I do not think my father so much cared for the ownership of the
newspaper. He took our enterprise more easily than my elder brother, but
that was temperamental in both, and one was no more devoted than the
other. My companionship was far more with my father, but before my
intimacy with J. W. interrupted this my studies had already ascertained
the limits of his learning in the regions where I was groping my way,
and where the light of my friend's greater knowledge now made him my
guide. If J. W. was more definite in his ambition of one day getting
some sort of college professorship than I in my plans of literary
achievement, he could not have been more intense in his devotion to what
we were trying to do. I was studying those languages because I wished to
possess myself of their literatures; still groping my way in the dark,
where a little light shed from larger learning would have helped me so
much. The grammars and the text-books could tell me what I wanted to
know, but they did not teach it; and I realize now as I could not then
that self-taught is half-taught. Yet I think my endeavor merited reward;
if I worked blindly, I worked hard; and in my attempts at fiction or at
verse where I could create the light by mere trituration, as it were, I
did not satisfy myself with less than final perfection so far as I could
imagine it. I loved form, I loved style, I loved diction, and I strove
for them all, rejecting my faultier ideals when I discovered them, and
cleaving to the truer. In some things, the minor things, I was of
wavering preference; I wrote a different hand every other week, and if I
have now an established handwriting it is more from disgust of change
than from preference. In the spirit of my endeavor there was no
variableness; always I strove for grace, for distinctness, for light;
and my soul detests obscurity still. That is perhaps why I am beating
out my meaning here at the risk of beating it into thin air.
In the final judgment of my father's help and unhelp in my endeavors, I
should say that they were the measure of his possibility. For a man of
his conditioning he had a wonderful outlook in many directions on life,
but he was without perspective; he could not see how my unaided efforts
were driving to the vanishing-point. He had been my instructor in many
things beyond my young ken; he had an instinct for beauty and truth; he
loved the poetry which was the best in his youth, though he did not deny
me the belief that the poetry of mine was better still; his gentle
intelligence could follow me where his liking failed, and he modestly
accepted my opinions. His interest had once been absorbed mostly, but
not wholly, by the faith which he had imbibed from his reading of
Swedenborg, but when I began to know him as a boy may know his elder, he
was more and more concerned in the national struggle with the
pro-slavery aggression. Politics had always been his main worldly
interest, and not only as to measures; he passionately favored certain
men, because he liked the nature of them, as well as because he believed
them right. It seems to me now that he took a personal interest in
conventions and nominations, but I am not sure, for I myself took no
interest whatever in them; their realities did not concern me so much as
the least unrealities of fiction; and I can only make sure of my
father's interest in the elections after the nominations. I suppose that
he was not very skilled in practical politics, as log-rolling and
wire-pulling have come to be called, though in a village which was the
home of a United States Senator, a Congressional Representative, a State
Senator, and a Legislative Representative, with the full corps of county
office-holders, and a Common Pleas Judge, the science might well have
forced itself upon his study. Many years after our coming to the Western
Reserve he was sent to the State Senate by a war-majority larger than
any majority which had yet returned a candidate, or yet has; but long
before that he began to find his way beyond the local favor or disfavor,
and was chosen one of the House clerks in the State Legislature. That
must have been when I was eighteen years old, but he seems to have left
our newspaper to my sole charge without misgiving, and fortunately no
trouble came of his trust in me. I was then taking my civic and social
opinions from the more Tory of the English quarterlies, but nobody knew
what I meant by them; I did not know myself, and I did no harm with
them.
In the mean time our Congressman was writing for us every week from
Washington a letter full of politics far more intelligible to our
readers than mine were to me. He was that Joshua R. Giddings, early one
of the paladins of anti-slavery in a series of pro-slavery Congresses,
where he represented and distinguished his district for twenty years
after his resignation under a vote of censure and his overwhelming
re-election. But in a fatal moment of that fatigue which comes to
elderly people, he finally let fall an expression of indifference to
office. The minor and meaner men of his party who were his enemies
promptly seized the chance of defeating him for the nomination which was
equivalent to an election in our district, and an inferior good man was
named in his place. His friends would have had him contest the decision
of the convention, but he would not, and he passed into private life,
where he remained till the favor of Lincoln sought him out, and he died
Consul-General to Canada after he had lived to write several books and
to tell the story of the Civil War up to its penultimate year. Neither
he nor Wade was of that Connecticut lineage which almost exclusively
peopled the Western Reserve, and especially in Ashtabula County desired
power and place to itself. Wade was from western Massachusetts, and
Giddings was from western Pennsylvania, but in the new country where
they met, they joined their forces as partners in the law, and remained
together till politics separated them in the same cause. They still
remained fellow-citizens of the little town where they spent the summer
leisure of the Congressional adjournments, but without, somehow I
imagine, seeing much of each other. Giddings was far more freely about
the place, where his youth had been passed in the backwoods, and where
he made himself familiarly at home. The very simplicity of the place
seemed to comport with his statesman-like presence, his noble head, and
his great Johnsonian face, when he came out of his large old-fashioned
dwelling, sole rival of the Wade mansion; and he had no need to stoop in
being fellow-citizen with the least of his constituents. For myself, I
cannot recall any passage of words with him after a forgotten
introduction, and I wish it had been otherwise. I wish now I could have
known him even as a boy in his middle teens may know a man of his make;
though he might not have said anything to me worth remembering, or
inspired me to any expression worthier the event than that of a
Louisianian whom long later I saw introduced to him in Columbus, at his
own request. The Southerner stared at the giant bulk of the man who must
have long embodied to his imagination a demoniacal enmity to his
section, and could think of nothing better to say than, "Very pretty
day, Mr. Giddings," and when Giddings had assented with, "Yes, sir, a
fine day," the interview ended.
"Giddings, far rougher names than thine have grown
Smoother than honey on the lips of men,"
Lowell wrote in one of those magnanimous sonnets of his, when he bent
from his orient height to the brave Westerner, and though it has not yet
come quite to that honeyed utterance, the name cannot be forgotten when
the story of our Civil War, with its far or near beginnings, is told.