Part 21

A roar of applause welcomed the suggestion, and Mr. Clemens proceeded to make the speech. In the course of it he spoke of the multitude of young authors who beset every publisher and beseech him for advice after he has explained that their manuscripts are "not available" for publication by his own firm, with its peculiar limitations. Most publishers cruelly refuse, he said, to do anything for these innocents. "I never do that," he added. "I always give them good advice, and more than that, I always do something for them--_I give them notes of introduction to Gilder_."

I am persuaded that many scores of the notes of introduction brought to me have been written in precisely that spirit of helpless helpfulness.

Sometimes, however, letters of introduction, given thoughtlessly, are productive of trouble far more serious than the mere waste of a busy man's time. It is a curious fact that most persons stand ready to give letters of introduction upon acquaintance so slender that they would never think of personally introducing the two concerned, or personally vouching for the one to whom the letter is given.

When I was editing _Hearth and Home_ Theodore Tilton gave a young Indiana woman a letter of introduction to me. He afterwards admitted to me that he knew nothing whatever about the young woman.

"But what can one do in such a case?" he asked. "She was charming and she wanted to know you; she was interested in you as a Hoosier writer"--the Indiana school of literature had not established itself at that early day--"and when she learned that I knew you well she asked for a letter of introduction. What could I do? Could I say to her, 'My dear young lady, I know very little about you, and my friend, George Cary Eggleston, is so innocent and unsophisticated a person that I dare not introduce you to him without some certificate of character?' No. I could only give her the letter she wanted, trusting you to discount any commendatory phrases it might contain, in the light of your acquaintance with the ways of a world in which letters of introduction are taken with grains of salt. Really, if I mean to commend one person to another, I always send a private letter to indorse my formal letter of introduction, and to assure my friend that there are no polite lies in it."

[Sidenote: Some Dangerous Letters of Introduction]

In this case the young woman did nothing very dreadful. Her character was doubtless above reproach and her reformatory impulses were no more offensive than reformatory impulses that concern others usually are. My only complaint of her was that she condemned me without a hearing, giving me no opportunity to say why sentence should not be pronounced upon me.

In her interview, she was altogether charming. She was fairly well acquainted with literature, and was keenly appreciative of it. We talked for an hour on such subjects, and then she went away. A week or so later she sent me a copy of the Indiana newspaper for which she was a correspondent. In it was a page interview with me in which all that I had said and a great deal that I had not said was set forth in detail. There was also a graphic description of my office surroundings. Among these surroundings was my pipe, which lay "naked and not ashamed" on my desk. Referring to it, the young woman wrote that one saddening thing in her visit to me was the discovery that "this gifted young man is a victim of the tobacco habit."

Worse still, she emphasized that lamentable discovery in her headlines, and made so much of her compassionate regret that if I had been an inmate of a lunatic asylum, demented by the use of absinthe or morphine, her pity could hardly have been more active.

I do not know that this exhibition of reformatory ill manners did me any serious harm, but it annoyed me somewhat.

When I was serving as literary editor of the _Evening Post_, a very presentable person came to me bearing a note of introduction from Richard Henry Stoddard. Mr. Stoddard introduced the gentleman as James R. Randall, author of "My Maryland" and at that time editor of a newspaper in Augusta, Georgia. Mr. Randall was a person whom I very greatly wanted to know, but it was late on a Saturday afternoon, and I had an absolutely peremptory engagement that compelled me to quit the office immediately. Accordingly, I invited the visitor to dine with me at my house the next day, Sunday, and he accepted.

Sunday came and the dinner was served, but Mr. Randall was not there. Next morning I learned that on the plea of Saturday afternoon and closed banks he had borrowed thirty-five dollars from one of my fellow-editors before leaving. This, taken in connection with his failure to keep his dinner engagement with me, aroused suspicion. I telegraphed to Augusta, asking the newspaper with which Mr. Randall was editorially connected whether or not Mr. Randall was in New York. Mr. Randall himself replied saying that he was not in New York and requesting me to secure the arrest of any person trying to borrow money or get checks cashed in his name. He added: "When I travel I make my financial arrangements in advance and don't borrow money of friends or strangers."

