Recollections of a Varied Life Part 17

I knew him well, in literary and social ways, but I had never before trespa.s.sed upon his banker existence, and the visit mightily interested me, as one which furnished a view of an unfamiliar side of the "manyest-sided man"--that phrase I had learned from Mr. Whitelaw Reid--whom I ever knew.

It was during Stock Exchange hours that I made my call, and I intended to remain only long enough to secure an appointment for some other and less occupied time. But the moment I indicated the matter I wished to consult with him about, Stedman linked his arm in mine and led me to his "den," a little room off the banking offices, and utterly unlike them in every detail. Here were books--not ledgers; here were all the furnis.h.i.+ngs of the haunt of a man of letters, without a thing to suggest that the man of letters knew or cared for anything relating to stocks, bonds, securities, loans, discounts, dividends, margins, or any other of the things that are alone considered of any account in Wall Street.

"This is the daytime home of the literary side of me," he explained.

"When I'm out there"--pointing, "I think of financial things; when I enter here I forget what a dollar mark looks like."

"I see," I said. "Minerva in Wall Street--Athene, if you prefer the older Greek name."

"Say Apollo instead--for if there is anything I pride myself upon it is my masculinity. 'Male and female created he them, and G.o.d saw that it was good,' but the garments of one s.e.x do not become the other, and neither do the qualities and attributes."

He had a copy of "The Victorian Poets" in the den and together we made a minute comparison of his study of Tennyson's indebtedness to Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus with the magazinist's article. For result we found that beyond a doubt the magazinist had "skinned" his article out of Stedman's chapter--in other words, that he had in effect plagiarized his charge of plagiary and the proofs of it.

Stedman refused to write anything on the subject, deeming it not worth while, a judgment which I am bound to say was sound, though I did not like to accept it because my news instinct scented game and I wanted that article from Stedman's pen. His scholarly criticism was literature of lasting importance and interest. The magazine a.s.sault upon Tennyson's fame is utterly forgotten of those who read it.

XLII

[Sidenote: "The Hoosier Schoolmaster's" Influence]

It was early in our effort to achieve a circulation for _Hearth and Home_ that my brother decided to write for it his novel, "The Hoosier Schoolmaster." I have elsewhere related the story of the genesis of that work, and I shall not repeat it here. Its success was immediate and astonis.h.i.+ng. It quickly multiplied the circulation of _Hearth and Home_ many times over. It was reprinted serially in a dozen or more weekly newspapers in the West and elsewhere, and yet when it was published in a peculiarly unworthy and unattractive book form, its sales exceeded fifty thousand copies during the first month, at a time when the sale of ten thousand copies all told of any novel was deemed an unusual success.

The popularity of the story did not end even there. Year after year it continued to sell better than most new novels, and now nearly forty years later, the demand for it amounts to several thousand copies per annum. It was translated into several foreign languages--in spite of the difficulty the translators must have encountered in rendering an uncouth dialect into languages having no such dialect. It was republished in England, and the French version of it appeared in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_.

But great as its popularity was and still is, I am disposed to regard that as a matter of less significance and less consequence than the influence it exercised in stimulating and guiding the literary endeavors of others. If I may quote a sentence from a book of my own, "The First of the Hoosiers," Edward Eggleston was "the very first to perceive and utilize in literature the picturesqueness of the Hoosier life and character, the first to appreciate the poetic and romantic possibilities of that life and to invite others to share with him his enjoyment of its humor and his admiration for its st.u.r.dy manliness."

While Edward was absorbed in the writing of "The Hoosier Schoolmaster"

and its quickly following successor, "The End of the World," he more and more left the editorial conduct of the paper to me, and presently he resigned his editorial place, leaving me as his successor.

The work was of a kind that awakened all my enthusiasm. My tastes were literary rather than journalistic, whatever may have been the case as to my capacities, and in the conduct of _Hearth and Home_ my work was far more literary in character than any that had fallen to me up to that time in my service on daily newspapers. More important still, it brought me into contact, both personally and by correspondence, with practically all the active literary men and women of that time, with many of whom I formed friends.h.i.+ps that have endured to this time in the case of those who still live, and that ended only with the death of those who are gone. The experiences and the a.s.sociations of that time were both delightful and educative, and I look back upon them after all these years with a joy that few memories can give me. I was a mere apprentice to the literary craft, of course, but I was young enough to enjoy and, I think, not too conceited to feel the need of learning all that such a.s.sociations could teach.

