Journal of Arthur Stirling | Page 3

he owes me in
putting a notice in one of the papers. I suppose I owe that to the people
out West.
I can't write you to-night--before God I can't; my head is going like a
steel-mill, and I'm so sick. You will get over this somehow, and go on
and do your task and win. And if the memory of my prayer can help
you, that will be something. Do the work of both of us if you can. Only,
if you do pull through, remember my last cry--remember the young
artist! There is no other fight so worth fighting--take it upon you--shout
it day and night at them--what things they do with their young artists!
God bless you, dear friend. Yours, ARTHUR.
The above is the only tidings of him, excepting the extended accounts
of his death which appeared in the New York Times and the New York
World for June 10 and 11, 1902, and several letters which he wrote to
other people. There remains only to say a few words as to the journal.
It is scrawled upon old note-books and loose sheets of paper. The
matter, although a diary, contains odd bits of his writings--one of two
letters to me which he had me send back, and some extracts from an
essay which a friend of mine was offering at that time to magazines in
the hope of placing it for him. There is a problem about the work which
I leave to others to solve--how much of it was written as dated, and
how much afterward, as a piece of art, as a testament of his sorrow.
Parts of it have struck me as having been composed in the latter way,
and the last pages, of course, imply as much.
Extraordinary pages they are to me. That a man who was about to take
his life should have written them is one of the strangest cases of artistic

absorption I know of in literature. But Arthur Stirling was a man lost in
his art just so--so full of it, so drunk with it, that nothing in life had
other meaning to him. To quote the words he loved, from the last of his
heroes, he longed for excellence "as the lion longs for his food."
So he lived and so he worked; the world had no use for his work, and
so he died.
S.
NEW YORK, _November 15, 1902_.

READER:
I do not know if "The Valley of the Shadow" means to you what it
means to me; I do not know if it means anything at all to you. But I
have sought long and far for these words, to utter an all but unutterable
thought.
When you walk in the forest you do not count the lives that you tread
into nothingness. When you rejoice with the springtime you do not hear
the cries of the young things that are choked and beaten down and
dying. When you watch the wild thing in your snare you do not know
the meaning of the torn limbs, and the throbbing heart, and the awful
silence of the creature trapped. When you go where the poor live, and
see thin faces and hungry eyes and crouching limbs, you do not think of
these things either.
But I, reader--I dwell in the Valley of the Shadow.
Sometimes it is silent in my Valley, and the creatures sit in terror of
their own voices; sometimes there are screams that pierce the sky; but
there is never any answer in my Valley. There are quivering hands
there, and racked limbs, and aching hearts, and panting souls. There is
gasping struggle, glaring failure--maniac despair. For over my Valley
rolls _The Shadow_, a giant thing, moving with the weight of
mountains. And you stare at it, you feel it; you scream, you pray, you
weep; you hold up your hands to your God, you grow mad; but the
Shadow moves like Time, like the sun, and the planets in the sky. It
rolls over you, and it rolls on; and then you cry out no more.
It is that way in my Valley. The Shadow is the Shadow of Death.

CONTENTS

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
THE AUTHOR TO THE READER
PART I. WRITING A POEM
II. SEEKING A PUBLISHER
III. THE END

PART I
WRITING A POEM
The book! The book! This day, Saturday, the sixth day of April, 1901, I
begin the book!
I have never kept a journal--I have been too busy living; but to-day I
begin a journal. I am so built that I can do but one thing at a time. Now
that I have begun The Captive, I must be haunted with it all day; when I
am not writing it I must be dreaming