Eggleston was a successful young author of thirty-five, though by no means so famous as his elder brother Edward Eggleston, whose “Hoosier Schoolmaster,” appearing in book form in 1872, had sold 20,000 copies within a year. He had crowded into these thirty-five years as much experience as many active men get in a lifetime. Born in Indiana, educated in Virginia, a soldier throughout the war in the Confederate army, later a practicing lawyer in Illinois and Mississippi, he had come to Brooklyn and in 1870 became an editorial writer on Theodore Tilton’s Brooklyn Union. Soon afterward he and Edward Eggleston took joint charge of Hearth and Home, and began putting life into that moribund publication. It was in this effort that Edward Eggleston seized upon his brother’s experiences as a schoolmaster at Riker’s Ridge, Indiana, as a basis for his famous novel. The two were on the high road to success when the magazine was purchased, and both took to free lancing. George Cary Eggleston settled down to writing boys’ books and magazine articles in an orchard-framed farmhouse in New Jersey. He had already published, first in the Atlantic and then in book form, one of the most graphic of Southern war volumes, “A Rebel’s Recollections,” which had been warmly received.
Unfortunately, while at work in his cottage he was swindled out of all his savings by a scoundrelly publisher, and hurried to New York to seek editorial work again. He felt honored to be associated with Bryant; he liked the uncompromising dignity of the Evening Post. It was, he used to say, the completest realization of the ideal of the old Pall Mall Gazette—a newspaper conducted by gentlemen, for gentlemen. His work consisted of assisting Bryant, Sidney Howard Gay, Parke Godwin, and Watson R. Sperry in writing editorials, and was congenial. Incidentally, he helped Bryant in his search for a literary editor. He wrote Thomas Bailey Aldrich, setting forth the dignity of the position, the attractive salary, and the pleasant nature of the work; all of which Aldrich acknowledged, replying: “But, my dear Eggleston, what can the paper offer to compensate one for having to live in New York?”
While affairs were in this posture, Bryant one day entered the Post library and began clambering about on a step-ladder, searching the shelves. Eggleston, from his little den opening off the larger room, saw him hunting, and suggested that he might be able to help find the information wanted. “I think not,” answered Bryant in his curt, cold way, and then added, taking down still another volume: “I’m looking for a line that I ought to know where to find, but do not.” Asking Bryant for the substance of the quotation, Eggleston was fortunately able to recognize it as a half-forgotten passage in Cowley. He seized the office copy of Cowley, turned to the page, and laid it open in Bryant’s hand. The poet seemed surprised, and lost all interest in the quotation. “How,” he demanded, “do you happen to know anything about Cowley?”
Eggleston explained that as a youth upon a Virginia plantation, seized by an overmastering thirst for literature, he had read the books in the libraries of all the old mansions in the county. Bryant settled himself interestedly in a chair of Eggleston’s room. The young man’s half-written editorial for the morrow lay unfinished on the desk, but Bryant never heeded it. For two hours he questioned Eggleston as a candidate for the Ph.D. degree in English is now questioned at his oral examination; inquiring as to his preferences, dislikes, and knowledge of books and authors, and making him defend his opinions. Then he abruptly said “Good afternoon.”
Just before noon the next day the managing editor entered Eggleston’s room with an expression of mingled irritation and amusement. Mr. Bryant had just been in, he reported. “He walked into my office and said to me, ‘Mr. Sperry, I have appointed Mr. Eggleston literary editor. Good morning, Mr. Sperry,’ and walked out again.”
Eggleston’s literary editorship, which endured until the Post changed hands in 1881, was more energetic and fruitful than that of the half-invalid Thompson, partly because he had more money to spend. He was an ambitious, vigorous young man, who knew most of the chief literary figures of the time—Howells, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Stockton, and others met when he edited Hearth and Home. In this Indian summer of the old Post, before Carl Schurz and E. L. Godkin took it over, there was another outburst of poetry in its pages. It published Bryant’s “Christmas in 1875” and his “Centennial Hymn, 1876”; Whittier’s poem to the memory of Halleck a year later; and E. C. Stedman’s “Hawthorne.” Charles Follen Adams, author of the “Leedle Yawcob Strauss” poems, contributed repeatedly. It is interesting to find verse written by A. A. Adee while he was secretary of legation in Madrid; by William Roscoe Thayer; by Edgar Fawcett, the satirical novelist; by the late F. W. Gunsaulus, Chicago’s most famous preacher; by Edward Eggleston and Agnes Repplier. There were also interesting prose contributions. E. P. Roe wrote upon—gardening! Benton J. Lossing sent some historical articles in his last years; and W. O. Stoddard, who had been Lincoln’s secretary during the Civil War, contributed both prose and verse. Bret Harte for a time had a connection with the Post, which enabled him to appear regularly for his pay, though his writing was most irregular; his work is not identifiable.
