IX

I had begun now to know socially and intrinsically the little capital

which I had known only politically and extrinsically during the two

winters passed there as a legislative correspondent. I then consorted

with the strangers whom their share in the government made sojourners,

and who had little or no local quality to distinguish them from one

another. I shared the generalized hospitalities offered them with that

instinctive misgiving which I have rather more than hinted; and though I

distinguished among them, and liked and valued certain of them, yet I

had a painful sense of our common exteriorality and impermanence. I

cannot say that I ever expected to become part of the proper life of the

city, and when suddenly I found myself in that life, if not of it, I was

very willing to find it charming. How charming it was compared with the

life of other cities I had no means of knowing, but now after the

experiences, not too exhaustive, of half a century I still feel it to

have been charming, with the wilding grace proper to all the West in

those days, and the refinement remembered from the varied culture (such

culture as there was) of the East and South it derived from.

Not so many people in our town could have known me for my poetry as for

my journalism, and I do not pretend that the sexes were equally divided

in their recognition. I have intimated my fancy that with most men, men

of affairs, men of the more serious callings, the face of the poet was

saved by the audacity of the paragrapher. If I could be so sharp, so

hard in my comment on the day's events, I could not be so soft as I

seemed in those rhymes where I studied the manner of Heine, the manner

of Tennyson, and posed in this or that dramatized personality. I cannot

flatter myself that I did not seem odd sometimes to many of my

fellow-citizens, though I hope that with some of the hardest-headed

among them I was acceptable for qualities which recommend average men to

one another. Some of that sort made friends with me; some even who were

of an entirely diverse political thinking tolerated my mockeries of

opinions which they supposed their principles. But neither my pleasure

nor my pride was in such friendships. What I wished to do always and

evermore was to think and dream and talk literature, and literature

only, whether in its form of prose or of verse, in fiction, or poetry,

or criticism. I held it a higher happiness to stop at a street corner

with a congenial young lawyer and enter upon a fond discussion of, say,

De Quincey's essays than to prove myself worthy the respect of any most

eminent citizen who knew not or loved not De Quincey. But I held it far

the highest happiness to call at some house where there were young

girls waiting and willing to be called upon and to join them in asking

and saying whether we had read this or that late novel or current

serial. It is as if we did nothing then but read late novels and current

serials, which it was essential for us to know one another's minds upon

down to the instant; other things might wait, but these things were

pressing.

Of course there were some houses where such problems were of more

immediate and persistent interest than other houses. Such a house was

the ever-dear house of the S. family, which made itself a home any hour

of the day up to midnight for such youth as had once been adopted its

sons. It was not only a literary house, it was even more a musical

house, where there was both singing and playing, with interludes of

laughing and joking in all forms of seemly mirth, with the whole family,

till the little boys of it stumbled up the stairs half asleep. I could

not play, but I was sometimes suffered by that large-hearted hospitality

to try singing; and I could talk with the best. So, it was my more than

content in the lapses of the music to sit with the young aunt (she

seemed so mature in her later twenties to me in my earliest) and

exchange impressions of the books new and old that we had been reading.

We frequenters of the house held her in that honor which is the best

thing in the world for young men to feel for some gentle and cultivated

woman; I suppose she was a charming person apart from her literary

opinions; but we did not think of her looks; we thought of her wise and

just words, her pure and clear mind.

It was the high noon of Tennyson and Thackeray and George Eliot and

Dickens and Charles Reade, whose books seemed following one another so

rapidly. _The Newcomes_ was passing as a serial through _Harper's

Magazine_, and we were reading that with perhaps more pleasure than any

of the other novels and with the self-satisfaction in our pleasure which

I have before this argued was Thackeray's most insidious effect with

youth striving to spurn the world it longed to shine in. We went about

trying to think who in the story was like whom in life, and our kind

hostess was reading it, too, and trying to think that, too; but it was

not well for her to say what she thought in the case of the handsomest,

and for several reasons, really, the first among us. It appeared that

she thought he was like Clive Newcome and that we others were like those

friends of his whom in the tale his nature was shown subordinating. She

said something like this to some one, and when her saying came to us

others we revolted in a body. No, we would not have that theory of our

relation to our friend; and I do not know to what infuriate excess of

not calling for a week we carried our resentment. I do not know how

after the week, if it was so long, we began calling again; but I surmise

it was through something said or done by that dear Miss A. which made it

easy for her sister to modify her wounding theory into a recognition of

the proud equality which bound us friends together.

We are all dead now, all save me and the youngest daughter of the house,

but as I think back we are all living again, and others are living who

are also dead. Among these is a young lady visitor from a neighboring

city, one of those beautiful creatures who render the Madonna faces of

the painters credible, and of a prompt gaiety which shared our wonted

mirth in its own spirit. Her beauty might have dedicated her to any

mysterious fate; beauty is often of such tragical affinition; but not

her gaiety; and yet the glad die, too, and this glad creature within a

year had gone to the doom which sent no whisper back to the hearts left

lifelong aching. Her father was appointed consul to a Mediterranean

port, and she sailed with him in the ship which sailed with them both

into eternity, unseen, unsignaled, as messageless as if it had been a

mist swept from the face of the sea.

