Chapter LXVII: A Napoleonic Conception--A Challenge to the (10)

But mainly the bearers of letters of introduction who came to me at that time were very worthy persons who wanted to do literary work, but had not the smallest qualification for it. Some of them had rejected manuscripts which they were sure that I, "with my influence," could easily market to the replenishment of their emaciated purses. For the conviction that the acceptance of manuscripts goes chiefly by favor is ineradicable from the amateur literary mind. I have found it quite useless to explain to such persons that favor has nothing to do with the matter, that every editor and every publisher is always and eagerly alert to discern new writers of promise and to exploit them. The persons to whom these truths are told, simply do not believe them. They _know_ that their own stories or essays or what not, are far superior to those accepted and published. Every one of their friends has assured them of that, and their own consciousness confirms the judgment. Scores of them have left my library in full assurance that I was a member of some "literary ring," that was organized to exclude from publication the writings of all but the members of the ring. It was idle to point out to them the introduction of Saxe Holm, of Constance Fenimore Woolson, of Mrs. Custer, of Charles Egbert Craddock, or of any other of a dozen or more new writers who had recently come to the front. They were assured that each of these had enjoyed the benefits of "pull" of some sort.

One charming young lady of the "Society" sort brought me half a dozen letters of introduction from persons of social prominence, urging her upon my attention. She had written a "Society novel," she told me, and she wanted to get it published. She was altogether too well informed as to publishing conditions, to send her manuscript to any publisher without first securing "influence" in its behalf. She was perfectly well aware that I was a person possessed of influence, and so she had come to me. Wouldn't I, for a consideration, secure the acceptance of her novel by some reputable house?

I told her that "for a consideration"--namely, fifty dollars--I would read her manuscript and give her a judgment upon its merits, after which she might offer it to any publisher she saw fit, and that that was all I could do for her.

[Sidenote: The Disappointment of Lily Browneyes]

"But you are 'on the inside' at Harpers'," she replied, "and of course your verdict is conclusive with them."

"In some cases it is," I answered. "It has proved to be so in one peculiar case. I recently sold the Harpers a serial story of my own for their _Young People_. Afterwards a story of Captain Kirk Munroe's came to me for judgment. It covered so nearly the same ground that mine did, that both could not be used. But his story seemed to me so much better than my own, for the use proposed, that I advised the Harpers to accept it and return to me my own already accepted manuscript. They have acted upon my advice and I am a good many hundreds of dollars out of pocket in consequence. Now, my dear Miss Browneyes," I added, "you see upon what my influence with the Harpers rests. In so far as they accept literary productions upon my advice, they do so simply because they know that my advice is honest and represents my real judgment of the merits of things offered for publication. If I should base my recommendations upon any other foundation than that of integrity and an absolutely sincere critical judgment, I should soon have no more influence with the Harpers than any truckman in the streets can command. I will read your manuscript and give you my honest opinion of it, for fifty dollars, if you wish me to do so. But I do not advise you to do that. Judging of it in advance, from what I have seen of you, and from what I know of the limitations of the Society life you have led, I strongly advise you not to waste fifty dollars of your father's money in that way. It is scarcely conceivable that with your very limited knowledge of life, and your carefully restricted outlook, you can have written a novel of any value whatever. You had better save your fifty dollars to help pay for your next love of a bonnet."

"I'm awfully disappointed," she said. "You see it would be so nice to have all my Society friends talking about 'Lily Browneyes's book,' and perhaps that ought to be considered. You see almost every one of my Society friends would buy the book 'just to see what that little chatterbox, Lily Browneyes, has found to write about.' I should think, that would make the fortune of the book."

"How many Society friends have you, Miss Browneyes?" I asked.

"Oh, heaps of them--scores--dead oodles and scads of 'em, as we girls say."

"But really, how many?" I persisted. "Suppose your book were published, how many of your Society friends could you confidently reckon upon as probable purchasers? Here's paper and a pencil. Suppose you set down their names and tot them up."

She eagerly undertook the task, and after half an hour she had a list of forty-odd persons who would pretty surely buy the book--"if they couldn't borrow it," she added.

I explained the matter to her somewhat--dwelling upon the fact that a sale of two thousand copies would barely reimburse the publisher's outlay.

