Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  X

  Sometime during that winter of 1860-61 Greeley himself paid us a visit in the Journal office and volunteered a lecture on our misconduct of the paper, which he found the cause of its often infirmity. We listened with the inward disrespect which youth feels for the uninvited censure of age, but with the outward patience due the famous journalist (of such dim fame already!) sitting on the corner of a table, with his soft hat and his long white coat on, and his quaint child-face, spectacled and framed in long white hair. He was not the imposing figure which one sees him in history, a man of large, rambling ambitions, but generous ideals, and of a final disappointment so tragical that it must devote him to a reverence which success could never have won him. I do not know what errand he was on in Columbus; very likely it was some political mission; but it was something to us that he had read the Journal, even with disapproval, and we did not dispute his judgments; if we were a little abashed by them we hardened our hearts against them, whatever they were, and kept on as before, for our consciences were as clear as our hearts were light. No one at that time really knew what to think or say, the wisest lived from day to day under the gathering cloud, which somehow they expected to break as other clouds in our history had broken; when the worst threatened we expected the best.

  Price was not the companion of my walks so much as Reed had been; he was probably of frailer health than I noticed, for he died a few years later; and I had oftener the company of a young man who interested me more intensely. This was the great sculptor, J. Q. A. Ward, who had come to the capital of his native state in the hope of a legislative commission for a statue of Simon Kenton. It was a hope rather than a scheme, but we were near enough to the pioneer period for the members to be moved by the sight of the old Indian Fighter in his hunting-shirt and squirrel-skin cap, whom every Ohio boy had heard of, and Ward was provisionally given a handsome room with a good light, in the State House, where he modeled I no longer know what figures, and perhaps an enlargement of his “Kenton.” There I used to visit him, trying to imagine something of art, then a world so wholly strange to me, and talking about New York and the æsthetic life of the metropolis. My hopes did not rise so high as Boston, but I thought if I were ever unhorsed again I might find myself on my feet in New York, though I felt keenly the difference between the places, greater then than now, when literary endeavor is diffused and equally commercialized everywhere. Ward seemed to live much to himself in Columbus, as he always did, but I saw a great deal of him, for in the community of youth we had no want of things to talk about; we could always talk about ourselves when there was nothing else. He was in the prime of his vigorous manhood, with a fine red beard, and a close-cropped head of red hair, like Michelangelo, and a flattened nose like the Florentine’s, so that I rejoiced in him as the ideal of a sculptor. I still think him, for certain Greek qualities, the greatest of American sculptors; his “Indian Hunter” in Central Park must bear witness of our historic difference from other peoples as long as bronze shall last, and as no other sculpture can. But the “Kenton” was never to be eternized in bronze or marble for that niche in the rotunda of the capital where Ward may have imagined it finding itself. The cloud thickened over us, and burst at last in the shot fired on Fort Sumter; the legislature appropriated a million dollars as the contribution of the state to the expenses of the war, and Ward’s hopes vanished as utterly as if the bolt had smitten his plaster model into dust.

  Before Ward, almost, indeed, with my first coming to Columbus, there had been another sculptor whom I was greatly interested to know. This was Thomas D. Jones, who had returned to Ohio from an attempt upon the jealous East, where he had suffered that want of appreciation which was apt, in a prevalent superstition of the West, to attend any æsthetic endeavor from our section. He frankly stood for the West, though I believe he was a Welshman by birth; but in spite of his pose he was a sculptor of real talent. He modeled a bust of Chase, admirable as a likeness, and of a very dignified simplicity. I do not know whether it was ever put in marble, but it was put in plaster very promptly and sold in many such replicas. The sculptor liked to be seen modeling it, and I can see him yet, stepping back a little from his work, and then advancing upon it with a sensitive twitching of his mustache and a black censorious frown. The Governor must have posed in the pleasant room which Jones had in the Neil House where he lived, how I do not know, for he was threadbare poor; but in those days many good things seemed without price to the debtor class; and very likely the management liked to have him there, where his work attracted people. One day while I was in the room the Governor came in and, not long after, a lady who appeared instinctively to time her arrival when it could be most largely impressive. As she was staying in the hotel, she wore nothing on her dewily disheveled hair, as it insists upon characterizing itself in the retrospect, and she had the effect of moving about on a stage. She had, in fact, just come up on some theatrical wave from her native Tennessee, and she had already sent her album of favorable notices to the Journal office with the appeal inscribed in a massive histrionic hand, “Anything but your silence, gentlemen!” She played a short engagement in Columbus, and then departed for the East and for the far grander capitals of the Old World, where she became universally famous as Ada Isaacs Menken, and finally by a stroke of her fearless imagination figured in print as the bride of the pugilist Heenan, then winning us the laurels of the ring away from English rivalry. I cannot recall, with all my passion for the theater, that I saw her on any stage but that which for a moment she made of the sculptor’s room.

