The Three Fates 2

The Three Fates 2

The nature of this occupation, which he would not relinquish, was

beginning to produce its natural effect upon his character. He felt that

he was better than his work, and the inevitable result ensued. He felt

that he was hampered and tied, and that every hour spent in such labour

was a page stolen from the book of his reputation; that he was giving

for a pitiful wage the precious time in which something important might

have been accomplished, and that his life would turn out a failure if it

continued to run on much longer in the same groove. And yet he assumed

that it would be absolutely impossible for him to abandon his drudgery

in order to devote himself solely to the series of essays on which he

had pinned his hopes of success. His serious work, as he called it, made

little progress when interrupted at every step by the necessity for

writing twaddle about trash.

 

It may be objected that George Wood should not have written twaddle, but

should have employed his best energies in the improvement of second

class literature by systematically telling the truth about it.

Unfortunately the answer to such a stricture is not far to seek. If he

had written what he thought, the newspapers would have ceased to employ

him; not that it is altogether impossible to write honestly about the

great rivers of minor books which flow east and west and north and south

from the publishers’ gardens, but because the critic who has the age,

experience, and talent to bestow faint praise without inflicting

damnation commands a high price and cannot be wasted on little authors

and their little publications. The beginner often knows that he is

writing twaddle and regrets it, and he very likely knows how to write in

strains of enthusiastic eulogium or of viciously cruel abuse; but though

he have all these things, he has not yet acquired the unaffected charity

which covers a multitude of sins, and which is the result of an ancient

and wise good feeling entertained between editors, publishers and

critics. He cannot really feel mildly well disposed towards a book he

despises, and his only chance of expressing gentle sentiments not his

own, lies in the plentiful use of unmitigated twaddle. If he remains a

critic, he is either lifted out of the sphere of the daily saleable

trash to that of serious first class literature, or else he imbibes

through the pores of his soul such proportional parts of the editor’s

and the publisher’s wishes as shall combine in his own character and

produce the qualities which they both desire to find there and to see

expressed in his paragraphs.

 

It could not be said that George Wood was discontented with what he

found to do, so much as with being constantly hindered from doing

something better. And that better thing which he would have done, and

believed that he could have done, was in reality far from having reached

the stage of being clearly defined. He had never felt any strong liking

for fiction, and his mind had been nourished upon unusually solid

intellectual food, while the outward circumstances of his life had

necessarily left much to his imagination, which to most young men of

five and twenty is already matter of experience. As a boy he had been

too much with older people, and had therefore thought too much to be

boyish. Possibly, too, he had seen more than was good for him, for his

father had left him but a short time at school in the days of their

prosperity, and, being unable to leave New York for any length of time,

had more than once sent him abroad with an elderly tutor from whom the

lad had acquired all sorts of ideas that were too big for him. He had

been wrongly supposed to be of a delicate constitution, too, and had

been indulged in all manner of intellectual whims and fancies, whereby

he had gained a smattering of many sciences and literatures at an age

when he ought to have been following a regular course of instruction.

Then, before he was thought old enough to enter a university, the crash

had come.

 

Jonah Wood was far too conscientious a man not to sacrifice whatever he

could for the completion of his son’s education. For several years he

deprived himself of every luxury, in order that George might have the

assistance he so greatly needed while making his studies at Columbia

College in his native city. Then only did the father realise how he had

erred in allowing the boy to receive the desultory and aimless teaching

that had seemed so generous in the days of wealth. He knew more or less

well a variety of subjects of which his companions were wholly ignorant,

but he was utterly unversed in much of their knowledge. And this was not

all, for George had acquired from his former tutor a misguided contempt

for the accepted manner of dealing with certain branches of learning,

without possessing that grasp of the matters in hand which alone

justifies a man in thinking differently from the great mass of his

fellows. It is not well to ridicule the American method of doing things

until one is master of some other.

 

It was from the time when George entered college that he began to be a

constant source of disappointment to his father. The elderly man had

received a good, old-fashioned, thoroughly prejudiced education, and

though he remembered little Latin and less Greek, he had not forgotten

the way in which he had been made to learn both. George’s way of talking

about his studies disturbed his father’s sense of intellectual

propriety, which was great, without exciting his curiosity, which was

infinitesimally small. With him also prevailed the paternal view which

holds that young men must necessarily distinguish themselves above their

companions if they really possess any exceptional talent, and his peace

of mind was further endangered by his sense of responsibility for

George’s beginnings. If he had believed that George was stupid, he would

have resigned himself to that dispensation of Providence. But he thought

otherwise. The boy was not an ordinary boy, and if he failed to prove it

by taking prizes in competition, he must be lazy or his preparation must

have been defective. No other alternative was to be found, and the fault

therefore lay either with himself or with his father.

