← catalogue

The Journal of Arthur Stirling : ("The Valley of the Shadow")

by Upton Sinclair · English · Gutenberg #7774 · 416,627 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Journal of Arthur Stirling : ("The Valley of the Shadow")
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Journal of Arthur Stirling : ("The Valley of the Shadow")

Author: Upton Sinclair


        
Release date: March 1, 2005 [eBook #7774]
                Most recently updated: March 10, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7774

Credits: Text file produced by Distributed Proofreaders
        
        HTML file produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JOURNAL OF ARTHUR STIRLING : ("THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW") ***




Produced by Distributed Proofreaders






THE JOURNAL OF ARTHUR STIRLING

“THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW”

By Upton Sinclair

Revised And Condensed With An Introductory Sketch




EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION


The matter which is given to the public in this book will speak with a
voice of its own; it is necessary, however, to say a few words in advance
to inform the reader of its history.

The writer of the journal herein contained was not known, I believe,
to more than a dozen people in this huge city in which he lived. I am
quite certain that I and my wife were the only persons he ever called his
friends. I met him shortly after his graduation from college, and for the
past few years I knew, and I alone, of a life of artistic devotion of such
passionate fervor as I expect never to meet with again.

Arthur Stirling was entirely a self-educated man; he had worked at I know
not how many impossible occupations, and labored in the night-time like
the heroes one reads about. He taught himself to read five languages, and
at the time when I saw him last he knew more great poetry by heart than
any man of letters that I have ever met. He was the author of one book,
a tragedy in blank verse, called The Captive; that drama forms the chief
theme of this journal. For the rest, it seems to me enough to quote this
notice, which appeared in the New York Times for June 9, 1902.

  STIRLING.--By suicide in the Hudson River, poet and
     man of genius, in the 22d year of his age, only son of
     Richard T. and Grace Stirling, deceased, of Chicago.
       Chicago papers please copy.

Arthur Stirling was in appearance a tall, dark-haired boy--he was really
only a boy--with a singularly beautiful face, and a strange wistful
expression of the eyes that I think will haunt me as long as I live. I made
him, somewhat externally and feebly, I fear, one of the characters in a
recently published novel. That he was a lonely spirit will be plain enough
from his writings; he lived among the poverty-haunted thousands of this
city, without (so he once told me) ever speaking to a living soul for a
week. Pecuniarily I could not help him--for though he was poor, I was
scarcely less so. At the time of his frightful death I had not seen him for
nearly two months--owing to circumstances which were in no way my fault,
but for which I can nevertheless not forgive myself.

The writing of The Captive, as described in these papers, was begun in
April, 1901. I was myself at that time in the midst of a struggle to have
a book published. It was not really published until late in that year--at
which time The Captive was finished and already several times rejected.
It was an understood thing between us that should my book succeed it would
mean freedom for both of us, but that, unfortunately, was not to be.

Early in April of 1902 I had succeeded in laying by provisions enough to
last me while I wrote another book, and I fled away to put up my tent in
the wilderness. The last time that I ever saw Arthur Stirling was in his
room the night before I left. He smiled very bravely and said that he would
keep his courage up, that he was pretty sure he would come out all right.

I did not expect him to write often--I knew that he was too poor for that;
but after six weeks had passed and I had not heard from him at all, I
wrote to a friend to go and see him. It developed that he had moved. The
lodging-house keeper could only say that he had left her his baggage, being
unable to pay his rent; and that he “looked sick.” Where he went she did
not know, and all efforts of mine to find him were of no avail. The only
person that I knew of to ask was a certain young girl, a typewriter, who
had known him for years, and who had worshiped him with a strange and
terrible passion--who would have been his wife, or his slave, if he had not
been as iron in such things, a man so lost in his vision that I suppose he
always thought she was lost in it too. This girl had copied his manuscripts
for years, with the plea that he might pay her when he “succeeded”; and she
has all of his manuscripts now, except what I have, if she is alive. All
that we could learn was that she had “gone away”; I feel pretty certain
that she went in search of him.

In addition, all that I have to tell is that on Monday, June 9th last I
received a large express package from Arthur. It was sent from New York,
but marked as coming from another person--evidently to avoid giving an
address of his own. Upon opening it I found two packages, one of them
carefully sealed and marked upon the outside, The Captive; the other was
the manuscript of this journal, and upon the top of it was the following
letter:

    MY DEAR ----: You have no doubt been wondering what has become
    of me. I have been having a hard time of it. I wish I could
    find some way to make this thing a little easier, but I can
    not. When you read this letter I shall be dead. There is
    nothing that I can tell you about it that you will not read in
    the papers I send you. It is simply that I was born to be an
    artist, and that as anything else I can not live. The burden
    that has been laid upon me I can not bear another day. I have
    told the whole story of it in this book--I have kept myself
    alive for months, sick and weeping with agony, in order that I
    might tear it out of my heart and get it written. It has been
    my last prayer that the struggle my life has been may somehow
    not be useless. There will come others after me--others perhaps
    keener than I--and oh, the world must not kill them all!

    You will take this manuscript, please, and go over it, and cut
    out what you like to make it printable, and write a few words
    to make people understand about it. And then see if any one
    will publish it. You know more about all these things than I
    do. If it should sell, keep part of the money for your own
    work and give the rest to poor Ellen. As to The Captive--I
    all but burned it, as you will read; but keep it, sealed as
    I have sealed it, for two years, and then offer it to some
    publishers--to others than the nine who have already rejected
    it. If you can not find any one to take it, then burn it, or
    keep it for love, I do not care which.

    I am writing this on Thursday night, and I am almost dead. I
    mean to get some money to-morrow, and then to buy a ticket for
    as far up the Hudson as I can go. In the evening I mean to find
    a steep bank, and, with a heavy dumb-bell I have bought, and
    a strong rope, I think I can find the peace that I have been
    seeking.

    The first thing that I have to say to you about it is, that
    when you get this letter it will be over and done, and that I
    want you, for God's sake, not to make any fuss. No one will
    find my body and no one will care about it. You need not think
    it necessary to notify the newspapers--what I'm sending you
    here is literature and not journalism. I have no earthly
    belongings left except these MSS., upon which you will have to
    pay the toll. I have written to M----, a man who once did some
    typewriting for me, asking him to use a dollar he owes me in
    putting a notice in one of the papers. I suppose I owe that to
    the people out West.

    I can't write you to-night--before God I can't; my head is going
    like a steel-mill, and I'm _so_ sick. You will get over
    this somehow, and go on and do your task and win. And if the
    memory of my prayer can help you, that will be something. Do
    the work of both of us if you can. Only, if you do pull through,
    remember my last cry--remember the young artist! There is no
    other fight so worth fighting--take it upon you--shout it day
    and night at them--what things they do with their young artists!

    God bless you, dear friend. Yours, ARTHUR.

The above is the only tidings of him, excepting the extended accounts of
his death which appeared in the New York Times and the New York World for
June 10 and 11, 1902, and several letters which he wrote to other people.
There remains only to say a few words as to the journal.

It is scrawled upon old note-books and loose sheets of paper. The matter,
although a diary, contains odd bits of his writings--one of two letters
to me which he had me send back, and some extracts from an essay which
a friend of mine was offering at that time to magazines in the hope of
placing it for him. There is a problem about the work which I leave
to others to solve--how much of it was written as dated, and how much
afterward, as a piece of art, as a testament of his sorrow. Parts of it
have struck me as having been composed in the latter way, and the last
pages, of course, imply as much.

Extraordinary pages they are to me. That a man who was about to take his
life should have written them is one of the strangest cases of artistic
absorption I know of in literature. But Arthur Stirling was a man lost in
his art just so--so full of it, so drunk with it, that nothing in life had
other meaning to him. To quote the words he loved, from the last of his
heroes, he longed for excellence “as the lion longs for his food.”

So he lived and so he worked; the world had no use for his work, and so he
died.

S.

NEW YORK, _November 15, 1902_.




READER:

I do not know if “The Valley of the Shadow” means to you what it means to
me; I do not know if it means anything at all to you. But I have sought
long and far for these words, to utter an all but unutterable thought.

When you walk in the forest you do not count the lives that you tread into
nothingness. When you rejoice with the springtime you do not hear the cries
of the young things that are choked and beaten down and dying. When you
watch the wild thing in your snare you do not know the meaning of the torn
limbs, and the throbbing heart, and the awful silence of the creature
trapped. When you go where the poor live, and see thin faces and hungry
eyes and crouching limbs, you do not think of these things either.

But I, reader--I dwell in the Valley of the Shadow.

Sometimes it is silent in my Valley, and the creatures sit in terror of
their own voices; sometimes there are screams that pierce the sky; but
there is never any answer in my Valley. There are quivering hands there,
and racked limbs, and aching hearts, and panting souls. There is gasping
struggle, glaring failure--maniac despair. For over my Valley rolls _The
Shadow_, a giant thing, moving with the weight of mountains. And you
stare at it, you feel it; you scream, you pray, you weep; you hold up your
hands to your God, you grow mad; but the Shadow moves like Time, like the
sun, and the planets in the sky. It rolls over you, and it rolls on; and
then you cry out no more.

It is that way in my Valley. The Shadow is the Shadow of Death.




CONTENTS


EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

THE AUTHOR TO THE READER

PART I. WRITING A POEM

    II. SEEKING A PUBLISHER

   III. THE END




PART I. WRITING A POEM


The book! The book! This day, Saturday, the sixth day of April, 1901, I
begin the book!

I have never kept a journal--I have been too busy living; but to-day I
begin a journal. I am so built that I can do but one thing at a time. Now
that I have begun The Captive, I must be haunted with it all day; when I
am not writing it I must be dreaming it, or restless because I am not.
Therefore it occurred to me that in the hours of weariness I would write
about it what was in my mind--what fears and what hopes; why and how I
write it will be a story in itself, and some day I think it will be read.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have come to the last stage of the fight, and I see the goal. I will tell
the story, and by and by wise editors can print it in the Appendix!

Yesterday I was a cable-car conductor, and to-day I am a poet!

I know of some immortal poems that were written by a druggist's clerk, and
some by a gager of liquid barrels, but none by a cable-car conductor. “It
sounds interesting, tell us about it!” says the reader. I shall, but not
to-day.

To-day I begin the book!

       *       *       *       *       *

I did not write that on April 6th, I wrote it a month ago--one day when I
was thinking about this. I put it there now, because it will do to begin;
but I had no jests in my heart on April 6th.

       *       *       *       *       *

April 10th.

I have been for four days in a kind of frenzy. I have come down like a
collapsed balloon, and I think I have had enough for once.

I have written the opening scene, but not finally; and then I got into the
middle--I could not help it. How in God's name I am ever to do this fearful
thing, I don't know; it frightens me, and sometimes I lose all heart.

       *       *       *       *       *

I suppose I shall have to begin again tonight. I must eat something first,
though. That is one of my handicaps: I wear myself out and have to stop and
eat. Will anybody ever love me for this work, will anybody ever understand
it?

I suppose I can get back where I was yesterday, but always it grows harder,
and more stern. I set my teeth together.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was like the bursting of an overstrained dam, these last four days. How
long I have been pent up--eighteen months! And eighteen months seems like a
lifetime to me. I have been a bloodhound in the leash, hungering--hungering
for this thing, and the longing has piled up in me day by day. Sometimes it
has been more than I could bear; and when the time was near, I was so wild
that I was sick. The book! The book! Freedom and the book!

And last Saturday I went out of the hell-house where I have been pent so
long, and I covered my face with my hands and fled away home--away to the
little corner that is mine. There I flung myself down and sobbed like a
child. It was relief--it was joy--it was fear! It was everything! The
book! The book! Then I got up--and the world seemed to go behind me, and
I was drunk. I heard a voice calling--it thundered in my ears--that I was
free--that my hour was come--that I might live--that I might live--live!
And I could have shouted it--I know that I laughed it aloud. Every time I
thought the thought it was like the throbbing of wings to me--“Free! Free!”

No one can understand this--no one who has not a demon in his soul. No one
who does not know how I have been choked--what horrors I have borne.

I am through with that--I did not think of that. I am free! They will never
have me back.

That motive alone would drive me to my work, would make me dare _anything_.
But I do not need that motive.

       *       *       *       *       *

I think only of the book. I thought of it last Saturday, and it swept me
away out of myself. I had planned the opening scene; but then the thought
of the triumph-song took hold of me, and it drove me mad. That song was
what I had thought I could never do--I had never dared to think of it.
And it came to me--it came! Wild, incoherent, overwhelming, it came, the
victorious hymn. I could not think of remembering it; it was not poetry--it
was reality. _I_ was the Captive, _I_ had won freedom--a faith and a
vision!

So it throbbed on and on, and I was choked, and my head on fire, and my
hands tingling, until I sank down from sheer exhaustion--laughing and
sobbing, and talking to God as if He were in the room. I never really
believe in God except at such times; I can go through this dreadful world
for months, and never think if there be a God.--Here I sit gossiping about
it.--But I am tired out.

       *       *       *       *       *

The writing of a book is like the bearing of a child. But every birth-pang
of the former lasts for hours; and it is months before the labor is done.

It is not merely the vision, the hour of exultation; that is but the
setting of the task. Now you will take that ecstasy, and hold on to it,
hold on with soul and body; you will keep yourself at that height, you
will hold that flaming glory before your eyes, and you will hammer it
into words. Yes, that is the terror--into words--into words that leap the
hilltops, that bring the ends of existence together in a lightning flash.
You will take them as they come, white-hot, in wild tumult, and you will
forge them, and force them. You will seize them in your naked hands and
wrestle with them, and bend them to your will--all that is the making of
a poem. And last and worst of all, you will hold them in your memory, the
long, long surge of them; the torrent of whirling thought--you will hold it
in your memory! You are dazed with excitement, exhausted with your toil,
trembling with pain; but you have built a tower out of cards, and you have
mounted to the clouds upon it, and there you are poised. And anything
that happens--anything!--Ah, God, why can the poet not escape from his
senses?--a sound, a touch--and it is gone!

These things drive you mad.--

But meanwhile it is not gone yet. You have still a whole scene in your
consciousness--as if you were a juggler, tossing a score of golden balls.
And all the time, while you work, you learn it--you learn it! It is
endless, but you learn it. In the midst of it, perhaps, you come down of
sheer exhaustion; and you lie there, panting, shuddering, your hands moist;
you dare not think, you wait. And then by and by you begin again--if
it will not come, you _make_ it come, you lash yourself like a dumb
beast--up, up, to the mountain-tops again. And then once more the thing
comes back--you live the scene again, as an actor does, and you shape it
and you master it. And now in the midst of it, you find this highest of all
moments is gone! It is gone, and you can not find it! Those words that came
as a trumpet-clash, burning your very flesh--that melody that melted your
whole being to tears--they are gone--you can not find them! You search and
you search--but you can not find them. And so you stumble on, in despair
and agony; and still you dare not rest. You dare not ever rest in this
until the thing is done--done and over--until you have _nailed_ it
fast. So you go back again, though perhaps you are so tired that you are
fainting; but you fight yourself like a madman, you struggle until you feel
a thing at your heart like a wild beast; and you keep on, you hold it fast
and learn it, clinch it tight, and make it yours forever. I have done that
same thing five times to-day without a rest; and toiled for five hours in
that frenzy; and then lain down upon the ground, with my head on fire.

Afterward when you have recovered you sit down, and for two or three hours
you write; you have it whole in your memory now--you have but to put it
down. And this forlorn, wet, bedraggled thing--this miserable, stammering,
cringing thing--_this_ is your poem!

       *       *       *       *       *

Some day the world will realize these things, and then they will present
their poor poets with diamonds and palaces, and other things that do not
help.

