Chase was of courseourman for the 1860 nomination, and the political relations between him and our chief were close; but somehow I went more to other houses thanto his, though I found myself apparently launched from it upon a social tide that bore me through all the doors of the amiable little city. I was often at the evening parties (we called them evening parties then) which his daughter gave, and one day the Governor himself, as we met in the street, invited me to luncheon with him. I duly went and passed the shining butler’s misgiving into the dining-room, where I found the family at table with no vacant place among them. The Governor had forgotten me! That was clear enough, but he was at once repentant, and I lunched with him, outwardly forgiving, but inwardly resolved that it should be the last time I would come at his informal bidding. I have since forgotten much more serious engagements myself; I have not gone to dinners where I have promised over my own signature to go; but at twenty-one men are proud, and I was prouder then than I can yet find any reason for having been.
In our capital at that day we had rather the social facts than the social forms. We were invited to parties ceremoniously enough, but we did not find it necessary to answer whether we would come or not. Our hostess remained in doubt of us till we came or did not come; at least that was the case with young men; we never inquired whether it was so with young girls or not. But sometimes when a certain youth wished to go with a certain maiden he found out as delicately as he could whether she was invited, and if she was he begged her to let him go with her, and arrived with her in one of the lumbering two-horse hacks which supplied our cab-service, and which I see still bulking in the far perspective of the State Street corner of the State House yard. If you had courage so high or purse so full you had sent the young lady a flower which she wore to the party, preferably a white camellia which the German florist, knownto our young world only as Joe, grew very successfully, and allowed you to choose from the tree. Why preferably a camellia I could not say after this lapse of time; perhaps because its cold, odorless purity expressed the unimpassioned emotion which oftenest inspired the gift and its acceptance. It was very simple, very pastoral; I do not know when Columbus outgrew this custom, which of course it did long ago.
Bringing a young lady to a party necessarily meant nothing but that you enjoyed the pleasure of bringing her. Very likely she found her mother there when she came with you, unmindful, the one and the other, that there was such a thing as chaperonage in a more fastidious or censorious world. It seems to me, indeed, that parties at the Columbus houses were never wanting in the elders whom our American society of girls and boys used to be accused of ignoring. They superabounded at the legislative receptions, but even at the affairs which my sophistication early distinguished from those perfunctory hospitalities there were mature people enough, both married and unmarried, who, though they had felt no charge concerning their daughters or nieces, found it agreeable to remain till the young ladies were ready to be seen home by their self-chosen escorts. A youth who danced so reluctantly as I, was rather often thrown upon these charitable elders for his entertainment, and I cannot remember ever failing of it. People, and by people I do not mean women only, read a good deal in that idyllic Columbus, and it was my delight to talk with any one who would about the new books or the old. The old books were known mostly to that number of professional men—lawyers, doctors, divines, and scientists—which was disproportionately large in our capital; they were each cultivated in his own way, and in mine, too, or the better part of it, as I found. The young and the younger women
The State House yard on the State Street sideThe State House yard on the State Street side
read the current fiction and poetry at least enough to be asked whether they had read this thing or that; and there was a group of young men with whom I could share my sometimes aggressive interest in our favorite authors. I put the scale purposely low; I think that I could truthfully say that there was then no American community west of the Alleghanies which surpassed ours in the taste for such things. At the same time I must confess that it would be easy for such an exclusively literary spirit as I was to deceive himself, and to think that he always found what he may have oftener brought.
For a long time after the advent of our new journalism, the kind of writing which we practised—light, sarcastic, a little cruel, with a preference for the foibles of our political enemies as themes—seemed to be the pleasure of good society, which in that serious yet hopeful time did not object to such conscience as we put into our mocking. Some who possibly trembled at our boldness darklingly comforted themselves for our persiflage by the good cause in which it frisked. When anything very daring came out in the afternoon the young news-editor in his round of calls could hear the praise of it from charming readers in the evening, or he might be stopped in the street next day and told how good it was by the fathers, or brothers, or brothers-in-law, of those charming readers. It was more like the prompt acclaim the drama enjoys than the slow recognition of literature; but I, at least, was always trying to make my writing literature, and after fifty-odd years it may perhaps be safely owned that I had mainly a literary interest in the political aspects and events which I treated. I felt the ethical quality of the slavery question, and I had genuine convictions about it; but for practical politics I did not care; I wished only to understand enough of them to seize any chance for a shot at theother side which they might give. I had been in the midst of practical politics almost from my childhood; through my whole youth the din of meetings, of rallies, of conventions had been in my ears; but I was never at a meeting, a rally, or a convention; I have never yet heard a political speech to the end. For a future novelist, a realist, that was a pity, I think, but so it was.
