F. K. L.
Lane's desire for stimulating companionship in New York was quickly gratified. A spontaneous association of friendships, based upon a young delight in life and a vast curiosity of the mind, sprang up among a little group of men of very diverse types. All were strangers in New York with no immediate home ties. "Women played no part in our lives," one of them recalls. "We came together to discuss plays, poetry, politics, anything and everything—the great actors, comic operas, the songs of the streets, science, politics." John Crawford Burns, Lane, Brydon Lamb, Curt Pfeiffer formed the nucleus of what spread out irregularly into larger groupings.
John Crawford Burns, who was slightly older than the rest, a purist, and something of a "dour Scot," was a man of conservative and cultivated tastes and the dean of the group. He was in a business house that imported linens, and lived in a "glorious room with two outside windows, and ample seating capacity," so the friends often met there and learned something of Gothic architecture and of the abominations of slang, in spite of themselves. With Burns, and of his firm, was Brydon Lamb, "also of Scotch descent, but born in America, a delightful combination of strength, sweetness and light. The simple grace of his manner, his unhurried speech, his urbanity, captivated us all. We loved him for what he was, and we considered him our arbiter elegantiarum" Of Lane at that period the same friend writes, "I remember a fine, stocky, muscular presence with a striking head. A massive, commanding man, he was, a persuasive and compelling leader." But none of the men had any sense of anything but complete friendly, boyish equality. "Lane was," Pfeiffer says, "interested in human beings, not problems, excepting as their solution might be made serviceable to the needs of individuals. He had great tolerance for the most unusual opinions. I don't think Lane ever had much interest in the dogmas of science, religion, or philosophy; he lived by the spirit of them, that cannot be expressed in formulae. He had the peculiar sensitiveness of a poet for words, for colors and sounds, and for moral beauty, and blended with it the statesman's observant awareness of conditions in the world of affairs."
At the beginning of their friendship, in 1889, Curt Pfeiffer himself was only nineteen years old, a youth whose family had come from Holland and Germany. He appeared in the boarding-house on 32nd near Broadway, where Burns lived, fresh from three months at the Paris Exposition, a vacation that had followed a course of scientific study at Zurich, Switzerland. The wonders of Paris, a-glitter with the blaze of undreamed-of electrical beauty, and the greater wonder of the scientific discoveries and speculations, of the eighties, as taught at the University of Zurich, gave the young traveler an instant place among the others. Because of his love for exact statement and his scientific approach in discussion, young as he was, he contributed something very real to the group whose chief preoccupation—aside from the joy of living- was with art, government, and literature.
They read separately, and when a book seemed intolerably good to the discoverer, he brought it in and insisted on their reading parts of it together. Browning, Darwin, the Vedic Hymns, Stevenson, Taine, Buckle, Spencer, Kipling, Sir Henry Maine, on primitive law, and Emerson! The relation of the men was almost impersonal in the fervor of their explorations into life. Differences of blood and tradition were not only easily bridged but welcomed, because they assured, to the group as a whole, sharper angles of mental refraction—breaking the ray of truth they sought into more of its component colors.
Pfeiffer recalls that "one Saturday night, under the influence of reading from the Vedic Hymns, and a talk on astronomy, we went up on the roof of our boarding-place, and observed a complete revolution of the starry heavens, from dusk to dawn. We drifted into talk, … and when we finally descended to our beds on Sunday morning, we found ourselves drenched to the skin from the drizzling dew. We never forgot that experience, but we never repeated it either."
His political interests brought Lane into the Reform Club where
Progress and Poverty, Henry George's new book, was the center for
discussion upon the whole problem of the distribution of taxation.
Lane and Henry George established a cordial friendship.
John Crawford Burns says that in 1889 "Lane's chief hero was Cleveland, and his oracle Godkin, of the EVENING POST"—later, the NATION. "When I knew him in New York he represented a San Francisco newspaper, the CHRONICLE, I think, as correspondent. He was not whole-heartedly in sympathy with his proprietor, nor indeed with the sensational aspect of journalism, and he always scoffed at the idea of newspaper writers constituting a modern priesthood. He laughingly justified his association with the CHRONICLE by saying he gave tone to it. For this and other services, he received, I think, two thousand dollars a year, which even thirty years ago did not admit of luxury and riotous living."
Lane's whole stay in New York was less than two years in length, but the vital ideas that he shared with disinterested minds made of this period the seed-bed for future intellectual growth.
In 1891, in spite of the delights of personal friendships, in New York, Lane grew increasingly dissatisfied with the limitations of newspaper corresponding. He wanted a paper of his own, in which he could express without reserve the ideals of social and political betterment with which his mind was teeming. In this mood, the first acclaim of the rapid growth of the pioneer towns of the far Northwest reached him. He saw in this his opportunity, and acted quickly and decisively. He gathered together his own savings, borrowed from his friend, Sidney Mezes, a few more thousand dollars and went to Tacoma, Washington, to buy the Tacoma Evening News.