The Journal of Arthur Stirling : ("The Valley of the Shadow") Part 3

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 mailed 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 s.h.i.+mmer 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 n.o.bles, the tyranny of the ma.s.s 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 s.h.i.+pwreck, 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: