BRYANT AT THE HEIGHT OF HIS FAME AS EDITOR  
During all but the hottest months of the year, in the latter part of Grant’s second Administration, men on lower Broadway at about 8:45 every week-day morning might see a venerable figure come rapidly down toward Fulton Street. The aged pedestrian was slender and just above the middle height, but was given an impressive aspect by his heavy white beard and the long hoary hair that swept his shoulders. As he passed, it could be seen that his brow was bald; that his forehead was projecting, though not massive; that the deep-set eyes which peered from beneath his bushy brows were remarkably penetrating and observant, and that his features were rugged but benignant. He had a scholar’s stoop, but appeared wiry and vigorous far beyond his years. People glanced at him with respectful recognition—his was, as Tennyson said of Wellington, the good gray head that all men knew. On Fulton Street he turned into a tall, new building, and those who watched might see that, disdaining the elevator, he began rapidly climbing the stairs. This was William Cullen Bryant, at eighty still devoting four hours daily to the Evening Post.
Bryant had long since become the most distinguished resident of the city, referred to and honored as its first citizen. In civic, charitable, and social movements his name was given precedence over those of men like William M. Evarts or Henry Ward Beecher. On every great public occasion an effort was made to obtain his attendance as the representative of all that was choicest in literary, artistic, and professional life. When the artist Cole, and the authors Cooper, Irving, Verplanck, and Halleck died, he was chosen to deliver memorial discourses of that kind in which the French excel; he was339 the chief speaker at the dedication of the Morse, Shakespeare, Scott, Goethe, and Mazzini monuments in Central Park; and he presided over the testimonial benefit given Charlotte Cushman when she was about to retire from the stage, which occasioned one of the most notable assemblages ever brought into a modern theater. No New York meeting in behalf of free trade, sound money, or civil service reform was complete without his presence or a message from him. This high position was his because he was not merely a great poet, but a great publicist.
On Nov. 5, 1864, when Bryant had just attained his seventieth birthday, a celebration was held at the Century Club, of which he had been one of the earliest members. The historian Bancroft presided, and among the speakers were Emerson, Holmes, R. H. Stoddard, Julia Ward Howe, R. H. Dana, jr., and William M. Evarts; while poems were received from Whittier and Lowell. The editor as well as the poet was honored. Mrs. Howe recited:
... at his forge he wrought two-fold,
On the iron shield of freedom, and the poet’s links of gold.
while Lowell’s well-known verses, “On Board the Seventy-six,” referred to his editorial words of cheer during the gloomy early days of the Civil War. A little more than three years later (Jan. 30, 1868), a dinner was tendered Bryant at Delmonico’s as president of the American Free Trade League. Speeches were made in his honor by David Dudley Field, Parke Godwin, John D. Van Buren, and others, and letters read from Emerson and Gerrit Smith. Again, on Nov. 3, 1874, when Bryant became eighty years old, he was quietly finishing a forenoon’s work in the Evening Post office when a deputation of friends entered to congratulate him. That evening there was another celebration at the Century Club, at which a commemorative vase—now in the Metropolitan Museum—was given Bryant, while a simultaneous celebration was held in Chicago by the Literary Club of that city.
340 In the dozen years following Sumter, and especially in the Civil War years when it pressed its demand for energetic prosecution of the struggle, the Evening Post was at the height of its influence under Bryant. “The clear and able political leaders have been of more service to the government in this war than some of its armies,” said Littell’s Living Age in 1862. Charles Dudley Warner wrote at the same time in the Hartford Press: “The Evening Post is the most fearless and rigidly honest paper in the country, and its ability is equal to its moral worth. Some of its ordinary editorials are magnificent specimens of English.” A chorus of praise was aroused by the enlargement of the journal this year. “The Evening Post, we think, is the best newspaper in the United States,” remarked the Elmira Advertiser; the New Bedford Standard spoke of “the best paper in the United States, the Evening Post”; the Kennebec Journal said that “All things considered, it comes the nearest to our idea of what a metropolitan journal should be of any publication in the country”; and the Christian Enquirer testified that “the course of the Evening Post during the war has been above all praise—firm, bold, patriotic, and wise.”
