The winter of 1856-57 passed without my knowing more of the capital than
its official world. Even the next year, when I began to make some
acquaintance with the social world, it was with an alien or adoptive
phase of it, as I realize with tardy surprise. There were then so many
Germans in Ohio that an edition of the laws had to be printed in their
language, and there was a common feeling that we ought to know their
language, if not their literature, which was really what I cared more to
know. I carried my knowledge of it so far as to render a poem of my own
into German verse which won the praise of my teacher; and I wish I could
remember who he was, gentle, tobacco-smoked shade that he has long since
become, or who the German editor of what _republikanische Zeitung_ was
that sometimes shared my instruction with him. There were also two
blithe German youths who availed with me in the loan of Goethe's
_Wahlverwandschaften_, and gave me some fencing lessons in their
noonings. I forget what employ they were of, but their uncle was a
watchmaker and jeweler, and my father got him to gold-plate his silver
watch, or dye it, as he preferred to say. When the Civil War came he
went into it and was killed; and many years afterward, in my love and
honor of him, I turned his ghost into a loved and honored character in
_A Hazard of New Fortunes_. He was a political refugee, of those German
revolutionists who came to us after the revolts of 1848, and he still
dwells venerable in my memory, with his noble, patriarchally bearded
head.
But it all appears very fantastic in the retrospect, that Teutonic
period of my self-culture, and I am not sure that one fact of it is more
fantastic than another. Such was my zeal for everything German that I
once lunched at one of the German beer-saloons which rather abounded in
Columbus, on Swiss cheese with French mustard spread over it and a tall
glass of lager beer, then much valued as a possible transition from the
use of the strong waters more habitual with Americans than now; but it
made me very sick, and I was obliged to forego it as an expression of my
love for German poetry. To a little earlier period must have belonged
the incident of my going to see "_Die Räuber_" of Schiller, which I
endured with iron resolution from the beginning to the end. It was
given, I believe, by amateurs, and I tried my best to imagine that I
understood it as it went on, but probably I did not, though I would have
been loath to own the fact to any of the few German families who then
formed my whole acquaintance with society. I never afterward met them at
American houses; the cleavage between the two races in everything but
politics was absolute; though the Germans were largely anti-slavery, and
this formed common ground for them and natives of like thinking who did
not know them socially.
In those first winters my knowledge of American society was confined to
the generalized hospitality of the large evening receptions which some
of the leading citizens used to give the two Houses of the legislature,
including the correspondents and reporters attached to them. I cannot
say just how or when I began to divine that these occasions were not of
the first fashion, though the hosts and hostesses might have been so.
There were great suppers, mainly of oysters, to which our distance from
the sea lent distinction, and ice-cream, and sometimes, if I may trust a
faint reverberation from the past as of blown corks, champagne. There
was also dancing, and when some large, old-fashioned house was not large
enough, a wooden pavilion was improvised over the garden to give the
waltzes and quadrilles verge enough. I recall my share in the suppers,
if not in the dancing, but my deficiency was far more than made up by
the excess of a friend, who must then have been hard upon sixty years of
age, yet was of a charming gaiety and an unimpaired youthfulness. He
stood up in every quadrille, and he danced to the end of the evening,
with a demure smile on his comely, smooth-shaven, rosy face, and a
light, mocking self-consciousness in his kind eyes, as if he would agree
as to any incongruity the spectator might find in his performance. He
was one of the clerks of the House, an old politician, and the editor of
a leading Cleveland newspaper, which he chose to leave for the pleasures
of the capital. From his experience of the system which he was part of
he whimsically professed to believe that as great legislative wisdom
could be assembled by knocking down every other man in a crowd and
dragging him into the House or Senate as by the actual method of
nomination and election. At times he would support the theory of a
benevolent despotism, and advocate the establishment of what he called a
one-man power as the ideal form of government. I owed him much in the
discharge of duties which my finding the most important in the world
must have amused him, and when he went back to his newspaper he left me
to write the legislative letters for it.
This gentle reactionary was the antithesis of another very interesting
man, known to his fellow-legislators as Citizen Corry, in recognition of
his preference for the type of French Red Republicanism acquired in
Paris during his stay through the academic republic of 1848-50. Such a
residence would alone have given him a distinction which we can hardly
realize in our time, but he was, besides, a man of great natural
distinction, and of more cultivation than any of his fellow-legislators.
He was one of the Representatives from Cincinnati, and when another
Cincinnati Representative of his own party struck a member from the
Western Reserve, Citizen Corry joined the Republicans in voting his
expulsion. But he had already made a greater sensation, and created an
expectation of the unexpected in all he did by proposing an amendment to
the Constitution abolishing the system of dual chambers in the
legislature, and retaining only the House of Representatives. I think
that in Greece alone is this the actual parliamentary form, but I
believe that it was in that short-lived French republic of 1848 that
Corry saw its workings and conceived the notion of its superiority.
Under the present system he held that the House was merely a committee
at the bar of the Senate, and the Senate a committee at the bar of the
House, with a great waste of time and public advantage through the
working of a very clumsy machinery. His proposition was not taken
seriously by the Ohio House of Representatives, but to my young
enthusiasm it seemed convincing by its mere statement, and the arguments
on the other side, to the effect that the delays which he censured gave
time for useful reflection, appeared to me very fallacious. Citizen
Corry was not re-elected to the next legislature, and his somewhat
meteoric history did not include any other official apparition. But
while he was passing through the orbit of my world I was fully aware of
his vivid difference from the controlled and orderly planets, and he
dazzled in me an imagination always too fondly seeking the bizarre and
strange. I do not think I ever spoke with him, but I tingled to do so; I
created him citizen of that fine and great world where I had so much of
my own being in reveries that rapt me from the realities of the life
about me.