I
It is hard to know the child's own earliest recollections from the
things it has been told of itself by those with whom its life began.
They remember for it the past which it afterward seems to remember for
itself; the wavering outline of its nature is shadowed against the
background of family, and from this it imagines an individual existence
which has not yet begun. The events then have the quality of things
dreamt, not lived, and they remain of that impalpable and elusive
quality in all the after years.
I
Of the facts which I must believe from the witness of others, is the
fact that I was born on the 1st of March, 1837, at Martin's Ferry,
Belmont County, Ohio. My father's name was William Cooper Howells, and
my mother's was Mary Dean; they were married six years before my birth,
and I was the second child in their family of eight. On my father's side
my people were wholly Welsh, except his English grandmother, and on my
mother's side wholly German, except her Irish father, of whom it is
mainly known that he knew how to win my grandmother Elizabeth Dock away
from her very loving family, where they dwelt in great Pennsylvania-German
comfort and prosperity on their farm near Harrisburg, to share with him
the hardships of the wild country over the westward mountains. She was
the favorite of her brothers and sisters, and the best-beloved of her
mother, perhaps because she was the youngest; there is a shadowy legend
that she went one evening to milk the cows, and did not return from
following after her husband; but I cannot associate this romantic story
with the ageing grandmother whom I tenderly loved when a child, and whom
I still fondly remember. She spoke with a strong German accent, and she
had her Luther Bible, for she never read English. Sometimes she came to
visit my homesick mother after we went to live in southern Ohio; once I
went with my mother to visit her in the little town where I was born,
and of that visit I have the remembrance of her stopping me on the
stairs, one morning when I had been out, and asking me in her German
idiom and accent, "What fur a tay is it, child?"
I can reasonably suppose that it is because of the mixture of Welsh,
German, and Irish in me that I feel myself so typically American, and
that I am of the imaginative temperament which has enabled me all the
conscious years of my life to see reality more iridescent and beautiful,
or more lurid and terrible than any make-believe about reality. Among my
father's people the first who left Wales was his great-grandfather. He
established himself in London as a clock and watch maker, and I like to
believe that it is his name which my tall clock, paneled in the lovely
_chinoiserie_ of Queen Anne's time, bears graven on its dial. Two sons
followed him, and wrought at the same art, then almost a fine art, and
one of them married in London and took his English wife back with him to
Wales. His people were, so far as my actual knowledge goes, middle-class
Welsh, but the family is of such a remote antiquity as in its present
dotage not to know what part of Wales it came from. As to our lineage a
Welsh clergyman, a few years ago, noting the identity of name, invited
me to the fond conjecture of descent from Hywel Dda, or Howel the Good,
who became king of Wales about the time of Alfred the Great. He codified
the laws or rather the customs of his realm, and produced one of the
most interesting books I have read, and I have finally preferred him as
an ancestor because he was the first literary man of our name. There was
a time when I leaned toward the delightful James Howell, who wrote the
_Familiar Letters_ and many books in verse and prose, and was of several
shades of politics in the difficult days of Charles and Oliver; but I
was forced to relinquish him because he was never married. My father,
for his part, when once questioned as to our origin, answered that so
far as he could make out we derived from a blacksmith, whom he
considered a good sort of ancestor, but he could not name him, and he
must have been, whatever his merit, a person of extreme obscurity.
There is no record of the time when my great-grandfather with his
brothers went to London and fixed there as watchmakers. My tall clock,
which bears our name on its dial, has no date, and I can only imagine
their London epoch to have begun about the middle of the eighteenth
century. Being Welsh, they were no doubt musical, and I like to cherish
the tradition of singing and playing women in our line, and a somehow
cousinship with the famous Parepa. But this is very uncertain; what is
certain is that when my great-grandfather went back to Wales he fixed
himself in the little town of Hay, where he began the manufacture of
Welsh flannels, a fabric still esteemed for its many virtues, and
greatly prospered. When I visited Hay in 1883 (my father always call it,
after the old fashion, The Hay, which was the right version of its
Norman name of La Haye), three of his mills were yet standing, and one
of them was working, very modestly, on the sloping bank of the lovely
river Wye. Another had sunk to be a stable, but the third, in the spirit
of our New World lives, had become a bookstore and printing-office, a
well-preserved stone edifice of four or five stories, such as there was
not the like of, probably, in the whole of Wales when Hywel Dda was
king. My great-grandfather was apparently an excellent business man, but
I am afraid I must own (reluctantly, with my Celtic prejudice) that
literature, or the love of it, came into our family with the English
girl whom he married in London. She was, at least, a reader of the
fiction of the day, if I may judge from the high-colored style of the
now pathetically faded letter which she wrote to reproach a daughter who
had made a runaway match and fled to America. So many people then used
to make runaway matches; but when very late in the lives of these
eloping lovers I once saw them, an old man and woman, at our house in
Columbus, they hardly looked their youthful adventure, even to the fancy
of a boy beginning to unrealize life. The reader may care to learn that
they were the ancestors of Vaughan Kester, the very gifted young
novelist, who came into popular recognition almost in the hour of his
most untimely death, and of his brother Paul Kester, the playwright.