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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7b82bc --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +*.txt text eol=lf +*.htm text eol=lf +*.html text eol=lf +*.md text eol=lf diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..feb911b --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #69027 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69027) diff --git a/old/69027-0.txt b/old/69027-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 1536322..0000000 --- a/old/69027-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,16726 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook of Mammonart, by Upton Sinclair - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you -will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before -using this eBook. - -Title: Mammonart - An essay in economic interpretation - -Author: Upton Sinclair - -Release Date: September 22, 2022 [eBook #69027] - -Language: English - -Produced by: Tim Lindell, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed - Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was - produced from images made available by the HathiTrust - Digital Library.) - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAMMONART *** - - - - - - MAMMONART - - _An Essay in Economic Interpretation_ - - - BY - - UPTON SINCLAIR - - - PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR - PASADENA, CALIFORNIA - - - COPYRIGHT, 1924, 1925 - BY - UPTON SINCLAIR - - First edition, February, 1925, 4,000 copies, clothbound, - 4,000 copies, paperbound. - - - - -CONTENTS - - -CHAPTER PAGE - -I. Ogi, the Son of Og 1 - -II. Who Owns the Artists? 7 - -III. Art and Personality 11 - -IV. The Laborer and His Hire 14 - -V. The Lord’s Anointed 16 - -VI. Artificial Childhood 19 - -VII. Mrs. Ogi Emerges 21 - -VIII. The Horse-Trade 23 - -IX. The Class Lie 25 - -X. Mrs. Ogi Orders Jazz 27 - -XI. The Populist Convention 29 - -XII. Kansas and Judea 32 - -XIII. The Communist Almanac 35 - -XIV. God’s Propaganda 38 - -XV. Mrs. Prestonia Orders Plumbing 40 - -XVI. Mrs. Ogi Orders Etiquette 42 - -XVII. William Randolph Alcibiades 45 - -XVIII. The Age of Hero-Worship 46 - -XIX. Hundred Per Cent Athenian 49 - -XX. The Funny Man of Reaction 52 - -XXI. Athens and Los Angeles 56 - -XXII. The Slave Empire 58 - -XXIII. Dumb Pious Æneas 60 - -XXIV. The Roman Four Hundred 63 - -XXV. The American Empire 68 - -XXVI. The Christian Revolution 70 - -XXVII. The Ins and the Outs 71 - -XXVIII. The Heaven of Elegance 74 - -XXIX. The Muckraker’s Hell 77 - -XXX. The Pious Poisoners 80 - -XXXI. The Papal Paymasters 84 - -XXXII. Who Is Crazy? 88 - -XXXIII. Ogi, Anglomaniac 92 - -XXXIV. Phosphorescence and Decay 95 - -XXXV. The Good Man Theory 98 - -XXXVI. Comic Relief 101 - -XXXVII. Praise for Puritans 105 - -XXXVIII. Comrade’s Progress 110 - -XXXIX. Vanity Fair 113 - -XL. Glory Propaganda 116 - -XLI. Unbridled Desires 120 - -XLII. The Harpooner of Hypocrisy 124 - -XLIII. Écrasez l’Infame 130 - -XLIV. The Trumpeter of Revolution 135 - -XLV. The Harvard Manner 139 - -XLVI. The Poisoned Rat 142 - -XLVII. Virtue Rewarded 144 - -XLVIII. The Good Fellow’s Code 146 - -XLIX. The Gauger of Genius 148 - -L. The Brain Proprietor 150 - -LI. Politics Is Fate 154 - -LII. Behind the Hedge-Rows 159 - -LIII. Tory Romance 163 - -LIV. The Meaning of Magic 167 - -LV. The Tory Whip 171 - -LVI. The Fear That Kills 173 - -LVII. The First Lord of Letters 175 - -LVIII. The Angel of Revolt 178 - -LIX. The Stable-Keeper’s Son 183 - -LX. The Predatory Artist 190 - -LXI. The Old Communard 194 - -LXII. Tyger, Tyger! 199 - -LXIII. The Child of His Age 202 - -LXIV. Prayer in Adultery 204 - -LXV. Main Street in France 206 - -LXVI. The Mattress Grave 209 - -LXVII. Siegfried-Bakunin 211 - -LXVIII. The Gospel of Silence 216 - -LXIX. The Lullaby Laureate 220 - -LXX. High-Brow Society 225 - -LXXI. Official Pessimism 228 - -LXXII. God Save the People 231 - -LXXIII. The Collector of Snobs 233 - -LXXIV. Arts and Crafts 236 - -LXXV. Seeing America First 239 - -LXXVI. The Age of Innocence 242 - -LXXVII. A Snow-Bound Saint 244 - -LXXVIII. Puritanism in Decay 246 - -LXXIX. The Angel Israfel 249 - -LXXX. The Good Grey Poet 253 - -LXXXI. Cabbage Soup 258 - -LXXXII. Dead Souls 260 - -LXXXIII. The Russian Hamlet 263 - -LXXXIV. The Dead-House 265 - -LXXXV. The Christian Bull-Dog 268 - -LXXXVI. The Peasant Count 271 - -LXXXVII. Headaches and Dyspepsia 276 - -LXXXVIII. The Troughs of Zolaism 279 - -LXXXIX. The Sportive Demon 283 - -XC. The Foe of Formulas 285 - -XCI. The Biological Superior 289 - -XCII. The Overman 291 - -XCIII. The Octopus Cities 295 - -XCIV. The Inspired Parrakeet 298 - -XCV. The Green Carnation 302 - -XCVI. The White Chrysanthemum 307 - -XCVII. The Duel of Wit 312 - -XCVIII. The Cultured-Class Historian 316 - -XCIX. The Premier Novelist 322 - -C. The Uncrowned King 326 - -CI. Smiling America 333 - -CII. The Eminent Tankard-Man 337 - -CIII. The Soldier of Fortune 341 - -CIV. The Bowery Boy 345 - -CV. The California Octopus 349 - -CVI. The Old-Fashioned American 353 - -CVII. Badgad-on-the-Subway 357 - -CVIII. Supermanhood 363 - -CIX. The Stealthy Nemesis 372 - -CX. The Rebel Immortal 379 - -CXI. A Text-Book for Russia 383 - - - - -MAMMONART - - - - -CHAPTER I - -OGI, THE SON OF OG - - -One evening in the year minus ninety-eight thousand and -seventy-six--that is, one hundred thousand years ago--Ogi, the son of -Og, sat in front of a blazing fire in the cave, licking his greasy lips -and wiping his greasy fingers upon the thick brown hair of his chest. -The grease on Ogi’s lips and fingers had come from a chunk out of an -aurochs, which Ogi had roasted on a sharpened stick before the fire. The -tribe had been hunting that day, and Ogi himself had driven the spear -through the eye of the great creature. Being young, he was a hero; and -now he had a hero’s share of meat in him, and sat before the fire, -sleepy-eyed, retracing in dull, slow revery the incidents of the hunt. - -In his hand was the toasting-stick, and he toyed with it, making marks -upon the ground. Presently, half involuntarily, there came a pattern -into these marks: a long mark--that was how the body of the aurochs -went; two marks in front, the forelegs of the aurochs; two marks in -back, the hind legs; a big scratch in front, the head. And suddenly Ogi -found a thrill running over him. There was the great beast before him, -brought magically back to life by markings in the dirt. Ogi had made the -first picture! - -But then terror seized him. He lived in a world of terror, and always -had to act before he dared to think. Hastily he scratched over the dirt, -until every trace of the magic beast was gone. He gazed behind him, -expecting to see the spirit of the aurochs, summoned into the cave by -this fearful new magic. He glanced at the other members of his tribe, -crouching sleepily about the fire, to see if they had noticed his daring -venture. - -But nothing evil happened; the meat in Ogi’s stomach did not develop bad -spirits that summer night, neither did the lightning poke him with its -dagger, nor a tree-limb crash upon his head. Therefore, next evening a -temptation came upon him; he remembered his marks, and ventured to bring -back his magic aurochs, and sit before the fire and watch him toss his -head and snort at his enemies. As time passed Ogi did a thing yet -bolder; he made a straight up-and-down mark, with two prongs underneath, -and a round circle on top; Ogi himself, a double Ogi, with his long -spear stopping the monster’s charge! - -Even that did not prove bad magic; Ogi did not sicken, no -lightning-daggers or tree-branches struck him. With practice, another -idea came; he indicated the body of the aurochs by two marks, one above -and one below, where the creature vanished into space. Between these -were other scratches indicating a shaggy coat; and in the head a round -spot, with a black hole punched deep by the toasting-stick--the eye of -the monster, glaring balefully at Ogi, and filling him with such thrills -as had never before passed along the nerves of a living organism. - -Of course such big magic could not long remain a secret. Ogi was -irresistibly driven to show his homemade aurochs to the tribe, and there -was a tremendous commotion. It was a miracle, all made clear by their -gruntings; they knew the monster instantly--an aurochs, and nothing -else! They cried out with delight at the cleverness of the -representation. - -(And ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and sixty-six years later, when -the writer was a little boy, he used to see in a certain home of wealth -which he visited, three pictures hanging in the dining-room, and -appealing to gastronomic emotions. One picture represented several -peaches on a platter, another represented half a dozen fish on a string, -the third showed two partridges hanging by their necks. The members of -the tribe of Ogi, now called the Merchants and Manufacturers Association -of Baltimore, would gather at supper parties and marvel at this big -magic. Here were works of art, and all knew they were works of art, and -knew exactly why; they would say of the fish: “You can see the very -shine of the scales!” Of the peaches: “You can rub the fuzz off them!” -Of the birds: “You can bury your hands in the feathers!”) - -But when the first thrills had passed, the dwellers in the cave with Ogi -fell victims to panic. An aurochs was a fearful and destructive beast; -it was hard enough to have to kill him for food--but now to bring back -his angry spirit was tempting fate. In the Holy Mountain fronting the -cave dwelt the Great Hunter, who made all aurochs, and would be jealous -of usurpers. The Witch Doctor of the tribe, who visited the Great Hunter -and made spells for good luck--he was the proper person to make magic, -and not an up-start boy. So the Witch Doctor trampled out the drawing of -Ogi, and the Old Man of the tribe, who made the laws, drove him out from -the cave, and into the night where the sabre-toothed tiger roamed. - -(And last winter the writer stood one night at 43rd Street and Broadway, -a busy corner of New York, and across the front of a building a whole -block long he beheld great letters of violet fire, spelling three words: -THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. He entered the building, and there upon a silver -screen he saw a flash of lightning, followed by a burst of clouds and a -terrifying clatter of stage thunder, and out of the lightning and clouds -and thunder was unrolled before his eyes the Second Commandment: _Thou -shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything -that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in -the water under the earth._) - -Ogi found a cave of his own, and escaped the sabre-tooth tiger. And not -all the furies of the Witch Doctor, nor even the Ten Commandments of the -Great Hunter, could take from his mind the memory of those delicious -thrills which had stolen over him when he made the magic aurochs in the -dirt. Being now alone, he had time for magic, and he got red stones and -covered the walls of his cave with pictured beasts of many sorts. And -presently came young men from the tribe, and beholding what he had done, -they took to visiting him in secret to share the forbidden thrills. - -(And on Main Street in our Great City, I can take you to a cave with -letters of fire over the top, called an “arcade,” and you may go in, and -find the magic of Ogi hidden in little boxes, into which you drop a -token made of copper, and see what is to be seen. One part of this cave -is labeled, _For Men Only_. I have never been into this part, and -therefore do not know what magic the descendants of Ogi have there -hidden; but it is interesting to know that a nerve channel, once -established in a living organism, can be handed down through generations -to the number of three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three.) - -Now in the course of time it happened that there was war in the tribe -between the Old Man and the Next Oldest Man; and also between the Old -Witch Doctor and the Next Doctor. The rebels, having learned about the -magic of Ogi, desired to make use of it. There was a secret meeting, at -which the rebel Witch Doctor declared that he had had an interview with -the Great Hunter on the Holy Mountain, and the Great Hunter Himself had -given Ogi power to make the magic aurochs, and to kill them in magic -hunts. In other words, said the Witch Doctor, Ogi was an Inspired -Artist; and if he and his friends would help the new party into power, -Ogi would become Court Painter, and his scratches would be raised to the -status of Ritual. Needless to say, Ogi was delighted at that, and -likewise his friends, some of whom had learned to make scratches almost -as good as Ogi’s, and who desired now to become Inspired Artists, and to -decorate the cave walls and weapons of the tribe. - -But one provision must be made clear, said the rebel Witch Doctor; Ogi -and his friends must understand that they were to glorify the magic of -this particular Witch Doctor. When they portrayed hunting, they must -make it plain that it was the new Old Man who was head of the hunt; they -must make him wonderful and fearful to the tribe. Ogi and his pupils -answered that so long as they were permitted to make drawings of aurochs -and of hunters, it made not the slightest difference what aurochs and -what hunters they portrayed. Art was a thing entirely aloof from -politics and propaganda. And so the bargain was settled; the banner of -insurrection was raised, and the new Old Man became head of the tribe, -and the new Witch Doctor set up his magic behind the aurochs-skin -curtains in the far end of the cave; and Ogi made many pictures of both -of them. - -(And I have walked through the palaces of kings, and through temples and -cathedrals in many lands, and have seen long rows of portraits of the -Old Men of many tribes, clad in robes of gorgeous colors, and wearing -upon their heads crowns of gold and flashing jewels; they were called -kings and emperors and dukes and earls and princes and captains of -industry and presidents of chambers of commerce. I have seen also the -portraits and statues of Witch Doctors of many varieties of magic; they -were called popes and priests and cardinals and abbots and college -presidents and doctors of divinity. And always the paintings were called -Old Masters.) - -So Ogi became Court Painter and painted the exploits of his tribe. And -when the tribe went out to battle with other tribes, Ogi made pictures -to show the transcendent beauty of his tribe, and the unloveliness of -the tribe they were to destroy. - -(And when my tribe went out to battle, its highly paid magazine -illustrators made pictures of noble-faced maidens shouting war-cries, -and it was called a Liberty Bond Campaign. And the story-tellers of my -tribe became martial, and called themselves Vigilantes.) - -Now Ogi throve greatly, developing his technique, so that he could show -all kinds of beasts and men. The fame of his magic spread, and other -tribes came to visit the caves and to marvel at his skill, and to gaze -reverently upon the Inspired Artist. - -(And in a certain hotel restaurant in New York I was admitted behind the -magic red cord which separates the great from the unheard of, and -sitting at a table my companion enlightened me with discreet nods and -whispers, saying: “That is Heywood Broun; and next to him is Rita -Weiman; and that’s Mencken just coming in; and that round little man in -the brown suit and the big spectacles is Hergesheimer.”) - -The fame of Ogi, and the magic of which he was master, brought thrills -to the young women of the tribe, and they cast themselves at his feet, -and so his talent was not lost to future generations. - -(And in the galleries of Europe I gazed upon miles of madonnas--madonnas -mournful and madonnas smiling, madonnas with wavy golden hair and -madonnas with straight black hair--but never a madonna that was not -plump, manicured and polished and robed in silks and satins, as became -the mistresses of court painters, and of popes and cardinals and abbots -able to pay for publicity.) - -The sons and grandsons of Ogi cultivated his magic, and found new ways -to intensify the thrills of art. They learned to make clay figures, and -to carve the Old Men of the tribe and the Witch Doctors out of wood and -stone. - -(And just before the war, being in Berlin, I was taken by a friend for a -drive down the Sieges Allée, between rows of white marble monsters in -halberd and helm and cowl and royal robes, brandishing sceptres and -mitres, battle-axes and two-bladed swords. Being myself a barbarian, I -ventured to titter at this spectacle; whereupon my friend turned pale, -and put his fingers upon my lips, indicating the driver of the hack, and -whispering how more than once it had happened that presumptuous -barbarians who tittered at the Old Men of the Hohenzollern tribe had -been driven by a loyal hackman straight to the police station and to -jail.) - -Likewise the sons of Ogi learned to make noises in imitation of the -songs of birds, and so they were able to bring back the thrills of first -love. They learned to imitate the rolling of thunder, and the clash of -clubs and spears in battle fury, and so they were able to renew the -glory of the hunt and the slaughter. - -(And in the year 1870 the Khedive of Egypt offered a prize of ten -thousand pounds to that descendant of Ogi who should make the most -powerful magic out of his ancestral slaughterings; and now, throughout -all civilization, the masters of the machines of slaughter put on their -honorific raiment, and escort their pudgy wives, bedecked with jewels, -to performances of their favorite grand opera, “Aida.”) - -Likewise the descendants of Ogi learned to enact their adventures in -imitation hunts. Inspired by music, they would dance about the -camp-fire, thrusting their weapons into a magic aurochs, shouting when -they saw him fall, and licking their chops at the taste of imaginary -flesh. - -(And in thirty thousand “movie” houses throughout the United States the -tribes now gather to woo and win magic darlings of luxury, and lick -their chops over the acquirement of imaginary millions; also to shudder -at wicked Russian Bolsheviks with bristling beards, at villainous “Red” -agitators with twisted faces, and at such other spectacles as the Old -Men and the Witch Doctors prepare for them, according to instructions -from the Great Hunter on the Holy Mountain.) - -Three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three generations have passed, -and in every generation the descendants of Ogi have had to face the -problem of their relationship to the Old Men and the Witch Doctors. Ogi -himself was a hunter, who slew his aurochs with his own hand, and -butchered and cooked his meat before he ate it. But now it has been long -since any descendant of Ogi has driven a spear through the eye of a -charging aurochs. They have become specialists in the imaginary; their -hands adjusted, not to spears and stone hatchets, but to brushes and -pencils, fountain-pens and typewriter keys. So, when they are cast out -from the tribe they can no longer face the sabre-toothed tiger and find -meat for themselves and their beautiful women; so, more than ever, the -grip of the Old Men and the Witch Doctors grows tight upon them. More -than ever it is required that their pictures and stories shall deal with -things of which the Old Men and the Witch Doctors approve; more than -ever they are called upon to honor and praise the customs of their -tribe, as against the customs of all other tribes of men or angels. - - - - -CHAPTER II - -WHO OWNS THE ARTISTS? - - -Many and various are the art-forms which the sons and grandsons of Ogi -have invented; but of all these forms, the one which bores us most -quickly is the parable--a little story made up for the purpose of -illustrating a special lesson. Therefore, I hasten to drop Ogi and his -sons and grandsons, and to say in plain English that this book is a -study of the artist in his relation to the propertied classes. Its -thesis is that from the dawn of human history, the path to honor and -success in the arts has been through the service and glorification of -the ruling classes; entertaining them, making them pleasant to -themselves, and teaching their subjects and slaves to stand in awe of -them. - -Throughout this book the word artist is used, not in the narrow sense -popular in America, as a man who paints pictures and illustrates -magazines; but in its broad sense, as one who represents life -imaginatively by any device, whether picture or statue or poem or song -or symphony or opera or drama or novel. It is my intention to study -these artists from a point of view so far as I know entirely new; to ask -how they get their living, and what they do for it; to turn their -pockets inside out, and see what is in them and where it came from; to -put to them the question already put to priests and preachers, editors -and journalists, college presidents and professors, school -superintendents and teachers: WHO OWNS YOU, AND WHY? - -The book will present an interpretation of the arts from the point of -view of the class struggle. It will study art works as instruments of -propaganda and repression, employed by the ruling classes of the -community; or as weapons of attack, employed by new classes rising into -power. It will study the artists who are recognized and honored by -critical authority, and ask to what extent they have been servants of -ruling class prestige and instruments of ruling class safety. It will -consider also the rebel artists, who have failed to serve their masters, -and ask what penalties they have paid for their rebellion. - -The book purposes to investigate the whole process of art creation, and -to place the art function in relation to the sanity, health and progress -of mankind. It will attempt to set up new canons in the arts, -overturning many of the standards now accepted. A large part of the -world’s art treasures will be taken out to the scrap-heap, and a still -larger part transferred from the literature shelves to the history -shelves of the world’s library. - -Since childhood the writer has lived most of his life in the world’s -art. For thirty years he has been studying it consciously, and for -twenty-five years he has been shaping in his mind the opinions here -recorded; testing and revising them by the art-works which he has -produced, and by the stream of other men’s work which has flowed through -his mind. His decisions are those of a working artist, one who has been -willing to experiment and blunder for himself, but who has also made it -his business to know and judge the world’s best achievements. - -The conclusion to which he has come is that mankind is today under the -spell of utterly false conceptions of what art is and should be; of -utterly vicious and perverted standards of beauty and dignity. We list -six great art lies now prevailing in the world, which this book will -discuss: - -Lie Number One: the Art for Art’s Sake lie; the notion that the end of -art is in the art work, and that the artist’s sole task is perfection of -form. It will be demonstrated that this lie is a defensive mechanism of -artists run to seed, and that its prevalence means degeneracy, not -merely in art, but in the society where such art appears. - -Lie Number Two: the lie of Art Snobbery; the notion that art is -something esoteric, for the few, outside the grasp of the masses. It -will be demonstrated that with few exceptions of a special nature, great -art has always been popular art, and great artists have swayed the -people. - -Lie Number Three: the lie of Art Tradition; the notion that new artists -must follow old models, and learn from the classics how to work. It will -be demonstrated that vital artists make their own technique; and that -present-day technique is far and away superior to the technique of any -art period preceding. - -Lie Number Four: the lie of Art Dilettantism; the notion that the -purpose of art is entertainment and diversion, an escape from reality. -It will be demonstrated that this lie is a product of mental -inferiority, and that the true purpose of art is to alter reality. - -Lie Number Five: the lie of the Art Pervert; the notion that art has -nothing to do with moral questions. It will be demonstrated that all art -deals with moral questions; since there are no other questions. - -Lie Number Six: the lie of Vested Interest; the notion that art excludes -propaganda and has nothing to do with freedom and justice. Meeting that -issue without equivocation, we assert: - -_All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; -sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda._ - -As commentary on the above, we add, that when artists or art critics -make the assertion that art excludes propaganda, what they are saying is -that their kind of propaganda is art, and other kinds of propaganda are -not art. Orthodoxy is my doxy, and heterodoxy is the other fellow’s -doxy. - -As further commentary we explain that the word morality is not used in -its popular sense, as a set of rules forbidding you to steal your -neighbor’s purse or his wife. Morality is the science of conduct; and -since all life is conduct it follows that all art--whether it knows it -or not--deals with the question of how to be happy, and how to unfold -the possibilities of the human spirit. Some artists preach -self-restraint, and some preach self-indulgence; and both are preachers. -Some artists says that the purpose of art is beauty, and they produce -beautiful art works to demonstrate the truth of this doctrine; when such -art works are completed, they are beautiful demonstrations of the fact -that the purpose of art is to embody the artist’s ideas of truth and -desirable behavior. - -What is art? We shall give a definition, and take the rest of the book -to prove it. We hope to prove it both psychologically, by watching the -art process at work, and historically, by analyzing the art works of the -ages. We assert: - -_Art is a representation of life, modified by the personality of the -artist, for the purpose of modifying other personalities, inciting them -to changes of feeling, belief and action._ - -We put the further question: What is great art? We answer: - -_Great art is produced when propaganda of vitality and importance is put -across with technical competence in terms of the art selected._ - -As commentary we add that whether a certain propaganda is really vital -and important is a question to be decided by the practical experience of -mankind. The artist may be overwhelmingly convinced that his particular -propaganda is of supreme importance, whereas the experience of the race -may prove that it is of slight importance; therefore, what was supposed -to be, and was for centuries taken to be a sublime work of art, turns -out to be a piece of trumpery and rubbish. But let the artist in the -labor of his spirit and by the stern discipline of hard thinking, find a -real path of progress for the race; let him reveal new impulses for men -to thrill to, new perils for them to overcome, new sacrifices for them -to make, new joys for them to experience; let him make himself master of -the technique of any one of the arts, and put that propaganda -adequately and vitally before his fellows--and so, and so alone, he may -produce real and enduring works of art. - - -POSTSCRIPT - -Manifestly, all this depends upon the meaning given to the term -propaganda. The writer thought that he could trust his critics to look -it up in the dictionary; but during the serial publication of the book -he discovered that the critics share that false idea of the word which -was brought into fashion during the World War--this idea being itself a -piece of propaganda. Our own martial fervor was of course not -propaganda, it was truth and justice; but there crept in an evil enemy -thing, known as “German propaganda”; and so the word bears a stigma, and -when this book applies it to some honorable variety of teaching, the -critics say that we are “stretching its meaning,” and being absurd. - -But all we are doing is to use the word correctly. The Standard -Dictionary defines propaganda as: “Effort directed systematically toward -the gaining of support for an opinion or course of action.” This, you -note, contains no suggestion of reprobation. Propaganda may be either -good or bad, according to the nature of the teaching and the motives of -the teacher. The Jesuits have been carrying on a propaganda of their -faith for three hundred years, and one does not have to share this faith -in order to admit their right to advocate it. The present writer has for -twenty-one years been carrying on a propaganda for Socialism, and has a -sturdy conviction that his time has not been wasted. - -We take certain opinions and courses of action for granted; they come to -us easily, and when in a poem or other work of art we encounter the -advocacy of such things, it does not seem to us propaganda. Take, for -example, that favorite theme of poets, the following of our natural -impulses; it is pleasant to do this, and the poet who gives such advice -awakens no opposition. But it is different in the case of ideas which -require concentration of the attention and effort of will; such ideas -trouble and repel us, we resent them, and the term “propaganda” is our -expression of resentment. For example, the old poet Herrick advises: - - Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, - Old time is still a-flying, - And this same flower that smiles today, - Tomorrow will be dying. - -Here is an attitude of relaxation toward life; the poet gives his advice -under a beautiful simile and with alluring melody, and therefore it is -poetry. If we should call it propaganda, all critics would agree that we -were “stretching the word,” and being absurd. But now, take four lines -by Matthew Arnold: - - Charge once more, then, and be dumb! - Let the victors, when they come, - When the forts of folly fall, - Find your body by the wall. - -Here is an utterance of exactly the opposite kind, an utterance of moral -conviction and resolution; the poet is bidding us fight for truth and -justice. Like Herrick, he has chosen an effective simile, and has put -music and fervor into his message; as poetry his lines are exactly as -good as Herrick’s; and yet, if we called them propaganda, how many -critics would object? - -This book will endeavor to demonstrate that exactly the same thing -applies to the phenomena of the class struggle, as they appear either in -real life or in works of art. It comes easy to human beings to accept -society as it is, and to admire the great and strong and wealthy. On the -other hand, it gives us a painful wrench to be told that there are moral -excellences and heroic splendors in the souls of unwashed and -unbeautiful workingmen. We resent such ideas, and likewise the persons -who persist in forcing them into our minds; which explains why all -orthodox critics agree that Jesus and Tolstoi are propagandists, while -Shakespeare and Goethe are pure and unsullied creative artists. Such -distinction between “art” and “propaganda” is purely a class distinction -and a class weapon; itself a piece of ruling-class propaganda, a means -of duping the minds of men, and keeping them enslaved to false standards -both of art and of life. - - - - -CHAPTER III - -ART AND PERSONALITY - - -We have promised to prove our thesis psychologically, by watching the -art process at work, and historically, by studying the art works of the -ages. We begin with the former task. - -Let us investigate the art process in its elemental forms, as we have -seen them in the story of Ogi. Art begins as the effort of man to -represent reality; first, for the purpose of bringing it back to his own -mind, and second, for the purpose of making it apprehensible to others. -Just as Ogi would seek for ways to keep the meat of the aurochs for as -long as possible so that he might eat it, so he would keep the memory of -the aurochs so that he might contemplate it. And just as he would share -the meat of the aurochs in a feast with his fellows, and derive honor -and advantage therefrom, so he would use a picture of the aurochs, or a -story of the hunt, or a song about it, or a dance reproducing it. - -Thus we note two motives, the second of them predominantly social. It is -this impulse to communicate ideas and emotions to others, that becomes -the dominant motive in art, and is the determining factor in the -greatness of art. We share Ogi’s memory of the hunt, his thrills of -fear, his furious struggle, his triumph over a chunk of brutal and -non-rational force. Try it on your own little Ogis, and you will find -they never tire of hearing about the aurochs hunt; and--here is the -essential point--while hearing, they are living in the minds of others, -they are becoming social beings. So through the ages the race has -developed its great civilizing force, the sympathetic imagination, which -has brought the tribes together into nations, and ultimately may bring -the nations into the human race. - -The pleasures which we derive from a picture or representation of -reality are many and complicated. There is, first of all, the pleasure -of recognition. In its cruder form it is like guessing a puzzle; in more -mature reproductions we have the pleasure of following the details. -“That is old Smith,” we say--“even to the wart on his nose!” We say: -“You can see the shine of the fish’s scales, you can wipe the fuzz off -the peach, you can bury your hands in the birds’ feathers!” But is that -all there is to art? Manifestly not, for if it were, the sons and -grandsons of Ogi would have been put out of business by the photographic -camera. You can take a microscope to the product of a camera, and -discover endless more details--a bigger magic than any son or grandson -of Ogi has achieved. - -But even supposing that a micro-photograph were the highest art, still -you could not get away from the influence of personality. There would -always remain the problem: Upon what shall the camera-lens be focussed? - -The first artist I met in my life was a painter, the late J. G. Brown. -He used to paint pictures of newsboys and country urchins, and the -quaint-looking old fellows who loaf in cross-roads stores. As a boy I -watched him at work, and roamed about the country with him when he -selected his subjects. At this distance I remember only two things about -him, his benevolent gray beard, and the intense repugnance he expressed -when I pointed out an old war veteran who had lost an arm. Deformity and -mutilation--oh, horrible! Never could an artist tolerate such a subject -as that! - -But growing older, I observed that some of the world’s greatest artists -had made a habit of painting mutilations and deformities. I saw “Old -Masters” portraying crucifixions and martyrdoms; I saw the nightmares of -Doré, and the war paintings of Verestchagin. So I understand the -difference between a man who wishes to probe the deeps of the human -spirit, and one who wishes merely to be popular with children and -childish-minded adults. The late J. G. Brown was a “realist,” according -to the popular use of the term; that is, having selected a subject, he -painted him exactly as he was; but by deliberately excluding from his -artistic vision everything suggesting pain and failure, he left you as -the sum total of his work an utterly false and sentimental view of life. - -Most artists go even further in imposing their personality upon their -work. Having selected a subject, they do not reproduce it exactly, but -modify it, emphasizing this trait or that. This process is known as -“idealizing.” The word is generally understood to mean making the thing -more pretty, more to the beholder’s taste; but this is a misuse of the -word. To idealize a subject means to modify it according to an idea, to -make it expressive of that idea, whether pleasing or otherwise. Henry -James tells a story about a portrait painter, who takes as his subject a -prominent man; divining the fundamental cheapness and falsity of the -man’s character, he paints a portrait which brings out these qualities, -and so for the first time reveals the man to the world, and causes the -man’s wife to leave him. That is one kind of “idealizing”; but -manifestly the portrait painter who practiced that method would have a -hard time to find sitters. - -What generally happens in such cases we saw when Ogi was invited to -portray the Witch Doctor and the Old Man of his tribe. The last great -hero of the Hohenzollerns, who paid for those white marble monsters at -which I tittered in the Sieges Allée, is cursed with a withered left -arm, a cause of agonies of humiliation