I am not a politician, and so don’t know much one way or the other for or against George William Curtis politically. But I know of a little episode in his career (or at least he thinks it only a little episode, and never talks about it, although most men would think and talk a good deal about it) which is really interestingly touchin’, and shows that whether he is or is not a statesman he is, by all odds, a man.
A good many years ago a publication was started called Putnam’s Magazine. It was a good magazine, too, very well conducted. In fact, too well conducted, that is, for the average class of magazine readers.
That great writer Bulwer says somewhere that “you can miss a mark as completely by aimin’ above it as by aimin’ below it,” and the Putnam’s Magazine people aimed too high, the majority of the readers couldn’t appreciate ‘em, and so, after a struggle, the magazine came to grief, like Grant and Ward, it “bust up,” and like Grant and Ward it owed what in that day was big money, over $60,000.
George William Curtis (who had been one of the dreamers in the “Brook Farm” romance, which, as near as I can understand it, was an attempt to reintroduce the Garden of Eden, all but the fig leaves, and which, like the original Garden of Eden, was a failure) took a great deal of interest in this Putnam’s Magazine. He also took a good deal of stock in it, in the shape of stock shares, and thus became not only a writer for it, but a partner in it.
He had been left a snug little fortune by his father, and he put this into the magazine. It was swept away, just as easy as rollin’ off a log, and not only so, but as the only one of the partners who was of much account, the whole of the $60,000 due by the defunct concern was legally settled upon him to pay.
It was very hard lines, and most men, ninehundred and ninety-nine men out of one thousand, would have wriggled out somehow or other and got rid of payin’ the indebtedness of the concern. For that matter, there would have been no dishonesty or dishonor on Curtis’s part in repudiatin’ the debt, for it had been verbally and in honor understood among the partners of Putnam’s that Curtis’s responsibility was limited, that he was only a special partner in the concern. But Curtis didn’t see the matter in that light. He didn’t look on his side of the matter, but on the creditor’s side of it, looked at that side altogether, and just there, I think, is where he made his mistake. A man ought to see and act on both sides of a thing, and try to do justice to both, without any shirkin’ or dishonesty on the one hand or highfalutin’ sentimentality on the other. In Curtis’s case there ought to have been a compromise between him and the creditors, a sort of half-and-half mutually advantageous arrangement.
But as I have just said, Curtis didn’t see it that way. He shut his eyes to his own interests and only looked at his obligations. It was a mistake, but a mighty noble one, one that could have only been made by a noble man.
He assumed the whole debt of $60,000 himself, and undertook to pay it by his own brains and pains in a certain time. And he paid it.
He had to work very hard to do it. He wrote novels for it, went on lecturin’ tours for it, edited papers and magazines for it.
Altogether it took him about fifteen years, the best fifteen years of his life, to pay this self-assumed debt of honor, which had been contracted without his knowledge and consent, and which was due to a lot of men whom he had never seen.
In paying this debt Curtis put himself into a peculiar position. The Harper Brothers had started a really popular magazine, just up to but not a bit above the wants of the general public, and so made plenty of money with it. In fact, the success of Harper’s Magazine was one of the chief reasons of the failure of Putnam’s. What did Curtis do but go to the very concern whose success had helped to ruin him and obtained from it an editorial position which thus enabled him to pay off the very debts which its success had saddled on him. This was strategy indeed, and was makin’ the victor pay the price of victory.
And it was in tryin’ to pay off this debt to Putnam’s that George William Curtis became editor of Harper’s Weekly and a leadin’ Republican.
Finally he managed to pay the last dollar of his $60,000, and became a free man, but a pretty old man at the same time.
I don’t know anythin’ about the true inwardness of his fight with Roscoe Conkling and Arthur, and I do know that he is used a good deal as a figure-head, but I am certain that the noble manner in which George William Curtis undertook to pay off his debts of honor will command the respect of men of all parties, and of women the world over.
[Editor’s notes: Both Putnam’s Monthly and Harper’s New Monthly magazines were mined for source material by the Harry Hill’s Gotham column.]
