Why should not Philip trust the future? He was a free man. He had given
no hostages to fortune. Even if he did not succeed, no one else would
be involved in his failure. Why not follow his inclination, the dream of
his boyhood?
He was at liberty to choose for himself. Everybody in America is; this
is the proclamation of its blessed independence. Are we any better off
for the privilege of following first one inclination and then another,
which is called making a choice? Are they not as well off, and on the
whole as likely to find their right place, who inherit their callings in
life, whose careers are mapped out from the cradle by circumstance and
convention? How much time do we waste in futile experiment? Freedom to
try everything, which is before the young man, is commonly freedom to
excel in nothing.
There are, of course, exceptions. The blacksmith climbs into a city
pulpit. The popular preacher becomes an excellent insurance agent. The
saloon-keeper develops into the legislator, and wears the broadcloth and
high hat of the politician. The brakeman becomes the railway magnate,
and the college graduate a grocer's clerk, and the messenger-boy,
picking up by chance one day the pen, and finding it run easier than
his legs, becomes a power on a city journal, and advises society how to
conduct itself and the government how to make war and peace. All this
adds to the excitement and interest of life. On the whole, we say
that people get shaken into their right places, and the predetermined
vocation is often a mistake. There is the anecdote of a well-known
clergyman who, being in a company with his father, an aged and
distinguished doctor of divinity, raised his monitory finger and
exclaimed, “Ah, you spoiled a first-rate carpenter when you made a poor
minister of me.”
Philip thought he was calmly arguing the matter with himself. How often
do we deliberately weigh such a choice as we would that of another
person, testing our inclination by solid reason? Perhaps no one could
have told Philip what he ought to do, but every one who knew him, and
the circumstances, knew what he would do. He was, in fact, already doing
it while he was paltering with his ostensible profession. But he never
would have confessed, probably he would then have been ashamed to
confess, how much his decision to break with the pretense of law was
influenced by the thought of what a certain dark little maiden, whose
image was always in his mind, would wish him to do, and by the very
remarkable fact that she was seen going to her room with his well-read
story in her hand. Perhaps it was under her pillow at night!
Good-luck seemed to follow his decision--as it often does when a man
makes a questionable choice, as if the devil had taken an interest in
his downward road to prosperity. But Philip really gained a permanent
advantage. The novel had given him a limited reputation and very
little money. Yet it was his stepping-stone, and when he applied to his
publishers and told them of his decision, they gave him some work as a
reader for the house. At first this was fitful and intermittent, but
as he showed both literary discrimination and tact in judging of the
market, his services were more in request, and slowly he acquired
confidential relations with the house. Whatever he knew, his knowledge
of languages and his experience abroad, came into play, and he began to
have more confidence in himself, as he saw that his somewhat desultory
education had, after all, a market value.
The rather long period of his struggle, which is a common struggle, and
often disheartening, need not be dwelt on here. We can anticipate
by saying that he obtained in the house a permanent and responsible
situation, with an income sufficient for a bachelor without habits of
self-indulgence. It was not the crowning of a noble ambition, it was not
in the least the career he had dreamed of, but it gave him support and
a recognized position, and, above all, did not divert him from such
creative work as he was competent to do. Nay, he found very soon that
the feeling of security, without any sordid worry, gave freedom to his
imagination. There was something stimulating in the atmosphere of books
and manuscripts and in that world of letters which seems so large to
those who live in it. Fortunately, also, having a support, he was not
tempted to debase his talent by sensational ventures. What he wrote for
this or that magazine he wrote to please himself, and, although he saw
no fortune that way, the little he received was an encouragement as well
as an appreciable addition to his income.
There are two sorts of success in letters as in life generally. The one
is achieved suddenly, by a dash, and it lasts as long as the author can
keep the attention of the spectators upon his scintillating novelties.
When the sparks fade there is darkness. How many such glittering
spectacles this century has witnessed!
There is another sort of success which does not startlingly or at
once declare itself. Sometimes it comes with little observation. The
reputation is slowly built up, as by a patient process of nature. It
is curious, as Philip wrote once in an essay, to see this unfolding
in Lowell's life. There was no one moment when he launched into great
popularity--nay, in detail, he seemed to himself not to have made the
strike that ambition is always expecting. But lo! the time came when, by
universal public consent, which was in the nature of a surprise to him,
he had a high and permanent place in the world of letters.
In anticipating Philip's career, however, it must not be understood that
he had attained any wide public recognition. He was simply enrolled in
the great army of readers and was serving his apprenticeship. He was
recognized as a capable man by those who purvey in letters to the
entertainment of the world. Even this little foothold was not easily
gained in a day, as the historian discovered in reading some bundles of
old letters which Philip wrote in this time of his novitiate to Celia
and to his cousin Alice.
