XXXII
The Beginning of Newspaper Life
Let me pass hurriedly over the years that immediately followed the end of the war. I went West in search of a living. In Cairo, Illinois, I became counsel and attorney "at law and in fact," for a great banking, mining, steamboating, and mercantile firm, whose widely extending interests covered the whole West and South.
The work was uncongenial and by way of escaping from it, after I had married, I removed to Mississippi and undertook the practice of law there.
That work proved still less to my liking and in the summer of 1870 I abandoned it in the profoundest disgust.
With a wife, one child, a little household furniture, and no money at all, I removed to New York and secured work as a reporter on the Brooklyn Union, an afternoon newspaper.
I knew nothing of the business, art, or mystery of newspaper making, and I knew nothing of the city. I find it difficult to imagine a man less well equipped for my new undertaking than I was. But I had an abounding confidence in my ability to learn anything I wanted to learn, and I thought I knew how to express myself lucidly in writing. For the rest I had tireless energy and a good deal of courage of the kind that is sometimes slangily called "cheek." This was made manifest on the first day of my service by the fact that while waiting for a petty news assignment I wrote an editorial article and sent it in to Theodore Tilton, the editor, for use. I had an impulse of general helpfulness which was left unrestrained by my utter ignorance of the distinctions and dignities of a newspaper office. I had a thought which seemed to me to deserve editorial utterance, and with the mistaken idea that I was expected to render all the aid I could in the making of the newspaper, I wrote what I had to say.
Theodore Tilton was a man of very hospitable mind, and he cared little for traditions. He read my article, approved it, and printed it as a leader. Better still, he sent for me and asked me what experience I had had as a newspaper man. I told him I had had none, whereupon he said encouragingly:
"Oh well, it doesn't matter much. I'll have you on the editorial staff soon. In the meantime, learn all you can about the city, and especially about the shams and falsities of its 'Society' with a big 'S.' Study state politics, and equip yourself to comment critically upon such things. And whenever you have an editorial in your mind write it and send it to me."
The Union had been purchased by Mr. Henry C. Bowen, the owner of the New York Independent, then the most widely influential periodical of its class in America. Theodore Tilton was the editor of both.
An Old School Man of Letters
Theodore Tilton was at the crest of the wave of success at that time, and he took himself and his genius very seriously. Concerning him I shall write more fully a little later on. At present I wish to say only that with all his self-appreciation he had a keen appreciation of other men's abilities, and he sought in every way he could to make them tributary to his own success in whatever he undertook. To that end he had engaged some strong men and women as members of his staff on the Union, and among these the most interesting to me was Charles F. Briggs, the "Harry Franco" of an earlier literary time, the associate and partner of Edgar Allan Poe on the Broadway Journal, the personal friend or enemy of every literary man of consequence in his time, the associate of George William Curtis and Parke Godwin in the conduct of Putnam's Monthly; the coadjutor of Henry J. Raymond on the Times, the novelist to whom Lowell dedicated "The Fable for Critics," and whose personal and literary characteristics Lowell set forth with singular aptitude in that poem. In brief, he was in his own person a representative and embodiment of the literary life of what I had always regarded as the golden age of American letters. He talked familiarly of writers who had been to me cloud-haloed demigods, and made men of them to my apprehension.
Let me add that though the literary life of which he had been a part was a turbulent one, beset by jealousies and vexed by quarrels of a bitter personal character, such as would be impossible among men of letters in our time of more gracious manners, I never knew him to say an unjust thing about any of the men he had known, or to withhold a just measure of appreciation from the work of those with whom he had most bitterly quarreled.
Perhaps no man among Poe's contemporaries had juster reason to feel bitterness toward the poet's memory than had Mr. Briggs. Yet during my intimacy with him, extending over many years, I never heard him say an unkind word of Poe. On the other hand, I never knew him to fail to contradict upon occasion and in his dogmatic fashion—which was somehow very convincing—any of the prevalent misapprehensions as to Poe's character and life which might be mentioned in his presence.
