BOHEMIA’S HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS.
“Work thou for pleasure; paint or sing or carve
The thing thou lovest, though the body starve.
Who works for glory misses oft the goal;
Who works for money coins his very soul.
Work for the work’s sake, then, and it may be
That these things shall be added unto thee.”
--_Kenyon Cox._
One day a miracle happened,--at least Cartice Doring considered it a
miracle. She was swinging to a strap in one of the always dirty and
frequently crowded cars of the elevated railroad--when, as the train
went ricketing round a curve she was flung against a man behind her
with such force that both well-nigh fell to the floor.
Before she could apologize, a familiar voice said:
“Mrs. Doring! I’m delighted to have been knocked down, since it proves
to be the means of meeting you.”
He was a newspaper man whose occasional visits to the _Register_ she
had greatly enjoyed; and his was the first familiar face that she had
encountered since she had turned her back on former scenes.
“Why, Mr. Farnsworth, I’m glad enough to cry,” she blurted out, and
came near proving the truth of her assertion.
When he learned that she had come to New York to seek her fortune, he
said:
“I can put a spoke in your wheel, for I came here with that intention
myself, and have my tent permanently pitched. A pen and pencil like
yours need never be idle. Come to our publishing house to-morrow at two
o’clock--here’s a card--and we will lay the corner-stone of your future
greatness.”
Cartice was wakeful far into the night nursing her gratitude, and
thinking over the miracle. Farnsworth had been a lifelong friend to
Prescott. Perhaps Prescott brought about their meeting, and put it into
Farnsworth’s head to employ her. Who knows what the people we call
dead may not be able to do? Perhaps they give us many of our thoughts,
purposes and plans. Does not every event in our lives, however trivial
and insignificant, hang upon thousands of preceding events, great and
small?
And when it comes to a question of what a soul can or cannot do,
embodied or disembodied, who can answer?
What is the soul of man? Before assigning it limitations it were well
to know its composition. It is assumed to be the “immortal unit which
represents personality”; but here and there have been men and women who
demonstrated a marvelous complexity of ego, their visible body seeming
a mere tenement for a variety of distinct personalities, all linked
together by some mysterious chain of kinship, though not all resembling
each other, and not always dwelling in harmony.
Stevenson makes Dr. Jekyll say, “I hazard a guess that man will be
ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and
independent denizens.”
Are we not all conscious of a Mr. Hyde within us who breaks out at
times and sadly stains the good record of Dr. Jekyll? May we not be
harboring many Jekylls and Hydes, each differing in degrees of goodness
and badness?
Thinking on this, Cartice remembered the answer of the nameless wise
one to the question, “What is the soul?”--an answer that startled her,
for it opened a vista so vast, since it meant that the soul is God, or
absolute being revealing himself or itself.
This being granted, its personalities are beyond computation. Its
Jekylls and Hydes and its millions which are neither Jekylls nor Hydes
are past number.
In a sea of wonder like this is it worth while to ponder the causes of
any miracle great or tiny?
The next day Cartice found herself installed at a desk in Farnsworth’s
publishing house, pen and pencil both flying. The wished-for foothold
was found, and she stood upon it, busy and grateful.
After becoming acquainted with a number of the metropolitan people of
the pen, she was obliged to give up many of her illusions regarding
them. Some of whom she had formed a flattering opinion, on acquaintance
fell far below the mark. Others who flew high on paper, kept shockingly
near the ground off paper. Some who had been successful were struggling
frantically against a turn of the tide. But that which astonished and
pained her most was their lack of ennobling ideals. Their pens were
ever pointed toward the market, their talk was of prices, not ideas,
and the shrine at which they worshipped was the ninth letter of the
alphabet.
For the most part they were so busy writing and talking of what they
had written and intended to write, that none read another’s production.
Like swimmers in a turbulent sea, their energies were wholly given
to the business of keeping afloat. In slavery to the baker and
meat-seller, they expressed only such sentiments as they believed
acceptable to the commonplace majority,--otherwise marketable products.
They trimmed, tempered, pruned, whittled and cut their literary wares,
to make them suit what they supposed to be the public’s wants, without
regard to conscience or convictions.
Did all angle in these shallow waters? No! Here and there a worthy
few had boldly refused to write down to the low level of average
intelligence. They had penned their honest thought, and by so doing
had brought a respectable portion of the public up to their plane, fame
and money sometimes coming with it. Consciously or unconsciously they
had operated a great law of the universe, that of giving one’s best to
get the best.