But well a year before this time and a year after our first meeting in

Columbus I saw her in Boston, in a house swept as wholly from the face

of the earth as that ship from the face of the sea. I suppose the Court

House in Boston is an edifice as substantial as it is plain, but for me,

when I look at the place where it stands my vision pierces to the row of

quiet, dignified mansions which once lined that side of Somerset Street,

and in one of which I somehow knew that I should find with her uncle's

family the beautiful creature already so unimaginably devoted to

tragedy, to mystery, to the eternal baffle of surmise. It seemed that

from often being there she knew the city so enchanted and enchanting to

me then, and she went about with me from one wonder of it to another;

and it remains in the glimmer of that association, which no after-custom

could wholly eclipse. It was a moment of the glad young American life of

other days which seems so impossible to after days and generations; and

with the Common and its then uncaterpillared elms, with the Public

Garden, just beginning in leaf and flower, with the stately dwellings

which looked upon those pleasances in the streets long since abandoned

to business, with the Public Library, the fine old Hancock House, and

the Capitol as Bullfinch designed and left it, and the Athenæum as it

used to be, and Faneuil Hall, swarming with memories for my young ardor,

and the Old State House, unvisited by its manifold transformations,--the

brave little city of the past is all contemporaneous again.

X

As I have said, all they of that Columbus house but one are gone. One of

the little boys went before they were men, and then the other; the

mother went long afterward; the elder daughter, who had been the widow

of our repudiated Clive Newcome, went longer afterward yet; and then

still later, finding myself once on a very mistaken lecturing-tour in

Kansas, where our beloved Miss A. had lived many married years, I asked

for her, hoping to see her, and heard that she had died the year before.

But first of all the father died, leaving me the memory of kindness

which I hardly know how to touch aright. He was my physician as well as

my friend, and saw me through the many maladies, real and unreal, of my

ailing adolescence, but he would have no fee for curing me of either my

pains or my fears. I had come to him first with my father, who somehow

knew him before me, and it was as if he became another father to me.

Often in those nights of singing and playing, of talking and joking, he

would look in for a moment between patients to befriend our jollity; and

when at last it came to my leaving Columbus, and going that far journey

to Venice, whither I seemed bound as on a journey to another planet, he

asked me one night into his little outside office by the State Street

gate, and had me tell him what provision I had made for the chances

before me. I told him, and then whether he thought it not enough in that

war-time when the personal risks were doubled by the national risks he

said, "Well, I am not a rich man, or the son of a rich man, but if you

think you need something more, I can let you have it." I had been

keeping my misgivings to myself, but now I owned them and borrowed the

two hundred dollars which he seemed to have there with him, as if in

expectation of my need.

For a darker tint in the picture I have been painting of my past let me

record here a fact which may commend itself for the younger reader's

admonition; the old cannot profit by it, perhaps, though as long as we

live we are in danger of forgetting kindness. When my family first came

to Columbus we were much beholden to another family, poor like

ourselves, which did everything but turn itself out of doors to let us

have the little house we were to occupy after them. They shared it with

us till they could place themselves elsewhere; and my father and mother

remained bound to them in willing gratitude. When I came back to the

capital after my five years of exile in our village I, too, remembered

our common debt, but when the world began to smile upon me I forgot the

friends who had not forgotten me till one day my father wished me to go

with him to see them. The mother of the family received me with a sort

of ironical surprise, and then her hurt getting the better, or the

worse, of her irony, she said some things about my losing sight of

humble friends in the perspectives opening so alluringly before me. I

could not recall, if I would, just the things she said, but they

scorched, and the place burns yet; and if I could go back and repair the

neglect which she brought home to me how willingly, after nearly sixty

years, would I do it! But at the time I hardened my heart and as I came

away I tried to have my father say something in extenuation of the fault

which I angrily tried to make a merit of; but with all his tenderness

for me he would not or could not.

Perhaps he, too, thought that I had been a snob, a thing that I had not

needed the instruction of Thackeray to teach me the nature of; but I

hope I was not so bad as that; I hope there was nothing meaner in me

than youth flattered out of remembrance of old kindness by the new

kindness in which it basked. I will confess here that I have always

loved the world and the pleasures which other sages pretend are so

vapid. If I could make society over, or make it over a little, so that

it would be inclusive rather than exclusive, I believe I would still

like to go into it, supposing it always sent a motor to fetch and carry

me and did not insist upon any sort of personal exertion from me. But

when I was between twenty and twenty-three and lived in Columbus I was

willing to be at almost any trouble for it. All up and down the wide

shady streets which ran from High eastward, and were called Rich and

Town and State and Broad, there were large pleasant houses of brick,

with or without limestone facings, standing in lawns more ample or less,

and showing through their trees the thrilling light of evening parties

that burst with the music of dancing from every window. Or if this was

not the case with every house, beautiful girls were waiting in every

other to be called upon, beside the grates with their fires of soft

coal, which no more discriminated between winter and summer than the

door-yard trees which seem to have been full-foliaged the whole year

round.

