It was a great day, which I must have spent chiefly in admiring the new house. It was so very new yet as not to be plastered; they had not been able to wait for that; but it was beautifully lathed in all its partitions, and the closely fitted floors were a marvel of carpentering. I roamed through the rooms, and up and down the stairs, and freshly admired the familiar outside of the house as if it were as novel as the interior, where open wood fires blazed upon the hearths and threw a pleasant light of home upon the latticed walls.
I must have gone through the old log cabin to see how it looked without us, but I have no recollection of ever entering its door again, so soon had it ceased to be part of my life. We remained in the new house, as we continued to call it, for two or three months, and then the changes of business which had been taking place without the knowledge of us children called us away from that roof, too, and we left the mills and the pleasant country that had grown so dear, to take up our abode in city streets again. We went to live in the ordinary brick house of our civilization, but we had grown so accustomed, with the quick and facile adaptation of children, to living in a house which was merely lathed, that we distinguished this last dwelling from the new house as a “plastered house.”
Some of our playmates of the neighborhood walked part of the way to X —— with us boys, the snowy morning when we turned our backs on the new house to take the train in that town. A shadow of the gloom in which our spirits were steeped passes over me again, but chiefly I remember our difficulties in getting our young Newfoundland dog away with us; and our subsequent embarrassments with him on the train, where he sat up and barked out of the window at the passing objects and finally became seasick, blot all other memories of that journey from my mind.
PART II
IF in a child’s first years the things which it apparently remembers are really the suggestions of its elders, it begins soon to repay the debt, and repays it more and more fully until its memory touches the history of all whom it has known. Through the whole time when a boy is becoming a man his autobiography can scarcely be kept from becoming the record of his family and his world. He finds himself so constantly reflected in the personality of those about him, so blent with it, that any attempt to study himself as a separate personality is impossible. His environment has become his life, and his hope of a recognizable self-portrait must lie in his frank acceptance of the condition that he can make himself truly seen chiefly in what he remembers to have seen of his environment.
I
We were now going from the country to Columbus, where my father, after several vain attempts to find an opening elsewhere as editor or even as practical printer, had found congenial occupation at least for the winter; and the reader who likes to date a small event by a great one may care to know that we arrived in the capital of Ohio about the time that Louis Kossuth arrived in the capital of the United States. In the most impressive exile ever known he came from Hungary, then trampled under foot by the armies of Austria and Russia, and had been greeted with a frenzy of enthusiasm in New York as the prophet and envoy of a free republic in present difficulties, but destined to a glorious future. At Washington he had been received by both Houses of Congress with national honors which might well have seemed to him national promises of help against the despotisms joined in crushing the Magyar revolt; we had just passed a law providing for the arrest of slaves escaping from their owners in the South, and we were feeling free to encourage the cause of liberty throughout the world.
Kossuth easily deceived himself in us, and he went hopefully about the country, trying to float an issue of Hungarian bonds on our sympathetic tears, and in his wonderful English making appeals full of tact and eloquence, which went to the hearts if not the pockets of his hearers. Among the other state capitals he duly came to Columbus, where I heard him from the steps of the unfinished State House. I hung on the words of the picturesque black-bearded, black-haired, black-eyed man, in the braided coat of the Magyars, and the hat with an ostrich plume up the side which set a fashion among us, and I believed with all my soul that in a certain event we might find the despotisms of the Old World banded against us, and “would yet see Cossacks,” as I thrilled to hear Kossuth say. In those days we world-patriots put the traitor Görgy, who surrendered the Hungarian army to the Austrians and Russians, beside our own Benedict Arnold; but what afterward became of him I do not know. I know that Kossuth went disappointed back to Europe and dwelt a more and more peaceful newspaper correspondent in Turin till the turn of fortune’s wheel would have dropped him, somehow politically tolerable to Austria, back in his native country. But he would not return; he died in Turin; and a few years ago in Carlsbad I fancied I had caught sight of his son at a café, but was told that I had seen the wrong man, who was much more revolutionary-looking than Kossuth’s son, and more like Kossuth.
