Of Literature (eBook)

still see him sitting athletic, almost pugilistic, of presence, with his

strong face, but kind, framed in long hair that swept above his massive

forehead, and fell to the level of his humorously smiling mouth.  His

eyes quaintly gleamed at the things we told him of our life in the

strange place; but he only partly relaxed from his strenuous pose, and

the hands that lay upon his knees were clinched.  Afterwards, as he

passed our balcony in a gondola, he lifted the brave red fez he was

wearing (many people wore the fez for one caprice or another) and saluted

our eagle and us: we were often on the balcony behind the shield to

attest the authenticity of the American eagle.

III.

Before I left Venice, however, there came a turn in my literary luck, and

from the hand I could most have wished to reverse the adverse wheel of

fortune.  I had labored out with great pains a paper on recent Italian

comedy, which I sent to Lowell, then with his friend Professor Norton

jointly editor of the North American Review; and he took it and wrote me

one of his loveliest letters about it, consoling me in an instant for all

the defeat I had undergone, and making it sweet and worthy to have lived

through that misery.  It is one of the hard conditions of this state that

while we can mostly make out to let people taste the last drop of

bitterness and ill-will that is in us, our love and gratitude are only

semi-articulate at the best, and usually altogether tongue-tied.  As

often as I tried afterwards to tell Lowell of the benediction, the

salvation, his letter was to me, I failed.  But perhaps he would not have

understood, if I had spoken out all that was in me with the fulness I

could have given a resentment.  His message came after years of thwarted

endeavor, and reinstated me in the belief that I could still do something

in literature.  To be sure, the letters in the Advertiser had begun to

make their impression; among the first great pleasures they brought me

was a recognition from my diplomatic chief at Vienna; but I valued my

admission to the North American peculiarly because it was Lowell let me

in, and because I felt that in his charge it must be the place of highest

honor.  He spoke of the pay for my article, in his letter, and asked me

where he should send it, and I answered, to my father-in-law, who put it

in his savings-bank, where he lived, in Brattleboro, Vermont.  There it

remained, and I forgot all about it, so that when his affairs were

settled some years later and I was notified that there was a sum to my

credit in the bank, I said, with the confidence I have nearly always felt

when wrong, that I had no money there.  The proof of my error was sent me

in a check, and then I bethought me of the pay for "Recent Italian

Comedy."

It was not a day when I could really afford to forget money due me, but

then it was not a great deal of money.  The Review was as poor as it was

proud, and I had two dollars a printed page for my paper.  But this was

more than I got from the Advertiser, which gave me five dollars a column

for my letters, printed in a type so fine that the money, when translated

from greenbacks into gold at a discount of $2.80, must have been about a

dollar a thousand words.  However, I was richly content with that, and

would gladly have let them have the letters for nothing.

Before I left Venice I had made my sketches into a book, which I sent on

to Messrs. Trubner & Co., in London.  They had consented to look at it to

oblige my friend Conway, who during his sojourn with us in Venice, before

his settlement in London, had been forced to listen to some of it.  They

answered me in due time that they would publish an edition of a thousand,

at half profits, if I could get some American house to take five hundred

copies.  When I stopped in London I had so little hope of being able to

do this that I asked the Trubners if I might, without losing their offer,

try to get some other London house to publish my book.  They said Yes,

almost joyously; and I began to take my manuscript about.  At most places

they would not look at me or it, and they nowhere consented to read it.

The house promptest in refusing to consider it afterwards pirated one of

my novels, and with some expressions of good intention in that direction,

never paid me anything for it; though I believe the English still think

that this sort of behavior was peculiar to the American publisher in the

old buccaneering times.  I was glad to go back to the Trubners with my

book, and on my way across the Atlantic I met a publisher who finally

agreed to take those five hundred copies.  This was Mr. M. M. Hurd, of

Hurd & Houghton, a house then newly established in New York and

Cambridge.  We played ring-toss and shuffleboard together, and became of

a friendship which lasts to this day.  But it was not till some months

later, when I saw him in New York, that he consented to publish my book.

I remember how he said, with an air of vague misgiving, and an effect of

trying to justify himself in an imprudence, that it was not a great

matter anyway.  I perceived that he had no faith in it, and to tell the

truth I had not much myself.  But the book had an instant success, and it

has gone on from edition to edition ever since.  There was just then the

interest of a not wholly generous surprise at American things among the

English.  Our success in putting down the great Confederate rebellion had

caught the fancy of our cousins, and I think it was to this mood of

theirs that I owed largely the kindness they showed my book.  There were

long and cordial reviews in all the great London journals, which I used

to carry about with me like love-letters; when I tried to show them to

other people, I could not understand their coldness concerning them.

At Boston, where we landed on our return home, there was a moment when it

seemed as if my small destiny might be linked at once with that of the

city which later became my home.  I ran into the office of the Advertiser

to ask what had become of some sketches of Italian travel I had sent the

paper, and the managing editor made me promise not to take a place

anywhere before I had heard from him.  I gladly promised, but I did not

hear from him, and when I returned to Boston a fortnight later, I found

that a fatal partner had refused to agree with him in engaging me upon

the paper.  They even gave me back half a dozen unprinted letters of

mine, and I published them in the Nation, of New York, and afterwards in

the book called Italian Journeys.

But after I had encountered fortune in this frowning disguise, I had a

most joyful little visit with Lowell, which made me forget there was

anything in the world but the delight and glory of sitting with him in

his study at Elmwood and hearing him talk.  It must have been my

freshness from Italy which made him talk chiefly of his own happy days in

the land which so sympathetically brevets all its lovers fellow-citizens.

At any rate he would talk of hardly anything else, and he talked late

into the night, and early into the morning.  About two o'clock, when all

the house was still, he lighted a candle, and went down into the cellar,

and came back with certain bottles under his arms.  I had not a very

learned palate in those days (or in these, for that matter), but I knew

enough of wine to understand that these bottles had been chosen upon that

principle which Longfellow put in verse, and used to repeat with a

humorous lifting of the eyebrows and hollowing of the voice:

              "If you have a friend to dine,

               Give him your best wine;

               If you have two,

               The second-best will do."

As we sat in their mellow afterglow, Lowell spoke to me of my own life

and prospects, wisely and truly, as he always spoke.  He said that it was

enough for a man who had stuff in him to be known to two or three people,

for they would not suffer him to be forgotten, and it would rest with

himself to get on.  I told him that though I had not given up my place at

Venice, I was not going back, if I could find anything to do at home,

and I was now on my way to Ohio, where I should try my best to find

something; at the worst, I could turn to my trade of printer.  He did not

think it need ever come to that; and he said that he believed I should

have an advantage with readers, if not with editors, in hailing from the

West; I should be more of a novelty.  I knew very well that even in...