" At all times he thought originally in words of delightf ul originality, which painted a fact with the greatest vividness. Of a person who had a nervous twitching of the face, and who wished to call up a friend to them, he said : ' He spasmed to the fellow across the room, and introduced him.' His written style had traits of the same adven- turousness, but it was his speech which was most captivating. As I write of him I see him before me : his white bearded face, with a kindly intensity which at first glance seemed fierce, the mouth humorously shap ing the mustache, the eyes vague behind the glasses ; his sensitive hand gripping the stick on which he rested his weight to ease it from the artificial limb he wore."
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Henry James, Jr., is one of five children. Equally as celebrated as Henry, both at home and abroad, is William James, a pro fessor at Harvard. In March, 1865, a month before his twenty-second year, Henry James made his first appearance in literature with a contribution to The Atlantic Monthly, en titled " A Story of a Year," which naturally had to do with the War of the Rebellion. It was The Atlantic which also published his first serial story, " Poor Richard," which ran through three numbers. Later followed "Gabrielle de Bergerac" and "Watch and Ward," each a little more ambitious than its predecessors ; and finally came his first long story, " Roderick Hudson," which lasted through twelve numbers of The Atlantic. The stories aroused a great deal of comment, most of which was favorable. This encouraged him to abandon all thought of law, which he had studied at Harvard, 94
HENRY JAMES
and make literature his profession. About the same time he went to England, where he has since spent most of his time.
Like Harte, James has suffered from the charge of expatriation. The very fact that the English reading public, which is a most discerning public, was quick to appreciate the rare quality of James's style has been sufficient to keep some American critics in bad temper — as if the mere matter of resi dence has any intimate connection with literature ! If James were an utter snob, if he slurred Americans or disclaimed any acquaintance with them, if his cynicism were not well founded, or if his satire were simply burlesque, he might justly be at tacked ; but as, personally, he is gentle and unassuming, as his cynicism is not a mania, and as his satire is more or less truthful, the belligerent critics have been largely wasting their ammunition. Probably no
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story of his has ever stirred up bitterer talk than " Daisy Miller," with its unconven tional American heroine ; yet it was only justice, not to mention literary acumen, which prompted so spirited an American as Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his " Short Studies of American Authors," to say of the author of " Daisy Miller " that " he has achieved no greater triumph than when, in this last-named book, he succeeds in holding our sympathy and even affec tion, after all, for the essential innocence and rectitude of the poor wayward girl whose follies he has so mercilessly por trayed." It is a singular commentary on the injustice of the denouncers of " Daisy Miller" that the young lady of Boston whom gossip made the original of the story was " cut " by society.
His friends and enemies were still further divided by " The American " and " The 96
HENRY JAMES
Portrait of a Lady," and we suspect that the author was poking a little fun at the hostile camp when he had the American woman journalist in the latter story say, " I was going to bring in your cousin — the alienated American. There is a great demand now for the alienated American, and your cousin is a beautiful specimen. I should have handled him severely."
Mr. James's friends say that he went to England, originally, for the benefit of his health. It cannot be gainsaid that he has a temperament which makes itself at home in all lands. He is, indeed, as much a citizen of Paris as of London, and his stories in French have been warmly praised by French critics. But it may be that, after all, he saw the wisdom of writing reminiscently, of writing at a distance from his subjects. Mr. Cable, for example, saw it when he moved North from New Orle-
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ans ; and, furthermore, we know that many an author has been condemned unjustly for telling the truth. The great novelist is not the idealist, with his world of prize-baby angels and impossible saints ; he is a photog rapher, and his mind and his hand are a camera that cannot lie. Mr. Warner once said that the object of the novel is to en tertain ; Mr. James has said that it is to represent life. James Lane Allen, we remember, joined the two statements thus : " The object of the novel is to entertain by representing life."
James's reach is transatlantic. Ameri cans and Britons alike share prominence in his works. Then, too, of late, his charac ters have grown more and more ethereal and ghostly ; they have such faint connec tion with the world of chalk-cliffs and prairies that the question of their citizen ship is insignificant. Physically they ap- 98
HENRY JAMES
pear to us only in episodes ; intellectually they are universal types. But, really, the last word on Henry James's art was said long ago by The Spectator :
" Mr. Henry James is certainly a very remarkable illustration of the tendency of our age to subdivide, in the finest way, the already rather extreme division of labor, till a very high perfection is attained in producing articles of the most curiously specialized kind, though apparently without the power of producing anything outside that kind. For a long time we have had novelists who are wonderfully skillful in a particular form of novels, but who seem unable to master more than one form for themselves. But Mr. Henry James, though he has attained a very great perfection in his own line, seems not to aim at anything quite so considerable as a story of human life of any sort. He eschews a story.
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What he loves is an episode, i. e., some thing which by the nature of the case is rather a fragment cut out of life, and not a fair or average specimen of it, nor even such a part of it as would give you the best essence of the whole, — but rather an eddy in it, which takes you for an interval out of its main current, and only ends as you get back into the main current again, or at least at the point at which you might get back into the main current again, if some event (accidental, in relation to the art of the story) did not occur to cut off abruptly the thread of the narrative. . . One might perhaps say that Mr. Henry James has discerned in relation to literature what has long been known in relation to art — that with artists of any genius, ' sketches ' are apt to be more satisfying than finished pictures. But then the sketches we like so much in artists' studios are, though un- 100
HENRY JAMES
finished pictures, still pictures of what the painter has been most struck with, pictures in which he has given all that struck him most, and left only what did not strike him to be filled in by the fancy of the public. Now, Mr. Henry James does not give us sketches of the most striking features in what he sees of human life and passion, so much as finished pictures of the little nooks and bays into which human caprice occa sionally drifts, when the main current of life's deeper interests has left us for a moment on one side, and rushed past us. . . Mr. Henry James is not so much a novel ist as an episodist, if such a term be allowable. But he is a wonderful episo dist."
All in all, that is the keenest and fairest criticism of James's works ever written. It should be taken with every one of his stories, just as soda is taken with brandy.
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Such a criticism is not fugacious ; it is complementary.
It brings to mind the amusing criti cism of " The Sacred Fount," notably Carolyn Wells's " Verbarium Tremens," published in The Critic, with its bright termination —
The mad gush of « The Sacred Fount " is
ringing in my ear, Its dictional excitements are obsessing me, I
fear. For its subtle fascination makes me read it,
then, alack, I find I have the James-james, a very bad
attack !
James is an exceedingly neat man, and this side of him at once strikes every visi tor to his home. The only known excep tion to this characteristic neatness is his handwriting, which is said to be as vexa tious as Horace Greeley's was. " I have a letter from him before me now, "says one of 102
HENRY JAMES
his correspondents. " The signature I know to be « Henry James.' You might take it for Henryk Sienkiewicz."
The same correspondent relates a story which throws a new light on his personal- ity:
" You will be astonished, possibly, to know that his income from his writing is a scant three hundred pounds a year, though in spite of this there has never come a man in need to Henry James to whom he has not offered a part of what he calls his own.
" Not so long ago a novelist in England died. He left two little children, abso lutely alone in the world. One of that man's friends put by a little sum for them, and, out of the kindness of his heart, wrote to other literary men soliciting their help. He sought a maker of books who lives in a castle . . . , whom he knew to have an
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income of over twenty thousand pounds from his literary work.
" ' Won't you aid these little folk ? ' he asked. Not a cent was forthcoming.
" Henry James was written in the mat ter. By return mail came a check for fifty pounds, one-tenth of his whole year's income."
We have been informed that this esti mate of Mr. James's income is rather small ; but, even if his income be as large as that of the "maker of books who lives in a castle," the fact remains that Mr. James proved his generosity handsomely.
James has acquired his extraordinarily brilliant style at the expense of incessant and determined effort. The dazzling spon taneities are really the product of toilsome hours. He works mostly in the morning, writing slowly, and his stories are written again and again before they go off to his 104
HENRY JAMES
publisher's. With him writing is a pro fession, a task ; he. is not the child of moods. Occasionally he visits friends — old friends, like Marion Crawford — but the greater part of the year he spends quietly and almost reclusely in England.
105
Photo by Parker, Morristown.
KKANCIS K1CIIARI) STOCKTON.
FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON
/j T a dinner given in honor of Mr. /J Frank R. Stockton by the Authors' •^ -**- Club of New York, early in the year 1901, Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of The Century, said: "A young man once came to me and said he would like to contribute to the magazine every month. I asked him what he wanted to write. 'Oh,' he said, 'I'd like to send you each month a story like The Lady or % Tiger?'" Mr. Gilder said at the end of his speech : " When I think of the immense amount of pleasure Mr. Stockton brought into the life of Stevenson it seems to me that alone would be to him a bene diction forever."
The editor of The Century thus happily
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illustrated the attitude of the reading world toward Mr. Stockton : on one side is an eager desire to emulate him, and on the other an equally eager desire to go to him for pleasure or for comfort. There is a natural grace about his stories which has often deceived the inexpert into an at tempt to rival him, while the sweet and simple comedy of the stories has for more than a quarter of a century been the delight of young and old. The young man who visited Mr. Gilder, and the brilliant novelist solacing himself with the acquaintance of Pomona, Ardis Claverden, Mrs. Null and Chipperton, are types.
The object of this variety of admiration was born in Philadelphia on April 5, 1834. On his father's side he is a descendant of the Richard Stockton who signed the Declaration of Independence. His father was notable chiefly for his religious zeal. 108
FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON
He married twice, and his second wife was the author's mother. She was a Vir ginian ; and from her side of the family tree was derived the name Ardis, found in "Ardis Claverden." There is a Stocktonian touch in the familiar story that the Chris tian name of Francis Richard was imposed upon Mr. Stockton by one of his half- sisters, who borrowed half of it from Fran cis I. of France and half from Richard Cceur de Lion. Some readers will doubt less remember Louise Stockton, Francis's sister, who was given the name of Napo leon's second wife.
It is remarkable, by the way, that with a sister so ready in the choice of names the novelist should himself find denomination a troublesome phase of his art. " The hardest work I have," he once said, "is naming my characters. Many of them are completely made up, others are suggested
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by something, others are but slightly changed from real names. I seldom use a name that in itself is a description of the character. That was Dickens's way, you remember. Nevertheless, sometimes one of my names does describe the character. Take Tippengray of * The Squirrel Inn.' Tippengray was a man whose hair was slightly tipped with gray. I always liked that name. Chipperton in ' A Jolly Fel lowship ' is very descriptive also."
Francis Richard first went to a private school in West Philadelphia. Later he at tended the public school, and at the age of eighteen was graduated from the Central High School with the degree of Bachelor of Arts. It was noticed at school that his bent was literary. In fact, this was obvious to his parents when he was only ten, for at that age he began to scribble verses. In spite of this proclivity, however, the boy, 110
FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON
after leaving the high school, took up wood- carving as a profession. Just one bond existed between himself and the world of letters, and that was his membership in a high school organization called the " Liter ary and Forensic Circle." Upon this slight basis has been erected an exceptionally bril liant career, for it was to the Circle that the Ting-a-Ling stories were first read. These stories were collected for his first book. The Circle also heard " Kate " as soon as it was written. This story and " The Story of Champaigne " were published by the South ern Messenger ; and it is sufficient to say that they created a demand for more like them. Thereafter, until 1874, Stockton wrote many short stories, his star all the time rising a little higher above the hori zon.
