Kitabı oku: «Years of My Youth», sayfa 9

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 grown
Smoother 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.

III

THROUGHOUT his later boyhood and into his earlier manhood the youth is always striving away from his home and the things of it. With whatever pain he suffers through the longing for them, he must deny them; he must cleave to the world and the things of it; that is his fate, that is the condition of all achievement and advancement for him. He will be many times ridiculous and sometimes contemptible, he will be mean and selfish upon occasion; but he can scarcely otherwise be a man; the great matter for him is to keep some place in his soul where he shall be ashamed. Let him not be afraid of being too unsparing in his memories; the instinct of self-preservation will safeguard him from showing himself quite as he was. No man, unless he puts on the mask of fiction, can show his real face or the will behind it. For this reason the only real biographies are the novels, and every novel, if it is honest, will be the autobiography of the author and biography of the reader.

I

It was doubtless a time of intense emotion for our whole family when my sister and I set out for the state capital with my father on his return to his clerical duties at the meeting of the legislature in 1856. If I cannot make sure that Columbus had become with those of us old enough to idealize it, a sort of metropolis of the mind to which we should repair if we were good enough, or, failing that, if fortune were ever kind enough, I am certain that my father’s sojourn there, with his several visits to us during the winter before, had kept the wonder of it warm in my heart. The books that he brought me at each return from the State Library renewed in me the sense of a capital which he had tried to implant in me when we lived there, and my sister could not have dreamt of anything grander or gayer. Perhaps we both still saw ourselves there in scenes like that in the title-page of that piece of sheet-music; but anything so definite as this I cannot be sure of.

What I can be sure of is the substantial nature and occasion of our going, so far as I was concerned. “We were to furnish,” my father and I, as I have told in My Literary Passions, “a daily letter giving an account of the legislative proceedings, which I was mainly to write from material he helped me get together. The letters at once found favor with the editors, who agreed to take them, and my father then withdrew from the work, after telling them who was doing it.” My sister of course had no part in the enterprise, and for her our adventure was pure pleasure, the pleasure we both took in our escape from the village, and the pleasure I did not understand then that she had in witnessing my literary hopes and labors.

In like manner I am belatedly sensible of the interest which our dear H. G. took in our going, and the specific instructions which he gave me for my entry into the great world; as if he would realize in my prosperous future the triumphs which fortune had denied him in his past. He adjured me not to be abashed in any company, but face the proudest down and make audacity do the part of the courage I was lacking in. Especially he would have me not distrust myself in such a social essential as dancing, which was a grace I was confessedly imperfect in, but to exhaust the opportunities of improving it which the Saturday evening hops at our hotel would give me. He advised me not to dress poorly, but go to the full length of Polonius’s precept —

 
“Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy” —
 

though what advantages his own experiences in these matters had won him could not have been very signal. He knew my ambition in that way, and how it had been defeated by the friendly zeal of our home-tailor; and we both held that with the clothing-stores of High Street open to my money all I had to do was to fix my mind upon a given suit which would fit me as perfectly as the Jew said, and then wear it away triumphantly appareled for the highest circles. We did not know that the art of dressing well, or fashionably, comes from deep and earnest study, and that the instinct of it might well have been blunted in me by my Quaker descent, with that desire to shine rather in the Other World than in this which had become a passion with my grandfather.

No fact of my leaving home upon the occasion which I must have felt so tremendous remains with me. I cannot even say whether it was through the snow or the mud that we drove ten miles from the county-seat to the railroad station at Ashtabula; whatever the going, it was over the warped and broken boards of the ancient plank-road which made any transit possible in that region of snow and mud, and remained till literally worn away even in the conception of the toll-taker. Without intervening event, so far as my memory testifies, or circumstance, any more than if we had flown through the air, we were there in Columbus together, living in an old-fashioned hotel on the northward stretch of High Street, which was then the principal business street, and for anything I know is so yet. The hotel was important to the eye of our village strangeness, but it was perhaps temperamentally of the sort of comfortable taverns which the hotels had come to displace. My father had gone to live there because he knew it from our brief sojourn when we came to the city from the country five or six years before, and because it was better suited to his means; but one of the vividest impressions of his youth had been the building of the National Road, a work so monumental for the new country it traversed, and he poetically valued the Goodale House for facing upon this road, which in its course from Baltimore to St. Louis became High Street in Columbus.

Not even in this association could it be equaled with the Neil House, then the finest hotel in the West, without a peer even in Cincinnati. Dickens, in his apparently unreasoned wanderings, paused in it over a day, and admired its finish in black-walnut, the wood that came afterward to be so precious for the ugliest furniture ever made. All visitors of distinction sojourned there, and it was the resort of the great politicians who held their conclaves in its gloomy corridors and in its office and bar on the eve of nominating conventions or the approach of general elections. I have a vision, which may be too fond, of their sitting under its porches in tilted arm-chairs as the weather softened, canvassing the civic affairs which might not have been brought to a happy issue without them. But however misled I may be in this I cannot err in my vision of the stately conflagration which went up with the hotel one windless night, a mighty front of flame hooded with somber smoke. I watched it with a vast crowd from the steps of the State House which it was worthier to face than any other edifice of the little city; but this was long after that winter of ours in the Goodale House, which I remember for the boundless abundance of its table and for those society events which on Saturday nights crowned the week.

I dare say they were not so fashionable as H. G. imagined them, or I, with a heart too weak and feet too untutored ever to join in them, but the world was present in other sophistications in our pleasant hotel which I could not so easily shun. Chief of these was the tipping, which there first insisted on my acquaintance by many polite insinuations, and when I would have withdrawn became explicit. The kind colored waiter who used to cumber me with service at table as his anxieties mounted once took courage to whisper in my ear that he thought he would like to go to the theater that evening, and it grieves me yet to think that I resented this freedom, and denied him the quarter he suggested. Since then life has been full of the experiences of tipping, always so odious, though apparently more rapacious than it really is, but I have never again been able to deny a tip, or to give so little as I would often like to give. I know that some better citizens, or wiser, than myself, punish the neglect or ingratitude of service by diminishing or withholding the tip, but I have never been able to perform this public-spirited duty, perhaps because, though I loathe tipping, I do not believe any fellow-creature as may be, would take a tip if he were paid a just wage, or any wage, without it.

 
“As meek and mere a serving-man,”
 

But all these incidents and interests were far in the future of that brave and happy time when I was intending and attempting the conquest of the whole field of polite learning from so many sides, in the studies which as at home now went on far into the night. These even included an Icelandic grammar, for the reason that, as I had read, the meter of Hiawatha was derived from that literature, but I do not know that I got so far as to identify it. My reading, now entirely from the State Library, included all the novels of Bulwer, which I was not ashamed to enjoy after my more distinguished pleasure in Thackeray; the critical authorities would not then have abashed me in it, as they would now. The other day I saw on my shelves the volume of Percy’s Reliques which my sister and I read together that winter; and I was so constantly and devotedly reading Tennyson and Shakespeare that I cannot understand how I had time for an equal constancy and devotion to Heine. I saw how much he had profited by the love of those English ballads which I was proud to share with him; and there were other German poets of his generation whose indebtedness to them I perceived and enjoyed. I was now, in fact, reading German to the entire neglect of Spanish; as for Latin and Greek, I had no more time or relish for them than those cultivated gentlemen who believe they read some Latin or Greek author every day before breakfast.