BY FINLEY PETER DUNNE
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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.
The fact is, he was the owner of a most enviable pair of
eyes, which reported to him only what was pleasant and
encouraging. A man is blessed or cursed by what his eyes see.
To some people the world of men is a confused and
undecipherable puzzle. To Mr. Davis it was a simple and
pleasant pattern—good and bad, honest and dishonest, kind and
cruel, with the good, the honest, and the kind rewarded; the
bad, the dishonest, and the cruel punished; where the heroes
are modest, the brave generous, the women lovely, the bus-drivers humorous; where the Prodigal returns to dine in a
borrowed dinner-jacket at Delmonico's with his father, and
where always the Young Man marries the Girl. And this is the
world as much as Balzac's is the world, if it is the world as
you see it.
[Description: The signature of Finley Peter Dunne]