Union Portraits: Vii. Samuel Bowles
I
IT seems highly suitable to conclude a series of Union Portraits with a study of one of the great journalists who played so important a part during the war and the years preceding and following. Several of these men have wider reputations than Samuel Bowles, but perhaps hardly any was more singly and intensely identified with his work. Weed and Greeley had an active personal interest in politics. Dana was a valuable public servant as well as an editor. Garrison was something far different from a mere newspaper man. Bennett was confessedly a money-maker. Raymond was, indeed, a thorough journalist; and Godkin also, one of the highest type; but Godkin was, after all, not born an American, though perhaps of more use to us on that account. Then, I confess that what draws me chiefly to Bowles is that no other journalist—and few other men of his time — has left us so complete, vivid, and passionately human a record of himself.
He was a journalist who grew as his paper grew. He had little more education than that of simple New England home life. In 1844, at eighteen years of age, a country boy, he took hold of his father’s weekly country paper, the Springfield Republican, and before he died, he made it one of the most intelligent and valuable dailies in the United States, ‘the most comprehensive paper,’ declared the Nation, at the time of his death, ‘we believe it is no exaggeration to say, in the country.’ And a good authority asserted that ‘No American journal during the last ten or twenty years has been more diligently studied by editors.’
There was always, to be sure, about the paper, as about its editor, a certain spice of provincialism, or, as he would have put it, localism. But those who know the old-fashioned New England country towns will admit that their atmosphere may be far broader and less fundamentally provincial than that of larger centres. There was fifty years ago — perhaps there is to-day — some truth in this provincial editor’s jibe at the metropolis of his state: ‘Always except Boston, of course, which has no more conception of what is going on in the world than the South Sea Islanders themselves.’
Bowles’s whole life, outside of his family affections, was in his paper, and he saw the world and mankind through his paper’s eyes. Every department was always under his immediate supervision, and he interested himself as much in the advertising and business management as in the editorials.
When he began work, modern possibilities of news were just developing, and he seized upon them eagerly. In the early days he himself reported, with keen observation and that journalistic sense of what counts which is more than observation; and he was always on the lookout for capable reporters. ‘News,’ he said, ‘is the distinctive object of the Republican, to which all other things must bend.’ Some thought he was not over-particular about the news he printed or the means of obtaining it. Even his ardent biographer, Merriam, admits that he sometimes appeared to cater to an unhealthy curiosity; and the ill-natured review of Merriam in the Nation, said to be by W. P. Garrison, calls Bowles ‘a great gossip and by no means a safe confidant.’ Yet he would certainly not have subscribed without reserve to the rather generous principle of Dana: ‘I have always felt that whatever the Divine Providence permitted to occur I was not too proud to report,’ — just as Dana himself might have shrunk from some later developments of his own doctrine, though indeed the chief error of these is apt to consist in reporting what even the Divine Providence did not permit to occur.
But, however vast his appetite for news, Bowles would have been the first to recognize that the newspaper had another function besides mere reporting, — that of commenting on news and shaping public opinion in regard to it. How important this function is can best be realized by reflecting that it did not exist at all a hundred years ago, and that even now it hardly exists elsewhere as it does in America. Up to the nineteenth century the pulpit did what the newspaper now does. The minister had the leading, because he had the reading, of the community. He commented on the world’s doings in the light of the moral law, and men went away and saw God’s finger in everything. Just how far the daily and Sunday papers have undermined the influence of the pulpit, who shall say? They have certainly taken the place of it, with some gain in universal information, but with enormous moral loss. ‘This country is not priest-ridden, but press-ridden,’ said Longfellow shrewdly. With the best will in the world — and I believe such will is seldom altogether wanting — the editor has many matters to consider besides moral elevation; and even if he wishes to furnish such a thing, he is not always competent to do so. When we read the words of Bowles, ‘The church organization seems to me a failure — at least that we have outgrown it, or are fast outgrowing it,’ and think, as he no doubt thought, of the newspaper as supplying the church’s place, we should remember the weighty remark of Godkin in regard to the defects and dangers of journalism, — ‘defects and dangers which nearly every one sees but editors, and which it would be well if editors saw oftener — the recklessness, haste, indifference to finish and accuracy and abstract justice which it is apt to beget in the minds of those who pursue it, and especially of those who pursue it eagerly.’
