THE FINEST SIDE OF “THE SUN”
Literary Associations of an Editorial Department That Has Encouraged and Attracted Men of Imagination and Talent.—Mitchell, Hazeltine, Church, and Their Colleagues.
THE Sun’s association with literature, particularly with fiction, has been more intimate than that of any other daily American newspaper. Ben Day had a taste for fiction, else the moon hoax, a bit of good writing as well as the greatest of fakes, would not have appeared. In the time of Moses Y. Beach the balloon hoax and other writings of Poe were in the Sun. Moses S. Beach, who owned or controlled the paper for twenty years, brought popularity and profit to it through stories written exclusively for the Sun by Mary J. Holmes, Horatio Alger, Jr., and a dozen other authors whose tales compelled readers to burn the midnight gas.
Under Dana the Sun’s interest in literature became broader, more intense. Dana’s knowledge that the most avid appetite of the public was for the short story and the novel, led him to encourage his men to adopt, when feasible, the fiction form in news writing. In his four-page daily there was not much room for romance proper, but when the Sunday Sun was under way, its eight pages afforded space for tales of fancy.
In the first few years of Dana’s ownership the walks of American literature were not crowded. As late as 1875 the Sun lamented:
For younger rising men we look almost in vain. Bret Harte gives no promise of lasting fecundity. Howells does charming work, and will probably long remain in position as a dainty but not suggestive or formative writer. Aldrich is very slight. John Hay easily won whatever name he has, and it will easily pass away. Henry James the younger is one of the rising men, the youth of literature.
But of all these there is not one who has yet discovered the stuff out of which the kings and princes, or even the barons, of literature are made.
Harte, having written his most famous short stories, had come East. Howells, then thirty-eight, had published three or four novels, but “The Rise of Silas Lapham” was ten years ahead. John Hay, then on the Tribune editorial staff, had written his “Pike County Ballads” and “Castilian Days.” Henry James had put forth only “Watch and Ward.” To these budding geniuses the general public was rather inclined to prefer Augusta Evans’s “St. Elmo,” E. P. Roe’s “Barriers Burned Away,” and Edward Eggleston’s “Hoosier Schoolmaster.”
Notwithstanding the expressed doubt as to Harte’s fecundity, Dana admired his work and printed his stories in the Sun for years afterward. Late in the seventies he bought Harte’s output and syndicated it—probably the first successful application of the newspaper syndicate system to fiction. About the same period Robert Louis Stevenson’s earlier successes, such as “The Treasure of Franchard” and “The Sire de Maletroit’s Door,” were having their first American printing in the Sun, their original appearance having been in Temple Bar and other English magazines.
The files of the Sun for 1891 contain writings of Stevenson that are omitted from most, if not from all of the collections of his works. These are parts of his articles on the South Seas, an ambitious series which he was unable to finish. Some of them were printed in the London Black and White. All of them appeared in the Sun. Through the Sun’s literary syndicate the American public gained some of its earliest acquaintance with Harte and Henry James. Kipling’s “Light That Failed” had its first American appearance in the Sun in the autumn of 1890. It may interest Mr. James’s admirers to know that one of the Middle Western newspapers, having bought a James novel from the Sun, played it up with a gingery head-line:
GEORGINA’S REASONS!
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HENRY JAMES’S LATEST STORY!
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A Woman Who Commits Bigamy and Enforces Silence on Her Husband!
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Two Other Lives Made Miserable by Her Heartless Action!
Among the literary men given less to fiction and more to history, sociology, and philosophy who have yielded to the Sun’s columns from their treasure, sometimes anonymously, were Jeremiah Curtin, the translator of Sienkiewicz and Tolstoy and an authority on folk-lore; George Ticknor Curtis, jurist and writer on the Constitution; Goldwin Smith, whose views on the subject of the destiny of Canada coincided with Dana’s, and who contributed to the Sun hundreds of articles from his store of philosophical and political wisdom; Charles Francis Adams, Jr., who wrote on railway management; General Adam Badeau, one of Grant’s biographers; William Elliot Griffis, probably the most authoritative of all American writers upon Japanese affairs; and Francis Lynde Stetson, the distinguished authority on corporation and railway law.
Of the more strictly journalistic writers who, although not attached permanently to the Sun’s staff, contributed to its news and editorial columns, the names rise of James S. Pike, of Joseph Pulitzer and his predecessor as editor of the World, William Henry Hurlbut; of James F. Shunk and his brother-in-law, Chauncey F. Black, both of Pennsylvania and both humorists; of Edward Spencer, a writer of fiction who displayed splendid imaginative qualities, and of Oliver Dyer, whose range of ability was so great that while one day he wrote for Bonner’s Ledger advice to distressed lovers, the next day would find him penning for the Sun an exhaustive article on the methods employed in building a railroad across the Andes!