It was not that he was a meekly forgiving person, for he was, on the contrary, pugnacious in an unusual degree. But the dominant quality of his character was a love of truth and justice. Concerning Poe and the supposed immorality of his life, he once said to me, in words that I am sure I remember accurately because of the impression they made on my mind:
"He was not immoral at all in his personal life or in his work. He was merely unmoral. He had no perception of the difference between right and wrong in the moral sense of those words. His conscience was altogether artistic. If you had told him you had killed a man who stood annoyingly in the way of your purposes, he would have thought none the worse of you for it. He would have reflected that the man ought not to have put himself in your way. But if you had been guilty of putting forth a false quantity in verse, he would have held you to be a monster for whom no conceivable punishment could be adequate."
Often Mr. Briggs's brusquerie and pugnacity were exaggerated, or even altogether assumed by way of hiding a sentiment too tender to be exhibited. Still more frequently the harshest things he said to his friends—and they were sometimes very bitter—were prompted, not by his displeasure with those who were their victims, but by some other cause of "disgruntlement." On such occasions he would repent him of his fault, and would make amends, but never in any ordinary way or after a fashion that anybody else would have chosen.
One morning he came into the editorial room which he and I jointly occupied. I bade him good-morning as usual, but he made no reply. After a little while he turned upon me with some bitter, stinging utterance which, if it had come from a younger man, I should have hotly resented. Coming from a man of his age and distinction, I resented it only by turning to my desk and maintaining silence during the entire morning. When his work was done, he left the office without a word, leaving me to feel that he meant the break between us—the cause of which I did not at all understand—to be permanent, as I certainly intended that it should. But when he entered the room next morning he stood still in the middle of the floor, facing my back, for I had not turned my face away from my desk.
Mr. Briggs Explains
"Good-morning!" he said. "Are you ready to apologize to me?"
I turned toward him with an involuntary smile at the absurdity of the suggestion, and answered:
"I don't know what I should apologize for, Mr. Briggs."
"Neither do I," he answered. "My question was prompted by curiosity. It usually happens that apologies come from the person offended, you know. Are you going to write on this affair in the Senate, or shall I take it up?"
From that moment his manner was what it always had been during our association. Beyond what he had said he made no reference to the matter, but after our work was finished he, in fact, explained his temper of the day before, while carefully avoiding every suggestion that he meant to explain it or that there was any connection between the explanation and the thing explained.
"What do you think of servants?" he asked abruptly. I made some answer, though I did not understand the reason for his question or its occasion.
"When I was in the Custom House," he resumed, "I had an opportunity to buy, far below the usual price, some of the finest wines and brandies ever imported. I bought some Madeira, some sherry, and some brandy—ten gallons of each, in five-gallon demijohns—and laid them away in my cellar, thinking the stock sufficient to last me as long as I lived. I rejoiced in the certainty that however poor I might become, I should always be able to offer a friend a glass of something really worthy of a gentleman's attention. Night before last I asked my daughter to replenish a decanter of sherry which had run low. She went to the cellar and presently returned with a look on her face that made me think she had seen a burglar. She reported that there wasn't a drop of anything left in any of the demijohns. I sent for some detectives, and before morning they solved the riddle. A servant girl who had resigned from our service a week or two before had carried all the wine and brandy—two bottlefuls at a time—to a miserable, disreputable gin mill, and sold it for what the thievish proprietor saw fit to give. When I learned the facts I lost my temper, which was a very unprofitable thing to do. I'm late," looking at his watch, "and must be off."
Mr. Briggs had a keen sense of humor, which he tried hard to disguise with a shaggy seeming of dogmatic positiveness. He would say his most humorous things in the tone and with the manner of a man determined to make himself as disagreeable as possible.