  Jones had been a friend from much earlier days, almost my earliest days in Columbus; it was he who took me to that German house, where I could scarcely gasp for the high excitement of finding myself with a lady who had known Heinrich Heine and could talk of him as if he were a human being. I had not become a hopeless drunkard from drinking the glass of eggnog which she gave me while she talked familiarly of him, and when after several years Jones took me to her house again she had the savoir faire quite to ignore the interval of neglect which I had suffered to elapse, and gave me a glass of eggnog again. It must have been in 1859 that Jones vanished from my life, but I must not let him take with him a friend whose thoughtfulness at an important moment I still feel.

  This was a man who afterward became known as the author of two curious books, entitled Library Notes, made up somewhat in the discursive fashion of Montaigne’s essays, out of readings from his favorite authors. There was nothing original in them except the taste which guided their selection, but they distinctly gave the sort of pleasure he had in compiling them, and their readers will recall with affection the name of A. P. Russell. He was the Ohio Secretary of State when I knew him first, and he knew me as the stripling who was writing in his nonage the legislative letters of the Cincinnati Gazette; and he alone remembered me distinctly enough to commend me for a place on the staff of the State Journal when Mr. Cooke took control of it. After the war he spent several years in some financial service of the state in New York, vividly interested in the greatness of a city where, as he was fond of saying, a cannon-shot could be heard by eight hundred thousand people; six million people could hear it now if anything could make itself heard above the multitudinous noises that have multiplied themselves since. When his term of office ended he returned to Ohio, where he shunned cities great and small, and retired to the pleasant town where he was born, like an Italian to his patria, and there ended his peaceful, useful days. It was my good fortune in almost the last of these days to write and tell him of my unforgotten gratitude for that essential kindness he had done me so long before, and to have a letter back from him, the more touching because another’s hand had written it; for Russell had become blind.

  Probably he had tried to help Ward in his hope, which was hardly a scheme, for that appropriation from the legislature for his “Simon Kenton.” They always remained friends, and during Russell’s stay in New York he probably saw more of Ward, so often sequestered with the horses for his eques
trian groups, than most of his other friends. I who lived quarter of a century in the same city with him saw him seldom by that fault of social indolence, rather than indifference, which was always mine, and which grows upon one with the years. Once I went to dine with him in the little room off his great, yawning, equine studio, and to have him tell me of his life for use in a book of “Ohio Stories” I was writing; then some swift years afterward I heard casually from another friend that Ward was sick. “Would he be out soon?” I asked. “I don’t think he’ll be out at all,” I was answered, and I went the next day to see him. He was lying with his fine head on the pillow still like such a head of Michelangelo as the Florentine might have modeled of himself, and he smiled and held out his hand, and had me sit down. We talked long of old times, of old friends and enemies (but not really enemies), and it was sweet to be with him so. He seemed so very like himself that it was hard to think him in danger, but he reminded us who were there that he was seventy-nine years old, and when we spoke about his getting well and soon being out again he smiled in the wisdom which the dying have from the world they are so near, and, tenderly patient of us, expressed his doubt. In a few days, before I could go again, I heard that he was dead.

  XI

  But in that winter of 1859-60, after Lincoln had been elected, Ward was still hopeful of an order from the state for his “Simon Kenton,” and I was hopeful of the poetic pre-eminence which I am still foregoing. I used such scraps of time as I could filch from the busy days and nights and gave them to the verse which now seemed to come back from editors oftener than it once did. This hurt, but it did not kill, and I kept on at verse for years in the delusion that it was my calling and that I could make it my living. It was not until four or five years later that a more practical muse persuaded me my work belonged to her, and in the measureless leisure of my Venetian consulate I began to do the various things in prose which I have mostly been doing ever since, for fifty years past. Till then I had no real leisure, but was yet far from the days when anything less than a day seems too small a space to attempt anything in. That is the mood of age and of middle age, but youth seizes any handful of minutes and devotes them to some beginning or ending. It had been my habit ever since I took up journalism to use part of the hour I had for midday dinner in writing literature, and such hours of the night as were left me after my many calls or parties; and now I did not change, even under the stress of the tragical events crowding upon us all.

  I phrase it so, but really I felt no stress, and I do not believe others felt it so much as the reader might think. As I look back upon it the whole state of affairs seems incredible, and to a generation remote from it must seem impossible. We had an entire section of the Republic openly seeking its dismemberment, and a government which permitted and even abetted the seizure of national property by its enemies and the devotion of its resources to its own destruction. With the worst coming, relentlessly, rapidly, audibly, visibly, no one apparently thought the worst would come; there had been so many threats of disunion before, and the measures now taken to effect it seemed only a more dramatic sort of threats. People’s minds were confused by the facts which they could not accept as portents, and the North remained practically passive, while the South was passionately active; and yet not the whole South, for as yet Secession was not a condition, but merely a principle. There was a doubt with some in the North itself whether the right of disunion was not implied in the very act of union; there had long been a devoted minority who felt that disunion without slavery was better than union with slavery; and on both sides there arose sentimental cries, entreaties from the South that the North would yield its points of right and conscience, appeals from the North that the South would not secede until the nation had time to decide what it would do. The North would not allow itself to consider seriously of coercing the seceding states; and there was a party willing to bid them, with unavailing tears, “Erring sisters, go in peace,” as if the seceding states, being thus delicately entreated, could not have the heart to go, even in peace. There were hysterical conferences of statesmen in and out of office to arrange for mutual concessions which were to be all on the part of the Union, or if not that then to order its decent obsequies.