But in 1874 the star blazed forth won- drously with the appearance of the first
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part of "Rudder Grange." From that day the author's place among the famous American humorists has been secure. The primary effect of the remarkable success of the first part of " Rudder Grange " was to encourage the author to write a second part ; its next effect was to persuade him to abandon wood-carving for literature.
There was an extraordinary infantile tangle connected with the popular story. In the original papers in Scribner's there was no baby; in the first edition of the book there was one baby ; in the second edition there were three babies ; in the third edition there were two. The author finally let Pomona's baby disappear, for it would have embarrassed her trip abroad. The author tells a story about this baby.
" I had planned out the book of Pomona's travels," he says, "and was about ready to write it. I was in Philadelphia at the 112
FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON
time, and had a business appointment with my dentist, an old friend. By the way, you should never change your dentist any more than you should your plumber. Both will want to take out the work of their predecessors, swearing that it was done very badly. Well, while in the chair I got to talking with this dentist friend about my new book. I told him I had serious thoughts of killing the baby. He was very much interested. We talked over the advisability of doing this, and, while he was not convinced, he in the main agreed with me.
" I had been finished with, and clasping his hand went into the waiting room on my way out. This waiting-room was filled with women. As I passed through the door I heard him call :
14 ' Then you have positively decided to kill that baby?'
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" * Positively,' I replied.
" You should have seen the women stare. It was not until I got well out in the hall way that I realized what they must, of course, have thought."
Pomona, the heroine, existed in real life. She was a charity girl whom the Stocktons had taken into the family. She was incorrigibly careless, however, and back to the charitable institution she was sent. She was stage-struck, too, and for all we know — Mr. Stockton veils the matter, half mysteriously, — she may have escaped from her guardians and won bou quets for herself before the footlights. While we are on the subject of characters real and imaginary we may add that Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine enjoyed actual existence under more common names. It has always been a source of affected trouble to Stockton that some people will persist 114
FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON
in calling the former Mrs. Leeks and the latter Mrs. Al-e-shi-ne, instead of Ale- shine.
The author's success with these two characters recalls the criticism that he was ignorant of the way in which young folks make love. " It is much more to my lik ing," he says, " to write about middle- aged women than young women. The older ones have more character ; you can make them do more amusing things."
But, to revert to the main line, " Rud der Grange " carved its writer's name in the Hall of Fame. It is undoubtedly his most popular work, for there is a call for it even at this late day. Some of his admirers call it his masterpiece. It is no backhanded compliment to say that he has never improved upon the profusion or the quaintness of its humor.
We have said that the success of " Rud-
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der Grange " induced Stockton to abandon everything but literature. He worked first for the Philadelphia Morning Post; later he joined Edward Eggleston on Hearth and Home; by and by he cast his lot with Berliner's Monthly, and finally he settled down on the editorial staff of St. Nicholas. In this position he remained until, in 1880, he gave up editorial work altogether. Thereafter he devoted him self entirely to fiction.
Even more sensational than the luck of "Rudder Grange " was the luck of " The Lady or the Tiger?" The story had a phenomenal sale — for those days — in this country, and it has been translated into a few foreign languages. " Perhaps the most interesting thing about ' The Lady or the Tiger? ' " says the humorist, " is its great popularity among the savage races. It has been told again and again by the 116
FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON
story-tellers of Burmah. A missionary once told the story to a tribe of Karens up in the north of Burmah. When she came back a year later the tribe surrounded her and wanted to know if she had found out whether —
"I cannot answer the question, for I have no earthly idea myself. I really have never been able to decide whether the Lady or the Tiger came out of that door. Yet 1 must defend myself. People for years have upbraided me for leaving it a mystery; some used to write me that I had no right to impose upon the good nature of the public in that manner. How ever, when I started in to write the story, I really intended to finish it. But it would never let itself be finished. I could not decide. And to this day, I have, I assure you, no more idea than anyone else."
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It used to be said that Mr. Stockton was a short-story writer and nothing more, as if that were not the most difficult branch of fiction ; but he silenced these reckless critics with " The Late Mrs. Null," which, in the beginning, had the biggest circula tion of all his books. Since then book has followed book, regularly but not hurriedly. The author of " Rudder Grange " does not follow the plan of Trollope ; he does not work so many hours a day, mood or no mood. Sometimes up to luncheon time not a word has been put on paper.
He never writes ; he dictates. In his early days he dictated to his wife, but in recent years he has employed a stenog rapher. At any appointed hour in the morning the young woman trips down stairs from the room at the top of the house to which she and her noisy type writer have been banished, and if the 118
FRANCIS EICHARD STOCKTON
author have his subject well in mind he delivers one thousand five hundred words before the morning is over. From this first draft the secretary makes the draft for the printer, which seldom is revised. The fact is, Stockton shapes his delightful stories in his mind as effectively as most other authors shape theirs on paper ; and, therefore, when a story has been dictated, he is done with it. Mrs. Stockton, of whom we spoke as his first amanuensis, was Miss Marian E. Tuttle of Amelia County, Virginia, visits to whose home gave the novelist the impressions of negro life which he has described so felicitously. At present the Stocktons live near Charlestown, West Virginia. The estate, named Claymoiit, comprises one hundred and fifty acres of a wide-spreading piece of land once owned by Washington. The house is said to have been planned by the
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first President himself. At any rate, it was built by the immortal patriot's grand- nephew, and it takes its name from the Washington homestead in England. Very appropriately the edition of Mr. Stockton's works has been given the title of Shenan- doah.
Personally the fanciful story-teller is small, spare, and shy. His is an elusivo personality. " A personality more winsomo and delightful," says one of his friends, "it would be difficult to find. It is a small man that sits before you, a keen-eyed man, whose eyes you know miss nothing, a man whose mustache is iron-gray and whose hair is almost white. His photographs give no hint of the man ; they do not even mirror his personal appearance. Nothing save a talk with him gives you that." Another friend has said : " The big dark eyes, full of patient, weary expression, are 120
FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON
luminous ; the mouth close and discouraged, expands into smiling curves, sweet and sympathetic ; the whole soul is in the face, and from head to foot, Frank Stockton is the genial responsive man. It is like a brilliant burst of sunshine following a cloud, suddenly and unexpectedly, and therefore more delicious in surprise and beauty."
Everyone under this charmer's spell will, we are sure, say with Edmund Clarence Stedman :
I have stayed at the Rudder Grange
Just after the wedding chime, Though that jolliest lodge — how strange ! —
Is of age at this very time ; I have roamed in the Squirrel Inn
(With my vouchers from Germantown) ; To the House of Martha I 've been,
And more than once have gone down In the queerest of all queer wrecks,
And have argued and taken my tea
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With Mesdames Aleshine and Leeks,
All up to our necks in the sea ; I have solved, with my private elf,
That Lady-and-Tiger riddle That routed the Sphinx herself
And parted the world in the middle ; And all this fellowship jolly,
With a wizard that led me around Through wonder and sweetest folly,
From first to last I have found His fancy more passing rare
Than that of mask or mummer Since Puck and Oberon wove the snare
In a night's dream of midsummer ; So I'll roam with him and his throng,
Wherever the course meander, Though he frolic a century long.
And outlive by a year the sage vizier
Of the Two-Horned Alexander.
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JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS.
JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS
/N an article published by The Book man not very long ago Mr. James Lane Allen remarked that Uncle Re mus was one of the two names in Ameri can fiction which have attained anything like universality of acceptance, the other name being, of course, Uncle Tom. And yet fame was thrust upon Mr. Joel Chand ler Harris.
It happened in this wise. Mr. Harris went to work for the Atlanta Constitution as an editorial writer in 1876, succeeding Mr. Samuel W. Small, who has since pre fixed to his name the title of Reverend. Mr. Small had made a success with sketches dealing with a character called Uncle Si, and Capt. Evan P. Ho well, the editor of
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the Constitution, desired to have the suc cess maintained in some form. So he ap proached Mr. Harris with the suggestion that he should try his hand at negro sketches. The young writer was diffident. He pleaded inexperience, incapability ; but Captain Howell wouldn't listen to the excuses. In a good-natured way he pur sued his associate, requesting, begging, entreating, encouraging. If Mr. Harris would only put into black-and-white those plantation stories with which he was accus tomed to entertain the staff ! If he would only get his courage up ! Finally, the young man yielded and put some of the memories of his boyhood in Putnam County, Georgia, into the mouth of a negro named Uncle Remus. Uncle Remus he has been ever since the publication of the first sketch — Uncle Remus, famous and beloved throughout the land. 124
JOEL CHA-NDLER HARRIS
Captain Howell is said to have gone to the editors' room the morning of the first appearance of Uncle Remus and shouted : •' Well, Harris, you're a trump ! If you just keep up that lick your fortune is made. Everybody is talking about Uncle Remus, so give us another story." It was given willingly.
Mr. Harris was born in 1848 in what used to be known as Middle Georgia. Like many another of our well-established authors, he received a good part of his education at the printer's case in a country newspaper office. It was at the case — just as in the story of Ho wells and of Mark Twain — that the Georgian acquired his love of journalism — a love which often very naturally develops into a love for higher and more durable literature. He joined the staff of the Atlanta Constitution at the age of eighteen. For a time he served
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as dramatic critic, in addition to his other service ; but he soon found that he had no taste for the theatre. It must be that it was his hard lot to fall among poor actors, for it was not long before he gave up the work and formed a determination to visit the theatre as seldom as possible. There after, he was virtually permitted by the edi tor of the Constitution to follow his own bent.
But the story is moving along a little too fast. It should be said that Mr. Harris was fortunate in his birthplace. Eatonton, the capital of Putnam County, was not a lively spot, in a mercantile sense, in the days before the war, but it could boast of an excellent school, Eatonton Academy.
Speaking of Eatonton, the Baltimore American, some thirteen or fourteen years ago, printed this strange biography of Mr. Harris under the title of " A Humorist's Sad Romance " : 126
JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS
" Joel C. Harris, the famous humorist, of the Atlanta (Ga.) Constitution, has had a strangely romantic career. His father was a missionary, and it was at the small town of Boog-hia, on the southern coast of Africa, that Joel was born. He was edu cated by his father, and is a profound Sanscrit scholar, besides being thoroughly versed in Hebraic and Buddhist literature. Just before the Civil War he emigrated to America, and taught school in a village near Lake Teeteelootchkee, Fla. There he fell in love with Sallie O. Curtis, daughter of a wealthy planter, and soon was engaged by Colonel Curtis as a private tutor. The parents made no objection to their daughter's choice of a husband, but the war came on before the marriage could take place, and so Colonel Curtis and Mr. Harris went away to the war. The Colonel lost all his property during the
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strife, and at the battle of Columbia, S. C., a grape shot tore his leg into shreds. When the war closed Miss Sallie died of yellow fever, and Mr. Harris became the support and comfort of the maimed sire of his dead sweetheart. The two yet live together in a vine-covered cottage near Atlanta. Mr. Harris is hardly forty years of age, but his snow-white hair tells the sorrow of his life. He is noted for his generosity, his amiability and his tenderness."
The fact is that from the time of his birth until General Sherman swept toward the sea after burning Atlanta, Mr. Harris lived in Eatonton. When he was six years old he could read, and it is said that a stray copy of " The Vicar of Wakefield," met in his juvenile days, did much to de velop his taste for good literature. Joel attended Eatonton Academy for a few terms, and at the age of twelve went to 128
JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS
work for Colonel Turner, the publisher of a weekly called The Countryman.
It was the boy's own enterprise and am bition which brought this about. It was Joel himself who heard that Colonel Turner was in need of a boy with " willing hands " to learn the printer's trade, and who went unbidden and unendorsed to ap ply for a job. The publisher and the youngster took a liking to each other on sight, and young Harris was put to work forthwith.
Those were unquestionably among the happiest days of the humorist's life. This is not saying, of course, that his cup of happiness is not brimming over to-day; but those were days of new contentment. The young printer's work was not burden some ; but the happiest fact of all is that his employer, Colonel Turner, had a rich library, in which his youngest workman
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was free to browse in leisure moments. The acorn of taste for good books which the boy had cultivated at home here devel oped into an oak ; and the soil in which the acorn took root was fertile, and there was ample room for the spread of every growing limb and bough.
At first the lad delved among the Eliza bethans. Sir Thomas Browne, too, became one of his favorite authors — nowadays Mr. Harris leans toward Thackeray, Steven son, Scott, Kipling and James Whitcomb Riley — a good catholic taste. Few boys ever enjoyed a more advantageous course of reading. Gradually the juvenile printer drifted from his books into writing, just as a student one day quits the gallery and starts to paint some work of his own. Colonel Turner responded to the ambition of his protege* most generously. He praised the little works judiciously, and 130
JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS
before long young Harris was prompted to doff his anonymity and stand up to be judged by himself. Thereafter he became a regular contributor to The Countryman — which was truly rustic in scope as well as in title — and the name of Harris began to be spoken throughout Georgia.
This pleasant existence was interrupted by the war, which to the editor and his assistant was indeed the fulfilment of an ancient threat. When Sherman left Atlanta to march to the sea, he shaped his course through Eatonton, and before him fled the loyal Southerners. Among the last to leave the town was the proprietor of Tlie Countryman. Young Harris remained be hind to look after the property. Little damage was done in Eatonton, but the budding author, finding the state of affairs chaotic, started, when the war was over, to make his fortune elsewhere. He found
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employment on various newspapers, first in Macon, then in New Orleans, then in Forsyth, and then in Savannah. In Sa vannah he secured an editorial position on the Morning News, of which W. T. Thomp son, the author of " Major Jones's Court ship," and other once popular humorous writings, was then the general manager. In Savannah, the vagrant Eatontonian married Miss La Rose, and there he lived, with ever-increasing success, until 1876, when yellow fever swept through the town. Then he moved to Atlanta and went to work for the Constitution. And here we shall take up the original thread of this article.
In 1880, four years after the beginning of Mr. Harris's connection with the Con stitution, the Uncle Rernus sketches, which meantime had won much praise through out the country, were numerous enough 132
JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS
to make a book of, and " Uncle Remus : His Songs and Sayings " was published by the Apple tons. The book solidified the author's fame. It had the good fortune to be reprinted in England. Even then, more than twenty years ago, it was reason able to say that Uncle Remus was one of the foremost characters in American fiction. In 1883, "Nights with Uncle Remus," was published ; the following year " Mingo and Other Sketches in Black and White " ; in 1887, " Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches." Up to date, Harris's books number at least sixteen.
But we must not lose sight of the fact that all the time the successful story-teller kept up his editorial work on the paper to whose fame he was contributing so materi ally. Indeed, until his retirement from newspaper work, in 1900, his chief title was that of a " hard-working journalist."
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It was his liabit until within recent years to give his mornings and afternoons to the Constitution work, and his evenings to miscellaneous literary work. He was able to maintain this arduous program for so long a time because of his apparently in exhaustible good nature and his simple manner of life ; and, moreover, attention to duties at hand soon became second nature in him. In recent years, however, he gave only his mornings to his editorial labors. " His habit," says an Atlanta cor respondent, " was to come down to the of fice at nine o'clock in the morning, get his editorial assignments for the day, and then go home and do his work, sending his copy down early in the afternoon. Such was his spirit of independence that if the editor chanced to be late in coming down to the office he would not waste time in waiting for him, but would pick up his 134
JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS
bundle of newspapers and start for home. Nevertheless, he would send in his copy without fail. On making his morning visit to the office Mr. Harris was never out of sorts. His good humor was peren nial, and he never failed to impart it to his co-workers. Though it was his lot to write editorials on political topics, he never enjoyed the rancor of partisan politics, and he managed to put into his editorials enough of humor to make the work pleas ant to himself as well as to others.
At the same time, the idol of the Consti tution staff, it is said, never took a hearty interest in politics ; he simply bowed to the fact that as an editorial writer he could hardly eschew politics entirely. But he felt that he owed much to the Consti tution for the opportunity it had given him to make his reputation; and he al lowed this circumstance to outweigh his
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personal inclinations until the time came when he found that he would either have to give up his editorial work or neglect his literary contracts. So, finally, on Sept. 6, 1900, he departed from the office of the Constitution for good, taking with him the tearful love of all his associates. As a sort of legacy, he left two sons on the paper, Julian, the managing news editor, and Evelyn, the city editor.
And then, almost at the end of his fifty- second year, the dearest Georgian of them all entered upon an unembarrassed literary career, with every promise of doing more work and better work than ever. But even if this promise should rest unfulfilled — which seems almost out of question — we have with us Uncle Remus and Aunt Minervy Ann, Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, creations unsurpassed in originality and in delightfulness. 136
JOEL CHANDLERHARRIS
Mr. Harris's work is done at his home in West End, one of the suburbs of Atlanta, and few visitors are permitted to interrupt him. Not that he is gruff ; he is simply retiring. He prefers to be known by his books. They who know him intimately — and they are not many — say that he is remarkably kind and hospitable. We re spect his desire for privacy. We will not even knock on the door and beg one glimpse of his private life. With the whole reading public we shall be content to note his boundless cheerfulness and rare enjoyableness as a story-teller.
137
DR. S. WKIlt MITCH KLL.
S. WEIRMITCHELL
jj BOUT sixty years ago Oliver Wen- /-i dell Holmes, taking dinner one •^ "*• night in Philadelphia with his friend, Dr. John K. Mitchell, was so pleased with one of Dr. Mitchell's boys, by name Silas Weir, then a little more than ten years old, that he gave the boy a copy of his famous ballad on the frigate Constitu tion.
Some seventeen years later, in 1856, when Silas was a young doctor, with a brand-new degree, he showed Dr. Holmes a book of poems which he hoped to have published. Dr. Holmes advised the young man to put the poems away until he was forty, and then to reconsider his determin ation to have them published. " The pub-
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lication of these verses at this time," said the genial but shrewd Autocrat," " will do you no good. They will not help you in your life as a physician, and they cannot stand alone." The soundness of Dr. Holmes's judgment was later proved by the circumstance that the young man blos somed into one of the most distinguished physicians of his time. Dr. Mitchell's volume of poems, " The Hill of Stones," published about four years ago, contains just one of the poems offered to the Boston poet in 1856, namely, " Herndon." As an author, Dr. Mitchell is less celebrated than his friendly counsellor ; but as a doctor he is far more celebrated than was Dr. Holmes in his palmiest days.
S. Weir Mitchell, one of the six sons of
Dr. John Kearsley Mitchell, was born in
Philadelphia on February 16, 1829. His
father was then a leader in his profession.
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S. WEIR MITCHELL
He was one of the first Americans to in vestigate scientifically "animal magne tism," as hypnotism was called in the early part of the last century ; and, more over, he was a highly valued contributor to the medical periodicals of the day. It is noteworthy that he had a taste for litera ture. Two of his lyrics, " The Old Song and the New Song " and " Prairie Lea," had a wide popularity in their day.
At the age of fifteen Weir Mitchell entered the University of Pennsylvania. There he spent three years ; and afterward he entered Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, in which his father was a professor. One of the severest disappoint ments in the son's life came in 1870, twenty years after graduation, when, not withstanding the solicitation of influential friends, he failed of election to a profes sorship in Jefferson College. However,
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this disappointment, like the one which he met when he consulted Dr. Holmes about his first book of poems, worked eventually to his greater glory.
After graduation from Jefferson College Dr. Mitchell, as we shall call our author henceforth, went to Paris, whence, owing to an attack of smallpox, he was obliged to return in less than two years.
By this time the young doctor had lost sight of his literary star. His ambition was to teach medicine. The first article from his pen appeared in the American Journal of Medical Science. Other articles followed with quick regularity, but to none of these early writings, we believe, does Dr. Mitchell attach much importance. From 1858 until 1862, when he enlisted as an army surgeon, the doctor devoted his spare hours to the study of poisons, particularly snake poisons. Not long after 142
S. WEIR MITCHELL
the Civil War, by the way, one of the largest rattlesnakes ever sent to him died of cold. Dr. Mitchell had the skin pre served and tanned, and he sent it to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes with the sugges tion that it might make a worthy binding for " Elsie Vernier." " I thank you for it," Dr. Holmes wrote back, "especially be cause it makes an attractive binding, and I know that its bark is better than its bite." It would be interesting to pursue Dr. Mitchell's scientific achievements, but such a pursuit would be too long to agree with the purpose of this sketch.
However, his career as a war surgeon is worth looking at, for it had something to do with his subsequent advent as a writer of fiction. Dr. Mitchell and his associates made a deep study not only of the effects of certain wounds but also of the effects of environ ment. Much of the curious information
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thus derived was given to the world through the medical papers. It was un doubtedly the study followed during this period which formed the base of Dr. Mitchell's now universally recognized suc cess as a neurologist. The universality of his fame as a specialist in nervous diseases has two substantial witnesses. One is the oration delivered at Edinburgh University in 1895, when he received the title of Doctor of Laws. In that oration he was spoken of as " the chief ornament to medical science in the new world." The other witness is the story of his visit some years ago to Dr. Charcot, one of the great French authorities on nervous diseases. Dr. Mitchell did not give his name ; he merely said that he was from Philadelphia, and that there was something the matter with his nerves.
" Why," said Dr. Charcot, " you should never have come beyond Philadelphia for 144
S. WEIR MITCHELL
advice for such an ailment. You have a physician in your own city better qualified to manage your case than I am."
" Indeed," the visitor is said to have re marked ; " and who may he be ? "
"Dr. S. Weir Mitchell," replied Dr. Charcot; "and as I know him by corres pondence I will venture to give you a letter to him. You should consult him upon your return home."
" No, thanks," said the American smil ing, " I am Dr. S. Weir Mitchell."
Certainly a handsome compliment for Dr. Mitchell ! And certainly a remarkable piece of professional modesty on the part of Dr. Charcot!
Perhaps it is well to say at this point that, in 1896, Harvard University also honored Dr. Mitchell with the title of Doctor of Laws ; that he is a member of the Ameri can National Academy of Sciences, an
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honorary member of the Clinical Society of London, the London Medical Society, the Royal Academy of Medicine of Rome, and a corresponding member of many other foreign medical societies ; and that he was once President of the Congress of American Physicians and Surgeons. In 1888 the University of Bologna conferred on him the title of Doctor of Medicine.
