Chapter V: The Artist in Revolt

I.

In this manner he earned his living and helped support his mother, until he was twenty. He had finished college at the age of eighteen, “passing comfortably near the bottom of his class”, and had entered Columbia University as a graduate student. During these years, he had written millions of words of hackwork--a total bulk, he had estimated it, equal to the complete works of Sir Walter Scott! The psychology of the period that immediately follows could not well be understood without taking that fact into consideration. It is obscured in his own autobiographical novel, _Love’s Pilgrimage_, and does not at all enter into the quasi-autobiographical _Journal of Arthur Stirling_. Both of these books tell of the frantic and frenzied struggles of a young writer for self-realization in the midst of poverty. In neither of these books will the young writer solve the problem of poverty by doing any other kind of work except writing: and this “no compromise” attitude, when carried to such extreme lengths as it is in these books, alienates a good deal of the sympathies of the reader. One is better able to understand such reckless and wilful intransigence when one realizes that this is the maddened rebellion of an over-driven hack. All work and no play may make Jack a dull boy, when Jack is an ordinary citizen; but if Jack feels himself to be an artist, too much hackwork and no opportunity for creative self-expression makes him go berserk. It is the artist’s revolt against slavery; and like any slave-revolt it is likely to be marked by “red ruin and the breaking up of homes”. It is these years of successful literary drudgery, these millions of meaningless and merely saleable words, that explain the ruthless singleness of artistic purpose in the face of every obstacle and in defiance of common sense. It is this situation which explains the extraordinary combination of abnormal personal sensitiveness with an inhuman indifference to all opposing human claims, whether in himself or in others who are dear to him; and it not merely explains but, more than anything else, serves to excuse the belief, on the part of the young man himself, that the frightful excesses of his morbid egotism are symptoms of “genius”.

The onset of this period of revolt was necessarily delayed at first and then intensified by a sense of his responsibilities toward his mother. The burden of her support had lately been borne much more by him than by his father. It may seem obvious enough to us that, in these circumstances, she should turn to her relatives for assistance, leaving the boy free to struggle with his career; but perhaps this was not so obvious to the relatives--and it was an idea which could grow in the boy’s mind only in the most painful fashion, and with the assistance of an immense amount of quasi-impersonal idealism.

He had to believe that his poetic career was of the utmost importance to humanity--perhaps never a difficult thing for a young poet to believe. And since being a poet meant necessarily being poor, his poverty had to have a quasi-divine sanction and justification, which his ascetically-religious tendencies made it easy for him to feel. Poetry was to be not a career so much as a Mission. The Muse might have spoken to him in such words as those of Jesus, saying: “If any man come to Me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple”. Indeed, the struggle through which he went was in the nature of a religious conversion, such as has led more than one zealot to break the bonds of filial affection and devote his life to poverty and danger. Yet his repudiation of his mother--for such it must have seemed to him--was a hard matter. And the partial transformation of his earlier ambition from that of becoming a poet in the pure and restricted sense to that of becoming a poetic novelist was perhaps not merely due to the influence of years of story-writing, but was a compromise with his sense of obligation to her. For he conceived of himself as ultimately and brilliantly successful. Such success would enable him to resume his obligations to her, without endangering his own ambitions. But this was the utmost compromise of which his tormented mind was capable. And in the meantime he had to repudiate all human obligations that stood in his way. He had to hate the Christianity he had already intellectually outgrown, and, with some help from Nietzsche, whom he had read in the German, to scorn its teaching of Obedience, as a slave-morality unfit for free men.

II.

This, in his twentieth and twenty-first years, was his secret life, and his preparation for the struggle soon to come. Ostensibly, he was at the university in preparation for a career as a lawyer. “His mother had given up all hope of seeing him a bishop, and they had compromised on a judgeship.” But he easily found reasons for repudiating that career: “Here at the university there was a law-school, and he met the students, and saw that this, too, could not be. These ‘lawyers’ were not seeking knowledge for the love of it--they were studying a trade, by which they could rise in the world. They were not going out to do battle for justice--they were perfecting themselves in cunning, so that they might be of help in money-disputes.” Besides, “they were a coarse and roystering crew, and he shrank from them in repugnance”.

Being secretly dedicated to a literary career, he was particularly sensitive to the deficiencies of the courses in English literature. An eminent professor and critic assigned him a “theme” on College Athletics. He decided to quit the course, and the following conversation ensued, as reported in _Love’s Pilgrimage_:

The professor gazed over his spectacles at him. “Why?”

“I don’t think I’m getting any good out of it.”

“But how can you tell what good you are getting?”

“... I don’t seem to feel that I am.”

“It’s not to be supposed that you would feel it--not at this early
stage. You must wait.”

“But I don’t like the method, sir.”

“What’s wrong with the method?”

He was not sure, he said; but he did not think that writing could
be taught. Anyway, one first had to have something worth saying----

“Are you laboring under the delusion that you know anything about
writing?... Because if you are, let me disabuse your mind at once.
There is no one in the class who knows less about writing than
yourself.... It is my business to teach students to write. I’ve
given my life to it, and I think I know something about it. But you
think you know more than I do. That’s all.”

And so they parted.

In a similar course under an even more eminent professor and critic, a grammatical error was discovered in a poem. “You will find such things occasionally,” said the professor, as the story is told in _The Goose-Step_. “There is a line in Byron--‘There let him lay’--and I have an impression that I once came upon a similar error in Shelley. Some day before long I plan to read Shelley through and see if I can find it.” Shelley was the boy’s dearest friend; and he quit that course also.

