“Bonner is down on stepmothers!” “All Ledger horses must be called Dobbin, and there is a heavy fine for driving them through a poem or serial faster than a walk, or, at best, a slow trot!” “Don’t write anything about cousins marrying unless you want to have them back on your hands again!” These were a few of the beacon-lights that shone on the literary pathway of twenty years ago, and I know of more than one successful writer whose early footsteps were guided by the great artistic principles first laid down by Robert Bonner and religiously followed by the makers of prose and verse who brought their wares to him every Friday morning. But poor Jack Moran did not live to become a successful writer. He dropped out of the ranks just as the rest of us were passing the quarter-post, but it was the first hurdle that really did for him. I have often thought that if Jack had taken his friend’s advice and “changed his poem round so as to make the stepmother a beast,” he might have lived to fill a responsible position in the Franklin Square Prose and Verse Foundry, or at the Eagle Verse Works in Jersey City. But Jack was a poet, and therefore did not know how to “change his poem round,” and besides he hated to go to work every morning with his dinner-pail in his hand, and there were cakes and ale in Bohemia in those days for such as he.
As for the poet who tried to guide Jack’s footsteps in the path that led to fame, he is alive to-day, and a highly esteemed member of the guild. Indeed, a more industrious, sober, or thrifty man of letters never put on a pair of overalls or crossed the North River in the early morning boat with a basket of poems, jokes, and stories on his arm.
One Friday morning, many years ago, I went with this poet to the Ledger building, and there found half a dozen writers gathered together in an outer office, anxiously watching the dark shadow of a man that was thrown upon a partition of ground glass that extended from floor to ceiling across the room and separated it from the private office of the great editor.
The dark moving shadow on which every eye was fixed was that of Robert Bonner himself, and as it was seen to cross the room to a remote corner—growing smaller and fainter as it receded—every face brightened with hope, and forms that had seemed bent and dejected but a moment before were suddenly straightened. An instant later the door opened and the editor of the Ledger crossed the threshold, handed a ten-dollar bill to one of the waiting poets, and then hastily retired to his own den again.
Then my friend showed me how the watchers could tell by the movements of the dark shade whether a poem had been accepted or refused. If the editor walked from his desk to the remote corner of his private office they knew that he did it in order to place a poem in the drawer of an old bureau in which he kept the accepted manuscript; but if, on the other hand, he came directly to the door a horrible feeling of anxiety came into every mind, and each poet uttered a silent prayer—while his heart literally stood still within him—that the blow might fall on some head other than his own.
On this occasion my friend received ten dollars for his poem entitled “When the Baby Smiled,” and in the fullness of his heart he invited the author of the rejected verses on “Resignation”—who, by the way, was uttering the most horrible curses as he descended the staircase—to join us in a drink.
It was on this occasion, also, as I distinctly remember, that my friend the poet put the whole trade of letters in a nutshell:
“There are plenty of people,” he remarked, “who can write good good stuff, but there are not many who can write good bad stuff. Here’s one of those ‘Two Brothers’ poems I told you about, and if that isn’t good bad stuff, I’d like to know what is.” He handed me a printed copy of the poem, and I can still recall the first verses of it:
Herbert to the city went,
Though as sturdy was his arm