Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis
V >>
Various Authors of Some Repute >> Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis
"Go put your creed into your deed
Nor speak with double tongue."
It is so impossible not to think first of the man, as the
testimony of every one who knew him shows, that those who have
long had occasion to watch and follow his work, not merely
with enjoyment but somewhat critically, may well look upon any
detailed discussion of it as something to be kept till later.
But there is more to be said than to recall the unfailing zest
of it, the extraordinary freshness of eye, the indomitable
youthfulness and health of spirit--all the qualities that we
associate with Davis himself. It was serious work in a sense
that only the more thoughtful of its critics had begun of late
to comprehend. It had not inspired a body of disciples like
Kipling's, but it had helped to clear the air and to give a
new proof of the vitality of certain ideals--even of a few of
the simpler ones now outmoded in current masterpieces; and it
was at its best far truer in an artistic sense than it was the
fashion of its easy critics to allow. Whether Davis could or
would have written a novel of the higher rank is a useless
question now; he himself, who was a critic of his own work
without illusions or affectation, used to say that he could
not; but it is certain that in the early part of "Captain
Macklin" he displayed a power really Thackerayan in kind.
Of his descriptive writing there need be no fear of speaking
with extravagance; he had made himself, especially in his
later work, through long practice and his inborn instinct for
the significant and the fresh aspect, quite the best of all
contemporary correspondents and reporters; and his rivals in
the past could be easily numbered.
BY AUGUSTUS THOMAS
One spring afternoon in 1889 a member brought into the Lambs
Club house--then on Twenty-sixth Street--as a guest Mr.
Richard Harding Davis. I had not clearly caught the careless
introduction, and, answering my question, Mr. Davis repeated
the surname. He did not pronounce it as would a Middle
Westerner like myself, but more as a citizen of London might.
To spell his pronunciation Dyvis is to burlesque it slightly,
but that is as near as it can be given phonetically. Several
other words containing _a_ long a were sounded by him in the
same way, and to my ear the rest of his speech had a related
eccentricity. I am told that other men educated in certain
Philadelphia schools have a similar diction, but at that time
many of Mr. Davis's new acquaintances thought the manner was
an affectation. I mention the peculiarity, which after years
convinced me was as native to him as was the color of his
eyes, because I am sure that it was a barrier between him and
some persons who met him only casually.
At that time he was a reporter on a Philadelphia newspaper,
and in appearance was what he continued to be until his death,
an unassertive but self-respecting, level-eyed, clean-toothed,
and wholesome athlete.
The reporter developed rapidly into the more serious workman,
and amongst the graver business was that of war correspondent.
I have known fraternally several war correspondents--Dick
Davis, Fred Remington, John Fox, Caspar Whitney, and
others--and it seems to me that, while differing one from
another as average men differ, they had in common a kind of
veteran superiority to trivial surprise, a tolerant world
wisdom that mere newspaper work in other departments does not
bring. At any rate, and however acquired, Dick Davis had the
quality. And with that seasoned calm he kept and cultivated
the reporter sense. He had insight--the faculty of going back
of appearances. He saw the potential salients in occurrences
and easily separated them from the commonplace--and the
commonplace itself when it was informed by a spirit that made
it helpful did not mislead him by its plainness.
That is another war-correspondent quality. He saw when
adherence to duty approached the heroic. He knew the degree
of pressure that gave it test conditions and he had an
unadulterated, plain, bread-and-water appreciation of it.
I think that fact shows in his stories. He liked
enthusiastically to write of men doing men's work and doing it
man fashion with full-blooded optimism.
At his very best he was in heart and mind a boy grown tall.
He had a boy's undisciplined indifference to great personages
not inconsistent with his admiration of their medals. By
temperament he was impulsive and partisan, and if he was your
friend you were right until you were obviously very wrong.
But he liked "good form," and had adopted the Englishman's
code of "things no fellow could do"--therefore his
impulsiveness was without offense and his partisanship was
not quarrelsome.
In the circumstance of this story of "Soldiers of Fortune" he
could himself have been either Clay or Stuart and he had the
humor of MacWilliams.
In the clash between Clay and Stuart, when Clay asks the
younger man if the poster smirching Stuart's relation to
Madame Alvarez is true, it is Davis talking through both men,
and when, standing alone, Clay lifts his hat and addresses the
statue of General Bolivar, it is Davis at his best.