She said I had been "very nice" to her, but on the whole she decided to accept my advice and not pay me fifty dollars for a futile reading of the manuscript. I was glad of that. For it seemed like breaking a butterfly to disappoint so charming a young girl.

The letters Lily Browneyes brought me had at least the merit of sincerity. They were meant to help her accomplish her purpose, and not as so many letters of the kind are, to get rid of importunity by shifting it to the shoulders of some one else. I remember something that illustrates my meaning.

I presided, many years ago, at a banquet given by the Authors Club to Mr. William Dean Howells. Nothing was prearranged. There was no schedule of toasts in my hand, no list of speakers primed to respond to them. With so brilliant a company to draw upon I had no fear as to the results of calling up the man I wanted, without warning.

In the course of the haphazard performance, it occurred to me that we ought to have a speech from some publisher, and accordingly I called upon Mr. J. Henry Harper--"Harry Harper," we who knew and loved him called him.

His embarrassment was positively painful to behold. He made no attempt whatever to respond but appealed to me to excuse him.

[Sidenote: Mark Twain's Method]

At that point Mark Twain came to the rescue by offering to make Mr. Harper's speech for him. "I'm a publisher myself," he explained, "and I'll speak for the publishers."

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.

[Sidenote: The Founding of the Authors Club]

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

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

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

The club was very modest in its beginnings. As its constituent members were mainly persons possessed of no money, so the club had none. For a time our meetings were held at the houses of members--Lawrence Hutton's, Dr. Youmans's, Richard Grant White's, and so on. But as not all of us were possessed of homes that lent themselves to such entertainment, we presently began meeting at Sieghortner's and other restaurants. Then came a most hospitable invitation from the Tile Club, offering us the use of their quarters for our meetings. Their quarters consisted, in fact, of a kitchen in the interior of a block far down town--I forget the number of the street. The building served Edwin A. Abbey as a studio--he had not made his reputation as an artist then--and the good old Irishwoman who cared for the rooms lived above stairs with her daughter for her sole companion. This daughter was Abbey's model, and a portrait of her, painted by his hand, hung in the studio, with a presentation legend attached. The portrait represented one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen. It was positively ravishing in its perfection. One day I had occasion to visit the place to make some club arrangement, and while there I met the young lady of the portrait. She was of sandy complexion, freckled, and otherwise commonplace in an extreme degree. Yet that exquisitely beautiful portrait that hung there in its frame was an admirably faithful likeness of the girl, when one studied the two faces closely. Abbey had not painted in the freckles; he had chosen flesh tints of a more attractive sort than the sandiness of the girl's complexion; he had put a touch of warmth into the indeterminate color of her pale red hair; and above all, he had painted intelligence and soul into her vacuous countenance. Yet the girl and the portrait were absolutely alike in every physical detail.

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

[Sidenote: Dime Novels]

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

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

This set us talking of the dime novel, a little group of us assembled in front of the fire. Some one started the talk by saying that the dime novel was an entirely innocent and a very necessary form of literature. There John Hay broke in, and Edwin Booth, who was also present, sustained him.

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

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

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

The interrupter admitted that he had not.

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

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

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

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

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

LXII

[Sidenote: The Authors Club]

It was not long after that that the Authors Club secured quarters of its own in Twenty-fourth Street, and became an established social organization. For it was never a literary club, but always strictly a social one, having a literary basis of eligibility to membership. From the beginning we refused to read papers at each other, or in any other way to "improve our minds" on club evenings by any form of literary exercise. As the carpenter, who dresses lumber and drives nails and miters joints for his daily bread does not seek his evening recreation by doing those things for amusement, so we who were all hard-working men of letters, earning our living with the pen, had no mind to do as amateurs that which we were daily and hourly doing as professionals.

In the same way we decided at the outset to eschew every form of propagandism. The club has had no cause to advocate, no doctrine to promulgate, no "movement" to help or hinder. It has been and still is strictly a social club composed of men of letters, and having for its guests interesting men of all other professions. Hence it has prospered and its members have become intimates with no trace or suggestion of friction between them. I think I am safe in saying that no other organization has done so much for the amelioration of the literary life, the removal of prejudices and bitternesses and spites and jealousies, and for the upbuilding of cordial friendship among writers. I think there is no man in the club who doesn't count every other man there his friend.

