Recollections of a Varied Life Part 31

The company laughed heartily at the witticism. Mr. Gosse smiled and a little later, in an aside, he asked me to explain just what Mr. Harper had meant by "subst.i.tutes."

Mr. Gosse left a sweet taste in our mouths when he sailed for home.

The attentions he had received here had in no way spoiled him. From beginning to end of his stay he never once manifested the least feeling of superiority, and never once did his manner suggest that British condescension, which is at once so amusing and so insulting to Americans. The same thing was true of Matthew Arnold, who, I remember, made himself a most agreeable guest at a reception the Authors Club gave him in the days of its extreme poverty. But not all English men of letters whom I have met have been like-minded with these. A certain fourth- or fifth-rate English novelist, who was made the guest of honor at a dinner at the Lotus Club, said to me, as I very well remember: "Of course you have no literature of your own and you must depend for your reading matter upon us at home." The use of "at home" meaning "in England," was always peculiarly offensive in my ears, but my interlocutor did not recognize its offensiveness. "But really, you know, your people ought to pay for it."

He was offering this argument to me in behalf of international copyright, my interest in which was far greater than his own. For because of the compet.i.tion of ten-cent reprints of English books, I was forbidden to make a living by literature and compelled to serve as a hired man on a newspaper instead.

A few of our English literary visitors have come to us with the modest purposes of the tourist, interested in what our country is and means.

The greater number have come to exploit the country "for what there is in it," by lecturing. Their lecture managers have been alert and exceedingly successful in making advertising agencies of our clubs, our social organizations, and even our private parlors, by way of drawing money into the purses of their clients.

[Sidenote: A Question of Provincialism]

Did anybody ever hear of an American author of equal rank with these going to England on a lecture or reading tour, and getting himself advertised by London clubs and in London drawing-rooms in the like fas.h.i.+on? And if any American author--even one of the highest rank--should try to do anything of the sort, would his bank account swell in consequence as those of our British literary visitors do? Are we, after all, provincial? Have we not yet achieved our intellectual and social independence?

I am persuaded that some of us have, though not many. One night at a club I asked Brander Matthews if I should introduce him to a second-rate English man of letters who had been made a guest of the evening. He answered:

"No--unless you particularly wish it, I'd rather talk to you and the other good fellows here. He hasn't anything to say that would interest me, unless it is something he has put into the lectures he's going to deliver, and he can't afford to waste on us any of that small stock of interesting things."

But as a people, have we outgrown our provincialism? Have we achieved our intellectual independence? Have we learned to value our own judgments, our own thinking, our own convictions independently of English approval or disapproval? I fear we have not, even in criticism.

When the novel "Democracy" appeared I wrote a column or two about it in the _Evening Post_, treating it as a noteworthy reflection of our own life, political and social--not very great but worthy of attention.

The impulse of my article was that the literature of a country should be a showing forth of its life, its thought, its inspirations, its aspirations, its character, its strength, and its weaknesses. That anonymous novel seemed to me to be a reflection of all these things in some degree and I said so in print. All the other newspapers of the country dismissed the book in brief paragraphs, quite as if it had had no distinctive literary quality of its own. But a year or so later the English critics got hold of the novel and wrote of it as a thing of significance and consequence. Thereupon, the American newspapers that had before given it a paragraph or so of insignificant reference, took it up again and reviewed it as a book that meant something, evidently forgetting that they had ever seen it before.

This is only one of many incidents of criticism that I might relate in ill.u.s.tration of the hurtful, crippling, paralyzing provincialism that afflicts and obstructs our literary development.

A few years ago the princ.i.p.al of a great and very ambitious preparatory school whose function it was to fit young men for college, sent me his curriculum "for criticism," he said,--for approval, I interpreted. He set forth quite an elaborate course in what he called "The Literature of the English Language." Upon looking it over I found that not one American book was mentioned in the whole course of it, either as a required study or as "collateral reading"--a t.i.tle under which a mult.i.tude of second- or third-rate English works were set down.

For criticism I suggested that to the American boy who was expected to become an American man of culture, some slight acquaintance with Irving, Hawthorne, Emerson, Motley, Prescott, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Poe, Parkman, Lowell, Mark Twain, Mr. Howells, Dr. S. Weir Mitch.e.l.l, Paul Hayne, Sidney Lanier, James Whitcomb Riley, Bret Harte, John Hay, and some other American writers might really be of greater advantage than familiarity with many of the English authors named.

