The Arlington Street Incarnation

IN celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Atlantic, its editor has graciously invited one of his predecessors — the only one, alas, now within reach of any editorial command — to write a few words of introduction. If I were to praise the present editor — whose term is by far the longest in the history of the magazine — as openly as he deserves, the editor would be certain to use his blue pencil. But he will allow, I hope, an expression of a veteran reader’s pleasure in what may be called the Arlington Street incarnation of the spirit of the Atlantic. For the magazine in its migrations from Winter Street to Tremont Street and from Tremont to Park and from Park to Arlington has managed somehow to carry with it more intangible properties than editorial and business staffs and office furniture. The more it changes, runs the comfortable French proverb, the more it remains the same thing.

Permanence in transiency! Its dwelling has ever been in the light of setting suns and of rising and falling literary and political rockets. The Autocrat hoped that the Atlantic would endure until an ideal state of society should be established. That implies, obviously, a very long voyage; and changing weather—business, social, political, artistic, and literary weather — is the permanent condition to be faced in any voyage worth making. The good ship was launched in the melancholy autumn of 1857, the ‘panic year.’ The weather was certainly thick enough. ‘It is a gloomy moment in history,’ declared an editorial in Harper’s Weekly for October 10, 1857. ‘Not for many years — not in the lifetime of most men who read this paper — has there been so much grave and deep apprehension. In our own country there is universal commercial prostration and thousands of our poorest fellow-citizens are turned out against the approaching winter without employment. In France the political caldron seethes and bubbles with uncertainty. Russia hangs like a cloud dark and silent upon the horizon of Europe; while all the energies, resources and influences of the British Empire are sorely tried and are yet to be tried more sorely, in coping with the vast and deadly Indian situation, and with disturbed relations in China. Of our own troubles no man can see the end. If we are only to lose money, and thus by painful poverty to be taught wisdom, no man need seriously despair. Yet the very haste to be rich, which is the occasion of this widespread calamity, has also tended to destroy the moral forces with which we are to resist and subdue the calamity.’

Precisely! No weather prophet of 1932 has stated the probabilities more accurately. Yet the Atlantic is still afloat, still sailing that endless voyage in quest of an ideal state of society. Editor after editor has taken his trick at the wheel. Traditions have been made, and, better still, traditions have been broken. There is no safe anchorage anywhere. ‘We only know the world is round, and we must sail forevermore.’

Doubtless there were many readers of the magazine, nearly twenty-five years ago, who felt a sentimental regret that ‘4 Park Street’ disappeared from its cover and No. 8 Arlington Street became the new home of the Atlantic. One cannot break camp, even after a single night’s lodging, without a rueful look at the extinguished fire. But making camp is a more cheerful matter and a truer test of one’s resourcefulness and energy. The director of a magazine faces conditions quite as inexorable as the necessity of finding water, wood, food, and shelter in the wilderness. He must choose his ‘line,’ purchase such manuscripts as he can sell to the public, hold his old subscribers and win new ones, secure his advertising contracts, meet his bills, and have his next number ready on the day of issue. All this is the prose side of the business, like pitching camp where wood and water are available rather than in some barren and picturesque spot where the sunsets are fine. Perhaps the highly respectable brownstone fronts of Arlington Street, facing on the Public Garden, are less picturesque than the old and somewhat inconvenient quarters in Park Street.

Yet it is to be suspected that the true theatre of operations, in this strange affair of editing, is always under the editor’s hat, and nowhere else. Mr. Sedgwick, planning his victorious campaigns amid the spacious dignities of Arlington Street; James Russell Lowell, tramping across the old Cambridge Bridge with his silk hat full of manuscripts which were disastrously blown with the hat into the Charles River; Mr. Aldrich, whose red Irish setter once devoured a sonnet in the Park Street office — ‘ How should he know it was doggerel?’ queried Aldrich; Mr. Scudder, who always began his day by reading Latin and Greek classics for half an hour, to keep his ear tuned properly for style; Mr. Page, who had specialized in Greek at Johns Hopkins, but who was most irreverently anticlassical in office hours — all these men could make camp anywhere and build a fire with a few sticks. It was what Fenimore Cooper would have called their ‘gift.’

Brilliant as the achievements of the Arlington Street period have been, it seems at present impossible to attempt any summary of the startling events and moods of the last quarter century as they have been reflected in the pages of the magazine. No one appears to know precisely whither we are going, and many readers are inclined to believe, with a recent historian, that ‘civilization has progressed so fast and furiously as to have got, for the time at least, out of control.’ Twenty-five years ago, when the Atlantic celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, it still seemed appropriate to try to balance the books of American civilization, and to record the progress made since 1857 in those fields of literature, art, science, and politics which the Atlantic had steadily cultivated. These formal summaries were entrusted to competent writers and still possess a certain historical value, particularly Woodrow Wilson’s analysis and forecast of our political tendencies. His paper is curiously interesting if read in the light of what has happened since and of what is now happening at Washington. But though Charles Eliot Norton, writing then as an old man whose memories extended over the entire period, pointed to the immense gulf that stretched between 1857 and 1907, there were other early contributors, like J. T. Trowbridge and William Dean Howells, whose papers for that anniversary number stressed the continuities in American life and literature rather than the cleavages. As these veterans recounted their delightful reminiscences, 1857 certainly seemed less remote than 1907 — the climax of the Theodore Roosevelt era — does to-day.

