Part 28

In 1873 Mr. Gilmore went to New York with his band, which became the Twenty-second Regiment Band of that city. He remained its leader up to the time of his death and made annual concert tours all over the country. It was my privilege to conduct several of these tours; in fact, I was his sole agent for booking his concerts until I was outbid by Mr. Blakely, who toured the band the four last years they were on the road. Gilmore’s Band, always one hundred strong, was at the head of all great public parades. Its appearance along the line of march was the signal for great outbursts of applause. Gilmore conceived the greatest and most popular schemes for hitting the music-loving as well as the patriotic masses. He was not a business man in the sense of loving to acquire money. In fact, he cared very little for money, but much for the fame of his band. He was a hard worker, and never left a rehearsal until everything was right. His musicians loved him and everybody respected him.

Once he and I were walking together down Broadway and were speaking of Parnell, who was then in New York and booked to speak in the Academy of Music in Brooklyn that evening. Mr. Beecher was to speak there also. Gilmore said to me:

“Major, do you know Mr. Beecher real well; I mean well enough to ask a favor? I want to get a seat on the stage to-night to hear him and Parnell, and it’s too late to think of securing a ticket.”

“Do I _know_ him?” I said.

Just then I saw Mr. Beecher coming up Broadway toward us. Our eyes met, but each pretended not to see the other, and we came together co-chunk! We squared off at each other, and so stood a few seconds, to the surprise of passers-by. Then came Mr. Beecher’s laugh of recognition, and I said:

“Mr. Beecher, to my surprise, _this man_, P. S. Gilmore, says he never met you and asks if I know you well enough to introduce him to you.”

“Well,” said Mr. Beecher, “I know Mr. Gilmore, but it’s quite evident that a man of his fair reputation and fame doesn’t know the company he is in.”

Mr. Beecher invited Mr. Gilmore to “come over early with Pond and take dinner, and if I get into the Academy you will.” So we were there at the great Parnell meeting, and Mr. Gilmore heard Mr. Beecher at his best, for that meeting is on record as an event in Mr. Beecher’s life.

I went home with Mr. Beecher, and he and I sat in his dining-room for some time over a light supper, I listening to his conversation on the topic of the evening just past. I left him at about eleven o’clock for my home at the Everett House, New York. Mr. Gilmore then resided in New York, at 61 West 12th Street. On my way home it occurred to me that possibly Mr. Gilmore had not yet finished his bottle of champagne, and so I rang his bell. It was just twelve o’clock. The colored boy opened the door and I asked if Mr. Gilmore were still up. He said, “Yes.” I walked back to the dining room, and there he stood, telling Mrs. Gilmore about his experiences of the evening. He turned to me, saying:

“Major, I’m glad you came in. I am telling Mrs. Gilmore that this evening has been the greatest of my life; that Mr. Beecher’s speech to-night should be carved in letters of gold and placed in every schoolroom throughout the entire land.”

Mr. Gilmore and I were fast friends up to the time of his death. He had many eccentricities, some of which retarded his success. He was the man and the only man who should have had the direction of the musical features at the Chicago Exposition. He was ignored, and the whole affair turned out a diabolical failure, as everybody at all versed in the management of musical affairs knew and felt at that time. It broke Mr. Gilmore’s heart to see so great an opportunity lost, and I believe that was one of the causes that hastened his death.

He left one of the finest musical libraries ever collected. I do not know who has it now. He had no successor. We have Sousa and his incomparable band, that is up to date and in keeping with the requirements of the time, but the two great leaders are not alike.

Gilmore, often seen plodding in the mud through the streets of Boston at the head of a score of musicians, then conceiving and carrying to successful termination the greatest musical jubilee ever known, and making Puritan Boston bow the knee to him, Irishman and Catholic though he was.