It was against Celia's most strenuous advice that he had trusted himself
to a literary career. “I see, my dear friend,” she wrote, in reply to
his announcement that he was going that day to Mr. Hunt to resign his
position, “that you are not happy, but whatever your disappointment
or disillusion, you will not better yourself by surrendering a regular
occupation. You live too much in the imagination already.”
Philip fancied, with that fatuity common to his sex, that he had worn an
impenetrable mask in regard to his wild passion for Evelyn, and did not
dream that, all along, Celia had read him like an open book. She judged
Philip quite accurately. It was herself that she did not know, and she
would have repelled as nonsense the suggestion that her own restlessness
and her own changing experiments in occupation were due to the
unsatisfied longings of a woman's heart.
“You must not think,” the letter went on, “that I want to dictate, but
I have noticed that men--it may be different with women--only succeed
by taking one path and diligently walking in it. And literature is not a
career, it is just a toss up, a lottery, and woe to you if you once draw
a lucky number--you will always be expecting another... You say that I
am a pretty one to give advice, for I am always chopping and changing
myself. Well, from the time you were a little boy, did I ever give you
but one sort of advice? I have been constant in that. And as to myself,
you are unjust. I have always had one distinct object in life, and that
I have pursued. I wanted to find out about life, to have experience, and
then do what I could do best, and what needed most to be done. Why did
I not stick to teaching in that woman's college? Well, I began to have
doubts, I began to experiment on my pupils. You will laugh, but I will
give you a specimen. One day I put a question to my literature class,
and I found out that not one of them knew how to boil potatoes. They
were all getting an education, and hardly one of them knew how much
the happiness of a home depends upon having the potatoes mealy and not
soggy. It was so in everything. How are we going to live when we are all
educated, without knowing how to live? Then I found that the masses here
in New York did not know any better than the classes how to live. Don't
think it is just a matter of cooking. It is knowing how, generally, to
make the most of yourself and of your opportunities, and have a nice
world to live in, a thrifty, self-helpful, disciplined world. Is
education giving us this? And then we think that organization will do
it, organization instead of self-development. We think we can organize
life, as they are trying to organize art. They have organized art as
they have the production of cotton.
“Did I tell you I was in that? No? I used to draw in school, and after
I had worked in the Settlement here in New York, and while I was working
down on the East Side, it came over me that maybe I had one talent
wrapped in a napkin; and I have been taking lessons in Fifty-seventh
Street with the thousand or two young women who do not know how to boil
potatoes, but are pursuing the higher life of art. I did not tell you
this because I knew you would say that I am just as inconsistent as you
are. But I am not. I have demonstrated the fact that neither I nor one
in a hundred of those charming devotees to art could ever earn a living
by art, or do anything except to add to the mediocrity of the amazing
art product of this free country.
“And you will ask, what now? I am going on in the same way. I am going
to be a doctor. In college I was very well up in physiology and anatomy,
and I went quite a way in biology. So you see I have a good start. I am
going to attend lectures and go into a hospital, as soon as there is an
opening, and then I mean to practice. One essential for a young doctor
I have in advance. That is patients. I can get all I want on the East
Side, and I have already studied many of them. Law and medicine are what
I call real professions.”
However Celia might undervalue the calling that Philip had now entered
on, he had about this time evidence of the growing appreciation of
literature by practical business men. He was surprised one day by a
brief note from Murad Ault, asking him to call at his office as soon as
convenient.
Mr. Ault received him in his private office at exactly the hour
named. Evidently Mr. Ault's affairs were prospering. His establishment
presented every appearance of a high-pressure business perfectly
organized. The outer rooms were full of industrious clerks, messengers
were constantly entering and departing in a feverish rapidity, servants
moved silently about, conducting visitors to this or that waiting-room
and answering questions, excited speculators in groups were
gesticulating and vociferating, and in the anteroom were impatient
clients awaiting their turn. In the inner chamber, however, was perfect
calm. There at his table sat the dark, impenetrable operator, whose time
was exactly apportioned, serene, saturnine, or genial, as the case might
be, listening attentively, speaking deliberately, despatching the affair
in hand without haste or the waste of a moment.
Mr. Ault arose and shook hands cordially, and then went on, without
delay for any conventional talk.
“I sent for you, Mr. Burnett, because I wanted your help, and because I
thought I might do you a good turn. You see” (with a grim smile) “I have
not forgotten Rivervale days. My wife has been reading your story. I
don't have much time for such things myself, but her constant talk about
it has given me an idea. I want to suggest to you the scene of a novel,
one that would be bound to be a good seller.
