Years of My Youth

XII

I could have been spared from the printing-office for the study of the law, when I could not be spared from it otherwise, because I might soon begin to make my living by practising before justices of the peace in the pettifogging which was then part of the study in the country offices. My labor, which was worth as much as a journeyman compositor’s, could not have been otherwise spared; much less could my father have afforded the expense of my schooling; and I cannot recall that I thought it an unjust hardship when it was decided after due family counsel, that I could not be sent to an academy in a neighboring village. I had not the means of estimating my loss; but the event seemed to have remained a poignant regret with my brother, and in after years he lamented what he felt to have been an irreparable wrong done me: now he is dead, and it touches me to think he should have felt that, for I never blamed him, and I am glad he gave me the chance to tell him so. I may have shed some tears when first denied; I did shed a few very bitter ones when I once confessed the hope I had that the editor of the Ohio Farmer might give me some sort of literary employment at a sum I named, and he said, “He would never pay you three dollars a week in the world for that,” and I had to own in anguish of soul that he was doubtless right. He worked every day of the week and far into every night to help my father earn the property we were all trying to pay for, and he rightfully came into the eventual ownership of the newspaper. By an irony of fate not wholly unkind he continued for half a century in the printing-business, once so utterly renounced. Then, after a few years of escape to a consular post in the tropics which he used to say was the one post which, if it had been whittled out of the whole universe, would have suited him best, he died, and lies buried in the village, the best-beloved man who ever lived there.

It was the day with us of self-denials which I cannot trust myself to tell in detail lest I should overtell them. I was willing to make a greater figure in dress than nature has ever abetted me in, but I still do not think it was from an excess of vanity that I once showed my father the condition of my hat, and left him to the logic of the fact. He whimsically verified it, and said, “Oh, get it half-soled,” as if it had been a shoe; and we had our laugh together, but I got the new hat, which, after all, did not make me the dashing presence I might have hoped, though the vision of it on the storekeeper’s counter always remained so distinct with me that in Seville, a few years ago, it seemed as if its ghost were haunting me in the Cordovese hats on all the heads I met. Like them it had a wide flat brim, and it narrowed slightly upward to the low flat crown of those hats which I now knew better than to buy.

But if we seem to have spared on dress, our table was of as unstinted abundance as it might be in a place where there was no market, except as the farmers brought us chickens and butter and vegetables and the small fruits of the pastures and clearings, where every sort of wild berries grew. The region had abounded in deer, and after we came to the village in 1852 venison was only three cents a pound. Once a black bear was chased from forest to forest across our land, but he did not wait to fix the market price of his meat; half the sky was often hidden with wild pigeons, and there was a summer when the gray squirrels swarmed through the streets in one of their mystical migrations from west to east. Such chances of game scarcely enriched our larder; and the salt-pork barrel was our constant reliance. This was a hardship, after the varied abundance of the larger places where we had lived, but we shared it with our fellow-villagers, and in this as in other conditions of our life we did not realize as deprivation what was the lot of the whole community. If we denied ourselves it was to meet the debts which would not be denied, and to possess ourselves of the roof over our heads and an ampler future in the ownership of our means of living. But I think we denied ourselves too much, and that we paid far beyond its moral worth for the house we were buying. To own the house she lived in had always been my mother’s dream since her young married days when my father built the first little house where they dwelt together, and where I was born. In all the intervening quarter of a century they had lived in rented houses, and she could not help feeling that the rent they paid ought to have gone toward buying a house of their own. In this she was practically right, but now the house which we all worked so hard to buy belongs to strangers, and unless there is an effect of our self-denial in some other world, the purchase was as much waste as rent paid to a landlord. We were in fact always paying a certain rent in the interest on the notes which we slowly accumulated the money to meet, but my mother could not feel that the same, and I am glad she had her wish long before she died, and her last years were passed under a roof which she owned.

In time, but I do not know how long time, for such things did not interest me, though I was doing my share in helping pay off our debt, the promissory notes which my father had given for the purchase of our newspaper were taken up, and the newspaper was also our property. Nobody could molest us or make us afraid in its possession; and in my hope of other things it did not concern me that the title vested in his partnership with my brother, who had most justly earned his half, and who by an enterprise of his own finally established the family fortunes in undreamed-of prosperity. It was characteristic of my father that as long as their partnership existed there were no accounts between them; after my brother had a family of his own each drew from the common income at his wish or need, and when I came of sufficient worldly wisdom to realize the risks to their peace from this anomalous arrangement, I protested against it in vain. They agreed with me that it was precarious and in a way ridiculous, and that it certainly ought to cease, but as long as they continued together they remained partners on these terms. After my father withdrew, my brother took his own son into partnership, and when he came in his turn to retire, he contritely owned to me that they had not departed from the same old unbusiness-like community of ways and means, though he had promised me very earnestly many times to end it. While I am upon these matters it is a pleasure for me to record that when I came home from Venice with the manuscript of Venetian Life promised publication by a London house if I could find an American house to take half the proposed edition, and I confessed that I had very little hope of getting this taken in New York or Boston, my brother promptly offered to take it himself. He was then in that undreamed-of prosperity which I have mentioned, and though he had no expectation of becoming a book-publisher, he was very willing to incur the risks involved. As all my world knows, the book found an equally courageous friend in New York, and came out with the American imprint of Hurd & Houghton instead of Joseph A. Howells & Co.

