“Not by any means,” answered Clay. “Armstrong talks about independence, and yet destines himself to the worst kind of dependence—slavery to money-getting. Most people, it seems to me, spend the best part of their lives not in living, but in getting the means to live. We’ll give Armstrong, say twenty years, to lay up enough money to retire on and begin to live. What sort of a position will he be in then to enjoy his independence? His nature will have got so subdued to what it works in that the only safety for him will be to keep on at the law.”
“All right! Then I’ll keep on,” interjected Armstrong.
“What the devil do you mean to do then?” asked Berkeley of Clay.
“I don’t quite know yet,” replied the latter. “I shall ‘loaf and invite my soul’ whenever I feel like it. I shall live as I go along, and not postpone it till I am forty. I sha’n’t put myself into any mill that will grind me just so much a day. I need my leisure too badly for that. I presume I shall spend most of my time at first in reading and walking. Then, whenever I think of anything to write I shall write it, and if I can sell what I write to some publisher or other, so much the better. If not, go on as before.”
“Meanwhile, where will your bread and butter come from?” asked Armstrong.
“Oh, I sha’n’t starve. I can get some sort of hack work—something that won’t take much of my time, and which I can do with my left hand. But the great point, after all, is to make your wants simple; to live like an Arab, content with a few dates and a swallow from the gourd. ‘Lessen your denominator.’ It’s easier than raising your numerator, and the quotient is the same.”
“No, it’s not the same,” Berkeley retorted. “Renunciation and enjoyment are not the same. It makes a heap of difference whether you have a thing or simply do without it. The plain living and high thinking philosophy may do for Clay, whose mind to him a kingdom is; but a fellow like me, whose mind is only a small Central American republic, can’t live on the revenues of the spirit. The fact is, Clay, you’ve read too much Emerson. I went into that myself once, but I soon found out that it wouldn’t wear. I want mine thicker. The worst thing about the career of a literary man or an artist is that if he fails there are no compensations; and success is mighty uncertain. Nobody doubts that you are smart enough, Clay, and I am sure we expect great things of you, whatever line you take up. But, for the sake of the argument, suppose you have grubbed along in a small way, living on crusts and water, till you are fifty, without doing any really good work. Then where are you? You haven’t had any fun. You’ve no other string to your bow. You haven’t that practical experience of the world which would enable you to turn your hand to something else. You have no influence or reputation; for, of all poor things, poor art of any kind is the worst—hateful to gods and men and columns. In short, where are you? You’re out of the dance; you don’t count.”
“Yes,” added Armstrong, “and you’ve no professional success or solid standing in the community; and, what’s worse, you’ve no money, which might make up for the want of all the rest.”
“I don’t think you get my meaning. I may fail,” said Clay, proudly; “I may never even try to succeed, in your sense of the word. I decline all mean competitions and all low views of success. The noblest ideal of life—at least, the noblest to me—is self-culture in the high meaning of the word; the harmonious development of one’s whole nature. Armstrong has drawn a picture of his future in the likeness of old Tulkinghorn. I suppose we are all accustomed to put our anticipations into some such concrete shape before our mind’s eye. The typical situation which I am fond of imagining is something like this: I like to fancy myself sitting in a dark old upper room in some remote farm-house, at the close of a winter day, after three or four hours of steady reading or writing. The room is full of books—the best books. There is a little fire on the hearth, there is a dingy curtain at the window. It is solitary and still, and when the light gets too scant to let me read any more, I fill my pipe, and go and stand in the window. Outside, there is a row of leafless elms, and beyond that a dim, wide landscape of lakes and hills, and beyond that a red, windy sunset. I can sit in that window and smoke my pipe and have my own thoughts till the hills grow black. There is no one to say to me ‘Go’ or ‘Come’; no patient to visit; no confounded case on the docket next morning at nine; no distasteful, mean, slavish job of any kind. How can I fail to have thoughts worth the thinking, and to live a rich and free life when I breathe every day the bracing air of nature and the great poets? Isn’t such a life in itself the best kind of success, even if a man accomplishes nothing in particular that you can put your hand on?”
“Yes, I know,” said Armstrong, taking a long breath. “I have felt that way too. But a man has got to put all that sternly behind him and do the world’s work for the world’s wages, if he means to amount to anything. It’s only a finer kind of self-indulgence, after all—egoistic Hedonism and that sort of thing.”