Sousa, an enlisted musician in the Marine Band at Washington, becoming its leader, then, through Mr. Gilmore’s former manager, starred with a band of his own, and rising year after year, through the popularity of his own compositions and charming personnel as a conductor, to the highest place as a musician, bandmaster, and composer--not like Gilmore, but like what he is, and no one else can be--Sousa.

Elbert Hubbard, editor of _The Philistine_, founder and owner of the Roycroft Shop in East Aurora, New York, is the most recent and unique development in the lecture field.

I wish that I were able to write of Mr. Hubbard as I should like, but as I cannot, I shall say nothing. He says it himself. I have read so many nice things of him in _The Philistine_, a few of them reprints from other papers, that I think the entire eulogistic field is exhausted. I am one of the subscribers who pay for those puffs that he prints about himself.

Notwithstanding all that, he is doing a mighty good work, and he is also letting the public into the secret about himself for a consideration. Not long ago he wrote me: “If I get down to business here and cut off all distractions, I can make a name equal to John Ruskin’s or Thomas Carlyle’s. _I can do it_, but I must keep out of sight in order to succeed. To merely talk is not to succeed, and the public is only a devil that takes a man to the top of the mountain and then casts him on the stones beneath. So make no more lecture engagements for me.” And so the lecture-going public will never know what it has lost.

Good luck to you, Elbert! A high ambition is the chief spur to success.

Mr. Hubbard has received great praise for many of his “Little Journeys to the Homes of Famous People,” and many of them are truly delightful; but, of course, visiting so many of these, he has been obliged to travel in all sorts of weather and at all seasons of the year. He must have visited the home of Robert Burns just at the breaking up of a hard winter or the opening up of spring, else his tracks could never have thrown up so much mud.

The proportionate success of Hubbard to some of the other men of the platform may be inferred from _The Philistine_ for April, 1900, where he says:

“The week before I was in Des Moines, Dean Stubbs exploited an audience in the same church. Stubbs had one hundred people; I had a thousand, with just $500 in the box office, that’s all. About an hour after the lecture the chairman of the committee snipped a clove, and declared that Stubbs wasn’t in it with me--a proposition I did not argue.”

In a later number of _The Philistine_ Mr. Hubbard went on to say:

“I see that Dean Stubbs of Ely is out with a letter in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, denying that he ever said that Major Pond was the original David Harum. In this letter the Dean takes occasion to say his regard for the Major is very great, and further, that he fully endorses Hall Caine’s project of placing in Westminster Abbey a memorial tablet to Major Pond. The leading literary men of England and several American authors also have made contributions for the purpose mentioned. All those who contribute will have their names on the tablet, too, and beneath will be these words, ‘It is he that hath made us and not we ourselves.’”

I was so elated to hear that the Dean had made nice mention of me, that I wrote to him, asking him to send me a copy of the _Pall Mall_, and here is his reply:

“Of course I did not write a letter to the _Pall Mall_ at all--on that or any other subject. I have not written a line about my American impressions in any English papers since my return, nor do I intend to do so.”

With this letter from the Dean of Ely, how am I to realize my blasted hopes of being immortalized in Westminster Abbey?

I travelled with Mr. Hubbard on a little starring tour last spring (March, 1900). Everywhere we went he had something nice to say to the porters, to the baggagemen, the hackmen, the street-car conductors, and the waiters in the hotels. He seemed incapable of hurting any one’s feelings. Everybody was in love with him. His is a remarkable personality. But when he gets set down by himself with that caustic pen of his, the words of Scripture seem to take possession of him, and “Whom he loveth he chasteneth.”

I like the atmosphere of East Aurora and frequently visit the Roycroft Shop. It is an object lesson in industry, frugality, and nice manners. A common friend, writing from St. Louis, expresses a wonder that a man who naturally elicits so much adulation does not become conceited!

Hubbard had the largest money audience of any “one-man show” in New York last winter, and the readers of _The Philistine_ have been told all about it. That was his first New York audience.

