It seemed to him sometimes, as he thought about it, that he alone, of all men living, had power to voice the despair of these tortured souls. Others had been down into that pit, and had come out alive; but who was there among them that was an artist; that could forge his hatred into a weapon, sharp enough and stout enough to be driven through the tough hide of the world of culture? To be an artist meant to have spent years and decades in toil and study, in disciplining and drilling one’s powers; and who was there that had descended into the social inferno, and had come back with strength enough to accomplish that labor?
So it seemed to him that he was the bearer of a gospel, that he had to teach the world something it could otherwise not know. He had tried out upon his own person, and upon the persons of his loved ones, the effects of poverty and destitution, of cold and hunger, of solitude and sickness and despair. And so he knew, of his own knowledge, the meaning of the degradation that he saw in modern society—of suicide and insanity, of drunkenness and vice and crime, of physical and mental and moral decay. He knew, and none could dispute him! Therefore he must nerve himself for the struggle; he must deliver that message, and pound home that truth. He must keep on and on—in defiance of authority, in the face of all the obloquy and ridicule that the prostitute powers of civilization could heap upon him. He must live for that work, and die for it—to make real to the thinking world the infamies and the horrors of the capitalist régime.
BOOK XV. THE CAPTIVE FAINTS
“Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?
Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on.”
“Do you remember how you used to tell me that?” she whispered. “Hoping—always hoping!”
“And always young!” he added.
“How did I keep so?” she said, with wonder in her voice; and he read—
“Thou nearest the immortal chants—of old!—
Putting his sickle to the perilous grain
In the hot corn-field of the Phrygian king,
For thee the Lityerses-song again
Young Daphnis with his silver voice doth sing!”