PAUL DANA
Of the more strictly journalistic writers who, although not attached permanently to the Sun’s staff, contributed to its news and editorial columns, the names rise of James S. Pike, of Joseph Pulitzer and his predecessor as editor of the World, William Henry Hurlbut; of James F. Shunk and his brother-in-law, Chauncey F. Black, both of Pennsylvania and both humorists; of Edward Spencer, a writer of fiction who displayed splendid imaginative qualities, and of Oliver Dyer, whose range of ability was so great that while one day he wrote for Bonner’s Ledger advice to distressed lovers, the next day would find him penning for the Sun an exhaustive article on the methods employed in building a railroad across the Andes!
Dana encouraged the men who wrote exclusively, or almost entirely, for the Sun, to write fiction. Edward P. Mitchell, whom Mr. Dana attracted to the Sun from the Lewiston (Maine) Journal in 1875, when Mr. Mitchell was twenty-three years old, wrote for the Sun at least a score of short stories of between two thousand and six thousand words. Two of his tales—“The Ablest Man in the World” and “The Tachypomp,” both scientific fantasies of remarkably ingenious construction, were included in the Scribner collection of “Short Stories by American Authors,” Mr. Mitchell being the only writer doubly represented in those volumes. “The Ablest Man in the World” also has its place in Stedman and Hutchinson’s distinguished “Library of American Literature.”
Other short stories of Mr. Mitchell’s, like “The Man Without a Body” and “The Balloon Tree,” are remembered by older Sun readers for their ingenious form and delightful narrative. Mr. Mitchell’s smaller sketches, numbering perhaps three hundred, included not only fancy but humour, and particularly little burlesques delicately picturing the weaknesses of the great or quasi-great men of the day. As a change from his strictly editorial work he might write a description of Mark Twain in his observatory, armed with a boat-hook and preparing to fend off a comet; or, becoming Mr. Dana’s reporter, he would expose a spiritualistic séance of the Eddy Brothers somewhere up in Vermont, or go to Madison Square to record the progress of George Francis Train toward world dictatorship by self-evolution on a diet of peanuts; or he would write a dramatic criticism of the appearance of the Sun’s droll friend, George, the Count Joannes, as Hamlet.
These few instances, a dozen out of twenty thousand articles that Mr. Mitchell wrote for the Sun, are not mentioned as a key to the general tenor of his work—which has covered everything from the definition of a mugwump to the interpretation of a President’s Constitutional powers—but rather as an indication of the Sun’s catholicity in subjects. If incidentally they serve to counteract the impression that the editorship of a great newspaper is gained through mere erudition, as opposed to a fine understanding of the very human reader, so much the better.
From his first day with the Sun Mr. Mitchell absorbed his chief’s lifelong belief that the range of public interest was infinite. As he said in 1916, in an address to the students of the Pulitzer School of Journalism on “The Newspaper Value of Non-Essentials”:
Sometimes people are as much interested in queer names, like Poke Stogis, for example, or in the discussion of a question such as “What Is the Best Ghost in Fiction?” or “How Should Engaged Couples Act at the Circus?” or “What Is a Dodunk?” or “Do the Angels Play Football?” as some other people are interested in the conference of the great powers.
It is well to remember always this psychological factor. Both the range of the newspaper and the attractive power of the writer for the newspaper in any department depend upon the breadth of sympathy with human affairs and the diversity of things in which he, the writer, takes a genuine personal interest.
In that speech the Sun’s judgment of what the people want, whether it be in news, editorial, or fiction, is restated exactly as it might have been stated at any time within the last fifty years. And Dana and Mitchell are found in agreement not only upon the subject of what the reader wishes, but upon the necessity for the preservation in newspapers, as well as in books, of the ideals of the language. Speaking at a conference held at Princeton University in 1917, Mr. Mitchell said:
The most serious practical evil that will result from the elimination of the classics will fall upon the English language itself. The racial memory begins to decay, the racial imagination, the begetter of memory, begins to weaken, the sense of precise meanings begins to lose its edge, and the English language ceases to be a vital thing and becomes a mere code of arbitrary signals wigwagged from mouth to ear. Were I the emergency autocrat of this language, I should proclaim in drastic regulations and enforce by severe penalties the American duty of adherence to the old habits of speech, the old scrupulous respect for the finer shades of meaning, the old rigid observance of the morality of word relations; and this, I believe, can be done only by maintaining the classical culture at high potency.