Similar tributes were paid the newspaper by a remarkable array of public men. In 1840 James K. Paulding wrote from Washington to console it for defeat in the Presidential election: “The manner in which the Evening Post is conducted, its stern and sober dignity, and its freedom from the base fury and still baser falsehoods, with which so many newspapers are debauched and disgraced, makes me proud to remember that I have a humble claim to be associated with its honors.” Sumner was constant in his praise in the fifties. Judge William Kent, son of the great Chancellor, not merely thought it the best American daily, but in 1857 proposed that he purchase a share in it and become one of the editors, a proposal which Isaac Henderson discouraged. William Jay in 1862 wrote Bryant, paying tribute to its “powerful and beneficial influence.” Charles Eliot Norton begged the following year “to express my hearty sympathy with the341 principles maintained by the Evening Post at this time, and my admiration for the ability with which they are sustained.” A little later Lowell wrote Bryant that he was a subscriber. “I am particularly pleased with the course of the Evening Post on reconstruction. Firmness equally tempered with good feeling is what we want—not generosity with twitches of firmness now and then.” W. H. Furness, the noted Philadelphia minister, sent another unsolicited tribute in the heat of the war, saying that he valued the Tribune, but was particularly grateful for the sound, calm vision of the Evening Post, and that “it stands in my esteem at the head of the American press. It is cheering that there is abroad such an educator of the public mind.” Caleb Cushing wrote (1868):
You may regard it as quite superfluous for me to speak in commendation of the Evening Post; but inasmuch as, at one period, I had reason to think and to assert that its language was occasionally overharsh to me, I desire to say, for my own satisfaction, not yours, with how great instruction and pleasure at present I read it every day, and with what daily increasing estimation of its superior dignity, fairness, wisdom, and truth.
Even abroad the paper was well known. Bigelow informed Bryant in 1864 that an Englishman had told him he thought it the best newspaper in the world. John Stuart Mill wrote Parke Godwin the following year that he was a regular reader of it through the kindness of Frederick Barnard, later President of Columbia, who thought it the best American daily, and that he had formed a high opinion of it.
If we ask what qualities made Bryant a great editor, we must place mere industry high on the list. Within a few years after his return to the prostrate Post in 1836 he had shaken off his distaste for the profession, and acquired a zest for it. From 1836 to 1866 he labored as hard upon his journal as if he had never written a line of verse—as the hardworking Greeley and Bennett did upon theirs. Always up in summer at five, in winter at five-thirty, he was frequently at his desk at seven, and342 seldom later than eight. His principal concern, the editorial page, was in itself a day’s work. He took in hand during this period nearly all the leading editorials. They were consistently longer than editorials of to-day, not infrequently in the fifties and sixties reaching 1,600 words, sometimes 1,800; and Bryant, conscious of his reputation, wrote with painful care. “As Dr. Johnson said of his talk,” he once told Bigelow, “I always write my best.”
But in his first forty years as editor Bryant also attended to a multitude of business and executive details. This was of course true in the thirties and forties, when the Evening Post was a struggling journal with a staff of three or four writers; but his unpublished papers show it almost equally true later. In his late fifties we find him carefully discussing by letter with John Bigelow whether the commercial reporter should get more than $900 a year; hiring the foreign correspondents, and resentful when the Tribune stole one of the best, Signora Jesse White Mario; and taking a keen interest in the fluctuations of advertising. We find him complaining of the daily squabble between the editorial room and advertising department, with the sturdy German head of the composing room, Henry Dithmar, parrying all attempts to displace advertisements by reading matter (1860). He was laying plans as the Civil War storm arose to get out a third edition, to occupy the same ground as the third edition of the Express, and considering ways and means of putting the first edition on the street in time to beat the Commercial. He kept a watchful eye upon all employees, now meting out praise and blame to the Washington and Albany correspondents, and now deciding indulgently what should be done with an office boy who was caught carrying off a dozen review copies of new books. When it grew necessary to enlarge the Post he knew just what it would cost to alter the “turtles,” and just why the importers and wholesalers preferred a journal of four blanket-size pages to one of eight smaller pages.
He had to answer an enormous correspondence, a task343 conscientiously performed. A hurried message to Dithmar is preserved: “Enclosed is the lady’s communication. I have looked two hours for it. Put it in and get me out of trouble.” He received a multitude of visitors. A note to his wife in 1851 remarks, “I was run down yesterday”—arriving to write a leader, he had been interrupted by five important and several lesser visitors. Sometimes the burden upon him was excessive. It was so after 1836, just before Bigelow came in the late forties, and at intervals later, such as early in 1860, when Bigelow was in Europe, Thayer was sick, Godwin was laid up with rheumatic fever, and Bryant had a sty into the bargain.
