And, what was more, during this new period I heard and occasionally saw discouraging things in connection with him from time to time. True to his great promise, for I sincerely think M---- had a genuine fondness for his young protege, as much of a fondness as he could well have for anything, he guaranteed him perhaps as much as three thousand a year; sent him to Stockholm at the age of twenty-four or
But after meeting with and working for M---- under this new arrangement and being apparently fascinated for the moment by his personality, he seemed to me to gradually lose sight of his ideal, to be actually taken in by the plausible arguments which the latter could spin with the ease that a spider spins gossamer. In that respect I insist that M---- was a bad influence. Under his tutelage L---- gradually became, for instance, an habitue of a well-known and pseudo-bohemian chop-house, a most mawkish and naively imitative affair, intended frankly to be a copy or even the original, forsooth, of an old English inn, done, in so far as its woodwork was concerned, in smoked or dark-stained oak to represent an old English interior, its walls covered with long-stemmed pipes and pictures of English hunting and drinking scenes, its black-stained but unvarnished tables littered with riding, driving and country-life society papers, to give it that air of sans ceremonie with an upper world of which its habitues probably possessed no least inkling but most eagerly craved. Here, along with a goodly group of his latter-day friends, far different from those by whom he had first been surrounded—a pretentious society poet of no great merit but considerable self-emphasis, a Wall Street broker, posing as a club man, raconteur, “first-nighter” and what not, and several young and ambitious playwrights, all seeking the heaven of a Broadway success—he began to pose as one of the intimates of the great city, its bosom child as it were, the cynosure and favorite of its most glittering precincts—a most M-----like proceeding. His clothes by now, for I saw him on occasion, had taken on a more lustrous if less convincing aspect than those he had worn when I first knew him. The small round hat or rakish cap, typical of his Western dreams, had now given way to a most pretentious square-topped derby, beloved, I believe, of undertakers and a certain severe type of banker as well as some clergymen, only it was a light brown. His suit and waistcoat were of a bright English tweed, reddish-brown or herring-bone gray by turns, his shoes box-toed perfections of the button type. He carried a heavy cane, often a bright leather manuscript case, and seemed intensely absorbed in the great and dramatic business of living and writing. “One must,” so I read him at this time, “take the pleasures as well as the labors of this world with the utmost severity.” Here, with a grand manner, he patronized the manager and the waiters, sent word to his friend the cook, who probably did not know him at all, that his chop or steak was to be done just so. These friends of his, or at least one of them (the poet) he met every day at five for an all-essential game of chess, after which an evening paper was read and the chop ordered. Ale—not beer—in a pewter mug was comme il faut, the only thing for a gentleman of letters, worthy of the name, to drink.
I am sorry to write so, for after all youth must have its fling. Still, I had expected better of L----, and I was a little disappointed to see that earlier dream of simplicity and privation giving way to an absolutely worthless show. Besides, twenty or thirty such stories as “The Right Man,” “Sweet Dreams,” “The Man With the Broken Fingers,” “The Second Motive,” would outweigh a thousand of the things he was getting published and the profits of which permitted him these airs.
Again, during the early days of his success with M----, he had married—a young nurse who had previously been a clerk in a store, a serious, earnest and from one point of view helpful person, seeing that she could keep his domestic affairs in order and bear him children, which she did, but she had no understanding of, or flair for, the type of thing he was called upon to do. She had no instinct for literature or the arts, and aside from her domestic capacities little skill or taste for “socializing.” And, naturally, he was neglecting her. His head was probably surging with great ideas of art and hence a social supremacy which might well carry him anywhere. He had bought a farm some distance from New York, where in a community supposedly inhabited by successful and superior men of letters he posed as a farmer at times, mowing and cocking hay as became a Western plow-boy; and also, as the mood moved him, and as became a great and secluded writer, working in a den entirely surrounded by books in fine leather bindings (!) and being visited by those odd satellites of the scriptic art who see in genius of this type the summum bonum of life. It was the thing to do at that time, for a writer to own a farm and work it. Horace had. One individual in particular, a man of genuine literary and critical ability and great taste in the matter of all the arts but with no least interest in or tolerance for the simplicities of effort, came here occasionally, as I heard, to help him pile hay, and this in a silk shirt and a monocle; a second—and a most fascinating intellectual flaneur, who, however, had no vision or the gift of dreams—came to eat, drink, talk of many things to be done, to steal a few ideas, borrow a little money perhaps or consume a little morphine, and depart; a third came to spout of his success in connection with plays, or his proposed successes; a fourth to paint a picture, urged on by L----; a fifth to compose rural verse; a sixth, a broker or race-track tout or city bar-tender (for color, this last), to marvel that one of L----‘s sense, or any one indeed, should live in the country at all. There were drinking bouts, absolute drunkenness, in which, according to the Johnsonian tradition and that of Messieurs Rabelais and Moliere, the weary intellect and one’s guiding genius were immersed in a comforting Lethe of rye.