The point emphasized above--that the club is a social, not a literary organization--is important. Neglect of it has led to a good deal of ill-informed and misdirected criticism. At the very beginning, on the night of the club's organization, we made up a list of somewhat more than a score of literary men who should be made members upon the invitation of our Executive Council without the formality of proposal and election. From that list we excluded--by unanimous vote--one man whose literary work abundantly qualified him for membership, but whose cantankerous self-satisfaction rendered him, in the general opinion, a man not "clubbable." The trouble with him was not so much that he regarded himself, as he once avowed in company that he did, as "a greater than Shakespeare," but that he was disposed to quarrel with everybody who failed to recognize the assumption as a fact.

If ours had been a literary club, he must have been admitted to membership without question. As it was a social club, we didn't want him, and three several efforts that he afterwards made to secure admission failed. The like has happened in the cases of two or three other men whose literary work rendered them eligible, but whose personal peculiarities did not commend them.

Chiefly, however, the club has been criticised for its failure to admit women to membership. Paul Leicester Ford said to me on that subject one day:

"I'll have nothing to do with your club. You arrogantly refuse to admit women, though women are doing quite as much as men in American literature."

[Sidenote: Why Women Are Not Eligible]

I explained several things to him. I reminded him that the Authors Club set up no pretension to be completely representative of American literary activity; that it was merely a club formed by gentlemen who felt the need of it, for the purpose of bringing literary men together for social intercourse over their pipes and sandwiches; that the admission of women would of necessity defeat this solitary purpose, and that their exclusion was no more a slight than that which he put upon his nearest friends whenever he gave a dinner or a theater party to which he could not invite everybody on his eligible list. Then I pointed out another difficulty and a supreme one. If we should admit women on the same terms of eligibility that we insisted upon in the case of men, a host of writing women would become eligible, while our own wives and daughters would in most cases be ineligible. If, in order to cover that difficulty we should admit the wives and daughters of male members, we should be obliged to admit also the husbands, sons, and fathers of our female members, so that presently we should become a mob of men and women, half or more of whom were ineligible under our original conception of the club and its reason for being. There is also the consideration that every club must and does exclude more than it includes; that in requiring New England birth or descent for membership, the New England Society excludes perhaps nine-tenths of the people of New York, while without that requirement the Society would lose its distinctive character and be no New England Society at all.

Mr. Ford was so far convinced that he authorized me to propose his name for membership, but before I had opportunity to do so, the tragedy that ended his life had befallen.

The club has found ways of marking its appreciation of the literary equality of women without destroying its own essential being. In February and March of each year it gives four afternoon receptions to women. In so far as it can find them out, the club's Executive Council invites to all of these receptions, besides the wives and daughters of its own members, every woman in the land whose literary work would render her eligible to membership if she were a man. In addition to this, every member of the club has the privilege of inviting any other women he pleases.

I do not think the club is deficient in gallantry, nor do I find any such thought prevalent among the pleasing throng of gentlewomen who honor us by accepting our invitations.

Our first quarters were meagerly furnished, of course. It took every dollar we had to furnish them even in the plainest way. There was neither a sofa nor an upholstered chair in our rooms. Cheap, straight-backed, cane-seated chairs alone were there. One night when General Sherman was a guest, some one apologized for our inability to offer him a more comfortable seat. The sturdy old soldier always had an opinion ready made to suit every emergency.

"Comfortable?" he responded. "Why, what do you call these chairs if they are not comfortable? I don't believe in cushions. They are unnatural; they are devices of self-indulgence and luxury. The law ought to forbid their existence. They make men limp and flabby when they ought to be strong and vigorous and virile. The best chair in the world is one with a raw bull's hide for a seat, and with leathern thongs to tighten it with when it stretches. Next best is the old-fashioned, wooden-bottomed kitchen chair that cost forty cents when I was a boy. I don't suppose they make 'em now. People are too luxurious to know when they are well off."

Presently some one spoke to him of his "March to the Sea," and he instantly replied:

"It's all romantic nonsense to call it that. The thing was nothing more nor less than a military change of base--a thing familiar to every student of tactics; but a poet got hold of it, nicknamed it the 'March to the Sea,' and that's what everybody will call it, I suppose, till the crack of doom, unless it is forgotten before that time."