Nevertheless, while at the university, he discovered for himself how to master a foreign language. He familiarized himself in a few days with the main features of its grammar and syntax, and then read--looking up each word once for all time, and impressing its meaning so firmly in his mind that he would never have to waste time looking in the dictionary again. On the side he thus taught himself German, French, and Italian and read immensely in all those languages. In German he made enthusiastically the acquaintance of Goethe, a picture of whom as a young poet he carried about in his pocket “like a lover”--perhaps, unwittingly to himself, as a secret promise of the coming true of his own rash poetic ambitions.

His only friends were still in the world of imagination. He had no time to make friends; and, if he had wished to do so, he was too much of an oddity at the university; “there was a certain facetious senior who had caught him hurrying through the corridors one day, declaring in excitement that--

‘Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow!’

But he had long ago ceased to hope for a friend, or to care what anybody thought about him; it was clear to him by this time that he had made himself into a poet, and was doomed to be unhappy.”

The time came when he could withhold himself no longer from his own creative work. “There were many signs by which this state might have been known. He went quite alone, and spoke to no man; he was self-absorbed, and walked about with his eyes fixed on vacancy; he was savage when disturbed, and guarded his time unscrupulously. He had given up the last formalities of life--he no longer attended any lectures, or wore cuffs, and he would not talk at meal-times. He took long walks at impossible hours, and he was fond of a certain high hill where the storms blew. These things had been going on for a year; and now the book that had been coming to ripeness in his mind was ready to be born.”

The projected book was a novel, to be called _Springtime and Harvest_. He was so full of this novel that he could not think about anything else; “the professors at the university, and all his relatives and acquaintances had given him up as a hopeless case”. But he had a hundred dollars saved up; and he would spend the summer in the country doing his book.

In the early spring he went to Quebec, found a lonely shack in the woods, had provisions brought to him twice a week, and wrote madly.

It was his break for freedom.

III.

That was in the spring of 1900, when he was not yet twenty-two years old. The previous years, ever since he had grown conscious of his poetic destiny, had been years of struggle and preparation to fit and free himself for his chosen creative task. It doubtless seemed to him that the preparation was complete, and that there remained but the actual struggle of accomplishment, under the mere handicap of poverty.

The truth would perhaps have been too discouraging to face.

Though he had formally decided to seek fame as a writer of prose, he had not really renounced his poetic ambitions; and we are obliged to consider, as gently as possible, his claims to distinction as a poet. His conceptions were truly poetic, and Shelleyan in their nature; it is not strange that his verse should have been thinly intellectual and of a rarefied emotional quality; it is natural enough that it should have dealt with life not directly but through the medium of vague images from some ideal fairyland; its lack of original music, its lack of observation of the natural world, its lack of any striking verbal qualities--all these are faults which might be overcome in time by a young poet of great energy and high ambitions. The early poems of great poets are sometimes terribly bad, and it would be rash to conclude from the mere feebleness and unoriginality of a young poet’s verse that he has no future. Yet in the fragments submitted for our examination in _Love’s Pilgrimage_ it is impossible to find any positive evidences of any sort indicating a poetic vocation.

The same faults, indeed, are apparent in his early prose; but miracles are more to be expected in the realm of prose achievement. Yet it was with but a scanty equipment that this young writer faced the world so confidently. This first novel of his, produced with his heart’s blood, was a shadowy affair; for his heart had no blood in it yet, only morals, ideas, and egotism. The terrible defect of this first creative effort was his lack of knowledge of life. Such knowledge as he had assimilated came from books. But of first-hand acquaintance with life he gave no indication. His actual experience of twenty-one years of existence in this troubled planet had been, it would seem, too painful for realization in concrete form; it had been refined by some psychic process into moral lessons, and it was in this dry form that it reached his imagination, to emerge in earnest but jejune fables that had but the remotest relation to reality. His imagination was securely barricaded against actual life. Of actual life he was afraid, however ardently he might live in his airy refuge of dreams and thoughts. Such, indeed, was his conception of the poet’s life. It was by deliberate intention that he turned his back upon the welter of experience. Filled as he was with moral earnestness, he no doubt despised the late nineteenth-century ideal of the “Ivory Tower”. Yet he lived in an equally remote and cloudy refuge of his own--it might be called a Tower of Clouds.

So long as he continued to live shut away from life behind those cloudy battlements, ambition and moral earnestness would scarcely avail him to become one of the Shelleyan “legislators of mankind”. He would have remained, for all his excellent intentions, utterly ineffective, forever unable to gain a hearing. His “genius” had to be informed by human experience before it could give him power to communicate his emotions to mankind. And since his ascetic fear of life made him incapable of learning joyously, he had to learn by pain. Life had to batter down the walls of his refuge, force itself upon him, pry open his eyes, pierce into his ears, overwhelm the defenses of his mind, before it could reach his heart.... The education of the artist is sometimes a complex business. A poem of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s, well-conned by him at the time, tells of the pain involved in “making a poet out of a man”. He was prepared to suffer that pain. But he was unprepared to suffer the further pain, which was to complicate his life for several years, of making a man out of a half-grown artist-boy. It would take a woman to do that for him.

But he was inured to pain, already an adept in those sufferings which come from resisting the claims of life; and life, even in the shape of woman, would find him a worthy and resourceful antagonist. It promised to be an epic conflict.