January 15 Saturday – Charles De Kay (1848-1935), art and literary critic of the N.Y. Times for eighteen years, wrote a review of FE which was published this day in the Times, “Mark Twain’s Mixed Pickles,” p. BR 40:

Mark Twain’s new book will challenge comparisons with “Innocents Abroad,” because it is cast on similar lines, being a salmi of plain information spiced with wit and humor. With such works each reader must decide whether the mixture suits him or not. …

While in fact “Following the Equator” is in many respects like “Innocents Abroad,” the hand that wrote it is a much surer, more practiced hand. We find again, here and there, sandy tracts of moralizing, but as we traverse them the green glimmer of fun appears much sooner on the horizon and the moral is somehow inadvertently swallowed as we open our mouths to laugh. …

Great as is Mark Twain’s fame about the earth, there are readers who will not forgive him two things— the injection of serious topics into his humorous papers, and occasional lapses into what they call coarseness. It may be pointed out that one of Mark Twain’s chief points of originality is the way in which he uses the serious as a foil to the humorous. Charles Dickens often employed the pathetic in the same way….Compared with Dickens he is weak on the constructive and dramatic sides.

Notes: Charles De Kay was from an old, distinguished New York family. He published The Bohemian (1878); Hesperus (1880); Vision of Nimrod (1881); Vision of Esther (1882); and “Love Poems of Louis Barnaval” (1883). His best-known story is “Manmatha.” Charles De Kay was known as the “Charmer of New York” in the 1870s, when he was in his twenties and had newly arrived to make his way socially and in literary circles. Educated in Europe and a Yale graduate, he ornamented salons both abroad and in New York. In 1876, he took over the post of literary and art editor of The New York Times until 1894. In 1880 De Kay founded the N.Y. Fencer’s Club; in 1882 he founded the Authors Club; in 1892 the Sculpture Society; and in 1899, the National Arts Club. He was appointed by President Cleveland to the Counsul General post in Berlin. He was elected a member of the Institute of Arts and Letters in 1906. He was also art editor of The New York Evening Post during 1907 and associate editor of Art World from 1915-1917. His obituary quotes an admirer, Robert Underwood Johnson, who thought De Kay was “the master of more branches of knowledge than any man I have ever met—art, science, philosophy, Oriental lore, to general literature….He was not only intellectual but also the master of half a dozen languages and of a rare scholarly precision of statement. I doubt if he was ever caught in an error of fact” [HelenADekayGilder.org; NY Times, May 24, 1935 obituary, p. 21]. Mrs. Richard Watson Gilder was a sister of Charles De Kay.