to his strutting soul. In his -photographs you will see him carefully posed, so that his left arm is -partly turned away. But how about the countless paintings he had made of -himself? Do you imagine that the painter ever failed to supply a sound -and sturdy left arm? In the same way, in the pictorial labors of all the -Ogis of Egypt, you will find the ruler always represented as of abnormal -stature. Manifestly, in a settled empire the ruler will be of smaller -stature than his fighting men, because he will be coddled in childhood; -but the smaller he becomes in reality, the more rigid the art convention -that he is big. - -It was for offenses such as this that Plato drove the artists out of his -Republic. They were liars and pretenders, the whole tribe, and destroyed -men’s respect for truth. But as a matter of fact, this kind of -idealizing of rulers and fighting men may be entirely sincere. The -artist is more sensitive than his fellowmen--that is what makes him an -artist; he shrinks from pain and violence, and feels a real awe for -authority. He thinks his sovereign is bigger in spirit; and so, in -making him bigger in body, the artist is acting as a seer and -philosopher, bringing out an inner truth. Such is the clue to the -greater part of our present-day art standards; snobbery and -subservience, timidity and worship of tradition, also bragging and -strutting and beating of tom-toms. Every little tea-party poet and -semi-invalid cherishes a strong and cruel dream--Nietzsche with his -Blond Beast, and Carlyle with his Hero-worship, and Henley with his -Song of the Sword, and Kipling with his God of our Fathers, known of -old, Lord of our far-flung battle-line. - - - - -CHAPTER IV - -THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE - - -Little by little we now begin to note the outlines of Ogi’s art code. -Two negative propositions we may consider as clear: Ogi does not paint -the thing as it really is; and he does not paint the thing as he sees -it. The former he could not do, for he does not know what the thing -really is; and the second he would consider bad manners, bad morals and -bad taste. Ogi paints the thing as he thinks it ought to be; or, more -commonly, he paints the thing as he thinks other people ought to think -it to be. - -And now comes the question: Why, having chosen his subject, does Ogi -idealize it according to one idea, and not according to another? Are -such decisions matters of accident or whim? Assuredly not; for human -psychology has its laws, which we can learn to understand. We ask: What -are the laws of Ogi, his hand and his eye and his brain? What forces -determine that he shall present his “reality” in this way and not in -that? - -The first thing to say is: Don’t ask Ogi about it, for he cannot tell -you. Ogi is not at all what he thinks he is, and does not produce his -works of art from the motives he publishes to the world. We shall find -that the fellow has been almost too shrewd--he has contrived a set of -pretenses so clever that he has fooled, not merely his public, but -himself. He who would produce a great work of art, said Milton, must -first make a work of art of his own life. Ogi has taken this maxim -literally, and got out a fancy line of trade-lies. - -It is perfectly plain that the artist is a social product, a member of a -tribe and swayed by tribal impulses. But you find him denying this with -passion, and picturing himself as a solitary soul dwelling in an ivory -tower, galloping through the sky on a winged horse, visited and directed -by heaven-sent messengers, and wooed by mysterious lovely ladies called -Muses. At the same time, however, he wants at least one lady love who is -real; and this lady love does not often share his interest in the -imaginary lady loves. On the contrary, she is accustomed to point out -the brutal fact that Ogi wants three good chunks of aurochs meat every -twenty-four hours; also, the lady herself wants a little meat--and more -important yet, she wants it served according to the best tribal -conventions, those to which she was accustomed before she ran away and -married an artist. The tribal law decrees that the glass on her table -must be cut by hand, even though it is cut crooked; the linen on her -table must be embroidered by hand, because, if it is done wholesale, by -machinery, it is not “art.” - -Theoretically, it is possible for an artist to produce his art-works for -the approval of the imaginary Muses; but as a matter of fact you find -that the most solitary old Ogi has somebody, a faithful friend, or an -old housekeeper, or even a child, whose approval he craves. Even an -artist on a desert island will be thinking that some day a ship will -land there; while young and rebellious artists produce for a dream -public in the future. I myself did all my early work from that motive; -and in Voltaire I came upon what seemed to me the cruelest sentence ever -penned: “Letters to posterity seldom reach their destination!” - -Ogi must have an audience. So, in his selecting, his idealizing, and his -other varieties of feigning, he has always before him the problem: Will -this please my public? And to what extent? And for how long? There is no -birth control movement in Ogi’s brain; vast numbers of dream children -are born there, and he must select a few of them to be nourished and -raised up to reality, while he sentences the others to be starved and -buried. - -Having become a professional, living by his work, Ogi is under the -necessity of finding an audience that will feed him. And remember, it is -not merely the three chunks of aurochs meat per day, and three more for -Mrs. Ogi; it is the means of serving Mrs. Ogi’s meat in the fashion her -social position requires. Surely I do not have to prove the proposition -that Ogi cannot produce beautiful and inspiring works of art while Mrs. -Ogi is raising ructions in the cave! - -So comes the great struggle in the artist’s soul, a struggle which has -gone on for three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three generations, -and may continue for as many more. Among the children of Ogi’s brain are -some he dearly loves, but who will not “sell.” There are others whom he -despises, but whom he knows the public will acclaim and pay for. “Which -shall it be?” - -The answers have been as various as the souls of artists. We shall see -how through the ages there have been hero artists and martyr artists, -men who have produced what they believed to be the best, in the face of -obloquy, ridicule, starvation, even the dungeon and the stake. But, -manifestly, these conditions are not the most favorable for the birth of -masterpieces. To develop an art technique requires decades of practice -and study. To feel other persons’ emotions intensely and reproduce them -according to some coherent plan; to devise new forms, and arrange -millions of musical notes or words or molecules of paint in a complex -design--all this requires intense and persistent concentration. Men -cannot do such work without leisure; neither can they do it while they -are despising themselves for doing it. So we may set down the following -as one of the fundamental art laws: - -_The bulk of the successful artists of any time are men in harmony with -the spirit of that time, and identified with the powers prevailing._ - - - - -CHAPTER V - -THE LORD’S ANOINTED - - -Who pays for art? The answer is that at every stage of social -development there are certain groups able to pay for certain kinds of -art. These groups may be large or small, but they constitute the public -for that kind of art, and determine its quality and character; he who -pays the piper calls the tune. It should need no stating that -Rolls-Royce automobiles are not made according to the tastes of -rag-pickers and ditch-diggers, nor yet of poets and saints; they are -made according to the tastes of people who can afford to pay for -Rolls-Royce automobiles. If our thinking about the arts were not so -completely twisted by false propaganda, it would seem an axiom to say -that the first essential to understanding any art product is to -understand the public which ordered and paid for that art product. - -Some arts, of course, are cheaper than others. Ballads cost nothing; you -can make one up and sing it on any street corner. Hence we find the -ballad close to the people, simple and human, frequently rebellious. The -same thing applies to folk tales and love songs--until men take to -printing them in books, after which they develop fancy forms, -understandable only to people who have nothing to do with their time -except to play with fancy things. - -Beginning with the primitive art forms, it would be possible to arrange -the arts in an ascending scale of expensiveness, and to show that -exactly in proportion to the cost of an art product is its aristocratic -spirit, its subservience to ruling class ideals. Of all the art forms -thus far devised, the most expensive per capita is the so-called “grand -opera”; this grandeur has to be subscribed for in advance by the -“diamond horseshoe,” and consequently there has never been such a thing -as a proletarian grand opera--if you except the “Niebelung Ring,” which -was so effectively disguised as a fairy story that nobody but Bernard -Shaw has been able to decipher its incendiary message. - -Many years ago I was talking with a captain of industry, prominent in -New York political life. I spoke of the corruption of the judges, and he -contradicted me with a smile. “Our judges are not bought; they are -selected.” And exactly so it has been with our recognized and successful -artists; they have been men who looked up to the ruling classes by -instinct, and served their masters gladly and freely. If they did not do -so, they paid the penalty by a life of conflict and exile; if they -happened to be poor and friendless, they do not even receive the -gratitude of posterity, because their dream-children died unborn, and -were buried, along with their parents, in graves unknown. “Some mute, -inglorious Milton here may rest.” - -It will be our task to study the great art periods one after another, -taking the leading artists and showing what they were, what they -believed, how they got their livings, and what they did for those who -paid them. We shall find that everywhere they were members of their -group, sharing the interests and the prejudices, the hates and fears, -the jealousies and loves and admirations of that group. We shall find -them subject to all the social stresses and strains of the time, and -fighting ardently the battles of their class. For life is never a static -thing, it is always changing, always subjecting its victims to new -dangers, forcing them to new efforts. Either the ruling class is -threatened by the attacks of outside enemies, or else there is a new -class arising inside the community. In times of internal order and -prosperity, there come luxury and idleness, the degeneration -of the tribe; there come all sorts of novelties startling the -elders--modernists sapping the old time creeds, and flappers adopting -the vices of men. - -Such evils must be corrected; such enemies of the tribe must be put -down; and in the course of these labors, what chance is there that the -ruling classes will fail to make use of their most powerful weapon, that -of art? There is simply no chance whatever. Ogi will be called on by his -masters; or else he will act of his own impulse--he will lead the -crusade, singing the praises of the old time ways, “idealizing” the -ancestral heroes, the holy saints and the founding fathers, and pouring -ridicule upon the bobbed heads of the flappers. The critics will leap to -Ogi’s support, hailing him as the Lord’s own anointed, a creator of -masterpieces, dignified, serene, secure in immortality. This is art, the -critics will aver, this is real, genuine, authentic art; while out there -in the wilderness somewhere howls a lone gray rebellious wolf, attacking -and seeking to devour everything that is beautiful and sacred in -life--and the howling of this wolf is not art, it is vile and cheap -propaganda. - -The critics are certain that the decision is purely a question of -aesthetics; and we answer that it is purely a question of class -prestige. They are certain that art standards are eternal; and we answer -that they are blown about by the winds of politics. Social classes -struggle; some lose, and their glory fades, their arts decay; others -win, and set new standards, according to their interests. The only -permanent factors are the permanent needs of humanity, for justice, -brotherhood, wisdom; and the arts stand a chance of immortality, to the -extent that they serve such ideals. - - - - -CHAPTER VI - -ARTIFICIAL CHILDHOOD - - -The reader who shares the art beliefs now prevalent in the world will be -quite certain that the ideas here being expounded are fantastic and -absurd. Among those who thus differ is a friend of mine, a very great -poet who is patiently reading the manuscript and suffering, both for -himself, and for all poets who will follow him. He writes: “There is and -should be such a thing as the enjoyment of what we are pleased to term -‘pure’ beauty.” And again: “You must believe either that we have a right -to play, in which case the poet-who-doesn’t-preach is justified, or -believe the contrary, with its corollary of a coming race of solemn -scientific monsters.” - -I do not want to gain an argument by the easy device of omitting -everything that does not help me; therefore I take up this friend’s -contentions. Manifestly an element of play is essential to all art; it -is what distinguishes art from other forms of expression, essays, -sermons, speeches, mathematical demonstrations. If we do not emphasize -this play element, it is not from failure to realize the difference -between a work of art and an essay, a sermon, a speech or a mathematical -demonstration; it is merely because the play element in art is -recognized by everyone, to the exclusion of the element of rational -thought and purpose, which is no less essential. - -Let us ask: what is play? The answer is: play is nature’s device whereby -the young train themselves for reality. Two puppies pretending to bite -each other’s throats, learn to fight without having their throats torn -in the process. So all young creatures develop their faculties; and this -function is carried right up into modern art products. From many new -novels I may learn, without risking the fatal experiment, what will -happen to me if I permit the wild beast of lust to get me by the throat. - -Let us have another principle, to guide us in our analysis: - -_Art is play, having for its purpose the development of human faculties, -and experiment with the possibilities of life._ - -But notice this distinction. Two puppies, leaping at each other’s -throats and dodging away, do not reason about what they are doing; they -are guided by instinct. But a modern novelist knows what he is doing; he -is thinking ordered thoughts about life, and making a deliberate record -thereof. So we have a second principle: - -_Art is play, to the extent that it is instinctive; it is propaganda -when it becomes mature and conscious._ - -Manifestly, art can never be entirely play, because no human being is -entirely instinctive; nor can it be entirely propaganda--if it is to -remain art, it must keep the play form. Moreover, the play element must -be real, not simply a sham; the work must be a representation of life so -skillful that we can pretend to take it for actuality. Wilkie Collins -gave his formula for success as a fiction writer: “Make ’em laugh, make -’em cry, make ’em wait.” In other words, make ’em do just what they -would have to do, if they were taking part in actual life. This is the -one indispensable element: the artist, by whatever trick, must persuade -us that this is no trick, but reality. - -The function of play in adults has been ably studied in Dr. Patrick’s -book, “The Psychology of Relaxation.” We humans have only recently -developed the upper lobes of the brain, and cannot stand using them all -the time; it is necessary occasionally to let them rest, and to live in -the lower centers; in other words, to go back into childhood and play. -To my friend the Poet, who asks if I believe in play, I answer by -pointing to my tennis racquet. But what shall we say about adults who -play all the time? Modern science has a name for such people; it calls -them morons. - -If you are a moron artist, producing for a moron public, it will not -avail to argue with you. But we have to inquire: how comes it that the -art of morons is glorified and defended as “true” and “pure” art? How -comes it that the quality of enjoyment without thought, which is -characteristic of puppies and infants, comes to be considered a great -quality in adults? In the fields of industry and education, we know that -pitiful thing, the mind of a child in the body of a grown man. How comes -it that such defective mentality is glorified in the field of art? - -The answer is what you will expect from me. There is a class which owns -and runs the world, and wishes everything to stay as it is. As one of -the functions of ownership, this class controls culture and determines -taste. It glorifies the scholar, the man who walks backward through -life; and likewise it glorifies the art-moron, the man who has emotions -without brains. - -The so-called “purity” of art is thus a form of artificial childhood. -Just as the Chinese bind the feet of their women in order to keep them -helpless and acquiescent, so ruling-class culture binds the imagination -of the race so that it may not stride into the future. And if you think -that those who run the world’s thinking for the ruling class are not -intelligent enough to formulate such a purpose as this--my reply is that -you are as unintelligent as they would wish you to be, and you justify -all the contempt they feel for you. - - - - -CHAPTER VII - -MRS. OGI EMERGES - - -We now assume as demonstrated the following propositions. First: - -_The artist is a social product, his psychology and that of his art -works being determined by the economic forces prevailing in his time._ - -And second: - -_The established artist of any period is a man in sympathy with the -ruling classes of that period, and voicing their interests and ideals._ - -If this be true, the next step to the understanding of art, and the -history of art periods past and present, is to understand the economic -forces controlling mankind; the evolution and struggle of classes. - -We get that far, when the argument is broken in upon by the particular -Mrs. Ogi who inhabits the cave where this manuscript is produced. Says -Mrs. Ogi: “In other words, you are going to give them your Socialist -lecture.” - -Says Mrs. Ogi’s husband: “But--” - -Says Mrs. Ogi, who finishes her husband’s sentences, as well as his -manuscripts: “You promised me to write one book without propaganda!” - -“But--” once more--“this is a book to prove that all books are -propaganda! And can I conduct a propaganda for propaganda that isn’t -propaganda?” - -“That depends,” says Mrs. Ogi, “upon how stupid you are.” - -She goes on to maintain that the purpose of all propaganda is to put -itself across; the essence of it being a new camouflage, which keeps the -reader from knowing what he is getting. “If you imagine that people who -take up a discussion of art standards are going to read a discourse on -the history of social revolutions, I call you silly, and you aren’t -going to alter my opinion by calling me Mrs. Ogi.” - -“My dear,” says the husband, in haste, “all that is not to be taken -literally. Mrs. Ogi is the wife of the artist in general; she is the -human tie that binds him to the group, and forces him to conform to -group conventions.” - -“I know--like all men, you want to have it both ways. Everybody will -assume--” - -“I won’t let them assume! It shall be explicitly stated that you are not -Mrs. Ogi.” - -“Let it be explicitly stated that there has never been any -hand-embroidered table-linen in this cave--never any sort of table-linen -but paper napkins since I’ve been in it!” - -“My dear,” says Ogi, patiently, “you were the one who first pointed out -to me the significance of hand-embroidered table-linen in the history of -art. You remember that time when we went to the dinner-party at Mrs. -Heavy Seller’s--” - -“Yes, I remember; and what you ought to do is to put that dinner-party -into your book. Entitle your next chapter ‘The Influence of Lingerie on -Literature,’ or, ‘The Soul of Man Under Silk Hosiery.’” - -“That’s not bad,” says Ogi, “I’ll use it later. Meantime, I’ll do my -best to liven up the argument as you request.” And so he retires and -cudgels his brain, and comes back with a new chapter--bearing, not the -dignified title of “The Evolution of Social Classes,” as he had planned, -but instead, a device to catch the fancy of the idle and frivolous-- - - - - -CHAPTER VIII - -THE HORSE-TRADE - - -Twenty-five years ago an American, himself a victim of the commercial -system and dying of consumption, wrote a novel which contained a -description of a horse-trade. The novel was rejected by many publishers, -but came finally to one reader who recognized this horse-trading scene -as the epitome of American civilization. He persuaded the author to -rewrite the book, putting the horse-trade first, and making everything -else in the novel subsidiary; this was done, and the result was the most -sensational success in the history of American fiction. Young and old, -rich and poor, high and low, all Americans recognized in the opening -scene of “David Harum” the creed they believed in, the code they -followed, the success they sought: they bought six hundred thousand -copies of the book. I was young at the time, but I recall how all the -people I knew were shaking their sides with laughter, discussing the -story with one another, delighting in every step of the process whereby -David got the better of the deacon. - -Let us analyze this horse-trade, taking our data from the book. First, -there is the lie of the seller, describing a horse which he believes to -be useless. “He’s wuth two hundred jest as he stands. He ain’t had no -trainin’, an’ he c’n draw two men in a road wagin better’n fifty.” And -second, there is the lie of the purchaser, as the purchaser himself -boasts about it afterwards: “Wa’al, the more I looked at him, the better -I liked him, but I only says, ‘Jes so, jes so, he may be wuth the money, -but jes as I’m fixed now he ain’t wuth it to _me_, an’ I hain’t got that -much money with me if he was,’ I says.” - -So we see that in a horse-trade both the traders lie; and further we see -that each pretends to be telling the truth, and makes an effort to -persuade the other that he is telling the truth. Watching the ignoble -process, we perceive that neither of the traders is ever sure how far -his own lies are being accepted; nor is he sure what modicum of truth -there may be in the other’s lies. So each is in a state of uncertainty -and fear. When the process has been completed, one trader has a sense of -triumph, mingled with contempt for the victim; the other trader has a -sense of hatred, mingled with resolve to “get square.” - -It is further to be pointed out that this conflict of wits, this modern -form of the duello, while it seems ruthless and cruel, yet has its own -strict ethical code. David would lie to the deacon, but he would not -pick the deacon’s pocket, nor would he stab the deacon in the back, no -matter how badly the deacon might have defeated him in commercial war. -We observe also that the author feels under the necessity of persuading -us that David would not have cheated the deacon unless he had first been -cheated _by_ the deacon; this being the conventional lie of the -horse-trader turned novelist. We may also observe that next to the -impulse to acquisitiveness, the supreme quality of this Yankee farmer, -comes the impulse to sociability; having consummated his bargain, he -tells his sister about it, and the humanness of the story lies not -merely in the triumph of David, but in his pleasure in telling his -sister. And observe that David tells her the truth without reservation. -There might be other matters about which he would lie to his sister, but -so far as concerns this horse-trade, he knows that she will not betray -him to the deacon. - -When the first savage offered a fish in exchange for a cocoanut, and -made statements as to the freshness of the fish, and the difficulties -and perils of fishing, the trade-lie was a comparatively simple thing. -But in the process of industrial evolution, there have been developed so -many variations and complexities that an encyclopedia of occupational -deceptions would be required. Suffice it to say that the principle is -understood in every nation and clime, being embodied in innumerable -maxims and witticisms: _caveat emptor_: business is business; dog eat -dog; the devil take the hindmost; look out for Number One; do others or -they will do you; self-preservation is the first law of Nature. In a -civilization based upon commercial competition, _laissez faire_ and -freedom of contract, the lie of the horse-trader becomes the basis of -all the really significant actions of men and women. - -So obvious is this, so clearly is it set forth in the wisdom of the -race, that at first thought it seems surprising that anyone could be led -into believing a trade-lie. But it is obvious that the test of a -competent liar is that he gets himself believed; like the endless -struggle between the gun-maker and the armor-plate maker, is the -struggle between the trader and his victim. The trader is aided by the -fact that an impulse towards constructiveness has been planted in the -human heart, which breeds a repugnance to dishonesty. So there are -ideals and aspirations, religions, loyalties and patriotisms; there are -the Christs and Galileos of history, the Parsivals and Don Quixotes of -legend. As the trader himself puts it, there is a sucker born every -minute. The trader kills a silly sheep, and puts the skin over his -wolf’s hide; so we have religious institutions and ethical systems, -philanthropic endowments, professional codes, political platforms; we -have honors, offices and titles, proprieties and respectabilities, -graces, refinements, etiquettes and standards of good taste. Many of -these things begin naively and in good faith; but in a society given up -to commercial competition, and dominated by systems of greed, they all -become trade-lies, and are used as weapons in the war of the classes. - - - - -CHAPTER IX - -THE CLASS LIE - - -In the stage of economic evolution where the savage exchanges a fish for -a cocoanut, the balance of advantage in the trade may be equal. The -fisherman may need the cocoanut as badly as the cocoanut-gatherer needs -the fish. But as soon as we come to the stage where tokens are accepted, -there begins a shifting of the balance of advantage; for the reason that -the seller comes to specialize in the selling of one thing, whereas the -more complex the society, the more different things the buyer must buy, -and so he remains an amateur as to each. Moreover, the sellers learn to -combine; they form partnerships, firms, corporations, alliances, -leagues, associations, parties, classes; the buyer, on the other hand, -remains unorganized and helpless. He is the consumer, who takes what he -can get; he is the proletarian, who has only his chains to lose; he is -that plaything of the competitive process, that jest of the trader -through the ages, the general public. “The public be damned,” said a -great seller of railway transportation, and his phrase has become the -corner-stone of capitalist civilization. - -Nineteen hundred years ago a revolutionary economist remarked, “To him -that hath shall be given; while from him that hath not shall be taken -away even that which he hath.” And this economic process is one which -tends continually to accelerate, multiplying itself by geometrical -progression. In present-day society, the sellers are nearly all -organized, while labor is only ten per cent organized, and the ultimate -consumer is not organized at all. We have thus the combination of a -monopoly price with a competitive wage, and the surplus wealth of the -world is drawn by automatic process into the hands of a small class. The -world’s selling power is now vested in combinations of capital, called -“trusts,” which present themselves in the aspect of enormous fortresses -of lies. - -Merely to give a catalogue of the various trade-lies embodied in the -daily operations of such a “trust” would require a volume. There are so -many kinds of lies that no one man can know them all. There are lies -carried in the heads and embodied in the practice of petty chiefs of -departments. There are lies so generally accepted and conventionalized -that the very liars do not know them as such, and are amazed and wounded -in the feelings when their attention is called to the truth. There are -lies so complicated that highly trained lawyers have been paid millions -of dollars to contrive them. There are lies so cleverly hidden that it -would take the restoring of tons of burned account-books to prove them. -There are lies so blazoned forth on billboards and in newspapers that -they have become part of the daily thought of the people, and have given -new words and phrases to the language. - -So comes the next stage in the evolution of the trade-lie. The owners of -trusts and combinations unite into parties, classes and governments for -the defense of their gains. They combine and endow and perpetuate their -trade-lies, making them into systems and institutions; and so we have -the Lie Wholesale, the Lie Sublimated, the Lie Traditional, the Lie -Classical; we have the Lie become Religion, Philosophy, History, -Literature, and Art. - -Turn back to Chapter II, and read the list of the six great art lies; -you may now understand who made them and why. Lie Number One, the Art -for Art’s Sake lie, the notion that the end of art is in the art work, -is a trade lie of the art specialist, the effort of a sacred caste to -maintain its prestige and selling price. Lie Number Two, the lie of Art -Snobbery, the notion that art is for the chosen few, and outside the -grasp of the masses, is the same. Lie Number Three, the lie of Art -Tradition, the notion that new artists must follow old models, is a -self-protective device of those in power. Lie Number Four, the lie of -Art Dilettantism, the notion that the purpose of art is entertainment -and diversion, is a device of the culturally powerful to weaken and -degrade those upon whom they prey; just as the creatures of the -underworld get their victims drunk before they rob them. Lie Number -Five, the lie of the Art Pervert, the notion that art has nothing to do -with moral questions, is the same. Lie Number Six, the lie of Vested -Interest, is the sum of all the other lies, of all the infinite -cruelties of predatory, class-controlled culture. - -The sarcastic critic will say that I make the artist an extremely -knavish and dangerous person. My answer is that he may be, and -frequently is, an amiable and guileless child. His knaveries are class -knaveries, collective cruelties, conventions and attitudes to life which -have been produced as automatic reactions to economic forces; the -individual acquires them with no more conscious thought than is involved -in the assimilation of his food. Ogi lies and pretends, he cheats, robs -and murders, imaginatively speaking, by the same instincts that cause -him to blink his eyes in a bright light. - - - - -CHAPTER X - -MRS. OGI ORDERS JAZZ - - -Says Mrs. Ogi: “Well, I see you are having your way.” - -Now this is a sore subject in the cave. Each of the residents is -absolutely certain that it is always the other who has his or her way; -and each is able to cite chapter and verse, and frequently does so. -However, at present Ogi has a guilty conscience, so he speaks softly. “I -am almost through with my explanation of industrial evolution.” - -“Almost!” sniffs Mrs. Ogi. “How much more?” - -“Well, I have to show how successive classes emerge and acquire power--” - -“Until at last we see the inevitable triumph of the proletariat and the -establishment of the Co-operative Commonwealth! That will be so new to -your readers, and so delightfully exciting! And meantime they sit and -wonder when the scandals begin.” - -“Scandals?” says Ogi. “Have I said anything about scandals?” - -“You tell your readers you’re going to turn the artists’ pockets inside -out and show what is in them! If you don’t do it, they’ll say, ‘This -show is a frost!’” - -I mention that Mrs. Ogi was brought up in exclusive social circles, -where never a breath of slang could pass her lips without some female -relative raising a finger and whispering: “Hush!” But times are -changing, and marriage becomes more and more a lottery. - -Says Mrs. Ogi’s husband: “Of course I intend to muck-rake individual -artists--” - -“Which artists?” - -“Well, I have to begin at the beginning--” - -“But you’ve already begun with the beginning of the world!” - -“I have to begin now with the first significant art.” - -Mrs. Ogi’s snort reminds her husband of the old days of the aurochs -hunt. “What the American people want to know is how many thousand -dollars a week Gloria Swanson is really getting, and what was Rupert -Hughes’ total income from ‘The Sins of Hollywood.’ Is all that to be put -off to the end of your book?” - -“But how can I deal with present-day art ahead of ancient art?” - -“You make me think of those interminable English novels, which begin -with the infancy of the hero, and get through public school at page -three hundred and something!” - -“But, my dear, there is some old literature that people are really -interested in. The Bible for example--” - -“The Hundred Best Books! Number two, Homer; number three, Shakespeare; -Number four, Paradise Lost--” - -“But you overlook the fact--the Bible is a best-seller!” - -“The people who buy it are not people who read about art, or would ever -hear of a book on art theories. They are people like Mamma! Once upon a -time a book-agent offered her a set of the World’s Great Orations, and -she decided the dark red leather binding would go well with the -draperies in the drawing-room. Then a couple of weeks later came another -man, selling a set of books in dark green cloth. She decided these would -match the decorations in the billiard-room, so she bought them also, and -it wasn’t until afterwards that somebody noticed the family had two sets -of the same World’s Great Orations!” - -“But, my dear, there really is literature in the Bible.” - -“People have been told about literature in the Bible since they were -children in Sunday school, and there’s no idea in the whole world that -bores them quite so much.” - -“But that’s exactly the point! That’s what this book is for--to show how -real literature was alive in its own day, and is just as much alive in -the present day. Don’t you see what a fascinating theme: they had in -Judea the very same class struggle--” - -There has come that fanatical light into his eyes which Mrs. Ogi knows -so well; he means to make her sit and listen to a whole chapter--and -when she has the laundry to count, and the apples to boil for his -supper! “Go ahead and write it,” she says, in a weary voice. “But take -my advice and jazz it up!” - -So Ogi goes away and postpones his exposition of the successive -emergence of social classes; and instead of an impressive title such as -“Agrarian Revolt in Ancient Judea,” he begins-- - - - - -CHAPTER XI - -THE POPULIST CONVENTION - -From the New York “Sun,” July 4, the early 1890s: - -KANSAS KICKING - -_Cranks’ Convention in Tumult at Topeka_ - -_Wild Asses of Prairie Bray_ - -_Millennium by Majority Vote Scheduled for Next November_ - - -Topeka, Kan., July 3. (Special to the “Sun.”) The open season for -devil-hunting is on in Topeka today. From Nemaha County on the North to -Comanche on the South, from Cherokee County on the East to Cheyenne on -the West, the hunters are pouring into their state capital; money-devil -hunters and speculator-devil hunters, railroad-devil hunters and -rum-devil hunters. The streets of the city swarm with them, the lobbies -of the hotels are packed with them, spell-binders and oratorical -wizards, political quack-doctors and prohibitionist cranks, long-haired -men and short-haired women, partisans of free money, free land and free -love. For months they have been looking forward to this convention, -which is to wrest the powers of government from the hands of a predatory -plutocracy; today, if there is a lunatic in Kansas who is not in Topeka, -it is only because the Wall Street devil has got him behind bars in one -of the asylums. - -The lobby of the American House this evening is more like the menagerie -tent of a circus than like anything else ever seen in the effete East. -The convention opens at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, and tonight every -orator has a last chance to save the nation before the platform is made -up. Audiences are not necessary, everybody talks at once, and there are -a dozen men delivering exhortations, standing on the leather seats of -hotel-lobby chairs. Here is “Sockless” Jeremiah Simpson, expecting to be -nominated for Congress tomorrow. Coatless and tieless, his collar wilted -flat, he shouts to the corn-field cohorts his denunciations of the -blood-sucking leeches which have picked the bones of the farmers of -Kansas. Here is Isaiah Woe, weird figure having whiskers almost to his -belt and pants almost to his shoe-tops, waving his skinny arms and -justifying his surname--“Woe, woe, woe--woe unto this and woe unto -that--woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write -grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from -judgment, and to take away the rights from the poor of my people, that -widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless!” - -Isaiah is known as a “prophet” among this prairie population; he roars -the grievances of the dear peepul of the prairie-country, and shakes the -hayseeds and corn-dust out of his white whiskers until his audience -really believes it sees a halo about his head. He does not hesitate to -claim divine inspiration, declaring to the mob: “The Lord hath anointed -me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the -broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives.” - -Isaiah has no rival in lung-power, unless it be Micah, the Pottawatomie -Prophet--“Mournful Mike,” as he is known in the state capital. This aged -replica of Uncle Sam is out on a cracker-box in front of the Elks’ Club, -and your reporter took down some of his sentences verbatim: “They build -up Washington with blood, and New York with iniquity. The heads thereof -judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the -prophets thereof divine for money.... Therefore shall Washington for -your sake be plowed as a field, and New York shall become heaps, and the -buildings of Wall Street as the high places of a forest.” - -There is a regiment of such calamity howlers and kickers, thirsting for -the blood of the money-devil. There is Elijah, known as the “boy orator” -from Kiowa County, and Angry Amos, the “Wild Man of Neosho.” There is -one John, who calls himself the Baptist, and has adopted the singular -habit of dipping his followers into water--though it must be stated that -few of them show the effects after a blistering hot day in Topeka. It is -reported and generally believed that the water-dipping prophet lives -upon the locusts which infest the Kansas corn-fields, together with wild -honey furnished by friendly bees in the cottonwoods along the creek -bottoms. Apparently, however, the prophet has not brought along a supply -of his customary provender, for your correspondent observed him this -afternoon partaking of sinkers and coffee in the railroad restaurant, -with a bunch of other wild asses from the prairie. - -Kansas is scheduled to have a new political party tomorrow; a party of -the peepul, to be run by prophets, none of whom will take their salaries -when they get elected to office. And what is to be the platform of this -party? Well, the government is to fix the price of wheat, and -freight-rates are to be reduced to a point which will compel holders of -railway securities to live on locusts and wild honey. All interest on -money is to be abolished; the prophets of the Lord call it “usury,” and -the plank in their platform on the subject reads as follows: - -“If thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee, then thou -shalt relieve him, yea, though he be a stranger or a sojourner, that he -may live with thee: Take thou no interest of him, or increase; but fear -thy God that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him any -money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase.” - -And if that be not enough, bond slavery is to be forbidden by law, and -beginning with the year 1900, and every fifty years thereafter, all -debts are to be forgiven, and everybody is to have a fresh start. Well -may Jabez Smith, chairman of the State Committee of the Republican -party, watching this outfit of wild men and listening to their -conglomeration of lunacy, lift up his hands and cry out: “Was ist los -mit Kansas?” ... - - * * * * * - -Such was news according to the New York “Sun” of Charles A. Dana’s time; -the sort of news from which I got all my political ideas during boyhood. -Seven times every week I would read articles and editorials in that -tone, and laugh with glee over them; and then, every Sunday morning and -evening I would go to church, and listen while the preacher read the -words of Jeremiah and Isaiah and Micah and Elijah and Amos and John the -Baptist, and I would accept them all as the divinely inspired words of -God. How was I, poor lad, to know that the very same prophets were back -on earth, living the very same lives and making the very same -speeches--trying to save America, as of old they had tried to save -Judea, from the hands of the defilers and the despoilers? - - - - -CHAPTER XII - -KANSAS AND JUDEA - - -How did it happen that political agitators, living in the Mississippi -Valley at the end of the nineteenth century, were identical in spirit -with religious prophets in Asia Minor five hundred years before Christ? -The answer is that civilizations rise and fall, and history repeats -itself. Let me describe one historic process, and you watch my statement -phrase by phrase, and see if you can tell whether I am referring to -ancient Judea or to modern Kansas. - -A people traveled for a long distance, fleeing from despotism and -seeking religious liberty. They were a primitive, hardy people, having a -stern faith in one God who personally directed their lives. They came to -a rich land, and conquered it by hard fighting, under this personal -direction of their God. They built homes, they gathered flocks and -herds, they accumulated wealth; and they saw this wealth pouring into -cities, to be absorbed by governing and trading classes. Their -agricultural democracy evolved into a plutocratic imperialism. The -landlords and the tax collectors left them nothing but a bare living; -the fruits of their labor paid for palaces and temples with golden -roofs, and for golden calves and monkey dinners, and rulers with a -thousand chorus girls. - -So there was revolt in the country districts, and one after another came -prophets of discontent. Always these prophets were radical in the -economic sense, voicing the wrongs of the poor and helpless, the widows -and the orphans. Always they were conservative in the social and -religious sense, calling the people back to simplicity and honesty of -life, to faith in the one true God. Always they used the symbols of the -old tribal creed; repudiating new-fangled divinities such as Baal and -Darwin, and gathering at Armageddon to battle for the Lord. Throughout -their lives they were stoned and persecuted and covered with ridicule; -when they died they became their country’s glory, and their words were -cherished and embodied in sacred records which school children were made -to study. - -Now, how much of that is Judea, and how much is Kansas? - -Let us make clear the point, essential to our present argument, that -from cover to cover the “Old Testament” is propaganda. Those who created -it created it as propaganda, having no remotest idea of anything else. -Nowadays our docile population reads it and accepts it as the literal -inspired Word--not realizing that the book is divided between two kinds -of propaganda, which exactly cancel each other: the propaganda of a -ruling class, teaching reverence for kings and priests, and the -propaganda of rebels, clamoring for the overthrow of these same kings -and priests! - -This Old Testament is also offered to us in the literature classes, so -it will be worth our while to consider it from that point of view. -Manifestly there is much of it which never pretended to be literature. -There are weary chronicles of the doings of kings, and lists of their -sons and grandsons. You may find acres of this in our big libraries, but -it is classified as genealogy, not literature. Likewise there are the -laws of the Hebrews, which belong in the legal department. There are -architectural specifications for the temple, and rules of hygiene--all -important to a historian, but rubbish to anybody else. There are a great -number of legends which are eternally delightful to children, stories of -the creation and the fall of man, and of gods and devils and miracles, -precisely as important as similar stories among the ancient -Anglo-Saxons, or the ancient Greeks, or the ancient Egyptians, or the -ancient Hopis. - -Among these stories are a few which display fine feeling and narrative -skill, and so for the first time we have literature. There is one -attempt at a drama; it is crude and confused--any sophomore, having -taken a course in dramatic construction at a state university, could -show the author of the Book of Job how to clarify his theme and cut out -the repetitions. But in the midst of such crudities is magnificent -poetry, which our university courses have not yet taught us to equal. -Likewise there is some shrewd philosophy--and it is amusing to note that -our verbal inspirationalists accept the worldly-wise common sense of the -Proverbs and the bleak cynicism of Ecclesiastes as equally divine with -the fervor of Isaiah and the fanatical rage of Jeremiah. - -Finally, there is some lyric poetry of a spiritual nature, this also -full of repetition. If you are judging it as ritual, that is all right, -because ritual is intended to affect the subconscious, and repetition is -the essence of the process. The difference between ritual and literature -is that the latter makes its appeal to the conscious mind, where a -little repetition goes a long way. - -Dr. Johnson was asked his opinion of the feminist movement in religion, -and he said that “a woman preaching is like a dog walking on two legs; -it is not well done, but we are surprised that it is done at all.” I -think that if we examine our judgments carefully, we shall find that our -high opinion of ancient writings is on this basis. We do not really -judge them by modern standards, any more than we judge a child by adult -standards when he tries to wield a pen, or a hoe, or an oar. Our -pleasure in reading ancient writings is to note the beginnings of real -thinking, of mature attitudes toward life. We say: “By George, those old -fellows had a lot of sense after all!” But judging the Old Testament -strictly, as literature, not as antiquity, I say that everything which -is of serious value to a modern adult person could be gathered into an -extremely small volume, certainly not over thirty thousand words, or -four per cent of the total. - - - - -CHAPTER XIII - -THE COMMUNIST ALMANAC - -From the “American Times” Sunday Review of Books, A. D. 1944 - -SATAN SANCTIFIED - -_A New Religion Enters the Lists_ - - -There come to the desk of a literary editor many volumes which could not -by any stretch of the imagination be considered as literature. But they -are printed and bound, and those who write them believe them of -importance, and others may be of the same opinion. So it becomes the -task of a reviewer to give an account of these volumes. - -The book now before us came through the mails, bearing no indication as -to the sender; and examination of the contents quickly reveals the -reason. Those who print and circulate the volume know that in so doing -they render themselves liable to the lethal gas chamber. Nevertheless, -they are impelled by fanaticism to incur the risk, so here is the result -on our desk. Technically, we believe the editor incurs penalties by -keeping the volume, instead of turning it over to the police -authorities. But it seems to us a matter of importance that the public -should know what sort of material is now being circulated among the -populace, and for that reason we give an account of the contents of the -“Communist Almanac for 1944.” - -It is perhaps a natural tendency of the human mind, an inevitable -process of history, that holders of proscribed opinions should see -themselves as martyrs, and endeavor to capitalize their sufferings for -political advantage. So, ever since the extermination of the Soviet -government by the armed forces of the civilized world, the surviving -Communists, hiding in forests and holes in the ground, have been seeing -themselves as founders of a new religion. In this document which they -now put before us, we find the creed and ritual of this monstrous -perversion of the so-called proletarian mind, together with the -biographies of its founder and the acts of its leading martyrs. - -The founder is Nikolai Lenin, and, incredible as it may seem, this -person has been selected for sanctification! A couple of years before -his death, an almost successful attempt was made to assassinate him, and -the bullets then shot into his body are said to have been the final -cause of his death. That is sufficient to constitute martyrdom in the -Soviet formula, and to entitle Vladimir Ulianov to become a legend. For -a year after his death the Soviet government attempted to preserve his -body in mummy form; but this kind of immortality being unattainable, the -body was buried, and soon afterwards rumors began to spring up all over -Russia to the effect that Lenin had come back to life, and was -reappearing to his followers, giving them advice about the management of -his Bolshevik dictatorship. That was a miracle; so now Lenin is a divine -personage, and those who died in the faith of the “proletarian” -revolution are martyrs and saints. At least, that is the thesis of the -“Communist Almanac for 1944.” - -The volume opens with no less than four biographies of the founder, -alleged to have been composed by different followers who knew him -intimately, Mattiu Shipinsky, Marco Sugarmann, Luka Herzkovitz, and Ivan -Petchnikoff. The last, it appears, is a kind of philosopher, and -provides for the Bolshevik cult the mantle of a mystical and -metaphysical system. It is amusing to note that the four biographies go -into minute detail--and differ as to many of these details! They purport -to quote their founder verbatim--and his words on the same occasions are -seldom the same words! Most absurd yet, they cannot even agree about his -ancestry! In fact, they cannot agree about anything, except that he was -the most remarkable person who has ever lived on earth, the bearer of a -new revelation to mankind. - -Following the biographies, the “Almanac” proceeds to a long recital of -the doings of various propagandists of the cult, their travels over the -world in the interest of the “class struggle,” and the persecutions to -which they were subjected in various countries. It is a melancholy duty -to record that among these emissaries of disaster were several of -American birth and ancestry. One of the easy ways of achieving -sanctification under the Bolshevik system is to be bitten by a -body-louse, and to die of typhus. So among the Soviet apostles we find -the figure of John Reed, graduate of Harvard University, and traitor to -his country and his race. - -Next we have various communications from these agents of social chaos, -addressed to their deluded followers. This part of the volume is almost -comical, in the solemnity with which these precious words are recorded -and preserved for the benefit of posterity. Needless to say, the -communications contain exhortations to the party members to remain -steadfast in the faith, and to carry the message to their fellow -“wage-slaves.” This portion of the volume is known as the -“Epistles”--the word “epistle” being Russian for letter. - -Finally, there is a collection of miscellaneous prophesyings, attributed -to a former commissar under the Russian Bolshevik government. All we can -say concerning this part of the volume is that we have been unable to -find out what it means, and it seems destined to serve as an inspiration -to all the lunatics and would-be prophets of the next two thousand -years. It is called “Revelations,” and closes the amazing volume. - -We think the time has come when public sentiment should make plain that -the present laxity of the Department of Justice toward Communist -agitators, and the whole tribe of “parlor Bolsheviks” and “pinks,” will -no longer be tolerated. We should be sorry to see this country return to -the old days of the Democratic and Republican parties, and the oil -scandals of the Harding-Coolidge era. But when we read a collection of -perversities such as this “Communist Almanac,” we cannot but sigh for -the return of Palmer and Daugherty, when red-blooded hundred per cent -Americans set to work with vigor to preserve their country from the -fanatical propagandists of class greed. - - - - -CHAPTER XIV - -GOD’S PROPAGANDA - - -We have before us another literary criticism, clipped from the “Roman -Times Weekly Review of Books” during the year 300, under the Emperor -Diocletian. It is word for word the same as that from the “American -Times” of 1944--the only difference being that one deals with an outlaw -party known as Bolsheviks, while the other deals with an outlaw sect -known as Christians. The Founder of this latter sect is described by the -“Roman Times” as a proletarian criminal, who was crucified for -disturbing the public peace under the Emperor Augustus Cæsar. His -followers have been hiding in catacombs and tombs, carrying on incessant -propaganda in defiance of the Roman law. In place of John Reed, the -“Roman Times” refers to a certain Paul, a renegade Roman gentleman and -former official of the empire. The good old days to which the “Roman -Times” looks back with longing, are the days of Nero, when these -incendiary fanatics were boiled in oil or fed to the lions. Under the -prodding of this most respectable “Times,” the Emperor Diocletian -undertook a new and ferocious persecution of the sect; but twenty-four -years afterwards the successor of Diocletian became converted to -Christianity, and adopted it as the official religion of the state, -entitled to persecute other religions. - -The reader who is a Christian will remind me that Jesus was a pacifist, -he was meek and gentle. To this I answer, the early social -revolutionists were likewise Utopians, appealing to love and -brotherhood. At the time the New Testament became fixed in its present -form, the Christians had never held power in any part of the world. When -they took power under the Emperor Constantine, they behaved like every -government in history--that is, they kept their power, using as much -force as necessary for the purpose. If the reader is shocked by the fact -that the Soviet government of Russia fought for two years a defensive -war on twenty-six fronts against its enemies, I invite him to consider -the Christian crusades, two centuries of offensive propaganda warfare. -If he is shocked by stories he has read about the Tcheka and its -torturing of prisoners, I invite him to consult Lea’s “History of the -Spanish Inquisition.” Considering the series of religious wars which -made of Europe a shambles for more than a thousand years, it is safe to -assert that for every human life sacrificed by the Soviet revolution in -Russia, a hundred thousand lives have been taken in the name of the -gentle and lowly Jesus. - -But these are questions which will not be settled in a generation, nor -in a century; therefore we pass on, and take up the question of the New -Testament as literature. It has been generally so recognized, and we may -doubt if any writing ever collected in one volume has exercised as great -an influence upon the human race. And let it be noted that this -literature is propaganda, pure and simple; we may defy anyone to find a -single line in the Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, or the Book of -Revelations which was not produced as conscious and deliberate -propaganda. - -A critic highly regarded by the academic authorities when I was a -student in college was George Henry Lewes. I read his “Life of Goethe,” -and made note of his argument on behalf of “realist” as opposed to -“idealist” art. Goethe and Shakespeare are his examples of the former -type; and how obvious is their superiority to those “subjective” -artists, who “seek in realities only visible illustrations of a deeper -existence!” The critic takes as his test the production of “the grandest -generalizations and the most elevated types”; but it was evident to me, -even in my student days, that he reached his conclusion by the simple -device of overlooking the evidence on the other side. I introduce to you -four “idealist” artists who bear the names--perhaps pen-names--of -Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Will anyone maintain that the works of -Shakespeare and Goethe contain “grander generalizations” or “more -elevated types” than the Four Gospels? We set Jesus against Shakespeare, -and Buddha against Goethe, and leave it for the common sense of mankind -to decide. - - - - -CHAPTER XV - -MRS. PRESTONIA ORDERS PLUMBING - - -When I was a young man, groping my way into Socialism, I discovered that -the movement in and about New York had a patroness. Mrs. Prestonia -Martin was her name, and she had a beautiful home in the suburbs, and -another up in the Adirondacks. An assortment of well-bred radicals would -gather, and wait on themselves at table, and do their own laundry, and -scratch a bit in the garden, and feel they were on the front door-step -of the Co-operative Commonwealth. John Martin had been a member of the -Fabian Society in London, so we knew we were under the best possible -auspices, doing the exactly correct advanced things. - -But time committed its ravages upon the minds of my friends Prestonia -and John. They lost their vision of the Co-operative Commonwealth, and -when you went to the beautiful “camp” overlooking Keene Valley, you no -longer met young radicals, and no longer helped with the laundry; you -met sedate philosophers, and listened to Prestonia expounding the -mournful conclusion that humanity had never made any advance. The couple -took up a new crusade--to avert from womankind the horrors of politics. -The last time I met John, just before the war, he was an entirely -respectable member of the New York school board and smiled at me a -patronizing smile when I ventured to prophesy that inside of ten years -women would be voting in New York state. “You will never live to see -that!” said the prophet John. - -The psalmist expresses the wish that “mine enemy would write a book”; -and in this case mine enemy’s wife committed the indiscretion. I have -before me a scholarly-looking volume, published in 1910, entitled “Is -Mankind Advancing?” by Mrs. John Martin. I cite it as an outstanding -example of one variety of culture superstition; it reduces to absurdity -the arguments of one group of tradition worshipers. My old friend -Prestonia has discovered that the Greeks achieved a higher civilization -than has ever since existed on earth, and her demonstration that mankind -is not advancing is based on the exaltation of Greek civilization over -everything that has since come along. - -Mrs. Prestonia does not really know very much about Greek civilization; -I can state that, because I had many discussions with her at the time -she was writing this book. What she has done is to take a history of -Greece and list the leading names, higgledy-piggledy, regardless of -their ideas, or of the parts they played, regardless of the fact that -they fought and even killed one another, regardless of the fact that -their doctrines contradict and cancel one another. They were Greeks, and -therefore they were great. Two or three hundred are listed, all men of -genius; and what names can you put against them? - -I ventured to suggest a number of names to my friend Prestonia; but you -see, my men were modern men, vulgar, common fellows who wore trousers, -and ate pie, and worked for dollars! Think of comparing Edison with -Archimedes--could anything be more absurd? Think of comparing Pasteur -with Hippocrates! “But, my dear lady,” I would argue, “Hippocrates -believed that disease was caused by ‘humors’; he believed that crises in -disease followed numerical systems.” Maybe that was true, said -Prestonia, but nevertheless, Hippocrates was the greatest physician that -ever lived. And she would have Socrates listed as one of the glories of -Athenian civilization--in spite of the fact that Athenian civilization -had compelled him to drink the hemlock! In her queer hall of fame the -imperialist Pericles, who led his country to ruin, and was convicted of -the theft of public money, takes rank as the greatest statesman in all -history, outranking Lincoln, who saved the American Union, and freed -several million slaves. A dissolute young despot, Alexander, who sighed -for new worlds to conquer, outranks George Washington, who founded a -nation of free men, and then retired to his plantation. - -After running over the list of all the achievements of modern literature -and art, politics and philosophy, science and industry, I was able at -last to find one thing which my friend Prestonia was unwilling to get -along without. She wanted to live in ancient Athens--but to have her -modern plumbing! And never once had it occurred to her that plumbing -means lead and copper and steel and brass and nickel and porcelain and -paint! Also mills in which these things are produced, railroads or -motor trucks on which they are transported, factories in which the cars -and trucks are made! Also telegraph and telephone and electric light, -and bookkeeping systems and credit systems, and capital and labor, and -the Republican party and the Socialist movement! - -All this is preliminary to a study of the literature and art of ancient -Greece; to help us clear our minds of cant, and persuade us to face the -question: how much do we really admire Greek literature and Greek art, -and how much do we just pretend to admire it? How much is the -superiority of Greek civilization a reality, and how much is it a -superstition maintained by gentlemen who have acquired honorific -university degrees, which represent to them a meal ticket for the -balance of their sojourns on earth? - - - - -CHAPTER XVI - -MRS. OGI ORDERS ETIQUETTE - - -“Well,” says Mrs. Ogi, “I see you have got down to the scandal.” - -Her husband looks pained. “Do you call that scandal?” - -“You accept people’s hospitality, and then come away and ridicule them, -and reveal secrets about how they got the family washing done--” - -“Secrets!” cries Ogi. “But that was a reform movement, a crusade!” After -reflection, he adds: “If I really wanted to tell scandals, I could do -it. I might hint that John lost his faith in the radical movement as a -result of auto-intoxication.” - -“Well, all I can say is that if you tell that, I’ll never speak to you -again.” - -Ogi answers meekly, “Excuse me.” And then: “What do you think of my -thesis?” - -“Well,” says Mrs. Ogi, “I see, of course--you are trying to irritate and -shock people as much as possible. Are you going to say that Greek art is -propaganda?” - -“I can’t possibly help saying it.” - -“You know that this art is always cited as the perfect type of pure art, -the expression of joy and love of beauty.” - -“The Greeks were a beauty-loving race and a joy-seeking race, and they -embodied their ideals in the figures of gods and goddesses--extremely -lovely figures. No one can do better with the human body than they did; -but if you take those divinities on their good looks, you’ll simply be -repeating the bitter mistake of the Greeks--and without their excuse of -inexperience.” - -Says Mrs. Ogi: “We’re to have a Christian sermon on naked marble idols?” - -“We are going to understand the total art product of the Greeks, to draw -out of it what they put into it. These people constituted themselves an -experiment station to try out beauty-loving--that is, trust in -Nature--as a basis of civilization; and they found it didn’t work. It -led them into pain and failure and despair, and the record is written -all over their art. There is a book, Mackail’s ‘Greek Anthology,’ a -collection of various kinds of inscriptions, brief verses and sentiments -from all sources; and you search the pages and hardly find one happy -word. You discover that their art was to put sadness into beautiful and -melodious language. ‘Of all things,’ says Theognis, ‘it is best for men -not to be born.’ And Anacreon, poet of the joy-lovers, compares life to -a chariot wheel that ‘runs fast away.’” - -“Well, but so it does!” - -“Something endures, and we have to find out what. We have to take hold -of life, and learn to direct it; we cannot just play in a garden, like -happy children. The Greeks played, and their garden turned into a -charnel-house, a place of horror. I call it an amazing blunder of -criticism--the notion that Greek art is one of joy and freedom. The -culmination of their art impulse was the tragedies which the whole -community helped to create and maintain. These performances were -religious ritual, their supreme civic events; and what do they tell us? -There is one theme, immutably fixed, the helplessness of the human -spirit in the grip of fate. A black shadow hangs over the life of men, -they grope blindly in the darkness. Whole families, mighty dynasties of -kings and rulers are condemned to destruction. They are pursued by -bitter and fierce and relentless Nemesis. Somber prophecies are spoken -before men are born, and then we see these men, striving with all their -wit to evade their destiny--in vain. Our pleasure as spectators is to -watch this process, and be convinced of the helplessness of our kind. We -are lifted up to the heaven of the gods, we are endowed with omniscience -and omnipotence--in order to drive a dagger into our own bosoms, to -cohabit with our own mothers and sisters, to stab our own fathers and -brothers, to tear out our own eyeballs. Enacting such things with -majesty and solemnity, reciting them in melodious language to the rhythm -of beautiful music and the graceful motions of a chorus--that is the -final achievement of these lovers of beauty and joy!” - -“You are becoming eloquent,” says Mrs. Ogi, who distrusts eloquence in -her cave. “What conclusion do you draw about this art?” - -“We are physicians, called to a case after the patient is dead. We want -to know what killed this man, so that we can advise living patients. -From this post-mortem we learn that sensuous charm does not suffice to -secure life; it is not enough for people to carve beautiful figures of -the nude human body, and build marble temples to joy and love, while -their civic affairs are full of jealousy and greed and corruption.” - -“Was there corruption in Greek public life?” - -“So much that we in modern times cannot conceive it. Yes, I know about -the Teapot Dome and the black satchel with a hundred thousand dollars -worth of bills. Nevertheless, if anyone were to tell us about corruption -such as the Greeks took for granted, not even a movie audience would -swallow it.” - -“Now that sounds interesting,” says Mrs. Ogi. “Tell us scandals about -these reverend ancients!” - -“First I want to explain the class struggle in Greek society, and the -economic basis of their state--” - -“You take my advice,” says Mrs. Ogi; “leave that lecture until the end, -and then forget it. Take your muck-rake and poke it into the Parthenon!” - -“What I want to do,” says Ogi, “is to take a character out of ancient -Greece, and set him down in our world and see how he’d sound to us. -Something like this--” - - - - -CHAPTER XVII - -WILLIAM RANDOLPH ALCIBIADES - - -From “The American Plutarch: Our Leading Statesmen Portrayed for the -Young; with Moral Inferences.” New York: A. D. 2124. - -The career of William Randolph Alcibiades, publisher, soldier and -politician, coincided with the era of the Great Wars. He was born to a -position of power and luxury, being a nephew of the greatest statesman -of his time, and having as his private tutor the leading philosopher of -his time. He had rare gifts of personal beauty and charm; but his youth -was wild and dissipated, and he spurned the conventional career which -lay open to him, and set himself up as a leader of the Democratic party. -His enemies called him a demagogue, and denied him any sincerity in his -popular appeals. - -In the first World War the young statesman was chosen commander-in-chief -of the American forces in France. Returning home, he organized and led -the expedition for the conquest of South America, and laid siege to the -city of Buenos Ayres. He was recalled, because his enemies charged that -on the night before the expedition sailed, he had committed an act of -sacrilege by chopping off the nose of the statue of George Washington in -front of the Treasury Building, New York. History will never know who -committed this vandalism; a young man confessed, and some of those whom -he charged with guilt were executed, but the enemies of William Randolph -maintained that he had purchased this confession, in order to get rid of -certain persons who stood in his way. - -William Randolph, while being conducted back to his country under -arrest, made his escape to England. In order to punish his enemies at -home, he made fervent appeals to the British government to enter the war -on the side of South America, and against his own country. His eloquence -prevailed, and both England and France sent ships to the relief of -Buenos Ayres. But William Randolph had to flee from England to France, -because the English king made the discovery that the young American had -seduced his wife. - -William Randolph now lived in retirement until the second World War -broke out--between the United States on the one hand, and Japan and -China, aided by England and France, on the other. William Randolph had -always been ardent in promoting hostility against Japan, but he now fled -to the court of the Japanese emperor, and with money furnished by this -wealthy monarch he sent emissaries to foment a conspiracy in the United -States. The conflict between the Republican and Democratic parties had -reached a stage of such bitterness that the wealthy classes were ready -to listen to any scheme which promised them power. William Randolph -having deserted the Democrats and gone over to the Republicans, his -agents approached the naval officers of the fleet, and these, combined -with Judge Gary and J. P. Morgan and other gentlemen of wealth, -overthrew the established government, and set up a new constitution, -which confined the voting power to five thousand of the richest -citizens. - -The new government made an alliance with Japan and China against England -and France; and William Randolph returned to the United States and -became a general in command of the American army. But his failure to win -victories caused his popularity to wane, and he fled to a castle he had -built for himself in Mexico. The British government, enraged by what he -had done to turn the Japanese emperor against them, sent emissaries to -set fire to his castle, and William Randolph Alcibiades was shot while -trying to make his escape from the flames. - -From this career we learn that it is not enough for a statesman to be -beautiful in person and charming in manner: it is also necessary that he -be taught to attend Sunday school in his youth. - - - - -CHAPTER XVIII - -THE AGE OF HERO-WORSHIP - - -Greek civilization was made by a large number of different tribes, -inhabiting islands, or fertile valleys and plains separated by mountain -ranges. Among these tribes there was incessant rivalry and bitter -jealousy. They were never able to form a national or racial union, and -their history is a succession of inter-tribal intrigues and wars. In -addition to this came the class struggle. The aristocratic classes, -based on landlordism, held the government, while the proletariat, -crowding into the towns, clamored for power; popular leaders arose, and -there were conspiracies and civic tumults. Invariably the leaders of the -dispossessed party would form alliances with outside states for war upon -their own state. More significant yet, some would take the money and -serve the cause of the Persian kings, who represented barbarian -despotism. - -In the beginning of their written record we find the Greeks just -emerging from the family stage. The old men ruled; they were the wise -and the rich, and no one disputed their authority. They formed alliances -and led expeditions