His industry was made possible by the fact that he had an admirable constitution, which he was at pains to preserve, and by his wise insistence upon recreation. In his early manhood he was a vegetarian. A letter of 1871 describing his mode of life shows by what a careful regimen he preserved his bodily and mental vigor. He still rose between four-thirty and five-thirty, according to season. While half-dressed, he spent a half hour in calisthenics with a pair of dumbbells, a light pole, a horizontal bar, and a chair. After bathing, he breakfasted on some cereal—hominy, wheat grits, or oatmeal—and milk, with baked apples in summer, and sometimes buckwheat cakes. He never touched tea or coffee. After breakfast, when in town, he walked three miles down to the Evening Post office, and doing his morning’s work, returned, “always walking, whatever be the weather or the state of the streets.” In the country he divided his time between literary work and outdoor employments. When in the city he made but two meals a day, and in the country three, although the middle meal consisted only of a little bread and butter, with possibly some fruit; the meat or fish that he took at dinner was in very sparing quantities. In later manhood he made it a rule to avoid every kind of literary occupation in the evening, finding that it interfered with his sleep; while he went to bed in town as early as ten, and in the country still earlier. A short344 time before his death, when he was eighty-three, Bigelow asked him if he had not reduced his period of morning gymnastics. “Not the width of your thumb-nail,” was his reply.
Bryant found his most congenial recreation not in the theater or society, but country employments. When youth passed into middle age he still liked all-day or week-end rambles up the Hudson or in the Catskills. After the purchase of his Roslyn home in 1842 he seldom failed, from April to October, to spend two or three days a week resting, gardening, draining, planning, and writing there. His most charming letters show him visiting his pigs and chickens, picking strawberries, treating children to his cherries, superintending the pruning, and bathing in the Sound when the tide met the grass.
The editor viewed his calling as a jealous mistress, declining all suggestions of public office or any other diversion from it. In 1861 it was rumored that Lincoln wished to appoint him Minister to Spain, and the Post promptly disposed of the suggestion that he would accept. “Those who are acquainted with Mr. Bryant know,” it said, “that there is no public office from that of the Presidency of the United States downward which he would not regard it as a misfortune to take. They know that he has expected no offer of any post from the government, and would take none if offered.” Grant also would have given him an important diplomatic position had he been ready to receive it. In 1872 it was thought necessary to publish the following tactful
CARD FROM MR. BRYANT
Certain journals of this city have lately spoken of me as one ambitious of being nominated for the Presidency of the United States. The idea is absurd enough, not only on account of my advanced age, but of my unfitness in various respects for the labors of so eminent a post. I do not, however, object to the discussion of my deficiencies on any other ground than that it is altogether superfluous, since it is impossible that I should receive any formal345 nomination, and equally impossible, if it were offered, that I should commit the folly of accepting it.
WM. C. BRYANT.
New York, July 8, 1872.
He avoided those controversial by-ways into which Greeley, as in his debate with Henry J. Raymond upon Socialism, so eagerly rushed. In 1860 the country’s foremost economist, Henry C. Carey, challenged him to a joint discussion of the tariff, and the Post replied that Bryant never accepted such invitations. “His duties as a journalist and a commentator on the events of the day and the various interesting questions which they suggest, leave him no time for a sparring match with Mr. Carey ...; and he has no ambition to distinguish himself as a public disputant. His business is to enforce important political truths, and to refute what seem to him errors, just as the occasions arise....” A time more malapropos for a long tariff debate could hardly have been selected.
It was part of Bryant’s creed that the profession to which he devoted his life should be treated as one of elevated dignity. When he died the Associated Press declared, in the preamble to its resolutions of respect, that “he redeemed, as far as one man could do so, the journalism of his early days from the offensive practice of personal discussion, often ending in duels, and at times in death, and placed it upon the broad foundation of that tolerance for others which is inseparable from free discussion and true self-respect.” In 1837 a hare-brained fellow named Holland, connected with a short-lived journal called the Times, challenged him to a duel because he had asserted that the Times was a mere tool in the hands of Senator Nathaniel P. Tallmadge. Bryant pocketed the challenge, and told its bearer that everything must take its turn; that Holland had already been termed a scoundrel by Leggett, and he could not take up the new quarrel till the old one was settled. Year by year the Evening Post refused to be drawn into offensive personalities. In 1832, when the Courier and Enquirer assailed it, Bryant wrote that “we shall never so far lose346 sight of a proper sense of our own dignity, or of respect for our readers, as to make incidents in the private life of any political opponent a subject of discussion or reproach.” Ten years later he was about to reply to an article in the Plebeian, but on looking at it a second time, “we were repelled from our purpose by the personalities which it contains.” In 1863 a scurrilous attack on Bigelow and Thayer by the World drew the same curt statement.
