Part 8 (1/2)
May 22d.
”No, officer, I am neither a burglar nor a highwayman, nor anything else worth bothering; I'm just a poet, and I'm crazy, to all practical purposes, so please get used to me and let me wander about the streets at these strange hours of the night without worrying!”
Poor, perplexed policeman! Poor, perplexed world! Poor, perplexed mothers and fathers, sisters and cousins and aunts of poets!
Mit deinen schwarzbraunen Augen Siehst du mich forschend an: ”Wer bist du, und was fehlt dir, Du fremder, kranker Mann!”
Who does not love the poet Heine--melodious, beautiful, bitter soul? Is there any other poet who can mingle, in one sentence, savage irony and tenderness that brings tears into the eyes? Who can tell the secret of his flower-like verses?
Ich bin ein deutscher Dichter, Bekannt im deutschen Land; Nennt man die besten Namen So wird auch der meine genannt.
Und was mir fehlt, du Kleine, Fehlt manchem im deutschen Land; Nennt man die schlimmsten Schmerzen, So wird auch die meine genannt!
I have never seen but one beautiful thing in New York, and that is its mighty river in the night-time. I wander down to the docks when my work is done, and when it is still; I sit and gaze at it until the city is quite gone, and all its restlessness,--until there is but that grave presence, rolling restlessly, silently, as it has rolled for ages. It makes no comments; it has seen many things.
To-night I sat and watched it till a tangled forest sprang up about me, and I saw a strange, high-bowed, storm-beaten craft glide past me, ghostly white, its ghostly sailors gazing ahead and dreaming of spices and gold.
The old, old river--my only friend in a whole city! It goes its way--it is not of the hour.
It fascinates me, and I sit and sit and wonder. I gaze into its black and gurgling depths, and whisper what Sh.e.l.ley whispered: ”If I should go down there, I should _know_!”
But no, I should not know anything.
_The days when thou wert not, did they trouble thee? The days when thou art not shall trouble thee as much._
May 24th.
AN ESSAY AFTER RIGHTEOUSNESS
I write this to set forth a purpose which I have for over a year held before me. I write it that it may serve me for a standard. I write it at a time when my bank-account consists of twenty-five dollars, and I mean to publish it at such a time as by the method of plain living and high thinking, I shall have been able to increase it a hundredfold.
We are told that a man who would write a great poem must first make a poem of his life. An artist, as I understand the word, is a man who has but one joy and one purpose and one interest in life--the creating of beauty; he is a man lifted above and set apart from all other motives of men; a man who seeks not wealth nor comfort nor fame, nor values these things at all; a man whose heart is forever lonely, whose life is an endless sorrow, and whose excuse and whose spur and whose goal and whose consecration, is the creating of beauty.
What power--be it talent or genius--G.o.d has given me, I can not tell; I only know that an artist in that sense of the word I mean to be. I have thought out a plan by which I shall make the publis.h.i.+ng of my books, as well as the writing of them, a thing of Art.
No one will read very far in what I shall write without perceiving there a savage hatred of the spirit of the modern world of wealth; it is only because I have faith in democracy and hope in the people of my country that I do not go to wors.h.i.+p my G.o.d on a desert island. The world which I see about me at the present moment--the world of politics, of business, of society--seems to me a thing demoniac in its hideousness; a world gone mad with pride and selfish l.u.s.t; a world of wild beasts writhing and grappling in a pit.
I am but a voice crying in the wilderness, and these things must run their course. But in the meantime there is one thing that I can do, and the doing of that has become with me a pa.s.sion--I can keep my own life pure; I can see that there is one man amid all this madness whose life is untouched by any stain of it; who lives not by bread alone, nor by jewelry and gold; who lives not to be stared at and made drunk with pride, but to behold beauty and dwell in love; who labors day and night to keep a heart full of wors.h.i.+p and to sing of faith to suffering men; who takes of the reward of that singing just what food and shelter his body needs; and who shrinks from wealth and luxury as he would from the mouth of h.e.l.l.
To live humbly and in oblivion would be my choice, but it will be my duty to do differently. I know enough about the human heart to know that the presence of one righteous man makes ten thousand unrighteous men angry and uncomfortable. And therefore, for the help of any whom it may comfort, and for the d.a.m.nation of all the rest, I shall choose that the life I live and the thing I do shall be public; I shall choose that the millions in our country who are wearing out their frantic lives in the pursuit of the dollar, and the few who are squandering their treasures in drunken pomp, shall know that there is one man who laughs at them--whom all the millions of all of them could not buy--and who dwells in joy and wors.h.i.+p in a heaven of which they can not even know. In other words, it is my idea not merely to make a poem of my life, but to publish the poem.