Years of My Youth

by William Dean Howells

“ ‘Sa! Sa!’—the dance of the Phantoms!
The dim corpse-candles flare;
On the whirl of the flying spectres
The shuddering windows stare.

“ ‘Oh, play us the silent Ghost-Waltz,
Thou fiddling blackamoor!’
He hears the ghostly summons,
He sees the ghosts on the floor.

“He plays the silent Ghost-Waltz
And through the death-mute hall
The voiceless echoes answer,
In time the ghost-feet fall.

“Und immer und immer schneller,
Und wild wie der Winterwind
Die beide College Gespenster
Sie walzen sinnengeschwind.

“They waltz to the open doorway,
They waltz up the winding stair:
‘Oh, gentle ghosts we are sneezing,
We are taking cold in the air.’ ”

XII

Very likely those dances lasted through the winter, but I cannot be sure; I can only be sure that they summed up the raptures of the time, which was the most memorable of my whole life; for now I met her who was to be my wife. We were married the next year, and she became with her unerring artistic taste and conscience my constant impulse toward reality and sincerity in my work. She was the first to blame and the first to praise, as she was the first to read what I wrote. Forty-seven years we were together here, and then she died. But in that gayest time when we met it did not seem as if there could ever be an end of time for us, or any time less radiant. Though the country was drawing nearer and nearer the abyss where it plunged so soon, few thought it would make the plunge; many believed that when it would it could draw back from it, but doubtless that was never possible; there is a doom for nations as there is for men, and looking back upon our history I cannot see how we could have escaped. The slaveholders in the old Union were a few hundred thousand against many millions, but a force in them beyond their own control incessantly sought to control the non-slaveholding majority. They did not brook question of their will from others; they brooked no self-question of it; however little they seemed at moments to demand, they never demanded less than that conscience itself should come to their help in making their evil our good. Having said that black was white, that wrong was right, they were vitally bound to compel the practical consent of humanity. It was what it had been aforetime and must be to aftertime; Lincoln did not deny them in terms different from Franklin’s, but the case had gone farther. The hour had come when they would not be denied at all; slavery could never keep its promises; it could hardly stay even to threaten. Long before there had been dreams of ending it by buying the slaves, but the owners would not have sold their slaves, and now, though the war against slavery tried to believe itself a war for the Union, when it came to full consciousness it knew itself a war for freedom; such freedom, lame and halt, as we have been able to keep for the negroes; a war for democracy, such democracy as we shall not have for ourselves until we have an economic democracy.

The prevision of the young writers on the State Journal was of no such reach as this retrospect. The best that could be said of them was that so far as they knew the right, they served it, and it is no bad thing to say of them that they met insolence with ridicule and hypocrisy with contempt. Still, as always before in those columns, they got their fun out of the opportunities which the situation offered, and they did not believe the worst was coming; that would excuse their levity, and it availed as much as gravity. I do not remember that we took counsel with any one as to what we said or that we consulted much with each other. We did not think that the Union would be dissolved, but if it should be we did not think that its dissolution was the worst thing that could happen; and this was the mind of vastly more at that day than most at this day will believe; some of those who were of that mind then may not like to own it now. People have the habit of saying that only those who have lived through a certain period can realize it, but I doubt if even they can realize it. A civic agitation is like a battle; it covers a surface so large that only a part of it can be seen by any one spectator at any one moment. The fact seems to be that the most of human motives and actions must always remain obscure; history may do its best to record and reveal them, but it will strive in vain to give us a living sense of them, because no one ever had a living sense of them in their entirety.

At the period which I am trying to tell of the hours passed and the days and weeks and months, bringing us forever nearer the catastrophe; but I could not truthfully say that their passing changed the general mood. The College group which I used to consort with had changed, and it was no longer so much to my liking; it had dwindled, and for me it chiefly remained in the companionship of one friend, whom I walked and talked with when I was not walking and talking with Price. This was that protested and rejected Clive Newcome, of ours, who in real life was James M. Comly, law student then, and then soldier, and then journalist. Of all the friends in whose contrast I have been trying to find myself, he was temperamentally the most unlike me, but a common literary bent inclined us to each other. In his room there was not only euchre for those who could not bear to waste in idleness the half-hours before dinner or supper, but there were the latest fashions in such periodicals as the Cornhill Magazine, then so brand new, and the Saturday Review, equally new, with the great Thackeray stooping from his Jovian height in the monthly to blunt against the weekly, with its social and critical offensives, such bolts as calling it the Superfine Review. Comly was of much the same taste as myself in authors, but not so impassioned; he was not so multifarious a reader and not so inclusive of the poets, and in obedience to his legalist instincts he was of more conservative feeling in politics. We had never a moment of misgiving for each other, yet I had one bad moment over an Atlantic poem of mine fabling the author as a bird singing in a tree, and flatteringly but unintelligently listened to by the cattle beneath which the title of the piece typified as “The Poet’s Friends.” The conceit had overtempted me, but when I had realized it in print, with no sense meantime of its possible relevance, I felt the need of bringing myself to book with the friend I valued most, and urging how innocently literary, how most merely and entirely dramatic the situation was. I think my anxiety amused him, as it very well might, but I still draw a long breath of relief when I remember how perfectly he understood.

Our association was mostly in the walks we took in the winter twilights and the summer moonlights, walks long enough in the far-stretching Columbus streets to have encompassed the globe; but our talks were not nearly so long as the walks, walks in which there were reaches of reticence, when apparently it was enough for us to be walking together. Yet we must often have talked about the books we were reading, that is to say the novels, though seldom about public events, which is the stranger, or the less strange, because as a student of law he was of course a potential politician, and I was writing politics every day.