Dana encouraged the men who wrote exclusively, or almost entirely, for the Sun, to write fiction. Edward P. Mitchell, whom Mr. Dana attracted to the Sun from the Lewiston (Maine) Journal in 1875, when Mr. Mitchell was twenty-three years old, wrote for the Sun at least a score of short stories of between two thousand and six thousand words. Two of his tales—“The Ablest Man in the World” and “The Tachypomp,” both scientific fantasies of remarkably ingenious construction, were included in the Scribner collection of “Short Stories by American Authors,” Mr. Mitchell being the only writer doubly represented in those volumes. “The Ablest Man in the World” also has its place in Stedman and Hutchinson’s distinguished “Library of American Literature.”
Other short stories of Mr. Mitchell’s, like “The Man Without a Body” and “The Balloon Tree,” are remembered by older Sun readers for their ingenious form and delightful narrative. Mr. Mitchell’s smaller sketches, numbering perhaps three hundred, included not only fancy but humour, and particularly little burlesques delicately picturing the weaknesses of the great or quasi-great men of the day. As a change from his strictly editorial work he might write a description of Mark Twain in his observatory, armed with a boat-hook and preparing to fend off a comet; or, becoming Mr. Dana’s reporter, he would expose a spiritualistic séance of the Eddy Brothers somewhere up in Vermont, or go to Madison Square to record the progress of George Francis Train toward world dictatorship by self-evolution on a diet of peanuts; or he would write a dramatic criticism of the appearance of the Sun’s droll friend, George, the Count Joannes, as Hamlet.
These few instances, a dozen out of twenty thousand articles that Mr. Mitchell wrote for the Sun, are not mentioned as a key to the general tenor of his work—which has covered everything from the definition of a mugwump to the interpretation of a President’s Constitutional powers—but rather as an indication of the Sun’s catholicity in subjects. If incidentally they serve to counteract the impression that the editorship of a great newspaper is gained through mere erudition, as opposed to a fine understanding of the very human reader, so much the better.
From his first day with the Sun Mr. Mitchell absorbed his chief’s lifelong belief that the range of public interest was infinite. As he said in 1916, in an address to the students of the Pulitzer School of Journalism on “The Newspaper Value of Non-Essentials”:
Sometimes people are as much interested in queer names, like Poke Stogis, for example, or in the discussion of a question such as “What Is the Best Ghost in Fiction?” or “How Should Engaged Couples Act at the Circus?” or “What Is a Dodunk?” or “Do the Angels Play Football?” as some other people are interested in the conference of the great powers.
It is well to remember always this psychological factor. Both the range of the newspaper and the attractive power of the writer for the newspaper in any department depend upon the breadth of sympathy with human affairs and the diversity of things in which he, the writer, takes a genuine personal interest.
In that speech the Sun’s judgment of what the people want, whether it be in news, editorial, or fiction, is restated exactly as it might have been stated at any time within the last fifty years. And Dana and Mitchell are found in agreement not only upon the subject of what the reader wishes, but upon the necessity for the preservation in newspapers, as well as in books, of the ideals of the language. Speaking at a conference held at Princeton University in 1917, Mr. Mitchell said:
The most serious practical evil that will result from the elimination of the classics will fall upon the English language itself. The racial memory begins to decay, the racial imagination, the begetter of memory, begins to weaken, the sense of precise meanings begins to lose its edge, and the English language ceases to be a vital thing and becomes a mere code of arbitrary signals wigwagged from mouth to ear. Were I the emergency autocrat of this language, I should proclaim in drastic regulations and enforce by severe penalties the American duty of adherence to the old habits of speech, the old scrupulous respect for the finer shades of meaning, the old rigid observance of the morality of word relations; and this, I believe, can be done only by maintaining the classical culture at high potency.
Mr. Mitchell was born in Maine in 1852, and was graduated from Bowdoin in 1871. It is curious to note, scanning the names of the editors and proprietors, how the Sun has drawn upon New England.
Benjamin H. Day was born in West Springfield, Massachusetts, April 10, 1810.
Moses Yale Beach was born in Wallingford, Connecticut, January 7, 1800.
Moses Sperry Beach was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, October 5, 1822.
Charles A. Dana was born in Hinsdale, New Hampshire, August 8, 1819.
Edward P. Mitchell was born in Bath, Maine, March 24, 1852.
Frank A. Munsey was born in Mercer, Maine, August 21, 1854.
