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The Journal of Arthur Stirling: "The Valley of the Shadow", a novel by Upton Sinclair |
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Part 1. Writing A Poem - April 10th. -- April 30th. |
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_ PART I. WRITING A POEM April 10th. -- April 30th. April 10th. I have never kept a journal--I have been too busy living; but to-day I begin a journal. I am so built that I can do but one thing at a time. Now that I have begun The Captive, I must be haunted with it all day; when I am not writing it I must be dreaming it, or restless because I am not. Therefore it occurred to me that in the hours of weariness I would write about it what was in my mind--what fears and what hopes; why and how I write it will be a story in itself, and some day I think it will be read. * * * * * I have come to the last stage of the fight, and I see the goal. I will tell the story, and by and by wise editors can print it in the Appendix! Yesterday I was a cable-car conductor, and to-day I am a poet! I know of some immortal poems that were written by a druggist's clerk, and some by a gager of liquid barrels, but none by a cable-car conductor. "It sounds interesting, tell us about it!" says the reader. I shall, but not to-day. To-day I begin the book! * * * * * I did not write that on April 6th, I wrote it a month ago--one day when I was thinking about this. I put it there now, because it will do to begin; but I had no jests in my heart on April 6th. * * * * * April 10th. I have been for four days in a kind of frenzy. I have come down like a collapsed balloon, and I think I have had enough for once. I have written the opening scene, but not finally; and then I got into the middle--I could not help it. How in God's name I am ever to do this fearful thing, I don't know; it frightens me, and sometimes I lose all heart. * * * * * I suppose I shall have to begin again tonight. I must eat something first, though. That is one of my handicaps: I wear myself out and have to stop and eat. Will anybody ever love me for this work, will anybody ever understand it? I suppose I can get back where I was yesterday, but always it grows harder, and more stern. I set my teeth together. * * * * * It was like the bursting of an overstrained dam, these last four days. How long I have been pent up--eighteen months! And eighteen months seems like a lifetime to me. I have been a bloodhound in the leash, hungering--hungering for this thing, and the longing has piled up in me day by day. Sometimes it has been more than I could bear; and when the time was near, I was so wild that I was sick. The book! The book! Freedom and the book! And last Saturday I went out of the hell-house where I have been pent so long, and I covered my face with my hands and fled away home--away to the little corner that is mine. There I flung myself down and sobbed like a child. It was relief--it was joy--it was fear! It was everything! The book! The book! Then I got up--and the world seemed to go behind me, and I was drunk. I heard a voice calling--it thundered in my ears--that I was free--that my hour was come--that I might live--that I might live--live! And I could have shouted it--I know that I laughed it aloud. Every time I thought the thought it was like the throbbing of wings to me--"Free! Free!" No one can understand this--no one who has not a demon in his soul. No one who does not know how I have been choked--what horrors I have borne. I am through with that--I did not think of that. I am free! They will never have me back. That motive alone would drive me to my work, would make me dare _anything_. But I do not need that motive. * * * * * I think only of the book. I thought of it last Saturday, and it swept me away out of myself. I had planned the opening scene; but then the thought of the triumph-song took hold of me, and it drove me mad. That song was what I had thought I could never do--I had never dared to think of it. And it came to me--it came! Wild, incoherent, overwhelming, it came, the victorious hymn. I could not think of remembering it; it was not poetry--it was reality. _I_ was the Captive, _I_ had won freedom--a faith and a vision! So it throbbed on and on, and I was choked, and my head on fire, and my hands tingling, until I sank down from sheer exhaustion--laughing and sobbing, and talking to God as if He were in the room. I never really believe in God except at such times; I can go through this dreadful world for months, and never think if there be a God.--Here I sit gossiping about it.