It is not surprising to me that I cannot date the time of our acquiring the newspaper, free and clear, as the real-estate phrase is, but I am certainly surprised and more pained that I cannot remember just when the house, endeared to us as home, became our very own. Its possession, as I have said, had been the poetry of my mother’s hard-working, loving life, and no doubt she had watched with hope and fear the maturing of each of the notes for it, with the interest they bore, until the last was paid off. In my father’s buoyant expectation of the best in everything, I do not think he had any misgiving of the event; my brother must have shared my mother’s anxiety, but we younger children did not, and the great hour arrived without record in my consciousness. Years later, when I came back from long sojourn abroad, I found that the little ground-wren’s nest, as it looks to me in the retrospect, had widened by half a dozen rooms without rising above its original story and a half. All round it the garden space was red and purple with the grapes which my father had induced, by his steady insistence, the neighboring farmers to plant. My mother and he were growing sweetly old in the keeping of the place, and certain wild furred and feathered things had come to share their home with them. Not only the door-yard trees which we boys had brought from the woods had each its colony of birds, but in the eaves a family of flying-squirrels had nested. I do not know whether I can impart the sense of peace and security which seemed to have spread from the gentle household to them, but I am sure that my mother could not have realized a fonder vision of the home she had longed for through so many years.

XIII

I do not think my father so much cared for the ownership of the newspaper. He took our enterprise more easily than my elder brother, but that was temperamental in both, and one was no more devoted than the other. My companionship was far more with my father, but before my intimacy with J. W. interrupted this my studies had already ascertained the limits of his learning in the regions where I was groping my way, and where the light of my friend’s greater knowledge now made him my guide. If J. W. was more definite in his ambition of one day getting some sort of college professorship than I in my plans of literary achievement, he could not have been more intense in his devotion to what we were trying to do. I was studying those languages because I wished to possess myself of their literatures; still groping my way in the dark, where a little light shed from larger learning would have helped me so much. The grammars and the text-books could tell me what I wanted to know, but they did not teach it; and I realize now as I could not then that self-taught is half-taught. Yet I think my endeavor merited reward; if I worked blindly, I worked hard; and in my attempts at fiction or at verse where I could create the light by mere trituration, as it were, I did not satisfy myself with less than final perfection so far as I could imagine it. I loved form, I loved style, I loved diction, and I strove for them all, rejecting my faultier ideals when I discovered them, and cleaving to the truer. In some things, the minor things, I was of wavering preference; I wrote a different hand every other week, and if I have now an established handwriting it is more from disgust of change than from preference. In the spirit of my endeavor there was no variableness; always I strove for grace, for distinctness, for light; and my soul detests obscurity still. That is perhaps why I am beating out my meaning here at the risk of beating it into thin air.

In the final judgment of my father’s help and unhelp in my endeavors, I should say that they were the measure of his possibility. For a man of his conditioning he had a wonderful outlook in many directions on life, but he was without perspective; he could not see how my unaided efforts were driving to the vanishing-point. He had been my instructor in many things beyond my young ken; he had an instinct for beauty and truth; he loved the poetry which was the best in his youth, though he did not deny me the belief that the poetry of mine was better still; his gentle intelligence could follow me where his liking failed, and he modestly accepted my opinions. His interest had once been absorbed mostly, but not wholly, by the faith which he had imbibed from his reading of Swedenborg, but when I began to know him as a boy may know his elder, he was more and more concerned in the national struggle with the pro-slavery aggression. Politics had always been his main worldly interest, and not only as to measures; he passionately favored certain men, because he liked the nature of them, as well as because he believed them right. It seems to me now that he took a personal interest in conventions and nominations, but I am not sure, for I myself took no interest whatever in them; their realities did not concern me so much as the least unrealities of fiction; and I can only make sure of my father’s interest in the elections after the nominations. I suppose that he was not very skilled in practical politics, as log-rolling and wire-pulling have come to be called, though in a village which was the home of a United States Senator, a Congressional Representative, a State Senator, and a Legislative Representative, with the full corps of county office-holders, and a Common Pleas Judge, the science might well have forced itself upon his study. Many years after our coming to the Western Reserve he was sent to the State Senate by a war-majority larger than any majority which had yet returned a candidate, or yet has; but long before that he began to find his way beyond the local favor or disfavor, and was chosen one of the House clerks in the State Legislature. That must have been when I was eighteen years old, but he seems to have left our newspaper to my sole charge without misgiving, and fortunately no trouble came of his trust in me. I was then taking my civic and social opinions from the more Tory of the English quarterlies, but nobody knew what I meant by them; I did not know myself, and I did no harm with them.

