If in a child's first years the things which it apparently remembers are
really the suggestions of its elders, it begins soon to repay the debt,
and repays it more and more fully until its memory touches the history
of all whom it has known. Through the whole time when a boy is becoming
a man his autobiography can scarcely be kept from becoming the record of
his family and his world. He finds himself so constantly reflected in
the personality of those about him, so blent with it, that any attempt
to study himself as a separate personality is impossible. His
environment has become his life, and his hope of a recognizable
self-portrait must lie in his frank acceptance of the condition that he
can make himself truly seen chiefly in what he remembers to have seen of
his environment.
I
We were now going from the country to Columbus, where my father, after
several vain attempts to find an opening elsewhere as editor or even as
practical printer, had found congenial occupation at least for the
winter; and the reader who likes to date a small event by a great one
may care to know that we arrived in the capital of Ohio about the time
that Louis Kossuth arrived in the capital of the United States. In the
most impressive exile ever known he came from Hungary, then trampled
under foot by the armies of Austria and Russia, and had been greeted
with a frenzy of enthusiasm in New York as the prophet and envoy of a
free republic in present difficulties, but destined to a glorious
future. At Washington he had been received by both Houses of Congress
with national honors which might well have seemed to him national
promises of help against the despotisms joined in crushing the Magyar
revolt; we had just passed a law providing for the arrest of slaves
escaping from their owners in the South, and we were feeling free to
encourage the cause of liberty throughout the world.
Kossuth easily deceived himself in us, and he went hopefully about the
country, trying to float an issue of Hungarian bonds on our sympathetic
tears, and in his wonderful English making appeals full of tact and
eloquence, which went to the hearts if not the pockets of his hearers.
Among the other state capitals he duly came to Columbus, where I heard
him from the steps of the unfinished State House. I hung on the words of
the picturesque black-bearded, black-haired, black-eyed man, in the
braided coat of the Magyars, and the hat with an ostrich plume up the
side which set a fashion among us, and I believed with all my soul that
in a certain event we might find the despotisms of the Old World banded
against us, and "would yet see Cossacks," as I thrilled to hear Kossuth
say. In those days we world-patriots put the traitor Görgy, who
surrendered the Hungarian army to the Austrians and Russians, beside our
own Benedict Arnold; but what afterward became of him I do not know. I
know that Kossuth went disappointed back to Europe and dwelt a more and
more peaceful newspaper correspondent in Turin till the turn of
fortune's wheel would have dropped him, somehow politically tolerable to
Austria, back in his native country. But he would not return; he died in
Turin; and a few years ago in Carlsbad I fancied I had caught sight of
his son at a café, but was told that I had seen the wrong man, who was
much more revolutionary-looking than Kossuth's son, and more like
Kossuth.
I adopted with his cause the Kossuth hat, as we called it, and wore it
with the plume in it till the opinions of boys without plumes in their
hats caused me to take the feather out. My father was of their mind
about the feather, but otherwise we thought a great deal alike, and he
was zealous to have me see the wonders of the capital. I visited the
penitentiary and the lunatic, deaf and dumb, and blind asylums with him,
though I think rather from his interest than mine; but I was willing
enough to realize the consequence of Columbus as the capital of a
sovereign American state, and I did what I could to meet his
expectations. Together we made as thorough examination of the new State
House as the workmen who had not yet finished it would allow, and he
told me that it would cost, when done, a million dollars, a sum of such
immensity that my young imagination shrank from grappling with it; but I
am afraid that before the State House was done it may have cost more;
certainly it must have cost much more with the incongruous enlargements
which in later years spoiled its classic proportions. My father made me
observe that it was built of Ohio limestone without, and later I saw
that it was faced with Vermont and Tennessee marble within, where it was
not stuccoed and frescoed; but as for the halls of legislation where the
laws of Ohio were made and provided, when I first witnessed the process,
they were contained in a modest square edifice of brick which could not
have cost a million dollars, or the twentieth part of them, by the
boldest computation of the contractors. It was entirely modest as to the
Hall of the House and the Senate Chamber, and I suppose that so were the
state offices, wherever they were, unnoted by me. The State House, as
much as I knew of it from a single visit to the Hall of
Representatives, was of a very simple interior heated from two vast
hearths where fires of cord-wood logs were blazing high. There were rows
of legislators sitting at their desks, and probably one of them was on
his feet, speaking; I recall dimly a presiding officer, but my main
affair was to breathe as softly as I could and get away as soon as
possible from my father's side where he sat reporting the proceedings
for the _Ohio State Journal_, then the Whig and later the Republican
organ.