--But I am tired out. * * * * * The writing of a book is like the bearing of a child. But every birth-pang of the former lasts for hours; and it is months before the labor is done. It is not merely the vision, the hour of exultation; that is but the setting of the task. Now you will take that ecstasy, and hold on to it, hold on with soul and body; you will keep yourself at that height, you will hold that flaming glory before your eyes, and you will hammer it into words. Yes, that is the terror--into words--into words that leap the hilltops, that bring the ends of existence together in a lightning flash. You will take them as they come, white-hot, in wild tumult, and you will forge them, and force them. You will seize them in your naked hands and wrestle with them, and bend them to your will--all that is the making of a poem. And last and worst of all, you will hold them in your memory, the long, long surge of them; the torrent of whirling thought--you will hold it in your memory! You are dazed with excitement, exhausted with your toil, trembling with pain; but you have built a tower out of cards, and you have mounted to the clouds upon it, and there you are poised. And anything that happens--anything!--Ah, God, why can the poet not escape from his senses?--a sound, a touch--and it is gone! These things drive you mad.-- But meanwhile it is not gone yet. You have still a whole scene in your consciousness--as if you were a juggler, tossing a score of golden balls. And all the time, while you work, you learn it--you learn it! It is endless, but you learn it. In the midst of it, perhaps, you come down of sheer exhaustion; and you lie there, panting, shuddering, your hands moist; you dare not think, you wait. And then by and by you begin again--if it will not come, you _make_ it come, you lash yourself like a dumb beast--up, up, to the mountain-tops again. And then once more the thing comes back--you live the scene again, as an actor does, and you shape it and you master it. And now in the midst of it, you find this highest of all moments is gone! It is gone, and you can not find it! Those words that came as a trumpet-clash, burning your very flesh--that melody that melted your whole being to tears--they are gone--you can not find them! You search and you search--but you can not find them. And so you stumble on, in despair and agony; and still you dare not rest. You dare not ever rest in this until the thing is done--done and over--until you have _nailed_ it fast. So you go back again, though perhaps you are so tired that you are fainting; but you fight yourself like a madman, you struggle until you feel a thing at your heart like a wild beast; and you keep on, you hold it fast and learn it, clinch it tight, and make it yours forever. I have done that same thing five times to-day without a rest; and toiled for five hours in that frenzy; and then lain down upon the ground, with my head on fire. Afterward when you have recovered you sit down, and for two or three hours you write; you have it whole in your memory now--you have but to put it down. And this forlorn, wet, bedraggled thing--this miserable, stammering, cringing thing--_this_ is your poem! * * * * * Some day the world will realize these things, and then they will present their poor poets with diamonds and palaces, and other things that do not help. I wrote this, and then I leaned back, tired out. My thoughts turned to Shakespeare, and while I was thinking of him--
April 11th. I have not done much to-day. I spent the morning brooding over the opening speech. It is somber and terrible, but I have not gotten it right. It must have a tread--a tread like an orchestra! Ah, how I wish I had an orchestra!--I would soon do it then--_"So bist nun ewig du verdammt!"_ The secret of the thing is iteration. I must find a word that is like a hammer-stroke. I have tried twenty, but I have not found the one. * * * * * --I spent the rest of the day thinking over the whole first act, mapping it out, so to speak. I have often fancied a resemblance between The Captive and the C-minor symphony; I wonder if any one else would have thought of it. It is not merely the opening--it is the whole content of the thing--the struggle of a prisoned spirit. I would call The Captive a symphony, and print the C-minor themes in it, only it would seem fanciful.--But it would not really be fanciful to put the second theme opposite the thought of freedom--of the blue sky and the dawning spring. All except the scherzo. I couldn't find room for the scherzo. Men who have wrestled with the demons of hell do not tumble around like elephants, no matter how happy they are. I wish I could take out Beethoven's scherzos! My heart leaps when I think of my one big step. I have put those pages away--I shall not look at them again for a month. Then I can judge them. * * * * * April 13th. A cable-car conductor and a poet! I think that will be a story worth telling. I have tried many and various occupations, but I have not found one so favorable to the study of poetry as my last. I should have made out very well--if I had not been haunted by The Captive. With everything else you do you are more or less hampered by having to sell your brain; and also by having to obey some one. But a cable-car is an unlimited monarchy; and all you have to do is to collect fares and pull the bell, both of which duties are quite mechanical. And besides that you receive princely wages--and can live off one-third of them, if you know how; and that means that you need only work one-third of the time, and can write your poetry the rest of it! This sounds like jesting, but it is not. I have