Hence the present anniversary number, in renouncing any formal interpretation of the significance of the last twenty-five years, shows, it seems to me, an unconventional and courageous wisdom. It simply reprints, without moralizing, some typical contributions which have given pleasure, on their first appearance, to multitudes of readers. The Autocrat’s famous account of his search for his wounded son — who is now, after seventy years, better known as Mr. Justice Holmes than as The Captain’ — represents the Olympians who contributed to the very first number. John Burroughs’s unsigned essay on ‘Expression,’ printed in 1860, was supposed at the time to be written by Emerson, as Burroughs in his old age used to point out with a chuckle of delight. Sill’s vivid personality is forgotten now, save by a few, but ‘The Fool’s Prayer’ will live a long time. Many of the remaining authors represented in this number are happily still living, or if not, like Dallas Lore Sharp and Randolph Bourne and Stuart Sherman, have left an indelible impression of vitality and of keenness of mind and phrase.

There has been no attempt in this number to traffic in those world-famous names which from time to time have appeared upon the cover of the magazine, or to reproduce articles which in their day changed the current of public opinion, though they may now seem to ‘date.’ But the breadth of interest which has increasingly characterized the Atlantic, and the variety and quality of its contributions, are assuredly revealed.

After all, how fugitive the day’s distinguished names become, and how permanent is the quality of friendliness which has marked this magazine from the beginning! It was founded by a group of intimates whose names may still be read in the prospectus of the first brown-covered number. Some of those names have quite lost their glory in the course of seventy-five years. All of them, except Melville, Emerson, and perhaps Hawthorne, are marked down to-day as inactive securities by the brisk young men who watch the ticker and assure us that American literature really began about 1906. Or was it 1917?

But to one reader, at least, those early editors and contributors still seem a living and friendly company, who created a mood that has survived all the changes from Winter Street to Arlington Street. I do not remember meeting Underwood, the real projector of the magazine, and my contacts with Fields and Lowell were limited to one or two memorable occasions; but Howells and Aldrich, Scudder and Page, all gave me their friendship. They had enjoyed their editorships and loved to talk about them. Themselves primarily men of letters, they had served as salaried employees of a famous publishing house, and when my turn came to sit for ten years in that pleasantly gilded cage I could comfort myself, in trying moments, with their experiences. Howells wrote about his, with grace and wistfulness, in the anniversary number in 1907. His Atlantic days were, I think, his happiest. ‘No one in New York ever drops in on me to talk about books,’ he told me once, ‘except Brander Matthews now and then.’ Aldrich, excessively fastidious in matters of style, did not exert himself to secure new contributors. He was often in Europe in the summers, and Miss Susan Francis, his shy and scholarly assistant, ran the magazine. It was she who, as Fields’s assistant long before, had discovered in a chance copy of the Overland Monthly Bret Harte’s ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’ and called her chief’s attention to the new author; and it was she who, when Aldrich was studying vintages in Hungary, had to delete on her own responsibility certain passages from Hardy’s Two on a Tower — then running serially — to avoid offending the decorums of that era. Scudder’s sound achievements as editor have never received the recognition they deserve. He made fewer errors, I fancy, than any editor of the Atlantic, but his hits were often credited to other players. Page, a man of widely different temperament, had assisted Scudder loyally before his own brief editorship began. He was nearly as witty as Aldrich and had a far more daring mind than Scudder. I had known him in his Forum days, but had never entered the Atlantic office until that summer day in 1899 when I walked in as the new editor. Page was sitting like a Buddha, correcting the page proofs of an elderly and revered author. ‘Old Blank is doddering,’ was Page’s cheerful greeting to his successor, ‘but you won’t be bothered by him very long.’ But Page was wrong for once. ‘Old Blank’ continued to delight the readers of the magazine for many a year.

Yet I fear I am forgetting Arlington Street in thus ‘doddering’ about the ancient friendships of Park Street. What I intended to stress, in commenting upon the present number, is its attestation of the Atlantic’s enduring and ever-broadening hospitality to writers of the most varied modes of thought and sorts of experience. Of the first nineteen names announced as future contributors in 1857, every one was that of a New Englander, and with a very few exceptions all were then domiciled in or near Boston. But already in Howells’s time, as he has written, ‘We were growing, whether we liked it or not, more and more American. Without ceasing to be Bostonian, at heart, we had become southern, midwestern and far-western in our sympathies.’ Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, as an Atlantic serial, was only one instance of this change. I recall my amazement in 1899 in discovering that there were then more subscribers in Wisconsin than in Massachusetts. Before long we were printing an entire number written by Californians. During the World War the Atlantic’s tolerant presentation of the point of view of the various European Powers became one of the outstanding achievements of American journalism, and the post-war period has proved to be an even more searching test of editorial prescience and courage.

Walter Page used to assert, long before he became an Ambassador, that the American people had no real interest in politics, but only in politics as affecting business. I do not believe that No. 8 Arlington Street would agree with this. Did not Page’s early friend Woodrow Wilson come much nearer the truth when he wrote in this magazine twenty-five years ago: ‘The Atlantic Monthly has enjoyed the great distinction of supplying the writing of conviction throughout the deep troubles and perplexities of a half-century of contest and reconstruction; it enters now upon a second half-century which is no less in need of similar tonic.’ Half of that second half-century has already gone, but certainly ‘the writing of conviction,’ as well as the writing about fascinating human experiences everywhere, has not gone out of fashion at No. 8 Arlington Street,