Swounds, show me what thou'lt do:Woo't weep? Woo't fight? Woo't fast? Woo't tear thyself?Woo't drink up eisel? Eat a crocodile?I'll do't. Dost thou come here to whine?To outface me with leaping in her grave?Be buried quick with her, and so will I:And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throwMillions of acres on us, till our ground,Singeing his pate against the burning zone,Make Ossa like a wart! Nay, an thou'lt mouth,I'll rant as well as thou!—
“This is mere madness,” observes the queen. Tone it down!
August 12th.
I sat last night brooding over this thing till almost dawn. I could not bring myself to the thought of offering my work again to be judged by such people. I made up my mind to take a different course—I sat and wrote a long letter to a certain poet whom I love and honor. He is known as a critic—he will know. I told him the whole story, and asked him to read the poem.
It was something that I had never thought about, the effect of The Captive upon commonplace people. I was so full of my own rapture—I made my audience out of my own fancy. And now these snuffy little men come peering at it!
My appeal is not to the reading public—my appeal is to great minds and heroic hearts—to the ages that will come when I have gone.
—And can it be that I am to repeat the old, old story—will every one laugh at me and leave me to starve?
—I will get myself together and prepare for a siege. I will find an opening somewhere. You can not shut up a volcano.
August 16th.
There seems to be little use of struggling. I can not control myself. I wander around, restless, unhappy. That horrible prison that I am pent in—God, how I hate it! Such heart-sickening waiting—waiting!—and meanwhile that intolerable treadmill! It drives me wild! I am so full of life, of passion; and to be dragged back—and back—and stamped on! Each day I feel myself weaker; each day my power and my joy are going. Let me go—let me go!
Is my inspiration of no value at all, my ardor, my tenderness, my faith,—all nothing? You treat me as if I were an ox!
It is like being chained in the galleys! The dust and the heat, the jostling crowds, the banging and rattling, the bare, hideous streets—and above it all the wild, rampant vulgarity—the sordidness, the cheapness, the chaffering! My eyes stare at advertisements and signs until they burn me in my head.
Oh, the hell of egotism and vulgarity that is a city!
—“Why so much trouble? Other men bear dust and heat, and do their work without complaining!” Ah, yes!—but they do not have to write poems in the bargain!
If it were for truth and beauty, such a life would be heroism. But the hoards of wealth that they heap up—they spend it upon fine houses, and silly clothes, and gimcracks, and jewels, and rich food to eat, and wines to drink, and cigars to smoke! Bah!—
It is the brutality of it all that drives me wild. I see great, hulking, disgustingbodiesthat live to be pampered and fed. And after that, in the place of minds, I see little restless centers of vanity—hungering, toiling, plotting, intriguing—to be stared at and praised and admired.
August 20th.
I thought that I would surely have heard from my poet by now. I am not a good waiter.
The senior-partner's nephew is a young German, over to learn the language. He is on a furlough from the army. He has close-cropped hair, a low forehead, and two front teeth like a squirrel's. When he smiles he makes you think of a horse. He has opinions, commercial and political, which he enunciates in a loud voice. Think of listening to Prussian opinions!
And there is another clerk who was meant for a variety-show specialist. He hums comic songs and cracks jokes, and conducts witty pantomime incessantly. He is very popular. He is never quiet. Sometimes he slaps you on the back.
I wrestle with my soul all day; the rage of it is like to burst me. The infinite pettiness of it—that is the thing! I am bitten and stung by a swarm of poisonous flies!
August 24th.
Another twelve dollars yesterday! I gasp with relief as if I were hauling a load up successive slopes; here is so much gained, so much safe. I have gotten along on twelve dollars; I have a little over thirty-five.
I believe these things are more wearing than the toil of writing; I know I find it so. Then I accomplish something; here I work myself into nervous frenzies, and chafe and pant for nothing. I can feel how it weakens me; I can feel that I have less elasticity, lessélanevery day. Ah, God, let me go!
August 25th.
Why doesn't he answer my letter?
August 27th.
To-day I took myself off in a corner. I said: “Am I not here, have I not this thing todo? The power that I have in my soul—it is to be used for the doing ofthis; if I am to save my soul, it must be by the doing ofthis! And I am a fool that I do not face the fact. I shall be free some day—that I know—I have only to bide my time and wait. Meanwhile I am to stay here—or until I have money enough; and now I will turn my soul to iron, and do it! I am going to study what I can in this place, and at night I am going to speed home and get into a book. I will never stop again, and never give up—and above all never think, and never feel! I will get books of fact to read—I will read histories, and no more poetry. I will read Motley, and Parkman, and Prescott, and Gibbon, and Macaulay.—Macaulay will not afflict me with wild yearnings, I guess.”
