Years of My Youth

by William Dean Howells

I dare say they were not so fashionable as H. G. imagined them, or I, with a heart too weak and feet too untutored ever to join in them, but the world was present in other sophistications in our pleasant hotel which I could not so easily shun. Chief of these was the tipping, which there first insisted on my acquaintance by many polite insinuations, and when I would have withdrawn became explicit. The kind colored waiter who used to cumber me with service at table as his anxieties mounted once took courage to whisper in my ear that he thought he would like to go to the theater that evening, and it grieves me yet to think that I resented this freedom, and denied him the quarter he suggested. Since then life has been full of the experiences of tipping, always so odious, though apparently more rapacious than it really is, but I have never again been able to deny a tip, or to give so little as I would often like to give. I know that some better citizens, or wiser, than myself, punish the neglect or ingratitude of service by diminishing or withholding the tip, but I have never been able to perform this public-spirited duty, perhaps because, though I loathe tipping, I do not believe any fellow-creature

“As meek and mere a serving-man,”

as may be, would take a tip if he were paid a just wage, or any wage, without it.

But all these incidents and interests were far in the future of that brave and happy time when I was intending and attempting the conquest of the whole field of polite learning from so many sides, in the studies which as at home now went on far into the night. These even included an Icelandic grammar, for the reason that, as I had read, the meter of Hiawatha was derived from that literature, but I do not know that I got so far as to identify it. My reading, now entirely from the State Library, included all the novels of Bulwer, which I was not ashamed to enjoy after my more distinguished pleasure in Thackeray; the critical authorities would not then have abashed me in it, as they would now. The other day I saw on my shelves the volume of Percy’s Reliques which my sister and I read together that winter; and I was so constantly and devotedly reading Tennyson and Shakespeare that I cannot understand how I had time for an equal constancy and devotion to Heine. I saw how much he had profited by the love of those English ballads which I was proud to share with him; and there were other German poets of his generation whose indebtedness to them I perceived and enjoyed. I was now, in fact, reading German to the entire neglect of Spanish; as for Latin and Greek, I had no more time or relish for them than those cultivated gentlemen who believe they read some Latin or Greek author every day before breakfast.

II

The life and the letters continued on terms which I should not have known how to wish different. I had a desk appointed me on the floor of the Senate as good as any Senator’s, for my convenience as a reporter; and my father gave me notes of the proceedings in the House, so that I could make a fair report of each day’s facts which we so early abandoned the pretense of his making. Every privilege and courtesy was shown the press, which sometimes I am afraid its correspondents accepted ungraciously. Either the first winter or the next one of them was expelled from the floor of the House for his over-bold criticisms of some member, and I espoused his cause with quite outrageous zeal. I had, indeed, such a swollen ideal of the rights and duties of the press that I spared no severity in my censure of Senators I found misguided. I was, perhaps, not wholly fitted by my nineteen years to judge them, though this possibility did not occur to me at the time with its present force; but if I was not impressed with the dignity of the Senate, the dignity of the Senate Chamber was a lasting effect with me, as, in fact, that of the whole Capitol was. I seemed to share personally in it as I mounted the stately marble stairway from the noble rotunda or passed through the ample corridors from the Senate to the House where it needed not even a nod to the sergeant-at-arms to gain me access to the floor; a nonchalant glance was enough. But the grandeur of the interior, which I enjoyed with the whole legislative body, was not more wonderful than its climate, which I found tempered against the winter to a summer warmth by the air rushing from the furnaces in the basement through gratings in the walls and floors. These were for me the earliest word of the comfort that now pervades our whole well-warmed American world, but I had scarcely imagined them even from my father’s report. How could I imagine them or fail to attribute to myself something like merit from them? I enjoyed, in fact, something like moral or civic ownership of the whole place, which I penetrated in every part on my journalistic business: the court-rooms, the agricultural department, the executive offices, and how do I know but the very room of the Governor himself? The library was of course my personal resort; as I have told, I was always getting books from it, and these books had a quality in coming from the State Library which intensified my sense of being of, as well as in, the capital of Ohio.

Whether the city itself shared my sense of its importance in the same measure I am not sure. There were reasons, however, why it might have done so. It was then what would be now a small city, say not above twenty thousand, and though it had already begun to busy itself with manufacturing and had two or three railroads centering in it, the industries and facilities which have now swollen its population to almost a quarter of a million were then in their beginning. Its political consciousness may have been the greater, therefore; it may indeed have been subjectively the sovereign city which I so objectively felt it. In that time, in fact, a state capital was both comparatively and positively of greater reality than it has been since. With the Civil War carried to its close in the reconstituted Union, the theory of State Rights forever vanished, and with this the dignity which once clothed the separate existence of the states. Their shadowy sovereignty had begun to wane in the anti-slavery North because it was the superstition of the pro-slavery South, yet I can remember a moment when there was much talk, though it never came to more than talk, of turning this superstition to a faith and applying it to the defeat of the Fugitive Slave Law. If it was once surmised that the decisions of the Ohio courts might nullify a law of the United States I do not believe that this surmise ever increased the political consciousness of our state capital. It remained a steadily prospering town like other towns, till now perhaps it may not feel itself a capital at all. Perhaps it could be restored to something like the quality I valued in it by becoming the residence of envoys from the other state capitals, and sending a minister to each of these. I have the conviction that public-spirited citizens could be found to take such offices at very moderate salaries, and that their wives would be willing to aid in restoring the shadow of state sovereignty by leaving cards upon one another.

III

The winter of 1856-57 passed without my knowing more of the capital than its official world. Even the next year, when I began to make some acquaintance with the social world, it was with an alien or adoptive phase of it, as I realize with tardy surprise. There were then so many Germans in Ohio that an edition of the laws had to be printed in their language, and there was a common feeling that we ought to know their language, if not their literature, which was really what I cared more to know. I carried my knowledge of it so far as to render a poem of my own into German verse which won the praise of my teacher; and I wish I could remember who he was, gentle, tobacco-smoked shade that he has long since become, or who the German editor of what republikanische Zeitung was that sometimes shared my instruction with him. There were also two blithe German youths who availed with me in the loan of Goethe’s Wahlverwandschaften, and gave me some fencing lessons in their noonings. I forget what employ they were of, but their uncle was a watchmaker and jeweler, and my father got him to gold-plate his silver watch, or dye it, as he preferred to say. When the Civil War came he went into it and was killed; and many years afterward, in my love and honor of him, I turned his ghost into a loved and honored character in A Hazard of New Fortunes. He was a political refugee, of those German revolutionists who came to us after the revolts of 1848, and he still dwells venerable in my memory, with his noble, patriarchally bearded head.

But it all appears very fantastic in the retrospect, that Teutonic period of my self-culture, and I am not sure that one fact of it is more fantastic than another. Such was my zeal for everything German that I once lunched at one of the German beer-saloons which rather abounded in Columbus, on Swiss cheese with French mustard spread over it and a tall glass of lager beer, then much valued as a possible transition from the use of the strong waters more habitual with Americans than now; but it made me very sick, and I was obliged to forego it as an expression of my love for German poetry. To a little earlier period must have belonged the incident of my going to see “Die Räuber” of Schiller, which I endured with iron resolution from the beginning to the end. It was given, I believe, by amateurs, and I tried my best to imagine that I understood it as it went on, but probably I did not, though I would have been loath to own the fact to any of the few German families who then formed my whole acquaintance with society. I never afterward met them at American houses; the cleavage between the two races in everything but politics was absolute; though the Germans were largely anti-slavery, and this formed common ground for them and natives of like thinking who did not know them socially.