From Godkin’s utterances upon journalism a small volume might easily be compiled. His ideal of a newspaper was as much English as American, with a good deal that was purely Godkinian superadded. He disliked headlines, even when not garish, and valued the headline merely as an aid to reference. He insisted upon absolute accuracy. Not only did he believe, quite properly, that comment had no place in a news story, but he thought any attempt at literary effects out of place there—that information was the one essential. Recognizing that accuracy often requires expert knowledge, he always insisted that this could be got by paying for it. Absolute integrity in every department was of course presupposed. Murat Halstead in 1889 told the Wisconsin Press Association that he saw no objection if readers “should find out that the advertiser occasionally dictates the editorials.” “No objection at all to that,” rejoined Godkin; “the objection is when they don’t find it out.”
During the eighties Dana and the Sun represented to Godkin nearly all that was evil in New York journalism, and the exchanges between the two editors were often bitter. Neither appreciated the other’s qualities. Everyone remembers Mrs. Frederick P. Bellamy’s explanation of the depravity of New York: “What can you expect of a city in which every morning the Sun makes vice attractive, and every night the Post makes virtue odious?” Dana found Godkin the one antagonist who could make him wince, and struck back hard. He persisted in calling the editor “Larry.” He never tired of exaggerating the Post’s staidness. When it changed its form in 1887, he wrote that it would now be dull in sixteen pages instead of eight. After one of the East River bridges was547 opened, he described the testing of the structure at length; how wagons of stone, trucks of metal, and ponderous engines were trundled across it, and finally, as the supreme burden, a cart bearing a copy of the Evening Post. When S. J. Randall died, and the Post spoke of his corrupting influence upon Congress, Dana seized the opportunity to characterize Godkin as “a scurrilous editor known to the police courts of this town as a libeler of the living, and who is known now as a defamer of the dead.”
What Godkin principally objected to in the Sun, of course, was Dana’s cynical defense of evils and his opposition to a long list of good causes. Supposedly a Democrat, Dana conceived a violent and irrational dislike of Cleveland, did his best in 1884 to defeat him, and later never missed an opportunity to attack him as the “Stuffed Prophet” or “Perpetual Candidate.” Supposedly a friend of decency in the city, for twenty years he was Tammany’s staunchest champion, a supporter in turn of Tweed’s associates, of Boss Kelly, of Grant and Gilroy, and of Croker. Standing for civil service reform in 1876, later he attacked and ridiculed reform measures unmercifully. Every attempt to improve politics elicited a burst of derision from him. The perversity of his course, its lack of principle, Godkin repeatedly exposed in columns of extracts from the Sun headed “Semper Fidelis.”
But he objected in almost equal degree to the Sun’s news columns—to the space they gave crime and scandal. Dana used to say that whatever God allowed to happen he would allow to be printed, and talked of giving a full picture of society. How far this creed carried him, and how caustically Godkin censured it, may be seen from one Evening Post paragraph (Sept. 28, 1886):
The first page of our enterprising contemporary, the Sun, to-day was an interesting picture of American society. The first column was devoted to the trial of a minister for immorality, to differences between a man named Lynch and his wife, to a rape in a vacant lot, and a suicide. The second was half given to a fire and the death of a blind newsdealer, the other half to politics. The third was given up to foreign news and politics, but half the548 fourth was taken up with murder in a buggy and the escape of two convicts. The fifth was wholly devoted to a very paying scandal about Lord Lonsdale and Miss Violet Cameron, and a small item about another Lord Lonsdale and twenty-four chorus girls. In the remaining two, we find the disappearance of one Sniffers, a divorce, two pugilistic items, half a column of the horse-whipping of a reporter by a girl, the discovery of her lover in jail by Miss Miller, the arrest of a small swindler, and a few other trifles. As a microcosm, the page is not often surpassed....
As Godkin said, the news of the most sensational papers gave an essentially false picture of American society. Any one who read it as a well-proportioned picture of what was happening in New York would believe that every evening about 10,000 betrayed servant girls, horse-whipped faithless lovers, and the same number of drunken husbands murdered wives in tenement houses; and that the bulk of the population was daily occupied in getting at the details of such cases, and wanted explanatory illustrations to help it, such as diagrams showing just where the servant girl stood when she struck the first blow. In a true picture, such incidents would get a few lines.