In the mean time our Congressman was writing for us every week from Washington a letter full of politics far more intelligible to our readers than mine were to me. He was that Joshua R. Giddings, early one of the paladins of anti-slavery in a series of pro-slavery Congresses, where he represented and distinguished his district for twenty years after his resignation under a vote of censure and his overwhelming re-election. But in a fatal moment of that fatigue which comes to elderly people, he finally let fall an expression of indifference to office. The minor and meaner men of his party who were his enemies promptly seized the chance of defeating him for the nomination which was equivalent to an election in our district, and an inferior good man was named in his place. His friends would have had him contest the decision of the convention, but he would not, and he passed into private life, where he remained till the favor of Lincoln sought him out, and he died Consul-General to Canada after he had lived to write several books and to tell the story of the Civil War up to its penultimate year. Neither he nor Wade was of that Connecticut lineage which almost exclusively peopled the Western Reserve, and especially in Ashtabula County desired power and place to itself. Wade was from western Massachusetts, and Giddings was from western Pennsylvania, but in the new country where they met, they joined their forces as partners in the law, and remained together till politics separated them in the same cause. They still remained fellow-citizens of the little town where they spent the summer leisure of the Congressional adjournments, but without, somehow I imagine, seeing much of each other. Giddings was far more freely about the place, where his youth had been passed in the backwoods, and where he made himself familiarly at home. The very simplicity of the place seemed to comport with his statesman-like presence, his noble head, and his great Johnsonian face, when he came out of his large old-fashioned dwelling, sole rival of the Wade mansion; and he had no need to stoop in being fellow-citizen with the least of his constituents. For myself, I cannot recall any passage of words with him after a forgotten introduction, and I wish it had been otherwise. I wish now I could have known him even as a boy in his middle teens may know a man of his make; though he might not have said anything to me worth remembering, or inspired me to any expression worthier the event than that of a Louisianian whom long later I saw introduced to him in Columbus, at his own request. The Southerner stared at the giant bulk of the man who must have long embodied to his imagination a demoniacal enmity to his section, and could think of nothing better to say than, “Very pretty day, Mr. Giddings,” and when Giddings had assented with, “Yes, sir, a fine day,” the interview ended.

“Giddings, far rougher names than thine have grownSmoother than honey on the lips of men,”

Lowell wrote in one of those magnanimous sonnets of his, when he bent from his orient height to the brave Westerner, and though it has not yet come quite to that honeyed utterance, the name cannot be forgotten when the story of our Civil War, with its far or near beginnings, is told.

XIV

That winter of my editorship wore away to the adjournment of the legislature and my father’s return home, after J. W.’s withdrawal into the vague of Wisconsin. But now another beloved friend had come to us. He had learned his trade with us in southern Ohio, where he lived with our family like one of ourselves, as brotherly as if he had been of our blood. In those days he and I read the same books and dreamed the same dreams, but he was nearer my eldest brother in age, and was as much his companion as mine. After he left us to live the wander-years of the journeyman printer, we heard from him at different points where he rested, and when the Civil War began in Kansas, five years before it began in South Carolina, we knew of him fighting and writing on the Free State side. In this time, my brother made it his romance to promote a correspondence between H. G. and a young girl of the village, which ended in their engagement. It was taking too great a risk in every way, but they were fitly mated in their tastes, and their marriage was of such lasting attachment that when she survived him and lay suffering in her last sickness, she prayed every night that she might die before she woke and be with him in the everlasting morning. Romance for romance, I think their romance of the greatest pathos of any I have known, and it had phases of the highest tragedy. H. G. was among the first to volunteer for the great war, and quickly rose from the ranks to be captain, but somehow he incurred the enmity of a superior officer who was able to have him cashiered in dishonor from the army. The great war which we look back upon as hallowed by a singleness of patriotic purpose was marked by many private wrongs which were promptly revenged, or kept for ultimate vengeance, sometimes forgone at last through the wearing out of the hate which cherished them. I am glad to think this was so with H. G.; his memory is very dear to me, and our friendship was of a warmth of affection such as I did not know for J. W., though he had so much greater charm for me, and in the communion of our minds I was so much more intimate with him.