It may be that with the passage of time there began to be shadows in the

picture otherwise too bright. It seems to me that in time the calls and

balls may have begun to pall and a subtle _Weltschmerz_, such as we had

then, to pierce the heart; but scarcely any sense of that remains. What

is certain is that the shadow of incredible disaster which was soon to

fill the whole heaven still lurked below the horizon, or if it showed

itself there, took the form of retreating clouds which we had but to

keep on laughing and singing in order to smile altogether out of sight.

The slavery question which was not yet formidably a question of disunion

was with most of the older men a question of politics, though with men

like Dr. S. it was a question of ethics; with the younger men it was a

partisan question, a difference between Democrats and Republicans; with

me it was a question of emotions, of impassioned preoccupations, and in

my newspaper work a question of copy, of material for joking, for firing

the Southern heart. It might be brought home to us in some enforcement

of the Fugitive Slave Law, as in the case of the mother who killed her

children in Cincinnati rather than let them be taken back with her to

Kentucky; or in the return of an escaping slave seized in our own

railroad station; and there was at first the horror of revolted humanity

and then the acquiescence of sickened patience. It was the law, it was

the law; and the law was constitutional and must be obeyed till it was

repealed. Looking back now to that law-abiding submission, I can see

that it was fine in its way, and I can see something pathetic in it as

well as in the whole attitude of our people, the South and North

confronted in that inexorable labyrinth, neither side quite meaning it

or realizing it.

That was a very crucial moment indeed, but the crisis had come for us

five or six years before when the case of some conscientious citizens,

arrested in the Western Reserve for violation of that abominable law,

came before Chief-Justice Swann of the Ohio Supreme Court. It was hoped

by the great majority of the Republican party and largely expected that

Justice Swann's opinion would in whatever sort justify the offenders,

and it was known that the Governor would support the decision with an

armed force against the United States, which must logically attempt the

execution of the law with their troops. Very probably the state of Ohio

would have been beaten in such an event, but Justice Swann defeated the

popular hope and expectation before-hand by confirming the judgment

against those right-minded but wrong-headed friends of humanity. Ohio

was

[Illustration: _Old-time dwellings on one of the Columbus streets that

Mr. Howells used to frequent_]

spared the disaster which befell South Carolina five or six years later,

and Justice Swann suffered the penalty of men whose judgment is

different from the convictions of their contemporaries. From being one

of the most honored leaders of his party, with the prospect of any

highest place in its gift, he remained one of the most distinguished

jurists of his time whose best reward came coldly from those who would

not blame where they could not praise. In Ohio the judiciary is

elective, and Judge Swann hastened the decision of the court before the

meeting of the Republican State Convention in order that his party might

not unwittingly renominate him in the expectation of an opinion from him

favorable to the good men of Ohio who had broken the bad law of the

United States.

There is a legend, cherished more for its dramatic possibility than for

any intrinsic probability, that when Lincoln appointed Noah L. Swayne

justice of the Supreme Court of the United States he supposed that he

was appointing Joseph Swann, and that he was misled by the similarity of

the names, not very great either to ear or eye. Swayne was then one of

the most eminent members of the Columbus bar, and, though he lacked the

judicial experience of Swann, was entirely fit for the place he was

called to fill. If such a mistake was made it was one which could well

retrieve itself, but it seems a very idle fancy which has toyed with its

occurrence. It would be altogether too nice in the face of its

unlikelihood to inquire whether Lincoln might have wished to express a

certain sympathy for the eminent jurist in the arrest of his public

career which followed his decision. One would first have to establish

the fact of such a feeling in him and prove that if he had it he would

have been so careless of the jurist's name as to mistake another name

for it. These are the things that happen in fiction when the novelist

is hard driven by the exigencies of his plot, but cannot easily occur in

sober history.

I met both of these prominent men during my Columbus years, as an

improminent young fellow-citizen might, Justice Swayne rather often, and

Justice Swann once at least, in their own houses. On this sole occasion,

which dimly remains with me, I was paying one of those evening calls

which we youth were diligent in making at houses where there were young

ladies; and after due introduction to the great jurist, I was aware of

him, withdrawn and darkling in the next room, not unkindly, but not

sensibly contributing to the gaiety of the time in me. That might have

been after I was asked to a party at his house, which I was told, by a

lady versed in such mysteries, was the greatest distinction which

society had to offer in our city, and I suppose from this fact that the

popular blame for his momentous decision, even if it was of much force,

did not follow him into more rarefied air.