But when sensational news was obtained by inventing it, or exaggerating small episodes, or heartless intrusion into private affairs, Godkin’s indignation was much greater. His opinion of this phase of journalism was precisely that which Howells expresses of Bartley Hubbard’s unscrupulous news-gathering in “A Modern Instance.” In June, 1886, he paid his respects to “those delightful creatures who lurked behind fences and hid in the bushes two weeks ago, watching the house” where Cleveland was passing his honeymoon. More than one New York journal at that time would fabricate interviews with men its reporters could not reach. One remedy for the current abuses, Godkin thought, lay in stringent enforcement of the laws for libel. In 1893 an invented scandal about a Toronto lady and gentleman resulted in the payment of $14,537 damages by three New York papers, and Godkin declared that it was a public service for injured persons thus to bring suit. On another occasion549 he wrote: “Some of the most highly paid laborers of our time are lying newspaper reporters and correspondents, men who make no pretense of telling the truth, and would smile if you reproached them with not doing so.”
Rollo Ogden
Editor-in-Chief 1903–1920.
In the nineties Godkin’s distaste for the Sun’s news was forgotten in his more intense reprobation of the so-called yellow press, the old World and Journal. He thought that their sensational attention to crime and immorality was shocking, that they were much more careless of truth than the Sun, and that their pictures and cartoons showed a new defect—the defect of puerility. They did go for a time to startling lengths. “The note of the press to-day which most needs changing is childishness,” wrote Godkin in May, 1896. “The pictures are childish; the intelligence is mainly for boys and girls.... The observations on public as distinguished from purely party affairs are quite juvenile.” When a number of city clubs and public libraries excluded the World and Journal from their reading rooms, Godkin applauded, holding that the new sensationalism could be stopped only by a vigorous public sentiment. He was deeply concerned, like many other sober men, over the intellectual effect of the cheap, widely read yellow sheets. They were making it impossible for the masses to read anything very long on any subject, he said, and to read anything, long or short, on any serious subject. They fed the people brief thrillers about shootings and assaults, titbits of scandal, bogus interviews, and comic aspects of every institution from Christianity down; and when the attention grew jaded, they offered pictures for tired minds. In this there was much truth, though the history of the World shows what an enormous force for good lay in the new journalism.
The sober news pages of the Evening Post were the product of a small force—never in Godkin’s day more than a half-dozen full-time reporters. But it was a remarkably efficient, well-managed force. During the nineties in particular it reached a very high level of enterprise. The managing editor from 1891 to the end of the decade was William A. Linn, who had succeeded James E.550 Learned. Linn had been with the Tribune from 1868 to 1871, and with the Post ever since, and had remarkable knowledge of his craft. His city editor from 1892 to 1898 was H. J. Wright, who was born in Scotland, graduated at New York University, and had worked on the Commercial Advertiser. These two found several capable men in the city room, added others, and infused an unusual esprit de corps in them. Wright’s vigor was infectious; he showed, says Norman Hapgood, “a great deal of tolerance, hard work, and enthusiasm, and a liking for intelligences of many kinds around him.”
The three most remarkable reporters of these years were Lincoln Steffens, Norman Hapgood, and W. L. Riardon, two of whom have made their mark in the higher reaches of journalism. Riardon was the political reporter. He had been trained for the Catholic priesthood, but weakness for drink and a talent for news-writing had derailed him. He was a member of Tammany Hall, and invaluable in getting material for assaults upon it. Yet his perfect accuracy and fairness shielded him from any resentment in that quarter. “He has to earn a living like the rest of us,” Croker would say whenever a particularly biting story about Tammany appeared in the Post. One of his merits was that he never failed to bring home news; if there was nothing in the assignment he went to cover, he would get a story as good or better somewhere else. Moreover, he never wrote himself out. On Friday, when a special column was often needed for Saturday’s enlarged paper, Riardon could always be counted on to have something worth while up his sleeve.
Steffens, a young Californian, who had studied in Germany and France, joined the staff on the recommendation of Mr. Bishop in 1892, and after some special reporting on rapid transit, was given a year in Wall Street at the beginning of the panic. When first sent down there, the regular Wall Street reporter being abroad, he asked for references to three or four leading bankers. “Calling on them,” he tells us, “I explained the predicament of the551 Post and my utter ignorance of finance and business. But I said that, if they would coach me from day to day, I would read up, study, work, and I promised in return for the trouble I might put them to, I would report even the most sensational happenings quietly and carefully. The agreement was made; I took the job, and though that had not been my purpose, the effect of the bankers’ interest in me was that we had many, many beats.” Later he was assigned to Police Headquarters at the height of the excitement over the Lexow Inquiry. His work in following the new Police Commission, of which Roosevelt was chairman, was of peculiar value to the public. This four-headed commission was always deadlocking. The obstructiveness of one member was such that the Mayor attempted his removal, but the Governor interfered to prevent it. Steffens for the Post and Jacob Riis for the Sun laid full reports of the Board’s activities before the public, and brought a great deal of public sentiment to bear behind Roosevelt. Steffens was a born newspaper man, sharply observant, vivid in description, full of humor, and with a thorough knowledge of the town.
