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Attributed Items: San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle
26 October–19 December 1865

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The mathematical Fitz Smythe, of the Alta, says in his paper that “the Colorado arrived from Panama after the quick passage of twelve days and twenty-four hours.”Ⓐtextual note That mode of expressing oneself in a solemn, religious paper like the Alta is extremely reprehensible. It is dreadfully well calculated to deceive—for who notices the odd hours? and who don't notice the round numbers and give the steamer credit for a twelve-day trip? Fitz Smythe, you won't do! Fitz Smythe, the atmosphere of the Police Court is destroying your religious principles! Fitz Smythe, beware! You will be a moral Augean Stable the first thing you know, Fitz Smythe! And in that case, there will be no Hercules found in these days equal to the job of shoveling you out! First class in mathematics, stand up: ArmandⒶemendation Leonidas Fitz Smythe, how many days do twelve days and twenty-four hours make?

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Lisle Lester, who is probably the worst writer in the world, though a good-hearted woman and a woman who means well, notwithstanding the distressing productions of her pen, has been visiting the Insane Asylum and favors the Marysville Appeal with some of her experiences. She is touched by the spectacle of mothers whose minds are so darkened by the clouds of insanity that “even the sight of an old child fails to recall the sweet relationship.” “Old child” is a rather pleasing expression, but it has an odd sound, especially when it drops unexpectedly into the midst of a paragraph which is perfectly saturated with pathos—or bathos—which is the case in the present instance. She recounts the sad history of a German girl in the asylum, and flavors the fearful tale with some decidedly queer phrases—thus: “She, the betrothed, saw the heart of him she loved was with the younger sister, and, strange as it is for womenⒶemendation, she gave him up, handed him to the sister Ⓐemendation, with her blessing and good will, wrapt up her grief, shut down her hopes, and to be alone came to America.” Wouldn't it have been more expressive to have said that “she shook him” and then wrapped up her grief, etc.? We cannot improve upon the steam-power of the phrase which informs us that she “shut down her hopes.” Of another patient, she says: “Wheat [begin page 484] in Michigan, lands in Ohio, houses in California, fill up the crevices of her fancy.” Isn't that rather crowding the “crevices?” Wouldn't it be more roomy to say these houses and things fill up the cañons of her fancy? As to Lisle Lester's grammar, we feel that we are speaking tamely when we say that it is powerful.

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The steamer did not pan out well for Fitz Smythe on Monday. He only got one departing notability out of the whole list of passengers. Moses Ellis retired from business with a heavy income, was banquetted at the Occidental by the merchants of the city, “left us on a visit to the home of his nativity,”Ⓐtextual note and Fitz Smythe gloats over it to the extent of a “stickfull.” But why did he neglect Conness? Why Rosecrans? Why Angela Starr King? And, above all, why did he let J. Schmeltzer go away without a parting dose of adulation? Oh, unhappy Schmeltzer, you didn't make your “pile,” perhaps!

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There is no use in a man trying to maintain a particular tone of feeling—a certain mood—when circumstances and surroundings are againstⒶemendation him. He may hold out for a while, but in the end he is bound to succumb to those circumstances and surroundings, and tune up afresh and in unison with their key-note. There is no use in a man trying to be a cynical, stoical humbug in the society of a lovely girl; and there is no use in his hoping to keep up a boisterous flow of spirits all through a Quaker meeting; and there is no use in his trying to remain cheerful and wide awake in a chloroform factory. It is no use for a man to attempt any of these things, because he can't “keep up his lick.” “Chrystal,” the San Mateo editorial correspondent of the Alta, who started out but one short week ago with a series of the liveliest and most enter- [begin page 487] taining articles (as contrasted with the general run of articles in that paper) has fallen! He has succumbed to the sleepy influences of that dreamy old chloroform factory. His sprightliness waned apace, and he has sunk down at last into a dreary homily on the immortality of the human soul—for the delectation of merchants and brokers, who are so partial to that sort of thing, and to teach the Alta editors “How to Conduct a Great Commercial Newspaper.” Alas! poor “Chrystal!” His surroundings were too much for him. He couldn't “keep up his lick!”

