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Martin that he declined to be held responsible for the old editor's
mistakes, and that he did not think much of "The Peri and the
Pearl" anyway.
But THE GLOBE, a Chicago magazine, gave Martin the most cruel
treatment of all. He had refrained from offering his "Sea Lyrics"
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Martin Eden
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166
for publication, until driven to it by starvation. After having
been rejected by a dozen magazines, they had come to rest in THE
GLOBE office. There were thirty poems in the collection, and he
was to receive a dollar apiece for them. The first month four were
published, and he promptly received a cheek for four dollars; but
when he looked over the magazine, he was appalled at the slaughter.
In some cases the titles had been altered: "Finis," for instance,
being changed to "The Finish," and "The Song of the Outer Reef" to
"The Song of the Coral Reef." In one case, an absolutely different
title, a misappropriate title, was substituted. In place of his
own, "Medusa Lights," the editor had printed, "The Backward Track."
But the slaughter in the body of the poems was terrifying. Martin
groaned and sweated and thrust his hands through his hair.
Phrases, lines, and stanzas were cut out, interchanged, or juggled
about in the most incomprehensible manner. Sometimes lines and
stanzas not his own were substituted for his. He could not believe
that a sane editor could be guilty of such maltreatment, and his
favorite hypothesis was that his poems must have been doctored by
the office boy or the stenographer. Martin wrote immediately,
begging the editor to cease publishing the lyrics and to return
them to him.
He wrote again and again, begging, entreating, threatening, but his
letters were ignored. Month by month the slaughter went on till
the thirty poems were published, and month by month he received a
check for those which had appeared in the current number.
Despite these various misadventures, the memory of the WHITE MOUSE
forty-dollar check sustained him, though he was driven more and
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more to hack-work. He discovered a bread-and-butter field in the
agricultural weeklies and trade journals, though among the
religious weeklies he found he could easily starve. At his lowest
ebb, when his black suit was in pawn, he made a ten-strike - or so
it seemed to him - in a prize contest arranged by the County
Committee of the Republican Party. There were three branches of
the contest, and he entered them all, laughing at himself bitterly
the while in that he was driven to such straits to live. His poem
won the first prize of ten dollars, his campaign song the second
prize of five dollars, his essay on the principles of the
Republican Party the first prize of twenty-five dollars. Which was
very gratifying to him until he tried to collect. Something had
gone wrong in the County Committee, and, though a rich banker and a
state senator were members of it, the money was not forthcoming.
While this affair was hanging fire, he proved that he understood
the principles of the Democratic Party by winning the first prize
for his essay in a similar contest. And, moreover, he received the
money, twenty-five dollars. But the forty dollars won in the first
contest he never received.
Driven to shifts in order to see Ruth, and deciding that the long
walk from north Oakland to her house and back again consumed too
much time, he kept his black suit in pawn in place of his bicycle.
The latter gave him exercise, saved him hours of time for work, and
enabled him to see Ruth just the same. A pair of knee duck
trousers and an old sweater made him a presentable wheel costume,
so that he could go with Ruth on afternoon rides. Besides, he no
longer had opportunity to see much of her in her own home, where
Martin Eden
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167
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Mrs. Morse was thoroughly prosecuting her campaign of
entertainment. The exalted beings he met there, and to whom he had
looked up but a short time before, now bored him. They were no
longer exalted. He was nervous and irritable, what of his hard
times, disappointments, and close application to work, and the
conversation of such people was maddening. He was not unduly
egotistic. He measured the narrowness of their minds by the minds
of the thinkers in the books he read. At Ruth's home he never met
a large mind, with the exception of Professor Caldwell, and
Caldwell he had met there only once. As for the rest, they were
numskulls, ninnies, superficial, dogmatic, and ignorant. It was
their ignorance that astounded him. What was the matter with them?
What had they done with their educations? They had had access to
the same books he had. How did it happen that they had drawn
nothing from them?
He knew that the great minds, the deep and rational thinkers,
existed. He had his proofs from the books, the books that had
educated him beyond the Morse standard. And he knew that higher
intellects than those of the Morse circle were to be found in the
world. He read English society novels, wherein he caught glimpses
of men and women talking politics and philosophy. 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. As it was clear to him that he had been
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handicapped by his early environment, so now he perceived that she
was similarly handicapped. She had not had a chance to expand.
The books on her father's shelves, the paintings on the walls, the
music on the piano - all was just so much meretricious display. To
real literature, real painting, real music, the Morses and their
kind, were dead. And bigger than such things was life, of which
they were densely, hopelessly ignorant. In spite of their
Unitarian proclivities and their masks of conservative
broadmindedness, they were two generations behind interpretative
science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while their
thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe
struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the
youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older - the same that
moved the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved
the first hasty Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from Adam's rib;
that moved Descartes to build an idealistic system of the universe
out of the projections of his own puny ego; and that moved the
famous British ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so
scathing as to win immediate applause and leave his name a
notorious scrawl on the page of history.
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