No one would have recognized these defects in general more heartily than Bowles. But no one was more earnest in insisting upon the power of the press as guide and leader. A Republican editorial, written during the war, which we may assume to be his, proclaims, ‘With all its failings, with all its prostitutions, the press is the great reliance and safeguard in a time like this, and with a government like ours. And we believe it mainly appreciates its opportunities and responsibilities and is earnest to fulfill them.’ He, at any rate, was earnest, and he did his very best to make a paper that should bring him an honest livelihood and should at the same time be a great and inspiring influence in public affairs, should consider the public good only, should be conservat ive with the radicals and progressive with the conservatives, should regard principles and not parties, measures and not men, and should follow truth without the slightest care for a merely formal consistency.
This is a high ideal for a newspaper or anything else in this imperfect world; and it is needless to say that the Republican, having an editor who was thoroughly human, did not always live up to it. It is a fine thing to avoid extremes, but in doing so you are sure to become obnoxious to all extremists. Hence the Republican, in its thirty years’ development during Bowles’s life, got plenty of shrewd knocks from all parties in succession. It is a fine thing to be independent. Unfortunately complete independence is impossible. There are so many cross twists and conflicting considerations to be taken into account, that at times independence may be taken for discretion; and Garrison could even go so far as to say of his able competitor that as a politician ‘he was essentially timid and timeserving.' Again, it is a fine thing to scorn consistency. Emerson did, and why should not Sam Bowles? ‘ It is no trouble at all to me,’ he says, ‘that the paper contradicts itself. My business is to tell what seems to me the truth and the news to-day. It’s a daily journal. I am not to live to be as old as Methuselah, and brood in silence over a thing till, just before I die, I think I have it right.’ The excuse is fascinating certainly, but the practice is likely to have its difficulties.
These difficulties showed in nothing more than in the Republican’s — and its editor’s — delusions as to men. One hero after another — Banks, Dawes, Colfax, Greeley, not to mention others — was set up and urged upon the public, till Time stowed them all neatly away in that vast wallet which contains his tribute to oblivion. Andrew, wrote Bowles, in 1861, ‘is conceited, dogmatic, and lacks breadth and tact for government’; Lincoln ‘ is a “simple Susan.” ’ These are things that a man — or a newspaper — would rather not have said.
II
But such criticisms do not alter the fact t hat during all those trying, bitter, passionate years the Republican stood earnestly for the best, the highest things, and was in every way and at every point alive. If it was so, it was because Samuel Bowles was as thoroughly alive as any man who ever put pen to paper to describe the doings and sufferings of this intricate world. He had his faults and weaknesses; but sloth and inertia and indifference were not among them.
All his life, the man’s whole soul, are reflected in the letters contained in his biography, which are much more significant than his formal books of travel, or even his editorials. It is a great pity that his correspondence has not been collected and published separately, for in my judgment no more telling, varied, human letters have been written upon this side of the Atlantic.
Dead letters do not mean dead souls. There are souls touched with the keenest intensity of living that either cannot or will not reveal themselves in correspondence with even their most intimate friends. Take as an instance the letters of Matthew Arnold. Here assuredly was a man of the widest thought and the subtlest spiritual experience. Yet he writes almost wholly of practical affairs, in a dull conventional strain, which has no claims to attention except those of undeniable simplicity and sincerity. But letters alive as those of Bowles must certainly ind icate a burning heart behind them. Take the verve of a scrap from one of the earlier. ‘Croak, croak, croak! Why the devil can’t Berkshire do something besides? Let those who are right go to work.’ Nor is it in any way a matter of mere slang or expletives. These fly freely when they add force or color, but there is plenty of force and color without them. There is grace and sparkle in the adjectives; there is delicate suggestion in the sweep of the phrases; there is, above all, the cunning, instinctive use of rhythm to charm, to spur, to stimulate, which is perhaps the most effective instrument of the great prose writer. ‘I should chiefly regret Aiken of this lot. I have imbibed a good deal of respect for that man. Ben Butler says he is an exaggeration of the stage Yankee; but he is fresh and hearty, and keen and human, and says civil things about me— and of course I like him.’ When letters run on like that, through two stout volumes, we are bound to learn something of the man that writes them.
