RECOLLECTIONS OF LIFE IN OHIO, KROM isis TO BY WILLIAM COOPER
HOWELLS. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HIS SON, WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS.
CINCINNATI THE ROBERT CLARKE COMPANY, 1895. WILLIAM COOPER HOWELLS.
COPYRIGHT, 1895, BY THE ROBERT CLARKE COMPANY. INTRODUCTION. It was
at my suggestion that my father began, ten or twelve years ago, to
set down the facts of his early life. At first the record was meant
for his family only, but when I came to read it over I found it so
full of expe riences and observations of general interest, that I
urged him to continue it, with a view to its final publication, and
yet keep it as simple and informal as he had origi nally intended.
This will account for its appearance and character in the present
shape. He was never able to finish it, and the work of revision
fell to me after his death. In doing this work I felt that the
value of his reminiscences to the public was, of course, in the per
spective they afforded of times and conditions long past away, and
I have tried to free them from all personalities not essential to
this. Necessarily, however, they remain very personal, as far as
the writer and his immediate family are concerned. These, indeed,
constitute the background of a picture, which could not have had
due relief without them. A middle-class English family, coming to
Ohio early in the iii iv Introduction. century, could see the
primitive American life more or less from the outside. They would
be in it, but not of it and their point of view would have distinct
advan tages for the study of its peculiarities. My father was
always a very close and critical observer, both of nature and of
human nature, and I may say that he was equally a lover of both.
When Ifirst began to make my ob servations of him, I used to think,
with that wisdom of youth which we are not so sure of later, that
he was easily deceived in people but I have since come to see that
he understood quite well the character of such peo ple, and that
what he trusted in them was human na ture, which in the long run
did not deceive him. There was that in him which appealed to the
better qualities of those he came in contact with, and made them
wish to be as good as he thought them capable of being. He was not
a poet in tLe artistic sense, but he was a poet in his view of
life, the universe, creation and his dream of it included man, as
well as the woods and fields and their citizenship. His first
emotion concerning every form of life was sympathetic he wished to
get upon common ground with every person and with every thing, But
he had the philosophic rather than the imagin ative temperament,
and what he sometimes thought he wished to do in literature and in
art for he used, when young, to write verse and to draw, he would
probably not have done if he had enjoyed all those opportunities
Introduction. y and advantages which, circumstances denied him. In
the things which vitally pleased him, circumstance de nied him
nothing. All his long life he had full scope for the contemplation,
serene and wise and gentle, to which this world and the world to
come wore mostly a hopeful aspect. The real hurt which adverse
fortune did him was to make him contented with makeshifts in the
material and aesthetic results he aimed at. In the conditions that
hampered him through the whole of his childhood and earlier
manhood, a makeshift was the ut most he could achieve, and the
perfect thing must bealways postponed until the habit of makeshifts
became confirmed with him. Consequently, he was not a very good
draughtsman, not a very good poet, not a very good farmer, not a
very good printer, not a very good editor, according to the several
standards of our more settled times but he was the very best man I
have ever known. I say this with a full sense of his faults, both
of tem perament and of character...
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