Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis
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Various Authors of Some Repute >> Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis
APPRECIATIONS
Gouverneur Morris
Booth Tarkington
Charles Dana Gibson
E. L. Burlingame
Augustus Thomas
Theodore Roosevelt
Irvin S. Cobb
John Fox, Jr
Finley Peter Dunne
Winston Churchill
Leonard Wood
John T. McCutcheon
R. H. D.
BY GOUVERNEUR MORRIS
"And they rise to their feet as He passes by, gentlemen unafraid."
He was almost too good to be true. In addition, the
gods loved him, and so he had to die young. Some people think
that a man of fifty-two is middle-aged. But if R. H. D. had
lived to be a hundred, he would never have grown old. It is
not generally known that the name of his other brother was Peter Pan.
Within the year we have played at pirates together, at the
taking of sperm whales; and we have ransacked the Westchester
Hills for gunsites against the Mexican invasion. And we have
made lists of guns, and medicines, and tinned things, in case
we should ever happen to go elephant-shooting in Africa. But
we weren't going to hurt the elephants. Once R. H. D. shot a
hippopotamus and he was always ashamed and sorry. I think he
never killed anything else. He wasn't that kind of a
sportsman. Of hunting, as of many other things, he has said
the last word. Do you remember the Happy Hunting Ground in
"The Bar Sinister"?--"where nobody hunts us, and there is
nothing to hunt."
Experienced persons tell us that a manhunt is the most
exciting of all sports. R. H. D. hunted men in Cuba. He
hunted for wounded men who were out in front of the trenches
and still under fire, and found some of them and brought them
in. The Rough Riders didn't make him an honorary member of
their regiment just because he was charming and a faithful
friend, but largely because they were a lot of daredevils and
he was another.
To hear him talk you wouldn't have thought that he had ever
done a brave thing in his life. He talked a great deal, and
he talked even better than he wrote (at his best he wrote like
an angel), but I have dusted every corner of my memory and
cannot recall any story of his in which he played a heroic or
successful part. Always he was running at top speed, or
hiding behind a tree, or lying face down in a foot of water
(for hours!) so as not to be seen. Always he was getting the
worst of it. But about the other fellows he told the whole
truth with lightning flashes of wit and character building and
admiration or contempt. Until the invention of moving
pictures the world had nothing in the least like his talk.
His eye had photographed, his mind had developed and prepared
the slides, his words sent the light through them, and lo and
behold, they were reproduced on the screen of your own mind,
exact in drawing and color. With the written word or the
spoken word he was the greatest recorder and reporter of
things that he had seen of any man, perhaps, that ever lived.
The history of the last thirty years, its manners and customs
and its leading events and inventions, cannot be written
truthfully without reference to the records which he has left,
to his special articles and to his letters. Read over again
the Queen's Jubilee, the Czar's Coronation, the March of the
Germans through Brussels, and see for yourself if I speak too
zealously, even for a friend, to whom, now that R. H. D. is
dead, the world can never be the same again.
But I did not set out to estimate his genius. That matter
will come in due time before the unerring tribunal of
posterity.
One secret of Mr. Roosevelt's hold upon those who come into
contact with him is his energy. Retaining enough for his own
use (he uses a good deal, because every day he does the work
of five or six men), he distributes the inexhaustible
remainder among those who most need it. Men go to him tired
and discouraged, he sends them away glad to be alive, still
gladder that he is alive, and ready to fight the devil himself
in a good cause. Upon his friends R. H. D. had the same
effect. And it was not only in proximity that he could
distribute energy, but from afar, by letter and cable. He had
some intuitive way of knowing just when you were slipping into
a slough of laziness and discouragement. And at such times he
either appeared suddenly upon the scene, or there came a boy
on a bicycle, with a yellow envelope and a book to sign, or
the postman in his buggy, or the telephone rang and from the
receiver there poured into you affection and encouragement.
But the great times, of course, were when be came in person,
and the temperature of the house, which a moment before had
been too hot or too cold, became just right, and a sense of
cheerfulness and well-being invaded the hearts of the master
and the mistress and of the servants in the house and in the
yard. And the older daughter ran to him, and the baby, who
had been fretting because nobody would give her a double-
barrelled shotgun, climbed upon his knee and forgot all about
the disappointments of this uncompromising world.