I adopted with his cause the Kossuth hat, as we called it, and wore it with the plume in it till the opinions of boys without plumes in their hats caused me to take the feather out. My father was of their mind about the feather, but otherwise we thought a great deal alike, and he was zealous to have me see the wonders of the capital. I visited the penitentiary and the lunatic, deaf and dumb, and blind asylums with him, though I think rather from his interest than mine; but I was willing enough to realize the consequence of Columbus as the capital of a sovereign American state, and I did what I could to meet his expectations. Together we made as thorough examination of the new State House as the workmen who had not yet finished it would allow, and he told me that it would cost, when done, a million dollars, a sum of such immensity that my young imagination shrank from grappling with it; but I am afraid that before the State House was done it may have cost more; certainly it must have cost much more with the incongruous enlargements which in later years spoiled its classic proportions. My father made me observe that it was built of Ohio limestone without, and later I saw that it was faced with Vermont and Tennessee marble within, where it was not stuccoed and frescoed; but as for the halls of legislation where the laws of Ohio were made and provided, when I first witnessed the process, they were contained in a modest square edifice of brick which could not have cost a million dollars, or the twentieth part of them, by the boldest computation of the contractors. It was entirely modest as to the Hall of the House and the Senate Chamber, and I suppose that so were the state offices, wherever they were, unnoted by me. The State House, as much as I knew of it from a single visit to the Hall of Representatives, was of a very simple interior heated from two vast hearths where fires of cord-wood logs were blazing high. There were rows of legislators sitting at their desks, and probably one of them was on his feet, speaking; I recall dimly a presiding officer, but my main affair was to breathe as softly as I could and get away as soon as possible from my father’s side where he sat reporting the proceedings for the Ohio State Journal, then the Whig and later the Republican organ.
II
Nobody cares now for the details, or even the main incidents of state legislation, but in that day people seemed to care so much that the newspapers at the capital found their account in following them, and as I learned later the papers at Cincinnati and Cleveland had correspondents at Columbus to let them know by letter what went on in the House and Senate. My father could make a very full and faithful report of the legislative proceedings in longhand, and for this he was paid ten dollars a week. As I have told elsewhere, I worked on the same paper and had four dollars as compositor; my eldest brother became very provisionally clerk in a grocery-store where he had three dollars, and read the novels of Captain Maryatt in the intervals of custom. Our joint income enabled us to live comfortably in the little brick house, on a humble new street, which my father hired for ten dollars a month from a Welsh carpenter with a large family. No sense of our own Welsh origin could render this family interesting; I memorized some scraps of their Cymric as I overheard it across the fence, but we American children did not make acquaintance with the small Welsh folk, or with more than these
few words of their language, which after several attempts at its grammar still remain my sole knowledge of it. On the other side lived a mild, dull German of some lowly employ, whom I remember for his asking us across the fence, one day, to lend him a leather cover. When by his patient repetition this construed itself as an envelope, we loved him for the pleasure it gave us, and at once made leather-cover the family name for envelope. Across the street dwelt an English family of such amiable intelligence that they admired some verses of mine which my father stole to their notice and which they put me to shame by praising before my face.