Perhaps the hard-fighting veteran's appreciation of the romantic aspect of great achievements was less keen than that of a company of creative writers. Perhaps his modesty got the better of him.

[Sidenote: The First "Watch Night"]

It happened early in the history of the Authors Club that the regular meeting night fell one year on the thirty-first of December. At first it was suggested that the date be changed, but some one remembered the old custom of the Methodists who held "Watch Night" meetings, seeing the old year out and the new year in with rejoicing and fervent singing. Why shouldn't we have a "Watch Night" after our own fashion? The suggestion was eagerly accepted. No programme was arranged, no order of exercises planned. Nothing was prearranged except that with friendship and jollity and the telling of stories we should give a farewell to the old year and a welcome to the new.

Fortunately, Mark Twain was called upon to begin the story telling, and he put formality completely out of countenance at the very outset. Instead of standing as if to address the company, he seized a chair, straddled it, and with his arms folded across its back, proceeded to tell one of the most humorous of all his stories. Frank Stockton followed with his account of the "mislaid corpse" and before the new year had an hour or two of age, there had been related enough of exquisitely humorous incident--real or fanciful--to make the fortune of two or three books of humor.

At midnight we turned out the gas and sang a stanza or two of "Auld Lang Syne" by way of farewell to the old year. Then, with lights all ablaze again, we greeted the new year in the familiar "He's a jolly good fellow."

Max O'Rell was my guest on one of these occasions, and in one of his later books he gave an account of it. After recording the fact that "at precisely twelve o'clock the lights are turned out," he added a footnote saying in solemn fashion: "A clock is _borrowed for the occasion_."

I saw a good deal of that witty Frenchman during his several visits to America. I wrote an introduction to the American edition of his "John Bull, Jr.," and it served to protect that work with a copyright entry.

He never paid me a cent for the service.

That was because I refused to accept the remuneration he pressed upon me.

I offer that as a jest which he would have appreciated keenly.

He was a man of generous mind, whose humor sometimes impressed others as cynical, a judgment that I always regarded as unjust, for the reason that the humorist must be allowed a certain privilege of saying severer things than he really feels, if he is to be a humorist at all. When Max O'Rell says of a certain type of stupid British boy of the "upper class," that he ultimately enters the army and fights his country's enemies, and then adds: "And whether he kills his country's enemy or his country's enemy kills him, his country is equally benefited," he does not really mean what he says. He once confessed to me that he had had an abiding affection for every such boy, but that the temptation to make a jest at his expense was irresistible in the case of a writer whose bread and butter were dependent upon his ability to excite smiles.

In the same way, as everybody must have observed, the humor that has made the reputation of many newspaper editors is largely leveled at women in their various relations with men and at the sacred things of life. Much of it would be cruelly unjust if it were seriously meant, as ordinarily it is not.

I have sometimes wondered whether the injustice did not outweigh the humor--whether the smile excited by the humor was worth the wound inflicted by the injustice.

[Sidenote: Habitual Humorists]

The professional humorist, whether with pen, pencil, or tongue, is the victim of a false perspective. He is so intent upon his quip or quibble or jest, that he loses sight of more serious things. He does not hesitate to sacrifice even truth and justice, or the highest interest of whatever sort, for the sake of "making his point." He perhaps mistakenly believes that his reader or the person studying his caricature will regard his jest lightly and without loss of respect for the more serious things that lie behind. As a matter of fact, this rarely happens. The reader of the jest accepts it as a setting forth of truth, or at any rate is affected by it in some such fashion.

On the whole, therefore, I cannot help regarding the confirmed humorist in literature or art as a detrimental force.

I do not mean to include in this condemnation such genial literary humorists as Charles Battell Loomis, and Frank R. Stockton, and Charles Dudley Warner, who made things funny merely by looking at them with an intellectual squint that deceived nobody and misled nobody. I refer only to the habitual jokers of the newspapers and the like,--men who, for a wage, undertake to make a jest of everything that interests the popular mind, and who, for the sake of their jest, would pervert the Lord's Prayer itself to a humorous purpose. These people lose all sense of propriety, proportion, perspective, and even of morality itself. They make their jests at so much per line, and at all hazards of truth, justice, and intelligence.