His answer was conclusive and profoundly discouraging. It was his function, he said, to prepare boys for their entrance examinations in our great colleges and universities, "and not one of these," he added, "names an American author in its requirement list."

I believe the colleges have since that time recognized American literature in some small degree, at least, though meagerly and with no adequate recognition of the fact that a nation's literature is the voice with which it speaks not only to other countries and to posterity but to its own people in its own time, and that acquaintance with it ministers, as no other scholars.h.i.+p does, to good, helpful, patriotic citizens.h.i.+p.

[Sidenote: A Library Vandal]

One of the English writers who came to this country possibly for his own country's good, gave me some trouble. I was editing _Hearth and Home_ at the time, and he brought me for sale a number of unusually good things, mainly referring to matters French and Italian. He was absolute master of the languages of both those countries, and his acquaintance with their literature, cla.s.sical, medieval, and modern, was so minute that he knew precisely where to find any literary matter that seemed salable.

With a thrift admirable in itself, though misdirected, it was his practice to go to the Astor Library, find what he wanted in rare books or precious foreign newspaper files, translate it, and then tear out and destroy the pages he had plundered. In that irregular fas.h.i.+on he made quite a literary reputation for himself, though after detection he had to retire to Philadelphia, under the orders of Mr. Saunders, Librarian of the Astor Library, who decreed banishment for him as the alternative of prosecution for the mutilation of books.

He carried the thing so far, at last, that I regarded it as my duty to expose him, and I did so in my capacity as literary editor of the _Evening Post_. I was instantly threatened with a libel suit, but the man who was to bring it left at once on a yachting trip to the West Indies, and so far as I can learn has never reappeared either in America or in Literature. It is one of the abiding regrets of my life that the papers in that libel suit were never served upon me.

LXI

In the autumn of 1882 a little group of literary men, a.s.sembled around Richard Watson Gilder's fireside, decided to organize an Authors Club in New York. They arranged for the drafting of a tentative const.i.tution and issued invitations for twenty-five of us to meet a little later at Lawrence Hutton's house in Thirty-fourth Street to organize the club.

We met there on the 13th of November and, clause by clause, adopted a const.i.tution.

It was obvious in that little a.s.semblage itself, that some such organization of authors was badly needed in New York. For, though there were only twenty-five of us there, all selected by the originating company, every man of us had to be introduced to some at least of the others present. The men of letters in New York did not know each other.

They were beset by unacquaintance, prejudices, senseless antagonisms, jealousies, amounting in some cases to hatreds. They had need to be drawn together in a friendly organization, in which they could learn to know and like and appreciate each other.

[Sidenote: The Founding of the Authors Club]

So great were the jealousies and ambitions to which I have referred that early in the meeting Mr. Gilder--I think it was he--called three or four of us into a corner and suggested that there was likely to be a fight for the presidency of the club, and that it might result in the defeat of the entire enterprise. At Mr. Gilder's suggestion, or that of some one else--I cannot be sure because all of us in that corner were in accord--it was decided that there should be no president of the club, that the government should be vested in an executive council, and that at each of its meetings the council should choose its own chairman. In later and more harmonious years, since the men of the club have become an affectionate brotherhood, it has been the custom for the council to elect its chairman for a year, and usually to reelect him for another year. But at the beginning we had conditions to guard against that no longer exist--now that the literary men of New York know and mightily like each other.

The eligibility clause of the const.i.tution as experimentally drawn up by the committee, prescribed that in order to be eligible a man must be the author of "at least one book proper to literature," or--and there followed a clause covering the case of magazine editors and the like.

As a reader for a publis.h.i.+ng house, I scented danger here. Half in play, but in earnest also, I suggested that the authors.h.i.+p of at least one book proper to literature would render pretty nearly the entire adult male population of the United States eligible to members.h.i.+p in the club, unless some requirement of publication were added. My ma.n.u.script reading had seemed to me at least to suggest that, and, as a necessary safeguard, I moved to insert the word "published" before the word "book," and the motion was carried with the laughter of the knowing for its accompaniment.

