I did what I could to prove myself unworthy of them by refusing their
invitations, and giving myself wholly to literature, during the early
part of the winter that followed; and I did not realize my error till the
invitations ceased to come, and I found myself in an unbroken
intellectual solitude. The worst of it was that an ungrateful Muse did
little in return for the sacrifices I made her, and the things I now
wrote were not liked by the editors I sent them to. The editorial taste
is not always the test of merit, but it is the only one we have, and I am
not saying the editors were wrong in my case. There were then such a
very few places where you could market your work: the Atlantic in Boston
and Harper’s in New York were the magazines that paid, though the
Independent newspaper bought literary material; the Saturday Press
printed it without buying, and so did the old Knickerbocker Magazine,
though there was pecuniary good-will in both these cases. I toiled much
that winter over a story I had long been writing, and at last sent it to
the Atlantic, which had published five poems for me the year before.
After some weeks, or it may have been months, I got it back with a note
saying that the editors had the less regret in returning it because they
saw that in the May number of the Knickerbocker the first chapter of the
story had appeared. Then I remembered that, years before, I had sent
this chapter to that magazine, as a sketch to be printed by itself, and
afterwards had continued the story from it. I had never heard of its
acceptance, and supposed of course that it was rejected; but on my second
visit to New York I called at the Knickerbocker office, and a new editor,
of those that the magazine was always having in the days of its failing
fortunes, told me that he had found my sketch in rummaging about in a
barrel of his predecessors manuscripts, and had liked it, and printed
it. He said that there were fifteen dollars coming to me for that
sketch, and might he send the money to me? I said that he might, though
I do not see, to this day, why he did not give it me on the spot; and he
made a very small minute in a very large sheet of paper (really like Dick
Swiveller), and promised I should have it that night; but I sailed the
next day for Liverpool without it. I sailed without the money for some
verses that Vanity Fair bought of me, but I hardly expected that, for the
editor, who was then Artemus Ward, had frankly told me in taking my
address that ducats were few at that moment with Vanity Fair. I was then
on my way to be consul at Venice, where I spent the next four years in a
vigilance for Confederate privateers which none of them ever surprised.
I had asked for the consulate at Munich, where I hoped to steep myself
yet longer in German poetry, but when my appointment came, I found it was
for Rome. I was very glad to get Rome even; but the income of the office
was in fees, and I thought I had better go on to Washington and find out
how much the fees amounted to. People in Columbus who had been abroad
said that on five hundred dollars you could live in Rome like a prince,
but I doubted this; and when I learned at the State Department that the
fees of the Roman consulate came to only three hundred, I perceived that
I could not live better than a baron, probably, and I despaired. The
kindly chief of the consular bureau said that the President’s
secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr. John Hay, were interested in my
appointment, and he advised my going over to the White House and seeing
them. I lost no time in doing that, and I learned that as young Western
men they were interested in me because I was a young Western man who had
done something in literature, and they were willing to help me for that
reason, and for no other that I ever knew. They proposed my going to
Venice; the salary was then seven hundred and fifty, but they thought
they could get it put up to a thousand. In the end they got it put up to
fifteen hundred, and so I went to Venice, where if I did not live like a
prince on that income, I lived a good deal more like a prince than I
could have done at Rome on a fifth of it.
If the appointment was not present fortune, it was the beginning of the
best luck I have had in the world, and I am glad to owe it all to those
friends of my verse, who could have been no otherwise friends of me. They
were then beginning very early careers of distinction which have not been
wholly divided. Mr. Nicolay could have been about twenty-five, and Mr.
Hay nineteen or twenty. No one dreamed as yet of the opportunity opening
to them in being so constantly near the man whose life they have written,
and with whose fame they have imperishably interwrought their names. I
remember the sobered dignity of the one, and the humorous gaiety of the
other, and how we had some young men’s joking and laughing together, in
the anteroom where they received me, with the great soul entering upon
its travail beyond the closed door. They asked me if I had ever seen the
President, and I said that I had seen him at Columbus, the year before;
but I could not say how much I should like to see him again, and thank
him for the favor which I had no claim to at his hands, except such as
the slight campaign biography I had written could be thought to have
given me. That day or another, as I left my friends, I met him in the
corridor without, and he looked at the space I was part of with his
ineffably melancholy eyes, without knowing that I was the
indistinguishable person in whose “integrity and abilities he had reposed
such special confidence” as to have appointed him consul for Venice and
the ports of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, though he might have
recognized the terms of my commission if I had reminded him of them. I
faltered a moment in my longing to address him, and then I decided that
every one who forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand,
did him a kindness; and I wish I could be as sure of the wisdom of all my
past behavior as I am of that piece of it. He walked up to the
water-cooler that stood in the corner, and drew himself a full goblet from
it, which he poured down his throat with a backward tilt of his head, and
then went wearily within doors. The whole affair, so simple, has always
remained one of a certain pathos in my memory, and I would rather have
seen Lincoln in that unconscious moment than on some statelier occasion.