My First Visit to New England (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance) , livre ebook

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53 pages

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pubOne.info present you this new edition. If there was any one in the world who had his being more wholly in literature than I had in 1860, I am sure I should not have known where to find him, and I doubt if he could have been found nearer the centres of literary activity than I then was, or among those more purely devoted to literature than myself. I had been for three years a writer of news paragraphs, book notices, and political leaders on a daily paper in an inland city, and I do not know that my life differed outwardly from that of any other young journalist, who had begun as I had in a country printing-office, and might be supposed to be looking forward to advancement in his profession or in public affairs. But inwardly it was altogether different with me. Inwardly I was a poet, with no wish to be anything else, unless in a moment of careless affluence I might so far forget myself as to be a novelist. I was, with my friend J. J. Piatt, the half-author of a little volume of very unknown verse, and Mr. Lowell had lately accepted and had begun to print in the Atlantic Monthly five or six poems of mine

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Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	06 novembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782819948209
Langue	English

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MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
If there was any one in the world who had his beingmore wholly in literature than I had in 1860, I am sure I shouldnot have known where to find him, and I doubt if he could have beenfound nearer the centres of literary activity than I then was, oramong those more purely devoted to literature than myself. I hadbeen for three years a writer of news paragraphs, book notices, andpolitical leaders on a daily paper in an inland city, and I do notknow that my life differed outwardly from that of any other youngjournalist, who had begun as I had in a country printing-office,and might be supposed to be looking forward to advancement in hisprofession or in public affairs. But inwardly it was altogetherdifferent with me. Inwardly I was a poet, with no wish to beanything else, unless in a moment of careless affluence I might sofar forget myself as to be a novelist. I was, with my friend J. J.Piatt, the half-author of a little volume of very unknown verse,and Mr. Lowell had lately accepted and had begun to print in theAtlantic Monthly five or six poems of mine. Besides this I hadwritten poems, and sketches, and criticisms for the Saturday Pressof New York, a long-forgotten but once very lively expression ofliterary intention in an extinct bohemia of that city; and I wasalways writing poems, and sketches, and criticisms in our ownpaper. These, as well as my feats in the renowned periodicals ofthe East, met with kindness, if not honor, in my own city whichought to have given me grave doubts whether I was any real prophet.But it only intensified my literary ambition, already so strongthat my veins might well have run ink rather than blood, and gaveme a higher opinion of my fellow-citizens, if such a thing couldbe. They were indeed very charming people, and such of them as Imostly saw were readers and lovers of books. Society in Columbus atthat day had a pleasant refinement which I think I do notexaggerate in the fond retrospect. It had the finality which itseems to have had nowhere since the war; it had certain fixedideals, which were none the less graceful and becoming because theywere the simple old American ideals, now vanished, or fastvanishing, before the knowledge of good and evil as they have it inEurope, and as it has imparted itself to American travel andsojourn. There was a mixture of many strains in the capital ofOhio, as there was throughout the State. Virginia, Kentucky,Pennsylvania, New York, and New England all joined to characterizethe manners and customs. I suppose it was the South which gave thesocial tone; the intellectual taste among the elders was theSouthern taste for the classic and the standard in literature; butwe who were younger preferred the modern authors: we readThackeray, and George Eliot, and Hawthorne, and Charles Reade, andDe Quincey, and Tennyson, and Browning, and Emerson, andLongfellow, and I— I read Heine, and evermore Heine, when there wasnot some new thing from the others. Now and then an immediateFrench book penetrated to us: we read Michelet and About, Iremember. We looked to England and the East largely for ourliterary opinions; we accepted the Saturday Review as law if wecould not quite receive it as gospel. One of us took the CornhillMagazine, because Thackeray was the editor; the Atlantic Monthlycounted many readers among us; and a visiting young lady from NewEngland, who screamed at sight of the periodical in one of ourhouses, “Why, have you got the Atlantic Monthly out here? ” couldbe answered, with cold superiority, “There are several contributorsto the Atlantic in Columbus. ” There were in fact two: myroom-mate, who wrote Browning for it, while I wrote Heine andLongfellow. But I suppose two are as rightfully several as twentyare.
II.
That was the heyday of lecturing, and now and then aliterary light from the East swam into our skies. I heard and sawEmerson, and I once met Bayard Taylor socially, at the hospitablehouse where he was a guest after his lecture. Heaven knows how Igot through the evening. I do not think I opened my mouth toaddress him a word; it was as much as I could do to sit and look athim, while he tranquilly smoked, and chatted with our host, andquaffed the beer which we had very good in the Nest. All the whileI did him homage as the first author by calling whom I had met. Ilonged to tell him how much I liked his poems, which we used to getby heart in those days, and I longed (how much more I longed! ) tohave him know that:
“Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren, ”
that I had printed poems in the Atlantic Monthly andthe Saturday Press, and was the potential author of things destinedto eclipse all literature hitherto attempted. But I could not tellhim; and there was no one else who thought to tell him. Perhaps itwas as well so; I might have perished of his recognition, for mymodesty was equal to my merit.
In fact I think we were all rather modest youngfellows, we who formed the group wont to spend some part of everyevening at that house, where there was always music, or whist, orgay talk, or all three. We had our opinions of literary matters,but (perhaps because we had mostly accepted them from England orNew England, as I have said) we were not vain of them; and we wouldby no means have urged them before a living literary man like that.I believe none of us ventured to speak, except the poet, myroommate, who said, He believed so and so was the original of soand so; and was promptly told, He had no right to say such a thing.Naturally, we came away rather critical of our host's guest, whom Iafterwards knew as the kindliest heart in the world. But we had notshone in his presence, and that galled us; and we chose to thinkthat he had not shone in ours.
III
At that time he was filling a large space in thethoughts of the young people who had any thoughts about literature.He had come to his full repute as an agreeable and intelligenttraveller, and he still wore the halo of his early adventures afootin foreign lands when they were yet really foreign. He had notwritten his novels of American life, once so welcomed, and now soforgotten; it was very long before he had achieved thatincomparable translation of Faust which must always remain thefinest and best, and which would keep his name alive with Goethe's,if he had done nothing else worthy of remembrance. But what thenmost commended him to the regard of us star-eyed youth (nowblinking sadly toward our seventies) was the poetry which heprinted in the magazines from time to time: in the first Putnam's(where there was a dashing picture of him in an Arab burnoose and,a turban), and in Harper's, and in the Atlantic. It was often verylovely poetry, I thought, and I still think so; and it wasrightfully his, though it paid the inevitable allegiance to themanner of the great masters of the day. It was graced for us by thepathetic romance of his early love, which some of its sweetest andsaddest numbers confessed, for the young girl he married almost inher death hour; and we who were hoping to have our hearts broken,or already had them so, would have been glad of something more ofthe obvious poet in the popular lecturer we had seen refreshinghimself after his hour on the platform.
He remained for nearly a year the only author I hadseen, and I met him once again before I saw any other. Our secondmeeting was far from Columbus, as far as remote Quebec, when I wason my way to New England by way of Niagara and the Canadian riversand cities. I stopped in Toronto, and realized myself abroadwithout any signal adventures; but at Montreal something verypretty happened to me. I came into the hotel office, the evening ofa first day's lonely sight-seeing, and vainly explored the registerfor the name of some acquaintance; as I turned from it two smartlydressed young fellows embraced it, and I heard one of them say, tomy great amaze and happiness, “Hello, here's Howells! ”
“Oh, ” I broke out upon him, “I was just looking forsome one I knew. I hope you are some one who knows me! ”
“Only through your contributions to the SaturdayPress, ” said the young fellow, and with these golden words, theprecious first personal recognition of my authorship I had everreceived from a stranger, and the rich reward of all my literaryendeavor, he introduced himself and his friend. I do not know whatbecame of this friend, or where or how he eliminated himself; butwe two others were inseparable from that moment. He was a younglawyer from New York, and when I came back from Italy, four or fiveyears later, I used to see his sign in Wall Street, with anever-fulfilled intention of going in to see him. In whatever worldhe happens now to be, I should like to send him my greetings, andconfess to him that my art has never since brought me so sweet arecompense, and nothing a thousandth part so much like Fame, asthat outcry of his over the hotel register in Montreal. We werecomrades for four or five rich days, and shared our pleasures andexpenses in viewing the monuments of those ancient Canadiancapitals, which I think we valued at all their picturesque worth.We made jokes to mask our emotions; we giggled and made giggle, inthe right way; we fell in and out of love with all the pretty facesand dresses we saw; and we talked evermore about literature andliterary people. He had more acquaintance with the one, and morepassion for the other, but he could tell me of Pfaff's lager-beercellar on Broadway, where the Saturday Press fellows and the otherBohemians met; and this, for the time, was enough: I resolved tovisit it as soon as I reached New York, in spite of the tobacco andbeer (which I was given to understand were de rigueur), though theyboth, so far as I had known them, were apt to make me sick.
I was very desolate after I parted from this goodfellow, who returned to Montreal on his way to New York, while Iremained in Quebec to continue later on mine to New England. When Icame in from seeing him off in a calash for the boat, I discove