Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis

BY AUGUSTUS THOMAS

One spring afternoon in 1889 a member brought into the Lambs Club house—then on Twenty-sixth Street—as a guest Mr. Richard Harding Davis. I had not clearly caught the careless introduction, and, answering my question, Mr. Davis repeated the surname. He did not pronounce it as would a Middle Westerner like myself, but more as a citizen of London might. To spell his pronunciation Dyvis is to burlesque it slightly, but that is as near as it can be given phonetically. Several other words containing a long a were sounded by him in the same way, and to my ear the rest of his speech had a related eccentricity. I am told that other men educated in certain Philadelphia schools have a similar diction, but at that time many of Mr. Davis's new acquaintances thought the manner was an affectation. I mention the peculiarity, which after years convinced me was as native to him as was the color of his eyes, because I am sure that it was a barrier between him and some persons who met him only casually.

At that time he was a reporter on a Philadelphia newspaper, and in appearance was what he continued to be until his death, an unassertive but self-respecting, level-eyed, clean-toothed, and wholesome athlete.

The reporter developed rapidly into the more serious workman, and amongst the graver business was that of war correspondent.

I have known fraternally several war correspondents—Dick Davis, Fred Remington, John Fox, Caspar Whitney, and others—and it seems to me that, while differing one from another as average men differ, they had in common a kind of veteran superiority to trivial surprise, a tolerant world wisdom that mere newspaper work in other departments does not bring. At any rate, and however acquired, Dick Davis had the quality. And with that seasoned calm he kept and cultivated the reporter sense. He had insight—the faculty of going back of appearances. He saw the potential salients in occurrences and easily separated them from the commonplace—and the commonplace itself when it was informed by a spirit that made it helpful did not mislead him by its plainness.

That is another war-correspondent quality. He saw when adherence to duty approached the heroic. He knew the degree of pressure that gave it test conditions and he had an unadulterated, plain, bread-and-water appreciation of it.

I think that fact shows in his stories. He liked enthusiastically to write of men doing men's work and doing it man fashion with full-blooded optimism.

At his very best he was in heart and mind a boy grown tall. He had a boy's undisciplined indifference to great personages not inconsistent with his admiration of their medals. By temperament he was impulsive and partisan, and if he was your friend you were right until you were obviously very wrong. But he liked "good form," and had adopted the Englishman's code of "things no fellow could do"—therefore his impulsiveness was without offense and his partisanship was not quarrelsome.

In the circumstance of this story of "Soldiers of Fortune" he could himself have been either Clay or Stuart and he had the humor of MacWilliams.

In the clash between Clay and Stuart, when Clay asks the younger man if the poster smirching Stuart's relation to Madame Alvarez is true, it is Davis talking through both men, and when, standing alone, Clay lifts his hat and addresses the statue of General Bolivar, it is Davis at his best.

Modern criticism has driven the soliloquy from the theatre, but modern criticism in that respect is immature and wrong. The soliloquy exists. Any one observing the number of business men who, talking aloud to themselves, walk Fifth Avenue any evening may prove it. For Davis the soliloquy was not courageous; it was simply true. And that was a place for it.

When "Soldiers of Fortune" was printed it had a quick and a deserved popularity. It was cheerily North American in its viewpoint of the sub-tropical republics and was very up to date. The outdoor American girl was not so established at that time, and the Davis report of her was refreshing. Robert Clay was unconsciously Dick Davis himself as he would have tried to do—Captain Stuart was the English officer that Davis had met the world over, or, closer still, he was the better side of such men which the attractive wholesomeness of Davis would draw out. Alice and King were the half-spoiled New Yorkers as he knew them at the dinner-parties.

At a manager's suggestion Dick made a play of the book. It was his first attempt for the theatre and lacked somewhat the skill that he developed later in his admirable "Dictator." I was called in by the manager as an older carpenter and craftsman to make another dramatic version. Dick and I were already friends and he already liked plays that I had done, but that alone could not account for the heartiness with which he turned over to me his material and eliminated himself. Only his unspoiled simplicity and utter absence of envy could do that. Only native modesty could explain the absence of the usual author pride and sensitiveness. The play was immediately successful. It would have been a dull hack, indeed, who could have spoiled such excellent stage material as the novel furnished, but his generosity saw genius in the dramatic extension of the types he had furnished and in the welding of additions. Even after enthusiasm had had time enough to cool, he sent me a first copy of the Playgoers' edition of the novel, printed in 1902, with the inscription:

TO AUGUSTUS THOMAS:

Gratefully, Admiringly, Sincerely.