Any grouping of Sun men on the purely literary side brings the name of Hazeltine to stand with those of Dana and Mitchell. Mayo Williamson Hazeltine was a fine example of the scholar in newspaper work; an example of the way in which Dana, with his intellectual magnificence, found the best for his papers.
Educated at Harvard and Oxford and in continental Europe, Hazeltine came to the Sun in 1878, and was its literary critic until his death in 1909. During the same period he was also one of its principal writers of articles on foreign politics and sociology. His book-reviews, published in the Sun on Sundays, which made the initials “M. W. H.” familiar to the whole English-reading world, were marvels of comprehension. Many a publisher of a three-volume historical work lamented when it attracted Hazeltine’s attention, for his review, whether two columns or seven, usually compressed into that space all that the average student cared to know about the book, reducing the high cost of reading from six or eight dollars to a nickel.
Hazeltine enjoyed, under both Dana and Mitchell, practically his own choice of subjects, a free hand with them, and a generous income; and in return, for more than thirty years, he poured into the columns of the Sun a wealth of the erudition which was his by right of education, travel, an intense interest in all things intellectual, and a wonderful memory.
In the list of writers of editorial articles which includes Dana, Mitchell, William O. Bartlett, and Hazeltine, are found also the names of Frank P. Church, E. M. Kingsbury, Napoleon L. Thiéblin, James Henry Wilson, John Swinton, Henry B. Stanton, Fitz-Henry Warren, William T. Washburn, Harold M. Anderson, Frank H. Simonds, and Henry M. Armstrong. Of these Church stands alone as the writer in whose case the Sun broke its rule that the anonymity of editorial writers is absolute. After Mr. Church’s death on April 11, 1906, it was announced in the Sun that he was the author of what for more than twenty years has been regarded as the most popular editorial article ever written. It appeared on September 21, 1897:
IS THERE A SANTA CLAUS?
We take pleasure in answering at once and thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of the Sun:
DEAR EDITOR:
I am eight years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says “If you see it in the Sun it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?
VIRGINIA O’HANLON.
115 West Ninety-Fifth Street.
Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas, how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance, to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank God, he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
Church, as one intimate wrote upon his death, after more than thirty years with the Sun, had all the literary gifts, “the tender fancy, the sympathetic understanding of human nature, the humour, now wistful, now joyous, the unsurpassed delicacy of touch.”
In dramatic criticism, where the Sun has required from its writers somewhat more than the mere ability to praise or blame, its roster bears such names as Frank Bowman, Willard Bartlett, Elihu Root, William Stewart (“Walsingham”), who was the first of the dramatic critics to adopt an intimate style; Andrew Carpenter Wheeler, better known to the public under his pen-name of “Nym Crinkle,” whose reviews were a feature of the Sunday issue of the Sun; William M. Laffan, the always brilliant and sometimes caustic; Franklin Fyles, who wrote plays as well as reviews of plays; John Corbin, the scholarly analyst; Walter Prichard Eaton, author of “The American Stage of To-day,” and Lawrence Reamer, who has been with the Sun, as reporter or critic, for a quarter of a century.
In criticism of opera and other musical events the Sun, through the writings of William J. Henderson, has pleased the general public as well as the musicians, and has added many sound and scholarly chapters to newspaper literature.
In book-reviewing a hundred pens have served the Sun. Hazeltine, E. P. Mitchell, Willard Bartlett, Erasmus D. Beach, George Bendelari, Miss Dana Gatlin, H. M. Anderson, and Grant M. Overton are but a few of the men and women who have told Sun readers what’s worth while.
For Sun reporters the Sunday paper has been a favourable field for an excursion into fiction-writing. In its columns a man with a tale to tell has every chance. There William Norr gave, in his “Pearl of Chinatown,” the real atmosphere of a little part of New York that once held romance. It was for the Sunday Sun that Edward W. Townsend created his celebrated characters, Chimmie Fadden, Miss Fanny, Mr. Paul, and the rest of that happy, if slangy, family. Clarence L. Cullen laid bare the soul of alcoholic adventurers in his “Tales of the Ex-Tanks.” Ed Mott made famous the bears of Pike County, Pennsylvania. David A. Curtis related the gambling ways of Old Man Greenlaw and his associates. Charles Lynch conferred the title of the Duke of Essex Street upon an obscure lawyer, and made him the talk of the East Side. Joseph Goodwin brought to the notice of an ignorant world the ways of Sarsaparilla Reilly and other Park Row restaurant heroes. David Graham Phillips, Samuel Hopkins Adams, and other men destined to be known through their books, ground out, for glory and eight dollars a column, the yarns—sometimes fact turned into fiction, sometimes fiction masked as fact—that kept the readers of the Sunday Sun from getting out into the open air.
