“My next contribution to literature was jointly with John J. Piatt,
the poet, who had worked with me as a boy in the printing office at
Columbus. We met in Columbus, where I was then an editor, and we made
our first literary venture together in a volume entitled, ‘Poems of Two
Friends.’ The volume became instantly and lastingly unknown to fame;
the west waited, as it always does, to hear what the east should say.
The east said nothing, and two-thirds of the small edition of five
hundred copies came back upon the publisher’s hands. This did not deter
me, however, from contributing to the periodicals, which, from time to
time, accepted my efforts.”
“Did you remain long, as an editor, in Columbus?”
“No; only until 1861, when I was appointed consul at Venice. I really
wanted to go to Germany, that I might carry forward my studies in
German literature; and I first applied for the consulate at Munich. The
powers at Washington thought it quite the same thing to offer me Rome,
but I found that the income of the Roman consulate would not give me a
living, and I was forced to decline it. Then the president’s private
secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr. John Hay, who did not know me,
except as a young westerner who had written poems in the ‘Atlantic
Monthly,’ asked me how I would like Venice, promising that the salary
would be put up to $1,000 a year. It was really put up to $1,500, and I
accepted. I had four years of nearly uninterrupted leisure at Venice.”
“Was it easier when you returned from Venice?”
“Not at all. On my return to America my literary life took such form
that most of my reading was done for review. I wrote at first a good
many of the lighter criticisms in ‘The Nation,’ and then I went to
Boston, to become assistant editor of ‘The Atlantic Monthly,’ where I
wrote the literary notices for that periodical for four or five years.”
“You were eventually editor of the ‘Atlantic,’ were you not?”
“Yes, until 1881; and I have had some sort of close relation with
magazines ever since.”
“Would you say that all literary success is very difficult to achieve?”
I ventured.
“All that is enduring.”
“It seems to me ours is an age when fame comes quickly.”
“Speaking of quickly made reputations,” said Mr. Howells, meditatively,
“did you ever hear of Alexander Smith? He was a poet who, in the
fifties, was proclaimed immortal by the critics, and ranked with
Shakespeare. I myself read him with an ecstacy which, when I look over
his work to-day, seems ridiculous. His poem, ‘Life-Drama,’ was heralded
as an epic, and set alongside of ‘Paradise Lost.’ I cannot tell how we
all came out of this craze, but the reading world is very susceptible
of such lunacies. He is not the only third-rate poet who has been
thus apotheosized, before and since. You might have envied his great
success, as I certainly did; but it was not success, after all; and I
am sure that real success is always difficult to achieve.”
“Do you believe that success comes to those who have a special bent or
taste, which they cultivate by hard work?”
“I can only answer that out of my literary experience. For my own
part, I believe I have never got any good from a book that I did not
read merely because I wanted to read it. I think this may be applied
to anything a person does. The book, I know, which you read from a
sense of duty, or because for any reason you must, is apt to yield you
little. This, I think, is also true of everything, and the endeavor
that does one good,—and lasting good,—is the endeavor one makes with
pleasure. Labor done in another spirit will serve in a way, but
pleasurable labor brings, on the whole, I think, the greatest reward.”