The Sunny Side of the Street

When you say “journalist” to a man of my profession—or of any other that devotes its time and wits to the task of amusing and entertaining people, it is taken for granted that you mean “critic,” and that “critic” in turn means faultfinder. This is extremely unfair to journalists in general and to critics in particular, for not all journalists are critics, nor all critics faultfinders. Run over the names of all the critics you’ve heard of here or in London or Paris—critics, dramatic, musical and literary, and you will discover, to your surprise, that those who are best known and have most influence, are those who are quickest to praise and slowest to find fault.

As a proof of it, and how it strikes the men and women most concerned, both in pocket and pride, is the following:—almost every new play, concert and entertainment of any kind tries to give its first real performance in New York. It may endeavor to get some money out of the later rehearsals by giving a few performances out of town:—“Trying it on the dog” is the name for this sort of thing, but New York is trusted to set the pace, and this is what follows;—on the day on which New York newspapers containing a report of the performance reaches any city or town where the same attraction has been booked conditionally, or where managers or entertainment committees have heard enough in advance about it to want to hear more, there is a run on news-stands for certain New York papers. I won’t indicate them closer than to say that they are not those sheets which support the brilliant chaps who skilfully ride hobbies of their own, or who are most skilled at vivisecting and eviscerating a playwright and splitting each particular hair of an actor, singer or entertainer. The papers for which there is general demand are those which tell whether the performance was good of its kind, specify the kind and tell how the audience regarded it. At the end of the third act of a new play in New York a noted critic was buttonholed in the lobby by a club-man who had a friend in the cast and asked for his opinion.

“It’s a success—a great success,” was the reply.

“Good! I’m so glad you like it.”

“Like it? My dear fellow, I never was worse bored in my life. I’d rather have heard ‘Julius Cæsar’ done by a lot of high school boys. But that has nothing to do with it. If pieces were written and played for me and my kind, they’d have to charge ten dollars a ticket to get money enough to pay for the gas and music. Plays are made for audiences; this audience likes this play—likes it immensely, so other audiences will like it too, and if I don’t say so in our newspaper to-morrow morning I deserve to be bounced and have this week’s salary docked.”

Of course it is a critic’s business to see defects and call attention to them. When he does so he confers a favor upon the performer, who generally is so absorbed in what he is doing that he doesn’t know what he is leaving undone or doing badly. But the faults of stage or platform can’t be remedied with a sledge-hammer or a double bladed dagger—not ever if you give the dagger a turn or two after you have jabbed it in. A prominent critic said to me:

“I don’t criticise a play according to my own feelings and tastes. Although I’ve a very good opinion of my own personal standard of judgment, I don’t believe the people collectively would give a snap of the finger for it. I simply try to ascertain the opinion of the audience and express it for the benefit of the people of whom audiences are made. I greatly dislike — and — (mentioning a popular actor and actress) but who cares? It would not be fair to try to impress my dislikes upon others, unless I chance upon some one who takes the stage seriously, and there are only two classes who do this—conceited critics, and actors who don’t get their pay. Fortunately I know very few professional people; if I knew more I would become insane through trying to dissociate their personality from their work. It is bad to know too much about anybody or anything, if you don’t want to throw the world out of joint. Except in matters of morals and manners, ‘where ignorance is bliss ’tis folly to be wise.’ Did you ever hear how Horace Greeley once got cold feet? A friend—one of the wise, observant, upsetting kind of friends called on Greeley, one cold winter day, and found the great journalist with a favorite book in his hand, a beatific smile on his face and his feet over the register. The visitor had previously been through the building and learned that the furnace had gone wrong and been removed, the cold air flue could not be closed, and zero air was coming through all the registers, so he said:

“‘Mr. Greeley, why do you keep your feet there? There is no heat—only cold air is coming up!’

“Greeley tumbled out of his chair and in the childish whine that always came to him when he was excited, replied,

“‘Why didn’t you let me alone? I was entirely comfortable; but now, I’m near you, I’m frozen.’”