The literary correspondence of the journal was greatly strengthened. Regular letters were sent from Boston by George Parsons Lathrop, Hawthorne’s son-in-law, who during part of this period was assistant editor of the Atlantic, and well known for his books. His report (Feb. 27, 1878) of Emerson’s long-awaited delivery of his lecture on “The Fortune of the Republic”—the sunlight streaming through a window of Old South upon the speaker’s face, his manuscript placed on the flag draping the pulpit, a distinguished audience hanging on his words—was a fine bit of writing. Elie Reclus, the eminent French geographer, wrote upon French literature, as did Edward King, while there were Italian and London correspondents. From various American hands came gossip about rising literary men of the day, like the following vignette of a young lecturer named John Fiske:
His vast learning is appalling to the ordinary man.... His mind is so clear that it is said he never copies his manuscript. He writes slowly—the right thought following its predecessor with unerring precision, the fit word dropping into its place; and with this enviable faculty of composition, of understanding thoroughly, and putting on paper just as he has in mind what he sees so clearly, he works right on, far into the night, scarcely feeling the need which most writers have of mental rest. He is so deliberate and to be relied on that once seeing the man, and knowing his diligence and habits of investigation and method of writing, you cannot entertain a doubt that he will accomplish whatever he sets himself to do....
He is of a very simple and sincere nature; and of Saxon complexion and hair.... He has a rosy face, auburn beard and hair—the latter in short, crisp curls—and brown eyes as round as marbles, which, seen through the glasses he always wears, seem to have just looked up from some absorbing study and to be scarcely yet ready to take in the common scenes of life. His is not a changeful countenance, but of the same calm, self-reliant expression on all occasions, as if he took the world philosophically and was always in good humor with it. He is solid, inclined to the sluggish in build and motion, and is slow of utterance, speaking in measured phrases with his teeth half shut.
But the standard of literary criticism was very little raised by Eggleston. Some light is thrown upon his aims by his rejoinder to a fellow Virginian, E. S. Nadal, who in the Atlantic in 1877 accused newspaper critics of yielding to pressure from the advertisers, and of refusing to treat harshly writers they personally knew. Eggleston indignantly denied both allegations, remarking that he had reviewed “several thousands of good and bad books” without thought of advertising or personal friendship. He added that Nadal had mistaken the function of the newspaper literary critic. It could not be so elevated, analytic, and rigid as magazine reviewing. The newspaper writer’s chief business was not to point out faults, but “to tell newspaper readers what books are published, and what sort of book each of them is, so that the reader may decide for himself what books to buy. His work is not so much criticism as description. It is in the nature of news and comment upon news, and the newspaper reviewer rightly omits much in the way of adverse criticism.” Eggleston’s successor proved how utterly fallacious was this statement.
In accordance with it, we find the great majority of volumes—travels like Burnaby’s “Ride to Khiva,” biographies like Mrs. Charles Kingsley’s “Letters and Memorials” of her husband, histories like Symonds’s “Renaissance in Italy”—merely scissored and summarized. Eggleston plumed himself upon being the first to give a thorough account, thought quite uncritical, of the most important books. Thus Elie Reclus in 1877 sent the Post a scoop upon Hugo’s new “History of a Crime”; and a few months later it was delighted to give, in a column and a half, the first résumé of Schliemann’s story of his discoveries at Mycenæ. Eggleston was alert to obtain advance sheets of new books, and the morning newspapers complained that the publishers made him a favorite. When Tennyson’s “Harold” was issued late in 1876, there was no previous announcement, and a copy was sent all American and British literary editors precisely at noon. The Evening Post reviews for that day were already in the forms, and only an hour remained before the first edition went to press. But Eggleston resolved to anticipate the morning papers, enlisted Foreman Dithmar of the composing room, hurriedly prepared two columns of quotation and comment, and had them in type ready for the front page within his time-limit. This exploit, in which it is hard to share his pride, reminds us of the story of Hugo’s “Legend of the Ages” reaching the Tribune office just before Bayard Taylor left for the night, and of how Taylor within fifteen hours finished an “exhaustive” review, including translations of five poems.