First, he was a man of the deepest, tenderest affection and devotion. He married very young a girl who was very young, and their attachment through early years of struggle and later years of illness is charming to study and appreciate. They had ten children, which naturally means care, especially for a worker of limited means and nervous temperament. The difference of sex gleams vividly in the father’s casual remark concerning the death of one of these children at birth: ‘She [Mrs. Bowles] feels her loss terribly. Though a disappointment, it is a small matter to me, only as it affects her.’
Yet the most watchful care and solicitude for both mother and children are everywhere apparent, a care that was duly and lovingly returned. The husband’s full appreciation of all he received shows in this passage, referring to a journey proposed for his benefit: ‘Of course Mrs. Bowles is always ready to say go; you know she would give up any gratification, or endure any suffering, to give me a pleasure, or get me out of the way of a half-day of work. But that does n’t make it always right that I should take her at her word — by no means.’ While his constant anxiety for the welfare of the woman he adored appears characteristically and delightfully in a letter laying down a minute programme of what she should do for her health every hour in the day: the meals, the air, the exercise, the society. ‘Have somebody come to see you every day. Read newspapers more. Read light books more. Study things that make for fun and peace.’ And we know, and he knew, that nobody ever obeys such injunctions. But to give them eases the tired heart of love in solitude. As for his children, his care of them was guided by this exquisite precept, which would save a world of woe if it were written on every parent’s heart: ‘It is not much that I can do for my children, but I never want to lose sight of myself at their ages — then the little I do can be done more intelligently.’
Nor was his family affection all care and solicitude. As to his children, listen to this pretty rapture on one of the ten in infancy: ‘He is practicing on Yes and Mamma; but all his efforts at the latter melt sweetly into Papa — so ravishingly.' And the following delicate discriminat ion proves the thoughtful study of enduring tenderness: ‘We are all pretty well; Ruth is a breeze from the northwest, and Dwight from the south, all the while; Bessie is daint y and shy and quiet and strange, and Charlie enterprising beyond his power.’
As for the depth of conjugal devotion, it is shown so profoundly and so searchingly all through the book, that passages are difficult to choose. I select one not addressed to Mrs. Bowles, that, underneath its general analysis of emotion, implies personal experience of the deepest and most intimate character. ‘You must give if you expect to receive — give happiness, friendship, love, joy, and you will find them floating back to you. Sometimes you will give more than you receive. We all do that in some of our relations, but it is as true a pleasure often to give without return as life can afford us. We must not make bargains with the heart, as we would with the butcher for his meat. Our business is to give what we have to give— what we can get to give. The return we have nothing to do with. It will all come in due time — in this world or another.’
As these words indicate, Bowles’s sympathy and tenderness extended far beyond the family circle. Indeed they were as wide as the world. He has observation just as subtle and delicate on unselfishness and sacrifice as on positive affection. ‘We, fortunately, know our failures, and, alas, how well we know them. And yet, out of our very selfishness, out of our very neglect, God buildeth us up; so that what we do perform for kindred and friends takes on larger power and gives deeper bliss than if in a narrow way we had given more hours and thought and service to the beloved. It is a shadowy, tender line between service to ourselves and service to others.’
It is true that this is a newspaper man, who looked at life from the journalistic angle, which is not always strictly humanitarian. To be sure, even as an editor his keen, delightful sympathies often warm his impersonal comment, as when he writes of a deceased celebrity, ‘Years and invalid experience have unlocked for us some of the mysteries of his life; we know him better lately without seeing him at all.' But it is also said that his zeal for news sometimes led to disastrous revelations, as when he stopped prize-fighting in Springfield by printing the names of respected citizens who had patronized it; while in other cases his methods were less justified by results.
In private life Bowles’s kindness was by no means confined to theory or sentiment. There is clear record of many deeds of broad generosity and covert indication of many more. Perhaps the most touching is recorded in the last words written by him to his wife, before sailing for Europe in search of health, when money was none too abundant and other prospects were dreary enough: ‘—— has just come to say good-bye. He will write you. He accepts our offer. I am very glad of it. Now send him and —— the money regularly, and tell nobody.’
