Recollections of a Varied Life

by George Cary Eggleston

While I was in Boston Mr. Howells called on me, and in his gentle way suggested that I should write my reminiscences of Southern army life in a series of articles for the Atlantic Monthly, of which he was then the editor.

The suggestion, coming from such a source, almost made me dizzy. I had vaguely and timidly cherished a secret hope that some day—after years of preparatory practice in smaller ways—I might have the honor and the joy of seeing some article of mine in one or other of the great magazines. But that hope was by no means a confident one, and it looked to a more or less remote future for its fulfilment. Especially it had never been bold enough to include the Atlantic Monthly in the list of its possibilities. That was the magazine of Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton, and their kind—the mouthpiece of the supremely great in our literature. The thought of ever being numbered among the humblest contributors to that magazine lay far beyond the utmost daring of my dreams. And the supremacy of the Atlantic, in all that related to literary quality, was at that time very real, so that I am in nowise astonished even now that I was well-nigh stunned when Mr. Howells suggested that I should write seven papers for publication there, and afterward embody them in a book together with two others reserved from magazine publication for the sake of giving freshness to the volume.

I did not accept the suggestion at once. I was too greatly appalled by it. I had need to go home and cultivate my self-conceit before I could believe myself capable of writing anything on the high level suggested. In the end I did the thing with great misgiving, but with results that were more than satisfactory, both to Mr. Howells and to me.

"A Rebel's Recollections"

The passions aroused by the war of which I wrote had scarcely begun to cool at that time and there was a good deal of not very friendly surprise felt when the Atlantic's constituency learned that the great exponent of New England's best thought was to publish the war memories of a Confederate under the seemingly self-assertive title of "A Rebel's Recollections."

That feeling seems to have been alert in protest. Soon after the first paper was published Mr. Howells wrote me that it had "brought a hornets' nest about his ears," but that he was determined to go on with the series. After the second paper appeared he wrote me that the hornets had "begun to sing psalms in his ears" because of the spirit and temper in which the sensitive subject was handled. On the evening of the day on which the "Recollections" appeared in book form, there was a banquet at the Parker House in Boston, given in celebration of the Atlantic's fifteenth birthday. Without a moment's warning I was toasted as the author of the latest book from the Riverside Press, and things were said by the toast-master about the spirit in which the book was written—things that overwhelmed me with embarrassment, by reason of the fact that it was my first experience of the kind and I was wholly unused to the extravagantly complimentary eloquence of presiding officers at banquets.

I had never been made the subject of a toast before. I had never before attempted to make an after-dinner speech, and I was as self-conscious as a schoolboy on the occasion of his first declamation before an outside audience. But one always does stumble through such things. I have known even an Englishman to stammer out his appreciation and sit down without upsetting more than one or two of his wine glasses. In the same way I uttered some sort of response in spite of the embarrassing fact that George Parsons Lathrop, who had been designated as the "historian of the evening and chronicler of its events," sat immediately opposite me, manifestly studying me, I thought, as a bugologist might study a new species of beetle. I didn't know Lathrop then, as I afterward learned to know him, in all the friendly warmth and good-fellowship of his nature.

When the brief ordeal was over and I sat down in full conviction that I had forever put myself to shame by my oratorical failure, Mr. Howells left his seat and came to say something congratulatory—something that I attributed to his kindly disposition to help a man up when he is down—and when he turned away Mark Twain was there waiting to say something on his own account.

"When you were called on to speak," he said, "I braced myself up to come to your rescue and make your speech for you. I thought of half a dozen good things to say, and now they are all left on my hands, and I don't knew what on earth to do with them."

Then came Mr. Frank B. Sanborn to tell me of a plan he and some others had hurriedly formed to give me a little dinner at Swampscott, at which there should be nobody present but "original abolitionists" and my rebel self.