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TALES FROM BOHEMIA


By Robert Neilson Stephens




ROBERT NEILSON STEPHENS--A MEMORY

One crisp evening early in March, 1887, I climbed the three flights of
rickety stairs to the fourth floor of the old "Press" building to begin
work on the "news desk." Important as the telegraph department was
in making the newspaper, the desk was a crude piece of carpentry. My
companions of the blue pencil irreverently termed it "the shelf." This
was my second night in the novel dignity of editorship. Though my rank
was the humblest, I appreciated the importance of a first step from "the
street." An older man, the senior on the news desk, had preceded me. He
was engaged in a bantering conversation with a youth who lolled at such
ease as a well-worn, cane-bottomed screw-chair afforded. The older man
made an informal introduction, and I learned that the youth with pale
face and serene smile was "Mr. Stephens, private secretary to the
managing editor." That information scarcely impressed me any more
than it would now after more than twenty years' experience of managing
editors and their private secretaries.

The bantering continued, and I learned that the youth cherished literary
aspirations, and that he performed certain work in connection with the
dramatic department for the managing editor, who kept theatrical news
and criticisms within his personal control.

Suddenly a chance remark broke the ice for a friendship between the
young man and me which was to last unbroken until his untimely death.
Stephens wrote the Isaac Pitman phonography! Here had I been for more
than three years wondering to find the shorthand writers of wide-awake
and progressive America floundering in what I conceived to be the
Serbonian bog of an archaic system of stenography. Unexpectedly a
most superior young man came within my ken who was a disciple of Isaac
Pitman. Furthermore, like myself, he was entirely self taught. No old
shorthand writer who can look back a quarter of a century on his own
youthful enthusiasm for the art can fail to appreciate what a bond of
sympathy this discovery constituted. From that night forward we were
chosen friends, confiding our ambitions to each other, discussing the
grave issues of life and death, settling the problems of literature.
Notwithstanding his more youthful appearance, my seniority in age
was but slight. Gradually "Bob," as all his friends called him with
affectionate informality, was given opportunities to advance himself,
under the kindly yet firm guidance of the managing editor, Mr. Bradford
Merrill. That gentleman appreciated the distinct gifts of his young
protege, journalistic and literary, and he fostered them wisely and
well. I remember perfectly the first criticism of an important play
which "Bob" was permitted to write unaided. It was Richard Mansfield's
initial appearance in Philadelphia as "Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde," at the
Chestnut Street Theatre on Monday, October 3, 1887.

After the paper had gone to press, and while Mr. Merrill and a few of
the telegraph editors were partaking of a light lunch, the night editor,
the late R.E.A. Dorr, asked Mr. Merrill "how Stephens had made out."

"He has written a very clever and very interesting criticism," Mr.
Merrill replied. "I had to edit it somewhat, because he was inclined to
be Hugoesque and melodramatic in describing the action with very short
sentences. But I am very much pleased, indeed."

That was the beginning of Bob's career as a dramatic critic, a career
in which he gained authority and in which his literary faculties, his
felicity of expression and soundness of judgment found adequate scope.

In the following two or three years the cultivation of the field of
dramatic criticism occupied his time to the temporary exclusion of his
ambition for creative work. He and I read independently; but our
tastes had much in common, though his preference was for imaginative
literature. Meanwhile I was writing short stories with plenty of plot,
some of which found their way into various magazines; but his taste lay
more in the line of the French short story writers who made an
incident the medium for portraying a character. Historical romance had
fascinations for me, but Alphonse Daudet attracted both of us to the
artistic possibilities that lay in selecting the romance of real life
for treatment in fiction as against the crude and repellent naturalism
of Zola and his school. This fact is not a little significant in view of
the turn toward historical romance which exercised all the activities of
Robert Neilson Stephens after the production of his play, "An Enemy to
the King," by E.H. Sothern.

Still our intimacy had prepared me for the change. Through many a long
night after working hours we had wandered through the moonlit streets
until daybreak exchanging views freely and sturdily on historical
characters on the philosophy of history, on the character of Henry of
Navarre and his followers, and on the worthies of Elizabethan England,
in the literature of which we had immersed ourselves. Kipling had
recently burst meteor-like on the world, and Barrie raised his head with
a whimsical smile closely chasing a tear. Thomas Hardy was in the saddle
writing "Tess," and in France Daudet was yet active though his prime was
past. Guy de Maupassant continued the production of his marvellous
short stories. These were the contemporary prose writers who engaged our
attention. A little later we hailed the appearance of Stanley J. Weyman
with "A Gentleman of France," and the Conan Doyle of "The White
Company" and "Micah Clarke" rather than the creator of "Sherlock Holmes"
commended our admiration. We were by