Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

We were very vain of that press, which replaced the hand-press hitherto employed in printing the paper. This was of the style and make of the hand-press which superseded the Ramage press of Franklin’s time; but it had been decided to signalize our new departure by the purchase of a power-press of modern contrivance and of a speed fitted to meet the demands of a subscription-list which might be indefinitely extended. A deputation of the leading politicians accompanied the editor to New York, where he went to choose the machine, and where he bought a second-hand Adams press of the earliest pattern and patent. I do not know, or at this date I would not undertake to say, just what principle governed his selection of this superannuated veteran; it seems not to have been very cheap; but possibly he had a prescience of the disabilities which were to task his ingenuity to the very last days of that press. Certainly no man of less gift and skill could have coped with its infirmities, and I am sure that he thoroughly enjoyed nursing it into such activity as carried it hysterically through those far-off publication days. It had obscure functional disorders of various kinds, so that it would from time to time cease to act, and would have to be doctored by the hour before it would go on. There was probably some organic trouble, too, for, though it did not really fall to pieces on our hands, it showed itself incapable of profiting by several improvements which he invented, and could, no doubt, have successfully applied to the press if its constitution had not been undermined. It went with a crank set in a prodigious fly-wheel which revolved at a great rate, till it came to the moment of making the impression, when the whole mechanism was seized with such a reluctance as nothing but an heroic effort at the crank could overcome. It finally made so great a draught upon our forces that it was decided to substitute steam for muscle in its operation, and we got a small engine which could fully sympathize with the press in having seen better days. I do not know that there was anything the matter with the engine itself, but the boiler had some peculiarities which might well mystify the casual spectator. He could easily have satisfied himself that there was no danger of its blowing up when he saw my brother feeding bran or corn-meal into its safety-valve in order to fill up certain seams or fissures in it which caused it to give out at the moments of the greatest reluctance in the press. But still he must have had his misgivings of latent danger of some other kind, though nothing ever actually happened of a hurtful character. To this day I do not know just where those seams or fissures were, but I think they were in the boiler-head, and that it was therefore suffering from a kind of chronic fracture of the skull. What is certain is that, somehow, the engine and the press did always get us through publication day, and not only with safety, but often with credit; so that many years after, when I was at home, and my brother and I were looking over an old file of the paper, we found it much better printed than either of us expected; as well printed, in fact, as if it had been done on an old hand-press, instead of the steam-power press which it vaunted the use of. The wonder was that, under all the disadvantages, the paper was ever printed on our steam-power press at all; it was little short of miraculous that it was legibly printed, and altogether unaccountable that such impressions as we found in that file could come from it. Of course, they were not average impressions; they were the very best out of the whole edition, and were as creditable as the editorial make-up of the sheet.

  VI

  Upon the whole, our paper was an attempt at conscientious and self-respecting journalism; it addressed itself seriously to the minds of its readers; it sought to form their tastes and opinions. I do not know how much it influenced them, if it influenced them at all, and as to any effect beyond the circle of its subscribers, that cannot be imagined, even in a fond retrospect. But since no good effort is altogether lost, I am sure that this endeavor must have had some tacit effect; and I am sure that no one got harm from a sincerity of conviction that devoted itself to the highest interests of the reader, that appealed to nothing base, and flattered nothing foolish in him. It went from our home to the homes of the people in a very literal sense, for my father usually brought his exchanges from the office at the end of his day there, and made his selections or wrote his editorials while the household work went on him, about and his children gathered around the same lamp, with their books or their jokes; there were a good many of both.