Modern criticism has driven the soliloquy from the theatre,
but modern criticism in that respect is immature and wrong.
The soliloquy exists. Any one observing the number of
business men who, talking aloud to themselves, walk Fifth
Avenue any evening may prove it. For Davis the soliloquy was
not courageous; it was simply true. And that was a place for
it.
When "Soldiers of Fortune" was printed it had a quick and a
deserved popularity. It was cheerily North American in its
viewpoint of the sub-tropical republics and was very up to
date. The outdoor American girl was not so established at
that time, and the Davis report of her was refreshing. Robert
Clay was unconsciously Dick Davis himself as he would have
tried to do--Captain Stuart was the English officer that Davis
had met the world over, or, closer still, he was the better
side of such men which the attractive wholesomeness of Davis
would draw out. Alice and King were the half-spoiled New
Yorkers as he knew them at the dinner-parties.
At a manager's suggestion Dick made a play of the book. It
was his first attempt for the theatre and lacked somewhat the
skill that he developed later in his admirable "Dictator." I
was called in by the manager as an older carpenter and
craftsman to make another dramatic version. Dick and I were
already friends and he already liked plays that I had done,
but that alone could not account for the heartiness with which
he turned over to me his material and eliminated himself.
Only his unspoiled simplicity and utter absence of envy could
do that. Only native modesty could explain the absence of the
usual author pride and sensitiveness. The play was
immediately successful. It would have been a dull hack,
indeed, who could have spoiled such excellent stage material
as the novel furnished, but his generosity saw genius in the
dramatic extension of the types he had furnished and in the
welding of additions. Even after enthusiasm had had time
enough to cool, he sent me a first copy of the Playgoers'
edition of the novel, printed in 1902, with the inscription:
TO AUGUSTUS THOMAS:
Gratefully, Admiringly, Sincerely.
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS.
And then, as if feeling the formality of the names, he wrote below:
DEAR GUS,
If you liked this book only one-fifth as much as I like your play,
I would be content to rest on that and spare the public any others.
So for the sake of the public try to like it.
DICK.
In 1914 a motion-picture company arranged to make a feature
film of the, play, and Dick and I went with their outfit to
Santiago de Cuba, where, twenty years earlier, he had found
the inspiration for his story and out of which city and its
environs he had fashioned his supposititious republic of
Olancho. On that trip he was the idol of the company. With
the men in the smoking-room of the steamer there were the
numberless playful stories, in the rough, of the experiences
on all five continents and seven seas that were the
backgrounds of his published tales.
At Santiago, if an official was to be persuaded to consent to
some unprecedented seizure of the streets, or a diplomat
invoked for the assistance of the Army or the Navy, it was the
experience and good judgment of Dick Davis that controlled the
task. In the field there were his helpful suggestions of work
and make-up to the actors, and on the boat and train and in
hotel and camp the lady members met in him an easy courtesy
and understanding at once fraternal and impersonal.
That picture enterprise he has described in an article,
entitled "Breaking into the Movies," which was printed in
Scribner's Magazine.
The element that he could not put into the account, and which
is particularly pertinent to this page, is the author of
"Soldiers of Fortune" as he revealed himself to me both with
intention and unconsciously in the presence of the familiar
scenes.
For three weeks, with the exception of one or two occasions
when some local dignitary captured the revisiting lion, he and
I spent our evenings together at a cafe table over looking
"the great square," which he sketches so deftly in its
atmosphere when Clay and the Langhams and Stuart dine there:
"At one end of the plaza the President's band was playing
native waltzes that came throbbing through the trees and
beating softly above the rustling skirts and clinking spurs of
the senoritas and officers sweeping by in two opposite circles
around the edges of the tessellated pavements. Above the
palms around the square arose the dim, white facade of the
Cathedral, with the bronze statue of Anduella the liberator of
Olancho, who answered with his upraised arm and cocked hat the
cheers of an imaginary populace."
Twenty years had gone by since Dick had received the
impression that wrote those lines, and now sometimes after
dinner half a long cigar would burn out as he mused over the
picture and the dreams that had gone between. From one long
silence he said: "I think I'll come back here this winter and
bring Mrs. Davis with me--stay a couple of months." What a
fine compliment to a wife to have the thought of her and that
plan emerge from that deep and romantic background!