—Is there any author in the world more vulgar than Macaulay?—unless it be Gibbon. Or possibly Chesterfield.
I have heard Chesterfield's letters referred to as a “school for gentlemen.” When the world is a little bit civilized, men will read them as they now read Machiavelli's Prince.
—All these resolutions while I was selling wholesale-paper! I fought quite a battle, and heard some of the old-time music. What a task for a poet,—to fightnotto live!
August 30th.
I have still heard nothing from my poet! I wrote to him to-day to ask him if he had received my letter. Eighteen whole days gone by, and I watching every mail, with The Captive lying idle in a drawer! I can not stand waiting like this—Why do not people answer my letters promptly?
August 31st.
I have been reading George Moore's Evelyn Innes for the last two days. He is striving toward deeper things; but the mark of the beast is in the fiber.
The spiritual struggles of a young lady with two sloppy lovers at once! Of a young and beautiful girl whose first walk on the street with a baronet is a “temptation.” And who turns nun at last and worships the Holy Virgin, in order to forget her nastiness! A Gallicized novelist ought to deal with Gallic characters. While I was reading Evelyn Innes, I could never get away from the impression that I was reading the career of a chambermaid.
And the whole story hinges upon the fact that a woman can not sing the sacred ecstasy of Tristan and Isolde without being a harlot!
I read the Confessions of a Young Man, and I felt the vigor of it, and the daring; but it was a very cheap kind of daring. The fundamental laws of life are occasionally enunciated by commonplace people, and that gives an opportunity to be startling. But I leave it for small boys to gape at such fireworks; my interest is in the stars.
The last chapter runs into absolute brutality. I am accustomed to say that Gautier is a ruffian author, but if there is any ruffianism in Gautier more savage than that sentiment about the “skinful of champagne,” I do not know where to find it.
About such stuff as that I would say that it makes me sick, but it is not worth that—it simply makes me tired. One would not call it impudent, because it is so silly—it is the driveling of a fool. He will get me off in a corner now, will he, and probe my soul? “Out with it!—Why not confess that you'd like to live a life of dissipation if you only had the money!” Why, you poor fool, before I would live such a life, I'd have my eyes torn out, and my ears torn off, and my fingers, and my hands, and my feet. “Why not confess the wild joys of getting drunk on champagne!” Poor fool, I have never tasted champagne.
—“Perhaps that is just the reason,” you add. When the folly of a fool reaches its climax, the fool becomes a wit. But possibly that is it, I never was drunk.
—And yet I know something about drunkenness. I once buried a drunkard. He was my father. He died in a delirium.
There must be something young about my attitude—men smile at me. But I do not find it easy to imagine evil of men. I do not mean the crowd—I do not philosophize about the crowd. But I mean the artists. I was looking at a picture of Musset the other day; it was a noble face—the face of a man; and in the face of a man I read dignity and power—high things that I love and bow before. Here are lips,—and lips are things that speak of beauty; here are eyes,—and eyes are things that seek the light. And now to gaze upon that face and say: “This man lived in foulness; he was the slave of hateful lust—he died rotten, and sodden with drink.”—I say that I do not find it easy.
I have nothing to do with any artist who has anything to do with sin—anything, one way or the other. If a man must still think about sin, let him go back, and let him go down,—let him be a Christian. Let him wrestle with his body, overcome himself, obey laws, and learn fear. To such men and to such ways I can only say: “I have nothing to do with you.” My life is for free men—my words are for free men—for men defying law and purged of fear, for men mad with righteousness. What right have foul men in the temple of my muse? The thought of them is insult to me—away with them—in their presence I will not speak of what I love. For I am a drunkard—yes, and I am drunk all night and all day! And I am a lover—a free lover—knowing no law and defying all restraint. And how can I say such things in the presence of foul men?
Let not any man think that he can feel the love-clasp of my muse while he hides a satyr's body underneath his cloak. Free is my muse, and bold, fearing not the embrace of man, fearing not passion, nor the words of passion,—not the throbbing heart, nor the burning brow, nor the choking voice. But the warmth of her breath and the fire of her eyes, they were kindled at a shrine of which the beast does not know. Let not any man think that he can kiss the lips of my muse while his breath is tainted with the fumes of wine!
