The tyranny of talent has beset our path with many little proverbs that bark at our lagging heels. “Nothing succeeds like success” has hounded many a man to a desolate eminence. “Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well” is a maxim that we allow to control our activities as thoroughly as we refuse to allow it to convince our intelligence: for obviously whatever is worth doing is not worth doing well; on the one hand the statement may authorize a wasteful and indiscriminate energy; and, far worse, it is manifestly false, because everything that gives you joy is worth doing, and ten to one the thing that gives you most joy in the doing, is the thing that you do very ill indeed.
Superficially considered, success appears to be a consequence of self-expression necessarily gratifying; intimately experienced, success is found to be a consequence of self-repression most painful. The trouble is that one never knows in time. Often one goes gambolling into success unwittingly as a young animal, only to have one’s first joyous neigh, or bray, of achievement cut short by feeling sudden hands bind one to a treadmill—the treadmill that impels one to grind out similar achievements, tramp-tramp-tramp, all the rest of one’s life. The worst is that no one ever suspects the excellently efficient middle-aged nag of still sniffing a larking canter through the mad spring meadows of the unattempted. Our best friends suppose the treadmill contents us. Yet we are always cherishing our own little dreams of a medium of expression better suited to our individuality than that skill with which nature has endowed us. Browning acknowledges the phenomenon in “One Word More,” in noting the dissatisfaction of the artist with his proper medium:—
“Does he paint? He fain would write a poem,—
Does he write? He fain would paint a picture,
Put to proof art alien to the artist’s,
Once and only once, and for one only,
So to be the man and leave the artist,
Gain the man’s joy, miss the artist’s sorrow.”
The psychological experience described is more fundamental than its application in the poem merely to love and a lady.
The harshness of a controlling talent is severe in restricting us not alone to what we can do well, but to what we can do best. If we paint, we must not only not write a poem, but we must not attempt a picture different from our best; if we write, we must continue to write in the type and the tone of our first successful experiment. The chef may long to be an astronomer, but not only must he stick to his flesh-pots, but if, in the gusto of some early egg-beating, he has stumbled upon the omelet superlative, he must continue to furnish the world with omelets, no matter if eggs become for him an utter banality, and no matter how his fancy be seething with voluptuous dishes of air-drawn cabbage, or super-sheep.
The world is too much against us if we try to lay down the burdens the task-master Talent has imposed. The successful man belongs to the public: he no longer belongs to himself. Talent, tried and proved and acclaimed, is too strong for us; we continue its savorless round, against all our inward protest. We are its slaves, and through the amiability ineradicable in most bosoms, the slaves also of our admiring kinsfolk and friends and public; most of all, perhaps, the slaves of our own self-doubt, for possibly after all they are right, possibly we are justly the chattels of Talent, and not of that whispered self of the air, taunting, teasing us, “What you have done is sordid, is savorless! Come with me to attempt the unexplored!” This desire denied is both acknowledgment that all our lordly labeled triumphs may have had a false acclaim, and is also a protest against all mundane and mortal valuations. Our unshackled ego, scorning things done that took the eye and had the price, seems to have the truer voice. Is not art itself the assurance that we are no petty slaves of efficiency, but heirs of a serene domain where the unaccomplished is forever the only thing worth accomplishing?
XIII
The Woman Who Writes
I OFTEN wonder how other women write. Workers in art material are chary of revealing processes that might save other workers wasted effort and vain experiment, or, better yet, provoke challenge still more conducive to success. I venture to believe that any woman’s literary product is a matter of constant, and often desperate, compromise between writing and living; and some examination into the wherefore of this fact may throw light on the nature of writing processes, if not also on the nature of woman processes. Since there are scant data for analyzing the methods of other women writers, I give only my own, the experiment and experience of a woman who has chosen to earn a living as a literary free lance.
Such conclusions must necessarily be personal and practical, pretending to no theories except those made by immediate need. Driven to earn to-day’s bread and butter, I really have no time to study the superiority of prehistoric woman in the struggle for existence. Nor can I give undivided attention to the achievements of my sex as promised by the feminist millennium, when my 9 A.M. problem is to write a story that shall please some editor, presumably male. I do not know whether or not woman’s intellect is the equal of man’s; I know only that mine is not.