When Gladstone died, Bryce’s review of his career in the Post was signed. But it was regrettable that, after the demise of Darwin, the editors did not sign his name to his very interesting personal sketch of the great scientist:
I saw him at his home in Down last summer, and could not remember to have ever before seen him so bright, so cheerful, so full of talk. Feeble as his health had long been, he looked younger than his age, and had a freshness, an alertness of mind and eye, an interest in all passing affairs, which one seldom sees in men who are well past seventy. It was hard to believe that one was in the presence of so great and splendid a genius, for his manner was simple and natural as a child’s. He did not speak with any air of authority, much less dogmatism, even on his own topics; and on other subjects, politics for instance, he talked as one who was only anxious to hear what others had to say and resolve his own doubts. One remark struck particularly the two friends who had come to see him. He mentioned that Mr. Gladstone had, some months before, while spending a Sunday in the neighborhood, walked over to call on him; and speaking with lively admiration of the Prime Minister’s powers, he added: “It was delightful to see so great a man so simple and natural. He talked to us as one of ourselves; you would never have known what he was.” We looked at one another, and thought that there were other great men of whom this was no less true, and in whom such self-forgetful simplicity was no less beautiful.
Nearly all the Post’s obituary essays upon great American authors—Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Mrs. Stowe, and others—came from the chatty and interesting if not highly acute pen of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The Paris correspondent was Auguste Laugel, who furnished a dozen letters every half-year upon politics and literature. Much English correspondence came from the noted jurist and Oxford teacher, A. V. Dicey, who reviewed many of the important English histories, biographies, and political works before they were published in America. Occasional long reviews were furnished by other Englishmen, as Leslie Stephen and Alfred Russell Wallace.
The best appraisals of current fiction were those contributed in the eighties by W. C. Brownell, whose estimates of important books like Henry James’ “Portrait of a Lady” were almost perfect in their sanity, penetration, and literary grace. Unfortunately, he wrote rarely, and most reviews came from less distinguished hands. The Evening Post was always fervent in its admiration of Henry James’s earlier manner, and it never took a patronizing tone toward Mark Twain, but it was long a bit suspicious of Howells, admitting his power but regarding his work as ugly. Brownell enthusiastically described “The Portrait of a Lady” as superior in moral quality to George Eliot, but the reviewers of Howells disliked his realism. The verdict upon “Silas Lapham” was that, except in its fine literary form, the novel had no beauty. “There is no inspiration for any one in the character of Silas Lapham. It rouses no tender or elevating emotion, stirs no thrill of sympathy, suggests no ideal of conduct, no notion that the world at large is or can be less ugly than Lapham himself. If it is to be conceded that Mr. Howells and his school are great artists in the highest reaches of their art, then the language is in sore need of words to define Sir Walter Scott and Thackeray.” However, the writer admitted that the portrait of Lapham had a vividness and completeness unapproached in contemporary English fiction.
The essays and reviews of widest interest were probably those upon distinctly literary topics, and here the pens of George L. Kittredge, Thomas R. Lounsbury, Basil L. Gildersleeve, Charles Eliot Norton, and George E. Woodberry were especially in evidence. They wrote with charm upon a wide variety of books, and frequently with a special knowledge and interpretative insight that made their essays almost permanently significant. The most active reviewer of history and political biography was Gen. Jacob D. Cox, the works he treated ranging from the massive histories by Rhodes and Von Holst to lives of minor Civil War leaders. Cox himself wrote several books on the rebellion, and after the death of John C. Ropes—also a contributor—was easily the highest American authority upon its battles and strategy. Two other historians who assisted were Lea and Goldwin Smith. Wm. Graham Sumner wrote much on economics.
