Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  We who are here written down, having all sworn,

  despising the calumnies of the vulgar, strong in the

  justice of our cause and the boldness of our spirits, do

  solemnly declare ourselves the initiators of the Italian

  revolution. If the country does not respond to our appeal,

  we, without reproaching it, will know how to die

  like brave men, following the noble phalanx of Italian

  martyrs. Let any other nation of the world find men

  who, like us, shall immolate themselves to liberty, and

  then only may it compare itself to Italy, though she still

  be a slave.

  Mercantini puts his poem in the mouth of a peasant girl, and calls it

  THE GLEANER OF SAPRI.

  They were three hundred; they were young and strong,

  And they are dead!

  That morning I was going out to glean;

  A ship in the middle of the sea was seen

  A barque it was of those that go by steam,

  And from its top a tricolor flag did stream.

  It anchored off the isle of Ponza; then

  It stopped awhile, and then it turned again

  Toward this place, and here they came ashore.

  They came with arms, but not on us made war.

  They were three hundred; they were young and strong,

  And they are dead!

  They came in arms, but not on us made war;

  But down they stooped until they kissed the shore,

  And one by one I looked them in the face, —

  A tear and smile in each one I could trace.

  They were all thieves and robbers, their foes said.

  They never took from us a loaf of bread.

  I heard them utter nothing but this cry:

  “We have come to die, for our dear land to die.”

  They were three hundred; they were young and strong,

  And they are dead!

  With his blue eyes and with his golden hair

  There was a youth that marched before them there,

  And I made bold and took him by the hand,

  And “Whither goest thou, captain of this band?”

  He looked at me and said: “Oh, sister mine,

  I’m going to die for this dear land of thine.”

  I felt my bosom tremble through and through;

  I could not say, “May the Lord help you!”

  They were three hundred; they were young and strong,

  And they are dead!

  I did forget to glean afield that day,

  But after them I wandered on their way.

  And twice I saw them fall on the gendarmes,

  And both times saw them take away their arms,

  But when they came to the Certosa’s wall

  There rose a sound of horns and drums, and all

  Amidst the smoke and shot and darting flame

  More than a thousand foemen fell on them.

  They were three hundred; they were young and strong,

  And they are dead!

  They were three hundred and they would not fly;

  They seemed three thousand and they chose to die.

  They chose to die with each his sword in hand.

  Before them ran their blood upon the land;

  I prayed for them while I could see them fight,

  But all at once I swooned and lost the sight;

  I saw no more with them that captain fair,

  With his blue eyes and with his golden hair.

  They were three hundred; they were young and strong,

  And they are dead.

  CONCLUSION

  Little remains to be said in general of poetry whose character and tendency are so single. It is, in a measure, rarely, if ever, known to other literatures, a patriotic expression and aspiration. Under whatever mask or disguise, it hides the same longing for freedom, the same impulse toward unity, toward nationality, toward Italy. It is both voice and force.

  It helped incalculably in the accomplishment of what all Italians desired, and, like other things which fulfill their function, it died with the need that created it. No one now writes political poetry in Italy; no one writes poetry at all with so much power as to make himself felt in men’s vital hopes and fears. Carducci seems an agnostic flowering of the old romantic stalk; and for the rest, the Italians write realistic novels, as the French do, the Russians, the Spaniards — as every people do who have any literary life in them. In Italy, as elsewhere, realism is the ultimation of romanticism.

  Whether poetry will rise again is a question there as it is everywhere else, and there is a good deal of idle prophesying about it. In the mean time it is certain that it shares the universal decay.

  Compendio della Storia della Letteratura Italiana. Di Paolo Emiliano-Giudici. Firenze: Poligrafia Italiana, 1851.

  Della Letteratura Italiana. Esempj e Giudizi, esposti da Cesare Cant�. A Complemento della sua Storia degli Italiani. Torino: Presso l’Unione Tipografico-Editrice, 1860.

  Storia della Letteratura Italiana. Di Francesco de Sanctis. Napoli: Antonio Morano, Editore, 1879. Saggi Critici. Di Francesco de Sanctis. Napoli: Antonio Morano, Librajo-Editore, 1869.

  I Contemporanei Italiani. Galleria Nazionale del Secolo XIX. Torino: Dall’Unione Tipografico-Editrice, 1862.

  L’Italie est-elle la Terre des Morts? Par Marc-Monnier. Paris: Hachette & Cie., 1860.

  I Poeti Patriottici. Studii di Giuseppe Arnaud. Milano: 1862.

  The Tuscan Poet Giuseppe Giusti and his Times. By Susan Horner. London: Macmillan & Co., 1864.

  IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES

  CONTENTS

  THE COUNTRY PRINTER

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  POLICE REPORT

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  XI

  A TALK OF DREAMS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  VI

  VII

  AN EAST-SIDE RAMBLE

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  VI

  TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEERFUL GIVER

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  XI

  XII

  THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  GLIMPSES OF CENTRAL PARK

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  NEW YORK STREETS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  THE COUNTRY PRINTER

  MY earliest memories, or those which I can make sure are not the sort of early hearsay that we mistake for remembrance later in life, concern a country newspaper, or, rather, a country printing-office. The office was in my childish consciousness some years before the paper was; the compositors rhythmically swaying before their cases of type; the pressman flinging himself back on the bar that made the impression, with a swirl of his long hair; the apprentice rolling the forms, and the foreman bending over the imposing-stone, were familiar to me when I could not grasp the notion of any effect from their labors. In due time I came to know all about it, and to understand that these activities went to the making of the Whig newspaper which my father edited to the confusi
on of the Locofocos, and in the especial interest of Henry Clay; I myself supported this leader so vigorously for the A Presidency in nay seventh year that it was long before I could realize that the election of 1844 had resulted in his defeat. My father had already been a printer for a good many years, and some time in the early thirties he had led a literary forlorn hope, in a West Virginian town, with a monthly magazine, which he printed himself and edited with the help of his sister.

  As long as he remained in business he remained a country editor and a country printer; he began to study medicine when he was a young man, but he abandoned it for the calling of his life without regret, and though with his speculative and inventive temperament he was tempted to experiment in other things, I do not think he would ever have lastingly forsaken his newspaper for them. In fact, the art of printing was in our blood; it never brought us great honor or profit; and we were always planning and dreaming to get out of it, or get it out of us; but we are all in some sort bound up with it still. To me it is now so endeared by the associations of childhood that I cannot breathe the familiar odor of types and presses without emotion; and I should not be surprised if I found myself trying to cast a halo of romance about the old-fashioned country office in what I shall have to say of it here.

  I

  Our first newspaper was published in southwestern Ohio, but after a series of varying fortunes, which I need not dwell upon, we found ourselves in possession of an office in the northeastern corner of the State, where the prevalent political feeling promised a prosperity to one of my father’s anti-slavery opinions which he had never yet enjoyed. He had no money, but in those days it was an easy matter to get an interest in a country paper on credit, and we all went gladly to work to help him pay for the share that he acquired in one by this means. An office which gave a fair enough living, as living was then, could be bought for twelve or fifteen hundred dollars; but this was an uncommonly good office, and I suppose the half of it which my father took was worth one sum or the other. Afterward, within a few months, when it was arranged to remove the paper from the village where it had always been published to the county-seat, a sort of joint-stock company was formed, and the value of his moiety increased so much, nominally at least, that he was nearly ten years paying for it. By this time I was long out of the story, but at the beginning I was very vividly in it, and before the world began to call me with that voice which the heart of youth cannot resist, it was very interesting; I felt its charm then, and now, as I turn hack to it, I feel its charm again, though it was always a story of steady work, if not hard work.

  The county-seat, where it had been judged best to transfer the paper lest some other paper of like politics should be established there, was a village of only six or seven hundred inhabitants. But, as the United States Senator who was one of its citizens used to say, it was “a place of great political privileges.” The dauntless man who represented the district in the House for twenty years, and who had fought the antislavery battle from the first, was his fellow-villager, and more than compèer in distinction; and besides these, there was nearly always a State Senator or Representative among us. The county officers, of course, lived at the county-seat, and the leading lawyers, who were the leading politicians, made their homes in the shadow of the court house, where one of them was presently elected to preside as Judge of the Common Pleas. In politics, the county was already overwhelmingly Freesoil, as the forerunner of the Republican party was then called; the Whigs had hardly gathered themselves together since the defeat of General Scott for the Presidency; the Democrats, though dominant in state and nation, and faithful to slavery at every election, did not greatly outnumber among us the zealots called Comeouters, who would not vote at all under a constitution recognizing the right of men to own men. Our paper was Freesoil, and its field was large among that vast majority of the people who believed that slavery would finally perish if kept out of the territories, and confined to the old Slave States. With the removal of the press to the county-seat there was a hope that this field could be widened, till every Freesoil voter became a subscriber. It did not fall out so; even of those who subscribed in the ardor of their political sympathies, many never paid; but our list was nevertheless handsomely increased, and numbered fifteen or sixteen hundred. I do not know how it may be now, but then most country papers had a list of four or five hundred subscribers; a few had a thousand, a very few twelve hundred, and these were fairly decimated by delinquents. We were so flown with hope that I remember there was serious talk of risking the loss of the delinquents on our list by exacting payment in advance; but the measure was thought too bold, and we compromised by demanding two dollars a year for the paper, and taking a dollar and a half if paid in advance. Twenty-five years later my brother, who had followed my father in the business, discovered that a man who never meant to pay for his paper would as lief owe two dollars as any less sum, and he at last risked the loss of the delinquents by requiring advance payment; it was an heroic venture, but it was perhaps time to make it.

