In the* catalog of the university there were listed a number of courses in "rhetoric and English composition". They were for the purpose of teaching one how to write, and the catalog set forth convincingly the methods whereby this wai done. Thyrsis wished to know all there was to know about writing, and so he enrolled himself for an advanced course, and went for an hour every day and listened to expositions of the elements of sentence-structure by Prof. Osborne,
author of "American Prose Writers" and "The Science of Rhetoric". The professor would give him a theme, and bid him bring in a five-hundred word composition. Perhaps it was that Thyrsis was lacking in the play-spirit ; at any rate he could not write convincingly on the subject of "The Duty of the College Man to Support Athletics." He struggled for a month against his own impotence, and then went to see his instructor.
"I think," he said, "I shall have to drop Course A."
The professor gazed over his spectacles at him.
"Why?"
"I don't think I am getting any good out of it."
"But how can you tell what good you are getting?"
"I don't seem to feel that I am," said Thyrsis, deprecatingly.
"It is not to be supposed that you would feel it," said the other—"not at this early stage. You must wait."
"But I don't like the method, sir."
"What's wrong with the method?"
Thyrsis was embarrassed. He was not sure, he said; but he did not think that writing could be taught. Anyway, one had first to have something worth say-
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"Are you laboring under the delusion that you know anything about writing?" demanded the professor. (He had written across Thyrsis' last composition the words, "Feeble and trivial".)*
"Why, no," began the boy.
"Because if you are, let me disabuse your mind at once. There is no one in the class who knows less about writing than yourself."
"I think," said Thyrsis, "it's because I can't bring
myself to write in cold blood. I have to be interested. I'm sure that is the trouble."
"I'm sure,", said the other, "that the trouble is that you think you know too much."
"I'm sorry, sir," said Thyrsis, humbly. "I've tried my best "
"It is my business to teach students to write. I've given my life to that, and I think I know something about it. But you think you know more than I do. That's all."
And so they parted. Thyrsis kept a vivid recollection of this interview, for the reason that at a later stage of his career he came into contact with Prof. Osborne again, and got another glimpse of the authoritarian attitude towards the art of letters.
§ 15. THYRSIS had not many friends at college, and none at all at the university. He had no time to make any; and besides, there was a certain facetious senior who had caught him hurrying through the corridors one day, declaring in excitement that
"Banners yellow, glorious, golden, On its roof did float and flow!"
But he had long ago ceased to hope for a friend, or to care what anybody thought about him; it was clear to him by this time that he had made himself into a poet, and was doomed to be unhappy. His mother had given up all hope of seeing him a bishop, and they had compromised upon a judgeship; but here at the university there was a law-school, and he met the students, and saw that this, too, could not be. These "lawyers" were not seeking knowledge for the love of it—they were studying a trade, by which they
could rise in the world. They were not going out to do battle for truth and justice—they were perfecting themselves in cunning, so that they might be of help in money-disputes; they were sharpening their wits, to make them useful tools for the opening of treasure-chests. And this attitude to life was written all over their personalities; they seemed to Thyrsis a coarse and roistering crew, and he shrunk from them in repugnance.
He went his own impetuous way. He stayed at the university until he had taught himself French and Italian, as well as German, and had read all the best literature in those languages. And likewise he heard all the best music, and went about full of it day and night. By this time he had definitely beaten his devils, and had come to be master of himself; and though nobody guessed anything about it, there was a new marvel going on within him—he had, in a spiritual sense, become pregnant.
There were many signs by which this state might have been known. He went quite alone, and spoke to no man; he was self-absorbed, and walked about with his eyes fixed on vacancy; he was savage when disturbed, and guarded his time unscrupulously. He had given up the very last of the formalities of life—he no longer attended any lectures, or wore cuffs, and he would not talk at meal-times. He took long walks at impossible hours, and he was fond of a certain high hill where the storms blew. These things had been going on for a year; and now the book that had been coming to ripeness in his mind was ready to be born.
It had its origin in the reading of history, and the fronting; of old tyranny in its cruel forms. Thyrsis
•/ •/ •/
had come to hate Christianity for many things by that
time, but most of all he hated it because it taught the bastard virtue of Obedience. Thyrsis obeyed no man-he lived his life; and the fiery ardor with which he lived it was taking form in his mind as a personality. He was dreaming a hero who should be Resistance incarnate ; the passionate assertion of man's right and of man's defiance.
It was in the days of ferocity in Italy, the days of the despot and the bravo; and Thyrsis' hero was a minstrel, a mighty musician whose soul was free. And he sung in the despot's hall, and wooed the despot's daughter. This was the minstrel of "Zulieka"
"His ladder of song was slight, But it reached to her window's height; Each verse so frail was the silken rail, From which her soul took flight."
Thyrsis went about quite drunk with the burning words with which the minstrel won the lady, and tore her free from the mockeries of convention, and that divinity that doth hedge about a princess. He bore her away, locked tightly in his arms, and all his own—into the great lonely mountains ; and there lived the minstrel and the princess, the lord and the lady of an outlaw band. But the outlaws were cruel, and the minstrel sought goodness; and so there was a struggle, and he and the lady went yet deeper into the black forest, where they dwelt alone in a hut, he a prince of hunters and she a princess of love. But the outlaws led the despot to the place, and there was a battle; the princess was slain, and the minstrel escaped in the darkness. All night he roamed the forest, and in the morning he lay by the roadside with a bow in his hand, and when the despot rode by he rose and drove the shaft through his
heart. Then they captured him, and tortured him, and he died with a song of mockery and defiance upon his lips.
§ 16. Now, when these things first came to Thyrsis, he whispered in awe that it would be a life-time before he could write them. And a year passed thus, while every emotion of his life poured itself into some part of that story, and every note of music that he heard came out of the minstrel's heart. At last the time came when he was so full of it that he could no longer find peace; when the wonder of it was such that he walked along the street laughing, and with tears in his eyes. Then he said to himself, "It must be done! Now! Now!" And he looked about him as a woman might, seeking some place for her labor.
That was in the late winter, when the professors at the university, and all his relatives and acquaintances, had given him up as a hopeless case. He had stopped all his writing for money—he had a hundred dollars laid by, and that would suffice him; and he was wandering about whispering to himself: "The springtime! The spring-time! For it must be in the country!" When April had come he could stand it no longer—he must go! So he left all behind him, and set out for a place in the wilderness.