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FROM HOME.
Every morning, a man may say,
Calls him up with a new birth-day;
Every day is a little life,
Sunny with love, stormy with strife;
Every life is a little death,
From which too soon he awakeneth--
--as Walter himself wrote, not then knowing half that the words meant.
As with the skirt of her mantle the dark wipes out the day, so with her
sleep the night makes a man fresh for the new day's journey. If it were
not for sleep, the world could not go on. To feel the mystery of day and
night, to gaze into the far receding spaces of their marvel, is more
than to know all the combinations of chemistry. A little wonder is worth
tons of knowledge. But to Walter the new day did not come as a call to
new life in the world of will and action, but only as the harbinger of a
bliss borne hitherward on the wind of the world. Was he not going forth
as a Titanic child to become a great man among great men! Who would be
strong among the weak! who would be great among the small! He did not
suspect in himself what Molly saw, or at least suspected in him. When a
man is hopeful, he feels strong, and can work. The thoughts come and the
pen runs. Were he always at his best, what might not a man do! But not
many can determine their moods; and none, be they poets or economists,
can any more secure the conditions of faculty than they can create the
faculty. When the mood changes and hope departs, and the inward
atmosphere is grown damp and dismal, there may be whose imagination will
yet respond to their call; but let some certain kind of illness come,
and every one must lose his power; his creature-condition will assert
itself; he is compelled to discover that we did not create ourselves,
neither live by ourselves.
Walter loved his father, but did not mind leaving him; he loved Molly,
but did not mind leaving her; and we can not blame him if he was glad to
escape from his aunt. If people are not lovable, it takes a saint to
love them, or at least one who is not afraid of them. Yet it was with a
sense of somewhat dreary though welcome liberty, that Walter found
himself, but for the young man his father had befriended, alone in
London. With his help he found an humble lodging not far from the
British Museum, to the neighborhood of which his love of books led him;
and for a time, feeling no necessity for immediate effort, he gave
himself to the study of certain departments of our literature not
hitherto within his easy reach. In the evening he would write, or
accompany his new friend to some lecture or amusement; and so the weeks
passed. To earn something seemed but a slowly approaching necessity, and
the weeks grew to months. He was never idle, for his tastes were strong,
and he had delight in his pen; but so sensitive was his social skin,
partly from the licking of his aunt's dry, feline tongue, that he shrunk
from submitting anything he wrote to Harold Sullivan, who, a man of
firmer and more world-capable stuff than he, would at least have shown
him how things which the author saw and judged from the inner side of
the web, must appear on the other side. There are few weavers of thought
capable of turning round the web and contemplating with unprejudiced
regard the side of it about to be offered to the world, so as to
perceive how it will look to eyes alien to its genesis.
It would be to repeat a story often told, to relate how he sent poem
after poem, now to this now to that periodical, with the same
result--that he never heard of them again. The verses over which he had
labored with delight, in the crimson glory they reflected on the heart
whence they issued, were nothing in any eyes to which he submitted them.
In truth, except for a good line here and there, they were by no means
on the outer side what they looked to him on the inner. He read them in
the light of the feeling in which he had written them; whoever else read
them had not this light to interpret them by, had no correspondent mood
ready to receive them. It was the business of the verse itself, by
witchery of sound and magic of phrase, to rouse receptive mood: of this
it was incapable. A course of reading in the first attempts of such as
rose after to well-merited distinction, might reveal not a few
things--among the rest, their frequent poverty. Much mere babbling often
issues before worthy speech begins. There was nothing in Walter's mind
to be put in form except a few of the vague lovely sensations belonging
to a poetic temperament. And as he grew more and more of a reader, his
inspiration came more and more from what he read, less and less from
knowledge of his own heart or the hearts of others. He had no revelation
to give. He had, like most of our preachers, set out to run before he
could walk, begun to cry aloud before he had any truth to utter; to
teach, or at least to interest others, before he was himself interested
in others. Now and then, indeed, especially when some fading joy of
childhood gleamed up, words would come unbidden, and he would throw off
a song destitute neither of feeling nor music; but this kind of thing he
scarcely valued, for it seemed to cost him nothing.
He comforted himself by concluding that his work was of a kind too
original to be at once recognized by dulled and sated editors; that he
must labor on and keep sending.
"Why do you not write something?" his friend would say; and he would
answer that his time was not come.
The friends he made were not many. Instinctively he shrunk from what was
coarse, feeling it destructive to every finer element. How could he
write of beauty, if, false to beauty, he had but for a moment turned to
the unclean? But he was not satisfied with himself: he had done nothing,
even in his own eyes, while the recognition of the world was lacking!
He was in no anxiety, for he did not imagine it of consequence to his
father whether he began a little sooner or a little later to earn. The
governor knew, he said to himself, that to earn ought not to be a man's
first object in life, even when necessity compelled him to make it first
in order of time, which was not the case with him! But he did not ask
himself whether he had substituted a better object. A greater man than
himself, he reflected--no less a man, indeed, than Milton--had never
earned a dinner till after he was thirty years of age! He did not
consider how and to what ends Milton had all the time been diligent. He
was no student yet of men's lives; he was interested almost only in
their imaginations, and not half fastidious enough as to whether those
imaginations ran upon the rails of truth or not. He was rapidly filling
his mind with the good and bad of the literature of his country, but he
had not yet gone far in distinguishing between the bad and the good in
it. Books were to him the geological deposits of the literary forces. He
pursued his acquaintance with them to nourish the literary faculty in
himself. They afforded him atmosphere and stimulant and store of matter.
He was in full training for the profession that cultivates literature
for and upon literature, and neither for nor upon truth.
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