I wrote this, and then I leaned back, tired out. My thoughts turned to
Shakespeare, and while I was thinking of him--

  But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
  Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill!

       *       *       *       *       *

April 11th.

I have not done much to-day. I spent the morning brooding over the opening
speech. It is somber and terrible, but I have not gotten it right. It
must have a tread--a tread like an orchestra! Ah, how I wish I had an
orchestra!--I would soon do it then--_“So bist nun ewig du verdammt!”_

The secret of the thing is iteration. I must find a word that is like a
hammer-stroke. I have tried twenty, but I have not found the one.

       *       *       *       *       *

--I spent the rest of the day thinking over the whole first act, mapping it
out, so to speak.

I have often fancied a resemblance between The Captive and the C-minor
symphony; I wonder if any one else would have thought of it. It is not
merely the opening--it is the whole content of the thing--the struggle of a
prisoned spirit. I would call The Captive a symphony, and print the C-minor
themes in it, only it would seem fanciful.--But it would not really be
fanciful to put the second theme opposite the thought of freedom--of the
blue sky and the dawning spring.

All except the scherzo. I couldn't find room for the scherzo. Men who have
wrestled with the demons of hell do not tumble around like elephants, no
matter how happy they are. I wish I could take out Beethoven's scherzos!

My heart leaps when I think of my one big step. I have put those pages
away--I shall not look at them again for a month. Then I can judge them.

       *       *       *       *       *

April 13th.

A cable-car conductor and a poet! I think that will be a story worth
telling.

I have tried many and various occupations, but I have not found one so
favorable to the study of poetry as my last. I should have made out very
well--if I had not been haunted by The Captive.

With everything else you do you are more or less hampered by having to sell
your brain; and also by having to obey some one. But a cable-car is an
unlimited monarchy; and all you have to do is to collect fares and pull
the bell, both of which duties are quite mechanical. And besides that you
receive princely wages--and can live off one-third of them, if you know
how; and that means that you need only work one-third of the time, and can
write your poetry the rest of it!

This sounds like jesting, but it is not. I have only been a cable-car
conductor six months, but in that time I have taught myself to read Greek
with more than fluency. All you need is good health and spirits, a will of
iron, and a very tiny note-book in the palm of your hand, full of the words
you wish to learn. And then for ten or twelve hours a day you go about
running a car with your body--and with your mind--hammering, hammering!
It is excellent discipline--it is fighting all day, “_Pous, podos_,
the foot--_pous, podos_, the foot--34th Street, Crosstown East and
West--_pous, podos_, the foot!”

And then when you get home late at night, are there not the great masters
who love you?

       *       *       *       *       *

April 15th.

Thou wouldst call thyself Artist; thou wouldst have the Eternal Presence to
dwell within thee, to fire thy heart with passion and dower thy lips with
song; canst thou go into thy closet, and alone with thy Maker, say these
words:

“O Thou Unthinkable, source of all light and life, Thou the great unselfish
One, the great Sufferer; Thou seest my heart this day, how in it dwells but
love of Thy truth and worship of Thy holiness. Thou seest that I seek not
wealth that men should serve me, nor fame that they should honor me, for
the glory that is Thine. Thou seest that I bring all my praise to Thy feet,
that I love all things that Thou hast made, that I envy no man Thy gifts,
that I rejoice when Thou sendest one stronger than I into the battle. And
when these things are not, may Thy power leave me; for I seek but to dwell
in Thy presence, and to speak Thy truth, which can not die.”

       *       *       *       *       *

That prayer welled up in my heart to-day. There are times when I sit before
this thing in my soul, crouching and gazing at it in fear. Then I see
the naked horror of it, the shuddering reality of it. I see the Soul:
motionless, tense, quivering, wrestling in an agony with the powers of
destruction. It is so real to me that my body stiffens into stone, and I
sit with the sweat on my forehead. That happened to me to-day, and I wrote
a few lines of the poem that made my voice break--the passionate despairing
cry for deliverance, for rest from the terror.

But there is no rest. The mountain slope is so that there is no standing
upon it, and once you stop, it breaks your heart to begin again. And so you
go on--up--up--and there is not any summit.

It is that way when you write a book; and that way when you make a
symphony; and that way when you wage a war.

       *       *       *       *       *

But my soul hungered for it. I have loved the great elemental
art-works--the art-works that were born of pure suffering. For months
before I began The Captive I read but three books--read them and brooded
over them, all day and all night. They were Prometheus Bound, Prometheus
Unbound, and Samson Agonistes.

You sit with these books, and time and space “to nothingness do sink.”
 There looms up before you--like a bare mountain in its majesty--the great
elemental world-fact, the death-grapple of the will with circumstance.
You may build yourself any philosophy or any creed you please, but you
will never get away from the world-fact--the death-grapple of the soul
with circumstance. Æschylus has one creed, and Milton has another,
and Shelley has a third; but always it is the death-grapple. Chaos,
evil--circumstance--lies about you, binds you; and you grip it--you close
with it--all your days you toil with it, you shape it into systems, you
make it live and laugh and sing. And while you do that, there is in your
heart a thing that is joy and pain and terror mingled in one passion.

Who knows that passion? Who knows--

  “With travail and heavy sorrow
   The holy spirit of Man.”

Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and Samson Agonistes! And now there
will be a fourth. It will be The Captive.

Am I a fool? I do not know--that is none of my business. It is my business
to do my best.

       *       *       *       *       *

Horace bids you, if you would make him weep, to weep first yourself. I
understand by the writing of a poem just this: that the problem you put
there you discover for yourself; that the form you put it in you invent
for yourself; and, finally, that what you make it, from the first word to
the last word, from the lowest moment to the highest moment, you _live_;
that when a character in such a place acts thus, he acts thus because you,
in that place--not would have acted thus, but _did_ act thus; that the
words which are spoken in that moment of emotion are spoken because you,
in that moment of emotion--not would have spoken them, but _did_ speak
them. I propose that you search out the scenes that have stirred the hearts
of men in all times, and see if you can find one that was written thus--not
because the author had lived it thus, but because somebody else had lived
it thus, or because he wanted people to think he had lived it thus.

And now you are writing The Captive. You do not go into the dungeon in the
body, because you need all your strength; but in the spirit you have gone
into the dungeon, and the door has clanged, and it is black night--the
world is gone forever. And there you sit, while the years roll by, and
you front the naked fact. Six feet square of stone and an iron chain are
your portion--that is circumstance; and the will--_you_ are the will. And
you grip it--you close with it--all your days you toil with it; you shape
it into systems, make it live and laugh and sing. And while you do that
there is in your heart a thing that is joy and pain and terror mingled in
one passion.

       *       *       *       *       *

Yes, sometimes I shrink from it; but I will do it--meaning what those words
mean. I will fight that fight, I will live that life--to the last gasp; and
it shall go forth into the world a living thing, a new well-spring of life.

It shall be--I don't know what you call the thing, but when you have hauled
your load halfway up the hill you put a block in the way to keep it from
sliding back. That same thing has to be done to society.

Man will never get behind the Declaration of Independence again, nor behind
the writings of Voltaire again. We let Catholicism run around loose now,
but that is because Voltaire cut its claws and pulled out all its teeth.

       *       *       *       *       *

April 16th.

I was thinking to-day, that The Captive would be an interesting document
to students of style. Read it, and make up your mind about it; then I will
tell you--the first line of it is almost the first line of blank verse I
ever wrote in my life.

I have read about the French artists, the great masters of style, and
how they give ten years of their lives to writing things that are never
published. But I have noticed that when they are masters at last, and when
they do begin to publish--they very seldom have anything to say that I care
in the least to hear.

--My soul is centered upon _the thing_!

Let it be a test.

       *       *       *       *       *

I am trying to be an artist; but I have never been able to study style. I
believe that the style of this great writer came from what he had to say.
You think about how he said it; but he thought about what he was saying.

It seemed strange to me when I thought of it. With all my trembling
eagerness, with all my preparation, such an idea as “practise” never came
to me. How could I cut the path until I had come to the forest?

All my soul has been centered upon _living_. Since this book first took
hold of me--eighteen months ago--I could not tell with what terrible
intensity I have lived it. They said to me, “You are a poet; why don't you
write verses for the magazines?” But I was not a writer of verses for the
magazines.

It has been a shrine that I have kept in the corner of my heart, and tended
there. I have never gone near it, except upon my knees. There were days
when I did not go near it at all, when I was weak, or distraught. But I
knew that every day I was closer to the task, that every day my heart was
more full of it. It was like wild music--it came to a climax that swept me
away in spite of myself.

To get the mastery of your soul, to hold it here, in your hands, at your
bidding, to consecrate your life to that, to watch and pray and toil for
that, to rouse yourself and goad yourself day and night for that; to
thrill with the memory of great consecrations, of heroic sufferings and
aspirations; to have the power of the stars in your heart, of nature, of
history and the soul of man; _that_ is your “practise.”

       *       *       *       *       *

April 17th.

It is true that my whole life has been a practise for the writing of
this book, that this book is the climax of my whole life. I have
toiled--learned--built up a mind--found a conviction; but I have never
written anything, or tried to write anything, to be published. I have said,
“Wait; it is not time.” And now it _is_ time. If there is anything of
use in all that I have done, it is in this book.

Yes; and also it is a climax in another way. It is my goal and my
salvation.--Ah, how I have toiled for it!

       *       *       *       *       *

April 19th.

I saw my soul to-day. It was a bubble, blown large, palpitating, whirling
over a stormy sea; glorious with the rainbow hues it was, but perilous,
abandoned.--Do you catch the _feeling_ of my soul?

Something perilous--I do not much care what. A traveler scaling the
mountains, leaping upon dizzy heights; a gambler staking his fortune, his
freedom, his life--upon a cast!

I will tell you about it.

It began when I was fifteen. My great-uncle, my guardian, is a wholesale
grocer in Chicago; he has a large palace and a large waistcoat.

“Will you be a wholesale grocer?” said he.

“No,” said I, “I will not.”

I might have been a partner by this time, had I said Yes, and had a palace
and a large waistcoat too.

“Then what will you be?” asked the great-uncle.

“I will be a poet,” said I.

“You mean you will be a loafer?” said he.

“Yes,” said I--disliking argument--“I will be a loafer.”

And so I went away, and while I went I was thinking, far down in my soul.
And I said: “It must be everything or nothing; either I am a poet or I am
not. I will act as if I were; I will burn my bridges behind me. If I am, I
will win--for you can not kill a poet; and if I am not, I will die.”

Thus is it perilous.

I fight the fight with all my soul; I give every ounce of my strength, my
will, my hope, to the making of myself a poet. And when the time comes I
write my poem. Then if I win, I win empires; and if I lose--

“You put all your eggs into one basket,” some one once said to me.

“Yes,” I replied, “I put all my eggs into one basket--and then I carry the
basket myself.”

Now I have come to the last stage of the journey--the “one fight more, and
the last.” And can I give any idea of what is back of me, to nerve me to
that fight? I will try to tell you.

For seven years I have borne poverty and meanness, sickness, heat,
cold, toil--that I might make myself an artist. The indignities, the
degradations--I could not tell them, if I spent all the time I have in
writing a journal. I have lived in garrets--among dirty people--vulgar
people--vile people; I have worn rags and unclean things; I have lived upon
bread and water and things that I have cooked myself; I have seen my time
and my strength wasted by a thousand hateful impertinences--I have been
driven half mad with pain and rage; I have gone without friends--I have
been hated by every one; I have worked at all kinds of vile drudgery--or
starved myself sick that I might avoid working.

But I have said, “I will be an artist!”

Day and night I have dreamed it; day and night I have fought for it. I have
plotted and planned--I have plotted to save a minute. I have done menial
work that I might have my brain free--all the languages that I know I have
worked at at such times. I have calculated the cost of foods--I have lived
on a third of the pittance I earned, that I might save two-thirds of my
time. I once washed dishes in a filthy restaurant because that took only
two or three hours a day.

I have said, “I will be an artist! I will fix my eyes upon the goal; I
will watch and wait, and fight the fight day by day. And when at last I am
strong, and when my message is ripe, I will earn myself a free chance, and
then I will write a book. All the yearning, all the agony of this my life
I will put into it; every hour of trial, every burst of rage. I will make
it the hope of my life, I will write it with my blood--give every ounce of
strength that I have and every dollar that I own; and I will win--I will
win!

“So I will be free, and the horror will be over.”

I have done that--I am doing that now. I mean to finish it if it kills
me.--

But I was sitting on the edge of the bed to-night, and the tears came into
my eyes and I whispered: “But oh, you must not ask me to do anymore! I can
not do any more! It will leave me broken!”

Only so much weight can a man carry. The next pound breaks his back.

       *       *       *       *       *

April 22d.

I am happy to-night; I am a little bit drunk.

To-day was one day in fifty. Why should it be? Sometimes I have but to
spread my wings to the wind. Yesterday I might have torn my hair out, and
that glory would not have come to me. But to-day I was filled with it--it
lived in me and burned in me--I had but to go on and go on.

The Captive! It was the burst of rage--the first glow in the ashes of
despair. I was walking up and down the room for an hour, thundering it to
myself. I have not gotten over the joy of it yet: _“Thou in thy mailèd
insolence!”_

I wonder if any one who reads those thirty lines will realize that they
meant eight hours of furious toil on my part!

       *       *       *       *       *

Stone by stone I build it.

The whole possibility of a scene--that is what I pant for, always; that
it should be all there, and yet not a line to spare; compact, solid,
each phrase coming like a blow; and above all else, that it should be
inevitable! When you stand upon the height of your being, and behold the
thing with all your faculties--the thing and the phrase are one, and one to
all eternity.

       *       *       *       *       *

April 24th.

I was looking at a literary journal to-day. Oh, my soul, it frightens me!
All these libraries of books--who reads them, what are they for? And each
one of them a hope! And I am to leap over them all--I--I? I dare not think
about it.

I have been helpless to-day. I can not find what I want--I struggled for
hours, I wore myself out with struggling. And I have torn up what I wrote.

Blank verse is such a--such a thing not to be spoken of! Is there anything
worse, except it be a sonnet? How many miles of it are ground out every
day--sometimes that kind comes to me to mock me--I could have written a
whole poem full of it this afternoon. If there are two lines of that sort
in The Captive, I'll burn it all.

An awful doubt came to me besides. Somebody had sown it long ago, and it
sprouted to-day. “Yes, but will it be _interesting_?”

Heaven help me, how am I to know if it will be interesting? The question
made me shudder; I have never thought anything about making it
interesting--I've been trying to make it true. Can it possibly be that the
ecstasy of one soul, the reality of one soul, the quivering, exulting life
of it--will not interest any other soul?

“How can you know that what you are doing is real, anyhow?” The devil would
plague me to death to-day. “But how many millions write poems and think
they are wonderful!”

--I do not believe in my soul to-day, because I have none.

       *       *       *       *       *

April 25th.

Would you like to know where I am, and how I am doing all these things?
I am in a lodging-house. I have one of three hall rooms in a kind of top
half-story. There is room for me to take four steps; so it is that I “walk
up and down” when I am excited. I have tried--I have not kept count of
how many places--and this is the quietest. The landlady's husband has a
carpenter shop down-stairs, but he is always drunk and doesn't work; it has
also been providentially arranged that the daughter, who sings, is sick for
some time. Next door to me there is a man who plays the 'cello in a dance
hall until I know not what hour of the night. He keeps his 'cello at the
dance hall. Next to him is a pale woman who sits and sews all day and
waits for her drunken husband to come home. In front there is some kind of
foolish girl who leaves her door open in the hope that I'll look in at her,
and a couple of inoffensive people not worth describing.