An artist is a man with one pleasure—and it is not self-indulgence; an artist is a man with one virtue—and it is not self-restraint. Sweetly and simply will I and my muse take all temptation, knowing not that it tempts, and wondering at the clamor of men. I will eat and drink that I may be nourished, I will sleep that I may be rested, I will dress that I may be warm. When I go among men it shall be to speak the truth, and when I press a woman to my heart, it shall be that a man may be born into the world. There is but one sin that I know, and that is dulness; there is but one virtue, and that is fire. And for the rest, I love pleasure, and hold it sweetest and holiest of all the words I know; the guide-post of all righteousness is pleasure—which whoso learns to read may follow all his days.
September 1st.
“The reason for delay in replying to your letter is that it was mislaid. I am directed by Mr. —— to say that he has so many requests to read manuscripts that he is compelled to make it an invariable rule to decline.
“Secretary.”
So that hope is gone!
That letter—or rather the chain of thoughts which it brought me, made me feel ill to-night. “So many requests!” “An invariable rule!”
So many swarming millions, helpless, useless, dying unknown and unheeded. And I am in the midst of them—helpless, unknown, and unheeded! And now that I have done my work, I can not find any one with faith enough—interest enough—even to look at it!
How could a man who is a poet—who writes things that stir the hearts of men—how could he send such an answer to such a letter as I wrote him? I do not think thatIshall ever send such an answer!
Or is it really true, then, that the world is such a thing that it closes the hearts even of poets? That his ardor and his consecration, his sympathy and love and trust—he gives all to the things of his dreams and never to the men and women he meets?
Oh how shall I find one—just one—warmhearted man!
I begin the trying of the publishers once more to-morrow.
September 2d.
I am in my sixth week! Two weeks of the money is nearly gone—I had to get another pair of shoes and a necktie and to have some things laundered twice. I have to be respectable now, I can not wash my own clothes at the faucet when no one is about.
My “room” costs me seventy-five cents a week, and my food from a dollar and a half to two dollars. At the end of the seventh week I shall have over fifty dollars clear. I have made up my mind to give up the place at the end of that time. Twelve dollars is the most I ever earned, but I can't stand it longer than that.
I shall be clear for nearly four months, and that will surely put me safe until I have found a publisher. I would go away into the country again, only I must have books. I have nothing to write now.
—Oh the heat of this dreadful city; sometimes it takes all my strength to bear that and my drudgery, and nothing else. When the night comes I am panting, and can only shut my eyes.
If I am kept here long, I tell you I shall never, as long as I live, be as strong and keen as I might have been.
So long as I was working, striving for an education, preparing myself, I could bear it. But now I have done all that I can do amid these surroundings. I cry out day and night, “I have earned my freedom!”
September 6th.
He had no business to send me that answer! He had no business to send it! I care not how many such requests he gets! Pain throbbed in that letter, hunger and agony were in it; and if he were a man he would have known it! He had no business to send me that answer! I shall never forgive him for it.
The last publisher said it would take a month; they had many manuscripts on hand, and could not do any better. So I have only to set my teeth together and wait.
I count the days before my escape from that hideous place down-town. The thought of it drives me wild—it gets more and more a torture. Can I stay out the week? I ask.
September 8th.
All day—all day—I have but one thought in my mind—but one thought in my life! I am beset by it, I can not escape it. That horrible shame to which I am subjected!
It turns all my life to gall! It beats down my enthusiasm, it jeers at my faith, it spits into the face of my unselfishness! I come home every night weak and worn and filled with despair, or else with a choking in my throat, and helpless, cruel rage in my soul. Never mind that I am going to be free—the wrong is that it should ever have been—it will stay with me all my days and turn all my life to gall! It will wreck all my visions, all my aspirations, my faith, my eagerness; the memory of it will sound like a mocking voice in my ears, a sneer!
Day by day I strive and struggle and tear my-self to pieces, and sink back worn out; and don't you suppose that has any effect upon me? I can feel it. I see it plain as day, and shudder at it—I am being cowed! I am being tamed, subdued, overpowered; the thing is like a great cold hand that is laid upon me, pressing me down, smothering me! I know it—and I cry out and struggle as if in a nightmare; but it only presses the harder. Why, I was like a lion—restless—savage—all-devouring! Never-ceasing, eager, untamable—hungry for life, for experience, for power! I rushed through in days what others took months at—I watched every instant—I crowded hours into it.
—And now look at me! I crouch and whine—there is an endless moan in my soul. Can you break a man's spirit so that he never rises again? So that all his attempts to be what he was mock at him? So that he nevertriesany more? Look at those poor wretches you pass on the street—those peasants from Europe, from Russia! See the restless, shifting eyes, the cringing gait—thatis what it is to be tamed!
