But in that winter of 1859-60, after Lincoln had been elected, Ward was
still hopeful of an order from the state for his "Simon Kenton," and I
was hopeful of the poetic pre-eminence which I am still foregoing. I
used such scraps of time as I could filch from the busy days and nights
and gave them to the verse which now seemed to come back from editors
oftener than it once did. This hurt, but it did not kill, and I kept on
at verse for years in the delusion that it was my calling and that I
could make it my living. It was not until four or five years later that
a more practical muse persuaded me my work belonged to her, and in the
measureless leisure of my Venetian consulate I began to do the various
things in prose which I have mostly been doing ever since, for fifty
years past. Till then I had no real leisure, but was yet far from the
days when anything less than a day seems too small a space to attempt
anything in. That is the mood of age and of middle age, but youth seizes
any handful of minutes and devotes them to some beginning or ending. It
had been my habit ever since I took up journalism to use part of the
hour I had for midday dinner in writing literature, and such hours of
the night as were left me after my many calls or parties; and now I did
not change, even under the stress of the tragical events crowding upon
us all.
I phrase it so, but really I felt no stress, and I do not believe others
felt it so much as the reader might think. As I look back upon it the
whole state of affairs seems incredible, and to a generation remote from
it must seem impossible. We had an entire section of the Republic openly
seeking its dismemberment, and a government which permitted and even
abetted the seizure of national property by its enemies and the devotion
of its resources to its own destruction. With the worst coming,
relentlessly, rapidly, audibly, visibly, no one apparently thought the
worst would come; there had been so many threats of disunion before, and
the measures now taken to effect it seemed only a more dramatic sort of
threats. People's minds were confused by the facts which they could not
accept as portents, and the North remained practically passive, while
the South was passionately active; and yet not the whole South, for as
yet Secession was not a condition, but merely a principle. There was a
doubt with some in the North itself whether the right of disunion was
not implied in the very act of union; there had long been a devoted
minority who felt that disunion without slavery was better than union
with slavery; and on both sides there arose sentimental cries,
entreaties from the South that the North would yield its points of right
and conscience, appeals from the North that the South would not secede
until the nation had time to decide what it would do. The North would
not allow itself to consider seriously of coercing the seceding states;
and there was a party willing to bid them, with unavailing tears,
"Erring sisters, go in peace," as if the seceding states, being thus
delicately entreated, could not have the heart to go, even in peace.
There were hysterical conferences of statesmen in and out of office to
arrange for mutual concessions which were to be all on the part of the
Union, or if not that then to order its decent obsequies.
I cannot make out that our chief had any settled policy for the conduct
of our paper; nobody had a settled policy concerning public affairs. If
his subordinates had any settled policy, it was to get what fun they
could out of the sentimentalists, and if they had any fixed belief it
was that if we had a war peace must be made on the basis of disunion
when the war was over. In our wisdom we doubted if the sections could
ever live together in a union which they had fought for and against. But
we did not say this in print, though as matters grew more hopeless Price
one day seized the occasion of declaring that the Constitution was a
rope of sand. I do not remember what occasion he had for saying this,
but it brought our chief actively back to the censorship; Price's
position was somehow explained away, and we went on as much as before,
much as everybody else went on. I will not, in the confession of our
youthful rashness, pretend that there were any journalists who seemed
then or seem wiser now or acted with greater forecast; and I am sure
that we always spoke from our consciences, with a settled conviction
that the South was wrong. We must have given rather an ironical welcome
to a sufficiently muddled overture of the Tennessee legislature which
during the winter sent a deputation of its members to visit our own
Houses and confer with them as to what might be done. The incident now
has it pathos, there was so much that was well meant in the attempt to
mend our bad business with kind words and warm feelings, though then I
was sensible only of its absurdity. I did not hear any of the speeches,
but I remember seeing the Tennessee statesmen about the Capitol for the
different conferences held there and noting that some of them spoke with
a negroid intonation and not with that Ohio accent which I believed the
best in the English-speaking world. No doubt they parted with our own
legislators affectionately, and returned home supported by the hope that
they had really done something in a case where there was nothing to be
done.
