IX

MOUNT TOM IS CONVERTED

Motto: (To be Sung to the Tune of "I want to be an Angel.”)

I want to be an Ad-man

And with the Ad-men stand
A Searchlight on my forehead
And a world within my hand.

But with all my gladness and fresh desire to be of service, I did not find it as easy to be of some use-to a toothbrushI would have thought.

-as

I had to be honest with a toothbrush. I had to struggle to realize what it was. (People may laugh if they like.) I had to go through spiritual fires to express a toothbrush as well as I could.

A man never realizes anything until he tries either in action or in words to express it to himself. If he can express it to others, he realizes it still more.

I had been writing and was writing every day about everything that interested me, trying to realize things in words and to make them over into a kind of word-living: the angleworm on the sidewalk after the rain at 206 South Street was in the same number of Mount Tom I was writing that week, roosters, too, and poor people, dogs, poppies, clouds and mountains, Walt Whitman-dandelions and some little whirls of dust I saw in the road.

On the same principle, I might be in the middle of a book on the poetry of the future (which I was), but I could not help having off moments of being interested in toothbrushes—in the

humanness, the homeliness—in the spiritual experiences parents had in trying to get children to use them. And in the children's spiritual experiences, too.

And the same was true of writing paper or hot-water bottles, and also, Gentle Reader, would you believe it, even of soap and of hooks and eyes and of the ethics, æsthetics, dynamics and immoralities of pianolas!

Trying to get a boy to use his toothbrush is a serious, amusing, and interesting subject. All one has to do is to get enough of the boy in. Everything is interesting when one sees it in all its bearings or enough of its bearings.

I do not want to dwell on this point too long, but the whole point of my book turns on it, on what might seem at first perhaps the telling of the little story of my own mind and of how I was brought out from a region of literary snobbishness

an art preserve, from that old private, select twilight or moonlight of the arts into what seems to me now the plainer, deeper, higher, more radiant sunshine of the common day which sheds itself with the same delight on redwood trees and milkweeds, which clothes the ocean with wonder-does off dewdrops, pyramids and nations all at a stroke, which at the same time up in the wide sky holds the stars in their places and on the nursery walls frolics with the baby in his crib.

Suffice it to say that advertisement writing undertaken in this way as a means of making practicable a good start for Mount Tom was too profitable to be long necessary. If I was to write with regard to other things as I wanted to, it soon became apparent that with regard to the advertisements (if I did not want to peter out into a millionaire) they would have to be dropped. So they were.

The advertisements in Mount Tom as they appeared from issue to issue were copyrighted. They were then sold outright for a generous price to the manufacturers interested and used and printed as they liked in all magazines.

Of course what I supposed I was working out (having the

position of being a capitalist without having any capital) was a scheme for giving Mount Tom a start, but what I was really working out was very different. I was working out with bits of ink on bits of paper, blunderingly, with my eyes slowly prying open, a vision of civilization, a theory of literature-(and with a strange new gladness) one more man's life!

All the great principles that apply in literature and art, the principle of seeing the universal in the particular, the infinite in the little, the slow, deep, transfiguring or illuminating of the world which the artist lives to achieve all these are brought into play in trying to express in all its relations to humanity, the round of human emotions, the common-looking things. They are very convenient. Everybody has some of them. And they have become common-looking things only because very common people, i. e., very tired, hurried people, or inspired people in their very tired moods, have allowed them one by one to slip over into that sea of meaninglessness, of sleep, of inattention and emptiness that rolls in our ears. Every now and then I find myself on purpose going out about me--and looking— deliberately rescuing some common workaday thing. It makes the world all over in a minute when I have done it. I wake up into that old delighted awareness once more-that old literal face-to-faceness with things; I see this beautiful young world, like some mighty youth in his gray work clothes, suddenly stripped before me, standing there like a god in the morning. It makes me strangely happy. If no one ever saw a line of what I have felt in looking at a fountain pen or in trying to make people buy a fountain pen-I would write the advertisement for what the advertisement did for me. If I can get my homely world about me suddenly touched with imagination-flooded with light-I do not care whether it is done by my thoughts in the presence of a brook, a mountain, or a typewriter, or a spool of thread. I do not care whether the light is turned on by a sunset or a button. A sunset is a button-to God, and if I am in my senses a button is a sunset to me.

If I wanted to train a boy to be a literary artist I would have him write exclusively at first about little things until he saw the heavens and the earth and his God reflected in the little things—the praying and singing of his own life, until his life became filled with tiny, mighty symbols, dewdrop-universes, dandelions, Pleiades up over the sleepy world, and crickets in the grass chanting to the sky. What makes a man a man in this world is the platitudes he can destroy—the miracles he has stripped off of the common things at his side. He can go anywhere. There is always that perennial fresh, innocent nakedness of simple things before his soul.

And so he lives and keeps a boy and becomes a man-becomes a candidate for an artist or even a prophet.

If I wanted to train a boy to be not only a literary artist but a prophet, to become a master, a mighty lover, a magician in the human heart—an artist in making things happen, I would let him try his hand at writing about the things that human beings use and want, the things that most men despise, until they become as warm and human, as big with his soul, as touched with affection and beauty and fear and hope as the lives of the men and the women who use them.

The man who picks up a lady's handkerchief or a flower that she has dropped and who hides it or carries it around with him for days as a presence, as a smile, as a voice-has in him the spiritual secret out of which Wordsworth wrote his Ode to Immortality, and out of which any real man does any real thing.

The seeing a thing in an intense, vivid, poetic realness in its full associations, its deepest human associations, and possibilities as it really is, is what Wordsworth wrote his poetry out of. Shakespeare in writing Hamlet's soliloquy with the skull and John Powers in writing his advertisement of the Macbeth lamp chimney both played with the same divine, terrible, beautiful fire of human association, of electric human realization, the fire that burns through what they are writing about, their purpose in writing it.

I am not sure, too, but that it is more difficult to attain the necessary purity of being, the moral transparency and artistic honesty to express a lamp chimney so that anyone will want to buy one to see if it is as represented, than it is to express death so that anybody would want to die to see if it is as quaint and curious and amusing as represented by Shakespeare in Hamlet's soliloquy.

The principle of spiritual and physical preparation and training necessary for both of these acts of expression is the same, and I doubt if there is a man who could successfully contradict the fact that this is the law of artistic expression except some man who cannot express himself and who will not really be right, of course, until he can.

This is what I mean by the first paragraph of this chapter: “I had to be honest with a toothbrush. I had to struggle to realize what it was. (People may laugh if they like.) I had to go through spiritual fires to express a toothbrush as well as I could."