The club was very modest in its beginnings. As its const.i.tuent members were mainly persons possessed of no money, so the club had none. For a time our meetings were held at the houses of members--Lawrence Hutton's, Dr. Youmans's, Richard Grant White's, and so on. But as not all of us were possessed of homes that lent themselves to such entertainment, we presently began meeting at Sieghortner's and other restaurants. Then came a most hospitable invitation from the Tile Club, offering us the use of their quarters for our meetings. Their quarters consisted, in fact, of a kitchen in the interior of a block far down town--I forget the number of the street. The building served Edwin A. Abbey as a studio--he had not made his reputation as an artist then--and the good old Irishwoman who cared for the rooms lived above stairs with her daughter for her sole companion. This daughter was Abbey's model, and a portrait of her, painted by his hand, hung in the studio, with a presentation legend attached. The portrait represented one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen. It was positively ravis.h.i.+ng in its perfection. One day I had occasion to visit the place to make some club arrangement, and while there I met the young lady of the portrait.

She was of sandy complexion, freckled, and otherwise commonplace in an extreme degree. Yet that exquisitely beautiful portrait that hung there in its frame was an admirably faithful likeness of the girl, when one studied the two faces closely. Abbey had not painted in the freckles; he had chosen flesh tints of a more attractive sort than the sandiness of the girl's complexion; he had put a touch of warmth into the indeterminate color of her pale red hair; and above all, he had painted intelligence and soul into her vacuous countenance. Yet the girl and the portrait were absolutely alike in every physical detail.

I have not wondered since to learn that the husbands of high-born English dames, and the fathers of English maidens have been glad to pay Abbey kings' ransoms for portraits of their womankind. Abbey has the gift of interpretation, and I do not know of any greater gift.

[Sidenote: Dime Novels]

The rear building in which we met by virtue of the Tile Club's hospitality was approached through an alleyway, or covered gallery rather, concerning which there was a tradition that two suicides and a murder had been committed within its confines.

"How inspiring all that is!" said John Hay one night after the traditions had been reported in a peculiarly prosaic fas.h.i.+on by a writer of learned essays in psychology and the like, who had no more imagination than an oyster brings to bear upon the tray on which it is served. "It makes one long to write romantic tragedies, and lurid dramas, and all that sort of thing," Mr. Hay went on. "I'm sorely tempted to enter upon the career of the dime novelist."

This set us talking of the dime novel, a little group of us a.s.sembled in front of the fire. Some one started the talk by saying that the dime novel was an entirely innocent and a very necessary form of literature.

There John Hay broke in, and Edwin Booth, who was also present, sustained him.

"The dime novel," Mr. Hay said, "is only a rude form of the story of adventure. If Scott's novels had been sufficiently condensed to be sold at the price, they would have been dime novels of the most successful sort. Your boy wants thrill, heroics, tall talk, and deeds of derring-do, and these are what the dime novelist gives him in abundance, and even in lavish superabundance. I remember that the favorite book of my own boyhood was J. B. Jones's 'Wild Western Scenes.' His 'Sneak' was to me a hero of romance with whom Ivanhoe could in no way compare."

"But dime novels corrupt the morals of boys," suggested some one of the company.

"Do they?" asked Mr. Hay. Then a moment later he asked: "Did you ever read one of them?"

The interrupter admitted that he had not.

"Till you do," said Mr. Hay, "you should hesitate to pa.s.s judgment. The moral standards of the dime novel are always of the highest. They are even heroic in their insistence upon honor and self-sacrifice in behalf of the right. They are as chivalric as the code of honor itself. There is never anything unclean in the dime novel, never anything that even squints at toleration of immorality. The man beset by foes is always gallantly supported by resolute fellows with pistols in their hands which they are ready to use in behalf of righteousness. The maiden in trouble has champions galore, whose language may not always square itself with Sunday School standards, but whose devotion to the task of protecting innocence is altogether inspiring."

"What about their literary quality?" asked some one in the group.

"It is very bad, I suppose," answered Edwin Booth, "but that isn't the quality they put to the front. I have read dozens, scores, hundreds of them, and I have never challenged their literary quality, because that is something to which they lay no claim. Their strength lies in dramatic situations, and they abound in these. I must say that some of them are far better, stronger, and more appealing than are many of those that have made the fortune of successful plays."

"Do you read them for the sake of the dramatic situations, Mr. Booth?"

some one asked.

"No. I read them for the sake of sleep," he replied. "I read them just as I play solitaire--to divert my mind and to bring repose to me."

LXII