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One of Rev. Mr. Stebbins' deacons has been arrested for bigamy, and is to be examined in the Police Court. Mr. Robinson—John R. Robinson—is the culprit. It is charged that he married Kate R. Anderson in 1854, and afterward tried to get divorced from her in our courts. But he failed; and then he sent a statement of the case to Brigham Young's Probate Court, and that inspired body did the businessⒶemendation for him—though the chances are that these proceedings were exceedingly irregular in all their details, and that Brigham's Probate had no jurisdiction in the matter anyhow. However, it suited Robinson, and he went and got Rev. Mr. Stebbins to marry him to Laura Hatch in 1864, and then sailed in to hatch some more trouble. This kind of thing isn't going to do, Robinson. You must put a stop to it, you know. You are putting things into people's heads that shouldn't be there. And, moreover, your example is calculated to divert business from the California courts. The “Robertsonian method of teaching French” is very good, but the Robinsonian method of getting divorces is rather too brash. You won't do, Robinson. Robinson, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!

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It comes to us in the shape of a neat little note of two or three pages, and seems intended to convey some information of some kind or other, but it fails altogether if such be the object—for we can say, in all honesty and candor and without any disposition to be either facetious or severe, that we do not understand a solitary sentence in it. It might as well have been written in Sanscrit, for all that we can make out of it. She says: “The recent compliment paid me in your little sheet is not the cause of this address,” etc. Very well, then, why write the “address” at all—for the article which she has the charity to call a “compliment” is the only one in which we ever recollect of mentioning her in the Chronicle. Then she goes on and talks incoherently about some mysterious personage who has been trying to “injure” her—but as we know nothing about this personage, and as we have made no attempt to injure her ourselves, we cannot see how we are interested in the matter. She winds up by saying she “feels injured, not insulted.” In another place she seems to intimate that we are not “gentlemen” (the italics are hers). After that we feel injured, but not insulted, also. So neither party has any advantage; both are injured and neither insulted; this squares the account and makes a perfectly equitable “stand-off.” Therefore, all things being serene and lovely, let the sanguinary hatchet be interred. Is it a “whack?”

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This Fitz Smythianism in yesterday's Alta—“He thought he smelled a magnificent rodent”—is calculated to inflict painful suspense and distress upon the ignorant if left unexplained. It is merely a corruption of a familiar and harmless expression, and means: “He thought he smelt a rat.” But this thing must be stopped. We cannot afford to be constantly fooling away time and space in translating the Alta for its patrons, and saving them from demoralizing panic or suicide every day.

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Fitz Smythe says: “On examination of their boots they discovered that they had more real estate than blacking on theⒶemendation outer surface, and an examination of their pockets showed conclusively that both parties were teetotally impecunious.” How sparkling! What a fine flow of humor! And yet how low-spirited it makes a man feel to read it. Translated into simple English, and despoiled of its gorgeous panoply of funniness, the quotation becomes: “Their boots were soiled with dust and they had no money.”

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Let the Supreme Court stand back and give the Alta a chance. The Alta knows more about these things than the Supreme Court does. What does a man who is defeated in the Supreme Court stop there for? Why don't he appeal his case to the Alta? All this withering irony is called forth by a luminous editorial in Monday's issue of that paper in which the conduct of the Supreme Court is sharply criticised, the Judges instructed, and one or two of their decisions setⒶemendation aside with unspeakable gravity. Let all hands [begin page 493] “take a fresh holt” on the earth, now, and look out for “blood, hair and the ground tore up”—for the Alta has hung an anvil on her safety valve, and is going to try the Moses Frank forgery case all over again!

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Our friend, Fitz Smythe of the Alta, goes into raptures over a certain “magnificent funeral car” recently received by “Atkins Massey, the well-knownⒶemendation undertaker.” Fitz Smythe fairly “gloats” over this piece of sepulchral gorgeousness, summoning his choicest rhetoric to the task of describing its beauties and perfections. He dwells unctuously on its “elegance of design,” its “beauty of finish,” its “costly material and workmanship,” which he avers, in an esctasy of admiration, quite “excel anything of the kind ever produced in America.”Ⓐtextual note Furthermore, he expresses the opinion that “the term, luxury of grief,Ⓐtextual note may well be applied to this magnificent establishment.” What delightful enthusiasm, considering the subject! It seems as if the fascinated youth really hankered after “the luxury” of being locomoted to Lone Mountain in that “gorgeous establishment.”

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Fitz Smythe has gone into spasmsⒶemendation of delight over a magnificent hearse (our language is tame, compared to his,) which has just been imported here by one of our undertakers. This “genius of abnormal tastes” is generally gloating over a rape, or a case of incest, or a dismal and mysterious murder, or something of that kind; he is always going into raptures about something that other people shiver at. Now, he looks with a lecherous eye on this gorgeous star-spangled banner bone-wagon, and would become positively frantic with delight if he could only see it in its highest reach of splendor once with a five hundred dollar coffinful of decaying mortality in it. He could not contain his enthusiasm under such thrilling circumstances; he would swing his hat on the street corners and cheer the funeral procession. This fellow must be cramped down a little. He would burst with ecstasy if he could clasp a real, sure-enough body-snatcher to his bosom once, and be permitted to make an item of it. He must be gagged. Otherwise he will seduce some weak patron of the Alta into dying, for the sake of getting the first ride in the pretty hearse.