He was touchingly sweet with children. I think he was a
little afraid of them. He was afraid perhaps that they
wouldn't find out how much be loved them. But when they
showed him that they trusted him, and, unsolicited, climbed
upon him and laid their cheeks against his, then the loveliest
expression came over his face, and you knew that the great
heart, which the other day ceased to beat, throbbed with an
exquisite bliss, akin to anguish.
One of the happiest days I remember was when I and mine
received a telegram saying that he had a baby of his own. And
I thank God that little Miss Hope is too young to know what an
appalling loss she has suffered. . . .
Perhaps he stayed to dine. Then perhaps the older daughter
was allowed to sit up an extra half-hour so that she could
wait on the table (and though I say it, that shouldn't, she
could do this beautifully, with dignity and without giggling),
and perhaps the dinner was good, or R. H. D. thought it was,
and in that event he must abandon his place and storm the
kitchen to tell the cook all about it. Perhaps the gardener
was taking life easy on the kitchen porch. He, too, came in
for praise. R. H. D. had never seen our Japanese iris so
beautiful; as for his, they wouldn't grow at all. It wasn't
the iris, it was the man behind the iris. And then back he
would come to us, with a wonderful story of his adventures in
the pantry on his way to the kitchen, and leaving behind him a
cook to whom there had been issued a new lease of life, and a
gardener who blushed and smiled in the darkness under the
Actinidia vines.
It was in our little house at Aiken, in South Carolina, that
he was with us most and we learned to know him best, and that
he and I became dependent upon each other in many ways.
Events, into which I shall not go, had made his life very
difficult and complicated. And he who had given so much
friendship to so many people needed a little friendship in
return, and perhaps, too, he needed for a time to live in a
house whose master and mistress loved each other, and where
there were children. Before he came that first year our house
had no name. Now it is called "Let's Pretend."
Now the chimney in the living-room draws, but in those first
days of the built-over house it didn't. At least, it didn't
draw all the time, but we pretended that it did, and with much
pretense came faith. From the fireplace that smoked to the
serious things of life we extended our pretendings, until real
troubles went down before them--down and out.
It was one of Aiken's very best winters, and the earliest
spring I ever lived anywhere. R. H. D. came shortly after
Christmas. The spiraeas were in bloom, and the monthly roses;
you could always find a sweet violet or two somewhere in the
yard; here and there splotches of deep pink against gray cabin
walls proved that precocious peach-trees were in bloom. It
never rained. At night it was cold enough for fires. In the
middle of the day it was hot. The wind never blew, and every
morning we had a four for tennis and every afternoon we rode
in the woods. And every night we sat in front of the fire
(that didn't smoke because of pretending) and talked until the
next morning. He was one of those rarely gifted men who find
their chiefest pleasure not in looking backward or forward,
but in what is going on at the moment. Weeks did not have to
pass before it was forced upon his knowledge that Tuesday, the
fourteenth (let us say), had been a good Tuesday. He knew it
the moment he waked at 7 A. M. and perceived the Tuesday
sunshine making patterns of bright light upon the floor. The
sunshine rejoiced him and the knowledge that even before
breakfast there was vouchsafed to him a whole hour of life.
That day began with attentions to his physical well-being.
There were exercises, conducted with great vigor and
rejoicing, followed by a tub, artesian cold, and a loud and
joyous singing of ballads.
At fifty R. H. D. might have posed to some Praxiteles and,
copied in marble, gone down the ages as "statue of a young
athlete." He stood six feet and over, straight as a Sioux
chief, a noble and leonine head carried by a splendid torso.
His skin was as fine and clean as a child's. He weighed
nearly two hundred pounds and had no fat on him. He was the
weight-throwing rather than the running type of athlete, but
so tenaciously had he clung to the suppleness of his
adolescent days that he could stand stiff-legged and lay his
hands flat upon the floor.
The singing over, silence reigned. But if you had listened at
his door you must have heard a pen going, swiftly and boldly.
He was hard at work, doing unto others what others had done
unto him. You were a stranger to him; some magazine had
accepted a story that you had written and published it. R. H.
