This conviction Bierce holds in the fashion of a religious zealot. He has reached the stage of knowing that the rest of the world doubts his faith; therefore he asserts it the more vehemently, and flies into a rage with all who question it. His letters have been published; and in the first one, addressed to a young girl who aspires to write, he storms at the viciousness of those who would use the writer’s craft in the service of human progress. “Such ends are a prostitution of art.” And later on in the letters this champion of the art-for-art’s-sake theory reveals the terror that gnaws at his soul. “If poets saw things as they are they would write no more poetry.” Some twenty years ago Jack London sent me the first book of a San Francisco poet, and in an inscription he described the author: “I have a friend, the dearest in this world.” The book was “The Testimony of the Suns,” by George Sterling; and friendship being an unlimited thing, I also took over a share of it. For twenty years I have been puzzled at finding in this gracious companion and maker of exquisite verses certain qualities of bitterness and aching despair. When I read these letters of Ambrose Bierce I discovered a plausible explanation; for here is the young poet, submitting his first efforts; and here is the savage misanthropist using his power as a preacher and an elder, in an effort to set the poet’s feet in the paths of futility and waste. Ambrose Bierce, among his host of antagonisms, had one which amounted to an insanity--his dislike of Socialists; and he saw both London and Sterling lending their influence to the hellish cult. Bierce was one of those subtle opponents who say that they have a certain amount of sympathy with the Socialist ideal, were it not for the fact that the partisans of the cause make themselves so objectionable. Yes; they would truly be willing to see mankind delivered from poverty, crime, prostitution and war, were it not for creatures of the lunatic fringe, who wear their hair long and tie their neck-ties into a bow! There is something pathological about the ravings of Bierce on this subject, and we are not surprised to learn that in his early days a prominent Socialist writer, Laurence Gronlund, took a girl away from him, and thus excited his animosity. We find him quarreling with one person after another who persists in dallying with Socialist ideas, and in the end he quarreled even with Sterling, and wrote him letters of harsh abuse, which Sterling out of kindness to his memory destroyed.