Years of My Youth

by William Dean Howells

VI

We aspired at least tacitly to a metropolitan character in our journalism; there were no topics of human interest which we counted alien to us anywhere in the range of politics, morals, literature, or religion; and I was suffered my say. The writer who was more habitually and profitably suffered his say was, I still think, a man of very uncommon qualities and abilities. He was a journalist who could rightly be called a publicist, earnest if things came to that, of a faithful conscience and of a mocking skill in the chances pretty constantly furnished us by our contemporaries, especially some of our Southern contemporaries whom it was difficult to take as seriously as they took themselves. When they made some violent proclamation against the North, or wreaked themselves in some frenzy of pro-slavery ethics, we took our pleasure in shredding the text into small passages and tagging each of these with a note of open derision or ironical deprecation. We called it “firing the Southern heart,” in a phrase much used at the time. It was not wise, it was not well, but it was undeniably amusing, and we carried it to any lengths that the very intermittent supervision of our nominal chief would allow. We may have supposed that it would help laugh away the madness of the South which few in the North believed more than a temporary insanity, but the uneasy honesty which always lurks somewhere in my heart to make me own my errors must acquit my fellow-editor of the worst excesses in this sort, so mainly literary with me. He was not only a man of high journalistic quality, of clear insight, shrewd judgment, and sincere convictions, but I do not believe that in the American press of the time he was surpassed as a clear thinker and brilliant writer. All the days of journalism are yesterdays; and the name of Samuel R. Reed will mean nothing to these oblivious morrows, even in Ohio, but all the more I wish to do his memory such honor as I may. We were of course daily together in our work, and often in our walks on the Sundays which were as other days to his steadfast agnosticism. The word was not yet, but the thing has always been, and especially it always was in the older West, where bold surmise of the whence and whither of life often defied the authority of Faith, then much more imperative than now. Reed’s favorite author, whom he read as critically as if he were not his favorite, was Shakespeare; but his far more constant reading was the Bible, especially the Old Testament. I could not say why he read it so much, but he may have felt in it the mystical power which commands the imagination of men and holds them in respectful contemplation of a self-sufficing theory of the universe such as nothing in science or philosophy affords. He quoted it for a peculiar joy in the fitness of its application to every circumstance; he quoted Dickens, as everybody did then; he quoted Shakespeare a great deal more both in his talking and in his writing; and later in his life, long after mine had parted from it, he amused the spare moments of his journalistic leisure by a study of Shakespeare’s women whom he did not take at the generally accepted critical appraisement.

I am tempted out of the order of these confessions to follow him to the end which death put to the long kindness between us, and I recall with tenderness our last meeting near New York where he was hesitating whether to continue on his way to Europe. He had at last given up his work in Cincinnati where he had spent the many years after the few years we spent together in Columbus. He owned that he had worn himself out in that work, toiling incessantly through many homicidal Cincinnati summers, and he blamed himself for the sacrifice. He felt that he had turned from it too late; and in fact he died at sea soon after. He accepted his impending doom with the stoical calm which he always kept, and which I had once seen him keep so wonderfully after the war began, when a Southern Unionist, the formerly famous, now forgotten Parson Brownlow of Tennessee, came to reproach him for the part which he held that such writing as Reed’s had borne in bringing on the strife. Reed suffered the good man’s passion almost with compassion, and when Brownlow was gone he would not let me blame him, but said that he had played a noble part in the struggle to hold his region in the Union. He always kept a countenance of bland calm, lit by pale-blue eyes which gave no hint of the feeling within, and if I had not loved him so much and known him so well I might have thought the habitual smile of his clean-shaven lip sometimes a little cruel. He let his full soft beard grow inordinately long, and he had a way of stroking it as he slightly smiled and crisply spoke; it was the only touch of quaintness in him at a time when beards were self-indulgently worn in many fantastic ways. He was the best-dressed man I knew, in fashions as little aged as possible in their transition from the East to the West, and he was of a carefulness in such minor morals as gloves and boots very uncommon in our somewhat slovenly ways.

