ISN’T LIFE EXCITING ENOUGH?

Why should one take to strong drink because this is now a fashionable perversity practiced against the prohibition amendment, as ill-bred people disregard other people’s respect for law and decency? We depend too much upon artificial stimulation. There used to be a home-brew known as fine conversation which was much more delightfully intoxicating than any brand of bootleg liquor now known to polite society. Lacking conversation here, I have frequently risen to a state of happy inebriation by following a particularly entrancing train of thought.

This is one thing I have observed about gambling--it renders a man or a woman sinister and silent when other people present are obvious and vocative. They are mortgaged mentally by a fixed idea. In this connection I recall a visit made years ago to Monte Carlo. I missed the thrill. All my life I have been such a desperate gambler against fate, adversity, and the weather that the games I saw played there seemed childishly inadequate so far as gratifying an adventurous spirit is concerned. Men and women simply pawned themselves for a little gold, lost it or doubled it in a moment, and then repeated the experiment indefinitely. My notion about such people is that they lack the courage to sit in the long game of life and play it according to the rules.

I am something of a piker, financially speaking; but I have always entertained the conceit that I might have done very well in Wall Street if I had not been more profitably engaged. My dealings have been chiefly with the earth and editors. Both are frightful risks. A flood or a drought may destroy your harvest. The forensic mind of the editor may have changed while you are writing the thing he thought he wanted, or you may have missed your cue and produced something he never dreamed of. My rule is never to kick against the pricks. What is the use of adding wounds to your misfortune, because if you push one of them he can give you reasons frightfully diminishing to your vanity for turning down your copy. They are the most convincing men on earth at that business.

I recall only one triumphant exception in my twenty-five years’ experience with them. In 1915 I had a contract to deliver three short stories to be published in a New York magazine. When they were delivered, the editor wired me that he would take them, since he was obliged to do so under the terms of the contract, but that he did not want them. The implication was not complimentary. Two days later I arrived in New York, called the editor of another magazine and offered him the same stories at an advance of two hundred dollars each on the original price. He agreed to take them sight unseen. I hurried off to call on the other editor who held the manuscripts.

He was astonished, and obviously not glad to see me. But my manner was so regretful and apologetic that he recovered his more vehement faculties at once. Never have I heard such a scathing criticism of literary composition. But I let him do his worst; I urged him on to speak yet more contemptuously of the things until words failed him.

I do not remember ever feeling meek in the presence of mere man, but any woman can look meek. I folded my hands and regarded him like a shorn lamb in a cold wind.

He accepted the compliment and relaxed. He said he regretted the necessity of being perfectly frank, but he thought under the circumstances it was his privilege to tell the truth about those stories. He was willing to keep the things, but they were not worth the price he had promised to pay for them, and so on and so forth. Oh, certainly not, I agreed; they were not worth anything to him, but to me, everything. My honor was involved; I could not think of allowing him to keep them, and so on and so forth, in a sad, low tone.

This contest lasted an hour before I was at last obliged to fling off my sheep’s clothing, give him a glint of my real mind and demand them. He yielded then only on condition that I send him another story within the year. I agreed on condition that he should pay for it at once in advance, for no other reason that I can think of than to see how far I could go, seeing that I had started so glibly on this adventure.

I delivered the three condemned stories to the other editor, having told him the scandal connected with them, and returned to my hotel with checks amounting to nearly four thousand dollars.

This indicates that I have some natural talent for speculating, but I am thinking my career as a writer has lasted longer because I have had the shrewdness not to develop the gift.

There is a wideness of the mind not dependent upon the experience of a broad manner of living, if you know what I mean. But let that go; I suppose after all is said that can be said one way or the other, a man’s point of view about such matters depends upon his quality and his taste. Many people mistake jazz for joy, a loose life for a full life, successful selfishness for the survival of the fittest and the rationalism of a dirt dauber’s intellect for wisdom. Mine tend toward the great simplicities, whether they are actually to be attained or not. I prefer to clothe my egotism according to the nobler scriptures defining immortality rather than in the less expensive worldly vanities.

This is a mean advantage to take of those critics who lack the spunk of such divine egotism without ever being able to prove immortality is an illusion of the mortal mind inspired by the fear of death. I have my anxieties about the traveling passports of saints in the next world; but if it is possible to obtain a furlough from paradise, I shall apply for one as soon as I am incorruptible and spirit-proved, return to this world and pinch a few friends and critics who now look askance upon my professions of faith. If I shall have developed no more than one wing, I mean to spread it in a smile, rustle it triumphantly in their ears by way of whispering, ‘Thou fool!’ But I do not suppose this will make any difference. It has already been written and proved that ‘even if one rose from the dead’ they will not believe.

So my years have gone by. If you have read this record so far you will have perceived that these last ones lack the glory and loveliness of those earlier years. I am better known in the world and not so dependent in spirit as I used to be upon the angels in Heaven. I have not outgrown their ministrations; I seem to have lost them. Sometimes at night in this lonely house, lying awake, I remember the child I used to be in the little room at home, when I literally believed in my own guardian angels, one at the head and one at the foot of my bed.

What sublime experiences children have, and how serenely they accept them! I used to fall asleep nonchalantly conscious of these angels and their protection. Now if for one fleeting moment I could be aware of such hallowed companionship, I am certain my corruption would put on incorruption and I should rise from that bed a spiritual body. I should be young and lovely; and the next morning, though I might look the same, I should be changed. I should have the heart of a child, know no evil, believe everything and draw all men to me.

Very few people enjoy the privilege of laying the scenes of their own minds. They are controlled by circumstances, conventions, and that windy weather of other people’s minds known as the spirit of the times. If a man conceives the ambition to do such a thing, the easiest way is to climb into an attic, close the door and write out the scenes of his mind on paper. And this is pure fiction so far as he is concerned, even if he produces a volume of the profoundest philosophy. He has not lived it; he has merely thought it.

This is the reason why I have never bowed my dizzy old head to the greatest thinker of them all. I have done too much active living between the devil and the deep blue sea to be petrified into a state of admiration by a mere system of thought. Let him try out his theories on the land, in the street, in the commercial or industrial world, in society, even in the Church, and find out how long they will last.

But watch the philosopher! He keeps out of the ructions of real life, which is the only personal evidence he shows of being one. All that stuff he has written is for you to practice. I never heard of an up-and-doing ubiquitous philosopher. He may lecture, but he does not live; he only exists. His books are popular or unpopular, but the man as a man would prove ineffective if he should be put to the tests the simplest of us must pass in order to matriculate as serviceable scholars in the real arts of living. I should be willing to match one of my narrow circuit rider’s days in living, or a half of one of my own days spent in this green attic of the hills, with one of Herbert Spencer’s days anytime; not that I know his private life, but I have my suspicions that there was not much of it. He was too entirely absorbed in recording his ideas to have had the energy and initiative to dramatize his thinking into deeds.

The more one reflects upon the business rather than the theories of living, the more do creeds and philosophies shrink in importance. It is like starting on a long and arduous journey burdened with luggage. You are handicapped by too many doctrines and complicated systems of thinking, which interferes with that moral elasticity so essential to courage and a good conscience. You may become famous for your piety or your wisdom, but you do not arrive. Respect for a doctrine or for logic trips you at the very moment when you might have made the grade. You may found a transient school of thought, obtain the flighty tail of a following; but there is no profit beyond that of gratified vanity in such an adventure. The world will presently swing through the lightening dust of your great mind and go on its way as if you had never happened--as this earth would scarcely be spattered by radiance if it passed through the flame tail of the brightest comet.