Chase was of course _our_ man for the 1860 nomination, and the political
relations between him and our chief were close; but somehow I went more
to other houses than to his, though I found myself apparently launched
from it upon a social tide that bore me through all the doors of the
amiable little city. I was often at the evening parties (we called them
evening parties then) which his daughter gave, and one day the Governor
himself, as we met in the street, invited me to luncheon with him. I
duly went and passed the shining butler's misgiving into the
dining-room, where I found the family at table with no vacant place
among them. The Governor had forgotten me! That was clear enough, but he
was at once repentant, and I lunched with him, outwardly forgiving, but
inwardly resolved that it should be the last time I would come at his
informal bidding. I have since forgotten much more serious engagements
myself; I have not gone to dinners where I have promised over my own
signature to go; but at twenty-one men are proud, and I was prouder then
than I can yet find any reason for having been.
In our capital at that day we had rather the social facts than the
social forms. We were invited to parties ceremoniously enough, but we
did not find it necessary to answer whether we would come or not. Our
hostess remained in doubt of us till we came or did not come; at least
that was the case with young men; we never inquired whether it was so
with young girls or not. But sometimes when a certain youth wished to go
with a certain maiden he found out as delicately as he could whether she
was invited, and if she was he begged her to let him go with her, and
arrived with her in one of the lumbering two-horse hacks which supplied
our cab-service, and which I see still bulking in the far perspective of
the State Street corner of the State House yard. If you had courage so
high or purse so full you had sent the young lady a flower which she
wore to the party, preferably a white camellia which the German florist,
known to our young world only as Joe, grew very successfully, and
allowed you to choose from the tree. Why preferably a camellia I could
not say after this lapse of time; perhaps because its cold, odorless
purity expressed the unimpassioned emotion which oftenest inspired the
gift and its acceptance. It was very simple, very pastoral; I do not
know when Columbus outgrew this custom, which of course it did long ago.
Bringing a young lady to a party necessarily meant nothing but that you
enjoyed the pleasure of bringing her. Very likely she found her mother
there when she came with you, unmindful, the one and the other, that
there was such a thing as chaperonage in a more fastidious or censorious
world. It seems to me, indeed, that parties at the Columbus houses were
never wanting in the elders whom our American society of girls and boys
used to be accused of ignoring. They superabounded at the legislative
receptions, but even at the affairs which my sophistication early
distinguished from those perfunctory hospitalities there were mature
people enough, both married and unmarried, who, though they had felt no
charge concerning their daughters or nieces, found it agreeable to
remain till the young ladies were ready to be seen home by their
self-chosen escorts. A youth who danced so reluctantly as I, was rather
often thrown upon these charitable elders for his entertainment, and I
cannot remember ever failing of it. People, and by people I do not mean
women only, read a good deal in that idyllic Columbus, and it was my
delight to talk with any one who would about the new books or the old.
The old books were known mostly to that number of professional
men--lawyers, doctors, divines, and scientists--which was
disproportionately large in our capital; they were each cultivated in
his own way, and in mine, too, or the better part of it, as I found. The
young and the younger women
[Illustration: _The State House yard on the State Street side_]
read the current fiction and poetry at least enough to be asked whether
they had read this thing or that; and there was a group of young men
with whom I could share my sometimes aggressive interest in our favorite
authors. I put the scale purposely low; I think that I could truthfully
say that there was then no American community west of the Alleghanies
which surpassed ours in the taste for such things. At the same time I
must confess that it would be easy for such an exclusively literary
spirit as I was to deceive himself, and to think that he always found
what he may have oftener brought.
