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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."
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.
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.
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.