Of his rapidity and capacity Norman Hapgood furnishes an interesting illustration. One day the 17-story Ireland building collapsed:
It fell down just about three-quarters of an hour before we went to press. There was nobody in the office except me. Mr. Wright was in despair. This was before I had developed, rather suddenly, into a reporter. As far as a story of this kind went, I was in the sub-cub stage. Nevertheless, Mr. Wright had to send me. When I reached the scene of the disaster, I saw Steffens talking to somebody concerned—I think two or three policemen. I went up to him and in quite a leisurely way asked him what information he had. He had come to know me, and be rather amused by my detached ways, so he smiled slightly, never thought of answering me, and went on with his work. I got a few points, went back to the office, and turned in about one stick of inconsequential detail. About five or ten minutes before press time, Steffens called up on the telephone. When he heard of the disaster he had not taken the trouble to phone Mr. Wright, but552 went direct to the spot. The paper was held fifteen or twenty minutes, and in less than half an hour’s dictation by phone Steffens had covered the catastrophe, given all its drama, told everything in an orderly, expert manner, and not missed a detail. There was not a morning paper that had an account as good.
Hapgood began on space, making about $12 a week at first; but he soon developed into the best general reporter Mr. Wright ever knew. He could write shorthand, and was particularly effective in taking interviews, addresses, and trial reports in the English style. He, and every other reporter, found that the absolute trustworthiness of the paper made men of affairs willing to give it news they denied to other dailies. The treatment of one “beat” which he procured is a happy illustration of the Post’s studious avoidance of anything that would seem noisy. He was well acquainted with some of the leaders of the Salvation Army, and at the time when the public was most interested in the question whether Ballington Booth was going to break with his father, Hapgood received absolute knowledge that he was. Turning in a story on the general situation, he inserted a short paragraph in the middle giving this statement. Mr. Wright was tempted to pick it out and put it at the head of the column. Then he laughed, said he would leave it where it was, and called attention to it only by a minor headline.
During the Spanish War the Post had a creditable quota of correspondents with the Cuban forces. A. G. Robinson sent accounts of camp life at Jacksonville and Key West; Franklin Clarkin was with Sampson’s fleet and later in the Santiago trenches; and John Bass was also at Santiago. The most remarkable of the lot, however, was E. G. Bellairs, as he called himself, who got into Cuba at Nuevitas aboard a blockade-runner from the Bahamas, and was soon sending up remarkable accounts of his adventures among the insurgents. He fell sick, his servant dug a grave for him and departed, and he was rescued by an old woman who fed him miraculous steaks and meat jellies—miraculous, that is, until he observed that his mule had disappeared. Bellairs was dismissed553 for cause, and it later turned out that his name was an alias, covering a criminal record; but he had high merits as a correspondent. The Associated Press promptly employed him. The Post showed its customary quietness when Sampson destroyed Cervera’s fleet. That event occurred Sunday, July 3, and the morning papers on the Fourth had very meager news; but the day being a legal holiday, the Post refused to issue any edition. Later it had full and prompt correspondence from the Philippines, a spot in which its editors were keenly interested.
Much of the Evening Post’s news value was always furnished by certain unrivaled special features—unrivaled not only in New York, but the whole country. Perhaps the chief, and certainly the most effective in maintaining the circulation, was the financial department. Alexander Dana Noyes, who came from the Commercial Advertiser to be financial editor in 1891, and held that post till 1920, gave new credit to Whiting’s pages, and ably supplemented Horace White in the editorial discussion of financial questions. As far west as Chicago, and as far south as Atlanta his columns were looked to daily as the best on industry and finance printed.
A position of equal pre?minence was held by the Evening Post’s literary department, the record of which repays examination in detail. Falling heir in 1881 to the literary editor and traditions of the Nation, the Post became the first American newspaper to publish book criticism that was consistently expert, discriminating, and of high literary quality. James Bryce doubted whether there was any criticism in the world as good as the old Nation’s. By 1881 some of the greatest of Godkin’s original contributors, as Henry James and Lowell, were no longer writing for it. But in spite of such defections, the list was impressively weighty and comprehensive, and the Post had every worthy book reviewed by an authority in the field in which it lay. In fact, the dominant tone of its literary pages was authoritativeness—it was not clever, it was not newsy, but it was definitive.
