“Be careful,” says Mrs. Ogi; “the Mexican bandits may not have got him after all.”
“He has already had a few whacks at me. George Sterling sent him an article of mine, published twenty years ago, ‘Our Bourgeois Literature,’ and he ridiculed my thesis that the qualities of American literature are explained by American social conditions: ‘The political and economical situation has about as much to do with it as the direction of our rivers and the prevailing color of our hair.’ Also he read ‘The Journal of Arthur Stirling,’ and called my poor poet ‘the most disagreeable character in fiction.’”
Says Mrs. Ogi: “He did not even trouble to get the poor poet’s name right!”
Her husband answers: “The officers in the British army have a saying: ‘What is fame? To die in battle and have your name misspelled in the “Gazette”.’”
CHAPTER CIII
THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE
Having considered a fiction writer whom the great public rejected, let us now consider one whom it enthusiastically acclaimed.
Richard Harding Davis was born in Philadelphia in 1864. His father was a famous editor, and he was raised among cultured people, with every advantage of prestige and social position. He was handsome, full of energy, and all his life made hosts of friends. After getting through college, he took a job with Arthur Brisbane on the New York “Evening Sun,” where his brother tells us he underwent “considerable privation,” his salary being only thirty dollars a week at the start, plus his earnings from short stories. During this same period the present writer was living in New York upon four and one-half a week, and never sure of having that; so you see that standards of “considerable privation” vary considerably.
Davis’s first stories dealt with a hero named Van Bibber, a scion of the Fifth Avenue plutocracy, handsome, debonair, wearing his clothes with irreproachable taste, and devoting his abundant leisure to the reforming of New York; Haroun-al-Raschid brought down to date, Sir Galahad in a dress-suit. Happy, care-free, he wanders, with innocent heart and open purse, making things right wherever he finds them wrong. He has the entrée behind the scenes of theatres, but not to seduce the chorus girls—ah, nothing like that, but to rescue a sweet, innocent child and carry her home to a cold, proud, cruel Fifth Avenue father who has refused to acknowledge his wild oat. That done, Van Bibber roams again, and jumps on the neck of a burglar, and kicks his pistol out of his hand, and then gets sorry for him, and buys him a ticket to Montana, where his wife and daughter wait for him to come and reform. Then he wanders to the Bowery, and sees a rowdy insulting a lady; it is not enough for him to demonstrate the natural superiority of the plutocracy by putting this one rowdy to flight, he must crown the demonstration by accepting a challenge from three of “the purest specimens of the tough of the East Side waterfront,” and routing them in the presence of the proud aristocratic beauty. The charm of the story lies in the truly elegant insouciance with which young Van Bibber does all these things—the manner of a juggler keeping six billiard-balls in the air.
Here, you see, is the perfect type of the ruling-class glorifier: Homer and the Arabian Nights, Don Quixote and King Arthur, Dumas, Ouida, Rudyard Kipling and Mrs. Humphry Ward all rolled into one. No wonder our grandfathers were captivated, or that the innocent souls who edited “Harper’s” and “Scribner’s” extended the freedom of their columns to this inspired creator of plutocratic romance! It is interesting to note that our “Dick” came from the most English place in the United States, and looked like an Englishman and, perhaps as a matter of instinct, dressed and talked like an Englishman. In his early writing days he lived for a few months at Oxford, and the students of Balliol College took him in on equal footing, an honor never before accorded to a non-student American.
The English ruling class had taken upon itself the task of colonizing and exploiting the rest of the world, and the American ruling class was following suit, and Richard Harding Davis became the prophet of both. Throughout Central America and the West Indies the process is invariable: American capitalists bribe the governments of these countries and get enormously valuable concessions, then they send in engineers and other handsome young heroes clad in khaki and puttees and with automatics in their belts. These heroes engage the natives of the country to exploit the natural resources and ship out the wealth of the country, to be spent upon monkey dinners at Newport and champagne suppers in Broadway lobster palaces. Sooner or later the natives become irritated at the sight of their natural resources being exported for such purposes, so they revolt against the native government which has sold them to the Yankees. Then the handsome young Yankee heroes draw their automatics and bring up machine guns, and gloriously defend the native government which they have bought and paid for. The ending comes triumphantly with a Yankee gunboat in the harbor, and some marines charging up the slope of a hill waving Old Glory, while the audience leaps from its seats and cheers for five minutes.