Years of My Youth

by William Dean Howells

II

Whether the currency of The Pilot’s Story and the Atlantic publication of my Heinesque poems added to my reputation in our city I could not say. It was the belief of my senior on the newspaper that our local recognition was enervating and that it had better go no farther, but naturally I could not agree with a man of his greater age and observation, and it is still a question with me whether recognition hurts when one has done one’s best. I cannot recall that I ever tried to invite it; I hope not; but certainly I worked for it and hoped for it, and I doubt if any like experiment was ever received with more generous favor than ours by a community which I had reasons for knowing was intelligent if not critical. Our paper, if I may say it, was always good society, but after a while and inevitably it became an old story, or at least an older story than at first, though it never quite ceased to be good society. There remained the literary interest, the æsthetic interest for me, after the journalistic interest had waned; there was always the occasion, or the occasion could always be made. Passages in those old letters home remind me that we talked long and late about The Marble Faun one night at a certain house; at another we talked about other books from nine o’clock on, I imagine till midnight. At another the young lady of the house “sang about a hundred songs.” At still another the girl hostess said, “You haven’t asked me to sing to-night, but I will sing,” and then sang divinely half the night away, for all I know. There was a young lady who liked German poetry, and could talk about Goethe’s lyrics; and apparently everywhere there were the talking and the laughing and the singing which fill the world with bliss for youth.

Perhaps I sacrifice myself in vain by my effort to impart the sense of that past which faded so long ago; perhaps some readers will hold me cheap for the fondness which recurs to it and lingers in it. But I believe that I prize its memories because they seem so full of honor and worship for the girlhood and womanhood which consecrate it in my remembrance. Within this gross world of ours as it now is, women are still so conditioned that they can lead the life of another and a better world, and if they shall ever come to take their rightful share of the government of the world as men have made it I believe they will bring that other and better world of theirs with them and indefinitely advance the millennium. I have the feeling of something like treason to the men I knew in that time, when I own that I preferred the society of women to theirs, but I console myself with the reflection that they would probably have said the same as to mine. Our companionship could hardly have chosen itself more to my liking. It was mainly of law students, but there was here and there one engaged in business, who was of a like joking and laughing with the rest. We lived together in a picturesque edifice, Gothic and Tudor, which had been meant for a medical college, and had begun so, and then from some financial infirmity lapsed to a boarding-house for such young men as I knew, though we were not without the presence of a young married pair, now and then, and even a young lady, a teacher or the like, who made us welcome when we ended a round of evening calls outside by calling on them from room to room. In my boyhood days at Columbus I was sometimes hustled off the sidewalk by the medical students coming from the College, then in its first prosperity, and taking up the whole pavement as they swept forward with interlinked arms. This was at noontime, when they were scarcely less formidable than the specters which after dark swarmed from the dissecting-room, and challenged the boy to a trial of speed in escaping them. Now the students had long been gone from the College and I dwelt in its precincts with such other favorites of fortune as could afford to pay three dollars and a half a week for their board. The table was even super-abundant, and the lodging was almost flatteringly comfortable after experience of other places. I can only conjecture that the rooms we inhabited had been meant for the students or professors when the College was still a medical college. They were large, and to my untutored eye, at least, were handsome, and romantically lighted by windows of that blend of Tudor and Gothic which I have mentioned, but their architecture showed more on the outside than on the inside, and of course the pinnacles and towers of the edifice were more accessible to the eye without. It was the distinction of people who wished to be known for a correct taste to laugh at the architecture of the College, and perhaps they do so still, but I was never of these. For me it had, and it has, a charm which I think must have come from something like genius, if not quite genius, in the architect, to whose daring I would like to offer this belated praise. At any rate it was the abode of entire satisfaction to me in those happy years between 1857 and 1860 when I could not have wished other companionship than I had there.

There could have been no gayer table than we kept, where we made the most of one another’s jokes, and were richly personal in them, as youth always is. The management was of the simplest, but not incompatible with dignity, for the landlord waited upon the table himself, and whoever the cook might be, the place was otherwise in the sole charge of an elderly maid, with a curious defect of speech, which kept her from answering, immediately or ultimately, any question or remark addressed to her. We valued her for this impediment because of the pathetic legend attaching to it, and we did not value her the less, but the more, because she was tall and lank and uncouth of face and figure, though of a beauty in her absolute faithfulness to her duties and the kindness beyond them which she always showed. The legend was that in her younger if not fairer time she had been married, and when one day her husband, suddenly killed in an accident, was brought home to her, she tried to speak, but could not speak, and then ever afterward could only speak after great stress, and must often fall dumb, and go away without speaking.