In that day of lingering intolerance, intolerance which can scarcely be imagined in this day, and which scarcely stopped short of condemning the mild latitudinarianism of theAutocrat of the Breakfast Tableas infidelity, every one but a few outright atheists was more or less devout. In Columbus everybody went to church; the different forms of Calvinism drew the most worshipers; our chief was decorously constant with his family at the Episcopal service; but Reed was frankly outside of all ecclesiastical allegiance, and I who, no more than he, attended any religious service, believed myself of my father’s Swedenborgian faith; at any rate. I could make it my excuse for staying away from other churches, since there were none of mine. While I am about these possibly needless confidences I will own that sermons and lectures as well as speeches have mostly been wearisome to me, and that I have heard only as many of them as I must. Of the three, I prefer sermons; they interest me, they seem really to concern me; but I have been apt to get a suggestive thought from them and hide away with it in a corner of my consciousness and lose the rest. My absences under the few sermons which I then heard must have ended chiefly in the construction or the reconstruction of some scene in my fiction, or some turn of phrase in my verse.
Naturally, under these circumstances, the maturer men whom I knew were oftener doctors of medicine thandoctors of divinity; in fact, I do not think I knew one clergyman. This was not because I was oftener sick than sorry; I was often sorry enough, and very sensible of my sins, though I took no established means of repenting them; but I have always found the conversation of physicians more interesting than that of most other men, even authors. I have known myself in times past to say that they were the saints of the earth, as far as we then had saints, but that was in the later Victorian period when people allowed themselves to say anything in honor of science. Now it is already different; we have begun to have our doubts of doubt and to believe that there is much more in faith than we once did; and I, within the present year, my seventy-ninth, have begun to go to church and to follow the sermon with much greater, or more unbroken, attention than I once could, perhaps because I no longer think so much in the terms of fiction or meditate the muse as I much more used to do.
In those far days I thought prose fit mainly for every-day use in newspaper work. I was already beginning to print my verses in such of the honored Eastern periodicals as would take them: usually for nothing. I wrote for theSaturday Pressof New York, which ambitious youth everywhere were then eager to write for, and I wrote for theAtlantic Monthlyoftener than I printed in it. I have told all this and more inMy Literary Passionsand I will not dwell here upon the whirl of æsthetic emotion in which I eddied round and round at that tumultuous period. In that book I have also sufficiently told the story of my first formal venture in the little volume of verse which I united with my friend John J. Piatt in offering to the world. But I may add here that it appeared just at Christmas-time in 1859 from the press of a hopeful young publisher of Columbus who was makinghis experiment in the disquieting hour when no good thing was expected to come out of our Western Nazareth. We two were of the only four poets west of the Alleghanies who had yet been accepted by theAtlantic, and our publisher had the courage to make our book very pretty in print and binding. It was so pretty that I am afraid some readers liked it for its looks; one young lady said that I at least could have no trouble in choosing what Christmas presents I should make my friends. She was that very beautiful girl who easily bore the palm for beauty in Columbus, and I do not yet understand how I was able to reject her unprofessional suggestion with as much pride as if she had been plain. I gave my book to no one, in my haughty aversion from even the shadow of advertising, and most of my friends had their revenge, I suppose, in not buying it.
I had begun now to know socially and intrinsically the little capital which I had known only politically and extrinsically during the two winters passed there as a legislative correspondent. I then consorted with the strangers whom their share in the government made sojourners, and who had little or no local quality to distinguish them from one another. I shared the generalized hospitalities offered them with that instinctive misgiving which I have rather more than hinted; and though I distinguished among them, and liked and valued certain of them, yet I had a painful sense of our common exteriorality and impermanence. I cannot say that I ever expected to become part of the proper life of the city, and when suddenly I found myself in that life, if not of it, I was very willing to find it charming. How charmingit was compared with the life of other cities I had no means of knowing, but now after the experiences, not too exhaustive, of half a century I still feel it to have been charming, with the wilding grace proper to all the West in those days, and the refinement remembered from the varied culture (such culture as there was) of the East and South it derived from.
Not so many people in our town could have known me for my poetry as for my journalism, and I do not pretend that the sexes were equally divided in their recognition. I have intimated my fancy that with most men, men of affairs, men of the more serious callings, the face of the poet was saved by the audacity of the paragrapher. If I could be so sharp, so hard in my comment on the day’s events, I could not be so soft as I seemed in those rhymes where I studied the manner of Heine, the manner of Tennyson, and posed in this or that dramatized personality. I cannot flatter myself that I did not seem odd sometimes to many of my fellow-citizens, though I hope that with some of the hardest-headed among them I was acceptable for qualities which recommend average men to one another. Some of that sort made friends with me; some even who were of an entirely diverse political thinking tolerated my mockeries of opinions which they supposed their principles. But neither my pleasure nor my pride was in such friendships. What I wished to do always and evermore was to think and dream and talk literature, and literature only, whether in its form of prose or of verse, in fiction, or poetry, or criticism. I held it a higher happiness to stop at a street corner with a congenial young lawyer and enter upon a fond discussion of, say, De Quincey’s essays than to prove myself worthy the respect of any most eminent citizen who knew not or loved not De Quincey. But I held it far the highest happiness to call at some house where there wereyoung girls waiting and willing to be called upon and to join them in asking and saying whether we had read this or that late novel or current serial. It is as if we did nothing then but read late novels and current serials, which it was essential for us to know one another’s minds upon down to the instant; other things might wait, but these things were pressing.