Hateful tyrant of the commonplace—so you will lay your cold hand over me and crush out all the fire from my heart. All this that was to build new empires—new hopes, new virtues, new power; all that I was, and all that I sought to be! Ah, but you will not crush me—understand it well, you may beat me and kick me, you may starve me to death, but you will never overcome me, you will never tame me into one of the pack-horses of society! I will fight while I have a breath in me, while my heart has left one beat.
The time may come when I shall have to drag myself away like a sick beast to die in the mountains; but if it does, I shall go defying you!
Bah!
—How I wish I could find a rich man who could spare it, and from whom I could steal a thousand dollars. I would turn it into a thousand songs that diamonds could not buy—that would build new empires—and then I would pay the poor rich man back.
—I read a poem of Matthew Arnold's last night:
From the world's temptations,From tribulations;From that fierce anguishWherein we languish;From that torpor deepWherein we lie asleep,Heavy as death, cold as the grave,Save, oh save!
September 10th.
A man was talking to me to-day about what I am doing. “I should think you would try to get some work more congenial,” he said, “some literary work.” Yes!—I sell wholesale-paper, and that is bad enough; but at least I do not sell my character.
I to enter into the literary business world! I to forsake my ideals and my standards—to learn to please the public and the men who make money out of the public! Ah, no—let me go on selling paper, and “keep my love as a thing apart—no heathen shall look therein!”
What could I do, besides? And who would give me a chance? I could not review books—I know nothing about modern books, and still less about modern book standards. Neither do I know anything to write that any magazines would want.
—And besides, in four days more, shall I not have fifty or sixty dollars? And what shall I want then?
Ah, how I count the days! And when I am out of this place, how I will run away from it! The very books I read while I was there will always be painful to me.
—They will be glad to get rid of me, too. Poor me—I have given up trying to be understood. All these things pass. My business is with God.
Cicero thinks that the remembering of past sorrows is a pleasure. Yes, when the sorrows are beautiful, noble. But I have sorrows in my life, the thoughts of which send through my whole frame—literally and physically—aspasm.
September 11th.
I told the bald-headed, grim-visaged senior-partner to-day that I was going to leave. He seemed surprised—offered me a “raise.” I told him I was going out of New York.
—I am a liar. Sometimes I philosophize about that. I am an unprincipled idealist. I have not the least respect for fact; I am doing my work. If I could help my work, I would lie serenely in all the six languages I know. And if I were caught, I would say, “Why, yes, of course!”
I think I would rather have a finger cut off than say to a New York business man, “I am a poet!”
September 12th.
I have been forcing myself to read Gibbon, but half of him was all I could stand. I think with astonishment of the reputation of this history, a bare recital of facts, without the least interest or importance, and a recital by the shallowest of men!
The vulgarity of his character is more evident than ever since the repressed parts of his biography have appeared. It is comical. And this man, who has no more understanding of spirituality than a cow, to tell the story of the greatest movement of the soul of man in history!
There is not one gleam of the Christian superstition left in me. I have nothing to fear from the sneers of Gibbon any more than I have from those of Voltaire; but I do not care to hear lectures on the steam-engine by a man who does not believe in steam.
—Some of these days—the last thing that I can see on the horizon of my future—I am going to write a tragedy called Jesus. The time is past, it seems to me, when an artist must leave alone the greatest art-theme of the ages.
Is it not the greatest? Is there any story in history more sublime than the story of this man? A humble, ignorant peasant he was, and out of the faith of his soul he made the future of the world for centuries! It is a thing that makes your brain reel.
I write it casually, but I have shuddered over it far into the deep, deep night. I have dreamed of two acts—one of them Gethsemane, and the other Calvary.—Poor fool, perhaps I shall never write them!
I have burrowed into that soul, seeking out the truths of it; the truths, as distinguished from the ten thousand fancies of men. When I write that drama I shall deal with those truths.
The climax of the scene in the garden of Gethsemane will be a vision in which looms up before him the whole history of Christianity; and that will be the last agony. It will be then that he sweats blood.
That will be something, I think.
September 13th.
To-morrow is the last time I shall ever go into that hellish place! To-morrow is the last time in all my life that I shall ever have to say, “We have this same quality in ninety-pound paper at four sixty-nine!”
Throughout all this thing it seemed to me that when I came out I should no longer have a soul. But it is not so; I shall still keep at it grimly.
September 14th.
And now to-day I make my plans. I must keep near a library; but I shall hunt out a room uptown. There I can be near the Park, and I shall suffer a little less from these hideous noises. I shall go over there and spend every day—find out some place where there are not too many nurse-girls!
I can not begin any other book; I must stand or fall by The Captive. I shall be a “homo unius libri”!
