Delphi complete works of.., p.1612
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells, page 1612
IV
The first winter of my legislative correspondence began with a letter to my Cincinnati newspaper in which I
The Ohio State House at Columbus viewed from High Street
described the public opening of the new State House. I remember the event vividly because I thought it signally important, and partly because, to relieve myself from the stress of the crowd passing through the doorways, I lifted my arms and was near having my breath crushed out. There were a ball and a banquet, but somewhere, somehow, amidst the dancing and the feeding and smoking, I found a corner where I could write out my account of the affair and so escaped with my letter and my life.
Much as I might have wished to share socially, with such small splendor as might be, in this high occasion, the reporter’s instinct was first with me. I was there as the representative of a great Cincinnati newspaper, and I cared more to please its management than to take any such part as I might in the festivity. My part was to look on and tell what I saw, and I must have done this in the manner of my most approved good masters, no doubt with satirically poetic touches from Heine and bits of worldly glitter from Thackeray. I should like to see that letter now, and I should like to know how I contrived to get it, more or less surreptitiously, into the hands of the express agent for delivery to my newspaper. In those days there was a good deal of talk, foolish talk, I am since aware, of having the post-office superseded in its functions by the express companies. Now the talk and the fact are all the other way; but then the mail was slow and uncertain, and if my letter was of the nature of manuscript the express might safely carry it and deliver it in time for the next day’s paper. That was rightful and lawful enough, but there was a show of secrecy in the transaction which was not unpleasing to the enterprise of a young reporter.
My letters, as they went on from day to day, contented the managers of the Gazette so well that when the session of the legislature ended they gave me an invitation which might well have abused my modesty with a sense of merit. This invitation was to come and be their city editor, which then meant the local reporting, at a salary twice as great as that which I had been getting as their legislative correspondent. I do not know whose inspiration the offer was, but I should like to believe it was that of the envoy from the paper who made it in person, after perhaps more fully satisfying himself of my fitness. He is long since dead, but if he were still alive I hope he would not mind my describing him as of less stature than myself even, wearing the large, round glasses which give certain near-sighted persons a staring look, and of speech low almost to whispering, so that I could not quite be sure that the incredible thing he was proposing was really expressed to me. I like to recall the personal fact of him because he was always my friend, and he would have found me another place on the paper if he could when I would not take the one he had offered. He did make room for me in his own department for as long as he could, or as I would stay, when I went down to Cincinnati to look the ground over, and he kept me his guest as far as sharing his room with me in the building where we worked together, and where I used to grope my way toward midnight up a stairway entirely black to his door. There I lighted the candle-end which I found within and did what I could to sleep till he came, hours later, when the paper went to press. I have the belief that the place was never swept or dusted, and that this did not matter to the quiet, scholarly man whose life was so wholly in his work that he did not care how he lived.
He was buoyed up, above all other things, by the interest of journalism, which for those once abandoned to it is indeed a kind of enchantment. As I knew it then and afterward, it has always had far more of my honor and respect than those ignorant of it know how to render. One incident of it at this time so especially moved me that I will give it place in this wayward tale, though it is probably not more to the credit of the press than unnumbered others which others could cite. A miserable man came late one night to ask that a certain report which involved his good name, and with it the good name of a miserable woman, and the peace of their families, might be withheld. He came with legal counsel, and together they threshed the matter out with our editorial force upon the point whether we ought or ought not to spare him, our contention being that as a prominent citizen he was even less to be spared than a more unimportant person. Our professional conscience was apparently in that scruple; how it was overcome I do not remember, but at last we promised mercy and the report was suppressed.
It was one of the ironies of life that after the only suspected avenue to publicity had been successfully guarded, the whole fact should have cruelly come out in another paper the next morning. But I cannot feel even yet that the beauty of our merciful decision was marred by this mockery of fate, or that the cause of virtue was served by it, and I think that if I had been wiser than I was then I would have remained in the employ offered me, and learned in the school of reality the many lessons of human nature which it could have taught me. I did not remain, and perhaps I could not; it might have been the necessity of my morbid nerves to save themselves from abhorrent contacts; in any case, I renounced the opportunity offered me by that university of the streets and police-stations, with its faculty of patrolmen and ward politicians and saloon-keepers. The newspaper office was not the Capitol of Ohio; I was not by the fondest imputation a part of the state government, and I felt the difference keenly. I was always very homesick; I knew nobody in the city, and I had no companionship except that of my constant friend, whom I saw only in our hours of work. I had not even the poor social refuge of a boarding-house; I ate alone at a restaurant, where I used sadly to amuse myself with the waiters’ versions of the orders which they called down a tube into the kitchen below. The one which cheered me most was that of a customer who always ordered a double portion of corn-cakes and was translated as requiring “Indians, six on a plate.”
