Home > Authors Index > Upton Sinclair > Journal of Arthur Stirling: "The Valley of the Shadow" > This page
The Journal of Arthur Stirling: "The Valley of the Shadow", a novel by Upton Sinclair |
||
Part 2. Seeking A Publisher - January 5th. -- January 31st. |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ PART II. SEEKING A PUBLISHER January 5th. -- January 31st. Two days ago I was reading Menschen und Werke, by Georg Brandes. I was glancing over an essay on Friedrich Nietzsche, and I came upon some things that made my heart throb:-- "This man [Nietzsche's ideal] takes willingly upon himself the sorrow of speaking the truth. His chief thought is this: A happy life is an impossibility; the highest that man can attain is a heroic life, a life in which, amid the greatest difficulties, something is striven for which, in one way or other, proves for the good of all. To what is truly human only the true men can lift us, those who seem to have come into being through a leap of nature, the thinkers and discoverers, the artists and producers, and those who achieve more through their being than their doing; the noble, the good in a great sense, those in whom the genius of the good works. These men are the goal of history. Nietzsche formulates the sentence 'Humanity shall labor continually at this, to beget solitary great men--and this and nothing else is its task.'-- "Here Nietzsche has reached the final answer to his question 'What is Culture?' For upon this rest the fundamental principles of Culture, and the duties which it imposes. It lays upon me the duty to place myself actively in relation to the great human ideals. Its chief thought is this: To every one who will look for it and partake of it, it sets the task; to labor in himself and outside of himself at the begetting of the thinker and the artist, the truth-loving and the beauty-loving man, the pure and good personality--and therewith at the fulfilment of nature.... "In our day a so-called Culture institution signifies only too often an arrangement by which the cultured, moving in closed ranks, force to one side all those solitary and contrary ones whose striving is directed to higher things. Also among the learned there is so far lacking, as a rule, all sense for the genius that is coming into being, and every feeling for the work of the contemporary and struggling soul. Therefore, in spite of the irresistible and restless advance in all technical and specialized fields, the conditions for the originating of the great are so little improved that the opposition to the highly gifted has rather increased than diminished. "From the government the superior individuals can not expect much. It helps them rarely when it takes them into its service, very certainly it will help them only when it gives them full independence. Only true Culture can prevent their early becoming weary or exhausted, and protect them from the exasperating battle with Culture-philistinism." * * * * * Those words made my blood tingle, they made me tremble. Alone, miserable, helpless--here was a voice at last, a friend! I dropped the book and I went to the library, and I was back with "Also sprach Zarathustra" in an hour. * * * * * I have been reading it for two days--reading it in a state of excitement, forgetting everything. Here is a man!--Here is a man! The first night that I read it I kicked my heels together and laughed aloud in glee, like a child. _Oh_, it was so fine! And to find things like this already written, and in the world! Great heavens, it was like finding a gold mine underneath my feet; and I have forgotten all my troubles again, forgotten everything! I have found a man who understands me, a man to be my friend! * * * * * I do not know what the name Friedrich Nietzsche conveys to the average cultured American. I can only judge by my own case--I have kept pace with our literary movements and I have read the standard journals and reviews; but I have never come upon even a reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, except as a byword and a jest. * * * * * I had rather live my own life than any other man's life. My own vision is my home. But every great man's inspiration is a challenge, and until you have mastered it you can not go on. I speak not of poets, nor of philosophers, but of religious teachers, of prophets; and I speak but my opinion--let every man form his own. I say that I have read all those that men honor, and that a greater prophet than this man has not come upon the earth in centuries. I think of Emerson and Carlyle as the religious teachers, the prophets, of this time; and beside this mighty spirit Emerson is a child and Carlyle a man without a faith or an idea. I call him the John Baptist of the new Dispensation, the first high priest of the Religion of Evolution; and I bid the truth-seeker