Martin Eden quotes

His eyes were wide apart; nothing in their field of vision escaped; and as they drank in the beauty before them the fighting light died out and a warm glow took its place.

He was responsive to beauty, and here was cause to respond.

An oil painting caught and held him. A heavy surf thundered and burst over an outjutting rock; lowering storm-clouds covered the sky;

He glanced around at his friend reading the letter and saw the books on the table.

Into his eyes leaped a wistfulness and a yearning as promptly as the yearning leaps into the eyes of a starving man at sight of food.

An impulsive stride, with one lurch to right and left of the shoulders, brought him to the table, where he began affectionately handling the books.

The book was closed on his forefinger, and before he turned he was thrilling to the first new impression, which was not of the girl, but of her brother’s words.

Under that muscled body of his he was a mass of quivering sensibilities.

At the slightest impact of the outside world upon his consciousness, his thoughts, sympathies, and emotions leapt and played like lambent flame. He was extraordinarily receptive and responsive, while his imagination, pitched high, was ever at work establishing relations of likeness and difference. “Mr.

Here was intellectual life, he thought, and here was beauty, warm and wonderful as he had never dreamed it could be. He forgot himself and stared at her with hungry eyes.

Here was something to live for, to win to, to fight for⁠—ay, and die for.

The books were true. There were such women in the world. She was one of them.

It was the finest thing yet that he had seen in this small glimpse of that world. He was moved deeply by appreciation of it, and his heart was melting with sympathetic tenderness.

He had starved for love all his life. His nature craved love.

It was an organic demand of his being. Yet he had gone without, and hardened himself in the process. He had not known that he needed love. Nor did he know it now.

When he heard such words dropping carelessly from the lips of the members of this marvellous family, her family, he thrilled with delight. The romance, and beauty, and high vigor of the books were coming true.

He was in that rare and blissful state wherein a man sees his dreams stalk out from the crannies of fantasy and become fact.

Never had he been at such an altitude of living, and he kept himself in the background, listening, observing, and pleasuring, replying in reticent monosyllables, saying, “Yes, miss,” and “No, miss,” to her, and “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am,” to her mother.

Eden,” his aggressive pride was forgotten, and he was glowing and warm with delight. He was a civilized man, that was what he was, shoulder to shoulder, at dinner, with people he had read about in books.

He was in the books himself, adventuring through the printed pages of bound volumes.

But while he belied Arthur’s description, and appeared a gentle lamb rather than a wild man, he was racking his brains for a course of action.

In his mind, as in her own, the gulf widened; but faster than it widened, towered his ambition to win across it. But he was too complicated a plexus of sensibilities to sit staring at a gulf a whole evening, especially when there was music.

He was remarkably susceptible to music. It was like strong drink, firing him to audacities of feeling⁠—a drug that laid hold of his imagination and went cloud-soaring through the sky.

It banished sordid fact, flooded his mind with beauty, loosed romance and to its heels added wings. He did not understand the music she played. It was different from the dance-hall piano-banging and blatant brass bands he had heard.

It was a sensuous, tropic night. In the background a volcano crater was silhouetted against the stars. Overhead drifted a pale crescent moon, and the Southern Cross burned low in the sky.

He was a harp; all life that he had known and that was his consciousness was the strings; and the flood of music was a wind that poured against those strings and set them vibrating with memories and dreams.

He did not merely feel. Sensation invested itself in form and color and radiance, and what his imagination dared, it objectified in some sublimated and magic way. Past, present, and future mingled;

But their heads were filled with knowledge that enabled them to talk her talk—the thought depressed him. But what was a brain for? he demanded passionately. What they had done, he could do.

They had been studying about life from the books while he had been busy living life.

His brain was just as full of knowledge as theirs, though it was a different kind of knowledge. How many of them could tie a lanyard knot, or take a wheel or a lookout?

For years she had kissed him only when he returned from voyages or departed on voyages. But this kiss had tasted of soapsuds, and the lips, he had noticed, were flabby. There had been no quick, vigorous lip-pressure such as should accompany any kiss.

Hers was the kiss of a tired woman who had been tired so long that she had forgotten how to kiss.

He remembered her as a girl, before her marriage, when she would dance with the best, all night, after a hard day’s work at the laundry, and think nothing of leaving the dance to go to another day’s hard work.