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS.

And then, as if feeling the formality of the names, he wrote below:

DEAR GUS,

If you liked this book only one-fifth as much as I like your play, I would be content to rest on that and spare the public any others. So for the sake of the public try to like it.

DICK.

In 1914 a motion-picture company arranged to make a feature film of the play, and Dick and I went with their outfit to Santiago de Cuba, where, twenty years earlier, he had found the inspiration for his story and out of which city and its environs he had fashioned his supposititious republic of Olancho. On that trip he was the idol of the company. With the men in the smoking-room of the steamer there were the numberless playful stories, in the rough, of the experiences on all five continents and seven seas that were the backgrounds of his published tales.

At Santiago, if an official was to be persuaded to consent to some unprecedented seizure of the streets, or a diplomat invoked for the assistance of the Army or the Navy, it was the experience and good judgment of Dick Davis that controlled the task. In the field there were his helpful suggestions of work and make-up to the actors, and on the boat and train and in hotel and camp the lady members met in him an easy courtesy and understanding at once fraternal and impersonal.

That picture enterprise he has described in an article, entitled "Breaking into the Movies," which was printed in Scribner's Magazine.

The element that he could not put into the account, and which is particularly pertinent to this page, is the author of "Soldiers of Fortune" as he revealed himself to me both with intention and unconsciously in the presence of the familiar scenes.

For three weeks, with the exception of one or two occasions when some local dignitary captured the revisiting lion, he and I spent our evenings together at a cafe table over looking "the great square," which he sketches so deftly in its atmosphere when Clay and the Langhams and Stuart dine there: "At one end of the plaza the President's band was playing native waltzes that came throbbing through the trees and beating softly above the rustling skirts and clinking spurs of the senoritas and officers sweeping by in two opposite circles around the edges of the tessellated pavements. Above the palms around the square arose the dim, white facade of the Cathedral, with the bronze statue of Anduella the liberator of Olancho, who answered with his upraised arm and cocked hat the cheers of an imaginary populace."

Twenty years had gone by since Dick had received the impression that wrote those lines, and now sometimes after dinner half a long cigar would burn out as he mused over the picture and the dreams that had gone between. From one long silence he said: "I think I'll come back here this winter and bring Mrs. Davis with me—stay a couple of months." What a fine compliment to a wife to have the thought of her and that plan emerge from that deep and romantic background!

And again, later, apropos of nothing but what one guessed from the dreamer's expressive face, he said: "I had remembered it as so much larger"—indicating the square—"until I saw it again when we came down with the army." A tolerant smile—he might have explained that it is always so on revisiting scenes that have impressed us deeply in our earlier days, but he let the smile do that. One of his charms as companion was that restful ability not to talk if you knew it, too.

The picture people began their film with a showing of the "mountains which jutted out into the ocean and suggested roughly the five knuckles of a giant's hand clenched and lying flat upon the surface of the water." That formation of the sea wall is just outside of Santiago. "The waves tunnelled their way easily enough until they ran up against those five mountains and then they had to fall back." How natural for one of us to be unimpressed by such a feature of the landscape, and yet how characteristic of Dick Davis to see the elemental fight that it recorded and get the hint for the whole of the engineering struggle that is so much of his book!

We went over those mountains together, where two decades before he had planted his banner of romance. We visited the mines and the railroads, and everywhere found some superintendent or foreman or engineer who remembered Davis. He had guessed at nothing. Everywhere he had overlaid the facts with adventure and with beauty, but he had been on sure footing all the time. His prototype of MacWilliams was dead. Together we visited the wooden cross with which the miners had marked his grave.

One is tempted to go choosing through his book again and rob its surprises by reminiscence—but I refrain. Yet it is only justice to point out that for "Soldiers of Fortune," as for the "Men of Zanzibar," "Three Gringos in Venezuela," "The King's Jackal," "Ranson's Folly," and his other books, he got his structure and his color at first hand. He was a writer and not a rewriter. And another thing we must note in his writing is his cleanliness. It is safe stuff to give to a young fellow who likes to take off his hat and dilate his nostrils and feel the wind in his face. Like water at the source, it is undefiled.

DAVIS AND THE ROUGH RIDERS

BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT

I knew Richard Harding Davis for many years, and I was among the number who were immediately drawn to him by the power and originality of "Gallegher," the story which first made his reputation.