Of course there were some houses where such problems were of more immediate and persistent interest than other houses. Such a house was the ever-dear house of the S. family, which made itself a home any hour of the day up to midnight for such youth as had once been adopted its sons. It was not only a literary house, it was even more a musical house, where there was both singing and playing, with interludes of laughing and joking in all forms of seemly mirth, with the whole family, till the little boys of it stumbled up the stairs half asleep. I could not play, but I was sometimes suffered by that large-hearted hospitality to try singing; and I could talk with the best. So, it was my more than content in the lapses of the music to sit with the young aunt (she seemed so mature in her later twenties to me in my earliest) and exchange impressions of the books new and old that we had been reading. We frequenters of the house held her in that honor which is the best thing in the world for young men to feel for some gentle and cultivated woman; I suppose she was a charming person apart from her literary opinions; but we did not think of her looks; we thought of her wise and just words, her pure and clear mind.
It was the high noon of Tennyson and Thackeray and George Eliot and Dickens and Charles Reade, whose books seemed following one another so rapidly.The Newcomeswas passing as a serial throughHarper’s Magazine, and we were reading that with perhaps morepleasure than any of the other novels and with the self-satisfaction in our pleasure which I have before this argued was Thackeray’s most insidious effect with youth striving to spurn the world it longed to shine in. We went about trying to think who in the story was like whom in life, and our kind hostess was reading it, too, and trying to think that, too; but it was not well for her to say what she thought in the case of the handsomest, and for several reasons, really, the first among us. It appeared that she thought he was like Clive Newcome and that we others were like those friends of his whom in the tale his nature was shown subordinating. She said something like this to some one, and when her saying came to us others we revolted in a body. No, we would not have that theory of our relation to our friend; and I do not know to what infuriate excess of not calling for a week we carried our resentment. I do not know how after the week, if it was so long, we began calling again; but I surmise it was through something said or done by that dear Miss A. which made it easy for her sister to modify her wounding theory into a recognition of the proud equality which bound us friends together.
We are all dead now, all save me and the youngest daughter of the house, but as I think back we are all living again, and others are living who are also dead. Among these is a young lady visitor from a neighboring city, one of those beautiful creatures who render the Madonna faces of the painters credible, and of a prompt gaiety which shared our wonted mirth in its own spirit. Her beauty might have dedicated her to any mysterious fate; beauty is often of such tragical affinition; but not her gaiety; and yet the glad die, too, and this glad creature within a year had gone to the doom which sent no whisper back to the hearts left lifelong aching. Herfather was appointed consul to a Mediterranean port, and she sailed with him in the ship which sailed with them both into eternity, unseen, unsignaled, as messageless as if it had been a mist swept from the face of the sea.
But well a year before this time and a year after our first meeting in Columbus I saw her in Boston, in a house swept as wholly from the face of the earth as that ship from the face of the sea. I suppose the Court House in Boston is an edifice as substantial as it is plain, but for me, when I look at the place where it stands my vision pierces to the row of quiet, dignified mansions which once lined that side of Somerset Street, and in one of which I somehow knew that I should find with her uncle’s family the beautiful creature already so unimaginably devoted to tragedy, to mystery, to the eternal baffle of surmise. It seemed that from often being there she knew the city so enchanted and enchanting to me then, and she went about with me from one wonder of it to another; and it remains in the glimmer of that association, which no after-custom could wholly eclipse. It was a moment of the glad young American life of other days which seems so impossible to after days and generations; and with the Common and its then uncaterpillared elms, with the Public Garden, just beginning in leaf and flower, with the stately dwellings which looked upon those pleasances in the streets long since abandoned to business, with the Public Library, the fine old Hancock House, and the Capitol as Bullfinch designed and left it, and the Athenæum as it used to be, and Faneuil Hall, swarming with memories for my young ardor, and the Old State House, unvisited by its manifold transformations,—the brave little city of the past is all contemporaneous again.
