Chapter III (7)

William Dean Howells, Mark Twain always insisted, would be a success on the platform if he would ever consent to go lecturing, and on that recommendation, more than my love for his books, few of which I have ever read, I have used my persuasive eloquence on him more than on any other American author. I had other reasons for importuning Mr. Howells. One was because so many applications had come to me, year after year, from lyceums in all parts of the country, urging me to secure him and expressing wonder that he should refuse. Another was that every visit to the popular novelist increased my faith in the ultimate success of my object. He was always cordial and polite and seemingly pleased that there was so much of a desire on the part of the public to see and hear him, not knowing whether he could entertain them or not. He always seemed to reason very encouragingly from a business standpoint, going into details of probable results from a tour of from fifty to one hundred lectures, as compared with what he could earn by writing during the same length of time. He would like to try it, but there was the risk of health, and of giving up a certainty for what seemed to him an uncertainty. He felt sure that he could prepare a lecture that would please the people and give much information concerning the mysteries of his craft that he could not impart so well in any other way. He was more or less pessimistic concerning himself.

Finally there was some prospective change at _Harper’s Weekly_, to which he had regularly contributed so long, and to my delight, in the spring of 1899, he informed me that he would accept my offer, and that I might book fifty engagements for him to lecture, not more than four times a week, and not to go farther west than Kansas or Iowa. I think I never made an announcement that gave me more real inward satisfaction, for in all the years of my pursual of him I had come to learn his painstaking habit of devotion to his work, and that whatever he attempted would be sure of success.

When Mark Twain learned that Mr. Howells had at last consented to undertake a lecture tour, he wrote me:

* * * * *

“I am glad you have corralled Howells. He’s a most sinful man, and I always knew God would send him to the platform if he didn’t behave.”

* * * * *

He went to his country place in Maine to prepare his lectures. I received frequent letters from him telling me that he was taking easily to the work, and that I might feel satisfied that his lecture would meet the public approval. His first lecture, “The Heroes and Heroines of Fiction,” was given at my house.

His first public lecture was in Ypsilanti, Mich., for I had planned to make the long rides and distant cities before cold weather set in. Prevented by sickness from accompanying him myself, I sent another gentleman with him in my stead, and together they made a tour of the principal cities of the middle West. The newspaper criticisms of Mr. Howells’ lectures were fine, and everywhere that he went he found large and enthusiastic audiences. He endeared himself to his hearers. A gentleman in Des Moines, Ia., after Mr. Howells’ lecture there, sat down and wrote me a letter, from which I quote:

* * * * *

“DEAR MR. POND:

“I am led to address you in this familiar way out of the enthusiastic pleasure which I have enjoyed over the visit of Mr. Howells, and I have thought it would be pleasing to you to know that his reception here was enthusiastic and appreciative. It was my good fortune to have him, with President McLean of the State University, and Major Byers of this city, at a little one o’clock lunch at my home on Wednesday, 1st inst., and his stay there will always be remembered by us as a delight. He is one of the sweetest tempered and most lovable men that I have ever known. The trait which, perhaps, first becomes noticeable when you have met him is his absolute honesty and faithfulness to the truth, and he carried out this principle in his lecture by making it not alone an effort to please, but by giving us an hour of the most valuable instruction. It is not necessary for me to enlarge upon the importance of this in a day so prolific of novels, and when it is so important that our novel reading should be well directed. Mr. Howells created a splendid impression in Des Moines, and has left the literary life of our city decidedly the better for his presence.”

* * * * *

The cordiality of the people he met throughout those middle Western States was almost too much for Mr. Howells. He wrote me from Emporia, Kansas:

* * * * *

“I had a great house--1,300 or 1,400--last night here, and only less quick and keen than in Topeka, where it was perfect. But I cannot stand the racket. I cannot sleep without drugs, and I will ask you not to make any more dates for me after Hamilton, if you can get me there; for I cannot promise to fill these; and I don’t want to disappoint people. It is the _kindness_ (as I foresaw) that kills. I _cannot_ refuse people’s hospitality, and it is simply disastrous.”

* * * * *

On his return to New York he brought up the subject again, by writing me:

* * * * *

“The trouble with lecturing is the social side, which is essentially a part of it, and a very pleasant part. If I could lecture every night (which I cannot) and arrive every day too late for an afternoon reception, and get away as soon as I read my paper, it would be fine, but that is impossible.”

* * * * *

This tour, I believe, brought a great deal of pleasure and profit to the novel-reading public (and whom does that term not include?) who had their first opportunity to hear the greatest realist in American fiction explain the technique of his profession. It seems, too, that some of the experiences were an education to Mr. Howells, who wrote me:

* * * * *

“Grinnell was my first glimpse of the real West, and it is simply stupendous. The beauty and richness of the country are marvellous. Co-education is the true thing for the West. I have never met brighter minds than among the women members of the faculty. What charming people, all!”

