Recollections of a Varied Life Part 20

When the publisher or editor is satisfied that he does not wish to purchase a ma.n.u.script, it makes no manner of difference by what process he has arrived at that conclusion. The subject of the book or article may be one that he does not care to handle; the author's manner, as revealed in the early pages of his ma.n.u.script, may justify rejection without further reading. Any one of a score of reasons may be conclusive without the necessity of examining the ma.n.u.script in whole or even in part. I once advised the rejection of a book without reading it, on the ground that the woman who wrote it used a cambric needle and milk instead of a pen and ink, so that it would be a gross immorality to put her ma.n.u.script into the hands of printers whose earnings depended upon the number of ems they could set in a day.

[Sidenote: Ma.n.u.scripts and Their Authors]

But the conviction is general among the amateur authors of unsolicited ma.n.u.scripts that the editors or publishers to whom they send their literary wares are morally bound not only to examine them, but to read them carefully from beginning to end. They sometimes resort to ingenious devices by way of detecting the rascally editors in neglect of this duty. They slenderly stick the corners of two sheets together; or they turn up the lower corner of a sheet here and there as if by accident but so carefully as to cover a word or two from sight; or they place a sheet upside down, or in some other way set a trap that makes the editor smile if he happens to be in good temper, and causes him to reject the thing in resentment of the impertinence if his breakfast has not agreed with him that day.

I was speaking of these things one day, to Mr. George P. Putnam, Irving's friend and the most sympathetically literary of publishers then living, when he suddenly asked me:

"Do you know the minimum value of a lost ma.n.u.script?"

I professed ignorance, whereupon he said:

"It is five hundred dollars." Presently, in answer to a question, he explained:

"In the old days of _Putnam's Monthly_, one of the mult.i.tude of unsolicited ma.n.u.scripts sent in would now and then be mislaid. I never knew a case of the kind in which the author failed to value the ma.n.u.script at five hundred dollars or more, no matter what its subject or its length or even its worthlessness might be. In one case, when I refused to pay the price fixed upon by the author, he inst.i.tuted suit, and very earnestly protested that his ma.n.u.script was worth far more than the five hundred dollars demanded for it. He even wrote me that he had a definite offer of more than that sum for it. To his discomfiture somebody in the office found the ma.n.u.script about that time and we returned it to the author. He sent it back, asking us to accept it.

I declined. He then offered it for two hundred and fifty dollars, then for two hundred, and finally for seventy-five. I wrote to him that he needn't trouble to reduce his price further, as the editors did not care to accept the paper at any price. I have often wondered why he didn't sell it to the person who, as he a.s.serted, had offered him more than five hundred dollars for it; but he never did, as the thing has never yet been published, and that was many years ago."

XLVI

It was during my connection with _Hearth and Home_ that I first met two men who greatly interested me. One of them was the newest of celebrities in American literature; the other was old enough to have been lampooned by Poe in his series of papers called "The Literati."

The one was Joaquin Miller, the other Thomas Dunn English.

[Sidenote: Joaquin Miller]

Joaquin Miller had recently returned in a blaze of glory from his conquest of London society and British literary recognition. He brought me a note of introduction from Mr. Richard Watson Gilder of the _Century_ or _Scribner's Monthly_ as I think the magazine was still called at that time. He wore a broad-brimmed hat of most picturesque type. His trousers--London made and obviously costly--were tucked into the most superior looking pair of high top boots I ever saw, and in his general make-up he was an interesting cross or combination of the "untutored child of nature" fresh from the plains, and the tailor-made man of fashion. More accurately, he seemed a carefully costumed stage representation of the wild Westerner that he professed to be in fact.