In large part this meant that the reviewing was by554 university scholars, and the academic tone of the writing, in the best sense of the word, had much to do with the esteem for the Evening Post in academic circles. People who wanted bright belletristic literary pages were disappointed. Glancing down the roster of reviewers in the eighties, we find only two men known as novelists or writers of light essays, Joel Chandler Harris and Edward Eggleston. There was a decided deficiency in news of literary personalities, and discussions of current literary movements. But all the great institutions of learning were ably represented. It is sufficient to take Harvard as an example. Her contributors included:
Alexander Agassiz, H. P. Bowditch, Edward Channing, Francis J. Child, Ephraim Emerton, C. H. Grandgent, J. B. Greenough, Albert Bushnell Hart, William James, Charles R. Lanman, Charles Eliot Norton, George H. Palmer, Josiah Royce, N. S. Shaler, F. W. Taussig, J. D. Whitney, Justin Winsor.
Outside the universities, we find among the reviewers the names of historians like Parkman, Henry Adams, Henry C. Lea, John C. Ropes, and John Fiske; a number of men in the Federal service, like the arch?ologist A. F. Bandelier, the astronomer Simon Newcomb, Henry Gannett, and J. R. Soley; and writers of reputation in various fields like George E. Woodberry, T. W. Higginson, W. C. Brownell, Kenyon Cox, Brander Matthews, H. H. Furness, and Angelo Heilprin. The fare was not sufficiently varied by light and elegant features—one rule was not to accept any poetry—but it was of the best possible quality.
The literary editor from 1881 to 1903 was Wendell Phillips Garrison, who had been with the Nation since its founding in 1865, and had early taken charge of the reviews. His name is indissolubly linked with Godkin’s. “If anything goes wrong with you, I will retire into a monastery,” the editor wrote in 1883. “You are the one steady and constant man I have ever had to do with.” He is not remembered, like R. H. Hutton of the London Spectator, the only literary editor of the time superior to555 him, for permanently valuable literary criticism. His distinction lay in his keen judgment in selecting reviewers, his ability to inspire them, his careful scholarship, and his skill in making homogeneous the work sent to him.
Both to his associates in the office and distant contributors, Garrison was endeared by his tact and charm. When writing to reviewers, he was wont to include some personal word of friendship, often whimsical, which drew the recipients into an intimate circle. He thus built up a great family of Evening Post and Nation writers, from the Pacific Coast to St. Petersburg, more than two hundred of whom joined on the fortieth anniversary of his entrance upon journalism in presenting him a silver vase, inscribed by Goldwin Smith. Whenever Godkin caused a storm in the office, Garrison was expected to restore calm. A single example of his constant thoughtfulness may be given. H. T. Finck, the Post’s music critic, while traveling in Switzerland one summer, was attacked in Berne by typhoid fever, and sent to the University Hospital. Garrison heard of his plight, immediately ascertained that the Nation had a subscriber in Berne, a wealthy cheese exporter, and wrote this gentleman of Mr. Finck’s illness. The result was that the critic spent his convalescence in the subscriber’s home.
By his tact and high ideals, Garrison made the learned world of the United States feel that the book pages of the Evening Post and Nation were a co?perative enterprise, which all scholars should take pride in keeping at the highest possible level. Their labors were scrupulously supplemented by his own, for his scholarship was rare and his exactness almost painful. He would send a telegram to settle the question of a hyphen. An authority upon punctuation and syllabication, he prepared the materials for an exhaustive treatise upon them, parts of which were printed in a memorial volume in 1908. Until May, 1888, much of the impeccable accuracy of the literary columns was attributable to the aid furnished by Michael Heilprin, a truly noble scholar who had been driven from Hungary by the collapse of the revolution of 1848–49, and556 who just before the Civil War had connected himself with Appleton’s Cyclop?dia. He not only wrote many articles for the Post and Nation, but placed his marvelous scholarship at their service in the revision and proof-reading of articles by others. He had a reading-knowledge of eighteen languages. Taking a dictionary of dates, he could run his eye down the page and make corrections by the half-dozen. He could give the time and place of every battle and engagement in the Civil War, and “say his popes” without stumbling, a feat which even Macaulay declined to attempt. In history, biography, geography, and literature he commanded facts literally by the ten thousand.
One of the most striking traits of Evening Post criticism was the unity of tone which Garrison gave it. All reviews and nearly all general articles were anonymous. Godkin and Garrison held that an article by a named writer was not appreciated on its merits; that if he was famous, the veriest twaddle from his pen was devoured, while if he was obscure, nothing he wrote was read. The reviewers hence felt no temptation to air personal idiosyncrasies, and were the more ready to assume the Post’s general point of view. Mr. Garrison chose his reviewer with the greatest care, and left him almost perfect freedom to say what he thought, secure in his discretion. For reasons of space he frequently had to use the blue pencil drastically, but though he called himself The Butcher he used it with tact.