* * * * *

But he got homesick for New York and his desk, and some weeks before the tour was completed, he countermanded his request to make engagements for him only every other day, and asked me to crowd in all the dates possible in November, so as to let him off early in December.

Although in haste to escape from what he termed “the worst slavery I ever imagined,” and to get back to his writing, he called a halt at Hamilton, Ohio, the town of his early boyhood. How much human nature and “boy” nature the following few words reveal:

* * * * *

“Hamilton is my ‘Boy’s Town’ and I wish to go there on almost any terms. I could lecture there the night after Cincinnati, and I should like a day off there afterward.”

* * * * *

He did stop off there, and preceding his regular lecture on “The Novel and Novel Writing,” he delighted the people of Hamilton with some of his autobiographical reminiscences. The town was proud of him, if one may judge from the extended reports that appeared in the local papers.

I have since made several attempts to induce Mr. Howells to fill lecture engagements and thus give pleasure to the many people who are constantly applying to me for him, but his prejudice against the platform seems adamantine. Here is a record of one such futile attempt:

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(Dict.) “May 24, 1900.

“MY DEAR MR. HOWELLS:

“Will you go to Wilmington, Del., and lecture for $350? I should think it would be splendid recreation for you. There are a great many people who have died for the want of platform ozone.”

“Sincerely yours, “J. B. POND.”

“Mr. W. D. Howells, 40 West 59th St., N. Y.”

* * * * *

“40 WEST 59TH ST., May 24, 1900.”

“MY DEAR MAJOR:”

“I am not quite hungry enough yet. But I appreciate your kindness, and I wonder at Wilmington.”

“Yours truly, “W. D. HOWELLS.”

* * * * *

I wanted to say something of Mr. Howells--better than I knew how to write--so I asked my friend, Mr. George W. Cable, to write it for me, and here is what he has to say:

* * * * *

Nearly twenty years ago, Mr. Thomas Sargent Perry wrote of Mr. Howells: “He has made over the American novel, taught it gracefulness and compactness, and has given it a place in literature along with the best of modern work.” This was far from the first word of praise and appreciation evoked by Mr. Howells, who, as editor of a leading literary magazine, as poet and as novelist, had already firmly established himself in the ranks of the writers of to-day. And since his name first became known it has grown constantly more familiar and more loved, until to-day it is regarded as that of the most typically American of American writers, without a rival in his particular field of work.

This field of work has been the subject of more or less discussion among his readers, regarding its merits and demerits. But however much discussion there may be, as to the subject he has chosen, there can be absolutely no doubt as to the excellency of his treatment of it. He has chosen, as Thomas Wentworth Higginson tells us: “To look away from great passions, and rather to elevate the commonplace by minute touches.” He began by throwing aside all the meaningless conventionalities that then hung around the novel, boldly asserting that, “As for him, he was a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles--an observer and a portrayer of the trivial commonplaces of life.” Yet in truth he is far more than this; to quote Mr. Perry again, Mr. Howells touches the reader’s shoulder and points out the beauty hidden in simple actions, the pathos lurking beneath seemingly indifferent words--in short, the humanity of life.”

To “paint the thing as he sees it” has been and is ever Mr. Howells’s chief aim in his work. And because of his patient, conscientious adherence to this principle, he gives us life, his characters are not puppets, conjured from a wild imagination and moved mechanically by strings, but living, human men and women, such as we meet any and every day--very ordinary, perhaps, and at times even uninteresting, except that, as Browning has it:

“We’re made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we’ve passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see.”

It is as the leading exponent of realism in art that Mr. Howells stands to-day--for realism as opposed to romanticism, for living interest in the world around us instead of a vague, fanciful dreaming about the past. Mr. Howells himself has told us that we cannot have romanticism back because we live now in an age of hopeful doing and striving, not of mere dreaming. “Like Tolstoi and Ibsen,” some one has written of him, “his types are drawn directly from the reality he knows, and have no prototypes in fiction. All romantic traditions are discarded and the story moves on, not only with the strictest regard for probability, but with the inevitableness of life itself.”

His “heavenly scorn” for conventions and traditions, for all that is second hand or sham, and his conscientious desire to set forth the truth and to show us life as he knows it, are the fundamental bases of his success. Yet I think he has become endeared to the American people even more through his pure, unqualified Americanism--his “contemporaneousness,” as Boyesen calls it, when he says, “That good-natured disrespect toward the past, that humorous tolerance of amusing shams, that large-hearted sympathy and kindliness toward all humanity, which are the most characteristic qualities of the American people, have never before found so typical a representative in American literature.” His men and women are not only real men and women of to-day, they are American men and women; and if he has been censured for giving us frivolous, inconsequent, nervously silly women, it is, as some one has said, because, “the vain and weak women intrude themselves a good deal in real life, while the Olive Hallecks and Penelope Laphams are content to keep a post of quiet observation farther back.” His fine, pure, unselfish women are not wanting any more than are his strong, noble men. He is too keen an observer to fail to recognize their existence even in the “everyday world” that he depicts, but his all-pervading humor ferrets out weakness and inconsequence and folly, exposing them, not in an unfriendly way, but with a generous, sympathetic smile that makes even his victims smile with him.