But I can not attempt to write again—ever—in these circumstances. It is not that my force is spent—I am only at the beginning of my life, I see everything in the future. But I could not wrestle with these outside things again—it took all my courage and all my strength to do it once.
There is no reason why I should worry about that. I have fifty-six dollars, and I am free for four months, barring accidents. And surely I shall have found some one to love my book by that time!
And so I set to work reading.
September 15th.
A slight preliminary, of course. I spent a ghastly day hunting for a room. I found one in a sufficiently dirty and cheap place, and then I spent another hour finding a man who would take my trunk for a quarter. Having succeeded in that, I walked up there to save five cents; and when the trunk came the driver tried to charge me fifty cents!
Picture me haggling and arguing on the steps—“Didn't know it was so far—Man didn't understand”—God knows what else! And then he tries to carry off the trunk—and I rushing behind, looking for a policeman! Again more arguing, and a crowd, of course. At last it appears that I have to pay him what he asks and go down to the City Hall and make my complaint—hadn't told him how many steps there were, etc. So finally I agree to carry it up the steps myself, if he'll only leave it for a quarter!
Next you must picture me breaking my back and tearing my fingers and the damned wall paper—while the damned frowsy-headed landlady yells and the damned frowsy-headed boarders stick out their heads! And so in the end I get into my steaming hot room and shut the door and fall down on the bed and burst into tears.
O God, the stings of this bitter, haunting, horrible poverty! The ghastly weight that has hung about my neck since ever I can remember! Oh, shall I ever be free from it? Shall I ever know what it is to have what I ought to have, to think of my work without the intrusion of these degrading pettinesses?
They are so infinite, so endless, so hideous! The thing gets to be a habit of my thoughts; my whole nature is steeped and soaked in it—in filthy sordidness! I plot and I plan all the day—I can not buy a newspaper without hesitating and debating—I am like a ragpicker going about the streets!
Sometimes the thing goads me so that I think I must go mad—when I think of the time that I lose, of the power, of the courage! I walk miles when I am exhausted, to save a car-fare! I wear ragged collars and chafe my neck! I stand waiting in foul-smelling grocery shops with crowds of nasty people! I cook what I eat in a half-dirty frying-pan because I can not afford to pay the servant to wash it! So it is that I drag myself about—chafing and goaded—crouching and cringing like a whipped cur!
My God, when will I be free? My God! My God!
—The boarding-houses that I have been in! The choice collection of memories that I have stored away in my mind, memories of boarding-houses! The landladies' faces—the assorted stenches—the dark hallways—the gabbling, quarreling, filthy, beer-carrying tenants! Oh, I wring my hands and something clutches me in my heart! Let me go! Let me go!
Six times in the course of my life, when I have been starved sick on my own feeding, I have become a “table-boarder”; and out of those six experiences I could make myself another Zola. The infinite variety of animality in those six vile stables—the champing jaws and the slobbering mouths and the rank odor of food! The men who shoveled with their knives or plastered things on their forks as hod-carriers do mortar! The women who sucked in their soup, and the children who smeared their faces and licked their lips and slopped upon the table-cloth! The fat Dutchman who grunted when he ate, and then leaned back and panted! The yellow woman with the false teeth who gathered everything about her on the table! The flashy gentleman with the diamond scarf-pin and the dirty cuffs, who made a tower out of his dirty dishes and then sucked his teeth! O God!
And the loathsome food!—For seven years I have had my nose stamped into this mud, and all in vain; I can still starve, but I can not eat what is not clean.
—Some day I shall put into a book all the rage and all the hate and all the infamy of these things, and it will be a book that will make your flesh sizzle. And you will wonder why I did it!
It will be better than Troilus and Cressida, better than the end of Gulliver's Travels—better than Swellfoot the Tyrant!
I wonder why nobody else ever reads or mentions Swellfoot the Tyrant? I call it the most whole-hearted, thorough-going, soul-satisfying piece of writing in any language that I know.
—When you think of my work you must think of these things! I do not mention them often, but they are never out of my mind. If you should read anything beautiful of mine, you must bear in mind that it is about half a chance that there was a dirty child screaming out in the hall while I wrote it.
September 20th.
It took me a couple of days to realize that I have still not to go down-town. But I have a fine facility in making myself new habits! Just now I am on a four months' studying campaign. It is monotonous—to read about. I get up at six, and when I have had my breakfast and fixed a lunch, I go over into the Park. There are only birds and squirrels and a few tramps about then, and it is glorious. Sometimes I am so happy that I do not want to read; later come the squalling children and the hot sun; but I flit about from place to place. I wonder what they think of me!—
Wer bist du, und was fehlt dir!