There are little kindnesses, little matters of thoughtfulness, which often mean more than money, and certainly endear more. In these Bowles was admirably proficient, because he had the instinct for them. And there is no occasion when such kindnesses are more needed, more appreciated, and more difficult than during travel. General Walker, an admirable judge, who was with Bowles for some months in England, testifies to his exceptional qualities in this direction. He was always thoughtful of others, enjoyed every minute of their pleasures, and was much more anxious to discover what his young companions wished to see, than to see anything himself.
In short, he was an eminent ly social being. This is evident from the first page of his biography to the last. It is true that he had his times of reserve and repression, times when he did not seem to welcome even friends. Such times must come to every man who lives a busy, eager, crowded inner life. ‘Why,’ he said to one of his acquaintances, ‘why don’t people clap me on the shoulder, with a “How are you, old fellow?” as they do you?’ ‘Because,’ was the answer, ‘you go along with a look that says, “ Keep away from me, d—n you!” ’ But the very pathos of the query shows a longing for human contact and fellowship and intimacy, and this pathetic longing is especially apparent in Bowles’s exclamations of solitude and loneliness when he is traveling and among strangers. Busy as his thoughts were, they did not give him sufficient companionship. If he had a delightful experience, he wanted a friend to share it. If he had a bitter experience, he wanted a friend to take away the sting.
This intense human interest undoubtedly served him well in the business of his life. Nobody profits more by human contact than the journalist. To Bowles the wide world was, in a sense, fodder for his paper. He talked with men of all types and occupations, gathered ideas from the professor and the mechanic, from the farmer and the lawyer, from the fine lady and the ditchdigger in t he street. He carried to perfection the delicate art of listening, and knew how to make his own speech serve to elicit the speech and the inmost thought of others.
At the same time, in doing this he was no hypocrite, did not seek men’s company with any cold design of betraying their confidence, did not scoff at or deride them. If he mingled freely and widely with his fellows, it was first of all because he loved to do so, loved the touch of the human hand and the sound of the human voice. It was this spontaneous and constant humanity which made his presence so widely sought in all societies. Senator Dawes wrote, after Bowles’s death, ‘ I never knew a man who knew him who would n’t rather have him at his table than any other man in the world.
Even in illness and decay, when most of us prefer to brood alone over disappointment and failure, this same charming social instinct found utterance in one of those delightful passages which are in themselves complete lyric poems. ‘I was sure you would have a pleasant summer with the Haskells. They are dreadful good fellows, both of them. But I could n’t have kept up with your gait. I am the chap for “the bank where the wild thyme grows,” with one other fellow, male or female, lying in the sunshine, picking flowers to pieces, and discoursing on the frivolity of things we cannot do.’
The distinction, or indistinction, of sex in this passage is characteristic; for among Bowles’s multitude of friends there were many women. His relations with them seem to have been wholly intellectual, and I see no reason to suppose that Mrs. Bowles had ever any cause for jealousy. But his quick, light, active spirit naturally responded to a woman’s gayety and sensitiveness, and he sought them, wanted them, missed them. At Baden-Baden he writes, ‘There are no women to chaff with, and to rub your mind out of its morbidity.’ None of his letters are more varied, more charming, more full of fresh and vivid interest than those he writes to Miss Whitney. At one moment he laughs with her over some trifle, some new fashion or folly, at the next he is discussing the future of democracy or the welfare of his soul.
It appears that with women he was always perfectly easy and natural; that he did not stand in awe of them or regard them as in any way different. Says one lady of his visits, ‘He used to come in for a few moments, on his way back and forth between his home and his office, and would perhaps sit with both legs hanging over the arm of a chair, his hat low down over his eyes, and talk sarse, as he called it.’ Also, he did not abstain from that affectionate criticism which one sex always feels privileged to bestow upon the other. ‘Women are fascinating creatures; yet it is treading upon eggs all the time to deal with them.’ And again, in his extraordinarily careless, vivid fashion, ‘Traveling with women sops up one’s time awfully.’
