Journal of Arthur Stirling | Page 6

like elephants, no matter how happy they are. I wish I could take out Beethoven's scherzos!
My heart leaps when I think of my one big step. I have put those pages away--I shall not look at them again for a month. Then I can judge them.
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April 13th.
A cable-car conductor and a poet! I think that will be a story worth telling.
I have tried many and various occupations, but I have not found one so favorable to the study of poetry as my last. I should have made out very well--if I had not been haunted by The Captive.
With everything else you do you are more or less hampered by having to sell your brain; and also by having to obey some one. But a cable-car is an unlimited monarchy; and all you have to do is to collect fares and pull the bell, both of which duties are quite mechanical. And besides that you receive princely wages--and can live off one-third of them, if you know how; and that means that you need only work one-third of the time, and can write your poetry the rest of it!
This sounds like jesting, but it is not. I have only been a cable-car conductor six months, but in that time I have taught myself to read Greek with more than fluency. All you need is good health and spirits, a will of iron, and a very tiny note-book in the palm of your hand, full of the words you wish to learn. And then for ten or twelve hours a day you go about running a car with your body--and with your mind--hammering, hammering! It is excellent discipline--it is fighting all day, "_Pous, podos_, the foot--_pous, podos_, the foot--34th Street, Crosstown East and West--_pous, podos_, the foot!"
And then when you get home late at night, are there not the great masters who love you?
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April 15th.
Thou wouldst call thyself Artist; thou wouldst have the Eternal Presence to dwell within thee, to fire thy heart with passion and dower thy lips with song; canst thou go into thy closet, and alone with thy Maker, say these words:
"O Thou Unthinkable, source of all light and life, Thou the great unselfish One, the great Sufferer; Thou seest my heart this day, how in it dwells but love of Thy truth and worship of Thy holiness. Thou seest that I seek not wealth that men should serve me, nor fame that they should honor me, for the glory that is Thine. Thou seest that I bring all my praise to Thy feet, that I love all things that Thou hast made, that I envy no man Thy gifts, that I rejoice when Thou sendest one stronger than I into the battle. And when these things are not, may Thy power leave me; for I seek but to dwell in Thy presence, and to speak Thy truth, which can not die."
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That prayer welled up in my heart to-day. There are times when I sit before this thing in my soul, crouching and gazing at it in fear. Then I see the naked horror of it, the shuddering reality of it. I see the Soul: motionless, tense, quivering, wrestling in an agony with the powers of destruction. It is so real to me that my body stiffens into stone, and I sit with the sweat on my forehead. That happened to me to-day, and I wrote a few lines of the poem that made my voice break--the passionate despairing cry for deliverance, for rest from the terror.
But there is no rest. The mountain slope is so that there is no standing upon it, and once you stop, it breaks your heart to begin again. And so you go on--up--up--and there is not any summit.
It is that way when you write a book; and that way when you make a symphony; and that way when you wage a war.
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But my soul hungered for it. I have loved the great elemental art-works--the art-works that were born of pure suffering. For months before I began The Captive I read but three books--read them and brooded over them, all day and all night. They were Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and Samson Agonistes.
You sit with these books, and time and space "to nothingness do sink." There looms up before you--like a bare mountain in its majesty--the great elemental world-fact, the death-grapple of the will with circumstance. You may build yourself any philosophy or any creed you please, but you will never get away from the world-fact--the death-grapple of the soul with circumstance. ?schylus has one creed, and Milton has another, and Shelley has a third; but always it is the death-grapple. Chaos, evil--circumstance--lies about you, binds you; and