Very likely those dances lasted through the winter, but I cannot be
sure; I can only be sure that they summed up the raptures of the time,
which was the most memorable of my whole life; for now I met her who was
to be my wife. We were married the next year, and she became with her
unerring artistic taste and conscience my constant impulse toward
reality and sincerity in my work. She was the first to blame and the
first to praise, as she was the first to read what I wrote. Forty-seven
years we were together here, and then she died. But in that gayest time
when we met it did not seem as if there could ever be an end of time for
us, or any time less radiant. Though the country was drawing nearer and
nearer the abyss where it plunged so soon, few thought it would make the
plunge; many believed that when it would it could draw back from it, but
doubtless that was never possible; there is a doom for nations as there
is for men, and looking back upon our history I cannot see how we could
have escaped. The slaveholders in the old Union were a few hundred
thousand against many millions, but a force in them beyond their own
control incessantly sought to control the non-slaveholding majority.
They did not brook question of their will from others; they brooked no
self-question of it; however little they seemed at moments to demand,
they never demanded less than that conscience itself should come to
their help in making their evil our good. Having said that black was
white, that wrong was right, they were vitally bound to compel the
practical consent of humanity. It was what it had been aforetime and
must be to aftertime; Lincoln did not deny them in terms different from
Franklin's, but the case had gone farther. The hour had come when they
would not be denied at all; slavery could never keep its promises; it
could hardly stay even to threaten. Long before there had been dreams of
ending it by buying the slaves, but the owners would not have sold their
slaves, and now, though the war against slavery tried to believe itself
a war for the Union, when it came to full consciousness it knew itself a
war for freedom; such freedom, lame and halt, as we have been able to
keep for the negroes; a war for democracy, such democracy as we shall
not have for ourselves until we have an economic democracy.
The prevision of the young writers on the _State Journal_ was of no such
reach as this retrospect. The best that could be said of them was that
so far as they knew the right, they served it, and it is no bad thing to
say of them that they met insolence with ridicule and hypocrisy with
contempt. Still, as always before in those columns, they got their fun
out of the opportunities which the situation offered, and they did not
believe the worst was coming; that would excuse their levity, and it
availed as much as gravity. I do not remember that we took counsel with
any one as to what we said or that we consulted much with each other. We
did not think that the Union would be dissolved, but if it should be we
did not think that its dissolution was the worst thing that could
happen; and this was the mind of vastly more at that day than most at
this day will believe; some of those who were of that mind then may not
like to own it now. People have the habit of saying that only those who
have lived through a certain period can realize it, but I doubt if even
they can realize it. A civic agitation is like a battle; it covers a
surface so large that only a part of it can be seen by any one spectator
at any one moment. The fact seems to be that the most of human motives
and actions must always remain obscure; history may do its best to
record and reveal them, but it will strive in vain to give us a living
sense of them, because no one ever had a living sense of them in their
entirety.
At the period which I am trying to tell of the hours passed and the days
and weeks and months, bringing us forever nearer the catastrophe; but I
could not truthfully say that their passing changed the general mood.
The College group which I used to consort with had changed, and it was
no longer so much to my liking; it had dwindled, and for me it chiefly
remained in the companionship of one friend, whom I walked and talked
with when I was not walking and talking with Price. This was that
protested and rejected Clive Newcome, of ours, who in real life was
James M. Comly, law student then, and then soldier, and then journalist.
Of all the friends in whose contrast I have been trying to find myself,
he was temperamentally the most unlike me, but a common literary bent
inclined us to each other. In his room there was not only euchre for
those who could not bear to waste in idleness the half-hours before
dinner or supper, but there were the latest fashions in such periodicals
as the _Cornhill Magazine_, then so brand new, and the _Saturday
Review_, equally new, with the great Thackeray stooping from his Jovian
height in the monthly to blunt against the weekly, with its social and
critical offensives, such bolts as calling it the _Superfine Review_.
Comly was of much the same taste as myself in authors, but not so
impassioned; he was not so multifarious a reader and not so inclusive of
the poets, and in obedience to his legalist instincts he was of more
conservative feeling in politics. We had never a moment of misgiving for
each other, yet I had one bad moment over an _Atlantic_ poem of mine
fabling the author as a bird singing in a tree, and flatteringly but
unintelligently listened to by the cattle beneath which the title of the
piece typified as "The Poet's Friends." The conceit had overtempted me,
but when I had realized it in print, with no sense meantime of its
possible relevance, I felt the need of bringing myself to book with the
friend I valued most, and urging how innocently literary, how most
merely and entirely dramatic the situation was. I think my anxiety
amused him, as it very well might, but I still draw a long breath of
relief when I remember how perfectly he understood.
Our association was mostly in the walks we took in the winter twilights
and the summer moonlights, walks long enough in the far-stretching
Columbus streets to have encompassed the globe; but our talks were not
nearly so long as the walks, walks in which there were reaches of
reticence, when apparently it was enough for us to be walking together.
Yet we must often have talked about the books we were reading, that is
to say the novels, though seldom about public events, which is the
stranger, or the less strange, because as a student of law he was of
course a potential politician, and I was writing politics every day.
He was the last but one of the friends whom my youth was so rich in, for
no reason more, perhaps, than that we were young together, though they
were all older than I, and Comly was five or six years my senior. When I
knew him first, with his tall, straight figure, his features of Greek
fineness, his blue eyes, and his moustache thin and ashen blond, he was
of a distinction fitting the soldier he became when the Civil War began,
and he fought through the four years' struggle with such gallantry and
efficiency that he came out of it with the rank of brigadier-general. He
had broken with the law amid arms, and in due time he succeeded to the
control of our newspaper where he kept on terms of his own the tradition
of Reed, which Price and I had continued in our fashion, and made the
paper an increasing power. But he had never been the vigorous strength
he looked, and after certain years of overwork he accepted the
appointment of minister to Hawaii. The rest and the mild climate renewed
his health, and he came back to journalism under different conditions of
place. But the strain was the same; he gave way under it again, and died
a few years later.