When I notified Stoddard of the situation, so that he might not commend his friend, "Mr. Randall," to others, I expressed the hope that he had not himself lent the man any money. In reply he said:

"Lent him money? Why, my dear George Cary Eggleston, what a creative imagination you must have! 'You'd orter 'a' been a poet.' Still, if I had had any money, as of course I hadn't, I should have lent it to him freely. As he didn't ask for it--probably he knew my chronic impecuniosity too well to do that--I didn't know he was 'on the borrow.' Anyhow, I'm going to run him to earth."

[Sidenote: Moses and My Green Spectacles]

And he did. It appeared in the outcome that the man had called upon Edmund Clarence Stedman, bearing a letter from Sidney Lanier--forged, of course. Stedman had taken him out to lunch and then, as he expressed a wish to meet the literary men of the town, had given him a note of introduction to Stoddard together with several other such notes to men of letters, which were never delivered. The man proved to be the "carpetbag" ex-Governor Moses, who had looted the state of South Carolina to an extent that threatened the bankruptcy of that commonwealth. He had saved little if anything out of his plunderings, and, returning to the North, had entered upon a successful career as a "confidence man." He was peculiarly well-equipped for the part. Sagacious, well-informed, educated, and possessed of altogether pleasing manners, he succeeded in imposing himself upon the unsuspecting for many years. At last, some years after my first encounter with him, he was "caught in the act" of swindling, and sent for a term to the Massachusetts state prison.

On his release, at the end of his sentence, he resumed his old business of victimizing the unsuspicious--among whom I was one. It was only a few years ago when he rang my door bell and introduced himself as a confidential employee of the Lothrop Publishing Company of Boston, who were my publishers. He had seen me, he said, during the only visit I had ever made to the offices of the company, but had not had the pleasure of an introduction. Being in New York he had given himself the pleasure of calling, the more because he wished to consult me concerning the artistic make-up of a book I then had in preparation at the Lothrops'.

His face seemed familiar to me, a fact which I easily accounted for on the theory that I must have seen him during my visit to the publishing house. For the rest he was a peculiarly agreeable person, educated, refined, and possessed of definite ideas. We smoked together, and as an outcome of the talk about cigars, I gave him something unusual. An indiscreetly lavish friend of mine had given me a box of gigantic cigars, each of which was encased in a glass tube, and each of which had cost a dollar. I was so pleased with my visitor that I gave him one of these, saying that it didn't often happen to a man who had anything to do with literature to smoke a dollar cigar.

At the end of his visit he somewhat casually mentioned the fact that he and his wife were staying at the Astor House, adding:

"We were anxious to leave for Boston by a late train to-night but I find it impracticable to do so. I've suffered myself to run short of money and my wife has made the matter worse by indulging in an indiscreet shopping tour to-day. I have telegraphed to Boston for a remittance and must wait over till it comes to-morrow. It is a very great annoyance, as I am needed in Boston to-morrow, but there is no help for it."

I asked him how much money was absolutely necessary to enable him to leave by the late train, which there was still time to catch, and after a moment of mental figuring, he fixed upon the sum of sixteen dollars and fifty cents as sufficient.

It was Sunday night and I had only a dollar or so in my pocket, but with a keenly realizing sense of his embarrassment, I drew upon my wife's little store of household change, and made up the sum required. He seemed very grateful for the accommodation, but before leaving he asked me to let him take one of those dollar cigars, to show to a friend in Boston.

About half an hour after he had left, I suddenly remembered him and identified him as Moses--ex-carpetbag governor of South Carolina, ex-convict, and _never_ ex-swindler. A few calls over the telephone confirmed my conviction and my memory fully sustained my recollection of the man. A day or two later he was arrested in connection with an attempted swindle, but I did not bother to follow him up. I acted upon the dictum of one of the most successful men I ever knew, that "it's tomfoolery to send good money after bad."

LX

[Sidenote: English Literary Visitors]

It was during the period of my withdrawal from newspaper work that Mr. Edmund Gosse made his first visit to this country. At that time he had not yet made the reputation he has since achieved for scholarship and literary accomplishment. As a scholar he was young and promising rather than a man of established reputation. As a writer he was only beginning to be known. But he was an Englishman of letters and an agreeable gentleman, wherefore we proceeded to dine him and wine him and make much of him--all of which helped the success of his lecture course.

