Editors and publishers of powerful newspapers have unique opportunity to make their lives interesting. Many of them do. Some of them, like Henry Watterson, Wickham Steed and Georges Clémenceau write about their experiences, when they no longer take the world’s pulse, shape public opinion and re-order society. Their memoirs and lives are of the most entertaining of all biographic literature; they know the art of writing; all their lives, they have been observing and studying character, heralding and shaping events; it has been their self-imposed duty to sit in judgment and the self-advancement urge of their fellows brings them into intimate contact with the important persons of their period. Small wonder they write entertainingly when their sun begins to set.
Few have reviewed their experiences more delightfully than Edward P. Mitchell, for many years Editor-in-Chief of The New York Sun.
When I read Mr. Mitchell’s Memoirs of an Editor every page made firmer the conviction that I was companioning a great mind and a kindly heart. I recalled something that Mark Twain said of Anson Burlingame: “His outlook upon the world and its affairs was as wide as the horizon, and his speech was of a dignity and eloquence proper to it. It dealt in no commonplaces, for he had no commonplace thoughts. He was a kindly man, and most lovable. He wrought for justice and humanity. All his ways were clean; all his motives were high and fine.” That is Edward P. Mitchell if I may estimate him from his autobiography. If he has any fault, it is that he is too affable. He is a tiny bit too polite. There have been proprietors of the New York Sun within the memory of man who did not have all the virtues, but no one would suspect it from Mr. Mitchell’s book. The Sun that he writes about most entertainingly and instructively is the Sun for which Charles A. Dana got all the credit. Mr. Mitchell does not hint that the credit was unjustly allotted, but no one can read the chapters “How I Went to the Sun” and “The Newspaperman’s Newspaper” without being convinced that it was. The Sun could not have been what it was in the days of its ascendency: a beacon light of newspaperdom, a stimulus and a joy to thousands, a scourge to scores, had it not been for Francis P. Church, Fitz Henry Warren, and William D. Bartlett.
But it is not the story of the Sun that Mr. Mitchell set out to write. His colleague Frank M. O’Brien did that, and any one who believes he could improve on it would be as daring or demented as the artist who believes he can improve on the Mona Lisa. O’Brien’s story reflected the spirit of that newspaper as the portrait mentioned above reflected the soul of her who reminded Pater of Leda. However, Mr. Mitchell could scarcely tell us of himself without telling the story of the Sun too.
The volume is replete with personality studies of sages and cranks, philosophers and buffoons, experts and amateurs. Any one who is interested in the spirit of the Puritan, the pioneer, the pathfinder; any one who is intrigued by guessing at the truth, will be helped by reading the pages on Goldwin Smith. Any one who would like to clarify his hazy notions of paranoia will be aided by perusal of the pages on George Francis Train; any one who would make the acquaintance of a critic of letters to whom his countrymen should have accorded the esteem that the French accorded Rémy de Gourmont and the British George Saintsbury, should read what Mr. Mitchell says of Mayo W. Hazeltine; any one who would learn of the forces that did more than anything else to deliver us as a nation from the spirit of parochialism should read his pages on Bunan-Varilla, the French engineer, who made possible the Panama Canal.
It is a book for a rainy day and a starry night; a book to be read in Watchapey and Washington; to accompany one on Lake Louise or the Atlantic. The author’s wish has come true. It was that here and there some kind friends unknown might find in his book something as interesting for them to read as it was for him to remember. If he had as much pleasure in writing it as they have reading it, Edward P. Mitchell is a giant joy-creator.
Mr. Mitchell is a modest man. That can scarcely be said of Mr. Edward W. Bok. He is proud of his accomplishment as editor, prouder of his success as uplifter and proudest of the masterfulness which he displayed in piloting his ship of life through troubled waters and adverse currents to a safe port and serene haven. A few years ago he told about these various successes in a fat volume entitled The Americanisation of Edward Bok. Now he rewrites his autobiography and calls it Twice Thirty: Some Short and Simple Annals of the Road. Simple is a more appropriate adjective than short. Mr. Bok is pleased with himself. He was well born; he is of a nation that has been a parent in most things. It invented golf; it was the founder of the modern school of music; it furnished us with our fundamental institutions; our Federal Constitution; the Declaration of Independence; our State constitutions; our freedom of religion; our free public schools; our free press; our written ballot; our town, county and state system of self-government; the system of recording deeds and mortgages; the germinal idea of the Ladies Home Journal, New York City and the Hudson River. In fact, it would be difficult to name anything or any one save the Ku Klux Klan and Mayor Hylan that the Netherlands did not originate. And it contributed a man who never knew fear: Mr. Bok.
Thomas Carlyle wrote that he could get a far more penetrating insight of a writer’s personality from a portrait of the man, photographic or oleographic, than from his writing. I was never convinced that the sage of Chelsea was in the right until I saw the frontispiece in the book under consideration. It is labelled “At Twice Thirty.” The legend could be replaced by “Self-Satisfaction” and beneath it, this quotation from the text might be pasted: “I have had too distinct a leaning toward looking for and discovering the faults in persons and then of becoming possessed with a mad desire to correct those faults.” But neither from gazing at the portrait nor from reading the text am I moved to objurgation similar to that of the Apostle: Mr. Bok is not a hypocrite; though he believes it is the beam that is in his brother’s eye and the mote that is in his own. Nevertheless it will occur to some that at times he goes dangerously close to hypocrisy; for instance, “This book is written for my two sons.” If Mr. Bok’s pineal gland were opened and the day book diary of his soul extracted, it is safe to assume that the magician who could read it would find there an entry, “October 9th, 1924. Decided to publish Twice Thirty so that the world might have my four pages of biographical data from a reliable source.” Then there is that chapter entitled “My Most Unusual Experience,” in which Mr. Bok relates how he rescued a young American girl from the jaws of the lion and dragged her from the Coliseum, the jaws being a salacious Frenchman and the coliseum the promenade of the Empire in London. The beau geste reflects great credit on Mr. Bok, and he intended it should. That is the reason he published it. There can be no other. He does not cotton to axioms even though they are of divine origin. His right hand has always known just what his left was doing.
Mr. Bok quotes Henry Ward Beecher as saying to him that wisdom comes at sixty, not before. Job said it before Beecher. Storing up treasure in Heaven has always been considered an indication of wisdom. Even in Heaven, I fancy, you can’t have your cake and eat it. You can not insist upon having your reward now and also having it put to your credit in the hereafter. In fact we have the word of the Master to that effect.