“I could guarantee a big circulation. I have just become interested in
one of the great transcontinental lines.” He named the most picturesque
of them--one that he, in fact, absolutely controlled. “Well, I want a
story, yes, I guess a good love-story--a romance of reality you might
call it--strung on that line. You take the idea?”
“Why,” said Philip, half amused at the conceit and yet complimented
by the recognition of his talent, “I don't know anything about
railroads--how they are run, cost of building, prospect of traffic,
engineering difficulties, all that--nothing whatever.”
“So much the better. It is a literary work I want, not a brag about the
road or a description of its enterprise. You just take the line as your
scene. Let the story run on that. The company, don't you see, must not
in any way be suspected with having anything to do with it, no mention
of its name as a company, no advertisement of the road on a fly-leaf or
cover. Just your own story, pure and simple.”
“But,” said Philip, more and more astonished at this unlooked-for
expansion of the literary field, “I could not embark on an enterprise of
such magnitude.”
“Oh,” said Mr. Ault, complacently, “that will be all arranged. Just a
pleasure trip, as far as that goes. You will have a private car,
well stocked, a photographer will go along, and I think--don't you? a
water-color artist. You can take your own time, stop when and where
you choose--at the more stations the better. It ought to be profusely
illustrated with scenes on the line--yes, have colored plates, all that
would give life and character to your story. Love on a Special, some
such title as that. It would run like oil. I will arrange to have it as
a serial in one of the big magazines, and then the book would be bound
to go. The company, of course, can have nothing to do with it, but I can
tell you privately that it would rather distribute a hundred thousand
copies of a book of good literature through the country than to
encourage the railway truck that is going now.
“I shouldn't wonder, Mr. Burnett, if the public would be interested in
having the Puritan Nun take that kind of a trip.” And Mr. Ault ended his
explanation with an interrogatory smile.
Philip hesitated a moment, trying to grasp the conception of this
business use of literature. Mr. Ault resumed:
“It isn't anything in the nature of an advertisement. Literature is a
power. Why, do you know--of course you did not intend it--your story has
encouraged the Peacock Inn to double its accommodations, and half the
farmhouses in Rivervale are expecting summer boarders. The landlord
of the Peacock came to see me the other day, and he says everything is
stirred up there, and he has already to enlarge or refuse application.”
“It is very kind in you, Mr. Ault, to think of me in that connection,
but I fear you have over-estimated my capacity. I could name half a
dozen men who could do it much better than I could. They know how to do
it, they have that kind of touch. I have been surprised at the literary
ability engaged by the great corporations.”
Mr. Ault made a gesture of impatience. “I wouldn't give a damn for
that sort of thing. It is money thrown away. If I should get one of the
popular writers you refer to, the public would know he was hired. If you
lay your story out there, nobody will suspect anything of the sort. It
will be a clean literary novel. Not travel, you understand, but a story,
and the more love in it the better. It will be a novelty. You can run
your car sixty miles an hour in exciting passages, everything will work
into it. When people travel on the road the pictures will show them the
scenes of the story. It is a big thing,” said Mr. Ault in conclusion.
“I see it is,” said Philip, rising at the hint that his time had
expired. “I am very much obliged to you, Mr. Ault, for your confidence
in me. But it is a new idea. I will have to think it over.”
“Well, think it over. There is money in it. You would not start till
about midsummer. Good-day.”
A private car! Travel like a prince! Certainly literature was looking
up in the commercial world. Philip walked back to his publishers with a
certain elasticity of step, a new sense of power. Yes, the power of the
pen. And why not? No doubt it would bring him money and spread his name
very widely. There was nothing that a friendly corporation could not
do for a favorite. He would then really be a part of the great, active,
enterprising world. Was there anything illegitimate in taking advantage
of such an opportunity? Surely, he should remain his own master, and
write nothing except what his own conscience approved. But would he not
feel, even if no one else knew it, that he was the poet-laureate of a
corporation?
And suddenly, as he thought how the clear vision of Evelyn would plunge
to the bottom of such a temptation, he felt humiliated that such a
proposition should have been made to him. Was there nothing, nobody,
that commercialism did not think for sale and to be trafficked in?
Nevertheless, he wrote to Alice about it, describing the proposal as it
was made to him, without making any comment on it.
Alice replied speedily. “Isn't it funny,” she wrote, “and isn't it
preposterous? I wonder what such people think? And that horrid young
pirate, Ault, a patron of literature! My dear, I cannot conceive of you
as the Pirate's Own. Dear Phil, I want you to succeed. I do want you to
make money, a lot of it. I like to think you are wanted and appreciated,
and that you can get paid better and better for what you do. Sell your
manuscripts for as good a price as you can get. Yes, dear, sell your
manuscripts, but don't sell your soul.”