Dr. Mitchell's entrance into romantic literature was made anonymously and, it might be said, accidentally. Soon after the close of the Civil War, the story goes, he and some professional associates one day discussed all sides of the question whether the loss of the limbs involves the loss of the victim's individuality. As a result of that discussion Dr. Mitchell wrote the story of the fictitious case of one George Dedlow, who had suffered the loss of his arms and his legs. The story, 146
S. WEIR MITCHELL
which, as they who have read it know, is an intensely interesting complication of romance and science, came to the hands of the Rev. Dr. Furness, one of Dr. Mitchell's friends, who took the liberty of sending it to Edward Everett Hale, in Boston. Dr. Hale, who, at that time, was at the height of his literary power, saw that the story was rare material, and he submitted it forthwith to the editor of The Atlantic Monthly. It was promptly accepted, and the first Dr. Mitchell knew of what had happened was when he received a proof of the story, together with a good-sized check and a note complimenting him on the freshness and attractiveness of his article. " The Case of George Dedlow," indeed, was described so realistically that, accord ing to tradition, subscriptions were raised for the poor victim's support and comfort. The newspapers, too, started a discussion
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of the prodigy, and it was a long time be fore the public became persuaded that the tale was utter fiction, put together with extraordinary skill.
Dr. Mitchell's first book was " Children's Hours," a collection of' fairy tales, illus trated by Dr. John Packard. The book was in no sense a great literary effort ; it was intended to serve, and did serve, a charitable purpose. His first novel was "In War Times," published serially in The Atlantic Monthly in 1885. Between that time and the publication of " Hugh Wynne " in 1897, the Philadelphian wrote a number of works, the most notable among which were a few dramatic poems. The poems delighted the critical; they were caviare to the general. Dr. Mitchell is not a poet of the "golden clime" of which Tennyson speaks ; he has simply found in poetry the fittest vehicle for the 148
S. WEIR MITCHELL
expression of some attractive and stirring ideas. His verse reveals his fine sympathy with the true poets rather than his intimate association with them.
Unqualified success came to the veteran author with the publication in 1897 of " Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker," which will be remembered in years to come as one of the choicest of American novels. The writing of " Hugh Wynne," which was done at Bar Harbor in the summer of 1896, in less than two months, took years of preparation. It is said that he wrote to a woman " for the name and a full descrip tion of every article of apparel worn by a lady in America in the years before and about the time " of the Revolution. More over : «' One will find on the shelves of his library at home," says a casual biogra pher, "great rows of books consulted in the preparation of the novel, and among
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them, as samples, will be noticed Keith's 'Provincial Councillors of Pennsylvania,' Watson's 'Annals,' Trumble's ' The Knight ly Soldier, 'Fiske's 'CriticalPeriod of Amer ican History,' ' The True George Wash ington,' by Ford ; Professor McMaster's ' History of the United States,' ' The Can noneer,' by Buell, and scores of others, some of them very rare." We find it also said that every chapter of importance in the story was written at least twice, and that some chapters were written even three times, before the manuscript was sent to the publisher. Nothing which Dr. Mitchell has written since shows a power equal to the power of " Hugh Wynne." That novel, therefore, must be regarded as his supreme literary effort. " The Adven tures of Frangois " proved entertaining and nothing more ; its early popularity was an echo of the immense popularity of the 150
S. WEIR MITCHELL
Revolutionary story. " Dr. North and His Friends " is not, as many suppose, an auto biography ; but it may fairly be said that by means of Dr. North the author relates some of his most remarkable personal im pressions and personal experiences.
Dr. Holmes was once a little disturbed, and much amused, at the same time, by a reference to his "medicated writings." The careful reader will note a strong patho logical element in most of Dr. Mitchell's works ; not enough, however, to warrant describing them as '; medicated." The fact is, Dr. Mitchell has made good use of his rare scientific knowledge in the devel opment of many of his characters. One of his intimate friends is reported to have said once that the doctor is constantly studying human characteristics, especially the characteristics of singular persons. •' He picks out their brains in a very fine and
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delicate way," said the friend. " Thus he studies human nature, much in that same synthetical manner in which he dissects a physical malady."
Personally the author of "Hugh Wynne" is described as gentle, cordial, and, in con vivial company, very entertaining. It has frequently been said of him that he appears to be what he is, — a scholar and a scientist.
Some years ago, when Dr. Mitchell was a guest in one of the semi-literary clubs in London, he and the circle around him fell into a discussion of problem novels, which finally resolved itself into a discus sion of " Tess of the D'Urbervilles," then in the heyday of its popularity. Dr. Mitchell took his ground on two points : he expressed admiration of Mr. Hardy as an artist, but utter dislike of the scheme of " Tess." A man who had meantime joined the circle entered quietly and unob- 152
S. WEIR MITCHELL
trusively into the conversation, admitting the force of some of Dr. Mitchell's general objections to problem novels, but maintain ing the ethical and artistic merits of the plan of Judge Hardy's new book. The newcomer showed such an intimate knowl edge of the construction of " Tess " that the American paid more than ordinary attention to him. At length, when the company was dispersing, Dr. Mitchell's host, with an innocent smile, proceeded to make the two debaters formally acquainted with each other.
"This is a friend of mine, Doctor," he said to his guest, " about whose work you know a great deal. Allow me to intro duce to you Thomas Hardy, with whom you can hardly find any fault for defend ing poor Tess."
The acquaintance thus curiously begun has since ripened into a rich friendship.
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Dr. Mitchell does most of his literary work at Bar Harbor, in the summer. There is no sign of the end of this pure labor of love ; but the work which exists already is sufficient, in itself, to show that a man bur dened with the gravest interests of medi cal science may give profitable and brilliant employment to his imagination.
154
ROBKltT GHANT.
ROBERT GRANT
jn|OBERT GRANT leads the Ameri- r^ can satirists. Many writers, un- "*- ^ named paragraphers and critics of high degree, have pursued him relentlessly ; but he will not surrender. Contrariwise, it is more likely that they will yet sur render to him. He has Napoleon's way of turning upon pursuers.
The satirist is not always clearly under- derstood. For some of this misunderstand ing the satirist himself is to blame. Mr. Grant, for example, has never yet explained what he meant by saying in " The Art of Living" that a satisfactory life demands an income of ten thousand a year. On the other hand, some of the misunderstanding is due to a lack of humor among his critics.
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And at the bottom of the misunderstanding is the natural inconsistency which prompted Mr. Aldrich to write in "Marjorie Daw" — " I have known a woman to satirize a man for years, and marry him after all."
An incident which took place not long ago illustrates Judge Grant's sincerity. The statement had been made in a periodical now defunct that " a sufficiency of money has made things pretty pleasant for our liter ary philosopher." Although averse, un like many professional writers, to taking advantage of opportunities for controversy, the Judge made this reply to the state ment : " It is true that for some years I have had a comfortable income ; but if I have been able to command the advantages of modern life at the rate of $10,000 a year, it is because I have earned the money by the sweat of my brow through literary and legal work, and not because my ' judicial 156
ROBERT GRANT
seat' is ' padded' with inherited stocks and bonds ... It may interest those who have convinced themselves that my philosophy is founded on a patrimony, to know that from the time I left the Law School in 1879 the yearly income which I have received from vested property has been so small as barely to pay for the life insurance which I carry, and that I have acquired the money which I spend or save by my own exertions. It is true that I was brought up in comfort and given every opportunity to follow my tastes, but this is all I owe to family income."
The incident is worth recalling for the light which it throws on the novelist's eco nomical position. The man who is com petent to make ten thousand a year is wel come to his enjoyment of it.
Robert Grant first earned some celebrity as a writer while at Harvard, which he en tered after his graduation from the Bos-
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ton Latin School in 1869, when he was seventeen years old. His literary career began with his contributions to the college papers, notably The Lampoon. That his literary skill was recognized at Harvard is proved by his election to the office of class poet at graduation, in 1873. That summer, while abroad, he seems to have determined upon following his first taste, to use his own expression ; for at the end of the summer he went back to Harvard for a three years' course in English and foreign literature, upon the completion of which he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Why he decided to chose another profes sion has never been divulged, but, anyhow, at the end of the summer of 1876, he entered the Harvard Law School. Three years afterward he was graduated from it, and forthwith he became a member of the Bar and an active practitioner. 158
ROBERT GRANT
Mr. Grant left Harvard with a budding reputation. In company with Mr. F. J. Stimson (" J. S. of Dale "), Barrett Wen dell (now professor of English at Harvard), F. G. Attwood, whose untimely death has bereft our literature of one of its happiest decorators, and Mr. John T. Wheelwright, now a lawyer in Boston, he had polished The Lampoon considerably. Perhaps his most popular work at this time was " The Little Tin Gods on Wheels ; or, Society in our Modern Athens," a burlesque after the Greek manner, which appeared in The Lampoon, with illustrations by Attwood. In fact, it was to be found in a book pub lished by Sever, together with the young satirist's other promising works, " The Wall Flowers," " The Chaperons," and " Oxy gen, a Mt. Desert Pastoral," squibs dealing with the foibles of fashionable society.
Thus favorably introduced to the reading
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public, he lost no time in striking the iron while it was hot, and in 1880 gave out his first novel, " The Confessions of a Frivolous Girl," which, by reason of its remarkable exposition of the character of the leading lady, as she may be called, and its popular attractiveness, won immediate success at home and abroad. Three years later his second book, " The Knave of Hearts," the autobiography of a ruthless young man, was published ; and the same year appeared in The Century the articles which make up "An Average Man," and a satire on Wall Street entitled " The Lambs, a Tragedy." In 1883, too, it may be mentioned, Mr. Grant read at the Phi Beta Kappa re union at Harvard a poem called " Yankee Doodle." In 1885 "A Romantic Young Lady," another skit on fashionable life, made its appearance ; and that year he also served as the poet of the two hundred and 160
ROBERT GRANT
fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the Boston Latin School.
The following year, 1886, he finished what, up to that time, was by far his most serious work, " Face to Face," which was published anonymously. In it Anglo mania and the labor problem are touched on boldly and brilliantly, and even to-day the points of the book are fresh and spark ling. Later came "The Reflections of .a Philosopher," " The Opinions of a Married Man," " Searchlight Letters," " The Art of Living," and, last of all, " Unleavened Bread." " He says," once remarked a man, " what you have thought and wanted to say yourself"; and a better compli ment could hardly be paid his philosophy.
A writer who went to see Judge Grant some years ago said : " He has cultivated to a rare degree the faculty which is of the utmost importance to every literary man,
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namely, that of concentration. The greater part of his writing is done during the inter vals of business in the morning hours at his office. There, the casual visitor is almost certain to find him, seated at his desk, with his manuscript spread out before him. He will drop his pen, upon the instant, to con sider some point of legal technique, with which imagination has nothing whatever to do, listen attentively, take notes or give ad vice, as though this were the sole object of his existence ; then, when the interruption ceases, he will turn back to his unwritten page, finishing that and another too, it may be, before the morning goes, if he is in the vein. This power of leaving off and begin ning again quickly was not easily acquired. It is the result of long training in years of practical experience. But, like every true artist, Mr. Grant really carries his work with him wherever he goes. He is always 162
ROBERT GRANT
recording and storing up impressions, taking mental notes, or working out details of con struction, even when these matters seem to be the farthest from his thoughts ; and he is accustomed to say that the actual writing of a story troubles him very little since, with him, when writing begins, the most difficult part of the task is already accomplished. But, in spite of his fluent pen, he has learned to look at his work objectively, and he is extremely self-critical, having de stroyed more than once a tale half told, from conviction that it failed to do him justice." In 1882 Mayor Green of Boston selected Mr. Grant as his private secretary, and in 1888 Mayor O'Brien of Boston appointed him a member of the board of water com missioners. This latter post he held until a few years ago, when he was appointed a Judge in the Probate Court of Suffolk County, sitting in Boston. There, almost
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every day, he may be seen by anyone visit ing Boston, a medium-sized, delicate-look ing man, with shrewd features, an eye sharp as a detective's, a somewhat brisk manner, and a faint but pleasant voice, to which the most learned counsel lend eager ears. Since his appointment to the Bench he has limited his literary activity to two hours a day, which short but productive period he has been wont to spend generally at the Athe- nseum Library on Beacon Street, a stone's throw from the Court House.
