The family scene that passed in that earlier time was not always as
idyllic as I have painted it. With five brothers in it there was often
the strife which is always openly or covertly between brothers. My elder
brother, who was four years my elder, had changed from the whimsical
tease and guardian angel of our childhood to the anxious taskmaster of
our later boyhood, requiring the same devotion in our common work that
his conscience exacted of himself. I must say that for my own part I
labored as faithfully as he, and I hotly resented his pressure. Hard
words passed between us two, as blows, not very hard, had passed, while
we were still children, between me and my younger brothers. But however
light the blows were, they had to be disclaimed, and formal regret
expressed, at my father's insistence. He would ascertain who struck the
first blow, and when he had pronounced that wrong he would ask, "And you
struck him back?" If the fact could not be denied, he went on to the
further question, "Well, do two wrongs make a right?" Clearly they did
not, and nothing remained but reluctant apology and reconciliation.
Reason and civic morality were on his side, but I could not feel that
justice was, and it seems to me yet that the primary offender was
guiltier than the secondary.
Long ago, long before our youth was passed, utter forgiveness passed
between my elder brother and me. The years since were years of such
mutual affection as I could not exaggerate the sense of in tenderness
and constancy, and the exchange of trust and honor. He came even in our
youth to understand my aim in life, and feel what was always leading me
on. He could not understand, perhaps, why poetry in literature should be
so all in all with me, but he felt it in nature as keenly and deeply as
I; and I have present now the experience of driving with him one
September afternoon (on some chase of the delinquent subscriber), when
he owned by his few spare words the unity of the beautiful in everything
as I spoke the melting lines of Tennyson:
"Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.
Tears from the depths of some divine despair
Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more."
He had a grotesque humor which vented itself in jokes at the expense of
my mother's implicit faith in everything he said, as when she wondered
how the cow got into the garden, and he explained, "She pulled out the
peg with her teeth and put it under her fore leg and just walked through
the gate," and my mother answered, "Well, indeed, indeed, I believe she
did, child." She had little humor of her own, but she had a childlike
happiness in the humor of us others, though she would not suffer joking
from any but him. She relied upon him in everything, but in some things
she drew a sharp line between the duties of her boys and girls in the
tradition of her Pennsylvania origin. Indoor work was for girls, and
outdoor for boys, and we shared her slight for the Yankee men who went
by our gate to the pasture with their milk-pails. That was woman's work
though it was outdoor work; and though it was outdoor work to kill
chickens for the table, none of us boys had the heart to cut their heads
off because we could not bear to witness their post-mortem struggles;
but my brother brought out his gun and shot them, and this pursuit of
them as game in our barnyard got us over a difficulty otherwise
insuperable. The solution of our scruple, which my father shared, must
have amused him; but my brother took it seriously. His type of humor was
in the praise which long afterward he gave a certain passage of my
realistic fiction, when he said it was as natural as the toothache.
Throughout that earlier time my father's chief concern was first that
very practical affair of making his paper pay for the office and the
house, and then incidentally preventing the spread of slavery into the
territories. He was willing enough, I fancy, to yield his silent
partnership in my studies to the young printer who now, for no reason
that I can remember, began to take an active share in them. I have told
in _My Literary Passions_ how J. W. and I read Cervantes and Shakespeare
together; but I could not say just why or when we began to be boon
companions in our self-conducted inquiries into Latin and Greek, and
then into German, which presently replaced Spanish in my affections
through the witchery of Heine. He had the definite purpose of making
those languages help him to a professorship in a Western college, but if
I had any clear purpose it was to possess myself of their literature. To
know them except to read them I do not think I cared; I did not try to
speak or write the modern tongues; to this day I could not frame a
proper letter in Spanish, German, French, or Italian, but I have a
literary sense of them all. I wished to taste the fruit of my study
before I had climbed the tree where it grew, and in a manner I did begin
to gather the fruit without the interposition of the tree. Without clear
knowledge of their grammatical forms, I imitated their literary forms. I
cast my poetry, such as it was, into the metres of the Spanish poets I
was reading, and without instruction or direction I acquainted myself
with much of their literary history. I once even knew from the archaic
tragedy of her name who Iñez de Castro was; I do not know now.
