The Shadow Of A Dream. William Dean Howells

      Part First: Faulkner

      I

      DOUGLAS FAULKNER was of a type once commoner in the West than now, I fancy. In fact, many of the circumstances that tended to shape such a character, with the conditions that repressed and the conditions that evolved it, have changed so vastly that they may almost be said not to exist any longer.

      He was a lawyer, with a high ideal of professional honor, and in his personal relations he was known to be almost fantastically delicate, generous, and faithful. At the same time he was a "practical" politician; he adhered to his party in all its measures; he rose rapidly to be a leader in it, and was an unscrupulous manager of caucuses and conventions. For a while he was editor of the party organ in his city, and he wrote caustic articles for it which were rather in the line of his political than his personal morality. This employment was supposed to be more congenial. than his profession to the literary taste for which he had a large repute among his more unliterary acquaintance. They said that Faulkner could have been an author if he had chosen, and they implied that this was not worth while with a man who could be something in law and politics. Their belief had followed him from Muskingum University, where he was graduated with distinction in letters and forensics. The school was not then on so grand a scale as its name, and a little of the humanities might have gone a long way in it; but Faulkner was really a lover of books, and a reader of them, whether he could ever have been a writer of them or not; and he kept up his habit of reading after he entered active life.

      It was during his editorial phase that I came from the country to be a writer on the opposition newspaper in his city, and something I did caught his fancy: some sketch of the sort I was always trying at, or some pert criticism, or some flippant satire of his party friends. He came to see me, and asked me to his house, for a talk, he said, about literature; and when I went I chose to find him not very modern in his preferences. He wanted to talk to me about Byron and Shelley, Scott and Cooper, Lamartine and Schiller, Irving and Goldsmith, when I was full of Tennyson and Heine, Emerson and Lowell, George Eliot and Hawthorne and Thackeray; and he rather bored me, showing me fine editions of his favorites. I was surprised to learn that he was only a few years older than myself: he had filled my mind so long as a politician that I had supposed him a veteran of thirty, at least, and he proved to be not more than twenty-six. Still, as I was only twenty-two I paid him the homage of a younger man, but I remember deciding that he was something of a sentimentalist. He seemed anxious to account for himself in his public character, so out of keeping with the other lives he led; he said he was sorry that his mother (with whom he lived in her widowhood) was out of town; she was the inspiration of all his love of literature, he said; and would have been so glad to see me. I was flattered, for the Faulkners were of the first social importance; they were of Virginian extraction. From his library he took me into what he called his den, and introduced me to a friend of his who sat smoking in a corner, and whom I saw to be a tall young Episcopal clergyman when he stood up. The night was very hot; Faulkner had in some claret punch, and the Rev. Mr. Nevil drank with us. He did not talk much, and I perceived that he was the matter-of-fact partner in a friendship which was very romantic on Faulkner's side, and which appeared to date back to their college days. That was now a good while ago, but they seemed to be in the habit of meeting often, and to have kept up their friendship in all its first fervor. Mr. Nevil was very handsome, with a regular face, and a bloom on it quite girlishly peachy, and very pure, still, earnest blue eyes. He looked physically and spiritually wholesome; but Faulkner certainly did not look wholesome in the matter of his complexion at least. It was pale, with a sort of smokiness, and his black, straight hair strung down in points over his forehead; his beautiful dark eyes were restlessly brilliant; he stooped a little, and he was, as they say in the West, loose-hung. I noticed his hands, long, nervous, with fingers that trembled, as he rested their tips, a little yellowed from his cigar, on a book.

      It was a volume of De Quincey, on whom we all came together in literature, and we happened to talk especially of his essay on Kant, and of the dreams which afflicted the philosopher's old age, and which no doubt De Quincey picturesquely makes the most of. Then we began to tell our own dreams, the ghastlier ones; and Faulkner said he sometimes had dreams, humiliating, disgraceful, loathsome, that followed him far into the next day with a sense of actual occurrence. He was very vivid about them, and in spite of the want of modernity in his literary preferences, I began to think he might really have been a writer. He said that sometimes he did not see why we should not attribute such dreams to the Evil One, who might have easier access to a man in the helplessness of sleep; but Nevil agreed with me that they were more likely to come from a late supper. Faulkner submitted, but he said they were a real affliction, and their persistence in a man's waking thoughts might almost influence his life.

      When I took my leave he followed me to his gate, in his bare head and slippers; it was moonlight, and he walked a long way homeward with me. We led a very simple life in our little city then, and a man might go bareheaded and slipper-footed about its streets at night as much as he liked. Now and then we met a policeman, and Faulkner nodded, with the facile "Ah, Tommy!" or "Hello, Mike!" of a man inside politics. I told him I envied him his ability to mingle with the people in that way, and he said it was not worth while.

      "You are on the right track, and I hope you'll stick to it. We ought to have some Western authors; the West's ripe for it. I used to have the conceit to think I could have done something myself in literature, if I'd kept on after I left college."

      I murmured some civilities to the effect that this was what all his friends thought.

      "Well, it's too late, now," he said, "if ever it was early enough. I was foredoomed to the law; my father wouldn't hear of anything else, and I don't know that I blame him. I might have made a spoon, but I should certainly have spoiled a horn. A man generally does what he's fit for. Now there's Nevil--Don't you like Nevil?"

      I said, "Very much," though really I had not thought it very seemly for a clergyman to smoke, and drink claret punch: I was very severe in those days.

      Faulkner went on: "Nevil's an instance, a perfect case in point. If ever there was a human creature born into the world to do just the work he is doing, it's Nevil. I can't tell you how much that fellow has been to me, March!" This was the second time we had met; but Faulkner was already on terms of comradery with me; he was the kind of man who could hold no middle course; he must stand haughtily aloof, or he must take you to his heart. As he spoke, he put his long arm across my shoulders, and kept it there while we walked. "I was inclined to be pretty wild in college, and I had got to running very free when