IV.
Mr. Grady took great interest in children and young people. It pleased him beyond measure to be able to contribute to their happiness. He knew all the boys in the Constitution office, and there is quite a little army of them employed there in one way and another; knew all about their conditions, their hopes and their aspirations, and knew their histories. He had favorites among them, but his heart went out to all. He interested himself in them in a thousand little ways that no one else would have thought of. He was never too busy to concern himself with their affairs. A year or two before he died he organized a dinner for the newsboys and carriers. It was at first intended that the dinner should be given by the Constitution, but some of the prominent people heard of it, and insisted in making contributions. Then it was decided to accept contributions from all who might desire to send anything, and the result of it was a dinner of magnificent proportions. The tables were presided over by prominent society ladies, and the occasion was a very happy one in all respects.
This is only one of a thousand instances in which Mr. Grady interested himself in behalf of young people. Wherever he could find boys who were struggling to make a living, with the expectation of making something of themselves; wherever he could find boys who were giving their earnings to widowed mothers—and he found hundreds of them—he went to their aid as promptly and as effectually as he carried out all his schemes, whether great or small. It was his delight to give pleasure to all the children that he knew, and even those he didn’t know. He had the spirit and the manner of a boy, when not engrossed in work, and he enjoyed life with the zest and enthusiasm of a lad of twelve. He was in his element when a circus was in town, and it was a familiar and an entertaining sight to see him heading a procession of children—sometimes fifty in line—going to the big tents to see the animals and witness the antics of the clowns. At such times, he considered himself on a frolic, and laid his dignity on the shelf. His interest in the young, however, took a more serious shape, as I have said. When Mr. Clark Howell, the son of Captain Evan Howell, attained his majority, Mr. Grady wrote him a letter, which I give here as one of the keys to the character of this many-sided man. Apart from this, it is worth putting in print for the wholesome advice it contains. The young man to whom it was written has succeeded Mr. Grady as managing editor of the Constitution. The letter is as follows:
Atlanta, Ga., Sept. 20, 1884.
My Dear Clark:—I suppose that just about the time I write this to you—a little after midnight—you are twenty-one years old. If you were born a little later than this hour it is your mother’s fault (or your father’s), and I am not to blame for it. I assume, therefore, that this is your birthday, and I send you a small remembrance. I send you a pen (that you may wear as a cravat-pin) for several reasons. In the first place, I have no money, my dear boy, with which to buy you something new. In the next place, it is the symbol of the profession to which we both belong, in which each has done some good work, and will, God being willing, do much more. Take the pen, wear it, and let it stand as a sign of the affection I have for you.
Somehow or other (as the present is a right neat one I have the right to bore you a little) I look upon you as my own boy. My son will be just about your age when you are about mine, and he will enter the paper when you are about where I am. I have got to looking at you as a sort of prefiguring of what my son may be, and of looking over you, and rejoicing in your success, as I shall want you to feel toward him. Let me write to you what I would be willing for you to write to him.
Never Gamble. Of all the vices that enthrall men, this is the worst, the strongest, and the most insidious. Outside of the morality of it, it is the poorest investment, the poorest business, and the poorest fun. No man is safe who plays at all. It is easiest never to play. I never knew a man, a gentleman and man of business, who did not regret the time and money he had wasted in it. A man who plays poker is unfit for every other business on earth.
Never Drink. I love liquor and I love the fellowship involved in drinking. My safety has been that I never drink at all. It is much easier not to drink at all than to drink a little. If I had to attribute what I have done in life to any one thing, I should attribute it to the fact that I am a teetotaler. As sure as you are born, it is the pleasantest, the easiest, and the safest way.
Marry Early. There is nothing that steadies a young fellow like marrying a good girl and raising a family. By marrying young your children grow up when they are a pleasure to you. You feel the responsibility of life, the sweetness of life, and you avoid bad habits.
If you never drink, never gamble, and marry early, there is no limit to the useful and distinguished life you may live. You will be the pride of your father’s heart, and the joy of your mother’s.
I don’t know that there is any happiness on earth worth having outside of the happiness of knowing that you have done your duty and that you have tried to do good. You try to build up,—there are always plenty others who will do all the tearing down that is necessary. You try to live in the sunshine,—men who stay in the shade always get mildewed.
I will not tell you how much I think of you or how proud I am of you. We will let that develop gradually. There is only one thing I am a little disappointed in. You don’t seem to care quite enough about base-ball and other sports. Don’t make the mistake of standing aloof from these things and trying to get old too soon. Don’t underrate out-door athletic sports as an element of American civilization and American journalism. I am afraid you inherit this disposition from your father, who has never been quite right on this subject, but who is getting better, and will soon be all right, I think.
Well, I will quit. May God bless you, my boy, and keep you happy and wholesome at heart, and in health. If He does this, we’ll try and do the rest.
Your friend, H. W. Grady.