 

George never obtained a prize, and barely passed his examinations at

all. Jonah Wood made a point of seeing all his examiners as well as the

instructors who had known him during his college life. Three-quarters of

the number asserted that the young fellow was undeniably clever, and

added, expressing themselves with professorial politeness, that his

previous studies seemed to have taken a direction other than that of the

college “curriculum,” as they called it. The professor of Greek presumed

that George might have distinguished himself in Latin, the professor of

Latin surmised that Greek might have been his strong point; both

believed that he had talent for mathematics, while the mathematician

remarked that he seemed to have a very good understanding, but that it

would be turned to better account in the pursuit of classical studies.

Jonah Wood returned to his home very much disturbed in mind, and from

that day his anxiety steadily increased. As it became more clear that

his son would never accept a business career, but would probably waste

his opportunities in literary dabbling, the good man’s alarm became

extreme. He did not see that George’s one true talent lay in his ready

power of assimilating unfamiliar knowledge by a process of intuition

that escapes methodical learners, any more than he understood that the

boy’s one solid acquirement was the power of using his own language. He

was not to be too much blamed, perhaps, for the young man himself was

only dimly conscious of his yet undeveloped power. What made him write

was neither the pride of syntax nor the certainty of being right in his

observations; he was driven to paper to escape from the torment of the

desire to express something, he knew not what, which he could express in

no other way. He found no congenial conversation at home and little

abroad, and yet he felt that he had something to say and must say it.

 

It should not be supposed that either Jonah Wood’s misfortunes or his

poverty, which was after all comparative, though hard to bear, prevented

George from mixing in the world with which he was connected by his

mother’s birth, and to some extent by his father’s former position. The

old gentleman, indeed, was too proud to renew his acquaintance with

people who had thought him dishonourable until he had proved himself

spotless; but the very demonstration of his uprightness had been so

convincing and clear that it constituted a patent of honour for his son.

Many persons who had blamed themselves for their hasty judgment would

have been glad to make amends by their cordial reception of the man they

had so cruelly mistaken. George, however, was quite as proud as his

father, and much more sensitive. He remembered well enough the

hard-hearted, boyish stare he had seen in the eyes of some of his

companions when he was but just seventeen years old, and later, at

college, when his father’s self-sacrifice was fully known, and his old

associates had held out their hands to his in the hope of making

everything right again, George had met them with stony eyes and scornful

civility. It was not easy to forgive, and with all his excellent

qualities and noble honesty of purpose, Jonah Wood was not altogether

displeased to know that his son held his head high and drew back from

the renewal of fair weather friendships. Almost against his will he

encouraged him in his conduct, while doing his best to appear at least

indifferent.

 

George needed but little encouragement to remain in social obscurity,

though he was conscious of a rather contemptible hope that he might one

day play a part in society, surrounded by all the advantages of wealth

and general respect which belong especially to those few who possess

both, by inheritance rather than as a result of their own labours. He

was not quite free from that subtle aristocratic taint which has touched

so many members of American society. Like the wind, no man can tell

whence it comes nor whither it goes; but unlike the ill wind in the

proverb it blows no good to any one. It is not the breath of that

republican inequality which is caused by two men extracting a different

degree of advantage from the same circumstances; it is not the

inevitable inequality produced by the inevitable struggle for existence,

wealth and power; but it is the fictitious inequality caused by the

pretence that the accident of a man’s birth should of itself constitute

for him a claim to have special opportunities made for him, adapted to

his use and protected by law for his particular benefit. It is a fallacy

which is in the air, and which threatens to produce evil consequences

wherever it becomes localised.

 

Perhaps, at some future time yet far distant, a man will arise who shall

fathom and explain the great problems presented by human vanity. No more

interesting study could be found wherewith to occupy the greatest mind,

and assuredly none in the pursuit of which a man would be so constantly

confronted by new and varied matter for research. One main fact at least

we know. Vanity is the boundless, circumambient and all-penetrating

ether in which all man’s thoughts and actions have being and receive

manifestation. All moral and intellectual life is either full of it and

in sympathy with it, breathing it as our bodies breathe the air, or is

out of balance with it in the matter of quantity and is continually

struggling to restore its own lost equilibrium. It is as impossible to

conceive of anything being done in the world without also conceiving the

element of vanity as the medium for the action, as it is to imagine

motion without space, or time without motion. To say that any man who

succeeds in the race for superiority of any sort is without vanity, is