and women? He found them not among the careless, gross, and stupid
intelligences that answered the call of vision to his narrow room.
He felt a loathing for them such as Circe must have felt for her
swine. When he had dismissed the last one and thought himself
alone, a late-comer entered, unexpected and unsummoned. Martin
watched him and saw the stiff-rim, the square-cut, double-breasted
coat and the swaggering shoulders, of the youthful hoodlum who had
once been he.
“You were like all the rest, young fellow,” Martin sneered. “Your
morality and your knowledge were just the same as theirs. You did
not think and act for yourself. Your opinions, like your clothes,
were ready made; your acts were shaped by popular approval. You
were cock of your gang because others acclaimed you the real thing.
You fought and ruled the gang, not because you liked to, – you know
you really despised it, – but because the other fellows patted you
on the shoulder. You licked Cheese-Face because you wouldn’t give
in, and you wouldn’t give in partly because you were an abysmal
brute and for the rest because you believed what every one about
you believed, that the measure of manhood was the carnivorous
ferocity displayed in injuring and marring fellow-creatures’
anatomies. Why, you whelp, you even won other fellows’ girls away
from them, not because you wanted the girls, but because in the
marrow of those about you, those who set your moral pace, was the
instinct of the wild stallion and the bull-seal. Well, the years
Martin Eden
173
have passed, and what do you think about it now?”
As if in reply, the vision underwent a swift metamorphosis. The
stiff-rim and the square-cut vanished, being replaced by milder
garments; the toughness went out of the face, the hardness out of
the eyes; and, the face, chastened and refined, was irradiated from
an inner life of communion with beauty and knowledge. The
apparition was very like his present self, and, as he regarded it,
he noted the student-lamp by which it was illuminated, and the book
over which it pored. He glanced at the title and read, “The
Science of AEsthetics.” Next, he entered into the apparition,
trimmed the student-lamp, and himself went on reading “The Science
of AEsthetics.”
CHAPTER XXX
On a beautiful fall day, a day of similar Indian summer to that
which had seen their love declared the year before, Martin read his
“Love-cycle” to Ruth. It was in the afternoon, and, as before,
they had ridden out to their favorite knoll in the hills. Now and
again she had interrupted his reading with exclamations of
pleasure, and now, as he laid the last sheet of manuscript with its
fellows, he waited her judgment.
She delayed to speak, and at last she spoke haltingly, hesitating
to frame in words the harshness of her thought.
“I think they are beautiful, very beautiful,” she said; “but you
can’t sell them, can you? You see what I mean,” she said, almost
pleaded. “This writing of yours is not practical. Something is
the matter – maybe it is with the market – that prevents you from
earning a living by it. And please, dear, don’t misunderstand me.
I am flattered, and made proud, and all that – I could not be a
true woman were it otherwise – that you should write these poems to
me. But they do not make our marriage possible. Don’t you see,
Martin? Don’t think me mercenary. It is love, the thought of our
future, with which I am burdened. A whole year has gone by since
we learned we loved each other, and our wedding day is no nearer.
Don’t think me immodest in thus talking about our wedding, for
really I have my heart, all that I am, at stake. Why don’t you try
to get work on a newspaper, if you are so bound up in your writing?
Why not become a reporter? – for a while, at least?”
“It would spoil my style,” was his answer, in a low, monotonous
voice. “You have no idea how I’ve worked for style.”
“But those storiettes,” she argued. “You called them hack-work.
You wrote many of them. Didn’t they spoil your style?”
“No, the cases are different. The storiettes were ground out,
jaded, at the end of a long day of application to style. But a
reporter’s work is all hack from morning till night, is the one
paramount thing of life. And it is a whirlwind life, the life of
Martin Eden
174
the moment, with neither past nor future, and certainly without
thought of any style but reportorial style, and that certainly is
not literature. To become a reporter now, just as my style is
taking form, crystallizing, would be to commit literary suicide.
As it is, every storiette, every word of every storiette, was a
violation of myself, of my self-respect, of my respect for beauty.
I tell you it was sickening. I was guilty of sin. And I was
secretly glad when the markets failed, even if my clothes did go
into pawn. But the joy of writing the ‘Love-cycle’! The creative
joy in its noblest form! That was compensation for everything.”
Martin did not know that Ruth was unsympathetic concerning the
creative joy. She used the phrase – it was on her lips he had
first heard it. She had read about it, studied about it, in the
university in the course of earning her Bachelorship of Arts; but
she was not original, not creative, and all manifestations of
culture on her part were but harpings of the harpings of others.
“May not the editor have been right in his revision of your ‘Sea
Lyrics’?” she questioned. “Remember, an editor must have proved
qualifications or else he would not be an editor.”
“That’s in line with the persistence of the established,” he
rejoined, his heat against the editor-folk getting the better of
him. “What is, is not only right, but is the best possible. The
existence of anything is sufficient vindication of its fitness to
exist – to exist, mark you, as the average person unconsciously
believes, not merely in present conditions, but in all conditions.
It is their ignorance, of course, that makes them believe such rot
– their ignorance, which is nothing more nor less than the
henidical mental process described by Weininger. They think they
think, and such thinkless creatures are the arbiters of the lives
of the few who really think.”
He paused, overcome by the consciousness that he had been talking
over Ruth’s head.
“I’m sure I don’t know who this Weininger is,” she retorted. “And
you are so dreadfully general that I fail to follow you. What I
was speaking of was the qualification of editors – ”
“And I’ll tell you,” he interrupted. “The chief qualification of
ninety-nine per cent of all editors is failure. They have failed
as writers. Don’t think they prefer the drudgery of the desk and
the slavery to their circulation and to the business manager to the
joy of writing. They have tried to write, and they have failed.
And right there is the cursed paradox of it. Every portal to
success in literature is guarded by those watch-dogs, the failures
in literature. The editors, sub-editors, associate editors, most
of them, and the manuscript-readers for the magazines and book-
publishers, most of them, nearly all of them, are men who wanted to
write and who have failed. And yet they, of all creatures under
the sun the most unfit, are the very creatures who decide what
shall and what shall not find its way into print – they, who have
proved themselves not original, who have demonstrated that they
lack the divine fire, sit in judgment upon originality and genius.
And after them come the reviewers, just so many more failures.
Martin Eden
175
Don’t tell me that they have not dreamed the dream and attempted to
write poetry or fiction; for they have, and they have failed. Why,
the average review is more nauseating than cod-liver oil. But you
know my opinion on the reviewers and the alleged critics. There
are great critics, but they are as rare as comets. If I fail as a
writer, I shall have proved for the career of editorship. There’s
bread and butter and jam, at any rate.”
Ruth’s mind was quick, and her disapproval of her lover’s views was
buttressed by the contradiction she found in his contention.
“But, Martin, if that be so, if all the doors are closed as you
have shown so conclusively, how is it possible that any of the
great writers ever arrived?”
“They arrived by achieving the impossible,” he answered. “They did
such blazing, glorious work as to burn to ashes those that opposed
them. They arrived by course of miracle, by winning a thousand-to-
one wager against them. They arrived because they were Carlyle’s
battle-scarred giants who will not be kept down. And that is what