We take this occasion to congratulate the old friends of the Evening Post, who have read it for the last score of years or thereabouts, on this new triumph of the principles which it maintains. The Wilmot Proviso is now consecrated as a part of the national public policy by this election; but earlier than the Wilmot Proviso was the opposition of our journal to the enlargement of slavery. It began with the first whisper of the scheme to annex Texas to the American Union, and it has been steadily maintained from that moment till now, when the right and justice of our cause is proclaimed in a general election by the mighty voice of a larger part of thirty millions of people.
Freedom, democracy—to these two principles every utterance of the Evening Post in its fifty years under Bryant was referred. Other journals might think of the day only and let the morrow take care of itself, but he was solicitous that each issue should fit into the exposition of a policy good for the year and the decade. “He looked upon the journal which he conducted,” wrote his last managing editor, Robert Burch, “as a conscientious statesman looks upon the official trust which has been committed to him, or the work which he has undertaken—not with a view to do what is to be done to-day in the easiest or most brilliant way, but so to do it that it may tell upon what is to be done to-morrow, and all other days, until the worthiest object of journalism is achieved. This is the most useful journalism; and first and last, it is the most effective and influential.”
In his method of work, combining remarkable efficiency with a remarkable amount of disorder, Bryant was a true newspaper man. His desk, a large one used after him by Parke Godwin and Carl Schurz, was kept piled with litter—books, manuscripts, pamphlets, documents, and stranded memoranda; a little square being left in the middle where he could place writing materials and do his work. Once when Bryant went to Europe, says Bigelow, “I thought, I am going to clean house, and I did, and found all sorts of old newspapers, old contributions, letters, etc., etc.” When the poet returned and saw his desk cleared, he demanded an explanation. Bigelow, giving it, perceived instantly that his little housecleaning had been an error. “I saw by his expression that I was trespassing. He did not make any remark, but his silence was a very severe rebuke. He did not like it at all that he could not have his old papers just as he had left them.” Indeed, he was attached to a large number of homely but familiar objects. Among these was a pen-knife with which he used to trim both his quill pen and his finger nails. He owned an old blue cotton umbrella that he always insisted upon carrying. When he was departing for Mexico, his daughter replaced it with a handsome new one, but he missed it and refused the exchange.
It was Bryant’s habit to write for the Post on the backs of circulars, letters received, and rejected manuscripts, for he held that it was shameful to waste the least scrap of useful material, since it represented men’s time and labor. It is curious, in looking over his papers, to find what these scraps were; a letter to Lincoln, for example, was copied off from the back of a wine merchant’s circular, offering Moët champagne at $12 the case. Yet he was really the soul of carefulness. His copy often went up to the printer a mass of interlineations and corrections; he never sent a letter away without first making a rough draft. Throughout his life he made it a rule to write everything for the Post in the office, never at home, and even when an additional task was laid upon him, as when he wrote a sketch of the journal’s history in 1851, he refused to do it elsewhere. This was a wise husbanding of his nervous energy; but his family recalls that he and Parke Godwin often discussed the paper’s affairs at night.
No head of a newspaper was ever more considerate of his subordinates than Bryant, who had but one serious quarrel with an associate, and that was soon bridged over. Bigelow tells us that “he never rebuked me; he never criticized me.” In looking over Bigelow’s proofs, he would sometimes say, “Had not this word better be changed for that or the other? Does that phrase express all or more than you mean, or as clearly as you wish it to?” Even this gentle correction was rare. Another worker tells us that it was Bryant’s habit, whenever he wished to speak to any one in the office, to go to the desk of the man rather than call him in. When John R. Thompson, the Southern poet, became literary editor just after the Civil War, Bryant knew how ardently he had sympathized with the Confederacy, and personally saw that he was given no book to review that would hurt his feelings. We have noted how he refused to say a word against the inefficient business manager of the Post early in the fifties, though recognizing his incompetence. He never wavered in his loyalty to Isaac Henderson when the latter was under fire in connection with Civil War contracts, and beyond doubt remained sincerely convinced that Henderson had done no wrong.
