XI
But in that winter of 1859-60, after Lincoln had been elected, Ward was still hopeful of an order from the state for his “Simon Kenton,” and I was hopeful of the poetic pre-eminence which I am still foregoing. I used such scraps of time as I could filch from the busy days and nights and gave them to the verse which now seemed to come back from editors oftener than it once did. This hurt, but it did not kill, and I kept on at verse for years in the delusion that it was my calling and that I could make it my living. It was not until four or five years later that a more practical muse persuaded me my work belonged to her, and in the measureless leisure of my Venetian consulate I began to do the various things in prose which I have mostly been doing ever since, for fifty years past. Till then I had no real leisure, but was yet far from the days when anything less than a day seems too small a space to attempt anything in. That is the mood of age and of middle age, but youth seizes any handful of minutes and devotes them to some beginning or ending. It had been my habit ever since I took up journalism to use part of the hour I had for midday dinner in writing literature, and such hours of the night as were left me after my many calls or parties; and now I did not change, even under the stress of the tragical events crowding upon us all.
I phrase it so, but really I felt no stress, and I do not believe others felt it so much as the reader might think. As I look back upon it the whole state of affairs seems incredible, and to a generation remote from it must seem impossible. We had an entire section of the Republic openly seeking its dismemberment, and a government which permitted and even abetted the seizure of national property by its enemies and the devotion of its resources to its own destruction. With the worst coming, relentlessly, rapidly, audibly, visibly, no one apparently thought the worst would come; there had been so many threats of disunion before, and the measures now taken to effect it seemed only a more dramatic sort of threats. People’s minds were confused by the facts which they could not accept as portents, and the North remained practically passive, while the South was passionately active; and yet not the whole South, for as yet Secession was not a condition, but merely a principle. There was a doubt with some in the North itself whether the right of disunion was not implied in the very act of union; there had long been a devoted minority who felt that disunion without slavery was better than union with slavery; and on both sides there arose sentimental cries, entreaties from the South that the North would yield its points of right and conscience, appeals from the North that the South would not secede until the nation had time to decide what it would do. The North would not allow itself to consider seriously of coercing the seceding states; and there was a party willing to bid them, with unavailing tears, “Erring sisters, go in peace,” as if the seceding states, being thus delicately entreated, could not have the heart to go, even in peace. There were hysterical conferences of statesmen in and out of office to arrange for mutual concessions which were to be all on the part of the Union, or if not that then to order its decent obsequies.
I cannot make out that our chief had any settled policy for the conduct of our paper; nobody had a settled policy concerning public affairs. If his subordinates had any settled policy, it was to get what fun they could out of the sentimentalists, and if they had any fixed belief it was that if we had a war peace must be made on the basis of disunion when the war was over. In our wisdom we doubted if the sections could ever live together in a union which they had fought for and against. But we did not say this in print, though as matters grew more hopeless Price one day seized the occasion of declaring that the Constitution was a rope of sand. I do not remember what occasion he had for saying this, but it brought our chief actively back to the censorship; Price’s position was somehow explained away, and we went on as much as before, much as everybody else went on. I will not, in the confession of our youthful rashness, pretend that there were any journalists who seemed then or seem wiser now or acted with greater forecast; and I am sure that we always spoke from our consciences, with a settled conviction that the South was wrong. We must have given rather an ironical welcome to a sufficiently muddled overture of the Tennessee legislature which during the winter sent a deputation of its members to visit our own Houses and confer with them as to what might be done. The incident now has it pathos, there was so much that was well meant in the attempt to mend our bad business with kind words and warm feelings, though then I was sensible only of its absurdity. I did not hear any of the speeches, but I remember seeing the Tennessee statesmen about the Capitol for the different conferences held there and noting that some of them spoke with a negroid intonation and not with that Ohio accent which I believed the best in the English-speaking world. No doubt they parted with our own legislators affectionately, and returned home supported by the hope that they had really done something in a case where there was nothing to be done.