As I have said, all they of that Columbus house but one are gone. One of the little boys went before they were men, and then the other; the mother went long afterward; the elder daughter, who had been the widow of our repudiated Clive Newcome, went longer afterward yet; and then still later, finding myself once on a very mistaken lecturing-tour in Kansas, where our beloved Miss A. had lived many married years, I asked for her, hoping to see her, and heard that she had died the year before. But first of all the father died, leaving me the memory of kindness which I hardly know how to touch aright. He was my physician as well as my friend, and saw me through the many maladies, real and unreal, of my ailing adolescence, but he would have no fee for curing me of either my pains or my fears. I had come to him first with my father, who somehow knew him before me, and it was as if he became another father to me. Often in those nights of singing and playing, of talking and joking, he would look in for a moment between patients to befriend our jollity; and when at last it came to my leaving Columbus, and going that far journey to Venice, whither I seemed bound as on a journey to another planet, he asked me one night into his little outside office by the State Street gate, and had me tell him what provision I had made for the chances before me. I told him, and then whether he thought it not enough in that war-time when the personal risks were doubled by the national risks he said, “Well, I am not a rich man, or the son of a rich man, but if you think you need something more, I can let you have it.” I had been keeping my misgivings to myself, but now I owned them and borrowed the two hundred dollars which he seemed to have there with him, as if in expectation of my need.
For a darker tint in the picture I have been painting of my past let me record here a fact which may commend itself for the younger reader’s admonition; the old cannot profit by it, perhaps, though as long as we live we are in danger of forgetting kindness. When my family first came to Columbus we were much beholden to another family, poor like ourselves, which did everything but turn itself out of doors to let us have the little house we were to occupy after them. They shared it with us till they could place themselves elsewhere; and my father and mother remained bound to them in willing gratitude. When I came back to the capital after my five years of exile in our village I, too, remembered our common debt, but when the world began to smile upon me I forgot the friends who had not forgotten me till one day my father wished me to go with him to see them. The mother of the family received me with a sort of ironical surprise, and then her hurt getting the better, or the worse, of her irony, she said some things about my losing sight of humble friends in the perspectives opening so alluringly before me. I could not recall, if I would, just the things she said, but they scorched, and the place burns yet; and if I could go back and repair the neglect which she brought home to me how willingly, after nearly sixty years, would I do it! But at the time I hardened my heart and as I came away I tried to have my father say something in extenuation of the fault which I angrily tried to make a merit of; but with all his tenderness for me he would not or could not.
Perhaps he, too, thought that I had been a snob, a thing that I had not needed the instruction of Thackeray to teach me the nature of; but I hope I was not so bad as that; I hope there was nothing meaner in me than youth flattered out of remembrance of old kindness by the new kindness in which it basked. I will confess here that Ihave always loved the world and the pleasures which other sages pretend are so vapid. If I could make society over, or make it over a little, so that it would be inclusive rather than exclusive, I believe I would still like to go into it, supposing it always sent a motor to fetch and carry me and did not insist upon any sort of personal exertion from me. But when I was between twenty and twenty-three and lived in Columbus I was willing to be at almost any trouble for it. All up and down the wide shady streets which ran from High eastward, and were called Rich and Town and State and Broad, there were large pleasant houses of brick, with or without limestone facings, standing in lawns more ample or less, and showing through their trees the thrilling light of evening parties that burst with the music of dancing from every window. Or if this was not the case with every house, beautiful girls were waiting in every other to be called upon, beside the grates with their fires of soft coal, which no more discriminated between winter and summer than the door-yard trees which seem to have been full-foliaged the whole year round.
It may be that with the passage of time there began to be shadows in the picture otherwise too bright. It seems to me that in time the calls and balls may have begun to pall and a subtleWeltschmerz, such as we had then, to pierce the heart; but scarcely any sense of that remains. What is certain is that the shadow of incredible disaster which was soon to fill the whole heaven still lurked below the horizon, or if it showed itself there, took the form of retreating clouds which we had but to keep on laughing and singing in order to smile altogether out of sight. The slavery question which was not yet formidably a question of disunion was with most of the older men a question of politics, though with men like Dr. S. it was a question of ethics; with the younger menit was a partisan question, a difference between Democrats and Republicans; with me it was a question of emotions, of impassioned preoccupations, and in my newspaper work a question of copy, of material for joking, for firing the Southern heart. It might be brought home to us in some enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, as in the case of the mother who killed her children in Cincinnati rather than let them be taken back with her to Kentucky; or in the return of an escaping slave seized in our own railroad station; and there was at first the horror of revolted humanity and then the acquiescence of sickened patience. It was the law, it was the law; and the law was constitutional and must be obeyed till it was repealed. Looking back now to that law-abiding submission, I can see that it was fine in its way, and I can see something pathetic in it as well as in the whole attitude of our people, the South and North confronted in that inexorable labyrinth, neither side quite meaning it or realizing it.