How scrupulous Bryant was in his fifty years’ editorship two incidents will illustrate. In the spring of 1859 a bill was pending at Albany to increase the compensation paid for legal advertisements, which was unfairly low. All the newspapers urged it, and the Evening Post’s correspondent, one Wilder, proved a perfect Hercules of a lobbyist. “Yet,” Bryant wrote Bigelow, “I was uncomfortable all the while at the idea of having a bill before the Legislature from which, if it passed, I would derive a personal advantage, and I was quite relieved when I saw that it was defeated.” Some years earlier the London Examiner published a complimentary article regarding Bigelow’s book upon Jamaica, of which he had about a hundred copies that he was eager to sell. He asked Bryant if he would be guilty of an impropriety in republishing the notice. “No,” Bryant said hesitatingly, looking up from his desk, “no, not as the world goes.” “But,” persisted Bigelow, “how as the Evening Post goes?” “Why,” rejoined the poet, “I never did such a thing. I have had a good many pleasant things said about me, but I never republished one of them in the Evening Post.” It need not be said that Bigelow abandoned his plan.
Bryant brought to his editorship a culture such as American journalism had not seen before, and has not since seen surpassed. A writer in Fraser’s Magazine in 1855 made sport of the ignorance of American newspapers. He cited the Herald’s statement, in a criticism of Racine’s “Phedre,” that “the language is written in what we call blank verse”; and its translation of a tag347 from Virgil: “Adsum qui feci; he or me must perish.” His sweeping criticism was unjust to a profession which already enlisted men like Richard Hildreth, Richard Grant White, and George Ripley, but Bryant, with his international reputation, was the most shining exception to it. His readers thought nothing of seeing an editorial on the United States Bank begin with an allusion to the episode of Nisus and Euryalus in Virgil, some story drawn from the legal lore he had mastered at the bar, or an apt quotation from the wide range of English poetry. His allusions and illustrations were always deft. “Like the misshapen dwarf in the ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel,’” he said of the anti-Jacksonians in 1833, “they wave their lean arms on high and run to and fro crying, ‘Lost! Lost! Lost!’” When Cass objected to any “temporary” measures regarding slavery in the territories, Bryant simply retold the story of Swift’s servant, who did not clean his master’s shoes because they would soon be dirty again; whereupon the Dean punished him by making him go without breakfast, because he would soon be hungry again.
The editor read assiduously. His wide acquaintance with the most intellectual men of New York kept him conversant with the latest ideas in every field. Above all, at a time when few journalists went abroad, his many trips to Europe supplied him with a constant fund of suggestions for civic and other improvements. These ranged from penny postage to street cleaning machines, from apartment houses to police uniforms, and from Central Park to the nickel five-cent piece, which, in imitation of a German coin, he was one of the first to advocate.
