Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis | Page 3

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APPRECIATIONS
Gouverneur Morris
Booth Tarkington
Charles Dana Gibson
E. L.
Burlingame
Augustus Thomas
Theodore Roosevelt
Irvin S. Cobb

John Fox, Jr
Finley Peter Dunne
Winston Churchill
Leonard
Wood
John T. McCutcheon

R. H. D.
BY GOUVERNEUR MORRIS
"And they rise to their feet as He passes by, gentlemen unafraid."
He was almost too good to be true. In addition, the gods loved him, and
so he had to die young. Some people think that a man of fifty-two is
middle-aged. But if R. H. D. had lived to be a hundred, he would never
have grown old. It is not generally known that the name of his other
brother was Peter Pan.
Within the year we have played at pirates together, at the taking of
sperm whales; and we have ransacked the Westchester Hills for
gunsites against the Mexican invasion. And we have made lists of guns,
and medicines, and tinned things, in case we should ever happen to go
elephant-shooting in Africa. But we weren't going to hurt the elephants.
Once R. H. D. shot a hippopotamus and he was always ashamed and
sorry. I think he never killed anything else. He wasn't that kind of a
sportsman. Of hunting, as of many other things, he has said the last
word. Do you remember the Happy Hunting Ground in "The Bar
Sinister"?--"where nobody hunts us, and there is nothing to hunt."
Experienced persons tell us that a manhunt is the most exciting of all
sports. R. H. D. hunted men in Cuba. He hunted for wounded men who

were out in front of the trenches and still under fire, and found some of
them and brought them in. The Rough Riders didn't make him an
honorary member of their regiment just because he was charming and a
faithful friend, but largely because they were a lot of daredevils and he
was another.
To hear him talk you wouldn't have thought that he had ever done a
brave thing in his life. He talked a great deal, and he talked even better
than he wrote (at his best he wrote like an angel), but I have dusted
every corner of my memory and cannot recall any story of his in which
he played a heroic or successful part. Always he was running at top
speed, or hiding behind a tree, or lying face down in a foot of water (for
hours!) so as not to be seen. Always he was getting the worst of it. But
about the other fellows he told the whole truth with lightning flashes of
wit and character building and admiration or contempt. Until the
invention of moving pictures the world had nothing in the least like his
talk. His eye had photographed, his mind had developed and prepared
the slides, his words sent the light through them, and lo and behold,
they were reproduced on the screen of your own mind, exact in drawing
and color. With the written word or the spoken word he was the
greatest recorder and reporter of things that he had seen of any man,
perhaps, that ever lived. The history of the last thirty years, its manners
and customs and its leading events and inventions, cannot be written
truthfully without reference to the records which he has left, to his
special articles and to his letters. Read over again the Queen's Jubilee,
the Czar's Coronation, the March of the Germans through Brussels, and
see for yourself if I speak too zealously, even for a friend, to whom,
now that R. H. D. is dead, the world can never be the same again.
But I did not set out to estimate his genius. That matter will come in
due time before the unerring tribunal of posterity.
One secret of Mr. Roosevelt's hold upon those who come into contact
with him is his energy. Retaining enough for his own use (he uses a
good deal, because every day he does the work of five or six men), he
distributes the inexhaustible remainder among those who most need it.
Men go to him tired and discouraged, he sends them away glad to be
alive, still gladder that he is alive, and ready to fight the devil himself
in a good cause. Upon his friends R. H. D. had the same effect. And it
was not only