D. had found something to like and admire in that story (very
little perhaps), and it was his duty and pleasure to tell you
so. If he had liked the story very much he would send you
instead of a note a telegram. Or it might be that you had
drawn a picture, or, as a cub reporter, had shown golden
promise in a half-column of unsigned print; R. H. D. would
find you out, and find time to praise you and help you. So it
was that when he emerged from his room at sharp eight o'clock,
he was wide-awake and happy and hungry, and whistled and
double-shuffled with his feet, out of excessive energy, and
carried in his hands a whole sheaf of notes and letters and
telegrams.
Breakfast with him was not the usual American breakfast, a
sullen, dyspeptic gathering of persons who only the night
before had rejoiced in each other's society. With him it was
the time when the mind is, or ought to be, at its best, the
body at its freshest and hungriest. Discussions of the latest
plays and novels, the doings and undoings of statesmen,
laughter and sentiment--to him, at breakfast, these things
were as important as sausages and thick cream.
Breakfast over, there was no dawdling and putting off of the
day's work (else how, at eleven sharp, could tennis be played
with a free conscience?). Loving, as he did, everything
connected with a newspaper, he would now pass by those on the
hall-table with never so much as a wistful glance, and hurry
to his workroom.
He wrote sitting down. He wrote standing up. And, almost
you may say, he wrote walking up and down. Some people,
accustomed to the delicious ease and clarity of his style,
imagine that he wrote very easily. He did and he didn't.
Letters, easy, clear, to the point, and gorgeously human,
flowed from him without let or hindrance. That masterpiece
of corresponding, "The German March through Brussels," was
probably written almost as fast as he could talk (next to
Phillips Brooks he was the fastest talker I ever heard), but
when it came to fiction he had no facility at all. Perhaps I
should say that he held in contempt any facility that he may
have had. It was owing to his incomparable energy and Joblike
patience that he ever gave us any fiction at all. Every
phrase in his fiction was, of all the myriad phrases he could
think of, the fittest in his relentless judgment to survive.
Phrases, paragraphs, pages, whole stories even, were written
over and over again. He worked upon a principle of
elimination. If he wished to describe an automobile turning
in at a gate, he made first a long and elaborate description
from which there was omitted no detail which the most
observant pair of eyes in Christendom had ever noted with
reference to just such a turning. Thereupon he would begin a
process of omitting one by one those details which he had been
at such pains to recall; and after each omission he would ask
himself: "Does the picture remain?" If it did not, he
restored the detail which he had just omitted, and
experimented with the sacrifice of some other, and so on, and
so on, until after Herculean labor there remained for the
reader one of those, swiftly flashed, ice-clear pictures
(complete in every detail) with which his tales and romances
are so delightfully and continuously adorned.
But it is quarter to eleven, and, this being a time of
holiday, R. H. D. emerges from his workroom happy to think
that he has placed one hundred and seven words between himself
and the wolf who hangs about every writer's door. He isn't
satisfied with those hundred and seven words. He never was in
the least satisfied with anything that he wrote, but he has
searched his mind and his conscience and he believes that
under the circumstances they are the very best that he can do.
Anyway, they can stand in their present order until--after
lunch.
A sign of his youth was the fact that to the day of his death
he had denied himself the luxury and slothfulness of habits.
I have never seen him smoke automatically as most men do. He
had too much respect for his own powers of enjoyment and for
the sensibilities, perhaps, of the best Havana tobacco. At a
time of his own deliberate choosing, often after many hours of
hankering and renunciation, he smoked his cigar. He smoked it
with delight, with a sense of being rewarded, and he used all
the smoke there was in it.
He dearly loved the best food, the best champagne, and
the best Scotch whiskey. But these things were friends to
him, and not enemies. He had toward food and drink the
Continental attitude; namely, that quality is far more
important than quantity; and he got his exhilaration from the
fact that he was drinking champagne and not from the
champagne. Perhaps I shall do well to say that on questions
of right and wrong he had a will of iron. All his life he
moved resolutely in whichever direction his conscience
pointed; and, although that ever present and never obtrusive
conscience of his made mistakes of judgment now and then, as
must all consciences, I think it can never once have tricked
him into any action that was impure or unclean. Some critics
maintain that the heroes and heroines of his books are
impossibly pure and innocent young people. R. H. D. never
called upon his characters for any trait of virtue, or
renunciation, or self-mastery of which his own life could not
furnish examples.