read well his Bible, for in it lies the future of mankind for ages upon ages to come. * * * * * Half that I love in my soul's life I owe to the prophet of Nazareth. The other half I owe,--not to Nietzsche, but to the new Dispensation of which he is a priest. Nietzsche will stand alone; but he is nevertheless the child of his age--he sings what thousands feel. * * * * * It is a disadvantage to be the first man. If you are the first man you see but half-truths and you hate your enemies. When you seek truth, truly, all systems and all faiths of men--they are beautiful to you--born of sorrow, and hallowed with love; but they will not satisfy you, and you put them by. You do not let them influence you one way or the other; you can no more find truth while you are bound to them by hatred than while you are bound to them by love. There are dreary places in "Also sprach Zarathustra," narrownesses and weaknesses too; they come whenever the writer is thinking of the evils of the hour, whenever he is gazing, not on the vision of his soul, but on the half-truths of the men about him. * * * * * When I speak of Christ let no man think of Christianity. I speak of a prince of the soul, the boldest, the freest, the noblest of men that I know. With the thousand systems that mankind has made in his memory, I have simply nothing in any way to do. * * * * * To me all morality is one. Morality is hunger and thirst after righteousness. Morality is a quality of will. The differences that there are between Christ and Nietzsche are differences of the intellect--where no man is final. The doctrine of each is a doctrine of sacrifice; with one it is a sacrifice of love, with the other it is a sacrifice of labor. For myself, I care not for the half-truths of any man. I said to my soul, "Shall I cast out love for labor?" And my soul replied, "For what wilt thou labor but love?" * * * * * Moral sublimity lies in the escape from self. The doctrine of Christ is a negation of life, that of Nietzsche an affirmation; it seems to me much easier to attain to sublimity with the former. It is easier to die for righteousness than to live for it. If you are to die, you have but to fix your eyes upon your vision, and see that you do not take them away. But the man who will _live_ for righteousness--he must plant and reap, must gather fire-wood and establish a police-force; and to do these things nobly is not easy; to do them sublimely seems hardly possible at all. * * * * * Twenty centuries ago the Jewish world was a little plain, and God a loving Father. He held you in his arms, he spoke to you in every dream, in every fantasy, in every accident. Life was very short--but a little trial--you had only to be patient, and nothing mattered. Society did not exist--only your neighbor existed. Knowledge did not exist, nor was it needed--the world was to end--perhaps to-night--and what difference made all the rest? You took no heed for the morrow--for would not your Father send you bread? You resisted not evil--for if you died, was not that all that you could ask? It was with such a sweet and simple faith as this that the victory of Jesus Christ was won. These were his ideas, and as the soul was all-consuming with him, he lived by them and died by them, and stands as the symbol of faith. * * * * * And now twenty centuries have gone by. And a new teacher has come to whom also the soul is all-consuming. What ideas has _he_? And what task does he face? * * * * * I speak not to children. I speak to men seeking truth. In twenty centuries we have learned that God is not a Father who answers prayers and works miracles and holds out his arms at the goal. We have come shuddering to the awful mystery of being; strange and terrible words have been spoken--words never to be forgotten--"phenomenon," and "thing-in-itself"; not knowing what these words mean, you are ignorant and recreant to the truth; _knowing_ what they mean, you tug no more at the veil. Also we have learned that time and change are our portion, "the plastic dance of circumstance"; we talk no more of immortality. We have turned our hopes to the new birth of time, to the new goal of our labor, the new parent of our love, that we name Society. And likewise Evolution has come, which is the whole of knowledge. And we have learned of starry systems, of the building of worlds, of the pageant of history and the march of mind. Out of all these things has come a new duty, which is not peace, but battle--which is not patience, but will--which is not death, but life. * * * * * There is no room in the world of Evolution for the doctrine of non-resistance to evil. Non-resistance to evil is the negation of life, and the negation of life is the negation of faith. How shall you resist not evil when life is action and not passion? When not a morsel of food can you