“No,” said Dana, “mark it ‘Respectfully declined,’ and send it back to him. He has been honest enough to enclose postage-stamps.”
CHAPTER XI
DANA, AS MITCHELL SAW HIM
A Picture of the Room Where One Man Ruled for Thirty Years.—The Democratic Ways of a Newspaper Autocrat.—W. O. Bartlett, Pike, and His Other Early Associates.
The English historian, Kinglake, wrote a description of John T. Delane, the most famous editor of the London Times, which Mr. Dana’s associate, Mr. Mitchell, liked to quote as a picture of what Mr. Dana was not. It is a fine limning of the great editor, as great editors were supposed to be before Dana showed his disregard for the journalistic dust of the ages:
From the moment of his entering the editor’s room until four or five o’clock in the morning, the strain he had to put on his faculties must have been always great, and in stirring times almost prodigious. There were hours of night when he often had to decide—to decide, of course, with great swiftness—between two or more courses of action momentously different; when, besides, he must judge the appeals brought up to the paramount arbiter from all kinds of men, from all sorts of earthly tribunals; when despatches of moment, when telegrams fraught with grave tidings, when notes hastily scribbled in the Lords or Commons, were from time to time coming in to disturb, perhaps even to annul, former reckonings; and these, besides, were the hours when, on questions newly obtruding, yet so closely, so importunately, present that they would have to be met before sunrise, he somehow must cause to spring up sudden essays, invectives, and arguments which only strong power of brain, with even much toil, could supply. For the delicate task any other than he would require to be in a state of tranquillity, would require to have ample time. But for him there are no such indulgences; he sees the hand of the clock growing more and more peremptory, and the time drawing nearer and nearer when his paper must, must be made up.
That, mark you, was Delane, not Dana. When Mr. Dana counselled the young men at Cornell never to be in a hurry, he meant it. Fury was never a part of his system of life and work. Probably he viewed with something like contempt the high-pressure editor of his own and former days. There was no agony in the daily birth of the Sun. Mr. Mitchell said of his chief:
Mr. Dana has always been the master, and not the slave, of the immediate task. The external features of his journalism are simplicity, directness, common sense, and the entire absence of affectation. He would no more think of living up to Mr. Kinglake’s ideal of a great, mysterious, and thought-burdened editor, than of putting on a conical hat and a black robe spangled with suns, moons, and stars, when about to receive a visitor to his editorial office in Nassau Street.
That office in Nassau Street, of which every reader of the Sun, and surely every newspaperman in America, formed his own mental picture! To some imaginations it probably was a bare room, with a desk for the editor and, close by, the famous cat. To other imaginations, whose owners were familiar with Mr. Dana’s love for the beautiful, the office may have been a studio unmarred by the presence of a single unbeautiful object. Both visions were incorrect.