I get up--I never know the time in the morning; and sometimes I lie without
moving for hours--thinking--thinking. Or sometimes I go out and roam around
the streets; or sit perfectly motionless, gazing at the wall. When it will
not come, I make it. I breakfast on bread and milk, and I eat bread and
milk at all hours of the day when I am hungry. For dinner I cook a piece of
meat on a little oil-stove, and for supper I eat bread and milk. The rest
of the time I am sitting on the floor by the window, writing; or perhaps
kneeling by the bed with my head buried in my arms, and thinking until the
room reels. When I am not doing that I wander around like a lost soul; I
can not think of anything else.--Sometimes when I am tired and must rest, I
force myself to sit down and write some of this.

I have just forty dollars now. It costs me three dollars a week, not
including paper and typewriting. Thus I have ten or twelve weeks in which
to finish The Captive--that many and no more.

If I am not finished by that time it will kill me; to try to work and earn
money in the state that I am in just at present would turn me into a
maniac--I should kill some one, I know.

I am quivering with nervous tension--every faculty strained to breaking;
the buzz of a fly is a roar to me. I build up these towering castles of
emotion in my soul, castles that shimmer in the sunlight:

  Banners yellow, glorious, golden!

And then something happens, and they fall upon me with the weight of
mountains.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ten weeks! And yet it is not that which goads me most.

What goads me most is that I am a captive in a dungeon, and am fighting for
the life of my soul.

I shall win, I do not fear--the fountains of my being will not fail me. I
saw my soul a second time to-day; it was no longer the bubble, blown large,
palpitating. It was a bird resting upon a bough. The bough was tossed and
flung about by a tempest; and a chasm yawned below; but the bough held, and
the bird was master of its wings, and sang.

The name of the bough was Faith.

       *       *       *       *       *

April 27th.

I have read a great deal of historical romance, and a great deal of local
color fiction, and a great deal of original character-drawing--and I have
wished to get away from these things.

There is no local color, and no character-drawing, in The Captive. You do
not know the name of the hero; you do not know how old he is, or of what
rank he is, at what period or in what land he lives. He is described but
once. He is “A Man.”

My philosophy is a philosophy of will. All virtue that I know is
conditioned upon freedom. The object of all thinking and doing, as I see
it, is to set men free.

There is the tyranny of kings--the tyranny of force; there is the tyranny
of priests--the tyranny of ignorance; there is the tyranny of society--the
tyranny of selfishness and indolence; and above all, and including all, and
causing all--there is the tyranny of self--the tyranny of sin, the tyranny
of the body. So it is that I see the world.

So it is that I see history; I can see nothing else in history. The tyranny
of kings and nobles, the tyranny of the mass and the inquisition, the
tyranny of battle and murder and crime--how was a man to live in those
ages?

How is a man to live in _this_ age? The tyranny of kings and of
priests is gone, and from the tyranny of industrialism the individual can
escape. But the lightning--is not that an inquisition? And if it comes
after you, will it not find out all your secrets? And the tyranny of
hurricane and shipwreck, of accident, disease, and death? Any tyranny is
all tyranny, I say; and the existence of tyranny is its presence.

It is conceivable that some day the sovereign mind may shake off its
shackles, and the tyranny of matter be at an end. But that day is not yet;
and meanwhile, the thing existing, how shall a man be free? That has been
the matter of my deepest brooding.

This much I have learned:

The man may accept this life, if it please him, and its chances; but while
he does he can never be a soul. So long as he accepts this life and its
chances, he is the slave of tyranny. When the day comes that mind is
sovereign, I will give myself into the hands of this life. But meanwhile I
will know myself for what I am--a bubble upon the surface of a whirling
torrent, an insect borne aloft upon a flying wheel.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is by your will that you are free; by your will you are one with the
infinite freedom, by your will you are master of time and your fate, lord
of the stars and the endless ages, thinker of all truth, hearer of all
music, beholder of all beauty, doer of all righteousness. That is the truth
which I have brought out of my deepest brooding.

So long as your happiness is in anything about yourself--your wealth, or
your fame, or your life--you are not free. So long as your happiness is in
houses and lands, in sons and in daughters, you are not free. You give one
atom of your soul to these things at your own peril; for when your hour
comes you tear them from you, though they be as your eyes; and by your
_will_ you save your soul alive.

Therefore I write The Captive. I put aside childish things--I grip my hands
upon naked Reality.

       *       *       *       *       *

There are nine characters in The Captive: a tyrant, two slaves, six guests,
and a man. There are two scenes--a dungeon, and a banquet-hall.

A tyrant: I understand by a tyrant a man whose happiness is the unhappiness
of others. I read of the discoverers of Mexico, and how they found a
pyramid of human skulls, raised as a monument; that has been to me, ever
since, the type of tyranny. The forms of tyranny vary through the ages, but
the principle is always the same; a tyrant is a man who is made great by
the toil and sorrow of others.

The slave also remains the same through all time; and likewise the guest.
The guest is the man who takes the world as he finds it, and likes a good
dinner. The population of society is made up of tyrants, slaves, and
guests.

The man is a character of my own imagining.

The first scene of The Captive is the dungeon. When I was very young I was
in Europe, and I was in a dungeon; I have never forgotten it. There enter
the tyrant and the two slaves with the man. They chain him to the wall, and
then the tyrant speaks. That first speech--I have written it now--I have
gotten the hammer-thuds! Tyranny is an iron thing--you had to feel the
tread of it, the words had to roll like thunder. It is an advantage to me
that I am full of Wagner; I always hear the music with my poetry. (I shall
be disappointed if some one does not make an opera out of The Captive.)

       *       *       *       *       *

The man is there, and he is there forever. After that, once a day, bread
and water are shoved in through an opening. But the door of the dungeon
does not open again until the last act--when ten years have passed.

       *       *       *       *       *

That is all. And now the man will battle with that problem. Will he go mad
with despair? Will he sink into a wild beast? Will he commit suicide? Or
what _will_ he do? Day by day he sinks back from the question, numb with
agony; day by day the grim hand of Fate drags him to it; and so, until from
the chaos of his soul he digs out, blow by blow, a faith.

Here there will be Reality; no shams and no lies will do here--here is iron
necessity, and cries out for iron truth. God--duty--will--virtue--let such
things no more be names, let us see what they _are_!

These are awful words. Sometimes I shrink from this thing as from fire,
sometimes I rush to it with a song; I am writing about it now because I am
worn out, and yet I can not think of anything else.

This man will find the truth; being delivered from the captivity of the
world and set free to be a soul. Superstition blinds him; doubt and despair
and weakness blind him; but still he gropes and strives, cries out and
battles for truth; until at last, shut up in his own being, he tears his
way out to the very source of it, and knows for himself what it is.
_Infinite it is, and unthinkable; glorious, all-consuming, all-sufficing;
food and drink, friendship and love, ambition and victory, joy, power,
and eternity it is to him who finds it; and all things in this world are
nothing to him who finds it._

       *       *       *       *       *

And so comes the victory to this soul. Hour by hour he catches gleams of
the light; day by day he toils toward it, with fear and agony and prayer;
until at last he knows his salvation--to rest never, and to toil always,
and to dwell in this Presence of his God. In one desperate hour he flings
away the world and the hope of the world, and vows this consecration, and
lives.

       *       *       *       *       *

He keeps the vow; it is iron necessity that drives him. He finds himself,
he finds his way--each day his step is surer.

Each day the channels of his being deepen. He lays broad plans for his
life--he gathers all knowledge, he solves all problems; lord of the
infinite mind, he ranges all existence, and beholds it as the symbol of
himself. Into the deeps and yawning spaces of it he plunges; blind, he sees
what men have never seen; deaf, he hears what men have never heard--singer
he is, prophet and poet and maker. New worlds leap into being in the
infinite fulness of his heart, visions of endless glory that make his
senses reel; as a column of incense towering to the sky is the ecstasy of
his adoration and his joy.

       *       *       *       *       *

And so the long years roll by; and the unconquered spirit has left the
earth: left time and space and self, and dwells where never man has dwelt
before. And then one day the door of the dungeon is opened, and his chains
are shattered, and the slaves lead him up to the light of day.

It is the banquet-hall; and there is the tyrant, and there the
guests--there is the world.

       *       *       *       *       *

He is aged, and weak, and white, and terrible. They stare at him; and he
stares at them, for he is dazed. They begin to mock at him, and then at
last he realizes, and he covers his face and weeps--beholding the world,
and the way that it must come. They jeer at him, they strike him; and when
he answers not, they call to the slaves to torture him.

       *       *       *       *       *

This man has lived for ten years with _himself_. He is nothing but a
will. And now they will conquer him!

       *       *       *       *       *

I recall the highest moment of my being. I saw that moment, and all the
others of my life. I saw them as something that I could not bear to see,
and I cried out that from that hour I would change them. I have not kept
the vow; there was no one to drive me.

But this man they drive; they pinch him and burn him and tear him; they
crush his limbs, they break his bones, they grind his flesh, they make his
brain a living fire of anguish. And he fights them.

Into the deep recesses of his being goes the cry--for all that he has--for
all that he is! For every ounce of his strength, for every throb of his
will, for every vision, every truth that he knows! To bear this, to save
him here! And so he wrestles, so he rises, so he gropes and gasps; and in
the moment of his fiercest straining, with the throb of all his being he
bursts the barrier, he rends the veil; and infinite passion rolls in in
floods upon him, he clutches all existence in his arms; and from his lips
there bursts a mad frenzied shout of rapture--that makes his torturers
stand transfixed, listening, trembling with terror.

And so they drag him back to his dungeon; and there, unable to move, he
lies upon the stones and pants out his ecstasy and his life.

That is The Captive.

       *       *       *       *       *

April 29th.

What counts in this thing is momentum--spiritual momentum. You are filled
with it all the time, it never leaves you; it drives behind you like a gale
of wind; it roars in your ears when you are awake, it rocks you to sleep
when you are weary; whenever you are dull or do not heed it, it nags at
you, it goads you, it beats into your face. Each day it is more, each day
it is harder, more unattainable; but only do not stop, it carries you with
it like a wave; you mount upon each day's achievement to reach the next,
you move with the power of all the days before. It is momentum that counts.

Do not stop!--I cry it all day--Do not stop!

       *       *       *       *       *

April 30th.

It is weak of me, but sometimes I can not help but look ahead--and think
that it is done! I could not find any words to tell the joy that that will
be to me--to be free, after so long--to be free!

I do not care anything about the fame--it would not be anything to me to be
a great author. If it could be done, nothing would please me better than
to publish it anonymously--to let no one ever know that it was mine. If I
could only have the little that I need to be free, I would publish all that
I might ever write anonymously.

Yes, that is the thing that makes my blood bound. To be free! Let it only
be done--let it only be real, as it will be--and the naked force of it will
shake men to the depths of their souls. I could not write it, if I did not
believe that I was writing words that would grip the soul of any man--I
care not how dull or how coarse he might be.

       *       *       *       *       *

I finished the first act just now.

       *       *       *       *       *

May 1st.

I am wild to-day. Oh, how can I bear this--why should I have to contend
with such things as this! Is it not hard enough--the agony that I have to
bear, the task that takes all my strength and more? And must I be torn to
pieces by such hideous degradation as this? Oh, my God, if my life is not
soon clear of these things I shall die!

       *       *       *       *       *

Oh, it is funny--yes, funny!--Let us laugh at it. The dance-hall musician
has brought home his 'cello! I heard him come bumping up the stairs with
it--God damn his soul! And there he sits, sawing away at some loathsome jig
tunes! And he has two friends in there--I listen to their wit between the
tunes.

Here I sit, like a wild beast pent in a cage. I tell you I can bear any
work in the world, but I can not bear things such as this. That I, who am
seeking a new faith for men--who am writing, or trying to write, what will
mean new life to millions--should have my soul ripped into pieces by such
loathsome, insulting indignities!

Oh, laugh!--but _I_ can't laugh--I sit here foaming at the lips, and
crying! And suppose he's lost his position, and does this every day!

Now every day I must lay aside what I am doing and sit and shudder when I
hear him coming up the steps--and wait for him to begin this! I tell you,
I demand to be free--I _demand_ it! I want nothing in this world but to
be let alone. I don't want anybody to wait on me.--_I don't want anything
from this hellish world but to be let alone!_

It is pouring rain outside, and my overcoat is thin; but I must go out and
pace the streets and wait until a filthy Dutchman gets through scraping
ragtime on a 'cello.

All day wasted! All day! Does it not seem that these things persecute you
by system? I came in, cold and wet, and got into bed, and then he began
again! And the friends came back and they had beer, and more music. And I
had to get up and put on the wet clothes once more.

       *       *       *       *       *

May 2d.

I was crouching out on one of the docks last night. I had no place else to
go. I can think anywhere, if it is quiet.

A wonderful thing is the night. I bless Thee for the night, oh “_süsse,
heilige Natur_”!

It was a voice in my soul, as clear as could be.

--She can not bear too long the sight of men, sweet, holy Nature: the
swarming hives--the millions of tiny creatures, each drunk and blind with
his own selfishness; and so she lays her great hand upon it all, and hides
it out of her sight.

Once it was all silent, and formless as the desert; soon it shall all be
silent and formless again; and meanwhile--the night, the night!

       *       *       *       *       *

Oh, I hunger for the desert! I do not care for beauty--I have no time for
beauty, I want the earth stern and forbidding. Give me some place where no
one else would want to go--an iron crag where the oceans beat--a
mountain-top where the lightning splinters on the rocks.

       *       *       *       *       *

I go at it again. But I am nervous--these things get me into such a state
that I simply can not do anything. It was not merely yesterday--I have it
constantly. The dirty chambermaid singing, or yelling down to the landlady;
the drunken man swearing at his wife; the boys screaming in the street and
kicking a tomato-can about. When I think of how much beauty and power has
been shattered in my life by such things as these, it brings tears of
impotent rage into my eyes.

I must be free--oh, I must be free!

       *       *       *       *       *

It comes strangely from the author of The Captive, does it not?

I give all my life to my work, and sometimes, when I am broken like this, I
wonder if I do not give too much. Once I climbed to a dizzy height, and I
cried out a dizzy truth:

“O God, how as nothing in Thy sight are my writings!”

I do not know if I shall ever reach that height again.

       *       *       *       *       *

May 3d.

I have not one single beautiful memory in my life. I have nothing in my
life that, when I think of it, does not make me _writhe_.

To all that I have lived, and known, and seen, I have but one word, one
cry--Away! Away! Let me get away from it! Let me get away from cities, let
me get away from men, let me out of my cage! Let me go with my God, let
me forget it all--put it away forever and ever! Let me no longer have to
plot and plan, to cringe and whimper, to barter my vision and my hours for
bread!

Who knows what I suffer--who has any idea of it? To have a soul like a
burning fire, to be hungry and swift as the Autumn wind, to have a heart as
hot as the wild bird's, and wings as eager--and to be chained here in this
seething hell of selfishness, this orgy of folly.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ah, and then I shut my hands together. No, I am not weak, I do not spend my
time chafing thus! I have fought it out so far--

  “I was ever a fighter, so one fight more!”

I will go back, and I will hammer and hammer again--grimly--savagely--day
by day. And out of the furnace of my soul I will forge a weapon that will
set me free in the end--I think.

       *       *       *       *       *

May 4th.

I wrote a little poem once. I remembered two lines of it--a nature
description; they were not great lines, but there flashed over me to-day an
application of them that was a stroke of genius, I believe. I was passing
the Stock Exchange. It was a very busy day. I climbed one of the pillars,
in spirit, and wrote high above the portals:

  Where savage beasts through forest midnight roam,
  Seeking in sorrow for each other's joy.