It was during this _Hearth and Home_ period that my first books were written and published. They were the results of suggestions from others rather than of my own self-confidence, as indeed most of the thirty-odd books I have written have been.

Mr. George P. Putnam, the Nestor of American book publis.h.i.+ng, the friend of Was.h.i.+ngton Irving and the discoverer of his quality, returned to the work of publis.h.i.+ng about that time. In partners.h.i.+p with his son, George Haven Putnam, then a young man and now the head of a great house, he had set up a publis.h.i.+ng firm with a meager "list" but with ambition to increase it to a larger one.

[Sidenote: My First Book]

In that behalf the younger member of the firm planned a series of useful manuals to be called "Putnam's Handy Book Series," and to be sold at seventy-five cents each. With more of hopefulness than of discretion, perhaps, he came to me asking if I could not and would not write one or two of the little volumes. The immediate result was a little book ent.i.tled "How to Educate Yourself."

In writing it I had the advantage of comparative youth and of that self-confident omniscience which only youth can have. I knew everything then better than I know anything now, so much better indeed that for a score of years past I have not dared open the little book, lest it rebuke my present ignorance beyond my capacity to endure.

Crude as the thing was, it was successful, and it seems to have satisfied a genuine need, if I may judge by the numberless letters sent to me by persons who felt that it had helped them. Even now, after the lapse of more than thirty-eight years, such letters come to me occasionally from men in middle life who say they were encouraged and helped by it in their youth. I once thought of rewriting it with more of modesty than I possessed when it had birth, but as that would be to bring to bear upon it a later-acquired consciousness of ignorance rather than an enlarged knowledge of the subject, I refrained, lest the new version should be less helpful than the old.

The Rev. Dr. Theodore L. Cuyler once said to me:

"If one gets printer's ink on his fingers when he is young, he can never get it off while he lives." The thought that suggested that utterance had prompt ill.u.s.tration in this case. Not long after this poor little first book was published, I went to Boston to secure literary contributions for _Hearth and Home_. In those days one had to go to Boston for such things. Literary activity had not yet transferred its dwelling place to New York, nor had Indiana developed its "school."

While I was in Boston Mr. Howells called on me, and in his gentle way suggested that I should write my reminiscences of Southern army life in a series of articles for the _Atlantic Monthly_, of which he was then the editor.

The suggestion, coming from such a source, almost made me dizzy. I had vaguely and timidly cherished a secret hope that some day--after years of preparatory practice in smaller ways--I might have the honor and the joy of seeing some article of mine in one or other of the great magazines. But that hope was by no means a confident one, and it looked to a more or less remote future for its fulfilment. Especially it had never been bold enough to include the _Atlantic Monthly_ in the list of its possibilities. That was the magazine of Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton, and their kind--the mouthpiece of the supremely great in our literature. The thought of ever being numbered among the humblest contributors to that magazine lay far beyond the utmost daring of my dreams. And the supremacy of the _Atlantic_, in all that related to literary quality, was at that time very real, so that I am in nowise astonished even now that I was well-nigh stunned when Mr. Howells suggested that I should write seven papers for publication there, and afterward embody them in a book together with two others reserved from magazine publication for the sake of giving freshness to the volume.

I did not accept the suggestion at once. I was too greatly appalled by it. I had need to go home and cultivate my self-conceit before I could believe myself capable of writing anything on the high level suggested.

In the end I did the thing with great misgiving, but with results that were more than satisfactory, both to Mr. Howells and to me.

[Sidenote: "A Rebel's Recollections"]

The pa.s.sions aroused by the war of which I wrote had scarcely begun to cool at that time and there was a good deal of not very friendly surprise felt when the _Atlantic's_ const.i.tuency learned that the great exponent of New England's best thought was to publish the war memories of a Confederate under the seemingly self-a.s.sertive t.i.tle of "A Rebel's Recollections."

That feeling seems to have been alert in protest. Soon after the first paper was published Mr. Howells wrote me that it had "brought a hornets'

nest about his ears," but that he was determined to go on with the series. After the second paper appeared he wrote me that the hornets had "begun to sing psalms in his ears" because of the spirit and temper in which the sensitive subject was handled. On the evening of the day on which the "Recollections" appeared in book form, there was a banquet at the Parker House in Boston, given in celebration of the _Atlantic's_ fifteenth birthday. Without a moment's warning I was toasted as the author of the latest book from the Riverside Press, and things were said by the toast-master about the spirit in which the book was written--things that overwhelmed me with embarra.s.sment, by reason of the fact that it was my first experience of the kind and I was wholly unused to the extravagantly complimentary eloquence of presiding officers at banquets.