  I cannot make out that our chief had any settled policy for the conduct of our paper; nobody had a settled policy concerning public affairs. If his subordinates had any settled policy, it was to get what fun they could out of the sentimentalists, and if they had any fixed belief it was that if we had a war peace must be made on the basis of disunion when the war was over. In our wisdom we doubted if the sections could ever live together in a union which they had fought for and against. But we did not say this in print, though as matters grew more hopeless Price one day seized the occasion of declaring that the Constitution was a rope of sand. I do not remember what occasion he had for saying this, but it brought our chief actively back to the censorship; Price’s position was somehow explained away, and we went on as much as before, much as everybody else went on. I will not, in the confession of our youthful rashness, pretend that there were any journalists who seemed then or seem wiser now or acted with greater forecast; and I am sure that we always spoke from our consciences, with a settled conviction that the South was wrong. We must have given rather an ironical welcome to a sufficiently muddled overture of the Tennessee legislature which during the winter sent a deputation of its members to visit our own Houses and confer with them as to what might be done. The incident now has it pathos, there was so much that was well meant in the attempt to mend our bad business with kind words and warm feelings, though then I was sensible only of its absurdity. I did not hear any of the speeches, but I remember seeing the Tennessee statesmen about the Capitol for the different conferences held there and noting that some of them spoke with a negroid intonation and not with that Ohio accent which I believed the best in the English-speaking world. No doubt they parted with our own legislators affectionately, and returned home supported by the hope that they had really done something in a case where there was nothing to be done.

  Their endeavor was respectable, but there was no change in the civic conditions except from bad to worse. In the social conditions, or the society conditions, everything was for the better, if indeed these could be bettered in Columbus. Of all the winters this was the gayest; society was kind again, after I had paid the penalty it exacted for my neglect, and I began to forget my purpose of living in air more absolutely literary. Again I began going the rounds of the friendly houses, but now, as if to win my fancy more utterly, there began to be a series of dances in a place and on conditions the most alluring. For a while after the functions of the medical school were suspended in the College where I had lodged, the large ward where the lectures were once given was turned into a gymnasium and fitted up with the usual gymnastic apparatus. I do not recall whether this was taken away or not, or was merely looped up and put aside for our dances, and I do not know how we came into possession of the place; in the retrospect, such things happen in youth much as things happen in childhood, without apparent human agency; but at any rate we had this noble circus for our dances. There must have been some means of joining them, but it is now gone from me, and I know only that they were given under the fully sufficing chaperonage of a sole matron. There were two negro fiddlers, and the place was lighted by candles fixed along the wall; but memory does not serve me as to any sort of supper; probably there was none, except such as the young men, after they had seen the young ladies to their homes, went up-town to make on the oysters of Ambos.

  It is strange that within the time so dense with incident for us there should have been so few incidents now separately tangible, but there is one that vividly distinguishes itself from the others. In that past I counted any experience precious that seemed to parallel the things of fact with the things of fiction. Afterward, but long afterward, I learned to praise, perhaps too arrogantly praise, the things of fiction as they paralleled the things of fact, but as yet it was not so. I suppose
the young are always like us as we of the College dances were then, but romance can rarely offer itself to youth of any time in the sort of reality which one night enriched us amid our mirth with a wild thrill of dismay at the shriek in a girl’s voice of “Dead?” There was an instant halt in the music, and then a rush to the place where the cry had risen. Somebody had fainted, and when the fact could be verified, it was found that one of the blithest of our company had been struck down with word from home that her sister had fallen dead of heart failure. Then when we began to falter away from the poor child’s withdrawal, suddenly another tumult stayed us; a young father, who had left his first-born with its mother in their rooms above while he came down for some turns in the waltz, could not believe that it was not his child that was dead, and he had to be pulled and pushed up-stairs into sight and sound of the little one roused from its sleep to convince him, before he could trust the truth.

  Here was mingling of the tragic and the comic to the full admired effect of Shakespearian drama, but the mere circumstance of these esthetic satisfactions would have been emotional wealth enough; and when I got home on such a night to my slumbering room-mate Price I could give myself in glad abandon to the control of the poet whose psychic I then oftenest was, with some such result as I found in a tattered manuscript the other day. I think the poet could hardly have resented my masking in his wonted self-mocking, though I am afraid that he would have shrunk from the antic German which I put on to the beat of his music.