       *       *       *       *       *

May 5th.

A dreadful thing is unbelief! A dreadful thing it is to be an infidel!

--That is what all men cry nowadays--there is so much infidelity in the
world--it is the curse of our modern society--it is everywhere--it is
all-prevailing!

I had a strange experience to-day, Sunday. I went into a church, and high
up by the altar, dressed in solemn garb and offering prayers to God--I saw
an infidel!

He preached a sermon. The theme of his sermon was “Liberalism.”

“These men,” cried the preacher, “are blinding our eyes to our salvation,
they are undermining, day by day, our faith! They tell us that the sacred
word of God is 'literature'! And they show us more 'literature'; but oh, my
friends, what new _Bible_ have they shown us!”

As I got up and went out of that church, I whispered: “What a dreadful
thing it is to be an infidel!”

Oh Dante and Goethe and Shakespeare--oh Wordsworth and Shelley and Emerson!
Oh thrice-anointed and holy spirits! What a dreadful thing it is to be an
infidel!

What a dreadful thing it is to believe in a Bible, and not to believe in
literature--to believe in a Bible and not to believe in a God!

You think that this world lives upon the revelation of two thousand years
ago! Fool--this world lives as your body lives by the beating of its
heart--upon the revelation and the effort of each instant of its life. And
to-day or to-morrow the great Revealer might send to some lonely thinker in
his garret a new word that would scatter to dust and ashes all laws and all
duties that now are known to men.

       *       *       *       *       *

There are many ways to look at the world, and always a deeper one. I see it
as a fearful thing, towering, expanding, upheld by the toil and the agony
of millions. Who will bring us the new hope, the new song of courage, that
it go not down into the dust to-day?

To do that there is the poet; to live and to die unheeded, and to feed for
ages upon ages the hungry souls of men--that is to be a poet. Therefore
will he sing, and sing ever, and die in the sweetness of his song.

When I think of that--not now as I write it here in bare words--but in
quivering reality, it is a hand upon my forehead, and a presence in the
room.

       *       *       *       *       *

May 6th.

Chiefest of all I think of my country! Passionately, more than words can
utter, I love this land of mine. If I tear my heart till it bleeds and pour
out the tears of my spirit, it is for this consecration and this hope--it
is for this land of Washington and Lincoln. There never was any land like
it--there may never be any like it again; and Freedom watches from her
mountains, trembling.

--It is a song that it needs, a song and a singer; to point it to its high
design, to thrill it with the music of its message, to shake the heart of
every man in it, and make him burn and dare! For the first time there is
Liberty; for the first time there is Truth, and no shams and no lies,
enthroned. The news of it has gone forth like the sound of thunder, and has
shaken all the earth: that man at last may live, may do what he can and
will!

--And to what is it? Is it to the heaping up of ugly cities, the packing of
pork and the gathering of gold? That is the thing that I toil for--to tear
this land from the grasp of mean men and of merchants! To take the souls
of my countrymen into the high mountains with me, to thrill them with a
soaring, strong resolve! _Living things_ shall come from this land of
mine, living things before I die, for the hunger of it burns me, and will
not ever let me rest. Freedom! freedom! And stern justice and honor, and
knowledge and power, and a noonday blaze of light!

  Arise in thy majesty, confronting the ages!
  Stretch out thine arms to the millions that shall be!
  Justice thine inheritance, God thy stay and sustenance,
    My country, to thee!

Those are feeble words. If this were a book, I would tear it all up.

I wonder if any one will ever read this. As a matter of fact, I suppose ten
people will read gossip about the book for every one who reads the book.

       *       *       *       *       *

This is just a month from the beginning. A month to-day! Yes--I have done
my share, I have done a third of it--a third!

But the end is so much harder!

       *       *       *       *       *

May 9th.

I have been for two days in the mire. I was disturbed, and then I was
sluggish. Oh, the sluggishness of my nature!

If ever I am a great poet, I will have made myself that by the power of my
will; that is a fact. I am by nature a great clod--I feel nothing, I care
about nothing. I look at the flowers as a cow chewing its cud.--It is only
that I _will_ to do right.

Sometimes the sight of my dulness drives me wild. Then again I merely
gaze at it. I try time and again to get my mind on my work, and
something--anything, provided it is trivial enough--turns me aside. Just
now I saw a spider-web, and that made me think of Bruce, and thence I went
by way of Walter Scott to Palestine, and when I came to I was writing a
song for--who was the minstrel?--to sing outside of the prison of Coeur de
Lion.

I go wandering that way--sometimes I sit so for an hour; and then suddenly
I leap up with a cry. But I may try all I please--I don't care anything
about the work--it doesn't stir me--the verses I think of make me sick. And
then I remember that I have only so many weeks more; and what it will mean
to fail; and that makes me desperate, but doesn't help.

When I have stopped at some resting-place in the poem, I can get going
again. But now I have stopped in the middle of a climax; and the number
of times that I have read that last line, trying to find another--Great
heavens!

       *       *       *       *       *

But I can not find another word. I am in despair.

I know perfectly well what I shall do, only I am a coward, and do not do
it. I shall stay in this state till my rage has heaped itself up enough and
breaks through everything at last. And then I shall begin to hammer myself!
to swear at myself in a way that would make a longshoreman turn white. And
I shall spend perhaps two or three hours--perhaps two or three days--doing
that, until I am quite in a white heat; and then--I shall go to my work.

That is the price I pay for being distracted.

       *       *       *       *       *

May 11th.

I said to myself the day before yesterday--with a kind of a dry sob--“I
can't do it! I can't do it!”

Oh how tormented I am by noises--noises! What am I not tormented by? Some
days ago I was writing in a frenzy--and the landlady came for her rent. And
the horrible creature standing there, talking at me! “So lonely!--don't
ever see people! Mrs. Smithers was a-saying--” Oh, damn Mrs. Smithers!

I thought I could never do it--I was really about to give it up. I went out
on the street--I roamed about for hours, talking I don't know what nonsense
to myself. And then at last I came home, and I knelt down there at the
bedside and said: “Here you stay without anything to eat until you've
written ten lines of that poem!”

And that was how I did it. I stayed there, and I prayed. I don't often
pray, but that time I prayed like one possessed--I was so lonely and so
helpless--and the work was so beautiful. I stayed there for nine blessed
hours, and then the clock stopped and I couldn't count after that.

But the day came, and then the ten lines! And so I had my breakfast.

These things leave you weak, but a little less dull.

       *       *       *       *       *

May 13th.

I have been working with a kind of wild desperation all day to-day. Oh it
hurts--it hurts--but I am doing it! Whenever I read some lines of it that
are real--whenever some great living phrase flashes over me--then I laugh
like a man in the midst of a battle.

I shall be just as a man who has been through a battle; haggard and wild
and desperate. Oh, I don't think I shall _ever_ have the courage to do
it again!

I did not know what it meant! I did not! It was giving myself into the
hands of a fiend!

All great books will be something different to me after this. Did
Shakespeare write thus with the blood of his soul? Or am I weak? Did he
ever cry out in pain, as I have?

       *       *       *       *       *

May 14th.

Another day of raw torture. It is like toiling up a mountain side; and your
limbs are of lead. It is like struggling in a nightmare,--that is just what
it is like. It is sickening.

But then you dare not stop. It is hard to go on, but it is ten times as
hard to start if you stop.

I could hardly stand up this afternoon! but the thing was ringing in
my ears--it went on and on--I had to go after it! I was in the seventh
heaven--I could see anything, dare anything, do anything. It made no
difference how hard--it called to me--on--on! And I said: “Suppose I were
to be tortured--could I go then?” And so I went and went.

I haven't written it down yet; I felt sick. But I know it all.

Oh men--oh my brothers--will you love me for this thing?

       *       *       *       *       *

May 16th.

I did no writing yesterday or to-day. I have been terribly frightened.

I wrote what I had to write the day before yesterday--I could not help it.
But when I stopped my head was literally on fire, and the strangest mad
throbbing in it--I stood still in fear, it felt so as if something were
going to burst--my head seemed to weigh a ton. I poured cold water over it,
but it made no difference--it stayed that way all night and all yesterday.

What am I to do? I dare not think--I took a long walk, and even now I find
myself thinking of the book without knowing it. Imagine me sitting on a
doorstep and playing for two hours with a kitten!

Why should I be handicapped in such a way as this? I had never thought of
such a thing.

       *       *       *       *       *

I was thinking about The Captive--it is my own. Nobody has helped me--I
have told not one person of it. Everything in it has come out of my soul.

       *       *       *       *       *

May 17th.

I feel better to-day, but I hardly know what to do.

Meantime I was happy!--Think of a poet's being happy with city flowers! of
a poet's being happy with store-flowers--prostitute-flowers--flowers for
sale!

It was all about a narcissus--“Very flower of youth, and morning's golden
hour!”--as I called it once. And it danced so! (It was out on the
curbstone)--and I went off happy.

Then I thought of a poem that is pure distilled ecstasy to my spirit. I
will write it, and be happy again:

  Sit thee by the ingle, when
  The sear faggot blazes bright;
  Spirit of a winter's night!-- ...
  Sit thee there, and send abroad,
  With a mind self-overaw'd,
  Fancy, high-commission'd:--send her!
  She has vassals to attend her;
  She will bring, in spite of frost,
  Beauties that the earth hath lost;
  She will bring thee, all together,
  All delights of summer weather;
  All the buds and bells of May,
  From dewy sward or thorny spray;
  All the heaped Autumn's wealth,
  With a still, mysterious stealth;
  She will mix those pleasures up,
  Like three fit wines in a cup,
  And thou shall quaff it!--

Ah! And so I went along, “sun, moon, and stars forgot”--laughing and half
dancing. People stared at me--and I laughed. And then I passed three pretty
girls, and I laughed, and they laughed too. I guess they thought I was
going to follow them.

--But that pleasure was not in my cup, dear girls.

       *       *       *       *       *

Some of these days I hope to live in a beautiful world, where a man may
speak to a pretty girl on the street. Badness is its own punishment, let
the bad world observe.

I would rather look at a beautiful woman than do anything else I know of in
this world, except listen to music.

       *       *       *       *       *

May 18th.

I often think how I shall spend my money after The Captive is done. I shall
take a band of chosen youths, seekers and worshipers, and we shall build a
house on a mountain-top and worship the Lord in the beauty of music!

I shall have to begin at the beginning--I have never had any one to teach
me music. But oh, if I did know!--And if I ever got hold of an
orchestra--_how_ I would make it go!

And in the middle of it the astonished orchestra would see the conductor
take wings unto himself and fly off through the roof.

A book that I mean to write some day will be called The Pleasures of Music,
and it will sing the joys of being clean and strong, of cold water and the
early morning and a free heart. It will show how all the unhappiness of men
is that they live in the body and in self, and how the world is to be saved
through music, which is not of the body, nor of self--which is free and
infinite, swift as the winds, vast as the oceans, endless as time, and
happy as whole meadows of flowers! The more who come to partake of it, the
better it is; for generous is “Frau Musika,” her heart is made wholly of
love.

--And when I have shown all these things, Frau Musika, I shall tell of the
golden lands that I have visited upon the wings of thy spirit!--

  What objects are the fountains
    Of thy happy strain!
  What fields or waves or mountains,
    What shapes of sky or plain!
    What love of thine own kind, what ignorance of pain!

       *       *       *       *       *

May 20th.

I live among the poor people and that keeps me humble. There is not much
chance for freedom, I hear them say, there are not many who can dwell in
the forests. Prove your right to it--prove what you can do--the law is
stern. I am not afraid of the challenge; I will prove what I can do.

But I see one here and there with whom the law is not so strict, I think.

       *       *       *       *       *

I met a merchant the other night. I dreamed of him. He said: “I buy such
goods as men need; I buy them as cheaply as I can, since life is grim. I
sell them as cheaply as I can, since men are poor and suffering. I make of
profit what I need to live humbly. I am not of the world's seekers; I am of
the finders.”

       *       *       *       *       *

I met also a guileless fool.

We passed a great mansion. “I should like to know the man who lives there,”
 said the fool.

“Should you?” said I.

“Is he a hero?” asked the fool.

“No,” said I.

“Is he a poet?” asked the fool.

“No,” said I.

“Must he not be very beautiful,” said the fool, “that men judge him worthy
of so much beauty?”

       *       *       *       *       *

May 21st.

I must finish this thing this time! That cry rings in my ears night after
night. I am toiling upward--upward--I can see no sign of the end yet--but
I must finish this time! If I had to stop with this thing haunting me--if
I had to go out into that jungle of a world with this weight upon me--to
repress myself with this fire in my heart--I could not bear it--I could not
bear it!

And if I stopped and went out into that world again--how many weeks of
agony would it cost me to get back to where I am now!

I must finish this time!

       *       *       *       *       *

May 22d.

“No, officer, I am neither a burglar nor a highwayman, nor anything else
worth bothering; I'm just a poet, and I'm crazy, to all practical purposes,
so please get used to me and let me wander about the streets at these
strange hours of the night without worrying!”

Poor, perplexed policeman! Poor, perplexed world! Poor, perplexed mothers
and fathers, sisters and cousins and aunts of poets!

  Mit deinen schwarzbraunen Augen
  Siehst du mich forschend an:
  “Wer bist du, und was fehlt dir,
  Du fremder, kranker Mann!”

Who does not love the poet Heine--melodious, beautiful, bitter soul? Is
there any other poet who can mingle, in one sentence, savage irony and
tenderness that brings tears into the eyes? Who can tell the secret of his
flower-like verses?

  Ich bin ein deutscher Dichter,
  Bekannt im deutschen Land;
  Nennt man die besten Namen
  So wird auch der meine genannt.
  Und was mir fehlt, du Kleine,
  Fehlt manchem im deutschen Land;
  Nennt man die schlimmsten Schmerzen,
  So wird auch die meine genannt!

I have never seen but one beautiful thing in New York, and that is its
mighty river in the night-time. I wander down to the docks when my work is
done, and when it is still; I sit and gaze at it until the city is quite
gone, and all its restlessness,--until there is but that grave presence,
rolling restlessly, silently, as it has rolled for ages. It makes no
comments; it has seen many things.

To-night I sat and watched it till a tangled forest sprang up about me, and
I saw a strange, high-bowed, storm-beaten craft glide past me, ghostly
white, its ghostly sailors gazing ahead and dreaming of spices and gold.

       *       *       *       *       *

The old, old river--my only friend in a whole city! It goes its way--it is
not of the hour.

It fascinates me, and I sit and sit and wonder. I gaze into its black and
gurgling depths, and whisper what Shelley whispered: “If I should go down
there, I should _know_!”

       *       *       *       *       *

But no, I should not know anything.

       *       *       *       *       *

_The days when thou wert not, did they trouble thee? The days when thou
art not shall trouble thee as much._

       *       *       *       *       *

May 24th.

AN ESSAY AFTER RIGHTEOUSNESS

I write this to set forth a purpose which I have for over a year held
before me. I write it that it may serve me for a standard. I write it at
a time when my bank-account consists of twenty-five dollars, and I mean
to publish it at such a time as by the method of plain living and high
thinking, I shall have been able to increase it a hundredfold.

We are told that a man who would write a great poem must first make a poem
of his life. An artist, as I understand the word, is a man who has but one
joy and one purpose and one interest in life--the creating of beauty; he is
a man lifted above and set apart from all other motives of men; a man who
seeks not wealth nor comfort nor fame, nor values these things at all; a
man whose heart is forever lonely, whose life is an endless sorrow, and
whose excuse and whose spur and whose goal and whose consecration, is the
creating of beauty.

