Once established in full charge of the Evening Post, with a capable lieutenant, he was able to make rapid, far-reaching, and profitable improvements in the form of the journal. In 1829 it was still closely akin to the Evening Post of 1801—four pages of six columns each, much smaller than newspaper pages of to-day, dingily printed and ineffectively made up. When he left for Europe five years later the four pages had seven columns each, and were much larger than present-day pages—great blanket papers. Old John Randolph of Roanoke wrote Bryant complaining that these expansive sheets crinkled so badly in the mail that he had to have his housekeeper iron them out. But the results of the enlargement were an enhanced revenue from advertisements, and a rise of the subscription list, at $10 a year, above 2,000. In 1834 the management boasted that the journal had never been in a more prosperous condition, and that not three other papers in the city were so productive. The whole number of employees, including those in the mechanical departments, was then thirty.
When Bryant wrote his wife in 1826 that the Evening Post’s profits were $30,000 a year, he overestimated them; its gross receipts were only that much. But Bryant’s share in the newspaper, which was at first one-eighth, which in 1830 became one-fourth, in 1832 was one-third of seven-eighths, and in 1833 was a full third, sufficed to free him from all money cares at once, and within a short time to make him prosperous. The journal’s books were balanced each year on Nov. 16, the anniversary of its founding. On that date in 1829, it was found that the net profits were $10,544, of which Bryant’s one-eighth made $1,318.04. The next year the net profits had risen to $13,466, and Bryant’s quarter share was $3,366.51. In 1831 there was a further increase to $14,429, making Bryant’s income $3,507.24. A heavy slump occurred the following twelvemonth, cutting the net profits to $10,220, and the poet’s share to $2,980.99, but this was only temporary. For the half-year alone ending May 16, 1833—the figures for the full year are lost—the profits were $6,000.35, making Bryant’s income for six months exactly $2,000; and for the full year which closed Nov. 16, 1834, his one-third share yielded no less than $4,646.20. In those days an income of $4,000 or above was handsome, and Bryant was able to sail in the summer of 1834 with a full purse.
The literary world, however, looked with cold disapproval upon Bryant’s entrance into the newspaper field, which it believed was occupied by cheap political controversialists, and thought offered an atmosphere hostile to poetry. It found confirmation for this attitude in the marked slackening of Bryant’s productiveness as a poet. Of the whole quantity of verse which he wrote during his long lifetime, about 13,000 lines, approximately one-third had been composed before 1829. During 1830 he wrote but thirty lines, during 1831 but sixty, in 1832 only two hundred and twenty-two, and in 1833 apparently none at all; nor was his verse of this period in his best vein. He was too completely occupied in mastering his new calling to cultivate the muse.
“Would that Mr. Bryant was employed in writing poetry ... and sending back his thoughts to the streams and mountains which his young eyes were familiar with, and from which he drank his first inspiration!” lamented a writer in the New England Magazine for 1831. “But alas! he is busied about far other things, and what he is writing, is as little like poetry, as Gen. Jackson is like Apollo.” This writer had called on the editor in his little Pine Street office. “He is a man rather under the middle height than otherwise, with bright blue eyes and an ample forehead, but not very distinguished either in face or person,” we are told. “His manners are quiet and unassuming, and marked with a slight dash of diffidence; and his conversation (when he does converse, for he is more used to thinking than talking), is remarkably free from pretension, and is characterized by good sense rather than genius.” Why could he not have remained a lawyer in Great Barrington, amid his Berkshire hills and brooks?
We cannot close this notice without again expressing our sorrow at the nature of Mr. Bryant’s present occupation, and that a man capable of writing poetry to make so many hearts throb, and so many eyes glisten with delight, should be lending himself to an employment in which the greater the success the more occasion there is for regret, for it must arise from the exertion of those very qualities which we are least willing a poet should possess. “’Tis strange, ’tis passing strange, ’tis pitiful, that” he should hang up his own cunning harp upon the willows, and take to blowing a brazen and discordant trumpet in the ranks of faction.
An early number of the Southern Literary Messenger regretted that Bryant was to be found “dashing in the political vortex” with those who “engage in party squabbles.” The New York Courier and Enquirer, in an utterance of 1832 which is to be discounted because of editorial jealousy, remarked that “he has embarked in a pursuit not suited to his genius and utterly at variance with all his studies and habits of mind. We wish him a better fate than can ever be his while doomed to follow a business for which he has not a solitary qualification, and compelled to give utterance to sentiments he most cordially despises.”
To a certain extent Bryant agreed with these writers. He did not believe journalism an unworthy or undignified occupation. In the Evening Post of July 30, 1830, he gave reasons for holding the contrary opinion, descanting upon the value of the opportunity to guide the thinking of thousands. “In combating error in all shapes and disguises,” he wrote, it was ample compensation for an editor’s trials “to perceive that you are understood by the intelligent, and appreciated by the candid, and that truth and correct principles are gradually extending their sway through your efforts.” But he had no attachment as yet to the editorial career, he wanted with all his heart to have leisure for pure literature, and he meant to get out of the newspaper office as quickly and finally as possible. He bracketed it with the law as a “wrangling profession,” and talked of being chained to the oar. Always fond of travel, he escaped from his desk after 1830 as much as he possibly could. In January, 1832, he took a trip to Washington, making the establishment of a regular Washington correspondence his excuse, and had a conversation of three quarters of an hour there with Jackson. That spring he made an excursion to Illinois, to visit his brothers. During the summer of 1833 he went to Montreal and Quebec. When he took passage abroad on June 24, 1834, he hoped that the business capacity of Michael Burnham and the editorial capacity of William Leggett would make anything but intermittent attention by him to the Evening Post thenceforth unnecessary. “I have been employed long enough with the management of a daily newspaper, and desire leisure for literary occupations that I love better,” he later wrote his brother. “It was not my intention when I went to Europe to return to the business of conducting a newspaper.” He hoped that his third share would support him.
How these expectations were suddenly wrecked, and how Bryant was brought back by harsh necessity to rescue the Evening Post from ruin, is a dramatic story.