An American author, born in Plainfield, Mass. He graduated at Hamilton College, N. Y., in 1851. After spending a short time in surveying on the Missouri frontier (1853), he returned to the East (1854) to take up the study of law. He graduated at the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1856, when he removed to Hartford. Here he became assistant editor and later editor-in-chief of the Hartford Press, and in 1867 co-editor of the Hartford Courant, with which he was connected till his death. In 1881 he took charge of the department of Harper’s Magazine called “The Editor’s Drawer,” and in 1892 succeeded W. D. Howells in “The Editor’s Study,” of the same periodical. He made several visits to Europe and the East as correspondent of American newspapers and traveled extensively in the United States and Mexico, contributing papers of descriptive and social life to Harper’s Magazine. His separately published work began in 1870 with “My Summer in a Garden,” a volume of genial sketches, and was afterwards varied and extended. Among his best known books are: “Saunterings” (1872); “Backlog Studies” (1872); “Baddeck, and That sort of Thing” (1874); “Mummies and Moslems” (1876); “In the Levant” (1877); “Being a Boy” (1877); “Washington Irving” (1881); “Captain John Smith” (1881); “A Roundabout Journey” (1883); “Their Pilgrimage” (1887); “On Horseback” (1888); “Studies in the South and West, with Comments on Canada” (1889); “A Little Journey in the World” (1889), a novel; “Our Italy” (1891); “As We Were Saying” (1894); and “The Golden House” (1895), a novel. He was also editor of the “American Men of Letters” (1881), a series of biographies, and of the “Library of the World’s Best Literature” (1896–97). In conjunction with S. L. Clemens (“Mark Twain”) he wrote “The Gilded Age” (1873).

Personal

  Warner is rather tall and slender, with keen blue eyes under gold-rimmed glasses, a fair and transparent complexion, wholly white hair, and beard, a prominent nose, a high, retreating forehead, and a look of refinement, dignity, and good-humour. He appears nervous and delicate, but by no means weak or effeminate. In fact, he is athletic, and keeps himself in training. His manners are cordial and prepossessing, and his solid qualities and perfect tact have secured for him fast friends…. His house is modest, but one of the most attractive in a city of beautiful dwellings. It is in the western suburb, near a pleasant piece of woods and a wild glen that is a surprise and a delight in the border of a city.

  In appearance Mr. Warner is tall and erect in form, with a strong countenance, indicative of thought and refinement. When at his work, he wears a black velveteen jacket. His pedestrian powers are good, and in the summer he takes long tramps, accompanied by one or two friends; the Adirondack region being a favorite resort. As an angler, he is patient and expert. All the walls in his house are covered with brown wrapping-paper, or paper such as is used to put down under carpets. There are different shades of the paper, to be sure, and the frieze in each room is of some bright color, which relieves the monotony. An unnoticed, plain wall surface Mr. Warner considers the best background for pictures.

  But after all, delightful as a glimpse of his house is, it is Mr. Warner himself who is of the most importance to those who have admired for years the sanity and delicacy of his genial humor. Looking at the tall, spare, athletic figure of Mr. Warner as he moves about his study, the visitor finds it hard to realize that he lacks just one year of three-score and ten. It is true that his hair and beard are white, but his dark eye is as keen and his voice as buoyant as of a man twenty years younger. One secret, he thinks, of his activity has been his habit of seeking at intervals a complete rest from routine. Thus after a protracted period of editorial and literary work he will take a year off for a visit to Europe and Egypt, or three months for California or Mexico. Only a man, of course, who has succeeded could afford to do this. But Mr. Warner, by filling an editorial chair as a vocation, has been able to pursue literature as an avocation. His advice to all young writers, he tells me, is to follow somewhat the same course—to engage in a definite occupation that will provide a sure income. In this way it is possible for any one to pursue his literary ideals without regard to their money value.

  As a man Mr. Warner was a typical American of the older stock, full of shrewd common-sense, of kindly feeling and of healthy optimism. Bred up in the country, he retained to the last a little touch of rustic simplicity and quaintness, which imparted something exceedingly agreeable to his manner, and it was seen also in the unaffected love of nature, which, with his humour, won for him his earliest success. He was interested in many things. He liked his library and the company of his books. It was a pleasure to him to write, and this is, perhaps, the secret why his own particular public found always in his books something that it was a pleasure for them to read. He was interested also in the happenings of the larger world, that lay beyond his library. He showed himself an earnest advocate of social and political reforms. He both wrote and spoke in behalf of a more humane and a more efficient prison system. He was, in short, a useful, liberal-minded citizen with a genuine sense of civic duty and responsibility.

  He had the air of a man who had been accustomed to the best society among books and men. His sanity and poise reflected a wide contact with the world; he was tolerant of everything except vulgarity, sham, and cheapness. His ease of manner suggested liberal opportunities and an ample background of social and intellectual life. His humor was the free play of a nature which felt itself at home in the world and qualified to compare varying standards of action, diverse ideals of manners and types of character.

  Amongst my fellow-students at De Ruyter was Charles Dudley Warner, with whom I contracted a friendship which survives in activity, though our paths in life have been since widely separated. I recall him as a sensitive, poetical boy,—almost girlish in his delicacy of temperament,—and showing the fine esprit which has made him one of the first of our humorists. His “Being a Boy” is a delightful and faithful record of the existence of a genuine New England boy, which will remain to future generations as a paleontological record when the race of them is extinct, if indeed it be not so already.

  I have heard of an Irishman who, being asked to give his recollections of one with whom he had long been intimate, declined to do so, for the reason, he said, that the best of them he had forgotten. I can, at this moment, well understand what he meant. For more than thirty years Charles Dudley Warner was my neighbor and friend. The humour, softly radiant, refined, winsome, dewy, mixed with wisdom, that was so distinct a feature of his mind and utterance, was memorably to me one of the refreshments that went with his dear company for all that time. But though the impression of it vividly remains, and cannot but be abiding, in trying to convey that impression, far fewer things to the purpose than I should have expected return to me in shape to tell. This is, doubtless, in great measure due to the fact I have already noted, that the stamp of humor peculiar to him was eminently such as to elude description. His beloved shade haunts the places long gladdened by his presence, the echo of his voice seems there to linger in kindly benediction, the unfailing delight yielded by the affluent felicities of his discourse comes fondly back to memory; but the words in which they were clothed are mostly escaped and gone.

General

  Our prose-poet here [“Back Log Studies”] takes hold of morals, sentiment, and modes, with a dainty lightness of touch—again conveying an impression that he is not putting forth all his strength—confining himself by certain limits, yet within those bounds giving us delightful and satisfactory work, of the class which Mr. Higginson aptly designates as literature of the Meditative School…. As a piece of literary workmanship, “Back Log Studies” is an advance upon his earlier productions. Much of it is cast in the form of dialogue, but the characteristic monologues which frequently occur are the portions wherein Mr. Warner is wholly at ease, and exhibit his most attractive delicacy of thought and style…. An extended notice of Mr. Warner’s writings does not come within our present limits, otherwise some of the foregoing remarks might be illustrated most agreeably by extracts from his earlier and later works. I should like to quote his anathema of the gas-log fire—a fraud, which no one can poke, and before which no cat would condescend to lie down—a “centre of untruthfulness,” demoralizing the life of an entire family. I should like to transfer this picture of King Jehoiakim sitting by the hearth-stone, reading the Memphis Palimpsest, or the contributions of Sappho and Anacreon to the Attic Quarterly. In his graver passages the language is pure, without extravagance—held in with a sort of dry restraint, betokening the genuine Yankee aversion to outspoken sentiment—a disdain of any thing like “gush.” Half-ashamed of the happiest descriptions in the story of his Northern tour, he relieves them with a light mirth and is almost Hudibrastic in comparing the slow rising of the sun to that of the sluggish ferryman at Canso. But these matters are in every reader’s memory. He has been chided for occasional slips of language, and his merrier work has been too seriously taken as a gauge of his prevailing motives or cast of thought. The arduous requirements of his profession should be kept in mind.

  “My Summer in a Garden” was simply a series of papers reprinted from the Hartford Courant. They retained, even in book form, an unmistakable newspaper flavor. Yet they had a freshness that delighted every one, a charming out-door atmosphere, and much delicate and quiet humor. On the other hand, their literary quality was alloyed by some cheap puns and short-lived poetical allusions; and these gave the impression that the author, even at forty-two years of age, did not fully discern his own highest vein, or—which is more probable—that he did not fully trust his public, and would not risk himself on his best work alone…. It is undeniable that up to this time, Mr. Warner’s works, with all their uncommon charm, yet suggest the suspicion of a certain thinness of material. He may possess greater resources than he has yet shown, deeper motives, higher originality, firmer convictions. This is the problem which his admirers are waiting to see him solve. Until its solution, he is in the position of the American troops at Bunker Hill; victory within his grasp, if only the ammunition holds out; and a highly creditable service, even if the supply should fail.

  Warner, like Howells, is an author whose humor is intermixed with his sentiment, understanding and fancy. In “My Summer in a Garden,” “Back-Log Studies,” and other volumes he exhibits a reflective intellect under the guise of a comically sedate humor. Trifles are exalted into importance by the incessant play of his meditative facetiousness.

  After graduating at college, he engaged for awhile in railroad surveying in the West; then studied, and for a short time practised, law; but finally, at the call of his friend Hawley, came to Hartford and settled down to the work of an editor, devoting his whole strength to it, with marked success from the outset, and so continued for the years before, during and after the War, supposing that as a journalist he had found his place and his career. His editorial work, however, was such as to give him a distinctly literary reputation; and a share of it was literary in form and motive. People used to preserve his Christmas stories and letters of travel in their Scrap-books. The chapters of “My Summer in a Garden” were originally a series of articles written for his paper, without a thought of further publication. It was in response to numerous suggestions coming to him from various quarters that they were made into a book. The extraordinary favor with which the little volume was received was a surprise to Mr. Warner, who insisted that there was nothing in it better than he had been accustomed to write. He was much disposed to view the hit he had made as an accident, and to doubt if it would lead to anything further in the line of authorship. But he was mistaken. The purveyors of literature were after him at once. That was in 1870. Since then his published works have grown to a considerable list, and there is time, if fortunately his life is spared, for a good many more.