I had never been made the subject of a toast before. I had never before attempted to make an after-dinner speech, and I was as self-conscious as a schoolboy on the occasion of his first declamation before an outside audience. But one always does stumble through such things. I have known even an Englishman to stammer out his appreciation and sit down without upsetting more than one or two of his wine gla.s.ses. In the same way I uttered some sort of response in spite of the embarra.s.sing fact that George Parsons Lathrop, who had been designated as the "historian of the evening and chronicler of its events," sat immediately opposite me, manifestly studying me, I thought, as a bugologist might study a new species of beetle. I didn't know Lathrop then, as I afterward learned to know him, in all the friendly warmth and good-fellows.h.i.+p of his nature.

When the brief ordeal was over and I sat down in full conviction that I had forever put myself to shame by my oratorical failure, Mr. Howells left his seat and came to say something congratulatory--something that I attributed to his kindly disposition to help a man up when he is down--and when he turned away Mark Twain was there waiting to say something on his own account.

"When you were called on to speak," he said, "I braced myself up to come to your rescue and make your speech for you. I thought of half a dozen good things to say, and now they are all left on my hands, and I don't knew what on earth to do with them."

Then came Mr. Frank B. Sanborn to tell me of a plan he and some others had hurriedly formed to give me a little dinner at Swampscott, at which there should be n.o.body present but "original abolitionists" and my rebel self.

I was unable to accept this attention, but it ended all doubt in my mind that I had written my "Recollections" in a spirit likely to be helpful in the cultivation of good feeling between North and South. The reviews of the book, especially in the New England newspapers, confirmed this conviction, and I had every reason to be satisfied.

XLIII

[Sidenote: A Novelist by Accident]

Before "A Rebel's Recollections" appeared, I had written and published my first novel, "A Man of Honor."

That book, like the others, was the result of accident and not of deliberate purpose. The serial story had become a necessary feature of _Hearth and Home_, and we had made a contract with a popular novelist to furnish us with such a story to follow the one that was drawing to a close. Almost at the last moment the novelist failed us, and I hurriedly visited or wrote to all the rest of the available writers in search of a suitable ma.n.u.script. There were not so many novelists then as there are now. The search proved futile, and the editorial council was called together in something like panic to consider the alarming situation. The story then running was within a single instalment of its end, and no other was to be had. It was the unanimous opinion of the council--which included a member of the publis.h.i.+ng firm as its presiding officer--that it would be disastrous to send out a single number of the paper without an instalment of a serial in it, and worse still, if it should contain no announcement of a story to come. The council, in its wisdom, was fully agreed that "something must be done," but no member of it could offer any helpful suggestion as to what that "something" should be.

The list of available story writers had been completely exhausted, and it was hopeless to seek further in that direction. Even my old-time friend, John Esten Cooke, whose fertility of fiction was supposed to be limitless, had replied to my earnest entreaties, saying that he was already under contract for two stories, both of which were then in course of serial publication, and neither of which he had finished writing as yet. "Two sets of clamorous printers are at my heels," he wrote, "and I am less than a week ahead of them in the race between copy and proof slips."

As we sat in council, staring at each other in blank despair, I said, without really meaning it:

"If worse comes to worst, I'll write the story myself."

Instantly the member of the publis.h.i.+ng firm who presided over the meeting answered:

"That settles the whole matter. Mr. Eggleston will write the story. The council stands adjourned," and without waiting for my remonstrance, everybody hurried out of the room.

I had never written a story, long or short. I hadn't the remotest idea what I should or could write about. I had in my mind neither plot nor personages, neither scene nor suggestion--nothing whatever out of which to construct a story. And yet the thing must be done, and the printers must have the copy of my first instalment within three days.

I turned the key in my desk and fled from the office. I boarded one of the steamers that then ran from Fulton Ferry to Harlem. I wanted to think. I wanted quietude. When the steamer brought me back, I had in my mind at least a shadowy notion--not of the story as a whole, but of its first chapter, and I had decided upon a t.i.tle.

Hurrying home I set to work to write. About nine o'clock the artist who had been engaged to ill.u.s.trate the story called upon me and insisted upon it that he must decide at once what he should draw as the first ill.u.s.tration. He reminded me that the drawing must be made on wood, and that it would take two or three days to engrave it after his work upon it should be finished.