The Savannah morning news., 1903-01-25
new YORK TOPICS
GOSSIP AND COMMENT FROM ME-
TROPoLITAN CIRCLES.

The Interesting Gift of His Literary
and Artistic Treasures to the Au-
thOr's Club by Richard Henry
StOddnrd, the Veteran POet-He is
a Link Between the Literary
Giants of the Past and the Modern
American World of Letters, an
Embodied Memory of the Golden
Age of Letters In the New World.
What the Authors Club Is Like
and How IL Came Into BeinE-The
versity Club.
New York. Jan. 24.-One of the most
interesting recent incidents of literary
life in the metropolis was the presen-
tation the other day, by Richard Hen
ry Stoddard. the poet. of his literary
and artistic treasures to the Authors
Club.
These treasures represent the coll
lection of an unusually long literary
lifetime, and some of them are of
great value, because of the source from
which Mr.. Stoddard gathered them, re-
CARELESS of his own connection with
them.
They are links. so to speak, between
the giants in letters who were in their
prime when Mr.. Stoddard was begin
ming and the writers of to-day, so
many of whose names appear on the
roster of the organization whose head
1xrtn
decorate.
Mr.. Stoddard is himself one of the
most interesting figures of these times.
1t is hardly correct to regard him
as of the same grade as Longfellow
and Bryant, Whittier and all the 9TH
ers with whom, in his younger days,
he was on terms of familiarity, but
he is imbued with the same spirit that
animated them; the trace of modernity
is not found in anything that he writes
or has written. He is an embodied
memory, so to speak, of what has been
termed the Golden Age of American
literature.
The circumstance that he was a con-
temporary of these men has impressed
many with the notion that he is a
very old man. Well, that depends up
on how you look at it. Mr. Stoddard
was born in 1925, and so is rs years
old. Truly he is no longer young, but
many men, eminent in letters and art
and public life, have lived years be-
yond IS. His friends hope that he may
still be active for years to come.
The poets great and lifelong re-
gret has been his lack of classical
training, for, contrary to what might
be supposed from the reading of his
books, he had no education" from the
schoolmans point of view, and though
he has writton on more than one
Oriental and European topic, he has
never been outside America.
His father and his father and his
father too. were sea captains. For
some reason Richard Henry decided
not to follow the ocean blue, but came
to New York when a lad. Here he
managed to get through the public
schools, but after finishing with them
he went into an iron foundry for fur
Their training. instead of a college. How
he got into literature is too long sto-
ry to tell here.
His treasures, mentioned above, I
may say, at the risk of duplicating in
the dispatches, include lock of Mil
toms hair, a note in Thackeray's hand
writing, the last letter ever written by
William Cullen Bryant. etc.
The Authors Club is not a half bad
thing in it's way, even if it was brought
into being through pique. The story
of it's genesis is something like this:
There is in the town a social organ
ization known as the Century Associa-
ton. It's membership is made up large
ly of writer's, artists, editors and pub
fishers. It's rolls are always full, with
many applicants waiting. Some years
ago one or two writers were refused
membership in the Century. Whether
because the members already in didn't
like them or not doesn't matter; the
result was the same: The excluded
ones declared the Century an exclu-
sive, aristocratic, priggish, stuck-up,
high backed, short-sighted, hide-bound,
un-American institution and forthwith
planned a club that would of a surety
accept them as members, since they
would be its founders.
To settle for once and for all the stat
us of those not founders who should
be eligible to membership, the name
Authors Club was chosen, with an ex-
planatory phrase in the constitution or
bylaws or something, to the effect that
in the lexicon of the club authors"
meant men who had written books
Cbound in boards or leather: no paper
backs or serial stories counted) of a
distinctly literary character.
Then, though some of the most sue
cessful authors of these days are wom-
en-, no member of the fair sex need
apply neither need the writer of vol
ume on electricity, for instance. or any
other technical subject no matter how
many pounds the volume weighs nor
how beautiful the decoration of its
binding.
There were many in the Century
Association who sneered at the Au-
thors' Club in its early days, as did
also many members Of the University
Club, membership in which is condi-
toned on the possession of a diploma