I was not only again at congenial work, but I was in the place that I
loved best in the world, though as well as I can now visualize the town
which had so great charm for me then I can find little beauty in it.
High Street was the only street of commerce except for a few shops that
had strayed down from it into Town Street, and the buildings which
housed the commerce were not impressive, and certainly not beautiful. A
few hotels, three or four, broke the line of stores; there was the
famous restaurant of Ambos, and some Jewish clothiers; but above all,
besides a music and picture store, there was an excellent bookstore,
where I supplied myself from a good stock of German books, with Heine
and Schiller and Uhland, and where one could find all the new
publications. The streets of dwellings stretched from High Street to the
right, over a practically interminable plain, and shorter streets on the
left dropped to the banks of the Scioto where a lower level emulated the
inoffensive unpicturesqueness of the other plain. A dusty bridge crossed
the river, where in the slack-water ordinarily drowsed a flock of
canal-boats which came and went on the Ohio Canal. Some old-fashioned,
dignified dwellings stood at the northern end of High Street, with the
country close beyond, but the houses which I chiefly knew were on those
other streets. I cannot say now whether they added to the beauty of the
avenues or not; I suppose that oftenest they did not embellish them
architecturally, though they were set in wide grounds among pleasant
lawns and gardens. The young caller knew best their parlors in winter
and their porches in summer; there was little or no lunching or dining
for any one except as a guest of pot-luck; and the provisioning was
mainly, if not wholly, from the great public market. Greengrocers' and
butchers' shops there were none, but that public market was of a
sumptuous variety and abundance, as I can testify from a visit paid it
with a householding friend who drove to it in his carriage, terribly
long before breakfast, and provisioned himself among the other fathers
and the mothers who thronged the place with their market-baskets. This
was years after my last years in Columbus, when I was a passing guest;
while I lived there I was citizen of a world that knew no such household
cares or joys.
On my return from my travels, though I was so glad to be again in
Columbus, I no longer gave myself up to society with such abandon as
before. I kept mostly to those two houses where I was most intimate, and
in my greater devotion to literature I omitted to make the calls which
were necessary to keep one in society even in a place so unexacting as
our capital. Somewhat to my surprise, somewhat more to my pain, I found
that society knew how to make reprisals for such neglect; I heard of
parties which I was not asked to, and though I might not have gone to
them, I suffered from not being asked. Only in one case did I regret my
loss very keenly, and that was at a house where Lincoln's young private
secretaries, Hay and Nicolay, passing through to Washington before the
inauguration, had asked for me. They knew of me as the author of "The
Pilot's Story" and my other poems in the _Atlantic Monthly_, as well as
that campaign life of Lincoln which I should not have prided myself on
so much; but I had been justly ignored by the hostess in her
invitations, and they asked in vain. I fully shared after the fact any
disappointment they may have felt, but I doubt if I was afterward more
constant in my social duties; I was intending more and more to devote
myself to poetry, and with a hand freer than ever, if that were
possible, in the newspaper, I was again feeling the charm of journalism,
and was giving to it the nights which I used to give to calls and
parties.
I did not go back to live in the College, but with Price I took a room
and furnished it; we went together for our meals to the different
restaurants, a sort of life more conformable to my notion of the life of
the literary freelance in New York. But let not the reader suppose from
this large way of speaking that there were many restaurants in Columbus,
or much choice in them. The best, the only really good one, was that of
Ambos in High Street, where, as I have said before, we silvern youth
resorted sometimes for the midnight oyster, which in handsome
half-dozens was brought us on chafing-dishes, to be stewed over
spirit-lamps and flavored according to our taste with milk and butter.
We cooked them for ourselves, but our rejected, or protested, Clive
Newcome was the most skilled in an oyster stew, and we all emulated him
as we sat at the marble table in one of the booths at the side of the
room. In hot weather a claret punch sometimes crowned the night with a
fearful joy, and there was something more than bacchanalian in having it
brought with pieces of ice clucking in a pitcher borne by the mystical
Antoine from the bar where he had mixed it: that Antoine whom we
romanced as of strange experiences and recondite qualities, because he
was of such impregnable silence, in his white apron, with his face white
above it, damp with a perennial perspiration, which even in the hottest
weather did not quite gather into drops. We each attempted stories of
him, and somewhere yet I have among my manuscripts of that time a very
affected study done in the spirit and manner of the last author I had
been reading.
