Chapter XXXII - Page 2

"Yes, that's it, a good phrase, - mouthing and besliming the True,
and Beautiful, and Good, and finally patting him on the back and
saying, 'Good dog, Fido.' Faugh! 'The little chattering daws of
men,' Richard Realf called them the night he died."

"Pecking at star-dust," Martin took up the strain warmly; "at the
meteoric flight of the master-men. I once wrote a squib on them -
the critics, or the reviewers, rather."

"Let's see it," Brissenden begged eagerly.

So Martin unearthed a carbon copy of "Star-dust," and during the
reading of it Brissenden chuckled, rubbed his hands, and forgot to
sip his toddy.

"Strikes me you're a bit of star-dust yourself, flung into a world
of cowled gnomes who cannot see," was his comment at the end of it.
"Of course it was snapped up by the first magazine?"

Martin ran over the pages of his manuscript book. "It has been
refused by twenty-seven of them."

Brissenden essayed a long and hearty laugh, but broke down in a fit
of coughing.

"Say, you needn't tell me you haven't tackled poetry," he gasped.
"Let me see some of it."

"Don't read it now," Martin pleaded. "I want to talk with you.
I'll make up a bundle and you can take it home."

Brissenden departed with the "Love-cycle," and "The Peri and the
Pearl," returning next day to greet Martin with:-

"I want more."

Not only did he assure Martin that he was a poet, but Martin
learned that Brissenden also was one. He was swept off his feet by
the other's work, and astounded that no attempt had been made to
publish it.

"A plague on all their houses!" was Brissenden's answer to Martin's
volunteering to market his work for him. "Love Beauty for its own
sake," was his counsel, "and leave the magazines alone. Back to
your ships and your sea - that's my advice to you, Martin Eden.
What do you want in these sick and rotten cities of men? You are
cutting your throat every day you waste in them trying to
prostitute beauty to the needs of magazinedom. What was it you
quoted me the other day? - Oh, yes, 'Man, the latest of the
ephemera.' Well, what do you, the latest of the ephemera, want
with fame? If you got it, it would be poison to you. You are too
simple, took elemental, and too rational, by my faith, to prosper
on such pap. I hope you never do sell a line to the magazines.
Beauty is the only master to serve. Serve her and damn the
multitude! Success! What in hell's success if it isn't right
there in your Stevenson sonnet, which outranks Henley's
'Apparition,' in that 'Love-cycle,' in those sea-poems?

"It is not in what you succeed in doing that you get your joy, but
in the doing of it. You can't tell me. I know it. You know it.