That was a very crucial moment indeed, but the crisis had come for us five or six years before when the case of some conscientious citizens, arrested in the Western Reserve for violation of that abominable law, came before Chief-Justice Swann of the Ohio Supreme Court. It was hoped by the great majority of the Republican party and largely expected that Justice Swann’s opinion would in whatever sort justify the offenders, and it was known that the Governor would support the decision with an armed force against the United States, which must logically attempt the execution of the law with their troops. Very probably the state of Ohio would have been beaten in such an event, but Justice Swann defeated the popular hope and expectation before-hand by confirming the judgment against those right-minded but wrong-headed friends of humanity. Ohio was
Old-time dwellings on one of the Columbus streets that Mr. Howells used to frequentOld-time dwellings on one of the Columbus streets that Mr. Howells used to frequent
spared the disaster which befell South Carolina five or six years later, and Justice Swann suffered the penalty of men whose judgment is different from the convictions of their contemporaries. From being one of the most honored leaders of his party, with the prospect of any highest place in its gift, he remained one of the most distinguished jurists of his time whose best reward came coldly from those who would not blame where they could not praise. In Ohio the judiciary is elective, and Judge Swann hastened the decision of the court before the meeting of the Republican State Convention in order that his party might not unwittingly renominate him in the expectation of an opinion from him favorable to the good men of Ohio who had broken the bad law of the United States.
There is a legend, cherished more for its dramatic possibility than for any intrinsic probability, that when Lincoln appointed Noah L. Swayne justice of the Supreme Court of the United States he supposed that he was appointing Joseph Swann, and that he was misled by the similarity of the names, not very great either to ear or eye. Swayne was then one of the most eminent members of the Columbus bar, and, though he lacked the judicial experience of Swann, was entirely fit for the place he was called to fill. If such a mistake was made it was one which could well retrieve itself, but it seems a very idle fancy which has toyed with its occurrence. It would be altogether too nice in the face of its unlikelihood to inquire whether Lincoln might have wished to express a certain sympathy for the eminent jurist in the arrest of his public career which followed his decision. One would first have to establish the fact of such a feeling in him and prove that if he had it he would have been so careless of the jurist’s name as to mistake another name for it. These are the things that happen in fiction when thenovelist is hard driven by the exigencies of his plot, but cannot easily occur in sober history.
I met both of these prominent men during my Columbus years, as an improminent young fellow-citizen might, Justice Swayne rather often, and Justice Swann once at least, in their own houses. On this sole occasion, which dimly remains with me, I was paying one of those evening calls which we youth were diligent in making at houses where there were young ladies; and after due introduction to the great jurist, I was aware of him, withdrawn and darkling in the next room, not unkindly, but not sensibly contributing to the gaiety of the time in me. That might have been after I was asked to a party at his house, which I was told, by a lady versed in such mysteries, was the greatest distinction which society had to offer in our city, and I suppose from this fact that the popular blame for his momentous decision, even if it was of much force, did not follow him into more rarefied air.
We young men of that time were mostly Republicans, but some of us were Democrats and some of us were Southerners, or derivatively Southern. I have said how little society with us was affected by New England, even in such a custom as Thanksgiving, and I may go a little farther and say how it was characterized for good as well as for evil by the nearer South rather than the farther East, but more for good than for evil. Many people of Southern origin among us had chosen a Northern home because they would rather live in a Free State than a Slave State; they had not cast their sectional patriotism, but when it came to a question of which ideal should prevail, they preferred the Northern ideal. They derived from that South which antedated the invention of the cotton-gin,and which could take a leading part in keeping the Northwestern Territory free, with Ohio the first Free State born of that great mother of Free States. The younger generation of their blood were native Ohioans, and these were not distinguishable from the children of the New-Englanders and the Scotch-Irish Pennsylvanians by anything that I can remember. We had already begun to be Ohioans, with an accent of our own, and I suppose our manners were simpler and freer than those of the East, but the American manners were then everywhere simple and free, and are so yet, I believe, among ninety-nine hundred-thousandths of our ninety-nine millions. It seems to me now that the manners in Columbus were very good then among the young people. No one can say what change the over-muchness of subsequent money may have made in them, but one likes to think the change, if any, is not for the better. There seems to have been greater pecuniary equality then than there is now; there was an evener sky-line, with scarcely a sky-scraping millionaire breaking it anywhere. Within what was recognized as society there was as much social as pecuniary equality; apparently one met the same people everywhere on that easily ascertained level above the people who worked for their living with their hands. These were excluded, as they always have been excluded from society in all times and places; so that if I had still been a compositor at the printer’s case I could not have been received at any of the houses that welcomed me as a journalist, though that did not occur to me then, and only just now occurs to me, as something strange and sad; something that forever belies our democracy, but is so fast and deep-rooted in the conditions which our plutocracy has kept from our ancestral monarchies and oligarchies and must keep as long as men live upon one another in the law of competition.