When the Evening Post had a special titbit in the literary columns its rule of anonymity must have seemed a disadvantage. Thus in 1883 it published an article upon the death of Trollope, which even then would have made a greater impression upon readers had they known that its author was James Bryce. Bryce described the creator of Mrs. Proudie from personal acquaintance—“a genial, hearty, vigorous man, a typical Englishman in his face, his talk, his ideas, his tastes. His large eyes, which looked larger behind his large spectacles, were full of good-humored life and force; and though he was not witty nor557 brilliant in conversation, he was what is called very good company, having traveled widely, known all sorts of people, and formed positive views on nearly every subject, which he was always ready to promulgate and maintain. There was not much novelty in them ... but they were worth listening to for their solid sense, and you enjoyed the ardor with which he threw himself into a discussion.” He had, Bryce added, no successor. Howells and James, though true artists, had not yet laid hold upon the general public; Miss Broughton’s fine promise had not ripened; and “Mr. George Meredith, a strong and peculiar genius, who has a great fascination for those who will take the pains to follow him, remains unknown to the vast majority of novel readers.”
When Gladstone died, Bryce’s review of his career in the Post was signed. But it was regrettable that, after the demise of Darwin, the editors did not sign his name to his very interesting personal sketch of the great scientist:
I saw him at his home in Down last summer, and could not remember to have ever before seen him so bright, so cheerful, so full of talk. Feeble as his health had long been, he looked younger than his age, and had a freshness, an alertness of mind and eye, an interest in all passing affairs, which one seldom sees in men who are well past seventy. It was hard to believe that one was in the presence of so great and splendid a genius, for his manner was simple and natural as a child’s. He did not speak with any air of authority, much less dogmatism, even on his own topics; and on other subjects, politics for instance, he talked as one who was only anxious to hear what others had to say and resolve his own doubts. One remark struck particularly the two friends who had come to see him. He mentioned that Mr. Gladstone had, some months before, while spending a Sunday in the neighborhood, walked over to call on him; and speaking with lively admiration of the Prime Minister’s powers, he added: “It was delightful to see so great a man so simple and natural. He talked to us as one of ourselves; you would never have known what he was.” We looked at one another, and thought that there were other great men of whom this was no less true, and in whom such self-forgetful simplicity was no less beautiful.
558 Nearly all the Post’s obituary essays upon great American authors—Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Mrs. Stowe, and others—came from the chatty and interesting if not highly acute pen of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The Paris correspondent was Auguste Laugel, who furnished a dozen letters every half-year upon politics and literature. Much English correspondence came from the noted jurist and Oxford teacher, A. V. Dicey, who reviewed many of the important English histories, biographies, and political works before they were published in America. Occasional long reviews were furnished by other Englishmen, as Leslie Stephen and Alfred Russell Wallace.
The best appraisals of current fiction were those contributed in the eighties by W. C. Brownell, whose estimates of important books like Henry James’ “Portrait of a Lady” were almost perfect in their sanity, penetration, and literary grace. Unfortunately, he wrote rarely, and most reviews came from less distinguished hands. The Evening Post was always fervent in its admiration of Henry James’s earlier manner, and it never took a patronizing tone toward Mark Twain, but it was long a bit suspicious of Howells, admitting his power but regarding his work as ugly. Brownell enthusiastically described “The Portrait of a Lady” as superior in moral quality to George Eliot, but the reviewers of Howells disliked his realism. The verdict upon “Silas Lapham” was that, except in its fine literary form, the novel had no beauty. “There is no inspiration for any one in the character of Silas Lapham. It rouses no tender or elevating emotion, stirs no thrill of sympathy, suggests no ideal of conduct, no notion that the world at large is or can be less ugly than Lapham himself. If it is to be conceded that Mr. Howells and his school are great artists in the highest reaches of their art, then the language is in sore need of words to define Sir Walter Scott and Thackeray.” However, the writer admitted that the portrait of Lapham had a vividness and completeness unapproached in contemporary English fiction.
559 The essays and reviews of widest interest were probably those upon distinctly literary topics, and here the pens of George L. Kittredge, Thomas R. Lounsbury, Basil L. Gildersleeve, Charles Eliot Norton, and George E. Woodberry were especially in evidence. They wrote with charm upon a wide variety of books, and frequently with a special knowledge and interpretative insight that made their essays almost permanently significant. The most active reviewer of history and political biography was Gen. Jacob D. Cox, the works he treated ranging from the massive histories by Rhodes and Von Holst to lives of minor Civil War leaders. Cox himself wrote several books on the rebellion, and after the death of John C. Ropes—also a contributor—was easily the highest American authority upon its battles and strategy. Two other historians who assisted were Lea and Goldwin Smith. Wm. Graham Sumner wrote much on economics.