But we have the testimony of the most intelligent men and women both, that this ease and occasional apparent flippancy did not spring from indifference or contempt. ‘I hardly ever saw any one give just the sort of recognition to a woman that he did,’ says one male friend, ‘treating her as an intellectual equal, yet with a kind of chivalrous deference, suggested rather than expressed.’ And a woman has rarely paid finer tribute to a man than has Miss Brackett to him: ’Of all the men I have ever known, he was the only one who never made a woman feel as if he were condescending in thought or word when he talked to her.’
III
I have not meant to emphasize Bowles’s social qualities at the expense of his intellectual, for it is the latter that make him most interesting now and that account for most of his achievement, though here also the social did its part. He was not a profound or elaborate thinker on abstract questions, did not pretend to be. In all matters of practical morals and the conduct of life he had very energetic and decided opinions and proclaimed them in his letters and in his paper, perhaps not always logically or consistently, but always with a manifest intention of promoting the good in the world. He liked to preach and believed that he did it better than a good many parsons, in which he was certainly right. ‘Nor do I see any other line of influence or noble effort in this world except in behalf of ideals.’ What could be more touching or more significant of a life passed with high aims than his last words to Dawes, ‘ Drop on your knees, Dawes, and thank God that you have done a little good in the world, and ask his forgiveness that you have done no more.’
Also, as time served, he liked to wrestle with great spiritual problems. ‘Without philosophy,’ he wrote, ’there is vastly little of life but a passion and a struggle.’ The long letter written to Miss Whitney in January, 1862, is an intensely curious analysis of religious and speculative theories, the earnest effort of a mind not schooled by abstract thought to disentangle the complex web of human longing and passion and despair. Of almost equal interest is the letter to Mrs. Bowles expressing a humble desire to conform to her religious observances, even when he could not himself wholly enter into them.
Yet the attitude generally is one of groping, not a sad or morbid groping, but a willingness to leave to God the things that are God’s, while working day and night at the task which God has set us to be done in this world. The whole nature of the man leaps out in one of those splendid phrases that he had the secret of coining: ‘It is comforting to people with free and vagrant heads to feel that there is a Christianity back of and without Christ, and to which he seems rather interpreter and disciple than founder.’ (The italics are mine.)
A free and vagrant head! That is what gives Bowles much of his charm, and he himself prized that freedom far above what any conventional education could have afforded him. For he had no academic discipline, and very little of school; he got what learning he possessed from the touch of human heads and hearts and the careful contemplation of his own. ‘His lack of early training was never compensated by self-culture or wise reflection,’ says Garrison, scornfully. This is far too severe. At the same time, it is curious to consider that a man who was all his life a guide to the public through written words should have been so little conversant with the written words of others. Bowles’s reading was mainly newspapers; and newspapers, though good seasoning, are not very substantial diet for the intellect.
Bowles himself was keenly aware of his deficiencies. Indeed, as regards style and literary quality, he was far too humble. ‘The book made itself,’ he says of one of his volumes of travel; ‘it is a newspaper book; I am a newspaper writer, and not a book writer; and I do not aspire to be other than I am.’ Again: ‘I was afraid you would think it [an editorial] a little overwrought, and not low-toned enough for the subject. That is where I always err in my work; it gives it something of its power and charm with the mass of readers; it loses for it something of the impression on the select and superior few.’ And as he criticized his own writing, so he often lamented his lack of leisurely reading, of wide contact with the best thought and experience of humanity. When he traveled in Europe, art meant little to him, historical association meant little to him. He sighs for time and strength to t hink, to adjust himself to the larger current, of the world, to get out of the mad, exhausting whirl of news, mere news, which makes the passing passions of the hour seem out of all proportion to the permanent interests of life. Yet even in these longings, books, the distillation of human activity, do not take first place. ‘ I would roam about the world, studying books some, nature a good deal, and people and institutions more.’