I suppose he was not really of any intrinsic interest, but if he had
been of the greatest I could not have afforded, even on my increased
salary, to resort to Ambos's for frequent observation of him. Ambos's
was the luxury of high occasions, and Price and I went rather for our
daily fare to the place of an Americanized German near our office, where
the cooking was very good, and the food without stint in every variety,
but where the management was of such an easy kind that the rats could
sometimes be seen clambering over the wall of the storeroom beyond where
we sat. There was not then the present feeling against those animals,
which were respected as useful scavengers, and we were rather amused
than revolted by them, being really still boys with boys' love of
bizarre and ugly things. Once we had for our guest in that place the
unique genius destined to so great fame as Artemus Ward; he shared our
interest in the rats, and we joked away the time at a lunch of riotous
abundance; I should say superabundance if we had found it too much. For
a while also we ate at the house of a lady who set a table faultless to
our taste, but imagined that the right way to eat pie was with a knife,
and never gave a fork with it. Here for a while we had the company of
the young _Cincinnati Gazette_ correspondent, Whitelaw Reid, joyful like
ourselves under the cloud gathering over our happy world. One day, after
the cloud had passed away in the thunder and lightning of the four
years' Civil War, he came radiant to my little house at Cambridge with
a piece of news which I found it as difficult to realize for fact in my
sympathy with him as he could have wished. "Just think! Horace Greeley
has asked me to be managing editor of the _Tribune_, and he offers me
six thousand dollars a year!" A great many years afterward we met in a
train coming from Boston to New York, when he brought the talk round to
the Spanish War, and, for whatever reason, to his part in the Treaty of
Paris and the purchase of the Philippines. "_I_ did that," he said. But
I could not congratulate him upon this as I did upon his coming to the
editorship of the _Tribune_, being of a different mind about the
acquisition of the Philippines.
X
Sometime during that winter of 1860-61 Greeley himself paid us a visit
in the _Journal_ office and volunteered a lecture on our misconduct of
the paper, which he found the cause of its often infirmity. We listened
with the inward disrespect which youth feels for the uninvited censure
of age, but with the outward patience due the famous journalist (of such
dim fame already!) sitting on the corner of a table, with his soft hat
and his long white coat on, and his quaint child-face, spectacled and
framed in long white hair. He was not the imposing figure which one sees
him in history, a man of large, rambling ambitions, but generous ideals,
and of a final disappointment so tragical that it must devote him to a
reverence which success could never have won him. I do not know what
errand he was on in Columbus; very likely it was some political mission;
but it was something to us that he had read the _Journal_, even with
disapproval, and we did not dispute his judgments; if we were a little
abashed by them we hardened our hearts against them, whatever they
were, and kept on as before, for our consciences were as clear as our
hearts were light. No one at that time really knew what to think or say,
the wisest lived from day to day under the gathering cloud, which
somehow they expected to break as other clouds in our history had
broken; when the worst threatened we expected the best.
Price was not the companion of my walks so much as Reed had been; he was
probably of frailer health than I noticed, for he died a few years
later; and I had oftener the company of a young man who interested me
more intensely. This was the great sculptor, J. Q. A. Ward, who had come
to the capital of his native state in the hope of a legislative
commission for a statue of Simon Kenton. It was a hope rather than a
scheme, but we were near enough to the pioneer period for the members to
be moved by the sight of the old Indian Fighter in his hunting-shirt and
squirrel-skin cap, whom every Ohio boy had heard of, and Ward was
provisionally given a handsome room with a good light, in the State
House, where he modeled I no longer know what figures, and perhaps an
enlargement of his "Kenton." There I used to visit him, trying to
imagine something of art, then a world so wholly strange to me, and
talking about New York and the æsthetic life of the metropolis. My hopes
did not rise so high as Boston, but I thought if I were ever unhorsed
again I might find myself on my feet in New York, though I felt keenly
the difference between the places, greater then than now, when literary
endeavor is diffused and equally commercialized everywhere. Ward seemed
to live much to himself in Columbus, as he always did, but I saw a great
deal of him, for in the community of youth we had no want of things to
talk about; we could always talk about ourselves when there was nothing
else. He was in the prime of his vigorous manhood, with a fine red
beard, and a close-cropped head of red hair, like Michelangelo, and a
flattened nose like the Florentine's, so that I rejoiced in him as the
ideal of a sculptor. I still think him, for certain Greek qualities, the
greatest of American sculptors; his "Indian Hunter" in Central Park must
bear witness of our historic difference from other peoples as long as
bronze shall last, and as no other sculpture can. But the "Kenton" was
never to be eternized in bronze or marble for that niche in the rotunda
of the capital where Ward may have imagined it finding itself. The cloud
thickened over us, and burst at last in the shot fired on Fort Sumter;
the legislature appropriated a million dollars as the contribution of
the state to the expenses of the war, and Ward's hopes vanished as
utterly as if the bolt had smitten his plaster model into dust.