After his liking for Shakespeare and Dickens he liked the Ingoldsby Legends, but he did not care for the poetry which I was constantly reading and trying to write. The effect of my endeavor as it appeared in the passionate or pessimistic verse which I contributed to Eastern periodicals must have amused him; but perhaps he tolerated me because, along with this poetical effusiveness in which I was grievously sensitive to any breath of sarcasm, I had a tooth as sharp as his own in our journalism. He was intelligently and I suppose scientifically fond of music, since he failed of no chance to hear the best, a chance rare in our city; and he held that the composition of grand opera was the highest feat of the human intellect, which was to me a stumbling-block and foolishness, though I liked dramatic singing, and indeed singing of all kinds. We came together in our fondness for the theater, and after our evening’s work was done he sometimes turned with me into the barnlike structure on State Street which served the pathetic need of the drama in Columbus at that day. The place was heated in the winter for its twenty or thirty frequenters by two huge cast-iron stoves, one on either side of the orchestra: stoves such as I have since seen in English cathedrals; but when the curtain rose the blast of freezing air that swept out upon us made us shiver for the players in their bare arms and necks and their thin hosiery and drapery. They were often such bad players that they merited their sufferings; the prompter audibly bore a very leading part in the performance as he still does in the Italian theater; yet for all his efforts we one night saw Hamlet in two acts; it was, to be sure, a very cold night, of an air eagerer and nippinger than even that the ghost walked in at Elsinore, and we would not have had the play longer. Yet we often saw very well given some of the old English comedies which are now no longer well or ill given; and between the acts, somewhere, a plain young girl, in a modest modicum of stocking, represented the ballet by dancing the Highland Fling, always the Highland Fling. Such plays as “The Lady of Lyons” happened now and then, and “The Daughter of the Regiment” must have been, at least partly, sung. We did not lack the more darkling melodrama, and there were heroic pieces which gave the leading actor opportunities not lost upon him, however they failed of effect with the rest of the cast. I remember how one night a robustuous periwig-pated fellow ramped and roared up and down the stage, but left quite cold a large group of the dramatis personæ which his magniloquence was intended to convulse with either sympathy or antipathy; and how Reed noted with mock-thoughtful recognition of the situation, “Can’t excite those fellows off to the left, any.” I should not be able to say how killingly droll I found this.

VII

I suppose that every young man presently attempting journalism feels something of the pride and joy I felt when I began it; though pride and joy are weak words for the passion I had for the work. If my soul was more in my verse, I did not know it, and I am sure my heart was as much in my more constant labors. I could find time for poetry only in my brief noonings, and at night after the last proofs had gone to the composing-room, or I had come home from the theater or from an evening party, but the long day was a long delight to me over my desk in the room next my senior. To come upon some inviting fact, or some flattering chance for mischief in an exchange, above all a Northern contemporary with Southern principles, and to take this to him and talk it or laugh it over and leave it with him, or bring it back and exploit it myself, was something that made every day a heyday. We shunned personalities, then the stock in trade of most newspaper wits; we meant to deal only with the public character of men and things. It seems to have been all pleasure as I tell it, but there was a great deal of duty in it, too; though if burlesquing the opposite opinions of our contemporaries happened to be a duty, so much the better. If it were to do again, I should not do it, or not so much; but at the time I cannot deny that I liked doing it. So, too, I liked to write cutting criticisms of the books which it was part of my work to review; and I still hope to be forgiven by the kindness which I sinned against without winning the authority as reviewer which I aimed at.