I do not know whether we really believed in this or not, but we behaved as if we did, and revered the silent heroine of the tragedy as if it were unquestionably true. What kept me from trying to make it into a poem I cannot say, but I would like to think it was that I felt it above rather than below the verse of even the poet I meant to be. How many rooms she had charge of I could as little say, but I am certain that there were two of us young men in each of them. My own room-mate was a poet, even more actual than myself, though not meaning so much as I to be always a poet; he was reading law, and he meant to practise it, but he had contributed two poems to the Atlantic Monthly before any of mine had been printed there. This might have been a cause of bitterness with me; his work was certainly good enough to be a cause of bitterness, and perhaps I was not jealous because I felt that it would be useless; I should like to believe I was not even jealous of him for being so largely in society before I was. Later, when we came in from our evening calls, we sometimes read to each other, out of what books I could not say now, but probably some poet’s; certainly not our own verse: he was too wise for that and I too shy.

He was then reading law, and sometime in my middle years at Columbus he left us to begin his law practice farther West. In noticing his departure as a friendly journalist should I obeyed his wish not to speak of him as a poet; that, he said, would injure him with his new public; but whether it would or not I am not sure; the Western community is sometimes curiously romantic, and does not undervalue a man for being out of the common in that way. What really happened with him was that, being of a missionary family and of a clerical tradition, he left the law in no great time and studied divinity. It was a whole generation afterward before I saw him again; and now his yellow hair and auburn beard of the early days were all one white, but his gentle eyes were of the old hazel, undimmed by the age that was creeping upon us both. He had followed me with generous remembrance and just criticism in my fiction; and again he made me a sort of professional reproach for dealing in my novels (notably in A Modern Instance) with ethical questions best left to the church, he thought. I thought he was wrong, but I am not sure that I so strenuously think so now; fiction has to tell a tale as well as evolve a moral, and either the character or the principle must suffer in that adjustment which life alone can effectively manage. I do not say ideally manage, for many of the adjustments of life seem to me cruel and mistaken. If it is in these cases that religion can best intervene, I suppose my old friend was right; at any rate, he knows now better than I, for he is where there is no manner of doubt, and I am still where there is every manner of doubt.

I believe, in the clerical foreshadowing of his future, perhaps, he was never of those wilder moments of our young companionship when we roamed the night under the summer moon, or when we forgathered around the table in a booth at the chief restaurant, and over a spirit-lamp stewed the oysters larger and more delicious than any to be found now in the sea; or when, in the quarter-hours of digestion which we allowed ourselves after our one-o’clock dinner we stretched ourselves on the grass, often sunburnt brown, before the College and laughed the time away at anything which pretended itself a joke.

We collegians were mostly Republicans as most of the people we knew were. A few young men in society were not, but they were not of our companionship, though we met them at the houses we frequented, and did not think the worse of them for being Democrats. In fact, there was no political rancor outside of the newspapers, and that was tempered with jocosity. Slavery had been since the beginning of the nation, the heritage of the states from the colonies, and it had been accepted as part of the order of things. We supposed that sometime, somehow, we should be rid of it, but we were not sanguine that it would be soon; and with so many things of pressing interest, the daily cares, the daily pleasures, the new books, the singing and laughing and talking in the pleasant houses, I could leave the question of slavery in abeyance, except as a matter of paragraphing. There had been as many warnings of calamity to come as ever a people had. There had been the breaking of solemn promises from the South to the North; there had been the bloody fights between the sections in Kansas and the treacheries of the national government; there had been the quarrels and insults and violences in Congress; there had been the arrests and rescues of fugitive slaves; there had been the growth of hostile opinion, on one side fierce and on the other hard, maturing on both sides in open hate. There had been all these portents, and yet when the bolt burst from the stormy sky and fell at Harper’s Ferry we were as utterly amazed as if it had fallen from a heaven all blue.