These many years, recollections of a New Yorker

Contents

CHA.PTEB PAGE

I. The Point of View 1

II. The Parentage of a New Yorker ... 18

Chapter I The Point Of View

WHEN a man squares himself at his desk and for a moment stays his hand from the pen while he tries to "squeeze the sponge of memory" — to borrow the apt phrase of Henry James — when he seeks to recall and to set in order his most salient recollections, he finds himself confronted by the duty of making a choice between the two kinds of autobiography, loosely so called. He must decide whether he will write mainly about himself, bringing up to date the log of his own lonely voyage thru life, or whether he will not talk mainly about others, about his fellow-passengers on that Noah's Ark whereon we are all of us embarked as it drifts over the endless waters. If he shall choose rather to recall what he remembers about others than what he remembers about himself, the result will be only a book of reminiscences and not a true autobiography. And a book of reminiscences, however valuable it may be, is necessarily less valuable than a true autobiography, since a man can know other men only from the outside, whereas he ought to know himself from the inside.

Not only is the true autobiography likely to have solider qualities than the book of reminiscences, it ought also to be more amusing for its maker; it ought to be more fun for him (and therefore to have more flavor for those who may read it), because altho we may like to gossip about others we dearly love to chatter about ourselves. In fact, the only two occasions when a man has the privilege of amply expressing himself, and of telling what he thinks and feels, are when he summons the family physician to listen to his self-scrutiny and when he solicits the gentle reader to assume the same attitude. A bore has been defined as a man who wants to talk about himself when you want to talk about yourself. Yet even by this condemnatory definition the autobiographer escapes, for when the gentle reader settles himself under the evening lamp and before the wood-fire with a book in his hand, he does not then desire to talk about himself, whatever may be his wishes at other moments. What the gentle reader demands is that the autobiographer shall so talk about himself as to make his interest in his personal theme more or less contagious — that he shall somehow and in some measure transmit to others the pleasure he finds in his gossip about himself. "Truly, I think," so the candid Sir Walter Scott made one of his characters confess, "writing history (one's self being the subject) is at any time as amusing as reading that of foreign countries."

The autobiographer may be at fault in thinking that he can carry over to the reader any part of the delight he has taken in his selfish task; and he may even err in thinking that there is any call for the telling of his life. Yet even the most insignificant and unworthy of autobiographers is after all a human being; and the life of any human being has its worth and its significance. The superiority of autobiography over every other form of biography has been asserted by two American authors, neither of whom oddly enough left behind him his own account of his own career. Longfellow, in one of his note-books, asserted playfully that "autobiography is what biography ought to be"; and Holmes, in one of his essays, declared that "there are but two biographers who can tell the story of a man's or a woman's life. One is the person himself or herself; the other is the Recording Angel. The autobiographer cannot be trusted to tell the whole truth, tho he may tell nothing but the truth; and the Recording Angel never lets his book out of his own hands."

The whole truth the autobiographer cannot tell for many reasons, partly because it is given to no man to know the whole truth — especially about himself. His personal equation prevents him from taking an absolutely accurate observation of his own deeds and of his own moods. The whole truth he cannot hope to tell; and perhaps his ambition to tell nothing but the truth is as futile. To do this may be his sole ambition, yet it is unattainable by human infirmity. However honest a man may be and however little of romanticism lie may have in him, he cannot help poetizing his own part, mixing fancy with his facts, Dichtung with Wahrheit. The sponge of memory, even when pressed by clean hands, can rarely give us the pure water of truth, for the stream that drips from it must be more or less muddied by our likes and dislikes, earlier and later. If we cannot rely on our observation of life, how can we put confidence in our memories ? The physiologists tell us that a man is made over at least once in seven years; and how shall a man made over again and again be trusted to recapture from one of his vanished selves the fleeting feelings of that departed entity?

"Memory is never purely passive, and therefore never absolutely faithful," we were told by Jules Lemaitre, that most suggestive of French critics, always alert to the world at large, even when he was playfully centering his immediate attention on the passing shows presented in the minor theaters of Paris. "Its activity is constant and not to be coerced. At bottom memory is not to be distinguished — except chronologically — from imagination, to which it furnishes materials, but materials already rehandled and altered. Never do we remember things exactly. Always what we are, what we feel at the present moment, modifies in our own eyes what we felt and what we were in the past."