touch except by the right that you are more fitted to survive than that morsel? How when you know that you rose from the beast by resistance? And that you stay above the beast by resistance? Will you give up the farm land to be jungle again? Or will you teach the beasts your non-resistance? And the trees of the forest to crowd no more your land! It is no longer possible to build a heaven and reject the earth. Such as life is you have to take it. * * * * * And you have to live it. The huge machinery of Society is on your hands, with all its infinite complications, its infinite possibilities of beauty and joy. Your life is, as ever, a sacrifice; all life is, as ever, a sacrifice; but it is a sacrifice to man--a sacrifice to the best. Once your task was self-abnegation, and that was easy; now it is self-assertion, and that is hard. Knowing what you are, you will dare to live, not for your own sake, but that strength and beauty may be in the world. Knowing what you might be, you choose infinite toil for your portion, and in the humility of toil you find your holiest peace. Your enemy you resist with all your soul, not for hatred of your enemy, but for love of the right. If he were not evil he could not be your enemy; and being evil, he has no right to be. Your conscience to you is no longer a shame, but a joy; you think no more of infinite sin, but of infinite virtue.--And for the rest, you do not attain perfection, and you are not worshiped as a god; you are much troubled by trivialities, and the battle tries your soul. But you make no truce with lies, and you never lay down your sword; you keep your eyes upon a far goal, and you leave the world better than you found it. When you come to die you have no fear, but a song; for you are master of yourself, and you have learned to know that which you are. * * * * * --And there is only to add--that whether you believe these things or not, they are what you actually _do_. It seems to me not desirable that one's belief should be less than one's practise. * * * * * January 6th. Has any one, at this end of the nineteenth century, a clear idea of what the poets of the ages called _Inspiration_? If no one have, I will describe it. With the least remainder of superstition in him a man would scarcely be able to put aside the idea that he was merely the Incarnation, the mouthpiece, the medium of overwhelming powers. The idea of Revelation in the mind describes exactly the state of affairs--that suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and fineness, something became visible and audible, something that shakes and pervades one to the depths. One hears--he does not seek; he takes--he does not ask who gives; like lightning gleams out a thought, of necessity, formed without hesitation--I have never had a choice. An ecstasy, whose colossal strain breaks in the middle with a stream of tears, in the course of which the step becomes, involuntary, now raging, now slow; a state in which one is completely beside himself, with the distinctest consciousness of countless shudderings and quiverings, even to the toes of his feet; a depth of joy in which all that is painful and somber serves, not as a contrast, but as conditioned, as demanded, as a necessary color in such an overflow of light; an instinct of rhythmic relations which overleaps vast spaces of forms; all happening in the highest degree involuntarily, but as if in a storm of sensations of freedom, of infinity, of power, of divinity.--This is my experience of Inspiration; I doubt not but that one must needs go back thousands of years to find one who might say, "It is also mine." * * * * * Do you think that _I_ wrote that--I, Arthur Stirling? No, I did not write that. The man who wrote that is known to you as an atheist. * * * * * January 7th. When Zarathustra came into the next city, which lay beside the forest, he found in that place much people gathered together in the market; for they had been called that they should see a rope-dancer. And Zarathustra spoke thus unto the people: _"I teach ye the Over-man._ The man is something who shall be overcome. What have ye done to overcome him? "All being before this made something beyond itself: and you will be the ebb of this great flood, and rather go back to the beast than overcome the man? "What is the ape to the man? A mockery or a painful shame. And even so shall man be to the Over-man: a mockery or a painful shame. "Man is a cord, tied between Beast and Over-man--a cord above an abyss. "A perilous arriving, a perilous traveling, a perilous looking backward, a perilous trembling and standing still. "What is great in man is that he is a bridge, and no goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-over and a going-under. "I love them that know not how to live, be it even as those going under, for such are those going across. "I love them that are great in scorn, because these are they that are great in reverence, and _arrows of longing toward the other shore!"