Still, even this kindly humor is far less noticeable in his later work than in his early writing. It has rather broadened into a large human sympathy, a genial love of his kind, and a keen appreciation of their merits as well as of their faults. When he moralizes, as he sometimes does, it is, as some one has said, in an “open and fearless treatment of the living problems of the hour.... Underlying each of his later works is the thought of a perfect brotherhood.”

To quote Thomas Sargent Perry again, than whose appreciation of Mr. Howells I know of none finer: “That he has delighted us all, we all know. He has shown us how genuine, how full of romance, is the life about us which seems sordid and has a fine reputation for sordidness. It is the tone of the author’s mind that makes the mark upon that of the reader, and who that knows Mr. Howells’s work does not feel that he learns new sympathies and gentler judgment from his generosity and careful study?”

Mr. Howells is not only one of the most prolific of all imaginative American writers of the first rank, but within the last ten years or so he has come to be regarded as one of the foremost authorities, if not the very first, in the criticism of current poetry and romance. Hundreds of thousands of readers put themselves under the inspiration and leading of his printed talks upon books and writers of the day, and while he has been to our vast reading public one of the least seen of literary Americans, no portrait is better known than his, no man’s utterance upon any subject of literary value is more widely or eagerly considered. All the more emphatically is this latter statement true of the subjects he has now chosen for his public lectures. These themes are peculiarly his own, and the opportunity to see the very face and hear the living voice of the man himself is one that, it may safely be predicted, the whole book-loving element of American society will avail itself of with a keen and affectionate delight.

G. W. CABLE.

Northampton, Mass., July, ’99.

* * * * *

I want Mr. Howells to live to a good old age, as long as the great war horses of the platform lived. The people want to see and hear him most of all. Here is what his friend, Mark Twain, said of lecturing at the close of the American end of his tour around the world:

“Lecturing is gymnastics, chest-expander, medicine, mind healer, blues destroyer, all in one. I am twice as well as I was when I started out. I have gained nine pounds in twenty-eight days, and expect to weigh six hundred before January. I haven’t had a blue day in all the twenty-eight.”

George William Curtis has filled, as no other American man of letters of this generation, the ideal of clear intellect, pure taste, moral purpose, chivalry of feeling, and personal refinement and grace. The grace and culture he possessed were as natural as his courtesy and his faith in mankind. They were ingrained as part of his being, wrought into every strain and making the strands of his everyday life.

From the moment of his entrance into public life as a speaker, now nearly fifty years ago, he entirely satisfied the higher conception of purity, dignity, and sweetness. He was a lecturer of beautiful presence and was superbly artificial, yet this artificiality was natural. His hair and beard were a beautiful silver-gray, his face was pale, his manner studied, his voice cultivated. It was as enjoyable to hear him as to listen to an opera, and was a lesson in grand manners and elocution.

His voice, like his manners and appearance on the platform, was ideal--clear, bell-like, silvery. He could be heard in the largest of halls without apparently any special effort. It was a delight to listen; every syllable was distinct, yet there was no strain. The enunciation was perfect. The matter of his speeches was like the sound, perfect in sense, clear in meaning, as graceful as the speaking, and always carrying the sense of conviction to the hearers.

A gentleman, and exclusive in bearing, Curtis was, nevertheless, profoundly democratic. He believed in his fellowmen--that was the essence of his democracy--and, like Wendell Phillips, he illustrated in his manners and greeting that the noblest refinement was in all senses a part of the most complete faith in republican doctrine and in the essential equality of human beings. For twenty years Mr. Curtis commanded the highest fees--about the same as Gough, Beecher, and Phillips. He always read his lectures from carefully prepared manuscripts.

MISCELLANEOUS Henry Watterson I have known for the twenty-five years that he has been coming to the Everett House, New York. I think I know him better than many of those who count themselves intimate acquaintances and friends. My office has been his headquarters most of that time, where he has been in the habit of meeting all classes of political leaders, newspaper managers, and editors, and where have been discussed all progressive schemes in the interest of telegraph news, printing machinery, paper manufacture, and advancement in industry of all kinds, political, social, scientific, and for the general good in all directions.

A Democratic leader and editor of the most influential paper in the South, he has counted such men as Greeley, Raymond, James, Whitelaw Reid, Dana, McGill, and John Swinton among his nearest friends and advisers. He was looked upon by his political opponents as one of the safest of their advisers. I think Henry Watterson has had the entrée to the White House during every administration since Grant’s, excepting Hayes, although I hardly think he and President Cleveland were over fond of each other.

There are conditions under which a close friend of the Colonel can learn all about him--his remarkable social experiences, especially among the men and women of the lyric and dramatic stage. At one time he knew every great actor, actress, singer, and manager in the English-speaking world, and they were all his friends.

