Throughout his later boyhood and into his earlier manhood the youth is
always striving away from his home and the things of it. With whatever
pain he suffers through the longing for them, he must deny them; he must
cleave to the world and the things of it; that is his fate, that is the
condition of all achievement and advancement for him. He will be many
times ridiculous and sometimes contemptible, he will be mean and selfish
upon occasion; but he can scarcely otherwise be a man; the great matter
for him is to keep some place in his soul where he shall be ashamed. Let
him not be afraid of being too unsparing in his memories; the instinct
of self-preservation will safeguard him from showing himself quite as he
was. No man, unless he puts on the mask of fiction, can show his real
face or the will behind it. For this reason the only real biographies
are the novels, and every novel, if it is honest, will be the
autobiography of the author and biography of the reader.
I
It was doubtless a time of intense emotion for our whole family when my
sister and I set out for the state capital with my father on his return
to his clerical duties at the meeting of the legislature in 1856. If I
cannot make sure that Columbus had become with those of us old enough to
idealize it, a sort of metropolis of the mind to which we should repair
if we were good enough, or, failing that, if fortune were ever kind
enough, I am certain that my father's sojourn there, with his several
visits to us during the winter before, had kept the wonder of it warm in
my heart. The books that he brought me at each return from the State
Library renewed in me the sense of a capital which he had tried to
implant in me when we lived there, and my sister could not have dreamt
of anything grander or gayer. Perhaps we both still saw ourselves there
in scenes like that in the title-page of that piece of sheet-music; but
anything so definite as this I cannot be sure of.
What I can be sure of is the substantial nature and occasion of our
going, so far as I was concerned. "We were to furnish," my father and I,
as I have told in _My Literary Passions_, "a daily letter giving an
account of the legislative proceedings, which I was mainly to write from
material he helped me get together. The letters at once found favor with
the editors, who agreed to take them, and my father then withdrew from
the work, after telling them who was doing it." My sister of course had
no part in the enterprise, and for her our adventure was pure pleasure,
the pleasure we both took in our escape from the village, and the
pleasure I did not understand then that she had in witnessing my
literary hopes and labors.
In like manner I am belatedly sensible of the interest which our dear H.
G. took in our going, and the specific instructions which he gave me for
my entry into the great world; as if he would realize in my prosperous
future the triumphs which fortune had denied him in his past. He adjured
me not to be abashed in any company, but face the proudest down and make
audacity do the part of the courage I was lacking in. Especially he
would have me not distrust myself in such a social essential as
dancing, which was a grace I was confessedly imperfect in, but to
exhaust the opportunities of improving it which the Saturday evening
hops at our hotel would give me. He advised me not to dress poorly, but
go to the full length of Polonius's precept--
"Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy"--
though what advantages his own experiences in these matters had won him
could not have been very signal. He knew my ambition in that way, and
how it had been defeated by the friendly zeal of our home-tailor; and we
both held that with the clothing-stores of High Street open to my money
all I had to do was to fix my mind upon a given suit which would fit me
as perfectly as the Jew said, and then wear it away triumphantly
appareled for the highest circles. We did not know that the art of
dressing well, or fashionably, comes from deep and earnest study, and
that the instinct of it might well have been blunted in me by my Quaker
descent, with that desire to shine rather in the Other World than in
this which had become a passion with my grandfather.
No fact of my leaving home upon the occasion which I must have felt so
tremendous remains with me. I cannot even say whether it was through the
snow or the mud that we drove ten miles from the county-seat to the
railroad station at Ashtabula; whatever the going, it was over the
warped and broken boards of the ancient plank-road which made any
transit possible in that region of snow and mud, and remained till
literally worn away even in the conception of the toll-taker. Without
intervening event, so far as my memory testifies, or circumstance, any
more than if we had flown through the air, we were there in Columbus
together, living in an old-fashioned hotel on the northward stretch of
High Street, which was then the principal business street, and for
anything I know is so yet. The hotel was important to the eye of our
village strangeness, but it was perhaps temperamentally of the sort of
comfortable taverns which the hotels had come to displace. My father had
gone to live there because he knew it from our brief sojourn when we
came to the city from the country five or six years before, and because
it was better suited to his means; but one of the vividest impressions
of his youth had been the building of the National Road, a work so
monumental for the new country it traversed, and he poetically valued
the Goodale House for facing upon this road, which in its course from
Baltimore to St. Louis became High Street in Columbus.
Not even in this association could it be equaled with the Neil House,
then the finest hotel in the West, without a peer even in Cincinnati.
Dickens, in his apparently unreasoned wanderings, paused in it over a
day, and admired its finish in black-walnut, the wood that came
afterward to be so precious for the ugliest furniture ever made. All
visitors of distinction sojourned there, and it was the resort of the
great politicians who held their conclaves in its gloomy corridors and
in its office and bar on the eve of nominating conventions or the
approach of general elections. I have a vision, which may be too fond,
of their sitting under its porches in tilted arm-chairs as the weather
softened, canvassing the civic affairs which might not have been brought
to a happy issue without them. But however misled I may be in this I
cannot err in my vision of the stately conflagration which went up with
the hotel one windless night, a mighty front of flame hooded with somber
smoke. I watched it with a vast crowd from the steps of the State House
which it was worthier to face than any other edifice of the little city;
but this was long after that winter of ours in the Goodale House, which
I remember for the boundless abundance of its table and for those
society events which on Saturday nights crowned the week.
I dare say they were not so fashionable as H. G. imagined them, or I,
with a heart too weak and feet too untutored ever to join in them, but
the world was present in other sophistications in our pleasant hotel
which I could not so easily shun. Chief of these was the tipping, which
there first insisted on my acquaintance by many polite insinuations, and
when I would have withdrawn became explicit. The kind colored waiter who
used to cumber me with service at table as his anxieties mounted once
took courage to whisper in my ear that he thought he would like to go to
the theater that evening, and it grieves me yet to think that I resented
this freedom, and denied him the quarter he suggested. Since then life
has been full of the experiences of tipping, always so odious, though
apparently more rapacious than it really is, but I have never again been
able to deny a tip, or to give so little as I would often like to give.
I know that some better citizens, or wiser, than myself, punish the
neglect or ingratitude of service by diminishing or withholding the tip,
but I have never been able to perform this public-spirited duty, perhaps
because, though I loathe tipping, I do not believe any fellow-creature
"As meek and mere a serving-man,"
as may be, would take a tip if he were paid a just wage, or any wage,
without it.
But all these incidents and interests were far in the future of that
brave and happy time when I was intending and attempting the conquest of
the whole field of polite learning from so many sides, in the studies
which as at home now went on far into the night. These even included an
Icelandic grammar, for the reason that, as I had read, the meter of
_Hiawatha_ was derived from that literature, but I do not know that I
got so far as to identify it. My reading, now entirely from the State
Library, included all the novels of Bulwer, which I was not ashamed to
enjoy after my more distinguished pleasure in Thackeray; the critical
authorities would not then have abashed me in it, as they would now. The
other day I saw on my shelves the volume of _Percy's Reliques_ which my
sister and I read together that winter; and I was so constantly and
devotedly reading Tennyson and Shakespeare that I cannot understand how
I had time for an equal constancy and devotion to Heine. I saw how much
he had profited by the love of those English ballads which I was proud
to share with him; and there were other German poets of his generation
whose indebtedness to them I perceived and enjoyed. I was now, in fact,
reading German to the entire neglect of Spanish; as for Latin and Greek,
I had no more time or relish for them than those cultivated gentlemen
who believe they read some Latin or Greek author every day before
breakfast.