Part 13

In the case of "A Man of Honor" the end was not yet. Mrs. Stannard's novel with that title and the footnote was still in its early months of American circulation when one day I found among the recently published English novels sent to me for examination one by John Strange Winter (Mrs. Stannard) entitled, "On March." Upon examining it I found it to be the same that the Harpers had issued with the "Man of Honor" title. I suppose that after the correspondence above referred to, Mrs. Stannard had decided to give the English edition of her work this new title, but had omitted to notify the Harpers of the change.

[Sidenote: A "Warlock" on the Warpath]

Mention of this matter of trouble with titles reminds me of a rather curious case which amused me at the time of its occurrence and may amuse the reader. In the year 1903 I published a novel entitled "The Master of Warlock." During the summer of that year I one day received a registered letter from a man named Warlock, who wrote from somewhere in Brooklyn. The missive was brief and peremptory. Its writer ordered me to withdraw the book from circulation instantly, and warned me that no more copies of it were to be sold. He offered no reason for his commands and suggested no explanation of his authority to give them. I wrote asking him upon what ground he assumed to interfere, and for reply he said briefly: "My grounds are personal and legal." Beyond that he did not explain.

He had written in the same way to the publishers of the book, who answered him precisely as I had done.

A month later there came another registered letter from him. In it he said that a month had passed since his demand was made and that as I had paid no heed to it, he now repeated it. He said he was armed with adequate proof that many copies of the book had been sold during that month--a statement which I am glad to say was true. There must now be a prompt and complete withdrawal of the novel from the market, he said.

This time the peremptory gentleman graciously gave me at least a hint of the ground upon which he claimed a right to order the suppression of the novel. He said I ought to know that I had no right to make use of any man's surname in fiction, especially when it was a unique name like his own.

As I was passing the summer at my Lake George cottage, I sent him a note saying that I should continue in my course, and giving him the address of a lawyer in New York who would accept service for me in any action he might bring.

For a time thereafter I waited anxiously for the institution of his suit. I foresaw a great demand for the book as a consequence of it, and I planned to aid in that. I arranged with some of my newspaper friends in New York to send their cleverest reporters to write of the trial. Charles Henry Webb--"John Paul," who wrote the burlesques, "St. Twelvemo" and "Liffith Lank"--proposed to take up on his own account Mr. Warlock's contention that the novelist has no right to use any man's surname in a novel, and make breezy fun of it by writing a novelette upon those lines. In his preface he purposed to set forth the fact that there is scarcely any conceivable name that is not to be found in the New York City directory, and that even a name omitted from that widely comprehensive work, was pretty sure to belong to somebody somewhere, so that under the Warlock doctrine its use must involve danger. He would show that the novelist must therefore designate his personages as "Thomas Ex Square," "Tabitha Twenty Three," and so on with a long list of mathematical impersonalities. Then he planned to give a sample novel written in that way, in which the dashing young cavalier, Charles Augustus + should make his passionate addresses to the fascinating Lydia =, only to learn from her tremulous lips that she was already betrothed to the French nobleman, Compte [Symbol: cube root]y.

Unhappily Mr. Warlock never instituted his suit; John Paul lost an opportunity, and the public lost a lot of fun.

By way of completing the story of this absurdity, it is worth while to record that the novel complained of had no personage in it bearing the name of Warlock. In the book that name was merely the designation by which a certain Virginia plantation was known.

XLIV

[Sidenote: "Pike County Ballads"]

During our early struggles to secure a place for _Hearth and Home_ in popular favor, I was seized with a peculiarly vaulting ambition. John Hay's "Pike County Ballads" were under discussion everywhere. Phrases from them were the current coin of conversation. Critics were curiously studying them as a new and effective form of literature, and many pious souls were in grave alarm over what they regarded as blasphemy in Mr. Hay's work, especially the phrase "a durned sight better business than loafin' round the throne," at the end of "Little Breeches."

I knew Mr. Hay slightly. Having ceased for a time to hold diplomatic place, he was a working writer then, with his pen as his one source of income. I made up my mind to secure a Pike County Ballad for _Hearth and Home_ even though the cost of it should cause our publishers the loss of some sleep. Knowing that his market was a good one for anything he might choose to write, I went to him with an offer such as few writers, if any at that time, had ever received, thinking to outbid all others who might have designs upon his genius.

It was of no use. He said that the price offered "fairly took his breath away," but told me with the emphasis of serious assurance, that he "could not write a Pike County Ballad to save his life." "That was what they call a 'pocket mine,'" he added, "and it is completely worked out."