I had much better been at the theater than writing some of the things I then wrote. But it may as well be owned here as anywhere that whatever might have been its value to me as a school of morals the theater was not good society in Columbus then; and I was now in a way of being good society, and had been so for some time. The rehabilitation of our newspaper was coincident with the rise of the Republican party to the power which it held almost unbroken for fifty years. It had of course lost the Presidential election in 1856, but its defeat left it in better case than an untimely victory might have done. Ohio had, at any rate, a Republican Governor in a man afterward of a prime national importance, and already known as a statesman-like politician well fitted by capacity and experience for that highest office which never ceased to be his aim while he lived. Salmon P. Chase had been a lawyer of the first standing in Cincinnati, where, although a Democrat, he had early distinguished himself by his services in behalf of friendless negroes. The revolt of the whole self-respecting North against the repeal of the Missouri Compromise swept him finally out of the Democracy into that provisional organization which loosely knew itself as the Anti-Nebraska party; but before he was chosen Governor by it he had already served a term in the United States Senate, where with one other Freesoiler he held the balance of power in an otherwise evenly divided body. He was a large, handsome man, of a very senatorial presence, and now in the full possession of his uncommon powers; a man of wealth and breeding, educated perhaps beyond any of the other Presidential aspirants except Seward, versed in the world, and accustomed to ease and state; and he gave more dignity to his office, privately and publicly, than it had yet known among us. He lived in a pretty house of the Gothic make then much affected by our too eclectic architecture, with his brilliant young daughter at the head of it; for the Governor was a widower.

He was naturally much interested in the new control of the Republican organ, and it would not be strange if he had taken some active part in its rehabilitation, but I do not know that he had. At any rate, he promptly made the editorial force welcome to his house, where Reed and I were asked to Thanksgiving dinner; Mr. Cooke had not yet brought his family to Columbus. Thanksgiving was not then observed on the present national terms; it was still the peculiar festival of New England, and in our capital its recognition was confined to families of New England origin; our Kentuckians and Virginians and Marylanders kept Christmas, though the custom of New-Year’s calls was domesticated among us with people of all derivations, and in due time suffered the lapse which it fell into in its native New York. Our Governor was born in New Hampshire, where his family name was already distinguished in public life; and he kept the Thanksgiving which he had probably not officially invited his fellow-citizens to commemorate. I suppose we had turkey for our dinner, but I am surer of the manner than the make of the feast, for it was served with a formality new to my unworldly experience. The turkey was set before the governor who carved it, and then it was brought to the guests by a shining black butler, instead of being passed from hand to hand among them, as I had always seen it done. That was, in fact, my first dinner in society.

The young editors were the only guests; and after dinner the family did not forbid itself the gaieties befitting its young people’s years. We had charades, then much affected in society, and I believe the Governor alone was not pressed into helping dramatize the riddle to be finally guessed as Canterbury Bell. I do not remember how the secret was kept to the end, or guessed from the successive parts. My fear and pride were put to a crucial test in the first dissyllable, which the girlish hostess assigned me, and nothing but the raillery glancing through the deep lashes of her brown eyes which were very beautiful, could have brought me to the self-sacrifice involved. I lived through the delight and anguish of that supreme evening, and found myself, as it were, almost immediately afterward in society. It could not have been quite immediately, for when I called at the Governor’s soon after New-Year’s and he asked me if I had made many New-Year’s calls I answered that I had not made any because I knew no one. Then he said I might have called at his house; and I did not fail, on this kind reproach, to go to Miss Chase’s next reception, where again she laughed at my supposed dignity in refusing to dance; she would not suppose my inability.

But before entering that field so flowery fair which society now seemed to open before me perhaps I had better continue my recollections of a man whose public career has its peculiar pathos. It was his constant, his intense, his very just desire to be President; no man of his long time was fitter to be President, unless his ambition was a foible that unfitted him. He accepted not the first place, but the second place, in the administration of the man whose place as President he had so ardently longed to fill, and after he had resigned his governorship of Ohio and gone to Washington as Secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln I saw him there when I went to look after the facts of the consulship which had been offered me. His fellow Ohioans must have swarmed upon him in the eagerness for public service afterward much noted in them, and I do not blame him for imagining that I had called upon him in the hope that he would urge my case upon the President. He said, rather eagerly, that he had no influence with the administration (it likewise became Lincoln’s own humorous complaint) quite before I had asked it, and was sorry that he could not help me; and when I thanked him and remarked that I believed the President’s private secretaries, Hay and Nicolay, were interested in my affair, he said, with visible relief, Oh well, then, I was in the best possible hands; as indeed it turned out. I had heard before that he had spoken to the President in my behalf, and he may very well have felt that he had done his best.