Earlier in his absence, I had grown more and more into intellectual companionship with the eldest of my sisters, who was only little more than a year younger than myself. We had gone to the village parties and dances and sleigh-rides together, but she was devoted to my mother and the helper in her work, and gave herself far less than I to the pleasures which had palled upon me; she may never have cared for them much; certainly not so much as for the household life. It is one of those unavailing regrets which gather upon us if we question memory as I am doing now, and try to deal honestly with the unsparing truth of its replies, that I ignored so long her willingness to be my companion in the things of the mind. With my mother it was a simple affair; I was bound to her in an affection which was as devoted throughout my youth as it had been in my childhood; she was herself the home which I suffered such longing for if I ever left it; and I am now, in my old age, humbly grateful for the things I was prompted to do in my love of her. I could not, without an effect of exaggeration unworthy of her dear memory, express my sense of her motherly perfection within the limits of her nature, which I would not now have had different through worldly experience or privilege. She had, like my father, the instinct of poetry; and over what was left of her day’s work for the long evenings which we spent reading or talking or laughing together, while my father selected copy for his paper without losing the fun we all made, she was gay with the gayest of us. Often I had savagely absented myself from the rest, but when I came out of my little study, dazed with my work, after the younger children had gone to bed, I have the vision of her rolling her sewing together in her lap, and questioning me with her fond eyes what I was thinking of or had been trying to do.

I believe she did not ask; that was forbidden by my pride and shame. I did not read to any of them what I had been writing; they would not have been hard enough upon it to satisfy me, though if they had criticized it I should have been furious. In fact, I was not an amiable or at least a reasonable youth; it was laid upon me to try solitarily for the things I had no help in doing, and I seldom admitted any one to the results until that sister of mine somehow passed my ungracious reserves. I do not know just how this happened; but perhaps it was through our confiding to each other, brokenly, almost unspokenly, our discontent with the village limit of our lives. Within our home we had the great world, at least as we knew it in books, with us, but outside of it, our social experience dwindled to the measure of the place. I have tried to say how uncommon the place was intellectually, but we disabled it on that side because it did not realize the impossible dreams of that great world of wealth, of fashion, of haughtily and dazzlingly, blindingly brilliant society, which we did not inconveniently consider we were altogether unfit for. The reader may or may not find a pathos in our looking at the illustration on the front of a piece of tawdry sheet-music, and wondering whether it would ever be our high fortune to mingle with a company of such superbly caparisoned people as we saw pictured there, playing and singing and listening.

Vanity so criminal as ours, might have been for a just punishment lastingly immured in that village which the primeval woods encircled like a prison wall; and yet almost at that moment, when we had so tardily discovered ourselves akin in our tastes, our hopes and despairs, we were nearer the end of our imprisonment than we could have imagined. Whether we were punished in our enlargement which we were both so near, I cannot say; my own life since that time has been such as some know and any may know who care, and of hers I may scarcely speak. After a few happy weeks, a few happy months of our common escape, she went back to those bounds where her duty lay; and when after many years she escaped from them again it was to circumstances where she was so willingly useful as to feel herself very happy. Her last dream, one of being usefuler yet to those dearest to her, ended in a nightmare of disappointment; but that too had wholly passed before she woke to the recompense which we try to believe that death shall bring to all who suffer here to no final good.

Now it was life full beyond our fondest expectations, if not our fancies of its possibilities, which lured us forward. We were making the most of our mutual interest in the books we were reading, and she was giving, as sisters give so far beyond the giving of brothers, her sympathy to me in what I was trying to write. It was some time since I had turned, upon the counsel of J. W., from Greek to German, I forget from just what reasoning, though I think it was because he said I could study Greek any time, and now we could study German together. I had gone so far with it that I was already reading Heine and trying to write like him, instead of reading my Spanish poets and trying to imitate them in their own meters. But there is scarcely any definite memory of my sister’s literary companionship left me. I remember her coming to me once with the praise, which I shame-facedly refused, of the neighbor who had pointed to a row of Washington Irving’s works in her house, and said that some day my books would fill a shelf like that. For the rest, I am dimly aware of our walking summer evenings down a certain westward way from our house, and of her helping me dream a literary future. If she had then a like ambition she kept it from me, and it was not till twenty years later that she sent me a play she had written, with village motives and village realities, treated with a frankness which I still had not the intelligence to value. The play never came to the stage, and in that farther time, it was the fruition of hopes which had not defined themselves, that when my father’s scheme was realized, not only I, but she too, was to return to Columbus with him. It would be easy to pretend, and I can easily believe that we had always, at the bottom of our hearts, thought of Columbus with distinct longing; but I am not sure that there was more in our remembrance of it than a sense of its greatness as the state capital to give direction to our ambition for some experience of the world beyond our village. There was no part for her in our journalistic plan; probably the affair for her was an outing which she had won by her unselfish devotion to the duties of her narrow lot; but what I am sure of, and what I am glad of now, amidst my compunctions for not valuing her loving loyalty at its true worth, is that she did have this outing.