LV
When Mr. Bryant died, Mr. Parke Godwin assumed editorial control of the Evening Post, and his attention promptly wrought something like a miracle in the increased vigor and aggressiveness of its editorial conduct. Mr. Godwin was well advanced in middle life at that time; he was comfortably provided with this world's goods, and he was not anxious to take up again the strenuous journalistic work in which he had already achieved all there was to achieve of reputation. But in his own interest and in the interest of Mr. Bryant's heirs, it seemed necessary for him to step into this breach. Moreover, he had abated none of his interest in public affairs or in those things that make for culture, enlightenment, and human betterment. He had never ceased to write for the Evening Post upon matters of such kind when occasion called for strong, virile utterance.
In his declining years Mr. Bryant had not lost interest in these things, but he had abated somewhat his activity with reference to them. He had more and more left the conduct of the newspaper to his subordinates, trusting to what he used to call his "volunteer staff"—Parke Godwin, John Bigelow, Samuel J. Tilden, and other strong men, to furnish voluntarily all that was needed of strenuosity in the discussion of matters closely concerning the public weal. I do not know that Mr. Tilden was ever known to the public even as an occasional writer for the Evening Post. He was a man of singularly secretive temperament, and when he wrote anything for the Evening Post its anonymity was guarded with a jealousy such as I have never known any other person to exercise. What he wrote—on the infrequent occasions of his writing at all—was given to Mr. Bryant and by him handed in with instructions for its publication and without a hint to anybody concerning its authorship. It was only by accident that I learned whence certain articles came, and I think that knowledge was not usually shared with any other member of Mr. Bryant's staff.
Mr. Godwin pursued a different course. These occasional contributions did not satisfy his ideas of what the Evening Post should be in its editorial utterances. He set to work to stimulate a greater aggressiveness on the part of the staff writers, and he himself brought a strong hand to bear upon the work.
"A Lion in a Den of Daniels"
When Mr. Godwin died, a few years ago, Dr. Titus Munson Coan, in an obituary sketch read before the Authors Club, said with reference to this part of his career that in the Evening Post office "he was a lion in a den of Daniels," and the figure of speech was altogether apt.
He had gifts of an uncommon sort. He knew how to say strong things in a strong way. He could wield the rapier of subtle sarcasm, and the bludgeon of denunciation with an equally skilled hand. Sometimes he brought even a trip-hammer into play with startling effect.
I remember one conspicuous case of the kind. Sara Bernhardt was playing one of her earliest and most brilliant engagements in New York. Mr. Godwin's alert interest in every form of high art led him not only to employ critics of specially expert quality to write of her work, but himself now and then to write something of more than ordinary appreciation of the great Frenchwoman's genius as illustrated in her performance.
Presently a certain clergyman of the "sensational" school, who had denounced the theater as "the door of hell and the open gateway of damnation," sent to the Evening Post an intemperate protest against the large space it was giving to Sara Bernhardt and her art. The letter was entitled "Quite Enough of Sara Bernhardt," and in the course of it the writer declared the great actress to be a woman of immoral character and dissolute life, whom it was a shame, a disgrace, and a public calamity for the Evening Post even to name in its columns.
Mr. Godwin wrote an answer to the tirade. He entitled it "Quite Enough of X"—the "X" standing here for the clergyman's name, which he used in full. It was one of the most effective bits of criticism and destructive analysis I ever saw in print, and it left the critic of Sara Bernhardt with not a leg to stand upon, and with no possibility of reply. Mr. Godwin pointed out that Sara Bernhardt had asked American attention, not as a woman, but solely as an artist; that it was of her art alone, and not of her personality that the Evening Post had written; that she had neither asked admission to American society nor accepted it when pressed upon her; and that her personal character and mode of life had no more to do with the duty of considering her art than had the sins of any old master when one viewed his paintings and sought to interpret the genius that inspired them.
So far Mr. Godwin was argumentative and placative. But he had other arrows in his quiver. He challenged the clergyman to say how he knew that the actress was a person of immoral character and dissolute life, and to explain what right he had to make charges of that kind against a woman without the smallest evidence of their truth. And so on to the end of a chapter that must have been very bitter reading to the offender if he had been a person of normal sensitiveness, as he was not.
I have cited this occurrence merely by way of explaining the fact that Mr. Godwin had many critics and many enemies. A man of sincere mind and aggressive temper upon proper occasion, and especially one possessed of his gift of vigorous expression, must needs make enemies in plenty, if he edits a newspaper or otherwise writes for publication. But on the other hand, those who knew him best were all and always his devoted friends—those who knew his sturdy character, his unflinching honesty of mind, and his sincere devotion to the right as he saw it.
My acquaintance with him, before his assumption of control on the Evening Post, was comparatively slight, and in all that I here write of his character and mind, I am drawing upon my recollection of him during a later intimacy which, beginning on the Evening Post, was drawn closer during my service on another newspaper, and endured until his death.