In my leisure from the printing-office I was in fact cultivating a sufficiently thankless muse in the imitation of Pope and Goldsmith, for in me, more than his other children, my father had divined and encouraged the love of poetry; but in reproducing his poets, as I constantly did, to his greater admiration than mine, I sometimes had a difficulty which I did not carry to him. There is no harm in now submitting it to the reader, who may have noted in his own case the serious disadvantage of writing about love when he had as yet had no experience of the passion. I did my best, and I suppose I did no worse than other poets of thirteen. But I fell back mostly upon inanimate nature, which I knew very well from the woods where I had hunted and the fields where I had hoed; to be honest, I never hoed so much as I hunted, and I never hunted very successfully. I now went many walks into the woods and fields about the town in my longing for the wider spaces I had known, and helped my sisters dig up the wild flowers which they brought home and planted in our yard. But I recall more distinctly than any other a Sunday walk which I took with my father across the Scioto to the forsaken town on the western bank of the river. Franklinton had been thought of as the capital before Columbus, and it has now been rehabilitated in an indefinitely greater prosperity than it ever enjoyed in its prime, but during my life in the city which so promptly won the capital away from it, Franklinton lay abandoned by nine-tenths of its inhabitants, and stretched over the plain in rows of small, empty brick dwellings. I have the impression of disused county buildings, but I am not sure of them; I heard (but in days when I did not much concern myself with such poor unliterary facts) that the notion of Franklinton as the capital was rejected because it was apt in springtime to be flooded by the Scioto, and was at other seasons infested by malaria which the swarms of mosquitoes bore to every household. The people, mostly sallow women and children who still gaze at me from a few of the doorways and windows, looked as if their agues were of unfailing recurrence every other day of every week; though I suppose that in winter they were somewhat less punctual. I should like to believe that Franklinton was precious to me because of its suggestion of Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, but I cannot claim that it bore any likeness to the hamlet of the poet’s fancy, even in the day when I was hungering to resemble all life to literature; and I never made it the subject of my verse, though I think now it merited as much and more. Since that time I have seen other abandoned cities, notably Pompeii and Herculaneum, but Franklinton remains of a memorable pathos and of a forlornness all the more appreciable because it had become ruin and eld amidst the young, vigorous life of a new country.
In My Literary Passions I have made full mention of the books I was reading that winter of 1851-2; but I was rather surprised to find that in a boyish diary of the time, lately discovered in the chaos of a storage warehouse, none of my favorite authors was specified. I could trace them, indeed, in the varying style of the record, but the diarist seems to have been shy of naming them, for no reason that I can now imagine.
The diary is much more palpable than the emotions of the diarist, and is a large, flat volume of foolscap paper, bound in marbled boards, somewhat worn with use and stained with age. The paper within is ruled, which kept the diarist’s hand from wandering, and the record fills somewhat less than a fourth of the pages; the rest are given to grammatical exercises in Spanish, which the diarist was presently beginning to study, but even these interrupt themselves, falter, and are finally lost in space. The volume looks quite its age of sixty years, for it begins in the closing months of 1851.
The diarist practised a different handwriting every day and wrote a style almost as varied. The script must have been imitated from the handwritings which he successively admired, and the literary manner from that which seemed to him most elegant in the authors he had latest read. He copies not only their style, but their mental poses, and is often sage beyond his years, which are fourteen verging upon fifteen. With all its variety of script, the spelling in the diary is uniformly of the correct sort which printers used to learn as part of their trade, but which is said to be now suffering a general decay through the use of type-setting machines. There are few grammatical errors in the diversified pages and the punctuation is accurate and intelligent.
Though there is little note or none of the diarist’s reading, there is other witness that it had already begun to be of wide range and copious variety. Now and then there are hints of his familiarity with Goldsmith’s Essays, and Dickens’s novels which his father was reading aloud, and one Sunday it appears that when he was so loath to get up that he did not rise until eight o’clock he tells us: “I slipped into my clothes, made the fire in the sitting-room, wrapped father’s cloak about me, and sat down to read the travels of Hommaire de Hell, a Frenchman who traveled in the Russian Empire in the year 1840.” I do not care much now who M. Hommaire de Hell was or what he had to say of the Russian Empire in 1840, but I wish I could see that boy wrapped in his father’s cloak, and losing himself in the Frenchman’s page. Though I have the feeling that we were once familiarly acquainted, I am afraid the diarist would not know me if he looked up across the space of threescore years, though he might divine in me a kindred sense of the heaviness of the long Sunday hours which he confronts when he rises from his reading.