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Fitz Smythe has got one mysterious goblin on whom he lays all the dark crimes done in the city for which a plausible perpetrator cannot be otherwise drummed up. The first effort of this goblin was the murder and chopping to pieces of several persons in an obscure alley two or three years ago—on which occasion he carried off some small articles of value. Next, a lonely woman, living in a lonely by-street, was attacked at dead of night and slashed to death with a carpenter's chisel. Fitz Smythe said the goblin did it, and called attention to the startling similarity of the two cases in proof of the theory—barring of course that the goblin stole something in the first case but did not in the second. After a long interval something else occurred in the mysterious line—Fitz Smythe laid it on the goblin, as usual—said it was just after his style of doing business. After another interval the Mayor's clerk was robbed of a large sum of money in the night. “The goblin again!” whispers Fitz Smythe, with a shudder, and goes to work and compares all the ghost's former exploits together and makes out a clear case against him. Then, after another interval, comes the Meyers case in Commercial street, where a youth is slung-shotted at noonday and his father's pawnbroker shop robbed of some jewelry and second-hand meerschaum pipes—Fitz Smythe instantly recognizes the “peculiar style” of the goblin, and falls down in an agony of distress. He says: “Look at his old original [begin page 497] murders where he stole things; look how he chiseled that woman, where he didn't steal things; look how he went through the Mayor's clerk, but didn't touch him or mutilate him; look how he beat officer Rose nearly to death and cut his throat with a mysterious penknife, in the ancient Alameda; look how he knocked young Meyers endways with a dreadful slung shot, and took some second-hand pipes and old socks: look at these instances, look at them!—all out of the common order of things—all terrible and ‘peculiar’Ⓐemendation—all so similar, and yet so little alike—all evidently done by the same cool, shrewd, calculating hand—Oh, God, it is the goblin!”—and Fitz Smythe shudders at the bare thought. Poor fellow, he has had a long respite—so long, indeed, that his fears have gradually become toned down until his items were beginning to lose their wildness and read somewhat coherently, when lo! the mysterious What Cheer robbery suddenly resurrects the terrible goblin again and turns Fitz Smythe's hair gray in a single night! He don't go back over all the goblin's exploits this time. He considers that he has firmly established the goblin's guilt in those things long ago; so he merely tacks the new burglary on to his last feat—the pawnbroker robbery—and makes the chain complete from the What Cheer to the mysterious murderers of three years ago. But he overestimates the facility of the public for being “struck at once” with his far-fetched and dissimilar similarities. Hear him; “The similarity of the details of this robbery to those of that which came so near proving fatal to young Meyers, in the Commercial street pawnbroker's shop, over a year since, will strike our readers at once.” Fitz Smythe, you won't do. You never come across a pumpkin but you think you have found a mare's nest.

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In reporting the Board of Education the Alta says sometimes, “The petition was received and referred with power.” That is too vague. Why don't you state how much power? Why can't you cipher it down a little closer? Couldn't you say the petition was referred with one-horse power, or four-horse power, or forty-horse power, or somehow that way, so that one could form a kind of definite idea of the degree of force employed in referring the petition! Now don't you go on keeping people in suspense in this sort of way. You are big enough to know what you are talking about, but you don't half the time.

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There is such a confounded prejudice against the Alta that we don't suppose it will be a bit of use our saying that it is not as stupid as it used to be. It's a fact nevertheless. The Alta is improving. It has a good London correspondent; then look at those letters from “Harry Palmer in the Humboldt!” Don't they show genius? Read “Charlie's”Ⓐemendation “Notes by the Way through Napa Valley.” His description of Calistoga is a sweet thing in descriptions. He talks of “the perfumed breezes that in the sweet springtideⒶemendation and summer [begin page 500] play and gambol there.” Yes, and think of the perfumed “sports” that in the sweet spring and summer play and gamble there! You forgot to mention them in your description, Charlie. How many notes, by the way, did you get for that puff of Calistoga, Charlie? It doesn't signify; business is business. On Saturday the Alta had a leader on “The Policy of Louis Napoleon!” There's pluck for you! There's moral hardihood! People may laugh at the Alta writing on such a subject as the policy of Louis Napoleon, but that leader was notⒶemendation half badⒶtextual note; there was nothing very new in it, but it was written in tolerably good English. Then Fitz Smythe, though he never will learn to write the English language correctly, has almost given up his insane attempts to make one joke before he dies. Altogether, the Alta is certainly improving. Even the commercial reporter is getting lively and sportive, and to make up for the suppression of the “Poets' Corner,” quotes little bits of poetry. We have hopes that the Alta will become a newspaper yet.Ⓐemendation