My intimate association with him, however, was while he was with my regiment in Cuba, He joined us immediately after landing, and was not merely present at but took part in the fighting. For example, at the Guasimas fight it was he, I think, with his field-glasses, who first placed the trench from which the Spaniards were firing at the right wing of the regiment, which right wing I, at that time, commanded. We were then able to make out the trench, opened fire on it, and drove out the Spaniards.

He was indomitably cheerful under hardships and difficulties and entirely indifferent to his own personal safety or comfort. He so won the esteem and regard of the regiment that he was one of the three men we made honorary members of the regiment's association. We gave him the same medal worn by our own members.

He was as good an American as ever lived and his heart flamed against cruelty and injustice. His writings form a text-book of Americanism which all our people would do well to read at the present time.

BY IRVIN S. COBB

Almost the first letter I received after I undertook to make a living by writing for magazines was signed with the name of Richard Harding Davis. I barely knew him; practically we were strangers; but if he had been my own brother he could not have written more generously or more kindly than he did write in that letter. He, a famous writer, had gone out of his way to speak words of encouragement to me, an unknown writer; had taken the time and the pains out of a busy life to cheer a beginner in the field where he had had so great a measure of success.

When I came to know him better, I found out that such acts as these were characteristic of Richard Harding Davis. The world knew him as one of the most vivid and versatile and picturesque writers that our country has produced in the last half-century, but his friends knew him as one of the kindest and gentlest and most honest and most unselfish of men—a real human being, firm in his convictions, steadfast in his affections, loyal to the ideals by which he held, but tolerant always in his estimates of others.

He may or may not have been a born writer; sometimes I doubt whether there is such a thing as a born writer. But this much I do know—he was a born gentleman if ever there was one.

As a writer his place is assured. But always I shall think of him as he was in his private life—a typical American, a lovable companion, and a man to the tips of his fingers.

BY JOHN FOX, JR

During the twenty years that I knew him Richard Harding Davis was always going to some far-off land. He was just back from a trip somewhere when I first saw him in his rooms in New York, rifle in hand, in his sock feet and with his traps in confusion about him. He was youth incarnate—ruddy, joyous, vigorous, adventurous, self-confident youth—and, in all the years since, that first picture of him has suffered no change with me. He was so intensely alive that I cannot think of him as dead—and I do not. He is just away on another of those trips and it really seems queer that I shall not hear him tell about it.

We were together as correspondents in the Spanish War and in the Russo-Japanese War we were together again; and so there is hardly any angle from which I have not had the chance to know him. No man was ever more misunderstood by those who did not know him or better understood by those who knew him well, for he carried nothing in the back of his head—no card that was not face up on the table. Every thought, idea, purpose, principle within him was for the world to read and to those who could not know how rigidly he matched his inner and outer life he was almost unbelievable. He was exacting in friendship because his standard was high and because he gave what he asked; and if he told you of a fault he told you first of a virtue that made the fault seem small indeed. But he told you and expected you to tell him.

Naturally, the indirection of the Japanese was incomprehensible to him. He was not good at picking up strange tongues, and the Japanese equivalent for the Saxon monosyllable for what the Japanese was to him he never learned. For only one other word did he have more use and I believe it was the only one he knew, "hyaku—hurry!" Over there I was in constant fear for him because of his knight-errantry and his candor. Once he came near being involved in a duel because of his quixotic championship of a woman whom he barely knew, and disliked, and whose absent husband he did not know at all. And more than once I looked for a Japanese to draw his two-handed ancestral sword when Dick bluntly demanded a reconciliation of his yea of yesterday with his nay of today. Nine months passed and we never heard the whistle of bullet or shell. Dick called himself a "cherry-blossom correspondent," and when our ship left those shores each knew that the other went to his state-room and in bitter chagrin and disappointment wept quite childishly.

Of course, he was courageous—absurdly so—and, in spite of his high-strung temperament, always calm and cool. At El Paso hill, the day after the fight, the rest of us scurried for tree-trunks when a few bullets whistled near; but Dick stalked out in the open and with his field-glasses searched for the supposed sharpshooters in the trees. Lying under a bomb-proof when the Fourth of July bombardment started, I saw Dick going unhurriedly down the hill for his glasses, which he had left in Colonel Roosevelt's tent, and unhurriedly going back up to the trenches again. Under the circumstances I should have been content with my naked eye. A bullet thudded close to where Dick lay with a soldier.

"That hit you?" asked Dick. The soldier grunted "No," looked sidewise at Dick, and muttered an oath of surprise. Dick had not taken his glasses from his eyes. I saw him writhing on the ground with sciatica during that campaign, like a snake, but pulling his twisted figure straight and his tortured face into a smile if a soldier or stranger passed.