I read all day, right straight along, and all night, now that it is not too hot. I have always done my reading by periods—I read our nineteenth-century poets that way, sixteen hours a day; I read Shakespeare in three weeks that way, and finished the month with Milton. So when I got German, I read Goethe and Schiller, and Molière and Hugo again.
Now I am reading history; it gives me the nightmare, but one has to read it.
Every night when I put down my book, I flee in thought to my own land as to a city of refuge. A history where everything counts! A history that is not a mad, blind chaos of blood and horror! A history that has other meaning than the drunken lust and the demon pride of a Napoleon or a Louis le Grand!
—Some day the ages will discern two movements in history: the first, the Christian dispensation, and the second the American.
There is a great deal in knowing how to read, especially with such books as history. I try to read as I write; to lash my author, to make him fill my mind. If he gets sluggish I am soon through with him—I read whole paragraphs in a sentence, and whole volumes in an hour.
September 25th.
The third week of the publisher's month has gone by. God, how cruel is waiting! I wonder if their readers knew how hungry I am if they would not hurry a little!
I say to myself—“There has been enough of this nonsense! Oh, surely there will not be any more, surely these men must take it!”
September 28th.
I still read the literary journals and tingle with excitement thinking of the time when The Captive is discussed in them. Can I believe that this book will not stir the world? If I did not believe it, I could not believe anything!
I feel a new interest now in the authors that people talk about. I want to know who they are and what they do. And all the time I find myself thinking: “Have I more than this man?—More than that man?” That always throws me into despair, because I am a great admirer; and because I am always hypnotized by the last thing that I read.
But I find very little that is great in modern books. Books are better made now than they ever were before—I mean in the way of literary craftsmanship. As far as form goes, there is no author living who would put together such a hodge-podge as Wilhelm Meister, or La Nouvelle Heloïse. But they all imitate each other; they are all mild and tame; there is no real power, no genius among them. They have even forgotten it exists.
I came across this, for instance, the other day in a book of Mr. Howells's:
“In fact, the whole belief in genius seems to me rather a mischievous superstition, and if not mischievous, always, still always, a superstition. From the account of those who talk about it, genius appears to be the attribute of a very potent and admirable prodigy which God has created out of the common for the astonishment and confusion of the rest of us poor human beings. Do they mean anything more or less than the mastery which comes to any man in accordance with his powers and diligence in any direction? If not, why not have an end to the superstition which has caused our race to go on for so long writing and reading of the difference between talent and genius?”
Is not that simply blasphemous?
—Have I genius? Ah, save the word!
How can I know? It is none of my affair—I do my work.
Genius is next to the last and most sacred word we know, next to God; and next to the most abused word. Every man will possess it, in degree proportionate to his vanity. I think if they knew the work and the terror that goes with even a grasp at it, they would not make so free with it.
September 30th.
I wait—I wait for The Captive. I do all these other things—I read, I think, I study—but all the while I am merely passing the time. I am waiting for The Captive to win me the way. All my life hangs on that, I can do nothing else but pray for that—pray for it and yearn for it!
—Yes—and do you know it?—I am sinking down every day! Down, down! The Captive is my high-water mark; where I was when I wrote that I shall never come again in my life—until I am given my freedom and new courage, and can set to work to toil as I did then!
Tell me not about future books, foolish publishers! I have told you I put all that I had and all that I was into that book! And by that book I stand or I fall.
October 3d.
Their month is up. I walked down there to-day and saw them. “The manuscript is now being read—we are awaiting a second report.”
A second! That made my heart go like mad. “Does that mean that the first is favorable?” I asked.
“It means that we are interested in it,” the man answered; “we will let you know shortly.”
Oh this waiting, this waiting!
October 8th.
Ah, God! I came home from the Park tonight, and I saw something that made my heart go down like lead. It hurt me so that I cried out!
My manuscript! It was back again!
O Christ! How the sight of it hurt me! There was a letter with it, and my hand shook as I opened it:
“We are returning you the manuscript of The Captive by messenger herewith, regretting exceedingly that we can not make you a publishing offer upon it.”
Is not this awful? Oh, it is terrible! It is beyond belief! A whole month gone, and only a note like that to show for it! Four weeks of yearning and hoping—of watching the mail in agony—of struggling and toiling to forget! And then a note like this!
Oh, it drives me wild! I sat to-night in a chair motionless, forgetting that I was hungry, forgetting everything. I looked to the future; I had a feeling that I do not think I ever had in my life before—a horrible, black, yawning despair—a thing so fearful that it took my breath away. Suppose you were standing on a bridge over an abyss, and that suddenly it gave way, and in one dreadful instant you realized that you were going down—down like a flash—and that nothing could save you!
