As soon as my nerves regained something of their former tone, I renewed
my struggle with those alien languages, using such weapons as I could
fit my hand to. Notably there was a most comprehensive manual which,
because it proposed instruction in so many languages, I called (from my
father's invention or my own, for I had early learnt the trick of his
drolling) a sixteen-bladed grammar. I wish now I could see that book,
which did not include Greek or Hebrew or German, but abounded in
examples of Latin, Italian, French, Spanish and probably Portuguese, and
other tongues of that kinship, with literal versions of the texts. These
versions falsified the native order of the words to the end that the
English of them might proceed in the wonted way, and when I detected the
imposition, I was the more offended because the right order of the words
in those idioms was always perplexing me. The sixteen-bladed grammar was
superseded by the ordinary school-books, Arnold's for Latin, and
Anthon's for Greek, but the perplexities of one sort or other persisted.
Such a very little instruction would have enlightened me; but who was to
give it me? My father, perhaps, but he may not have known how, though in
his own youth he had written an English grammar and more or less taught
it, or he may have thought I would find it out for myself. He would have
temperamentally trusted to that; he was always prouder than I of what I
did unaided; he believed I could do everything without help. That was an
error, but more than I ever could say do I owe to his taste in
literature and the constant guidance up to a certain limit which he gave
me. When I came back from the fields and woods with the sense of their
beauty, and eager to turn it into literature, he guarded me against
translating it in the terms of my English poets, with their larks and
nightingales, their daisies and cowslips. He contended that our own
birds and flowers were quite as good, besides being genuine; but he
taught me to love the earlier English classics; and if I began to love
the later classics, both English and American, and to be his guide in
turn, this is only saying that each one is born of his generation. The
time came early in our companionship when he thought fit to tell me that
he regarded me as different from other boys of my age; and I had a very
great and sweet happiness without alloy of vanity, from his serious and
considered words. He did not say that he expected great things of me;
though I had to check his fondness in offering my poor endeavors for the
recognition of print, and I soon had the support of editors in this. But
he justified himself and convinced me by once bringing to our house a
kindly editor from a neighboring city whom he showed some of my things,
and who carried away with him one of the minutely realistic sketches in
which I had begun to practise such art as I have been able to carry
farthest. When week after week the handsomely printed _Ohio Farmer_ came
with something in it, verse or prose, which I had done, I am not sure I
had greater joy in it than my father, though now he thought it well to
hide his joy as I always did mine.
All the while I was doing sketches and studies and poems for our own
paper, which I put into type without first writing them, and short
stories imitated from some favorite author of the moment with an art
which I imagined must conceal itself from the reader. Once I carried
Shakespeare beyond himself in a scene transferred from one of the
histories, with such comedy characters as Pistol and Bardolph speaking
the interchangeable prose and verse of his plays in adapting themselves
to some local theme, which met with applause from the group of
middle-aged cronies whom I most consorted with at the time. Once, also.
I attempted a serial romance which, after a succession of several
numbers, faltered and at last would not go on. I have told in another
place how I had to force it to a tragic close without mercy for the
heroine, hurried to an untimely death as the only means of getting her
out of the way, and I will not repeat the miserable details here. It was
a thing which could not meet with praise from any one, not even my
father, though he did his best to comfort me in the strange disaster.
If my mother was the heart, he was the soul of our family life. In those
young days when he did so much of his newspaper work at home he would
always turn from it to take part in our evening jollity. He was gladly
our equal in the jokes which followed around our table; and when he was
stricken in his great age with the paralysis which he rallied from for a
time, it was his joy to join his gray-haired children at the board in
his wheeled chair and share in their laughing and making laugh. It seems
to me that I can render him intelligible by saying that while my very
religious-minded grandfather expected and humbly if fervently hoped to
reach a heaven beyond this world by means of prayers and hymns and
revivals and conversions, my not less religious-minded father lived for
a heaven on earth in his beloved and loving home; a heaven of poetry and
humor, and good-will and right thinking. He made it that sort of heaven
for himself, and as he was the bravest man I have known because he never
believed there was any danger, I think he must have felt himself as safe
from sorrow in it as if he were in the world beyond this. When one of my
younger brothers died, he was as if astonished that such a thing could
be; it burst his innocent and beautiful dream; and afterward when I
first met him, I was aware of his clinging, a broken man, to what was
left of it. Death struck again and again, and he shrank under the
bewildering blows; but a sense of that inexpressible pathos of his
first bereavement remains with me.