At that time he was filling a large space in the thoughts of the young
people who had any thoughts about literature. He had come to his full
repute as an agreeable and intelligent traveller, and he still wore the
halo of his early adventures afoot in foreign lands when they were yet
really foreign. He had not written his novels of American life, once so
welcomed, and now so forgotten; it was very long before he had achieved
that incomparable translation of Faust which must always remain the
finest and best, and which would keep his name alive with Goethe’s, if he
had done nothing else worthy of remembrance. But what then most
commended him to the regard of us star-eyed youth (now blinking sadly
toward our seventies) was the poetry which he printed in the magazines
from time to time: in the first Putnam’s (where there was a dashing
picture of him in an Arab burnoose and, a turban), and in Harper’s, and
in the Atlantic. It was often very lovely poetry, I thought, and I still
think so; and it was rightfully his, though it paid the inevitable
allegiance to the manner of the great masters of the day. It was graced
for us by the pathetic romance of his early love, which some of its
sweetest and saddest numbers confessed, for the young girl he married
almost in her death hour; and we who were hoping to have our hearts
broken, or already had them so, would have been glad of something more of
the obvious poet in the popular lecturer we had seen refreshing himself
after his hour on the platform.
He remained for nearly a year the only author I had seen, and I met him
once again before I saw any other. Our second meeting was far from
Columbus, as far as remote Quebec, when I was on my way to New England by
way of Niagara and the Canadian rivers and cities. I stopped in Toronto,
and realized myself abroad without any signal adventures; but at Montreal
something very pretty happened to me. I came into the hotel office, the
evening of a first day’s lonely sight-seeing, and vainly explored the
register for the name of some acquaintance; as I turned from it two
smartly dressed young fellows embraced it, and I heard one of them say,
to my great amaze and happiness, “Hello, here’s Howells!”
“Oh,” I broke out upon him, “I was just looking for some one I knew. I
hope you are some one who knows me!”
“Only through your contributions to the Saturday Press,” said the young
fellow, and with these golden words, the precious first personal
recognition of my authorship I had ever received from a stranger, and the
rich reward of all my literary endeavor, he introduced himself and his
friend. I do not know what became of this friend, or where or how he
eliminated himself; but we two others were inseparable from that moment.
He was a young lawyer from New York, and when I came back from Italy,
four or five years later, I used to see his sign in Wall Street, with a
never-fulfilled intention of going in to see him. In whatever world he
happens now to be, I should like to send him my greetings, and confess to
him that my art has never since brought me so sweet a recompense, and
nothing a thousandth part so much like Fame, as that outcry of his over
the hotel register in Montreal. We were comrades for four or five rich
days, and shared our pleasures and expenses in viewing the monuments of
those ancient Canadian capitals, which I think we valued at all their
picturesque worth. We made jokes to mask our emotions; we giggled and
made giggle, in the right way; we fell in and out of love with all the
pretty faces and dresses we saw; and we talked evermore about literature
and literary people. He had more acquaintance with the one, and more
passion for the other, but he could tell me of Pfaff’s lager-beer cellar
on Broadway, where the Saturday Press fellows and the other Bohemians
met; and this, for the time, was enough: I resolved to visit it as soon
as I reached New York, in spite of the tobacco and beer (which I was
given to understand were de rigueur), though they both, so far as I had
known them, were apt to make me sick.
I was very desolate after I parted from this good fellow, who returned to
Montreal on his way to New York, while I remained in Quebec to continue
later on mine to New England. When I came in from seeing him off in a
calash for the boat, I discovered Bayard Taylor in the reading-room, where
he sat sunken in what seemed a somewhat weary muse. He did not know me,
or even notice me, though I made several errands in and out of the
reading-room in the vain hope that he might do so: doubly vain, for I am
aware now that I was still flown with the pride of that pretty experience
in Montreal, and trusted in a repetition of something like it. At last,
as no chance volunteered to help me, I mustered courage to go up to him
and name myself, and say I had once had the pleasure of meeting him at
Doctor-------‘s in Columbus. The poet gave no sign of consciousness at
the sound of a name which I had fondly begun to think might not be so all
unknown. He looked up with an unkindling eye, and asked, Ah, how was the
Doctor? and when I had reported favorably of the Doctor, our
conversation ended.
He was probably as tired as he looked, and he must have classed me with
that multitude all over the country who had shared the pleasure I
professed in meeting him before; it was surely my fault that I did not
speak my name loud enough to be recognized, if I spoke it at all; but the
courage I had mustered did not quite suffice for that. In after years he
assured me, first by letter and then by word, of his grief for an
incident which I can only recall now as the untoward beginning of a
cordial friendship. It was often my privilege, in those days, as
reviewer and editor, to testify my sense of the beautiful things he did
in so many kinds of literature, but I never liked any of them better than
I liked him. He had a fervent devotion to his art, and he was always
going to do the greatest things in it, with an expectation of effect that
never failed him. The things he actually did were none of them mean, or
wanting in quality, and some of them are of a lasting charm that any one
may feel who will turn to his poems; but no doubt many of them fell short
of his hopes of them with the reader. It was fine to meet him when he
was full of a new scheme; he talked of it with a single-hearted joy, and
tried to make you see it of the same colors and proportions it wore to
his eyes. He spared no toil to make it the perfect thing he dreamed it,
and he was not discouraged by any disappointment he suffered with the
critic or the public.
He was a tireless worker, and at last his health failed under his labors
at the newspaper desk, beneath the midnight gas, when he should long have
rested from such labors. I believe he was obliged to do them through one
of those business fortuities which deform and embitter all our lives; but
he was not the man to spare himself in any case. He was always
attempting new things, and he never ceased endeavoring to make his
scholarship reparation for the want of earlier opportunity and training.
I remember that I met him once in a Cambridge street with a book in his
hand which he let me take in mine. It was a Greek author, and he said he
was just beginning to read the language at fifty: a patriarchal age to me
of the early thirties!
I suppose I intimated the surprise I felt at his taking it up so late in
the day, for he said, with charming seriousness, “Oh, but you know, I
expect to use it in the other world.” Yea, that made it worth while, I
consented; but was he sure of the other world? “As sure as I am of
this,” he said; and I have always kept the impression of the young faith
which spoke in his voice and was more than his words.
I saw him last in the hour of those tremendous adieux which were paid him
in New York before he sailed to be minister in Germany. It was one of
the most graceful things done by President Hayes, who, most of all our
Presidents after Lincoln, honored himself in honoring literature by his
appointments, to give that place to Bayard Taylor. There was no one more
fit for it, and it was peculiarly fit that he should be so distinguished
to a people who knew and valued his scholarship and the service he had
done German letters. He was as happy in it, apparently, as a man could
be in anything here below, and he enjoyed to the last drop the many cups
of kindness pressed to his lips in parting; though I believe these
farewells, at a time when he was already fagged with work and excitement,
were notably harmful to him, and helped to hasten his end. Some of us
who were near of friendship went down to see him off when he sailed, as
the dismal and futile wont of friends is; and I recall the kind, great
fellow standing in the cabin, amid those sad flowers that heaped the
tables, saying good-by to one after another, and smiling fondly, smiling
wearily, upon all. There was champagne, of course, and an odious
hilarity, without meaning and without remission, till the warning bell
chased us ashore, and our brave poet escaped with what was left of his
life.