Judge Grant is very happy in his chil dren, and this circumstance may account for his delightful books for boys, "Jack Hall " and "Jack in the Bush." He is a keen though perhaps not enthusiastic sportsman. Every few years he and his wife, who was Miss Gait, the eldest daughter of Sir Alex ander Tillock Gait, the Canadian statesman, go bicycling in Europe. 164
ROBERT GRANT
This excursive disposition does not nar row his enjoyment of what is best in town life. It has been said of him : " He is not only an admirable talker with a nimble wit, apt at repartee, but he is also a genial sympathetic listener, thus combining very happily the qualities which make a man hail-fellow-well met wherever he goes ; and no one meeting Mr. Grant for the first time can fail to recognize and delight in that quick sense of humor which is so character istic of his writing."
A few years ago he was interviewed regarding his likes and dislikes. He said that his favorite prose authors were Thackeray and Balzac, his favorite poets, Shakespeare and Goethe, his favorite book, " Vanity Fair," his favorite play," Hamlet," his favorite heroines in fiction, Becky Sharp and Euge'nie Grandet, his favorite heroes in fiction, Santa Glaus and Brer Rabbit; and
165
he admires truth most in men and loving sympathy in women.
His strength as a writer lies in an un surpassed ability to detect and delineate shams, and this ability shines brilliantly in the character of Selma White, the heroine of " Unleavened Bread." The book is a protest against superficiality ; the character of Selma White is a monument of vanity. We have all met Selmas, rampant women — there are men like them, of course — who flatter themselves that they are born to grace every resting-place and brush aside difficulties that would have staggered Napo leon or Catherine de Medici. The author has contradicted the opinion that Selma is a shaft aimed at women's clubs. " It is simply that modern women's clubs are the best medium for that kind of women," he says " that I depicted Selma as a prime mover in some of them. But she exists outside of 166
ROBERT GRANT
women's clubs probably more plentifully than in them."
It has been said that Judge Grant is timid about forcing his way into public attention. The reply quoted from early in this article was an exception to an apparently firmly es tablished rule. At the time when comment on his ten-thousand-a-year proposition was severest Judge Grant wrote to a friend for advice, and he was very easily persuaded to give no heed to his critics. At the same time, if what he had thought of saying would have blown the fog away, it would have been better for him then to have set tled the question decisively. But, he was content for the nonce to have his retiring disposition approved ; and a philosopher of this type rather invites than forbids attack. But, after all, even his harshest critics praise his rare skill in the exposition of character, his remarkable fertility of wit,
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and his complete mastery of the technique of literature. Nor is" it to be gainsaid that his career has illustrated the wisdom of his lines in " The Lambs " :
Success is Labor's prize
Work is the mother of fame. And who on a boom shall rise
To the height of an honest name ? The bee by industry reapeth
The stores which enrich the hives. All that is thrifty creepeth,
For toil is the law of lives, And he who reaps without sowing,
A bitter harvest reaps ; The law of gradual growing
Is the law that never sleeps.
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F. MARION CRAWFORD.
F. MARION CRAWFORD
^ylNCE 1893, when he made his first
\ tour through the country as a lec- ^—^ turer, F. Marion Crawford has be come a somewhat familiar figure to many Americans, who have noted his athletic form, his handsome face, his melodious voice, his polished deportment. He is easily the best known of the American authors who make their homes abroad.
In Major Pond's " Reminiscences," by the way, they who have heard Mr. Crawford read from his novels or recite his descrip tion of Pope Leo XIII, will find a very interesting account of the author's exper iences during his American tours.
Mr. Crawford is a cosmopolite of the first rank. He was born in Bagni di Lucca,
169
Italy, August 2, 1854. His father was Thomas Crawford, the famous sculptor, who, born in the west of Ireland and reared in America, had, some years before, been sent to Rome to master his profession. He had finished studying with the great Thor- waldsen, and had made a reputation of his own, when he met and married Miss Louisa Ward, who was visiting Rome with Dr. Samuel G. Howe and his wife, Julia Ward Howe. Marion was the youngest of four children. One of his sisters, Mrs. Fraser, has made no small name for herself as a writer.
At the age of two, Marion was sent to live for awhile with kinsfolk in Bordentown, N. J. "Among the earliest things that I remember," he said once to an interviewer, " is my great delight in watching the com ing and going of the trains as they shot across the farm near the old house." 170
F. MARION CRAWFORD
His father died in 1857, and then Marion was taken back to Italy, where he spent his early days.
" Most of my boyhood," lie said, to an interviewer, when he was in this country on his first lecture tour, " was spent under the direction of a French governess. Not only did I learn her language from her, but all of my studies, geography, arithmetic, and so forth, were taught me in French, and I learned to write it with great readiness, as a mere boy, because it was the language of my daily tasks. The consequence is that to this day I write French with the ease of English. There have been times when I know that I have lost some of my facility in speaking French through long absence from the country, but the acquirement of writing is always with me, which shows the value of early impressions in that direction."
When twelve years old Marion was sent
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to St. Paul's School, Concord, N. H., where he remained for two years. Readers fam iliar with his portraits will remember that in most of them he is represented as smok ing. This inveterate habit he acquired dur ing his first year's residence at St. Paul's.
The age of fifteen found the migrant youth back in Rome again, where he took up the study of Greek and mathematics. Later he studied with a private tutor at Hatfield Broadoak, in Essex, England, and from this school he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he passed four terms. There he perfected himself in German, Swedish and Spanish. He found German of good use when, later, he studied at Karlsruhe and at Heidelberg. At the age of twenty-two he returned to Rome to study at the University of Rome. There one of the professors interested him in Buddhism and the other Oriental mysteries. 172
F. MARION CRAWFORD
This professor, who recognized the young pupil's aptitude in languages, advised him to go to India and study Sanscrit, and then returning, he could readily obtain a pro fessorship. The advice appealed to young Crawford, and he borrowed a hundred pounds and sailed for Bombay. There he occasionally wrote articles for one of the newspapers, but his employment was un certain, and two pounds represented all his worldly possessions when the editor of the Bombay Gazette informed him that the editor of the Allahabad Indian Herald was in need of a " good man." Would he take the position ? " Would a duck swim ? " said Mr. Crawford ; and off he went to Allahabad, a thousand miles away. There he learned that the " good man " was sup posed to fill the posts of reporter, managing editor and editorial writer, with now and then a turn at type-setting. Thus none of
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the sixteen hours of the working day would be wasted. But Mr. Crawford couldn't afford to grumble. Instead he buckled down to what he describes as the hardest eighteen months' work of his life.
In 1880, at the age of twenty-six, with no valuable possessions except his experi ence, he returned to Rome, and thence, early in 1881, he set out for America. The old steamship in which he took passage broke down in mid-ocean, and Mr. Craw ford's great physical strength and nervous energy were in constant demand. As the only cabin passenger on board, he had the honor of alternating on deck with the captain and the mates. At Bermuda, where the ship put in for repairs, he nar rowly escaped drowning. Finally, at the end of two months, the ship reached New York. In this country he made his home at times with his uncle, Samuel Ward, the 174
F. MARION CRAWFORD
Horace of "Dr. Claudius," and at times with his aunt, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. He had not been long in the country before he entered Harvard College, where he took a special course in Sanscrit under Prof. Charles Lanman.
He left Harvard in a state of uncertainty. He was ready to do anything to earn a living. He tried unsuccessfully to place some articles 011 philology. He reviewed books, principally for the New York Times. He lectured on " The Origin of Sacrifice." He won a small sum of money with an article on the silver question. One day early in May, 1882, his kind uncle, Samuel Ward, asked him to dinner at the New York Club, which was then situated in Madison Square. But here is where Mr. Crawford should come in to tell his own interesting story :
" As was perfectly natural, we began to
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exchange stories while smoking, and I told him (Mr. Ward), with a great deal of de tail, my recollections of an interesting man whom I met in Simla. When I had fin ished, he said to me : ' That is a good two- part magazine story, and you must write it out immediately.' He took me around to his apartments, and that night I began to write the story of * Mr. Isaacs.' Part of the first chapter was written afterward, but the rest of that chapter and several succeed ing chapters are the story I told to Uncle Sam. I kept at it from day to day, getting more interested in the work as I proceeded, and from time to time I would read a chapter to Uncle Sam. When I got through the original story I was so amused with the writing of it that it occurred to me that I might as well make Mr. Isaacs fall in love with an English girl, and then I kept on writing to see what would happen. 176
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By and by I remembered a mysterious Buddhist whom I had met once in India, and so I introduced him, still further to complicate matters. I went to Newport to visit my aunt, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, while I was in the midst of the story, and continued it there. It was on June 13, 1882, while in her home, that I finished the last chapter of ' Mr. Isaacs,' and, Uncle Sam appearing in Newport at that time, I read him the part of the story which he had not heard. ' You will give it to me,' he said, « and I shall try to find a publisher.' He had for many years frequented the bookstore of Macmillan, and was well ac quainted with the elder George Brett. He took the manuscript to Mr. Brett, who for warded it to the English house, and in a short time it was accepted.
" Having tasted blood, I began, very soon after finishing 'Mr. Isaacs,' to write
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another story for my own amusement, ' Dr. Claudius.' Late in November I was ad vised by the Messrs. Macmillan that in order to secure an English copyright, as well as an American copyright, I must be on English soil on the day of publication. So I went to St. John, New Brunswick, where I had a very pleasant time, and con tinued to write the story of ' Dr. Claudius,' which I finished in December. ' Mr. Isaacs ' was published on December 6, and I, of course, knew nothing about its recep tion. However, toward the end of the month I started on my return journey to the United States, and when I arrived in Boston on the day before Christmas, and stepped out of the train, I was surprised beyond measure to find the railway news stand almost covered with great posters an nouncing ' Mr. Isaacs.' The next morning, at my hotel, I found a note awaiting me 178
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from Thomas Bailey Aldrich, then editor of The Atlantic Monthly, asking me for an interview, at which he proposed that I write a serial for his magazine. I felt confident then, and do now, that ' Dr. Claudius ' would not be a good serial story. How ever, I promised that Mr. Aldrich should have a serial, and began soon after to write 4 A Roman Singer,' which was completed in February, 1883."
That is Mr. Crawford's own story of his start as a novelist, told to us nine years ago in a Boston hotel. The original of Mr. Isaacs was a diamond dealer in Simla named Jacobs. We have heard it related that the chief figure in " A Roman Singer " was partly sketched from a musician now resident in Boston, whom the novelist had known intimately in Rome. The Amer ican scenery of " Dr. Claudius " was, of course, fresh in the author's mind.
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Mr. Crawford said last year : " What a novelist needs in order to succeed is energy above all else. But he also needs to be very poor. No man with money will work hard enough when he is young to succeed. He needs to begin early, work hard, and sit long in one place. If he has money he won't sit long in one place." Mr. Crawford had no money when he started, but he had abundant energy, and he could sit for a day in one place. Hence his success. In " The Three Fates " the close reader will discern a glimpse of the foundation of Mr. Crawford's literary career.