  Warner is chiefly, one might almost say always, the essayist. His humor is not wit; he pleases by the diffused light which illuminates his writings on various themes, not by any startling or sensational effect. American humor, as displayed in his masterpiece, “My Summer in a Garden,” is shown in its better estate. Warner’s intellectual kinship is with Irving, Curtis, and Holmes, not with Artemus Ward or Mark Twain,—though he wrote a book in collaboration with the last-named popular writer. Truth and wholesomeness, a genuine local flavor without coarseness, and a power to amuse without conspicuous effort,—these qualities one finds in his graceful papers. Delicacy of touch, as seen in his work, is after all the prevalent characteristic of the really representative American humorous essayists, the men who, like Warner, have actually contributed to literature. Those in search of rude and clownish “merriment,” may not appreciate the fact at the present time, but the future may be trusted to emphasize the truth of the statement.

  “Back Log Studies” is a maturer and more substantial book than its predecessor, full of wise and witty observation, and delightful in its quiet, mellow tone. There is no effort to shine by laboured antithesis in style, but only a bright and playful fancy, a suggestion of quaint images, and the warmth of a genial and generous nature; in short, that rare quality or assemblage of qualities never yet defined, Humour. The wit which glitters at the expense of another, and exults in sardonic laughter, may touch the intellect, but not the heart. There are brilliant jokers whose want of human feeling gives to their points a malignity that shocks us. Far different is the effect of the obtrusive and kindly humour of Warner. He never poses, nor cackles over his jokes. His sentences have a buoyant swell like the waves of a summer sea, inspiring and restful. Modest to a fault, and sparing of words, he merely suggests a pleasantry, but never pursues it. His books leave with the reader the enduring impression of a wholly lovable man…. “My Winter on the Nile” is a book with vivid colour movement, and is full of brilliant bits of description; but its successive scenes are rather overloaded so as to produce after a while the effect of repetition; and the author’s pleasantry too often takes the form of Yankee colloquialisms, which impair the literary quality. To be easy in narration and never trivial or profuse is a most difficult art. The Nile book has a great store of information from latest Egyptologists; the scenery is done in a masterly way; the people we meet are real flesh and blood; and all the incidents of the voyage are as vivid as the pictures in one’s own memory. These are great and positive merits. If the author had made the book for the English-speaking world and not specially for the American people, and had somewhat shortened the occasional descriptions which have a family likeness, he would have made a masterpiece like “Eothen.” As it is, it is one of the very best accounts of Egypt ever written.

  He sustains the impact of the world with a humorous smile; he sees everything, but sees it in an entertaining light; he is tranquil and observant where another would be bewildered and fractious. Whether digging and planting in his garden, or contemplating the majesty of the Sphinx at Memphis, he is always true to himself—an American of Americans, and therefore free from prejudices and provincialisms, but redolent of the native flavor, unterrified by conventions and pretences, yet reverent always in the presence of what deserves reverence; testing all things with the talisman of simple common-sense, which counteracts false enchantments and restores objects to their real shapes. To look upon the world independently and, as it were, primitively, and to report the unhackneyed and untraditional truth about it, is a rare and precious faculty; it is of the essence of the best type of American humor, which is Warner’s. He makes himself impersonal by identifying himself with his own reader; it is as if the reader were writing the book, or the writer reading it.

  His pungent and witty, yet wise and kindly essays revealed to us a truly French perception of beauty of form, and a new virtuosity in literary color. His early work was interpenetrated with mellow sympathy for all the pure outgoings of youth. No one has caught the American boy and girl better; no one has shown more dramatic instinct in setting a scene or in letting a story tell itself in a dry, clever, bantering, paradoxical tone which wins a smile that seldom degenerates into a laugh.

  He was an eager traveller and a born observer; and he came at a time when Americans were going out of themselves to see the world and to understand their own places in it. Mr. Warner’s roots were deep in the soil of the New World, and he carried a very independent mind abroad; but he had a tolerant temper, the tastes and charity of a man of the world, and the receptivity of nature which loves excellence and is quick to recognize it wherever it discloses its presence. From all taint of that narrow Americanism which has its roots in local ignorance Mr. Warner was absolutely free; there was no touch of provincialism in him. He believed in having the best, and if the best could not be had at home he believed in importing it free of duty. He believed in and loved his country, but he was as free to speak of its faults as Lowell. Patriotism is to be measured in the long run by a man’s willingness to offend his countrymen for the sake of his country.

  Mr. Warner was by no means a man of the boldest creative imagination. He was not a poet at all. The form of the novel he deliberately adopted, quite late in his career, expressly to criticise most effectively certain dangerous phases of metropolitan life. There is something of the clever amateur in his rather transparent plots, as in Dr. Holmes’s; but his shrewd observation, and his genial philosophy of life, make his three stories valuable, chiefly as realistic studies by a keen yet kindly critic.