And again, later, apropos of nothing but what one guessed from
the dreamer's expressive face, he said: "I had remembered it
as so much larger"--indicating the square--"until I saw it
again when we came down with the army." A tolerant smile--he
might have explained that it is always so on revisiting scenes
that have impressed us deeply in our earlier days, but he let
the smile do that. One of his charms as companion was that
restful ability not to talk if you knew it, too.
The picture people began their film with a showing of the
"mountains which jutted out into the ocean and suggested
roughly the five knuckles of a giant's hand clenched and lying
flat upon the surface of the water." That formation of the
sea wall is just outside of Santiago. "The waves tunnelled
their way easily enough until they ran up against those five
mountains and then they had to fall back." How natural for
one of us to be unimpressed by such a feature of the
landscape, and yet how characteristic of Dick Davis to see the
elemental fight that it recorded and get the hint for the
whole of the engineering struggle that is so much of his book!
We went over those mountains together, where two decades
before he had planted his banner of romance. We visited the
mines and the railroads, and everywhere found some
superintendent or foreman or engineer who remembered Davis.
He had guessed at nothing. Everywhere he had overlaid the
facts with adventure and with beauty, but he had been on sure
footing all the time. His prototype of MacWilliams was dead.
Together we visited the wooden cross with which the miners had
marked his grave.
One is tempted to go choosing through his book again and rob
its surprises by reminiscence--but I refrain. Yet it is only
justice to point out that for "Soldiers of Fortune," as for
the "Men of Zanzibar," "Three Gringos in Venezuela," "The
King's Jackal," "Ranson's Folly," and his other books, he got
his structure and his color at first hand. He was a writer
and not a rewriter. And another thing we must note in his
writing is his cleanliness. It is safe stuff to give to a
young fellow who likes to take off his hat and dilate his
nostrils and feel the wind in his face. Like water at the
source, it is undefiled.
DAVIS AND THE ROUGH RIDERS
BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT
I knew Richard Harding Davis for many years, and I was among
the number who were immediately drawn to him by the power and
originality of "Gallegher," the story which first made his reputation.
My intimate association with him, however, was while he was
with my regiment in Cuba, He joined us immediately after
landing, and was not merely present at but took part in the
fighting. For example, at the Guasimas fight it was he, I
think, with his field-glasses, who first placed the trench
from which the Spaniards were firing at the right wing of the
regiment, which right wing I, at that time, commanded. We
were then able to make out the trench, opened fire on it, and
drove out the Spaniards.
He was indomitably cheerful under hardships and difficulties
and entirely indifferent to his own personal safety or
comfort. He so won the esteem and regard of the regiment that
he was one of the three men we made honorary members of the
regiment's association. We gave him the same medal worn by
our own members.
He was as good an American as ever lived and his heart flamed
against cruelty and injustice. His writings form a text-book
of Americanism which all our people would do well to read at
the present time.
BY IRVIN S. COBB
Almost the first letter I received after I undertook to make a
living by writing for magazines was signed with the name of
Richard Harding Davis. I barely knew him; practically we were
strangers; but if he had been my own brother he could not have
written more generously or more kindly than he did write in
that letter. He, a famous writer, had gone out of his way to
speak words of encouragement to me, an unknown writer; had
taken the time and the pains out of a busy life to cheer a
beginner in the field where he had had so great a measure of
success.
When I came to know him better, I found out that such acts as
these were characteristic of Richard Harding Davis. The world
knew him as one of the most vivid and versatile and
picturesque writers that our country has produced in the last
half-century, but his friends knew him as one of the kindest
and gentlest and most honest and most unselfish of men--a real
human being, firm in his convictions, steadfast in his
affections, loyal to the ideals by which he held, but tolerant
always in his estimates of others.
He may or may not have been a born writer; sometimes I doubt
whether there is such a thing as a born writer. But this much
I do know--he was a born gentleman if ever there was one.
As a writer his place is assured. But always I shall think of
him as he was in his private life--a typical American, a
lovable companion, and a man to the tips of his fingers.
BY JOHN FOX, JR.
