XI

We young men of that time were mostly Republicans, but some of us were

Democrats and some of us were Southerners, or derivatively Southern. I

have said how little society with us was affected by New England, even

in such a custom as Thanksgiving, and I may go a little farther and say

how it was characterized for good as well as for evil by the nearer

South rather than the farther East, but more for good than for evil.

Many people of Southern origin among us had chosen a Northern home

because they would rather live in a Free State than a Slave State; they

had not cast their sectional patriotism, but when it came to a question

of which ideal should prevail, they preferred the Northern ideal. They

derived from that South which antedated the invention of the

cotton-gin, and which could take a leading part in keeping the

Northwestern Territory free, with Ohio the first Free State born of that

great mother of Free States. The younger generation of their blood were

native Ohioans, and these were not distinguishable from the children of

the New-Englanders and the Scotch-Irish Pennsylvanians by anything that

I can remember. We had already begun to be Ohioans, with an accent of

our own, and I suppose our manners were simpler and freer than those of

the East, but the American manners were then everywhere simple and free,

and are so yet, I believe, among ninety-nine hundred-thousandths of our

ninety-nine millions. It seems to me now that the manners in Columbus

were very good then among the young people. No one can say what change

the over-muchness of subsequent money may have made in them, but one

likes to think the change, if any, is not for the better. There seems to

have been greater pecuniary equality then than there is now; there was

an evener sky-line, with scarcely a sky-scraping millionaire breaking it

anywhere. Within what was recognized as society there was as much social

as pecuniary equality; apparently one met the same people everywhere on

that easily ascertained level above the people who worked for their

living with their hands. These were excluded, as they always have been

excluded from society in all times and places; so that if I had still

been a compositor at the printer's case I could not have been received

at any of the houses that welcomed me as a journalist, though that did

not occur to me then, and only just now occurs to me, as something

strange and sad; something that forever belies our democracy, but is so

fast and deep-rooted in the conditions which our plutocracy has kept

from our ancestral monarchies and oligarchies and must keep as long as

men live upon one another in the law of competition.

In one house there was more singing and playing and in another more

reading and talking. All the young ladies were beautiful, with the

supremacy of that young lady whom it was our poetry to hold so beautiful

that no other might contest it. As I believe the use still is in the

South, we called them Miss Lilly, Miss Julia, Miss Sally, Miss Fanny,

Miss Maggie, whether they were the older or the younger daughters of the

family. We were always meeting them at parties or, failing that or

including that, we went to call upon them at their houses. We called in

the evening and it was no strange thing for a young man to call every

evening of the week, not at one house, but at three or four. How, in the

swift sequence of the parties, we managed so often to find the young

ladies at home remains one of the mysteries which age must leave youth

to solve. Possibly in that sharply foreshortened perspective of the past

the parties show of closer succession than they really were.

At most of the houses we saw only the young ladies; it was they whom we

asked for; but there were other houses where the mothers of the family

received with the daughters, and at one of these my welcome was

immediately of a kindness and always of a conscience which it touches me

to realize. I was taken at the best I meant as well as the best I was by

the friend who was the exquisite spirit of the house, and made me at

home in it. My world had been very small, and it has never since been

the greatest, but I think yet, as I divined then, that she was of a

social genius which would have made her in any great-worldlier capital

the leader she was in ours, where her supremacy in that sort was no more

questioned than the incomparable loveliness of that most beautiful girl

whom every one worshiped. Her house expressed her, so that when her home

finally changed to another the new house obeyed the magic of her taste

and put on the semblance of the first, with a conservatory breathing

through it the odor of her flowers and the murmur of the dove that lived

among them: herself a flower-like and birdlike presence, delicate,

elegant, such as might have been fancied of some fine, old-world

condition in a new-world reading of it. She lived to rule socially in a

community which attested its gentleness by its allegiance to her until

she was past eighty, but when I knew her first she was too young to be

titularly accepted as their mother by her stepdaughters and was known to

them as their cousin in what must have been her own convention; but I

suppose she liked to be not less than sovereign among her equals. With

me she was not only the kindest, but the most candid of my friends; my

literary journalism and later my literature may have been to her liking,

but she never flattered me for them when, as I now know, too much praise

had made me hungry for flattery. No young man such as I was then could

have had a wiser and faithfuler friend, and I render her memory my

tribute after so many years from a gratitude which cannot be spoken.

After so many years I cannot make out whether she accepted or merely

suffered my extreme opinions in politics; though she was wholly Ohioan,

her husband's family had close affiliations with the South; but hers was

certainly a Republican house, as nearly all the houses I frequented

were. What may have made her even anticipatively my friend was our

common acceptance of the Swedenborgian philosophy, which long, long

afterward, the last time I saw her, I spoke of as a philosophy. But then

she rejected the notion with scorn; it might be a pleasant fancy, she

said, but a philosophy, no; and I perceived that she had come the way of

that agnosticism which the whole cultivated world had taken. Now I have

heard that in her last years she went back to the faith which was

perhaps more inherited than reasoned in both of us. But I am sure that

it was at first a bond and that she was conscientiously true to this

bond of a common spiritual tradition, when upon some public recognition

of my work she reminded me how according to Swedenborg every beautiful

thing we said or did was by an influx from the divine. I submitted

outwardly, but inwardly I rebelled: not that my conceit of the things I

did was so very great; I believe I thought rather modestly of myself for

doing them, and I always meant to do much better things; in fact I still

have my masterpiece before me; but, poor things as they were, I wished

to feel them wholly mine.

For a kindred reason I quite as altogether refused, and more explicitly,

the theory of my old friend, Moncure D. Conway, as to the true function

of the West in literature. He was then a young Unitarian minister,

preaching at Cincinnati an ever-widening liberalism in religion, and

publishing a slight monthly magazine named after _The Dial_ of Emerson

at Concord, and too carefully studied from it. For this paler avatar of

that transcendental messenger he had asked me for contributions, and so

a friendship, which lasted throughout our lives, sprang up between us.

When he once came to Columbus he came to lunch with me, and quite took

my appetite away by propounding his theory that the West was to live its

literature, especially its poetry, rather than write it, the East being

still in that darkling period when it could not live its literature. I

do not remember the arguments by which he supported his thesis; but

proofs as of holy writ could not have persuaded me of it as far as I

myself was concerned. My affair was to make poetry, let who would live

it, and to make myself known by both the quality and quantity of my

poetry. It is not clear to me now how I declared my position without

immodesty, but somehow I declared it, and so finally that Conway was

very willing to carry away with him for his magazine a piece of rhyme

which I had last made. He could the more willingly do this because _The

Dial_ was one of those periodicals, commoner then than now, that paid

rather in glory than in money; in fact it was not expected to pay

anything in money, so that I doubly defeated him: I was not only not

living my poetry, I was not even living by it.