Chapter XIII

I do not think my father so much cared for the ownership of the newspaper. He took our enterprise more easily than my elder brother, but that was temperamental in both, and one was no more devoted than the other. My companionship was far more with my father, but before my intimacy with J. W. interrupted this my studies had already ascertained the limits of his learning in the regions where I was groping my way, and where the light of my friend's greater knowledge now made him my guide. If J. W. was more definite in his ambition of one day getting some sort of college professorship than I in my plans of literary achievement, he could not have been more intense in his devotion to what we were trying to do. I was studying those languages because I wished to possess myself of their literatures; still groping my way in the dark, where a little light shed from larger learning would have helped me so much. The grammars and the text-books could tell me what I wanted to know, but they did not teach it; and I realize now as I could not then that self-taught is half-taught. Yet I think my endeavor merited reward; if I worked blindly, I worked hard; and in my attempts at fiction or at verse where I could create the light by mere trituration, as it were, I did not satisfy myself with less than final perfection so far as I could imagine it. I loved form, I loved style, I loved diction, and I strove for them all, rejecting my faultier ideals when I discovered them, and cleaving to the truer. In some things, the minor things, I was of wavering preference; I wrote a different hand every other week, and if I have now an established handwriting it is more from disgust of change than from preference. In the spirit of my endeavor there was no variableness; always I strove for grace, for distinctness, for light; and my soul detests obscurity still. That is perhaps why I am beating out my meaning here at the risk of beating it into thin air.

In the final judgment of my father's help and unhelp in my endeavors, I should say that they were the measure of his possibility. For a man of his conditioning he had a wonderful outlook in many directions on life, but he was without perspective; he could not see how my unaided efforts were driving to the vanishing-point. He had been my instructor in many things beyond my young ken; he had an instinct for beauty and truth; he loved the poetry which was the best in his youth, though he did not deny me the belief that the poetry of mine was better still; his gentle intelligence could follow me where his liking failed, and he modestly accepted my opinions. His interest had once been absorbed mostly, but not wholly, by the faith which he had imbibed from his reading of Swedenborg, but when I began to know him as a boy may know his elder, he was more and more concerned in the national struggle with the pro-slavery aggression. Politics had always been his main worldly interest, and not only as to measures; he passionately favored certain men, because he liked the nature of them, as well as because he believed them right. It seems to me now that he took a personal interest in conventions and nominations, but I am not sure, for I myself took no interest whatever in them; their realities did not concern me so much as the least unrealities of fiction; and I can only make sure of my father's interest in the elections after the nominations. I suppose that he was not very skilled in practical politics, as log-rolling and wire-pulling have come to be called, though in a village which was the home of a United States Senator, a Congressional Representative, a State Senator, and a Legislative Representative, with the full corps of county office-holders, and a Common Pleas Judge, the science might well have forced itself upon his study. Many years after our coming to the Western Reserve he was sent to the State Senate by a war-majority larger than any majority which had yet returned a candidate, or yet has; but long before that he began to find his way beyond the local favor or disfavor, and was chosen one of the House clerks in the State Legislature. That must have been when I was eighteen years old, but he seems to have left our newspaper to my sole charge without misgiving, and fortunately no trouble came of his trust in me. I was then taking my civic and social opinions from the more Tory of the English quarterlies, but nobody knew what I meant by them; I did not know myself, and I did no harm with them.

In the mean time our Congressman was writing for us every week from Washington a letter full of politics far more intelligible to our readers than mine were to me. He was that Joshua R. Giddings, early one of the paladins of anti-slavery in a series of pro-slavery Congresses, where he represented and distinguished his district for twenty years after his resignation under a vote of censure and his overwhelming re-election. But in a fatal moment of that fatigue which comes to elderly people, he finally let fall an expression of indifference to office. The minor and meaner men of his party who were his enemies promptly seized the chance of defeating him for the nomination which was equivalent to an election in our district, and an inferior good man was named in his place. His friends would have had him contest the decision of the convention, but he would not, and he passed into private life, where he remained till the favor of Lincoln sought him out, and he died Consul-General to Canada after he had lived to write several books and to tell the story of the Civil War up to its penultimate year. Neither he nor Wade was of that Connecticut lineage which almost exclusively peopled the Western Reserve, and especially in Ashtabula County desired power and place to itself. Wade was from western Massachusetts, and Giddings was from western Pennsylvania, but in the new country where they met, they joined their forces as partners in the law, and remained together till politics separated them in the same cause. They still remained fellow-citizens of the little town where they spent the summer leisure of the Congressional adjournments, but without, somehow I imagine, seeing much of each other. Giddings was far more freely about the place, where his youth had been passed in the backwoods, and where he made himself familiarly at home. The very simplicity of the place seemed to comport with his statesman-like presence, his noble head, and his great Johnsonian face, when he came out of his large old-fashioned dwelling, sole rival of the Wade mansion; and he had no need to stoop in being fellow-citizen with the least of his constituents. For myself, I cannot recall any passage of words with him after a forgotten introduction, and I wish it had been otherwise. I wish now I could have known him even as a boy in his middle teens may know a man of his make; though he might not have said anything to me worth remembering, or inspired me to any expression worthier the event than that of a Louisianian whom long later I saw introduced to him in Columbus, at his own request. The Southerner stared at the giant bulk of the man who must have long embodied to his imagination a demoniacal enmity to his section, and could think of nothing better to say than, "Very pretty day, Mr. Giddings," and when Giddings had assented with, "Yes, sir, a fine day," the interview ended.

"Giddings, far rougher names than thine have grown
Smoother than honey on the lips of men,"

Lowell wrote in one of those magnanimous sonnets of his, when he bent from his orient height to the brave Westerner, and though it has not yet come quite to that honeyed utterance, the name cannot be forgotten when the story of our Civil War, with its far or near beginnings, is told.