Colonel Watterson has been a successful lecturer during the last two decades and has covered as much territory as any other man. He is equally popular in New England and in the South; is a favorite in Texas, California, Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa, and all the Western States. He has given his lecture on “Abraham Lincoln” before crowded houses in Southern cities where, when he was a rebel captain, he would joyfully have directed the Federal President’s execution.

Until 1894 he conducted the councils of his party in all national conventions, and has wielded an influence more potent in the advancement of the Democratic party than any other man of his time.

He is a charming man personally, honest, kind-hearted, and sincere in every way (except at poker: I have known him to rake in all the chips in a three-round jack-pot, and raise out five good players--a Vice-President of the United States, a governor of a State, and three United States Senators--on a bobtail flush). His friends are legion. As a public speaker I think he is as bad as he is charming in private conversation. The secret of his universal popularity is his own magnificent self.

The Hon. William Parsons, a Dublin barrister, was a splendid representative of a school of literary and historical lecturers, who, like Dr. John Lord, followed the platform as a profession. Taking him all in all, Mr. Parsons was decidedly the most satisfactory man to manager and audiences alike that has come from abroad. His taking presence, charming manners, and well-equipped brain, admirably furnished, his ease of speech and pleasant, well-trained voice, together with his ready wit and careful scholarship, made him a favorite always during the twelve years he was continuously coming here for the lecture season. But his voice was his best tool; it never wore on himself or tired his hearers.

From 1873 to 1884, the Hon. William Parsons made annual lecture tours in America. Next to Gough, he was about the first one to be booked for the following season wherever he appeared. Generally he returned after the close of a lecture tour with his time for the following season all booked solid and contracts in his pocket. His lectures were biographical.

William E. Gladstone could not be prevailed upon to undertake a lecture tour in America. I made him a final otter of £4,000 for twenty lectures. Of course he did not accept it; yet, if he had only known the reception he would have gotten in America, and the anxious, almost feverish desire that there was on the part of the people to see and hear him, I think he would have been inclined to run across. There is no auditorium in this country that he could not have filled nightly at big prices. But possibly the fear also of the reception may have influenced his negative. It certainly did affect John Bright in the series of refusals he made to my several suggestions.

I met Mr. Gladstone three times at his home in London and submitted propositions for a tour of fifty lectures. He did not discourage me at first, but later on said that he thought he was too old to make the trip. “Besides,” he added, “why should I go to America? Don’t all Americans come to see me?” I give the letter Mr. Gladstone sent me in reply to my last:

* * * * *

“DEAR SIR: I have to acknowledge the receipt of your letter, with all the kindness it expresses, and the dazzling proposals which it offers. Unhappily my reply lies not in vague expressions of hope, but in the burden of seventy years, and of engagements and duties beyond my strength, by the desertion of which, even for the time needed, I should really be disentitling myself to the good will of the people of America, which I prize so highly.

“I remain, dear sir, Your most faithful servant, W. E. GLADSTONE.”

“February 7, 1880.

“TO MAJOR J. B. POND, Boston, U. S. A.”

* * * * *

On two occasions I breakfasted with Mr. Gladstone at his Harley Street house. He was very much interested in my stories of Western frontier life, and asked if I had any objections to having a stenographer sit behind a screen and take down the “stories.” So on my third visit we sat down to breakfast and I talked. I had been thinking all the night before and all the morning on my way to his house what I would say, but when once seated at the table, somehow, unconsciously, I was going on at a great rate, giving experiences of my Western life, all drawn out of me by Mr. Gladstone’s fascinating way of doing things. It was one o’clock when we rose from the table. He said: “Major Pond, I cannot tell you how interesting your visit has been to me. I thank you for it.” The reporter was concealed behind a screen very near. I have looked for the stories in print, but I never found them.

P. T. Barnum I first saw in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, in 1853. The agitation over the Maine Law had excited the then new and farthest Western State, Wisconsin, and there was a movement on foot to have the Maine Law passed by the State Legislature. Many speakers were secured from the East, among whom were Mrs. Fowler, Mrs. S. R. I. Bennett, P. T. Barnum, and another gentleman, a famous agitator, whose name I forget. This party travelled in a two-horse carriage from town to town, holding temperance meetings and making speeches. I know that I walked with my father from Alto to Fond du Lac (twenty miles) to see and to hear “the great humbug,” Barnum. I remember Darling’s Hall was packed. The women speakers, to my eye, seemed very beautiful. I remember that the hair of one hung in long ringlets down each side of her face and neck, and her shoulders and arms were bare! She was very picturesque.

