Years of My Youth

by William Dean Howells

XI

Somewhere about this time I gave a month to the study of law in the office of the United States Senator dwelling among us. I have never regretted reading a first volume of Blackstone through, or not going on to the second; his frank declaration that the law was a jealous mistress and would brook no divided love, was upon reflection quite enough for one whose heart was given to a different muse. I was usually examined in this author by the Senator’s nephew, my fellow-student, whom I examined in turn; but once, at least, the Senator himself catechized me, though he presently began to talk about the four great English quarterly reviews which I was known in the village for reading, and which it seemed he read too. No doubt he found me more perfect in them than in Blackstone; at least I felt that I did myself more credit in them. I have elsewhere spoken more fully already of this episode of my life; but I speak of it again because I think that the commonly accepted Wade legend scarcely does justice to a man not only of great native power, but of wider cultivation than it recognizes, and I would like to do what I can to repair the injustice. He was famed in contemporary politics as Old Ben Wade before he had passed middle life, and he was supposed to stand up against the fierce pro-slavery leaders in Congress with an intrepidity even with their own. He had a strong, dark face, and a deep, raucous voice, with a defiant laugh, and these lent their support to the popular notion of him as a rude natural force unhelped by teaching, though he had taught himself in the days of his early struggle, as Lincoln and most public men of his time had done, and later had taught others as country schoolmaster. Farm-boy and cattle-drover and canal-digger, more had remained to him from schoolmaster and medical student, than from either of his other callings, and though he became part of our history without the help of great intellectual refinement, he was by no means without intellectual refinement, or without the ability to estimate the value of it in others. Naturally he might also underestimate it, and perhaps it was from an underestimate that he judged the oratory of such a man as Charles Sumner, to whom he told me he had said of a speech of his, “It’s all very well, Sumner, but it has no bones in it.”

Wade was supposed by his more ill-advised admirers to lend especial effect to his righteous convictions by a free flow of profanity, but I have to bear witness that I never heard any profanity from him, though profanity must have been the common parlance of the new country and the rude conditions he grew up in. He was personally a man of silent dignity, as we saw him in the village, going and coming at the post-office, for he seldom seemed to pass the gate of his house yard on any other errand, in the long summer vacations between the sessions of the many Congresses when he sojourned among us. I have the sense of him in a back room of the office which stood apart from his house, after the old-fashioned use of country lawyers’ and doctors’ offices; and I can be sure of his visiting the students in the front room only that once when he catechized me in Blackstone, but I cannot say whether I stood in awe of him as a great lawyer, or quite realized his importance as United States Senator from the State of Ohio for eighteen years. Historically it has been thought his misfortune to outlive the period when the political struggle with slavery passed into the Civil War, and to carry into that the spirit of the earlier time, with his fierce alienation from the patient policy of Lincoln, and his espousal of the exaggerations of the Reconstruction. But it would be easy to do injustice to this part of his valiant career, and not easy to do justice to that part of it where he stood with the very few in his defiance of the pro-slavery aggression.

Probably he would not have understood my forsaking the law, and I evaded the explanation he once sought of me when we met in the street, dreading the contempt which I might well have fancied in him. I wish now that, knowing him a little on his æsthetic side, I might have had the courage to tell him why I could not give my heart to that jealous mistress, being vowed almost from my first days to that other love which will have my fealty to the last. But in the helplessness of youth I could not even imagine doing this, and I had to remain in my dread of his contempt. Yet he may not have despised me, after all. It was known with what single-handed courage I was carrying on my struggle with the alien languages, and their number was naturally over-stated. The general interest in my struggle was reflected in the offer of a farmer from another part of the county to be one of three or four who would see me through Harvard. It was good-will which, if it had ever materialized, my pride would have been fierce to refuse; but now I think of it without shame, and across the gulf which I would fain believe has some thither shore I should like to send that kind man the thanks which I fancy were never adequately expressed to him while he lived. It remains vaguely, from vague personal knowledge, that he was of Scotch birth and breeding; he had a good old Scotch name, and he lived on his prosperous farm in much more than the usual American state, with many books about him.

I went back not without shame, but also not without joy from the Senator’s law-office to my father’s printing-office, and I did not go to Harvard, or to any college or school thereafter. I still think that a pity, for I have never agreed with Lowell, who, when I deplored my want of schooling, generously instanced his own over-weight of learning as an evil I had escaped. It still seems to me lamentable that I should have had to grope my way and so imperfectly find it where a little light from another’s lamp would have instantly shown it. I still remain in depths of incredible ignorance as to some very common things; for at school I never got beyond long division in arithmetic, and after my self-discovery of grammar I should be unable to say, in due piedi, just what a preposition was, though I am aware of frequently using that part of speech, and, I hope, not incorrectly.

I did what I could to repair the defect of instruction, or rather I tried to make myself do it, for I had the nature of a boy to contend with, and did not love my work so much as I loved the effect of it. While I live I must regret that want of instruction, and the discipline which would have come with it, though Fortune, as if she would have flattered my vanity when she could bring her wheel round to it, bore me the offer of professorships in three of our greatest universities. In fact, when I thought of coming home from my consulship in Venice, ten years after my failure to achieve any sort of schooling, it had been my hope that I might get some sort of tutorship in a very modest college, and I wrote to Lowell about it, but he did not encourage me. Yet I was hardly fixed in the place which much better suited me as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, when one of the faculty came to me from Schenectady to offer me the sub-professorship of English in Union College, and no long time after I was sounded by the first educational authority in the country as to whether I would accept a like place in Washington University at St. Louis. It was twice as long after this that those three supreme invitations which I have boasted came to me. But I knew better than any one, unless it was Fortune herself, the ignorance I had hidden so long, and I forbore to risk a middling novelist on the chance of his turning out a poor professor, or none. In every case the offer was such as might well have allured me, but when, after a sleepless night of longing and fearing over that of Harvard which Lowell conveyed me with the promise, “You shall wear the gown that Ticknor wore, and Longfellow wore, and I wore,” I had the strength to refuse it, he wrote me his approval of my decision. It was a decision that I have rejoiced in ever since, with the breathless gratitude, when I think of it, of one who has withheld himself from a step over the brink of a precipice.

The other allurements to a like doom were hardly less gratifying. What indeed could have been more gratifying, except the Harvard offer of the professorship of the languages of the south of Europe (with the privilege of two years’ preparation in the Latin countries, whose tongues I had tampered with), than the offer of the English professorship in Yale? It was Lounsbury, now lately lost forever to these skies, Lounsbury the fine scholar, the charming writer, the delightful wit, the critic unsurpassed in his kind, who came smiling with the kind eyes, dimmed almost to blindness on the field of Gettysburg in the forgotten soldiership of his youth, to do me this incredible honor. Later came the offer of the same chair in Johns Hopkins, twice repeated by the president of that university. When in my longing and my despair I asked, What was the nature of such a professorship, he answered, Whatever I chose to make it; and this still seems to me, however mistaken in my instance, the very measure of the wisest executive large-mindedness. President Gilman had written to me from New York, and had come to see me in London, and again written to me in Boston, and I could not do less than go down to Baltimore and look at the living body of the university and see what part in it I might become. A day sufficed; where so many men were busy with the work which they were so singularly qualified to do, I could not think of bringing my half-heartedness to an attempt for which all the common sense I had protested my unfitness, my entire unlikeness to the kind of man he had so magnanimously misimagined me. I turned from that shining opportunity of failure as I turned from the others, and if the reader thinks I have dwelt too vaingloriously upon them he shall have his revenge in the spectacle of my further endeavors not to be the stuff which professors are made of.

XII

I could have been spared from the printing-office for the study of the law, when I could not be spared from it otherwise, because I might soon begin to make my living by practising before justices of the peace in the pettifogging which was then part of the study in the country offices. My labor, which was worth as much as a journeyman compositor’s, could not have been otherwise spared; much less could my father have afforded the expense of my schooling; and I cannot recall that I thought it an unjust hardship when it was decided after due family counsel, that I could not be sent to an academy in a neighboring village. I had not the means of estimating my loss; but the event seemed to have remained a poignant regret with my brother, and in after years he lamented what he felt to have been an irreparable wrong done me: now he is dead, and it touches me to think he should have felt that, for I never blamed him, and I am glad he gave me the chance to tell him so. I may have shed some tears when first denied; I did shed a few very bitter ones when I once confessed the hope I had that the editor of the Ohio Farmer might give me some sort of literary employment at a sum I named, and he said, “He would never pay you three dollars a week in the world for that,” and I had to own in anguish of soul that he was doubtless right. He worked every day of the week and far into every night to help my father earn the property we were all trying to pay for, and he rightfully came into the eventual ownership of the newspaper. By an irony of fate not wholly unkind he continued for half a century in the printing-business, once so utterly renounced. Then, after a few years of escape to a consular post in the tropics which he used to say was the one post which, if it had been whittled out of the whole universe, would have suited him best, he died, and lies buried in the village, the best-beloved man who ever lived there.

It was the day with us of self-denials which I cannot trust myself to tell in detail lest I should overtell them. I was willing to make a greater figure in dress than nature has ever abetted me in, but I still do not think it was from an excess of vanity that I once showed my father the condition of my hat, and left him to the logic of the fact. He whimsically verified it, and said, “Oh, get it half-soled,” as if it had been a shoe; and we had our laugh together, but I got the new hat, which, after all, did not make me the dashing presence I might have hoped, though the vision of it on the storekeeper’s counter always remained so distinct with me that in Seville, a few years ago, it seemed as if its ghost were haunting me in the Cordovese hats on all the heads I met. Like them it had a wide flat brim, and it narrowed slightly upward to the low flat crown of those hats which I now knew better than to buy.