only been a cable-car conductor six months, but in that time I have taught myself to read Greek with more than fluency. All you need is good health and spirits, a will of iron, and a very tiny note-book in the palm of your hand, full of the words you wish to learn. And then for ten or twelve hours a day you go about running a car with your body--and with your mind--hammering, hammering! It is excellent discipline--it is fighting all day, "_Pous, podos_, the foot--_pous, podos_, the foot--34th Street, Crosstown East and West--_pous, podos_, the foot!" And then when you get home late at night, are there not the great masters who love you? * * * * * April 15th. Thou wouldst call thyself Artist; thou wouldst have the Eternal Presence to dwell within thee, to fire thy heart with passion and dower thy lips with song; canst thou go into thy closet, and alone with thy Maker, say these words: "O Thou Unthinkable, source of all light and life, Thou the great unselfish One, the great Sufferer; Thou seest my heart this day, how in it dwells but love of Thy truth and worship of Thy holiness. Thou seest that I seek not wealth that men should serve me, nor fame that they should honor me, for the glory that is Thine. Thou seest that I bring all my praise to Thy feet, that I love all things that Thou hast made, that I envy no man Thy gifts, that I rejoice when Thou sendest one stronger than I into the battle. And when these things are not, may Thy power leave me; for I seek but to dwell in Thy presence, and to speak Thy truth, which can not die." * * * * * That prayer welled up in my heart to-day. There are times when I sit before this thing in my soul, crouching and gazing at it in fear. Then I see the naked horror of it, the shuddering reality of it. I see the Soul: motionless, tense, quivering, wrestling in an agony with the powers of destruction. It is so real to me that my body stiffens into stone, and I sit with the sweat on my forehead. That happened to me to-day, and I wrote a few lines of the poem that made my voice break--the passionate despairing cry for deliverance, for rest from the terror. But there is no rest. The mountain slope is so that there is no standing upon it, and once you stop, it breaks your heart to begin again. And so you go on--up--up--and there is not any summit. It is that way when you write a book; and that way when you make a symphony; and that way when you wage a war. * * * * * But my soul hungered for it. I have loved the great elemental art-works--the art-works that were born of pure suffering. For months before I began The Captive I read but three books--read them and brooded over them, all day and all night. They were Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and Samson Agonistes. You sit with these books, and time and space "to nothingness do sink." There looms up before you--like a bare mountain in its majesty--the great elemental world-fact, the death-grapple of the will with circumstance. You may build yourself any philosophy or any creed you please, but you will never get away from the world-fact--the death-grapple of the soul with circumstance. Aschylus has one creed, and Milton has another, and Shelley has a third; but always it is the death-grapple. Chaos, evil--circumstance--lies about you, binds you; and you grip it--you close with it--all your days you toil with it, you shape it into systems, you make it live and laugh and sing. And while you do that, there is in your heart a thing that is joy and pain and terror mingled in one passion. Who knows that passion? Who knows--
Am I a fool? I do not know--that is none of my business. It is my business to do my best. * * * * * Horace bids you, if you would make him weep, to weep first yourself. I understand by the writing of a poem just this: that the problem you put there you discover for yourself; that the form you put it in you invent for yourself; and, finally, that what you make it, from the first word to the last word, from the lowest moment to the highest moment, you _live_; that when a character in such a place acts thus, he acts thus because you, in that place--not would have acted thus, but _did_ act thus; that the words which are spoken in that moment of emotion are spoken because you, in that moment of emotion--not would have spoken them, but _did_ speak them. I propose that you search out the scenes that have stirred the hearts of men in all times, and see if you can find one that was written thus--not because the author had lived it thus, but because somebody else had lived it thus, or because he wanted people to think he had lived it thus. And now you are writing The Captive. You do not go into the dungeon in the body, because you need all your strength; but in the spirit you have gone into the dungeon, and the door has clanged, and it is black night--the world is gone forever. And there you sit, while the years roll by, and you front the naked fact. Six feet square of stone and an iron chain are your portion--that is circumstance; and the will--_you_ are the will. And you grip it--you close with it--all your days you toil with it; you shape