For the man was above all a worker and liver. It was just the ‘ free and vagrant head’ that made his life so joyously abundant and his paper so forcible. His intelligence may not have been profound, but it was splendid in its vigor, its energy, its variety, its speed. How direct and frank it was, profiting by its very self-training to brush away old convention and the dry bones of formal futility! Has he to congratulate a friend on a congressional victory? ‘It is not statesmanship, and you know it. But it is all of statesmanship, I frankly admit, that the present Congress is up to.’ Do fools torment him with old saws about dead reputations? ‘I hate the “Nil de mortuis,” etc. What do men die for, except that posterity may impartially judge, and get the full benefit of their example? ’
So in his business. He wanted no shirkers, no drivelers, no fuss, no makebelieve. He exacted work — faithful, earnest, driving work. He was in a sense a severe task-master, having sharp reproof at his command, when necessary, — not in stormy verbosity, but in just the word or two that find a joint and put a barb in it. He insisted upon exactness, nicety, finish, and set a high standard of mechanical production in days when there were fewer facilities than at present.
But he knew how to make work easy, so far as it ever can be. His office was systematized. Each man had his task, was taught how and when to do it and by whom it was to be controlled and criticized when done. And if the chief could reprove, he could also encourage. Sharp words were lightened by a touch of the quick, sympathetic humor that was natural to him. Words of praise were rare, but they meant something when they came, and power of achievement in any special line was quickly discerned and energetically supported.
Moreover, work was urged on by the most powerful stimulus of all, example. This was no man to set wheels a-going and then watch them whirl at his leisure. From his journeyman days to the last minute when work was possible, and longer, he labored with all that was in him. ‘What with forty-two hours’ continuous work Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, without sleep, and getting over it, I had not time to write to you,’is one of his casual, significant comments. Work was his life, writes one who knew him intimately. We have seen the depth of his domestic affection. Yet in a sense it would be just to say that for thirty years the Springfield Republican was wife and child and food and sleep to him. It certainly robbed him of any complete enjoyment of all these things, though it also made his enjoyment of them keener. Even his recreation had usually storm and fury in it. He liked a horse, but he cared nothing for looks or pedigree. What he wanted was speed. An acquaintance, who had studied this phase, said of him, ‘He was fonder of reckless driving than any man I ever knew.’ Then, though rarely, he would relax and drop into absolute quiescence. As he lay one afternoon on the piazza, with the apple-blossoms blowing over him, he murmured, ‘This, I guess, is as near heaven as we shall ever get in this life.’
For, as you see, he was a mere bundle of nerves, the quintessence of our sunand wind-driven New England temperament, whose life is work, whose death is work, whose heaven is work, whatsoever other heaven we may dream of. You can read it written on his spare, energetic figure, on his sensitive, strained, wistful forehead; above all, in his intense and eager eyes. It was the quick, responsive nerves that enabled him to do the work he did, that gave him passionate joys and passionate sorrows. Even when the nerves are disordered and tormenting, he recognizes their value with wonderfully subtle analysis. ‘There is a certain illumination with the disorder that is enchanting at times.’ He is determined that they shall be his servants, not his masters. Now he lays whip and spur to them, forces them to do and overdo, till a set task is accomplished. Again he restrains them, lives by rule and system, makes schedules of food, schedules of hours. These exuberant sensibilities are splendid things, so you control them. ‘Sympathies and passions are greater elements of power than he admits. All they want is to have judgment equal to and directing them. No matter how powerful, how acute they are — the more so the better. But sympathies and passions that run away with us are oftener a curse than a blessing.’ He thinks he has controlled them, declares he has. ‘You must remember I have necessarily schooled myself to coolness and philosophy, and to the look ahead. Otherwise my life would have killed me years ago.’
But such control, especially when carried beyond the normal, is a wearing, exhausting process, and is sure in the end to bring a penalty. Bowles, with his ‘look ahead,’ knew this perfectly well and faced it always. When a friend warned him of what was inevitably coming, he answered with these striking words: ‘I know it just as well as you do. When my friends point out that I am working toward a breakdown, they seem to think that is to influence my action. Not at all! I have got the lines drawn, the current flowing, and by throwing my weight here now, I can count for something. If I make a long break or parenthesis, to get strong, I shall lose my chance. No man is living a life that is worth living, unless he is willing to die for somebody or something, — at least to die a little!’