In May, 1883, the rising author went back to Italy, where he wrote "To Lee ward " and " Saracinesca." The next year he spent in Constantinople, and there he was married to Miss Elizabeth Berdan, the daughter of General Berdan. In 1885 he settled permanently at Sorrento. " Villa 180
F. MARION CRAWFORD
Crawford," his home, stands on a high bluff, overlooking the Bay of Naples. There, in a room padded to keep out sound, the author of " Mr. Isaacs " has done most of his literary work for the last fifteen years. Mr. Crawford has frequently been called " a born novelist," and we have yet to find a critic who, judging him by all that he has done, is inclined to deny him the right to that high title. His dialogue is vivid, his problems, as a rule, logically worked out, his dramatic situations strong and timely. Not all his works, however, are of even power or attractiveness; and no one recognizes this fact more clearly than the novelist himself. He has said that the book which he enjoyed writing most is " Mr. Isaacs " ; the book which has for him the most reality is "Pietro Ghisleri," and the book of the most polish is " Zoro aster." In years gone by " Zoroaster "
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was studied in the English departments of many colleges.
" I believe," said Mr. Crawford, last year, " that the novelist is the result of a de mand. Consequently, I believe that it is the province of the novel to amuse, to cul tivate, mainly to please. I do not believe that the novel should instruct. The story is the great thing. Therefore, I do not believe in problem novels, or what they call realism. It is disagreeable to the people." Yet, in his thirty-six works, he has said, to use his own words, some "pretty tall things."
Mr. Crawford attributes much of his skill in writing English to the letters which his mother used to write to him when he was away at school. After she had married Mr. Terry, her home in Rome, the Palazzo Odescalchi, became the meeting-place of many brilliant men and women. Artists, 182
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poets and literarians crowded her house every Wednesday afternoon, and this choice admiration of her ended only with her death. Of French, German, and, of course Italian, her brilliant son is as sure a master as he is of English ; he writes Turkish and Rus sian readily, and he converses fluently in most of the Eastern tongues. His recrea tion is yachting. Indeed he holds a ship master's certificate entitling him to navigate sailing vessels on the high seas. Five years ago he proved his seamanship by navi gating his yacht, an old New York pilot boat, across the seas to Sorrento.
All in all, a delightful and accomplished author and gentleman-at-large.
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I'lioto by Ilollingor, N. Y
JAMKS LANK ALLEN.
JAMES LANE ALLEN
sj FEW novelists know the world /J which renews its youth every -*• -*- spring and that dies every autumn, as intimately as Thoreau knew it. One of these novelists is Thomas Hardy, whose description of Egdon Heath in " The Re turn of the Native" has long been in use as a model in the English Department at Harvard. One of these also is James Lane Allen, the Kentucky schoolmaster.
The chapter entitled " Hemp " in " The Reign of Law," contains abundant evidence of this loving power. Here is a random choice :
" One day something is gone from earth and sky : Autumn has come, season of scales and balances, when the earth, brought
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to judgment for its fruits, says, ' I have done what I could — now let me rest ! '
" Fall I — and everywhere the sights and sounds of falling. In the woods, through the cool silvery air, the leaves, so indispen sable once, so useless now. Bright day after bright day, dripping night after drip ping night, the never-ending filtering or gusty fall of leaves. The fall of walnuts, dropping from bare boughs with muffled boom into the deep grass. The fall of the hickory-nut, rattling noisily down through the scaly limbs and scattering its hulls among the stones of the brook below. The fall of buckeyes, rolling like balls of mahog any into the little dust paths made by sheep, in the hot months, when they had sought those roofs of leaves. The fall of acorns, leaping out of their matted green cups as they strike the rooty earth. The fall of red haw, persimmon, and pawpaw, 186
JAMES LANE ALLEN
and the odorous wild plum in its valley thickets. The fall of all seeds whatsoever of the forest, now made ripe in their high places and sent back to the ground, there to be folded in against the time when they shall rise again as the living generations ; the homing, downward flight of the seeds in the many-colored woods all over the quiet land."
Mr. Mabie, writing once in The Outlook, dwelt on what has been called the " land scape beauty " of Mr. Allen's work. " No American novelist," he said " has so im bedded his stories in Nature as has James Lane Allen ; and among English novels one recalls only Mr. Hardy's three classics of pastoral England, and among French novel ists George Sand and Pierre Loti. Nature furnishes the background of many charm ing American stories, and finds delicate or effective remembrance in the hands of
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writers like Miss Jewett and Miss Murfree ; but in Mr. Allen's romances Nature is not behind the action; she is involved in it. Her presence is everywhere ; her influence streams through the story ; the deep and prodigal beauty which she wears in rural Kentucky shines on every page; the tre mendous forces which sweep through her disclose their potency in human passion and impulse . . ."
And when James MacArthur was edit ing The Bookman he said : " Poetry, ' the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,' according to Wordsworth, ' the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science,' — that poetry irrespective of rhyme and metrical arrangement which is as immortal as the heart of man, is distinc tive in Mr. Allen's work from the first written page. Like Minerva issuing full- formed from the head of Jove, Mr. Allen 188
JAMES LANE ALLEN
issues from his long years of silence and seclusion a perfect master of his art — un failing in its inspiration, unfaltering in its classic accent." It was Mr. MacArthur, who, speaking of " The Choir Invisible," said that " it would be difficult to recall any other novel since ' The Scarlet Letter' that has touched the same note of greatness, or given to one section of our national life, as Hawthorne's classic did to another, a voice far beyond singing."
Mr. MacArthur's remark that Mr. Allen came forth from " his long years of silence and seclusion a perfect master of his art " is largely true. Although born about half a century ago, it was not until 1884 that he settled down to writing. Not many of our distinguished writers passed thirty be fore tasting the bitter-sweet fruit of author ship.
Mr. Allen was born on a farm in Fayette
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County, Kentucky, a few miles from Lex ington ; and on the farm he spent his early childhood. His mother's maiden name was Helen Foster. Her parents, who were of the Scotch-Irish stock which settled in Pennsylvania before the Revolution, had found a permanent home in Mississippi. On his father's side he is a descendant of the Virginians who formed the Kentucky pioneers. The son was graduated from Kentucky University — which has been pictured in the history of his latest hero, David, — in 1872. For several years after ward he taught in district schools, at first near his home, and later in Missouri. Still later he became a private tutor; then he took a professorship in his alma mater; and at length he brought his career as a teacher to a close while at Bethany Col lege, West Virginia. That very year, 1884, he moved. to New York, put away 190
JAMES LANE ALLEN
his text-books, and plunged into the sea of literature. One who knew him in those days has described him as " a blond young giant with a magnificent head and a strong, kindly face."
From the day of his decision to be a writer until the present time Mr. Allen has worked industriously and successfully. Fifteen years ago the chief literary and critical magazines published many of his essays, and from time to time his short stories appeared in Harper s Magazine and The Century Magazine. These short stories were afterward collected and published under the title of "Flute and Violin." Then appeared at irregular intervals " The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky," "A Kentucky Cardinal" and its sequel, " After math," "A Summer in Arcady," "The Choir Invisible," and, latest of all, " The Reign of Law."
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The author's high reputation was firmly established by " A Kentucky Cardinal " and " Aftermath." " In these two books," said one critic, looking backward, " Nature was intervoven benignantly with the hu man nature resting on her bosom, leading her lover, Adam Moss, with gentle influ ences to the Imman lover, and, when be reft of human love, receiving him back into her healing arms." The books made as deep an impression upon Englishmen as upon Americans; indeed, as late as the spring of 1900 the London Academy de voted a page to a flattering and most sym pathetic review of them. The gentle, playful humor, the healthy joyousness, the rare ten derness displayed by Mr. Allen in these two books, are irresistible. Months, and even years, after laying the books down, the reader must remember the many delightful sketches of which they are made. 192
JAMES LANE ALLEN
"And while I am watching the birds, they are watching me. Not a little fop among them, having proposed and been ac cepted, but perches on a limb, and has the air of putting his hands mannishly under his coat-tails and crying out to me, ' Hello ! Adam, what were you made for?' 'You attend to your business, and I '11 attend to mine,' I answer, ' You have one May ; I have twenty-five ! ' He didn 't wait to hear. He caught sight of a pair of clear brown eyes peeping at him out of a near tuft of leaves, and sprang thither with open arms and the sound of a kiss."
What charming sport ! What uncom mon perception! And here is one of his choice, frank, bucolic sentiments:
" The longer I live here the better satis fied I am in having pitched my earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping it on one side, and the green fields,
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lanes and woods on the other. Each, in turn, is to me as a magnet to the needle. At times the needle of my nature points towards the country. On that side every thing is poetry. I wander over field and forest, and through me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across the meadows of May. At others the needle veers round, and I go to town — to the massed haunts of the highest animal and cannibal. That way nearly everything is prose. I can feel the prose rising in me as I step along, like hair on the back of a dog, long before any other dogs are in sight. And, indeed, the case is much that of a country dog come to town, so that growls are in order at every corner. The only being in the universe at which I have ever snarled, or with which I have rolled over in the mud and fought like a common cur, is Man." 194
JAMES LANE ALLEN
" Summer in Arcady " shocked many who had fallen in love with the pastoral simplicity and spiritual delicacy of the two preceding books ; but it was generally ad mitted that the book showed an advance in the author's powers, particularly in his power of vivid dialogue. In his first novel Mr. Allen had written that " The simple, rural, key-note of life is still the sweetest," and a change to another key-note, tremu lous with pathos and tragedy, surprised the reading public ; but the opinion that it was likely to prove a stepping-stone to higher things found general favor. Nor was this opinion unsound, for " The Choir Invisible " lifted its author for the time above the heads of all his contemporaries.
Both here and in England the book fairly leaped to success ; both here and in Eng land it was praised almost unqualifiedly. An American critic, writing of it, said :
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"Mr. Allen stands to-day in the front rank of American novelists. ' The Choir Invis ible' will solidify a reputation already es tablished and bring into clear light his rare gifts as an artist. For this latest story is as genuine a work of art as has come from an American hand." An English critic noted that it was " highly praised, and with reason." " It is written," he said, " with singular delicacy, and has an old-world fra grance which seems to come from the classics we keep in lavender."
The book succeeded so immensely that an attempt was made to dramatize it, but the attempt failed. The atmosphere of the book proved to be too ethereal, too spir itual, for dramatization.
That "The Choir Invisible" solidified
Mr. Allen's reputation was demonstrated
by the eagerness of the demand for " The
Reign of Law." In some respects this is
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JAMES LANE ALLEN
Mr. Allen's greatest work : it reveals even a deeper knowledge of nature than he ever revealed before, and it deals more intimately with things which have revolved around his own career.
Fame has little to do with the sale of books. If " The Kentucky Cardinal," " The Choir Invisible," and " The Reign of Law" had not been sold by the thou sands, Mr. Allen's fame would still be of more than transient quality. There is nothing ephemeral about these stories: they are, strictly speaking, a part of our classical literature. The vividness of the pictures will always be fresh and inter esting.
