All authors are reformers. Said one of them to Brown in the Empyrean Club:
"When an author in his own heart ceases to be a reformer he begins to be a menace!"
It was a fine sentiment, and Brown wrote it in[115] his note-book. Afterward, the more he analyzed it the less it seemed to mean.
Another author informed him that the proper study for man is man. He'd heard that before, but the repetition steeled his resolve. And his resolve was to reproduce in literature exactly what he observed about him; nothing more, nothing less.
There was to be no concession to imagination, none to convention, none to that insidious form of human weakness known as good taste. As for art, Brown already knew what Art really was.
There was art enough for anybody in sheer truth, enough in the realism made up of photographic detail, recorded uncompromisingly in ordered processional sequence. After all, there was really no beauty in the world except the beauty of absolute truth. All other alleged beauty was only some form of weakness. Thus Brown, after inhaling literary atmosphere.
Like the majority of young men, Brown realised that only a man, and a perfectly fearless, honest, and unprejudiced one, was properly equipped to study woman and tell the entire truth about her in literature.
So he began his first great novel—"The Unquiet Sex"—and he made heavy weather of it that autumn—what[116] with contributing to the literary atmosphere every afternoon and evening at various clubs and cafés—not to mention the social purlieus into which he ventured with the immortal lustre already phosphorescent on his brow. Which left him little time for mere writing. It is hard to be an author and a writer, too.
The proper study for man being woman, Brown studied her solemnly and earnestly. He studied his mother and his sisters, boring them to the verge of distraction; he attempted to dissect the motives which governed the behaviour of assorted feminine relatives, scaring several of the more aged and timorous, agitating others, and infuriating one or two—until his father ordered him to desist.
House-maids, parlour-maids, ladies'-maids, waitresses, all fought very shy of him; for true to his art, he had cast convention aside and had striven to fathom the souls and discover the hidden motives imbedded in Milesian, Scandinavian and Briton.