My friendship with J. W. early became chief of the many friends of a
life rich in friendships. He was like most of his craft in his eccentric
comings and goings to and from our employ, when sometimes we had no work
to give him, and sometimes he had none to give us. When he left us he
always went to Wisconsin, where he had once lived; and when he came back
from one of these absences he would bring with him bits of character
which he gave for our joy in his quaint observance, such as that of the
mother who complained of her daughter because "she didn't cultivate her
featur's none; she just let 'em hing and wallop," or the school-mistress
who genteelly explained in the blackberry-patch where he found her, that
she was "just out picking a few berries for tea-he-he-he," or the
country bachelor who belatedly made up his mind to marry, and in his
default of female acquaintance took his place on the top rail of a
roadside fence, and called to the first woman who passed, "Say! You a
married woman?" and then at the frightened answer, indignantly gasped
out, "Yes, sir!" offered a mere "Oh!" for all apology and explanation,
and let himself vanish by falling into the corn-field behind him.
J. W. literally made his home with us, for as if the burden of work for
our own large family were not enough for my mother, we had always some
of the printers, men or maids, to board. He entered into the spirit of
our life; but it was recognized that he was peculiarly my friend, and we
were left to our special comradeship. In that village nearly everybody
played or sang, and in the summer nights the young people went about
serenading one another's houses, under the moon which was then always
full; and J. W. shared in every serenade where a tenor voice was
welcome. At the printing-office, in the afternoon when the compositors
were distributing their cases, he led the apprentice-girls in the songs
which once filled the whole young world. The songs were often
poverty-stricken enough in sentiment, and I suppose cheap and vulgar in
music, but they were better than the silence that I should once have
said had followed them. Yet only last winter in a hotel on the New
Jersey coast, where there was some repairing in the corridor outside my
room, the young painters and carpenters gathered at their lunch near my
door, and after they had begun to joke they suddenly began to sing
together as if it were still the habit for people of their lot to do so,
in a world I had thought so hushed, except for its gramophones; and
though I could not make out the words, the gentle music somehow saved
them from seeming common. It went to my heart, and made me glad of life
where youth still sang as it used to sing when I was young.
Sometimes the village serenaders came to me, and then I left my books
and stumbled down to the gate, half dazed, to find the faces I knew
before they flashed away with gay shrieking and shouting; and J. W.
among them, momentarily estranged from me, jealous in that world where
we had our intimacy. My ambition was my barrier from the living world
around me; I could not beat my way from it into that; it kept me absent
and hampered me in the vain effort to be part of the reality I have
always tried to portray. Though J. W. expected to make a more definite
use of our studies, he seemed to understand me as well at least as I
understood myself in my vaguer striving. I do not now remember reading
him the things I was trying to write; or of his speaking to me of them.
Perhaps my shyness, my pride, went so far as keeping them from him,
though I kept from him so few of my vagaries in that region of hopes and
fears where youth chiefly has its being.
The songs he had were as many as the stories, but there was one song,
often on the tongues of the village serenaders, which was oftenest on
his, and which echoes to me still from those serenades and those choral
afternoons in the printing-office, and more distinctly yet from what we
felt a midnight of wild adventure, when he sang it alone. We had gone to
call together on two of our village girls at school fifteen miles away,
and had set out in the flattering temperature of a January thaw; but
when we started home, many hours into the dark, the wind had whipped
round from the south to the north and had frozen the curdling slush into
icy ruts under the runners of our sleigh. Our coats were such as had
suited the thaw, but J. W. had a pair of thin cotton gloves for driving,
while I had none. We took turns in driving at first, but as the way
lengthened the cold strengthened and I cowered definitively under our
buffalo robe, then the universal provision against the rigor of winter
travel. For a while we shouted together in some drama of the situation,
but by and by our fun froze at our lips, and then J. W. began to sing
that song he used oftenest to sing:
"Talk not to me of future bliss,
Talk not to me of joys gone by!
The happiest time is this!"
He kept the measure of the tune by beating on the robe above my head,
first with one fist and then the other, as he passed the reins from hand
to hand, and by pounding with both feet on the floor of the sleigh
beside me. We lived through the suffering of that drive partly because
he was twenty-two years old and I was eighteen, but partly also because
we realized the irony of the song, with all the joke of it. Yet it was a
long nightmare of misery, with a moment of supreme anguish, when we
stopped at the last toll-gate, two miles from home, and the keeper came
shuddering out with his red blot of a lantern. Then the song stopped for
an instant, but seems to have begun again, and not ended till we sat
with our feet in the oven of the kitchen stove at home, counting our
adventure all gain. The memory of it brings before me again the face of
my friend, with its beautiful regularity of feature, its pale blue eyes,
its smooth, rich, girlish complexion, and its challenging, somewhat
mocking smile. But the date when I saw him last in life is lost to me.
He went to Wisconsin, as usual, but there was no wonted return; we kept
each other present in the long letters which we wrote so long, but they
faltered with time and ceased, and I can only make sure now that he got
the professorship he aimed at in some seat of learning so modest that it
has kept its name from me; and then, years after, that he went into the
war for the Union and was killed.