Their endeavor was respectable, but there was no change in the civic conditions except from bad to worse. In the social conditions, or the society conditions, everything was for the better, if indeed these could be bettered in Columbus. Of all the winters this was the gayest; society was kind again, after I had paid the penalty it exacted for my neglect, and I began to forget my purpose of living in air more absolutely literary. Again I began going the rounds of the friendly houses, but now, as if to win my fancy more utterly, there began to be a series of dances in a place and on conditions the most alluring. For a while after the functions of the medical school were suspended in the College where I had lodged, the large ward where the lectures were once given was turned into a gymnasium and fitted up with the usual gymnastic apparatus. I do not recall whether this was taken away or not, or was merely looped up and put aside for our dances, and I do not know how we came into possession of the place; in the retrospect, such things happen in youth much as things happen in childhood, without apparent human agency; but at any rate we had this noble circus for our dances. There must have been some means of joining them, but it is now gone from me, and I know only that they were given under the fully sufficing chaperonage of a sole matron. There were two negro fiddlers, and the place was lighted by candles fixed along the wall; but memory does not serve me as to any sort of supper; probably there was none, except such as the young men, after they had seen the young ladies to their homes, went up-town to make on the oysters of Ambos.
It is strange that within the time so dense with incident for us there should have been so few incidents now separately tangible, but there is one that vividly distinguishes itself from the others. In that past I counted any experience precious that seemed to parallel the things of fact with the things of fiction. Afterward, but long afterward, I learned to praise, perhaps too arrogantly praise, the things of fiction as they paralleled the things of fact, but as yet it was not so. I suppose the young are always like us as we of the College dances were then, but romance can rarely offer itself to youth of any time in the sort of reality which one night enriched us amid our mirth with a wild thrill of dismay at the shriek in a girl’s voice of “Dead?” There was an instant halt in the music, and then a rush to the place where the cry had risen. Somebody had fainted, and when the fact could be verified, it was found that one of the blithest of our company had been struck down with word from home that her sister had fallen dead of heart failure. Then when we began to falter away from the poor child’s withdrawal, suddenly another tumult stayed us; a young father, who had left his first-born with its mother in their rooms above while he came down for some turns in the waltz, could not believe that it was not his child that was dead, and he had to be pulled and pushed up-stairs into sight and sound of the little one roused from its sleep to convince him, before he could trust the truth.
Here was mingling of the tragic and the comic to the full admired effect of Shakespearian drama, but the mere circumstance of these esthetic satisfactions would have been emotional wealth enough; and when I got home on such a night to my slumbering room-mate Price I could give myself in glad abandon to the control of the poet whose psychic I then oftenest was, with some such result as I found in a tattered manuscript the other day. I think the poet could hardly have resented my masking in his wonted self-mocking, though I am afraid that he would have shrunk from the antic German which I put on to the beat of his music.
“To-night there is dancing and fiddling
In the high windowed hall
Lighted with dim corpse-candles
In bottles against the wall.
“And the people talk of the weather,
And say they think it will snow;
And, without, the wind in the gables
Moans wearily and low.
“ ‘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.
He was the last but one of the friends whom my youth was so rich in, for no reason more, perhaps, than that we were young together, though they were all older than I, and Comly was five or six years my senior. When I knew him first, with his tall, straight figure, his features of Greek fineness, his blue eyes, and his moustache thin and ashen blond, he was of a distinction fitting the soldier he became when the Civil War began, and he fought through the four years’ struggle with such gallantry and efficiency that he came out of it with the rank of brigadier-general. He had broken with the law amid arms, and in due time he succeeded to the control of our newspaper where he kept on terms of his own the tradition of Reed, which Price and I had continued in our fashion, and made the paper an increasing power. But he had never been the vigorous strength he looked, and after certain years of overwork he accepted the appointment of minister to Hawaii. The rest and the mild climate renewed his health, and he came back to journalism under different conditions of place. But the strain was the same; he gave way under it again, and died a few years later.
XIII
I cannot make out why, having the friends and incentives I had in Columbus, I should have wished to go away, but more and more I did wish that. There was no reason for it except my belief that my work would be less acceptable if I remained in the West; that I should get on faster if I wrote in New York than if I wrote in Columbus. Somehow I fancied there would be more intellectual atmosphere for me in the great city, but I do not believe this now, and I cannot see how I could anywhere have had more intelligent sympathy. When I came home from Venice in 1865, and was looking about for some means of livelihood, I found that Lowell had a fancy for my returning to the West, and living my literary life in my own air if not on my own ground. He apparently thought the experiment would be interesting; and if I were again twenty-eight I should like to try it. I would indeed have been glad then of any humble place on a newspaper in the West; but the East more hospitably entreated me, and after a flattering venture in New York journalism I was asked to the place in Boston which of all others in the world was that I could most have desired.
