The first distressful event came into Robert's life when, at the age of nine, some seven years after the family had moved from New Bloomfield to Huntingdon, on the Juniata River, his father died. His mother, to support her children, took a position as a school teacher. Notwithstanding the lack of wealth, however, Robert went through the public high school. After leaving school he went to work, for three dollars and a half a week, in a bookstore connected with a stationery factory. Aside from his pride and his poverty, which seem to have influenced him to no small extent, he was a delicate youth, and his steadiest companions were books. Besides, he cultivated assiduously the faculty of observation. This cultivation shows itself in his books. He is unsurpassed among the novelists of the day for mastery of the life of bygone periods.
The work in the bookstore was distasteful to him in many ways. The narrowness and the ignorance of the factory hands chafed his delicate sensibilities; the nature of the work itself jarred on his always strengthening mental equipment. He looked about him for a means of escape from this sort of prison, incarceration in which was little sweetened by the fact that in the second year his salary was raised to four dollars and a half. One of the modes of escape which he attempted was stenography. By assiduous practice he acquired such facility in this branch of writing that the Hon. John Scott, solicitor-general of the Pennsylvania Railroad, aided by Mr. William B. Wilson, an old friend of the boy's father, before long secured him a position in the railroad company's office in Philadelphia. When settled down, Robert brought his mother and brother to the city on the Delaware.
But, pleasant as its environment was, the young stenographer saw in his new position no very rosy future. It was not—as it is not to-day—his disposition to confound mere comfort with success. We have quoted his remark that he would rather be rich and sick than poor and well; but we venture to think that the riches of Mr. Rockefeller would fail to give him absolute satisfaction so long as the feeling of professional success were absent from him. At any rate, we judge by his present pursuits and aims that his ideal is nearer to the revered and affluent workman, like Zola, for example, than like to a man whose sole object is the enjoyment and disbursement of dollars and cents.
From the Pennsylvania road he went to the Philadelphia Press, which in those days was a veritable cradle of authors. Here his literary instinct took hold of him. It had taken hold of him once before, in Huntingdon, one vacation, when he had worked as printer's devil in the office of a weekly newspaper, and, as often happens to "devils," had been stricken down with what may be called typographical fever. The great are not alone in the enjoyment of authorship. We believe that Mr. Stephens's first literary offering, an article describing the joys and woes of budding printers, appeared in that Huntingdon weekly.
That, however, was a mere juvenile spasm, It was nothing like the powerful impulse that came to him just previous to his début as a writer of theatrical notices for the Press. He showed so marked an aptitude for this employment that within a year he was virtually in full charge of the paper's important dramatic column. Stephens's career on the Press was as varied as that of the average newspaper man, and, consequently, as interesting and precious. For the patience that, like the steam-drill, bores its way through every obstacle; for accumulative industry, for tireless zeal, for unaffected modesty dashed with power, for knowledge of the overt and covert ways of men—for such a unique mixture of crude virtue and wisdom combined commend us to the enthusiastic journalist.
Stephens unconsciously heeded Stevenson's caution and retired from journalism before its hypnotic spell had taken complete possession of him. One of the reasons for his retirement from journalism was the singular rule made by the Press that members of its staff must not write for any other periodical. Stephens had been fortunate in placing his extra work, and naturally he felt that the rule shut out promising opportunities.
Besides, in 1889, he had married—Mrs. Stephens was, before her marriage, Miss Maude Helfenstein, of Chicago—and there were other reasons for his practical view of the situation. There was no risk in the retirement, for he had made many friends while on the Press, especially among the inhabitants of the theatrical world. He received and accepted, in 1893, an offer to become general agent for a firm of theatrical managers.
Incidentally he was required to write cheap plays—plays for the vulgar public that Gautier despised and ridiculed. These dutiful efforts are hardly noteworthy, but we must mention "On the Bowery," a melodrama which afforded the picturesque and withal good-hearted Steve Brodie a chance to be heroic some sixty-four times a week. But although this grade of work was uncongenial to the author, it opened the way to a better field, and, in September, 1896, his play, "An Enemy to the King," written during the winter of 1894-95, was produced in New York by E. H. Sothern. As this was his first ambitious production, the author displayed some lack of nerve. Instead of accompanying his wife to the theatre, he shrank back to a nearby comfortable refuge, whither, between the acts, a friend brought him tidings of the performance. The call for him was led by Richard Harding Davis and DeWolf Hopper, who, running across him outside the theatre, half suffocated him with congratulatory embraces. By and by Mr. Sothern took the successful play to Boston; and there happened the circumstance which established the author's fame.
The play was seen in Boston by Mr. L. Coues Page, the Boston publisher, who, recognizing in it the elements which constitute a popular semi-historical romance, and foreseeing the extensive demand for that branch of literature, sought the author and proposed that he should make a novel out of his play. The proposal was readily accepted; in fact the contract was signed twenty-four hours after the author and publisher had first met.
The instantaneous popularity of the book, which was published in the fall of 1897, had a two-sided effect: it induced the author to abandon hack-work entirely and devote his best energy and proficiency to fiction.