it into systems, make it live and laugh and sing. And while you do that there is in your heart a thing that is joy and pain and terror mingled in one passion. * * * * * Yes, sometimes I shrink from it; but I will do it--meaning what those words mean. I will fight that fight, I will live that life--to the last gasp; and it shall go forth into the world a living thing, a new well-spring of life. It shall be--I don't know what you call the thing, but when you have hauled your load halfway up the hill you put a block in the way to keep it from sliding back. That same thing has to be done to society. Man will never get behind the Declaration of Independence again, nor behind the writings of Voltaire again. We let Catholicism run around loose now, but that is because Voltaire cut its claws and pulled out all its teeth. * * * * * April 16th. I was thinking to-day, that The Captive would be an interesting document to students of style. Read it, and make up your mind about it; then I will tell you--the first line of it is almost the first line of blank verse I ever wrote in my life. I have read about the French artists, the great masters of style, and how they give ten years of their lives to writing things that are never published. But I have noticed that when they are masters at last, and when they do begin to publish--they very seldom have anything to say that I care in the least to hear. --My soul is centered upon _the thing_! Let it be a test. * * * * * I am trying to be an artist; but I have never been able to study style. I believe that the style of this great writer came from what he had to say. You think about how he said it; but he thought about what he was saying. It seemed strange to me when I thought of it. With all my trembling eagerness, with all my preparation, such an idea as "practise" never came to me. How could I cut the path until I had come to the forest? All my soul has been centered upon _living_. Since this book first took hold of me--eighteen months ago--I could not tell with what terrible intensity I have lived it. They said to me, "You are a poet; why don't you write verses for the magazines?" But I was not a writer of verses for the magazines. It has been a shrine that I have kept in the corner of my heart, and tended there. I have never gone near it, except upon my knees. There were days when I did not go near it at all, when I was weak, or distraught. But I knew that every day I was closer to the task, that every day my heart was more full of it. It was like wild music--it came to a climax that swept me away in spite of myself. To get the mastery of your soul, to hold it here, in your hands, at your bidding, to consecrate your life to that, to watch and pray and toil for that, to rouse yourself and goad yourself day and night for that; to thrill with the memory of great consecrations, of heroic sufferings and aspirations; to have the power of the stars in your heart, of nature, of history and the soul of man; _that_ is your "practise." * * * * * April 17th. It is true that my whole life has been a practise for the writing of this book, that this book is the climax of my whole life. I have toiled--learned--built up a mind--found a conviction; but I have never written anything, or tried to write anything, to be published. I have said, "Wait; it is not time." And now it _is_ time. If there is anything of use in all that I have done, it is in this book. Yes; and also it is a climax in another way. It is my goal and my salvation.--Ah, how I have toiled for it! * * * * * April 19th. I saw my soul to-day. It was a bubble, blown large, palpitating, whirling over a stormy sea; glorious with the rainbow hues it was, but perilous, abandoned.--Do you catch the _feeling_ of my soul? Something perilous--I do not much care what. A traveler scaling the mountains, leaping upon dizzy heights; a gambler staking his fortune, his freedom, his life--upon a cast! I will tell you about it. It began when I was fifteen. My great-uncle, my guardian, is a wholesale grocer in Chicago; he has a large palace and a large waistcoat. "Will you be a wholesale grocer?" said he. "No," said I, "I will not." I might have been a partner by this time, had I said Yes, and had a palace and a large waistcoat too. "Then what will you be?" asked the great-uncle. "I will be a poet," said I. "You mean you will be a loafer?" said he. "Yes," said I--disliking argument--"I will be a loafer." And so I went away, and while I went I was thinking, far down in my soul. And I said: "It must be everything or nothing; either I am a poet or I am not. I will act as if I were; I will burn my bridges behind me. If I am, I will win--for you can not kill a poet; and if I am not, I will die." Thus is it perilous. I fight the fight with all my soul; I give every ounce of my strength, my will, my hope, to the making of myself a poet. And when the time comes I write my poem. Then if I win, I win empires; and if I lose-- "You put all your eggs into one basket," some one once said to me. "Yes," I replied, "I put all my eggs into one basket--and then I carry the basket myself." Now I have come