What power--be it talent or genius--God has given me, I can not tell; I
only know that an artist in that sense of the word I mean to be. I have
thought out a plan by which I shall make the publishing of my books, as
well as the writing of them, a thing of Art.

No one will read very far in what I shall write without perceiving there
a savage hatred of the spirit of the modern world of wealth; it is only
because I have faith in democracy and hope in the people of my country that
I do not go to worship my God on a desert island. The world which I see
about me at the present moment--the world of politics, of business, of
society--seems to me a thing demoniac in its hideousness; a world gone mad
with pride and selfish lust; a world of wild beasts writhing and grappling
in a pit.

I am but a voice crying in the wilderness, and these things must run their
course. But in the meantime there is one thing that I can do, and the doing
of that has become with me a passion--I can keep my own life pure; I can
see that there is one man amid all this madness whose life is untouched by
any stain of it; who lives not by bread alone, nor by jewelry and gold; who
lives not to be stared at and made drunk with pride, but to behold beauty
and dwell in love; who labors day and night to keep a heart full of worship
and to sing of faith to suffering men; who takes of the reward of that
singing just what food and shelter his body needs; and who shrinks from
wealth and luxury as he would from the mouth of hell.

To live humbly and in oblivion would be my choice, but it will be my duty
to do differently. I know enough about the human heart to know that the
presence of one righteous man makes ten thousand unrighteous men angry and
uncomfortable. And therefore, for the help of any whom it may comfort, and
for the damnation of all the rest, I shall choose that the life I live and
the thing I do shall be public; I shall choose that the millions in our
country who are wearing out their frantic lives in the pursuit of the
dollar, and the few who are squandering their treasures in drunken pomp,
shall know that there is one man who laughs at them--whom all the millions
of all of them could not buy--and who dwells in joy and worship in a heaven
of which they can not even know. In other words, it is my idea not merely
to make a poem of my life, but to publish the poem.

I shall have other, and deeper, and kinder reasons also, for what I shall
do. What I write in my books must be from my deepest heart, the confession
of those moments of which I would speak to no living soul; it must be all
my tenderness, and all my rapture, and all my prayer; and do you think it
will come easily to me to put that out before the rough world to be stared
at, to be bound up in a book and hawked about by commercial people?...

    (Here follows in the manuscript the outline of a
    plan for publishing the writer's works at cost.)

       *       *       *       *       *

Would it not be interesting to me, if I could but pierce the future once,
and see how long it is destined to be before I do so publish a book! I
would do my work better, I fancy, for that.--But let it lie. I shall
publish it some day surely, that I know at least.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sometimes I can hardly realize what it will be to me when I have really won
fame, when I can speak the things that so need speaking--and be heard.

       *       *       *       *       *

May 25th.

Line by line, page by page, I do it. I am counting the days now,
wondering--longing.

It is not merely the writing of it, it is the seeing of it--the planning
and designing. Sometimes I brood over it for hours--I can not find what
I want; and then suddenly a phrase flashes over me and like a train of
gunpowder my thought goes running on--leaping, flying; and then the whole
thing is plain as day. And I hold it all living in my hands.

I am blessed with a good memory. In times of excitement such as that I
seize all the best phrases and carry them away, and bury them out of sight,
like a miser. They are my nuggets of gold.

And sometimes I am a greedy miser, and stand perplexed; shall I go on and
gather more, or shall I make off with the armful that I have?

       *       *       *       *       *

May 26th.

My religion is my Art. I have no prayer but my work.

Sometimes that is a glory, and sometimes again that is an agony. To have no
duty outside of yourself; to have no inspiration outside of yourself; to
have no routine to help you, no voice to cry out when your conscience goes
to sleep, no place of refuge in your weakness!--

All that is but the reason why I dare not be weak. I have chosen to lead
and not to follow; therefore I have no rest, and may not look behind me,
and can think of nothing but the way.

To be the maker of a religion is to sweat blood in the night-time.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is but one way that I may live--to take every impulse that comes--to
be watching, watching--to dare always and instantly, to hesitate, to put
off never, to seize the skirt of my muse whenever it shimmers before me. So
I make myself a habit, a routine, a discipline; and so each day I have new
power. So each day I feel myself, I bare my arms, I walk erect, exulting--I
laugh--I am a god!

--And as I write that a feeling takes rise in me, and my heart beats
faster; but I am tired, I sink back, I do not take the gift that is
offered; and then my conscience gives a growl, and in a flash I see what
I have done, and feel a throb of rage and leap up.

       *       *       *       *       *

One of my perils is that when I am strong I feel that I must always be so.
This truth that is so obvious, these words that flow so swift--what need is
there to fear for them, to write them now?--And so they are never written.

       *       *       *       *       *

May 27th.

Will you imagine me to-day, kneeling by the bedside, shuddering; my face
hidden, the tears streaming down my cheeks--and I crying aloud: “I
will--oh, I will!”

I can not tell any more.

       *       *       *       *       *

May 29th.

I am coming to the last scenes. I hear them rumbling in my soul--far, far
off--like a distant surf on a windless night.

I am coming, step by step: I mean to fight it out on this line.

I know a man who always rose to the occasion. Never was he challenged that
he did not dare and triumph. Oh, if instead of being hungry and pining, I
had but the music of that divine inspirer!--

  Heller schallend,
    mich umwallend,
  sind es Wellen
    sanfter Lüfte?
  Sind es Wogen
    wonniger Düfte?
  Wie sie schwellen,
    mich umrauschen,
  soll ich athmen,
    soll ich lauschen?
  Soll ich schlürfen,
    untertauchen,
  süss in Düften
    mich verhauchen?

       *       *       *       *       *

May 30th.

To-day. I had a spiritual experience--a revelation; to-day, in a flash of
insight, I understood an age--whole centuries of time, whole nations of
men.

I had been writing one of the great hymns, one of the great victories; and
I had been drunk with it, it had come with a surge and a sweep, it had set
everything about me in motion--huge phantom shapes--all life and all being
gone mad.

And then, when I had written it, I went out into the dark night; I walked
and walked, not knowing where, still tingling with excitement. And,
suddenly, I stood spellbound--the cathedral!

There it was--there it was! I saw it, alive and real before me--all of
it--all that I had seen and known! I cried out for joy, I stretched out my
arms to it--the great, dark surging presence; and all my soul went with it,
singing, singing--up into the misty night!

       *       *       *       *       *

June 1st.

I sat to-night by the river again. It was moonlight, and the water lay
shimmering. A little yacht, gleaming with lights, sped by; it was very
close, and I saw a group of people on it, I heard them laughing; and one
of them--a woman--was singing.

O God, what a voice! So rich, so exquisite! It soared upward and died
again, quivering like the reflection of the stars on the water. It went
in--in to the very depths of my soul; it loosed all the woe of my spirit,
it made the tears gush into my eyes. And then it died away, away in the
distance; and I sat with my hands clasped.

Sail on--sail on--oh heavenly voice! Far-off vision of brightness and
beauty! Your lot is not my lot.

       *       *       *       *       *

--There is something within me that weeps yet, at the echo of that music.
Oh, what would I not give for music! How much of my bitterness, how many of
my sorrows have melted into tears at one strain!

And I can not have it! Oh, you who do have it, do you know what you have?
Oh beautiful voice, do you hear yourself?

All things else I can make for myself--friendship and love--nature and
books and prayer; all things but music!

       *       *       *       *       *

Can you not hear that voice dying--dying--“over the rolling waters”?

       *       *       *       *       *

June 2d.

I shall come out of this a man--a man! I shall know how to live all my
days! I shall have memories that will always haunt me, memories that I can
build the years by!

       *       *       *       *       *

June 3d.

From the time that I began The Captive it has been almost two months; it is
just six weeks from the day I wrote that I had ten or twelve weeks in which
to finish. I have done well financially--I have twenty-one dollars left,
and I have paid for my typewriting.

It is not a fortune. But enough is as good as a fortune.

And I am coming on! I have been counting the scenes--I am really within
sight of the end.

--That day when I crouched by the bed I saw all of the end. I have seen the
whole thing. It will leave me a wreck, but I can do it. And it will take me
about three weeks.

Think of my being able to say that!--Five or six hundred lines at least
I shall have to do, and still I dare to say that. But I am full of this
thing, I mount with it all the time. I am finding my wings.

Nothing can stop me now; I feel that I shall hold myself to it. I become
more grim every day.

       *       *       *       *       *

No one can guess what it means to me to find that I have hold of the whole
of this thing! It is like strong wine to me--I scarcely know where I am.

       *       *       *       *       *

June 4th.

I am sitting down by the window, and first I kick my heels against my old
trunk, and then I write this. Hi! Hi! I think of a poem that I used to
recite about Santa Claus--“Ho, Castor! ho, Pollux!”--and then ho a lot of
other things--a Donner and a Blitzen I remember in particular. I want a
reindeer--a Pegasus--a Valkyrie--an anything--to carry me away up into the
air where I can exult without impropriety!

  Come blow your horn, hunter,
  Come blow your horn on high!
  In yonder room there lieth a 'cello player,
  And now he's going to move away!
  Come blow your horn--

That's an old Elizabethan song. I heard them come up for his trunk just
now, and they've dragged it down-stairs, and I hear the landlady fuming
because they are tearing the wall paper. I have never loved the sound of
the landlady's voice before.

       *       *       *       *       *

--The world is divinely arranged, there is no question about it.

       *       *       *       *       *

June 5th.

Deep in my soul I was convinced that the room would be let to something
worse. But now it appears that the landlady's sister is to occupy it.

--So now I will get to work!

--Moving is noisy; I can't complain. I have been walking about the streets.
I am hungry for the work; but still, I had much to think of. It is a
wonderful thing--a glorious thing, this story--it will make men's hearts
leap.

       *       *       *       *       *

June 6th.

I have plenty of time to write journals, if I feel like it. There is the
sister, and there is the landlady, and there is another woman, and they
have been jabbering about dresses all of the morning. I have been like a
crazy man--I was all on fire this morning, too! O God, it is too cruel!

I could dress those three hags with broomsticks.

       *       *       *       *       *

--How long is this to continue, I want to know. Here it is afternoon and
they are still chattering. Every time I have tried to compose my thoughts
they have come back and begun chattering again. And so I can only pace
about, and then rush out into the street--and wear myself sick. I call
this simply monstrous. That my soul should be tied down to such vulgarity
as this--is it not maddening? Here I am--with all my load of woe--at
this fearful crisis! And I am to be shattered and wrecked and ruined by
_this_! Just as long as they choose to sit there, just so long I am
helpless. Was it for this that I have borne all the pain?

       *       *       *       *       *

It seems to me that I hear jeering laughter around me from a swarm of
little demons. I hide my face and flee, but they follow me.

       *       *       *       *       *

But what can you expect? Have they not a right to talk?--Yes--all the world
has a right to be as hideous as it can. And I have no right but to suffer
and to choke in my rage.

Three vile, ignorant serving-women! Serving-women--ah yes, and if they were
_my_ servants! If I could pay them!--But who serves me! Of what consequence
am I!

       *       *       *       *       *

These things goad me, they are like poisoned thorns in my flesh. The
infinite degradation of it all, the shame, the outrage!

It has burned a brand deep into my flesh, and never while I live will it
come out. Ah, you rich men! You who rule us, who own the treasures, the
opportunities, the joys! You who trample the fair gardens of life like
great blind beasts!

Do you think it is nothing to me that the inspiration and the glory of my
whole lifetime is to be trampled into nothingness for lack of what others
spend upon one dress? Yes, of my whole lifetime! My whole lifetime! Give me
but what another will spend upon one foolish gimcrack that he never looks
at again, and I will live for a whole lifetime! And I will write such
music--Bah! What am I doing?

       *       *       *       *       *

--Sometimes when I think of these things a black shadow stalks over my
heart. I hear a voice, “Fool, and do you still think that you are ever
to escape from this? Do you not perceive that this sordid shame is your
_lot_? Do you not perceive that you may writhe and twist, struggle and
pant, toil and serve, till you foam at the lips? Who will heed you! Who
will hear you! Who cares anything about you!--Who wants your Art! Who wants
your work! Who wants your _life_!--Fool!”

       *       *       *       *       *

--Of course this thing could not go on. And so of course,--stammering and
writhing, as I always do when I have my nose pushed into this kind of
filth--I had to speak to the landlady about it to-night.--

And of course the landlady was astonished. “Why, Mr. Stirling, can't a body
talk in a body's own room?” Yes, a body can talk, but then other bodies
have to move away.

Now she's going to speak to her sister about it. And here I sit, writhing
and trembling. Oh my God, suppose I have to move! Oh merciful Father, have
pity on me--I can't bear much of this! To go tramping around this hot and
horrible city, to go into some new and perhaps yet more dirty place! And
oh, the agony, the shame--suppose _that_ will not do, and I have to
keep on searching! Dragging this fearful burden with me! And I have only
eighteen dollars left!

       *       *       *       *       *

If I think of it any longer I shall scream with nervousness.

       *       *       *       *       *

June 7th.

And now it is all settled. A body has to talk in a body's own room, and a
body's nose has to turn up with indignation as a body announces the fact.
And so here I sit, waiting for the expressman to come for my trunk.

Now that it is over it does not seem so bad. I am like a snail--once back
in my shell, I do not care what happens. I have given up trying to write
The Captive, and so nothing bothers me any more.--I have forgotten all
about it now, it is years behind me.

But I have seen it all; I can get it back in good time. I do not fear.

I have rolled up a little bundle, a tooth-brush and some manuscripts
principally; and I send the rest to a friend's house. I have had an
inspiration. Why should I stay in this hot and steaming place?--Why should
I be “barricaded evermore within the walls of cities?” _Ich will ins
Land!_

Why did I not think of this in the beginning? I am going now to see the
springtime!--“the only pretty ring time, when birds do sing--hey
ding-a-ding!”

That was a real idea. I do not know where I am going; but I will walk and
get somewhere--there will be woods. I'll sleep in hay-ricks if it can't be
managed any other way.

  Away, away from men and towns,
  To the wildwood and the downs!

I could have been through in three weeks now, I believe. But it was not to
be. We have to take what comes to us--

  Let us then be up and doing,
  With a heart for any fate.

I'm glad I don't have to write poetry like _that_!

       *       *       *       *       *

June 8th.

Howdy-do, Brother Bobolink! How in the world did you guess I was coming
this way?

  --Es ist nun einmal so.
  Kein Dichter reist incognito!

Ah, to be out in the open air again, to see the world green and beautiful;
to run with the wind and look at the flowers and listen to the birds! I am
sitting by a spring; I have eaten my dinner.

I turned my steps Jerseyward.

       *       *       *       *       *

--I have been walking all day. I must find some place to stop very soon.
I can not think of the country with this burden on me. I am like a sick
animal--I seek a hiding-place. I fancied I might think of my work on the
way, but I can not. The world is happy; my work is not happy.

My hope is all in the end of the journey, and the walking is drudgery. And
then, my money is going! I must find some sort of a hut--a tumble-down
house, an old barn--anything.

I shall trudge one more day's journey. Then I think I shall be far enough
from New York.

       *       *       *       *       *

--I passed a tramp to-day; and while we walked together I composed an
address:

“My brother--for are we not brothers, thou and I?

“Have we not fled from the sleek man, thou and I? And is it not we alone
that know Truth?

“Thy clothing is ragged, and there is hunger in thine eyes; it is so also
with me.

“It is thy fate to wander; it is my fate to wander too. And with restless
eyes to look out upon the world, to meet with distrust from men.

“Yet not for that am I sad, nay, not for that, but for a deeper sorrow;
because I was sent out into the world with a curse upon me, because I was
sent out into the world a Drunkard.

“Yea, so it is, my brother.