It is evident that the Evening Post’s literary strength counted as a marked addition to its new value. Some books are not news, but most are; and if in no other American journal was there so little news of sensation, in none was there so much news of ideas. An outstanding review like that which J. D. Cox wrote of Bryce’s “American Commonwealth” or Gamaliel Bradford of Woodrow Wilson’s “Congressional Government” was news in the best sense. From all the important foreign capitals, not merely London and Paris, came constant news of the new publications, new intellectual movements, and new events in letters, art, and science. Until her death that remarkable Englishwoman, Jessie White Mario, wrote from Italy. The first American news of the production of Ibsen’s “Ghosts” and the stir it caused was furnished in a long letter from Berlin in January, 1887, by C. H. Genung. Perhaps the outstanding illustration of this alertness of the Evening Post to intellectual news is its clear reflection throughout the eighties of the discovery of Russian literature by the Western world. It and the Nation did far more than all other periodicals combined to introduce Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Dostoievsky560 to the American public. As it remarked in 1886, when it published articles upon “Anna Karenina,” “Childhood and Youth,” “Crime and Punishment,” and “The Insulted and Injured,” the appearance of this new literature recalled the wonder of English readers when, in the time of Scott and Coleridge, German literature was first opened to them. Isabel Hapgood was long the St. Petersburg correspondent, while Auguste Laugel was in personal communication with not only De Vogué and other students of Russian letters, but with Turgenev.
The campaign which Bryant had carried on for an international copyright law was tirelessly maintained by Godkin and Garrison. After a time it appeared that cheap piracy was about to accomplish what argument had never done; that the disreputable pirates were ruining the business of respectable piracy, as carried on by Harper’s and others. The latter paid a popular English author for the right to issue an authorized version, but within a week some printer who had paid nothing might be out with a cheaper edition which displaced the other. More and more publishers, therefore, joined in the crusade. Late in Arthur’s Administration the judiciary committee of the House reported that the justice of an international copyright law was unquestionable, and Arthur, in his last annual message, urged the subject upon the attention of Congress. But as Godkin wrote, some clergyman was always ready to start up and announce that books were a property that God had meant to be stolen, and that it was only an oversight that they had not been excepted by name from the Ten Commandments; while some Western paper was always ready to prove that a copyright bill held a hidden villainy in behalf of the pampered noblemen who wrote and published books in England.
Godkin, growing deeply interested as the eighties passed, wrote with a vehemence which George Haven Putnam describes as invaluable in impressing most thoughtful citizens and legislators, but which actually antagonized some others, and which ultimately led to a cause célébre. Prominent among the opponents of international561 copyright was the Rev. Dr. Isaac K. Funk, a leader of the Methodists and Prohibitionists, who gradually built up the great publishing business of Funk & Wagnalls. Dr. Funk mistakenly came to believe that a majority of Godkin’s blows were aimed at his head, and he resented the fact that among all the exponents of piracy he should be singled out as a shining mark. In due time the editor, commenting on Funk’s alleged piracy of an important English work, rather overstepped the mark and laid himself open to legal counterattack. Dr. Funk promptly brought suit for defamation and injury in the amount of $250,000. There was some consternation at the Evening Post office, where Godkin’s attack was deemed legally indefensible, and Joseph H. Choate, who was retained to defend the editor, shared it. Indeed, he told Mr. Godkin that he could hardly expect to bring him off scot-free, but would try to hold the penalty to a nominal sum.
But by characteristic adroitness and audacity, especially in cross-examining Dr. Funk, Choate made his conduct of the case a notable triumph. Mr. Godkin’s attacks had extended over a number of years. Nevertheless, Choate showed that during all this time Dr. Funk had repeatedly been asked to officiate in Methodist pulpits, that he had been honored by his denomination in other ways, that the Prohibitionists had nominated him for Congress and the Governorship, and that it was not improbable that he would some day receive their nomination for the Presidency. All these honors had come at the time when the attacks by the Post had been most intense.
“Now,” said Choate to Dr. Funk, “now, sir, will you please make clear to his honor, and to the gentlemen of the jury, just in what manner your character and your relations with your friends and your associates and the public at large have suffered injury from the so-called brutal attacks of my client?” To this challenge Dr. Funk did not know how to reply. In his final address to the jury Choate carried the war into the enemy’s territory562 with staggering effect. It happened that Dean Farrar’s life of Christ had been first brought out here in an authorized edition by E. P. Dutton & Co., and had immediately been pirated by Dr. Funk, although Dutton’s had paid the author a substantial sum. “I have never been a doctor of divinity,” remarked Choate; “I never expect to be one. I cannot tell, therefore, just how a doctor of divinity feels; but to me, an outsider and a layman, there is something incongruous in the idea of a doctor of divinity going into business for gain and beginning his operations by stealing the Life of his Saviour.” Partly because of the lack of evidence of any real injury to Dr. Funk, partly because of Choate’s shrewd thrust, the jury’s verdict was in favor of Godkin, and the costs were assessed upon Dr. Funk.
