PHILADELPHIA, July 22nd, 1890.
10.30 P. M.
[MY DEAR Boy:]
You can do it; you have done it; it is all right. I have
read A Walk up the Avenue. It is far and away the best
thing you have ever done — Full of fine subtle thought, of
rare, manly feeling.
I am not afraid of Dick the author. He's all right. I
shall only be afraid — when I am afraid — that Dick the man
will
not live up to the other fellow, that he may forget how much
the good Lord has given him, and how responsible to the good
Lord and to himself he is and will be for it. A man entrusted
with such talent should carry himself straighter than others
to whom it is denied. He has great duties to do; he owes
tribute to the giver.
Don't let the world's temptations in any of its forms
come between you and your work. Make your life worthy of your
talent, and humbly by day and by night ask God to help you to
do it.
I am very proud of this work. It is good work, with
brain, bone, nerve, muscle in it. It is human, with healthy
pulse and heartsome glow in it. Remember, hereafter, you have
by it put on the bars against yourself preventing you doing
any work less good. You have yourself made your record, you
can't lower it. You can only beat it.
Lovingly,
DAD.
In the latter part of December, 1890, Richard left The
Evening Sun to become the managing editor of
Harper's Weekly. George William Curtis was then its
editor, and at this time no periodical had a broader or
greater influence for the welfare of the country. As Richard
was then but twenty-six, his appointment to his new editorial
duties came as a distinct honor. The two years that Richard
had spent on
The Evening Sun had been probably the
happiest
he had ever known. He really loved New York, and at this time
Paris and London held no such place in his affections as they
did in later years. And indeed there was small reason why
these should not have been happy years for any young man. At
twenty-six Richard had already accomplished much, and his name
had become a familiar one not only to New Yorkers but
throughout the country. Youth and health he had, and many
friends, and a talent that promised to carry him far in the
profession he loved. His new position paid him a salary
considerably larger than he had received heretofore, and he
now demanded and received much higher terms for his stories.
All of which was well for Richard because as his income grew
so grew his tastes. I have known few men who cared less for
money than did my brother, and I have known few who cared more
for what it could buy for his friends and for himself. Money
to him, and, during his life he made very large sums of it, he
always chose to regard as income but never capital. A bond or
a share of stock meant to him what it would bring that day on
the Stock Exchange. The rainy day which is the bugaboo for
the most of us, never seemed to show on his horizon. For a
man whose livelihood depended on the lasting quality of his
creative faculties he had an infinite faith in the future, and
indeed his own experience seemed to show that he was justified
in this belief. It could
not have been very long after his start as a fiction writer
that he received as high a price for his work as any of his
contemporaries; and just previous to his death, more than
twenty years later, he signed a contract to write six stories
at a figure which, so far as I know, was the highest ever
offered an American author. In any case, money or the lack of
it certainly never caused Richard any worriment during the
early days of which I write. For what he made he worked
extremely hard, but the reputation and the spending of the money
that this same hard work brought him caused him infinite
happiness. He enjoyed the reputation he had won and the
friends that such a reputation helped him to make; he enjoyed
entertaining and being entertained, and he enjoyed pretty much
all of the good things of life. And all of this he enjoyed
with the naive, almost boyish enthusiasm that only one could
to whom it had all been made possible at twenty-six. Of these
happy days Booth Tarkington wrote at the time of my brother's
death:
"To the college boy of the early nineties Richard Harding
Davis was the `beau ideal of jeunesse doree,' a
sophisticated heart of gold. He was of that college boy's own
age, but already an editor — already publishing books! His
stalwart good looks were as familiar to us as were those of
our own football captain; we knew his face as we knew the face
of the President of the United States, but we infinitely
preferred Davis's. When the Waldorf was wondrously completed,
and we cut an exam. in Cuneiform Inscriptions for an excursion
to see the world at lunch in its new magnificence, and Richard
Harding Davis came into the Palm Room — then, oh, then, our day
was radiant! That was the top of our fortune; we could never
have hoped for so
much. Of all the great people of every continent, this was
the one we most desired to see."
Richard's intimate friends of these days were Charles
Dana Gibson, who illustrated a number of my brother's stories,
Robert Howard Russell, Albert La Montagne, Helen Benedict, now
Mrs. Thomas Hastings, Ethel Barrymore, Maude Adams, E. H.
Sothern, his brother, Sam, and Arthur Brisbane. None of this
little circle was married at the time, its various members
were seldom apart, and they extracted an enormous amount of
fun out of life. I had recently settled in New York, and we
had rooms at 10 East Twenty-eighth Street, where we lived very
comfortably for many years. Indeed Richard did not leave them
until his marriage in the summer of 1899. They were very
pleasant, sunny rooms, and in the sitting-room, which Richard
had made quite attractive, we gave many teas and
supper-parties. But of all the happy incidents I can recall
at the Twenty-eighth Street house, the one I remember most
distinctly took place in the hallway the night that Richard
received the first statement and check for his first book of
short stories, and before the money had begun to come in as
fast as it did afterward. We were on our way to dinner at
some modest resort when we saw and at once recognized the long
envelope on the mantel. Richard guessed it would be for one
hundred and ninety dollars, but with a rather doubting heart I
raised my guess to three hundred. And when, with trembling
fingers, Richard had finally torn open the envelope and found
a check for nine hundred and odd dollars, what a wild dance we
did about the hall-table, and what a dinner we had that night!
Not at the modest restaurant as originally intended, but at
Delmonico's! It was during
these days that Seymour Hicks and his lovely wife Ellaline
Terriss first visited America, and they and Richard formed a
mutual attachment that lasted until his death.
Richard had always taken an intense interest in the
drama, and at the time he was managing editor of Harper's
Weekly had made his first efforts as a playwright. Robert
Hilliard did a one-act version of Richard's short story, "Her
First Appearance," which under the title of "The Littlest
Girl" he played in vaudeville for many years. E. H. Sothern
and Richard had many schemes for writing a play together, but
the only actual result they ever attained was a one-act
version Sothern did at the old Lyceum of my brother's story,
"The Disreputable Mr. Raegen." It was an extremely tense and
absorbing drama, and Sothern was very fine in the part of
Raegen, but for the forty-five minutes the playlet lasted
Sothern had to hold the stage continuously alone, and as it
preceded a play of the regulation length, the effort proved
too much for the actor's strength, and after a few
performances it was taken off. Although it was several years
after this that my brother's first long play was produced he
never lost interest in the craft of playwriting, and only
waited for the time and means to really devote himself to it.