He was appalled at the problem confronting him, weighted down by the incubus of his working-class station. Everything reached out to hold him down—his sister, his sister’s house and family, Jim the apprentice, everybody he knew, every tie of life.

Existence did not taste good in his mouth.

Up to then he had accepted existence, as he had lived it with all about him, as a good thing. He had never questioned it, except when he read books; but then, they were only books, fairy stories of a fairer and impossible world.

Norman and Arthur knew that speech. He had heard them talking it. And they were her brothers. He left the alcove in despair. From every side the books seemed to press upon him and crush him.

He had never dreamed that the fund of human knowledge bulked so big.

He was frightened. How could his brain ever master it all? Later, he remembered that there were other men, many men, who had mastered it; and he breathed a great oath, passionately, under his breath, swearing that his brain could do what theirs had done.

When you meet a young lady and she asks you to call, how soon can you call? was the way he worded it to himself. But when he found the right shelf, he sought vainly for the answer.

He was appalled at the vast edifice of etiquette, and lost himself in the mazes of visiting card conduct between persons in polite society.

He abandoned his search. He had not found what he wanted, though he had found that it would take all of a man’s time to be polite, and that he would have to live a preliminary life in which to learn how to be polite.

A terrible restlessness that was akin to hunger afflicted Martin Eden. He was famished for a sight of the girl whose slender hands had gripped his life with a giant’s grasp.

He could not steel himself to call upon her. He was afraid that he might call too soon, and so be guilty of an awful breach of that awful thing called etiquette.

The many books he read but served to whet his unrest.

Every page of every book was a peephole into the realm of knowledge. His hunger fed upon what he read, and increased.

Also, he did not know where to begin, and continually suffered from lack of preparation. The commonest references, that he could see plainly every reader was expected to know, he did not know.

And as they waxed maudlin he studied them, watching the beast rise and master them and thanking God that he was no longer as they.

They had their limitations to forget, and when they were drunk, their dim, stupid spirits were even as gods, and each ruled in his heaven of intoxicated desire.

With Martin the need for strong drink had vanished. He was drunken in new and more profound ways—with Ruth, who had fired him with love and with a glimpse of higher and eternal life;

Again she looked.

All the centuries of woman since sex began were eloquent in her eyes.

And he measured her in a careless way, and knew, bold now, that she would begin to retreat, coyly and delicately, as he pursued, ever ready to reverse the game should he turn fainthearted.

Her idea of love was more that of placid affection, serving the loved one softly in an atmosphere, flower-scented and dim-lighted, of ethereal calm.

She did not dream of the volcanic convulsions of love, its scorching heat and sterile wastes of parched ashes.

She knew neither her own potencies, nor the potencies of the world; and the deeps of life were to her seas of illusion.

In similar ways she had experienced unusual feelings when she looked at wild animals in the menagerie, or when she witnessed a storm of wind, or shuddered at the bright-ribbed lightning. There was something cosmic in such things, and there was something cosmic in him.

He came to her breathing of large airs and great spaces.

The blaze of tropic suns was in his face, and in his swelling, resilient muscles was the primordial vigor of life. He was marred and scarred by that mysterious world of rough men and rougher deeds, the outposts of which began beyond her horizon.

To come into the same room with him, or to meet him at the door, was to take heart of life. And when he had gone, she would return to her books with a keener zest and fresh store of energy.

She knew her Browning, but it had never sunk into her that it was an awkward thing to play with souls.

As her interest in Martin increased, the remodelling of his life became a passion with her.

“Do you know,” he added, “I feel sorry for Mr. Butler.

He was too young to know better, but he robbed himself of life for the sake of thirty thousand a year that’s clean wasted upon him.

Why, thirty thousand, lump sum, wouldn’t buy for him right now what ten cents he was layin’ up would have bought him, when he was a kid, in the way of candy an’ peanuts or a seat in nigger heaven.”

She would never have guessed that this man who had come from beyond her horizon, was, in such moments, flashing on beyond her horizon with wider and deeper concepts.

Her own limits were the limits of her horizon; but limited minds can recognize limitations only in others.

And so she felt that her outlook was very wide indeed, and that where his conflicted with hers marked his limitations; and she dreamed of helping him to see as she saw, of widening his horizon until it was identified with hers.

The creative spirit in him flamed up at the thought and urged that he recreate this beauty for a wider audience than Ruth. And then, in splendor and glory, came the great idea. He would write.