This is uncontrovertible; and it is a warning to be heeded by the wary autobiographer. Strive as he may, he will err; and he will do well to recognize frankly in advance the pitiful fact that the picture of life he is about to present cannot avoid a resemblance more or less close to the absurd reflections of those convex or concave mirrors which distort the faces and the figures of grinning rustics in the side-show of the circus. And the more clearly this warning rings in the ear of the autobiographer, and the more often it checks the momentum of his self-confidence, the more likely is he to attain to that approximate verity which is the utmost he can hope to achieve. He can find a second warning in a saying of Mark Twain's, when approaching threescore years and ten: "When I was younger I could remember anything whether it happened or not — but now I'm getting old, and soon I shall remember only the latter." More than once as I have evoked the past in preparation for these pages, I have recalled events at which I have fondly believed myself to have been a spectator, only to discover that I was deluding myself by remembering what had not happened; and I can only hope that I may make this discovery as often as I may be in danger of deluding the reader.

II

It was, I think, in the first year of the twentieth century that a student in the Columbia Law School, who was taking a course of mine on the development of modern fiction, asked me to read a short-story of his; and when he came back for my criticism I told him that it was a good enough tale, and that it seemed to show his possession of the gift of narrative, but that it lacked the flavor of individuality, since it contained nothing to differentiate it sharply from other good-enough tales.

"What do you know," I asked, "that nobody else knows ? — or at least that nobody else has written about? Every one of us has had experiences denied to the rest of his fellow men; and this is the stuff out of which he can create literature with the most likelihood of its interesting the rest of us. What have you yourself seen that might be unhackneyed material or atmosphere or background for fiction ? "

"I know the lumber camps of Michigan," was his prompt answer.

"Is the life out there interesting?" I inquired.

"Very interesting," he responded.

"Well, then," I went on, "if you have found it interesting, so may your readers. Why not write about that?" So it was that a few months later Mr. Stewart Edward White sent me the 'Blazed Trail.'

And now when I seek to record my own retrospections I must, perforce, put my own question to myself. What have I to tell? What have I seen that others have not seen? What special experiences have I had to lend the flavor of individuality to these recollections of a man of letters? Even if the panorama of life, as it has unrolled itself before my gaze for more than threescore years, has keenly interested me, what reason have I to suppose that my report of it will have any attraction for gentle readers? Probably, like any other man talking to himself, I am not insistent upon a convincing answer to these questions. Yet if I must respond to my own interrogatories, I can only declare, first, that I have been singularly fortunate in my friends and acquaintance, since I have known more or less intimately many men who were very well worth knowing. Second, I should add that I have chanced to be present on more than one occasion when things happened — things of a certain historic interest. Thirdly, and finally, I should allege that the angle from which I surveyed these things and these men was all my own, since it is very unlikely that any other person who may have known these men and seen these things regarded them from the point of view personal to me.

This personal point of view was the result of my training for an unusual profession; and what made my position the more peculiar was that I was never permitted to practise this profession for which I had been prepared, whereas most of those who have practised it do so without the preparation I had received to qualify me to exercise it. This profession was that of millionaire, a calling less thickly populated half a century ago than it is now. For this profession I was deliberately educated by my father, who was frank in informing me in my youth that when I grew up I should not have to earn my own living. It was to be my task in life not to make money, but to administer an ample fortune, and to spend it as it ought to be spent, for my own advantage and for public service. My father had made the money for me, his only son, and there would be an abundance of it; and the wherewithal being thus provided, it was for me to fulfil the large but dimly envisaged ambitions he had formed for me. Altho he never clearly stated his hopes, I think that they turned in the direction of politics, and that he foresaw my entrance into public life, very much as tho I were an elder son, heir of an ancestral estate in Great Britain, whose place in Parliament was duly awaiting his majority.

To be a millionaire as my father conceived it for me was to practise one of the learned professions, as necessary to the state as any one of its older brethren, medicine or the law or the church. Altho my father in those days of my youth was immersed in affairs, busily engaged in accumulating wealth for my future use, money itself was very rarely a topic of conversation in our family circle. As we had it, there was no need to talk about it; and it was taken as a matter of course. Only when we ceased to have it did it begin to bulk bigger in our thoughts and in our converse. As a result of this reticence, at the time when my father intimated to me his expectations for my future, money did not have any mysterious attraction for me. The profession which my father had chosen for me seemed to me not unlike any other; and I scarcely suspected that it was that one which the immense majority of men would most gladly embrace. Whatever might be in my boyhood my personal opinion of my destined profession, I never had a chance to practise it, for my father's fortune began to fade away in the very year when I came of age, and it vanished finally a decade before my father died, leaving for the family needs only the far more modest inheritance of my mother.