In other words they had faithfully followed their highest ideals, in
the face of possible ruin, under the pressure of poverty and the frowns
of public taste and opinion. To do this is to live a great principle,
to set the soul free. Whoever does this shall reap the reward of
principle; he shall find his measure full. The multitude whose slavish
bonds of ignorance he defies will cringe and fawn at his feet and pour
its gold into his coffers.
The ideal is the real. If it be high its faithful followers are lifted
up.
Workers who spend their lives in throwing sops to the mass of mediocre
minds pay the inevitable penalty at last. They fall into the contempt
of the very monster whose favor they have courted, who at heart
respects only its masters, not its slaves.
* * * * *
One day Bardell, a straggler whose weapon was the pencil and whose
field was the dreadful one of the commonest newspaper art, stopped at
Mrs. Doring’s desk, as he often did, for a word or two. She regarded
him as an almost hopeless bungler, but liked his unassertive, dreamy
personality. Some of his drawings were altogether abominable, and in
none of them did he seem to have the slightest pride.
He was undersized and queer-looking, with a big square head, a thin
stooping body, large hollow eyes, and a face that suggested a worn-out
spirit.
Ordinarily he had almost no words about anything, yet seemed to derive
a silent pleasure from hanging near Cartice’s desk a few moments,
when he brought his drawings to the “art man” of the house. His
self-effacement was so refreshing to Cartice after much contact with
pushing ninth-letter people, that she showed him marked civility.
To-day he seated himself and asked her opinion of the drawing he
carried. As usual, his manner was without animation, yet she instantly
felt that he expected a word of praise. This was extraordinary on
his part, as he invariably gave out the wordless impression that he
continued to live more from habit than anything else, but found life
wholly without interest.
The picture, which was destined to illustrate a jingling little rhyme
and visualize it for such readers as have no imagination, represented
a short-skirted maid standing by a rustic fountain, pitcher in hand.
Cartice gave a little cry of delight, as her eyes fell upon it, though
a second glance showed her that something was wrong with it, but what,
she could not for a moment say. Presently the blunder stood revealed,
and was gross enough to mortify Bardell for all time, if she pointed it
out. Yet it would be his ruin to let him go to the “art man,” with the
drawing as it was. So she said, “It is charmingly done; but there is a
trifling error in it. The girl’s feet are put on wrong. Left and right
have changed places.”
The pale, hollow face of the artist flushed red with shame. “I’m most
grateful to you, Mrs. Doring,” he said, as his astonished eyes saw the
hitherto unnoticed blunder. “Had I gone to Buskirk with that it would
have been the end of me in this shop. As it is he almost withers me
with his contempt. It doesn’t stop at my work, either, but includes all
there is of me, physically, mentally, artistically, and financially.
I sustain myself under it with the reflection that, however profound
his contempt for me, it is outdone again and again by my contempt for
myself.”
Cartice understood well the awful wounds to self-respect men and
women are daily forced to endure for the sake of a chance to earn
a livelihood. She looked at Bardell with a vast, wordless sympathy
shining in her eyes, thinking of the courage necessary in the tragedy
of life, as displayed by the man before her and tens of thousands of
others. He understood and went on:
“I don’t endure it for the mere sake of living, I assure you. The
experience called life, as I know it, isn’t worth it. But when I was
younger and considerably more of a fool than I am now, I married,
as a kind of business or because others did, or I don’t really know
why. Anyhow, I have a little family now, and I have to put up with
everything, no matter what, in order to support them. Besides, I have
other ties that hold me to life, and those are my ideals.”
Mrs. Doring looked up with a start. “Tell me about them,” she said.
“Ever since I can remember they have been with me, and are my true
life,” he said. “They exist in the shape of simple rustic scenes,
old-time well-sweeps, tumble-down stone-houses and walls and things of
that sort, with people in them who are a part of their history. They
come into my mind and insist upon being painted. They are not satisfied
to be put in black and white. That is crucifixion for them and for me,
too. They beg, entreat and command me to put them in color.
“This girl at the old-time fountain in this drawing is one of them.
That’s the reason the picture isn’t hard and lifeless like most of
the truck I bring in here. The blunder of putting her feet on wrong
occurred, because I drew the feet last, and about that time she found
out that she wasn’t being painted, but was to be a sacrifice to the
terrible monster of newspaper illustration, which is an easy way to
please children and uneducated people, and an offence to those of a
higher order of intelligence. In rage at the use I was going to make
of her she jumped up and down so fast that her feet got tangled in my
mind. I saw her, you understand. She was real--I saw her--not in flesh
and blood, but imagination, which to me is a kind of higher reality.”