for the plundering of other states; then, returning -to their ancestral halls, they hired musicians to entertain them by -chanting the story of their exploits. So we have the Homeric poems, -ruling-class propaganda, written to glorify the ancestors of powerful -chieftains and fighting men, and to inculcate the spirit of obedience -and martial pride in the new generations. - -Every device of the poet’s art is employed to lend prominence and -splendor to the Homeric heroes. They are frequently demigods, the result -of some mood of dalliance on the part of one of the high gods of -Olympus, who came down to earth and encountered a lovely Greek maiden -wandering in a meadow. This divine illegitimacy entitles the heroes to -the center of the stage, and they take it. They are a set of extremely -greedy, jealous, vain and capricious school-boys; and, what is still -more significant, their gods, the highest ideal they could conceive, are -exactly as greedy, jealous, vain and capricious. The only beautiful -emotion in the poems is when some of the mothers and fathers, the wives -and children of those heroes express for them an affection of which they -are unworthy. - -We are accustomed to use the words “Homeric” and “epic” to signify -something vast, elemental, portentous. How is it that Homer secures to -his characters this “heroic” effect? By causing all the rest of the -world to bow to their pretensions, by interesting the gods in their -fate--and, above all else, by portraying them as unrestrained in their -emotions and limitless in their desires. These are the familiar devices -whereby aristocracy signifies itself. - -And that explains why such men as Matthew Arnold and Gladstone write -volumes of rhapsody over Homer. There is in England a class which has -invented ways of setting forth to the world the fact that it does not -have to work for a living. There are things this class can do which the -vulgar herd cannot do; and one of these things is to read and appreciate -Latin and Greek literature. Homer is to the British world of culture -what the top-hat is to the British world sartorial. - -Homer serves these purposes, because he has the aristocratic point of -view, and gives the aristocratic mind what it craves. Just as we cherish -genealogy volumes to prove that our ancestors came over in the -_Mayflower_, so the Homeric minstrel chanted a catalogue of the ships -which had taken part in the Trojan war. And just as our members of good -society preach “law and order” to the lower classes, so in the Homeric -poems it is made clear that the common soldier exists to shed his blood -for the glory of his chief. Only once does a common man lift his voice -in the “Iliad”--the famous scene in the council where Thersites dares to -rise up. He is represented as a hunchbacked and offensive brawler; he is -overwhelmed with ridicule, and finally receives a sound thrashing from -Ulysses, called “the wily,” the Greek ideal of the shrewd and sensible -man of the world. “The sovereignty of the many is not good,” declares -this “wily” one; “let there be one sovereign, one king.” - -We shall find that the bards of aristocracy seldom neglect to flatter -their masters by showing some rebel thus being taught his place. We -shall find Shakespeare treating Jack Cade precisely as Homer treats -Thersites; neither stopping for a moment to inquire whether the grumbler -had any just cause to grumble. We shall find also that leisure-class -critics always accept these scenes as pure and undefiled “art,” and are -shocked by the suggestion of their mighty minstrels stooping to -propaganda in the interest of those who pay them. In those early days -the pay was poor; if legend is to be trusted, Homer wandered blind and -friendless among the Greek towns, which afterwards claimed the honor of -being his birthplace. Says the epigram: - - Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead, - Through which the living Homer begged his bread. - -Taking the “Iliad” on the basis of literature, we say it contains fine -poetry, and vivid pictures of old-time manners, fascinating to read -about--if you come on them while you are young. There is a stage of life -when we are naïve and uncritical in our acceptance of “heroism.” We -adopt a certain shining person, we share his glories, we go out to -battle with him, we thrill to every stroke of his broad sword, we shout -when he wins the victory--and never reflect that we might exactly as -well be interested in the other fellow, who has exactly as much right to -survive. The average person reaches that age of hero-worship at twelve -years, and passes it at sixteen, if he passes it at all. Let children -read the “Odyssey” in a good translation; they will enjoy these perils -and later on they will discover that the universe has not yet been -entirely explored--there are perils in the starry spaces, and in the -deeps of our minds. - - - - -CHAPTER XIX - -HUNDRED PER CENT ATHENIAN - - -Once in their history fate provided the Greeks with a great cause; that -was in the fifth century, when the gigantic Juggernaut of Persia came -rolling down upon them. King Xerxes assembled his barbarian hordes, his -tribes of wild horsemen and his phalanxes of slaves, his war elephants -and his chariots. Compared with these invaders, the Greeks were modern -civilized men; free men, holding in their minds all the treasures of the -future. They forgot their state jealousies and civic factions, and -rallied and saved their culture. From that national impulse came -practically everything that is worth while in the “classics.” It was -here that the Greek spirit achieved self-consciousness; it was here that -Greek patriotism and Greek religion found their justification, their -validity as propaganda for great art. - -Among the Athenian captains who fought at Marathon was one by the name -of Æschylus. He returned, full of the pride of his race, and wrote a -tragedy, “The Persians,” around the story of the king whom he had helped -to defeat; the climax of the drama being the battle in which the poet -had been a leader. It was Greek patriotic and religious propaganda -without any thought of disguise; its purpose being to portray the -downfall of despotism. The play was a popular success, and made Æschylus -the national poet, not merely of Athens, but of all the Greeks. - -He wrote other plays of the same religious and patriotic sort, and he -never feared to put in whatever moral teachings he thought his audience -needed. “Obedience is the mother of success, bringing safety,” summed up -his political creed; so, needless to say, he belonged to the -conservative party. So little was he afraid of “propaganda” that in “The -Seven Against Thebes” he praised by name the statesman Aristides, who -was present in the audience. This kind of topical illusion “brought down -the house” in ancient Athens, precisely as it would in New York today. - -The sculptors and architects and other artists of Greece felt the same -patriotic and religious thrill, the same consciousness of a sublime -destiny; they labored with burning faith to glorify the gods and -demigods, the ancestors and rulers who had made them masters of the -land. As a memorial to the victory of Marathon the Greeks instituted -national games, which took place every four years, and were a means of -uniting the various tribes in worship of their gods. There was the -keenest rivalry, and the ambition of Greek gentlemen was to win the -crowns and laurel wreaths. When they had won, they wanted the fact to be -known; so they paid poets who could sing their achievements in glorious -verses. The poet Pindar became a high-class publicity man for these -aristocratic sportsmen; also he sang the praises of whatever tyrants -held power in the Greek cities, making them splendid and heroic, -regardless of how unprincipled and cruel they might be. - -The production of the dramas was also a kind of game. Each playwright -found a wealthy patron to pay the expenses of drilling and equipping the -chorus for his play; then, if the play carried off the prize, the -wealthy gentleman built a monument to his own generosity; and so we saw, -lining the streets of Athens, the choregic monuments of Andrew Carnegie -and John D. Rockefeller and Otto H. Kahn. Each poet seeking the prize -would take the demigods and ancestral rulers, and portray them -according to his own interpretation; incidentally he would use the -chorus to discuss the current events of politics, and to express his own -convictions. Thus Æschylus wrote his “Eumenides” to oppose the -abolishing of the Areopagiticus, an ancient court which met on the -Sacred Hill: just as if today a poet should produce a drama to combat -the radical attacks on the United States Supreme Court. - -Another dramatist arose, the son of a noble family, Sophocles by name. -He wrote some thirty plays, and carried off the prize nineteen times, -and his rivals and enemies took pleasure in charging that he was greedy -for money, a regular old miser, besides being exceptionally fond of the -ladies, and raising a large illegitimate family. Sophocles produced -serene and beautiful works, because he believed in the patriotic and -pious traditions he served, accepting the hideous stories of the -old-time Greek heroes and demi-gods as the natural fate of mortals. He -is the perfect type of the ruling-class artist who achieves perfection -without strife, because he is completely at one with his environment, -identifying the interests of his class with the will of the gods. We -shall encounter a line of such poets--Virgil, Spenser, Shakespeare, -Racine, Goethe, Tennyson. They feel love and pity for the unhappy -children of their brains, and they move us to grief and awe, but never -do they move us to revolt. - -But now came another dramatist, in a different mood. This man looked at -the Greek legends and decided that they were not true. He looked at -Greek institutions, private property, and state patriotism, and the -sovereignty of old men in family and tribe, and he decided that these -were not necessarily wise and permanent arrangements. He set himself up -as a propagandist of things that we call “modern,” and that the Greeks -called blasphemy and infidelity. His name was Euripides, and he took the -heroes and heroines of the old legends and turned them into plain human -beings, suffering the cruelties of fate, but fighting back, voicing -protests and doubts. So came a string of plays, jeering at militarism -and false patriotism, denouncing slavery and the subjection of women in -the home, rebuking religious bigotry, undermining the noble and wealthy -classes. A play in which the women get together to rebel against war! A -play in which a devoted wife gives her life to an angry god in order to -save her husband’s life--but the husband is shown as an egotistical cad, -not worthy of this dutiful and pious Greek sacrifice! Read a passage of -the dramatic propaganda of Euripides, and realize how this must have -sounded to hundred per cent Athenian patriots--and right in the midst of -a war to the death with Sparta: - - Doth some one say that there be gods above? - There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool, - Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you. - Look at the facts themselves, yielding my words - No undue credence; for I say that kings - Kill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud, - And doing thus are happier than those - Who live calm pious lives day after day. - How many little states that serve the gods - Are subject to the godless but more strong, - Made slaves by might of a superior army! - - - - -CHAPTER XX - -THE FUNNY MAN OF REACTION - - -Needless to say, the Bolshevik sentiments of Euripides were not -proclaimed before the altar of Dionysus without protest on the part of -the orthodox. There rose up another dramatist, this time a comedian, to -champion the ancient and honorable traditions of Athens. Aristophanes -was his name, and he was one of the world’s great masters of the comic -line. He had infinite verve and wit and imagination; you can read him -today and laugh out loud--even while his reactionary ideas make you -cross. - -The point to be got clear is that right or wrong, this poet is -altogether a propagandist; a political campaigner, full of the most -bitter fury against his enemies, attacking them by name, lampooning -them, ridiculing them, not scrupling even to tell vicious falsehoods -about them. He wrote his plays to advocate this thesis or that thesis; -he arranged his incidents to exhibit this or that aspect of the thesis; -he chose his characters, either to voice his own convictions, or to make -the opposite convictions absurd. Not merely do his characters make long -speeches in which they set forth the poet’s ideas; at any time in the -course of the action the poet will wave these characters one side, and -step out in the form of the chorus and say what he thinks, arguing and -pleading with the audience, scolding at them, denouncing his enemies, -explaining his previous actions, discussing his present play--even going -so far as to explain to the audience why they should award the prize to -Aristophanes and not to somebody else! I doubt if there has ever been a -bolder propagandist using the stage; I doubt if the propertied classes -and the partisans of tradition ever had a more vigorous defender; and -this, don’t fail to note, in a world dramatist, a “classic” of history’s -greatest “art for art’s sake” period! - -The amazing modernness of Aristophanes is what strikes us most. There is -hardly a single one of our present-day contentious questions he does not -discuss at length. He has the malicious wit of the New York “Sun” in the -days of Dana; he has the fun of Stephen Leacock, whose comical tales -ridicule every new and sensible idea the human mind can conceive. Again, -one thinks of the verses of Wallace Irwin--except that Aristophanes -sincerely held his convictions, whereas Mr. Irwin’s wit appears to be -directed by his newest publisher. - -Aristophanes was a gentleman, in the English sense of the word, and -wrote for other gentlemen. Just as in England during the late war we -observed the manufacturers of beer and munitions rising to power and -turning the aristocracy out of their castles, so during the -Peloponnesian war Aristophanes saw his cultured class dispossessed by -newly rich traders. There is a scene in the “Knights” in which he -denounces them; they are “mongers,” a whole succession of -“mongers”--topical allusions which the audience received with roars of -laughter. First came a rope-monger to govern the state, and then a -mutton-monger; now there was a leather-monger--Cleon, ruler of the city, -who sat in the audience and heard himself abused. Athens could go only -one stage lower, said Aristophanes, and he produced an offal-monger, and -recited to this person a list of his vices, which proved him fit to take -charge of public affairs. - -As to Cleon, the poet objected that his political manners were rude; and -in order to set him a good example, described him as “a whale that -keeps a public house and has a voice like a pig on fire!” This was in -war-time--and imagine what would have happened to a playwright who -produced a play in Washington, D. C., in the year 1918, describing the -President of the United States in similar language! - -Again, Aristophanes produced a play denouncing his city for its shabby -treatment of its tributary states. He produced this play while -ambassadors from those states were in the audience, attending a council -of the empire. For this Cleon had the poet prosecuted and fined; so in -his next production Aristophanes comes back, proposing that the people -shall kick out a number of rascals, including - - All statesmen retrenching the fees and the salaries - Of theatrical bards, in revenge for the railleries, - And jests, and lampoons, of this holy solemnity, - Profanely pursuing their personal enmity, - For having been flouted, and scoff’d, and scorn’d-- - All such are admonish’d and heartily warn’d! - -Aristophanes loathed Euripides for having turned the ancestral heroes -into weak mortals, with sentiments and whinings about their rights and -wrongs. He dragged the poet down into hell, and there beat him with all -the weapons he could lay hold of. He took the poet’s play of feminism, -the “Lysistrata,” and turned it to farce by that most modern of devices, -a strike of mothers! A play in which the women of Athens refuse to -co-habit with their husbands until the husbands have ended the war with -Sparta! - -Also Aristophanes loathed Socrates, because that philosopher taught the -youths of Athens to think for themselves. To this the poet attributed -the corruption of Alcibiades, the young aristocrat who had been a pupil -of Socrates, and had sold out his country to the Persian king. He wrote -a play called “The Clouds,” in which he represented Socrates as a -cunning trickster, teaching men how to advocate any cause for money. He -portrayed the philosopher sitting in a hanging basket in front of his -house, performing absurdities with his pupils. It is exactly the tone of -a “Saturday Evening Post” editorial, jeering at “parlor pinks,” and -college professors who teach their pupils “mugwumpery.” The time came -when the mob voted death to Socrates; and this was the great triumph of -the funny man of reaction. - -But alas, the death of one free-thinker did not suffice to bring the -citizens of Athens back to the simple life of their ancestors. They -continued to make money and enjoy themselves, and to hire soldiers to do -their fighting. Their dramatists developed the so-called “social -comedy”--that is, pictures of the fashions and follies of the leisure -class, without any propaganda. It is an invariable rule that the absence -of propaganda in the art of a people means that this people is in -process of intellectual and moral decay. So now a strong man came down -out of the north and took charge of Greece, and Greek literature moved -into the Alexandrine period. - -The center of this new culture was the city of Alexandria, in Egypt. The -poets now took pride in their technical skill, and wrote delicate and -charming portrayals of the delights of love. A horde of learned scholars -busied themselves with criticism and interpretation of the works of the -past, and composed long epic poems dealing with grammar and rhetoric and -similar subjects. This too was “propaganda”; but you note that it was -propaganda of a secondary and imitative sort, it was not produced by men -who were doing great deeds, and creating new forms of life. Alexandria -was a cosmopolitan center, ruled by a despot, the home of some wealthy -and cultured gentlemen, who supported painters and sculptors and poets -and musicians and actors to while away their boredom, and to serve as -their press-agents and trumpeters. But the art of classical Greece was -the work of free men, citizens of a state ruled by a larger proportion -of its inhabitants than had ever before held authority in civilized -times. That meant throughout the community the joy and thrill of -intellectual adventure, it meant a great leap of achievement for the -whole group. Such invariably is the origin of art which we now regard as -“classical”--and which we use to hold the minds of new generations in -chain to tradition and conformity! - - - - -CHAPTER XXI - -ATHENS AND LOS ANGELES - - -There has been peace in the cave for a while, because Mrs. Ogi has been -interested in learning about the Greeks. “I perceive,” she says, “that -there are superstitions in the arts, just as in religion.” - -“Exactly,” says Ogi; “and they serve the same purpose. They begin as -honest ignorance, and are then taken up and used as a source of income -and a shield to privilege.” - -Says Mrs. Ogi, “It strikes me the Greeks lived in a country very much -like Southern California.” - -“Quite so. The climate is the same; and the rocky hills and fertile -valleys, and people living the outdoor life, and giving their time to -sports. The one-piece bathing-suits that have come into fashion in our -‘beauty parades’ are about the same thing as the Greek maidens running -naked in the games. And if you want to parallel the darker side of Greek -sensuousness--” - -“There is Hollywood,” says Mrs. Ogi. - -“There is all smart society, as much luxury and wantonness as your -thesis requires.” - -“But then, why has Los Angeles never had any art? I know what you are -going to say--our mental energy goes into real estate advertisements. -But joking aside, why?” - -“Because the people here have never had a struggle. They came into a -country already prepared for them, inhabited by tame Indians living on -piñon nuts. All the settlers had to do was to subdivide the land, and -raise the price once every year. They are too polite to have an art; if -anybody makes a crude effort, it is a masterpiece, and we all get -together and boost. You can write one feeble book, and live a life-time -on your reputation. Los Angeles is a fruit that was rotten before it was -ripe.” - -“What are we going to do?” asks Mrs. Ogi. - -“We are going to take our choice between a social revolution and a slave -empire.” - -Mrs. Ogi is not certain about her choice; she sits, watching the -entrance of the cave out of the corner of her eye--the ancestral habit -of expecting some hostile intruder. After a while she remarks, “I -notice you didn’t say anything about slavery in Greece.” - -“It will be better to deal with slavery in the case of the Romans, where -its effects show so plainly. The Greeks had slavery, but the force which -destroyed their civilization was faction. They had their ‘world war,’ -and Sir Gilbert Murray, who knows them by heart, has drawn a parallel -between that war and ours; it is so exact that it makes you laugh--or -weep, according to your temperament. The Greek struggle was between the -Athenian empire, a democratic sea power, and the Spartans, an -aristocratic, military people with no nonsense about them. The war -lasted for two generations, off and on; they hadn’t developed the -technique of extermination as we have. But they had all the social and -psychic factors of our ‘war for democracy’--‘defeatists’ and -‘bitter-enders,’ poets and propagandists of hate, statesmen promising -utopias after victory, spies and informers and provocateurs, refugees -crowding into the cities, landlords raising rents, food famines, -rationing of supplies, and profiteers coining fortunes out of the -general misery. And of course the demagogues and haters had their way; -Athens was ruined and Sparta was bled white, and the Greeks became -subjects, first of Macedonia, then of the Romans, then of the Turks.” - -“Thus endeth the first lesson,” says Mrs. Ogi. “And now for the Romans.” - -“Well, the Romans didn’t bleed themselves to death; they were practical -fellows, with a business man’s point of view. They turned their deadly -short swords against other races; and when they had conquered somebody, -they put him to work for the glory of the Grand Old Party. They were -‘hard-boiled,’ as we say; our big business men of the rougher type--old -P. D. Armour, and Pullman, and ‘Jesse James’ Hill, and Harriman, and the -elder Morgan, and Judge Gary. This banker in Chicago that the Republican -party has just put over on us as vice-president, General ‘Helen Maria’ -Dawes--he commanded an army against the Germans, and having conquered -them, he goes back to put them under bond, to set them at work for long -hours, and drain the milk out of the mothers’ breasts, and feed it to -the international bankers, instead of to the German infants. That was a -perfect Roman job, and General Helen Maria would have been the boy -after the Romans’ own heart; they would have made him a prefect over the -whole of Asia Minor, or Northern Africa, or Spain, and he would have -come home a millionaire--but never so rich as the head of one of the -Morgan banks in Chicago!” - -“I shouldn’t think you’d get much art out of people like that,” says -Mrs. Ogi. “But go ahead and tell us the story.” - - - - -CHAPTER XXII - -THE SLAVE EMPIRE - - -Rome, like all other nations, was founded by stern, determined men, who -believed in themselves and in their tribal gods. They conquered the -peninsula of Italy, and built mighty cities, and a net-work of military -roads, and aqueducts which endure even today. All that time their state -was a republic; in fact, they made the word for us--res publicæ mean -public affairs, and all Roman citizens took part in them, discussed and -voted, passed laws and enforced the laws. They raised armies, and built -fleets of ships, and conquered Carthage, and ultimately the whole -Mediterranean world. But, according to the custom of the time, they -enslaved their prisoners in war; and so, in the course of six or eight -centuries, Rome provided the classic demonstration of what slavery does -to civilization. - -Emerson has said that wherever you find a chain fastened to the wrist of -a slave, you find the other end fastened to the wrist of a master. It is -possible for a slave-holder to be a virtuous man, but it is impossible -for him to raise virtuous children. Slaves are tricky and dishonest, -full of suppressions and secret vices; even where they mean well, they -debauch the young by waiting upon them and depriving them of initiative. -Why should a young aristocrat work, when he knows he will grow up to -inherit papa’s money? In a few generations he is too effeminate even to -fight. Why should he risk his precious life, when he can hire common -soldiers? - -Not only that, but slavery undermines free labor, and breaks down the -farming class. Cheap food poured into Rome, and the farmers were -ruined, and their sons drifted into the cities. The lands of Italy were -mortgaged, and the money-lenders got them. Wealthy merchants and -officials returning from the provinces became owners of vast estates, -while the cities were crowded with a hungry mob, idle, dissolute--and -victimized by the owners of slum tenements. You may see every bit of -that reproduced in the United States today, for chattel slavery and wage -slavery are in their economic effects the same. The only difference is -that a process which took six or eight centuries in Rome is taking one -century under the stimulus of machinery. - -The Roman mob had the vote, and they used it to get something for -themselves. There came class struggles, bitter and ferocious. Two young -brothers of the aristocracy, Caius and Tiberius Gracchus, became -champions of the common people--what we call “parlor Socialists.” They -were assassinated, and the partisans of privilege, the “old gang,” -proceeded to slaughter everybody in Italy who threatened their power. -There followed two generations of civil strife, and then came a strong -man, Julius Cæsar, who put an end to political democracy. In history -books that are taught to our school children today you will read that -Cæsar was a great and virtuous protector of law and order; because the -class which is paying for school text-books in capitalist America is -waiting hopefully for the arrival of exactly such a man to put an end to -the threat of industrial democracy. - -So Rome became in form what it was in fact, an empire, the most colossal -machine for plundering that had ever been seen on earth. A little inside -gang of rich men ran it, and kept the mob satisfied by bread and -circuses and gladiatorial shows. The Roman emperors tried every form of -debauchery and blood-thirsty cruelty, incest and unnatural vice, and -crowned it by having themselves made into gods with their statues set up -to be worshiped in the temples. Their heirs took to murdering and -poisoning each other, and Rome was governed by palace revolutions. Then -the army discovered that it could share the graft, and the troops took -to revolting and setting up their leaders as emperors and gods. All the -while the tribute continued to roll in--the wealth of the whole world -squandered in one mad orgy-- - -“Look here,” says Mrs. Ogi; “you have got in a solid chapter of -preaching--and we are trying to find out about art!” - -“I’m all through now,” says her husband, humbly. “But no one could -understand Roman art without understanding the economics of slavery.” - - - - -CHAPTER XXIII - -DUMB PIOUS ÆNEAS - - -In the beginning the Romans didn’t bother very much with art. In their -public buildings they were content to take over the Greek styles--but -making them heavy and solid, so as to last to the end of time. The -attitude of a Roman gentleman toward the fine arts reminds me of a -wealthy Southern planter whose son wanted to become a violinist, and the -father said, “I can hire all the fiddler-fellows I want.” The Roman -gentleman bought people of that sort--musicians, dancers and poets with -skill handed down from “the glory that was Greece.” - -Until the republic was dead and the Emperor Augustus took the throne. -Then came a time of peace, and a Roman scholar, the son of a country -proprietor, looked about him, and seeing the perils of internal decay -and outside barbarism looming over his world, he recalled the stern -sobriety of the good old days, and yearned to bring back the governing -class of Rome to reverence for their ancestors. There is a report that -the Emperor Augustus himself suggested the task to the poet; anyhow, Mr. -Publius Vergilius Maro, known to us as Virgil, set himself with sober -deliberation to the making of a piece of Roman national and religious -propaganda. - -It was to be an epic after the fashion of Homer, written in dactylic -hexameter, like Homer. Virgil cast about him for a hero, and selected a -legendary Trojan named Æneas, who was said to have fled from the Greeks -and to have founded Rome. The characters in Homer carried an adjective -before their names, “the wily Ulysses,” “the swift-footed Achilles,” and -so on. Therefore this hero must have an adjective, and he becomes “the -pious Æneas”--the man who respects the old-time faith, and preserves -the old-time traditions of virtue, sobriety and public service. - -So here is an epic poem, wrought with verbal skill and sincerity of -feeling, conveying to us the dream of Rome as it ought to be, but was -not. We see the wanderings of Æneas and his ship-load of companions. We -see him land at Carthage, and carry on a love affair with Queen Dido, -and then desert her--not a serious impropriety in Roman days. We see the -founding father celebrating the old-time religious rites, consulting the -auguries and asking the blessing of those gods, of which every Roman had -a little image in his home, just as orthodox Russians and Roman -Catholics do today. - -The “Æneid” is considered ideal for infliction upon helpless school -boys; it being full of that careful propriety and decorous tameness -which represent what our children ought to be, but are not. The old -professor of Latin who inflicted the poem upon me was an ardent -propagandist of the Catholic faith, and it was his hope that if we -learned proper respect for the established religion of ancient Rome, we -might some day be lured into similar respect for the established -religion of modern Rome. We read, or made up, a phrase: “Dum pius -Æneas,” meaning: “While the pious Æneas”--. We boys knew we were being -propaganded, and we resented it, and this phrase gave us a chance to -express our feelings. “The dumb pious Æneas” became our formula. “What’s -your next hour?” “Oh, I’ve got the dumb pious Æneas!” - -We would sit and solemnly translate a long account of a prize-fight--a -religious prize-fight, part of the pious games. The antagonists wore no -vulgar boxing-gloves, but a mysterious, romantic thing called a -“cestus,” which we did not recognize as plain “brass knucks.” And woe to -the student if the dumb pious professor happened to catch him with a -morning newspaper under his desk, reading an account of a prize-fight -which had happened the night before in Madison Square Garden! Woe -likewise to the student who, translating the rage of the deserted Queen -Dido--“furens quid femina possit”--happened to be caught reading the -story of some queen of the stage or the grand opera who had committed -suicide because of a faithless lover! - -Does anyone question that the “Æneid” is propaganda? If so, I mention -that the poet lost his country estate in one of the civil wars; and on -account of his beautiful verses the Emperor Augustus restored the -property to him, and made him a court favorite. So in the “Æneid” we -find this pious emperor described in the following fashion: - - This, this is he--long promised, oft foretold-- - Augustus Cæsar. He the age of gold, - God-born himself, in Latium shall restore - And rule the land that Saturn ruled before. - -That is a more direct and personal kind of propaganda, the propaganda of -a hungry poet in search of his dinner. We shall find a great deal of it -through the history of art, and it is, I am told, not entirely unknown -in art circles today. - -“I have here,” says Mrs. Ogi, “a letter from a Professor who has been -reading this manuscript. He protests, ‘not in a professorial fashion’--” - -“Naturally not,” says Ogi. - -“That you cannot possibly know the old authors as well as he does, who -has given the greater part of his life to studying them. ‘To say that -Virgil was a sycophant of a Roman emperor is a very superficial -estimate, which overlooks the really deep matter in his writings. To say -that somehow there has constantly been a conscious trick played on -humanity, in defending and glorifying the ruling classes, is merely -silly. There was no knowledge of a social question then, any more than -there was electric machinery.’” - -“That is important,” answers Ogi, “and I want to get it straight. I -should like to put an arrow on the cover of this book, directing the -attention of all professors to the fact that I do not state or imply -that the great leisure-class artists were playing a ‘conscious trick.’ -Sometimes they knew what they were doing; but most of the time they just -wrote that way, because they were that kind of men. I have tried to make -this plain; but evidently the Professor missed it, so let me give an -illustration: - -“Here is a hive of bees; each of these bees all day long diligently -labors to collect the juices of flowers and make it into honey; or to -collect wax, and build exact hexagonal architectural structures in which -to store the honey. Now comes an entomologist, and studies the life -cycle of the bee, and says that the purpose of the hexagonal structures -is to hold the honey in the most economical fashion; the purpose of the -honey is to nourish the infant bees which will be hatched in the -hexagonal cells. Now shall a critic say that this entomologist is -‘silly,’ because no bee can have understood the principles of economy -involved in the hexagonal structure, nor can it have performed chemical -tests necessary to determine the nutritive qualities of carbohydrates? - -“The class feelings of human beings are instinctive and automatic -reactions to economic pressure. The reactions of the artist, who seeks -fame and success by voicing these class feelings, may be just as -instinctive. But now mankind is emerging into consciousness, and social -life is becoming rational and deliberate. I say that one of the steps in -this process is to go back and study the life cycle of the artist, and -find out where he collected his honey, and how he stored it, and what -use was made of it by the hive.” - -At this point Mrs. Ogi, who has been reading in her Bible--known to the -rest of the world as the Works of G. B. S.