“And that for which I thirst is not easy to find; and when I have found it
I am not content, but must seek more; and so I have only desolation.

“Who laid this curse upon us, my brother?

“That we should dwell in sorrow and unrest?

“That no man should heed our voice, and that we should grow weak and faint?

“That we should die, and be forgotten--thou and I?

“Oh, tell us wherefore--ye wise men.”

       *       *       *       *       *

June 9th.

I have walked another day. I am beginning to get away from the suburban
towns, and into the real country. I knew that it would cost me a good deal
to go to a hotel last night, and it was warm, so I slept in a hay-stack!
It was quite an adventure. Now I've got my pockets stuffed full of rolls,
Benjamin Franklin style.

--My mind is like the ocean after a storm.

The great waves come rolling over it still; it is all restless, tossing.
But it is sinking, sinking to rest!--Heaven grant that I may find my place
of refuge before it is quite calm.

It is everything or nothing with me; I am made that way. Either I give
every instant of my time, every thought, every effort to my work, or else I
close up like a flower and wait. I can not write poetry and hunt a lodging
too.

So I am waiting--waiting.--

       *       *       *       *       *

June 10th.

I began inquiring to-day--a shanty, a barn--anything. Every one thinks it
necessary to be very much puzzled about what I want it for. My clothes
are still fairly respectable, and so they tell me about pretty summer
cottages--only so much per month!

       *       *       *       *       *

June 12th.

I have been tramping on and on for two more days. I do not believe I shall
ever find what I want. Nothing but one old musty place in ruins, so far!
And my money is going, and I am wild with anxiety! I am almost tempted to
turn back to the ruin.

       *       *       *       *       *

June 13th.

I am sitting in a room in a dirty hotel. It was raining to-day and I had to
come here. I shall probably have to pay fifty cents too. I won't stay to
breakfast.

Oh what will I do if my money gives out? I saw a cottage to-day, that a man
said I could have for ten dollars a month. I was tempted to spend nearly
all I had and take it, and live on bread and water. I am desperate.

       *       *       *       *       *

June 14th.

“Perhaps maybe you'd like 'Oaklands,'” said the farmer, laughing.

“Oaklands” turned out to be the home of a millionaire “dry-goods man” who
was in Europe. I did not want “Oaklands.”

“I don't know of anything else,” said the farmer, scratching his head. Then
he added with a grin, “unless it be the cook-house.”

“What's the cook-house?” I asked, suspiciously.

“Oh, it's a kind of a little place they've got 'way out in the woods,” said
the farmer. “It's where they goes when they goes picnicking.”

My heart gave a jump. “What sort of a place?” I asked.

“They've got a big platform chiefly, where they put up a tent. The
cook-house ain't nothin' but a little two by four shanty, with a big stove
in it.”

“How big is it?” I cried.

“It's about half o' this here room, I reckon.”

(“This here room” was about six of my rooms in New York!)

“And where is it?” I cried. “How can I get there?”

“Oh, you don't want to go to no sech place ez that!” said the farmer.
“There ain't no bed nor nothin' in it! An' it's two mile out there in the
woods!”

Let anybody imagine how my heart was going! “Who can show it to me?” I
panted.

“Why,” said he, “I'm the man that's in charge of it; but I--”

“And can you rent it to me for a month?”

“Why, I don't know any reason why I can't rent it to you for a year--only
it ain't worth nothin', an'--”

“Then rent it to me! The less it is worth the better it will suit me. But
come, show me where it is!”

“I reckon I can show you,” said the man, looking perplexed. “But what in
the world do you want to go into that lonesome place for? Why, boy, nobody
goes there in a month! An' what you goin' to do for somethin' to eat, an'
some place to sleep, an'--”

       *       *       *       *       *

I managed to get him started at last. And now, oh just look at me! I've
been roaming around staring at it--inside and outside. The gods love me
after all.

The infinite relief that it is! The infinite exultation that it is! And
all to myself--not a soul near me! And out in the woods! _And mine for
a month!_ Oh blessed 'cello player that moved away; blessed landlady's
sister that talked--!

And oh blessed cook-house! We will make thee a consecrated cook-house
before we get through--we will! We will cook a dish in thee that will warm
the hearts of a goodly company--oh blessed cook-house!

--And outside a great white moon streaming through the forest trees!

       *       *       *       *       *

The “cook-house” is about ten feet square. It is about one-third stove, now
covered with a newspaper and serving as a table. Besides that there is one
chair, for which I have just improvised a leg, with the help of my knife.

Besides the knife I have a fork, a plate, a cup, and a spoon--borrowed from
the farmer. I have a blanket and a bed consisting of an old carriage robe,
rented from the farmer. I have a lamp and a kerosene-can--ditto. I have a
frying-pan--ditto. But I haven't my little oil-stove, so I fear I shall eat
mostly cold things. I have a pail of milk, a loaf of bread, a ginger-cake,
some butter, some eggs, some bacon, some apples and some radishes; also a
tooth-brush, a comb, a change of clothing, two handkerchiefs, some pencils
and paper, Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, Samson Agonistes, faith,
hope, and charity!

--I believe I have named all the necessaries of life.

       *       *       *       *       *

June 15th.

I have scooped myself out a bathtub below the spring. I forgot towels in
my list of necessaries! I fear it will be inconvenient on rainy days. I am
like a child with a new toy, in my wonderful home. I was too excited to
think of working. I fried an egg over a little fire, and then I roamed all
about the woods. I don't remember ever having been so happy before. I had
forgotten there was anything beautiful in the world.--

       *       *       *       *       *

--I spent the whole of the afternoon dreaming a dream. When I have finished
The Captive and gotten some money, I am going to have a little house in the
woods! I have just had it before my eyes--and I laughed with delight like a
boy.

It will be a fine big house--it will cost about fifty dollars; and there
will be a table and a chair, and a cot, and such things. It will stand by a
lake, a wild lake far out in the mountains! I have vowed to find a lake at
least five miles from anything; and once a week I will have somebody bring
me provisions.

       *       *       *       *       *

--That is the way I shall spend next summer!--Up, up! Get to work!--

       *       *       *       *       *

June 17th.

I have done nothing for two days but wander around and stare at things. It
is all gone, every gleam of it! And I can not bring it back--I know not
what to do, where to turn. I stopped in one of the hardest parts of the
whole thing--in the very midst of it; and how in the world am I to begin? I
walk around, I sit down, I get up again; I try to put my thoughts upon it,
I bring them back again and again. But I can not do it--I have let every
thread of it go. What has tramping over the country and delight in houses
got to do with my work?

I have nothing to write--the whole thing is a blank to me. And here I am,
eating up my provisions!--This shows me what I am--what a child.

--But how am I to get up on those fearful heights again? How am I to take
the first step toward those fearful heights again? I cry that all day!

       *       *       *       *       *

June 20th.

Oh, the joy of being out in the woods! I never knew of it before--I never
dreamed it!

It is better than an orchestra. To be able to stretch your arms! To have a
place to walk! To be able to talk aloud!--to laugh--to shout--to do what
you please!--to be free from all men, and the thought of all men!

And to hear your own poetry aloud!--I cried out to-day that I would go back
and do the whole of The Captive over again, so that I could hear it out
loud. It made me quite wild yesterday when I first realized that I was
_alone_!

--Last night there was a gale, and the clouds sped over the moon, and the
wind roared in the trees--and I roared too!

--“For I see the crescent promise of my spirit hath not set!”

       *       *       *       *       *

June 21st.

I did just as I have always done before. I got desperate enough, and then
I went to work. I said “I will! and I will! and I will!” I think I said
nothing else for twenty-four hours.

And so the storm again, and the great waves speeding!

       *       *       *       *       *

Is there any one who has ever watched the great waves?--How they go! They
take you right with them. My verses shall be waves.

I am tired out again; but oh, I am filled with my music! There was never
any poetry like it in the world!

       *       *       *       *       *

And at the height of it I cry out: “I am free! I am free!

“I won't have to stop again!

“I can go to the very end of it!

“And I don't care who hears me!

“I am free!”

       *       *       *       *       *

June 23d.

I ate a raw egg this morning. For yesterday I let the fire go out five
times, and gave up my breakfast rather than start a sixth.

I wanted to save time--I thought it would be egg just the same; but I
record it for future generations of poets, that the experiment is not a
success. You taste raw egg all day.

I shall have them all hard-boiled in the farmhouse after this.

--Twenty-eight lines to-day! I had more, but I lost them, and then I fell
down.

--There is always a new height, but there are not always new words. My
verse grows more and more incoherent, and more and more daring. I can feel
the difference of a whole lifetime between it now, and what I wrote ten
weeks ago.

       *       *       *       *       *

--That is as it should be, of course. One does not reckon by days in a
dungeon.

I notice also that the periods get longer; it has more sweep--it leaps
wider spaces--it is less easy to follow.

       *       *       *       *       *

--Oh, let not any man read what I wrote this morning, except he stand upon
the heights!

       *       *       *       *       *

I have worn a path in the woods, deep and wide, pacing back and forth,
back and forth, all day. Any one who saw me would think that I was mad.
Fighting--fighting--all the time fighting! Sometimes I run--sometimes I
don't know what I do. Last night I know that it grew dark, and that I was
still lying flat on the dead leaves, striking my hands, that were numb with
excitement. I was too weak to move--but I remember panting out, “There is
nothing like that in _King Lear_!”

       *       *       *       *       *

I brought about twenty phrases out of that, and one or two sentences. They
will fall into the verse the next time it comes.

       *       *       *       *       *

June 24th.

--Listen to me, oh thou world--I will tell you something! You may take a
century to understand those phrases--to stop laughing at them, perhaps--who
knows? But those sentences are _real_; and they will last as long as
there is a man alive to read them!

When I let anything make me cease to believe in that scene, may I die!

--I will shout it aloud on the streets; they are _real_!

       *       *       *       *       *

And there has been nothing like them done for some years, either.

       *       *       *       *       *

June 25th.

To-day you may imagine me frantically throwing stones at a squirrel. I
said: “If I get him I won't have to go to the farmhouse to-morrow.”

I had had nothing to eat but bread and apples for two meals, and I couldn't
stand that again.

I had fried squirrel and fried apples for supper. It was a very curious
repast.

And I was hungry, and I ate too much! That made me wild, of course, and I
flung all my apples away into the woods. May they feed new squirrels!

       *       *       *       *       *

June 26th.

I get up every morning like--like the sun! I overflow with
laughter--nothing frightens me now. I never knew what was the matter with
me before--it was simply that I could not fight as I chose. If ever I go
back again to have my soul pent up in the cities of men!

I am full of it--full of it! I grapple with it all the day, I can not get
enough of it. I do crazy things.

And the harder it is the faster I go! This thing has been my torturing--it
has made me fight and live. That is really the truth.

       *       *       *       *       *

And I am coming to the end--really to the end!

       *       *       *       *       *

June 27th.

A rainy day! And no glass in my house--only a board cover to the window. I
made myself a nest on the sheltered side.

Nearer! Nearer!

       *       *       *       *       *

June 29th.

Wandering through the woods dreaming of a banquet-hall.--The guests are
witty.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have put into the mouths of the guests all that the world has said to me,
since first I went poetical.

       *       *       *       *       *

June 30th.

To-day I got a big stock of things to eat. I count my time not by days, but
by loaves of bread and dozens of hard-boiled eggs.

       *       *       *       *       *

--This book goes out into the world, not to be judged, but to judge!

       *       *       *       *       *

July 1st.

You do not hear much from a man in a battle, just now and then a cry.

I have gone in to seek out my last enemy--the last demon who has defied me.
I shall close with him--I shall have the thing over with--I will no longer
be haunted and made sick.

--I believe I shall do it all in one day. I don't think I can lay it aside.

       *       *       *       *       *

July 3d.

It is done!--

I wrote that at three o'clock this morning, and then I lay back and laughed
and sobbed, and in the end I fell asleep in the chair.

I was not ill--my relief was so great. I was only happy. I lay back and
closed my eyes. I have born my child.

It is done! It is done! I realize it, and then I am like a crazy person. I
do not know what I am doing--I only wander around and sit down in the woods
and laugh and talk to myself. O God, I am so happy!

I have only to write the end--the last scene in the dungeon. And that is
nothing. “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course!”

       *       *       *       *       *

July 4th.

I have only to write the echoes that are in my heart, the stammering words
of thanksgiving. It is nothing--I have been over them. My whole being is
melted with the woe of them--but I can do them anywhere--anyhow.

--And a sudden wild longing has come over me for the city. I must take all
the world into my arms--I am so happy--I love it so!

Ah, I have done it! I have done it! I am free! _Free!_ FREE!

I must get this thing typewritten--I must get rid of it--it must be
published. How long does it take to get a book published?

       *       *       *       *       *

July 5th.

I fought a fight with myself yesterday, and won it. The last of my
weaknesses! I wanted to pack up my things and go home! And finish my poem
on the train! I was that hungry for the goal! But I am still here--doing
the last scene. I shall stay until it is done. I can not stay after that.

       *       *       *       *       *

Let me hear how your voice trembles as you sing the last strains of your
song, and I will tell you how great an artist you are.

               Good night, sweet prince,
  And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

       *       *       *       *       *

July 6th.

Five in the afternoon! And the wind was howling in turret and tree, and all
the forest was an organ chant. So I packed up my belongings, and laid my
poem in next to my heart--the last words written: “It is done!”

And I went out and stood and gazed at my little home. Farewell, farewell,
little home! Perhaps I shall never see you again; but ever you will live
in my fancy as my heaven upon earth. They built thee for picnic parties!
And I wonder what proud prince had built for his pleasures--the Garden of
Gethsemane!

       *       *       *       *       *

And now I go forth like a bridegroom out of my chamber, rejoicing as a
strong man to run a race. And all the world dances around me, and I stretch
out my arms and sing!

Come, come, my foes, where are ye now? What foes shall I be afraid of now!
Is it the world and its trials? Come!

       *       *       *       *       *

I go back to conquer--I have forged my weapon! I have bared my arm! Where
are those foes of mine?

       *       *       *       *       *

There is nothing so commonplace that it does not sing to me. I walk with a
springing step, I laugh, I exult. Birds, flowers, men--I love them all; I
get into the train, and the going of it is drunkenness. I have won! I have
won!

I go back to the world. Come, world! I have but four dollars left--four
dollars!--and The Captive!

       *       *       *       *       *

It is not strange that a man should be made drunk with happiness by the
writing of a tragedy! That is the great insincerity of the artist. “That
cry of agony!--what a triumph of genius was that my cry of agony!”

       *       *       *       *       *

--It is not the sorrow, it is the struggle; so I read the tragedy. This man
is dead, but God lives, and Art lives.

I will go back, I will do anything now--I will empty ash-cans, and find
it a joy. The book is done--safe in next to my heart!--And now it will be
printed, and not fire nor earthquake can destroy it after that. Free! Free!

       *       *       *       *       *

I am writing on the train. I write commonplaces. That is because I can not
shout.

But back there, coming out of the woods, I shouted--and not commonplaces
either!

Coming out of the forest--forest-drunk! Now I know all about Pan and his
creatures!

       *       *       *       *       *

I write carelessly. But in my heart I sit shuddering before that fearful
glory. O God, my Father, let me not forget this awful week, and I will live
in Truth all my days.

       *       *       *       *       *

July 7th. [Footnote: Possibly an error in the date, as the day was Sunday.]

Wandering all day about the streets of the hot city, seeing it not, hearing
it not--waiting for the last lines of the poem to be copied! I could not do
anything until that was done, and at a publisher's. I got it and fled home,
and spent the night correcting the copy.

Ah, God, what a thing it is! How it roars, how it thunders, how it surges!
How infinite, how terrible! Stern, throbbing--is there anything like it in
the world?