Throughout the yellowing pages there is evident striving, not to say straining, for a literary style, the most literary style possible, and the very first page commemorates a visit to the Lunatic Asylum in terms of a noble participial construction. “Passing up the broad graveled path to the door of the institution, we entered the office, and leaving our hats on the table we proceeded on our way. The first room we entered contained those who were nearly cured. There was in it no one but an old and a young man. The old man I did not notice much, but the young one attracted my attention. He paced the floor all the time, not taking the least notice of us; then we went up-stairs where the most unmanageable ones were kept. Here was a motley crew, some of them lying at full length on the floor, standing up and walking about, while crownless hats and dilapidated shirt-bosoms were the order of the day. In the midst of these terrible men, thoughtless as the brute and ferocious as the tiger, stood a small man (the assistant physician) whom they could have torn limb from limb in a moment. Here was a beautiful instance of the power of mind over brute force. He was reading poetry to them, and the men, totally bereft of reason, listening like little children to the sweet cadence of the verse.” All this and more is in a fine script, so sloping that it is almost lying down, either from the exhausting emotions of the diarist or from a temporary ideal of elegance. But the very next day it braces itself for a new effort and it is not many days before it stands upright in a bold, vertical file.
The writer does not know any boys except in the printing-office, and these he knows only in a shrinking sort, not venturing to take part, except once, in their wild hilarity, and scarcely knowing their names, even the name of the boy whom he is afterward to associate himself with in their first venture with a volume of verse. His chief companionship is with his father, whom he goes long walks and holds long talks with, and it is his father who encourages him in his versifying and who presently steals into the print of the newspaper employing them both a poem on the premature warm weather which has invited the bluebirds and blackbirds into the northern March. At first the boy was in dismay at the sight of the poem, with the introductory editorial note customary in those days, but he hides th
is from his diary, where he confides his joy in finding his verses “copied into a New York paper, and also in the Cincinnati Commercial. I mean the piece on Winter.”
But the poet kept on and wrote more and more, while the diarist wrote less and less. It is needless to follow him through the pieces which were mostly imitated from some favorite poet of the moment or more originally drawn from the scenes of life known to the author. One of these, painting an emigrant’s farewell to the home he is leaving, tells how he stoops over —
“And pats the good old house dog
Who is lying on the floor.”
The morning after the piece appeared, a fellow printer-boy seems to have quoted the line aloud for all to hear, and dramatized it by patting the author on the head, inwardly raging but helpless to resent the liberty. In fact, the poet did not well know how to manage the publicity now thrust upon him. He behaved indeed with such outrageous resentment at finding his first piece of verse in print that his father, who had smuggled it into the editor’s hands, well-nigh renounced him and all his works. But not quite; he was too fond of both, and the boy and he were presently abetting each other in the endeavor for his poetic repute — so soon does the love of fame go to the strongest head.
As yet neither looked for his recognition in that sort of literature which the boy was ultimately to be best or most known in. He seems not to have read at this time much prose fiction, but he was reading Homer in Pope’s translation, or rather he was reading the Odyssey; the Iliad he found tiresome and noisy; and if the whole truth must be told, as I have understood it, he liked The Battle of the Frogs and Mice best of all the Homeric poems. It was this which he imitated in a burlesque epic of The Cat Fight, studied from nature in the hostilities nightly raging on the back fences; but the only surviving poem of what may be called his classical period, as the poets of it understood Queen Anne’s age, is a pastoral so exactly modeled upon the pastorals of the great Mr. Pope, that but for a faulty line here and there and the intrusion of a few live American birds among the stuffed songsters of those Augustan groves, I do not see how Mr. Pope could deny having written it. He might well have rejoiced in a follower who loved him so devotedly and so exactly reproduced his artificiality in heroic couplets studied from his own, with the same empty motive to the same unreal effect, as the surviving fragments of it will witness.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1605