Astonished and delighted to find one worker with ideals above mere
keeping afloat, Cartice asked him if he worked on his ideals or merely
dreamed of them.
“I reach after them all I can,” he said, “handicapped as I am. I give
my heart to them, though I haven’t been able to give them much of my
time. But I have not kicked them out of my way, or murdered them to
sell their flesh at the nearest market, as many of my associates have
done. Nor have I given up the belief that, if we work on our ideals,
devote ourselves to them, in the face of every obstacle, we shall be
lifted out of the dreadful mire of the commonplace, where the feet of
most of us stick fast all our lives. But they will have no half-hearted
devotion. They want whole-souled service only, and they are right.
Willing to give us all of themselves it is only fair they should ask
all from us.
“I have worked but little in oil, and am almost entirely uninstructed,
yet these pictures form, whenever I take up a brush; and it isn’t
putting it too strong to say that they beg to be painted. They come in
color exactly as they want to be put on canvas,--not simply in my mind,
but before my eyes, though thin and shadowy.
“One Sunday when rambling in the country I passed an old well, and said
to myself, ‘I’ll paint that.’ Instantly I saw a man lying by the well,
though no man was there. I painted it that way and put it up in the den
I call my studio.
“One day a stranger who came there with one of my friends saw it and
took a great fancy to it. He said it was a scene from his memory.
The old well was the one at his childhood’s home, and the man was
his father, as he had seen him lying in the shade many a time, long
ago. The upshot of it was, that he offered me two hundred and fifty
dollars for it--it was a little thing--which it is needless to say I
accepted. When he went away I thought I ought to faint or do something
extraordinary to work off my astonishment.”
“But you didn’t rest on that?”
“No; I went on with other ideals, in little spots of time squeezed out
of the odd-jobbery of my daily grind in black and white. I believe
that, when we work on our ideals, the very shape of our heads change.
My mother says mine is changing, for which I am most grateful, its
original shape being like unto an old-fashioned country horse-block.”
“Have you had sympathy in the pursuit of your ideals?” Cartice asked.
“Not always. That was a want I felt for ten years. All that time I
hunted for a companion, an artist, who, like myself, loved the country
and rural subjects, to paint with me. At last I found one and have him
yet. We inspire each other. Together we go to the country on Sundays
and make studies. The other artists I encounter in my humble path
are so woodeny, so coarse, so worldly that I need patience to suffer
them at all, and I never find them companionable. They chaff me and
call me a sentimentalist. I don’t care. I believe in sentiment. If I
didn’t idealize life and work, I should have to give both up. I would
willingly go and live in the humblest little old place in the country
and never see a city again, if I could but work on my ideals.”
Cartice was seeing the square-headed little plodder from a new point
of view--an inner and spiritual one, and in its beautifying light the
square head became symmetrical, the stooping shoulders erect, the pale
face attractive, the eyes aflame with vital force, and the bearing that
of one conscious of being of value. It was then that she recognized him
as one of her own people, from her own planet, and blamed herself for
not sooner seeing through the transparent mask that hard environment
had made.
She asked him what he thought is to be the fate of those, who, having
an ideal, stifle, ignore or slaughter it even, and give their time
and energy to the performance of some poor pitiful, paltry work which
demands but a tithe of their ability, for the sake of a little money
with which to keep out the unwelcome howls of the wolf.
“Look about you and see,” he said, with a contemptuous gesture. “Look
at me, a creature slinking in and out of rich publishing houses,
hunting crumbs, like the dogs that hung round the rich man’s table,
with fear written in every movement, dejection in my spirit, indigence
in my garments and weariness in my heart.”
He got up and walked to and fro nervously, and as he moved and talked
he became transformed. The timid, shrinking little figure vanished and
in its place strode one whose step was firm and eye fearless.
“There are hundreds like me. The woods--the city’s accursed woods are
full of them. They run over each other in their eagerness to do the
bidding of some master who can drop a coin or so into their flabby
purses. Faust sold his soul to the devil for a good price; but we,
miserable wretches, sell it daily for a song. Why? Because we are such
pitiful cowards that we can’t face the scarecrow that goes by the name
of starvation. We live so far below our true selves that we don’t know
the law that would carry us through, which is, give the best to get the
best. Why not trust the soul? The ideal is the real; it is the voice of
the soul, otherwise the voice of God, and it _must_ have expression.
If not here and now, then sometime, somewhere. Its account is bound to
be presented and _must_ be paid. Death itself can’t prevent the final
settlement.
“What do they do at school with the lazy boy who slights his lessons?