Then came the first gentleman, whom I didn’t care for; but at last came Barnum, “the humbug.” The first handclapping and cheers that I ever remember hearing were for Barnum. I didn’t understand what it was all about. A handsome, medium-sized man, in dark trousers, white vest, and a black sack coat, smooth shaven, with a wealth of curly black hair, and a smile all over his face, stepped forward on the platform. He prefaced his remarks by saying:

“Yes, I am a ‘humbug,’ but the cause which I have championed in company with these friends is sincere. That is no humbug. I have consented to accompany them throughout your State to help, if possible, in establishing a law in this young State that may save thousands and tens of thousands from ruin. You have laws for the prevention of murder and of theft and of all other crimes, but no law for the prevention of a man’s stealing and wasting his earnings in strong drink and impoverishing his family.”

He made a very eloquent appeal to our people, and closed his speech by reassuring his friends that he was no humbug, “but look out next year. I expect to send a show into this country. Then you may get humbugged.” He retired with more cheers and applause. The next year Barnum’s woolly horse was exhibited throughout the West, and everybody _was_ humbugged. My father, at great sacrifice, took all his family, and all the settlement did likewise. I didn’t see him after that until 1875 or 1876.

While I was associated with Mr. Redpath in Boston I engaged Mr. Barnum to give twenty lectures on temperance in New England, paying him $2,000 and his expenses. His first lecture was in Music Hall, Boston, in the Redpath Lyceum Course, before a very large audience.

The day he arrived at Boston I met him and Mrs Barnum, his new young wife, at the station. Each had small handbags. I asked him if he had any large baggage. He said they had none, excepting what they carried in their hands. I started to pilot them to a carriage, when Mr. Barnum said: “We will walk to the Parker House. It is not necessary to go to the expense of a carriage.” I accompanied him on his tour through New England, where he lectured in all the large towns, and he would never allow his manager to incur an extra expense for any unnecessary comfort. He was the most prudently economical man that I have ever known. It made no difference to him who paid the expenses. If they were unnecessary, he didn’t want them incurred. Invariably he walked from the station to the hotel. In business relations with him afterward I found that same rigid economy in all his dealings.

He told me that the large full sheet lithograph of his own head cost him a little less than a cent and a half each; I could not have got them at the time for less than eight cents. He also told me that his book, “The Life of P. T. Barnum,” a bound volume of several hundred pages, was printed in Buffalo, and cost him a trifle over nine cents each and sold for a dollar; but he bought a million copies both of the book and of his lithograph. He always arranged to have his colored show bills made so as to answer the same purpose from one year to another. He seldom had a new drawing made, but, with the introduction of modern type descriptive bills, he could border the old colored posters and make a fine display. He had bill-posting reduced to a fine art. He claimed that there was only one liquid a man could use in excessive quantities without being swallowed up by it, and that was printer’s ink.

His house in Bridgeport was a museum of itself. All the gems of the old museum that were of extraordinary interest as curios were to be seen there. Although he cared nothing especially for rare paintings, the things that he gathered about him seemed designed to attract the eye rather than the ear or the finer qualities of the mind. His band was composed of the cheapest musicians that could be hired. For his side shows he engaged people personally. I remember a man who had a special act of some kind that rather attracted Barnum’s interest as a feature for a side show. The man spoke of a woman he knew with whom he did a double act which made a great hit. Mr. Barnum at once asked if she were his wife. The man said, “No.”

“Well,” says Barnum, “you must fix that. You will have to make arrangements to occupy the same berth in the sleeping car. We put four people in a section.”

Once I told Mr. Barnum of an experience a friend of mine had at his show in Milwaukee. There was a big crowd around the ticket wagon, but he got through it and called for eight tickets, holding out a $50 bill to the agent, who seized it, handed him eight tickets and a wad of money. After he got out of the crowd and counted his money he found that he was $20 short, and of course that spoiled the enjoyment of the show for him. He seated his party, went back, and waited for an opportunity to get to the box office. The ticket seller just politely bluffed him off, insisting that he got his right change, and one or two “bouncers” around the office hustled the man away. Of course there was no recourse for him whatever. The story seemed to make no impression on Barnum at all. He simply said, “That was nothing; my man pays $5,000 a year for the privilege of selling tickets at my show.” I asked him if that was the custom, and he said it was with all circuses and big shows on the road; that the privilege of selling tickets was awarded to the highest bidder. For years he had never let it for less than $2,500. I afterward learned that that was indeed the custom.

Mr. Barnum frequently gave me passes to his show, written out in his own handwriting and always on the cheapest kind of paper. I wish I had kept some of them. I have had as many as a dozen of them in my pocket at one time.

He and I were one day sitting in the show in Boston a few minutes before the time for the performance to begin. The show peddlers came along crying, “Lemonade! Lemonade!” and, not recognizing Mr. Barnum, shouted in his face. Mr. Barnum said to them:

“Go to the other part of the show. I don’t want you to peddle these things anywhere within my hearing.”

That afternoon one of the Amazons in the great Amazon march, which was a feature that year, was run over and killed by a chariot near the entrance of the ring. Mr. Barnum did not move, and I said:

“That is dreadful, isn’t it?”

“Oh,” he replied, “there is another waiting for a place. It is rather a benefit than a loss.”