When the Dean of Ely gave a course of five lectures in the Lyceum Theatre, New York, the first one was not very largely attended. The second audience was larger; the third larger still; and at the fifth, the capacity of the house was reached. This information I give here, as my friend Hubbard has never been furnished with box-office statements of that business. Yet, of the two, from a business standpoint, I would prefer the Roycroft man for a series of one-night stands over the country in cities where he has _never_ before appeared--and there are many such towns left.

Mr. Hubbard’s love of water and cleanliness is remarkable. Not satisfied with his daily morning baths, he wants them all through the day. As soon as he arrives at a hotel he must have his bath, and before starting out sight-seeing he wants another. Then on his return for luncheon he will take out his watch, and if there happens to be fifteen minutes to spare, he says, “Just time for a bath before luncheon,” and off he goes for his tub.

At the Roycroft Shop he has had a number of bathrooms built for the convenience of the employees. At first there was but one, and when Mr. Hubbard announced that any one could be excused from work, at any time, long enough to take a bath, the capacity of this one room was soon reached and the employees were found waiting in line for their turn. So this permission had to be withdrawn until additional bathrooms could be added. The supply of bathrooms is now adequate and appreciated, as well as remunerative, for it adds vigor and energy to the workers, and increases their earning capacity.

In a sequestered bend of the brook, a few hundred yards from the back door of the Roycroft Shop, is the Roycroft swimming hole, which reminds the passer-by of a frog pond on a spring day, for the male Roycrofters, old and young, can be seen and heard jumping into the water for the time being, until the curious visitor has passed beyond the range of view.

“Cleanliness is godliness,” says Hubbard. “This is part of our system of education.”

Mr. Hubbard is without question the most amphibious man I ever knew--a sort of human sea lion--and I must say that when I saw him plunging around in the swimming hole at East Aurora, I was struck with the resemblance of his eyes to the beautiful, large, mild, liquid eyes of the California sea lion.

AUTHOR READERS

Sir Edwin Arnold is only one of many notable people with whom I have enjoyed relations of a kindly and personal character, but the enduring friendship with which he has honored me has been one of the pleasantest features of my whole life.

Now that his public activity, in a personal sense, has ceased, one may measure his notable career by the large pathway it has blazed. He has had always the honors usually attendant upon an English literary career. Educated at two of the endowed schools, which in England are called “public,” and of a legal family, he won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1854, taking in 1852 the Newdigate prize for an English poem. He was a second master in King Edward VI. School at Birmingham, but was soon appointed Principal of the Government Sanscrit College at Roona, in the Bombay Presidency, and was also made a Fellow of the Bombay University. He remained until 1861, serving also as an editorial correspondent of English papers, when he returned to London as chief of the editorial staff of the London _Telegraph_, a position that he still holds (1900).

It is certainly true, and I have had many evidences of it, that Sir Edwin Arnold has been and still is a political writer, a power to be counted with in British affairs. To him, perhaps, as political writer and Asiatic scholar and poet, is far more due the beginnings of present British Imperialism as a political condition than to either Chamberlain, as statesman, or Kipling, as singer of the “Greater Englanders.” The leading articles of the _Telegraph_ have been a unique feature of that powerful journal, as much for the wide knowledge shown of imperial affairs as for the peculiarly rich and refulgent literary merit they display. English editorials, though keen and incisive in logic, are usually colorless as to rhetoric and illustration. Arnold’s leaders have been and continue the reverse of that.

His literary work and industry have also been as marked and extensive. His writings make a rich library, which covers much of Asiatic life. There are ten volumes dealing with Sanscrit, Hindoo, and Persian subjects. His output has not only been splendid, but great in quantity, and one wonders how, with his unremitting daily labors on the _Telegraph_ for the last forty years, he has been able to accomplish so much of permanent form and value.