to the last stage of the journey--the "one fight more, and the last." And can I give any idea of what is back of me, to nerve me to that fight? I will try to tell you. For seven years I have borne poverty and meanness, sickness, heat, cold, toil--that I might make myself an artist. The indignities, the degradations--I could not tell them, if I spent all the time I have in writing a journal. I have lived in garrets--among dirty people--vulgar people--vile people; I have worn rags and unclean things; I have lived upon bread and water and things that I have cooked myself; I have seen my time and my strength wasted by a thousand hateful impertinences--I have been driven half mad with pain and rage; I have gone without friends--I have been hated by every one; I have worked at all kinds of vile drudgery--or starved myself sick that I might avoid working. 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 shimmer 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 nobles, the tyranny of the mass 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 shipwreck, 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: The man may accept this life, if it please him, and its chances; but while he does he can never be a soul. So long as he accepts this life and its chances, he is the slave of tyranny. When the day comes that mind is sovereign, I will give myself into the hands of this life. But meanwhile I will know myself for what I am--a bubble upon the surface of a whirling torrent, an insect borne aloft upon a flying wheel. * * * * * It is by your will that you are free; by your will you are one with the infinite freedom, by your will you are master of time and your fate, lord of the stars and the endless ages, thinker of all truth, hearer of all music, beholder of all beauty, doer of all righteousness. That is the truth which I have brought out of my deepest brooding. So long as your happiness is in anything about yourself--your wealth, or your fame, or your life--you are not free. So long as your happiness is in houses and lands, in sons and in daughters, you are not free. You give one atom of your soul to these things at your own peril; for when your hour comes you tear them from you, though they be as your eyes; and by your _will_ you save your soul alive. Therefore I write The Captive. I put aside childish things--I grip my hands upon naked Reality. * * * * * There are nine characters in The Captive: a tyrant, two slaves, six guests, and a man. There are two scenes--a dungeon, and a banquet-hall. A tyrant: I understand by a tyrant a man whose happiness is the unhappiness of others. I read of the discoverers of Mexico, and how they found a pyramid of human skulls, raised as a monument; that has been to me, ever since, the type of tyranny. The forms of tyranny vary through the ages, but the principle is always the same; a tyrant is a man who is made great by the toil and sorrow of others. The slave also remains the same through all time; and likewise the guest. The guest is the man who takes the world as he finds it, and likes a good dinner. The population of society is made up of tyrants, slaves, and guests. The man is a character of my own imagining. The first scene of The Captive is the dungeon. When I was very young I was in Europe, and I was in a dungeon; I have never forgotten it. There enter the tyrant and the two slaves with the man. They chain him to the wall, and then the tyrant speaks. That first speech--I have written it now--I have gotten the hammer-thuds! Tyranny is an iron thing--you had to feel the tread of it, the words had to roll like thunder. It is an advantage to me that I am full of Wagner; I always hear the music with my poetry. (I shall be disappointed if some one does not make an opera out of The Captive.) * * * * * The man is there, and he is there forever. After that, once a day, bread and water are shoved in through an opening. But the door of the dungeon does not open again until the last act--when ten years have passed. * * * * * That is all. And now the man will battle with that problem. Will he go mad with despair? Will he sink into a wild beast? Will he commit suicide? Or what _will_ he do? Day by day he sinks back from the question, numb with agony; day by day the grim hand of Fate drags him to it; and so, until from the chaos of his soul he digs out, blow by blow, a faith. Here there will be Reality; no shams and no lies will do here--here is iron necessity, and cries out for iron truth. God--duty--will--virtue--let such things no more be names, let us see what they _are_! These are awful words. Sometimes I shrink from this thing as from fire, sometimes I rush to it with a song; I am writing about it now because I am worn out, and yet I can not think of anything else. This man will find the truth; being delivered from the captivity of the world and set free to be a soul. Superstition blinds him; doubt and despair and weakness blind him; but still he gropes and strives, cries out and battles for truth; until at last, shut up in his own being, he tears his way out to the very source of it, and knows for himself what