Mr. Grady’s own boyishness led him to sympathize with everything that appertains to boyhood. His love for his own children led him to take an interest in other children. He wanted to see them enjoy themselves in a boisterous, hearty, health-giving way. The sports that men forget or forego possessed a freshness for him that he never tried to conceal. His remarks, in the letter just quoted, in regard to out-door sports, are thoroughly characteristic. In all contests of muscle, strength, endurance and skill he took a continual and an absorbing interest. At school he excelled in all athletic sports and out-door games. He had a gymnasium of his own, which was thrown open to his school-mates, and there he used to practice for hours at a time. His tastes in this direction led a great many people, all his friends, to shake their heads a little, especially as he was not greatly distinguished for scholarship, either at school or college. They wondered, too, how, after neglecting the text-books, he could stand so near the head of his classes. He did not neglect his books. During the short time he devoted to them each day, his prodigious memory and his wonderful powers of assimilation enabled him to master their contents as thoroughly as boys that had spent half the night in study. Even his family were astonished at his standing in school, knowing how little time he devoted to his text-books. He found time, however, in spite of his devotion to out-door sports and athletic exercises, to read every book in Athens, and in those days every family in town had a library of more or less value.
He had a large library of his own, and, by exchanging his books with other boys and borrowing, he managed to get at the pith and marrow of all the English literature to be found in the university town. Not content with this, he became, during one of his vacation periods, a clerk in the only bookstore in Athens. The only compensation that he asked was the privilege of reading when there were no customers to be waited on. This was during his eleventh year, and by the time he was twelve he was by far the best-read boy that Athens had ever known. This habit of reading he kept up to the day of his death. He read all the new books as they came out, and nothing pleased him better than to discuss them with some congenial friend. He had no need to re-read his old favorites—the books he loved as boy and man—for these he could remember almost chapter by chapter. He read with amazing rapidity; it might be said that he literally absorbed whatever interested him, and his sympathies were so wide and his taste so catholic that it was a poor writer indeed in whom he could not find something to commend. He was fond of light literature, but the average modern novel made no impression on him. He enjoyed it to some extent, and was amazed as well as amused at the immense amount of labor expended on the trivial affairs of life by the writers who call themselves realists. He was somewhat interested in Henry James’s “Portrait of a Lady,” mainly, I suspect, because it so cleverly hits off the character of the modern female newspaper correspondent in the person of Miss Henrietta Stackpole. Yet there was much in the book that interested him—the dreariness of parts of it was relieved by Mrs. Touchett. “Dear old Mrs. Touchett!” he used to say. “Such immense cleverness as hers does credit to Mr. James. She refuses to associate with any of the other characters in the book. I should like to meet her, and shake hands with her, and talk the whole matter over.”
When a school-boy, and while devouring all the stories that fell in his way, young Grady was found one day reading Blackstone. His brother asked him if he thought of studying law. “No,” was the reply, “but I think everyone ought to read Blackstone. Besides, the book interests me.” With the light and the humorous he always mixed the solids. He was fond of history, and was intensely interested in all the social questions of the day. He set great store by the new literary development that has been going on in the South since the war, and sought to promote it by every means in his power, through his newspaper and by his personal influence. He looked forward to the time when the immense literary field, as yet untouched in the South, would be as thoroughly worked and developed as that of New England has been; and he thought that this development might reasonably be expected to follow, if it did not accompany, the progress of the South in other directions. This idea was much in his mind, and in the daily conversations with the members of his editorial staff, he recurred to it time and again. One view that he took of it was entirely practical, as, indeed, most of his views were. He thought that the literature of the South ought to be developed, not merely in the interest of belles-lettres, but in the interest of American history. He regarded it as in some sort a weapon of defense, and he used to refer in terms of the warmest admiration to the oftentimes unconscious, but terribly certain and effective manner in which New England had fortified herself by means of the literary genius of her sons and daughters. He perceived, too, that all the talk about a distinctive Southern literature, which has been in vogue among the contributors of the Lady’s Books and annuals, was silly in the extreme. He desired it to be provincial in a large way, for, in this country, provinciality is only another name for the patriotism that has taken root in the rural regions, but his dearest wish was that it should be purely and truly American in its aim and tendency. It was for this reason that he was ready to welcome any effort of a Southern writer that showed a spark of promise. For such he was always ready with words of praise.
He was fond, as I have said, of Dickens, but his favorite novel, above all others, was Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables.” His own daring imagination fitted somewhat into the colossal methods of Hugo, and his sympathies enabled him to see in the character of Jean Valjean a type of the pathetic struggle for life and justice that is going on around us every day. Mr. Grady read between the lines and saw beneath the surface, and he was profoundly impressed with the strong and vital purpose of Hugo’s book. Its almost ferocious protest against injustice, and its indignant arraignment of the inhumanity of society, stirred him deeply. Not only the character of Jean Valjean, but the whole book appealed to his sense of the picturesque and artistic. The large lines on which the book is cast, the stupendous nature of the problem it presents, the philanthropy, the tenderness—all these moved him as no other work of fiction ever did. Mr. Grady’s pen was too busy to concern itself with matters merely literary. He rarely undertook to write what might be termed a literary essay; the affairs of life—the demands of the hour—the pressure of events—precluded this; but all through his lectures and occasional speeches (that were never reported), there are allusions to Jean Valjean, and to Victor Hugo. I have before me the rough notes of some of his lectures, and in these appear more than once picturesque allusions to Hugo’s hero struggling against fate and circumstance.
V.
The home-life of Mr. Grady was peculiarly happy. He was blessed, in the first place, with a good mother, and he never grew away from her influence in the smallest particular. When his father was killed in the war, his mother devoted herself the more assiduously to the training of her children. She molded the mind and character of her brilliant son, and started him forth on a career that has no parallel in our history. To that mother his heart always turned most tenderly. She had made his boyhood bright and happy, and he was never tired of bringing up recollections of those wonderful days. On one occasion, the Christmas before he died, he visited his mother at the old home in Athens. He returned brimming over with happiness. To his associates in the Constitution office he told the story of his visit, and what he said has been recorded by Mrs. Maude Andrews Ohl, a member of the editorial staff.
“Well do I remember,” says Mrs. Ohl, “how he spent his last year’s holiday season, and the little story he told me of it as I sat in his office one morning after New Year’s.
“He had visited his mother in Athens Christmas week, and he said: ‘I don’t think I ever felt happier than when I reached the little home of my boyhood. I got there at night. She had saved supper for me and she had remembered all the things I liked. She toasted me some cheese over the fire. Why, I hadn’t tasted anything like it since I put off my round jackets. And then she had some home-made candy, she knew I used to love and bless her heart! I just felt sixteen again as we sat and talked, and she told me how she prayed for me and thought of me always, and what a brightness I had been to her life, and how she heard me coming home in every boy that whistled along the street. When I went to bed she came and tucked the covers all around me in the dear old way that none but a mother’s hands know, and I felt so happy and so peaceful and so full of tender love and tender memories that I cried happy, grateful tears until I went to sleep.’
“When he finished his eyes were full of tears and so were mine. He brushed his hands across his brow swiftly and said, laughingly: ‘Why, what are you crying about? What do you know about all this sort of feeling!’
“He never seemed brighter than on that day. He had received an ovation of loving admiration from the friends of his boyhood at his old home, and these honors from the hearts that loved him as a friend were dearer than all others. It was for these friends, these countrymen of his own, that his honors were won and his life was sacrificed.”