The days of the years when youth is finding its way into manhood are not
those which have the most flattering memories. It is better with the
autobiographer both before and after that time, though both the earlier
and later times have much to offer that should keep him modest. But that
interval is a space of blind struggle, relieved by moments of rest and
shot with gleams of light, when the youth, if he is fortunate, gathers
some inspiration for a worthier future. His experiences are vivid and so
burnt into him that if he comes to speak of them it will require all his
art to hide from himself that he has little to remember which he would
not much rather forget. In his own behalf, or to his honor and glory, he
cannot recall the whole of his past, but if he is honest enough to
intimate some of its facts he may be able to serve a later generation.
His reminiscences even in that case must be a tissue of egotism, and he
will merit nothing from their altruistic effect.
I
Journalism was not my ideal, but it was my passion, and I was
passionately a journalist well after I began author. I tried to make my
newspaper work literary, to give it form and distinction, and it seems
to me that I did not always try in vain, but I had also the instinct of
actuality, of trying to make my poetry speak for its time and place. For
the most part, I really made it speak for the times and places I had
read of; but while Lowell was keeping my Heinesque verses among the
_Atlantic_ MSS. until he could make sure that they were not translations
from Heine I was working at a piece of realism which when he printed it
in the magazine our exchange newspapers lavishly reprinted. In that
ingenuous time the copyright law hung loosely upon the journalistic
consciousness and it was thought a friendly thing to reproduce whatever
pleased the editorial fancy in the periodicals which would now
frowningly forbid it, but with less wisdom than they then allowed it, as
I think. I know that as its author the currency of _The Pilot's Story_
in our exchanges gave me a joy which I tried to hide from my senior in
the next room; and I bore heroically the hurt I felt when some of the
country papers printed my long, overrunning hexameters as prose. I had
studied the verse not alone in Longfellow's "Evangeline," but in
Kingsley's "Andromeda," and Goethe's "Hermann and Dorothea," while my
story I had taken from a potentiality of our own life, and in the
tragedy of the slave girl whose master gambles her away at _monte_ on a
Mississippi steamboat, and who flings herself into the river, I was at
home with circumstance and scenery. I still do not think the thing was
ill done, though now when I read it (I do not read it often) I long to
bring it closer to the gait and speech of life. The popularity of the
piece had its pains as well as pleasures, but the sharpest anguish I
suffered was from an elocutionist who was proposing to recite it on the
platform, and who came to me with it to have me hear him read it. He did
not give it with the music of my inner sense, but I praised him as well
as I could till he came to the point where the slave girl accuses her
master with the cry of--
"Sold me! Sold me! Sold! And you promised to give me my freedom!"
when he said, "And here I think I will introduce a shriek." "A shriek?"
I faltered. "Yes, don't you think it would fill the suspense that comes
at the last word 'Sold!'? Something like this," and he gave a screech
that made my blood run cold, not from the sensibility of the auditor,
but the agony of the author. "Oh no!" I implored him, and he really
seemed to imagine my suffering. He promised to spare me, but whether he
had the self-denial to do so I never had the courage to inquire.
In the letters to my sister which I was so often writing in those
Columbus years I find record of the constant literary strivings which
the reader shall find moving or amusing as he will. "I have sold to
Smith of the Odd Fellow's Monthly at Cincinnati that little story I read
to you early last summer. I called it 'Not a Love Story.' He gave me six
dollars for it; and he says that as soon as I have time to dress up that
translation which B. rejected he will buy that. At the rate of two
dollars a page it will bring me sixteen or eighteen dollars. 'Bobby'"--I
suppose some sketch--"is going the rounds of the country papers. The
bookseller here told our local editor that it was enough to make
anybody's reputation--that he and his family laughed prodigiously over
it.... I have the assurance that I shall succeed, but at times I tremble
lest something should happen to destroy my hopes. I think, though, that
my adversity came first, and now it is prosperity lies before me. I am
going to try a poem fit to be printed in the _Atlantic_. They pay
Fullerton twenty-five dollars a page. I can sell, now, just as much as I
will write."
It was two years yet before that poem I was trying for the _Atlantic_
was fit, and sold to the magazine for twenty-five dollars, though it was
three pages long. I was glad of the pay, but the gain was nothing to the
glory; and with the letter which Lowell wrote me about it in the pocket
next my heart, and felt for to make sure of its presence every night and
morning and throughout the day, I was of the potentiality of
immeasurable success. I should have been glad of earning more money, for
there were certain things I wished to do for those at home which I could
not do on my salary of ten dollars a week, already beginning to be
fitfully paid. Once, I find that I had not the money for the white
gloves which it seems I expected myself to wear in compliance with usage
at a certain party; and there were always questions of clothes.
Dress-coats were not requisite then and there; the young men wore
frock-coats for the evening, but I had ambitiously provided myself with
the other sort upon the example of a friend who wore his all day; I wore
mine outdoors once by day, and then presciently dedicated it to evening
calls. The women dressed beautifully, to my fond young taste; they
floated in airy hoops; they wore Spanish hats with drooping feathers in
them, and were as silken balloons walking in the streets where men were
apt to go in unblacked boots and sloven coats and trousers. The West
has, of course, brushed up since, but in that easy-going day the Western
man did not much trouble himself with new fashions or new clothes.