  Our county was the most characteristic of that remarkable group of counties in northern Ohio called the Western Reserve, and forty years ago the population was almost purely New England in origin, either by direct settlement from Connecticut, or indirectly after the sojourn of a generation in New York State. We were ourselves from southern Ohio, where the life was then strongly tinged by the adjoining life of Kentucky and Virginia, and we found these transplanted Yankees cold and blunt in their manners; but we did not undervalue their virtues. They were very radical in every way, and hospitable to novelty of all kinds. I imagine that they tested more new religions and new patents than have been even heard of in less inquiring communities. When we came among them they had lately been swept by the fires of spiritualism, which left behind a great deal of smoke and ashes where the inherited New England orthodoxy had been. They were temperate, hard-working, hard-thinking folks, who dwelt on their scattered farms, and came up to the county fair once a year, when they were apt to visit the printing-office and pay for their papers. They thought it droll, as people of the simpler occupations are apt to think all the more complex arts; and one of them once went so far in expression of his humorous conception as to say, after a long stare at one of the compositors dodging and pecking at the type in his case, “Like an old hen pickin’ up millet.” This sort of silence, and this sort of comment, both exasperated the printers, who took their revenge as they could. They fed it full, once, when a country subscriber’s horse, hitched before the office, crossed his hind legs and sat down in his harness like a tired man, and they proposed to go out and offer him a chair, to take him a glass of water, and ask him to come inside. Fate did not often give them such innings; they mostly had to create their chances of reprisal, but they did not mind that.

  There was always a good deal of talk going on, but, although we were very ardent politicians, our talk was not political. When it was not mere banter, it was mostly literary; we disputed about authors among ourselves and with the village wits who dropped in, and liked to stand with their backs to our stove and challenge opinion concerning Holmes and Poe, Irving and Macaulay, Pope and Byron, Dickens and Shakespeare. But it was Shakespeare who was oftenest on our tongues; indeed, the printing-office of former days had so much affinity with the theater that compositors and comedians were almost convertible. Religion entered a good deal into our discussions, which my father, the most tolerant of men, would not suffer to become irreverent. Part of his duty, as publisher of the paper, was to bear patiently with the type of farmer who thought he wished to discontinue his paper, and really wished to be talked into continuing it. I think he rather enjoyed letting such a subscriber talk himself out, and carrying him from point to point in his argument, always consenting that he knew best what he wanted to do, but skilfully persuading him at last that a home paper was more suited to his needs than any city substitute. Once I could have given the heads of his reasoning, but they are gone from me now.

  He was like all country editors then, and I dare say now, in being a printer as well as an editor, and he took a just share in the mechanical labors. These were formerly much more burdensome, for twice or thrice the present type-setting was then done in the country offices. In that time we had three journeymen at work and two or three girl-compositors, and commonly a boy-apprentice besides. The paper was richer in a personal quality, and the printing-office was unquestionably more of a school. After we began to take girl-apprentices it became coeducative, as far as they cared to profit by it; but I think it did not serve to widen their thoughts or quicken their wits as it did those of the boys. They looked to their craft as a living, not as a life, and they had no pride in it. They did not learn the whole trade, as the journeymen had do
ne; but served only such apprenticeship as fitted them to set type; and their earnings were usually as great at the end of a month as at the end of a year.

  VII

  The printing-office had been my school from childhood so largely that I could almost say I had no other, but the time had come, even before this, when its opportunities did not satisfy the hunger which was always in me for knowledge convertible into such beauty as I imagined and wished to devote my life to. I was willing and glad to do my part in helping my father, but he recognized my right to help myself forward in the line of my own longing, and it was early arranged that I should have a certain measure of work to do, and when it was done I should be free for the day. My task was finished early in the afternoon, and then my consuming pleasures began when I had already done a man’s work. I was studying four or five languages, blindly and blunderingly enough, but with a confidence at which I can even now hardly smile; I was attempting many things in verse and prose which I seldom carried to a definite close, and I was reading, reading, reading, right and left, hither and yon, wherever an author tempted me. I was not meaning to do less than the greatest things, or to know less than the most, but my criticism outran my performance and exacted of me an endeavor for the perfection which I found forever beyond me. Far into the night I clung to my labored failures in rhyme while I listened for the ticking of the death-watch in the walls of my little study; or if I had imagined, in my imitations of others’ fiction, some character that the poet had devoted to an early death, I helplessly identified myself with that character, and expected his fate. It was the day when this world was much more intimate with the other world than it is now, and the spiritualism which had evoked its phenomena through most houses in the village had left them haunted by dread sounds, if not sights; but it was not yet the day when nervous prostration had got its name or was known in its nature. For me this malady came in the hypochondria which was misery not less real because at the end of the ends I knew it to be the exaggeration of an apprehension without ground in reality.