In one house there was more singing and playing and in another more reading and talking. All the young ladies were beautiful, with the supremacy of that young lady whom it was our poetry to hold so beautiful that no other might contest it. As I believe the use still is in the South, we called them Miss Lilly, Miss Julia, Miss Sally, Miss Fanny, Miss Maggie, whether they were the older or the younger daughters of the family. We were always meeting them at parties or, failing that or including that, we went to call upon them at their houses. We called in the evening and it was no strange thing for a young man to call every evening of the week, not at one house, but at three or four. How, in the swift sequence of the parties, we managed so often to find the young ladies at home remains one of the mysteries which age must leave youth to solve. Possibly in that sharply foreshortened perspective of the past the parties show of closer succession than they really were.
At most of the houses we saw only the young ladies; it was they whom we asked for; but there were other houses where the mothers of the family received with the daughters, and at one of these my welcome was immediately of a kindness and always of a conscience which it touches me to realize. I was taken at the best I meant as well as the best I was by the friend who was the exquisite spirit of the house, and made me at home in it. My world had been very small, and it has never since been the greatest, but I think yet, as I divined then, that she was of a social genius which would have made her in any great-worldlier capital the leader she was in ours, where her supremacy in that sort was no more questioned than the incomparable loveliness of that most beautiful girl whom every one worshiped. Her house expressed her, so that when her home finally changed to another the new house obeyed the magic of her tasteand put on the semblance of the first, with a conservatory breathing through it the odor of her flowers and the murmur of the dove that lived among them: herself a flower-like and birdlike presence, delicate, elegant, such as might have been fancied of some fine, old-world condition in a new-world reading of it. She lived to rule socially in a community which attested its gentleness by its allegiance to her until she was past eighty, but when I knew her first she was too young to be titularly accepted as their mother by her stepdaughters and was known to them as their cousin in what must have been her own convention; but I suppose she liked to be not less than sovereign among her equals. With me she was not only the kindest, but the most candid of my friends; my literary journalism and later my literature may have been to her liking, but she never flattered me for them when, as I now know, too much praise had made me hungry for flattery. No young man such as I was then could have had a wiser and faithfuler friend, and I render her memory my tribute after so many years from a gratitude which cannot be spoken. After so many years I cannot make out whether she accepted or merely suffered my extreme opinions in politics; though she was wholly Ohioan, her husband’s family had close affiliations with the South; but hers was certainly a Republican house, as nearly all the houses I frequented were. What may have made her even anticipatively my friend was our common acceptance of the Swedenborgian philosophy, which long, long afterward, the last time I saw her, I spoke of as a philosophy. But then she rejected the notion with scorn; it might be a pleasant fancy, she said, but a philosophy, no; and I perceived that she had come the way of that agnosticism which the whole cultivated world had taken. Now I have heard that in her last years she went back to the faith which was perhapsmore inherited than reasoned in both of us. But I am sure that it was at first a bond and that she was conscientiously true to this bond of a common spiritual tradition, when upon some public recognition of my work she reminded me how according to Swedenborg every beautiful thing we said or did was by an influx from the divine. I submitted outwardly, but inwardly I rebelled: not that my conceit of the things I did was so very great; I believe I thought rather modestly of myself for doing them, and I always meant to do much better things; in fact I still have my masterpiece before me; but, poor things as they were, I wished to feel them wholly mine.
For a kindred reason I quite as altogether refused, and more explicitly, the theory of my old friend, Moncure D. Conway, as to the true function of the West in literature. He was then a young Unitarian minister, preaching at Cincinnati an ever-widening liberalism in religion, and publishing a slight monthly magazine named afterThe Dialof Emerson at Concord, and too carefully studied from it. For this paler avatar of that transcendental messenger he had asked me for contributions, and so a friendship, which lasted throughout our lives, sprang up between us. When he once came to Columbus he came to lunch with me, and quite took my appetite away by propounding his theory that the West was to live its literature, especially its poetry, rather than write it, the East being still in that darkling period when it could not live its literature. I do not remember the arguments by which he supported his thesis; but proofs as of holy writ could not have persuaded me of it as far as I myself was concerned. My affair was to make poetry, let who would live it, and to make myself known by both the quality and quantity of my poetry. It is not clear to me now how I declared my position without immodesty,but somehow I declared it, and so finally that Conway was very willing to carry away with him for his magazine a piece of rhyme which I had last made. He could the more willingly do this becauseThe Dialwas one of those periodicals, commoner then than now, that paid rather in glory than in money; in fact it was not expected to pay anything in money, so that I doubly defeated him: I was not only not living my poetry, I was not even living by it.