Altho our change of circumstances had many displeasing accompaniments, and altho it forced me to face the world for myself, in a fashion that I had never foreseen, I believe I can honestly say that I have never unduly bewailed the loss of the wealth I was to have inherited. It was with ultimate equanimity that I relinquished any hope of entering the profession for which I had been trained. And of late I have found myself wondering at times whether I should have been any happier or any richer in the' things that are worth while had I come into the fortune which had once been my father's. At last I have become more and more inclined to the conclusion that, on the whole, I have been better off without it. It is true that I might have administered it well and that I might have risen to place and power in politics; but it is even more probable that I might not have been able to withstand the insidious temptations and the disintegrating accompaniments of wealth not earned by my own efforts.

I have also wondered frequently whether it was an advantage or a disadvantage for me to have spent my boyhood in luxurious surroundings, when the wealth that supplied them was to shrivel away just as I was about to appreciate its possibilities. To have had in abundance and then not to have, this is a deprivation of accustomed things; and for years it made itself felt in a constant sense of loss. Many a poor boy has had a hard struggle in his bare youth, battling almost for life itself, and has toiled unceasingly, striving upward until he has won a large fortune for his old age; and I have often asked myself whether his experience is more satisfactory on the whole than mine. I had at least the privilege of early initiation, of association from my youth up with the well-bred, of living in a home of graceful refinement, of profiting by foreign travel in childhood and boyhood, of meeting interesting people, authors and artists, of having every opportunity for surveying the world in its pleasantest aspects. And perhaps I owe to this some part, at least, of my incurable cheerfulness, of my tolerant good humor, and of my indurated optimism.

These things have each of them their own value; and taken together they may be called a fair compensation for other things which I have had to surrender. But no one of them, nor all of them together, can I deem as important as another benefit for which I am more and more grateful as the years go by. Wealth, merely as wealth, as money heaped up, as a source of luxury and of self-indulgence, has never had for me any glamor. Of course, it would be inept not to conceive of money as a good thing to have; but it never appeared to me as other than one of the many good things that fate may or may not have bestowed upon any one of us. A great fortune, or what was so accounted half a century ago, had been a possession of mine, at least in immediate expectation; and all unthinking I had enjoyed the benefit of it. In consequence, I have never been awed by wealth, or even greatly impressed by it, having no temptation to worship it inordinately, even if I retain a full understanding of its value as a lubricant for the machinery of life.

Ill

A few years ago, half-a-dozen or half-a-score, up in the sunny smoking-room only recently built on the roof of the Athenaeum in London, and on a lovely summer afternoon, I had an illuminating conversation that comes back to me now as I write. That keen explorer of nature and art and life, Sir Martin Conway, in the course of our wandering talk about men and things, was unexpectedly moved to develop what struck me at first as only a clever but abhorrent paradox, until his clear exposition at last almost carried conviction. His startling contention was that the ultimate strength of Great Britain, her march forward in peace and in war, her unparalleled ability to administer a stupendous empire, her unexampled power of ruling alien dependencies, in fact, all her acknowledged superiorities, were the direct result of a single principle, a principle which the British alone among their European rivals had preserved, and which we Americans had never allowed to be established. This was the principle of primogeniture, by which the great estates passed entire to the eldest son, cutting off the younger sons to fend for themselves.

As Conway proceeded to expound this unacceptable theory, I slowly realized the force of the French wit's assertion that "a paradox is often only a truth serving its apprenticeship." He began by admitting the apparent unfairness of refusing their equal share to the younger sons, but he maintained that this unfairness was but apparent, since it deprived them only of money while giving them what was far better than money. He insisted that they actually had the best of it, since what is really best for any man is not that he should have his path made smooth for him by the enervating inheritance of unearned wealth, but that he should receive the rich training which would fit him most adequately for making his own way in the world when he is finally cast on his own resources; that he should know from the first the necessity he will be under to fend for himself, so that he will at the start have every incentive to profit by his ample educational opportunities; and then finally that he should be forced "to fight for his own hand," assured in advance of the influential support of the head of the family, the elder son who is the only one of the lot to be laden with the heavy responsibility of keeping up appearances, and who is the only one to be cursed with unearned wealth.