Fortunately, he did not have for his friends the same
conscience that he had for himself. His great gift of
eyesight and observation failed him in his judgments upon his
friends. If only you loved him, you could get your biggest
failures of conduct somewhat more than forgiven, without any
trouble at all. And of your molehill virtues he made splendid
mountains. He only interfered with you when he was afraid
that you were going to hurt some one else whom he also loved.
Once I had a telegram from him which urged me for heaven's
sake not to forget that the next day was my wife's birthday.
Whether I had forgotten it or not is my own private affair.
And when I declared that I had read a story which I liked
very, very much and was going to write to the author to tell
him so, he always kept at me till the letter was written.
Have I said that he had no habits? Every day, when he was
away from her, he wrote a letter to his mother, and no swift
scrawl at that, for, no matter how crowded and eventful the
day, he wrote her the best letter that he could write. That
was the only habit he had. He was a slave to it.
Once I saw R. H. D. greet his old mother after an absence.
They threw their arms about each other and rocked to and fro
for a long time. And it hadn't been a long absence at that.
No ocean had been between them; her heart had not been in her
mouth with the thought that he was under fire, or about to
become a victim of jungle fever. He had only been away upon a
little expedition, a mere matter of digging for buried
treasure. We had found the treasure, part of it a chipmunk's
skull and a broken arrowhead, and R. H. D. had been absent
from his mother for nearly two hours and a half.
I set about this article with the knowledge that I must fail
to give more than a few hints of what he was like. There
isn't much more space at my command, and there were so many
sides to him that to touch upon them all would fill a volume.
There were the patriotism and the Americanism, as much a part
of him as the marrow of his bones, and from which sprang all
those brilliant headlong letters to the newspapers: those
trenchant assaults upon evil-doers in public office, those
quixotic efforts to redress wrongs, and those simple and
dexterous exposures of this and that, from an absolutely
unexpected point of view. He was a quickener of the public
conscience. That people are beginning to think tolerantly of
preparedness, that a nation which at one time looked yellow as
a dandelion is beginning to turn Red, White, and Blue is owing
in some measure to him.
R. H. D. thought that war was unspeakably terrible. He
thought that peace at the price which our country has been
forced to pay for it was infinitely worse. And he was one of
those who have gradually taught this country to see the matter
in the same way.
I must come to a close now, and I have hardly scratched the
surface of my subject. And that is a failure which I feel
keenly but which was inevitable. As R. H. D. himself used to
say of those deplorable "personal interviews" which appear in
the newspapers, and in which the important person interviewed
is made by the cub reporter to say things which he never said,
or thought, or dreamed of--"You can't expect a fifteen-dollar-
a-week brain to describe a thousand-dollar-a-week brain."
There is, however, one question which I should attempt to
answer. No two men are alike. In what one salient thing did
R. H. D. differ from other men--differ in his personal
character and in the character of his work? And that question
I can answer off-hand, without taking thought, and be sure
that I am right.
An analysis of his works, a study of that book which the
Recording Angel keeps will show one dominant characteristic to
which even his brilliancy, his clarity of style, his excellent
mechanism as a writer are subordinate; and to which, as a man,
even his sense of duty, his powers of affection, of
forgiveness, of loving-kindness are subordinate, too; and that
characteristic is cleanliness. The biggest force for
cleanliness that was in the world has gone out of the
world--gone to that Happy Hunting Ground where "Nobody hunts
us and there is nothing to hunt."
BY BOOTH TARKINGTON
To the college boy of the early nineties Richard Harding Davis
was the "beau ideal of jeunesse doree," a sophisticated
heart of gold. He was of that college boy's own age, but
already an editor--already publishing books! His stalwart
good looks were as familiar to us as were those of our own
football captain; we knew his face as we knew the face of the
President of the United States, but we infinitely preferred
Davis's. When the Waldorf was wondrously completed, and we
cut an exam. in Cuneiform Inscriptions for an excursion to see
the world at lunch in its new magnificence, and Richard
Harding Davis came into the Palm Room--then, oh, then, our day
was radiant! That was the top of our fortune: we could never
have hoped for so much. Of all the great people of every
continent, this was the one we most desired to see.