I do not know that all this, or any of it, was affectation in the invidious sense of the term. I took it to be nothing more than a clever bit of advertising. He was a genuine poet--as who can doubt who has read him? He had sagacity and a keen perception both of the weakness and the strength of human nature. He wanted a hearing, and he knew the shortest, simplest, surest way to get it. Instead of publishing his poems and leaving it to his publisher to bring them to attention by the slow processes of newspaper advertising, he went to London, and made himself his own advertis.e.m.e.nt by adopting a picturesque pose, which was not altogether a pose, though it was altogether picturesque, and trusting the poems, to which he thus directed attention, to win favor for themselves.

In saying that his a.s.sumption of the role of untutored child of nature was not altogether an a.s.sumption, I mean that although his boyhood was pa.s.sed in Indiana schools, and he was for a time a college student there, he had nevertheless pa.s.sed the greater part of his young manhood in the wilds and among the men of the wilderness. If he was not in fact "untutored," he nevertheless owed very little to the schools, and scarcely anything to the systematic study of literature. His work was marked by crudenesses that were not a.s.sumed or in any wise fict.i.tious, while the genuineness of poetic feeling and poetic perception that inspired it was unquestionably the spontaneous product of his own soul and mind.

In my editorial den he seated himself on my desk, though there was a comfortable chair at hand. Was that a bit of theatrical "business"? I think not, for the reason that Thomas Bailey Aldrich, the least affected of men, used nearly always to bestride a reversed chair with his hands resting upon its back, when he visited me in my office, as he sometimes did, to smoke a pipe in peace for half an hour and entertain me with his surprising way of "putting things," before "going off to suffer and be good by invitation," as he once said with reference to some reception engagement.

London had accepted Joaquin Miller's pose without qualification. Even the London comic journals, in satirizing it, seemed never to doubt its genuineness. But on this side of the water we had begun to hear rumors that this son of the plains and the mountains, this dweller in solitudes whose limitless silence he himself suggested in the lines:

"A land so lone that you wonder whether The G.o.d would know it should you fall dead,"

was after all a man bred in civilization and acquainted with lands so far from lone that the coroner would be certain to hear of it promptly if death came to one without the intervention of a physician.

As he addressed me by my first name from the beginning, and in other ways manifested a disposition to put conventionalities completely aside, I ventured to ask him about one of these rumors, which particularly interested me.

"I hear, Mr. Miller," I said, "that you are my compatriot--that you are a Hoosier by birth, as I am--is it true?"

He sat in meditation for a time; then he said:

"George, I've told so many lies about my birth and all that, that there may be inconsistencies in them. I think I'd better not add to the inconsistencies."

I did not press the question. I asked him, instead, to let me have a poem for _Hearth and Home_.

[Sidenote: Joaquin Miller's Notions of Dress]

"I can't," he replied, "I haven't a line of unsold ma.n.u.script anywhere on earth, and just now I am devoting myself to horseback riding in Central Park. I've got a seven hundred dollar saddle and I must use it, and you, as an old cavalryman, know how utterly uninspiring a thing it is to amble around Central Park on a horse trained to regard a policeman as a person to be respected, not to say feared, in the matter of speed limits and the proper side of the trail, and all that sort of thing. But that saddle and these boots must be put to the use for which they were built, so I must go on riding in the park till they grow shabby, and I can't think in meter till I get away somewhere where the trees don't stand in rows like sentinels in front of a string of tents, and where the people don't all dress alike. Do you know that is the worst tomfoolery this idiotic world ever gave birth to? It is all right for British soldiers, because there must be some way in which the officers can tell in a crowd who is a soldier and who is not, and besides, regular soldiers aren't men anyhow. They're only ten-pins, to be set up in regular order by one man and bowled over by another.

"But what sense is there in men dressing in that way? You and I are tall and slender, but our complexions are different. We are free American citizens. Why should anybody who invites us both to dinner, expect that we shall wear the same sort of clothes? And not only that, why should they expect us to put on precisely the same sort of garments that the big-bellied banker, who is to be our fellow-guest, is sure to wear? It's all nonsense, I tell you. It is an idea born of the uninventive genius of an inane society whose const.i.tuent members are as badly scared at any suggestion of originality or individuality as a woman is at the apparition of a mouse in her bedchamber."