Mr. Grady’s own boyishness led him to sympathize with everything that appertains to boyhood. His love for his own children led him to take an interest in other children. He wanted to see them enjoy themselves in a boisterous, hearty, health-giving way. The sports that men forget or forego possessed a freshness for him that he never tried to conceal. His remarks, in the letter just quoted, in regard to out-door sports, are thoroughly characteristic. In all contests of muscle, strength, endurance and skill he took a continual and an absorbing interest. At school he excelled in all athletic sports and out-door games. He had a gymnasium of his own, which was thrown open to his school-mates, and there he used to practice for hours at a time. His tastes in this direction led a great many people, all his friends, to shake their heads a little, especially as he was not greatly distinguished for scholarship, either at school or college. They wondered, too, how, after neglecting the text-books, he could stand so near the head of his classes. He did not neglect his books. During the short time he devoted to them each day, his prodigious memory and his wonderful powers of assimilation enabled him to master their contents as thoroughly as boys that had spent half the night in study. Even his family were astonished at his standing in school, knowing how little time he devoted to his text-books. He found time, however, in spite of his devotion to out-door sports and athletic exercises, to read every book in Athens, and in those days every family in town had a library of more or less value.
He had a large library of his own, and, by exchanging his books with other boys and borrowing, he managed to get at the pith and marrow of all the English literature to be found in the university town. Not content with this, he became, during one of his vacation periods, a clerk in the only bookstore in Athens. The only compensation that he asked was the privilege of reading when there were no customers to be waited on. This was during his eleventh year, and by the time he was twelve he was by far the best-read boy that Athens had ever known. This habit of reading he kept up to the day of his death. He read all the new books as they came out, and nothing pleased him better than to discuss them with some congenial friend. He had no need to re-read his old favorites—the books he loved as boy and man—for these he could remember almost chapter by chapter. He read with amazing rapidity; it might be said that he literally absorbed whatever interested him, and his sympathies were so wide and his taste so catholic that it was a poor writer indeed in whom he could not find something to commend. He was fond of light literature, but the average modern novel made no impression on him. He enjoyed it to some extent, and was amazed as well as amused at the immense amount of labor expended on the trivial affairs of life by the writers who call themselves realists. He was somewhat interested in Henry James’s “Portrait of a Lady,” mainly, I suspect, because it so cleverly hits off the character of the modern female newspaper correspondent in the person of Miss Henrietta Stackpole. Yet there was much in the book that interested him—the dreariness of parts of it was relieved by Mrs. Touchett. “Dear old Mrs. Touchett!” he used to say. “Such immense cleverness as hers does credit to Mr. James. She refuses to associate with any of the other characters in the book. I should like to meet her, and shake hands with her, and talk the whole matter over.”
When a school-boy, and while devouring all the stories that fell in his way, young Grady was found one day reading Blackstone. His brother asked him if he thought of studying law. “No,” was the reply, “but I think everyone ought to read Blackstone. Besides, the book interests me.” With the light and the humorous he always mixed the solids. He was fond of history, and was intensely interested in all the social questions of the day. He set great store by the new literary development that has been going on in the South since the war, and sought to promote it by every means in his power, through his newspaper and by his personal influence. He looked forward to the time when the immense literary field, as yet untouched in the South, would be as thoroughly worked and developed as that of New England has been; and he thought that this development might reasonably be expected to follow, if it did not accompany, the progress of the South in other directions. This idea was much in his mind, and in the daily conversations with the members of his editorial staff, he recurred to it time and again. One view that he took of it was entirely practical, as, indeed, most of his views were. He thought that the literature of the South ought to be developed, not merely in the interest of belles-lettres, but in the interest of American history. He regarded it as in some sort a weapon of defense, and he used to refer in terms of the warmest admiration to the oftentimes unconscious, but terribly certain and effective manner in which New England had fortified herself by means of the literary genius of her sons and daughters. He perceived, too, that all the talk about a distinctive Southern literature, which has been in vogue among the contributors of the Lady’s Books and annuals, was silly in the extreme. He desired it to be provincial in a large way, for, in this country, provinciality is only another name for the patriotism that has taken root in the rural regions, but his dearest wish was that it should be purely and truly American in its aim and tendency. It was for this reason that he was ready to welcome any effort of a Southern writer that showed a spark of promise. For such he was always ready with words of praise.
He was fond, as I have said, of Dickens, but his favorite novel, above all others, was Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables.” His own daring imagination fitted somewhat into the colossal methods of Hugo, and his sympathies enabled him to see in the character of Jean Valjean a type of the pathetic struggle for life and justice that is going on around us every day. Mr. Grady read between the lines and saw beneath the surface, and he was profoundly impressed with the strong and vital purpose of Hugo’s book. Its almost ferocious protest against injustice, and its indignant arraignment of the inhumanity of society, stirred him deeply. Not only the character of Jean Valjean, but the whole book appealed to his sense of the picturesque and artistic. The large lines on which the book is cast, the stupendous nature of the problem it presents, the philanthropy, the tenderness—all these moved him as no other work of fiction ever did. Mr. Grady’s pen was too busy to concern itself with matters merely literary. He rarely undertook to write what might be termed a literary essay; the affairs of life—the demands of the hour—the pressure of events—precluded this; but all through his lectures and occasional speeches (that were never reported), there are allusions to Jean Valjean, and to Victor Hugo. I have before me the rough notes of some of his lectures, and in these appear more than once picturesque allusions to Hugo’s hero struggling against fate and circumstance.