For a long time after the advent of our new journalism, the kind of
writing which we practised--light, sarcastic, a little cruel, with a
preference for the foibles of our political enemies as themes--seemed to
be the pleasure of good society, which in that serious yet hopeful time
did not object to such conscience as we put into our mocking. Some who
possibly trembled at our boldness darklingly comforted themselves for
our persiflage by the good cause in which it frisked. When anything very
daring came out in the afternoon the young news-editor in his round of
calls could hear the praise of it from charming readers in the evening,
or he might be stopped in the street next day and told how good it was
by the fathers, or brothers, or brothers-in-law, of those charming
readers. It was more like the prompt acclaim the drama enjoys than the
slow recognition of literature; but I, at least, was always trying to
make my writing literature, and after fifty-odd years it may perhaps be
safely owned that I had mainly a literary interest in the political
aspects and events which I treated. I felt the ethical quality of the
slavery question, and I had genuine convictions about it; but for
practical politics I did not care; I wished only to understand enough of
them to seize any chance for a shot at the other side which they might
give. I had been in the midst of practical politics almost from my
childhood; through my whole youth the din of meetings, of rallies, of
conventions had been in my ears; but I was never at a meeting, a rally,
or a convention; I have never yet heard a political speech to the end.
For a future novelist, a realist, that was a pity, I think, but so it
was.
In that day of lingering intolerance, intolerance which can scarcely be
imagined in this day, and which scarcely stopped short of condemning the
mild latitudinarianism of the _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_ as
infidelity, every one but a few outright atheists was more or less
devout. In Columbus everybody went to church; the different forms of
Calvinism drew the most worshipers; our chief was decorously constant
with his family at the Episcopal service; but Reed was frankly outside
of all ecclesiastical allegiance, and I who, no more than he, attended
any religious service, believed myself of my father's Swedenborgian
faith; at any rate. I could make it my excuse for staying away from
other churches, since there were none of mine. While I am about these
possibly needless confidences I will own that sermons and lectures as
well as speeches have mostly been wearisome to me, and that I have heard
only as many of them as I must. Of the three, I prefer sermons; they
interest me, they seem really to concern me; but I have been apt to get
a suggestive thought from them and hide away with it in a corner of my
consciousness and lose the rest. My absences under the few sermons which
I then heard must have ended chiefly in the construction or the
reconstruction of some scene in my fiction, or some turn of phrase in my
verse.
Naturally, under these circumstances, the maturer men whom I knew were
oftener doctors of medicine than doctors of divinity; in fact, I do not
think I knew one clergyman. This was not because I was oftener sick than
sorry; I was often sorry enough, and very sensible of my sins, though I
took no established means of repenting them; but I have always found the
conversation of physicians more interesting than that of most other men,
even authors. I have known myself in times past to say that they were
the saints of the earth, as far as we then had saints, but that was in
the later Victorian period when people allowed themselves to say
anything in honor of science. Now it is already different; we have begun
to have our doubts of doubt and to believe that there is much more in
faith than we once did; and I, within the present year, my
seventy-ninth, have begun to go to church and to follow the sermon with
much greater, or more unbroken, attention than I once could, perhaps
because I no longer think so much in the terms of fiction or meditate
the muse as I much more used to do.
In those far days I thought prose fit mainly for every-day use in
newspaper work. I was already beginning to print my verses in such of
the honored Eastern periodicals as would take them: usually for nothing.
I wrote for the _Saturday Press_ of New York, which ambitious youth
everywhere were then eager to write for, and I wrote for the _Atlantic
Monthly_ oftener than I printed in it. I have told all this and more in
_My Literary Passions_ and I will not dwell here upon the whirl of
æsthetic emotion in which I eddied round and round at that tumultuous
period. In that book I have also sufficiently told the story of my first
formal venture in the little volume of verse which I united with my
friend John J. Piatt in offering to the world. But I may add here that
it appeared just at Christmas-time in 1859 from the press of a hopeful
young publisher of Columbus who was making his experiment in the
disquieting hour when no good thing was expected to come out of our
Western Nazareth. We two were of the only four poets west of the
Alleghanies who had yet been accepted by the _Atlantic_, and our
publisher had the courage to make our book very pretty in print and
binding. It was so pretty that I am afraid some readers liked it for its
looks; one young lady said that I at least could have no trouble in
choosing what Christmas presents I should make my friends. She was that
very beautiful girl who easily bore the palm for beauty in Columbus, and
I do not yet understand how I was able to reject her unprofessional
suggestion with as much pride as if she had been plain. I gave my book
to no one, in my haughty aversion from even the shadow of advertising,
and most of my friends had their revenge, I suppose, in not buying it.