The ultimate partial victory for international copyright in March, 1891, just as Congress was ending its session, left the Evening Post dissatisfied. It admitted that the law was a triumph for honesty, and that it put an end to the Algerine system of fostering the national intelligence. “But if we said that it was a measure to be proud of, we should be going far beyond the truth. The obligation under which it places the foreign author of having his book ‘manufactured’ in this country, as a condition of protection for it, is a piece of tariff barbarism which is enough to make one hang one’s head.” Unfortunately, the manufacturing clause, after thirty years, is still retained in our copyright legislation.
Mr. Towse’s promotion from a reportership to the dramatic editorship was no accident, for by training and taste he was admirably fitted for the position. He had been taken regularly to the theater from his eighth birthday, had seen Charles Kean play, and recalls a performance at the old Adelphi in London in April, 1853. As a boy he was a constant and sometimes surreptitious attendant in the pit of the Old Drury, Haymarket, and other theaters. The Haymarket at the time was the recognized home of polite comedy in London, and there Mr. Towse saw admirable performances of Shakespeare,563 Sheridan, and Goldsmith, as well as E. A. Sothern as Lord Dundreary before the part had been made the piece of broad buffoonery which it later became in America. The Adelphi was the home of melodrama, well played. But the performances which made the chief impression upon the boy were those of the famous actor-manager Samuel Phelps, who in the fifties and early sixties raised Sadler’s Wells Theater, in the shabby and despised suburb of Islington, into a famous shrine of dramatic art, and who later appeared in other London theaters. Phelps is pronounced by Mr. Towse to have been beyond doubt the most versatile actor of the nineteenth century.
The outstanding merits of the London stage of this period lay in the fact that it rested upon the old stock companies, in which the standards of acting were far more uniformly high than those which obtained after the introduction of the star system. The actors and actresses had been reared in a school of hard work, small pay, and rigid insistence upon the difference between a mere performance and a characterization. All had served a long apprenticeship, and gained such a comprehensive knowledge of their craft that they knew how to acquit themselves creditably in comedy, tragedy, or melodrama. Mr. Towse recalls their striking diversity and authority of gesture, their distinction of speech, their easy adaptation of manner to the character, and remarkable power of emotional expression. Versatility was unescapable. At Sadler’s Wells, for instance, all Shakespeare’s plays except two were produced during Phelps’s seventeen years of management, along with the other Elizabethan dramatists, and many plays by later or contemporary authors—Colman, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Knowles, Bulwer, and so on; there being a change of bill at least twice or thrice a week.
When Mr. Towse began to review plays for the Evening Post in the early seventies, he found in New York still several very flourishing stock companies, though the theater was rapidly entering upon a transition to the star-and-circuit564 system. Their proficiency was like that of the British companies, although, being fewer, they did not supply so many all-round actors. A number of the best of the players had disappeared or were disappearing. James K. Hackett, Junius Brutus Booth, and J. W. Wallack were gone, Edwin Forrest and Charlotte Cushman were meditating their farewells, and Edwin Booth was in a period of temporary eclipse. The speculative manager, almost wholly ignorant of anything about the theater but its money-making possibilities, was beginning to arise and foreshadow the day when he would make the typical New York production one in which one or two fairly able players would be supported by a parcel of supernumeraries.
But the performances at Wallack’s in the seventies and eighties were found by Mr. Towse to compare favorably with those given by the Haymarket company in London. He saw John Gilbert in a number of striking characterizations, notably Sir Harcourt Courtly, Sir Peter Teazle, and Sir Anthony Absolute, while Lester Wallack played admirably in other parts; and two other performers of note were Charles and Rose Coghlan. Augustin Daly’s company gave many brilliant, if uneven, performances in the late seventies and early eighties, and included a number of players of trained skill: Charles Fisher, Fanny Davenport, John Drew, Mrs. G. H. Gilbert, Ada Rehan, and others. When “Romeo and Juliet” was presented in 1877, with Adelaide Neilson as Juliet, Mr. Towse gave her at once a place among the very great Juliets. The union Square Company was almost wholly limited to melodrama, but within that field it was the best in the country, and probably in the world. With it Clara Morris achieved some remarkable successes. In later years Mr. Towse recalls her as playing with Tommaso Salvini, whom he thinks “not only incomparably the greatest actor and artist I have ever seen, but one who has never had an equal, probably, since the days of Garrick.”
