“Two years. At the end of the first winter, a Cincinnati paper offered
me the city editorship, but one night’s round with the reporters at
the police station satisfied me that I was not meant for that kind
of work. I then returned home for the summer, and spent my time in
reading, and in sending off poems, which regularly came back. I worked
in my father’s printing office, of course; but, as soon as my task was
done, went home to my books, and worked away at them until supper.
Then a German bookbinder, with whom I was endeavoring to read Heine in
the original, met me in my father’s editorial room, and with a couple
of candles on the table between us, and our Heine and the dictionary
before us, we read until we were both tired out.”
“Did you find it labor?”
“I fancy that reading is not merely a pastime, when it is apparently
the merest pastime. It fatigues one after the manner of other work, and
uses up a certain amount of mind-stuff; and I have found that, if you
are using up all the mind-stuff you have, much or little, in some other
way, you do not read, because you have not the mind-stuff for it. You
cannot say more of any other form of work.”
“Then it might be said that you worked at separate and equally
difficult tasks, constantly?”
“Perhaps not equally difficult, but, certainly, constantly.”
“Rather a severe schooling to give one’s self, don’t you think it?”
Mr. Howells smiled. “It was not without its immediate use. I learned
how to choose between words, after a study of their fitness; and,
though I often employed them decoratively, and with no vital sense
of their qualities, still, in mere decoration, they had to be chosen
intelligently, and after some thought about their structure and
meaning. I would not imitate great writers without imitating their
method, which was to the last degree intelligent. They knew what they
were doing, and, although I did not always know what I was doing,
they made me wish to know, and ashamed of not knowing. The result was
beneficial.”
“It is very evident that you recovered your health, in spite of your
toil?”