During the twenty years that I knew him Richard Harding Davis
was always going to some far-off land. He was just back from
a trip somewhere when I first saw him in his rooms in New
York, rifle in hand, in his sock feet and with his traps in
confusion about him. He was youth incarnate--ruddy, joyous,
vigorous, adventurous, self-confident youth--and, in all the
years since, that first picture of him has suffered no change
with me. He was so intensely alive that I cannot think of him
as dead--and I do not. He is just away on another of those
trips and it really seems queer that I shall not hear him tell
about it.
We were together as correspondents in the Spanish War and in
the Russo-Japanese War we were together again; and so there is
hardly any angle from which I have not had the chance to know
him. No man was ever more misunderstood by those who did not
know him or better understood by those who knew him well, for
he carried nothing in the back of his head--no card that was
not face up on the table. Every thought, idea, purpose,
principle within him was for the world to read and to those
who could not know how rigidly he matched his inner and outer
life he was almost unbelievable. He was exacting in
friendship because his standard was high and because he gave
what he asked; and if he told you of a fault he told you first
of a virtue that made the fault seem small indeed. But he
told you and expected you to tell him.
Naturally, the indirection of the Japanese was
incomprehensible to him. He was not good at picking up
strange tongues, and the Japanese equivalent for the Saxon
monosyllable for what the Japanese was to him he never
learned. For only one other word did he have more use and I
believe it was the only one he knew, "hyaku--hurry!" Over
there I was in constant fear for him because of his knight-
errantry and his candor. Once he came near being involved in
a duel because of his quixotic championship of a woman whom he
barely knew, and disliked, and whose absent husband he did not
know at all. And more than once I looked for a Japanese to
draw his two-handed ancestral sword when Dick bluntly demanded
a reconciliation of his yea of yesterday with his nay of to-
day. Nine months passed and we never heard the whistle of
bullet or shell. Dick called himself a "cherry-blossom
correspondent," and when our ship left those shores each knew
that the other went to his state-room and in bitter chagrin
and disappointment wept quite childishly.
Of course, he was courageous--absurdly so--and, in spite of
his high-strung temperament, always calm and cool. At El Paso
hill, the day after the fight, the rest of us scurried for
tree-trunks when a few bullets whistled near; but Dick stalked
out in the open and with his field-glasses searched for the
supposed sharpshooters in the trees. Lying under a bomb-proof
when the Fourth of July bombardment started, I saw Dick going
unhurriedly down the hill for his glasses, which he had left
in Colonel Roosevelt's tent, and unhurriedly going back up to
the trenches again. Under the circumstances I should have
been content with my naked eye. A bullet thudded close to
where Dick lay with a soldier.
"That hit you?" asked Dick. The soldier grunted "No," looked
sidewise at Dick, and muttered an oath of surprise. Dick had
not taken his glasses from his eyes. I saw him writhing on
the ground with sciatica during that campaign, like a snake,
but pulling his twisted figure straight and his tortured face
into a smile if a soldier or stranger passed.
He was easily the first reporter of his time--perhaps of all
time. Out of any incident or situation he could pick the most
details that would interest the most people and put them in a
way that was pleasing to the most people; and always, it
seemed, he had the extraordinary good judgment or the
extraordinary good luck to be just where the most interesting
thing was taking place. Gouverneur Morris has written the
last word about Richard Harding Davis, and he, as every one
must, laid final stress on the clean body, clean heart, and
clean mind of the man. R. H. D. never wrote a line that
cannot be given to his little daughter when she is old enough
to read, and I never heard a word pass his lips that his own
mother could not hear. There are many women in the world like
the women in his books. There are a few men like the men, and
of these Dick himself was one.
