“I see,” said Dana, smiling. “Well, Mr. Daly, I will speak to Mr. Laffan about the matter, and if he thinks that he really deserves to be discharged, I will most certainly do it!”
Thirty or forty years ago the belief was not uncommon, among those ignorant of editorial methods and the limitations of human powers, that Mr. Dana wrote every word that appeared on the editorial page of the Sun. It is likely that this flattering myth came to his ears and caused him more than one chuckle. Dana wrote pieces for the Sun, many of them, but he never essayed the superhuman task of filling the whole page with his own self. Nobody knew better than he what a bore a man becomes who flows opinion constantly, whether by voice or by pen.
For Dana, not the eternal verities in allopathic doses, but the entertaining varieties, carefully administered. He might be immensely interested in the destruction of the Whisky Ring, and in writing about that infamy articles which would scorch the ears of Washington; but he knew that not every man, woman, and child who read the Sun was furious about the Whisky Ring or cared to read columns of opinion about it every day. They must have pabulum in the form of an article about the princely earnings of Charles Dickens, or the identification of Mount Sinai, or the mysterious murder of a French count.
So he hired men who could compare Dickens’s lectures with Thackeray’s, or were familiar with the controversy over Mount Barghir, or who knew a murder mystery when they saw it. They wrote, and he read and sometimes edited, but usually approved, for he knew that newspaper success lay not so much in a choice of topics as in a choice of men. He knew that the success of an editorial page came less from inside opinions than from outside interest. Dana’s remarkable success in the exaltation of journalism to literary heights was won not so much through what he wrote, but through what he left other men free to write.
His own work as a writer for the Sun took but a fraction of his busy day. He dictated his articles to Tom Williams, his stenographer, a Fenian and a bold man.
“Can you write as fast as I talk?” asked Dana when Williams applied for the job.
“I doubt it, Mr. Dana,” said Williams; “but I can write as fast as any man ought to talk.”
For twenty years Tom Williams transcribed articles that absorbed the readers of the Sun, but his own heart was down the bay, near his Staten Island home, where he spent most of his spare time in fishing and sailing. It was always a grief to Williams to enter the office on an election or similarly important night, and to find that no one paid any attention to his stories about how the fish were biting.
Dana had no doubt—nor had any one, least of all those who came under his editorial condemnation—of his own ability as a trenchant writer. The expression of thought was an art which he had studied from boyhood. Whatever of the academic appeared in his early work had been driven out during his service on the Tribune and in the war, particularly the latter, for as a reporter for the government he learned to avoid all but the salients of expression. But as the editor of the Sun he found less delight in his own product than in the work of some other man whose literary ability answered his own standards of terseness, vigour, and illumination. The new man would help the Sun, and that was all that Dana asked.
That another man’s work should be mistaken for his own, or his own for another man’s, was to Dana nothing at all, except perhaps a source of amusement. The anonymity of the writers on the Sun was so complete that the public knew their work only as a whole; but whenever anything particularly biting or humorous appeared, the same public instantly decided that Dana must have written it.