Chapter XXIII

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

　　That Ruth had little faith in his power as a writer, did not alterher nor diminish her in Martin's eyes. In the breathing spell ofthe vacation he had taken, he had spent many hours in self-analysis, and thereby learned much of himself. He had discoveredthat he loved beauty more than fame, and that what desire he hadfor fame was largely for Ruth's sake. It was for this reason thathis desire for fame was strong. He wanted to be great in theworld's eyes; "to make good," as he expressed it, in order that thewoman he loved should be proud of him and deem him worthy.As for himself, he loved beauty passionately, and the joy ofserving her was to him sufficient wage. And more than beauty heloved Ruth. He considered love the finest thing in the world. Itwas love that had worked the revolution in him, changing him froman uncouth sailor to a student and an artist; therefore, to him,the finest and greatest of the three, greater than learning andartistry, was love. Already he had discovered that his brain wentbeyond Ruth's, just as it went beyond the brains of her brothers,or the brain of her father. In spite of every advantage ofuniversity training, and in the face of her bachelorship of arts,his power of intellect overshadowed hers, and his year or so ofself-study and equipment gave him a mastery of the affairs of theworld and art and life that she could never hope to possess.All this he realized, but it did not affect his love for her, norher love for him. Love was too fine and noble, and he was tooloyal a lover for him to besmirch love with criticism. What didlove have to do with Ruth's divergent views on art, right conduct,the French Revolution, or equal suffrage? They were mentalprocesses, but love was beyond reason; it was superrational. Hecould not belittle love. He worshipped it. Love lay on themountain-tops beyond the valley-land of reason. It was asublimates condition of existence, the topmost peak of living, andit came rarely. Thanks to the school of scientific philosophers hefavored, he knew the biological significance of love; but by arefined process of the same scientific reasoning he reached theconclusion that the human organism achieved its highest purpose inlove, that love must not be questioned, but must be accepted as thehighest guerdon of life. Thus, he considered the lover blessedover all creatures, and it was a delight to him to think of "God'sown mad lover," rising above the things of earth, above wealth andjudgment, public opinion and applause, rising above life itself and"dying on a kiss."Much of this Martin had already reasoned out, and some of it hereasoned out later. In the meantime he worked, taking norecreation except when he went to see Ruth, and living like aSpartan. He paid two dollars and a half a month rent for the smallroom he got from his Portuguese landlady, Maria Silva, a virago anda widow, hard working and harsher tempered, rearing her large broodof children somehow, and drowning her sorrow and fatigue atirregular intervals in a gallon of the thin, sour wine that shebought from the corner grocery and saloon for fifteen cents. Fromdetesting her and her foul tongue at first, Martin grew to admireher as he observed the brave fight she made. There were but fourrooms in the little house - three, when Martin's was subtracted.One of these, the parlor, gay with an ingrain carpet and dolorouswith a funeral card and a death-picture of one of her numerousdeparted babes, was kept strictly for company. The blinds werealways down, and her barefooted tribe was never permitted to enterthe sacred precinct save on state occasions. She cooked, and allate, in the kitchen, where she likewise washed, starched, andironed clothes on all days of the week except Sunday; for herincome came largely from taking in washing from her more prosperousneighbors. Remained the bedroom, small as the one occupied byMartin, into which she and her seven little ones crowded and slept.It was an everlasting miracle to Martin how it was accomplished,and from her side of the thin partition he heard nightly everydetail of the going to bed, the squalls and squabbles, the softchattering, and the sleepy, twittering noises as of birds. Anothersource of income to Maria were her cows, two of them, which shemilked night and morning and which gained a surreptitiouslivelihood from vacant lots and the grass that grew on either sidethe public side walks, attended always by one or more of her raggedboys, whose watchful guardianship consisted chiefly in keepingtheir eyes out for the poundmen.In his own small room Martin lived, slept, studied, wrote, and kepthouse. Before the one window, looking out on the tiny front porch,was the kitchen table that served as desk, library, and type-writing stand. The bed, against the rear wall, occupied two-thirdsof the total space of the room. The table was flanked on one sideby a gaudy bureau, manufactured for profit and not for service, thethin veneer of which was shed day by day. This bureau stood in thecorner, and in the opposite corner, on the table's other flank, wasthe kitchen - the oil-stove on a dry-goods box, inside of whichwere dishes and cooking utensils, a shelf on the wall forprovisions, and a bucket of water on the floor. Martin had tocarry his water from the kitchen sink, there being no tap in hisroom. On days when there was much steam to his cooking, theharvest of veneer from the bureau was unusually generous. Over thebed, hoisted by a tackle to the ceiling, was his bicycle. At firsthe had tried to keep it in the basement; but the tribe of Silva,loosening the bearings and puncturing the tires, had driven himout. Next he attempted the tiny front porch, until a howlingsoutheaster drenched the wheel a night-long. Then he had retreatedwith it to his room and slung it aloft.A small closet contained his clothes and the books he hadaccumulated and for which there was no room on the table or underthe table. Hand in hand with reading, he had developed the habitof making notes, and so copiously did he make them that there wouldhave been no existence for him in the confined quarters had he notrigged several clothes-lines across the room on which the noteswere hung. Even so, he was crowded until navigating the room was adifficult task. He could not open the door without first closingthe closet door, and vice versa. It was impossible for himanywhere to traverse the room in a straight line. To go from thedoor to the head of the bed was a zigzag course that he was neverquite able to accomplish in the dark without collisions. Havingsettled the difficulty of the conflicting doors, he had to steersharply to the right to avoid the