Bryant’s insistence upon purity of diction was such that John Bigelow believed that in all his writings for the Post fewer blemishes could be found than in the first ten numbers of the Spectator. His sensitiveness as to literary form was fully developed when he joined the paper. On May 11, 1827, he published in it a paragraph on affectations of expression, condemning such barbarisms in current newspapers as “consolate.” The most famous348 evidence of his love of precision was his index expurgatorius. This was less extensive than it was sometimes represented to be, containing but eighty-six words or phrases; and as Bryant told George Cary Eggleston, it was for the guidance only of immature staff writers, and might sometimes be overstepped. It includes inflated words like inaugurate for begin, misemployed words like mutual for common, and along with some terms now used without hesitation, others universally condemned:
Above and over (for more than); Artiste (for artist); Aspirant; Authoress; Beat (for defeat); Bagging (for capturing); Balance (for remainder); Banquet (for dinner or supper); Bogus; Casket (for coffin); Claimed (for asserted); Commence (for begin); Collided; Compete; Cortege (for procession); Cotemporary (for contemporary); Couple (for two); Darkey (for negro); Day before yesterday (for the day before yesterday); Début; Decease; Democracy (applied to a political party); Develop (for expose); Devouring element (for fire); Donate; Employee; Enacted (for acted); Endorse (for approve); En Route; “Esq.”; Graduate (for is graduated); Gents (for gentlemen); Hon. House (for House of Representatives); Humbug; Inaugurate (for begin); In our midst; Item (for particle, extract, or paragraph); Is being done, and all passives of this form; Jeopardise; Jubilant (for rejoicing); Juvenile (for boy); Lady (for wife); Last (for latest); Lengthy (for long); Leniency (for lenity); Loafer; Loan or loaned (for lend or lent); Located; Majority (relating to places or circumstances, for most); Mrs. President, Mrs. Governor, Mrs. General, and all similar titles; Mutual (for common); Official (for officer); Ovation; On yesterday; Over his signature; Pants (for pantaloons); Parties (for persons); Partially (for partly); Past two weeks (for last two weeks, and all similar expressions relating to a definite time); Poetess; Portion (for part); Posted (for informed); Progress (for advance); Quite (prefixed to good, large, etc.); Raid (for attack); Realized (for obtained); Reliable (for trustworthy); Rendition (for performance); Repudiate (for reject); Retire (as an active verb); Rev. (for the Rev.); Role (for part); Roughs; Rowdies; Secesh; Sensation (for noteworthy event); Standpoint (for point of view); Start (in the sense of setting out); State (for say); Talent (for talents or ability); Talented; Tapis; The deceased; War (for dispute).
349 Bryant was frequently called upon to decide nice questions of English, which he did with care; during the Civil War he took time, in answer to a query regarding the superlative, to dig up ancient instances like Milton’s “virtuousest, discreetest, best.” He has recorded his judgment that from newspaper writing a man’s style gains in clearness and fluency, but is likely to become loose, diffuse, and stuffed with bad diction. He always insisted upon simplicity as the sole foundation of a fine style. Once the Post received a letter from a servant girl so clear and precise that Bryant had her sought out to learn how she could write so well. She explained that she used no expression of whose meaning she was not certain; that if at first she did so, she later struck it out and substituted a simpler word or phrase. Bryant held this procedure to be a model for reporters.
Parke Godwin, writing Charles A. Dana in 1845 that the best all-round editor in America was Greeley, added that Bryant “is by all odds the most varied and beautiful writer.” He here touched one of Bryant’s most distinctive merits as an editor. Bryant could not argue with more force than Greeley, or with the incisiveness and point of E. L. Godkin; but when moved by a great event, he wrote with an eloquence which no other editor ever attempted. The springs that fed his poetry fed this mastery of elevated prose. Any one who will study the fine rhetorical effects of his first great poem, “Thanatopsis,” or of one of his last, “The Flood of Years,” will understand what effects he sometimes wrought in the editorial columns of the Evening Post. Opening soberly though on a high plane, his more impassioned editorials would rise to a splendid climax. He did not use his grand style too frequently, but during the Civil War he employed it again and again. Thus he wrote July 6, 1863, upon the “three glorious days” at Vicksburg and Gettysburg:
Many a gallant spirit lies silent forever on the bloody field; many peaceful homes are instantly made desolate; our hearts go forth in sorrow to the fallen and in condolence to the bereaved; but this is the eternal glory of those who have perished, as of350 those who mourn their deaths, that they have given their lives in the noblest cause in which man was ever called to suffer. They have died for a country which is worthy of the blood of its citizens; for the integrity and honor of a government in which the dearest rights of millions are involved; and for the great principles of human freedom and human justice, in which the world and ages to come are deeply interested. Nowhere else could they have earned a more glorious renown, for nowhere else could they have contributed a better service to humanity.
Again, we find him hailing the doom of the Confederacy (Dec. 5, 1864):
In the tone of that pristine rebel whom the great poet makes to exclaim, “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven,” these proud and insolent spirits disdained to brook their fate, and flew to revolt. A new slave empire, a new semi-tropical nation, a grand aristocracy of white masters, was to be built around the Gulf of Mexico, our western Mediterranean, but alas for these dreams of ambition, the throne of Maximilian casts its shadow over one end of their prospective dominion, and the tread of Sherman’s soldiers shakes the other into dust.
But the foundation of Bryant’s power as an editor lay simply in his soundness of judgment, and his unwavering courage in maintaining it. The greatest peril of the profession, he wrote in 1851, “is the strong temptation which it sets before men, to betray............