had
resolved to climb high. "I will carry mother and Jessie to comfort and
to some small share, at least, in the world of art," was my resolve. In
this way I sought to palliate my selfish plan.

Obscurely forming in my mind were two great literary concepts--that
truth was a higher quality than beauty, and that to spread the reign of
justice should everywhere be the design and intent of the artist. The
merely beautiful in art seemed petty, and success at the cost of the
happiness of others a monstrous egotism.

In the spirit of these ideals I returned to my small attic room in
Jamaica Plain and set to work to put my new conceptions into some sort
of literary form.

CHAPTER XXIX

I Join the Anti-Poverty Brigade

In the slow procession of my struggling fortunes this visit to the West
seems important, for it was the beginning of my career as a fictionist.
My talk with Kirkland and my perception of the sordid monotony of farm
life had given me a new and very definite emotional relationship to my
native state. I perceived now the tragic value of scenes which had
hitherto appeared merely dull or petty. My eyes were opened to the
enforced misery of the pioneer. As a reformer my blood was stirred to
protest. As a writer I was beset with a desire to record in some form
this newly-born conception of the border.

No sooner did I reach my little desk in Jamaica Plain than I began to
write, composing in the glow of a flaming conviction. With a delightful
(and deceptive) sense of power, I graved with heavy hand, as if with pen
of steel on brazen tablets, picture after picture of the plain. I had no
doubts, no hesitations about the kind of effect I wished to produce. I
perceived little that was poetic, little that was idyllic, and nothing
that was humorous in the man, who, with hands like claws, was scratching
a scanty living from the soil of a rented farm, while his wife walked
her ceaseless round from tub to churn and from churn to tub. On the
contrary, the life of such a family appealed to me as an almost
unrelievedly tragic futility.

In the few weeks between my return and the beginning of my teaching, I
wrote several short stories, and outlined a propagandist play. With very
little thought as to whether such stories would sell rapidly or not at
all I began to send them away, to the _Century_, to _Harper's_, and
other first class magazines without permitting myself any deep
disappointment when they came back--as t