Taking too literally Mr. Allen's remark in " The Reign of Law" that Kentucky University is a ruin and will always remain a ruin, the reading public has generally decided, we have found, that the
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university, the author's alma mater, does not exist. It does exist, but, apparently, not in the condition in which the author would have it. Before " The Reign of Law'' had been long on the market, he and the president of Kentucky University fell into a contro versy which makes an interesting chapter in the academic side of the history of the Blue Grass State.
Mr. Allen works slowly and carefully, as may be inferred from the number and the character of his books. And he lives quietly, modestly. He is not in the least given to the exploitation of his habits and his manners, even so far as they may be con nected with his literary work. Little has ever been heard of him by the thousands who hurry to read his books, and who read them only to praise him. Some time ago his publishers issued a brochure dealing with his career, and the vital facts contained in 198
JAMES LANE ALLEN
it, if put together, would not cover more than twenty or thirty ordinary lines.
It should be said before ending, however, that the author of "The Reign of Law "is looked up to almost filially by the younger writers of the middle West. They are never weary of applauding him and of in dicating, publicly as well as privately, his extraordinary reputation. Traces of his style, notably as it appears in his Corot-like pictures of nature, may be found in their writings. Indeed, it is quite likely that nothing would please one of these fine young men more than to have it said of his work that it resembles the masterly work of James Lane Allen.
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THOMAS NELSON PAGE
THOMAS NELSON PAGE first came into national prominence seventeen years ago through the publication by The Century Magazine of the short story called " Marse Chan." He received eighty dollars for the story.
A few years ago, in conversation with Mr. Frank G. Carpenter, the author re lated the incidents which led to the writing of " Marse Chan." At the bottom was a letter which a friend had shown him. " This letter," said Mr. Page, " was from an illiterate girl in Georgia to her soldier sweetheart. The letter was poorly written and poorly spelled, but full of pathos. The girl had, it seems, trifled with the man, but after he had left for the war she had
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realized her great love for Mm and written to him. She wrote : ' I know I have treated you mean. I ain't never done right with you all the time. When you asked me to marry you, I laughed, and said I wouldn't have you, and it makes me cry to think you are gone away to the war. Now, I want you to know that I love you, and I want you to git a furlow and come home and I'll marry you.' With a few words of affec tion the letter closed, but a postscript was added : ' Don't come home without a fur- low, for unless you come home honorable I won't marry you.' This letter was re ceived by the soldier only a few days before the battle of Seven Pines, and after he was shot it was found in his breast pocket, just over his heart. The pathos of it struck me so forcibly that out of it came the story of ' Marse Chan.' '
Thomas Nelson Page was thirty-one 202
THOMAS NELSON PAGE
when " Marse Chan" appeared, and at that time his shingle was new outside his office in Richmond. Mr. Page was born in Hano ver County, Virginia, on April 23, 1853, and is consequently now in his forty-ninth year. A description of the house in which he was born — Oakland, it was called — may be found in "Two Little Confederates." On both sides he is a lineal descendant of Gen. Thomas Nelson, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. It has been said that there is scarcely an old family in all Virginia to which the author is not re lated in some degree. One of his cousins is the Princess Troubetskoy, Amelie Rives before her marriage, whose first husband was John Armstrong Chaiiler. At the time of the birth of Thomas the Pages were compar atively wealthy, but later, during the war, they lost most of their wealth. Thomas's first reading lessons, in the Waverley novels,
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were given him by an aunt, who also taught him to read the Episcopal prayer-book. His education was interrupted by the outbreak of the war, for his father accepted a commis sion in the Confederate army. Occasionally the boy visited his father in camp, when the troops were on the road from Oakland to Richmond. Once he witnessed a bombard ment. Happily, he was old enough to appre ciate the gossip of the war which passed around the negro cabins.
Like all the slaveholders, the Pages were much reduced in riches when the war ended, but, nevertheless, at the age of six teen, Thomas was sent to Washington and Lee University. Of his college days he once said :
"My standing was not high. I don't know
that I had much ambition to be one of the
first honor men. At any rate, I got no
medals of any kind. I suppose I was a fair
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average student, but I hear that I devoted myself more to outside reading than to my studies. I was a member of the literary society, and for a time was the editor of the college paper. Contrary to the usual cus tom, I wrote short articles instead of long essays, and from this got the nick-name of ' The Short-Article Editor.' I wrote, I suppose, much for the pleasure of seeing myself in print. I was very bashful in those days, and I know that I trembled when I first got up to speak in the literary society. I had a chum at college who is now one of the most famous lawyers of the country. He excels as a debater. He was also bashful, and during our college days he joined with me in a method of improving our oratorical powers. We would get to gether in a room, and, having closed the doors, would debate with each other, upon some question. One would stand on one
205
side of the table and one on the other and we would declaim away, each having a fif teen minutes' speech and a like time for answers. This practice helped me materially in my work as a lawyer."
After his graduation from Washington and Lee University, Mr. Page secured em ployment as a teacher in a private school in Kentucky, not far from Louisville. There he taught for a year, and he says that he enjoyed it very much. He kept his pen at work steadily. The influential paper in the part of the country where he was teach ing, was, of course, The Louisville Courier- Journal. The young teacher was intensely interested in Ik Marvel's books, and he wrote some essays in imitation of Marvel and sent them to the Courier- Journal. They were rejected. From what he has said since, their rejection was not a source of much discouragement to him. 206
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At the end of a year the rebuffed essay ist returned to his home in Virginia, and, soon after, deciding to study law, he entered the law school of the University of Virginia. Greatly to his credit, he got his degree in a year. Meantime, however, he kept up his interest in literature. While at the University of Virginia he contributed to the college paper. It was also his habit, while at home, to write stories on slates for the entertainment of his friends, and erase the stories after he had read them. At school, too, he began to write stories in the negro dialect, and he continued this practice in his law office in Richmond. At his office he wrote the first of his works ac cepted by the magazines, a poem called "Unc' Gabe's White Folks," which was published in Scrilner's in 1876. He re ceived fifteen dollars for it. He was very proud of that unpretentious check. Later
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he wrote a historical article relating to the centennial celebration in old Yorktown, and then he sent out his first story, " Marse Chan." It was paid for promptly, but, like many another story sent to the maga zines, particularly stories from unknown authors, it remained unpublished for several years. Finally, overcome by impatience, the author wrote to ascertain what had be come of it, and shortly afterward he received a proof of it. With its publication in 1884 came instant popularity.
But at no time previous to his moving to Washington was literature first in Page's mind. In the beginning, at Richmond, he wrote only at night, when his day's work was done ; and for a time he actually ceased writing fiction entirely lest it might inter fere with the practice of his profession. For, as a matter of fact, he has been a very successful lawyer. Six months after he 208
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had settled down in Richmond he was able to support himself with his earnings at the bar, and during the eighteen years which followed, that is, up to the time of his settling down in Washington, his income was chiefly from law.
So, it was some time before " Marse Chan " was succeeded by " Meh Lady," "Unc' Edinburg's Drowndin'," "Polly" and " Ole ' Stracted." It was said in those days that the stories were like variations on a single theme ; but we are inclined to agree with the critic who said : " For this we feel no disposition to quarrel with Mr. Page, being eager to hear the tale as often as he may find ways to tell it, and grateful to him for such beautiful and faithful pictures of a society now become portion and parcel of the irrevocable past." To Mr. Page and his equally delightful con temporary, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, the
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reading public is indebted for no small number of the most charming features of American literature.
It may please those who enjoy particu lars to know that the popular writer re gards " Unc' Edinburg's Drowndin'," which was first to follow " Marse Chan," as his best picture of Virginia life. Mr. Page, in 1886, married Miss Anne Seddon Bruce, the daughter of Charles Bruce of Charlotte County, Virginia, largely for whose enter tainment he had written his early stories ; and before the death of Mrs. Page in 1888 Mr. Page had written " Meh Lady " and had published " In Ole Virginia," a collec tion of his works, all in dialect.
In those days, by the way, his work was often compared by the critics with the work of Mr. Harris. Perhaps the fairest comparison was made by Mr. Coleman, who admired the two authors quite equally. 210
THOMAS NELSON PAGE
" Mr. Page," said the critic, " enjoys the reputation of having written the most ex quisite story of the war that has yet appeared (" Marse Chan "). In compari son with the works of Joel Chandler Harris, though both authors deal with the negro, the one in no wise interferes with the proper appreciation of the other. In Uncle Remus Mr. Harris has given us the truer insight into the character of the type to which he belongs, while the venerable family servant is somewhat idealized by Mr. Page, and, moreover, is made to tell a story possessing a value and interest of its own not entirely dependent upon the per sonality of the narrator and his race pecu liarities. In the matter of dialect, Mr. Page has the advantage, though this may be due, in part, to the difference between the Vir ginia negro and his brother of Georgia."
The Virginian has portrayed the sweeter
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side of the old slavery days, in direct con trast to Mrs. Stowe's picture of the harsher side. In the master he has delineated for bearance, confidence, protection ; in the slave, respect, devotion and fidelity. With out a scruple he has felt constrained to make one of his characters say of the days before the war : " Dem wuz good ole times, mars- ter — de bes' Sam ever see ! De wuz, in fac' ! Niggers did n' hed nothin' 't all to do — jes' hed to 'ten' to de feedin' an' cleanin' de hosses, an' doin' what de marster tell 'em to do ; an' when dey wuz sick, dey had things sent 'em out de house, an' de same doctor came to see 'em whar 'ten' to de white folks when dey wuz po'ly. Dyah war n' no trouble nor nuthin."
A few years ago Mr. Page was asked if he wrote rapidly. " Yes and no," he re plied. " I write the first draft as rapidly as I can and then go over it very carefully 212
THOMAS NELSON PAGE
in the revision. I try to simplify my writ ings as much as possible. The more simple it is, I think, the better it is. I find, how ever, that the revision often takes away the spirit from the first draft. I lay away the manuscript, and looking at it several weeks later, I can see that the first draft is truer to nature than the more stilted revision. I think I do more careful work now than I have done in the past. My ideal is far above anything I have ever done, and I sometimes despair of approaching it. There is one thing I do, however, which I think is a good plan for any writer. That is, I always give the best I have in me to the story which I am writing. I do not save anything which I think might perhaps be of use to me in the future. The cream, if you could use that expression, always goes to the present."
In 1891 the author of " Marse Chan "
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left Richmond and went to New York to succeed Charles Dudley Warner in the conduct of " The Drawer " in Harper's Monthly, Mr. Warner succeeding Mr. How- ells, who at that time left Harper's for the Cosmopolitan, in the conduct of " The Study." That same year Mr. Page ap peared as a public reader. Two years later he married Mrs. Henry Field of Chicago, a granddaughter of Governor Barbour of Virginia, and since then, for the most part, he has lived and worked in Washington. By far his most ambitious work is " Red Rock," a novel which has done much to affect favorably the old atti tude of the North toward the South.
Not many of our writers rest their fame on fewer works.
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RICIIAUI> IIAUDING DAVIS.
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
sj GREAT many persons, indeed, a /J great many critics, have called Richard Harding Davis superfi cial. 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 journal istic 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 con-
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elusion 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 '11 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 run ning by on the other. That 's a gay sight, ain 't it now ? With all the girls coming 216
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
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 '11 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 atten tive 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.
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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 point ing them out. Their minds run in differ ent channels. But this ability to see things is my greatest joy in life, incidentally my living. I cultivated it when I began re porting, and to this day if I see a man turn in a car to look out the window I uncon sciously 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 ob jective habit. In fact, a story which Mr. 218
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
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 tene ment house in which fire had little more than singed the top floor. The crowd had left, a few ashes were smouldering, and the in surance 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 blacken ed 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.
