Part 23 (1/2)

What could I do, besides? And who would give me a chance? I could not review books--I know nothing about modern books, and still less about modern book standards. Neither do I know anything to write that any magazines would want.

--And besides, in four days more, shall I not have fifty or sixty dollars?

And what shall I want then?

Ah, how I count the days! And when I am out of this place, how I will run away from it! The very books I read while I was there will always be painful to me.

--They will be glad to get rid of me, too. Poor me--I have given up trying to be understood. All these things pa.s.s. My business is with G.o.d.

Cicero thinks that the remembering of past sorrows is a pleasure. Yes, when the sorrows are beautiful, n.o.ble. But I have sorrows in my life, the thoughts of which send through my whole frame--literally and physically--a _spasm_.

September 11th.

I told the bald-headed, grim-visaged senior-partner to-day that I was going to leave. He seemed surprised--offered me a ”raise.” I told him I was going out of New York.

--I am a liar. Sometimes I philosophize about that. I am an unprincipled idealist. I have not the least respect for fact; I am doing my work. If I could help my work, I would lie serenely in all the six languages I know.

And if I were caught, I would say, ”Why, yes, of course!”

I think I would rather have a finger cut off than say to a New York business man, ”I am a poet!”

September 12th.

I have been forcing myself to read Gibbon, but half of him was all I could stand. I think with astonishment of the reputation of this history, a bare recital of facts, without the least interest or importance, and a recital by the shallowest of men!

The vulgarity of his character is more evident than ever since the repressed parts of his biography have appeared. It is comical. And this man, who has no more understanding of spirituality than a cow, to tell the story of the greatest movement of the soul of man in history!

There is not one gleam of the Christian superst.i.tion left in me. I have nothing to fear from the sneers of Gibbon any more than I have from those of Voltaire; but I do not care to hear lectures on the steam-engine by a man who does not believe in steam.

--Some of these days--the last thing that I can see on the horizon of my future--I am going to write a tragedy called Jesus. The time is past, it seems to me, when an artist must leave alone the greatest art-theme of the ages.

Is it not the greatest? Is there any story in history more sublime than the story of this man? A humble, ignorant peasant he was, and out of the faith of his soul he made the future of the world for centuries! It is a thing that makes your brain reel.

I write it casually, but I have shuddered over it far into the deep, deep night. I have dreamed of two acts--one of them Gethsemane, and the other Calvary.--Poor fool, perhaps I shall never write them!

I have burrowed into that soul, seeking out the truths of it; the truths, as distinguished from the ten thousand fancies of men. When I write that drama I shall deal with those truths.