The Independent published my paper on “Teaching of Languages” (February 27, 1902) and a follow-up article, “Language Study: Some Facts” (June 19, 1902). I sent a questionnaire to a thousand college graduates, and discovered that among those who had been out ten years, practically none could read the languages they had studied in college. Another article was called “A Review of Reviewers” (February 6, 1902), occasioned by the odd contrast between the reviews of Springtime and Harvest, a pitiful, unattractive little volume published by the author, and the reviews of the same novel when it was issued under the name of King Midas, in conventional costume by an established publishing house. It was, quite unintentionally, a test of book reviewers and their independence of judgment. Springtime and Harvest had a preface, which had crudity and inexperience written all over it; accordingly, the thirteen reviewers of the United States who found the little book worth mentioning employed such phrases as: “proofs of immaturity” ... “this tumult of young blood” ... “a crude one, showing the youth, the inexperience of the writer” ... “betrays the fact that he is a novice in literature” ... “considering his youth,” etc.

But then came King Midas, a stately volume illustrated by a popular artist and bearing the imprint of Funk and Wagnalls. It carried the endorsement of Edwin Markham, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Barrett Wendell, and George Santayana; also a rousing publisher’s blurb: “Full of power and beauty; an American story of today by a brilliant writer; no novel we have ever published equals this in the wonderful reception accorded to it, in advance of publication, in commendations from the critics and in advance orders from the trade.”

In the face of this barrage, what became of the crudity and inexperience? In the first eight weeks after publication, fifty reviews appeared; and setting aside half a dozen that connected the book with Springtime and Harvest, only one critic noted crudity and inexperience! The “novice in literature” had come to display “the mind of a master”; the “tumult of young blood” had become “musical and poetic fervor, at times bordering on the inspired”; the “crude work” had become “a novel of tremendous power”; “the youth, the inexperience of the writer” had developed, according to the Outlook, into “workmanship that may be called brilliant ... sincerity as well as knowledge are apparent on every page”—and so on through a long string of encomiums. The article made amusing reading for the public but cannot have been very pleasing to the critics upon whom a young writer’s future depended.

VII

Corydon went to spend the summer with her parents in the Catskills, and Thyrsis went back alone to Leek Island, which seemed home to him because it was full of memories of the previous summer. He put up the tent on the same spot, and sailed the same little skiff, older and still leakier, across the stormy channel. He had gone too early, because of a new book that was clamoring to be written, and the icy gales blowing through the tent almost froze him in his chair. He built the fire too hot in the little round drum of a stove, and set fire to his tent, and had to put it out with the contents of his water pail. For several days the channel could not be crossed at all, and the author lived on dried apples and saltine crackers. The fish would not bite, and the author went hunting, but all he could get was a crow, which proved to have a flesh of deep purple, as strong in texture as in flavor.

From the library of Columbia University, the author had taken a strange German book called Also Sprach Zarathustra. While waiting for the muse to thaw out, the author lay wrapped in blankets reading this volume. He put an account of it into his new work, The Journal of Arthur Stirling, which helped to launch the Nietzsche cult in America. The vision revealed in Zarathustra is close to the central doctrine of all the seers, and in a chapter on Nietzsche in Mammonart I pointed out its curious resemblance to the beatitudes. My friend Mencken, reviewing the book, declared that nothing could be more absurd than to compare Jesus and Nietzsche. My friend Emanuel Haldeman-Julius took up the cudgels, declaring that Mencken was an authority on Nietzsche to whom I should bow—overlooking the fact that Arthur Stirling was published in 1903, and Mencken’s book on Nietzsche in 1908. I could not induce either Mencken or his champion to publish the words from Zarathustra that are so curiously close to the beatitudes.

Arthur Stirling was written in six weeks of intense and concentrated labor; that harrowing, fourteen-hour-a-day labor that is destroying to both mind and body. Of course, my stomach went on strike; and I went to consult a country doctor, who explained a new scientific discovery whereby I could have my food digested for me by the contents of the stomach of a pig. This appealed to me as an advanced idea, and for several weeks I took after each meal a spoonful of pink liquid containing pig pepsin. But gradually its magic wore off, and I was back where I was before. So began a long siege, at the end of which I found it necessary to become my own doctor and another kind of “crank.”

Arthur Stirling was sent to a publisher, and I went into the Adirondacks, on the Raquette River, and spent several weeks in the company of hunters and lumbermen. I was a reasonably good hunter for the first ten minutes of any hunt; after that, I would forget what I was doing and be a thousand miles away in thought; a deer would spring up in front of me, and I would see a flash of white tail over the top of the bushes. The reader, having been promised laughter, is invited to contemplate the spectacle of a young author lying on the edge of a mountain meadow in November, watching for deer at sunset, wrapped in a heavy blanket against the cutting frost—and reading a book until the deer should arrive! The deer must have come up and smelled the back of my neck; anyhow, there was a crash five or ten feet behind me, and a deer going twenty feet at a leap, and me pulling the trigger of an uncocked gun!

VIII

For months I had been living in fancy with Arthur Stirling, and this poet had become as real to me as myself. Why not let this poet’s diary pass as a true story—as in the spiritual sense it was? In New York was a stenographer who had worked for me for several years, and he inserted in the New York papers a notice of the death by suicide of the poet Arthur Stirling. The reporters took it up, and published many biographical details about the unfortunate young man.