I think I never knew a more heartless man or one who knew the value and possibilities of a dollar more than P. T. Barnum. I am told he left a very handsome fortune. He cut always with a gold knife. A more plausible, pleasant-speaking man was never heard. It was as good as the show itself to listen to him in conversation. He was familiar with every slightest detail of his great performance.

I said to him once: “You utilized Jumbo’s stampede in the Zoological Gardens, London, to pretty good advantage as an advertisement.”

Barnum replied: “We did nothing. We could not help it. I had been to a thousand dollars’ expense sending men to India, and had sketches made of the scene of capturing this immense beast, and had started my man to Buffalo with drawings and orders for the printing when I saw in the papers that Jumbo refused to leave the garden, and that there was a general uprising of the children of London, who were making a protest against his going. I had a cable proposition to buy him back, but I didn’t sell. It never cost me a cent to advertise Jumbo. It was the greatest free advertising I ever heard of.”

Mr. George H. Daniels, general passenger agent of the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad, is a many-sided man who has added a new subject to the lecture platform.

It is somewhat surprising that although almost every conceivable phase of art, literature, science, invention, adventure, and philanthropy has been treated by lyceum lecturers, the almost limitless subject of the evolution of facilities for rapid and luxurious travel has been neglected. Yet it is a subject in which the great travelling public is much interested. The development of the means of travel and commerce is so universally a part of daily life that we do not stop to realize the causes of the tremendous strides which have been made in these fields within a single lifetime. It remained for Mr. Daniels to introduce us to this interesting subject.

Early in the Civil War Mr. Daniels left the public school in Aurora, Ill., and enlisted in the marine artillery of New York, going to North Carolina with the Burnside expedition, later becoming a government steamboat pilot for the inland waters of North Carolina and Virginia, serving in that capacity until the close of the war.

After the war he became connected with Western railroads and has grown up in the transportation business, so that he has not only observed, but has had an important part in its development. In his special department he has shown a combination of rare executive ability which amounts almost to genius. He is original in his way of doing things and is full of new and progressive schemes. Besides this, Mr. Daniels is a man of excellent literary ability, as well as originality of thought--a rare combination of qualities.

His speeches are concise and to the point and crowded with information. He is _the_ man to address railroad assemblies on all sorts of occasions, and is one of the most brilliant of speakers. If our lyceum managers could realize the great educative influence such lectures would have upon their community, they would not be long in restoring the lyceum platform to its original position when it stood for genius, ability, and education.

In spite of his brilliant qualities as a writer and speaker, Mr. Daniels is satisfied with the very highest position in his profession, and is not ambitious to fill any other niche of public eminence. He has risen by sheer ability to the high position which he now occupies in his special line, and is contented to remain the “right file in the front rank,” with the largest income of any general passenger agent in the world.

Mr. Daniels, it is expected, will soon convey passengers from New York to Chicago between sunrise and sunset, via the New York Central Railroad.

Mr. Ed. Heron-Allen, who is now a barrister in London, was one of the most unique as well as most remarkable successes in the way of a lyceum novelty that I ever discovered. He came to me while I was in London with Mr. Beecher in 1886, and showed me a little book which he had written on the science of the hand.

He at once impressed me as one of the most dashing and attractive young gentlemen I had ever met, and I found that he was a favorite with many of the swell clubs and literary societies. He was a young man with tremendous assurance, which at once inspired confidence on the part of whomever he met.

He wished to go to America and give lessons and lectures on the science of the hand, and went so far as to propose that he would hire a hall and give his lecture that I might judge of it for myself. He did so, and Mr. Beecher and I, with a number of his friends, attended the lecture in Hempstead, London.

When he was eighteen years of age he was sent to the continent to secure a collection of violins and other stringed instruments for the Colonial Exhibition in London. His expedition was very successful, and he became so intensely enamored of his work that he wrote a book on violin making, which is now a standard authority on the subject for all violin makers. He seemed possessed of many most remarkable gifts.

Arrangements were completed, and he came to America on the same steamer on which Mr. and Mrs. Beecher, my brother, and I returned. He was the most popular man on the boat, improvising a number of brilliant social affairs that added to the pleasure of the voyagers.

On his arrival in New York, he took an extensive suite of parlors at the Everett House, and held a press reception, at which he examined the hands of many of the reporters and their friends, including several men of distinction, and wrote descriptions of the characters of many, to the wonder and admiration of his auditors.

Within a week he was a favorite in New York’s best society. He sent out his cards announcing that he would give lessons in the science of the hand, with charts and written descriptions accompanying them. One leading young ladies’ school in New York arranged for seventy sittings of pupils, each of whom paid ten dollars. Their hands were examined, charts made, and a description of their character was written out. Ed. Heron-Allen was indeed a very busy young man. He employed a stenographer to take down his descriptions of the hands and write them out to accompany the printed charts in which he himself inserted the lines of the hands he examined. He found a stenographer who could take down his descriptions with such accuracy that when he had finished his examinations the chart and descriptive paper were ready to hand over to the pupil enclosed in a cardboard roller and tied with a tasty bow of various-colored ribbons. In this way he was kept very busy for a number of weeks, and would often come down to my office at the close of a day’s work and turn in from $100 to $150 in cash, which he had taken in from visitors in a single day.

