the next day i was left to myself, and visited city hall, brooklyn bridge, wall street and the financial and commercial sections.
i, having no skill for making money and intensely hungry for the things that money would buy, stared at wall street, a kind of cloudy olympus in which foregathered all the gods of finance, with the eyes of one who hopes to extract something by mere observation. physically it was not then, as it is today, the center of a sky-crowded world. there were few if any high buildings below city hall, few higher than ten stories. wall street was curved, low-fronted, like oxford street in london. it began, as some one had already pointed out, at a graveyard and ended at a river. the house of j. p. morgan was just then being assailed for its connection with a government gold bond issue. the offices of russell sage and george gould (the son), as well as those of the standard oil company below wall in broadway, and those of a whole company of now forgotten magnates, could have been pointed out by any messenger boy, postman or policeman. what impressed me was that the street was vibrant with something which, though far from pleasing, craft, greed, cunning, niggardliness, ruthlessness, a smart swaggering ease on the part of some, and hopeless, bedraggled or beaten aspect on the part of others, held my interest as might a tiger or a snake. i had never seen such a world. it was so busy and paper-bestrewn, messenger and broker bestridden, as to make one who had nothing to do there feel dull and commonplace. one thought only of millions made in stocks over night, of yachts, orgies, travels, fames and what not else. since that time wall street has become much tamer, less significant, but then one had a feeling that if only one had a tip or a little skill one might become rich; or that, on the other hand, one might be torn to bits and that here was no mercy.
i arrived a little before noon, and the ways were alive with messenger boys and young clerks and assistants. on the ground was a mess of papers, torn telegrams and letters. near broad and wall streets the air was filled with a hum of voices and typewriter clicks issuing from open windows. just then, as with the theatrical business later, and still later with the motion picture industry, it had come to be important to be in the street, however thin one’s connection. to say “i am in wall street” suggested a world of prospects and possibilities. the fact that at this time, and for twenty years after, the news columns were all but closed to suicides and failures in wall street, so common were they, illustrates how vagrant and unfounded were the dreams of many.
but the end of wall street as the seat of american money domination might even then have been foretold. the cities of the nation were growing. new and by degrees more or less independent centers of finance were being developed. in the course of fifteen years it had become the boast of some cities that they could do without new york in the matter of loans, and it was true. they could; and today many enterprises go west, not east, for their cash. in the main, wall street has degenerated into a second-rate gamblers’ paradise. what significant wall street figures are there today?
on one of my morning walks in new york i had wandered up broadway to the herald building and looked into its windows, where were visible a number of great presses in full operation, much larger than any i had seen in the west, and my brother had recalled to me the fact that james gordon bennett, owner and editor of the herald, had once commissioned henry m. stanley, at that time a reporter on the paper, to go to africa to find livingstone. and my good brother, who romanticized all things, my supposed abilities and possibilities included, was inclined to think that if i came to new york some such great thing might happen to me.
on another day i went to printing house square, where i stared at the sun and world and times and tribune buildings, all facing city hall park, sighing for the opportunities that they represented. but i did not act. something about them overawed me, especially the world, the editor of which had begun his career in st. louis years before. compared with the western papers with which i had been connected, all new york papers seemed huge, the tasks they represented editorially and reportorially much more difficult. true, a brother of a famous playwright with whom i had worked in st. louis had come east and connected himself with the world, and i might have called upon him and spied out the land. he had fortified himself with a most favorable record in the west, as had i, only i did not look upon mine as so favorable somehow. again, a city editor once of st. louis was now here, city editor of one of the city’s great papers, the recorder, and another man, a sunday editor of pittsburgh, had become the sunday editor of the press here. but these appeared to me to be exceptional cases. i reconnoitered these large and in the main rather dull institutions with the eye of one who seeks to take a fortress. the editorial pages of all of these papers, as i had noticed in the west, bristled with cynical and condescending remarks about that region, and their voices representing great circulation and wealth gave them amazing weight in my eyes. although i knew what i knew about the subservience of newspapers to financial interests, their rat-like fear of religionists and moralists, their shameful betrayal of the ordinary man at every point at which he could possibly be betrayed yet still having the power, by weight of lies and pretense and make-believe, to stir him up to his own detriment and destruction, i was frightened by this very power, which in subsequent years i have come to look upon as the most deadly and forceful of all in nature: the power to masquerade and by.
there was about these papers an air of assurance and righteousness and authority and superiority which overawed and frightened me. to work on the sun, the herald, the world! how many cubs, from how many angles of our national life, were constantly and hopefully eyeing them from the very same sidewalks or benches in city hall park, as the ultimate solution of all their literary, commercial, social, political problems and ambitions. the thousands of pipe-smoking collegians who have essayed the sun alone, the scullion danas, embryo greeleys and bennetts!
