Recollections of a Varied Life Part 16

Her industry was at times almost appalling in its tireless energy, yet it seemed to make no draughts upon her vitality that her singularly buoyant nature could not meet without apparent strain.

She had also a rare gift of recognizing ability in others, judging it accurately, and setting it to do its proper work. One of the greatest services she rendered _Hearth and Home_ was in suggesting Frank R.

Stockton for employment on the staff when we found ourselves in need of an a.s.sistant. He had not begun to make his reputation then. Such newspaper work as he had found to do had afforded his peculiar gifts no adequate opportunity and outside a narrow circle he was wholly unknown. But Mrs. Dodge was right in her reckoning when she advised his employment, and equally right in her perception of the kind of opportunity he needed.

The friends.h.i.+p between Stockton and myself, which was begun during the time of our a.s.sociation on _Hearth and Home_, endured and increased to the end of his life. The fame that those later years brought to him is a matter of familiar knowledge to all who are likely to read this book.

It is not of that that I wish to write here, or of the character of the work by which that fame was won. It is only of Stockton the man that I need set down anything in these pages.

He was the best of good company always, as I found out early in our a.s.sociation, in those days when we went out together for our luncheon every day and enjoyed an hour of relaxation between the long morning's work and that of the longer afternoon. He never failed to be ready to go when the luncheon hour came. His work was always in shape and he carried no care for it with him when we quitted the office together.

He never talked shop. I cannot remember that he ever mentioned anything respecting his work or asked a question concerning it between the time of our leaving the office and that of our return.

Not that he was indifferent to it, for on the contrary I never knew a more conscientious worker, or one who more faithfully attended to every detail. When his "copy" was laid on my desk I knew perfectly that every sentence was as he had intended it to be, that every paragraph break was made at the point he desired it to be, and that every comma was marked in its proper place. While engaged in doing his work he gave his undivided attention to it, but when he went with me to the Crooked Stoop house in Trinity Alley for his luncheon, he gave equal attention to the mutton and potatoes, while his conversation was of things light, airy, and not strenuous.

I spoke of this to him one day many years after the time of our editorial a.s.sociation, and for answer he said:

"I suppose there are men who can part their hair and polish their boots at the same time, but I am not gifted in that way."

I never saw Stockton angry. I doubt that he ever was so. I never knew him to be in the least degree hurried, or to manifest impatience in any way. On the other hand, I never knew him to manifest enthusiasm of any kind or to indulge in any but the most moderate and placid rejoicing over anything. Good or ill fortune seemed to have no effect whatever upon his spirits or his manner, so far as those who were intimately acquainted with him were able to discover. Perhaps it was only that his philosophy taught him the injustice of asking others to share his sorrows or his rejoicings over events that were indifferent to them.

[Sidenote: Frank R. Stockton]

He was always frail in health, but during all the years of my acquaintance with him I never once heard him mention the fact, or discovered any complaint of it in his tone or manner. At one time his weakness and emaciation were so great that he walked with two crutches, not because of lameness for he had none, but because of sheer physical weakness.

Yet even at that time his face was a smiling one and in answer to all inquiries concerning his health he declared himself perfectly well.

His self-possessed repression of enthusiasm is clearly manifest in his writings. In none of his stories is there a suggestion of anything but philosophic calm on the part of the man who wrote them. There is humor, a fascinating fancy, and an abounding tenderness of human sympathy of a placidly impersonal character, but there is no pa.s.sion, no strenuosity, nothing to suggest that the author is anywhere stirred to enthusiasm by the events related or the situations in which his imaginary personages are placed.

He one day said to me that he had never regarded what is called "love interest" as necessary to a novel, and in fact he never made any very earnest use of that interest. In "The Late Mrs. Null" he presented the love story with more of amus.e.m.e.nt than of warmth in his manner, while in "Kate Bonnet" the love affair is scarcely more than a casual adjunct to the pirate story. In "The Hundredth Man" he manifested somewhat greater sympathy, but even there his tone is gently humorous rather than pa.s.sionate.

Many of the whimsical conceits that Stockton afterward made the foundations of his books were first used in the more ephemeral writings of the _Hearth and Home_ period. It has often interested me in reading the later books to recall my first acquaintance with their germinal ideas. It has been like meeting interesting men and women whom one remembers as uncouth boys or as girls in pantalettes. For _Hearth and Home_ he wrote several playful articles about the character of eating houses as revealed in what I may call their physiognomies. The subject seemed to interest and amuse him, as it certainly interested and amused his readers, but at that time he probably did not dream of making it a considerable part of the structure of a novel, as he afterwards did in "The Hundredth Man."

In the same way in a series of half serious, half humorous articles for the paper, he wrote of the picturesque features of piracy on the Spanish Main and along our own Atlantic coast. He gave humor to the historical facts by looking at them askance--with an intellectual squint as it were--and attributing to Blackbeard and the rest emotions and sentiments that would not have been out of place in a Sunday School. These things he justified in his humorously solemn way, by challenging anybody to show that the freebooters were not so inspired in fact, and insisting that men's occupations in life const.i.tute no safe index to their characters.