  I have hesitated to make any record of this episode, but I think it essential to the study of my very morbid boyhood, and I hope some knowledge of it may be helpful to others in like suffering. Somehow as a child I had always had a terror of hydrophobia, perhaps from hearing talk of that poor man who had died of it in the town where we then lived, and when years afterward I was, as I have told, bitten by a dog, my terror was the greater because I happened to find myself alone in the house when I ran home. I had heard of excising a snake-bite to keep the venom from spreading, and I would now have cut out the place with my knife, if I had known how. In the end I did nothing, and when my father came home he did not have the wound cauterized. He may have believed that anything which tended to fix my mind upon it would be bad, and perhaps I forgot it the sooner for his decision. I have not forgotten the make of the gloomy autumnal afternoon when the thing happened, or the moment when years afterward certain unguarded words awoke the fear in me which as many more years were needed to allay. By some chance there was talk with our village doctor about hydrophobia, and the capricious way the poison of a dog’s bite may work. “Works round in your system,” he said, “for seven years or more, and then it breaks out and kills you.” The words he let heedlessly fall fell into a mind prepared by ill-health for their deadly potency, and when the summer heat came I was helpless under it. Somehow I knew what the symptoms of the malady were, and I began to force it upon myself by watching for them. The splash of water anywhere was a sound I had to set my teeth against, lest the dreaded spasms should seize me; my fancy turned the scent of the forest fires burning round the village into the subjective odor of smoke which stifles the victim. I had no release from my obsession, except in the dreamless sleep which I fell into exhausted at night, or that little instant of waking in the morning, when I had not yet had time to gather my terrors about me, or to begin the frenzied stress of my effort to experience the thing I dreaded. There was no longer question of work for me, with hand or head. I could read, yes, but with the double consciousness in which my fear haunted every line and word without barring the sense from my perception. I read many novels, where the strong plot befriended me and formed a partial refuge, but I did not attempt escape in the poor boyish inventions, verse or prose, which I had fondly trusted might be literature. Instinct taught me that some sort of bodily fatigue was my safety; I spent the horrible days in the woods with a gun, or in the fields gathering wild berries, and walked to and from the distant places that I might tire myself the more. My father reasoned to the same effect for me, and helped me as best he could; of course I was released from my tasks in the printing-office, and he took me with him in driving about the country on political and business errands. We could not have spent many days in this way, when, as it seems, I woke one morning in a sort of crisis, and having put my fear to the test of water suddenly dashed from a doorway beside me and failed of the convulsion which I was always expecting, I began imperceptibly to get the better of my demon. My father’s talk always distracted me somewhat, and that morning especially his disgust with the beefsteak fried in lard which the landlady gave us for breakfast at the country tavern where we had passed the night must even have amused me, as a touch of the comedy blent with the tragedy in the Shakespearian drama of life. But no doubt a more real help was his recurrence, as often as I chose, to his own youthful suffering from hypochondria, and his constantly repeated assurance that I not only would not and could not have hydrophobia from that out-dated dog-bite, but that I must also soon cease to have hypochondria. I understood as well as he that it was not the fear of that malady which I was suffering, but the fear of the fear; that I was in no hallucination, no illusion as to the facts, but was helpless in the nervous prostration which science, or our poor village medicine, was yet many years from knowing or imagining. I have heard and read that sometimes people in their apprehension of the reality can bring on a false hydrophobia and die of it in the agonies their fancy creates. It may be so; but all that fear could do was done in me; and I did not die.