I interrupt myself at this point to say that we do these things more generously and more lavishly than our kin beyond sea ever think of doing them. With the exception of Mark Twain, no living American author visiting England is ever received with one-half, or one-quarter, or one-tenth the attention that Americans have lavished upon British writers of no greater consequence than our own. If Irving Bacheller, or Charles Egbert Craddock, or Post Wheeler, or R. W. Chambers, or Miss Johnston, or Will Harben, or Thomas Nelson Page, or James Whitcomb Riley, or any other of a score that might be easily named should visit London, does anybody imagine that he or she would receive even a small fraction of the attention we have given to Sarah Grand, Mr. Yeats, Max O'Rell, B. L. Farjeon, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Mr. Locke, and others? Would even Mr. Howells be made to feel that he was appreciated there as much as many far inferior English writers have been in New York? Are we helplessly provincial or hopelessly snobbish? Or is it that our English literary visitors make more skilful use of the press agent's peculiar gifts? Or is it, perhaps, that we are more generous and hospitable than the English?

Mr. Gosse, at any rate, was worthy of all the attention he received, and his later work has fully justified it, so that nothing in the vagrant paragraph above is in any way applicable to him.

Mr. Gosse had himself carefully "coached" before he visited America. When he came to us he knew what every man of us had done in literature, art, science, or what not, and so far he made no mistakes either of ignorance or of misunderstanding.

"Bless my soul!" said James R. Osgood to me at one of the breakfasts, luncheons or banquets given to the visitor, "he has committed every American publishers' catalogue to memory, and knows precisely where each of you fellows stands."

Upon one point, however, Mr. Gosse's conceptions were badly awry. He bore the Civil War in mind, and was convinced that its bitternesses were still an active force in our social life. One night at the Authors Club I was talking with him when my brother Edward came up to us and joined in the conversation. Mr. Gosse seemed surprised and even embarrassed. Presently he said:

"It's extremely gratifying, you know, but this is a surprise to me. I understand that you two gentlemen held opposite views during the war, and one of the things my mentors in England most strongly insisted upon was that I should never mention either of you in talking with the other. It is very gratifying to find that you are on terms with each other."

"On terms?" said Edward. "Why, Geordie and I have always been twins. I was born two years earlier than he was, but we've been twin brothers nevertheless, all our lives. You see, we were born almost exactly on the line between the North and the South, and one fell over to one side and the other to the other. But there was never anything but affection between us."

[Sidenote: An Amusing Misconception]

On another occasion Mr. Joe Harper gave a breakfast to Mr. Gosse at the University Club. There were seventy or eighty guests--too many for anything like intimate converse. To remedy this Mr. Harper asked about a dozen of us to remain after the function was over, gather around him at the head of the table--tell all the stories we could remember, and "give Mr. Gosse a real insight into our ways of thinking," he said.

Gordon McCabe and I were in the group, and Mr. Gosse, knowing perfectly what each of us had written, knew, of course, that McCabe and I had fought on the Southern side during the Civil War. If he had not known the fact in that way he must have discovered it from the stories we told of humorous happenings in the Confederate service. Yet here we were, on the most cordial terms with men who had been on the other side. It was all a bewildering mystery to Mr. Gosse, and presently he ventured to ask about it.

"Pardon me," he said to Mr. Harper, "it is all very gratifying, I'm sure, but I don't quite understand. I think Mr. Eggleston and Mr. McCabe were in active service on the Southern side during the war?"

"Yes," answered Mr. Harper, "and they have told us all about it in their books."

"And the rest of you gentlemen sided with the North?"

"Yes."

"Well, it's very gratifying, of course, but it is astonishing to a stranger to find you all on such terms of friendship again."

"Isn't it?" broke in Mr. Harper. "Here we are, having champagne together quite like old friends, while we all know that only a dozen years or so ago, McCabe and Eggleston were down there at Petersburg trying with all their might to _kill our substitutes_."

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 "substitutes."

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 competition 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 fashion? 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 illustration of the hurtful, crippling, paralyzing provincialism that afflicts and obstructs our literary development.

A few years ago the principal 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 title under which a multitude 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 Mitchell, 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 scholarship does, to good, helpful, patriotic citizenship.

[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, classical, 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 fashion 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, assembled around Richard Watson Gilder's fireside, decided to organize an Authors Club in New York. They arranged for the drafting of a tentative constitution 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 constitution.

It was obvious in that little assemblage 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.