Conway pointed out that this assured to the younger sons the "career open to the talents," which the French Revolution proclaimed, open in England not to all the talents as the French had demanded, but only to a strictly selected group, limited to the class which had been proved to possess a hereditary gift for leadership. My brilliant friend had no difficulty in adducing a host of illustrations, including, of course, the most obvious and the most illustrious — Wellington. As he developed his paradox it began slowly to take on the attributes of an unrecognized truth, incomplete in its application, no doubt, but demanding consideration. And I could not refrain from silently making a personal application to myself. I was not a younger son; in fact, I was an only son; yet I had had every educational opportunity, even if I had not improved these as amply as the younger sons in England who had gone forth to win fame and fortune for themselves. That I had not profited as wisely or as fully as I might by my earlier advantages, was perhaps because I had not the warning they received almost in the cradle that the luxury which surrounded and supported them, and supplied the preparation for self-advancement was never to be theirs.

IV

Altho I do not now feel any keen disappointment at my failure to come into the fortune my father hoped to bequeath to me, and altho I believe myself to be amply reconciled to the state of life in which I find myself to-day, I am forced to confess to a disappointment of a totally different kind, due to my failure to attain what was a very early object of ambition. In spite of my placid expectation of wealth, what I most vigorously desired in my youth was not the leisure and the luxury, or even the position in public life wherein my father placed me in his forecasting aspirations. Indeed, I doubt if I ever adequately appreciated the possibilities of the career planned for me, or if that career really appealed to me, forever dangling itself before me as a prize to be won by hard labor. To politics I felt little attraction, even when I chanced to give it a thought; but I did not often let my mind play with it, since public life seemed to me far in the future, and in a way unreal. It had no power to excite me, ignorant as I was of its allurements.

What had the power to excite me was the theater; and its allurements were immediate and genuine. I did not want to act; I wanted to write plays for others to act. That was the goal where my wandering thoughts tended to direct themselves when I was an undergraduate and a law student. I made no effort to reconcile this wish for the practice of stage-craft with the possession of wealth; indeed, I do not believe that I ever got so far as to consider play -writing as a profession, or to weigh its pecuniary rewards; I simply wanted to write plays, for the sheer delight of writing them, without thought of fortune or fame, and without being conscious of any pent-up emotions within me demanding expression in dialog and in action. I had no surging sentiments; I did not need money; and as for winning a reputation by my work for the stage, that — to the best of my recollection — simply never entered my head. I wanted to write plays for the joy of the job itself, wholly without any ulterior consideration.

In a letter written when he was eighteen, Longfellow told his father that he most eagerly aspired after future eminence in literature; "my whole soul burns ardently for it, and every earthly thought centers in it." I had no such soaring ambition, and none of the proud consciousness of power which must have moved Longfellow to this warm expression of his youthful hope. What I obeyed was apparently an inborn impulse, the result of my having been taken to the theater not infrequently in my childhood, and of having gone there often in my boyhood. It was before I was eighteen that I made my first attempt, as impossible and as empty as a boy's first attempts at play-writing usually are. And before I was twenty a bald and hasty adaptation of a French farce was actually produced by real actors in a real theater before a real audience. This took place in a Southwestern city, and I did not have the excruciating pleasure of being present at the ordeal by fire. The piece was given on the benefit night of the chief performer; and then it sank forever out of sight, raising no ripple on the surface of the river of oblivion.

In the forty years that followed I have written other plays, either alone or in collaboration, original and not taken from the French. At least half-adozen of these, some in one act only, and the others stretching out to the larger framework of three and four acts, have been exposed to the public gaze; and two or three of them have been found to possess the power of pleasing the assembled playgoers. I have never been the happy author of what may be termed a "best seller" of the stage, one of these triumphant spectacles, displayed for half a thousand nights on Broadway, with half-a-dozen subsidiary companies exploiting it simultaneously from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, and with foreign countries still to be heard from. This prolonged pleasure has never been mine; and yet my average of success on the stage has not been unsatisfactory.