  The people of the county were mostly farmers, and of these nearly all were dairymen. The few manufactures were on a small scale, except perhaps the making of oars, which were shipped all over the world from the heart of the primeval forests densely wooding the vast levels of the region. The portable steam sawmills dropped down on the borders of the woods have long since eaten their way through and through them, and devoured every stick of timber in most places, and drunk up the watercourses that the woods once kept full; but at that time half the land was in the shadow of those mighty poplars and hickories, elms and chestnuts, ashes and hemlocks; and the meadows that pastured the herds of red cattle were dotted with stumps as thick as harvest stubble. Now there are not even stumps; the woods are gone, and the watercourses are torrents in spring and beds of dry clay in summer. The meadows themselves have vanished, for it has been found that the strong yellow soil will produce more in grain than in milk. There is more money in the hands of the farmers there, though there is still so little that by any city scale it would seem comically little, pathetically little; but forty years ago there was so much less that fifty dollars seldom passed through a farmer’s hands in a year. Payment was made in kind rather than in coin, and every sort of farm produce was legal tender at the printing-office. Wood was welcome in any quantity, for the huge box-stove consumed it with inappeasable voracity, and then did not heat the wide, low room which was at once editorial-room, composing-room, and press-room. Perhaps this was not so much the fault of the stove as of the building. In that cold lake-shore country the people dwelt in wooden structures almost as thin and flimsy as tents; and often in the first winter of our sojourn the type froze solid with the water which the compositor put on it when he wished to distribute his case; the inking rollers had to be thawed before they could be used on the press; and if the current of the editor’s soul had not been the most genial that ever flowed in this rough world, it must have been congealed at its source. The eases of type had to be placed very near the windows so as to get all the light there was, and they got all the cold there was, too. From time to. time, the compositor’s fingers became so stiff that blowing on them would not avail; he passed the time in excursions between his stand and the stove; in very cold weather, he practiced the device of warming his whole case of types by the fire, and when it lost heat, warming it again. The man at the press-wheel was then the enviable man; those who handled the chill damp sheets of paper were no more fortunate than the compositors.

  II

  THE first floor of our office-building was used by a sash-and-blind factory; there was a machine-shop somewhere in it, and a mill for sawing out shingles; and it was better fitted to the exercise of these robust industries than to the requirements of our more delicate craft. Later, we had a more comfortable place, in a new wooden “business block,” and for several years before I left it the office was domiciled in an old dwelling-house, which we bought, and which we used without much change. It could never have been a very lu
xurious dwelling, and my associations with it are of a wintry cold, scarcely less polar than that we were inured to elsewhere. In fact, the climate of that region is rough and fierce; and the late winds have a malice sharper than the saltest gales of the North Shore of Massachusetts. I know that there were lovely summers and lovelier autumns in my time there, full of sunsets of a strange, wild, melancholy splendor, I suppose from some atmospheric influence of the lake; but I think chiefly of the winters, so awful to us after the mild seasons of southern Ohio; the frosts of ten and twenty below; the village streets and the country roads drowned in snow, the consumptives in the thin houses, and the “slippin’,” as the sleighing was called, that lasted from December to April with hardly a break. At first our family was housed on a farm a little way out, because there was no tenement to be had in the village, and my father and I used to walk to and from the office together in the morning and evening. I had taught myself to read Spanish, in my passion for Don Quixote, and I was then, at the age of fifteen, preparing to write a life of Cervantes. This scheme occupied me a good deal in those bleak walks, and perhaps it was because my head was so hot with it that my feet were always very cold; but my father assured me that they would get warm as soon as my boots froze. If I have never yet written that life of Cervantes, on the other hand I have never been quite able to make it clear to myself why my feet should have got warm when my boots froze.

  III

  It may have been only a theory of his; it may have been a joke. He had a great many theories and a great many jokes, and together these always kept life interesting and sunshiny to him. With his serene temperament and his happy doubt of disaster in any form, he was singularly well fitted to encounter the hardships of a country editor’s lot. But for the moment, and for what now seems a long time after the removal of our paper to the county-seat, these seem to have vanished. The printing-office was the centre of civic and social interest; it was frequented by visitors at all times, and on publication day it was a scene of gayety that looks a little incredible in the retrospect. The place was as bare and rude as a printing-office seems always to be: the walls were splotched with ink and the floor littered with refuse newspapers; but lured by the novelty of the affair, and perhaps attracted by a natural curiosity to see what manner of strange men the printers were, the school-girls and young ladies of the village flocked in, and made it like a scene of comic opera, with their pretty dresses and faces, their eager chatter, and lively energy in folding the papers and addressing them to the subscribers, while our fellow-citizens of the place, like the bassos and barytones and tenors of the chorus, stood about and looked on with faintly sarcastic faces. It would not do to think now of what sorrow life and death have since wrought for all those happy young creatures, but I may recall without too much pathos the sensation when some citizen volunteer relaxed from his gravity far enough to relieve the regular mercenary at the crank of our huge power-press wheel, amid the applause of the whole company.