  I could not absolutely fix the moment when I began to find my way out of the cloud of misery which lowered on my life, but I think that it was when I had gathered a little strength in my forced respite from work, and from the passing of the summer heat. It was as if the frost which people used to think put an end to the poisonous miasm of the swamps, but really only killed the insect sources of the malaria, had wrought a like sanitation in my fancy. My fear when it once lifted never quite overwhelmed me again, but it was years before I could endure the sight of the word which embodied it; I shut the book or threw from me the paper where I found it in print; and even now, after sixty years, I cannot bring myself to write it or speak it without some such shutting of the heart as I knew at the sight or sound of it in that dreadful time. The effect went deeper than I could say without accusing myself of exaggeration for both good and evil. In self-defense I learnt to practise a psychological juggle; I came to deal with my own state of mind as another would deal with it, and to combat my fears as if they were alien.

  I cannot leave this confession without the further confession that though I am always openly afraid of dogs, secretly I am always fond of them; and it is only fair to add that they reciprocate my liking with even exaggerated affection. Dogs, especially of any more ferocious type, make up to me in spite of my diffidence; and at a hotel where we were once passing the summer the landlord’s bulldog, ugliest and dreadest of his tribe, used to divine my intention of a drive and climb into my buggy, where he couched himself on my feet, with a confidence in my reciprocal tenderness which I was anxious not to dispel by the least movement.

  VIII

  As soon as my nerves regained something of their former tone, I renewed my struggle with those alien languages, using such weapons as I could fit my hand to. Notably there was a most comprehensive manual which, because it proposed instruction in so many languages, I called (from my father’s invention or my own, for I had early lea
rnt the trick of his drolling) a sixteen-bladed grammar. I wish now I could see that book, which did not include Greek or Hebrew or German, but abounded in examples of Latin, Italian, French, Spanish and probably Portuguese, and other tongues of that kinship, with literal versions of the texts. These versions falsified the native order of the words to the end that the English of them might proceed in the wonted way, and when I detected the imposition, I was the more offended because the right order of the words in those idioms was always perplexing me. The sixteen-bladed grammar was superseded by the ordinary school-books, Arnold’s for Latin, and Anthon’s for Greek, but the perplexities of one sort or other persisted. Such a very little instruction would have enlightened me; but who was to give it me? My father, perhaps, but he may not have known how, though in his own youth he had written an English grammar and more or less taught it, or he may have thought I would find it out for myself. He would have temperamentally trusted to that; he was always prouder than I of what I did unaided; he believed I could do everything without help. That was an error, but more than I ever could say do I owe to his taste in literature and the constant guidance up to a certain limit which he gave me. When I came back from the fields and woods with the sense of their beauty, and eager to turn it into literature, he guarded me against translating it in the terms of my English poets, with their larks and nightingales, their daisies and cowslips. He contended that our own birds and flowers were quite as good, besides being genuine; but he taught me to love the earlier English classics; and if I began to love the later classics, both English and American, and to be his guide in turn, this is only saying that each one is born of his generation. The time came early in our companionship when he thought fit to tell me that he regarded me as different from other boys of my age; and I had a very great and sweet happiness without alloy of vanity, from his serious and considered words. He did not say that he expected great things of me; though I had to check his fondness in offering my poor endeavors for the recognition of print, and I soon had the support of editors in this. But he justified himself and convinced me by once bringing to our house a kindly editor from a neighboring city whom he showed some of my things, and who carried away with him one of the minutely realistic sketches in which I had begun to practise such art as I have been able to carry farthest. When week after week the handsomely printed Ohio Farmer came with something in it, verse or prose, which I had done, I am not sure I had greater joy in it than my father, though now he thought it well to hide his joy as I always did mine.