After a brief period of editorship Mr. Godwin sold a controlling interest in the Evening Post to a company of men represented by Messrs. Horace White, E. L. Godkin, and Carl Schurz—Mr. Schurz becoming the titular editor for a time. When Mr. Godwin learned, after the sale was agreed upon, that Mr. Godkin was one of the incoming group, he sought to buy Mr. Godkin's weekly newspaper, The Nation, and as the negotiation seemed for a time to promise well, he arranged to make me editor of that periodical. This opened to me a prospect of congenial work, more agreeable to me than any that a daily newspaper could offer. But in the end Mr. Godkin declined to sell the Nation at any price that Mr. Godwin thought fair, and made it instead the weekly edition of the Evening Post.
The Literary Shop Again
Accordingly, I again quitted the newspaper life, fully intending to enter it no more. Literary work of many kinds was open to me, and it was my purpose to devote myself exclusively to it, maintaining a literary workshop in my own home. I became an adviser of the Harper publishing house, with no office attendance required of me, no working time fixed, and no interference of any kind with my entire liberty. I was writing now and then for the editorial pages of the great newspapers, regularly for a number of magazines, and occasionally writing a book, though that was infrequent for the reason that in the absence of international copyright, there was no encouragement to American authors to write books in competition with reprints that cost their publishers nothing.
In mentioning this matter of so-called "piracy," I do not mean to accuse the reputable American publishers of English books of any wrong, for they were guilty of none. They were victims of the lack of law as truly as the authors on either side were. They were as eager as the authors—English or American—could be, for an international copyright law. For lack of it their profits were cut short and their business enterprises set awry. The reputable publishing houses in this country actually purchased the American publishing rights of many English books with no other protection of what they had purchased than such as was afforded by the "courtesy of the trade"—a certain gentlemen's agreement under which no reputable American publisher would reprint a book of which another publisher had bought the advance sheets. This protection was uncertain, meager, and often ineffective for the reason that there were disreputable publishers in plenty who paid no heed to the "courtesy of the trade" but reprinted whatsoever they thought would sell.
In the case of such works as those of Herbert Spencer and some others, I believe I am correctly informed that the American publishers paid larger royalties to the authors—larger in gross amount, at least—than those authors received from their English publishers. In the same way American publishers of the better class paid liberally for advance sheets of the best foreign fiction, often at heavy loss to themselves because the books they had bought were promptly reprinted in very cheap form by their less scrupulous competitors. In the case of fiction of a less distinguished kind, of which no advance sheets were offered, they had no choice but to make cheap reprints on their own account.
It is proper to say also that if this was "piracy," the American publishers were by no means the worst pirates or the most conspicuous ones, though the complaints made were chiefly of English origin and were all directed against the Americans.
Piracy—British and American
I shall never forget the way in which my brother, Edward Eggleston —himself an active worker for international copyright—met the complaints of one English critic who was more lavish and less discriminative in his criticism in a company of Americans than Edward thought good manners justified. The critic was the son of an English poet, whose father's chief work had won considerable popularity in America. The young man was a guest at one of the receptions of the Authors Club, every member of which was directly or indirectly a sufferer by reason of the lack of international copyright. He seized upon the occasion for the delivery of a tirade against the American dishonesty which, he said, threatened to cut short his travel year by depriving his father of the money justly due him as royalty on the American reprints of his books.
My brother listened in silence for a time. Then that pinch of gunpowder that lies somewhere in every human make-up "went off."
"The American publishers of your father's poem," he said, "have paid him all they could afford to pay in the present state of the law, I believe?"
"Yes—but what is it? A mere fraction of what they justly owe him," the young man answered.
"Now listen," said Edward. "You call that American piracy, and you overlook the piracy on the other side. Your father's book has sold so many thousand copies in America"—giving the figures. "The English reprint of my 'Hoosier Schoolmaster' has sold nearly ten times that number, according to the figures of the English 'pirates' who reprinted it and who graciously sent me a 'tip,' as I call it, of one hundred dollars—less than a fraction, if I may so call it, of what American publishers have voluntarily paid your father. But dropping that smaller side of the matter, let me tell you that every man in this company is a far greater sufferer from the barbaric state of the law than your father or any other English author ever was. We are denied the opportunity to practise our profession, except under a paralysing competition with stolen goods. What chance has an American novel, published at a dollar or more, in competition with English fiction even of an inferior sort published at ten cents? We cannot expect the reader who reads only for amusement to pay a dollar or a dollar and a half for an American novel when he can fill his satchel with reprints of English novels at ten cents apiece. But that is the very smallest part of our loss. The whole American people are inestimably losers because of this thing. They are deprived of all chance of a national literature, reflecting the life of our country, its ideas, its inspirations, and its aspirations. You Englishmen are petty losers in comparison with us. Your losses are measurable in pounds, shillings, and pence. Ours involve things of immeasurably greater value."
I have quoted here, as accurately as memory permits, an utterance that met the approval of every author present, because I think that in our appeals to Congress for international copyright only the smaller, lower, and less worthy commercial aspects of the matter have been presented, and that as a consequence the American people have been themselves seriously and hurtfully misled as to the higher importance of a question involving popular interests of far more consequence than the financial returns of authorship can ever be.