THE FIRST VOYAGE OVER
OBSERVATIONS AND IMPRESSIONS OF A NAÏVELY SOPHISTICATED TRAVELER AT FORTY
BY THEODORE DREISER
Author of “Sister Carrie,” “Jennie Gerhardt,” etc.
WITH PICTURES BY W. J. GLACKENS
I HAVE just turned forty. I have seen a little something of life. I have been a newspaper man, editor, magazine contributor, author, and, in earlier days, several odd kinds of clerk before I found out what I could do.
Eleven years ago I wrote my first novel, which was issued by New York publishers, and suppressed by them. Heaven knows why, for the same autumn they suppressed my book because of its alleged immoral tendencies they published Zola’s “Fecundity” and “An Englishwoman’s Love-Letters.” I fancy now, after eleven years of wonder, that it was not so much the supposed immorality as the book’s straightforward, plain-spoken discussion of American life in general. We were not used then in America to calling a spade a spade, particularly in books. We had great admiration for Tolstoy and Flaubert and Balzac and De Maupassant at a distance,—some of us,—and it was an honor to have handsome sets of these men on our shelves; but mostly we had been schooled in the literature of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Charles Lamb, and that refined company of English sentimental realists who told us something about life, but not everything. I am quite sure that it never occurred to many of us that there was something really improving in a plain, straightforward understanding of life. For myself, I now accept no creeds. I do not know what truth is, what beauty is, what love is, what hope is. I do not believe any one absolutely and I do not doubt any one absolutely. I think people have both evil and good intentions.
While I was opening my mail one morning I encountered a note, now memorable, which was addressed to me at my apartment. It was from an old literary friend of mine in England, who expressed himself as anxious to see me immediately. I have always liked him. I like him because he strikes me as amusingly English, decidedly literary and artistic in his point of view, a man with wide wisdom, discriminating taste, rare selection. He wears a monocle in his right eye, à la Chamberlain, and I like him for that. I like people who take themselves with a grand air, whether they like me or not, particularly if the grand air is backed up by a real personality. In this case it is.
Next morning G. took breakfast with me; it was a most interesting affair. He was late—very. He stalked in, his spats shining, his monocle glowing with a shrewd, inquisitive eye behind it, his whole manner genial, self-sufficient, almost dictatorial, and always final. He takes charge easily, rules sufficiently, does essentially well in all circumstances where he is interested so to do.
“I have decided,” he observed with that managerial air which always delights me because my soul is not in the least managerial, “that you will come back to England with me. I have my passage arranged for the twenty-second. You will come to my house in England; you will stay there a few days; then I shall take you to London and put you up at a very good hotel. You will stay there until January first and then we shall go to the Continent. Sometime in the spring or summer, when you have all your notes, you will return to London or New York and write your impressions, and I will see that they are published.”