This acquaintance was of great
advantage to Henry Murger. Monsieur Champfleury was a young man of
energy and will, who took a practical view of life, and believed that a
pen could in good hands earn bread as well as a yardstick, and command,
what the latter cannot hope, fame. He believed that independence was
the first duty of a literary man, and that true dignity consists in
diligent labor rather than in indolent railing at fate and the scoffings
of "uncomprehended" genius. Monsieur Champfleury was no poet. He
detested poetry, and his accurate perception of the world showed him
that poetry is a good deal like paper money, which depends for its
current value rather upon the credit possessed by the issuer than upon
its own intrinsic value. He pressed Murger to abandon poetry and take to
prose. He was successful, and Murger labored to acquire bread and
reputation by his prose-compositions. He practised his hand in writing
vaudevilles, dramas, tales, and novels, and abandoned poetry until
better days, when his life should have a little more silk and a little
more gold woven into its woof. But the hours of literary apprenticeship
even of prose-writers are long and arduous, especially to those whose
only patrimony is their shadow in the sun.
Pages:
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88