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"'What time did you break in here?' he asked.
" ' Let me see,' yawned the bluecoat ; 'Seven o' clock it was. I remember be cause that alarm was going off just as I got inside.'
" ' That's my story,' said Davis, and he began his account, touching and vivid, sim ply 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 exist ence 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 220
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
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 Phila delphia 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
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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 busi ness, 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 ' — 0, believe me, it is re-writing that I have chiefly in my
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mind. If you will do this I hope to hear of you some day.
Please excuse this sermon from Your obliged
ROBERT Louis STEVENSON.
This letter, brought to light a short Avhile ago by Mr. Sangree, in a magazine article, discloses an exchange of sentiments credit able to all the correspondents concerned.
For a time the promising journalist was overmastered by an ambition to be an editor, and he established a short-lived dra matic periodical called The Stage. In 1889 he reported the Johnstown flood for a Philadelphia paper, and then, the follow ing summer, went abroad with the All- Philadelphia cricket team. Upon his return to this country, New York charmed him, and there, for the most part, he has lived ever since. At first he was connected with The Evening Sun. During this con-
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nection he wrote his delightful "Van Bibber" stories. But these were not his first stories. His first stories were written while he was editor of a paper at Lehigh College, in his student days. The stories numbered about a dozen, and Mr. Davis collected them and paid ninety dollars to have them published in book form. The book has scarcely ever been heard of since. Later, while at Johns Hopkins University, he wrote his first accepted story, " Richard Carr's Baby," a sort of foot-ball tale, which was published in St. Nicholas. However, the " Van Bibber " stories were his first work of any serious account ; they were the first work to bring him popular ity.
After the " Van Bibber " sketches came
his most sparkling gem, "Gallegher," a
newspaper story which was refused by
three editors and then published, with im-
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RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
mediate success, in Scribner's Magazine. Later appeared in quick succession " The Other Woman," "An Unfinished Story,'" •'My Disreputable Friend, Mr. Raegan," and the other short stories which soon made their author's name familiar to the reading public on both sides of the ocean.
In 1890 Davis became editor of Harper's Weekly. This position he left a year or so later to travel across the continent, with " The West Through a Car Window " as the result. Then he went to London, and described the life there ; and then he went to Egypt and wrote "The Rulers of the Mediterranean." He was now fairly well started; and since then his pen has never been idle.
Since Mr. Davis's advent as a serious writer of fiction he has been subjected on one side to the most extravagant praise and on the other to the most merciless censure.
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The critics on both sides have made matters worse by dropping the subject at hand and bringing out for public inspection vast quantities of personal anecdotes about the unfortunate author, most of which stories are probably apocryphal. In fact, at one time the newspaper comments were so vulgar that the helpless victim said to a friend who visited him in New York : " If I thought I was like the man the news papers make me out to be, I would not only cut my own acquaintance ; I 'd cut my own throat." But, so far as the public ever found out, he took the slings and arrows philosophically. He could afford to. One by one his new works have prospered. It was at the height of this hypercritical hostility that, in 1897, Davis was suddenly missed. About the same time the stories in the London Times on the war between Turkey and Greece began to attract uni- 226
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
versal attention. The Times, said one of the New York newspapers, which had shown especial bitterness toward its for mer reporter, has discovered a brilliant war correspondent. It seemed that people all over the world were asking, Who is he? It was Mr. Davis, proving, under the cloak of the Times' traditional anonymity his right to be respected as a descriptive writer of the first quality. He repeated this suc cess the next year in Cuba, during the Spanish war, when his extraordinary skill in the description of picturesque incidents was favored by the circumstance that the generals and admirals themselves were sending home virtually all the news.
When, last year, Mr. Davis went to South Africa it was commonly expected that he would take sides with the British. Never was public expectation more emphat ically at fault. In a moment he took the
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measure of the British cause and the Brit ish tactics ; both of these things disgusted him. He put Mr. Kipling himself to shame by serving " the God of Things as They Are " ; and as a result he forfeited many friendships which he had made in England. But he won the hearts of his countrymen. His courageous honesty de stroyed in this country the last vestige of captious hostility.
To-day, at the age of thirty-eight, just at the entrance to full-blown life, Mr. Davis is widely admired and honored. He has pleased the light-hearted with his pretty romantic tales, and he has satisfied the strong of heart with his many examples of an unerring sense of the true comedy and the true pathos of life, and, moreover, of his remarkable personal fearlessness. Per haps the term which a friend applied to him is most fitting — perhaps he may best 228
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
be called a " sublimated reporter " °, for your sublimated reporter must be at once an imperturbable philosopher and an artist holding the mirror up to nature.
The author's marriage to Miss Cecil Clark of Chicago, at Marion, Massachusetts, on May 4, 1899, was an event remarkable for its jollity. Last year Mrs. Davis ac companied her husband to South Africa. She is said to be as skillful with the pencil as he is with the pen.
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Photo by Hollmger, N. Y.
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS.
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
jj DOZEN years or so ago, when
/J Mr. Bangs faced at home an audi- •^ ence, which had gathered to hear
his address on " The Evolution of the Humorist," he said:
" I was born in and have resided in Yonkers for a number of years ; I have braved the perils of life in this community, and have endured, without a murmur, the privations common to all of us."
A modest biography, and withal an illus tration of Mr. Bangs's philosophy. He takes things as they come — and leaves his imprint on them. Comparisons of skill aside, no man could do more.
John Kendrick Bangs was born in Yonkers, New York, in May, 1862. His
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father, Francis N. Bangs, was a prominent New York lawyer, in fact, one of the most prominent lawyers the New York bar has ever known. His grandfather was the Rev. Nathan Bangs, D.D., the first his torian of the Methodist Church in this country, the first editor of a Methodist paper, and for many years president of Wesleyan University, Middletown, Con necticut.
In 1883, after receiving such an educa tion as any New York boy of a well-to-do New York family receives, young Bangs was graduated with the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy from the School of Political Science of Columbia University, New York. For a year and a half afterward he studied law in his father's office — studied at " long range," as he has said himself. But all the time he was impatient to go into literature. " I was more of a fighter," he 232
JOHN KENDK1CK BANGS
says, " and it seemed to me that a man has enough battles of his own to wage without rushing after the battles of other people." Gradually his inherited fondness for litera ture smothered his zeal as a student of law. While contributing in his undergraduate days to the college paper, Acta Coluwibiana, he had enjoyed a taste of literary glory. So, between dips into his father's dry volumes, he wrote little sketches in his characteristic vein. These tentative works introduced him favorably to the managers of Life, and, late in 1884, he became asso ciated with Mr. Mitchell in the editorship of that entertaining periodical. In addition to his editorial work he undertook to maintain the attractive "By the Way" page, and to this valuable feature of Life he contributed an extraordinary amount of original matter. What would not have been asked of many other men was re-
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quested of the new humorist in the most casual manner, for he quickly proved that, besides possessing a keen literary instinct and that kindly and delightful insight into human nature which, brought together, double the value of a comic paper, he also possessed remarkable energy and power of application.
In 1887, while still connected with Life, and shortly after his marriage, young Bangs went abroad, and during this ab sence from editorial work his first book, " Roger Camorden, a Strange Story," was published. It was an unusual and very promising tale of hallucination, and its success was encouraging. That same year, in collaboration with his friend and class mate, Frank Dempster Sherman, he pro duced a series of satirical and humorous pieces, which were put into a volume under the title of "New Waggings of old Tales." 234
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
Soon afterward he resigned from Life, in order to devote more time to larger work.
The first product of the rising author's independent career was a travesty on " The Taming of the Shrew" called "Katherine," which he wrote for a dramatic association connected with the Seventh Regiment of the New York National Guard. It fol lowed the Shakespearean construction rather closely, and, with its many quips and gags and jolly songs, made a first-rate libretto for a comic opera. The popularity of the. travesty advertised the fame of Bangs from one end of Manhattan Island to the other. The following year, for the same organization, he wrote another trav esty, " Mephistopheles, a Profanation " ; and this, too, won much popularity and further brightened its author's name.
The happy results of his experience as
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the father of three boys were noticeable in the book which Mr. Bangs published in 1891, " Tiddledywink Tales," the first of a series of amusing stories for children. The other divisions of this series are " In Camp with a Tin Soldier," « The Tiddledy wink Poetry Book," and " Half Hours with Jimmie-Boy," books that have endeared their author to half the grown-up children in the land. It was by means of these books that he became a most welcome con tributor to Harper's Round Table and to the juvenile departments of various literary syndicates. A novel, " Toppleton's Client," appeared in 1893, and in that year also ap peared his first widely successful work, " Coffee and Repartee," a collection of Idiot papers, which has been described, and with good reason, as a mixture of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Bill Nye. Those were not, compared with the present time, 236
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
enthusiastic literary days, and yet in a few- years fifty thousand copies of the little book were sold. " Coffee and Repartee" was followed at regular intervals by " The Water-Ghost," "The Idiot," "Mr. Bona parte of Corsica," and by the other books whose names have at some time, been on every liberal reader's tongue,
One of the most entertaining of the New Yorker's books is " Ten Weeks in Politics," behind the writing of which is a story worth telling. In 1894 Mr. Bangs was nominated by the Democrats for Mayor of Yonkers. "No candidate, I sincerely believe," says his friend Mr. Corbin, " ever entered a political campaign with greater seriousness or with a more strenuous desire to devote himself to the public good ; and except for any one of half a dozen acci dents he would have been elected. To begin with, one of the cleverest of New
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York newspapers, the editorial policy of which has been suspected of personal pre judice, appeared to bear a grudge against Mr. Bangs, and persecuted him in prose and in verse with the implication that he was making a farce of politics. But the real cause of his defeat, as he explains with a quiet smile, was the fact that he refused one midnight to turn his house in to a beer garden for the benefit of a local German band that serenaded him ; and in point of fact the votes of the musicians and their heelers were enough to turn the scale. Though Mr. Bangs is always will ing to laugh at the figure he cut as a politician, he has never lost the sense of his duty as a citizen. His victorious rival had the magnanimity, which in such cases is scarcely to be distinguished from politi cal wisdom, to offer him a subordinate position in his administration — on the 238
JOHN KENDRICK BANGS
Board of Education, I think. Mr. Bangs had the magnanimity, which could not have contained the least scruple of policy, to accept the position and to fill it to the best of his ability, even while he was writing his ' Ten Weeks in Politics.' This episode is thoroughly characteristic." Mr. Bangs has spoken of that defeat as the greatest blessing that he ever met. " In later years," he says, " when I saw how I would have been forced to abandon my chosen profession for politics, when I learned that the mayoralty would have taken every moment of my time, I was glad that I had been defeated. I saw, for the first time, the truth in the saying that a man can do more to bring success within his grasp by standing by his original propo sition, even if it be a humorous one. And politics and humor do not mix, unless you happen to be a cartoonist."
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Politics and humor mix well enough in the right man ; but it is not to be doubted that literature has been the gainer by the result of that election in Yonkers. The defeated candidate would probably have made an excellent Mayor. He certainly would have made a conscientious Mayor ; and by reason of this conscientiousness the reading public would have missed books which have made us certain that Mr. Bangs is a gifted humorist.
Mr. Corbin, by the way, tells another interesting story of his friend's character