--produces a text from “The -Quintessence of Ibsenism,” reading as follows: “The existence of a -discoverable and perfectly definite thesis in a poet’s work by no means -depends on the completeness of his own intellectual consciousness of -it.” - - - - -CHAPTER XXIV - -THE ROMAN FOUR HUNDRED - - -A few years after Virgil came another Roman poet, whom I learned to read -as a lad. He also was taken up by the Emperor Augustus, and wrote -fulsome odes in praise of this emperor. Also he found a patron, a -wealthy gentleman by the name of Mæcenas, who was really fond of the -arts, and gave the poet a Sabine farm to live on. This poet was, I -believe, the first author who invited the public into his home, and told -them his private affairs, pleasant or otherwise. Being that kind of a -tactless author myself, I early conceived a feeling of affection for Mr. -Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known to us as Horace. - -For one thing, this worldly wise poet knows how to tip us a wink, even -while handing out flattery to his patron. For another thing, his Mæcenas -seems to have been a really worthy soul. I know how easy it is to love a -rich man; but in Rome it must have been hard to find a rich man who -could be loved at any price. Horace was a man of humble tastes; all he -wanted was to live in his books, and to escape the brawl and fury of -politics. We might have expected him to fall down on his knees and kiss -the hand of a man who gave him a quiet home, with fruit-trees around -him, and snow-capped mountains in the distance, and a crackling log fire -in winter-time. - -But, as a matter of fact, the poet was quite decent about it. He -asserted the right of a man of letters to live an independent -life--quite a “modern” idea, and hard for brutal rich Romans to -understand. Every now and then Horace would have to visit his patron and -friend, and meet some of these haughty conquerors of the world, and be -put in his place by them. The father of Horace was what the Romans -called a “freedman”; that is, he had formerly been a slave, and the -great world sneered at the poet on that account. But instead of being -ashamed of his ancestry, and trying to hide it, Horace put his old -father into his books, for all Rome to meet. Yes, said the poet, that -fond old freedman father brought his little boy to Rome to get an -education, and walked every day to school with him, carrying his books -and slate. - -We can honor this honest gentleman, and read his charming verses with -pleasure--but without committing the absurdities of the classical -tradition, which ranks Horace as a great poet. He was a pioneer man of -letters, and in that way made history; but there is nothing he wrote -that the world has not learned to write better today. There are a score -of young fellows writing verses for the columns of American newspapers -who can turn out just as witty and clever and human stuff. “F. P. A.” -has written “take-offs” on Horace, which shock the purists, but would -have delighted Horace. Louis Untermeyer has published volumes of such -mingled wisdom and wit; and there is Austin Dobson, and above all, -Heine--a man who writes verse of loveliness to tear your heart-strings, -and at the same time had the nerve to hit out at the ruling-class brutes -of his age. - -“Wasn’t there a single artist in Rome who revolted?” asks Mrs. Ogi. - -“Yes, there was one. He also was the son of a freedman, and came nearly -a century after Virgil and Horace, in the reign of the infamous -Domitian. His name was Juvenal, and he wrote satires in which he flayed -the aristocracy of the empire for their vileness and materialism. I once -published a novel, ‘The Metropolis,’ in which I did the same thing for -the so-called ‘Four Hundred’ of New York; and it is interesting to -compare the two pictures--” - -“Now don’t you start talking about your own books!” cries Mrs. Ogi. - -“I don’t offer ‘The Metropolis’ as literature, but merely as a record of -things I saw in New York twenty years ago. Afterwards I’ll show what -Juvenal has to say on the same topics. First, ‘The Metropolis,’ page -278, listing the health-cures of ladies in high society: - -“One of the consequences of the furious pace was that people’s health -broke down very quickly; and there were all sorts of bizarre ways of -restoring it. One person would be eating nothing but spinach, and -another would be living on grass. One would chew a mouthful of soup -thirty-two times; another would eat every two hours, and another only -once a week. Some went out in the early morning and walked barefooted in -the grass, and others went hopping about the floor on their hands and -knees to take off fat. There were ‘rest cures’ and ‘water cures,’ ‘new -thought’ and ‘metaphysical healing’ and ‘Christian Science’; there was -an automatic horse, which one might ride indoors, with a register -showing the distance traveled. Montague met one man who had an electric -machine, which cost thirty thousand dollars, and which took hold of his -arms and feet and exercised him while he waited. He met a woman who told -him she was riding an electric camel! - -“But of course they could not really succeed in reducing weight, because -they were incapable of self-restraint. Mrs. Billy Alden gave Montague a -delightfully malicious account of a certain lordly fat lady of her set, -who had got the Turkish-bath habit. Terrible to encounter, most awful in -visage, she would enter the baths by night, and all the attendants would -rush into instant action. ‘She delights in perspiring with great -tumult,’ said Mrs. Billy. ‘And when her arms have sunk down, wearied -with the heavy dumb-bells, the sly masseur omits to rub down no part of -her person. Meantime, perhaps there are a number of guests assembled for -dinner at home. They wait, overcome with drowsiness and hunger. At last -the lady comes, flushed, and declaring that she is thirsty enough for a -whole ‘magnum.’ As soon as she is seated at the table, the footman -brings her a bucket of ice, packed about her own special quart of -champagne. She drinks half of this before she tastes any food--calling -it an appetizer. She drinks so much that it won’t stay down, but returns -as a cascade on the floor’--and Montague had to stop Mrs. Billy in her -too vivid description of the sights which a certain unhappy banker, the -husband of this lady, had to witness at his dinner-parties. Said Mrs. -Billy, with her usual vividness of metaphor: ‘It is like a snake that -has crawled into a cask of wine; it takes in and gives out again.’” - -Mrs. Ogi interrupts. “There is one thing I want to make plain--that you -weren’t married to me when you published that disgusting stuff.” - -“All right,” says Ogi; “it shall be entered in the record. But you must -understand that I am not to blame for Mrs. Billy’s stories.” - -“You were to blame for the company you kept,” declares Mrs. Ogi. “I call -that sort of writing inexcusable.” - -“Well, I’ll try again,” says her husband. “On page 351 of ‘The -Metropolis’ you find a glimpse of the underworld of New York: - -“So far had the specialization in evil proceeded that there were places -of prostitution which did a telephone business exclusively, and would -send a woman in a cab to any address; and there were high-class -assignation-houses, which furnished exquisite apartments and the -services of maids and valets. And in this world of vice the modern -doctrine of the equality of the sexes was fully recognized; there were -gambling-houses and pool-rooms and opium-joints for women, and -drinking-places which catered especially to them. In the ‘orange room’ -of one of the big hotels, you might see rich women of every rank and -type, fingering the dainty leather-bound and gold-embossed wine cards. -In this room alone were sold over ten thousand drinks every day; and the -hotel paid a rental of a million a year to the Devon estate. Not far -away the Devons also owned negro-dives, where, in the early hours of the -morning, you might see richly gowned white women drinking. - -“Montague was told by a certain captain of police a terrible story about -the wife of our very greatest railroad magnate, who lived in a colossal -marble palace on Fifth Avenue. As soon as she perceived that her husband -was asleep, she would put on a yellow wig as a disguise, and wearing an -overcoat which she kept for this purpose, she would quit the palace on -foot, with only a single attendant. She would enter one of the brothels -in the ‘Tenderloin,’ where she had a room set apart for herself. There -she took her stand, with naked breasts and gilded nipples, bearing the -name of Zaza, and displaying the person of the mother of one of our most -magnificent young lords of society and finance. She would receive all -comers with caresses, and when the madame dismissed her customers, she -would take her leave sadly, lingering, and being the last to close the -door of her room. Still unsatisfied in her desires, she would retire -with her sullied cheeks, bearing back the odors of the brothel to the -pillow of her mighty railroad magnate. And shall I speak of the -love-charms--” - -“Most emphatically you shall not!” cries Mrs. Ogi, “I think we’ve had -enough of ‘The Metropolis’ and I won’t hear of its being reproduced in -this new book. It’s your crudest Socialist propaganda--” - -“You’re quite sure it’s propaganda?” says Ogi. - -“Of course. Who would question that?” - -“Well then, I’ve proved one point!” says the other. - -“I don’t understand.” - -“I have made you the victim of a mean little trick. Each of those -passages starts out as ‘The Metropolis’; but then it slides into -Juvenal--the sixth satire, dealing with the ladies of ancient Rome. The -point of my joke is that you will have to consult the books in order to -be sure which is Juvenal and which is me. Of course I’ve had to change -names and phrases, replacing Roman things with New York things. And I’ve -had to tone Juvenal down, because there are some of his phrases I -couldn’t reproduce--” - -“There are some you have tried to reproduce, and that you’re going to -cut out,” says Mrs. Ogi. And as always, she has her way, and so it is a -Bowdlerized Juvenal you have been reading! - - - - -CHAPTER XXV - -THE AMERICAN EMPIRE - - -“You had your fun out of that,” says Mrs. Ogi. “But of course I can’t -judge; somebody who knows about Rome may come along and show that it’s -all nonsense.” - -“Those who know about Rome,” says Ogi, “don’t always know about -capitalist America. There has never been such a parallel of two -civilizations in all history. I could write, quite literally, a whole -book of mystifications--quoting American poets and statesmen and -journalists, and mixing in passages from the same kind of people in -Rome, and unless you knew the different passages you couldn’t tell which -was which.” - -“We still have our republic, have we not?” - -“In every presidential election for the past fifty years that candidate -has won who has had the campaign-funds; and he has had the -campaign-funds because he was the candidate of the plutocracy. Right now -we are at the critical moment--the age of the Gracchi. We are trying to -rouse the people to action; and whether we succeed, or whether we are -going to be slaughtered, as our industrial masters desire and intend--” - -Mrs. Ogi’s hand tightens upon her husband’s arm. She never has this -thought out of mind; and whenever in the midnight hours a cat or dog -sets foot upon the porch of her home, she leaps up, expecting to see a -company of bankers and merchants, clad in their new uniform of white -night-shirts and hoods. Our aristocratic party has what it calls the -“Better Roman Federation,” and collects lists of the proscribed, and -issues secret bulletins to its mobbing parties. Last week, down at -Brundisium, our naval harbor, their subsidized mob raided a meeting of -wage slaves, beat some of them insensible with clubs, threw a little -girl into a great receptacle of boiling coffee, scalding her almost to -death, and dragged six men off into the woods and tarred and feathered -them. - -“What do you really think is coming?” asks Mrs. Ogi. - -“There are two factors in modern civilization that did not exist in -Rome. First there is the printing press, a means of spreading -information. So far as the master class can control it, it is a machine -for debauching the race mind; but in spite of everything the masters can -do, the workers get presses of their own, and so get information which -was denied the slaves of Rome.” - -“And the other factor?” - -“The labor movement. In Rome there were some labor unions, but they were -weak and the slaves were an unorganized mob; when they revolted, as they -did again and again, they were slaughtered wholesale. But the modern -labor movement goes on growing; it trains its members, and gives them -sound ideas. So, out of the final struggle we may have, not another -empire, and another collapse of civilization, but the co-operative -commonwealth of our dreams.” - -This, of course, is outright preaching; but it happens that Mrs. Ogi has -just received a letter about the child who was thrown into the scalding -coffee, so her husband gets his way for once. Besides, as he explains, -there is nothing more to be said about Roman art, because there is no -more Roman art. The plutocracy of the empire had brought themselves to a -state where they were incapable of sustained thinking or effort of any -sort. The barbarian hordes, which had been besieging the frontiers, -broke through and overwhelmed the Roman empire, and so came what history -knows as the Dark Ages. - -When I was a lad, my Catholic teachers explained to me that these ages -were called dark, not because they had no culture, but because we were -so unfortunate as not to know about it. I was not able to answer the -Catholic gentlemen in those days, but I can answer them now. When groups -of human beings kindle the precious light of the intellect, they make it -into a torch and pass it on to posterity. That is always their first -impulse; and so we may be sure that if an age had no art, it was a dark -age. - - - - -CHAPTER XXVI - -THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTION - - -It took several centuries for the peoples of Europe to lift themselves -out of barbarism and chaos. Then we find a new art developing, an -altogether different art, built upon Babylonian and Hebrew foundations, -instead of Greek and Roman. It meant an overthrowing of standards, and a -setting-up of new values--a precedent of enormous importance to social -revolutionists. - -What exactly was the difference between Pagan and Christian art? The -Greeks said: The human body is the most beautiful thing in the world. To -which the Christians replied: All flesh is grass. The Greeks said: -Because the body is beautiful, we immortalize it in statues. The -Christians replied: We are iconoclasts--that is to say, breakers of -marble idols. The Romans said: Material wealth is the basis of -individual and national safety. The Christians replied: What shall it -profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? - -These Christian sayings meant that mankind had discovered new -satisfactions, replacing, for a time at any rate, the customary ones of -physical pleasure and domination over others. These new joys came from -inside the self, and required a new word, spiritual. To the artist was -set the task of making these inner qualities apprehensible, and for this -he had to have a new technique. Where the Greeks had carved the body -graceful, the Christians carved it with that ugliness which results from -the ascetic life. Where the Romans had represented their great men -muscular and mighty, the Christians represented them frail and sickly. -The Christians reveled in wounds, disease and deformity, taking a -perverse pleasure in defying old standards--a process known to the -psychologist as “over-correction.” The two favorite themes of Christian -art became a man-god who accepted all suffering and humiliation, and a -woman-god who allowed the erring soul an unlimited number of new -opportunities. - -Because this new art was trying so often to express the inexpressible, -it was driven to symbolism. The painters and sculptors invented outward -and visible signs of the inward and spiritual graces: the cross, the -crown of thorns, the sacrificial lamb. The Virgin Mary would have a -heart of radiant fire, with perhaps a white dove perched on top of it. -The saints and martyrs wore halos of light about their heads, so as not -to be mistaken for ordinary beggars, or for patients in the last stages -of tuberculosis. One should hardly need to state that all this art was -propaganda; it was permitted on that basis alone. - -The significance of all this to social revolutionists lies in the fact -that they also plan an art revolution. What the Christians did to Pagan -art, the Socialists now seek to do to bourgeois art; metaphorically -speaking, to smash the idols and burn the temples dedicated to the -worship of individual and class aggrandizement, and to set up new art -standards, based on the abolition of classes, and the assertion of -brotherhood and solidarity. Just as the stone which was rejected of the -Pagan builders became the cornerstone of the Christian temple, so those -things which are despised and rejected of plutocratic snobbery will -become the glory of revolutionary art; the very phrases of contempt will -become battle-cries--the great unwashed, the vulgar herd, the common -man. The revolutionary artist, clasping the toiling masses to his -bosom-- - -“Over-correction?” suggests Mrs. Ogi. - -“Partly that; but also the longing for solidarity, the enlargement of -the personality through mass feeling.” - -“But beauty came back into art,” says Mrs. Ogi. - -“Yes, and that is an interesting story; a drama of the conflict between -God and Mammon, and the triumph of what I am calling Mammonart. I have -pondered a title for the drama--something like this: Christianity as a -Social Success; or the admission of the Martyr to the Four Hundred!” - - - - -CHAPTER XXVII - -THE INS AND THE OUTS - - -There are two types of human temperament and attitude which manifest -themselves in the world’s art product: the Art of Beauty and the Art of -Power. - -The Art of Beauty is produced by ruling classes when they are -established and safe, and wish to be entertained, and to have their -homes and surroundings set apart from the common mass. I do not mean -that simple and primitive people do not produce beauty of a naïve sort; -but for such art to develop and mature, it must be taken up by the -privileged classes, patronizing and encouraging the artist, and making -his work a form of class distinction. The fact that the men who produce -this art have come from the people is a fact of no significance; for the -ruling classes take what they want where they find it, and shape it to -their own class ends. The characteristics of the Art of Beauty, whether -in painting, or sculpture, or music, or words, or actions, are those of -rest and serenity, pleasure in things as they actually exist; also -clarity of form--because the leisure-class artist has time to study -technique, and knows what he wants to do. - -In every human society there is one group which controls, and another -which struggles for control; the “ins” versus the “outs,” the “haves” -versus the “have-nots.” In every well-developed civilization this latter -class will be strong enough to have its art, which is apt to be crude -and instinctive, full of surging, half-expressed and half-realized -emotion. Such art lays stress upon substance, rather than form; it aims, -or at any rate tends, to arouse to action; and so we call it the Art of -Power. - -This is the art which is generally described as “propaganda” by -established criticism; the distinction being, as we have previously -explained, itself a piece of propaganda. The Art of Beauty is equally -propaganda; it is the gas-barrage of the “haves,” and the essence of its -deadliness lies in the fact that it looks so little like a weapon. But -to me it seems clear enough that when a leisure-class artist portrays -the graces and refinements of the civilization which maintains him, when -he paints the noble features, and quotes the imaginary golden words of -ruling-class ladies and gentlemen, he is doing the best he knows how to -protect those who give him a living. Nor is he, as a rule, without some -awareness of the harsh and rough and dangerous forces which surround -him, besieging the ivory tower, or the temple, or the sacred grove, or -wherever it is that he keeps his working tools. But even where the -artist is instinctive and naïve, the class which employs him knows what -he is doing; it knows what is “safe and sane,” and “of sound tendency”; -it approves of such art, and pays its money to maintain such art. - -Unless the society is stagnant, like China, its social life is marked by -changes of power. The revolutionary classes succeed, and replace the old -rulers; whereupon we note at once a change in their art. Those who were -dissatisfied now find peace; those whose emotions overwhelmed them now -find themselves able to order their thoughts; those who were interested -in what they had to say now achieve triumphs of technique; in short, -those who were producing an Art of Power now begin to produce an Art of -Beauty. And so we are in position to understand what happened to -Christian art, when the martyrs and the saints broke into “good -society.” - -The Roman Empire fell about five hundred years after Christ, and for -another five hundred years the Italian peninsula was a battle-ground of -invading barbarian hordes. When finally things settled down, the land -was held by a great number of feudal princes and plundering groups, -having their lairs in castles and walled cities. Christianity was the -official religion, and abbots and bishops and popes were robber chiefs -commanding armies. In between their military campaigns they took their -pleasures like other princes; and among their pleasures were those of -art. - -The inner emotions which Christianity cultivated were free to those who -sought them in monks’ cells and hermits’ caves, but they could not be -purchased nor rented out, and they wilted in the atmosphere of palaces -and courts. So gradually we find Italian religious art undergoing a -change. The saints become gentlemen of refinement wearing scholars’ -robes; Jesus becomes a heavenly prince, in spotless linen garments and a -golden crown, casting benevolent looks upon the clergy; the Virgin Mary -becomes the favorite mistress of a duke or abbot or pope--or perhaps the -painter’s own mistress. This latter arrangement is common, for business -reasons easy to understand. The lady is at hand, and has nothing to do -while the painter is painting; he gets the service of a model free, he -flatters his lady love’s vanity, and at the same time he keeps her safe -from other painters. So the poison of luxury creeps into what is -supposed to be religious art; and we see the symbols of martyrdom and -holy sacrifice employed to glorify the vanities and cloak the vices of -the predatory classes. - -But the soul of man never dies; it goes on struggling for justice and -brotherhood, in spite of all betrayal and persecution. So inside the -church and outside comes a long line of heroic souls, fighting to -restore the primitive simplicity and honesty of the faith. The struggle -between the “ins” and the “outs,” the “haves” and the “have-nots,” takes -the form of heresy and schism, of mendicant and preaching orders and -Protestant sects. Young and obscure servants of God arise, denouncing -the corruption of the church machine. Some retire to monasteries, -spurning the wicked world; others take literally the words of Jesus, and -go out upon the road without scrip or cloak, preaching to whoever will -hear them, and living on charity. They are denounced and excommunicated, -their followers are slaughtered by the tens and hundreds of thousands; -but the movement persists, and when the leaders die they are canonized, -and become in their turn themes for artists--to be “idealized,” and -dressed in spotless raiment, and made fit for stained glass windows and -the art galleries of prelates and princes. St. Francis of Assisi in the -thirteenth century, putting on beggar’s clothing and being publicly -disinherited by his father; Savonarola in the fifteenth century, -persuading the rich to throw their jewels into the flames, and being -publicly hanged in Florence; Martin Luther in the sixteenth century, -preaching against the sale of indulgences and nailing his theses to the -church door; George Fox in the eighteenth century, crying out against -priestly corruption in the streets, and jailed time after time; Bishop -Brown in the twentieth century, kicked out of the Episcopal church for -repudiating dogma and defending Communism--such are the figures which -have kept the Christian religion alive, and such are the themes of vital -religious art. - - - - -CHAPTER XXVIII - -THE HEAVEN OF ELEGANCE - - -It was in Italy first that the language of the people became the -language of culture, replacing Latin; and the two greatest writers of -this age afford us an interesting contrast between the Art of Beauty and -the Art of Power. - -The favorite ruling-class poet and novelist of medieval Italy was the -illegitimate son of a merchant, who was recognized by his father and -given the best education of his time. He chose as his mistress the -natural daughter of a king; with this married lady he carried on an -intrigue for many years, and wrote to her long epic poems about Greek -heroes, weaving into the poems elaborate acrostics and secret codes. The -first letters of the lints, taken according to certain numerical -systems, made three other separate poems; other letters, chosen -according to other systems, spelled the names of other lady loves. In -such ways the skillful artists of the Italian courts were accustomed to -beguile their leisure, wrung from the toil of a wretched enslaved -peasantry. - -This poet rose to fame, and became the darling of the ruling classes. He -was sent as an ambassador on various important missions to popes and -princes; he became the favorite of a queen, and did not reject her favor -even when she turned into a murderess. He learned to write beautiful -Italian prose, a great service to his country. He used his skill to -compose a collection of short stories dealing with the sojourn in a -country villa of a number of Italian ladies and gentlemen of wealth and -charm, the occasion being an outbreak of the plague in Florence. These -ladies and gentlemen did not feel impelled by their religion to nurse -the suffering; they were of too great importance to be risked in such -crude fashion, so they retired, and passed their time listening to -charmingly narrated tales of sexual promiscuity. - -I do not mean to imply that there is nothing but smut in the “Decameron” -of Boccaccio. We shall find it a rule throughout history that -leisure-class ladies and gentlemen do not spend their entire time in -trying new sexual combinations. They have to eat, and so their artists -give us delightful, appetizing accounts of banquets. They have to drink, -and so their artists give us an entire lore of intoxicating liquors. -They have to cover their nakedness, so we have a complicated art of -dress, a mass of subtlety constantly changing, and affording traps to -catch the feet of the unwary, so that the sacred inner circles may be -protected from those individuals who have disgraced themselves by doing -useful work, or by having parents or grandparents who did useful work. - -Also, the ladies and gentlemen have palaces to live in, and country -estates to which they may flee from pestilence, famine and war; so we -have the art of architecture. Because these homes have walls which must -be decorated, we have the art of painting; and so on through a long list -of cultural accomplishments. Moreover, not all ladies and gentlemen have -been able to exclude the natural human emotions from their hearts; so in -leisure-class art we have sentiments and sentimentalities. We like to be -sorry for the poor, provided they are “worthy”; so we have “idylls” and -other sad, sweet tales. When we are sick with ennui, we like to imagine -going back to the country; so we have a long line of “return to nature” -arts--eclogues and bucolics and pastorals, with beautiful shepherds and -shepherdesses dancing on the green, and country lads and lasses giving -touchingly quaint imitations of the manners of their betters. - -Also we have in this leisure-class world vestigial traces of the sense -of duty. We take this sense and refine it or exaggerate it, making it -into something fantastic, stimulating to jaded tastes. So we find in -Boccaccio the famous story of the “patient Griselda,” a leisure-class -model of wifely fidelity and humility. She is married to a monster, who -subjects her to every indignity the perverted imagination can conceive; -but she endures all things, and continues to be his patient and devoted -slave, and in the end she conquers her tormentor, and brings about the -necessary happy ending. The legend of this most convenient lady -represents a popular form of masculine wish-fulfillment. - -Giovanni Boccaccio died in ripe old age, and the Catholic Church took -cognizance of his popularity among the Italian people by preparing an -expurgated and authorized edition of his “Decameron.” From this edition -they omitted no word of the obscenities, but they changed each of the -stories so that wherever Boccaccio described indecencies committed by -priests and monks and holy popes, the said indecencies were transferred -to laymen! The tales of this darling of the Italian leisure class remain -today one of the most popular of books, which every dirty old boy keeps -hidden in his trunk, and every dirty young boy reads under his desk -while the professor of moral philosophy is lecturing on the social -responsibilities of great wealth. - - - - -CHAPTER XXIX - -THE MUCKRAKER’S HELL - - -Now by way of contrast we take the Italian poet of revolt and moral -indignation. We have only to look at the pictures of this man to see -that he is a crusader; a lean, hawk-like face, stern, bitter, lined with -suffering; “the mournfulest face,” says Carlyle, “that ever was painted -from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face.” There has -never been a world poet so deliberately ethical, preoccupied with moral -problems, and using his art as a means of teaching mankind what he -believed to be sound ideas about conduct. - -Dante Alighieri was born to comfortable circumstances in Florence; he -had the education of a scholar, and might have lived a life of literary -ease. Instead, he chose to take part in the tumultuous and dangerous -politics of his city, becoming one of the leaders of the republican -party. When the forces of the pope conquered Italy, he fled for his -life, and a sentence of exile was pronounced upon him. This exile was a -cruel hardship; he describes himself as “a pilgrim, almost a beggar, -displaying against my will the wounds of fortune.... Truly have I been a -vessel without sail and without rudder, borne to divers ports and shores -and havens by the dry wind that blows from dolorous poverty.” Yet he -never wavered in his convictions; on the contrary, by his writings he -brought upon himself a confirmation of the decree of exile, and an exile -he died. - -We shall not go into the details of medieval politics, the complicated -wranglings among various cities and principalities, the warring factions -in each, plus the partisans of papal dominion and those of the Holy -Roman Empire. Suffice it here to point out that one of the greatest -world poets was from the beginning to the end of his life a politician, -and took a vigorous part in the practical affairs of his time, fighting -his enemies hard, hating them implacably, and not hesitating to use his -literary art to punish them in a future world. When Dante goes down into -hell he encounters in the lowest pits of torment various Florentine -politicians, who have betrayed and debauched his city. How he regards -them may be judged by the case of Bocca degli Abbati, a gentleman who -is found locked helpless up to his neck in ice; the poet grabs his hair -and tears it out by the handful! - -The quality which Dante especially loathed was greed, “cupiditia.” He -raged at the church of his time, because it had accepted the “fatal -gift” from the Emperor Constantine--the temporal possessions which made -the popes into worldly potentates, intriguers and heads of armies. The -two popes of his own time Dante flung into hell, and portrayed heaven -itself as reddening with anger at their deeds. St. Peter declares that -each of them “has of my cemetery made a sewer of blood and filth.” This -is plain muck-raking; and how undignified and unliterary it must have -seemed to the cultured prelates of the fourteenth century! - -It seems that way to modern critics also. Albert Mordell has published a -book entitled “Dante and Other Waning Classics,” in which he argues that -the “Divine Comedy” is ugly, as well as out of date, with its elaborate -symbolism derived from church legend, and from Greek and Latin -mythology, combined and complicated by scholastic subtlety. Mr. Mordell -is one of those who think that art ought not to preach; and certainly -Dante does not shirk this issue--he tells us in plain words: “The kind -of philosophy under which we proceed in the whole and in the part is -moral philosophy or ethics; because the whole was undertaken not for -speculation but for use.” - -What are the moral problems which occupied the soul of Dante, and have -these problems any interest for us? There are two which I believe will -always concern mankind. First, the problem of divine justice. How does -it happen that the wicked flourish? How shall we explain their power to -oppress the innocent? If God has power to prevent it, why does He not -use that power? Dante traveled to the depths of hell and ascended -through purgatory to heaven, seeking answers to these questions. Our -only advantage over him is that we do not even think we can answer. - -The second great problem is that of love. The Christian revolution had -brought with it a new attitude toward womanhood. Mankind made the -discovery of what the psycho-analysts call the sublimation of sex, that -gratification withheld acts as a stimulus to all the psychic being. So -the simple naturalism of the Greeks was replaced by the romanticism of -the Middle Ages; and Dante’s whole being, his total art product, was -illuminated by the vision of a great and wonderful love, which began by -a chance meeting with a nine-year-old girl, and continued without -physical expression through the poet’s whole life. No student of the -science of sex today would accept Dante’s attitude as sound or sensible; -nevertheless, we are stirred by his exaltation of the ideal woman, and -the Beatific Vision which she brings to his soul. - -In Dante’s pilgrimage through hell he accepted the leadership of Virgil. -This was because he honored in the Roman poet those factors we have -stressed--the moral earnestness, the effort of a lofty soul to rescue a -civilization. In Dante’s time the cultured world was just making the -discovery of Greek and Roman art, and was all a-thrill with the wonder -of a past age, rescued after a thousand years: the Renaissance, or -re-birth, we call it. - -We may understand how it was by recalling our own excitement over the -tomb of King Tutankhamen. Let us suppose that in that tomb had been -found Egyptian literary masterpieces, which revealed the existence of a -Socialist civilization in ancient Egypt. There was a mighty king who had -been just to the poor, who had abolished exploitation by the landlords, -and had kept the peace with other nations. A Socialist poet of our day, -wishing to satirize the “war for democracy” by locating its leaders in -hell, would take this ancient Egyptian king for a guide, and would -exchange fraternal greetings with his royal comrade, and discuss with -him political conditions both in ancient Egypt and in modern America. - -And in the nethermost pits the poet would meet Lloyd George and -Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson, together with the rowdies and bullies -whom these statesmen turned loose upon mankind. Attorney-General Palmer, -for example, would be represented as a devil with a long barbed tail; -the poet would seize this tail and twist it, and the attorney-general -would howl and shriek, and a radical audience would be delighted. But -respectable critics would turn up their noses, saying that of course no -one would take such a thing for art; it was the most obvious soap-box -propaganda. - -So the cultured Renaissance critics looked upon Dante as a crude and -“popular” person; the highly cultured Bishop della Casa spoke -patronizingly concerning “the rustic homeliness of his language and -style, his lack of decorum and grace.” If space permitted I could show -you that every truly vital artist who has ever lived has been thus dealt -with by the academic critics of his own time. - - - - -CHAPTER XXX - -THE PIOUS POISONERS - - -The Italian princes were no more influenced by the moral austerity of -Dante than the Roman ruling class had been by Virgil. Medieval Italy -traveled the same road as imperial Rome, and two centuries after Dante -we find the vicars of God on earth reproducing the worst crimes of the -Neros and Caligulas. Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, purchased his high -office, and then set to work to plunder the cities of Italy and harry -the whole peninsula with war. Among his children by his numerous -mistresses was Cesare Borgia, who became the commander of the papal -armies, and slaughtered and poisoned all who stood in his way, including -his own brother. Returning from his wars, he would amuse himself by -using his prisoners of war as targets for archery practice in the -courtyard of the Vatican. In the end Cesare died of wounds, Alexander -died by poison, and his daughter Lucrezia poisoned her own son and then -herself. - -Here was an ideal environment for the development of leisure-class art. -These popes and princes built themselves magnificent palaces, and as a -measure of soul-insurance they built cathedrals and churches. They were -willing to spend fortunes upon famous artists; and the artists, needless -to say, were willing to take the money. Browning has a poem, “The Bishop -Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church,” a vivid picture of the attitude -of mind of these pious poisoners and artistic assassins. The bishop lies -upon his couch dying, and his sons, politely known as “nephews,” gather -about him to hear his vision of a tomb which is to preserve his memory -and bring peace to his soul. He describes the treasures of beauty which -are to go upon the tomb-- - - One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut, - There’s plenty jasper somewhere in the world-- - And have I not St. Praxed’s ear to pray - Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts, - And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs? - -The pious soul goes on to specify his epitaph; it must be “choice Latin, -picked phrase,” from Cicero. Having got this-- - - And then how I shall lie through centuries, - And hear the blessed mutter of the mass, - And see God made and eaten all day long, - And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste - Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke! - -The true “art for art’s sake” attitude, you perceive; and under the -patronage of such esthetic prelates, the poets and musicians, the -painters and sculptors flourished in sixteenth century Italy. Among -those who were employed by the poisoner pope, Alexander VI, was a -youthful painter of extraordinary ability, Raphael Sanzio by name. This -pope was succeeded by two others, who conquered many cities for the -glory of God, and spent millions of their plunder upon religious art. So -this young painter of genius was floated through life upon a flood of -gold ducats, and with his magic brushes he turned the blood and sweat -and tears of the peasantry of Italy into beautiful images of serenely -smiling madonnas, and enraptured saints, and ineffably gracious Jesuses. -Raphael is ranked by many as the greatest painter in history; we stand, -therefore, within the very holy of holies, before the shrine of “pure” -beauty, and it will repay us to dig into the roots of his life, and see -from what soil this precious flower grows. - -He was the son of a court painter, and his life was one of ease, swift -achievement, and applause. He was gifted with all the graces of body, -also a genial and winning nature. He studied the work of one painter -after another, and acquired all the powers of each. He became so famous -that his life was “not that of a painter, but of a prince.” Ambassadors -from the wealthy and powerful besieged his doors, and waited for months -in hope of an interview. He went about accompanied by a band of more -than fifty youths, pupils and adorers of his art. - -He had one weakness, which was for the ladies. The popes and princes -who cherished him sought to put loving restraint upon him, and planned -wealthy marriages for him, but he could not bring himself to stoop to -matrimony. At this time he was decorating the palace of a Sienese -millionaire, Chigi, owner of ships and of salt and alum mines throughout -Italy; this gentleman, discovering that Raphael was so wrapped up in his -mistress that he was neglecting the palace decorations, solved the -problem by a brilliant move--bringing the mistress to live in the -palace! In the end this darling of fortune died at the age of -thirty-seven, of a fever brought on by self-indulgence. His adoring -biographer, Vasari, tells us that when he knew his last hour had come, -he sent away his mistress from his home, “as a good Christian should,” -and so passed on to decorate the palaces of heaven. - -What was the secret of Raphael’s fortune? The answer is, he painted the -ruling class of Italy, in their physical beauty and their material -luxury and splendor. In order to flatter their vanity, he painted them -as all the saints and demigods of the Catholic mythology. Every trace of -asceticism is now gone out of church art; the Christian gentlemen and -mistresses and virgins and gods and saints of Raphael and his -contemporaries are full-throated and full-bosomed and ruddy-cheeked -pictures of prosperity; their ecstasies have never been permitted to -interfere with their digestions. The angel comes to the Virgin Mary to -bring to her the sacred tidings of her divine pregnancy, and finds her -seated, not in a carpenter’s hut, but in a palace. Even when Jesus is -crucified and borne to the sepulchre, the mourning ladies have not -forgotten the proper arrangement of their hair and the proper costumes -for the historic occasion. Says Vasari: “Our Lady is seen to be -insensible, and the heads of all the weeping figures are exceedingly -graceful.” - -Needless to say, Raphael painted portraits of all the Old Men and the -Witch Doctors of his time, and he made them magnificent and thrilling. -Of the portrait of Pope Julius II, valiant war-maker, Vasari writes: -“The picture impresses on all beholders a sense of awe, as if it were -indeed the living object.” Later on came another pope, Leo X, who in -order to get the millions necessary for his family monuments, and for -the art glories of St. Peter’s, started a sale of indulgences, which -brought about the church revolt known to us as the Reformation. His -portrait by Raphael shows a Tammany politician of the bar-room type; and -Vasari tells us-- - - The velvet softness of the skin is rendered with the utmost - fidelity; the vestments in which the Pope is clothed are also most - faithfully depicted, the damask shines with a glossy luster; the - furs which form the linings of his robes are soft and natural, - while the gold and silk are copied in such a manner that they do - not seem to be painted, but really appear to be silk and gold. - There is also a book in parchment decorated with miniatures, a most - vivid imitation of the object represented, with a silver bell, - finely chased, of which it would not be possible adequately to - describe the beauty. Among other accessories, there is, moreover, a - ball of burnished gold on the seat of the Pope, and in this--such - is its clearness--the divisions of the opposite window, the - shoulders of the Pope, and the walls of the room, are faithfully - reflected; all these things are executed with so much care, that I - fully believe no master ever has done, or ever can do anything - better. - -A man who can perform such miracles for the rich and powerful can -command his own price, and is master of everything except his own -passions. Raphael’s old uncle wrote, begging him to return to his home -town and take himself a respectable wife. The young painter’s reply has -come down to us. “If I had done as you wished,” he says, “I should not -be where I am now.” And he goes on to tell where he is-- - - At the present time I have property in Rome worth three thousand - gold ducats, and an income of fifty gold crowns, as his Holiness - gives me a salary of three hundred gold ducats for superintending - the fabric of St. Peter, which will continue as long as I live; and - I am sure to earn more from other sources and am paid whatever I - choose to ask for my work. And I have begun to paint another room - for his Holiness which will bring me one thousand two hundred gold - ducats, so that you see, my dearest uncle, that I do honor to you - and to all my family and to my country.... What city in the world - can compare with Rome, what enterprise is more worthy than this of - Peter, which is the first temple in the world? And these are the - grandest works which have ever been seen, and will cost more than a - million in gold, and the Pope has decided to spend sixty thousand - ducats a year on the fabric and can think of nothing else. - -While Raphael was thus flourishing and proud of his world, a German monk -by the name of Martin Luther was nailing his condemnation of the papacy -upon the door of the church at Wittenberg. But our painter-prince was so -busy, he had so many commissions to portray new popes and cardinals, -new annunciations and transfigurations and illuminations and immaculate -conceptions, that he probably never even heard of the barbarian rebel in -the far North. He remained to the end the perfect exemplar of -leisure-class art, and is today the darling of pious peasant-wives, and -sentimental school-marms doing culture-pilgrimages: in short, of all who -wish to develop their emotions at the expense of their brains, and to -shut their eyes to the grim realities of life, out of which alone true -and vital beauty can grow. - - - - -CHAPTER XXXI - -THE PAPAL PAYMASTERS - - -Among its numerous artists of beauty Renaissance Italy produced one man -who did not find life a garden of pleasure; one man who, when he sinned, -did not do it with easy grace and cheerful heart; a man who faced the -mysteries of life, and took seriously the terrors which the medieval -mind has conjured for itself. This man was a rebel against the wanton -and cruel spirit of his age; a rebel also against nature, those -cruelties which time and death inflict upon our race. He was a lonely -man, pursued by the jealousies and greeds of his rivals, tortured by his -own sensuality and by fears of eternal torment. He lived a life of -futile and agonized revolt, and produced some magnificent and terrible -art. - -In this book it is our task to study the artist in relation to the -masters of money; and we shall find no more tragic illustrations of the -waste that is wrought in the life of genius by the powers of greed, than -are revealed to us in the story of Michelangelo Buonarroti. He is ranked -as one of the greatest sculptors of all time; he was also one of the -greatest of painters, and a great poet. Like most of those who have -visioned the sublime and the colossal, he was a man of frail physique, -fear-haunted all his life. As a child he was beaten by his father, who -sought to break him of the desire to become an artist. At the age of -nine he was taken to hear the thunderings of Savonarola, another frail -prophet who had arisen to denounce the vices of the church in Florence. -When Michelangelo was twenty-three, Savonarola was publicly hanged, -after having been excommunicated by the Borgia pope. The young painter -at that time was beguiling himself with Greek beauty; but the terrible -fate of the prophet cannot have failed to impress him, and helps to -account for the religious fervors of his later years. Two worlds -struggled in his soul, the world of pagan beauty and luxurious pleasure, -and the world of heavenly raptures and fanatical asceticism. - -This artist’s abilities were quickly recognized. The same pope, Julius -II, who was showering Raphael with golden ducats, adopted Michelangelo -as his chief glorifier, and the two of them spent a year or two -preparing colossal plans for the pope’s tomb, something greater than any -tomb ever seen on earth before, a perfect mountain of marble, with more -than forty statues of colossal size. Here we see Michelangelo’s fate; -one of the great masters of life, with a mighty message concerning the -destiny of man, he is obliged to get the money by which he lives, and -the marble which he carves, from a vain and greedy politician in -churchly raiment. He is permitted to make statues of David and of Moses, -of Day and Night and Morning and Evening, and other great symbolic -ideas; but he must carve them for the tomb of some pope or potentate, -and must spend the greater part of his life in quarreling--not merely -with this pope or potentate, but with officials and subordinates, all -hating, intriguing, threatening to stab or to poison. - -In the sentimental rubbish which historians and art critic’s write about -the Middle Ages, we are told that mighty cathedrals and temples were -produced by the co-operative devotion and reverence of whole communities -of worshipers. When you come to investigate the facts, you find that -they were produced amid a chaos of wrangling and cheating and lying, -exactly as a modern public building, or a battleship, or a fleet of -aeroplanes is produced. The chief architect of Pope Julius II was a -dissipated and murderous rascal, who was putting rotten walls into the -Vatican buildings--walls which have had to be repaired incessantly ever -since. He carried on intrigues against Michelangelo, and succeeded in -persuading the pope that it was bad luck for anyone to build his own -tomb while he was alive. So the pope dropped the project, and -Michelangelo was left in debt, having to pay out of his own pocket the -costs of transporting the mountain of marble. The sculptor stormed the -Vatican and insisted upon being paid, and the pope had him put out by a -groom. - -Next he was required to make a bronze statue of his most holy pope. He -protested that he did not know anything about casting bronze, but he -worked at it for more than a year, making a wretched failure of it, and -ruining his health. Then he was ordered to paint the ceiling of the -Sistine Chapel. He protested that he did not know how to paint ceilings, -it was hard and exhausting work; but again the pope insisted, and -Michelangelo spent four years at this, painting his colossal and -terrifying symbols upside down. Because he took so long at it, the pope -was enraged, insisting upon seeing the work and criticizing it, flying -into a fury and beating Michelangelo with his staff, then sending a -messenger with five hundred ducats to salve his feelings. - -Julius II died and Leo X came in. Michelangelo had made a new contract -with the heirs of the dead pope to complete the tomb, and had started -work on thirty-two colossal statues. But the new pope wanted -Michelangelo’s fame for himself, and so for ten years the poor sculptor -was pulled and hauled between two rival groups. It was the fashion of -other sculptors and painters, when thus loaded down with work, to hire a -number of assistants and put the job through in a hurry. But -Michelangelo suffered from conscientiousness; he thought that nobody -else could do his work as he wanted it done, and he sweated and agonized -and groaned under the burden of these contracts. More marble was needed, -and he was dragged about between the rival owners of marble quarries. -The unsuccessful owners intrigued with the boatmen to make it impossible -for the marble to be moved; just like a certain teamsters’ strike which -I had occasion to investigate in Chicago some twenty years ago--the -riots and mobbings and showers of brick-bats and broken heads and -bullet-riddled bodies were caused by a great mail-order house having -paid for a strike against a rival mail-order house! - -There came another pope, this time a Medici. He wanted a tomb to his -ancestors, who were splendid and wealthy merchants in Florence. Also -there was to be a colossus in the Medici gardens, a difficult matter, -because of the lack of room; Michelangelo discussed the problem in a -letter to a friend, which has come down to us. Read this picture of a -man of genius trying to please a wealthy and fastidious patron: - - I have thought about the Colossus; I have indeed thought a great - deal about it. It seems to me that it would not be well placed - outside the Medici gardens because it would take up too much room - in the street. A better place, I think, would be where the barber’s - shop is. There it would not be so much in the way. As for the - expenses of expropriation, I think to reduce them we could make the - figure seated, and as it could be hollowed, the shop could be - placed inside so the rent would not be lost. It seems to me a good - idea to put in the hand of the Colossus a horn of abundance, and - this could be hollow and would serve as a chimney. The head could - also be made use of, I should think; for the poultryman, my very - good friend who lives on the square, said to me secretly that it - would make a wonderful dovecote. I have another and still better - idea--but in that case the statue must be made very much larger, - which would not be impossible, for towers are made with stone--and - that is that the head should serve as a bell-tower to S. Lorenzo, - which now has none. By placing the bells so that the sound would - come out of the mouth it would seem as if the giant cried for - mercy, especially on holidays when they use the big bells. - -Michelangelo was in Florence when the republican revolution against the -Medici took place. The artist sympathized with the revolutionists, -against his patrons; he proposed to make for the revolutionists a -gigantic statue of David and Goliath, but they decided he had better use -his energies in fortifying the walls! When the city was taken, and the -slaughter of the rebels began, Michelangelo hid for a month or two. Then -he was commanded to come forth and resume his task of glorifying his -conquerors! He did so, and was put to work on the tomb of the Medici. -Needless to say, the figures on the tomb are not figures of serene -contentment and spiritual peace! Romain Rolland describes them as an -“outburst of despair” whereby the sculptor “drowned his shame at raising -this monument of slavery.” - -Another pope came, and wanted Michelangelo for his chief glorifier. The -artist pleaded his old contracts, but the pope was furious, and -commanded him to tear them up. He was put to work on the ceiling of the -Sistine Chapel, and the result was the marvelous painting, “The Last -Judgment,” in which all the terrors and torments of the Middle Ages are -summed up. It was one of the world’s greatest paintings; but the pious -of the time were shocked, and the pope put some of his other painters -to putting panties on the nude saints. From time to time other shocked -ecclesiastics had this or that article of clothing painted into the -picture; and because they used any color they happened to have lying -about, we can now form little idea of Michelangelo’s vision of the Day -of Doom. - -All this time the artist was being hounded by the heirs of his first -pope; but the present pope insisted that he should be the architect of -St. Peter’s; so here we see the old man, over seventy, still fighting -the grafters and hounded by conspirators. It appears that in Renaissance -Rome, when a grafter was caught, and threatened to expose his -fellow-grafters, he was shot, and the world was told that he had -committed suicide; exactly as it happens in Washington, D. C., in these -our days of oil-thieves and bootleggers! Michelangelo was still afraid, -as he had been all his life; but he was still more afraid of God, and -determined to finish St. Peter’s as a means of saving his soul at the -Last Judgment. - -So he stuck and fought the grafters. There came yet another pope--the -artist had to win each one in turn, thwarting a whole new set of -intriguing enemies. We find him at the age of eighty-eight, exposing -thieves who are building the walls of St. Peter’s out of rotten -materials--and around him the thieves are stabbing each other. At last, -at the age of ninety, he lies on his death-bed, his terrific labors at -an end; and between his dying gasps he confides to a friend his one -regret, that he has to die just when he has succeeded in learning the -alphabet of his art! - - - - -CHAPTER XXXII - -WHO IS CRAZY? - - -When civilization emerged from the Dark Ages, the fighting man went -about with a hard-shell covering, like a crab, and was called a knight. -Both he and his horse underwent a long training, and when it was -finished he was a fighting engine which could roll over anything else -existing in the world. He went on crusades, and drove back the Saracen -and the Turk from Europe. In these days of real and cruel danger he -produced a genuine Art of Power: for example, “The Song of Roland,” an -eleventh century French poem, telling of a terrific all-day battle -against invading infidel hordes. - -But afterwards, when chivalry had become established, it developed its -Art of Beauty; a fantastic literature about ideal beings, who conformed -to an artificial and complicated code of etiquette, and spent their time -rescuing beautiful young ladies from the claws of various monsters. -There grew up a whole genealogy of these literary knights, and enormous -long poems were composed about them. When I was at Columbia University, -acquiring culture, one of the tasks set me was the reading of Ariosto, -an Italian poet of the sixteenth century, and I valiantly struggled -through a dozen cantos of these absurd adventures. They resemble a -Griffith moving picture, in which there is a villain engaged in an -elaborate process of raping a beautiful virgin, while the gallant hero -is galloping on his way to a rescue. But Ariosto regales us with more -details of the attempted rape; for in these old times people were not -afraid of the animal aspects of life. - -In the distant island of Britain some rough country fellows trained -themselves to shoot arrows through the joints of the knightly armor. A -little later came the invention of gunpowder, and that finished the -hard-shell crabs on horseback. But the literary world also resembles a -crab, in that it walks backward, with its eyes on the past. Invariably -you find that what is called scholarship and culture is several -generations behind the practical life of men; and so the poets went on -composing elaborate and fantastic romances of chivalry. The test of -excellence in literature was the refinement and elegance and remoteness -from life of this perverted leisure-class art: until Cervantes came -along and laughed it to death. - -He was born in Spain in the middle of the sixteenth century, noble but -poor. He first lived his great book, and then in old age he wrote it. He -went to Rome in the retinue of a papal ambassador, and later on took up -the chivalrous career, a crusade. The Turks were in possession of the -Mediterranean, and the Spaniards were trying to drive them out; -Cervantes, though ill of a fever, fought desperately at the battle of -Lepanto, and was twice wounded. After five years of such war he was -sailing home, when the Turks captured him, and for several years he was -a slave in Algiers--a gallant and romantic slave, the darling of his -companions and the terror of his masters. He made several attempts to -escape, and finally was ransomed by his relatives, and came home to -Spain, crippled and poor--to reflect, like so many returned soldiers, -upon the bitterness of dead glory. - -He became a government agent, collecting naval stores. He was not a -great success: one of his subordinates defaulted, and he was put in -prison. He lived in straitened circumstances, in a household with five -women relatives and his sense of humor. Then he tried writing; for -twenty years he wrote every kind of thing which a man of his time could -imagine would bring a living, but all in vain. He was not a university -man and so the critics of his time considered him presumptuous in -attempting to break into their sacred ranks. Until he was fifty-eight -his life was a failure. - -Then he hit upon the idea of ridiculing the established literature of -chivalry, by bringing it into contact with the every-day realities of -Spain. He created a character very much like himself; except that the -old Don Quixote had read so many romances that his head was turned, and -he began to take them seriously, mounted his old nag and rode out to -rescue damsels, and to mistake a barber’s basin shining in the sun for a -helmet, and wind-mills for giants who must be overthrown. The story -rambles along from one comical adventure to the next, and brings in -almost every type of person in Spain. It became an instant and -enormously popular success; but poor Cervantes got practically nothing -out of it, because editions were pirated all over the country. He was a -failure to the end--and curiously enough, did not get any satisfaction -even from his fame. He was ashamed of his popular book, and quite sure -that mankind would some day appreciate his long poems, “The Journey to -Parnassus,” and the pastoral romance, “Galatea,” and the romantic poem, -“Persiles and Sigismunda.” - -Many of the world’s greatest writers have thus fallen victim to -culture-snobbery. Shakespeare was despised by the academic critics of -his own time, and apparently did not think enough of his own plays to -see that posterity got a correct edition of them. When I was a boy we -all read “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn,” and “laughed our heads -off” over them; but if anybody had suggested to us that Mark Twain -might be one of the world’s great writers, we should have thought it a -Mark Twain joke. - -“Don Quixote” was produced, definitely and deliberately, as a piece of -propaganda. We no longer know even the names of these long-winded -romances of chivalry, so we do not realize that the author, in -ridiculing them, is trying to teach us something. Also, there is another -kind of propaganda that Cervantes put into the book, his ideas -concerning one of the gravest problems confronting mankind through the -ages. What shall be the relation of the idealist, the dreamer of good -and beautiful things, to the world of ugliness and greed in which he -finds himself? He has a vision of something splendid, but the world -knows nothing about that vision, and cannot be made to understand it; if -he tries to apply it, the world will call him crazy, it will treat him -so badly that before he gets through he may be really crazy. But what, -after all, is it to be crazy? Is it to believe in the possibility of -something splendid in life? Or is it to believe that life must always be -the hateful and ugly thing we now see it? - -Nobody can be sure just how much Cervantes realized all this himself. -There are many cases of men of genius writing, out of their sorrow and -their laughter, things more wise and more deep than they know. Did -Shakespeare intend Shylock to be a comic character, to be howled at and -pelted by the Jew-hating mob of his time, or did he realize that in this -half-comic, half-tragic figure he was voicing the grief and protest of a -persecuted race? - -What Cervantes has done in “Don Quixote” is to supply the critics and -interpreters with material for speculation through many ages to come. He -gave his crack-brained old gentleman a devoted servant, with no particle -of his master’s idealism or insanity. Sancho Panza is entirely normal, -from the world’s point of view, a sturdy and practical fellow; yet he -gets into just as many absurd scrapes as his master--because he is -ignorant, and is betrayed by his own greed. So we are brought back again -and again to the question: Who is it that is really crazy in this -shifting and uncertain world? Is a reader of literature insane because -he sets out to apply the ideas of that literature in real life? Or does -insanity lie with writers who produce and critics who praise literature -which cannot be applied to real life, and is not intended to be so -applied? If, as I believe, the latter answer is correct--then how many -foolish persons there are writing books today! - -It is interesting to note how many of the world’s great monuments of art -were produced by men who saw their country traveling the road to ruin, -and pleaded in vain with the ruling classes. Cervantes himself was a -devout Catholic, and would not have understood us if we had told him -that Don Quixote typified the Spain of his time; the Spain which -believed that the human mind could be shackled by religious bigotry, and -forced by dungeon and torture and the stake to accept a set of -theological dogmas. The Spaniards slaughtered or drove into exile their -most intelligent population, the Moors; and Cervantes approved it. They -set out to conquer the world for their hateful faith, and Cervantes saw -their powerful Armada overthrown and destroyed by the little ships of -sturdy, independent Englishmen, who had recently kicked out the pope -from their country and taken charge of their own thinking. This pope had -by formal decree presented England to Spain; but the old, crack-brained -Don Quixote empire had been unable to take possession, and the sad -gentleman-soldier, Cervantes, died without having understood any of -these world-events. - - - - -CHAPTER XXXIII - -OGI, ANGLOMANIAC - - -Says Mrs. Ogi: “This is getting to be quite a respectable literary book: -the very thing for club ladies here in Southern California, who hire -somebody to read books for them, and tell them what the books are about. -Here you’ve read thousands of books for them!” - -Says Ogi: “They’ll get all the culture of the ages in a lecture lasting -three-quarters of an hour. I remember your telling how the Negro mammies -chew up the babies’ food for them, and then feed it back into the -babies’ mouths.” - -“Yes, but don’t you tell that!” cries Mrs. Ogi. - -“A little too Renaissancy?” laughs her husband. - -“With reasonable care,” persists the other, “you can break into literary -society with this book. I understand you’re leading up to English -literature; and that is where respectability begins and ends.” - -“You forget my Russian and German readers. Also, I’m sorry to report, we -have to have another chapter of economics and politics.” - -“What’s happened now?” - -“Free institutions have got a new start, and we have to understand the -process. We have to make an appraisal of the parliamentary system; and -if we make one that is just, we shall displease all parties to the -controversy. You remember how during the war this Ogi family used to -argue until three o’clock in the morning. The most difficult question in -all history had to be decided, and kept decided for four years. Was -there really a choice between British capitalism and German autocracy? -Was there any real life left in the parliamentary system, anything worth -saving in political democracy; or must we go over to working class -dictatorship? We listened to the partisans of each side as they stormed -at us; there were millions of separate facts, and we had to appraise -them and strike a balance. And just when we thought we had it, some -Irishman or Hindoo would come along with fresh examples of British -governmental imbecility.” - -“But what’s that got to do with the book?” demands Mrs. Ogi. - -“We have to make the same decision in our study of world culture. Here -is Elizabethan England, and we have to appraise it, and appraise -Shakespeare. Are we going to agree with Bernard Shaw and scold him -because he isn’t a Socialist? Are we going to agree with Tolstoy and -scrap him because he isn’t a saint? Evidently I’m expected to do those -things. Here’s a letter from George Sterling, who disapproves most -strenuously of my thesis, but who says, ‘From your point of view -Shakespeare is your biggest and most vulnerable game.’” - -“Well,” says Mrs. Ogi, “what’s Shakespeare to you, or you to -Shakespeare?” - -“For one thing, he’s an old friend. For another, he’s a whole universe -in himself--” - -“Surely a respectable opinion!” - -“I’m sorry to be respectable, but I want to be just. It is easy to name -great and important qualities that Shakespeare lacked, and damn him for -that lack. On the other hand, one can think of hideous qualities he -lacked--and honor him for their absence. Most important of all, he -wasn’t a medieval bigot. If he doesn’t ascend to the heights of moral -idealism, at least he avoids wallowing in what Sterling calls ‘the -liquid manure of superstition.’ He is a modern man, who looks at life -with clear eyes, and judges it on its own merits. Coming from Catholic -Europe to Elizabethan England is like coming out of a morgue, and -standing on a headland where the wind blows from the sea. Shakespeare -knew that, and all the men of his time knew it; they were defending -themselves from the Inquisition, they were saving the race-mind. - -“The future world poet was twenty-four years old when the Spanish Armada -was harried down the English channel by the little ships of Drake and -Frobisher. He had already come up to London, and perhaps he heard the -guns. Anyhow, all England knew that the pope had by formal decree turned -over their country to be a vassal of Spain; they knew that King Philip -was preparing against them the most powerful fleet in history. They -waited, in just such an agony of suspense as we knew during the long -struggle in France. And just as Æschylus was inspired by the battle of -Marathon to write Greek patriotic propaganda, so Shakespeare was -inspired by the defeat of the Armada to write English patriotic -propaganda. Now, in weighing the value of that propaganda, we have to -judge the society in which Shakespeare lived, the balance of democratic -and aristocratic forces, of progress and reaction it contained. We can’t -do that without a theory of political evolution--” - -“I’ll tell you what you do,” says Mrs. Ogi. “You start in and tell us -some facts about Shakespeare’s plays, and what’s in them, and work in -your theory of political evolution as you go along. Then, as I go along, -I’ll take a pencil and mark most of it out!” - - - - -CHAPTER XXXIV - -PHOSPHORESCENCE AND DECAY - - -A few months ago I had the pleasure of spending twenty-four hours with a -Chicago millionaire who specializes in knowing all there is to know on -the subject of ciphers. During the war he gave our army practically all -its information on this subject; so precious was his knowledge that, for -fear the enemy might get him, he was kept for a year and a half locked -up in the fire-proof, bomb-proof, burglar-proof and bullet-proof vault -where his books and manuscripts are preserved. - -Sitting in this vault, the owner showed me the greatest collection of -Bacon and Shakespeare first editions in America. For several hours he -pointed out the ciphers in these editions, and coming home on the train -I read the narrative which is hidden in these ciphers, the secret life -of Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, wherein he claims to have been a natural -son of Queen Elizabeth, and the author of most of the plays attributed -to William Shakespeare. It seems strange that one has to learn about -these things in French; but so it stands, in a series of articles by -General Cartier, published in the “Mercure de France,” September, 1922. - -If I were going to have an opinion on this subject, I should want at -least two years to devote, without interruption, to a study of this -cipher literature, and to the lives of Bacon and Shakespeare, and a -comparison of their literary styles. Lacking this leisure in the present -crisis of man’s fate, I content myself with saying that here is one of -the most fascinating mysteries in the world, and that I am not one of -those comfortable people who know a thing to be impossible, merely -because it is new and strange. Having said this much, I proceed upon the -orthodox assumption that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare -were written by the actor of that name. - -He was born in 1564 at Stratford-on-Avon, his father being a merchant -who early fell into misfortune. There are legends that the son was wild, -and ran away to London to escape prosecution for deer-stealing. He -became a hanger-on of theatrical companies, held horses at the doors of -theaters, became connected with the Duke of Leicester’s company, acted -in various plays, was called upon to revise and patch up manuscripts, -and finally wrote plays of his own which were popular successes. He made -money, bought several pieces of property at Stratford, won the -friendship of some of the powerful and great, and finally returned to -his home town, to die at the age of fifty-two. - -That is all we know about the greatest poet of all time. How he managed -to escape attention, how above all he failed to see to it that the world -got authentic copies of his plays, is a mystery only partly explained by -the fact that playwriting and acting were disreputable occupations. -Actors had been strolling vagabonds, liable to be thrown into jail by -any constable, like a workingman out of a job in the United States. Only -by getting the protection of some noble earl could they be safe from -persecution; and if you had become a friend of noble earls, and a -gentleman of property in your home-town, you did not boast of plays you -had written, any more than if you lived on Fifth Avenue today you would -boast of a saloon you had once kept. - -Shakespeare’s first plays are romantic comedies in the style of the -time. It was the tradition of the pastoral, fostered by elegant ladies -and gentlemen who know nature as a place for picnics. It is a world of -beauty, wit and “charm”; everybody is young, everybody’s occupation is -falling in love with some other pretty body, and problems exist only to -be solved in the last act. - -When I was young I saw Julia Marlowe in “As You Like It,” and was -ravished with delight. Now I look back on it, in the broad daylight of -my present knowledge about life; I recall the thousand traps into which -I fell because of ignorance of sex, ignorance of money, ignorance of -almost everything about my fellow human beings. I recall the people I -have known who fell into these same traps, and were not able to -extricate themselves, but paid for their romantic illusions with -poverty, drunkenness, disease, divorce, insanity, suicide. So I am -compelled to declare that these “charming” comedies are as false to life -as the average moving picture of our time, in which the problems of -labor and capital are solved by the honest labor leader marrying the -daughter of the great captain of industry. - -I have to go further and maintain that this betrayal of life was -deliberate; the writer himself knew more than he told us. Shakespeare is -fond of jeering at the “groundlings,” and those who stoop to tickle -their unwashed ears. In the Shakespearean theater the cheap seats were -in the pit, or what we call the orchestra; the aristocrats sat on the -sides of the stage, and frequently got drunk, and amused themselves by -sprawling in their seats and tripping up the actors and guying the show. -These elegant ones were not “groundlings,” and it was no disgrace to a -romantic poet to rise in the world by giving them what they wanted. -Shakespeare was even cynical enough to laugh at them for their silly -taste; he called one of his comedy successes “As You Like It,” and -another “Twelfth Night, or What you Will.” - -This man was gifted with the most marvelous tongue that has yet appeared -on earth. Golden, glowing, gorgeous words poured out of him at a -moment’s notice all his life; he covered everything he wrote with the -glamour of poetry. This gift was his fortune; but also it was a trap, -because it saved him the need of thinking. It is a trap for us, because -it tempts us into sharing his emotions without thinking. But force -yourself to think, ask yourself what is the actual value of the ideas -the mighty poet is expressing, and you discover that many of them are -commonplace, many are worldly and cheap, many are the harsh prejudices -of his time and class. - -In these early days Shakespeare wrote a long narrative poem, which helps -us to know him. It is dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton, his -patron, and is called “Venus and Adonis”; a typical example of the -pseudo-classical romantic rubbish which the cultured world of that time -called “art.” Nature has provided for the mixing and distributing of the -qualities of living creatures by a system of sex exchanges. Throughout -the higher forms of life, and with men and women in their primitive, -natural condition, the act of sex fertilization occupies less than the -entire time of the creature. But now a leisure-class arises, parasitic -upon its fellows; and the members of this class seek to divert their -idle time by the endless elaboration of the sex function. - -“Venus and Adonis” tells the story of an effort of the goddess of love -to secure the sexual attentions of a reluctant youth. The striking -thing about the poem is the extent to which the Greek ideal of the -goddess of fecundity has been debased--I will not say to the animal -level, because the animals are decent and sensible in their sex affairs; -I say to the level of the high-priced brothel, where the jaded rich are -beguiled. Venus in this poem has no idea of making herself spiritually -or intellectually attractive to the youth; she does not know how to be -sublime and goddess-like, she does not know how to be wise, or even to -be witty and gay. She only knows how to force her unwanted flesh more -and more persistently upon the youth, to wallow upon his body, -disgusting both the youth and the reader. - -The fact that “Venus and Adonis” is full of verbal splendor, like -everything else that Shakespeare wrote, makes it more and not less -offensive to an intelligent person. By means of our intelligence we have -invented the microscope, and thereby we know that decay is not less -decay because it happens to be phosphorescent. We can surely say that -there was decay in the fashionable world of Shakespeare’s time, when -twelve editions of “Venus and Adonis” were called for, while for a -mighty tragedy like “Othello” there was not demand enough to secure its -printing until six years after its author was dead! - - - - -CHAPTER XXXV - -THE GOOD MAN THEORY - - -When I was young the orthodox critics of Shakespeare taught, and -everybody accepted the idea, that there was no poet who had been more -aloof from his own work, and that it was impossible to tell anything -about him from the characters he portrayed. But now comes Frank Harris -with his book, “The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life-Story.” Harris -contends that no poet has revealed himself more continuously than -Shakespeare; the character speaking out of the plays is that of a man -tormented all his life by sensuality, and fighting in pain and -bewilderment to save a brilliant intellect from ruin by excess. - -Frank Harris is such a man himself; he makes no secret of the fact that -this has been his tragic life-story. So, as we read the book, our first -question is, to what extent has Frank Harris read himself into -Shakespeare. It has been a long time since I read the plays straight -through, and I should want to do it again before I felt I had an -opinion. Meantime, we can say this much: if the Shakespeare of Frank -Harris is not Shakespeare, but a work of imagination, it is one of the -most fascinating works of imagination in the world, fully as significant -as any character in any of Shakespeare’s plays. - -All critics would assent to the statement that Shakespeare began with -youthful glorification of his leisure-class friends, their graces and -their charms; and that as the years passed he met with a series of -disillusionments, which drove him to bitterness, almost to madness. But -it is to be noted that throughout this period of disillusionment he -remains purely personal, he never rises above the “good man” theory of -life. You know how it is in our politics; if there is corruption, it is -because we have elected bad men to office. The test of one’s ability to -think straight on social questions is the outgrowing of this “good man” -theory. - -“Just a moment,” says Mrs. Ogi, who has not entirely outgrown this -theory herself. “Do you deny that there are some things a good man can -do in the world that would not be done otherwise?” - -“Of course; I’m willing to admit that any social system would work, if -we could manage to get good men in charge, and to keep them there. The -trouble about evil systems is that they keep good men out of power; they -turn good men into bad men, even before they get into office. They keep -us from finding the good men; they make us think that bad men are -good--until ruin has come and it’s too late.” - -“But think of the frightful pictures that Shakespeare drew of evil men -in power!” - -“Shakespeare was a man of refinement, he loathed brutality and cruelty. -That was a part of his propaganda, his hatred of power blindly used; he -comes back again and again to cry out against it, to defend the gentle -and the innocent and the kind. In those ways he was far ahead of his -time; for those things we love him, they help to make him a world poet. -But here is the point--with Shakespeare it is all a family matter, -inside the leisure class. Some bad member of the family has got power, -and our attention is concentrated upon turning him out, and putting in -some good member of the family, who will make wiser use of power. - -“We shall find that the leisure-class artist is frequently permitted -this kind of criticism. He has his friends among the ruling class, he -comes to think of himself as belonging; so he has a right to find fault. -You know how it is with Mrs. Ogi; she will say things about her own -family--they are ignorant, they are arrogant, they are this and that. -But it is the part of discretion for her husband to remain silent at -such times. Mrs. Ogi will entertain the company with tales about the -absent-mindedness and general absurdity of her own husband; but it will -be the part of discretion for the company to dissent gently from such -ridicule.” - -“If you stay married to me long enough,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you will know -enough about human nature to be able to write a novel. But now we are -talking about Shakespeare. Aren’t you ahead of the time in expecting him -to have revolutionary feelings?” - -“Not at all. There was plenty of revolt, both political and social, in -Shakespeare’s day; there had been two centuries of social protest before -he was born. John Ball, the rebel priest, had been hanged and quartered -for asking the dangerous question: - - ‘When Adam delved and Eve span - Who then was the gentleman?’ - -“So, if Shakespeare had wanted to cast in his lot with the poor he had -his opportunity. But there was nothing of that sort in him. He was a -brilliant youth who had come up to London, poor and friendless, to -become intimate with noble earls and wealthy gentlemen, to dedicate his -poems and sonnets to them, and have his plays produced by their licensed -companies. If they proved faithless, if they insulted and humiliated a -man of genius, if their brilliant ladies and dashing maids of honor -intrigued with him and then betrayed him--he would fly into a rage and -write plays of almost insane fury, such as ‘Timon of Athens’ and ‘King -Lear,’ or pictures of grim and somber cruelty such as ‘Measure for -Measure.’ But when these plays failed, he would learn his lesson and go -back to writing romantic dreams, pretty fairy stories like ‘A Winter’s -Tale’ and ‘The Tempest.’ In these latter we find the wistful sadness of -the old man who has learned that life is not the beautiful thing it -ought to be, but who sighs in vain for an all-powerful magician to come -and set it right. Again, you see, the ‘good man’ theory; while the -social classes whose destiny it is to abolish parasitism are the object -of Shakespeare’s haughty and aristocratic sneers.” - -“Ah, now!” says Mrs. Ogi. “That’s the part of the story you’re saving -for a climax!” - - - - -CHAPTER XXXVI - -COMIC RELIEF - - -Shakespeare’s historical plays cover a period of three hundred years; -the breakdown of the feudal system, and its replacement by a monarchy -more or less controlled by a parliament. We have ten plays dealing with -this period. Some of them Shakespeare wrote entirely, getting his data -from old chronicles; others he worked over from older plays. He was -careless about his facts; and how little grasp he had of fundamentals -you may judge from the circumstance that “King John” does not even refer -to the signing of Magna Charta. He might easily have had a character in -this play make a speech on the subject of the people binding the -insolence of their rulers. But he had no interest in such matters. - -What Shakespeare did was to make a series of chronicle plays dealing -with the intrigues and quarrels and fightings of the English nobility. -He followed tradition, but never hesitated to change the characters in -order to heighten the dramatic interest. The result has replaced English -history in the minds of all English school-boys, and those grown-up -school-boys called statesmen. Their national poet flatters their -vanities and encourages their insular prejudices. He did not like the -Irish, he did not like the Welsh, he did not like the Scotch, he did not -like the French, and of course he did not like the Spaniards. He liked -the Romans, apparently because they resembled the English ruling -classes. - -John of Gaunt in his dying speech proclaims England in a series of -rapturous similes “this other Eden, demi-paradise ... this happy breed -of men, this little world, this precious stone set in the silver sea ... -this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”... And that -is all right, that is the correct way for Englishmen to feel about -England. But do they permit Frenchmen to feel that way about France, to -love and defend their country, and manage it in their own way? The -answer is, they do not. Frenchmen are to see English kings laying claim -to their throne; they are to see English armies invading their country, -destroying their cities and laying waste their fields; and they are to -hear the great poet of England cheering on the invader with his golden -eloquence, burdening his play with wearisome speeches to prove the -validity of the English claim to the throne of France, and explaining to -Frenchmen that it is for their own good that their country is invaded by -a superior race. - -Stranger yet, we shall find American scholars and critics enraptured -over such English imperialist poetry! I go to my local library to see -what the learned gentry have to say on this subject, and the most -up-to-date thing I find is a book called “English History in -Shakespeare’s Plays,” by a professor of a university in Louisiana. He -quotes the passage in which Henry V incites his troops to the attack on -Harfleur: - - Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, - Or close the wall up with our English dead. - -Says our scholar: “We are now greeted by the noble strain; a strain -unworn by constant quotation, unhackneyed by trite allusions. Like the -splendid harmonies of a master-musician it throbs and thrills us as we -read, in spite of the declamations of the schoolroom and the parsing -exercises of childhood.” - -Joan of Arc arose to inspire her people to drive out these invaders; and -the English burned her as a witch. A hundred and sixty years had -passed--surely time enough for sober second thought, surely time for -England’s national poet to do what he could to wipe this blot from his -country’s good name. But the maid of Orleans had to look elsewhere for -vindication than to Shakespeare, friend of the rich and powerful, who -never advocated an unpopular cause in all his forty plays. He represents -Joan according to the basest of the prejudices of his “groundlings”; a -vain, boastful creature, unchaste, and not denying her unchastity. - -In the series of plays dealing with King Henry VI comes a still more -significant incident, the rebellion of Jack Cade. For three hundred -years the blood and treasure of the English people had been wasted in -these foreign wars, and incessant civil wars of rival earls and dukes -and barons. In the middle of the fifteenth century there was widespread -distress, and in Kent occurred an uprising; a popular leader took the -city of London, and forced some promises of reforms, and was then -betrayed and killed. This incident fell into Shakespeare’s lap--an -opportunity for delicious gentlemanly wit at the expense of the -exploited workers. “Be brave, then,” cries Cade, “for your captain is -brave and vows reformation. There shall be in England seven half-penny -loaves sold for a penny, the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and -I will make it felony to drink small beer.” - -Just as soon as the Cade of Shakespeare gets power he sets himself up to -be a nobleman, and offers to strike one of his followers dead for -failing to recognize his claim. He addresses Lord Say, one of the -persons against whom the indignation of the people had been roused: - - Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in - erecting a grammar school; and whereas, before, our fathers had no - other book but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing - to be used; and contrary to the king, his crown and dignity, thou - hast erected a paper mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou - hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun, and a verb, and - such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear. - -Such is the wit of our gentleman poet; and what is the comment of our -Louisiana scholar? He tells us: “This savors of modern times.... The -demagogue has the ignorance of his audience on his side. He has in -behalf of his appeals that sullen jealousy of the masses who are -conscious of classes, that is, of a caste above them and more -accomplished.” To be sure, the Louisiana professor admits that -Shakespeare is here handling a great historic scene “flippantly”; but -then, you see, the poet had such a good excuse! He was “sorely in need -of comedy for the tragic drama of ‘Henry VI’”! But I ask: why could he -not have made up some comedy dealing with noble lords and gentlemen? - -The answer is: It is a tradition of the leisure-class literature of -England that the sufferings of the rich and powerful are dignified -tragedy, while the sufferings of the poor are “comic relief.” The only -way a poor person of any sort can get Shakespeare to take him seriously -is by being a devoted servant of some wealthy and powerful person; for -example, Old Adam in “As You Like It,” a part which, according to -tradition, was played by Shakespeare himself. But when the common people -try to do something for themselves, they are clowns and fools, yokels -and tavern roysterers. - -Take the comedy scenes in “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” when working people -actually attempt to give a play. Shakespeare thinks that no idea could -be more absurd. But nowadays working people give many plays in England; -there are radical theater groups producing a new dramatic literature, in -which it does not always happen that poor people are boobs, while ladies -and gentlemen are refined and gracious. More significant yet, the -descendants of those Jack Cade rebels, whom Shakespeare represents as -objecting to grammar schools, have by a century-long struggle forced the -establishment of free schools for the children of the people in every -corner of England. They have some three thousand branches of the -Workers’ Education Association, in which the people learn about nouns -and verbs at their own expense. Was ever a national poet more sternly -rebuked by the people of his own nation? - -Says Mrs. Ogi: “It is time for Jack Cade to make it felony to read -Shakespeare.” - -“No,” says Ogi; “we have to follow the example of the Catholic Church, -whose priests are allowed to read prohibited books for purposes of -controversy. But certainly it is time for us to get clear in our minds -that Shakespeare is a poet and propagandist of the enemy; for the -present, at any rate, a burden upon the race mind. He is the crown and -glory of the system of class supremacy, and a magic word used by every -snob and every time-server in the place of straight thinking and the -reality of life.” - - - - -CHAPTER XXXVII - -PRAISE FOR PURITANS - - -Says Mrs. Ogi: “From the title of this chapter I judge that we here -begin our long-anticipated debate with H. L. Mencken!” - -“No,” replies her husband, “we shall hew to the line of John Milton; but -of course, if one of the chips happens to hit Mencken in the eye--” - -“He will let us know,” says Mrs. Ogi. - -“First we have to have some of the despised sociology. We have to -mention that human institutions arise, and serve their day, and then -degenerate. The shell which at one time protects the crab becomes an -encumbrance and has to be split and cast off. The English monarchy once -served to break the power of the rebellious nobles, and to give the -country unity; but now came Parliament, pushing the kings aside. The -people who brought about that change were the Puritans: and for a -century they represented such freedom of conscience and freedom of -intellect as England had. Incidentally, they settled the North American -continent, cleared out the savages, and made a civilization. We owe them -more than we owe to any other single group; and if nowadays we identify -Puritanism with the Society for the Prevention of Vice, we shall be just -as narrow and as bigoted as Anthony Comstock himself.” - -Says Mrs. Ogi: “There goes a chip straight for Mencken’s eye!” - -The society in which John Milton grew up was very much like the -Harding-Coolidge era which we know. There was the same raffish crew in -control of government, selling everything in sight, and trampling civil -rights. Men were thrown wholesale into prison, they were beaten and -tortured for their opinions’ sake. A small handful stood out, and -suffered martyrdom; they appealed to the public, and the public seemed -dead and indifferent--exactly as it seems today. - -John Milton had a fortunate and happy youth. His father was prosperous, -and gave his son the best guidance and education. At Christ’s College -they called the boy “the lady,” because he was beautiful and refined. He -returned to his father’s home to live a life of quiet study, and to -write poems of imperishable beauty. If “art for art’s sake” degenerates -care to know how poetry can have all the graces and sensuous charms, and -still be clean, they are referred to these early poems of the young -English Puritan. It is worth while to point out explicitly how little -his creed meant narrowness and contempt for art. All that came later, as -a result of the civil war. But Milton in his youth acquired all the -culture of his time; he was a thorough-going humanist, personally -graceful and attractive; he traveled in Italy and met the leading men of -his age, including the old blind Galileo, who had been forced under -threat of torture to recant his belief that the earth moves around the -sun. - -The efforts of the most Catholic King Charles I to break the parliament -of England brought Milton home from Italy. The parliament resisted, and -civil war broke out, and he put aside his poetry and teaching, and -plunged into the work of saving free government. Even today we find -leisure-class critics bewailing the fact that a great poet should have -wasted himself in a political career. But I venture the opinion that -John Milton has given us more great poetry than we take time to -appreciate; and it was worth while also to give us a life, and -demonstrate that a poet can be a man. - -For twenty years John Milton was the world voice of the Republican -cause. In order to defend it he made himself master of the finest -English prose style known up to that time. He defended his cause also in -Latin, in French, and in Italian; he defended it so well that it now -prevails over most of the world, and so we fail to realize what it -seemed in the poet’s day. The parliamentary army met the king in battle, -and took him prisoner, held him for three years, and then, because of -his infinite and incurable treachery, tried him and cut off his head. To -the orthodox respectability of the seventeenth century this was the most -horrible thing that had happened since the crucifixion of Christ. - -You know how Bolsheviks and Socialists are reputed to practice free -love, and worse yet, to preach it. John Milton was that kind of wicked -person, also. He married a giddy young Royalist wife, and she left him; -whereupon he wrote two pamphlets in favor of divorce. When he could not -get permission to print such diabolical documents, he printed them -without license; and when he was attacked for this, he published another -pamphlet, maintaining the unthinkable theory that men should be free to -print what they pleased. I have seen, within a few miles of my own home, -bookstores and printing offices raided, and their contents smashed and -burned, both by mobs and by officers of the law; I have seen one of my -friends fined thirty thousand dollars for publishing a book in favor of -the atrocious idea that human beings should not shed one another’s -blood; so I believe that I can understand how this Puritan poet was -regarded by the cultured world of his time. - -He was a grim fighter. It was the fashion in those days to abuse your -opponents, and Milton gave as good as he got. People who think that -Upton Sinclair is too personal in his controversial writing-- - -“Won’t think it any the less because he compares himself with Milton!” -says Mrs. Ogi. “Go on with your story.” - -So her husband confines his statement to the fact that Milton never -engaged in a fight except for human liberty. At the crisis of his -country’s peril he was told he had abused his eyes, and that if he did -not rest them, he would go blind. He wrote another pamphlet in defense -of his cause, thus deliberately sacrificing his sight in the effort to -save the republican government. The sacrifice was in vain, for Cromwell -died, and the government went to pieces, and the raffish rout came back; -“bonnie Prince Charlie,” lecherous, treacherous and vile, with all his -herd of noble plunderers. John Milton, foreign secretary out of a job, -went into hiding, and his books were burned by the public hangman; later -he was arrested and fined--they would have liked to have the hangman -deal with him also, but did not quite dare. - -However, he lost most of his property; and there he was, old, blind and -helpless--his very daughters caught the spirit of the new time, and -stole his books and sold them to gratify their own desires. That is what -happens to men who consecrate their art to a cause; and somehow they -have to rise above such circumstances, maintain the supremacy of the -human spirit, “and justify the ways of God to man.” - -The psychoanalysts have made us familiar with the word “sublimation.” -Without ever hearing the word, John Milton proceeded to sublimate his -sufferings and his balked hopes into one of the greatest of the world’s -poems. The first point to get clear about this poem is that it was a -piece of propaganda, pure and simple, deliberately so made. Beauty and -culture and charm--these things John Milton had known, and in his bitter -old age he did not forget them; but the task to which he now set himself -was the same task as Dante’s to explain the universe and its divine -governance. - -The epic of English Puritanism has never won its due recognition abroad; -the Continental critics have given preference to Byron, who was also a -rebel, but a man of the world, a lover, and a lord. Albert Mordell of -course includes “Paradise Lost” among his “waning classics”; he has an -easy time pointing out the absurdities of its theology, and argues that -the interest of the poem is bound up with these. For my part I say about -it what I said about Dante; some of its propaganda is out of date, and -some of it will be out of date when men cease to consecrate their lives -to ends greater than themselves. - -It is interesting to note how the spirit of Milton broke the fetters of -his theology. According to that theology Satan was the father of evil, -and there was no excuse for him; he had rebelled against a heavenly king -who was all-wise and all-good. But Milton also had rebelled against a -king, and could not forget the feeling; he poured his own revolt into -the speeches of Satan, making him the most interesting character in the -poem. - -If you live in New York or visit there, you may see in the public -library a painting of Milton as he sat in his home, dictating “Paradise -Lost.” We have a description from the pen of a visitor; it was a poor -little house, with only one room to the floor, and the poet sat in a -chair, in a rusty black suit, old and blind, pale and tormented with -rheumatism. Ten pounds he got for England’s great epic, and thirteen -hundred copies of it were sold during his lifetime. Yet his spirit never -wavered, and he lived to write “Samson Agonistes,” a drama in the Greek -style, neglected by the critics. As a rule there is nothing more futile -than imitations of outworn art forms; but once in a while it happens -that a man lives the old life, and can write in the old manner. Milton -writes a Greek drama about a Jewish strong man--and it turns out to be a -picture of the poet’s own soul at bay! - -Having praised Milton highly in this chapter, I recall my opening -statement as to the superiority of present-day technique. You will -expect me to justify this, and an interesting opportunity presents -itself here. In 1655 occurred a massacre of Swiss Protestants by Italian -Catholics under the Duke of Savoy. Milton, being then in office as -foreign secretary, wrote a sonnet voicing his indignation. It is rated -by critics as one of the greatest of English sonnets. For your -convenience I quote it: - -ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONT - - Avenge, O Lord! thy slaughter’d Saints, whose bones - Lie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold; - Even them who kept Thy truth so pure of old - When all our fathers worshipt stocks and stones. - Forget not: In Thy book record their groans - Who were Thy sheep, and in their ancient fold - Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that roll’d - Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans - The vales redoubled to the hills, and they - To Heaven. Their martyr’d blood and ashes sow - O’er all the Italian field, where still doth sway - The triple Tyrant, that from these may grow - A hundred-fold, who, having learnt Thy way, - Early may fly the Babylonian woe. - -Francis Turner Palgrave, named by Tennyson as the best judge of poetry -of his time, says in the notes to his “Golden Treasury”: “this ‘collect -in verse,’ as it has been justly called, is the most mighty Sonnet in -any language known to the Editor.” So you see, we are setting a high -standard. What modern work shall we compare with it? - -In the year 1914 there occurred in Colorado, in the Rocky Mountains -cold, the “Ludlow massacre” of the wives and children of miners on -strike. It caused a demonstration in front of the office of John D. -Rockefeller, Jr., at 26 Broadway, New York, about which you may read in -“The Brass Check.” A young poet who happened at that time to be my -secretary, and who has since made a success as a novelist, was moved by -these events to write a sonnet, which I sent to the Scripps newspapers, -getting for the poet the unprecedented sum of twenty-five dollars. I now -quote the sonnet, and invite you to study the two, comparing them by -all tests of poetry known to you. I give my own opinion: that in their -propaganda impulse these two sonnets are identical; that in simplicity, -directness, and fervor of feeling they are as nearly identical as two -art works can be; and that in technical skill the modern work is -superior. - -TO A CERTAIN RICH YOUNG RULER - -By Clement Wood - - White-fingered lord of murderous events, - Well are you guarding what your father gained; - With torch and rifle you have well maintained - The lot to which a heavenly providence - Has called you; laborers risen in defense - Of liberty and life, lie charred and brained - About your mines, whose gutted hills are stained - With slaughter of these newer innocents. - - Ah, but your bloody fingers clenched in prayer! - Your piety, which all the world has seen! - The godly odor spreading through the air - From your efficient charity machine! - Thus you rehearse for your high rôle up there, - Ruling beside the lowly Nazarene! - - - - -CHAPTER XXXVIII - -COMRADE’S PROGRESS - - -There is another artist of English Puritanism we must not overlook. We -shall have no trouble in proving this one a propagandist; so obviously -was he preaching, that the critics of his own time overlooked him -entirely. The elegant men of letters of the Restoration period, -gossiping in their coffee houses, dicing in their taverns, and carrying -on their fashionable intrigues, would have been moved to witty couplets -by the notion that an ignorant tinker, a street-corner tub-thumper -locked up in Bedford gaol, was engaged in composing one of the immortal -classics of English literature. As soon might you attempt to tell one of -the clever “colyumnists” of the New York newspapers, stumping his last -cigarette in his coffee saucer at luncheon in the Algonquin, that an -immortal classic of American literature was running serially in the -“Appeal to Reason” or the “Daily Worker.” - -John Bunyan came from the lowest ranks of the people, those same louts -and clowns whom Shakespeare delighted to ridicule. And he was quite as -ridiculous as Shakespeare could have wished him; he saw visions, and was -pursued by devils, and rushed out onto the street to save the souls of -people as ignorant and unimportant as himself. Under the laws of England -the saving of souls was a privilege reserved to the younger sons of the -gentry, who got “livings” out of it; so John Bunyan was persecuted, -precisely as ignorant and unimportant I. W. W. are persecuted in my -neighborhood today. And he behaved exactly as the I. W. W. behave; that -is, he stubbornly declined to change his opinions, or to cease -proclaiming them on the streets. Sent to prison, he did what a number of -the I. W. W. did in Leavenworth; despite the fact that he had a pregnant -wife and four small children, one of them blind, he refused to give a -purely formal promise to behave himself. This caused extreme -embarrassment to humane magistrates, who didn’t want to be hard on a -poor crack-brain, but were sworn to uphold the majesty of the law. - -So for twelve years John Bunyan stayed in jail and wrote “Pilgrim’s -Progress.” Now my friend, Albert Mordell, includes it among his “waning -classics.” He says: “The story that children delight in the book and -read it through is mythical; many children try to read it but usually -drop it.” Well, it so happened that when I read those words, I had been -making a test on a ten-year-old boy, my own. We used to read it aloud, -sitting in front of the fireplace on winter evenings; and of all the -books we read, none created such excitement. It was difficult to keep on -reading, because of the stream of questions: “What does that mean, -Papa?” You see, allegories, which bore us adults, are fascinating to the -child mind. Such a wonderful idea, when you first think of it--to embody -moral qualities in living beings, and give them names, and send them -walking out over the earth, to engage in adventures and contend with -each other! To see the every-day problems of your own conduct unrolled -before you in the form of a story! - -My young friends of the radical intelligentsia, who used to live in -Greenwich Village, but have now moved to Croton and Provincetown and -Stelton to get away from the bally-hoo wagons, have been calling me a -Puritan ever since they knew me; and now they will smile a patronizing -smile, hearing me endorse this old-fashioned Sunday school story. I can -only record my conviction, that one does not escape the need of personal -morality by espousing proletarian revolution. Even after the revolution, -there will be moral struggles fought out in the hearts of men and women. -I realize that morality is destined to become a science, and that by the -study of psychology we shall abolish many problems of conduct; -nevertheless, life will still require effort--there will remain the -question of whether to study or not to study, and why! - -I suggest to my young radical friends that they amuse an idle hour by -applying “Pilgrim’s Progress” to the great movement of our day. Instead -of Christian, read Comrade; instead of Christian’s burden, read a -soap-box. You can always find some youngster to serve as traveling -companion under the name of Hopeful. And very soon in your journey you -will enter the Valley of Humiliation; very soon you will begin to meet -Mr. Money-Love and Mr. Pliable; also Mr. Talkative will come in swarms -to your studio parties. And By-Ends--he works beside you in every -office; the fellow who takes care of himself and does not believe in -going to extremes. And Mr. Worldly-Wiseman--perhaps you have a rich -uncle who will serve; you can see him sitting in the padded leather -chairs of any club. And when Comrade’s Pilgrimage brings him to New -York, he will see Vanity Fair, flaunting its glories up and down the -avenue, protected by plate glass. And the fiend Appolyon--we have had -two attorney-generals exactly cut for the rôle. If you think that a -joke, it means that you have been playing the part of Mr. Facing -Both-ways during the past ten years, and do not know about the realities -of government by gunmen. - -The forms of things change, but the inner essence remains the same, and -you must learn to recognize it. The Slough of Despond, for example, is -discovered in the bottom of the coffee-cups in which Greenwich Village -now gets its bootleg gin. As for the Giant Despair--a singular -transformation!