In those Columbus days I was vaguely aware that if I went farther from home I should be homesick, for where I was, in that happy environment, I was sometimes almost intolerably homesick. From my letters home I find that I was vividly concerned in the affairs of those I had left there, striving and saving to pay for the printing-office and the house with so little help from me. I was still sometimes haunted by the hypochondria which had once blackened my waking hours with despair; I dare say I was always overworking, and bringing my fear upon me out of the exhaustion of my nerves. Perhaps I am confiding too much when I speak of this most real, most unreal misery, but if the confession of it will help any who suffer, especially in the solitude of youth which inexperience makes a prison-house, I shall not be ashamed of what some may impute to me for weakness. If one knows there is some one else who is suffering in his kind, then one can bear it better; and in this way, perhaps, men are enabled to go to their death in battle, where they die with thousands of others; in the multitudinous doom of the Last Day its judgments may not be so dreadful to the single culprit. Like every one who lives, I was a congeries of contradictions, willing to play with the fancies that came to me, but afraid of them if they stayed too late. Yet I did not lose much sleep from them; it is after youth is gone that we begin to lose sleep from care; while our years are few we indeed rise up with care, but it does not wake night-long with us, as it does when our years are more.
I had a most cheerful companion in my colleague, Price, who so loved to laugh and to make laugh. If he never made the calls or went to the parties to which I tempted him, apparently he found our own society sufficient, and, in fact, I could not wish for anything better myself than when, the day’s work and the night’s pleasure ended for me, we sat together in the editorial-room, where our chief seldom molested us, and waited for the last telegraphic despatches before sending the paper to press. Sometimes we had the company of officials from the State House who came over to while away the hours, more haggard for them than for us, with the stories they told while we listened. They were often such stories as Lincoln liked, no doubt for the humorous human nature and racy character in them. Very likely he found a relief in them from the tragedy overhanging us all, but not molesting our young souls with the portents which the sad-eyed man of duty and of doom was aware of, or perhaps not yet aware of.
The strangest impression that the time has left with me is a sense of the patient ignorance which seemed to involve the whole North. Doubtless the South, or the more positive part of it, knew what it was about; but the North could only theorize and conjecture and wait while those who were in keeping of the nation were seeking its life. In the glare of the events that followed volcanically enough, it seems as if the North must have been of the single mind which it became when the shot fired on Fort Sumter woke it at last to the fact that the country was really in peril. But throughout the long suspense after Lincoln’s election till his inauguration there was no settled purpose in the North to save the Union, much less to fight for it. People ate and slept for the most part tranquilly throughout; they married and gave in marriage; they followed their dead to the grave with no thought that the dead were well out of the world; they bought and sold, and got gain; what seemed the end could not be the end, because it had never come before.
After the war actually began we could not feel that it had begun; we had the evidence of our senses, but not of our experiences; in most things it was too like peace to be really war. Neither of the great sections believed in the other, but the South, which was solidified by the slaveholding caste, had the advantage of believing in itself, and the North did not believe in itself till the fighting began. Then it believed too much and despised the enemy at its throat. Among the grotesque instances of our self-confidence I recall the consoling assurance of an old friend, a chief citizen and wise in his science, who said, as the hostile forces were approaching each other in Virginia, “Oh, they will run,” and he meant the Southerners, as he lifted his fine head and blew a whiff from his pipe into the air. “As soon as they see we are in earnest they will run,” but it was not from us that they ran; and the North was startled from its fallacy that sixty days would see the end of the rebellion, whose end no prophet had now the courage to forecast. We of the Ohio capital wore a very political community, the most political in the whole state, in virtue of our being the capital, but none of the rumors of war had distracted us from our pleasures or affairs, at least so far as the eyes of youth could see. With our faith in the good ending, as if our national story were a tale that must end well, with whatever suspenses, or thrilling episodes, we had put the day’s anxieties by and hopefully waited for the morrow’s consolations. But when the fateful shot was fired at Fort Sumter, it was as if the echo had not died away when a great public meeting was held in response to the President’s call for volunteers, and the volunteering began with an effect of simultaneity which the foreshortening of past events always puts on to the retrospective eye. It seemed as if it were only the night before that we had listened to the young Patti, now so old, singing her sweetest in that hall where the warlike appeals rang out, with words smiting like blows in that “Anvil Chorus” which between her songs had thrilled us with the belief that we were listening to the noblest as well as the newest music in the world.