X
I had now begun to be impatient of the village, and when it came to my
last parting with J. W., which I did not know was the last, I felt the
life very dull and narrow which I had once found so vivid and ample.
There had come the radiant revelation of girlhood, and I had dwelt in
the incredible paradise where we paired or were paired off each with
some girl of his fancy or fancied fancy. There had been the ranging of
the woods in autumn for chestnuts and in the spring for wintergreen;
there had been the sleigh-rides to the other villages and the
neighboring farms where there was young life waiting to welcome us
through the drifting snows; there had been the dances at the taverns and
the parties at the girls' houses with the games and the frolics, and the
going home each with the chosen one at midnight and the long lingering
at the gate: there had been the moonlight walks; there had been the
debating societies and the spelling-matches; there had been the days of
the County Fair and the Fourths-of-July, and the Christmases
rehabilitated from Dickens; and there had been the impassioned interest
of the easily guessed anonymous letters of St. Valentine's day. But
these things had passed, and with a certain disappointment suffered and
yet prized there had come the sense of spent witchery and a spell
outworn, and I chose to revolt from it all and to pine for a wider world
and prouder pleasures. Distance in time and space afterward duly set the
village I had wearied of in a truer and kinder light, and I came to
value it as the potential stuff of such fiction as has never yet been
written, and now never will be by me. I came to see that it abounded in
characteristics and interests which differenced it from any other
village, and I still think the companionship to which I passed in the
absences of J. W. such as would make into the setting for as strange a
story as we could ask of reality in the days when we wished life to
surpass romance in strangeness.
I have told in _My Literary Passions_ of the misanthropical Englishman
who led in our Dickens-worship and played the organ in the little
Episcopal church, and built the organs for such country churches about
as could afford to replace their moaning melodions with them. I have
said, I hope without too much attempt to establish the fact, that he was
also a house-painter, and that in the long leisures of our summer days
and winter nights and in the throes of his perpetual dyspepsia he was
the inveterate antagonist in argument of the vivid Yankee who built
steam-engines among us, and had taught school, and turned his quick head
and hand to any art or trade which making an easy living exacted of him.
They both lavishly lent me their books, and admitted me on equal terms
to their intellectual enmity and amity, which was shared in some tacit
way with a clever New England trader in watches, clocks, and jewelry. He
came and went among us on visits more or less prolonged from some
Eastern center of his commerce (my memory somehow specifies Springfield,
Massachusetts), and he had a shrewd smile and kindly twinkling eye which
represent him to me yet. He seldom took part in the disputes nightly
held at the drug-and-book store; but not from want of spirit, when he
had the boldness to deny some ferocious opinion exploded by the
organ-builder in an access of indigestion.
The disputes nearly always involved question of the existence of a God,
which was thought improbable by both of the debaters, and the
immortality of the soul, which was doubted, in spite of the spiritualism
rife in every second house in the village, with manifestations by
rappings, table-tippings, and oral and written messages from another
world through psychics of either sex, but oftenest the young girls one
met in the dances and sleigh-rides. The community was prevalently
unreligious; there was an ageing attendance at the Baptist and Methodist
churches, but there was no stated service of the Congregationalists,
though there was occasional preaching at their house and sometimes a
lecture from an anti-slavery apostle, who wasted his doctrine on a
community steeped in it already. Among many of the young people of the
village the prevalent tone was irreverent to mocking in matters of
religion; but their unlimited social freedom was without blame and
without scandal, and if our villagers were not religious, they were, in
a degree which I still think extraordinary, literary. Old and young they
read and talked about books, and better books than people read and talk
about now, as it seems to me, possibly because there were not so many
bad ones; the English serials pirated into our magazines were followed
and discussed, and any American author who made an effect in the East
became promptly known in that small village of the Western Reserve.
There were lawyers, of those abounding at every county-seat, who were
fond of reading, and imparted their taste to the young men studying law
in their offices. I might exaggerate the fact, but I do not think I have
done so, or that I was much deceived as to a condition which reported
itself, especially to me whose whole life was in books, through the
sympathy I met in the village houses. I was always reading whatever came
to hand, either with an instinct for what was good in my choice of books
or with good fortune in my chance of them. Literature was so commonly
accepted as a real interest, that I do not think I was accounted
altogether queer in my devotion to it. To be sure, at an evening session
in one of the dry-goods and grocery stores where question of me came up,
it was decided that I would be nowhere in a horse-trade, but this was a
rare instance of slight, and I do not believe that my disability would
have been generally counted against me.