The Cafe de la Source,
Late in July 1914.
The other evening MacBean was in a pessimistic mood.
"Why do you write?" he asked me gloomily.
"Obviously," I said, "to avoid starving. To produce something that will
buy me food, shelter, raiment."
"If you were a millionaire, would you still write?"
"Yes," I said, after a moment's thought. "You get an idea. It haunts
you. It seems to clamor for expression. It begins to obsess you. At
last in desperation you embody it in a poem, an essay, a story. There!
it is disposed of. You are at rest. It troubles you no more. Yes; if I
were a millionaire I should write, if it were only to escape from my
ideas."
"You have given two reasons why men write," said MacBean: "for gain,
for self-expression. Then, again, some men write to amuse themselves,
some because they conceive they have a mission in the world; some
because they have real genius, and are conscious they can enrich the
literature of all time. I must say I don't know of any belonging to the
latter class. We are living in an age of mediocrity. There is no writer
of to-day who will be read twenty years after he is dead. That's a truth
that must come home to the best of them."
"I guess they're not losing much sleep over it," I said.
"Take novelists," continued MacBean. "The line of first-class novelists
ended with Dickens and Thackeray. Then followed some of the second
class, Stevenson, Meredith, Hardy. And to-day we have three novelists
of the third class, good, capable craftsmen. We can trust ourselves
comfortably in their hands. We read and enjoy them, but do you think
our children will?"
"Yours won't, anyway," I said.
"Don't be too sure. I may surprise you yet. I may get married and turn
_bourgeois_."
The best thing that could happen to MacBean would be that. It might
change his point of view. He is so painfully discouraging. I have never
mentioned my ballads to him. He would be sure to throw cold water on
them. And as it draws near to its end the thought of my book grows more
and more dear to me. How I will get it published I know not; but I will.
Then even if it doesn't sell, even if nobody reads it, I will be
content. Out of this brief, perishable Me I will have made something
concrete, something that will preserve my thought within its dusty
covers long after I am dead and dust.
Here is one of my latest: