Read Ebook: The Journal of Arthur Stirling : (The Valley of the Shadow) by Sinclair Upton

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Ebook has 1626 lines and 93088 words, and 33 pages

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

The book! The book! This day, Saturday, 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 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.

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.--

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--

But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill!

April 11th.

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!

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. AEschylus 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--

"With travail and heavy sorrow The holy spirit of Man."

Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and Samson Agonistes! And now there will be a fourth. It will be The Captive.

Am I a fool? I do not know--that is none of my business. It is my business to do my best.

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.

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