Chapter XXVII

CHAPTER XXVII

The sun of Martin's good fortune rose. The day after Ruth's visit,
he received a check for three dollars from a New York scandal
weekly in payment for three of his triolets. Two days later a
newspaper published in Chicago accepted his "Treasure Hunters,"
promising to pay ten dollars for it on publication. The price was
small, but it was the first article he had written, his very first
attempt to express his thought on the printed page. To cap
everything, the adventure serial for boys, his second attempt, was
accepted before the end of the week by a juvenile monthly calling
itself YOUTH AND AGE. It was true the serial was twenty-one
thousand words, and they offered to pay him sixteen dollars on
publication, which was something like seventy-five cents a thousand
words; but it was equally true that it was the second thing he had
attempted to write and that he was himself thoroughly aware of its
clumsy worthlessness.

But even his earliest efforts were not marked with the clumsiness
of mediocrity. What characterized them was the clumsiness of too
great strength - the clumsiness which the tyro betrays when he
crushes butterflies with battering rams and hammers out vignettes
with a war-club. So it was that Martin was glad to sell his early
efforts for songs. He knew them for what they were, and it had not
taken him long to acquire this knowledge. What he pinned his faith
to was his later work. He had striven to be something more than a
mere writer of magazine fiction. He had sought to equip himself
with the tools of artistry. On the other hand, he had not
sacrificed strength. His conscious aim had been to increase his
strength by avoiding excess of strength. Nor had he departed from
his love of reality. His work was realism, though he had
endeavored to fuse with it the fancies and beauties of imagination.
What he sought was an impassioned realism, shot through with human
aspiration and faith. What he wanted was life as it was, with all
its spirit-groping and soul-reaching left in.

He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of
fiction. One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin;
the other treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heaven-sent dreams
and divine possibilities. Both the god and the clod schools erred,
in Martin's estimation, and erred through too great singleness of
sight and purpose. There was a compromise that approximated the
truth, though it flattered not the school of god, while it
challenged the brute-savageness of the school of clod. It was his
story, "Adventure," which had dragged with Ruth, that Martin
believed had achieved his ideal of the true in fiction; and it was
in an essay, "God and Clod," that he had expressed his