He went on to tell me the story of the Ballads and the circumstances in which they were written. As he told me the same thing more in detail many years later, adding to it a good many little reminiscences, I shall draw upon the later rather than the earlier memory in writing of the matter here.

It was in April, 1902, when he was at the height of his brilliant career as Secretary of State that I visited him by invitation. In the course of a conversation I reminded him of what he had told me about thirty years before, concerning the genesis of the ballads, and said:

"I wonder if you would let me print that story? It seems to me something the public is entitled to share."

He responded without hesitation:

"Certainly. Print it by all means if you wish, and in order that you may get it right after all these years, I'll tell it to you again. It came about in this way: I was staying for a time at a hospitable country house, and on a hot summer Sunday I went with the rest to church where I sleepily listened to a sermon. In the course of it the good old parson--who hadn't a trace of humorous perception in his make-up, droned out a story substantially the same as that in 'Little Breeches.'

"As I sat there in the sleepy sultriness of the summer Sunday, in an atmosphere that seemed redolent of roasting pine pews and scorching cushion covers, I fell to thinking of Pike County methods of thought, of what humor a Pike County dialect telling of that story would have, and of what impression the story itself, as solemnly related by the preacher, would make upon the Pike County mind. There are two Pike Counties, you know--one in Illinois and the other confronting it across the river, in Missouri. But the people of the two Pike Counties are very much alike--isomeric, as the chemists say--and they have a dialect speech, a point of view, and an intellectual attitude in common, and all their own. I have encountered nothing else like it anywhere.

[Sidenote: John Hay's Own Story of the Ballads]

"When I left the church that Sunday, I was full to the lips of an imaginary Pike County version of the preacher's story, and on the train as I journeyed to New York, I entertained myself by writing 'Little Breeches.' The thing was done merely for my own amusement, without the smallest thought of print. But when I showed it to Whitelaw Reid he seized upon the manuscript and published it in the _Tribune_.

"By that time the lilt and swing of the Pike County Ballad had taken possession of me. I was filled with the Pike County spirit, as it were, and the humorous side of my mind was entertained by its rich possibilities. Within a week after the appearance of 'Little Breeches' in print all the Pike County Ballads were written. After that the impulse was completely gone from me. There was absolutely no possibility of another thing of the kind. When you asked me for something of that kind for _Hearth and Home_, I told you truly that I simply could not produce it. There were no more Pike County Ballads in me, and there never have been any since.

"Let me tell you a queer thing about that. From the hour when the last of the ballads was written until now, I have never been able to feel that they were mine, that my mind had had anything to do with their creation, or that they bore any trace of kinship to my thought or my intellectual impulses. They seem utterly foreign to me--as foreign as if I had first encountered them in print, as the work of somebody else. It is a strange feeling. Of course every creative writer feels something of the sort with regard to much of his work, but I, at least, have never had the feeling one-tenth so strongly with regard to anything else I ever did.

"Now, let me tell you," Mr. Hay continued, "of some rather interesting experiences I have had with respect to the ballads. One day at the Gilsey House, in New York, I received the card of a gentleman, and when he came to my room he said:

"'I am the son of the man whom you celebrated in one of your ballads as Jim Bludso, the engineer who stuck to his duty and declared he would "hold her nozzle agin the bank till the last galoot's ashore."'"

Mr. Hay added:

"This gave me an opportunity. Mark Twain had criticised the ballad, saying that Jim Bludso must have been a pilot, and not an engineer, for the reason that an engineer, having once set his engines going, could have no need to stay by them. In view of this criticism, I asked my visitor concerning it, telling him of what Mark Twain had said. For answer the caller assured me that the original Jim Bludso was in fact an engineer. He explained that as a Mississippi River steamboat has two engines, each turning an independent wheel, and as the current of the river is enormously swift, it was necessary for the engineer to remain at his post, working one engine and then the other, backing on one sometimes and going ahead on the other, if her nozzle was to be held 'agin the bank till the last galoot's ashore.'"

[Sidenote: Some Anecdotes from John Hay]

For reply to this I told Mr. Hay that I had seen in a Memphis cemetery a tombstone erected to a pilot, and inscribed with the story of his heroic death in precisely Jim Bludso's spirit. At the time that I read the inscription on it, "Jim Bludso" had not been written, but the matter interested me and I made inquiry for the exact facts. The story as I heard it was this: The boat being afire the pilot landed her, head-on against a bank that offered no facilities for making her fast with cables. The only way to get the "galoots ashore" was for the pilot to remain at his post and ring his engine bells for going ahead and backing, so as to "hold her nozzle agin the bank." But the flames were by that time licking the rear of the pilot house, and the captain frantically entreated the pilot to leap from the forward part of the structure to the deck below. This the heroic fellow refused to do so long as the safety of the passengers required his presence at his post. He stood there, calmly smoking his cigar and coolly ringing his bells as occasion required till at last every other human being on board had been saved. By that time the flames had completely enveloped the pilot-house, and there was left no possible way of escape. Then relinquishing his hold upon the wheel, the pilot folded his arms and stood like a statue until the floor beneath him gave way and he sank to a cruel death in the furnace-like fire below.