I sat with him at a public dinner one evening. He took the wines with the successive courses, but when later some one, on the other side of the table, lifted his glass of champagne and asked Mr. Briggs to drink with him, he excused himself for taking carbonic water instead of the wine, by saying:
"I'm a rigid 'temperance' man."
When we all smiled and glanced at the red and white wine glasses he had emptied in the course of the meal, he turned upon us savagely, saying:
"You smile derisively, but I repeat my assertion that I'm a strict 'temperance' man; I never take a drink unless I want it."
He paused, and then added:
"Temperance consists solely in never taking a drink unless you want it. Intemperance consists in taking drinks when some other fellow wants them."
Mr. Briggs's Generosity
He was peculiarly generous of encouragement to younger men, when he thought they deserved it. I may add that he was equally generous of rebuke under circumstances of an opposite kind. I had entered journalism without knowing the least thing about the profession, or trade—if that be the fitter name for it, as I sometimes think it is—and I had not been engaged in the work long enough to get over my modesty, when one day I wrote a paragraph of a score or two lines to correct an error into which the New York Tribune had that morning fallen. Not long before that time a certain swashbuckler, E. M. Yerger, of Jackson, Mississippi, had committed a homicide in the nature of a political assassination. The crime and the assassin's acquittal by reason of political influence had greatly excited the indignation of the entire North.
There lived at the same time in Memphis another and a very different E. M. Yerger, a judge whose learning, uprightness, and high personal character had made him deservedly one of the best loved and most honored jurists in the Southwest. At the time of which I now write, this Judge E. M. Yerger had died, and his funeral had been an extraordinary manifestation of popular esteem, affection, and profound sorrow.
The Tribune, misled by the identity of their names, had confounded the two men, and had that morning "improved the occasion" to hurl a deal of editorial thunder at the Southern people for thus honoring a fire-eating assassin.
By way of correcting the error I wrote and printed an editorial paragraph, setting forth the facts simply, and making no comments.
When Mr. Briggs next entered the office he took my hand warmly in both his own, and said:
"I congratulate you. That paragraph of yours was the best editorial the Union has printed since I've been on the paper."
"Why, Mr. Briggs," I protested, "it was only a paragraph——"
"What of that?" he demanded in his most quarrelsome tone. "The Lord's Prayer is only a paragraph in comparison with some of the 'graces' I've heard distinguished clergymen get off at banquets by way of impressing their eloquence upon the oysters that were growing warm under the gaslights, while they solemnly prated."
"But there was nothing in the paragraph," I argued; "it only corrected an error."
"Why, sir, do you presume to tell me what is and what isn't in an article that I've read for myself? You're a novice, a greenhorn in this business. Don't undertake to instruct my judgment, sir. That paragraph was excellent editorial writing, because it corrected an error that did a great injustice; because it gave important and interesting information; because it set forth facts of public import not known to our readers generally, and finally, because you put that final period just where it belonged. Don't contradict me. Don't presume to argue the matter. I won't stand it."
With that he left the room as abruptly as he had entered it, and with the manner of a man who has quarreled and has put his antagonist down. I smilingly recalled the lines in which Lowell so aptly described and characterized him in "A Fable for Critics":
"There comes Harry Franco, and as he draws near,
You find that's a smile which you took for a sneer;
One half of him contradicts t'other; his wont
Is to say very sharp things and do very blunt;
His manner's as hard as his feelings are tender,
And a sortie he'll make when he means to surrender;
He's in joke half the time when he seems to be sternest,
When he seems to be joking be sure he's in earnest;
He has common sense in a way that's uncommon,
Hates humbug and cant, loves his friends like a woman,
Builds his dislikes of cards and his friendships of oak,
Loves a prejudice better than aught but a joke;
Is half upright Quaker, half downright Come-Outer,
Loves Freedom too well to go stark mad about her;
Quite artless himself, is a lover of Art,
Shuts you out of his secrets and into his heart,
And though not a poet, yet all must admire
In his letters of Pinto his skill on the liar."