possessed her love; for now that he did possess her love, the
possession of her was far away as ever. He had asked for two
years; time was flying, and he was achieving nothing. Again, he
was always conscious of the fact that she did not approve what he
was doing. She did not say so directly. Yet indirectly she let
him understand it as clearly and definitely as she could have
spoken it. It was not resentment with her, but disapproval; though
less sweet-natured women might have resented where she was no more
than disappointed. Her disappointment lay in that this man she had
taken to mould, refused to be moulded. To a certain extent she had
found his clay plastic, then it had developed stubbornness,
declining to be shaped in the image of her father or of Mr. Butler.
What was great and strong in him, she missed, or, worse yet,
misunderstood. This man, whose clay was so plastic that he could
live in any number of pigeonholes of human existence, she thought
wilful and most obstinate because she could not shape him to live
in her pigeonhole, which was the only one she knew. She could not
follow the flights of his mind, and when his brain got beyond her,
she deemed him erratic. Nobody else’s brain ever got beyond her.
She could always follow her father and mother, her brothers and
Olney; wherefore, when she could not follow Martin, she believed
the fault lay with him. It was the old tragedy of insularity
trying to serve as mentor to the universal.
“You worship at the shrine of the established,” he told her once,
in a discussion they had over Praps and Vanderwater. “I grant that
Martin Eden
133
as authorities to quote they are most excellent – the two foremost
literary critics in the United States. Every school teacher in the
land looks up to Vanderwater as the Dean of American criticism.
Yet I read his stuff, and it seems to me the perfection of the
felicitous expression of the inane. Why, he is no more than a
ponderous bromide, thanks to Gelett Burgess. And Praps is no
better. His ‘Hemlock Mosses,’ for instance is beautifully written.
Not a comma is out of place; and the tone – ah! – is lofty, so
lofty. He is the best-paid critic in the United States. Though,
Heaven forbid! he’s not a critic at all. They do criticism better
in England.
“But the point is, they sound the popular note, and they sound it
so beautifully and morally and contentedly. Their reviews remind
me of a British Sunday. They are the popular mouthpieces. They
back up your professors of English, and your professors of English
back them up. And there isn’t an original idea in any of their
skulls. They know only the established, – in fact, they are the
established. They are weak minded, and the established impresses
itself upon them as easily as the name of the brewery is impressed
on a beer bottle. And their function is to catch all the young
fellows attending the university, to drive out of their minds any
glimmering originality that may chance to be there, and to put upon
them the stamp of the established.”
“I think I am nearer the truth,” she replied, “when I stand by the
established, than you are, raging around like an iconoclastic South
Sea Islander.”
“It was the missionary who did the image breaking,” he laughed.
“And unfortunately, all the missionaries are off among the heathen,
so there are none left at home to break those old images, Mr.
Vanderwater and Mr. Praps.”
“And the college professors, as well,” she added.
He shook his head emphatically. “No; the science professors should
live. They’re really great. But it would be a good deed to break
the heads of nine-tenths of the English professors – little,
microscopic-minded parrots!”
Which was rather severe on the professors, but which to Ruth was
blasphemy. She could not help but measure the professors, neat,
scholarly, in fitting clothes, speaking in well-modulated voices,
breathing of culture and refinement, with this almost indescribable
young fellow whom somehow she loved, whose clothes never would fit
him, whose heavy muscles told of damning toil, who grew excited
when he talked, substituting abuse for calm statement and
passionate utterance for cool self-possession. They at least
earned good salaries and were – yes, she compelled herself to face
it – were gentlemen; while he could not earn a penny, and he was
not as they.
She did not weigh Martin’s words nor judge his argument by them.
Her conclusion that his argument was wrong was reached –
unconsciously, it is true – by a comparison of externals. They,
the professors, were right in their literary judgments because they
Martin Eden
134
were successes. Martin’s literary judgments were wrong because he
could not sell his wares. To use his own phrase, they made good,
and he did not make good. And besides, it did not seem reasonable
that he should be right – he who had stood, so short a time before,
in that same living room, blushing and awkward, acknowledging his
introduction, looking fearfully about him at the bric-a-brac his
swinging shoulders threatened to break, asking how long since
Swinburne died, and boastfully announcing that he had read
“Excelsior” and the “Psalm of Life.”
Unwittingly, Ruth herself proved his point that she worshipped the
established. Martin followed the processes of her thoughts, but
forbore to go farther. He did not love her for what she thought of
Praps and Vanderwater and English professors, and he was coming to
realize, with increasing conviction, that he possessed brain-areas
and stretches of knowledge which she could never comprehend nor
know existed.
In music she thought him unreasonable, and in the matter of opera
not only unreasonable but wilfully perverse.
“How did you like it?” she asked him one night, on the way home
from the opera.
It was a night when he had taken her at the expense of a month’s
rigid economizing on food. After vainly waiting for him to speak
about it, herself still tremulous and stirred by what she had just
seen and heard, she had asked the question.
“I liked the overture,” was his answer. “It was splendid.”
“Yes, but the opera itself?”
“That was splendid too; that is, the orchestra was, though I’d have
enjoyed it more if those jumping-jacks had kept quiet or gone off
the stage.”
Ruth was aghast.
“You don’t mean Tetralani or Barillo?” she queried.
“All of them – the whole kit and crew.”
“But they are great artists,” she protested.
“They spoiled the music just the same, with their antics and
unrealities.”
“But don’t you like Barillo’s voice?” Ruth asked. “He is next to
Caruso, they say.”
“Of course I liked him, and I liked Tetralani even better. Her
voice is exquisite – or at least I think so.”
“But, but – ” Ruth stammered. “I don’t know what you mean, then.
You admire their voices, yet say they spoiled the music.”
Martin Eden
135
“Precisely that. I’d give anything to hear them in concert, and
I’d give even a bit more not to hear them when the orchestra is
playing. I’m afraid I am a hopeless realist. Great singers are
not great actors. To hear Barillo sing a love passage with the
voice of an angel, and to hear Tetralani reply like another angel,
and to hear it all accompanied by a perfect orgy of glowing and
colorful music – is ravishing, most ravishing. I do not admit it.
I assert it. But the whole effect is spoiled when I look at them –
at Tetralani, five feet ten in her stocking feet and weighing a
hundred and ninety pounds, and at Barillo, a scant five feet four,
greasy-featured, with the chest of a squat, undersized blacksmith,
and at the pair of them, attitudinizing, clasping their breasts,
flinging their arms in the air like demented creatures in an
asylum; and when I am expected to accept all this as the faithful
illusion of a love-scene between a slender and beautiful princess
and a handsome, romantic, young prince – why, I can’t accept it,
that’s all. It’s rot; it’s absurd; it’s unreal. That’s what’s the
matter with it. It’s not real. Don’t tell me that anybody in this
world ever made love that way. Why, if I’d made love to you in
such fashion, you’d have boxed my ears.”
“But you misunderstand,” Ruth protested. “Every form of art has
its limitations.” (She was busy recalling a lecture she had heard
at the university on the conventions of the arts.) “In painting
there are only two dimensions to the canvas, yet you accept the
illusion of three dimensions which the art of a painter enables him
to throw into the canvas. In writing, again, the author must be
omnipotent. You accept as perfectly legitimate the author’s
account of the secret thoughts of the heroine, and yet all the time