What is unsatisfactory that the sum total from which this average must be struck is not larger than it is, and that I have not oftener presented myself before the footlights, that I have not had plays produced season after season, to sink or to swim, as the winds of chance might blow. So keen is my enjoyment in the inventing, the constructing, and in the writing of a play that I can face with tranquillity the deep damnation of its taking off. I should not have complained had I had more than my fair share of failures, finding full compensation in the survivors from the wreck. The craft of play-making, with all its arduous secrets, and all its obscure processes, is to me so fascinating that I can sympathize with the remark of a fellow enthusiast of a wider experience than mine, to the effect that the next best thing to seeing a play of his succeed was to see it fail. I suppose that my sympathy with this saying evidences in me the survival of the gambling instinct, of the eagerness to throw dice with fate — for assuredly there is no aleatory excitement, short of actual warfare, so poignant as that inherent in the first performance of a new play before a metropolitan audience.

To write plays, and to keep on writing them, and to have them performed, one after another, year after year — this was my boyhood ambition; and to my constant disappointment this ambition has been incompletely gratified. I think I can spy out the reasons for this ; the foremost of them is that in spite of my love for the dramaturgic art, I never abandoned myself to it whole-heartedly — perhaps because the vocation was not so clear, the call not so loud, as I liked to believe. The drama is a most jealous mistress, and I have failed to serve her with unwavering fidelity. This is why I have been for a score of years or more engaged in expounding by word of mouth or on the printed page, the principles of the art of play-making rather than in putting them into practice for my own account.

Here is another profession for which I was carefully prepared, this time by my own act, and by years of devoted study; and this other profession I have been permitted to practise only intermittently. It would not be easy for me to decide which of my two professions, the one abandoned almost as soon as I came of age, and the other cherished unceasingly but never exclusively pursued, has had the more obvious influence upon the varied events of my life. What it is easy for me to point out is that when I was forty I was suddenly and most unexpectedly invited to enter a third profession — that of teaching — to which I had never given a thought, and for which I had made no conscious preparation.

Chapter II The Parentage Of A New Yorker

" /^NE cannot gather some of the best fruits i 1 of life without climbing out to the end of

^^ the slender branches of the Ego," said Holmes in one of his essays; and I cite this as an excuse for the inevitable prevalence of the perpendicular pronoun in these rambling reminiscences. I am the seventh in descent from James Matthews, who came over to Massachusetts between 1630 and 1636, in which latter year he was living in Charlestown. In 1639, or soon thereafter, he removed to Yarmouth on Cape Cod, where he was to die in January, 1685-6, after having been selectman of the town for many years. In 1664 he was representative in the colonial legislature. A doubtful tradition recorded that he was a man of "liberal education"; and this is likely enough, as there were in the seventeenth century more college-bred men in New England in proportion to the population than there ever have been since.

Altho the proof is inadequate, it seems probable also that he was a member of the Glamorganshire family of Matthews, which had close relations with Bristol, whence so many of the earlier immigrants departed to New England. It may be noted that the ship in which John Cabot had sailed from that port in 1497, on the voyage which resulted in the discovery of the mainland, was named either the Matthew, after the evangelist, or the Matthews, after some local patron — who may have been, so I like to fancy, a far distant ancestor of mine. There is one piece of evidence which may connect the James Matthews who came to New England before 1636 with an English family of the name. A will is preserved in Gloucester, England, dated 1650, in which Margery Matthews of Tewksbury, single woman, left forty pounds to her "kinsman, James Matthews, now beyond the seas, if he return for it." As James, the kinsman of Margery, did not return to claim this legacy, it is quite possible that he was the James Matthews who died at Yarmouth, thirty odd years after the date of this will.

Wherever the vaguely glimpsed ascendants of James Matthews may have dwelt, his descendants clung to the sandy soil of Cape Cod for five generations. Sometimes they married the daughters of their Barnstable County neighbors, and sometimes they sought wives as far afield as Boston. On the distaff side my father could claim descent from William Brewster, the elder who led the Pilgrims on the voyage to New England, and also from Thomas Prince, twice governor of Plymouth Colony. Two other of his ascendants in the female line also demand mention here; one is Colonel John Gorham, who commanded one of the two Plymouth companies at the Narragansett fight, in December, 1675, and who died of fever while on service in King Philip's