I HAD come to that period of a young man’s life where all is uncertainty. In America there seemed at that time but one direction, one channel, into which all such young fellows as myself could pour their energies. All must give themselves wholeheartedly to material and industrial progress. Could I do that? Was I fitted for such a life? It was a kind of moral duty to try and then, as now, men at the heads of the great industrial enterprises filled or had filled all the newspapers and magazines with sermons on industry, thrift, virtue, loyalty and patriotism, meaning I am afraid by the use of all these high-sounding terms only devotion to the interests in which they had money invested. But the terms were good terms, the words used were magnificent words. And I was by my nature a word fellow, one who could at most any time be hypnotized by high-sounding words. It was confusing to me as it must be confusing to many young men now. During the World War did we not see how even the very government went into the advertising business, selling the war to the young men of the country by the use of the same noble words advertising men used to forward the sale of soap or automobile tires? To the young man a kind of worship of some power outside himself is essential. One has strength and enthusiasm and wants gods to worship. There were only these gods of material success. Chivalry was gone. The Virgin had died. In America there were no churches. What were called churches were merely clubs, ruled over by the same forces that ruled over the factories and great mercantile houses. Often the men I heard speaking in churches spoke in the same words, used the same terms to define the meaning of life that were used by the real-estate boomer, the politician, or the enterprising business man talking to his employees of the necessity of steadfastness and devotion to the interests of his firm.
The Virgin was dead and her son had taken as prophets such men as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Benjamin Franklin, the one with his little books in which he set down and saved his acts and impulses, striving to make them all serve definite ends as he saved his pennies and the other preaching the intellectual doctrine of Self-reliance, Up and Onward. The land was filled with gods but they were new gods and their images, standing on every street of every town and city, were cast in iron and steel. The factory had become America’s church and duplicates of it stood everywhere, on almost every street of every city belching black incense into the sky.
A passion for reading books had taken possession of me and I did not work when I had any money at all but often for weeks spent my time reading any book I could get my hands on. In every city there were public libraries and I could get books without spending money.
The past took a strong hold on my imagination and I went eagerly down through the ages, reading of the lives of the great men of antiquity; of the Romans and their conquest of the world; of the early Christians and their struggles before the great organizer Paul came to “put Christianity across”; of the Cæsars, Charlemagnes and Napoleons, marching and countermarching across Europe at the head of their troops; of the cruel but powerful Peters and Ivans of Russia; of the great and elegant dukes of Italy—the poisoners and schemers listening to the words of their Machiavellis; of the magnificent painters and craftsmen of the Middle Ages; of English and French kings; roundheads; Spanish kings of the days of conquest and of gold ships bringing riches from the Spanish Main; the Grand Inquisitor; the coming of Erasmus, the cool scholarly questioner whose questions brought to the front Luther, the conscientious barbarian—all, all spread out before me, the young American coming into manhood, all in the books.
It was a feast. Could I digest it? I had saved a little money and knew how to live very cheaply. After working for some weeks, and when I did not spend money for drinking bouts to ease the confusion of my mind I had a few dollars put aside and dollars meant leisure. That is perhaps all dollars have ever meant to me.
Since I was always making the acquaintance of some fellow who lived by gambling I went now and then into a gambling place and sometimes had luck. I had five dollars when I went in at a certain door and came out with a hundred dollars in my pocket. Oh, glorious day! On such an amount I could live among books for weeks and so, renting a small room on a poor street, I went every day to a public library and got a new book. The book some man had spent years in composing was often waded through in a day and then thrown aside. What a jumble of things in my head! At times the life directly about me ceased to have any existence. The actuality of life became a kind of vapor, a thing outside of myself. My body was a house in which I lived and there were many such houses all about me but I did not live in them. Perhaps I was but trying to make solid the walls of my own house, to roof it properly, to cut windows, becoming accustomed to living in the house so that I could have leisure to look out at the windows and into other houses. Of that I do not know. To make such a claim for myself and my purpose seems giving my life a more intelligent direction than I can convince myself it has had.
I walked in and out of the little rooms in which I lived, often in what was called the tough part of a city, hearing all about me the oaths of drunken men, the crying of children, the weeping of some poor girl of the streets who has just been beaten by her pimp, the quarreling of laborers and their wives, walked hearing and seeing nothing, walked gripping a book in my hand.
In fancy I was at the moment with the great Florentine Leonardo da Vinci on a day when he sat on a little hill above his country house in Italy studying the flight of birds or was making the mathematical and geometrical calculations he so loved. Or I was sitting in a carriage beside the scholar Erasmus as he drove across Europe going from the court of one great duke or king to the court of another. The lives of the dead men and women had become more real to me than the lives of the living people about me.
How bad an American I had become, how utterly out of touch with the spirit of my age! Sometimes for weeks I did not read a newspaper—a fault in me that would have been considered almost in the light of a crime had it been generally known to my fellows. A new railroad might have been built, a new trust formed or some great national excitement like the free silver affair—that did fall in at about that time—might have shaken the whole country while I knew nothing about it.
There was indeed a kind of intimate acquaintance with an unknown and unheralded kind of people I was unconsciously getting. In Chicago, where I had now gone I for a time lived in a room in a huge cheaply constructed building that had been erected about a little court. The building was not old, had in fact been built but a few years before—during the Chicago World’s Fair—but already it was a half-tumbledown unsafe place with great sags in the floors in the hallways and cracks in the walls. The building surrounded the little brick-paved court and was divided into single rooms for bachelor lodgers and into small two- and three-room apartments. Since it was near the end of several street-car lines and a branch of the Chicago elevated railroad it was occupied for the most part by street-car conductors and motormen with their wives and children. Many of my fellow-lodgers were young fellows having wives but no children and not intending to have children if the accidents of life could be avoided. They went off to work and came home from work at all sorts of odd hours.