The boys of those days left college to work, to raise
families, to grow grizzled; but the glamour remained about
Davis; HE never grew grizzled. Youth was his great quality.
All his writing has the liveliness of springtime; it stirs
with an unsuppressible gayety, and it has the attraction which
companionship with him had: there is never enough. He could
be sharp; he could write angrily and witheringly; but even
when he was fiercest he was buoyant, and when his words were
hot they were not scalding but rather of a dry, clean
indignation with things which he believed could, if they
would, be better. He never saw evil but as temporary.
Following him through his books, whether he wrote of home or
carried his kind, stout heart far, far afield, we see an
American writing to Americans. He often told us about things
abroad in terms of New York; and we have all been to New York,
so he made for us the pictures he wished us to see. And when
he did not thus use New York for his colors he found other
means as familiar to us and as suggestive; he always made us
SEE. What claims our thanks in equal measure, he knew our
kind of curiosity so well that he never failed to make us see
what we were most anxious to see. He knew where our dark
spots were, cleared up the field of vision, and left us
unconfused. This discernment of our needs, and this power of
enlightening and pleasuring his reader, sprang from seeds
native in him. They were, as we say, gifts; for he always had
them but did not make them. He was a national figure at
twenty-three. He KNEW HOW, before he began.
Youth called to youth: all ages read him, but the young men
and young women have turned to him ever since his precocious
fame made him their idol. They got many things from him, but
above all they live with a happier bravery because of him.
Reading the man beneath the print, they found their prophet
and gladly perceived that a prophet is not always cowled and
bearded, but may be a gallant young gentleman. This one
called merrily to them in his manly voice; and they followed
him. He bade them see that pain is negligible, that fear is a
joke, and that the world is poignantly interesting, joyously
lovable.
They will always follow him.
THE FIRST GLIMPSE OF DAVIS
BY CHARLES DANA GIBSON
Dick was twenty-four years old when he came into the smoking-
room of the Victoria Hotel, in London, after midnight one July
night--he was dressed as a Thames boatman.
He had been rowing up and down the river since sundown,
looking for color. He had evidently peopled every dark corner
with a pirate, and every floating object had meant something
to him. He had adventure written all over him. It was the
first time I had ever seen him, and I had never heard of him.
I can't now recall another figure in that smoke-filled room.
I don't remember who introduced us--over twenty-seven years
have passed since that night. But I can see Dick now dressed
in a rough brown suit, a soft hat, with a handkerchief about
his neck, a splendid, healthy, clean-minded, gifted boy at
play. And so he always remained.
His going out of this world seemed like a boy interrupted in a
game he loved. And how well and fairly he played it! Surely
no one deserved success more than Dick. And it is a
consolation to know he had more than fifty years of just what
he wanted. He had health, a great talent, and personal charm.
There never was a more loyal or unselfish friend. There
wasn't an atom of envy in him. He had unbounded mental and
physical courage, and with it all he was sensitive and
sometimes shy. He often tried to conceal these last two
qualities, but never succeeded in doing so from those of us
who were privileged really to know and love him.
His life was filled with just the sort of adventure he liked
the best. No one ever saw more wars in so many different
places or got more out of them. And it took the largest war
in all history to wear out that stout heart.
We shall miss him.
BY E. L. BURLINGAME
One of the most attractive and inspiring things about Richard
Harding Davis was the simple, almost matter-of-course way in
which he put into practice his views of life--in which he
acted, and in fact WAS, what he believed. With most of us,
to have opinions as to what is the right thing to do is at the
best to worry a good deal as to whether we are doing it; at
the worst to be conscious of doubts as to whether it is a
sufficient code, or perhaps whether it isn't beyond us. Davis
seemed to have neither of these wasters of strength. He had
certain simple, clean, manly convictions as to how a man
should act; apparently quite without self-consciousness in
this respect, whatever little mannerisms or points of pride he
may have had in others--fewer than most men of his success and
fastidiousness--he went ahead and did accordingly, untormented
by any alternatives or casuistries, which for him did not seem
to exist. He was so genuinely straightforward that he could
not sophisticate even himself, as almost every man occasionally
does under temptation. He, at least, never needed to be told