Before Ward, almost, indeed, with my first coming to Columbus, there had
been another sculptor whom I was greatly interested to know. This was
Thomas D. Jones, who had returned to Ohio from an attempt upon the
jealous East, where he had suffered that want of appreciation which was
apt, in a prevalent superstition of the West, to attend any æsthetic
endeavor from our section. He frankly stood for the West, though I
believe he was a Welshman by birth; but in spite of his pose he was a
sculptor of real talent. He modeled a bust of Chase, admirable as a
likeness, and of a very dignified simplicity. I do not know whether it
was ever put in marble, but it was put in plaster very promptly and sold
in many such replicas. The sculptor liked to be seen modeling it, and I
can see him yet, stepping back a little from his work, and then
advancing upon it with a sensitive twitching of his mustache and a black
censorious frown. The Governor must have posed in the pleasant room
which Jones had in the Neil House where he lived, how I do not know,
for he was threadbare poor; but in those days many good things seemed
without price to the debtor class; and very likely the management liked
to have him there, where his work attracted people. One day while I was
in the room the Governor came in and, not long after, a lady who
appeared instinctively to time her arrival when it could be most largely
impressive. As she was staying in the hotel, she wore nothing on her
dewily disheveled hair, as it insists upon characterizing itself in the
retrospect, and she had the effect of moving about on a stage. She had,
in fact, just come up on some theatrical wave from her native Tennessee,
and she had already sent her album of favorable notices to the _Journal_
office with the appeal inscribed in a massive histrionic hand, "Anything
but your silence, gentlemen!" She played a short engagement in Columbus,
and then departed for the East and for the far grander capitals of the
Old World, where she became universally famous as Ada Isaacs Menken, and
finally by a stroke of her fearless imagination figured in print as the
bride of the pugilist Heenan, then winning us the laurels of the ring
away from English rivalry. I cannot recall, with all my passion for the
theater, that I saw her on any stage but that which for a moment she
made of the sculptor's room.
Jones had been a friend from much earlier days, almost my earliest days
in Columbus; it was he who took me to that German house, where I could
scarcely gasp for the high excitement of finding myself with a lady who
had known Heinrich Heine and could talk of him as if he were a human
being. I had not become a hopeless drunkard from drinking the glass of
eggnog which she gave me while she talked familiarly of him, and when
after several years Jones took me to her house again she had the _savoir
faire_ quite to ignore the interval of neglect which I had suffered to
elapse, and gave me a glass of eggnog again. It must have been in 1859
that Jones vanished from my life, but I must not let him take with him a
friend whose thoughtfulness at an important moment I still feel.
This was a man who afterward became known as the author of two curious
books, entitled _Library Notes_, made up somewhat in the discursive
fashion of Montaigne's essays, out of readings from his favorite
authors. There was nothing original in them except the taste which
guided their selection, but they distinctly gave the sort of pleasure he
had in compiling them, and their readers will recall with affection the
name of A. P. Russell. He was the Ohio Secretary of State when I knew
him first, and he knew me as the stripling who was writing in his nonage
the legislative letters of the Cincinnati _Gazette_; and he alone
remembered me distinctly enough to commend me for a place on the staff
of the _State Journal_ when Mr. Cooke took control of it. After the war
he spent several years in some financial service of the state in New
York, vividly interested in the greatness of a city where, as he was
fond of saying, a cannon-shot could be heard by eight hundred thousand
people; six million people could hear it now if anything could make
itself heard above the multitudinous noises that have multiplied
themselves since. When his term of office ended he returned to Ohio,
where he shunned cities great and small, and retired to the pleasant
town where he was born, like an Italian to his _patria_, and there ended
his peaceful, useful days. It was my good fortune in almost the last of
these days to write and tell him of my unforgotten gratitude for that
essential kindness he had done me so long before, and to have a letter
back from him, the more touching because another's hand had written it;
for Russell had become blind.
Probably he had tried to help Ward in his hope, which was hardly a
scheme, for that appropriation from the legislature for his "Simon
Kenton." They always remained friends, and during Russell's stay in New
York he probably saw more of Ward, so often sequestered with the horses
for his equestrian groups, than most of his other friends. I who lived
quarter of a century in the same city with him saw him seldom by that
fault of social indolence, rather than indifference, which was always
mine, and which grows upon one with the years. Once I went to dine with
him in the little room off his great, yawning, equine studio, and to
have him tell me of his life for use in a book of "Ohio Stories" I was
writing; then some swift years afterward I heard casually from another
friend that Ward was sick. "Would he be out soon?" I asked. "I don't
think he'll be out at all," I was answered, and I went the next day to
see him. He was lying with his fine head on the pillow still like such a
head of Michelangelo as the Florentine might have modeled of himself,
and he smiled and held out his hand, and had me sit down. We talked long
of old times, of old friends and enemies (but not really enemies), and
it was sweet to be with him so. He seemed so very like himself that it
was hard to think him in danger, but he reminded us who were there that
he was seventy-nine years old, and when we spoke about his getting well
and soon being out again he smiled in the wisdom which the dying have
from the world they are so near, and, tenderly patient of us, expressed
his doubt. In a few days, before I could go again, I heard that he was
dead.