(Drawn from Life by Corwin Knapp Linson)
MR. DANA IN HIS OFFICE
Surroundings were nothing to Dana. To him an office was a place to work, to convert ideas into readable form. What would works of art be in such a place to a man who took more interest in the crowds that went to and fro on Park Row beneath his window? Let the room itself be described by Mr. Mitchell, who set down this picture of it after he had spent hours in it with Mr. Dana almost daily for twenty years:
In the middle of the small room a desk-table of black walnut of the Fulton Street style and the period of the first administration of Grant; a shabby little round table at the window, where Mr. Dana sits when the day is dark; one leather-covered chair, which does duty at either post, and two wooden chairs, both rickety, for visitors on errands of business or ceremony; on the desk a revolving case with a few dozen books of reference; an ink-pot and pen, not much used except in correcting manuscript and proofs, for Mr. Dana talks off to a stenographer his editorial articles and his correspondence, sometimes spending on the revision of the former twice as much time as was required for the dictation; a window-seat filled with exchanges, marked here and there in blue pencil for the editor’s eyes; a big pair of shears, and two or three extra pairs of spectacles in cache against an emergency—these few items constitute what is practically the whole objective equipment of the editor of the Sun. The shears are probably the newest article of furniture in the list. They replaced, three or four years ago, another pair of unknown antiquity, besought and obtained by Eugene Field, and now occupying, alongside of Mr. Gladstone’s ax, the place of honor in that poet’s celebrated collection of edged instruments.
For the non-essentials, the little trapezoid-shaped room contains a third table containing a file of the newspaper for a few weeks back, and a heap of new books which have passed review; an iron umbrella-rack; on the floor a cheap Turkish rug; and a lounge covered with horsehide, upon which Mr. Dana descends for a five minutes’ nap perhaps five times a year.
The adornments of the room are mostly accidental and insignificant. Ages ago somebody presented to Mr. Dana, with symbolic intent, a large stuffed owl. The bird of wisdom remains by inertia on top of the revolving bookcase, just as it would have remained there if it had been a stuffed cat or a statuette of “Folly.” Unnoticed and probably long ago forgotten by the proprietor, the owl solemnly boxes the compass as Mr. Dana swings the case, reaching in quick succession for his Bible, his Portuguese dictionary, his compendium of botanical terms, or his copy of the Democratic national platform of 1892. On the mantelpiece is an ugly, feather-haired little totem figure from Alaska, which likewise keeps its place solely by possession. It stands between a photograph of Chester A. Arthur, whom Mr. Dana liked and admired as a man of the world, and the japanned calendar-case which has shown him the time of year for the last quarter of a century. A dingy chromolithograph of Prince von Bismarck stands shoulder to shoulder with George, the Count Joannes.
The same mingling of sentiment and pure accident marks the rest of Mr. Dana’s picture-gallery. There is a large and excellent photograph of Horace Greeley, who is held in half-affectionate, half-humorous remembrance by his old associate in the management of the Tribune. Another is of the late Justice Blatchford, of the United States Supreme Court; it is the strong face of the fearless judge whose decision from the Federal bench in New York twenty years ago blocked the attempt to drag Mr. Dana before a servile little court in Washington to be tried without a jury on the charge of criminal libel, at the time when the Sun was demolishing the District Ring.
Over the mantel is Abraham Lincoln. There are pictures of the four Harper brothers and of the Appletons. Andrew Jackson is there twice, once in black and white, once in vivid colors. An inexpensive Thomas Jefferson faces the livelier Jackson. A framed diploma certifies that Mr. Dana was one of several gentlemen who presented to the State a portrait in oils of Samuel J. Tilden. On different sides of the room are William T. Coleman, the organizer of the San Francisco Vigilantes, and a crude colored print of the Haifa colony at the foot of Mount Carmel in Syria. Strangest of all in this singular collection is a photograph of a tall, lank, and superior-looking New England mill-girl, issued as an advertisement by some Connecticut concern engaged in the manufacture of spool-cotton.
For a good many years the most available wall-space in Mr. Dana’s office was occupied by a huge pasteboard chart, showing elaborately, in deadly parallel columns, the differences in the laws of the several States of the Union respecting divorce. It was put there, and it remained there, serving no earthly purpose except to illustrate the editor’s indifference as to his immediate surroundings, until it disappeared as mysteriously as it had come.
Such were Mr. Dana’s surroundings, with nothing to indicate, as Mr. Mitchell remarked, that the occupant “knew Manet from Monet, or old Persian lustre from Gubbio.”