He would be one of the eyes through which the world saw, one of the ears through which it heard, one of the hearts through which it felt.

He would write—everything—poetry and prose, fiction and description, and plays like Shakespeare. There was career and the way to win to Ruth. The men of literature were the world’s giants, and he conceived them to be far finer than the Mr.

There was much that was dim and nebulous in that world, but he saw it as a whole and not in detail, and he saw, also, the way to master it.

To write! The thought was fire in him.

He would begin as soon as he got back. The first thing he would do would be to describe the voyage of the treasure-hunters. He would sell it to some San Francisco newspaper.

It was baffling.

He ached with desire to express and could but gibber prosaically as everybody gibbered.

He read his fragments aloud. The metre marched along on perfect feet, and the rhyme pounded a longer and equally faultless rhythm, but the glow and high exaltation that he felt within were lacking.

He was profoundly happy. Life was pitched high. He was in a fever that never broke.

The joy of creation that is supposed to belong to the gods was his.

All the life about him—the odors of stale vegetables and soapsuds, the slatternly form of his sister, and the jeering face of Mr. Higginbotham—was a dream.

The joy of creation that is supposed to belong to the gods was his. All the life about him—the odors of stale vegetables and soapsuds, the slatternly form of his sister, and the jeering face of Mr. Higginbotham—was a dream.

The real world was in his mind, and the stories he wrote were so many pieces of reality out of his mind.

The days were too short. There was so much he wanted to study. He cut his sleep down to five hours and found that he could get along upon it. He tried four hours and a half, and regretfully came back to five.

The toil meant nothing to him. It was not toil.

He was finding speech, and all the beauty and wonder that had been pent for years behind his inarticulate lips was now pouring forth in a wild and virile flood.

He showed the “Sea Lyrics” to no one, not even to the editors. He had become distrustful of editors. But it was not distrust that prevented him from submitting the “Lyrics.”

Greater than his adventure in the world of thought was his love-adventure.

The world itself was not so amazing because of the atoms and molecules that composed it according to the propulsions of irresistible force; what made it amazing was the fact that Ruth lived in it.

She was the most amazing thing he had ever known, or dreamed, or guessed.

but this did not satisfy his lover’s yearning. His lover’s imagination had made her holy, too holy, too spiritualized, to have any kinship with him in the flesh. It was his own love that thrust her from him and made her seem impossible for him.

Love itself denied him the one thing that it desired.

And then, one day, without warning, the gulf between them was bridged for a moment, and thereafter, though the gulf remained, it was ever narrower. They had been eating cherries—great, luscious, black cherries with a juice of the color of dark wine.

And later, as she read aloud to him from “The Princess,” he chanced to notice the stain of the cherries on her lips. For the moment her divinity was shattered.

She was clay, after all, mere clay, subject to the common law of clay as his clay was subject, or anybody’s clay.

Her lips were flesh like his, and cherries dyed them as cherries dyed his. And if so with her lips, then was it so with all of her. She was woman, all woman, just like any woman. It came upon him abruptly.

“She has worked long hours for years at machines.

When one’s body is young, it is very pliable, and hard work will mould it like putty according to the nature of the work.

I can tell at a glance the trades of many workingmen I meet on the street. Look at me. Why am I rolling all about the shop? Because of the years I put in on the sea.

… universe and held it up and looked at it, or wandered through its byways and alleys and jungles, not as a terrified traveller in the thick of mysteries seeking an unknown goal, but observing and charting and becoming familiar with all there was to know.

And the more he knew, the more passionately he admired the universe, and life, and his own life in the midst of it all.

“You fool!” he cried at his image in the looking glass. “You wanted to write, and you tried to write, and you had nothing in you to write about.

But Herbert Spencer had shown him not only that it was not ridiculous, but that it was impossible for there to be no connection.

All things were related to all other things from the farthermost star in the wastes of space to the myriads of atoms in the grain of sand under one’s foot.

This new concept was a perpetual amazement to Martin, and he found himself engaged continually in tracing the relationship between all things under the sun and on the other side of the sun.

Martin followed the discussion closely, and while he was convinced that Olney was right, he resented the rather cavalier treatment he accorded Ruth. A new conception of love formed in his mind as he listened.

Reason had nothing to do with love. It mattered not whether the woman he loved reasoned correctly or incorrectly.