BY FINLEY PETER DUNNE
In the articles about Mr. Davis that have appeared since his
death, the personality of the man seems to overshadow the
merit of the author. In dealing with the individual the
writers overlook the fact that we have lost one of the best of
our story-tellers. This is but natural. He was a very vivid
kind of person. He had thousands of friends in all parts of
the world, and a properly proportionate number of enemies, and
those who knew him were less interested in the books than in
the man himself--the generous, romantic, sensitive individual
whose character and characteristics made him a conspicuous
figure everywhere he went--and he went everywhere. His books
were sold in great numbers, but it might be said in terms of
the trade that his personality had a larger circulation than
his literature. He probably knew more waiters, generals,
actors, and princes than any man who ever lived, and the
people he knew best are not the people who read books. They
write them or are a part of them. Besides, if you knew
Richard Davis you knew his books. He translated himself
literally, and no expurgation was needed to make the
translation suitable for the most innocent eyes. He was the
identical chivalrous young American or Englishman who strides
through his pages in battalions to romantic death or romantic
marriage. Every one speaks of the extraordinary youthfulness
of his mind, which was still fresh at an age when most men
find avarice or golf a substitute for former pastimes. He not
only refused to grow old himself, he refused to write about
old age. There are a few elderly people in his books, but
they are vague and shadowy. They serve to emphasize the
brightness of youth, and are quickly blown away when the time
for action arrives. But if he numbered his friends and
acquaintances by the thousands there are other thousands in
this country who have read his books, and they know, even
better than those who were acquainted with him personally, how
good a friend they have lost. I happened to read again the
other day the little collection of stories--his first, I
think--which commences with "Gallegher" and includes "The
Other Woman" and one or more of the Van Bibber tales. His
first stories were not his best. He increased in skill and
was stronger at the finish than at the start. But "Gallegher"
is a fine story, and is written in that eager, breathless
manner which was all his own, and which always reminds me of a
boy who has hurried home to tell of some wonderful thing he
has seen. Of course it is improbable. Most good stories are
and practically all readable books of history. No old
newspaper man can believe that there ever existed such a "copy
boy" as Gallegher, or that a murderer with a finger missing
from one hand could escape detection even in a remote country
village. Greed would have urged the constable to haul to the
calaboose every stranger who wore gloves. But he managed to
attach so many accurate details of description to the romance
that it leaves as definite an impression of realism as any of
Mr. Howells's purposely realistic stories. The scene in the
newspaper office, the picture of the prize-fight, the mixture
of toughs and swells, the spectators in their short gray
overcoats with pearl buttons (like most good story-tellers he
was strong on the tailoring touch), the talk of cabmen and
policemen, the swiftness of the way the story is told, as if
he were in a hurry to let his reader know something he had
actually seen--create such an impression of truth that when
the reader finishes he finds himself picturing Gallegher on
the witness-stand at the murder trial receiving the thanks of
the judge. And he wonders what became of this precocious
infant, and whether he was rewarded in time by receiving the
hand of the sister of the sporting editor in marriage.
To give the appearance of truth to the truth is the despair of
writers, but Mr. Davis had the faculty of giving the appearance
of the truth to situations that in human experience could
hardly exist. The same quality that showed in his tales made
him the most readable of war correspondents. He went to all
the wars of his youth and middle age filled with visions of
glorious action. Where other correspondents saw and reported
evil-smelling camps, ghastly wounds, unthinkable suffering,
blunders, good luck and bad luck, or treated the subject with
a mathematical precision that would have given Clausewitz a
headache, Davis saw and reported it first of all as a romance,
and then filled in the story with human details, so that the
reader came away with an impression that all these heroic
deeds were performed by people just like the reader himself,
which was exactly the truth.
It is a pity that the brutality of the German staff officers
and the stupidity of the French and English prevented him from
seeing the actual fighting in Flanders and Picardy. The scene
is an ugly one, a wallow of blood and mire. But so probably
were Agincourt and Crecy when you come to think of it, and
Davis, you may be sure, would have illuminated the foul
battle-field with a reflection of the glory which must exist
in the breasts of the soldiers.
The fact is, he was the owner of a most enviable pair of eyes,
which reported to him only what was pleasant and encouraging.
A man is blessed or cursed by what his eyes see. To some
people the world of men is a confused and undecipherable
puzzle. To Mr. Davis it was a simple and pleasant
pattern--good and bad, honest and dishonest, kind and cruel,
with the good, the honest, and the kind rewarded; the bad, the
dishonest, and the cruel punished; where the heroes are
modest, the brave generous, the women lovely, the bus-drivers
humorous; where the Prodigal returns to dine in a borrowed
dinner-jacket at Delmonico's with his father, and where always
the Young Man marries the Girl. And this is the world as much
as Balzac's is the world, if it is the world as you see it.