Admirable words, and perhaps wise, though not for all, nor at all times. Dying a little is not always conveniently managed at discretion, nor even dying a great deal. And Bowles’s disregard and positive abuse of his nerves not only killed him at fifty-two, but caused him and all who loved him infinite distress and misery before that time. He perfectly understood the cause of his troubles. ‘My will has carried me for years beyond my mental and physical power; that has been the offending rock.’ Again, ‘Nobody knows how I have abused my brain but myself, and I therefore ought to be the most patient with its maladies.’
But to know the cause and to find the cure are far, far different. Therefore, from a very early stage, his life was made up alternately of extravagant effort at home to do more than he or any one man could do, and then of forced change and travel to procure that renovation which could come only — or at any rate could come far better — from within by the acquired habit of repose.
Repose, peace, and the tranquil sleep that should go with them these were the remedies, the blessings that Bowles sought far and wide, up and down, for thirty years. He told Mr. Howells in Venice that he was sleeping only one hour out of the twenty-four. Sometimes he slept more than that, but he never slept enough. Modern medical methods might have helped him a little. The advice he had was well meant, but now sounds strange. ‘ Kill a horse, and it will do you good.’ He might have killed a dozen horses, but black care would none the less have buzzed and snarled about his ears.
Peace! Peace! Not Clarendon’s Falkland could more longingly ingeminate the word. Perhaps Bowles knew so little about it that he overestimated its blessings. ‘I never saw in his face,’ said a friend, ‘ the expression of repose — the look was always of fire or tire.’ But even Clarendon wrote few things more striking than this paragraph on peace in heaven, though the quality is not Clarendon’s. ‘I wonder whether we shall have such weather in heaven! whether or no we go — whether or no such weather. But if the world lives much longer it will have abolished all these whims of its youth. The Unitarians came, and abolished hell; Parker came, Higginson stays, to abolish Christ; the next conceited set of upstarts to invent a new elixir of life, out of gin and juniper berries, will probably supersede heaven, or bring it down to earth. But that is what the rest of us dream of doing — but it can’t be done so long as nerves thrill and stomachs labor. No elixir of love, or gin, can make heaven, with neuralgia playing on the fiddles of the orchestra, and dyspepsia groaning through the grim trombone. Give it up. I think I will stick to the original heaven as a thing more sure.’
Nerves so thoroughly and constantly jangled could not fail to produce some unfortunate results in practical life. However perfect the control, there was irritability that would break out at times. Bowles often refers to being thoroughly cross and out of sorts, sometimes in a mood of discouragement, sometimes with his whimsical grace and fancy. Others refer to it also. In his home, with those he cherished, breaks of temper seem to have been rare; but in his office, though he was much admired and much beloved, he was regarded with a good deal of awe.
And the jangled nerves brought hours of depression and temporary hopelessness. He sometimes refers to these, expressing them with his really wonderful gift of telling phraseology. ‘I did not mount my great heights of abandon; perhaps it is better described in your own sad words as a “wise despair.”’ Take, again, this passage of extraordinary self-analysis, written to Mrs. Bowles, and doubly striking from a man so schooled by persistent discipline to courage and hope. ‘Mary, don’t let my fretful, downcast moods annoy you. They are unworthy of me and I ought to rise above them, and control them. But sometimes they master and overpower me. I want to give it all up sometimes. Nobody can understand the spell that is upon me. It cannot be described — it does n’t seem as if anybody else can ever feel it. Consider me if you can as a little child, sick and peevish, wanting love and indulgence and petting and rest and peace. There, this ought not to have been written. But it can’t be unwritten, and it is too late to write anything else. It is morbid; but there’s truth, sometimes the clearest, in our morbid reflections. Health is too often independence, selfish philosophy, and indifference.’
Also, worn nerves bring not only general depression and discouragement, but a bitter sense of tasks unaccomplished and vast hopes unrealized. This impression of failure or of uncompleted effort was most keenly felt by Bowles. He was a man with more than the common human passion for success. He could not bear to have other men defeat him. He could not bear to have chance or cross-accident defeat him. To have his own nerves defeat him was humiliation hardly to be described. He loved power, he loved domination, he loved mastery. No one appreciated more broadly then he the immense power that is given to the modern newspaper, and it was for this reason, more than for any other, that he loved newspaper work. In his own office he was absolute master; not a tyrant certainly, but in a quiet, determined, final fashion the one sole authority on little and great affairs.
