It is no question of what I will do! It is a question of what I can do! I am weakened and sick with the yearning that I have in me already. My last “business” experience drove me mad. And I am to go on, I am to rouse new hunger, new passion, new agony in my soul! Why, the work that I have dreamed of next is so hard and so far-away that I hardly dared even whisper it! It would take years and years of toiling! And I am to do it here in this seething city—to do it while I sell wholesale-paper—to do it while I am sick for lack of food! I can not do it! I can not!
I went home, and I was crazy; so it was that I did my second desperate thing.
I sat down and wrote a letter to Mr. ——. I wrote a letter—I can not see how it could fail to stir the soul of any man. I told him how I had toiled—I told him how for four long months I had waited in agony—I told him what the publishers had said to me. I begged him—I implored him—for the sake of the unuttered message that cried out day and night in my soul—not to throw the letter aside—to read it—to give me a chance to talk to him. I said: “I will live in a hut, I will cook my own food, I will wear the clothes of a day laborer! If I can only be free—if I can only be free to be an artist! I could do it, all of it, for two hundred dollars a year; and I could win the battle, I know, if I had but three years. I am desperate as I write to you—I look ahead and I can see only ruin; and not ruin for myself—I do not mind that—but ruin for my art! I can tell you what that means to me in but one way—I ask you to read my book. I have put all my soul into that book—I will stake my all upon it. If you will only read it, you will see what I mean—you will see why I have written you this letter. You will see that it is not a beggar's letter, but a high challenge from an artist's soul.”
So there is one chance more. I do not see how he can refuse, and if he will only read the manuscript, I will be safe, I think.
November 20th.
I have done nothing but wait for four days, but I have not heard from him yet. To-day I made up my mind that I would take the manuscript to another publisher's meanwhile. He is probably busy, and may not answer for a long while; and I can get the manuscript from a publisher at any time.