The last chapter of Twice Thirty bears the heading, “Is It Worth While?” “Scarcely,” is the answer, “if Twice Thirty is the antecedent of the pronoun.”
A few years ago it would have been said that a career such as Joseph Pulitzer’s could not have been staged anywhere save in this country. M. Coty, Lord Rothmere, Sig. Bergamini are examples of similar careers in France, England and Italy. Joseph Pulitzer galvanised the New York World into life, made it a power in the land and gathered about him a group of clever men, one of whom has written his life.
JOSEPH PULITZER
Painted by John Singer Sargent
Courtesy of “The New York World”
Mr. Don C. Seitz’s book is not a satisfactory biography, but it is readable and it engenders thought and reflection. It neither reveals nor suggests the mystery and secret of a dominant personality. He calls Joseph Pulitzer the Liberator of Journalism. For many years he was called the Libertine of Journalism, and worse than that. He deserves the one as richly as he deserved the other, no more so. The biographer, like the witness in court, should state facts, not conclusions. Joseph Pulitzer was an unusual man and he had an extraordinary career. Hungarian emigrant, without background or adventitious aid, he acquired within a quarter of a century, power, influence and wealth that were felt not only throughout this country but in Europe as well. Politics was his passion, property his obsession and power his ambition.
He was vouchsafed twenty years of public influence; he moulded minds, shaped opinions, conditioned decisions, germinated ideals; and they were twenty years of personal misery and decrepitude. Dying, he perpetuated his name by the establishment of the School of Journalism at Columbia University. It can scarcely fail to be interesting to learn about such a man. Mr. Seitz with the instinct and experience of the expert journalist, gives the information in the first chapter, which he entitles “Characteristics.” He moulds the clay, then animates it. As he hurls virtues into the receptive mass, he calls out their names loudly; as the limitations and defects steal in, he whispers or remains silent. Joseph Pulitzer had a genius for journalism and he was saturated with belief in liberty, equality, and opportunity; he was courageous, affectionate, hospitable, generous, indulgent and just; but he was also vain, arrogant, domineering, verbose, bulimious, tyrannical, self-sufficient, personally hypersensitive but insensitive to others’ feelings; he was devoid of humour, and he wore a mask that fell off on the slightest encounter. He had acquired a dexterity in regaining it which often prevented adversaries from seeing that it had fallen. The sea of his life was always turbulent. When he was on the crest of the wave, his speech and conduct were hypomaniac; when in the trough, he was taciturn, unapproachable, uncommunicative, inert. He had a firm intellect and an infirm temper; firm energy and an infirm body; a keen æsthetic sense and a contempt for his fellow man because he would not make himself in Joseph Pulitzer’s image. “I have no friends,” said he to one of his secretaries. “And this was in a great measure true,” adds his biographer. He has friends now, and he will have more in the future; Mr. Seitz’s book will make hundreds for him, and the institutions he founded, thousands.
It is natural enough that editors should like to talk about their doings. They have been compelled to be impersonal so long that they are impelled to gambol and frolic, to shout and sing, when they burst the barriers of their sanctums and do not have to return to them. John St. Loe Strachey has not ceased to be editor of “The Spectator,” but then he was never impersonal. The volume devoted to himself, published a year or so ago, called The Adventure of Living, amply testified it. Now he has published a new volume about himself called The River of Life. He does not give a portrait of himself, and he eliminates as far as possible enumeration of facts, positive statements, sequence, logical or chronological, and conclusions. His diary is of the sort that might have been written for the pleasure of the soul and the contentment of the heart, with no further motive. He tells of his likes and dislikes, as they are brought to his mind by travel and reading; he does not indulge in ratiocination or in plans for the future. He is content to see life as a river, flowing constantly, everlastingly the same, everlastingly different, and his diary leaves the impression of a walk through a flower garden. One stops at interesting points, picks here and there a flower which will be kept as a memento, and which, being seen again, will recall a pleasant day.