       *       *       *       *       *

Ten lines of it make my blood tingle--an act of it makes me bury my face in
my pillow and laugh and sob for five minutes.

       *       *       *       *       *

Go forth, oh my perfect song!




PART II. SEEKING A PUBLISHER


July 8th.

To-day I took it to the publisher's!

       *       *       *       *       *

I had been pondering for a week who were the best publishers. To-day I
hardly had the courage to go in--I know nothing about such things--and my
hands shook so I could hardly hold the package.

       *       *       *       *       *

I asked to see the manager. I told him I had a manuscript to submit. He
looked at me--I guess I must look rather seedy. “What sort of a
manuscript?” he asked. “A blank verse drama!”

Then he took it and glanced over it. “Blank verse dramas are difficult
things to publish,” he said.

“You had best read it, I think,” I answered, “you will find it worth
while.”

“Very well, if you wish,” said he, “we always read everything that is
offered to us.”

“How soon shall you be able to let me know?”

“Oh, in a week or ten days.”

       *       *       *       *       *

And then I went out--shuddering with excitement. A week or ten days!
Well--I can wait. I have done all _my_ duty, at any rate.

       *       *       *       *       *

July 9th.

I have certainly played a bold game with my poem! At the publisher's at
last--and I, having paid my room-rent, have just a dollar in my pocket!

       *       *       *       *       *

I have been tramping about all day to-day, looking for some work. I don't
care what it is--I can do anything to keep alive for a week or ten days.--I
wonder if they will advance me some money at once.

       *       *       *       *       *

They all stare at me suspiciously. I think some of the wildness of the
woods must still hang about me.--Anyway, I walk along on air, I fear
nothing. I could hug all the passers-by. My book is at the publisher's! I
could beg, I think, if I had to, and do it serenely, exultingly. I have
only a dollar--but have I not all the stars?

       *       *       *       *       *

I was thinking to-day about Carlyle, and that ghastly accident to his
manuscript. Let others blame Carlyle for his sins--for those days of agony
and horror I forgive him all things, and love him.

I have the original manuscript of The Captive put safely away. If that poem
were destroyed it would kill me. I can think of anything else in the world
but such a thing as that.

       *       *       *       *       *

July 10th.

What will they write me about it? I picture to myself all the emotions of
a publisher when he discovers a poem like that! Ah yes, good publisher,
I have scanned your lists for many months back; but you have published
nothing like The Captive.

And then I shall taste my first drop of success.

--I do not want it for myself--it is not that--I want it for the book! I
want people to love it--I want it to stir their souls! I want brothers and
friends and lovers in that great glory of mine! That is why I want all the
world to shake with it.

       *       *       *       *       *

And then I can go on!

       *       *       *       *       *

--I wonder if they will write to me sooner, when they find out what it
is.--

       *       *       *       *       *

I have been picturing myself with some money! It is all over now--and I can
do that--will it not be strange to have some money! I have been thinking
where I should live, and what I should do.

The first thing I shall do is to get somebody to teach me music. And then
all the concerts that I long for! How long has it been since I have heard a
note of music?

       *       *       *       *       *

I think that is all I want. I want no toys in my life. I want my freedom,
and my soul, and the forest once again.--

       *       *       *       *       *

I read some of the psalms to-night--far, far into the morning. My heart is
a psalm.

       *       *       *       *       *

--I have gotten something to do! I am a waiter in a restaurant on Sixth
Avenue! I got the place this morning. Ugh!--it is nasty beyond words. But I
do not care, it will keep me alive.

       *       *       *       *       *

July 11th.

What a thing is hope! I have been for two days chained in the most horrible
kind of a place. Picture it--to stand all day and see low people stuffing
themselves with food--the dirt and the grease and the stench and the
endless hideous drudgery! And I five days out of the springing forest and
the ecstasy of inspiration!--Truly, it is a thing to put one's glory to a
test! But I hardly feel it--I walk on air--deep back in my soul there is an
organ song, I hear it all day, all day!

How soon will they write? I fly up-stairs each night, looking for a letter.
Hurry up! Hurry up!

--“_Pegasus im Joche_!”

       *       *       *       *       *

July 13th.

The book! The book! I go thinking about it--when I come home I throw myself
down on the bed and laugh with suppressed excitement. I think all day--they
are reading it now, perhaps! Ah, my book! And perhaps I'll find somebody at
home there to see me about it to-night!

I look at the reviews--I am interested in all the books of the day
now--because The Captive is going to be among them! How will it seem to see
it there, in big letters?

       *       *       *       *       *

And how will it seem to be known? I am not a fool--I know what will help
me to my peace when I am out there in the woods again--and it will not be
that the newspapers have been talking about me, and that the dames of high
society have asked me to their tea-parties. But there are one or two men in
this world that I should like to know. Perhaps as the author of a book that
is known it would be possible.

       *       *       *       *       *

--Yes, before I was one of the mob, and now I have shown what I can do.

       *       *       *       *       *

July 15th.

The horror of that awful “eating-joint” grows on me every hour. I could not
bear it much more--physically it makes me ill, and no amount of enthusiasm
can make that better. I will not sell a second more of my time than I have
to. I made up my mind that I would give up the place at the end of the
week. The money will do me for another week after that, and by that time I
will surely have heard from the publishers.

       *       *       *       *       *

I'll have to tell them, that's all,--it is nothing to be ashamed of.
They'll have to give me some money in advance. I can not live in that
cesspool.

       *       *       *       *       *

Yes, to-morrow and half of the next day,--that is all I will bear!

       *       *       *       *       *

--I long sometimes to go and see them; but no, I can wait.

       *       *       *       *       *

July 17th.

I treated myself to a long holiday this afternoon. I went up to the park,
and walked and walked. Everything was in a tumult within me--I was clear
of that last prison. And all the excitement and the power of that poem are
still in me. I am restless, all on fire, stern, hungry, like a wind-storm.
Come not near me unless you wish for truth! Come not near me if you fear
the gods!

To-day my thoughts went surging into the future. I shall have money!--I
shall be free!--And what shall I do next? I counted up what I might
have--even a slight success for the book would mean a fortune such as
turned my head to think of. What would I do?

My mind pounced upon a new work--a work that I have dreamed of often. Would
it be my next work? I thought--would I be able--would I dare? It is a grand
thing.

I went on, and got to thinking of it; I almost forgot that I was not still
in the woods. What a sweeping thing I see it!

The American! It would have to be a three-volume novel, I fear--it would be
as huge as Les Misérables!

It is the Civil War! I am haunted by that fearful struggle. Is there
anything more fearful in history, any more tremendous effort of the human
spirit? And so far it has not made one great poem, one great drama, one
great novel!

       *       *       *       *       *

It was the furnace-fire in which this land was forged--this land which
holds in its womb the future of the world--this land that is to give laws
to the nations and teach mankind its destiny. I search the ages, and I find
no struggle so fraught with meaning, with the woe and the terror and the
agony of a desperate hope.

It must be all put into an art-work, I say! There is no theme that could
thrill the men of this country more, that could lift them more, that could
do more to make their hearts throb with pride. We sent all the best that we
had--armies and armies of them--and they toiled and suffered, they rotted
upon a thousand fields of horror. And their souls cry out to me, that it
must not be for naught, that the fearful consecration must not be for
naught.

The world is filled with historical fiction; it is the cant and the sham of
the hour.--Bah!

       *       *       *       *       *

--This is what I long to do; to take the agony of that struggle and live it
and forge it into an art-work; to put upon a canvas the soul of it; to put
it there, living and terrible, that the men of this land might know the
heritage that is come down to them.

It would take years of toil, it would take money, too--I should have to go
down there. But some day I shall do it!

I saw some of it to-day, and it made my blood go!

I saw a poet, young, sensitive, throbbing at the old, old wrong, at the
black shame of our history; I saw him drawn into that fearful whirlpool of
blood and passion, driven mad with the pain and the horror of it; and I saw
him drilled and hammered to a grim savageness, saw him fighting, day by
day, with his spirit, forging it into an iron sword of war. He was haggard
and hollow-eyed, hard, ruthless, desperate. He saw into the future, he saw
the land he loved, the land he dreamed of--the Union! She stretched out her
arms to him; she cried with the voices of unborn ages, she wrung her hands
in the agony of her despair. And for her his heart beat, for her he was
a madman, for her he marched in sun and in snow, for her he was torn and
slashed, for her he waded through fields of slaughter. Of her he dreamed
and sung--sung to the camps in the night-time, till armies were thrilled
with his singing.

       *       *       *       *       *

This was the thing of which he sang, the gaunt, grim poet: There is a
monster, huge beyond thought, terrible, all-destroying; the name of it is
Rebellion, and the end of it is Death! Day by day you grapple with it, day
by day you hammer it, day by day you crush it. Down with it, down with it!
Finish it!

I heard that as a battle-cry: “Finish it!” I saw a man, wild and
war-frenzied, riding a war-frenzied horse; he rode at the head of a
squadron, bare-headed, sword in hand, demon-like--thundering down-hill upon
a mass of men, stabbing, slashing, trampling, scattering! Above the roar of
it all I heard his cry: “Finish it! Finish it!”

And afterward he staggered from his horse and knelt by the men he had
killed, and wept.

       *       *       *       *       *

--I saw him again. It was when the man of the hour had come at last;
when the monster had met his master; when, day by day, they hammered it,
the fire-spitting, death-dealing monster; when they closed with it in
death-grapple in a tangled wilderness, where armies fought like demons in
the dark, and the wounded were burned by the thousands. I saw companies of
fainting, starving, agonized men, retreating, still battling, day by day;
and I saw the wild horseman galloping on their track, slashing,
trampling--and still with the battle-yell: “Finish it! Finish it!”

       *       *       *       *       *

I saw him yet a third time. It was done, it was finished; and he lay
wounded in a dark room, listening. Outside in the streets of Washington
a great endless army marched by, the army of victory, of salvation; and
the old war-flags waved, and the old war-songs echoed, and he heard the
trampling of ten thousand feet--the rumbling of the old cannon--and the
ocean-roaring of the vast throngs of men! A wild delirium of victory
throbbed in his soul,--burned him up, as he lay there alone, dying of his
passion and his wounds. Born of the joy that throbbed in the air about him,
born of the waving banners and the clashing trumpets and the trampling
hosts and the shouting millions--a figure loomed up before him--a figure
with eyes of flame and a form that towered like the mountains--with arms
outstretched in rapture and robes that touched the corn-fields as she
sped--angel, prophetess, goddess!--Liberty!

       *       *       *       *       *

--And at her feet he sobbed out his life.

       *       *       *       *       *

--The American!

       *       *       *       *       *

July 18th.

Still another day, and no news from the publisher's. The time is nearly
up--I can not wait much longer.

       *       *       *       *       *

They have rejected The Captive! They have rejected The Captive! In God's
name, what does it mean? They have rejected The Captive!

I stared at the paper in blank consternation! I couldn't realize the words,
I couldn't understand what they meant. Such a thing never occurred to me in
my wildest moment.

What is the matter with them--are they mad? Great God, that any human
creature!--And without a line about it!

--“We have carefully considered the MS. which you have kindly offered us,
and regret that we are not advised to undertake its publication. We are
returning the MS. with thanks for your courtesy in submitting it.”

       *       *       *       *       *

That letter came to me like a blow in the face.--I have spent hours
to-night pacing the streets, almost speechless. Fools!

--But I will not let such a thing disturb me for an instant. Yes, they are
a great publishing-house--but such things as I have seen them publish! And
they “regret.” Well, you _will_ regret, some day, never fear!

       *       *       *       *       *

July 19th.

The manuscript arrived this morning. I took it up-stairs and sat down,
trembling, and read it all again.

I wish that I could see the man or woman who read that poem and rejected
it--just that I might see what kind of looking person it is. Oh, the
wildness of it, the surge and the roar of it! The glory of it!

       *       *       *       *       *

I can not afford to waste my time worrying about such things. I only say
“Fools!”

       *       *       *       *       *

--I took it to another publisher. I don't know any in particular, but I
will try the best. This publisher didn't seem very anxious to read it. Go
ahead, try it!--Or are you a fool too?

--Of course I shall have to begin tramping around, looking for some work
again. I must find something better than the last.

       *       *       *       *       *

July 20th.

Nervous, impatient--it is so that I have lived. Never to waste an instant
has been my passion. I have struggled, watched, fought for a minute. If
ever I were held back or kept idle it drove me wild, and I burst through
everything. It has always been a torture to me not to be thinking
something.

But less of that torture than I have now, I think I never had; it seems as
if I had won the mastery--I mind nothing any more. I walk upon the air,
and I never tire. Thoughts--endless thoughts--come to me without ever the
asking; nothing disturbs me, nothing hinders me--I take everything along
with me.--I am full of impulse, of life, of energy!--

  I am the owner of the sphere,
  Of the seven stars and the solar year,
  Of Cæsar's hand and Plato's brain!--

And this when I have spent all the day looking for work!--answering
advertisements, and tramping to this place and that! Discouraging?--what
does the word mean?

       *       *       *       *       *

--I am the man who has never learned to shiver and shake!

       *       *       *       *       *

I thought of a young Irishman I worked with a long time ago. “Once I went
into a place, and says I, 'I'd like to be havin' a job.' An' he looked me
over, an' he says, says he, 'Git oot!' An' so I thought I'd better git
oot!”

       *       *       *       *       *

It might take me some time to find a publisher, I was thinking to-day. I do
not know anything about publishers. But once get it before the world, that
is the thing! I fear nothing, I can wait. It is done, that is all I can
think of. --The rest “must follow, as the night the day.”

       *       *       *       *       *

July 21st.

To-night I sat by the bedside trembling, thinking of what I had learned.
Oh, this faith that I have gained, it must go forth among men! A prayer
welled up in my soul--I have learned what I can do--I have learned that I
can do what I will! I have seen the infinite heights that lie beyond--oh,
let me not fail! The hopes of unborn generations are in my soul.

       *       *       *       *       *

--That is true. What systems shall come of this vision of mine, what new
ways of beauty, what new happiness and new freedom! That thought has shaken
the very depths of my soul.

It makes me leap up--it makes me wish to go! Why should I not start now?
Why should I waste to-day?

       *       *       *       *       *

July 22d.

I have been making plans. I must get to work. I was racing through all
sorts of vast schemes to-day as I walked about the streets hunting for
something to do. I will make my Greek perfect first--I can do that while I
am walking.

I made an athlete of myself pacing up and down with The Captive! I honestly
think I walked ten or twelve hours some days. I have walked all day to-day,
but I do not feel tired. I answered advertisements in the papers.

       *       *       *       *       *

--Why are men impolite? I do not believe I could ever learn to speak
rudely.

       *       *       *       *       *

July 23d.

The impossible occupations that I have thought of, in trying to solve
my problem! To-day I saw myself a lighthouse-keeper! What does a
lighthouse-keeper do, anyway? And could I manage to get such a place
where I could be alone by myself?

       *       *       *       *       *

--But no, some one would have to attend to the light!--

       *       *       *       *       *

I thought of being a hall-boy. But you are not paid very much.--I said,
however, that I would at least get some sort of a place up-town. I could
not stand it down in the “business” world.

       *       *       *       *       *

God, how horrible it is! All that seething effort--and for what? All this
“business”--is it really necessary to the developing of the souls of men?
Does each man in that rushing mob need more money yet, to begin developing
his soul?

       *       *       *       *       *

--Another occupation! I saw myself a lonely hunter, living by a mountain
lake, and shooting game for a living! I wonder if that wouldn't be
possible. I never shot any game, but I could learn.

It would suit me perfectly to sit by a mountain lake and read Greek and
watch for ducks.