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Fitz Smythe has not succeeded in making up his mind positively yet as to who robbed the What Cheer House, though he is still fulminating some stunning theories on the subject. It is a significant fact that on the morning of the burglary Fitz Smythe bundled up all the bills he owed the What Cheer House for board and put them into the hands of a constable for collection, and then packed up his alternate shirt and his other pair of socks, and went somewhere else to roost.

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The Alta Ⓐemendation says: “A communication was received by the Board of Education from Mrs. StoutⒶtextual note, requesting permission to have a ChristmasⒶemendation tree in her school.” This sort of thing should not be encouraged. We pay our teachers to teach, and for no other purpose; and it stands to reason that if they get to cultivating shrubbery, the interests of education are bound to suffer. Oh! this won't do. It would institute a pernicious precedent. Once you let these teachers get stuck after shrubbery, so to speak, and they will soon go to trying even more unseasonable and extraordinary experiments than attempting to raise Christmas trees in November. Let them raise trees in school, and they would shortly be wanting to have turnip patches and cabbage orchards under the benches—and then what would become of the pupils?—what then would become of the holy cause of education? Come, let up.

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A Mr. Johnson inveigled a Mr. Nichols into a dark room the other night, knocked him in the head with a club in the most mysterious manner, and then decamped and has not since been heard of. Go after him, Fitz Smythe! He is your dreadful goblin, sure. Don't you notice the “strange similarity” between this affair and the robbing of the What Cheer House, and the braining of Meyers' clerk, and the robbing of the Mayor's secretary, and the mutilation of officer Rose, and the chiseling of the lone woman, and the murder of the unknown family up a dark alley? Scat! Sick him, Fitz Smythe!

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Have we driven our best friends away from us? We are afraid we have actually done this foolish thing. We used to get the rarest material for squibs out of the Flag's execrable poetry; and out of the Call's hilarious romancing; and out of the Examiner's bottomless wisdom; and out of the Alta's dreary editorials; and out of the Flag's thunder-and-lightning-and-whisky ditto; and out of Fitz Smythe's dismal jokes; and out of the Mercury's French atrocities; and out of the Grass Valley Union's engaging simplicity—but behold! all these affluent leads are worked out—stripped to the bed-rock—and we are left poor and desolate in our old age. We have driven the Flag's villainous poetry from its columns, and it deals in sleepy poetical mediocrity now; we have broken the wing of the Call's soaring imagination and brought it down to earthy, unembellished facts; we have fished up the Examiner out of its vasty deeps of wisdom and made it “hug the shore” on soundings; we have galvanized the dead corpses of the Alta's leaders; we have banished the thunder, and the glare, and the gorgeous whisky-blossoms from the Flag's ditto; we have subjugated Fitz Smythe; we have stayed the Mercury's bloody French atrocities; we have hushed the sweet prattle of the innocent Union! All the papers have left the open plain of extremes and taken to the woods in the middle ground of non-committalismⒶemendation. We have improved the literature of the land to our own undoing. Come back, good friends, come back!

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Fitz Smythe had another fine runaway-horse item yesterday, but he only made nine lines of it. Come now, elaborate it and make it funny like you did that other one. Don't you know that your entertaining runaway horse literature is getting to be looked for eagerly in the Alta every morning? Give us a one-horse poem, can't you? Don't be mean, Fitz Smythe—don't be mean.

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Fitz Smythe brags on his beautiful new false teeth, and tells how closely they resemble nature, and how they defy the keenest scrutiny, and how they even impose upon the wearer himself—but he says never a word about how they impose upon the restaurant keepers. Oh, this is shameful!

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How much fruit, peanuts and salvation did Fitz Smythe get for that first rate notice of the apple-peddler and the old street-preaching Crisis man? You are becoming considerably too brash, Fitz Smythe. You will have to be crowded down a little. You must stop using the columns of a great commercial paper to puff all the old bummers in town.

