"I"ll get him some day," Thyrsis had said to himself, after their last interview; and he found that he had almost "got" him now. There was no chance of the play"s selling, said the professor, and therefore no recommending it for publication; but it was indeed a remarkable piece of work--one might possibly say that it was a _great_ piece of work.
To which the author responded, "Why can"t one say that surely?"
"I"m not quite sure," said the other, "whether your violinist is a genius, or only thinks he is."
Thyrsis pondered this. "That"s rather an important question," he said.
"Yes," admitted the other.
"There ought to be some way of deciding such a question definitely."
"Yes, there ought to be."
"But there isn"t?"
"No--I"m afraid there isn"t. We know too little about genius as yet."
"But, professor," said Thyrsis, "you are a critic--you write books of criticism. And that"s the one question a critic has to answer."
"Yes, I know," said Prof. Osborne.
"And yet, when you face the issue, you give up."
"It has generally taken a long time to decide such a matter," was the professor"s reply.
"Yes, it has," said the other; "and meantime the man is starved out."
There was a pause. "You have never had any such experience yourself?"
asked Thyrsis. "Of inspiration, I mean."
"No," was the answer. "I couldn"t pretend to."
"So your judgments are never from first-hand knowledge?"
The professor hesitated. "I am dealing with you frankly---" he began.
"I know," said Thyrsis, "and I appreciate that. You understand that it"s an important point for me to get clear. I"ve felt that all along about you--I"ve felt it about so many others who set themselves against me.
And yet I have to bear the burden of their condemnation--"
"I never condemned you," interposed the other.
"Ah, but you did!" cried Thyrsis. "You told me that I knew less about writing than anyone in your cla.s.s! And you spoke as one who had authority."
"But you had given no indications in the cla.s.s-room--"
"I know! I know! I tried to get you to see the reason. I wanted to create literature; and you set me down with a lot of formulas--you told me to write about "The Duty of the College Man to Support Athletics!""
"It"s difficult to see," began Prof. Osborne, "how we could teach college boys to create literature--"
"At least," said the other, "you need not follow a method which would make it impossible for one of them to create literature if he had it in him."
"Does it seem to you as bad as that?" asked the professor, a little disturbed.
"It truly does," said Thyrsis.
"But what would you say we could do?"
To which the boy replied, "You might try to get your pupils to feel one deep emotion about life, or to think one worth-while thought; then they might stand a chance of knowing how it feels to write."
Section 7. Thyrsis was still reading in the papers and magazines of philanthropists and public-spirited citizens; and he was still sitting down to write them and explain his plight. He would beg them to believe that he wanted nothing but a bare living; and he would send copies of his books or articles or ma.n.u.scripts, and ask these people to read them. And about this time an unusual thing happened--one of these philanthropists answered his letter. He wrote that he did not agree with Thyrsis" ideas, by any means, but appreciated the power of his writing, and was certain that he had a career before him. Whereupon Thyrsis made haste to follow up his advantage, and wrote another letter--one of the most intense and impa.s.sioned that he ever composed in his life.
He told about the new book he was dreaming. For years he had read his country"s history, and lived in it and thrilled with it. Especially had he read the Civil War; and now he was planning a book that should hold the War, and all the meanings of the War, as a wine-cup holds the rich flavors and aromas of the grape. A t.i.tan struggle it had been, the birth-agony of a nation; and it was a thing to be contemplated with amazement, that it should have produced so little in the way of art.
Half a dozen poems there were; but of novels not one above the grade of juvenile fiction.
What Thyrsis was planning was a new form; a series of swift visions, of glimpses into the very heart of the nation"s agony. He described some of the scenes that were haunting him and driving him. The winter"s night in the ditches in front of Marye"s Heights, when the dead and dying lay piled in windrows, and the soul of a people sobbed in despair! The night on the field of Gettysburg, when the young soldier lay wounded, but rapt in his vision, seeing the hosts of the victorious future defiling upon that hallowed ground! The ghastly scenes in Andersonville, and the escape, and the long journey filled with perils; and the siege of Petersburg, and the surrender; and last of all the ecstasy of the dying man in the capital, when the grim, war-worn legions were tramping for two days through the city. Such, wrote Thyrsis, was the book that he wished to compose, and that was being stifled in him for the lack of two or three hundred dollars.
Upon the receipt of this letter the philanthropist wrote again, suggesting that the poet come to see him and talk things over. He sent the price of a railroad ticket to Boston; and so Thyrsis made the acquaintance of a new world--one might almost say of a whole new system of worlds.
For here was the Athens of America, the hub of the universe. In Boston they worshipped culture, they lived in literature and art and the transcendental excellences; and by the way of showing that there was no sn.o.bbery in them, they opened the gates of their most august mansions to this soul-sick poet, and invited him to tea.