Love was above reason. If it just happened that she did not fully appreciate his necessity for a career, that did not make her a bit less lovable. She was all lovable, and what she thought had nothing to do with her lovableness.

“What in hell has Latin to do with it?” he demanded before his mirror that night. “I wish dead people would stay dead. Why should I and the beauty in me be ruled by the dead?

Beauty is alive and everlasting. Languages come and go.

They are the dust of the dead.”

“What in hell has Latin to do with it?” he demanded before his mirror that night. “I wish dead people would stay dead. Why should I and the beauty in me be ruled by the dead? Beauty is alive and everlasting. Languages come and go.

They are the dust of the dead.

”

But now I know, or, rather, am just beginning to know. This grass is more beautiful to me now that I know why it is grass, and all the hidden chemistry of sun and rain and earth that makes it become grass.

Why, there is romance in the life-history of any grass, yes, and adventure, too.

The very thought of it stirs me. When I think of the play of force and matter, and all the tremendous struggle of it, I feel as if I could write an epic on the grass.

I feel—oh, I can’t describe it—I feel the bigness of it, but when I speak, I babble like a little child.

It is a great task to transmute feeling and sensation into speech, written or spoken, that will, in turn, in him who reads or listens, transmute itself back into the selfsame feeling and sensation.

It is a lordly task. See, I bury my face in the grass, and the breath I draw in through my nostrils sets me quivering with a thousand thoughts and fancies. It is a breath of the universe I have breathed.

It is a lordly task. See, I bury my face in the grass, and the breath I draw in through my nostrils sets me quivering with a thousand thoughts and fancies.

It is a breath of the universe I have breathed.

I know song and laughter, and success and pain, and struggle and death; and I see visions that arise in my brain somehow out of the scent of the grass, and I would like to tell them to you, to the world.

Saints in heaven—how could they be anything but fair and pure? No praise to them.

But saints in slime⁠—ah, that was the everlasting wonder!

That was what made life worth while. To see moral grandeur rising out of cesspools of iniquity; to rise himself and first glimpse beauty, faint and far, through mud-dripping eyes;

“Yes, a little bit,” he confessed. “That is part of the adventure.

It is not the being famous, but the process of becoming so, that counts.

And after all, to be famous would be, for me, only a means to something else. I want to be famous very much, for that matter, and for that reason.”

“I will,” he said passionately. “And I promise you, Miss Morse, that I will make good.

I have come far, I know that; and I have far to go, and I will cover it if I have to do it on my hands and knees.

” He held up a bunch of manuscript. “Here are the ‘Sea Lyrics.’ When you get home, I’ll turn them over to you to read at your leisure. And you must be sure to tell me just what you think of them.

Then they fell upon each other, like young bulls, in all the glory of youth, with naked fists, with hatred, with desire to hurt, to maim, to destroy.

All the painful, thousand years’ gains of man in his upward climb through creation were lost. Only the electric light remained, a milestone on the path of the great human adventure.

Martin and Cheese-Face were two savages, of the stone age, of the squatting place and the tree refuge.

Though he slept soundly, he awoke instantly, like a cat, and he awoke eagerly, glad that the five hours of unconsciousness were gone.

He hated the oblivion of sleep. There was too much to do, too much of life to live.

He grudged every moment of life sleep robbed him of, and before the clock had ceased its clattering he was head and ears in the washbasin and thrilling to the cold bite of the water.

Life was intolerably dull and stupid, and its taste was bad in his mouth.

A black screen was drawn across his mirror of inner vision, and fancy lay in a darkened sickroom where entered no ray of light.

He envied Joe, down in the village, rampant, tearing the slats off the bar, his brain gnawing with maggots, exulting in maudlin ways over maudlin things, fantastically and gloriously drunk and forgetful of Monday morning and the week of deadening toil to come.

But it was only at rare moments that Martin was able to think.

The house of thought was closed, its windows boarded up, and he was its shadowy caretaker.

He was a shadow. Joe was right. They were both shadows, and this was the unending limbo of toil. Or was it a dream?

At the end of three months he went down a third time to the village with Joe. He forgot, and lived again, and, living, he saw, in clear illumination, the beast he was making of himself—not by the drink, but by the work.

The drink was an effect, not a cause. It followed inevitably upon the work, as the night follows upon the day.

Not by becoming a toil-beast could he win to the heights, was the message the whiskey whispered to him, and he nodded approbation. The whiskey was wise. It told secrets on itself.

