Part 1 (2/2)

Extraordinary pages they are to me. That a man who was about to take his life should have written them is one of the strangest cases of artistic absorption I know of in literature. But Arthur Stirling was a man lost in his art just so--so full of it, so drunk with it, that nothing in life had other meaning to him. To quote the words he loved, from the last of his heroes, he longed for excellence ”as the lion longs for his food.”

So he lived and so he worked; the world had no use for his work, and so he died.

S.

NEW YORK, _November 15, 1902_.

READER:

I do not know if ”The Valley of the Shadow” means to you what it means to me; I do not know if it means anything at all to you. But I have sought long and far for these words, to utter an all but unutterable thought.

When you walk in the forest you do not count the lives that you tread into nothingness. When you rejoice with the springtime you do not hear the cries of the young things that are choked and beaten down and dying. When you watch the wild thing in your snare you do not know the meaning of the torn limbs, and the throbbing heart, and the awful silence of the creature trapped. When you go where the poor live, and see thin faces and hungry eyes and crouching limbs, you do not think of these things either.

But I, reader--I dwell in the Valley of the Shadow.

Sometimes it is silent in my Valley, and the creatures sit in terror of their own voices; sometimes there are screams that pierce the sky; but there is never any answer in my Valley. There are quivering hands there, and racked limbs, and aching hearts, and panting souls. There is gasping struggle, glaring failure--maniac despair. For over my Valley rolls _The Shadow_, a giant thing, moving with the weight of mountains. And you stare at it, you feel it; you scream, you pray, you weep; you hold up your hands to your G.o.d, you grow mad; but the Shadow moves like Time, like the sun, and the planets in the sky. It rolls over you, and it rolls on; and then you cry out no more.

It is that way in my Valley. The Shadow is the Shadow of Death.

PART I. WRITING A POEM

The book! The book! This day, Sat.u.r.day, the sixth day of April, 1901, I begin the book!

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 G.o.d's name I am ever to do this fearful thing, I don't know; it frightens me, and sometimes I lose all heart.

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