He served a five-o’clock tea in his parlors every day, at which his fair pupils invariably assisted. In fact, it became a regular custom for the daily papers, under the head of “What is Going On in Society,” to announce the name of the lady who was to “pour tea” at Ed. Heron-Allen’s _séunce_. that day.

Notwithstanding the peculiarity of his profession, he had the entrée to the very best families of New York.

It was not long before there arose a jealousy of him among the young men of New York, and a great many of them were much opposed to him, but that made no difference to him. He was a favorite, and he knew it. He kept right along making friends and money.

He went to Boston and repeated his successes there, with headquarters at the Vendome. Mrs. Jack Gardner took him up, which of course made him a social attraction there. Then he went to Chicago, Philadelphia, and back to New York.

One day he and I, in company with a prominent citizen of Brooklyn, visited a famous violin maker in that city who was anxious to meet Mr. Heron-Allen. We found our way up to his studio or workshop, where he was hard at work in his shirt sleeves and apron, and before him lay Ed. Heron-Allen’s book on the violin. As he had not been apprised of Mr. Heron-Allen’s coming, the visit was a complete surprise; but it was a very interesting meeting to hear those two experts discussing the mechanism of the violin, and reminded one of the oft-quoted saying, that “if you want something you must give something.” Mr. Heron-Allen discovered we had a great violin maker in America, and the violin maker claimed he was greatly benefited by the visit from the man whom he considered possessed the greatest knowledge of the violin of any one of his years.

Cheirosophy became irksome to Ed. Heron-Allen in a short time, and he decided to turn his attention to literature. He told me that he was going to write a novel, that he had found a publisher who was to make an advance on royalties, and that he was going to try living the life of a Bohemian litterateur for two years, depending for his living entirely upon what he could make with his pen. He withdrew from society, took apartments in some obscure place in New York, and I didn’t see him for some months. One morning I met him on Fourth Avenue, and he looked emaciated and hungry. He said he was going to get some breakfast. I invited him to breakfast with me, but he declined, and said he was still engaged in his literary labors and depending upon them wholly for his sustenance. He did keep it up for two years, but came near starving to death. During that time he put out two books--one “The Kisses of Fate,” the other I have forgotten.

He afterward called upon me and told me that he was going back to London to take charge of his father’s business, who was a well-established barrister in Soho.

The season following I visited him at his office in London. He had some public position in the law courts, which I visited with him. He was not clerk of the court, but seemed in charge of the distribution of briefs and assignment of cases for the judge. He invited me inside the railing and introduced me to the judge on the bench as Judge Pond of New York, as coolly as though it were an indisputable fact. The judge welcomed me on the seat by his side, and was very chatty and agreeable to me. I managed in some way to mask my identity and to keep up the delusion until the hour for adjournment, when Mr. Heron-Allen and I walked out, he thanking the judge for his kindness to his friend. When we got out on the street he nearly fainted with laughter over the practical joke and the way it had succeeded.

On my last visit to London, in 1897, my wife and I dined at his house. He is happily married, owns a big establishment, has a fine profession, and has had some of the most wonderful experiences of any man I have ever known. He was a great friend of Sir Richard Burton, who declared to me that of all the interesting and remarkable characters he had ever met, Ed. Heron-Allen was the most interesting, and suggested that he should have been a great soldier and leader of armies. His youthful appearance would lead one to believe him a mere boy. His manner and habits are those of a perfect gentleman. Putney, London, was the home of his boyhood. He was reared in affluence, and in the part of London where he lived he was known by all classes, rich and poor, as “The Pet of Putney.”

Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore was the greatest manager of his time, as well as the greatest military bandmaster. To him is due almost all the credit of making it possible to produce fine orchestral effects with a military band. Before his time military bands were simply brass bands, and the introduction of wood instruments--the oboe, saxaphone, flute, piccolo, and clarinet--dates from the year of Gilmore’s great Peace Jubilee.

In 1859, in Salem, Mass., he organized Gilmore’s Band, which he maintained until his death, Sept. 24, 1892. In Music Hall, Boston, Gilmore introduced the first band concerts, at popular prices, that were self-sustaining. For years, in Boston and New England, Gilmore’s Band headed the great parades.