So he waited with Ruth and watched, desiring to speak his love but not daring. He was afraid of shocking her, and he was not sure of himself. Had he but known it, he was following the right course with her.

Love came into the world before articulate speech, and in its own early youth it had learned ways and means that it had never forgotten.

It was in this old, primitive way that Martin wooed Ruth. He did not know he was doing it at first, though later he divined it.

Whatever his tongue could express would have appealed, in part, to her judgment; but the touch of hand, the fleeting contact, made its way directly to her instinct.

Her judgment was as young as she, but her instincts were as old as the race and older.

They had been young when love was young, and they were wiser than convention and opinion and all the newborn things. So her judgment did not act.

Came a beautiful fall day, warm and languid, palpitant with the hush of the changing season, a California Indian summer day, with hazy sun and wandering wisps of breeze that did not stir the slumber of the air.

Filmy purple mists, that were not vapors but fabrics woven of color, hid in the recesses of the hills.

San Francisco lay like a blur of smoke upon her heights. The intervening bay was a dull sheen of molten metal, whereon sailing craft lay motionless or drifted with the lazy tide.

The erasure of summer was at hand.

Yet summer lingered, fading and fainting among her hills, deepening the purple of her valleys, spinning a shroud of haze from waning powers and sated raptures, dying with the calm content of having lived and lived well.

And among the hills, on their favorite knoll, Martin and Ruth sat side by side, their heads bent over the same pages, he reading aloud from the love-sonnets of the woman who had loved Browning as it is given to few men to be loved.

Ruth glanced sidewise at his neck. She did not lean toward him. She was drawn by some force outside of herself and stronger than gravitation, strong as destiny. It was only an inch to lean, and it was accomplished without volition on her part.

Her shoulder touched his as lightly as a butterfly touches a flower, and just as lightly was the counter-pressure.

She felt his shoulder press hers, and a tremor run through him. Then was the time for her to draw back. But she had become an automaton.

What did love have to do with Ruth’s divergent views on art, right conduct, the French Revolution, or equal suffrage? They were mental processes, but love was beyond reason; it was superrational. He could not belittle love. He worshipped it.

Love lay on the mountaintops beyond the valley-land of reason.

It was a sublimated condition of existence, the topmost peak of living, and it came rarely. Thanks to the school of scientific philosophers he favored, he knew the biological significance of love;

He sought always for the principle that lay behind and beneath.

He wanted to know how the thing was done; after that he could do it for himself.

He was not content with the fair face of beauty. He dissected beauty in his crowded little bedroom laboratory, where cooking smells alternated with the outer bedlam of the Silva tribe;

Nobody else’s brain ever got beyond her. She could always follow her father and mother, her brothers and Olney; wherefore, when she could not follow Martin, she believed the fault lay with him.

It was the old tragedy of insularity trying to serve as mentor to the universal.

“You worship at the shrine of the established,” he told her once, in a discussion they had over Praps and Vanderwater. “I grant that as authorities to quote they are most excellent—the two foremost literary critics in the United States.

I merely maintain my right as an individual. I have just been telling you what I think, in order to explain why the elephantine gambols of Madame Tetralani spoil the orchestra for me. The world’s judges of music may all be right.

But I am I, and I won’t subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind.

If I don’t like a thing, I don’t like it, that’s all; and there is no reason under the sun why I should ape a liking for it just because the majority of my fellow-creatures like it, or make believe they like it.

That was her total knowledge on the subject. She knew Martin was poor, and his condition she associated in her mind with the boyhood of Abraham Lincoln, of Mr. Butler, and of other men who had become successes.

Also, while aware that poverty was anything but delectable, she had a comfortable middle-class feeling that poverty was salutary, that it was a sharp spur that urged on to success all men who were not degraded and hopeless drudges.

So that her knowledge that Martin was so poor that he had pawned his watch and overcoat did not disturb her.

Nor had he departed from his love of reality. His work was realism, though he had endeavored to fuse with it the fancies and beauties of imagination. What he sought was an impassioned realism, shot through with human aspiration and faith.

What he wanted was life as it was, with all its spirit-groping and soul-reaching left in.

He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of fiction. One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin; the other treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heaven-sent dreams and divine possibilities.

but now, with nearly all debts paid, three dollars jingling in his pocket, and in his mind the consciousness of success, the sun shone bright and warm, and even a rain squall that soaked unprepared pedestrians seemed a merry happening to him.