Thyrsis got a strange impression among these people, who were living upon their knees before the shrine of their own literary history. One was treading here upon holy ground; in these very houses had dwelt immortal writers--their earthly forms had rested in these chairs, and their auras yet haunted the dim religious light of these drawing-rooms.
There were old people who had known them in the flesh, and could tell anecdotes about them--to which one listened in reverent awe; at every gathering one met people who were writing biographies and memoirs of them, or editing their letters and journals, or writing essays and appreciations, criticisms and commentaries and catalogs and bibliographies. And to be worthy of the visitations of such hallowed influences, one must guard one"s mind as a temple, a place of silences and serenities, to which no vulgar things could penetrate; one excluded all the uproar of these days of undisciplined egotism--above all things else one preserved an att.i.tude of aloofness from that which presumed to call itself "literature" in such degenerate times.
To have become acquainted with these high standards was perhaps worth the rent of a room and the cost of some food and clean collars. So Thyrsis reflected when, after his week of waiting, he had his interview with the benevolent philanthropist, who explained to him, at great length, how charity had the effect of weakening the springs of character, and destroying those qualities of self-reliance and independence which were the most precious things in a man.
Section 8. It was a curious coincidence, one that seemed almost symbolic--that Thyrsis should have gone from the Brahmins of Boston to the Socialists of the East Side!
In one of the publishing-houses he visited, Thyrsis had met a young man who gave him a Socialist magazine to read; as the magazine was published in the next building, Thyrsis went in and met the editor. About this time they were crowning a new king in England, and Thyrsis, who had no use for kings, wrote a sarcastic poem which the Socialist editor published free of charge. And so the boy discovered a new way in which he could relieve his feelings.
"I see what you want," he admitted, in his arguments with this editor; "and it"s the same thing as I want--every man with any sense must see that, in the ultimate outcome, all this capital will be owned by the public and not by private individuals. But what I object to is the way you go at it. The industrial process is a necessary thing; it is drilling and disciplining the workers. They are not yet fitted for the responsibility of managing the world."
"But," asked the editor, "what"s to be the sign when they _are_ fitted?"
"When they have been educated," Thyrsis answered.
To which the editor responded, "Who is to educate them, if we don"t?"
That was an interesting point; and Thyrsis found little by little that a new light was dawning upon him. He had somehow conceived of industrial evolution as something vast and intangible and mechanical, something that went on independent of men, and that could not be hurried or delayed. What this editor pointed out was that the process was a definite one, that it went on in the minds of men, and involved human effort--of which the publishing of Socialist literature was a most essential part.
"You ought to hear Darrell," said the man; and a few days later he wrote Thyrsis a note, asking him to go to a hall over on the East Side that evening.
Thyrsis went, and found a working-men"s meeting-room, ill-lighted and ill-ventilated, with perhaps two hundred people in it. The chairman introduced the speaker of the evening; and so Thyrsis got his first glimpse of Henry Darrell.
He was something over forty years of age, slight of build; his face was pale to the point of ghostliness, and this impression was heightened by a jet black mustache and beard. One"s first thought was that this man was no stranger to suffering.
He was not a good speaker, in the conventional sense, he fumbled for words, and repeated himself--and yet from his first sentence Thyrsis found himself listening spellbound. The voice went through him like the toll of a bell; never in all his life had he heard a speaker who put such a burden of anguish into his words--who gave such a sense of gigantic issues, of age-long destinies hanging in the balance, of world-embracing hopes and powers struggling to be born. Here was a prophet who carried in his soul the future of the race; who in the sudden flashes of his vision, in the swift rushes of his pa.s.sionate pleadings, evoked from the deeps of the consciousness forces that one contemplated with terror--confronted one with martyrdoms and agonies and despairs.
"Revolution" was his t.i.tle; he pictured modern civilization as it presented itself to the proletarian man--a gigantic Moloch, to which human lives were fed, a monster from whose dominion there was no deliverance, even in the uttermost parts of the earth. He pictured accident, disease and death, unemployment and starvation, child-labor, prost.i.tution, war; he was the voice of the dispossessed of the earth, the man beneath the machine, ground up body, mind and soul in this "world-wide mill of economic might". And he showed how this man dragged down with him all society; how the chain that bound the slave was fastened also to the master--so that from the poverty and oppression and degradation of this "downmost man" came all the ulcers that festered in the social body. He saw the great economic machine grinding on day and night, the mighty forces rushing to their culmination. He saw the toiling millions pressed deeper and deeper into the mire; he saw their blind, convulsive struggles for deliverance; he saw over them the gigantic slave-driver with his thousand-lashed whip--the capitalist state, cla.s.s-owned cla.s.s-administered--backed by the capitalist church and the capitalist press and capitalist "public sentiment". So the hopes of the people went down in blood and reaction sat enthroned. The nations, ridden by despotisms, and whirled into senseless wars, ran the old course of militarism, imperialism, barbarism; and so civilization slid back yet again into the melting-pot!