The details of the story were related to me by Captain John Cannon, of the steamer "Robert E. Lee," and the weather-beaten old navigator was not ashamed of the tears that trickled down his cheeks as he told the tale.

When I had finished, Mr. Hay said:

"That only means that we have two heroes to revere instead of one. Jim Bludso was an engineer."

Continuing his talk of coincidences, Mr. Hay said:

"I once went up to my native village, and as I walked along the street I accidentally jostled a man. When I apologized, he turned to me and said:

"'I ought to know you and you ought to know me, for your name's John Hay and mine's Jim Bludso. But I'm not the fellow you wrote that poetry about. He's very dead and you see I'm very much alive.'"

Then Mr. Hay told me of another curious encounter that connected itself with the Pike County Ballads.

"You remember," he said, "that it was from the sermon of an old minister that I got the story told in 'Little Breeches.' Well, when I was in California in company with President McKinley, I was one day visited by a venerable man who proved to be none other than the preacher from whose lips I had heard the original and authoritative prosaic version of that miracle story. It is curious how these coincidences occur."

The substance of this conversation with Mr. Hay was embodied in an article of mine in the New York _Herald_ for April 27, 1902. Proofs of the interview were sent to Mr. Hay in advance of publication, with my request that he should make such corrections in them as he saw fit. He returned the slips to me without an alteration and with a note saying; "I have no suggestions to make. Your report of our conversation is altogether accurate. I only wish I might have said something better worth printing."

That was the last time I saw John Hay. It was the end of an acquaintance which had been cordial, though not intimate, and which had extended over a period of thirty years. As I was leaving he stopped me. He took up a copy of the pamphlet containing his splendid tribute to the memory of President McKinley, inscribed it with his autograph, and handed it to me, saying, with a touch of sadness which was not quite melancholy:

"You care for my literary work. Perhaps in the coming years you will care to have, from my own hand, this copy of my latest and probably my last essay in that department of human endeavor."

The event verified his prophecy. He soon afterward fell ill, and in the year 1905 he died, affectionately regretted by every one who had ever known him personally and by scores of thousands who had known him only through his work.

[Sidenote: Mr. Hay's Personality]

John Hay's personal character was the foundation upon which all his successes, whether in journalism, literature, or statecraft were built. He was utterly sincere, as instinctively truthful as a child, and as gentle of spirit as any woman ever was. Those who knew him personally were never at a loss to account for the ease with which, in diplomatic matters, he won men to his wish and persuaded them to his point of view. Every one who came into contact with him was constrained by his gentle reasonableness to agree with him. His whole nature was winning in an extraordinary degree. Strong as he was in his own convictions, his assertion of them never took the form of antagonism. I really suppose that John Hay never said a thing in his life which aroused resentment--and that not because of any hesitation on his part to utter his thought but because of the transparent justice of the thought, and of his gently persuasive way of uttering it. His convictions were strong and there was enough of apostleship in his nature to prompt him to urge them on all proper occasions: but he urged them soothingly, convincingly, never by arrogant assertion or with obnoxious insistence.

Feeling no disposition to quarrel with anybody on his own account, he was always alert to make an end of other people's quarrels when opportunity of pacification came to him.

I remember an instance of this that fell under my own notice. During a prolonged absence of Mr. Whitelaw Reid from the country, Mr. Hay was left in control of the _Tribune_. I was not connected with any newspaper at the time, but was "running a literary shop" of my own, as Mr. Hay expressed it--writing books of my own, editing other people's books, advising a publishing firm, and writing for various newspapers and magazines. Now and then, when some occurrence suggested it, I wrote an editorial article for the _Tribune_, as I had done occasionally for a good many years before.

One day Mr. Hay asked me to call upon him with reference to some work he wanted me to do. After we had arranged all the rest of it, he picked up Jefferson Davis's "Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government," which had just been published.

"That is a subject," Mr. Hay said, "on which you can write as an expert. I want you, if you will, to review the book for the _Tribune_."