It is by the standards thus acquired in studying the old565 British and American stock companies that Mr. Towse has measured the present-day stage—standards of the utmost severity, which he believes show a steady and lamentable fall in the general level of acting. He has always been ready to admit the high merit of a good many, and the genius of a few, stars; but from the time of Edwin Booth, who encouraged the star system by his failure to insist upon good supporting casts, until to-day, he has condemned the indifference shown to the subordinate r?les. The lack of taste and artistic conscience among most of the managers of our time he equally deplores. His standards of criticism are severe from not only the histrionic and literary standpoints, but from the moral standpoint. Convinced that the theater is one of the most important educational influences, good or bad, within the resources of modern civilization, he insists upon drawing a clear line between inspiring and ennobling plays, and vicious plays. No other critic in England or America has a background of experience approaching Mr. Towse’s, and none writes with more responsibility and weight.
Mr. Finck, on the other hand, has had the advantage of finding New York’s music improving from decade to decade, until the city is one of the world’s greatest music centers. When he joined the Evening Post, operatic singers and audiences were divided into two hostile camps, the Italian and German—both accepting the French as allies. Companies which gave German opera sneered at the Italian; companies which, like Mapleson’s at the Academy of Music, gave Italian opera, ignored all Germans save those who, like Gluck and Mozart, wrote more or less in the Italian manner. The revolution which erased this narrow hostility was effected, in the main, by the growth of Wagner’s popularity among operatic performers until it became irresistible.
From the beginning Mr. Finck was a champion of the German opera which Mapleson systematically slighted. During the summer of 1882 he sent the Post from Bayreuth a series of highly interesting letters upon the Wagner566 performances there. He described old Wagner, almost seventy, as busy half the day overseeing the productions; pleased as a child whenever the effects were especially fine, and once even shouting to Frau Cosima across the whole auditorium, “You see, my dear little wife, that we can get up something together, after all.” Mr. Finck poked fun unmercifully at the more florid Italian operas, and assisted greatly in driving pieces like Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” from the stage. In October, 1883, he was able to hail the opening of the new Metropolitan, with a company that, including Campanini and Mme. Nilsson, was willing to do full justice to the Germans; and when in the spring of 1887 he reviewed the third season of German opera, he could rejoice that of sixty-two performances Wagner had received thirty-two.
Conservative and dignified though it was, in every direction the Evening Post had a marked growth during the eighties and nineties. It found its first sporting editor in Charles Pike Sawyer, who joined the staff in the spring of 1886. It soon had a real estate editor. Its steady expansion led to the abandonment, on Oct. 31, 1887, of the folio shape in which it had always appeared since 1801. The blanket sheet was unmanageable; it could not be stereotyped, so that the printing had to be done direct from the locked type; and it gave too little space. As Godkin said, the change was a contribution to the anti-profanity movement. The sturdiness of the Post is evinced by the fact that in occasional years its profits were large, and that for the whole period the balance was decidedly upon the right side of the ledger; from 1881 to 1915, the net profits on the capital invested were about two per cent. a year. This was in spite of the fact that Henry Villard did not expect it to be a money-making business, the fact that its business managers were not aggressive, and the fact that Mr. Godkin’s editorial fearlessness and bluntness inevitably made enemies. Near the end of his editorship, Godkin’s attacks upon the smallness of the hundred-dollar tariff exemption for travelers returning from abroad involved him in a dispute with567 mercantile interests in New York. He made some untactful remarks concerning small tradesmen, and the result was a boycott of the paper, involving most of the department stores, which cost it large sums. Henry Villard accepted this blow in an admirable spirit, and it was determined that it would not be allowed to hamper the management in any of its activities.
Mr. Godkin once said he had never known any other man capable of the generosity Mr. Villard showed with the Evening Post. The owner never sought to influence the paper; he rarely entered the office unless invited; and he submitted without a word to attacks by the financial editor upon his railway policies. Throughout his life and for years after his death Mrs. Villard, who became the owner, upheld the editors even when Mr. Godkin assailed causes near her heart, like woman suffrage, and made large financial sacrifices to sustain the paper.
Taking its editorial page, its criticism, and its news together, the Evening Post of the period under review was quite indispensable to New Yorkers of culture. One was as certain to see it in any home of intelligence and means as he was certain to find a set of Shakespeare. It is interesting to note how our writers have singled it out as an essential piece of furniture in any household of refinement. Edith Wharton shows us old Mr. van der Luyden immersed at his Skuyterscliff mansion in the Evening Post; Joseph Hergesheimer lays it beside the study of Beethoven and the Tanagra figurine on Howat Penny’s study table. The news was not superabundant, but it was well proportioned and thoroughly reliable. The financial columns were without an equal. The criticism of books, drama, music, and art was the best in the country. The editorial views might seem congenial or repugnant, but one simply had to know what Mr. Godkin was saying.