Much of the Evening Post’s news value was always furnished by certain unrivaled special features—unrivaled not only in New York, but the whole country. Perhaps the chief, and certainly the most effective in maintaining the circulation, was the financial department. Alexander Dana Noyes, who came from the Commercial Advertiser to be financial editor in 1891, and held that post till 1920, gave new credit to Whiting’s pages, and ably supplemented Horace White in the editorial discussion of financial questions. As far west as Chicago, and as far south as Atlanta his columns were looked to daily as the best on industry and finance printed.
A position of equal preëminence was held by the Evening Post’s literary department, the record of which repays examination in detail. Falling heir in 1881 to the literary editor and traditions of the Nation, the Post became the first American newspaper to publish book criticism that was consistently expert, discriminating, and of high literary quality. James Bryce doubted whether there was any criticism in the world as good as the old Nation’s. By 1881 some of the greatest of Godkin’s original contributors, as Henry James and Lowell, were no longer writing for it. But in spite of such defections, the list was impressively weighty and comprehensive, and the Post had every worthy book reviewed by an authority in the field in which it lay. In fact, the dominant tone of its literary pages was authoritativeness—it was not clever, it was not newsy, but it was definitive.
In large part this meant that the reviewing was by university scholars, and the academic tone of the writing, in the best sense of the word, had much to do with the esteem for the Evening Post in academic circles. People who wanted bright belletristic literary pages were disappointed. Glancing down the roster of reviewers in the eighties, we find only two men known as novelists or writers of light essays, Joel Chandler Harris and Edward Eggleston. There was a decided deficiency in news of literary personalities, and discussions of current literary movements. But all the great institutions of learning were ably represented. It is sufficient to take Harvard as an example. Her contributors included:
Alexander Agassiz, H. P. Bowditch, Edward Channing, Francis J. Child, Ephraim Emerton, C. H. Grandgent, J. B. Greenough, Albert Bushnell Hart, William James, Charles R. Lanman, Charles Eliot Norton, George H. Palmer, Josiah Royce, N. S. Shaler, F. W. Taussig, J. D. Whitney, Justin Winsor.
Outside the universities, we find among the reviewers the names of historians like Parkman, Henry Adams, Henry C. Lea, John C. Ropes, and John Fiske; a number of men in the Federal service, like the archæologist A. F. Bandelier, the astronomer Simon Newcomb, Henry Gannett, and J. R. Soley; and writers of reputation in various fields like George E. Woodberry, T. W. Higginson, W. C. Brownell, Kenyon Cox, Brander Matthews, H. H. Furness, and Angelo Heilprin. The fare was not sufficiently varied by light and elegant features—one rule was not to accept any poetry—but it was of the best possible quality.
The literary editor from 1881 to 1903 was Wendell Phillips Garrison, who had been with the Nation since its founding in 1865, and had early taken charge of the reviews. His name is indissolubly linked with Godkin’s. “If anything goes wrong with you, I will retire into a monastery,” the editor wrote in 1883. “You are the one steady and constant man I have ever had to do with.” He is not remembered, like R. H. Hutton of the London Spectator, the only literary editor of the time superior to him, for permanently valuable literary criticism. His distinction lay in his keen judgment in selecting reviewers, his ability to inspire them, his careful scholarship, and his skill in making homogeneous the work sent to him.
Both to his associates in the office and distant contributors, Garrison was endeared by his tact and charm. When writing to reviewers, he was wont to include some personal word of friendship, often whimsical, which drew the recipients into an intimate circle. He thus built up a great family of Evening Post and Nation writers, from the Pacific Coast to St. Petersburg, more than two hundred of whom joined on the fortieth anniversary of his entrance upon journalism in presenting him a silver vase, inscribed by Goldwin Smith. Whenever Godkin caused a storm in the office, Garrison was expected to restore calm. A single example of his constant thoughtfulness may be given. H. T. Finck, the Post’s music critic, while traveling in Switzerland one summer, was attacked in Berne by typhoid fever, and sent to the University Hospital. Garrison heard of his plight, immediately ascertained that the Nation had a subscriber in Berne, a wealthy cheese exporter, and wrote this gentleman of Mr. Finck’s illness. The result was that the critic spent his convalescence in the subscriber’s home.
By his tact and high ideals, Garrison made the learned world of the United States feel that the book pages of the Evening Post and Nation were a coöperative enterprise, which all scholars should take pride in keeping at the highest possible level. Their labors were scrupulously supplemented by his own, for his scholarship was rare and his exactness almost painful. He would send a telegram to settle the question of a hyphen. An authority upon punctuation and syllabication, he prepared the materials for an exhaustive treatise upon them, parts of which were printed in a memorial volume in 1908. Until May, 1888, much of the impeccable accuracy of the literary columns was attributable to the aid furnished by Michael Heilprin, a truly noble scholar who had been driven from Hungary by the collapse of the revolution of 1848–49, and who just before the Civil War had connected himself with Appleton’s Cyclopædia. He not only wrote many articles for the Post and Nation, but placed his marvelous scholarship at their service in the revision and proof-reading of articles by others. He had a reading-knowledge of eighteen languages. Taking a dictionary of dates, he could run his eye down the page and make corrections by the half-dozen. He could give the time and place of every battle and engagement in the Civil War, and “say his popes” without stumbling, a feat which even Macaulay declined to attempt. In history, biography, geography, and literature he commanded facts literally by the ten thousand.
One of the most striking traits of Evening Post criticism was the unity of tone which Garrison gave it. All reviews and nearly all general articles were anonymous. Godkin and Garrison held that an article by a named writer was not appreciated on its merits; that if he was famous, the veriest twaddle from his pen was devoured, while if he was obscure, nothing he wrote was read. The reviewers hence felt no temptation to air personal idiosyncrasies, and were the more ready to assume the Post’s general point of view. Mr. Garrison chose his reviewer with the greatest care, and left him almost perfect freedom to say what he thought, secure in his discretion. For reasons of space he frequently had to use the blue pencil drastically, but though he called himself The Butcher he used it with tact.
When the Evening Post had a special titbit in the literary columns its rule of anonymity must have seemed a disadvantage. Thus in 1883 it published an article upon the death of Trollope, which even then would have made a greater impression upon readers had they known that its author was James Bryce. Bryce described the creator of Mrs. Proudie from personal acquaintance—“a genial, hearty, vigorous man, a typical Englishman in his face, his talk, his ideas, his tastes. His large eyes, which looked larger behind his large spectacles, were full of good-humored life and force; and though he was not witty nor brilliant in conversation, he was what is called very good company, having traveled widely, known all sorts of people, and formed positive views on nearly every subject, which he was always ready to promulgate and maintain. There was not much novelty in them ... but they were worth listening to for their solid sense, and you enjoyed the ardor with which he threw himself into a discussion.” He had, Bryce added, no successor. Howells and James, though true artists, had not yet laid hold upon the general public; Miss Broughton’s fine promise had not ripened; and “Mr. George Meredith, a strong and peculiar genius, who has a great fascination for those who will take the pains to follow him, remains unknown to the vast majority of novel readers.”