When he starved, his thoughts had dwelt often upon the thousands he knew were starving the world over; but now that he was feasted full, the fact of the thousands starving was no longer pregnant in his brain.

He forgot about them, and, being in love, remembered the countless lovers in the world. Without deliberately thinking about it, motifs for love-lyrics began to agitate his brain.

“It’s absurd and unfair,” he had told Ruth weeks before, “this objection to talking shop.

For what reason under the sun do men and women come together if not for the exchange of the best that is in them?

And the best that is in them is what they are interested in, the thing by which they make their living, the thing they’ve specialized on and sat up days and nights over, and even dreamed about. Imagine Mr.

In all truth, they constitute the shop-talk of the idlers. And the funniest part of it is that many of the clever people, and all the would-be clever people, allow the idlers so to impose upon them.

As for me, I want the best a man’s got in him, call it shop vulgarity or anything you please.

”

He had fitted in wherever he found himself, been a favorite always and everywhere by virtue of holding his own at work and at play and by his willingness and ability to fight for his rights and command respect.

But he had never taken root.

He had fitted in sufficiently to satisfy his fellows but not to satisfy himself.

And he read of salons in great cities, even in the United States, where art and intellect congregated. Foolishly, in the past, he had conceived that all well-groomed persons above the working class were persons with power of intellect and vigor of beauty.

Culture and collars had gone together, to him, and he had been deceived into believing that college educations and mastery were the same things.

Well, he would fight his way on and up higher. And he would take Ruth with him. Her he dearly loved, and he was confident that she would shine anywhere.

“You were like all the rest, young fellow,” Martin sneered. “Your morality and your knowledge were just the same as theirs. You did not think and act for yourself.

Your opinions, like your clothes, were ready made; your acts were shaped by popular approval.

You were cock of your gang because others acclaimed you the real thing. You fought and ruled the gang, not because you liked to—you know you really despised it—but because the other fellows patted you on the shoulder.

It is their ignorance, of course, that makes them believe such rot—their ignorance, which is nothing more nor less than the henidical mental process described by Weininger.

They think they think, and such thinkless creatures are the arbiters of the lives of the few who really think.

”

Don’t think they prefer the drudgery of the desk and the slavery to their circulation and to the business manager to the joy of writing. They have tried to write, and they have failed. And right there is the cursed paradox of it.

Every portal to success in literature is guarded by those watchdogs, the failures in literature.

The editors, subeditors, associate editors, most of them, and the manuscript-readers for the magazines and book-publishers, most of them, nearly all of them, are men who wanted to write and who have failed.

“And I love you, not them, and nothing they do can hurt me.” Triumph sounded in his voice. “For I have faith in your love, not fear of their enmity.

All things may go astray in this world, but not love.

Love cannot go wrong unless it be a weakling that faints and stumbles by the way.”

“That my smattering of knowledge should enable me to shortcut my way to truth is most reassuring. As for myself, I never bother to find out if I am right or not. It is all valueless anyway.

Man can never know the ultimate verities.

”

If you got it, it would be poison to you. You are too simple, too elemental, and too rational, by my faith, to prosper on such pap. I hope you never do sell a line to the magazines.

Beauty is the only master to serve.

Serve her and damn the multitude! Success! What in hell’s success if it isn’t right there in your Stevenson sonnet, which outranks Henley’s ‘Apparition,’ in that ‘Love-cycle,’ in those sea-poems?

“

It is not in what you succeed in doing that you get your joy, but in the doing of it.

You can’t tell me. I know it. You know it. Beauty hurts you. It is an everlasting pain in you, a wound that does not heal, a knife of flame. Why should you palter with magazines? Let beauty be your end.

“It is not in what you succeed in doing that you get your joy, but in the doing of it. You can’t tell me. I know it. You know it.

Beauty hurts you. It is an everlasting pain in you, a wound that does not heal, a knife of flame.

Why should you palter with magazines? Let beauty be your end. Why should you mint beauty into gold? Anyway, you can’t; so there’s no use in my getting excited over it.

You can’t tell me. I know it. You know it. Beauty hurts you. It is an everlasting pain in you, a wound that does not heal, a knife of flame. Why should you palter with magazines? Let beauty be your end.

Why should you mint beauty into gold?