The poet-editor, like all notable workers I have known, has orderly habits and hours. His editorial room at the _Telegraph_ office, Fleet Street, London, was a modest one, furnished in light oak and with walls of a soft gray tint. Sir Edwin has kept but few books there, because he needed them little for reference, his wonderful memory having always placed dates and facts at command.

Arnold has a contempt for fussiness and keeps the newspaper man’s faculty of being able to prepare copy under any circumstances. He was always at work during the period of my personal knowledge. When on his Japanese “vacation” he told me that he had “written some sixty-two columns in letters to the _Telegraph_, composed an epic poem longer than ‘The Light of Asia,’ and furnished articles besides for _Scribner’s Magazine_ that made a volume, learned to speak colloquial Japanese, and to write the Kata Kara character.” He added, “I was not so very idle, you will see, Major.” “The Light of the World” went to press without his reading the last proofs, and the correctness of copy this shows is characteristic of all his work. His editorial “leaders” went to the printer’s hand as he dropped his pen or ceased dictation.

He once said: “I do not at any time force poetry. I must be thoroughly in the mood. These moods come imperatively, but very irregularly. My method is this: either I write first, and roughly, on scraps of paper, or my daughter takes it down from my dictation--she is the only one who can do so for me--as I walk up and down the room and smoke. I put the rough notes in my pocket until the next day. Then I read the verse over and over, correct and copy all out myself, altering it very much, and filling it up. These scraps I enter into a sort of day book or ledger until the work is nearly finished. I treat the matter thus compiled as the rough draft. I go over it myself, polish it, and transcribe it into a second book, which may be called the poem itself, but still in a rough state. Then I copy it out again, and finally, in a fair manuscript for the printer. Every line of the poem, therefore, passes through my mind three or four times. Sometimes the lines are importunate and _will_ be at once registered. Reading, smoking, driving, dressing for dinner--it does not matter how I may be then engaged, the verses will haunt and fascinate me, dance before my imagination, demanding to be fixed; and I must catch them then and there or they will go. Sometimes the right ideas will come as suddenly as if by electric message.”

The popularity of Sir Edwin Arnold as a poet was more widespread in the United States than in his own country when, in 1886, I first approached him with the proposition to make a reading tour on this side of the Atlantic. It is quite singular to note how little personal and popular knowledge there is in Great Britain of the men who really mould intellectual thought. If we Americans do not personally know a man who has written books and sung poems for us, we do at least strive to know his face, by wide possession of a “counterfeit presentment.” In our land John G. Whittier’s portrait hangs on the walls of many thousands of what the English call “middle-class” homes; yet no English poet of equal rank finds such recognition in his own land. Tennyson and Browning are far more widely known among us by their pictures than they are in England. It was a constant surprise to Sir Edwin Arnold to find himself recognized and his poems so extensively known in the United States. When he left our shores for Japan, and later resumed his editorial and literary labors at home, he was not only better known and appreciated as a poet than he was when he came to us, but he was personally better known to more thousands of cultivated people here than he was to scores in England.

My earliest attempt to secure him for a lecture tour in this country was unsuccessful, as the following quotation from his first letter to me shows:

* * * * *

“42 DENMARK VILLA, WEST BRIGHTON, “December 31, 1886.

“I thank you for the compliment conveyed in your letter of the 25th, and it is my wish and intention to visit America. It would, however, be impossible for me to go there now.”

* * * * *

The poet-editor was familiar enough with the United States, by marriage tie and several visits here, to understand our lecture platform and audiences, as well as our habits of travel and our needs. Mrs. Arnold was a Miss Channing of Boston. The present Lady Arnold is a member of a prominent and cultured Japanese family, who has become one of the most popular hostesses in London.

