Nevertheless, from time to time a genuinely critical bit of writing emerged in the Post. The reviews of Howells’s “A Foregone Conclusion” in 1875 and of Henry James’s “The American” in 1877, both appreciative, would do credit to any literary journal to-day. Parke Godwin wrote solid historical criticism. The paper was sufficiently discriminating to prefer the best of Constance Fenimore Woolson to the second-best of Bret Harte. Its worst misstep, shared by almost every other American journal, was its low estimate of “Tom Sawyer” in 1877. It thought the first half passable—“fairly entitled to rank with Mr. Aldrich’s ‘Story of a Bad Boy’”—but the second half poor, and it issued the grave warning: “Certainly it will be in the last degree unsafe to put the book into the hands of imitative youth.”
The subject of international copyright had been reopened in 1867 by an article in the Atlantic, and the republication of Henry C. Carey’s hostile essays; but a bill failed in Congress in 1868 and another in 1871. Bryant saw that the Evening Post kept up its campaign for a reform. Some publishers, led by Putnam’s and J. R. Osgood & Co., were for a liberal law, but others, like Harper & Brothers, stood opposed; while the type-founders, paper-makers, and binders throughout the Union were hostile. Carey’s school held that international copyright would produce a centralized monopoly of bookmaking, and included many booksellers of the Middle and Western States who complained that the bulk of English reprints were already monopolized by four or five Eastern firms. Carey also thought that the best way of giving an author his due would be simply to compel payment of a royalty to him. But the Post in 1877 took the view that the chief obstacle to international copyright lay in the conviction of many manufacturers and farmers of the West that the patent system was uneconomic and injurious, and their inclination to regard copyright as a kind of patent.
From Eggleston we learn nearly as much of Bryant in his editorial capacity as from Bigelow and Parke Godwin. Bryant regarded anonymous criticism, he told Eggleston, “as a thing quite as despicable, unmanly, and cowardly as an anonymous letter.” Eggleston’s own notices were unsigned, but Bryant had given prominence to the fact that he was literary editor, sending every publisher an announcement, and it was the rule that contributed criticism should bear at least an initial. Once when Eggleston was about to publish an anonymous review by R. H. Stoddard, Bryant’s indignant objections were with difficulty silenced. According to the literary editor, Bryant’s printed index expurgatorius by no means included all the words to which he objected; he tried to rule out “numerous” for “many,” “people” for “persons,” “monthly” for “monthly magazine,” and so on. He was accustomed to refer to Johnson’s dictionary as an authority instead of later works. Eggleston recalls the vigor of Bryant’s literary prejudices, one of them apparently evinced by his refusal to have the least share in the unveiling of the Poe monument in Baltimore.
Yet he lays emphasis upon Bryant’s unwillingness to deal severely with fellow poets. The old editor said he had always found it possible to say something good about the writings of the poorest—to praise some line, some epithet, at least. Once Eggleston in despair showed him a volume of which it was impossible to commend a single word. Bryant admitted that it was idiotic; he admitted that even the cover was an affront to taste; but, he said, looking at it with an expression of total disgust, “You can commend the publishers for putting it on well.” This was one expression of Bryant’s innate gentleness. He was seriously distressed when some scribbler of verse on one occasion caught up a single commendatory phrase in Eggleston’s unfavorable review, and asked Bryant to allow him to use that phrase as an advertisement, with Bryant’s own name attached. Eggleston answered the appeal, and did it forcibly. The poet would change his “day” at the office, or would work in the composing room, to avoid bores, but he never would be impolite to them. Once, indeed, a literary hack pestered him all morning in an effort to obtain the material for articles to publish upon Bryant when he died. Bryant came in obviously disturbed, and said to Eggleston in his mild way: “I tried to be patient, but I fear I was rude to him at the last. There seemed to be no other way of getting rid of him.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
WARFARE WITHIN THE OFFICE: PARKE GODWIN’S EDITORSHIP
Six weeks before Bryant’s death preparations were made, as with a prevision of that event, for the uninterrupted control of the newspaper by his family. A reorganization was forced, under circumstances later to be recounted, upon the business manager, Isaac Henderson. The poet assigned the presidency of the Evening Post Company to Judge John J. Monell, but kept the editorship; Henderson resigned as publisher and was succeeded by his son, Isaac, Jr.; and Parke Godwin became a trustee, resuming his connection as a writer on artistic, scientific, and literary topics. In June, 1878, immediately after the funeral of Bryant, Godwin, his son-in-law, took his place, and was formally named editor in December. His editorship, which endured but three years, affords an opportunity to pause for a survey of the men who made the Evening Post of the seventies, and of the figure believed by many to be trying to unmake it.
The newspaper establishment of which Godwin became head was one which, small and antiquated though it would seem now, had made extraordinary strides since the Civil War. During the conflict it had been housed in a dingy, rickety firetrap on the northwest corner of Liberty and Nassau Streets, where it had its publication office on the first floor, its five small editorial rooms together with the composing room on the third floor, and its presses in the basement. But in 1874–5 Henderson had erected a new and imposing building of ten stories on the corner of Fulton and Broadway, which the Post occupied until 1907. Here the composing rooms, unusually spacious and well-lighted, were on the top floor, the editorial rooms next below, and the offices on the ground floor.
It was necessary then to be near the postoffice to ensure the early delivery of mails, and there being no “tickers,” evening papers had also to be near Wall Street. Stock quotations were long printed from the official sheet of the Stock Exchange. A messenger boy was kept waiting for the first copy of this publication, and it was hurried to the newspaper office, there cut into small “takes,” and put into type with all possible speed. In the seventies and early eighties the Post was printed from a huge eight-cylinder press, direct from type which was locked upon the curved cylinders, while men standing in tiers upon each side fed in the paper. The last minutes before the press hour in the composing room, as the managing editor stood over the forms and decided what news should be killed, what used, and what held over, were highly exciting.
As for the staff, though still small, it had been steadily enlarged in the sixties and seventies. The first managing editor was Charles Nordhoff, who came in 1860, when the title was still an innovation, having recently been borrowed from the London Times by the Tribune to apply to Dana. For a generation it signified not a mere manager of the news columns, as it did later, but a man who in the absence of the editor performed all his functions. When Bryant was not in the office, and Godwin did not supply his place, Nordhoff was expected to take charge of the editorial page. The first literary editor, as we have seen, John R. Thompson, was employed in 1868; for a time he was expected also to review some plays, but within a few years the Evening Post had a special musical and dramatic editor in the person of William F. Williams, and by the middle seventies Williams was practically confining himself to music while J. Ranken Towse took over, to its vast improvement, the dramatic criticism. Thus there were three valuable employees doing work which had previously been ill-done or done not at all. As for the news force, when in 1871 William Alexander Linn accepted the position of city editor, he found it to consist, besides himself, of six men. These were the managing editor, at this date Charlton Lewis; his assistant, Bronson Howard; the telegraph editor, financial editor, one salaried reporter, and one reporter “on space.”