Anyway, you can’t; so there’s no use in my getting excited over it. You can read the magazines for a thousand years and you won’t find the value of one line of Keats.

“Not for fame, but for love,” Martin laughed. “

Love seems to have no place in your Cosmos; in mine, Beauty is the handmaiden of Love.

”

“But think of the rest of the world,” Martin protested. “

The function of beauty is joy-making.

”

He swiftly saw, no matter upon what they talked, that each man applied the correlation of knowledge and had also a deep-seated and unified conception of society and the Cosmos.

Nobody manufactured their opinions for them; they were all rebels of one variety or another, and their lips were strangers to platitudes.

Never had Martin, at the Morses’, heard so amazing a range of topics discussed. There seemed no limit save time to the things they were alive to. The talk wandered from Mrs.

Martin listened and fain would have rubbed his eyes. It was impossible that this should be, much less in the labor ghetto south of Market.

The books were alive in these men.

They talked with fire and enthusiasm, the intellectual stimulant stirring them as he had seen drink and anger stir other men. What he heard was no longer the philosophy of the dry, printed word, written by half-mythical demigods like Kant and Spencer.

Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack.

It was a wild night⁠—but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas.

Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws.

But he could see now no reason why he should not, and besides, he wanted to smoke. And what did the money matter? For five cents he could have bought a package of Durham and brown papers and rolled forty cigarettes—but what of it?

Money had no meaning to him now except what it would immediately buy.

He was chartless and rudderless, and he had no port to make, while drifting involved the least living, and it was living that hurt.

And what did the money matter? For five cents he could have bought a package of Durham and brown papers and rolled forty cigarettes—but what of it? Money had no meaning to him now except what it would immediately buy.

He was chartless and rudderless, and he had no port to make, while drifting involved the least living, and it was living that hurt.

The days slipped along, and he slept eight hours regularly every night. Though now, while waiting for more checks, he ate in the Japanese restaurants where meals were served for ten cents, his wasted body filled out, as did the hollows in his cheeks.

Martin had many times to be glad that Brissenden was dead. He had hated the crowd so, and here all that was finest and most sacred of him had been thrown to the crowd.

Daily the vivisection of Beauty went on.

Every nincompoop in the land rushed into free print, floating their wizened little egos into the public eye on the surge of Brissenden’s greatness. Quoth one paper:

The magazines were all Brissenden had said they were and more. Well, he was done, he solaced himself.

He had hitched his wagon to a star and been landed in a pestiferous marsh.

The visions of Tahiti—clean, sweet Tahiti—were coming to him more frequently. And there were the low Paumotus, and the high Marquesas;

He would entertain there the factor of Taiohae, captains of wandering traders, and all the best of the South Pacific riffraff. He would keep open house and entertain like a prince.

And he would forget the books he had opened and the world that had proved an illusion.

To do all this he must wait in California to fill the sack with money. Already it was beginning to flow in. If one of the books made a strike, it might enable him to sell the whole heap of manuscripts.

“You are a great and noble woman,” he said. “And it is I who should be proud to know you. And I am, I am.

You are a ray of light to me in a very dark world, and I’ve got to be straight with you, just as straight as you have been.

”

He was disappointed in it all. He had developed into an alien. As the steam beer had tasted raw, so their companionship seemed raw to him. He was too far removed. Too many thousands of opened books yawned between them and him.

He had exiled himself. He had travelled in the vast realm of intellect until he could no longer return home.

On the other hand, he was human, and his gregarious need for companionship remained unsatisfied. He had found no new home.

… so it was that Maria became a landlord and the sole owner of a dairy, with two hired men to do the work for her and a bank account that steadily increased despite the fact that her whole brood wore shoes and went to school.

Few persons ever meet the fairy princes they dream about; but Maria, who worked hard and whose head was hard, never dreaming about fairy princes, entertained hers in the guise of an ex-laundryman.

In the meantime the world had begun to ask: “Who is this Martin Eden?” He had declined to give any biographical data to his publishers, but the newspapers were not to be denied.

His intrinsic beauty and power meant nothing to the hundreds of thousands who were acclaiming him and buying his books.

He was the fad of the hour, the adventurer who had stormed Parnassus while the gods nodded.

The hundreds of thousands read him and acclaimed him with the same brute non-understanding with which they had flung themselves on Brissenden’s “Ephemera” and torn it to pieces—a wolf-rabble that fawned on him instead of fanging him.