He conceived and carried to a triumphant success the greatest musical jubilee festival ever known in all the world--the World Peace Jubilee Festival of 1872, when it did seem that wars were over and all the world was at peace. The immensity of the scheme was all the product of Gilmore’s brain. For over a year (1868-69) he found little encouragement. Business men scoffed at the wild idea and fairly laughed in his face at his persistence. “Finally,” as he told me himself, “I found one Boston merchant who was willing to listen to me, and as I unfolded the possibility and feasibilities of the plan and the great stimulus it would be to Boston trade, I saw that he caught the idea and comprehended the situation. This was Mr. Eben Jordan, who then and there promised me his help. I had no trouble from that time on. Mr. Jordan raised and supplied the money. I set about the details, secured the ground, had plans for the great coliseum drawn, contracts awarded, and the work was progressing rapidly and to the satisfaction of all interested. The great arches were raised, and the immensity of the structure attracted much public attention. People came from far and near to see the monster auditorium that was rising above everything in Boston. I was about ready to start for Europe to secure musical talent for the event, when, one morning, I saw headlines in the papers: ‘The Great Gilmore Coliseum Levelled to the Ground by a Hurricane,’ etc. I went out to the grounds and there everything lay flat. There was not a post standing. Those great arches were blown down and all was a hopeless wreck.

“I did not lose my courage, but called on Mr. Jordan, who listened to me as attentively as on the first occasion. I assured him that the accident was surely the most fortunate thing that could possibly have occurred. I had discovered, during the progress of this auditorium, which I had planned to seat 20,000, that it was inadequate, as the public attention which it was attracting warranted the fitting up of a building with three times that capacity. I was receiving orders from one end of the country to the other for blocks of seats, thousands of applications from singers to join the chorus, and there was not a military band leader in the country but had applied to join the great orchestra. We must have an auditorium with a capacity of 50,000--nothing less. I got that committee together, and before I slept that night had new plans matured and ready to announce the next morning.

“New life was instilled into the great project. The accident had provided the sure means of success. The whole community was heart and soul in it. The new coliseum was built. I engaged leaders, got out books of music to be used for choruses, and within three months singers were being drilled in all the New England cities.”

In 1871 Mr. Gilmore visited the capitals of Europe and succeeded in accomplishing what no other man could have brought about. He obtained from the governments of England, Germany, France, Ireland, Russia, and Italy, their national bands, all composed of enlisted men, and these bands were sent at the expense of their respective governments to take part in the World’s Peace Jubilee Festival.

It was interesting to hear from Mr. Gilmore’s own lips the accounts of his visits to the capitals and his arguments with the heads of governments when they tried to show the absurdity of granting leave of absence to enlisted men to visit our free country. Naturally, they said, the men would all desert, and quite naturally, too, the Americans would offer all inducements for them to desert--inducements quite irresistible, if all reports were true.

Mr. Gilmore replied that he would put them on their honor; that musicians were above the average of intelligence; they were gentlemen, and they would never desert. The fact that their sovereigns put trust in them and granted this privilege, would test their honor and their pride. He proposed to make a competitive international military band tournament, and every musician would feel bound to see his band bring home the prize.

Gilmore succeeded. Those foreign bands were a great feature of the jubilee, and their respective nations took a patriotic pride in seeing that nothing was lacking of perfect equipment for the visit.

The greatest opera singer of that time was Mme. Peschka Leutiner, who was subsidized by and under contract with the German government. Consent of the German Emperor must be obtained to bring her to America. Gilmore’s application for this great singer was refused. Nothing daunted, he secured an audience with Emperor William, and before leaving had obtained his consent, which meant an imperial order for Germany’s greatest singer to take the leading part in the World’s Peace Jubilee. “I never will forget the kindness and courtesy I received from the great emperor, and the feeling of triumph I had as I left his august presence,” said Mr. Gilmore afterward.

Many an evening while on tour, over his bottle of champagne after a concert (it was his custom to take a pint of champagne every night before going to bed), have I enjoyed Gilmore’s description of his successful visits to European capitals and the cordial receptions he had everywhere.

The great Peace Jubilee was the talk of the world to a greater degree than anything that has since taken place except the World’s Fair in Chicago.

While the plans for it were in progress, Gilmore was constantly being told by musical friends that his ensemble was so large as to render impossible the harmony of 1,000 instruments and 10,000 voices. They would be necessarily so far apart that the time required for the sound to travel would produce discord.

“I told them to wait and see,” said Gilmore, “and when I stood before that orchestra and that vast chorus, on my twenty-foot elevated stand, with my ten-foot baton in my hand, and began the opening overture with one grand harmony over the great coliseum, my triumph was complete. Major Pond, I would not have exchanged places with the greatest monarch living.” What a triumph!

THE WORLD’S PEACE JUBILEE IN BOSTON IN 1872.
P. S. GILMORE, Director.

Chorus: 10,000. Orchestra: 1,000.

Orchestra leaders: Carl Zarrhan, Johann Strauss, and Dr.
Tourjie.

Pianist: Dr. Von Buelow.

Soloists: Mme. Peschka Leutiner, Mme. Rudersdorff, and Miss
Adelaide Phillips.

National bands: English, German, French, Italian, Russian,
Irish, and American (the Marine Band, of
Washington, D. C.).

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: