An Adventure with a Genius: Recollections of Joseph PulitzerIreland, Alleyne
General
An Adventure with a Genius: Recollections of Joseph Pulitzer
Ireland, Alleyne
Pulitzer, Joseph, 1847-1911
I saw a great deal of Mr. Pulitzer while we were at Wiesbaden, owing to
the circumstance that Paterson was called to England on urgent private
affairs and Pollard was away on leave. The absence of these two men was
as much regretted by the staff as it was by J. P. himself. Paterson was,
from his extraordinary erudition, seldom at a loss for a topic of
conversation which would rivet J. P.'s attention, and Pollard, who had
been a number of years with J. P., was not only, on his own subjects,
the conversational peer of Paterson, but was in addition, from his
soothing voice and manner and from his long and careful study of J. P.,
invaluable as a mental and nervous sedative.
It was at Wiesbaden that I first began to read books regularly to J. P.
I read him portions of the biographies of Parnell, of Sir William Howard
Russell, of President Polk (very little of this), of Napoleon, of Martin
Luther, and at least a third of Macaulay's Essays.
He was a great admirer of Lord Macaulay's writings and read them
constantly, as he found in them most of the qualities which he admired--
great descriptive power, political acumen, satire, neatness of phrase,
apt comparisons and analogies, and shrewd analysis of character. Many
passages he made me read over and over again at different times. I
reproduce a few of his favorite paragraphs for the purpose of showing
what appealed to his taste.
From the Essay on Sir William Temple, the following lines referring to
the Right Hon. Thomas Peregrine Courtenay, who, after his retirement
from public life, wrote the Memoirs of Temple and stated in his preface
that experience had taught him the superiority of literature to politics
for developing the kindlier feelings and conducing to an agreeable life:
He has little reason, in our opinion, to envy any of those who are still
engaged in a pursuit from which, at most, they can only expect that, by
relinquishing liberal studies and social pleasures, by passing nights
without sleep and summers without one glimpse of the beauty of nature,
they may attain that laborious, that invidious, that closely watched
slavery which is mocked with the name of power.
More often than any others I read him the following passages from the
Essay on Milton:
The final and permanent fruits of liberty are wisdom, moderation, and
mercy. Its immediate effects are often atrocious crimes, conflicting
errors, scepticism on points the most clear, dogmatism on points the
most mysterious. It is just at this crisis that its enemies love to
exhibit it. They pull down the scaffolding from the half-finished
edifice: they point to the flying dust, the falling bricks, the
comfortless rooms, the frightful irregularity of the whole appearance;
and then ask in scorn where the promised splendor and comfort is to be
found. If such miserable sophisms were to prevail there would never be a
good house or a good government in the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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