kitchen. Next, he sheered to theleft, to escape the foot of the bed; but this sheer, if toogenerous, brought him against the corner of the table. With asudden twitch and lurch, he terminated the sheer and bore off tothe right along a sort of canal, one bank of which was the bed, theother the table. When the one chair in the room was at its usualplace before the table, the canal was unnavigable. When the chairwas not in use, it reposed on top of the bed, though sometimes hesat on the chair when cooking, reading a book while the waterboiled, and even becoming skilful enough to manage a paragraph ortwo while steak was frying. Also, so small was the little cornerthat constituted the kitchen, he was able, sitting down, to reachanything he needed. In fact, it was expedient to cook sittingdown; standing up, he was too often in his own way.In conjunction with a perfect stomach that could digest anything,he possessed knowledge of the various foods that were at the sametime nutritious and cheap. Pea-soup was a common article in hisdiet, as well as potatoes and beans, the latter large and brown andcooked in Mexican style. Rice, cooked as American housewives nevercook it and can never learn to cook it, appeared on Martin's tableat least once a day. Dried fruits were less expensive than fresh,and he had usually a pot of them, cooked and ready at hand, forthey took the place of butter on his bread. Occasionally he gracedhis table with a piece of round-steak, or with a soup-bone.Coffee, without cream or milk, he had twice a day, in the eveningsubstituting tea; but both coffee and tea were excellently cooked.There was need for him to be economical. His vacation had consumednearly all he had earned in the laundry, and he was so far from hismarket that weeks must elapse before he could hope for the firstreturns from his hack-work. Except at such times as he saw Ruth,or dropped in to see his sister Gertude, he lived a recluse, ineach day accomplishing at least three days' labor of ordinary men.He slept a scant five hours, and only one with a constitution ofiron could have held himself down, as Martin did, day after day, tonineteen consecutive hours of toil. He never lost a moment. Onthe looking-glass were lists of definitions and pronunciations;when shaving, or dressing, or combing his hair, he conned theselists over. Similar lists were on the wall over the oil-stove, andthey were similarly conned while he was engaged in cooking or inwashing the dishes. New lists continually displaced the old ones.Every strange or partly familiar word encountered in his readingwas immediately jotted down, and later, when a sufficient numberhad been accumulated, were typed and pinned to the wall or looking-glass. He even carried them in his pockets, and reviewed them atodd moments on the street, or while waiting in butcher shop orgrocery to be served.He went farther in the matter. Reading the works of men who hadarrived, he noted every result achieved by them, and worked out thetricks by which they had been achieved - the tricks of narrative,of exposition, of style, the points of view, the contrasts, theepigrams; and of all these he made lists for study. He did notape. He sought principles. He drew up lists of effective andfetching mannerisms, till out of many such, culled from manywriters, he was able to induce the general principle of mannerism,and, thus equipped, to cast about for new and original ones of hisown, and to weigh and measure and appraise them properly. Insimilar manner he collected lists of strong phrases, the phrases ofliving language, phrases that bit like acid and scorched likeflame, or that glowed and were mellow and luscious in the midst ofthe arid desert of common speech. He sought always for theprinciple that lay behind and beneath. He wanted to know how thething was done; after that he could do it for himself. He was notcontent with the fair face of beauty. He dissected beauty in hiscrowded little bedroom laboratory, where cooking smells alternatedwith the outer bedlam of the Silva tribe; and, having dissected andlearned the anatomy of beauty, he was nearer being able to createbeauty itself.He was so made that he could work only with understanding. Hecould not work blindly, in the dark, ignorant of what he wasproducing and trusting to chance and the star of his genius thatthe effect produced should be right and fine. He had no patiencewith chance effects. He wanted to know why and how. His wasdeliberate creative genius, and, before he began a story or poem,the thing itself was already alive in his brain, with the end insight and the means of realizing that end in his consciouspossession. Otherwise the effort was doomed to failure. On theother hand, he appreciated the chance effects in words and phrasesthat came lightly and easily into his brain, and that later stoodall tests of beauty and power and developed tremendous andincommunicable connotations. Before such he bowed down andmarvelled, knowing that they were beyond the deliberate creation ofany man. And no matter how much he dissected beauty in search ofthe principles that underlie beauty and make beauty possible, hewas aware, always, of the innermost mystery of beauty to which hedid not penetrate and to which no man had ever penetrated. He knewfull well, from his Spencer, that man can never attain ultimateknowledge of anything, and that the mystery of beauty was no lessthan that of life - nay, more that the fibres of beauty and lifewere intertwisted, and that he himself was but a bit of the samenonunderstandable fabric, twisted of sunshine and star-dust andwonder.In fact, it was when filled with these thoughts that he wrote hisessay entitled "Star-dust," in which he had his fling, not at theprinciples of criticism, but at the principal critics. It wasbrilliant, deep, philosophical, and deliciously touched withlaughter. Also it was promptly rejected by the magazines as oftenas it was submitted. But having cleared his mind of it, he wentserenely on his way. It was a habit he developed, of incubatingand maturing his thought upon a subject, and of then rushing intothe type-writer with it. That it did not see print was a matter asmall moment with him. The writing of it was the culminating actof a long mental process, the drawing together of scattered threadsof thought and the final generalizing upon all the data with whichhis mind was burdened. To write such an article was the consciouseffort by which he freed his mind and made it ready for freshmaterial and problems. It was in a way akin to that common habitof men and women troubled by real or fancied grievances, whoperiodically and volubly break their long-suffering silence and"have their say" till the last word is said.