_ * * * * * And here ended the first speech of Zarathustra. * * * * * "The air thin and clear, the danger nigh, and the spirit filled with a joyful mischief; these things go well together. "I will have gnomes about me, for I am merry.... "I feel no more with you; these clouds which I see under me, these clouds black and heavy over which I laugh--just these are your storm-clouds. "You gaze upward if you long for exaltation. I gaze downward because I am exalted. "Who among you can both laugh and be exalted? "Who climbs upon the highest mountains, he laughs at all sorrow-play and sorrow-reality. "Bold, untroubled, mocking, full of power--so will wisdom have us; she is a woman and loves always but the warrior. "You say to me: 'Life is hard to bear.' But for what had you your pride in the morning, and in the evening your submission?... "I would believe only in a god who knew how to dance. "And when I saw my devil, I found him earnest, profound, deep, solemn; he was the Spirit of Heaviness--through him fail all things. "Not by anger, but by laughing, one kills. Up, let us kill the Spirit of Heaviness!... * * * * * "Free dost thou call thyself? Thy ruling thoughts will I hear, and not that thou hast escaped a yoke. "Art thou such a one that _can_ escape a yoke? "Free from what? What is that to Zarathustra! Clear shall your eye tell me: free _to_ what? "Canst thou give to thyself thy good and thine evil, and hang thy will above thee as thy law? Canst thou be thine own judge, and avenger of thy law? "Fearful it is to be alone with the judge and the avenger of thy law. So is a stone flung out into empty space and into the icy breath of isolation.-- "Dost thou know truly, my brother, the word scorn? And the pain of thy righteousness, to be just that which thou dost scorn?... * * * * * "As I lay in sleep a sheep ate up the ivy crown of my head--ate and then said: 'Zarathustra is no more a scholar.' "Said it and went strutting away, and proud. A child told it to me.... "This is the truth. I am gone out of the house of the scholars, and have slammed to the door behind me.... "I am too hot, and burning with my own thoughts; oft will it take away my breath. I must into the open and out of all dusty rooms. "But they sit cool in cool shadows; they wish in all things to be but spectators, and guard themselves lest they sit where the sun burns the steps. "Like those who stand upon the street and stare at the people who go by; so they wait also and stare at the thoughts that others have thought. "If one touches them with the hands, they make dust around them like meal-sacks, and involuntarily; _but who could guess that their dust comes from corn and the golden rapture of the summer fields?_ * * * * * "Too far away into the future I flew; a horror overcame me. And as I looked around me, there was Time my only companion. "Then I flew backward, homeward--and ever faster: so I came to you, men of the present, and to the Land of Culture. "For the first time I brought an eye for you, and good wishes; truly, with longing in my heart I came. "And what happened to me? Frightened as I was--I had to laugh. Never had my eyes seen anything so color-besprinkled! "I laughed and laughed while my foot still trembled, and my heart too: 'Here is the home of all paint-pots!' said I. "Painted over with fifty spots in face and limbs; so sat ye there, to my amazement, ye men of the present!... "Written all over with the signs of the past, and also these signs painted over with new signs; so you have hidden yourself well from all sign-readers!... "All Times and Principles look piebald out of your coverings; all Customs and Faiths speak piebald out of your features.... "How _could_ ye believe, ye color-besprinkled!--who are pictures of everything that ever was believed!... "Ah, whither shall I go now with my longing?" * * * * * "Who are pictures of everything that ever was believed! Who are pictures of everything that ever was believed!" I read that and I slapped my knees and I lay back and laughed like a very Falstaff. "Pictures of everything that ever was believed!" Ho, ho, ho! * * * * * --That is some of Nietzsche! * * * * * January 8th. To-day it snowed hard, and it occurred to me that I might add to my money. I bought a second-hand shovel and went out to shovel snow. It is not so bad, I said, you are out of doors, and also you can think of Nietzsche. I made a dollar and a half, but I fear I did not think very much. My hands were cold, for one thing, and my shoes thin, for another. * * * * * There is nothing that brings me down like physical toil. It is madness to believe that you can do anything else--you drudge and drudge, and your mind is an absolute blank while you do it. It is a thing that sets me wild with nervousness and impatience. I hate it! I hate it! And I find myself crying out and protesting against it; and then I see other men not minding it, and I hear the words of my dear clergyman friend: "The labor which all of us have to share." So I say to myself: Perhaps I am really an idler then! A poor unhappy fool that can not face life's sternness, that is crying out to escape his duty! * * * * * That I could say such a thing--O God, what sign is that of how far I have fallen! Of how much I have yielded!