Nearly all the frequenters of this restaurant were men from their stores and offices, snatching a hasty midday meal, but a few were women, clerks and shop-girls of the sort who now so abound in our towns and cities, but then so little known. I was so altogether ignorant of life that I thought shame of them to be boldly showing themselves in such a public place as a restaurant. I wonder what they would have thought, poor, blameless dears, of the misgivings in the soul of the conscious youth as he sat stealing glances of injurious conjecture at them while he overate himself with the food which was the only thing that could appease for a moment the hunger of his homesick heart. If I could not mercifully imagine them, how could I intelligently endure the ravings of the drunken woman which I heard one night in the police-station where my abhorred duties took me for the detestable news of the place? I suppose it was this adventure, sole of its sort, which clinched my resolve to have no more to do with the money-chance offered to me in journalism. My longing was for the cleanly respectabilities, and I still cannot think that a bad thing, or if experience cannot have more than the goodly outside in life, that this is not well worth having. There was a relief, almost an atonement, or at least a consolation in being sent next day to report a sermon, in fulfilment of my friend’s ideal of journalistic enterprise, and though that sermon has long since gone from me and was perhaps at the time not distinctly with me, still I have a sense of cleansing from the squalor of the station-house in listening to it. If all my work could have been the reporting of sermons, with intervals of sketching the graduating ceremonies of young ladies’ seminaries, such as that where once a girl in garnet silk read an essay of perhaps no surpassing interest, but remained an enchanting vision, and the material of some future study in fiction; if it could have been these things, with nothing of police-stations in it, I might have tried longer to become a city editor. But as it was I decided my destiny in life differently.
V
I must not conceal the disappointment which my father delicately concealed when I returned and took up my old work in the printing-office. He might well have counted on my help in easing him of his load of debt, from the salary I had forgone, but there was no hint of this in the welcome given me in the home where I was again so doubly at home with my books and manuscripts. Now and then my friend of the Gazette management managed to have some sketch of mine accepted for it, and my life went on in my sister’s literary companionship on much the same terms as before our venture into the world the winter before. My father’s clerkship had ended with the adjournment of the legislature in the spring, but in the autumn, when it grew toward winter, I asked again for the correspondence of the Gazette. I got this by favor of my friend, and then I had courage to ask for that of the Cleveland Herald, which the interest of the blithe sexagenarian sufficed to secure me, and I returned to the capital with no pretense that I was not now writing the letters solely and entirely myself. But almost before my labors began my health quite broke under the strain of earlier over-study and later overwork. I gave up my correspondence for both those honored newspapers to my father, who wrote it till the close of the session, and at his suggestion the letters of the Gazette fell the next winter to the fit and eager hands of a young man who had just then sold his country newspaper and had come to try his fortune in the capital. His name was Whitelaw Reid, in the retrospect a tall, graceful youth with an enviable black mustache and imperial, wearing his hair long in the Southern fashion, and carrying himself with the native ease which availed him in a worldly progress uninterrupted to the end. He wrote the legislative letters so acceptably that when the Civil War broke out the Gazette people were glad to make him their correspondent in the field, where he distinguished himself beyond any other war correspondent in the West, or the East for what I knew. The world knows how riches and honors followed him all his days, and how when he died the greatest Empire sent his dust home to the greatest Republic in such a war-ship as the war correspondent of those years could not have dreamed of. From time to time we saw each other, but not often; he was about his business in the State House, and now I was about mine in the office of the Ohio State Journal, the organ of the Republican party, which had been newly financed and placed on a firm footing after rather prolonged pecuniary debility.
