DEAR HENDRICK,--Verily I think I ought to be apologizing for my
blues. But it is such a relief to write them betimes--when you are
sure of a patient hearing. Besides, it may interest you to hear of a
small professional scribbler's ups and downs. I used only to pray for
opportunity: if I could only get an audience! Now I have one--a small
one. An offer of $1200 from a syndicate, which would make for me nearly
$3000 here; and plenty of others. _And I can't write._ That is, I can
do nothing except what would lower the little reputation I have gained.
In such a case the duty is plainly not to try, but to wait for the Holy
Ghost,--or (as I am out of his domain) the coming of the gods. I am now
in a period of mental drought, but have written half of a book that
will probably be dedicated to E. H.,--or will certainly unless another
incomplete book should be ready first, a book to be called perhaps
"Thoughts about Feelings."
I am quite uncertain, however, as to the realization of this latter
book. Looking back through my life I find that, with the exception
of West-Indian and a few New Orleans experiences, I remember nothing
agreeable. It was a rule with me from boyhood to try to forget
disagreeable things; and in trying to forget them I made no effort to
remember the agreeable,--just because "a sorrow's crown of sorrows
is remembering happier things." So the past is nearly a blank. Then
another queer thing is my absolute ignorance of realities. Always
having lived in hopes and imaginations, the smallest practical matters,
that everybody should know, I don't know anything about. Nothing, for
example, about a boat, a horse, a farm, an orchard, a watch, a garden.
Nothing about what a man ought to do under any possible circumstances. I
know nothing but sensations and books,--and most of the sensations are
not worth penning. I really ought to have become a monk or something
of that kind. Still, I believe I have a new key to the explanation of
sensations,--if I can find the incident to peg the essays upon,--the
dummies for the new philosophical robes. So far the book of reveries
consists of only two little chapters. The better part of my life might
just as well never have been lived at all. I am only waking up in the
hoariness of age, and my next birth will probably see me a mud-turtle or
a serpent, or something else essentially torpid and speechless.
Of course, I can write and write and write; but the moment I begin to
write for money, vanishes the little special colour, evaporates the
small special flavour, which is ME. And I become nobody again; and the
public wonders why it ever paid any attention to so commonplace a fool.
So I must sit and wait for the gods.
Yet a little while, I shall be all hope and pride and confidence; and
again a little while, up to my ears in the Slough of Despond. And the
beautifully milled dollars and exquisitely engraved notes you talk of
will stay in the pockets of practical people.