爱华网When I was a child, my farther once gave me a book of short stories. When I was reading it, I felt that I was sitting in a theatre filled with dreams, fairies and mysteries. Sometimes I crawled in the forest with empty stomach; sometimes I lay on the snowfield with freezing leg; sometimes I rush against the fire with the red banner on my shoulder; sometimes I bowled over the opponent with boxing gloves under thundering cheers; sometimes I won the bet of sleigh match with my muscular malamute; sometimes I threw my last wood into the fire with dozens of hungry wolves waiting around. The book brought me from shiny California to icy Alaska, from secret ocean to silent wasteland, from the bar with stinking smoke to the deck under starry sky. At that time, I memorized the name of the author as unforgettable as my own--Jack London.
To my memory, most of his works deal romantically with the overwhelming power of nature and the struggle for survival such as Love of Life, Law of Life, To Build a Fire, and the White Silence. In his novel--the Sea-Wolf, Spencerian Evolutionism and Nietzschean Philosophy are told by the words of Wolf Larson. As his experience of an oyster pirate, a gold-seeker, a newspaper correspondent and a war correspondent, histories, romantic adventures with realistic setting and character can be found in most of his stories. He is especially famous for description of animals, men and nature, but the novel Martin Eden is quite different. He wrote love and its destroy.
When I read Martin Eden, something reminded me of another famous character―John Christopher. Although Jack London and Roman Rolland are totally different writers, I sometimes really find something similar of the two geniuses.
Both of them were of talent. Their life used to be with tears, sorrow, disappointment, loneliness and heartbreaks, but they won the reputation and respect of general public at last. When they were young, they were both pure, passionate, innocent and idealist. They adhere to their art as the truth of life; they were attacked by neighboring people and satirize by barbed critics; they were fed up with failure but never stopped marching; they both fell in love and both of them were hurt by love; they found the precious friendship and then lost it; they hated their former works which they used to regard as the outstanding masterpieces; they never stopped self-criticized in their growth; they met some people who helped them in a silent way; sometimes they were a little bit radical, wide and overconfident, but all the time they were kind and sincere; they usually deeply suffered from their mistakes; they are apparently selfish because of their spirits of self-sacrifice.
The two energetic young fantasts shared their art of life but the endings were far from the same. John Christopher got his truth while Martin Eden turned to be a tragedy. Sometimes I questioned myself that what is the cross diverging their destiny.
A man’s fate is determined by his heredity, environmental factors and those occasional cases. The later two points maybe the answers. Martin Eden’s suicide is not because of despair of literature, but because of despair of people. The despair of love, of humanity, and of social reality destroyed his hope of life.