Mention of Greeley, who was too busy a man to think of being a humorist, yet was one in spite of himself, recalls one of Mr. Depew’s stories about him. A man who was in search of financial aid for some evangelistic work got into Mr. Greeley’s sanctum one day, and found the great editor writing, with his head held sideways and close to the desk, like a schoolboy, as was his custom. He waved his hand, to signify that the man should go away, but Greeley had the reputation of being an easy-mark, financially, and the visitor’s mind was fixed on business, so he asked,

“Mr. Greeley, how much will you give to prevent your fellow men from going to hell?”

“Not a damn cent!” was the reply, as the great editor went on writing. “Not enough of them go there now. I could name hundreds who ought to have been there long ago——” all this in a whining drawl that carried conviction with it.

Speaking of drawls, I wish all my readers could have heard Mark Twain’s voice as he told me a tale of juvenile woe. I had asked him if he could remember the first money he had ever earned.

“Yes,” he said. “It was at school. All boys had the habit of going to school in those days, and they hadn’t any more respect for the desks than they had for the teachers. There was a rule in our school that any boy marring his desk, either with pencil or knife, would be chastised publicly before the whole school or pay a fine of five dollars. Besides the rule there was a ruler; I knew it because I had felt it; it was a darned hard one, too.

“One day I had to tell my father that I had broken the rule, and had to pay a fine or take a public whipping, and he said:

“‘Sam, it would be too bad to have the name of Clemens disgraced before the whole school, so I’ll pay the fine. But I don’t want you to lose anything, so come up-stairs.’ I went up-stairs with father and he was for-giving me. I came down-stairs with the feeling in one hand and the five dollars in the other, and decided that as I’d been punished once, and got used to it, I wouldn’t mind taking the other licking at school. So I did, and I kept the five dollars. That was the first money I ever earned.”

This unexpected shift of the moral point of view is peculiar to boys. James Whitcomb Riley, author of no end of things, humorous and pathetic, told me of a small boy who astonished his mother one night by saying his prayers in German. When reproved, he said:

“Oh, that was a joke.”

“You must not joke with heaven,” said his mother severely.

“Oh, the joke isn’t on heaven; it’s on you,” was the reply.

Another small friend of Mr. Riley jumped quickly into bed one cold night. His mother said:

“Johnny, haven’t you forgotten something?”

“No, mamma,” was the reply. “I’ve made up my mind not to say my prayers to-night or to-morrow night or the night after, and then if I have luck I won’t say them any more at all.”

My friend Frank Doubleday, a member of a publishing firm that all authors regard admiringly, would rather get a laugh on some one than get a record-breaking novel. He is a fine, tall, handsome fellow and like many another handsome man who is really manly, he is careless of his dress, looking more like a busy farmer than a successful publisher. Going through Greenwich Street one day, near the ferries and steamboat landings, his rural appearance and manner attracted the attention of one of the “bunco” or “green goods” gentry, who accosted him with:

“Why, Mr. Brown, I’m very glad to see you.”

“But my name isn’t Brown,” said Doubleday, in his most innocent manner.

“What? Aren’t you Mr. Brown, of Paterson?”

“No, my name is Marshall P. Wilder.”

“Oh, you go to h—ll!” growled the bunco-man with a glare.

To get back to journalists, with whom I began, I believe I have said elsewhere that Henry Watterson is the most quoted editor in the United States. Yet a lot of his best things do not appear over his signature; he says so many that only a phonograph could keep tally of them. One evening at the Riggs House in Washington he found his friend Col. Dick Wintersmith, the poet lobbyist, in a gastronomic quandary, for the colonel longed for a dinner of beefsteak and onions but dreaded to carry the perfume of onions in his breath. Watterson said:

“Colonel Dick, I’ll tell you how to avoid it.”

“Do!”

“Why, go to John Chamberlin’s for your beefsteak and onions; when you get your bill it will take your breath entirely away.”