It is evident that the Evening Post’s literary strength counted as a marked addition to its new value. Some books are not news, but most are; and if in no other American journal was there so little news of sensation, in none was there so much news of ideas. An outstanding review like that which J. D. Cox wrote of Bryce’s “American Commonwealth” or Gamaliel Bradford of Woodrow Wilson’s “Congressional Government” was news in the best sense. From all the important foreign capitals, not merely London and Paris, came constant news of the new publications, new intellectual movements, and new events in letters, art, and science. Until her death that remarkable Englishwoman, Jessie White Mario, wrote from Italy. The first American news of the production of Ibsen’s “Ghosts” and the stir it caused was furnished in a long letter from Berlin in January, 1887, by C. H. Genung. Perhaps the outstanding illustration of this alertness of the Evening Post to intellectual news is its clear reflection throughout the eighties of the discovery of Russian literature by the Western world. It and the Nation did far more than all other periodicals combined to introduce Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Dostoievsky to the American public. As it remarked in 1886, when it published articles upon “Anna Karenina,” “Childhood and Youth,” “Crime and Punishment,” and “The Insulted and Injured,” the appearance of this new literature recalled the wonder of English readers when, in the time of Scott and Coleridge, German literature was first opened to them. Isabel Hapgood was long the St. Petersburg correspondent, while Auguste Laugel was in personal communication with not only De Vogué and other students of Russian letters, but with Turgenev.
The campaign which Bryant had carried on for an international copyright law was tirelessly maintained by Godkin and Garrison. After a time it appeared that cheap piracy was about to accomplish what argument had never done; that the disreputable pirates were ruining the business of respectable piracy, as carried on by Harper’s and others. The latter paid a popular English author for the right to issue an authorized version, but within a week some printer who had paid nothing might be out with a cheaper edition which displaced the other. More and more publishers, therefore, joined in the crusade. Late in Arthur’s Administration the judiciary committee of the House reported that the justice of an international copyright law was unquestionable, and Arthur, in his last annual message, urged the subject upon the attention of Congress. But as Godkin wrote, some clergyman was always ready to start up and announce that books were a property that God had meant to be stolen, and that it was only an oversight that they had not been excepted by name from the Ten Commandments; while some Western paper was always ready to prove that a copyright bill held a hidden villainy in behalf of the pampered noblemen who wrote and published books in England.
Godkin, growing deeply interested as the eighties passed, wrote with a vehemence which George Haven Putnam describes as invaluable in impressing most thoughtful citizens and legislators, but which actually antagonized some others, and which ultimately led to a cause célébre. Prominent among the opponents of international copyright was the Rev. Dr. Isaac K. Funk, a leader of the Methodists and Prohibitionists, who gradually built up the great publishing business of Funk & Wagnalls. Dr. Funk mistakenly came to believe that a majority of Godkin’s blows were aimed at his head, and he resented the fact that among all the exponents of piracy he should be singled out as a shining mark. In due time the editor, commenting on Funk’s alleged piracy of an important English work, rather overstepped the mark and laid himself open to legal counterattack. Dr. Funk promptly brought suit for defamation and injury in the amount of $250,000. There was some consternation at the Evening Post office, where Godkin’s attack was deemed legally indefensible, and Joseph H. Choate, who was retained to defend the editor, shared it. Indeed, he told Mr. Godkin that he could hardly expect to bring him off scot-free, but would try to hold the penalty to a nominal sum.
But by characteristic adroitness and audacity, especially in cross-examining Dr. Funk, Choate made his conduct of the case a notable triumph. Mr. Godkin’s attacks had extended over a number of years. Nevertheless, Choate showed that during all this time Dr. Funk had repeatedly been asked to officiate in Methodist pulpits, that he had been honored by his denomination in other ways, that the Prohibitionists had nominated him for Congress and the Governorship, and that it was not improbable that he would some day receive their nomination for the Presidency. All these honors had come at the time when the attacks by the Post had been most intense.
“Now,” said Choate to Dr. Funk, “now, sir, will you please make clear to his honor, and to the gentlemen of the jury, just in what manner your character and your relations with your friends and your associates and the public at large have suffered injury from the so-called brutal attacks of my client?” To this challenge Dr. Funk did not know how to reply. In his final address to the jury Choate carried the war into the enemy’s territory with staggering effect. It happened that Dean Farrar’s life of Christ had been first brought out here in an authorized edition by E. P. Dutton & Co., and had immediately been pirated by Dr. Funk, although Dutton’s had paid the author a substantial sum. “I have never been a doctor of divinity,” remarked Choate; “I never expect to be one. I cannot tell, therefore, just how a doctor of divinity feels; but to me, an outsider and a layman, there is something incongruous in the idea of a doctor of divinity going into business for gain and beginning his operations by stealing the Life of his Saviour.” Partly because of the lack of evidence of any real injury to Dr. Funk, partly because of Choate’s shrewd thrust, the jury’s verdict was in favor of Godkin, and the costs were assessed upon Dr. Funk.