I told him I did not agree with him.

"The social rule in that respect seems to me a peculiarly sensible and convenient one," I said. "When a man is invited to anything, he knows exactly what to wear. If it be a daytime affair he has only to put on a frock coat with trousers of a lighter color; if it be an evening function a sparrowtailed coat, black trousers, a low cut vest, and a white tie equip him as perfectly as a dozen tailors could. In either case he need not give a thought to his clothes in order to be sure that his costume will be not only correct but so exactly like everybody's else that n.o.body present will think of it at all. It is a great saving of gray matter, and of money, too, and more important still, it sets men free. The great majority of us couldn't afford to go to any sort of function, however interesting, if we had to dress individually and compet.i.tively for it, as women do."

"Oh, of course," he answered, "the thing has its advantages, but it is dreadfully monotonous--what the children call 'samey, samey.'"

"By which you mean that it deprives one of all excuse for making himself conspicuous by his dress--and that is precisely what most of us do not want to do in any case. Besides, one needn't submit himself to the custom if he objects to it."

"That is so," he answered; "at any rate I don't."

His practice in the matter was extreme, of course. Even ten years after that he visited the Authors Club with his trousers in his boots, but at the time of my first meeting with him the rule of the "dress coat" was by no means confirmed. It was still a matter of choice with men whether they should wear it or not at evening functions, and its use at other times of day was still possible without provoking ridicule. At almost every banquet, dinner, or other evening function in those days there were sure to be a number of frock coats worn, and I remember that at the memorable breakfast given in Boston in celebration of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's seventieth birthday in 1879, there were a few guests who wore evening dress, although we sat down to the breakfast at one o'clock and separated before the sun went down. I observed the same thing at two of the breakfasts given to Mr. Edmund Gosse in New York in the early eighties. It was not until near the middle of that decade that the late William Henry Hurlbut authoritatively laid down the law that "a gentleman must never appear without evening dress after six o'clock P.M., and never, _never_ wear it before that hour, even at a wedding--even at his own wedding."

[Sidenote: Dress Reform a la Stedman]

I remember an incident that grew out of this once vexed question, which is perhaps worth recalling. When the Authors Club was founded in 1882, our chief concern was to make it and keep it an informal, brotherly organization of literary men by excluding from its rules and its practices everything that might impose restraint upon social liberty. We aimed at the better kind of Bohemianism--the Bohemianism of liberty, not license; the Bohemianism which disregards all meaningless formalities but respects the decencies and courtesies of social intercourse.

Edmund Clarence Stedman was an enthusiastic advocate of this policy. He was beset, he told me at the time, by a great fear that the club might go the way of other organizations with which he was connected; that it might lose its character as an a.s.sociation of authors in sympathy with each other's work and aspirations, and become merely an agency of fashion, a giver of banquets and receptions at which men should be always on dress parade. By way of averting that degeneracy he proposed for one thing that the members of the club should address each other always by their first names, as schoolboys do. This proved to be impracticable in a club which included such men as Dr. Drisler, Dr.

Youmans, President Noah Porter, Bishop Hurst, Parke G.o.dwin, James Russell Lowell, and others of like dignity--together with a lot of younger men who made their first acquaintance with these in the club itself. But another of Stedman's suggestions met with ready acceptance.

He proposed that we should taboo evening dress at our meetings. In playful humor he suggested that if any member should appear at a meeting of the club in that conventional garb, he should be required to stand up before all the company, explain himself, and apologize.

We laughingly adopted the rule, and the first person who fell a victim to it was Stedman himself. About ten o'clock one night he entered the club in full dinner dress. Instantly he was arraigned and, standing in the midst of what he called "the clamorous mob," entered upon his explanation. He had come, he said, directly from a philistine dinner at which the garb he wore was as inexorably necessary as combed hair or polished boots or washed hands; his home was far away, and he had been forced to choose between coming to the club in evening dress and not coming at all. Of the two calamities he had chosen the former as the primrose path--a path he had always followed instead of the stormy and th.o.r.n.y one, he said, whenever liberty of choice had been his. Then by way of "fruits meet for repentance," he drew from his pocket a black cravat and in the presence of the club subst.i.tuted it for the white one he had been wearing. At that time no other than a white cravat was permitted with evening dress, so that by this subst.i.tution of a black one, he took himself out of the category of the condemned and became again a companion in good-fellowship over the punch and pipes.

XLVII

[Sidenote: Beginnings of Newspaper Ill.u.s.tration]

It was during the early seventies that the inevitable happened, or at least began to happen, with regard to newspaper ill.u.s.tration. The excessive cost of ill.u.s.trating periodicals by wood engraving, and the time required for its slow accomplishment, together with the growing eagerness of the people for pictures, set a mult.i.tude of men of clever wits at work to devise some cheaper and speedier process of reproducing drawings and photographic pictures. I myself invented a very crude and imperfect process of that kind, which I thought susceptible of satisfactory development. I engaged a certain journalist of irregular habits and large pretensions, who was clever with his pencil, to join me in the development and exploitation of the process, he to furnish such drawings of various kinds as I needed, and I to experiment in reproduction. Of course I had to explain my process to him, and he, being a shrewd young man whose moral character was far less admirable than his always perfect costume, mastered my secret and sold it for a trifling sum to a man who promptly patented it and, with a few changes which I had not the cleverness to make, brought it into use as his own.

I said some ugly things to my dishonest coadjutor, whose manner of receiving them convinced me that he was well used to hear himself characterized in that way. Then I laughed at myself, went home and read about Moses and the green spectacles, in "The Vicar of Wakefield," and so calmed my spirit.

But mine was an extremely unsatisfactory process, even after the inventor who had bought it from my rascally a.s.sociate had improved it to the limit of his capacity, and there were far cleverer men at work upon the same problem. By 1874 one of them had so far succeeded that an enterprising firm, owning his patents, decided to set up in New York a daily ill.u.s.trated newspaper, the _Graphic_.

The failure of the enterprise was freely predicted from the beginning, and in the end failure came to it, but not for the reasons given by the prophets. The _Graphic_ failed chiefly because it never had an editor or manager who knew how to make a newspaper. An additional cause of its failure was its inability to get itself into that great news-gathering trust, the a.s.sociated Press, whose agents, local and general, covered the whole country and the whole world with a minuteness that no single newspaper could hope to approach.

But while the projectors of the _Graphic_ enterprise were full of their first hopefulness, they bought the good will and the subscription list of _Hearth and Home_, in order to make of that periodical the weekly edition of their ill.u.s.trated daily newspaper.

This left me "out of a job," but altogether happy. I was very tired. I had had but one week's vacation during my arduous service on _Hearth and Home_. I had removed to an old Dutch farmhouse in New Jersey because of the impaired health of one dear to me. I had become a contributor to all the great magazines of that time, and a writer of successful books.

I was pleased, therefore, to be freed from the Sisyphean labors of the editorial office. I decided to give up newspaper work in all its forms and to devote my future years to literature alone. I retired to my library, the windows of which were overhung by sweet-scented lilacs and climbing roses, beyond which lay an orchard of varied fruits surrounding the old farmhouse. There, I thought I would pa.s.s the remainder of my days--that phrase felt good in the mind of a work-weary man of thirty-four or about that--in quiet literary work, unvexed by intruding exigencies of any kind. Of course I would write editorials for those great metropolitan dailies for which I was accustomed to do that sort of work from time to time as impulse and opportunity permitted, but I was resolved never again to undertake editorial responsibility of any kind.