"We do not denounce the novelists and story writers," he one day said, "and call them untruthful persons merely because they gain their living by writing things that are not so. In their private lives many of the fiction writers are really estimable persons who go to church, wear clean linen, and pay their debts if they succeed in borrowing money enough for that purpose."

Here clearly was the thought that afterward grew into the novel of "Kate Bonnet."

About that time he wrote a little manual for Putnam's Handy Book Series, in which he undertook to show how to furnish a home at very small cost.

All his readers remember what fun he made of that performance when he came to write "Rudder Grange."

[Sidenote: A Whimsical View of Plagiary]

I do not think this sort of thing is peculiar to Stockton's work. I find traces of it in the writings of others, especially of those humorous writers who have the gift of inventing amusingly whimsical conceits.

It seems easily possible, for example, to find in "The Bab Ballads" the essential whimsicalities which afterward made the fortunes of Mr. W. S.

Gilbert's most famous comic operas.

Stockton's whimsical logic was brought to bear upon everything; so much so that I have often wondered how he would have regarded a "hold up" of his person for the sake of his purse if such a thing had happened to him.

One day a man submitted a ma.n.u.script to me for sale. It was an article on Alice and Phoebe Cary. The subject was interesting and the article was pleasingly brief, so that I thought it promising. When I began to read it, the sentences seemed strangely familiar. As I read on I recognized the thing as an editorial I had myself written for the _Evening Post_ on the day of Phoebe Cary's funeral. To verify my impression I went at once to the office of the _Evening Post_, compared the ma.n.u.script with the printed article, and found it to be a verbatim copy.

I was perhaps a little severe in my judgments of such things in those days, and when the plagiarist came back to learn the fate of his ma.n.u.script my language was of a kind that might have been regarded as severe. After the fellow had left, breathing threats of dire legal things that he meant to do to me for keeping his ma.n.u.script without paying for it, Stockton remonstrated with me for having lost my temper.

"It seems to me," he said, "that you do not sufficiently consider the circ.u.mstances of the case. That man has his living to make as a writer, and nature has denied him the ability to create literature that he can sell. What is more reasonable, then, than that he should select marketable things that other people have written and sell them? His creative ability failing him, what can he do but use his critical ability in its stead? If he is not equal to the task of producing salable stuff, he at least knows such stuff when he sees it, and in the utilization of that knowledge he finds a means of earning an honest living.

"Besides in selecting an article of yours to 'convey,' he has paid you a distinct compliment. He might have taken one of mine instead, but that his critical judgment saw the superiority of yours. You should recognize the tribute he has paid you as a writer.

"Still again what harm would have been done if he had succeeded in selling the article? It had completely served its purpose as an editorial in the _Evening Post_, why should it not serve a larger purpose and entertain a greater company of readers?

"Finally I am impressed with the ill.u.s.tration the case affords of the vagaries of chance as a factor in human happenings. There are thousands of editors in this country to whom that man might have offered the article. You were the only one of them who could by any possibility have recognized it as a plagiarism. According to the doctrine of chances he was perfectly safe in offering the ma.n.u.script for sale. The chances were thousands to one against its recognition. It was his ill-luck to encounter the one evil chance in the thousands. The moral of that is that it is unsafe to gamble. Still, now that he knows the one editor who can recognize it, he will no doubt make another copy of the article and sell it in safety to some one else."

This prediction was fulfilled. The article appeared not long afterward as a contribution to another periodical. In the meanwhile Stockton's whimsical view of the matter had so amused me as to smooth my temper, and I did not think it necessary to expose the petty theft.

XLI

[Sidenote: Some Plagiarists I Have Known]

The view taken by Stockton's perverse humor was much the same as that entertained by Benjamin Franklin with greater seriousness. He tells us in his Autobiography that at one time he regularly attended a certain church whose minister preached able sermons that interested him. When it was discovered that the sermons were borrowed, without credit, from some one else, the church dismissed the preacher and put in his place another whose sermons, all his own, did not interest Franklin, who thereupon ceased to attend the church, protesting that he preferred good sermons, plagiarized, to poor ones of the preacher's own.

I have since learned what I did not know at the time of the incident related, that there is a considerable company of minor writers hanging as it were on the skirts of literature and journalism, who make the better part of their meager incomes by copying the writings of others and selling them at opportune times. Sometimes these clever pilferers copy matter as they find it, particularly when its source is one not likely to be discovered. Sometimes they make slight alterations in it for the sake of disguise, and sometimes they borrow the substance of what they want and change its form somewhat by rewriting it. Their technical name for this last performance is "skinning" an article.

I have since had a good deal of experience with persons of this sort.

When Horace Greeley died one of them--a woman--sold me a copy of the text of a very interesting letter from him which she a.s.sured me had never been seen by any one outside the little group that cherished the original. I learned later that she had simply copied the thing from the _Home Journal_, where it had been printed many months before.