He was easily the first reporter of his time—perhaps of all time. Out of any incident or situation he could pick the most details that would interest the most people and put them in a way that was pleasing to the most people; and always, it seemed, he had the extraordinary good judgment or the extraordinary good luck to be just where the most interesting thing was taking place. Gouverneur Morris has written the last word about Richard Harding Davis, and he, as every one must, laid final stress on the clean body, clean heart, and clean mind of the man. R. H. D. never wrote a line that cannot be given to his little daughter when she is old enough to read, and I never heard a word pass his lips that his own mother could not hear. There are many women in the world like the women in his books. There are a few men like the men, and of these Dick himself was one.

BY FINLEY PETER DUNNE

In the articles about Mr. Davis that have appeared since his death, the personality of the man seems to overshadow the merit of the author. In dealing with the individual the writers overlook the fact that we have lost one of the best of our story-tellers. This is but natural. He was a very vivid kind of person. He had thousands of friends in all parts of the world, and a properly proportionate number of enemies, and those who knew him were less interested in the books than in the man himself—the generous, romantic, sensitive individual whose character and characteristics made him a conspicuous figure everywhere he went—and he went everywhere. His books were sold in great numbers, but it might be said in terms of the trade that his personality had a larger circulation than his literature. He probably knew more waiters, generals, actors, and princes than any man who ever lived, and the people he knew best are not the people who read books. They write them or are a part of them. Besides, if you knew Richard Davis you knew his books. He translated himself literally, and no expurgation was needed to make the translation suitable for the most innocent eyes. He was the identical chivalrous young American or Englishman who strides through his pages in battalions to romantic death or romantic marriage. Every one speaks of the extraordinary youthfulness of his mind, which was still fresh at an age when most men find avarice or golf a substitute for former pastimes. He not only refused to grow old himself, he refused to write about old age. There are a few elderly people in his books, but they are vague and shadowy. They serve to emphasize the brightness of youth, and are quickly blown away when the time for action arrives. But if he numbered his friends and acquaintances by the thousands there are other thousands in this country who have read his books, and they know, even better than those who were acquainted with him personally, how good a friend they have lost. I happened to read again the other day the little collection of stories—his first, I think—which commences with "Gallegher" and includes "The Other Woman" and one or more of the Van Bibber tales. His first stories were not his best. He increased in skill and was stronger at the finish than at the start. But "Gallegher" is a fine story, and is written in that eager, breathless manner which was all his own, and which always reminds me of a boy who has hurried home to tell of some wonderful thing he has seen. Of course it is improbable. Most good stories are and practically all readable books of history. No old newspaper man can believe that there ever existed such a "copy boy" as Gallegher, or that a murderer with a finger missing from one hand could escape detection even in a remote country village. Greed would have urged the constable to haul to the calaboose every stranger who wore gloves. But he managed to attach so many accurate details of description to the romance that it leaves as definite an impression of realism as any of Mr. Howells's purposely realistic stories. The scene in the newspaper office, the picture of the prize-fight, the mixture of toughs and swells, the spectators in their short gray overcoats with pearl buttons (like most good story-tellers he was strong on the tailoring touch), the talk of cabmen and policemen, the swiftness of the way the story is told, as if he were in a hurry to let his reader know something he had actually seen—create such an impression of truth that when the reader finishes he finds himself picturing Gallegher on the witness-stand at the murder trial receiving the thanks of the judge. And he wonders what became of this precocious infant, and whether he was rewarded in time by receiving the hand of the sister of the sporting editor in marriage.

To give the appearance of truth to the truth is the despair of writers, but Mr. Davis had the faculty of giving the appearance of the truth to situations that in human experience could hardly exist. The same quality that showed in his tales made him the most readable of war correspondents. He went to all the wars of his youth and middle age filled with visions of glorious action. Where other correspondents saw and reported evil-smelling camps, ghastly wounds, unthinkable suffering, blunders, good luck and bad luck, or treated the subject with a mathematical precision that would have given Clausewitz a headache, Davis saw and reported it first of all as a romance, and then filled in the story with human details, so that the reader came away with an impression that all these heroic deeds were performed by people just like the reader himself, which was exactly the truth.

It is a pity that the brutality of the German staff officers and the stupidity of the French and English prevented him from seeing the actual fighting in Flanders and Picardy. The scene is an ugly one, a wallow of blood and mire. But so probably were Agincourt and Crecy when you come to think of it, and Davis, you may be sure, would have illuminated the foul battle-field with a reflection of the glory which must exist in the breasts of the soldiers.