Their endeavor was respectable, but there was no change in the civic
conditions except from bad to worse. In the social conditions, or the
society conditions, everything was for the better, if indeed these could
be bettered in Columbus. Of all the winters this was the gayest; society
was kind again, after I had paid the penalty it exacted for my neglect,
and I began to forget my purpose of living in air more absolutely
literary. Again I began going the rounds of the friendly houses, but
now, as if to win my fancy more utterly, there began to be a series of
dances in a place and on conditions the most alluring. For a while after
the functions of the medical school were suspended in the College where
I had lodged, the large ward where the lectures were once given was
turned into a gymnasium and fitted up with the usual gymnastic
apparatus. I do not recall whether this was taken away or not, or was
merely looped up and put aside for our dances, and I do not know how we
came into possession of the place; in the retrospect, such things happen
in youth much as things happen in childhood, without apparent human
agency; but at any rate we had this noble circus for our dances. There
must have been some means of joining them, but it is now gone from me,
and I know only that they were given under the fully sufficing
chaperonage of a sole matron. There were two negro fiddlers, and the
place was lighted by candles fixed along the wall; but memory does not
serve me as to any sort of supper; probably there was none, except such
as the young men, after they had seen the young ladies to their homes,
went up-town to make on the oysters of Ambos.
It is strange that within the time so dense with incident for us there
should have been so few incidents now separately tangible, but there is
one that vividly distinguishes itself from the others. In that past I
counted any experience precious that seemed to parallel the things of
fact with the things of fiction. Afterward, but long afterward, I
learned to praise, perhaps too arrogantly praise, the things of fiction
as they paralleled the things of fact, but as yet it was not so. I
suppose the young are always like us as we of the College dances were
then, but romance can rarely offer itself to youth of any time in the
sort of reality which one night enriched us amid our mirth with a wild
thrill of dismay at the shriek in a girl's voice of "Dead?" There was an
instant halt in the music, and then a rush to the place where the cry
had risen. Somebody had fainted, and when the fact could be verified, it
was found that one of the blithest of our company had been struck down
with word from home that her sister had fallen dead of heart failure.
Then when we began to falter away from the poor child's withdrawal,
suddenly another tumult stayed us; a young father, who had left his
first-born with its mother in their rooms above while he came down for
some turns in the waltz, could not believe that it was not his child
that was dead, and he had to be pulled and pushed up-stairs into sight
and sound of the little one roused from its sleep to convince him,
before he could trust the truth.
Here was mingling of the tragic and the comic to the full admired effect
of Shakespearian drama, but the mere circumstance of these esthetic
satisfactions would have been emotional wealth enough; and when I got
home on such a night to my slumbering room-mate Price I could give
myself in glad abandon to the control of the poet whose psychic I then
oftenest was, with some such result as I found in a tattered manuscript
the other day. I think the poet could hardly have resented my masking in
his wonted self-mocking, though I am afraid that he would have shrunk
from the antic German which I put on to the beat of his music.
"To-night there is dancing and fiddling
In the high windowed hall
Lighted with dim corpse-candles
In bottles against the wall.
"And the people talk of the weather,
And say they think it will snow;
And, without, the wind in the gables
Moans wearily and low.
[Illustration: _The quaint doorway of the Medical College through which
Mr. Howells passed daily while he roomed in the building_]
"'_Sa! Sa!_'--the dance of the Phantoms!
The dim corpse-candles flare;
On the whirl of the flying spectres
The shuddering windows stare.
"'Oh, play us the silent Ghost-Waltz,
Thou fiddling blackamoor!'
He hears the ghostly summons,
He sees the ghosts on the floor.
"He plays the silent Ghost-Waltz
And through the death-mute hall
The voiceless echoes answer,
In time the ghost-feet fall.
"Und immer und immer schneller,
Und wild wie der Winterwind
Die beide College Gespenster
Sie walzen sinnengeschwind.
"They waltz to the open doorway,
They waltz up the winding stair:
'Oh, gentle ghosts we are sneezing,
We are taking cold in the air.'"