wouldn’t have in any position.”
“Then, I’ll have my spare time for study and for real work. In
between the grind I’ll try my hand at masterpieces, and I’ll study
and prepare myself for the writing of masterpieces. Why, I am
amazed at the distance I have come already. When I first tried to
write, I had nothing to write about except a few paltry experiences
which I neither understood nor appreciated. But I had no thoughts.
I really didn’t. I didn’t even have the words with which to think.
My experiences were so many meaningless pictures. But as I began
to add to my knowledge, and to my vocabulary, I saw something more
in my experiences than mere pictures. I retained the pictures and
I found their interpretation. That was when I began to do good
work, when I wrote ‘Adventure,’ ‘Joy,’ ‘The Pot,’ ‘The Wine of
Life,’ ‘The Jostling Street,’ the ‘Love-cycle,’ and the ‘Sea
Lyrics.’ I shall write more like them, and better; but I shall do
it in my spare time. My feet are on the solid earth, now. Hack-
work and income first, masterpieces afterward. Just to show you, I
wrote half a dozen jokes last night for the comic weeklies; and
just as I was going to bed, the thought struck me to try my hand at
a triolet – a humorous one; and inside an hour I had written four.
They ought to be worth a dollar apiece. Four dollars right there
for a few afterthoughts on the way to bed.”
“Of course it’s all valueless, just so much dull and sordid
plodding; but it is no more dull and sordid than keeping books at
sixty dollars a month, adding up endless columns of meaningless
figures until one dies. And furthermore, the hack-work keeps me in
touch with things literary and gives me time to try bigger things.”
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“But what good are these bigger-things, these masterpieces?” Ruth
demanded. “You can’t sell them.”
“Oh, yes, I can,” he began; but she interrupted.
“All those you named, and which you say yourself are good – you
have not sold any of them. We can’t get married on masterpieces
that won’t sell.”
“Then we’ll get married on triolets that will sell,” he asserted
stoutly, putting his arm around her and drawing a very unresponsive
sweetheart toward him.
“Listen to this,” he went on in attempted gayety. “It’s not art,
but it’s a dollar.
“He came in
When I was out,
To borrow some tin
Was why he came in,
And he went without;
So I was in
And he was out.”
The merry lilt with which he had invested the jingle was at
variance with the dejection that came into his face as he finished.
He had drawn no smile from Ruth. She was looking at him in an
earnest and troubled way.
“It may be a dollar,” she said, “but it is a jester’s dollar, the
fee of a clown. Don’t you see, Martin, the whole thing is
lowering. I want the man I love and honor to be something finer
and higher than a perpetrator of jokes and doggerel.”
“You want him to be like – say Mr. Butler?” he suggested.
”
I know you don’t like Mr. Butler,” she began.
“Mr. Butler’s all right,” he interrupted. “It’s only his
indigestion I find fault with. But to save me I can’t see any
difference between writing jokes or comic verse and running a type-
writer, taking dictation, or keeping sets of books. It is all a
means to an end. Your theory is for me to begin with keeping books
in order to become a successful lawyer or man of business. Mine is
to begin with hack-work and develop into an able author.”
“There is a difference,” she insisted.
“What is it?”
“Why, your good work, what you yourself call good, you can’t sell.
You have tried, you know that, – but the editors won’t buy it.”
“Give me time, dear,” he pleaded. “The hack-work is only
makeshift, and I don’t take it seriously. Give me two years. I
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126
shall succeed in that time, and the editors will be glad to buy my
good work. I know what I am saying; I have faith in myself. I
know what I have in me; I know what literature is, now; I know the
average rot that is poured out by a lot of little men; and I know
that at the end of two years I shall be on the highroad to success.
As for business, I shall never succeed at it. I am not in sympathy
with it. It strikes me as dull, and stupid, and mercenary, and
tricky. Anyway I am not adapted for it. I’d never get beyond a
clerkship, and how could you and I be happy on the paltry earnings
of a clerk? I want the best of everything in the world for you,
and the only time when I won’t want it will be when there is
something better. And I’m going to get it, going to get all of it.
The income of a successful author makes Mr. Butler look cheap. A
‘best-seller’ will earn anywhere between fifty and a hundred
thousand dollars – sometimes more and sometimes less; but, as a
rule, pretty close to those figures.”
She remained silent; her disappointment was apparent.
“Well?” he asked.
“I had hoped and planned otherwise. I had thought, and I still
think, that the best thing for you would be to study shorthand –
you already know type-writing – and go into father’s office. You
have a good mind, and I am confident you would succeed as a
lawyer.”
CHAPTER XXIII
That Ruth had little faith in his power as a writer, did not alter
her nor diminish her in Martin’s eyes. In the breathing spell of
the vacation he had taken, he had spent many hours in self-
analysis, and thereby learned much of himself. He had discovered
that he loved beauty more than fame, and that what desire he had
for fame was largely for Ruth’s sake. It was for this reason that
his desire for fame was strong. He wanted to be great in the
world’s eyes; “to make good,” as he expressed it, in order that the
woman he loved should be proud of him and deem him worthy.
As for himself, he loved beauty passionately, and the joy of
serving her was to him sufficient wage. And more than beauty he
loved Ruth. He considered love the finest thing in the world. It
was love that had worked the revolution in him, changing him from
an uncouth sailor to a student and an artist; therefore, to him,
the finest and greatest of the three, greater than learning and
artistry, was love. Already he had discovered that his brain went
beyond Ruth’s, just as it went beyond the brains of her brothers,
or the brain of her father. In spite of every advantage of
university training, and in the face of her bachelorship of arts,
his power of intellect overshadowed hers, and his year or so of
self-study and equipment gave him a mastery of the affairs of the
world and art and life that she could never hope to possess.
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All this he realized, but it did not affect his love for her, nor
her love for him. Love was too fine and noble, and he was too
loyal a lover for him to besmirch love with criticism. What did
love have to do with Ruth’s divergent views on art, right conduct,
the French Revolution, or equal suffrage? They were mental
processes, but love was beyond reason; it was superrational. He
could not belittle love. He worshipped it. Love lay on the
mountain-tops beyond the valley-land of reason. It was a
sublimates condition of existence, the topmost peak of living, and
it came rarely. Thanks to the school of scientific philosophers he
favored, he knew the biological significance of love; but by a
refined process of the same scientific reasoning he reached the
conclusion that the human organism achieved its highest purpose in
love, that love must not be questioned, but must be accepted as the
highest guerdon of life. Thus, he considered the lover blessed
over all creatures, and it was a delight to him to think of “God’s
own mad lover,” rising above the things of earth, above wealth and
judgment, public opinion and applause, rising above life itself and
“dying on a kiss.”
Much of this Martin had already reasoned out, and some of it he
reasoned out later. In the meantime he worked, taking no
recreation except when he went to see Ruth, and living like a
Spartan. He paid two dollars and a half a month rent for the small
room he got from his Portuguese landlady, Maria Silva, a virago and
a widow, hard working and harsher tempered, rearing her large brood