-- A vapor, heavy, hueless, formless, cold! Leave it to time! Leave it to time! --I hear that, and I hear around me the laughter of mocking demons. It startles my soul--but no longer to rage as it used to. I sit and stare at it with a great, heavy numbness possessing me. * * * * * January 12th. I am still reading Nietzsche. I think I shall read all that he has written. I am always kept aware of the limitations, but he is a tremendous man. Can you guess how this took hold of me?-- * * * * * THE GRAVE-SONG "There lies the island of graves, the silent; there are also the graves of my youth. Thither will I carry an evergreen wreath of life." Thus resolving in my heart, I went over the sea.-- Oh ye visions and apparitions of my youth! Oh all ye glances of love, ye godlike moments! How swiftly you died in me! I remember you to-day as my dead. From you, my dearest dead, there comes to me a sweet odor, heart-melting, tear-melting. Truly it shakes and melts the heart of the lonely seaman. Still am I the richest and the most to be envied--I, the most lonely. For I _had_ you, and you have me still; say, to whom fell, as to me, such rose-apples from the trees?... _Me_ to kill, they strangled you, you song-birds of my hopes. Yea, at you, the dearest, shot wickedness its arrows--to strike my heart!... This word will I speak to my enemies: "What is all murder of man beside that which ye did to me?" Thus, in the good hour, spake my purity: "Godlike shall all being be to me." Then ye fell upon me with your foul spirits; ah, whither now hath the good hour fled? "All days shall be holy to me"--so spake once the wisdom of my youth; truly the speech of a happy wisdom. But then you enemies stole away my nights and sold them to sleepless torment; ah, whither now hath the happy wisdom fled?... As a blind man once I went a blissful way; then you threw rubbish in the blind man's way; and now he is weary of the old blind ascendings.... And once would I dance as never had I danced before; above all the heavens away would I dance. And then you lured away my dearest singer!... Only in the dance can I speak metaphors of the highest things:--and now my highest metaphor remained unspoken in my limbs! Unspoken and undelivered remained my highest hope! And there died all the visions and solaces of my youth! * * * * * That thing brought the tears down my cheeks. It is what my soul has cried all day and all night--that I see all my joy and all my beauty going! It is the fearful, the agonizing _waiting_ that does it. I know it--I put it down--there is nothing kills the soul in a man so much as that. When you wait your life is outside of yourself; you hope,--you are at the mercy of others--at the mercy of indifference and accident and God knows what. But again I cry, "What can I do? If there is anything I have not done--tell me! Tell me!" Here I sit, and I have but seven dollars left to my name, including what I made by the shoveling. And I sit and watch the day creep on me like a wild beast on its prey--the day when I must go back into the world and toil again! Oh, it will kill me--it will kill me! * * * * * I sit and wait and hang upon the faint chance of one publisher more. It is my only chance,--and such a chance! I find myself calculating, wondering; yes, famous books have been rejected often, and still found their mark. Can I still believe that this book will shake men? Ah, God, in my soul I do not believe it, because I have lost my inspiration! I have let go of that fire that was to drive like a wind-storm over the world. * * * * * Yes, I ask myself if such things can be! I ask myself if they were real, all those fervors and all that boldness of mine! If it was natural, that way that lived! --Oh, and then I look back, and my heart grows sick within me. * * * * * So I spend my time, and when I turn and try to lose myself in Nietzsche, his mercilessness flings me into new despair. * * * * * January 18th. I have the terrible gift of insensibility; and I think my insensibility torments me more than anything else in the world. I have no life, no power, no feeling, naturally--it is all my will, it is all effort. And now that I am not striving, I sink back into a state of numbness, of dull, insensible despair. I no longer feel anything, I no longer care about anything. I pass my time in helpless impotence--and day by day I watch a thing creeping upon me as in a nightmare. I must go out into the world again and slave for my bread! --Oh, _then_ I will feel something, I think! * * * * * Another week and more is gone, and I have but a little over four dollars. * * * * * January 20th. I have stopped reading Nietzsche. I could not stand any more of it. It does not satisfy me. It is not merely that I am so weak now, and that his mocking goads me. I would have been through with him in any case. He is so narrow--so one-sided. It is reaction from the present, of course, that accounts for it. Too much gazing upon the world, that has led him to believe that love of man necessarily implies compromise. There are two words that are absent from his writings--they are love and humanity; and so it never satisfies you, you are always discontented, you have always to correct and supply. * * * * * January 22d. Oh why do those publishers take so long! I wait and yearn; I grow sick with waiting and yearning. I never allowed any weakness in my soul before; I never made any terms with it. I blamed everything upon myself. And now that my whole life is weakness and misery, I writhe and struggle--I turn back always on myself, suspecting myself, blaming myself. I can not lay it to the world, I can not get into the habit--it is such a miserable habit! How many millions there are of them--poor, querulous wretches, blaming their fate, crying out against the world's injustice and neglect--crying out against the need of working, wishing for this and that--discontented, impotent, miserable! Oh my God--and I am one of such! I can not bear the sound of my own voice when I complain! I hear the world answering me--and I take the part of the world! "Why don't you be a man and go out and earn your way? Why don't you face your fate? You prate about your message--what business has a man with a message that is too much for him? What business have you with weakness--what _excuse_ have you for weakness?" And so I came to see it. The world is right and I am all wrong! And the truth of it burns me like an acid in my brain. * * * * * January 24th. And all the time my whole being is still restless with the storms that raged in it last spring! I have all those memories, all that poignancy. I can not realize it--any of what I was and had--but I know it as a _fact_, a memory, and I crouch and tremble, I grow sick with it. * * * * * Why don't they write to me? My money is going! * * * * * January 26th. The reason that I shudder so at the prospect of having to face the world again, is that I have no hope. _I have no hope!_ Once I could go out into that hellish market. I could be any man's slave, do any drudgery--because I saw a light ahead--I saw deliverance--I had a purpose! And now what purpose have I--what hope have I? I tell you I am a man in a trap! I can do nothing! I can do no more than if I were walled in with iron! I say that my business in this world is to be a poet! I say that there is only one thing I can do--only one way that I can get free--and that is by doing my work, by writing books. And I have done all that I can do, I have earned my freedom--and no one will give it to me! Oh, I shall die if I am penned here much longer! * * * * * I eat out my heart, I burn up my very entrails in my frenzies. Set me free! _Set me free!_ * * * * * I thought to-day if I only had a little money--if I could only publish that book myself! I can not believe that men would not love it--I can not--no, you may crush me all you please, but I can not! And I would take it and shout it from the housetops--I would peddle it on the streets--I would _make_ the world hear me! --And then I sink back, and I hear the world say, "You poor fool!" * * * * * January 28th. I have only a dollar and a half left! I have sat, shuddering and waiting, all that I dare; the end is come now, I must look for work to-morrow. It is like a death-sentence to me. I could do nothing to-night. * * * * * January 29th. Providence came to help me to-night for once! It snowed to-day and I have been hard at work again. * * * * * January 30th. Some more snow. My hands were nearly frost-bitten, but I keep at it; for at least it is out in the air, and it gives me a little longer respite. In the afternoon I made up my mind to go and see the publishers and ask them if they could not read the story at once--it has been a month. I saw their literary manager; he said he was going to read it himself. * * * * * January 31st. More snow again to-day. And I have made over five dollars. But I have come out of it more dead than alive--dulled, dispirited, utterly worn out. If I could only be an animal for a time. But each day of the drudgery only makes me wilder with nervousness. _ |
||