Before I left Venice, however, there came a turn in my literary luck, and
from the hand I could most have wished to reverse the adverse wheel of
fortune. I had labored out with great pains a paper on recent Italian
comedy, which I sent to Lowell, then with his friend Professor Norton
jointly editor of the North American Review; and he took it and wrote me
one of his loveliest letters about it, consoling me in an instant for all
the defeat I had undergone, and making it sweet and worthy to have lived
through that misery. It is one of the hard conditions of this state that
while we can mostly make out to let people taste the last drop of
bitterness and ill-will that is in us, our love and gratitude are only
semi-articulate at the best, and usually altogether tongue-tied. As
often as I tried afterwards to tell Lowell of the benediction, the
salvation, his letter was to me, I failed. But perhaps he would not have
understood, if I had spoken out all that was in me with the fulness I
could have given a resentment. His message came after years of thwarted
endeavor, and reinstated me in the belief that I could still do something
in literature. To be sure, the letters in the Advertiser had begun to
make their impression; among the first great pleasures they brought me
was a recognition from my diplomatic chief at Vienna; but I valued my
admission to the North American peculiarly because it was Lowell let me
in, and because I felt that in his charge it must be the place of highest
honor. He spoke of the pay for my article, in his letter, and asked me
where he should send it, and I answered, to my father-in-law, who put it
in his savings-bank, where he lived, in Brattleboro, Vermont. There it
remained, and I forgot all about it, so that when his affairs were
settled some years later and I was notified that there was a sum to my
credit in the bank, I said, with the confidence I have nearly always felt
when wrong, that I had no money there. The proof of my error was sent me
in a check, and then I bethought me of the pay for “Recent Italian
Comedy.”
It was not a day when I could really afford to forget money due me, but
then it was not a great deal of money. The Review was as poor as it was
proud, and I had two dollars a printed page for my paper. But this was
more than I got from the Advertiser, which gave me five dollars a column
for my letters, printed in a type so fine that the money, when translated
from greenbacks into gold at a discount of $2.80, must have been about a
dollar a thousand words. However, I was richly content with that, and
would gladly have let them have the letters for nothing.
Before I left Venice I had made my sketches into a book, which I sent on
to Messrs. Trubner & Co., in London. They had consented to look at it to
oblige my friend Conway, who during his sojourn with us in Venice, before
his settlement in London, had been forced to listen to some of it. They
answered me in due time that they would publish an edition of a thousand,
at half profits, if I could get some American house to take five hundred
copies. When I stopped in London I had so little hope of being able to
do this that I asked the Trubners if I might, without losing their offer,
try to get some other London house to publish my book. They said Yes,
almost joyously; and I began to take my manuscript about. At most places
they would not look at me or it, and they nowhere consented to read it.
The house promptest in refusing to consider it afterwards pirated one of
my novels, and with some expressions of good intention in that direction,
never paid me anything for it; though I believe the English still think
that this sort of behavior was peculiar to the American publisher in the
old buccaneering times. I was glad to go back to the Trubners with my
book, and on my way across the Atlantic I met a publisher who finally
agreed to take those five hundred copies. This was Mr. M. M. Hurd, of
Hurd & Houghton, a house then newly established in New York and
Cambridge. We played ring-toss and shuffleboard together, and became of
a friendship which lasts to this day. But it was not till some months
later, when I saw him in New York, that he consented to publish my book.
I remember how he said, with an air of vague misgiving, and an effect of
trying to justify himself in an imprudence, that it was not a great
matter anyway. I perceived that he had no faith in it, and to tell the
truth I had not much myself. But the book had an instant success, and it
has gone on from edition to edition ever since. There was just then the
interest of a not wholly generous surprise at American things among the
English. Our success in putting down the great Confederate rebellion had
caught the fancy of our cousins, and I think it was to this mood of
theirs that I owed largely the kindness they showed my book. There were
long and cordial reviews in all the great London journals, which I used
to carry about with me like love-letters; when I tried to show them to
other people, I could not understand their coldness concerning them.
At Boston, where we landed on our return home, there was a moment when it
seemed as if my small destiny might be linked at once with that of the
city which later became my home. I ran into the office of the Advertiser
to ask what had become of some sketches of Italian travel I had sent the
paper, and the managing editor made me promise not to take a place
anywhere before I had heard from him. I gladly promised, but I did not
hear from him, and when I returned to Boston a fortnight later, I found
that a fatal partner had refused to agree with him in engaging me upon
the paper. They even gave me back half a dozen unprinted letters of
mine, and I published them in the Nation, of New York, and afterwards in
the book called Italian Journeys.
But after I had encountered fortune in this frowning disguise, I had a
most joyful little visit with Lowell, which made me forget there was
anything in the world but the delight and glory of sitting with him in
his study at Elmwood and hearing him talk. It must have been my
freshness from Italy which made him talk chiefly of his own happy days in
the land which so sympathetically brevets all its lovers fellow-citizens.
At any rate he would talk of hardly anything else, and he talked late
into the night, and early into the morning. About two o’clock, when all
the house was still, he lighted a candle, and went down into the cellar,
and came back with certain bottles under his arms. I had not a very
learned palate in those days (or in these, for that matter), but I knew
enough of wine to understand that these bottles had been chosen upon that
principle which Longfellow put in verse, and used to repeat with a
humorous lifting of the eyebrows and hollowing of the voice:
“If you have a friend to dine,
Give him your best wine;
If you have two,
The second-best will do.”
As we sat in their mellow afterglow, Lowell spoke to me of my own life
and prospects, wisely and truly, as he always spoke. He said that it was
enough for a man who had stuff in him to be known to two or three people,
for they would not suffer him to be forgotten, and it would rest with
himself to get on. I told him that though I had not given up my place at
Venice, I was not going back, if I could find anything to do at home, and
I was now on my way to Ohio, where I should try my best to find
something; at the worst, I could turn to my trade of printer. He did not
think it need ever come to that; and he said that he believed I should
have an advantage with readers, if not with editors, in hailing from the
West; I should be more of a novelty. I knew very well that even in my
own West I should not have this advantage unless I appeared there with an
Eastern imprint, but I could not wish to urge my misgiving against his
faith. Was I not already richly successful? What better thing
personally could befall me, if I lived forever after on milk and honey,
than to be sitting there with my hero, my master, and having him talk to
me as if we were equal in deed and in fame?
The cat-bird called in the syringa thicket at his door, before we said
the good-night which was good morning, using the sweet Italian words, and
bidding each other the ‘Dorma bene’ which has the quality of a
benediction. He held my hand, and looked into my eyes with the sunny
kindness which never failed me, worthy or unworthy; and I went away to
bed. But not to sleep; only to dream such dreams as fill the heart of
youth when the recognition of its endeavor has come from the achievement
it holds highest and best.