Opie Reid, editor and author, frequently appears on the platform, to the delight of every one who listens to him. One night he was greatly puzzled, for although his audience laughed heartily no one applauded. He learned afterward that he had been engaged to entertain the inmates of a home for disabled railway employees, and his audience was composed of switchmen, each of whom had lost an arm, perhaps two. He got a laugh even on one of the dreadful eating-houses peculiar to southern railroad stations. Most of his fellow passengers were commercial travelers, and knew by experience what to expect at such places, so they got off of the train with sullen looks, as if sorry rather than glad that they were to dine, and their complainings began before they reached the table. A negro was walking to and fro on the station platform ringing a dinner-bell, and near him was a small dog howling so piteously that the darky stopped and exclaimed:

“What’s you hollerin’ for? You don’t have to eat here.”

My friend Quimby of the Detroit Free Press tells of “meeting up” with two strangers who became so friendly that soon the three were introducing themselves.

“I’m from Detroit,” said Quimby to one. “Where are you from?”

“Boston,” was the reply. The Bostonian turned enquiringly to the third, who said:

“I’m from Pawtucket. Now, d—mn you, laugh!”

I am indebted to hundreds of critics and other journalists for kind things they have printed about me. As to authors, one of them saved my life a few years ago, and this is how it occurred:—I had rooms in Thirty-fourth Street, in New York, next door to the late Laurence Hutton, author of many well-known books. One night, on returning home very late, I discovered that I had neglected to take my keys, so I was practically locked out. I rang the bell, but no one responded. Suddenly I noted that lights were still burning in Mr. Hutton’s house, and I recalled that he had given a dinner that night to Mr. Edwin Booth, the tragedian. Hutton was the most obliging neighbor any one could have had, so I rang him up, told him of my trouble, and asked permission to go into his yard and climb the division fence, after which I would get into my own house through a rear window.

“All right, Marshall,” Hutton replied, “and I’ll go with you, and help you over the fence.”

My only fear was of a lodger in my own house—a nervous man, apprehensive of burglars, and who kept revolvers and a quick temper ready for use at any moment he might be aroused. I said as much to Mr. Hutton, and the affair immediately changed from a neighborly courtesy to an adventure with a spice of danger to make it more attractive. Mr. Booth who had overheard the conversation, announced that he wasn’t to be left out of any fun in sight, so we three crept silently into Hutton’s back yard like three burglars, or more like three schoolboys out for mischief. Finding that he could not lift me over, as he had intended, Hutton got a chair, stood upon it and helped me to the top of the fence, which was high. Even there I was no better off, for the fence was as tall as I was not, so like Mohammed’s coffin I was poised between heaven and earth and unable to drop without breaking something. But Hutton was a man of expedients: he stood on the extreme top of the chair-back, leaned over the fence and held my cane, by its crook, as if it were a dangling rope, down which I slid safely, thanks to a running fire of tragic stage-whispers, by Mr. Booth, to the general effect, that it is always well to keep very tight hold of a good thing, until you strike a better one.

I reached the ground safely and began the more dangerous part of my enterprise, which was to open a window of the main floor without rousing the lodger who was a light sleeper and kept pistols. A spectator, had there been any excepting the blasé man in the moon, might have gazed at an unusual scene—honest little me apparently burglarizing a house, while a prominent author and the greatest living tragedian, both honorable and law-abiding citizens, standing shakily on the highest back-bar of a single chair, steadying themselves by leaning heavily on a fence-top and giving me all the moral support that could be signified by heart-throbs and irregular breathings. Suddenly Hutton whispered hoarsely,

“Look out, Marshall!”

But I looked up, and right into the business end of a revolver, and I did not at all approve of what I saw. Had I looked toward the fence I would have beheld two eminent Americans in the undignified act of “ducking.” But I was too busily engaged in flattening myself against the window to have eyes for anything but fragmentary visions of the world to come: I shriveled so utterly that it seemed a million years before I had lungs enough to shout.

“Don’t shoot! It’s Marshall!”

We never settled it to our mutual satisfaction—Hutton’s, and Booth’s and mine, by which of us the world might have lost most had the revolver been fired and hit one of us. Mr. Booth was the incarnation of modesty, Hutton could eloquently praise any one but himself, while I—— But, as already said, we never agreed as to which would have been the world’s greatest loss.