XI

Somewhere about this time I gave a month to the study of law in the

office of the United States Senator dwelling among us. I have never

regretted reading a first volume of Blackstone through, or not going on

to the second; his frank declaration that the law was a jealous mistress

and would brook no divided love, was upon reflection quite enough for

one whose heart was given to a different muse. I was usually examined in

this author by the Senator's nephew, my fellow-student, whom I examined

in turn; but once, at least, the Senator himself catechized me, though

he presently began to talk about the four great English quarterly

reviews which I was known in the village for reading, and which it

seemed he read too. No doubt he found me more perfect in them than in

Blackstone; at least I felt that I did myself more credit in them. I

have elsewhere spoken more fully already of this episode of my life; but

I speak of it again because I think that the commonly accepted Wade

legend scarcely does justice to a man not only of great native power,

but of wider cultivation than it recognizes, and I would like to do what

I can to repair the injustice. He was famed in contemporary politics as

Old Ben Wade before he had passed middle life, and he was supposed to

stand up against the fierce pro-slavery leaders in Congress with an

intrepidity even with their own. He had a strong, dark face, and a deep,

raucous voice, with a defiant laugh, and these lent their support to the

popular notion of him as a rude natural force unhelped by teaching,

though he had taught himself in the days of his early struggle, as

Lincoln and most public men of his time had done, and later had taught

others as country schoolmaster. Farm-boy and cattle-drover and

canal-digger, more had remained to him from schoolmaster and medical

student, than from either of his other callings, and though he became

part of our history without the help of great intellectual refinement,

he was by no means without intellectual refinement, or without the

ability to estimate the value of it in others. Naturally he might also

underestimate it, and perhaps it was from an underestimate that he

judged the oratory of such a man as Charles Sumner, to whom he told me

he had said of a speech of his, "It's all very well, Sumner, but it has

no bones in it."

Wade was supposed by his more ill-advised admirers to lend especial

effect to his righteous convictions by a free flow of profanity, but I

have to bear witness that I never heard any profanity from him, though

profanity must have been the common parlance of the new country and the

rude conditions he grew up in. He was personally a man of silent

dignity, as we saw him in the village, going and coming at the

post-office, for he seldom seemed to pass the gate of his house yard on

any other errand, in the long summer vacations between the sessions of

the many Congresses when he sojourned among us. I have the sense of him

in a back room of the office which stood apart from his house, after the

old-fashioned use of country lawyers' and doctors' offices; and I can be

sure of his visiting the students in the front room only that once when

he catechized me in Blackstone, but I cannot say whether I stood in awe

of him as a great lawyer, or quite realized his importance as United

States Senator from the State of Ohio for eighteen years. Historically

it has been thought his misfortune to outlive the period when the

political struggle with slavery passed into the Civil War, and to carry

into that the spirit of the earlier time, with his fierce alienation

from the patient policy of Lincoln, and his espousal of the

exaggerations of the Reconstruction. But it would be easy to do

injustice to this part of his valiant career, and not easy to do justice

to that part of it where he stood with the very few in his defiance of

the pro-slavery aggression.

Probably he would not have understood my forsaking the law, and I evaded

the explanation he once sought of me when we met in the street, dreading

the contempt which I might well have fancied in him. I wish now that,

knowing him a little on his æsthetic side, I might have had the courage

to tell him why I could not give my heart to that jealous mistress,

being vowed almost from my first days to that other love which will have

my fealty to the last. But in the helplessness of youth I could not even

imagine doing this, and I had to remain in my dread of his contempt. Yet

he may not have despised me, after all. It was known with what

single-handed courage I was carrying on my struggle with the alien

languages, and their number was naturally over-stated. The general

interest in my struggle was reflected in the offer of a farmer from

another part of the county to be one of three or four who would see me

through Harvard. It was good-will which, if it had ever materialized, my

pride would have been fierce to refuse; but now I think of it without

shame, and across the gulf which I would fain believe has some thither

shore I should like to send that kind man the thanks which I fancy were

never adequately expressed to him while he lived. It remains vaguely,

from vague personal knowledge, that he was of Scotch birth and breeding;

he had a good old Scotch name, and he lived on his prosperous farm in

much more than the usual American state, with many books about him.

