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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
to cook it, appeared on Martins table at least once a day. Dried
fruits were less expensive than fresh, and he had usually a pot of them,
cooked and ready at hand, for they took the place of butter on his bread.
Occasionally he graced his table with a piece of round-steak, or with a
soup-bone. Coffee, without cream or milk, he had twice a day, in the
evening substituting tea; but both coffee and tea were excellently
cooked.
There was need for him to be economical. His vacation had consumed
nearly all he had earned in the laundry, and he was so far from his
market that weeks must elapse before he could hope for the first returns
from his hack-work. Except at such times as he saw Ruth, or dropped in
to see his sister Gertude, he lived a recluse, in each day accomplishing
at least three days labor of ordinary men. He slept a scant five hours,
and only one with a constitution of iron could have held himself down, as
Martin did, day after day, to nineteen consecutive hours of toil. He
never lost a moment. On the looking-glass were lists of definitions and
pronunciations; when shaving, or dressing, or combing his hair, he conned
these lists over. Similar lists were on the wall over the oil-stove, and
they were similarly conned while he was engaged in cooking or in washing
the dishes. New lists continually displaced the old ones. Every strange
or partly familiar word encountered in his reading was immediately jotted
down, and later, when a sufficient number had been accumulated, were
typed and pinned to the wall or looking-glass. He even carried them in
his pockets, and reviewed them at odd moments on the street, or while
waiting in butcher shop or grocery to be served.
He went farther in the matter. Reading the works of men who had arrived,
he noted every result achieved by them, and worked out the tricks by
which they had been achieved--the tricks of narrative, of exposition, of
style, the points of view, the contrasts, the epigrams; and of all these
he made lists for study. He did not ape. He sought principles. He drew
up lists of effective and fetching mannerisms, till out of many such,
culled from many writers, he was able to induce the general principle of
mannerism, and, thus equipped, to cast about for new and original ones of
his own, and to weigh and measure and appraise them properly. In similar
manner he collected lists of strong phrases, the phrases of living
language, phrases that bit like acid and scorched like flame, or that
glowed and were mellow and luscious in the midst of the arid desert of
common speech. He sought always for the principle that lay behind and
beneath. He wanted to know how the thing was done; after that he could
do it for himself. He was not content with the fair face of beauty. He
dissected beauty in his crowded little bedroom laboratory, where cooking
smells alternated with the outer bedlam of the Silva tribe; and, having
dissected and learned the anatomy of beauty, he was nearer being able to
create beauty itself.
He was so made that he could work only with understanding. He could not
work blindly, in the dark, ignorant of what he was producing and trusting
to chance and the star of his genius that the effect produced should be
right and fine. He had no patience with chance effects. He wanted to
know why and how. His was deliberate creative genius, and, before he
began a story or poem, the thing itself was already alive in his brain,
with the end in sight and the means of realizing that end in his
conscious possession. Otherwise the effort was doomed to failure. On
the other hand, he appreciated the chance effects in words and phrases
that came lightly and easily into his brain, and that later stood all
tests of beauty and power and developed tremendous and incommunicable
connotations. Before such he bowed down and marvelled, knowing that they
were beyond the deliberate creation of any man. And no matter how much
he dissected beauty in search of the principles that underlie beauty and
make beauty possible, he was aware, always, of the innermost mystery of
beauty to which he did not penetrate and to Martin Eden page 91 Martin Eden page 93 |