So it is to be this, so this is to be my life! I am to send this book to publisher after publisher, and have it come back like this! And meanwhile to spend my time alternating between this room—and the wholesale-paper business!
Yes, I am getting to see the truth! I am a helpless atom, struggling to survive—a glimmering light in the darkness—and I am going out! I am losing—and what shall I do! Who will save me—who will help me?
I was talking to a friend yesterday; he predicted just what happened. “Make one rule,” he said, “expect nothing of the world. When you send out a manuscript,knowthat it is coming back!—Otherwise you go mad.”
But I should go madthatway. Why, what am I to do? How am I to work unless I can get free? I can not live a single day unless I have that hope. And if these blind creatures that make money out of books keep on sending my poem back—why, it will kill me—it will turn me into a fool!
October 9th.
I did not go to bed last night until nearly daylight. I was desperate—I was crazy with perplexity. This thing had never occurred to me as the wildest possibility.
I would pace the floor for hours; and then again sink into a stupor. “They send it back! They don't want it!”—I kept on muttering.—And, poor fool that I am, I had pictured to myself how they would read it. I saw the publisher himself glancing at a line of it by chance, and then rushing on. I saw him declaiming it with excited eyes—as I used to declaim it! Poor fool!
—Well, I made another desperate attempt. I wrote last night to another poet that I respect—(the list is not very long). I wrote in the heat of my despair—I told him the whole story. I said that I was crying for the judgment of some one who had love and enthusiasm; some one who had another idea than making money out of it. I told him that I knew he had many such requests, but that he never had one from a man who had worked as I had. I pleaded that he need only read a few lines—I begged him to let me hear from him at once.
—And now I shall wait. I can't do anything else but wait!
October 10th.
I tried to read a novel to-day, but I could not fix my attention—I could not do anything.
October 11th.
“I answer your letter at once as you ask me to. In the first place let me assure you of my sympathy. You are at a stage at which all poets—or nearly all—have to pass. Do not let yourself be disheartened—keep at it—and if you work as you write you will come out the victor in the end.
“As to my reading the book, you must believe what I tell you—that I am simply crowded. I have no time to explain, but I could not possibly do it now, nor can I tell you when I could. Go ahead and try the publishers—there are enough of them. And take my advice—do not go on clinging to that book—do not pin all your hope to that—go on—go on! Maybe itisyoung and exaggerated—what of it? Go on!—Meanwhile your circumstances seem to you hard—but in future years when you look back at them you will see, as all men see, that it was in that struggle that you got your strength.”
It is a lie! It is a lie! It is silly cant—it is brutal stupidity! What, you try to tell me that it is in contest with these degradations—these horrors—that I am to find my enthusiasm and my hope! Am I a dog that you must kick me to my task?—It is a lie, I say—it is a lie!
If you could not find time to read my work, very well; but you did not have to sugar the pill with silly platitudes such as those. “Go on, go on!” My God, what a mockery! Is it not to go on that I am panting day and night—is it not with the hunger to go on that I am mad?—You fool—do you think I wrote to you because I wanted some one to admire me—because I had the need of praise and encouragement in my work? Give me a year's freedom—give me two hundred dollars—and I'll show you how much I care for your praise.
But then you chain me here to your torture stake, and bid me “Go on! Go on!”
—And it is in that struggle that I am to get my strength! That sentence burns in my blood, it stings me! What is this struggle that you prate about, anyway? And what do you mean by “getting my strength?” Did I get my strength to write The Captive that day when those fishwives moved in next door to me? Did I get my strength to dream of my new work that day when I was chasing after an express-driver to save a quarter? Do I get it now when I am sitting here panting and ill with a headache, and with despair, and with lack of food? Damn such asininity, I say!
What do you mean, I cry—what do you mean? Would it have helped Kant to solve the problems of the universe to have had a swarm of mosquitoes buzzing about his face? Would it have helped Beethoven to compose his symphonies to have had a dance hall over his head? What ghastly farce it is! That a poet is helped to realize his dreams and his joys in this hellish, reeking, market-place of a city! Why, I tell you, sir, that every hour that I have lived in it I have known that I have paid out unmeasured powers of my soul! And I know now, as every other poet knows, that when I am out of it I come with what pittance of strength I have been able to save from the horrible ordeal. Do you think that I am a fool that I do not know what inspires me and what degrades me? Why, sir, I sit here and watch my spirit wither like a frost-bitten plant!
Such things bring tears of indignation into my eyes.