it is. _Infinite it is, and unthinkable; glorious, all-consuming, all-sufficing; food and drink, friendship and love, ambition and victory, joy, power, and eternity it is to him who finds it; and all things in this world are nothing to him who finds it._ * * * * * And so comes the victory to this soul. Hour by hour he catches gleams of the light; day by day he toils toward it, with fear and agony and prayer; until at last he knows his salvation--to rest never, and to toil always, and to dwell in this Presence of his God. In one desperate hour he flings away the world and the hope of the world, and vows this consecration, and lives. * * * * * He keeps the vow; it is iron necessity that drives him. He finds himself, he finds his way--each day his step is surer. Each day the channels of his being deepen. He lays broad plans for his life--he gathers all knowledge, he solves all problems; lord of the infinite mind, he ranges all existence, and beholds it as the symbol of himself. Into the deeps and yawning spaces of it he plunges; blind, he sees what men have never seen; deaf, he hears what men have never heard--singer he is, prophet and poet and maker. New worlds leap into being in the infinite fulness of his heart, visions of endless glory that make his senses reel; as a column of incense towering to the sky is the ecstasy of his adoration and his joy. * * * * * And so the long years roll by; and the unconquered spirit has left the earth: left time and space and self, and dwells where never man has dwelt before. And then one day the door of the dungeon is opened, and his chains are shattered, and the slaves lead him up to the light of day. It is the banquet-hall; and there is the tyrant, and there the guests--there is the world. * * * * * He is aged, and weak, and white, and terrible. They stare at him; and he stares at them, for he is dazed. They begin to mock at him, and then at last he realizes, and he covers his face and weeps--beholding the world, and the way that it must come. They jeer at him, they strike him; and when he answers not, they call to the slaves to torture him. * * * * * This man has lived for ten years with _himself_. He is nothing but a will. And now they will conquer him! * * * * * I recall the highest moment of my being. I saw that moment, and all the others of my life. I saw them as something that I could not bear to see, and I cried out that from that hour I would change them. I have not kept the vow; there was no one to drive me. But this man they drive; they pinch him and burn him and tear him; they crush his limbs, they break his bones, they grind his flesh, they make his brain a living fire of anguish. And he fights them. Into the deep recesses of his being goes the cry--for all that he has--for all that he is! For every ounce of his strength, for every throb of his will, for every vision, every truth that he knows! To bear this, to save him here! And so he wrestles, so he rises, so he gropes and gasps; and in the moment of his fiercest straining, with the throb of all his being he bursts the barrier, he rends the veil; and infinite passion rolls in in floods upon him, he clutches all existence in his arms; and from his lips there bursts a mad frenzied shout of rapture--that makes his torturers stand transfixed, listening, trembling with terror. And so they drag him back to his dungeon; and there, unable to move, he lies upon the stones and pants out his ecstasy and his life. That is The Captive. * * * * * April 29th. What counts in this thing is momentum--spiritual momentum. You are filled with it all the time, it never leaves you; it drives behind you like a gale of wind; it roars in your ears when you are awake, it rocks you to sleep when you are weary; whenever you are dull or do not heed it, it nags at you, it goads you, it beats into your face. Each day it is more, each day it is harder, more unattainable; but only do not stop, it carries you with it like a wave; you mount upon each day's achievement to reach the next, you move with the power of all the days before. It is momentum that counts. Do not stop!--I cry it all day--Do not stop! * * * * * April 30th. It is weak of me, but sometimes I can not help but look ahead--and think that it is done! I could not find any words to tell the joy that that will be to me--to be free, after so long--to be free! I do not care anything about the fame--it would not be anything to me to be a great author. If it could be done, nothing would please me better than to publish it anonymously--to let no one ever know that it was mine. If I could only have the little that I need to be free, I would publish all that I might ever write anonymously. Yes, that is the thing that makes my blood bound. To be free! Let it only be done--let it only be real, as it will be--and the naked force of it will shake men to the depths of their souls. I could not write it, if I did not believe that I was writing words that would grip the soul of any man--I care not how dull or how coarse he might be. * * * * * I finished the first act just now. _ |
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