I went back not without shame, but also not without joy from the

Senator's law-office to my father's printing-office, and I did not go to

Harvard, or to any college or school thereafter. I still think that a

pity, for I have never agreed with Lowell, who, when I deplored my want

of schooling, generously instanced his own over-weight of learning as an

evil I had escaped. It still seems to me lamentable that I should have

had to grope my way and so imperfectly find it where a little light from

another's lamp would have instantly shown it. I still remain in depths

of incredible ignorance as to some very common things; for at school I

never got beyond long division in arithmetic, and after my

self-discovery of grammar I should be unable to say, _in due piedi_,

just what a preposition was, though I am aware of frequently using that

part of speech, and, I hope, not incorrectly.

I did what I could to repair the defect of instruction, or rather I

tried to make myself do it, for I had the nature of a boy to contend

with, and did not love my work so much as I loved the effect of it.

While I live I must regret that want of instruction, and the discipline

which would have come with it, though Fortune, as if she would have

flattered my vanity when she could bring her wheel round to it, bore me

the offer of professorships in three of our greatest universities. In

fact, when I thought of coming home from my consulship in Venice, ten

years after my failure to achieve any sort of schooling, it had been my

hope that I might get some sort of tutorship in a very modest college,

and I wrote to Lowell about it, but he did not encourage me. Yet I was

hardly fixed in the place which much better suited me as the assistant

editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_, when one of the faculty came to me

from Schenectady to offer me the sub-professorship of English in Union

College, and no long time after I was sounded by the first educational

authority in the country as to whether I would accept a like place in

Washington University at St. Louis. It was twice as long after this that

those three supreme invitations which I have boasted came to me. But I

knew better than any one, unless it was Fortune herself, the ignorance I

had hidden so long, and I forbore to risk a middling novelist on the

chance of his turning out a poor professor, or none. In every case the

offer was such as might well have allured me, but when, after a

sleepless night of longing and fearing over that of Harvard which Lowell

conveyed me with the promise, "You shall wear the gown that Ticknor

wore, and Longfellow wore, and I wore," I had the strength to refuse it,

he wrote me his approval of my decision. It was a decision that I have

rejoiced in ever since, with the breathless gratitude, when I think of

it, of one who has withheld himself from a step over the brink of a

precipice.

The other allurements to a like doom were hardly less gratifying. What

indeed could have been more gratifying, except the Harvard offer of the

professorship of the languages of the south of Europe (with the

privilege of two years' preparation in the Latin countries, whose

tongues I had tampered with), than the offer of the English

professorship in Yale? It was Lounsbury, now lately lost forever to

these skies, Lounsbury the fine scholar, the charming writer, the

delightful wit, the critic unsurpassed in his kind, who came smiling

with the kind eyes, dimmed almost to blindness on the field of

Gettysburg in the forgotten soldiership of his youth, to do me this

incredible honor. Later came the offer of the same chair in Johns

Hopkins, twice repeated by the president of that university. When in my

longing and my despair I asked, What was the nature of such a

professorship, he answered, Whatever I chose to make it; and this still

seems to me, however mistaken in my instance, the very measure of the

wisest executive large-mindedness. President Gilman had written to me

from New York, and had come to see me in London, and again written to me

in Boston, and I could not do less than go down to Baltimore and look at

the living body of the university and see what part in it I might

become. A day sufficed; where so many men were busy with the work which

they were so singularly qualified to do, I could not think of bringing

my half-heartedness to an attempt for which all the common sense I had

protested my unfitness, my entire unlikeness to the kind of man he had

so magnanimously misimagined me. I turned from that shining opportunity

of failure as I turned from the others, and if the reader thinks I have

dwelt too vaingloriously upon them he shall have his revenge in the

spectacle of my further endeavors not to be the stuff which professors

are made of.