       *       *       *       *       *

July 27th.

I was getting down pretty close to the limit again, but I got something to
do to-day. I had to take what I could find; it is what would be called a
good position, I suppose; I am in a wholesale-paper store. I get twelve
dollars, and that is quite something.

       *       *       *       *       *

The business of the will is to face the things that come--not any other
things. Now I have to drill and discipline myself anew, to learn to save my
soul alive in a wholesale-paper store!

It is a great, dingy place, full of chaffering, hungry-looking men. They
are all desperately serious; it is a great “business house,” I believe; the
very atmosphere of it is deadly poison.

--Oh bald-headed, grim-visaged senior-partner, that didst gaze at me over
black-rimmed spectacles--so I have “an opportunity to rise,” have I?

Yes,--I shall rise upon wings of a sapphire sheen, and toss myself up in
the wind and shake down showers of golden light into thy wondering eyes, oh
bald-headed, grim-visaged senior-partner!

       *       *       *       *       *

--It is my business to show samples of paper. I shall learn all about them
in a few days, and then I shall go at the Greek.

       *       *       *       *       *

July 28th.

Whenever I feel weary I run off into a corner and whisper into my ear, “It
is done! Be not afraid!” Instantly my heart goes up like swift music.

       *       *       *       *       *

July 31st.

Twelve days since I left The Captive; they said it would take three weeks.

       *       *       *       *       *

Something strange flashed over me to-day, something that sent a shudder
through me; I have done a strange thing to myself this summer, not in
metaphor, but in fact. I have seen a ghost; I have drunk a potion; I have
gazed upon a nymph; I have made myself mad!

       *       *       *       *       *

I am no longer a man among men--I am “the reed that grows never more
again”!

       *       *       *       *       *

--I try to lose myself in a book, but the book does not hold me. Nothing
satisfies me as it used to,--I am restless, hungry, ill at ease. Why should
I read this man's weak efforts--what profits me that man's half-truths?

       *       *       *       *       *

--And all the time I know too well what I want--I want to fight!

I want to get back into the woods again! I want that vision again! That
work again! I want _myself_!

       *       *       *       *       *

--And here I am, a bird in a cage, beating the bars. What folly to say that
I can be strong and endure this thing! That I can endure anything, dare
anything. Yes, so I can--if I can strive! Put me out there alone, and set
me a task, and I will do it though it kill me. But how can I conquer when I
can not strive?

Here I am, tied! I am tied--not hand and foot--but tied in soul. Tied in
time! Tied in attention! How can I be anything but beaten and wretched? How
can I expect anything but defeat and ruin? A song comes to me, it calls
me--and I can not go! I must stare at it and watch it leave me!--How can
that not drive me wild?

The great wings of my soul begin to beat--I go up, I am wild for the
air,--and then suddenly I am struck back by the hideous impertinences of
the wholesale-paper business! How can I endure such things as that--how can
I _conquer_ Why, it is like the clashing in my ears of twenty trumpets
out of tune!

       *       *       *       *       *

Do not keep me here long! Do not keep me here long!

       *       *       *       *       *

--It is something that I find very strange and curious to watch--how
spontaneously, and instinctively, all young men dislike me. Have I a brand
upon my forehead?

       *       *       *       *       *

It is not my habit to stand upon the pedestal of my inspiration, and gaze
down upon those that I meet. Sympathy is my life--I can sympathize even
with men who aspire to rise in business. But I have to live many lives, and
new lives; and I can brook no delay.

I will make no compromises; I have sworn a vow against idle words--they may
dislike me as they will. I give my work, for which I am paid; I can not
give my soul.

       *       *       *       *       *

August 2d.

Oh what a horrible thing is “business”! Here, where I am,--this is _the
world_. An industrial era!

       *       *       *       *       *

This is a wholesale-paper house, and the three partners who run it call
themselves, with unconscious irony, “wholesale-paper MEN”! They live their
lives in wholesale-paper,--they talk it--they dream it--they plan it--they
have no hope in the world except to find people to buy wholesale-paper! And
the manager--keen and hungry--he is planning to be a wholesale-paper man
himself. And here are twenty-five men and youths apparently having but one
virtue in the world, the possibility of consecrating their souls to
wholesale-paper!

What they make is useful, it may even be sublime--in which way the business
is unique. But none of these men ever thinks of that--they would be just as
absorbed in the business if it were wholesale bonnets. None of them has the
least care in the world about books. And these men who come here to buy the
paper--are _they_ any better? Or is their interest in the paper the
profits it may bring to them?

       *       *       *       *       *

--Dear God!--That brought me back to The Captive.

       *       *       *       *       *

--I have been sick to-day, and sickness clips your wings. It is an error of
mine--I pay for my food with my soul, and so I try to eat little, and
thereby make myself ill.

       *       *       *       *       *

August 3d.

I got my first twelve dollars to-day!

       *       *       *       *       *

August 5th.

To-day I made a resolution, that I must stop this chafing, this panting,
this beating my wings to pieces. A man's inspiration must be under his
control, to stop it, as well as to start it. I can not write or dream
poetry while I am in this slavery, and somehow I have to realize it. When
I go home I will get to some work, and not wander around hungering.

After my glimpse of the forest it is frightful to be penned in this
steaming city. To have to work in an office all day--sometimes it makes me
reel. And then at night too, when I try to read, the room gets suffocating.

Then I go out among the tenement-house crowds, carrying my little
note-book. I stop at a lamp-post and look at a couple of words and then
walk on and learn them! So I go for hours.

       *       *       *       *       *

--Hurry up, publishers!--I wrote to them to-night.

       *       *       *       *       *

August 7th.

“In answer to your letter of the 5th instant, we beg to inform you that
your manuscript is now in the hands of our readers, and that you may expect
a report upon it in a week.”

       *       *       *       *       *

I am reading Euripides.

       *       *       *       *       *

August 8th.

Oh how will I find words for my delight when I have got a little money and
can escape from dirt and horror. To-night two vile men have been quarreling
in the room underneath, and I have been drinking in all their brutal
ugliness. Bah!--

       *       *       *       *       *

To live in a place where there are not horrible women in wrappers, reeling,
foul-smelling men, snuffling children with beer-cans!

This is more of my “economy”!

       *       *       *       *       *

To-night I sat upon the edge of the bed and whispered, “To be free! I shall
be free!”--until I was trembling in every nerve.

My beautiful poem! My beautiful poem will set me free!

Sometimes I love it just as if it were a child.

       *       *       *       *       *

August 10th.

Twelve dollars more!

       *       *       *       *       *

August 11th.

“We have read with the utmost interest the manuscript of The Captive which
you have been so good as to show us. We are very sorry to say that it does
not seem to us that the publication of this poem would be a venture in
which we could engage with profit. At the same time, however, we have been
very much struck with it, and consider it an altogether remarkable piece of
work. We should like very much to have the privilege of an interview with
you, should you find it convenient.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Now what in the world do they mean by that? If they are not going to
publish the book, what do they want to see me for? And I've wasted two
weeks more of my life!

I had not reckoned on petty things such as these. I fear I have not much
knowledge of men. How can a man read The Captive and not know that others
would read it? What are they in business for, anyway?

       *       *       *       *       *

August 12th.

I begged off from work for an hour. I have had an interview with the great
publishers! I have learned a great deal too.

I saw the manager of the firm. He meant to be very kind, that is the first
thing to say; the second is that he is very well-dressed, and
comfortable-looking.

       *       *       *       *       *

“Now, Mr. Stirling,” said he, “you know a publishing house is always on
the lookout for the new man. That is why I wanted to have the pleasure of
meeting you. It is evident to me that you have literary talent of no common
kind.”

(I bow.)

“I wish that I could tell you that we could consider The Captive an
available piece of writing; I have read it myself with the greatest care.
But you must know, Mr. Stirling, that it is an exceedingly _difficult_
piece of work; I mean difficult from a publisher's point of view. There is
very little demand for poetry nowadays--a publisher generally brings out at
a loss even the poems that make a reputation for their authors. Whether you
are aware of that I don't know, but it is true; and I think of all kinds of
poetry a blank verse tragedy is the most to be shunned.”

(Here a pause. I have never any tongue when I am with men.)

“What I want to talk to you about, Mr. Stirling, is the work which you
contemplate in the future. As I said, I was interested at once in this
work; I should like very much indeed to advise you and to be of any
assistance to you that I can. I should like very much to know what your
plans are. I should like very much to see anything that you might write.
Are you contemplating anything just at present?”

“No, not just at present.”

“Not? Don't you think that you might find it possible to produce something
just a little more in accordance with the public taste? Don't you think,
for instance, that you might possibly write a novel?”

(Some hesitation.) “I have thought of a novel.”

“Ah! And might I ask--would it be a character study?--or perhaps
historical?--or--”

“It would be historical.”

“Ah! And of what period?”

“The Civil War.”

(A great look of satisfaction.) “Dear me! Why, that is very interesting
indeed, Mr. Stirling! I should like to see such a work from your pen. And
are you thinking of completing it soon?”

(General discomfort on my part.) “I had never thought of the time exactly.
I had feared it would take a great many years.”

(Perplexity.) “Oh, pshaw!--still, of course, that is the way all great work
is done. Yes, one has to obey one's own inspiration. I understand perfectly
how he can not adjust himself to the market. I have seen too often how
disastrous such attempts are.”

(More courteous platitudes, I assenting. Then at last, weary--)

“You don't think, then, that you will be able to undertake The Captive?”

“No, Mr. Stirling, I really do not think we can. You understand, of course,
if I take this work to the firm I have to tell them I think it will sell;
and that I can not honestly do. You know that a publishing house is just as
much limited as any other business firm--it can not afford to publish books
that the trade does not want. And this is an especially unusual sort of
thing, it is by no means easy to appreciate--you must be aware of that
yourself, Mr. Stirling. You see when I read a manuscript I have to keep
constantly before my mind the thought of how it is going to affect the
public--a very different thing from my own judgment, of course. From the
former standpoint I believe there are things in The Captive that would meet
with a reception not satisfactory to either of us, Mr. Stirling.”

(Perplexity on my part.) “You'll have to explain that to me, I fear.”

“Why--but the explaining of that would be to offer you my opinion about the
book--”

“I should be very pleased to hear it. Your reason for declining it, then,
is not altogether that it is a blank-verse drama?”

“Not altogether, Mr. Stirling. It's a little difficult for me to tell you
about these things, you know. I understand that the book must have meant a
great deal to you, and so I am naturally diffident. But if you will pardon
my saying so, it seems to me that the book--it is obviously, of course,
the work of a young man--it is very emotional, it strives to very high
altitudes. I will not say that it is exaggerated, but--the last part
particularly--it seems to me that you are writing in too high a key, that
your voice is strained.” (An uncomfortable pause.) “Of course, now, that is
but my opinion. It will not seem of any value to you, perhaps, but while
I read it I could not get away from the fact that it was not altogether
natural. It seemed hysterical and overwrought in places--it gives the
effect of crudeness. It is rather hard, you know, to expect a man who sits
at a desk all day to follow you in such very strenuous flights.” (A slight
laugh.)

“Mind you it is not that I do not appreciate high qualities, Mr. Stirling,
it is merely that it seemed to me that if it were toned down somewhat it
would be better--you know such things strike different people in different
ways; you do not find it easy to believe that it would affect men so--but I
am pretty sure that the impulse of the average critic would be to go still
further--to make fun of it. Here, for instance--let me read you the opinion
upon the book that was handed in by one of our most experienced
readers--etc., etc.--”

I have told enough of that story, giving the conversation as literally as
I can recall it. I am always a fool, the presence of other men overawes
me; I sit meek and take all that comes, and then make my escape. The great
publishers' manager still thinks he impressed me with his wisdom--he has
half an idea I'm going to “tone down” The Captive!

--He read me that criticism--great God, it makes me writhe! It was like a
review of the Book of Revelations by Bill Nye.

       *       *       *       *       *

_That my work should be judged by such men!_

       *       *       *       *       *

--“Exaggerated!” “Hysterical!” And is there nothing hysterical in life,
then? And would you go through battle and pestilence with the same serenity
that you sit there at your desk all day, you publisher?

As if a man who was being torn to pieces would converse after the manner of
Mr. Howells and Jane Austen!

       *       *       *       *       *

--“Tone it down!” That bit of inanity has been haunting my ears. Tone down
The Captive! Tone down the faith and rapture of my whole life, until
it is what the reading public will find natural!--And tone down the
Liebes-Tod--and tone down the Choral Symphony--and Epipsychidion--and King
Lear!

  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 throw
  Millions 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,
disgusting _bodies_ that 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, less _élan_ every 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 to _do_? The power that I have in my soul--it is to be
used for the doing of _this_; if I am to save my soul, it must be by
the doing of _this_! 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
fight _not_ to 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 that _I_ shall 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 never
_tries_ any 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--_that_ is 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 anguish
  Wherein we languish;
  From that torpor deep
  Wherein 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--a
_spasm_.

       *       *       *       *       *

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, _know_ that it is coming back!--Otherwise you go mad.”

But I should go mad _that_ way. 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 it _is_ young 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--_this_ book! It is a great
book--a great book--it is--it _is_!

       *       *       *       *       *

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--“It _is_ poetry! It is _great_
poetry! 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 go _now_!” 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, to _find_ this 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 they _will_ hear--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:

  For I am lord of a thousand dollars!

So it is that my best songs go. I can count them on my fingers. But I have
not yet learned how precious they are--that is why I lose them.

--Do you remember that time on the great cliffs by the ocean? There was
nothing left but the ending again--

  Oh bear me away in thy bosom,
  Thou wind of the mountain high!

       *       *       *       *       *

November 2d.

I am not always as I write here--I am not always angry. I have my tender
moments, when I see my woe as the world's woe--above all the poverty. Oh
let me always have a tender heart for the poor!

       *       *       *       *       *

November 6th.

I have a distant relative in this city, an old gentleman who belongs to
clubs and is what is known as a “man of the world.” He has quite a sense
of humor--is famous for good stories. He told me that he was interested in
me--that he would be glad to find a place for me in life, if I would only
get over my youthful follies. It has been years since I saw him, but I can
still hear him.

The last words he ever said to me were these--said with his quiet, amused
smile: “Never mind, my boy, leave it to time. You needn't argue with
me--just leave it to time, and it'll come out all right.”

Never have I sunk into a fit of despair that I have not thought of that;
and the quiet smile has become the sneer of an imp. It has become all the
world watching me, and knowing full well the issue; wise world!

That memory has never yet lost its power to make me grip my hands suddenly.
“So! And my life has no other purpose, then, than to point a moral for a
rich clubman!”

       *       *       *       *       *

Leave it to time! Leave it to time! O God, what a sentence that is--so
savage--and so true! Leave it to the long weary days that come one after
another--that never tire--that never are beaten--that never are less--never
faster--never slower--that wear you out as water wears a stone! Leave it to
time! Say nothing, fear nothing; leave it to time! Leave it to the hours of
dulness, the hours of sickness, the hours of despair! Leave it to failure
piled upon failure, to insult piled upon insult, to rebuff upon rebuff, to
sneer upon sneer! Leave it to the endless, never-ceasing sight of ugliness;
the endless, never-ceasing sight of selfishness; of pettiness, emptiness,
heartlessness, hatefulness! Leave it to heat and to cold, to dust and to
dirt, to hunger and penury, to headache and heartache, and bitter, bitter
loneliness! Leave it to time! Leave it to time!--_Oh my Father in
heaven!_

       *       *       *       *       *

November 8th.

--What am I doing? I am reading books full of facts--I am reading books
that do not make me wretched. I am _not_ reading poetry.

I am 

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/7774