The young author went back to his “pot-boiling.” He spent another winter in New York, wrestling with disillusionments and humiliations, and then, fleeing to the wilderness for a third summer, he put his experience into “The Journal of Arthur Stirling,” the story of a young poet who is driven to suicide by neglect and despair. The book was given to the world as a genuine document, and relieved the tedium of a literary season. Its genuineness was accepted almost everywhere, and the author sat behind the scenes, feeling quite devilish. When the secret came out, some critics were cross, and one or two of them have not yet forgiven the writer. The “New York Evening Post” is accustomed to mention the matter every once in a while, declaring that the person who played that trick can never receive anyone’s confidence. I will not waste space discussing this question, save to point out that the newspaper reviewers had set the rules of the game—that love and beauty in art were heeded only in connection with personalities and sensation; so, in order to project love and beauty upon the world, the young author had provided the personalities and sensation. As for the “Evening Post” and its self-righteousness, before I finish this book I shall tell of things done by that organ of Wall Street which qualify decidedly its right to sit in judgment upon questions of honor. CHAPTER III OPEN SESAME! My next effort was “Manassas,” a novel of the Civil war. I poured into it all my dream of what America might be, and inscribed it: “That the men of this land may know the heritage that has come down to them.” But the men of this land were not in any way interested in the heritage that had come down to them. The men of this land were making money. The newspapers of this land were competing for advertisements of whiskey and cigars and soap, and the men who wrote book-reviews for the literary pages of these newspapers were chuckling over such works of commercial depravity as “The Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son.” They had no time to tell the public about “Manassas”; though Jack London called it “the best Civil War book I’ve read,” and though it is my one book which no severest critic can say has any propaganda motive. Charlotte Perkins Gilman told me a story of how she persuaded an old Civil War veteran to read it. The old fellow didn’t want to read any book about the war by a youngster; he had been through it all himself, and no youngster could tell him anything. But Mrs. Gilman persisted, and when she met him again she found him with shining eyes and a look of wonder on his face. “It’s the War!” he cried. “It’s the War—and he wasn’t even born!”