In anticipating Philip's career, however, it must not be understood that
he had attained any wide public recognition. He was simply enrolled in
the great army of readers and was serving his apprenticeship. He was
recognized as a capable man by those who purvey in letters to the
entertainment of the world. Even this little foothold was not easily
gained in a day, as the historian discovered in reading some bundles of
old letters which Philip wrote in this time of his novitiate to Celia
and to his cousin Alice.
It was against Celia's most strenuous advice that he had trusted himself
to a literary career. “I see, my dear friend,” she wrote, in reply to
his announcement that he was going that day to Mr. Hunt to resign his
position, “that you are not happy, but whatever your disappointment
or disillusion, you will not better yourself by surrendering a regular
occupation. You live too much in the imagination already.”
Philip fancied, with that fatuity common to his sex, that he had worn an
impenetrable mask in regard to his wild passion for Evelyn, and did not
dream that, all along, Celia had read him like an open book. She judged
Philip quite accurately. It was herself that she did not know, and she
would have repelled as nonsense the suggestion that her own restlessness
and her own changing experiments in occupation were due to the
unsatisfied longings of a woman's heart.
“You must not think,” the letter went on, “that I want to dictate, but
I have noticed that men--it may be different with women--only succeed
by taking one path and diligently walking in it. And literature is not a
career, it is just a toss up, a lottery, and woe to you if you once draw
a lucky number--you will always be expecting another... You say that I
am a pretty one to give advice, for I am always chopping and changing
myself. Well, from the time you were a little boy, did I ever give you
but one sort of advice? I have been constant in that. And as to myself,
you are unjust. I have always had one distinct object in life, and that
I have pursued. I wanted to find out about life, to have experience, and
then do what I could do best, and what needed most to be done. Why did
I not stick to teaching in that woman's college? Well, I began to have
doubts, I began to experiment on my pupils. You will laugh, but I will
give you a specimen. One day I put a question to my literature class,
and I found out that not one of them knew how to boil potatoes. They
were all getting an education, and hardly one of them knew how much
the happiness of a home depends upon having the potatoes mealy and not
soggy. It was so in everything. How are we going to live when we are all
educated, without knowing how to live? Then I found that the masses here
in New York did not know any better than the classes how to live. Don't
think it is just a matter of cooking. It is knowing how, generally, to
make the most of yourself and of your opportunities, and have a nice
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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