THE MEMORY OFJOSEPH ALEXANDER HOWELLS
BORN AT ST. CLAIRSVILLE, OHIO, 1832
DIED AT AUBURNDALE, FLORIDA, 1912
AMERICAN CONSUL AT TURK’S ISLAND
FROM 1905 TO 1912
PRINTER AND THEN EDITOR,
HE IMPOSED IN PAGES ON THIS STONE,
WHICH HE DESIRED SHOULD MARK,
HIS FINAL RESTING PLACE,
THE TYPES OF THE ASHTABULA SENTINEL
FROM 1851 TO 1905
STONE, UPON WHICH WITH HANDS OF BOY AND MAN
HE FRAMED THE HISTORY OF HIS TIME UNTIL
WEEK AFTER WEEK THE VARYING RECORD RAN
TO ITS HALF-CENTURIED TALE OF WELL AND ILL.
REMEMBER, NOW, HOW TRUE THROUGH ALL THOSE DAYS
HE WAS, FRIEND, BROTHER, HUSBAND, FATHER, SON,
FILL THE WHOLE LIMIT OF YOUR SPACE WITH PRAISE,
THERE NEEDS NO ROOM FOR BLAME, BLAME THERE WAS NONE
W. D. HOWELLS
One of the oddest things of which I heard on my trip was that Mr. Howells is credited with being born in more than one place. A wealthy man has bought the property where the novelist dwelt in the family wanderings long after leaving Martin’s Ferry. The owner and others in the region are convinced that their locality is Mr. Howells’s first home. He was even considering erecting a birth-place for the distinguished author from some ruinous buildings on the premises. But I suppose the fact that a person is becoming legendary in his native region attests the genuineness and permanency of his fame.
What vital influence, if any, the Ohio country of Mr. Howells’s youth had on his genius I am uncertain. The small cities and rustic villages, and the farmlands with their stump-dotted fields that were still being wrested from the wilderness of the abounding woods, all left their impress, no doubt, but I incline to the belief that his admirable quality and large place in the literature of our day might be the same, even if the environment had been radically different.
Clifton Johnson.
June, 1917.
YEARS OF MY YOUTH
I
IT is hard to know the child’s own earliest recollections from the things it has been told of itself by those with whom its life began. They remember for it the past which it afterward seems to remember for itself; the wavering outline of its nature is shadowed against the background of family, and from this it imagines an individual existence which has not yet begun. The events then have the quality of things dreamt, not lived, and they remain of that impalpable and elusive quality in all the after years.
I
Of the facts which I must believe from the witness of others, is the fact that I was born on the 1st of March, 1837, at Martin’s Ferry, Belmont County, Ohio. My father’s name was William Cooper Howells, and my mother’s was Mary Dean; they were married six years before my birth, and I was the second child in their family of eight. On my father’s side my people were wholly Welsh, except his English grandmother, and on my mother’s side wholly German, except her Irish father, of whom it is mainly known that he knew how to win my grandmother Elizabeth Dock away from her very loving family, where they dwelt in great Pennsylvania-German comfort and prosperity on their farm near Harrisburg, to share with him the hardships of the wild country over the westward mountains. She was the favorite of her brothers and sisters, and the best-beloved of her mother, perhaps because she was the youngest; there is a shadowy legend that she went one evening to milk the cows, and did not return from following after her husband; but I cannot associate this romantic story with the ageing grandmother whom I tenderly loved when a child, and whom I still fondly remember. She spoke with a strong German accent, and she had her Luther Bible, for she never read English. Sometimes she came to visit my homesick mother after we went to live in southern Ohio; once I went with my mother to visit her in the little town where I was born, and of that visit I have the remembrance of her stopping me on the stairs, one morning when I had been out, and asking me in her German idiom and accent, “What fur a tay is it, child?”
I can reasonably suppose that it is because of the mixture of Welsh, German, and Irish in me that I feel myself so typically American, and that I am of the imaginative temperament which has enabled me all the conscious years of my life to see reality more iridescent and beautiful, or more lurid and terrible than any make-believe about reality. Among my father’s people the first who left Wales was his great-grandfather. He established himself in London as a clock and watch maker, and I like to believe that it is his name which my tall clock, paneled in the lovely chinoiserie of Queen Anne’s time, bears graven on its dial. Two sons followed him, and wrought at the same art, then almost a fine art, and one of them married in London and took his English wife back with him to Wales. His people were, so far as my actual knowledge goes, middle-class Welsh, but the family is of such a remote antiquity as in its present dotage not to know what part of Wales it came from. As to our lineage a Welsh clergyman, a few years ago, noting the identity of name, invited me to the fond conjecture of descent from Hywel Dda, or Howel the Good, who became king of Wales about the time of Alfred the Great. He codified the laws or rather the customs of his realm, and produced one of the most interesting books I have read, and I have finally preferred him as an ancestor because he was the first literary man of our name. There was a time when I leaned toward the delightful James Howell, who wrote the Familiar Letters and many books in verse and prose, and was of several shades of politics in the difficult days of Charles and Oliver; but I was forced to relinquish him because he was never married. My father, for his part, when once questioned as to our origin, answered that so far as he could make out we derived from a blacksmith, whom he considered a good sort of ancestor, but he could not name him, and he must have been, whatever his merit, a person of extreme obscurity.
There is no record of the time when my great-grandfather with his brothers went to London and fixed there as watchmakers. My tall clock, which bears our name on its dial, has no date, and I can only imagine their London epoch to have begun about the middle of the eighteenth century. Being Welsh, they were no doubt musical, and I like to cherish the tradition of singing and playing women in our line, and a somehow cousinship with the famous Parepa. But this is very uncertain; what is certain is that when my great-grandfather went back to Wales he fixed himself in the little town of Hay, where he began the manufacture of Welsh flannels, a fabric still esteemed for its many virtues, and greatly prospered. When I visited Hay in 1883 (my father always call it, after the old fashion, The Hay, which was the right version of its Norman name of La Haye), three of his mills were yet standing, and one of them was working, very modestly, on the sloping bank of the lovely river Wye. Another had sunk to be a stable, but the third,