After Stanley’s return to England at the conclusion of his most remarkable lecture tour (1890-91), the proposition to secure Sir Edwin was again broached, and was fully discussed between us, the Stanleys taking a very friendly interest in the matter and declaring that they would do all in their power to influence the poet’s decision. The accompanying letters show how thoroughly the great explorer fulfilled his promise, for under date of June 26, 1891, after writing relative to his pending lecture tour in Australia, he referred as follows to the Anglo-Indian poet, with whom I was then corresponding in relation to the proposed tour:

* * * * *

“I had Edwin Arnold to lunch the other day and we all did our best to induce him to make you his agent, but I find he has already engaged himself to another man--if he lectures, of which he is not assured yet.”

* * * * *

This was not very encouraging, but I am not easily discomfited. The negotiations proceeded, and an agreement was reached between the poet and myself. Stanley’s generous and constant interest is shown by this letter, written September 30, 1891:

* * * * *

“Yesterday Sir Edwin Arnold took tea with us, and naturally we talked of you and of his approaching departure for America. I do not think you need have any fear that he will fail. He has an unusually flexible voice, which is entirely at his command, admirably suited for the drawing-room or for the platform. It is at its best to-day. The way he manages it to attract, soothe, or excite, proves that were he not a first-class poet, he would make a first-class actor.

“I have often heard him make after-dinner speeches, wherein he is different from most men. He always contrives to express graceful sentiments appropriate to the occasion, uttered in those benevolent tones which leave you most kindly disposed toward him. You find his speech seemingly unstudied--and spoken right on, pleasing to the ear, as his expression charms the eye. He appears to be following a cue, which is to make every one feel pleasant and agreeable, and bereave them of unkindness toward one another. At a dinner, for instance, you never detect in him a consciousness that he has something to say which must be said, and that he bides his time to say it, meantime silently revolving the subject. No, his speech drops sweetly on the hearing, smooth, bland, and the guests look up wistful for more, for it is so apt, so rich in thought and charity. His memory is stored with the flowers of literature and the sweetest blossoms of poesy, and they are presented to his hearers with the grace that marks the learned gentleman.

“From this rapid sketch of Sir Edwin you have enough to measure him by. While he is in America he will only deem what is best in it worthy of his regard. He cannot forget that human nature is weak and vain, but he has a knack of shutting out observation of failings.”

* * * * *

It will be remembered, in passing, that Henry M. Stanley was sent to Africa by Sir Edwin’s paper, the London _Daily Telegraph_, and by the New York _Herald_.

I copy the last letter received from Sir Edwin before he sailed for America, as evidence of the spirit in which he came:

* * * * *

“DAILY TELEGRAPH OFFICE, “September 23, 1891.

“MY DEAR MAJOR POND:

“I have just received your kind and pleasant letter, and rejoice at your renewed health. I replied to it by a telegram indicating that although I cannot write anything new in the way of lectures, it will be very easy to put together from my prose and verse interesting discourses with poetical illustrations of ancient and modern India, Japan, etc. I enclose a rough sketch of the topics I would treat in this way. You need have no fear but that I shall hold and please your audiences.

“Best thanks for your very hospitable invitations as regards Miss Arnold. But I shall come quite alone, and shall put up at the Everett House, and always when we travel, as far as possible, at hotels. I have written to accept the very courteous invitation of the Lotos Club, but, as far as possible, I wish in America to preserve my time free from social interruption, and I shall ask you to help me in this.

“Kindly arrange that we may commence as soon as possible. But all these matters I gladly leave in your good hands.

“There will be just time, I think, for you to send me before I start some little sketch of what you have already planned.

“Yours always sincerely, “EDWIN ARNOLD.”

* * * * *

The engagement was for fifty “readings,” a descriptive word inadequate to express what he gave. The term “lecture” certainly does not apply to the delightful entertainment that Sir Edwin Arnold presented. The descriptive talk which accompanied each reading was so fresh and varied, and so full of the charm of scene and intimate knowledge, that it had almost the air of personal and fireside talks with his varied and delighted audiences. The man was felt so in it all--as traveller, observer, teacher, and poet--that you realized the atmosphere in which he had written, as well as the spirit of the poems which were its product.