In this love of power lay unquestionably Bowles’s weakness. The most marked failure of his life was his attempt to transfer his activity from the Republican to the Boston Traveler, in 1857. Various explanations were sought for this. Various elements no doubt entered into it. But a considerable element was the man’s own autocratic and imperious disposition. Garrison’s theory that he undertook the task ‘with a bumptiousness that at once made him the laughing-stock of his esteemed contemporaries’ is much too harsh, but it suggests substantial truth, nevertheless.
So, in the conduct of his own paper, he was too inclined to assert his personal views and feelings, for the pure pleasure of it. Independence in politics and religion is a difficult and dangerous path to follow, and an editor in absolute control is apt to mistake whim for pure reason and the rejection of others’ judgment for the assertion of his own. If I quote Garrison’s Nation review yet again, it is because there is a certain malicious pleasure in watching the editors of these two great journals, whose work was in some ways similar, criticize each other as they criticized all the rest of the world. Garrison, then, says, ‘The sort of independence which Mr. Bowles gradually achieved consisted in making a fetich of his journal’; and he again characterizes Bowles’s effort as ‘the evasion of personal responsibility under the guise of a highly virtuous independence.’ When the critic of the Nation penned this and the other amenities I have before cited, he had just had before his eyes the following from one of Bowles’s letters: ‘The Nation has become a permanent and proud addition to American journalism. Often conceited and priggish; coldly critical to a degree sometimes amusing, and often provoking; and singularly lacking, not only in a generous enthusiasm of its own but in any sympathy with that great American quality, by which alone we as a people are led on to our efforts and our triumphs in the whole arena of progress; the paper yet shows such vigor and integrity of thought, such moral independence of party, such elevation of tone, and such wide culture, as to demand our great respect and secure our hearty praise.’
But if Bowles’s criticism had some justice in it, so also had Garrison’s. Bowles’s own biographer admits that he was too ready to sacrifice friendship to what he considered duty, and that he freely found fault in his paper with those whom he loved and by whom he wished to be loved in private life. And have we not Bowles’s own personal testimony on the subject, none the less forcible for being half jocose? ‘I mean to be as loyal as possible, and that is n’t very loyal, for you know I do love to find fault and grumble, and thank God I can afford to.’ But who of us can really afford to grumble and find fault?
Yet what finer witness can there be to character than the great love that surrounded this man, in spite of his fault-finding? Those whom he attacked publicly resented it for a while, but once they met him they forgot it. He had the art of making men forget everything except his charm. All his life he fought Ben Butler. Yet whenever they met, they swapped jokes and stories. When Bowles was on his deathbed, he received from Butler a letter of sympathy and good wishes, and almost his last words were, ‘Write to thank General Butler, and say that while Mr. Bowles has always differed from him in politics, he has never failed to recognize his high qualities, and to appreciate his many personal attractions.’ Senator Dawes suffered repeatedly from the strictures of the Republican; yet he declared that he loved its editor more than any one outside of his own family. A member of the editorial staff, who had been a witness of many sharp rebuffs, confesses, ‘I almost worshiped him. There was more religion in my feeling toward him than in almost anything else in me.’ But most touching of all is the exclamation commonly heard among his humble neighbors in the city of Springfield, ‘I am so sorry Sam Bowles is going to die.’
He was a striking and most sympathetic type of the journalist, and the journalist is interesting because he came into the world only a hundred years ago and seems likely to play an increasingly great part in it. Certainly no one who has followed our own Civil War in the newspapers can fail to feel the singular and important position they then occupied. If the war itself is to be regarded as a great tragic drama, the newspapers almost precisely perform the function of the Greek tragic chorus. They comment abstractly, yet with trembling eagerness, upon the conduct and motives of the actors; they intervene often indiscreetly and with doubly tragic consequence; they prophesy with pathetic or ludicrous incapacity of vision; above all they reflect from moment to moment, like a sensitized surface, the long, unwieldy, enormous ebb and flow of events and passions and desires of which no man can really divine the end.