i decided that it would be best for me to return to pittsburgh and save a little money before i took one of these frowning editorial offices by storm, and i did return, but in what a reduced mood! pittsburgh, after new york and all i had seen there! and in this darkly brooding and indifferent spirit i now resumed my work. a sum of money sufficient to sustain me for a period in new york was all that i wished now.
and in the course of the next four months i did save two hundred and forty dollars, enduring deprivations which i marvel at even now—breakfast consisting of a cruller and a cup of coffee; dinners that cost no more than a quarter, sometimes no more than fifteen cents. in the meantime i worked as before only to greater advantage, because i was now more sure of myself. my study of balzac and these recent adventures in the great city had so fired my ambition that nothing could have kept me in pittsburgh. i lived on so little that i think i must have done myself some physical harm which told against me later in the struggle for existence in new york.
at this time i had the fortune to discover huxley and tyndall and herbert spencer, whose introductory volume to his synthetic philosophy (first principles) quite blew me, intellectually, to bits. hitherto, until i had read huxley, i had some lingering filaments of catholicism trailing about me, faith in the existence of christ, the soundness of his moral and sociologic deductions, the brotherhood of man. but on reading science and hebrew tradition and science and christian tradition, and finding both the old and new testaments to be not compendiums of revealed truth but mere records of religious experiences, and very erroneous ones at that, and then taking up first principles and discovering that all i deemed substantial—man’s place in nature, his importance in the universe, this too, too solid earth, man’s very identity save as an infinitesimal speck of energy or a “suspended equation” drawn or blown here and there by larger forces in which he moved quite unconsciously as an atom—all questioned and dissolved into other and less understandable things, i was completely thrown down in my conceptions or non-conceptions of life.
up to this time there had been in me a blazing and unchecked desire to get on and the feeling that in doing so we did get somewhere; now in its place was the definite conviction that spiritually one got nowhere, that there was no hereafter, that one lived and had his being because one had to, and that it was of no importance. of one’s ideals, struggles, deprivations, sorrows and joys, it could only be said that they were chemic compulsions, something which for some inexplicable but unimportant reason responded to and resulted from the hope of pleasure and the fear of pain. man was a mechanism, undevised and uncreated, and a badly and carelessly driven one at that.
i fear that i cannot make you feel how these things came upon me in the course of a few weeks’ reading and left me numb, my gravest fears as to the unsolvable disorder and brutality of life eternally verified. i felt as low and hopeless at times as a beggar of the streets. there was of course this other matter of necessity, internal chemical compulsion, to which i had to respond whether i would or no. i was daily facing a round of duties which now more than ever verified all that i had suspected and that these books proved. with a gloomy eye i began to watch how the chemical—and their children, the mechanical—forces operated through man and outside him, and this under my very eyes. suicides seemed sadder since there was no care for them; failures the same. one of those periodic scandals breaking out in connection with the care of prisoners in some local or state jail, i saw how self-interest, the hope of pleasure or the fear of pain caused jailers or wardens or a sheriff to graft on prisoners, feed them rotten meat, torture them into silence and submission, and then, politics interfering (the hope of pleasure again and the fear of pain on the part of some), the whole thing hushed up, no least measure of the sickening truth breaking out in the subservient papers. life could or would do nothing for those whom it so shamefully abused.
again, there was a poor section, one street in the east pittsburgh district, shut off by a railroad at one end (the latter erecting a high fence to protect itself from trespass) and by an arrogant property owner at the other end; those within were actually left without means of ingress and egress. yet instead of denouncing either or both, the railroads being so powerful and the citizen prosperous and within his “rights,” i was told to write a humorous article but not to “hurt anybody’s feelings.” also before my eyes were always those regions of indescribable poverty and indescribable wealth previously mentioned, which were always carefully kept separate by the local papers, all the favors and compliments and commercial and social aids going to those who had, all the sniffs and indifferences and slights going to those who had not; and when i read spencer i could only sigh. all i could think of was that since nature would not or could not do anything for man, he must, if he could, do something for himself; and of this i saw no prospect, he being a product of these selfsame accidental, indifferent and bitterly cruel forces.
and so i went on from day to day, reading, thinking, doing fairly acceptable work, but always withdrawing more and more into myself. as i saw it then, the world could not understand me, nor i it, nor men each other very well. then a little later i turned and said that since the whole thing was hopeless i might as well forget it and join the narrow, heartless, indifferent scramble, but i could not do that either, lacking the temperament and the skill. all i could do was think, and since no paper such as i knew was interested in any of the things about which i was thinking, i was hopeless indeed. finally, in late november, having two hundred and forty dollars saved, i decided to leave this dismal scene and seek the charm of the great city beyond, hoping that there i might succeed at something, be eased and rested by some important work of some kind.
