[CHAPTER VII]
JOHN BECOMES AN AUTHOR
(1869)
The next morning he felt in a state of complete collapse. His nerves still trembled and his body felt the fever of shame and intoxication. What should he do? He must save his honour. He must still hold out for two or three months and try again. That day he remained at home and read The Stories of a Barber-Surgeon. As he read it seemed to him that they recorded his own experience; they were about the reconciliation of a step-son to his step-mother. The breach in his domestic life had always weighed upon him like a sin, and he longed for reconciliation and peace. That day this longing took an unusually melancholy form, and as he lay on the sofa, his brain began to evolve various plans for smoothing away the domestic discord. A woman-worshipper as he then was, and under the influence of the book he had been reading, he thought that only a woman could reconcile him with his father. This noble rôle he assigned to his step-mother.
While thus tying on the sofa he felt an unusual degree of fever, during which his brain seemed to work at arranging memories of the past, cutting out some scenes, and adding others. New minor characters entered; he saw them mixing in the action, and heard them speaking, just as he had done on the stage. After one or two hours had passed, he had a comedy in two acts ready in his head. This was both a painful and pleasurable form of work if it could be called a work; for it went forward of itself, without his will or co-operation.
But now he had to write it. In four days the piece was ready. He kept on going from the writing-table to the sofa and back; and in the intervals of his work, he collapsed like a rag. When the work was finished, he drew a deep sigh of relief, as though years of pain were over, as though a tumour had been cut out. He was so glad, that he felt as though some one was singing within him. Now he would offer his piece to the theatre;—that was the way of salvation. The same evening he sat down to write a note of congratulation to a relative who had found a situation. When he had written the first line, it seemed to him to read like a verse. Then he added the second line which rhymed with the first. Was it no harder than that? Then with a single effort he wrote a four-page letter in rhyme and discovered that he could write verse. Was it no harder than that? Only a few months before he had asked a friend to help him with some verses for a special occasion. He had, however, received a negative but complimentary answer, in being told not to drive in a hired carriage, when he had one of his own.
One was not then born to write verses, he said to himself, nor did one learn it, though all kinds of verse-measures were taught in school, but it came,—or did not come. It seemed to him like the working of the Holy Spirit. Had the psychical convulsion, which he had felt at his defeat as an actor, been so strong that it had turned upside down all the strata of his memories and impressions, and had the violent impulse set his imagination to work? There had doubtless been a long preparation going on. Was it not his imagination, which had conjured up pictures, when as a child he had been afraid of the dark? Had he not written essays in school and letters for years? Had he not formed his style through reading, translating and writing for the papers? Yes, he had, but it was not till now that he noticed in himself the so-called creative power of the artist.
The art of the actor was therefore not the one suited to his powers; his having thought so was a mistake which could easily be rectified. Meanwhile he must keep his authorship fairly secret and remain at the theatre till the end of the season, so that his failure as an actor might not be known, or at any rate till his piece was accepted, as it naturally would be, for he thought it good.