Godkin would have been a greater journalist had he taken a broad and human interest in other departments of the newspaper than his own; and the Evening Post might have had a different history. It would have been less open to the reproach leveled against it, of being rather a magazine than a newspaper. Its circulation, instead of hovering uncertainly between 14,000 and 20,000, might have become extensive. The stone wall that was kept standing between editorial rooms and news rooms was good for neither. Mr. Godkin’s lack of broad cordiality and interest was not felt by those in daily contact with him, but it was often felt by those at the outer desks. Any newspaper must suffer if departmental members work as some did on the Post, to avoid censure and not to gain praise, for in such work there can be no initiative. There were employees who, in making decisions, would take no chance of doing anything the editor would not like, and were hence hostile to any innovation. “What I did not like and still resent somewhat,” says Lincoln Steffens, “is that he objected to individuality in reporting.” The newspaper was made too much for Godkin, too little for outside readers.
II
Yet Godkin’s defects as a general journalist only throw into clearer relief his distinction as a molder of opinion. The Evening Post was quite enough of a newspaper to be a vehicle for his editorial page, and for him that sufficed. He had no wish to appeal directly to several hundred thousand subscribers, to reach the ear of the masses, as Greeley had done. Nothing could have persuaded him to write down to the level of education and intelligence which a huge audience would have possessed. Editorial utterances could be quoted to show that he thought a daily was better when it appealed to comparatively small and select groups. In 1889 he deplored the nation-wide movement for reducing newspaper prices, and said that the Times and Tribune had been better at four cents than they were at two. Godkin spoke to the cultivated few—to university scholars, authors, clergymen, lawyers, physicians, and college graduates generally. Though at the farthest remove from pedantry or stiffness, his writing, polished, allusive, with a keen wit or irony playing across it, required a cultured understanding for its full appreciation. Addressing himself to this narrow constituency, he had an influence easily the greatest of its kind in the history of our journalism.
Foremost among the qualities which gave him this power, his friend of many years, Prof. A. V. Dicey, placed his gift of appositeness, or instinctive discernment of the question of the moment. He had this gift as clearly as Greeley, or Cobbett. His editorial page was kept constantly focussed upon the changing issues of the time. Godkin had no desire to be a voice crying in the wilderness, and knew that his influence would be lost if he wrote about international arbitration when men were thinking of the tariff. Prof. Dicey failed to add that he often helped powerfully toward putting an issue in the foreground. In 1890 he made Tammany a burning public question months before the city campaign; the Post was the first paper to show, in the early nineties, that a contest between jingoes and lovers of peace was taking shape; and he insisted that the free silver battle must be fought out when many Republican politicians were sneaking off the field. He knew how the public mind was moving before the public did. Supplementary to his gift for appositeness was his great skill in reiteration. No small part of the power of the Evening Post and Nation was simply a power of attrition. Once convinced of the justice of a position, he was always, though with unfailing originality and freshness, harping upon it. This, of course, was one of the Post’s irritating qualities for those who disagreed.
To the treatment of all subjects he brought a comprehensive and cosmopolitan knowledge of the world. He knew more than any other American editor about Europe because his personal knowledge of Europe ranged from Belfast, where he had been educated, to the Bosporus. He had lived in Paris, and written a youthful history of Hungary; when Bryce edited the Liberal Party’s “Handbook of Home Rule,” he was the only writer allotted two articles in it; he had many correspondents abroad, and in his later years spent long periods there. In this country he had seen much of ante-bellum and post-bellum society. Though a constant student, he learned only less from his intercourse with men of distinction, from Boston to Washington, than from books. His acquisitions regarding government, international affairs, politics, economics, and law gave him a clear advantage over even journalists like John Hay and Whitelaw Reid. On the other hand, he was handicapped by knowing comparatively little of the great common people, the unintellectual workers, from whose ranks Greeley, Bennett, and Raymond sprang. His Irish humor and sociability gave him some friends among them, but only a few.
Of his style it is easy to form a misapprehension. It was incisive, graphic, and pithy. But at all times it was simple, without the least straining for effect; he indulged in no rhetoric, he did not excel in epigram, as did Dana, and he had no desire to be brilliant in the sense of merely clever. It is true that one can easily find epigrams and witty flashes. On one occasion of much waving of the bloody shirt, he spoke of the rumors that there would be another war between North and South, the former led by Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, the latter by Tom, Dick, and Harry. “There are reports from Washington,” he wrote the fall of 1898, “that Hanna has told Duty to tell Destiny to tell the President to keep the Philippines. We doubt it. We believe Destiny will lie low and say nothing till after election.” He could condense an editorial into a single sentence. When Henry George, an ardent advocate of the confiscation of landed property, traveled in Ireland in the eighties, Godkin wrote: “A spark is in itself a harmless, pretty, and even useful thing, but a spark in a powder magazine is mischief in its most malignant form.” But the prevailing tone of his writings has been well said to be that “of an accomplished gentleman conversing with a set of intimates at his club.” The thoughtful, neatly-put flow of argument or exposition was constantly lighted up by humor, and often varied by irony or invective.
The humor was always spontaneous, and could be either genial or scorching. He had a remarkable faculty for humorous imagery. It was the most natural thing in the world for him to compare the Tammany panic over the Evening Post biographies with the introduction of a ferret into a rat cellar. Sometimes the image was elaborate. Thus, to show the folly of saddling the President with the appointment of thousands of postmasters, he wrote of “The President as Sheik,” comparing him with the Arab chief who sat under the big tree outside the city gate, ordering the bazaar thief to jail, hearing what the widow said of the knavish baker, and giving the good public official a robe of honor. When Cleveland’s friends explained his Venezuela message by the theory that he was forestalling a warlike message by Congress, Godkin remarked: “Foreseeing that Congress would shortly get drunk, he determined by way of cure to anticipate their bout by one of his own, feeling that his own recovery would be speedier and less costly than theirs. But the result was that they joined in his carouse, and they both went to work to smash the national furniture and crockery.”
Of his unequalled gift for compressing a homily into a humorous or ironical paragraph two examples will suffice, both written with typical gusto:
The scenes attending the burial of the late Jesse James on Thursday, at Kearney, Mo., were very affecting. Crowds of people flocked together from all parts of the State to get a last sight of the dead bandit, who had done so much to enable them to lead what they call in Boston “full” lives. Mrs. Samuels, Jesse’s mother, was on the ground early, and talked without reserve to everyone. Her conversation naturally, under the circumstances, was colored with deep religious feeling, and she said to a reporter, who in his shy way ventured to express his sympathy with her bereavement, “I knew it had to come; but my dear boy Jesse is better off in heaven today than he would be here with us”—a sentiment from which no one will be likely to dissent. The officiating clergyman with much tact avoided dwelling on the life and character of the deceased, and improved the occasion by enlarging upon Jesse’s chance of future improvement in Paradise, in a manner that would probably have struck Mr. James himself as rather mawkish. The widespread belief in the West that he has gone straight to heaven is a touching indication of the general softening of religious doctrines. (April, 1882.)
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