AT WORK.
Walter found that compulsory employment, while taking from, his time for
genial labor, quickened his desire after it, increased his faculty for
it, and made him more careful of his precious hours of leisure. Life,
too, had now an interest greater than before; and almost as soon as
anxiety gave place, the impulse to utterance began again to urge him.
What this impulse is, who can define, or who can trace its origin? The
result of it in Walter’s case was ordered words, or, conventionally,
poetry. Seldom is such a result of any value, but the process is for the
man invaluable: it remained to be seen whether in Walter it was for
others as well as himself.
He became rapidly capable of better work. His duty was drudgery, but
drudgery well encountered will reveal itself as of potent and precious
reaction, both intellectual and moral. One incapable of drudgery can not
be capable of the finest work. Many a man may do many things well, and
be far from reception into the most ancient guild of workers.
Walter labored with conscience and diligence, and brought his good taste
to tell on the quality of his drudgery. He is a contemptible workman who
thinks of his claims before his duties, of his poor wages instead of his
undertaken work. There was a strong sense of fairness in Walter; he saw
the meanness of pocketing the poorest without giving good work in
return; he saw that its own badness, and nothing else, makes any work
mean--and the workman with it. That he believed himself capable of
higher work was the worst of reasons for not giving money’s worth for
his money. That a thing is of little value is a poor excuse for giving
bad measure of it. Walter carried his hod full, and was a man.
Sullivan was mainly employed in writing the reviews of “current
literature.” One evening he brought Walter a book of some pretension,
told him he was hard pressed, and begged him to write a notice of it.
Walter, glad of the opportunity of both serving his friend and trying
his own hand, set himself at once to read the book. The moment he thus
took the attitude of a reviewer, he found the paragraphs begin, like
potatoes, to sprout, and generate other paragraphs. Between agreeing and
disagreeing he had soon far more than enough to say, and sought his
table, as a workman his bench.
To many people who think, writing is the greatest of bores; but Walter
enjoyed it, even to the mechanical part of the operation. Heedless of
the length of his article, he wrote until long after midnight, and next
morning handed the result to his friend. He burst out laughing.
“Here’s a paper for a quarterly!” he cried. “Man, it is almost as long
as the book itself! This will never do! The world has neither time,
space, money, nor brains for so much! But I will take it, and see what
can be done with it.”
About a sixth part of it was printed. In that sixth Walter could not
recognize his hand; neither could he have gathered from it any idea of
the book.
A few days after, Harold brought him a batch of books to review, taking
care, however, to limit him to an average length for each. Walter
entered thus upon a short apprenticeship, the end of which was that, a
vacancy happening to occur, he was placed on “the staff” of the journal,
to aid in reviewing the books sent by their publishers. His income was
considerably augmented, but the work was harder, and required more of
his time.
From the first he was troubled to find how much more honesty demanded
than pay made possible. He had not learned this while merely
supplementing the labor of his friend, and taking his time. But now he
became aware that to make acquaintance with a book, and pass upon it a
justifiable judgment, required at least four times the attention he
could afford it and live. Many, however, he could knock off without
compunction, regarding them as too slight to deserve attention:
“indifferent honest,” he was not so sensitive in justice as to reflect
that the poorest thing has a right to fair play; that, free to say
nothing, you must, if you speak, say the truth of the meanest. But
Walter had not yet sunk to believe there can be _necessity_ for doing
wrong. The world is divided, very unequally, into those that think a man
can not avoid, and those who believe he _must_ avoid doing wrong. Those
live in fear of death; these set death in one eye and right in the
other.
His first important review, Walter was compelled to print without having
finished it. The next he worked at hardest, and finished, but with less
deliberation. He grew more and more careless toward the books he counted
of little consequence, while he imagined himself growing more and more
capable of getting at the heart of a book by skimming its pages. If to
skim be ever a true faculty, it must come of long experience in the art
of reading, and is not possible to a beginner. To skim and judge, is to
wake from a doze and give the charge to a jury.
Writing more and more smartly, he found the usual difficulty in
abstaining from a smartness which was unjust because irrelevant.
So far as his employers were concerned, Walter did his duty, but forgot
that, apart from his obligation to the mere and paramount truth, it was
from the books he reviewed--good, bad, or indifferent, whichever they
were--that he drew the food he eat and the clothes that covered him.
His talent was increasingly recognized by the editors of the newspaper,
and they began to put other, and what they counted more important work
in his way, intrusting him with the discussion of certain social
questions of the day, in regard to which, like many another youth of
small experience, he found it the easier to give a confident opinion
that his experience was so small. In general he wrote logically, and,
which is rarer, was even capable of being made to see where his logic
was wrong. But his premises were much too scanty. What he took for
granted was very often by no means granted. It mattered, little to
editors or owners, however, so long as he wrote lucidly, sparklingly,
“crisply,” leaving those who read, willing to read more from the same
pen.