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Or what was the matter with the genial Fitz Smythe when he branched out on that high art criticism in Tuesday's Alta? He says one of the best paintings he has seen in San Francisco “is a genuine horreman,” etc., (meaning horseman, of course.) Now how can a mere painting, on lifeless canvass be a “genuine horseman?” And then immediately he drops the horseman and goes to talking incoherently about something connected with an artist's studio. What natural connection can there be between a genuine horseman or bogus horseman, or yet a horseman of any kind, and an artist's studio? You have been getting drunk again, Fitz Smythe. You had better stop that, you know.

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We don't so much mind Fitz Smythe's novel and irreverent familiarity—not to say novel and atrocious grammar—in speaking of “a skeleton with a black silk handkerchief around his neck”Ⓐemendation—we don't mind these queer little infelicities of composition which must of necessity frequently occur in the hurry of writing up a daily newspaper, but we do protest against “the fact of the handkerchief being around the neck, while there was no other clothing,” being received as conclusive and damning evidence that deceased was “murdered!” Oh, this won't do, you know. This is the wildest blast of inspiration that has yet swept through the teeming brain of the great theorizer who traces all mysterious crimes back, step by step, to the bloody unknown goblin who gobbled up the unoffending Doe family in an obscure house up a dark alley at dead of night three years ago. Why is a black silk handkerchief around the throat of a comfortably clad skeleton a matter of no significance—and yet why, after all the other clothing has rotted away, does that same black silk handkerchiefⒶemendation minutely proclaim that a terrible murder has been done? What is there so suspicious about a black silk handkerchief when it was unaccompanied by other clothing? How would it have been if the skeleton had worn one of Ward's shirts and no necktie at all? Fitz Smythe, you are wool-gathering. You are always haunted by some dark and dreadful theory or other. Fitz Smythe, you murdered that man and buried him in the sand, you know you did, and now you are just fixing yourself up to lay it all on your goblin with one of your fine theories.

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The exuberant Fitz Smythe has favored the world with another of his charming condensed romances. The scene is laid in a match factory, corner of Mission and Ninth streets. The principal characters are “a small China boy” and a squad of naughty “Melican” juveniles. The naughtyⒶemendation boys steal a jar containing “sticks of phosphorus,” which they mistake for “sticks of candy.” The “Melican boys” burn their fingers and flee in disgust. Young China hastens to appropriate the abandoned spoil, and, getting burnt too, darts frantically away, yelling “H-i-e Y-a-a-h! Me smelly h—l!” This surpasses all Fitz Smythe's previous efforts—for it has a moral. We recommend its publication as a tract for distribution in Sunday Schools. What can more forcibly impress upon the youthful mind the wickedness of stealing—unless you're quite sure you are after the right article?

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The Call Ⓐemendation gives an account of an unoffending Chinese rag-picker being set upon by a gang of boys and nearly stoned to death. It concludes the paragraph thus: “He was carried to the City and County Hospital in an insensible condition, his head having been split open and his body badly bruised. The young ruffians scattered, and it is doubtful if any of them will be recognized and punished.” If that unoffending man dies, and a murder has consequently been committed, it is doubtful whether his murderers will be recognized and punished, is it? And yet if a Chinaman steals a chicken he is sure to be recognized and punished, through the efforts of one of our active police force. If our active police force are not too busily engaged in putting a stop to petty thieving by Chinamen, and fraternizing with newspaper reporters, who hold up their wonderful deeds to the admiration of the community, let it be looked to that the boys who were guilty of this murderous assault on an industrious and unoffending man are recognized and punished. The Call says “some philanthropic gentlemen dispersed the miscreants;” these philanthropic gentlemen, if the police do their duty and arrest the culprits, can probably recognize them.

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The little Call is down on “the boys in blue”—very down. It is most egregiously prejudiced against them. It doesn't understand the rights of “the boys in blue,” and therefore it abuses them. It is systematically pursuing them with outrageous accusations. It accuses them of prodding inoffensive citizens with bayonets and things, of going a great way out of the way to steal divers property, of waylaying school children and confiscating their grub, and of getting caterwampously drunk. Now who ever knew of soldiers doing thus as aforesaid? Moreover, even if they do do thus, what then? Didn't they fight for their country, and haven't they saved the country? Well then. Very well then. After having saved the country, ain't they entitled to help themselves to just as much of it as they want? Don't the “spoils belong to the victors?” They should think so! The secret of this persecution of “the boys in blue” lies just here—they don't advertise in the little Call, and the little Call don't allow people to do as they “darn please,” unless they advertise in it. Then it is all right. Don't you think now, little Call, that you had better sling away that subject and tackle a fresh one—“The Blue Laws of Connecticut,” for instance, if you must “chaw up” something blue?