After a while they turn him back in his books and he has his road to
retrace. We shall have the same experience, if we have heard the voice
of the ideal and heeded it not. We shall be sent back to do it all over
again--yes, from beyond the grave, for what can there be on the other
side for him who has betrayed his trust, but contempt and a command to
go back and try again?”
He stopped before Cartice, and with blazing eyes and uplifted finger
said, “In this moment I determine to outrage my ideals no more, come
what may. I have new light. We all have been acting on the assumption
that we knew what would happen if we didn’t do thus and so. In point
of fact nobody knows. With results we have nothing to do. We have only
to follow our highest leading and leave the rest to God. To ignore or
debase a noble gift that has been entrusted to us is a sin against our
souls, which many of us have stupidly committed day after day, and we
are daily paying the penalty. You shall see me here no more, bartering
work in which I have no heart for a few miserable dollars. Never again;
no, never again.”
“You are right, Mr. Bardell, a thousand times right,” said Mrs. Doring,
with throbbing heart and glistening eyes. “I have long known that one
should never give less than the best, and that an outraged ideal will
be avenged. Yet I daily commit that sin. I used to feel that I had
something more than common to do in the world. I had ideals; but I put
them off, always waiting for a time when I could see my way clear to
devote myself entirely to them. I waited too long. Now they come less
frequently and are less urgent, and I have grown weary and indifferent.
I wasted my time hunting happiness.”
“Happiness belongs to the ideal,” said Bardell. “It is a matter of
subjective appreciation, so is its opposite, misery. Perhaps it would
be clearer to say that happiness exists in the idea one forms of it,
hence it is purely ideal. We are happy, when we believe ourselves
happy. But for the most part all the world thinks happiness is to be
found in externals; that it can be secured in thick slices which we
can eat like bread, while comfortably seated in good houses. Money and
marriage are supposed to have a monopoly of it. What idiocy!”
“Yes, idiocy,” Cartice echoed. “Thackeray says, ‘For my own part I know
of nothing more contemptible, unmanly or unwomanly and craven than the
everlasting sighing for happiness.’ When a child, I had a consciousness
or memory of a world in which I had once lived where there was no such
word as happiness, and yet none were unhappy. I understand that now.
It means that happiness only exists where it is not thought of, talked
about or pursued. I believe it is intended that we shall be happy; but
not in our own foolish way. Freedom is the destiny of the human race,
and that freedom holds for us a happiness infinitely greater and higher
than we now can imagine, because it contains our full development,
our perfected intellectual and spiritual growth. It is the freedom of
truth, long since prophesied. When we know the truth, we are free, and
happiness comes with freedom. Heaven is within one; it consists in the
soul’s unfolding or coming into a knowledge of itself. We reach that
through expression. In this way we grow, as every plant struggles to
do. So you see, if we strangle our ideals, we stunt our growth, and
shall be cut down like the bent, and imperfect tree,--cut down, to come
again perhaps, for another trial, and still another and another until
our destiny is accomplished. Therefore it is that doing our best should
be our religion, as it is nature’s religion. It is the only road we
can take which leads to the goal at which we must arrive, sooner or
later. It is the price each soul must pay who would be saved. Instead
of that, most of us have gone about hunting happiness on a childish
plane, and making a great plaint, when we didn’t find it. ’Twould be
laughable, were it not so pitiful.”
“Isn’t it plain enough,” said Bardell, “that if a wholesome civic and
social spirit prevailed, we should be sufficiently enlightened to find
our reward in doing our best, whether it were to raise potatoes, polish
door knobs or paint pictures. All great men and women who have helped
humankind have done so. They gave their best and nothing less, even
when the world did not want it, and stoned them for it. They had a far
greater reward than human appreciation. They grew to heroic, mental and
spiritual stature. If Jesus of Nazareth had not given the best that was
in Him, even at the cost of crucifixion, He could not have been the
light of the world.
“How would it be with the world to-day, if all the great spirits that
make up the enlightened minority, had merely jogged on doing something
that secured the necessities of the body, rather than run any risk
of being short of bread by pointing to a new road? The soul must follow
its best light, taking no thought for the result. I shall do that
henceforth.”
“I rejoice in your emancipation,” Cartice said, looking at him with
glowing eyes. “I begin to see what it means to be born again. May it
not be to awaken a knowledge of our own being, value and work?”
Bardell bade her good-bye with the seriousness of one going on a long
journey. When he was gone a new sense of loneliness came over her. It
was because he already had started up the mountain, leaving her still
in the vale.