THE days of the years when youth is finding its way into manhood are not those which have the most flattering memories. It is better with the autobiographer both before and after that time, though both the earlier and later times have much to offer that should keep him modest. But that interval is a space of blind struggle, relieved by moments of rest and shot with gleams of light, when the youth, if he is fortunate, gathers some inspiration for a worthier future. His experiences are vivid and so burnt into him that if he comes to speak of them it will require all his art to hide from himself that he has little to remember which he would not much rather forget. In his own behalf, or to his honor and glory, he cannot recall the whole of his past, but if he is honest enough to intimate some of its facts he may be able to serve a later generation. His reminiscences even in that case must be a tissue of egotism, and he will merit nothing from their altruistic effect.
Journalism was not my ideal, but it was my passion, and I was passionately a journalist well after I began author. I tried to make my newspaper work literary, to give it form and distinction, and it seems to me that I did not always try in vain, but I had also the instinct of actuality, of trying to make my poetry speak for its time and place. For the most part, I really made it speak for the times and places I had read of; but while Lowell was keeping myHeinesque verses among theAtlanticMSS. until he could make sure that they were not translations from Heine I was working at a piece of realism which when he printed it in the magazine our exchange newspapers lavishly reprinted. In that ingenuous time the copyright law hung loosely upon the journalistic consciousness and it was thought a friendly thing to reproduce whatever pleased the editorial fancy in the periodicals which would now frowningly forbid it, but with less wisdom than they then allowed it, as I think. I know that as its author the currency ofThe Pilot’s Storyin our exchanges gave me a joy which I tried to hide from my senior in the next room; and I bore heroically the hurt I felt when some of the country papers printed my long, overrunning hexameters as prose. I had studied the verse not alone in Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” but in Kingsley’s “Andromeda,” and Goethe’s “Hermann and Dorothea,” while my story I had taken from a potentiality of our own life, and in the tragedy of the slave girl whose master gambles her away atmonteon a Mississippi steamboat, and who flings herself into the river, I was at home with circumstance and scenery. I still do not think the thing was ill done, though now when I read it (I do not read it often) I long to bring it closer to the gait and speech of life. The popularity of the piece had its pains as well as pleasures, but the sharpest anguish I suffered was from an elocutionist who was proposing to recite it on the platform, and who came to me with it to have me hear him read it. He did not give it with the music of my inner sense, but I praised him as well as I could till he came to the point where the slave girl accuses her master with the cry of—
“Sold me! Sold me! Sold! And you promised to give me my freedom!”
“Sold me! Sold me! Sold! And you promised to give me my freedom!”
“Sold me! Sold me! Sold! And you promised to give me my freedom!”
when he said, “And here I think I will introduce a shriek.” “A shriek?” I faltered. “Yes, don’t you think it would fill the suspense that comes at the last word ‘Sold!’? Something like this,” and he gave a screech that made my blood run cold, not from the sensibility of the auditor, but the agony of the author. “Oh no!” I implored him, and he really seemed to imagine my suffering. He promised to spare me, but whether he had the self-denial to do so I never had the courage to inquire.
In the letters to my sister which I was so often writing in those Columbus years I find record of the constant literary strivings which the reader shall find moving or amusing as he will. “I have sold to Smith of the Odd Fellow’s Monthly at Cincinnati that little story I read to you early last summer. I called it ‘Not a Love Story.’ He gave me six dollars for it; and he says that as soon as I have time to dress up that translation which B. rejected he will buy that. At the rate of two dollars a page it will bring me sixteen or eighteen dollars. ‘Bobby’ ”—I suppose some sketch—“is going the rounds of the country papers. The bookseller here told our local editor that it was enough to make anybody’s reputation—that he and his family laughed prodigiously over it.... I have the assurance that I shall succeed, but at times I tremble lest something should happen to destroy my hopes. I think, though, that my adversity came first, and now it is prosperity lies before me. I am going to try a poem fit to be printed in theAtlantic. They pay Fullerton twenty-five dollars a page. I can sell, now, just as much as I will write.”
It was two years yet before that poem I was trying for theAtlanticwas fit, and sold to the magazine for twenty-five dollars, though it was three pages long. I was glad of the pay, but the gain was nothing to the glory; and with the letter which Lowell wrote me about it in thepocket next my heart, and felt for to make sure of its presence every night and morning and throughout the day, I was of the potentiality of immeasurable success. I should have been glad of earning more money, for there were certain things I wished to do for those at home which I could not do on my salary of ten dollars a week, already beginning to be fitfully paid. Once, I find that I had not the money for the white gloves which it seems I expected myself to wear in compliance with usage at a certain party; and there were always questions of clothes. Dress-coats were not requisite then and there; the young men wore frock-coats for the evening, but I had ambitiously provided myself with the other sort upon the example of a friend who wore his all day; I wore mine outdoors once by day, and then presciently dedicated it to evening calls. The women dressed beautifully, to my fond young taste; they floated in airy hoops; they wore Spanish hats with drooping feathers in them, and were as silken balloons walking in the streets where men were apt to go in unblacked boots and sloven coats and trousers. The West has, of course, brushed up since, but in that easy-going day the Western man did not much trouble himself with new fashions or new clothes.
Whether the currency ofThe Pilot’s Storyand theAtlanticpublication of my Heinesque poems added to my reputation in our city I could not say. It was the belief of my senior on the newspaper that our local recognition was enervating and that it had better go no farther, but naturally I could not agree with a man of his greater age and observation, and it is still a question with me whether recognition hurts when one has done one’s best. I cannot recall that I ever tried to invite it; Ihope not; but certainly I worked for it and hoped for it, and I doubt if any like experiment was ever received with more generous favor than ours by a community which I had reasons for knowing was intelligent if not critical. Our paper, if I may say it, was always good society, but after a while and inevitably it became an old story, or at least an older story than at first, though it never quite ceased to be good society. There remained the literary interest, the æsthetic interest for me, after the journalistic interest had waned; there was always the occasion, or the occasion could always be made. Passages in those old letters home remind me that we talked long and late aboutThe Marble Faunone night at a certain house; at another we talked about other books from nine o’clock on, I imagine till midnight. At another the young lady of the house “sang about a hundred songs.” At still another the girl hostess said, “You haven’t asked me to sing to-night, but I will sing,” and then sang divinely half the night away, for all I know. There was a young lady who liked German poetry, and could talk about Goethe’s lyrics; and apparently everywhere there were the talking and the laughing and the singing which fill the world with bliss for youth.
Perhaps I sacrifice myself in vain by my effort to impart the sense of that past which faded so long ago; perhaps some readers will hold me cheap for the fondness which recurs to it and lingers in it. But I believe that I prize its memories because they seem so full of honor and worship for the girlhood and womanhood which consecrate it in my remembrance. Within this gross world of ours as it now is, women are still so conditioned that they can lead the life of another and a better world, and if they shall ever come to take their rightful share of the government of the world as men have made it I believe they will bring that other and better world oftheirs with them and indefinitely advance the millennium. I have the feeling of something like treason to the men I knew in that time, when I own that I preferred the society of women to theirs, but I console myself with the reflection that they would probably have said the same as to mine. Our companionship could hardly have chosen itself more to my liking. It was mainly of law students, but there was here and there one engaged in business, who was of a like joking and laughing with the rest. We lived together in a picturesque edifice, Gothic and Tudor, which had been meant for a medical college, and had begun so, and then from some financial infirmity lapsed to a boarding-house for such young men as I knew, though we were not without the presence of a young married pair, now and then, and even a young lady, a teacher or the like, who made us welcome when we ended a round of evening calls outside by calling on them from room to room. In my boyhood days at Columbus I was sometimes hustled off the sidewalk by the medical students coming from the College, then in its first prosperity, and taking up the whole pavement as they swept forward with interlinked arms. This was at noontime, when they were scarcely less formidable than the specters which after dark swarmed from the dissecting-room, and challenged the boy to a trial of speed in escaping them. Now the students had long been gone from the College and I dwelt in its precincts with such other favorites of fortune as could afford to pay three dollars and a half a week for their board. The table was even super-abundant, and the lodging was almost flatteringly comfortable after experience of other places. I can only conjecture that the rooms we inhabited had been meant for the students or professors when the College was still a medical college. They were large, and to my untutored eye, at least, were handsome, and romantically lighted bywindows of that blend of Tudor and Gothic which I have mentioned, but their architecture showed more on the outside than on the inside, and of course the pinnacles and towers of the edifice were more accessible to the eye without. It was the distinction of people who wished to be known for a correct taste to laugh at the architecture of the College, and perhaps they do so still, but I was never of these. For me it had, and it has, a charm which I think must have come from something like genius, if not quite genius, in the architect, to whose daring I would like to offer this belated praise. At any rate it was the abode of entire satisfaction to me in those happy years between 1857 and 1860 when I could not have wished other companionship than I had there.
There could have been no gayer table than we kept, where we made the most of one another’s jokes, and were richly personal in them, as youth always is. The management was of the simplest, but not incompatible with dignity, for the landlord waited upon the table himself, and whoever the cook might be, the place was otherwise in the sole charge of an elderly maid, with a curious defect of speech, which kept her from answering, immediately or ultimately, any question or remark addressed to her. We valued her for this impediment because of the pathetic legend attaching to it, and we did not value her the less, but the more, because she was tall and lank and uncouth of face and figure, though of a beauty in her absolute faithfulness to her duties and the kindness beyond them which she always showed. The legend was that in her younger if not fairer time she had been married, and when one day her husband, suddenly killed in an accident, was brought home to her, she tried to speak, but could not speak, and then ever afterward could only speak after great stress, and must often fall dumb, and go away without speaking.