One day some years later I had a revelation made to me of the ethics of plagiarism accepted by a certain cla.s.s of writers for the minor periodicals. I found in an obscure magazine a signed article on the heroism of women, or something of that sort, the first paragraphs of which were copied verbatim from a book of my own, in which I had written it as a personal recollection. When the writer of the article was questioned as to his trespa.s.s upon my copyright, he wrote me an exceedingly gracious letter of apology, saying, by way of explanation, that he had found the pa.s.sage in an old sc.r.a.pbook of his own, with no memorandum of its authors.h.i.+p attached. He had thought it no harm, he said, to make the thing his own, a thing, he a.s.sured me, he would not have done had he known whose the pa.s.sage was. This explanation seemed to satisfy his conscience completely. I wonder what he would have thought himself privileged to do with a horse or a cow found wandering along a lane without the escort of its owner.

[Sidenote: A Peculiar Case of Plagiary]

Sometimes the plagiarist is far more daring in his thefts, taking as his own much greater things and more easily recognized ones than sc.r.a.pbooks are apt to hold. The boldest thing of the sort with which I ever came into personal contact happened in this wise. As literary editor of the _Evening Post_ during the late seventies it was a part of my duty to look out for interesting correspondence. One day there came to me a particularly good thing of the kind--two or three columns of fascinating description of certain phases of life in the Canadian Northwest. The writer proposed to furnish us a series of letters of like kind, dealing with the trading posts of the Hudson Bay Company, life among the trappers, Indians, and half-breeds, and the like. The letter submitted was so unusually good, both in its substance and in its literary quality, that I agreed to take the series on the terms proposed. A number of the letters followed, and the series attracted the pleased attention of readers. Presently, in addition to his usual letter our correspondent sent us a paper relating to the interesting career of a quaint personage who flourished in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in their territorial days. He was known as "Johnny Appleseed," because of his habit of carrying a bag of apple seeds in his wanderings and distributing them among the pioneers by way of inducing them to plant orchards.

Unfortunately that article had been written by some one other than our correspondent and published long before in _Harper's Magazine_.

When my suspicion was thus aroused with regard to the integrity of the correspondent, I inst.i.tuted an inquiry which revealed the fact that the letters we had so highly valued were plagiarized from a book which had been published in England but not reprinted here.

The daring of the man appalled me, but the limit of his a.s.surance had not yet been revealed. When I wrote to him telling him of my discovery of the fraud and declining to send a check for such of the letters as had been printed and not yet paid for, he responded by sending me a number of testimonials to the excellence of his character, furnished by the clergymen, bankers, and leading men generally of the town in which he lived. Having thus rehabilitated his character, he argued that as the letters had proved interesting to the readers of the paper, we had got our money's worth, and that it made no difference in the quality of the literature furnished whether he had written it himself or had transcribed it from a book written by another person. Curiously enough there was a tone of a.s.sured sincerity in all this which was baffling to the understanding. I can explain it only by thinking that he plagiarized that tone also.

It was about that time that my work as literary editor of the _Evening Post_ brought to my attention two cases of what I may call more distinguished plagiarism. Mrs. Wister, a gifted scholar and writer, was at that time rendering a marked service to literature by her exceedingly judicious adaptations of German fiction to the use of American readers.

She took German novels that were utterly too long and in other ways unfit for American publication, translated them freely, shortened them, and otherwise saved to American readers all that was attractive in novels which, if directly translated, would have had no acceptability at all in this country. The results were quite as much her own as those of the German authors of the books thus treated.

I had recently read and reviewed one of the cleverest of these books of hers, when there came to me for review an English translation of the same German novel, under another t.i.tle. That translation was presented as the work of an English clergyman, well known as one of the most prolific writers of his time. As I looked over the book I discovered that with the exception of a few initiatory chapters, it was simply a copy of Mrs. Wister's work. In answer to the charge of plagiarism the reverend gentleman explained that he had set out to translate the book, but that when he had rendered a few chapters of it into English Mrs.

Wister's work fell into his hands and he found her version so good that he thought it best to adopt it instead of making one of his own. He omitted, however, to explain the ethical conceptions that had restrained him from practising common honesty in a matter involving both reputation and revenue. That was at a time when English complaints of "American piracy" were loudest.

[Sidenote: A Borrower from Stedman]

The other case was a more subtle one, and incidentally more interesting to me. As literary editor of the _Evening Post_, under the editors.h.i.+p of Mr. Bryant, who held the literary side of the paper's work to be of more consequence than all the rest of it put together, I had to read everything of literary significance that appeared either in England or in America. One day I found in an English magazine an elaborate article which in effect charged Tennyson with wholesale plagiary from Theocritus. The magazinist was disposed to exploit himself as a literary discoverer, and he presented his discoveries with very little of that delicacy and moderation which a considerate critic would regard as the due of so distinguished a poet as Tennyson. I confess that his tone aroused something like antagonism in my mind, and I rather rejoiced when, upon a careful reading of his article, I found that he was no discoverer at all. Practically all that he had to say had been much better said already by Edmund C. Stedman first in a magazine essay and afterwards in a chapter of the "Victorian Poets." The chief difference was that Stedman had written with the impulse and in the tone and manner of a scholarly gentleman, while the other had exploited himself like a prosecuting attorney.

The obvious thing to do was to get Stedman, if that were possible, to write a signed article on the subject for the _Evening Post_. With that end in view I went at once to his office in Broad Street.