The hundreds of thousands read him and acclaimed him with the same brute non-understanding with which they had flung themselves on Brissenden’s “Ephemera” and torn it to pieces—a wolf-rabble that fawned on him instead of fanging him.

Fawn or fang, it was all a matter of chance.

One thing he knew with absolute certitude: “Ephemera” was infinitely greater than anything he had done. It was infinitely greater than anything he had in him. It was a poem of centuries.

He remembered the days of his desperate starvation when no one invited him to dinner. That was the time he needed dinners, and went weak and faint for lack of them and lost weight from sheer famine. That was the paradox of it.

When he wanted dinners, no one gave them to him, and now that he could buy a hundred thousand dinners and was losing his appetite, dinners were thrust upon him right and left.

But why? There was no justice in it, no merit on his part. He was no different. All the work he had done was even at that time work performed. Mr. and Mrs.

That was the way bourgeois society valued a man, and who was he to expect it otherwise? But he was proud. He disdained such valuation.

He desired to be valued for himself, or for his work, which, after all, was an expression of himself.

That was the way Lizzie valued him. The work, with her, did not even count. She valued him, himself. That was the way Jimmy, the plumber, and all the old gang valued him.

It was true, she refined it to “position,” but it meant the same thing, and in his own mind the old nomenclature stuck. He had read her all that he wrote—poems, stories, essays—“Wiki-Wiki,” The Shame of the Sun, everything.

And she had always and consistently urged him to get a job, to go to work⁠—good God!⁠—as if he hadn’t been working, robbing sleep, exhausting life, in order to be worthy of her.

So the little thing grew bigger. He was healthy and normal, ate regularly, slept long hours, and yet the growing little thing was becoming an obsession. Work performed. The phrase haunted his brain.

Not one word in “The Ring of Bells,” nor in “The Peri and the Pearl” has been changed. No; you’re not feeding me now for work performed.

You are feeding me because everybody else is feeding me and because it is an honor to feed me.

You are feeding me now because you are herd animals; because you are part of the mob; because the one blind, automatic thought in the mob-mind just now is to feed me.

But they saw only the empty centre aisle. He saw the young tough lurching down that aisle and wondered if he would remove the stiff-rim which never yet had he seen him without. Straight down the aisle he came, and up the platform.

Martin could have wept over that youthful shade of himself, when he thought of all that lay before him.

Across the platform he swaggered, right up to Martin, and into the foreground of Martin’s consciousness disappeared. The five hundred women applauded softly with gloved hands, seeking to encourage the bashful great man who was their guest.

“Too late.” Martin shook his head. “That night was the one night for me. I was in paradise. It’s commonplace with you, I know. But it wasn’t to me.

I shall never live at such a pitch again.

I’m done with philosophy. I want never to hear another word of it.”

“It ain’t your body. It’s your head.

Something’s wrong with your think-machine.

Even I can see that, an’ I ain’t nobody.”

Once in his rooms, he dropped into a Morris chair and sat staring straight before him. He did not doze. Nor did he think.

His mind was a blank, save for the intervals when unsummoned memory pictures took form and color and radiance just under his eyelids.

He saw these pictures, but he was scarcely conscious of them—no more so than if they had been dreams. Yet he was not asleep. Once, he roused himself and glanced at his watch. It was just eight o’clock.

Then they must want me for something else, for something that is outside of me, for something that is not I! Shall I tell you what that something is? It is for the recognition I have received.

That recognition is not I. It resides in the minds of others.

Then again for the money I have earned and am earning. But that money is not I. It resides in banks and in the pockets of Tom, Dick, and Harry.

I’ve got the same flesh on my bones, the same ten fingers and toes. I am the same. I have not developed any new strength nor virtue. My brain is the same old brain. I haven’t made even one new generalization on literature or philosophy.

I am personally of the same value that I was when nobody wanted me.

And what is puzzling me is why they want me now. Surely they don’t want me for myself, for myself is the same old self they did not want.

“

I’m afraid I am a shrewd merchant, peering into the scales, trying to weigh your love and find out what manner of thing it is.

”

In your case I do not mention royalties, though I am certain that they apply to the change wrought in your mother and father. Of course, all this is not flattering to me. But worst of all, it makes me question love, sacred love.

Is love so gross a thing that it must feed upon publication and public notice?

It would seem so. I have sat and thought upon it till my head went around.”