In the office, as outside of it, in fact, Bryant was a thorough democrat. During his travels in England, while staying at the home of a business man, he was once invited to dine with a country gentleman near by, and accepted in the belief that, as a matter of course, his host had also been invited. When he learned that this was not true, and that his host, being in trade, never thought of entering the gentleman’s house, Bryant angrily canceled his acceptance. The incident made so disagreeable an impression upon him that be shortened his stay in the country. Similarly, when Dickens first visited New York, a rich old Knickerbocker who had never theretofore taken the slightest notice of Bryant asked him to his house to meet the young novelist; and Bryant declined; telling a friend that he would never be a stool-pigeon to attract fine birds of passage. In all relations with others Bryant thought of the man, not of his rank, money, or reputation. The poverty-stricken, invalid Thompson became one of the intimates of his home soon after he joined the Post, and the editor showed a much higher regard for the rugged head of the composing-room, Dithmar, than for many a general or millionaire. When the Post moved to its new building in 1875, Bryant rarely occupied the handsome office fitted up for him there, with its fine view of the harbor, preferring a humble chair and desk in a corner of the composing room upstairs, where he was free from boresome callers.
“In his intercourse with his co-laborers and subordinates,” wrote Parke Godwin, “the impression produced by Mr. Bryant, after a certain reticence, which diffused an atmosphere of coldness about him, was broken through, was that of his extreme simplicity and sincerity of character. He was as transparent as the day, as guileless as a child, and as clear in his integrity as the crystal that has no flaw nor crack.” The coldness was but a mask, and Bryant’s own feelings often threw it off. Entering the office one day, he told in a self-accusing way how, walking down-town, he had smashed a kite that a small boy dragged across his face, without paying the urchin for it; he reproached himself deeply. George Cary Eggleston, who worked beside him three or four years, says that “I found him not only warm in his human sympathies, but even passionate.” Sometimes he would do something almost boyish. Once he was standing by a form around which the printers were gathered, hurriedly preparing it for the press. A word was spoken which suggested some stanzas from Cowley, and Bryant, locking his hands before him, repeated the verses with remarkable force and expression, while the printers paused and listened. Then he recovered himself with a start, a look of embarrassment overspread his face, and—to change the subject—he turned to the casement around the elevator, tapped it, and said: “There is very little wood there to make trouble in case of fire.”
He was wont to impress upon his associates the desirability of acting as courteously toward men and women of the outside world as possible. Bigelow says that he used to cite the example of Dr. Bartlett, editor of the Albion, whose rule was “never to write anything of any one which would make it unpleasant to meet him the following day at dinner.” When Martin F. Tupper was about to visit the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876, Eggleston wrote a playful editorial about him, which the managing editor received with some apprehension, for he knew that Tupper had once entertained Bryant in England. It was decided to show Bryant the manuscript. The editor read it with evident amusement, but remarked: “I heartily wish you had printed this without saying a word to me about it, for then, when Mr. Tupper becomes my guest, as he will if he comes to America, I could have explained to him that the thing was done without my knowledge by one of the flippant young men of my staff. Now that you have brought the matter to my attention, I can make no excuse.” The article was not published.
He disliked to rebuff unwelcome visitors. “It is a positive fact,” writes the veteran dramatic editor of the Evening Post, Mr. J. Ranken Towse, “that he not infrequently preferred to escape them by passing through a back door opening into the composing room, and descending thence to the ground floor by means of the freight elevator. Sometimes he sent for me and asked me to rid him of the visitors. This I did easily and unscrupulously. Thus, in addition to my regular duties—I was then city editor—I became a sort of amateur Cerberus.” When the widow of John Hackett, a young woman of striking beauty but no stage experience, resolved to play Lady Macbeth, she visited the Post, and although Mr. Towse tried to dissuade her, she induced Bryant to make a half-promise to deliver an introductory speech at her first appearance. Bryant uneasily confessed this to Mr. Towse, who warned him plainly of the false position in which he would be left when her début proved a failure, as it was certain to do. When Mr. Towse offered to extricate him by dismissing Mrs. Hackett upon her next call, the poet eagerly assented.
It should be said that Bryant could be very blunt on occasion, and had no hesitancy in offending those he disliked. There were some men to whom he would never speak. Thurlow Weed, who for a time edited the World, was one. Once when they were together at an evening party a friend insisted that he must be allowed to introduce them; finally Bryant half arose from his chair, and then sank back, saying, “Not yet—not yet!” When he concluded that a man in public life had done wrong, he followed him to the end of his career with unbending aversion. In the warfare over the United States Bank, he conceived a fierce hatred of Nicholas Biddle; and when Biddle died, far from taking a nil nisi bonum attitude, he expressed deep regret that he had not died in jail. His judgment so angered Philip Hone that he wrote of Bryant in his famous Diary as a “black-hearted misanthrope,” saying: “This is the first instance I have known of the vampire of party spirit seizing the lifeless body of its victim before its interment, and exhibiting its bloody claws to the view of mourning relatives.” As well expect honey from the rattle-snake as poetry from such a man, he added.