—As a matter of simple reference, if any one wants to know what I imagine helps a poet—it is to live in the woods, to think and to dream, to read books and hear music, to eat wholesome food—and, above all, to escape from hot asphalt streets, cable-car gongs, and flaring advertisements of soaps and cigars.
October 12th.
I had an adventure to-day. I woke up with a headache, dull, sick, discouraged. I cared no more about anything. I got out The Captive and made ready to take it to the publishers.
And then I thought I would read a little of it.
I sat down in the corner—I forgot the publishers—I sat reading—reading—and my heart beat fast, and my hands shook, and all my soul rose in one hymn of joy!
Oh world, do your worst, I do not care! You may turn me off—but the gates of heaven are open! I will go on—I will bear anything—bear all things! I will wait and live and learn meanwhile, knowing with all my soul what this book is and what it must bring. So long as I can read it, I can wake my soul again.
It is at the publishers'. I will read books meantime and be happy.
I saw a manuscript clerk this time. She was very airy. I fear I am a sad-looking poet—my buttonholes are beginning to wear out. “We never read manuscripts out of turn,” she said. “It will take them three or four weeks.”
—Yes, good poet, that is my answer to you. I can not take your advice—I will cling to my book—I will pin all my hopes to it! I will toil and strive for it, I will haunt men with it, I will shout it from the housetops. No other book—no future book—thisbook! It is a great book—a great book—it is—itis!
I am not ignorant of the price it costs to do that; it is my fate that I have to pay it. I can see, for instance, how Wordsworth paid it—Wordsworth, our greatest, our noblest poet since Milton. He had his sacred inspiration, and the world laughed at it; and so, grimly, systematically, he set to work to teach them—to say to all men—to say to himself—to say day and night—“Itispoetry! It isgreatpoetry! It is—it is!”
And of course at last he made them believe him; and when they believed him, he—Wordsworth—was a matter-of-fact, self-centered, dull and poor old man.
—It all rests with you, good world! How long must I stand here and knock at the door?
October 18th.
I am reading, reading—and trying to forget meanwhile! When I get through my long list of histories I shall go back to my Greek dramatists again. My Greek is getting better now—I expect to have a happy time with Aristophanes.—He is the funniest man that ever lived, Aristophanes.
Then I am coming back to read the French novelists. There are many of them I do not know. (I do not expect to like them—I do not like Frenchmen.)
October 22d.
I was glancing to-day over a volume of Shelley's, and the memory of old glories thrilled in me. Ah, let me not forget what Shelley was to me in my young struggling days! Let me not forget while I am wrestling with a dull world—let me not forget what a poet is to young men hungering for beauty! Let me not forget!
Yes, it is to such that my appeal is, it is by such that I will be judged! It is for such that I toil! For hearts upon whom the cold world has not laid its hand! For the poets and the seekers of all ages! Oh come to me, poets and seekers of all ages—dwell in my memory and strengthen my soul! That I go not down altogether—that I be not overcome by the dull things about me!
These thoughts are not becoming to a reader of history. But I am not a good reader of history—the old beasts are still growling within me. Something starts a longing in me—I cry out that I am getting dull, that I am going down, that I am putting off—I, who never put off before! And so the old storms rise and the great waves come rolling again!
October 25th.
I read that over just now. Yes, it is this that I dread. I dread the habit of not striving! When that becomes my habit it is my death! And here I sit, day by day—doing just the thing I dread! “Let me gonow!” something shouts in me. “Now—or I shall never go at all!”
Oh, if I could find some word to tell men the terror of that thought!
—It is my life—that is what it is! To obey this thing within me, to save this thing within me, tofindthis thing within me—that is my life!
It is a demon thing—it is a thing that has lifted me up by the hair of my head and shaken me—that has glared at me with the wild eyes of a beast—that has beaten me like a storm of wind and struck me down upon the ground! It shakes me now—it shakes me all the time—it makes me scream with pain—incoherently, frantically. “Oh save me!—Spare me!—Let me go!”
I rave, you say—yes, I know. That is because I can not say what I feel. But what matters it?
Sometimes I say to myself, “I put all that in The Captive, and men have not heard it! And now, what can I do that theywillhear—shall I have to go out in the streets and scream? Or what other desperate thing is there?”
—Mark this, oh you world that I can not make hear me! Some desperate thing I shall do—I will not sit here and be respectable always!
—I wonder what locusts taste like, and just where one could find wild honey.
October 29th.
I sang a song to-day—a mad, mad song! I wish I could bring it back. It came to me unexpectedly, while I was kneeling by the bed, thinking.
I have forgotten it all now—one always forgets his best songs. I have not a line of this one, except the chorus: