Part 23

Later there came to New York another Southerner--a Far Southerner of a very different quality--who attracted no little attention. This was Tom Ochiltree. He, too, was well born, his father an eminent jurist of Texas; he, himself, a wit, bon homme and raconteur. Travers once said: "We have three professional liars in America--Tom Ochiltree is one and George Alfred Townsend is the other two."

The stories told of Tom would fill a book. He denied none, however preposterous--was indeed the author of many of the most amusing--of how, when the old judge proposed to take him into law partnership he caused to be painted an office sign: Thomas P. Ochiltree and Father; of his reply to General Grant, who had made him United States Marshal of Texas, and later suggested that it would be well for Tom to pay less attention to the race course: "Why, Mr. President, all that turf publicity relates to a horse named after me, not to me," it being that the horse of the day had been so called; and of General Grant's reply: "Nevertheless, it would be well, Tom, for you to look in upon Texas once in a while"--in short, of his many sayings and exploits while a member of Congress from the Galveston district; among the rest, that having brought in a resolution tendering sympathy to the German Empire on the death of Herr Laska, the most advanced and distinguished of Radical Socialists, which became for the moment a cause célébre. Tom remarked, "Not that I care a damn about it, except for the prominence it gives to Bismarck."

He lived when in Washington at Chamberlin's. He and John Chamberlin were close friends. Once when he was breakfasting with John a mutual friend came in. He was in doubt what to order. Tom suggested beefsteak and onions.

"But," objected the newcomer, "I am about to call on some ladies, and the smell of onions on my breath, you know!"

"Don't let that trouble you," said Tom; "you have the steak and onions and when you get your bill that will take your breath away!"

Under an unpromising exterior--a stocky build and fiery red head--there glowed a brave, generous and tender spirit. The man was a preux chevalier. He was a knight-errant. All women--especially all good and discerning women who knew him and who could intuitively read beneath that clumsy personality his fine sense of respect--even of adoration--loved Tom Ochiltree.

The equivocal celebrity he enjoyed was largely fostered by himself, his stories mostly at his own expense. His education had been but casual. But he had a great deal of it and a varied assortment. He knew everybody on both sides of the Atlantic, his friends ranging from the Prince of Wales, afterward Edward VII, Gladstone and Disraeli, Gambetta and Thiers, to the bucks of the jockey clubs. There were two of Tom--Tom the noisy on exhibition, and Tom the courtier in society.

How he lived when out of office was the subject of unflattering conjecture. Many thought him the stipendiary of Mr. Mackay, the multimillionaire, with whom he was intimate, who told me he could never induce Tom to take money except for service rendered. Among his familiars was Colonel North, the English money magnate, who said the same thing. He had a widowed sister in Texas to whom he regularly sent an income sufficient for herself and family. And when he died, to the surprise of every one, he left his sister quite an accumulation. He had never been wholly a spendthrift. Though he lived well at Chamberlin's in Washington and the Waldorf in New York he was careful of his credit and his money. I dare say he was not unfortunate in the stock market. He never married and when he died, still a youngish man as modern ages go, all sorts of stories were told of him, and the space writers, having a congenial subject, disported themselves voluminously. Inevitably most of their stories were apocryphal.

I wonder shall we ever get any real truth out of what is called history? There are so many sides to it and such a confusing din of voices. How much does old Sam Johnson owe of the fine figure he cuts to Boswell, and, minus Boswell, how much would be left of him? For nearly a century the Empress Josephine was pictured as the effigy of the faithful and suffering wife sacrificed upon the altar of unprincipled and selfish ambition--lovelorn, deserted, heartbroken. It was Napoleon, not Josephine, except in her pride, who suffered. Who shall tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about Hamilton; about Burr; about Cæsar, Caligula and Cleopatra? Did Washington, when he was angry, swear like a trooper? What was the matter with Nero?

One evening Edward King and I were dining in the Champs Elysées when he said: "There is a new coon--a literary coon--come to town. He is a Scotchman and his name is Robert Louis Stevenson." Then he told me of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At that moment the subject of our talk was living in a kind of self-imposed penury not half a mile away. Had we known this we could have ended the poor fellow's struggle with his pride and ambition then and there; have put him in the way of sure work and plenty of it; perhaps have lengthened, certainly have sweetened, his days, unless it be true that he was one of the impossibles, as he may easily be conceived to have been from reading his wayward biography and voluminous correspondence.

To a young Kentuckian, one of "my boys," was given the opportunity to see the last of him and to bury him in far-away Samoa, whither he had taken himself for the final adventure and where he died, having attained some measure of the dreams he had cherished, and, let us hope, happy in the consciousness of the achievement.

I rather think Stevenson should be placed at the head of the latter-day fictionists. But fashions in literature as in dress are ever changing. Washington Irving was the first of our men of letters to obtain foreign recognition. While the fires of hate between Great Britain and America were still burning he wrote kindly and elegantly of England and the English, and was accepted on both sides of the ocean. Taking his style from Addison and Goldsmith, he emulated their charity and humor; he went to Spain and in the same deft way he pictured the then unknown byways of the land of dreams; and coming home again he peopled the region of the Hudson with the beings of legend and fancy which are dear to us.

He became our national man of letters. He stood quite at the head of our literature, giving the lie to the scornful query, "Who reads an American book?" As a pioneer he will always be considered; as a simple and vivid writer of things familiar and entertaining he will probably always be read; but as an originator literary history will hardly place him very high. There Bret Harte surely led him. The Tales of the Argonauts as works of creative fancy exceed the Sketches of Washington Irving alike in wealth of color and humor, in pathos and dramatic action.

Some writers make an exception of the famous Sleepy Hollow story. But they have in mind the Rip Van Winkle of Jefferson and Boucicault, not the rather attenuated story of Irving, which--as far as the twenty years of sleep went--was borrowed from an old German legend.

Mark Twain and Bret Harte, however, will always be bracketed with Washington Irving. Of the three I incline to the opinion that Mark Twain did the broadest and strongest work. His imagination had wider reach than Irving's. There is nowhere, as there is in Harte, the suspicion either of insincerity or of artificiality. Irving's humor was the humor of Sir Roger de Coverley and the Vicar of Wakefield. It is old English. Mark Twain's is his own--American through and through to the bone. I am not unmindful of Cooper and Hawthorne, of Longfellow, of Lowell and of Poe, but speak of Irving as the pioneer American man of letters, and of Mark Twain and Bret Harte as American literature's most conspicuous and original modern examples.

Chapter the Twenty-Seventh

The Profession of Journalism--Newspapers and Editors in America--Bennett, Greeley and Raymond--Forney and Dana--The Education of a Journalist

The American newspaper has had, even in my time, three separate and distinct epochs; the thick-and-thin, more or less servile party organ; the personal, one-man-controlled, rather blatant and would-be independent; and the timorous, corporation, or family-owned billboard of such news as the ever-increasing censorship of a constantly centralizing Federal Government will allow.

This latter appears to be its present state. Neither its individuality nor its self-exploitation, scarcely its grandiose pretension, remains. There continues to be printed in large type an amount of shallow stuff that would not be missed if it were omitted altogether. But, except as a bulletin of yesterday's doings, limited, the daily newspaper counts for little, the single advantage of the editor--in case there is an editor--that is, one clothed with supervising authority who "edits"--being that he reaches the public with his lucubrations first, the sanctity that once hedged the editorial "we" long since departed.

The editor dies, even as the actor, and leaves no copy. Editorial reputations have been as ephemeral as the publications which gave them contemporary importance. Without going as far back as the Freneaus and the Callenders, who recalls the names of Mordecai Mannasseh Noah, of Edwin Crosswell and of James Watson Webb? In their day and generation they were influential and distinguished journalists. There are dozens of other names once famous but now forgotten; George Wilkins Kendall; Gerard Hallock; Erastus Brooks; Alexander Bullitt; Barnwell Rhett; Morton McMichael; George William Childs, even Thomas Ritchie, Duff Green and Amos Kendall. "Gales and Seaton" sounds like a trade-mark; but it stood for not a little and lasted a long time in the National Capital, where newspaper vassalage and the public printing went hand-in-hand.

For a time the duello flourished. There were frequent "affairs of honor"--notably about Richmond in Virginia and Charleston in South Carolina--sometimes fatal meetings, as in the case of John H. Pleasants and one of the sons of Thomas Ritchie in which Pleasants was killed, and the yet more celebrated affair between Graves, of Kentucky, and Cilley, of Maine, in which Cilley was killed; Bladensburg the scene, and the refusal of Cilley to recognize James Watson Webb the occasion.

I once had an intimate account of this duel with all the cruel incidents from Henry A. Wise, a party to it, and a blood-curdling narrative it made. They fought with rifles at thirty paces, and Cilley fell on the third fire. It did much to discredit duelling in the South. The story, however, that Graves was so much affected that thereafter he could never sleep in a darkened chamber had no foundation whatever, a fact I learned from my associate in the old Louisville Journal and later in The Courier-Journal, Mr. Isham Henderson, who was a brother-in-law of Mr. Graves, his sister, Mrs. Graves, being still alive. The duello died at length. There was never sufficient reason for its being. It was both a vanity and a fad. In Hopkinson Smith's "Col. Carter of Cartersville," its real character is hit off to the life.

When very early, rather too early, I found myself in the saddle, Bennett and Greeley and Raymond in New York, and Medill and Storey in Chicago, were yet alive and conspicuous figures in the newspaper life of the time. John Bigelow, who had retired from the New York Evening Post, was Minister to France. Halstead was coming on, but, except as a correspondent, Whitelaw Reid had not "arrived." The like was true of "Joe" McCullagh, who, in the same character, divided the newspaper reading attention of the country with George Alfred Townsend and Donn Piatt. Joseph Medill was withdrawing from the Chicago Tribune in favor of Horace White, presently to return and die in harness--a man of sterling intellect and character--and Wilbur F. Storey, his local rival, who was beginning to show signs of the mental malady that, developed into monomania, ultimately ended his life in gloom and despair, wrecking one of the finest newspaper properties outside of New York. William R. Nelson, who was to establish a really great newspaper in Kansas City, was still a citizen of Ft. Wayne.

James Gordon Bennett, the elder, seemed then to me, and has always seemed, the real founder of the modern newspaper as a vehicle of popular information, and, in point of apprehension, at least, James Gordon Bennett, the younger, did not fall behind his father. What was, and might have been regarded and dismissed as a trivial slander drove him out of New York and made him the greater part of his life a resident of Paris, where I was wont to meet and know much of him.

The New York Herald, under father and son, attained enormous prosperity, prestige and real power. It suffered chiefly from what they call in Ireland "absentee landlordism." Its "proprietor," for he never described himself as its "editor," was a man of exquisite sensibilities--a "despot" of course--whom nature created for a good citizen, a good husband and the head of a happy domestic fabric. He should have married the woman of his choice, for he was deeply in love with her and never ceased to love her, forty years later leaving her in his will a handsome legacy.

Crossing the ocean with the "Commodore," as he was called by his familiars, not long after he had taken up his residence abroad, naturally we fell occasionally into shop talk. "What would you do," he once said, "if you owned the Herald?" "Why," I answered, "I would stay in New York and edit it;" and then I proceeded, "but you mean to ask me what I think you ought to do with it?" "Yes," he said, "that is about the size of it."

"Well, Commodore," I answered, "if I were you, when we get in I would send for John Cockerill and make him managing editor, and for John Young, and put him in charge of the editorial page, and then I would go and lose myself in the wilds of Africa."

He adopted the first two of these suggestions. John A. Cockerill was still under contract with Joseph Pulitzer and could not accept for a year or more. He finally did accept and died in the Bennett service. John Russell Young took the editorial page and was making it "hum" when a most unaccountable thing happened. I was amazed to receive an invitation to a dinner he had tendered and was about to give to the quondam Virginian and just elected New York Justice Roger A. Pryor. "Is Young gone mad," I said to myself, "or can he have forgotten that the one man of all the world whom the House of Bennett can never forget, or forgive, is Roger A. Pryor?"