I objected that my estimate of Mr. Davis was by no means a flattering one, and that in a cursory examination which I had already given to his book, I had discovered some misrepresentations of fact so extraordinary that they could not be passed over in charitable silence. I cited, as one of these misrepresentations, Mr. Davis's minute account--expunged from later editions of the book, I believe--of the final evacuation of Fort Sumter and the city of Charleston--in which he gave an account of certain theatrical performances that never occurred, and of impassioned speeches made by an officer who was not there and had not been there for eight months before the time of the evacuation.

"So far as that is concerned," said Mr. Hay, "it makes no difference. As a reviewer you will know what to say of such things. Mr. Davis has put forward a book. It is subject to criticism at the hands of any capable and honest reviewer. Write of it conscientiously, and with as much of good temper as you can. That is all I desire."

I then suggested another difficulty. For a considerable time past there had been some ill feeling between the editor of the _Tribune_ and the publishers of Mr. Davis's book. The _Tribune_ did not review or in any way mention books published by that firm. On one occasion, when I had been asked to review a number of books for the paper, one of them was withdrawn on that account. I suggested to Mr. Hay that perhaps a review of Mr. Davis's book by one who had been thus warned of the situation might be a displeasing impertinence. He replied:

"I have had no instructions on that head. I know nothing about the ill feeling. Perhaps you and I may make an end of the trouble by ignoring it. Write your review and I will publish it."

[Sidenote: Mr. Hay and "The Breadwinners"]

One other thing I may mention here as perhaps of interest. When the anonymous novel, "The Breadwinners," appeared, it excited a good deal of comment because of the freedom with which the author presented prominent persons under a disguise too thin to conceal identity. The novel was commonly and confidently attributed to Mr. Hay, and some of the critics ventured to censure him for certain features of it. One night at the Authors Club, at a time when talk of the matter was in everybody's mouth, and when Mr. Hay's authorship of the work had well-nigh ceased to be in doubt, he and I were talking of other things, when suddenly he said to me:

"I suppose you share the general conviction with regard to the authorship of 'The Breadwinners.' Let me tell you that I did not write that book, though I confess that some things in it seem to justify the popular belief that I did."

The peculiar form of words in which he couched his denial left me in doubt as to its exact significance, and to this day that doubt has never been resolved. Of course I could not subject him to a cross-examination on the subject.

XLV

I have wandered somewhat from the chronology of my recollections, but this record is not a statistical table, and so it matters not if I wander farther still in pursuit of vagrant memories.

The mention of Mr. Hay's old preacher who had no sense of humor in his composition reminds me of another of like kind, who was seized with an ardent desire to contribute--for compensation--a series of instructive moral essays to _Hearth and Home_.

When asked by a member of the publishing firm to let him do so, I replied that I did not think the paper was just then in pressing need of instructive moral essays, but that the reverend gentlemen might send one as a sample. He sent it. It began thus:

"Some philosopher has wisely observed that 'every ugly young woman has the comforting assurance that she will be a pretty old woman if she lives long enough.' Doubtless the philosopher meant that a young woman destitute of physical beauty, with all its temptations, is sure to cultivate those spiritual qualities which give beauty and more than beauty to the countenance in later years."

And so the dear, innocent old gentleman went on for a column or so, utterly oblivious of the joke he had accepted as profound philosophy. I had half a mind to print his solemn paper in the humorous column entitled, "That Reminds Me," but, in deference to his age and dignity, I forbore. As is often the case in such matters, my forbearance awakened no gratitude in him. In answer to his earnest request to know why I thought his essay unworthy, I was foolish enough to point out and explain the jocular character of his "philosopher's" utterance, whereupon he wrote to my publishers, strongly urging them to employ a new editor, for that "the young man you now have is obviously a person of frivolous mind who sees only jests in utterances of the most solemn and instructive import."

As the publishers did not ask for my resignation, I found it easy to forgive my adversary.

[Sidenote: The Disappointed Author]

In view of the multitude of cases in which the writers of rejected contributions and the victims of adverse criticism are at pains to advise publishers to change their editors, I have sometimes wondered that the editorial fraternity is not continually a company of literary nomads, looking for employment. In one case, I remember, a distinguished critic reviewing a rather pretentious book, pointed out the fact that the author had confounded rare old Ben Jonson with Dr. Samuel Johnson in a way likely to be misleading to careless or imperfectly informed readers, whereupon not only the author but all his friends sent letters clamoring for the dismissal of a reviewer so lacking in sympathetic appreciation of sincere literary endeavor. When I told Mr. George Ripley of the matter he replied:

"Oh, that is the usual thing. I am keeping a collection of letters sent to Mr. Greeley demanding my discharge. I think of bequeathing it to the Astor Library as historical material, reflecting the literary conditions of our time."