I have sometimes thought that I would write a novel, with its scene in our capital at that supreme moment when the volunteering began, but I shall never do it, and without the mask of fiction one cannot give the living complexion of events. Instantly the town was inundated from all the towns of the state and from the farms between as with a tidal wave of youth; for most of those who flooded our streets were boys of eighteen and twenty, and they came in the wild hilarity of their young vision, singing by day and by night, one sad inconsequent song, that filled the whole air, and that fills my sense yet as I think of them:
“Oh, nebber mind the weather, but git ober double trouble,
For we’re bound for the happy land of Canaan.”
They wore red shirts, as if the color of the Garibaldian war for Union in Italy had flashed itself across the sea to be the hue of our own war for Union. With interlinked arms they ranged up and down, and pushed the willing citizens from the pavement, and shouted the day and shouted the night away, with no care but the fear that in the outpour of their death-daring they might not be gathered into the ranks filling up the quota of regiments assigned to Ohio. The time had a sublimity which no other time can know, unless some proportionate event shall again cause the nation to stand up as one man, and the spectacle had a mystery and an awe which I cannot hope to impart. I knew that these boys, bursting from their fields and shops as for a holiday, were just such boys as I had always known, and if I looked at any one of them as they went swaggering and singing up and down I recognized him for what they were, but in their straggling ranks, with their young faces flushed the red of the blouses and their young eyes flaming, I beheld them transfigured. I do not pretend that they were of the make of armies such as I had seen pictured marching in serried ranks to battle, and falling in bloody windrows on the smoke-rolled plain. All that belonged to and not to the morrows in which I dwelt. But possibly if I had written that forever-to-be-unwritten novel I might have plucked out the heart of the moment and laid it throbbing before the reader; and yet I might rather have been satisfied with the more subjective riddle of one who looked on, and baffled himself with question of the event.
“Old, unhappy, far-off days,”
Only two or three of the friends who had formed our College group went to the war; of these my friend Comly, had been one of the earliest, and when I found him officer of the day at the first camp of the volunteers, he gave me what time he could, but he was helplessly pre-occupied, and the whole world I had known was estranged. One morning I met another friend, coming down the State House steps and smiling radiantly; he also was a law student, and he had just been made adjutant of a newly accepted regiment. Almost immediately afterward he was changed to the line, and at the end of the war, after winning its last important battle, John G. Mitchell came out with the rank of brigadier-general, to which the brevet of major-general could scarcely add distinction. By the chances which play with our relations in life I had not known him so well as some others. He was not of the College group; but after the war we came familiarly together in the friendship of the cousins who had become our wives. In that after-time he once held me rapt with the stories of his soldier life, promising, or half promising, to put them down for print, but never doing it, so that now they are lost to that record of personal experience of battle which forms so vital a part of our history. No stories of that life which I have read have seemed to me so frank, so full, so real, as those he told.
Our first camp was in our pretty Goodale Park, where I used to walk and talk with the sculptor Ward, and try the athletic feats in which he easily beat me. Now the pine sheds covered the long tables, spread with coffee and pork and beans, and the rude bunks filled with straw, and here and there a boy volunteer frowzily drowsing in them. It was one of the many shapeless beginnings which were to end in the review of the hundred thousands of seasoned soldiers marching to their mustering out in Washington after four years of fire and blood. No one could imagine that any of these boys were to pass through that abyss, or that they would not come safely out. Even after the cruel disillusion of Manassas the superstition of quick work remained with the North, and the three years’ quota of Ohio was filled almost as jubilantly as the three months’, but not quite so jubilantly. Sons and brothers came with tears to replace fathers and brothers who had not returned from Manassas, and there was a funeral undertone in the shrilling of the fifes and the throbbing of the drums which was not so before. Life is like Hamlet and will oftentimes “put an antic disposition on,” which I have never been one to refuse recognition, and now I must, with whatever effect from it, own a bit of its mockery. One of our reporters was a father whose son had been among the first to go, and word came that the boy had been killed at Manassas. I liked the father as I had liked the son, and the old man’s grief moved me to such poor offer of consolation as verse could make. He was deeply touched, but the next day another word came that the boy was alive and well, and I could not leave my elegiacs with his father, who was apparently reluctant to renounce the glory of them, although so glad. But he gave them back, and I depersonalized them by removing the name of the young soldier, and finally printed them in the volume of poems which two or three people still buy every year.