I was at home in the autumn, as I had been all the summer, eating my heart out (as I would have said in those days) when the call to a place on the Journal’s editorial staff incredibly, impossibly came, and I forgot my ills, and eagerly responded. I hardly know how to justify my inconsistency when I explain that this place was the same which I had rejected at twice the salary on the Cincinnati Gazette. Perhaps I accepted it now because I could no longer endure the disappointment and inaction of my life. Perhaps I hoped that in the smaller city the duties would not be so odious or so onerous; perhaps it was because I would have been glad to return to Columbus on any terms; in any case it fell out that the duties of the place were undertaken by another who doted on them, and quite different and far more congenial functions were assigned to me.
My chief was Henry D. Cooke, the successful editor and proprietor of a newspaper in northern Ohio, and brother of the banker Jay Cooke, once nationally noted in our finance and himself afterward Governor of the District of Columbia, the easiest of easy gentlemen, formed for prosperity and leisure, with an instinct for the choice of subordinates qualified to do the journalistic work he soon began to relinquish in his preoccupation with the politics of the capital. I have had no sweeter friend in a life abounding in friends, and after fifty years I think of his memory with gratitude for counsels which availed me much when given and would avail me still if I should ever again be a youth of twenty-one, proposing to do and say the things I then proposed. He rarely blamed anything I did in the stirring and distracted period of our relation, but one morning he brought me a too graphic paragraph, about a long-forgotten homicide done by an injured husband, and said, “Never, never write anything you would be ashamed to read to a woman,” and so made me lastingly ashamed of what I had done, and fearful of ever doing the like again, even in writing fiction. It seems not to be so now with our novelists, begun or beginning; they write many things they ought to be ashamed to read to women, or if they are of that sex, things they should be ashamed to read to men. But perhaps they are ashamed and only hold out writing so for art’s sake; I cannot very well speak for them; but I am still very Victorian in my preference of decency.
Mr. Cooke must have been often of a divided mind about his assistants, or about their expression of the opinions which he reticently held in common with them. He was a thorough Republican; he undoubtedly believed that the time had come for calling black black, but his nature would have been to call it dark gray, at least for that day or for the next. He would have oftenest agreed with us in what we said of the pro-slavery party and partisans, North and South, though he held it not honesty to have it thus set down. He would have liked better the milde Macht of a Hahnemannian treatment, while we were blistering and cauterizing, and letting blood wherever we saw the chance, and there were every day chances enough. I had been made news editor, and in the frequent intervals of our chief’s abeyance I made myself the lieutenant of the keen ironical spirit who mostly wrote our leaders, but did not mind my dipping my pen in his ink when I could turn from the paste and scissors which were more strictly my means of expression. My work was to look through the exchange newspapers which flocked to us in every mail, and to choose from them any facts that could be presented to our readers as significant. I called my column or two “News and Humors of the Mail,” and I tried to give it an effect of originality by recasting many of the facts, or, when I could not find a pretext for this, by offering the selected passages with applausive or derisive comment. We had French and Spanish and German exchanges, and I sometimes indulged a boyish vanity by prefacing a paragraph from these with such a sentence as, “We translate from the Courrier des États Unis,” or, “We find in La Cronaca of New York,” or “We learn from the Wachter am Erie,” as the case might be. Why I should have been suffered to do this without admonition from our chief or sarcasm from my senior I do not know; perhaps the one thought it best to let youth have its head when the head was harmlessly turned; and perhaps the other was too much occupied with his own work to trouble himself with mine; but certainly if I had caught a contemporary in such folly I should have tried what unsparing burlesque could do to make him wiser.
The reader who has no follies to own will probably not think me wise in owning mine, but from time to time I must do so; there were so many. It is with no hope of repairing these follies now that I confess the pride I felt in the poor little Spanish, German, and French which it had cost me so much to acquire unaided and unguided, and I was willing that my acquirements should shed luster on the newspaper I loved almost as much as I loved myself. I admired it even more, and I wished to do all that I could to make it admirable, even enviable, with others. I think now that I was not using one of the best means to do it; I only contend that it was one of the best I could think of then. If any contemporary had turned it against us, I hope I should have been willing to suffer personally for it, but I cannot now be sure.
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.