--he is a pale-colored microscopic organism of cork-screw -shape, lurking in the delicious intrigues of our gay and saucy young -folks. As for the Interpreter’s House, it is out of repair just now, -having been hit by H-E shells in 1917. As for the Celestial City, which -we old fogies used to vision under the name of the Co-operative -Commonwealth--the young people won’t let us mention it any more; they -tell us that propaganda is out of style, in these days of -petting-parties and hip-pocket flasks. - - - - -CHAPTER XXXIX - -VANITY FAIR - - -We have been keeping low company for so long that the reader may be -wondering: Were there no writers for ladies and gentlemen in the time of -Milton and Bunyan? The answer is, yes; and we should pay a brief visit -to that Vanity Fair which Bunyan saw through the bars of his prison. - -There was a poet laureate, who did not go to prison but became the idol -of his age, and the most prosperous writer up to that time. John Dryden -was his name, and like Milton, he was born of a well-to-do Puritan -family, and received the best education going. He was twenty-seven years -old when Cromwell died, and he wrote heroic stanzas on the Lord -Protector. He attached himself to his cousin, an official of the Puritan -republic, expecting advancement; but he did not get it, so two years -later, when the “bonnie Prince Charlie” came back to be crowned, the -young poet welcomed him with a panegyric ode, several pages of ecstatic -compliment-- - - How shall I speak of that triumphant day - When you renewed the expiring pomp of May? - A month that owns an interest in your name, - You and the flowers are its peculiar claim. - -I am following the life of Dryden by Professor Saintsbury, an eminent -scholar of the Tory way of thought, who has just immortalized himself by -publishing a whole volume devoted to the literature of alcoholic liquor. -This professor says everything that can be said in defense of Dryden, -but the best he can say about this “Astræa Redux” is that in order to -appreciate its beauties, you must forget the facts about the “bonnie -Prince Charlie” and his reign. The professor lists a few of the facts -you must forget: “the treaty of Dover and the closed exchequer, Madam -Carwell’s twelve thousand a year and Lord Russell’s scaffold.” That is -the way to read literature under the guidance of a leisure-class critic! -As we used to say when we were children: “Open your mouth and shut your -eyes, and I’ll give you something to make you wise!” - -The elegant literature of that time was described by the term -“metaphysical,” which meant that the poet exhausted his imagination in -inventing quaint and startling conceits. For example, one of Dryden’s -noble patrons contracted smallpox, and the poet, describing his -appearance, records that - - Each little dimple had a tear in it, - To wail the fault its rising did commit. - -By such personal attention to the rich and powerful John Dryden became -the greatest poet of his century, and married the daughter of an earl. -He took to writing heroic plays in the style of his time, such -preposterous bombast that if I were to tell you about them you would -think I was making them up. Then he wrote society comedies, also in the -style of his time, which was such high-toned sex nastiness that if I -were to write it today I should be taken up by the Shuberts and the -Laskys, and paid as much as Cecil de Mille and Robert W. Chambers and -Elinor Glyn rolled into one. - -The “Restoration comedies” were much the same thing as our “bedroom -farces,” except that they were long drawn out; the seventeenth century -audience was satisfied to listen to smart people gossiping about their -vices, while our audience wants to see the smart people climbing through -the transom in their pajamas. Also, the old comedies are difficult for -us to understand, because the language of polite obscenity changes from -age to age, and we don’t always know what Dryden and Congreve and -Wycherley are talking about. But we need not rack our brains; we may be -sure that all their witticisms have reference to fornication and -adultery. There was no other occupation for these “restored” ladies and -gentlemen--except gambling and eating and drinking, and cheating and -lying in order to get the money to pay for their elegant pleasures. - -Dryden gained by this writing an income of a couple of thousand pounds a -year, which was the top-notch for a literary fellow in England. Also he -became poet laureate, and an intimate of the king; in short, he reached -the heights. But alas, greatness has its penalties, as the poet soon -discovered, caught in the poisonous intrigues of a vile court. He was -accused of having written a slanderous poem, and one of his noble -enemies hired some bullies to beat him up one night. Also, a muck-raking -parson by the name of Jeremy Collier came along and lashed him in a book -entitled “A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English -Stage.” To all his other literary and political enemies the poet showed -himself a voluble antagonist; but to the Reverend Jeremy he had nothing -to answer. - -He began, apparently, to realize the seriousness of life, and took to -writing propaganda for his gang. He produced a series of political -tracts, satirical and didactic verses upon which he expended great -technical skill. Professor Saintsbury points out these literary -beauties; but again he specifies: in appreciating them, the reader has -to bear in mind that what Dryden proved today he may have disproved -yesterday, and he may prove something different tomorrow. Lacking this -acrobatic ability, I can only record my opinion, that these most famous -verses are snarling and odious quarrels, of exactly as much importance -to mankind as the yelps in a dog-fight. - -One of them was a poem full of enraptured praise for the Anglican -church. The poet at this time was listed for a salary of a hundred -pounds a year as poet laureate; but the salary was badly in arrears, and -somebody must have pointed out to him that his new sovereign, King James -II, was an ardent Catholic. So the poet became converted to Catholicism, -and wrote an equally enraptured poem in praise of that. But, alas! it -was a bad guess; shortly afterwards His Most Catholic Majesty was kicked -out of England, and William of Orange was brought over, and the country -was Protestant again. This was the period when the Vicar of Bray had -such a hard time holding his job; and our court poet also suffered, -losing most of his perquisites, and having to go to work again. - -He was an old man now, and decided to play safe; he made a verse -translation of Virgil, for which nobody could scold him. Nobody did, and -he died full of honors, and had a “sufficiently splendid funeral” in -Westminster Abbey, “with a great procession, preceded at the College by -a Latin oration, and by the singing of Exegi Monumentum to music.” - -And so, if you like that sort of thing, there you have what you like; -and if you have Dryden’s talents, and are willing to sell them to the -ruling classes, I can drive you over to Hollywood any day, and introduce -you to the fellows who will start you off at twenty thousand a year, and -raise you to two hundred thousand as soon as you have begun to deliver -the goods. - - - - -CHAPTER XL - -GLORY PROPAGANDA - - -In order to make a consecutive story we have followed the development of -English art for a century and a half. We now go back to cover the same -period on the Continent, where a new ruling class has acquired wealth -and power and has ordered a supply of new artists. - -The difference between France and England during the sixteenth and -seventeenth centuries may be summed up briefly. The English revolt -against the Catholic machine was successful, therefore the spirit of the -English race expanded, and new art forms were created. In France, on the -other hand, the Catholic machine succeeded in crushing the Protestants; -something over fifty thousand were slaughtered on St. Bartholomew’s Eve; -and therefore the art of France was held within the mold of the -classical tradition. The Elizabethan drama grew out of the old miracle -and mystery plays, a native product, crude, but popular and democratic. -There existed such a native drama also in France; but it was scorned and -repressed by authority, and cultured art followed the tragedies of -Seneca, a Roman millionaire of the time of Nero, who had of course -derived from the Greeks. - -It may seem strange that Catholic absolutism should have made Greek and -Latin art forms a part of its sacred dogma; but so it was. The doctors -of the church in the Middle Ages had put together a theology, in part -from the early Christian fathers, and in part from Athenian and -Alexandrian philosophers. It was for denying Ptolemy’s doctrine that the -sun moved round the earth that Galileo was forced to recant under -threat of torture by the pope; and it was for denying the sacred “three -unities,” derived from Aristotle’s “Poetics,” that playwrights were -critically tortured by the priests of orthodox culture. - -These three dogmas of play-writing were unity of theme, unity of time, -and unity of place. The first is, within reasonable limits, a natural -requirement of any work of art; but unity of time, meaning that the play -must happen within twenty-four hours, and unity of place, meaning that -it must happen on one physical spot, are absurdities. It is hard for us -to realize that such rules were compulsory upon any dramatist who wished -to see his work upon the stage; it is harder yet for us to realize that -such rules were used as weapons in the class struggle, along with the -infallibility of the pope and the divine right of kings. - -There arose in France a prelate of the grim and bloody kind, who became -the king’s minister, and directed the slaughtering of the Huguenots, and -chopped off the heads of the rebellious nobles; he even forced the -church to submit itself, and made his king the absolute ruler of France, -so that a year after Richelieu’s death it was possible for the king’s -son to ascend the throne, and to say, “I am the State,” and have no one -dispute him through his reign of seventy-two years. One of the engines -of repression that Richelieu devised was the French Academy, to take -charge of the language and art of the monarchy, and impose law and order -by chopping off the literary heads of all rebels. This Academy became -the ruling authority in cultured France, and has filled that rôle for -three hundred years. Not merely has it served the ruling classes by -maintaining tradition and discrediting every innovation in French -letters; it has issued formal pronouncements against unorthodox social -and political books--for example, Rousseau’s “Social Contract.” A list -of the French men of letters who have been excluded from the “immortals” -includes Descartes, Pascal, Molière, Saint-Simon, LeSage, Rousseau, -Beaumarchais, Diderot, Compte, Proudhon, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, -Zola, Goncourt, Maupassant, Jaurès, Barbusse, Rolland. - -The polite literature which reigned in Richelieu’s time was known as -“précieuse,” and occupied itself in the making up of elaborate long -similes, extending sometimes through several pages. It was foppish and -fantastic to the point of imbecility; and the makers of it were the -darlings of Richelieu’s Academy. There came up from the provinces a -young lawyer by the name of Pierre Corneille, who began to write -successful comedies, and received the high honor of being picked by -Richelieu as one of five men to write dramas under his august direction. -But Corneille, a man of genius, could not long submit himself to the -head-chopping cardinal. He went his own way, and incurred the raging -enmity of both Richelieu and his Academy. - -He wrote a tragedy in Alexandrine verse called “The Cid,” which was an -enormous popular success. This Cid was a legendary hero of Spain, a -“free captain”--that is, the head of an army of hired mercenaries, who -went about fighting for anybody who would pay him. We are used to this -system of “free captains” in the United States, where they are called -private detective bureaus and strike-breaking agencies. They have armies -of tens of thousands of fighting men, horse, foot and artillery, whom -they move about from place to place for the crushing of union labor. So -before long we shall see on Broadway or in Hollywood some young writer -making a tremendous ruling-class drama out of the legendary career of -Alan Pinkerton or William J. Burns. The great detective will be shown in -love with the beautiful daughter of some labor leader, the tragedy -coming when in the course of his duty the great detective has to kill -the labor leader. That is the story which Corneille developed--except -that of course, it was a rival prince whom the Cid was fighting. -Needless to say, in order not to have his head chopped off by Richelieu, -the playwright put his hero in the position of defending legitimacy. - -But the poet had failed to respect the “three unities” in his tragedy; -so, although acclaimed by audiences, he was viciously attacked by the -academicians--one of them even challenged him to a duel! The Academy as -a body was afraid to attack the play, but Richelieu forced it to take -action. Corneille was not strong enough to withstand opposition such as -this; in his future work he conformed to the rules, and became a humble -pensioner of the cardinal. It is interesting to note that his genius -began quickly to decline, and he had the humiliation of living to old -age and seeing himself scorned and neglected by the new generation. Thus -Richelieu’s Academy fulfilled at the outset its function, destroying the -greatest tragic dramatist that France had produced, and suppressing for -two hundred years the romantic movement in the French theater. - -It is important to get clear the difference between the real classical -art of the Greeks, and this imitation classical art of French -absolutism. The Greek stage rules had been made to fit the facts of the -Greek stage. Their tragedies had been enacted in a large open-air -theater, and to keep the actors from looking too small they had worn -high shoes, almost stilts, and had shouted to the audience through a -megaphone disguised as a mask. Needless to say, they could not move -quickly, and could not do anything but talk. Their tendency was to talk -at great length--like mighty ships, which, having got under way, were -not easily to be stopped. - -But in the time of Corneille and his successors all that was gone; plays -were acted in small, indoor theaters, and the characters might have been -human and real. But the critical authorities ordained that the Greek -conventions were sacred; so the characters of Corneille are stiff and -stately, and stalk about hurling long, impassioned tirades at one -another. - -Nevertheless, two thousand years have not failed to make an impression -upon the minds of men. The dark, overshadowing fate of the Greeks is -gone, its place as director of events being taken by human ambition. -Corneille’s characters are embodiments of this or that passion. They -are, of course, always aristocrats, the mighty and powerful of the -earth; they are intended to be morally sublime, but to us they seem -monsters of egotism. They want what they want when they want it, they -smite their breasts and exclaim: “Moi! Moi! Moi!” There is war, splendid -war, in which they gain the admiration and attention known as “glory.” -The tragedy comes because they cannot get all they want; they have -weaknesses, especially love, which get in the way, and paralyze the will -of mighty princes engaged in prevailing over each other. - -At this time the Thirty Years’ War was devastating Europe. It had begun -as a religious war, an effort of Catholic Austria to crush German -Protestantism; but it had now degenerated into a clash of rival -dynasties, with Richelieu, master intriguer, using the Protestants to -put down the enemies of the French monarchy. The mother of the French -king had been an Austrian princess, Catherine de’ Medici, and she was -intriguing against her son’s country. She had been driven into exile by -Richelieu, and was raising up armies against him; so, all over Europe, -the people were being led out to slaughter at the whim of this vicious -old woman. They were led out for one greedy prince or another; they were -led out because the mistress of some king had been snubbed by the wife -of some emperor; they were led out for an endless tangle of royal -jealousies and noble spites. - -And the function of the dramas of Corneille is to take us into the souls -of these lawless aristocrats; all the powers of genius, all the -resources of the stage are expended in order that we may share their -furies, may strut the stage with them and deliver tumultuous tirades. -For a time or two the experience is interesting; but then the novelty -wears off, and we ask ourselves: Do I really care anything about these -heroes? Do I want to share their feelings--or do I want to change the -world, so that there may be no corner where such dangerous and -destructive creatures can lurk? And so ends the glory propaganda of -Corneille. - - - - -CHAPTER XLI - -UNBRIDLED DESIRES - - -Louis XIV, the “grand monarch,” ascended the throne of France in the -year 1643, while Cromwell’s “Ironsides” were fighting their king, and -only six years before they cut off his head. A greater difference -between two kingdoms could scarcely be imagined; and this difference is -completely reflected in French and English art. - -All the life of France was centered at the court. The monarch who was -“the State” withdrew himself from Paris, and built a magnificent -play-ground at Versailles; aqueducts were constructed, a barren waste -was turned into a pleasure-park, whole forests of trees being moved and -replanted. Great palaces arose; the architects and landscape gardeners, -the sculptors and painters poured out their treasures, to make this -most wonderful garden of delight. - -All over the land was a ruined peasantry; misery, starvation and -ignorance, freedom crushed, justice flaunted, superstition and despotism -enthroned. A nation was taxed bare to make the beauty and glory and -luxury of this court. You might see the “grand monarch,” with a huge -powdered periwig on top of his head, in a costume of crimson and white -brocaded with gold, advancing with solemn steps upon red-heeled shoes, -and wielding a golden snuff-box covered with jewels. About him flock the -courtiers, great nobles and ecclesiastics, now deprived both of their -powers and their duties, and with nothing to do but dance attendance at -court. Here also are the swarms of fine ladies, trained in the arts of -seduction. In the morning the court rides forth in enormous hunting -parties, pursuing stags imported from all over Europe. They spend the -afternoons and evenings in feasting, gaming, gossiping, intriguing. - -And here, of course, come the artists; poets and painters, dramatists -and musicians, dancing masters and jugglers and makers of ballets and -masques. The king who said, “I am the State,” might equally have said, -“I am Art.” He and his court constituted audience and critics; either -you pleased them, or as an artist you were dead. - -It is interesting to note that the famous artists of that time all came -from the middle classes. The great gentlemen scorned to work at art, as -at anything else; they paid others to work for them. They were exacting -paymasters, having high standards of perfection in technique, and the -middle-class Ogis slaved diligently to polish and refine and beautify -their productions. - -War was far off from this splendid court, an echo of trouble in another -world; so the sternness and sublimity of Corneille went out of fashion. -Love was no longer a temptation and a weakness, but the delight and -glory of the “great world.” The source of human impulse was located in -what the poets of those days called “the heart”--though we, by surgical -investigations, have ascertained that it is located below the diaphragm. - -There came a new dramatist to thrill this amorous company. His name was -Jean Racine, and he also came from the middle classes. His genius -brought him instant success; he wrote an ode to the king, was awarded a -pension of six hundred livres, and became an assiduous and successful -courtier. He is, like Raphael, the perfect type of the ruling-class -artist; fitting exactly to his age, with no ideals below it and none -above it. His works represent perfection of technique, the ideal harmony -of content and form, the Art of Beauty as it had not been seen upon the -stage since the time of Sophocles. - -Until late in Racine’s life religion is purely formal in his work; his -plays deal with the princely world. Society is fixed, and its forms -ordained; nobody is rising and displacing anybody else, hence there can -be no social drama. You play your part “in that state of life to which -it has pleased God to call you”; and tragedy happens when somebody takes -away from you the sexual gratification you crave. Everything has become -personal; we are concerned with the jealousies, the fears, the loves and -hates of aristocratic individuals. The heroes and heroines abandon -themselves to their passions, they pour out floods of exquisite emotion. -The scene is laid in “an apartment in a palace,” and murder, suicide, -insanity and despair lurk just outside the door. - -They do not come upon the stage, because the classical tradition ordains -that violent actions happen off the stage, and people rush on and tell -us about them. We get the echoes of horror in the eyes and the voices of -these people. It is curious to compare Racine’s tragedies with those of -Shakespeare, which jump you about among a score or two of places all -over the earth, and bring on swarms of characters from every social -class. In Racine, not merely are the lower classes excluded from the -stage, the lower classes are excluded from existence. Three or four -noble ladies and gentlemen stand in a room, and come and go, and make -speeches to one another in marvelously polished rhymed couplets. They -address long soliloquies to the air, they address imaginary beings, the -heavenly powers of Christian mythology and Roman and Greek and Turkish -and Celtic mythology; they call earth and sea and sky to witness the -infinite wickedness and cruelty of their not being able to have what -they want. - -This is the height and perfection of art, according to the most -fastidious and exacting of French standards. And is it propaganda? I do -not see how anyone capable of putting two thoughts together can -question the fact. Here are the gods of a new hierarchy, princes and -potentates, absorbing to themselves by divine right all the treasures of -civilization. Here they are exhibited in all their splendor, one of the -world’s greatest poets devoting his technical skill to glorifying and -exalting them. Storms of thrilling emotion are poured forth, and the -crowds go mad with excitement. So ideals are created and standards set, -which govern, not merely the art life, but the social and political and -business life of the whole of society. - -The poet himself lived this life of elegant egotistical passion; he was -jealous and quarrelsome, and he followed the custom of the painters in -using his mistresses as models for his female types. One of his -tragedies became the cause of a ferocious court quarrel; a duchess hired -another playwright and produced a rival play on the same theme, and -hired a claque to applaud his play, and to hiss Racine’s. This -apparently frightened the poet; he lost his joy in the courtier life, -became sick, and in orthodox Catholic fashion retired into mysticism, -and wrote a play of religion, as unwholesome and remote from reality as -his worldly plays. - -The most famous of his tragedies is “Phedre,” which tells about the wife -of an Athenian king, who conceives an adulterous passion for her -step-son, and when the youth repels her advances, accuses him falsely to -his father, and brings about his death; after which, in a transport of -shame, she poisons herself. For two centuries and a half this portrayal -of unbridled desire has been the test of genius upon the French stage; -eight generations of actresses have exhausted their skill in portraying -it to eight generations of elegant ladies and gentlemen, living lives of -the same unbridled desire. - -In our time the great Phedre was Sarah Bernhardt, the “divine Sarah,” as -she was known to the leisure-class critics of my boyhood. Upon the stage -she exhibited the unbridled desires of an ancient Greek queen, and in -real life she exhibited the unbridled desires of a modern stage queen; a -woman who never felt a social emotion, but squandered the treasure of -various royal and plutocratic and literary lovers, who likewise had -never felt a social emotion. We are privileged now to read the extremely -stupid love-letters which King Edward of England wrote to her, and -learn what sums of money be paid to her, and what dignified court -gentlemen he sent to make his assignations with her. We read also about -her passion for Sardou, leisure-class playwright of her time, who -created a host of splendid prostitutes and lustful queens, to enable -this leisure-class divinity to sweep her audiences into ecstasy. - -We today, possessing means of exploring the subconscious mind, -understand these unbridled desires as symptoms of infantilism. Here are -babies, still reaching out for the moon, and shrieking because they -cannot have it; here are spoiled children, flattered by servants and -fawned upon by slaves, indulged and petted, never adjusting themselves -to the realities of life, but growing up to make heroes and heroines of -tragedy. We no longer consider these creations sublime; we call them -psychopaths, and the art which portrays them we call a bore. - -As economists we have explored the social causes of such raging -egotisms, and also the social consequences. The plutocracy is not the -only class which has unbridled desires; the proletariat has its share, -and if one class is permitted to gratify them, and to flaunt them before -the world, the only possible consequence is a revolution of blind and -bloody revenge. Queen Phedre, frenzied and horror-smitten, saw hell -looming hideous before her staring eyes; but she saw no hell compared -with what Racine’s audience might have seen, had they been able to look -forward a hundred years in French history, and to watch the starved and -brutalized mob of Paris dancing the “Carmagnole” in the streets, while -the guillotine rolled into its bloody basket the heads of the -great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of those splendid, unbridled -ladies and gentlemen who made up the “grand monarch’s” splendid, -unbridled court. - - - - -CHAPTER XLII - -THE HARPOONER OF HYPOCRISY - - -In vain do kings and emperors set up the doctrine that art exists for -courts; that only the great ones of the earth are the proper theme for -art works, and courtiers and court critics the true judges of taste. -Deeply planted in the human heart is an instinct, declaring that all -human beings are of consequence; and men of genius arise who follow that -instinct, and write about ordinary people, and appeal to wider and wider -groups of the community. We shall now see this happening to the -exclusive and haughty court of the “grand monarch.” A world genius -appears, who breaks the established barriers, sets all France to arguing -over his ideas, and helps to make the drama of Europe the social force -which it is today. - -He was the son of the royal upholsterer in Paris; that is to say, of a -tradesman who had the job of repairing the soft and expensive cushions -upon which this court reclined. But Molière, a volcano of energy and -enterprise, did not take long to discover that he was not interested in -cushioning a court. At the age of twenty-one he sold his claims to the -family job, and started a theater on a tennis-court in Paris. It was a -failure, and the young Molière was three times imprisoned for debt. But -he would not give up; he organized a company to tour the provinces, and -for thirteen years he lived a life of “one-night stands.” It is a dog’s -life today, and must have been worse three hundred years ago, when -actors were outcasts and almost outlaws. Catholic bigotry in France was -as bitter against them as Puritan bigotry in England. - -It was a hard school, in which Molière made no money and lost his -health. But it was a way to make a tragi-comic dramatist, for it brought -him into contact with every kind of human being. When he came to -Versailles to become the king’s favorite dramatist, he brought with him -knowledge of something more than courtly intrigue; he brought the -fighting spirit of a man who had been roughly handled, who had been poor -and in jail, and who knew France as it was to the plain people. - -Molière got a chance to produce plays before the king, including a -couple of his own little farces. The king was then twenty-one years of -age, curious about life, and not entirely in the hands of women and -priests as he later became. Molière was thirty-seven when he produced -his first significant work, “Les Précieuses Ridicules,” a satire on the -literary fashions of the time, according to which a mirror was called -“the counsellor of the graces,” and a chair “the commodity of -conversation.” Great ladies were accustomed to assemble to display their -wit to one another, and it was exactly like the literary tea-parties we -have nowadays. I have pictured them in a chapter in “The Metropolis”-- - -“Go ahead with Molière!” says Mrs. Ogi. - -“I just want to quote a dozen lines,” pleads her husband. “This shows -you what happens to literature, when it becomes ‘the rage’ among fine -ladies: ‘We learn thereby, every day, the latest gallantries, and the -prettiest novelties in prose and verse; we are told just in the nick of -time, that such a one has composed the prettiest piece in the world on -such a subject; that some one else has written words to such an air; -that this person has made a madrigal upon an enjoyment, and that his -friend has composed some stanzas upon an infidelity; that Mr. So-and-so -sent half a dozen verses yesterday evening to Miss Such-and-such, and -that she sent back an answer at eight o’clock this morning; that one -celebrated author has just sketched a plan for a new book, that another -has got to the third part of his romance, and that a third is passing -his works through the press.’” - -“Is that in ‘The Metropolis’?” asks Mrs. Ogi, suspiciously. - -Whereat, her husband grins with malice. “Look for it; and if you don’t -find it, try the tenth scene of ‘Les Précieuses Ridicules.’” - -It was insolence for a mere tradesman’s son to make fun of high-born -ladies, and the ladies were furious, and succeeded in keeping the play -off the stage for five days. That was the beginning of a fight, which -lasted the rest of Molière’s life. At any time he chose to write a silly -farce or a ballet he could have it produced safely and with applause; -but whenever he wrote a play with a serious purpose he raised up a swarm -of enemies, who kept his play off the boards anywhere from five days to -five years. And here is where the man showed his spirit; he was sick, he -was always struggling with debt, he had his theatrical company to look -out for--people whom he loved and whose burdens he carried. -Nevertheless, truth blazed in him like a white-hot flame, and he could -not let his enemies alone. He would quit the fight for a year or two, -then come back to it with a piece of ridicule yet more stinging, or a -picture of cruelty and falsehood so grim that it was hard to pass off -for a comedy. - -Molière hated hypocrisy with a deadly hatred; he hated the church of his -time, because it was an organized system of hypocrisy for cash. He hated -vain fops, and empty-headed, pretentious women, and the snobbish and -self-seeking great ones of the earth. Also he hated the enslaving and -imprisoning of love. In his time the French girl was raised in a -convent, and when she was somewhere between thirteen and eighteen her -parents, with the aid of the family lawyer, sold her in marriage to some -mature man of the world, who possessed rank and fortune, and was apt to -possess vices and diseases. In no less than nine of Molière’s plays -there is such a situation; also there is an amiable young man in love -with the girl, and the couple find a way to thwart the schemes of their -elders. The plays thus become a plea for common sense and human feeling, -as opposed to avarice and worldly pride. This has become a familiar -theme of comedy; the poet’s first instinctive revolt against the -money-power. - -It is Molière’s custom to take some propaganda theme, and to construct -upon it a sermon in picture form. He chooses very simple characters to -illustrate the theme, and in the conversations he pounds upon it like a -man driving in a spike with a sledge. Every bit of knowledge and skill -he possesses goes into those hard strokes; all his wit and verve, his -insight into human character, his amazing vividness, his palpitating -sense of life. - -The greatest evil of the time was unquestionably the church, which -controlled the mind and conscience of the nation and repressed all -independent thinking. The life of France was beset by a horde of spies, -the secret agents of a predatory power, the Jesuits; nothing could be -hid from them, because they controlled the salvation of souls, and -through the instrument of the confessional were able to dominate -political and social life. They worked, as always, upon the ignorance -and emotionalism of women; they beset the mind of the king, and in the -end they got him, forcing the revocation of the law tolerating -Protestants, and beginning another monstrous persecution. Molière saw -all that going on around him, and he wrote about it one of the most -terrible plays in the world. It is called “Tartuffe, or The Hypocrite,” -and shows a religious intriguer, worming his way into a middle-class -family and seducing the wife of his benefactor. The drama is an -utterance of blazing anger, a veritable harpooning of hypocrisy. As a -weapon of propaganda it is exactly as powerful today as it was three -hundred years ago. - -Of course it raised a storm in the little world of Paris and Versailles. -The clerical party besieged the king, and the play was barred from -public performance, though it was shown privately to some of the great -nobles. The archbishop threatened to excommunicate those who even read -the play, and Bossuet, the ruling-class literary pope of the time, took -Molière’s untimely death from tuberculosis as a divine judgment upon him -for the writing of this infamous work. Two years later the king again -permitted the play to be shown; but when the performance came on he was -away at one of his wars, and an official closed the theater, and -Molière’s appeals to the king were in vain. For five years the fight -over this play went on, before at last it could be freely shown. - -They were years of incessant struggle for Molière. He produced “Don -Juan,” and the clerical critics objected to that also, because it -portrayed an intellectual and free thinker. To be sure, it portrayed him -as a very immoral man; but that did not satisfy the clerical party, for -few of them could meet that test. It was the irony of fate that the -archbishop, who forbade to Molière’s body a church service, was himself -a man of notoriously vile habits. - -Then came a play called “The Misanthrope,” a name doubtless given as a -sop to Molière’s critics. There is really nothing misanthropic about the -hero; he is simply a man of fine ideals, who is stunned by his discovery -of the powers of evil in the world about him, and their ability to -destroy human life. He is married to a woman whom he loves, but who will -not give up this evil world, and gives up her husband instead. Molière -himself had made a bitterly unhappy marriage with a young actress who -preferred the world to her husband, and the hero of this play is -generally taken as Molière’s own voice, just as Hamlet is taken as -Shakespeare’s voice. - -This greatest comic dramatist of France had to waste much of his time -producing farces and ballets for his exacting king. He now wrote a farce -comedy, which I suppose is produced a thousand times every year in -American high schools, “The Bourgeois Gentleman.” The play makes merry -with a crude, newly-rich merchant who tries to acquire a little culture -in his prosperous years. Molière was thus catering to high-born -snobbery, and also voicing the dislike which all artists feel for those -who buy and sell. You will recall the scorn of Aristophanes for -“mongers” of all sorts--“mutton-mongers” and “rope-mongers” and -“leather-mongers” and “offal-mongers.” - -In another play, “The Learned Ladies,” Molière joins Aristophanes in -poking fun at the idea that women should or could be educated. It is -true that the vanities of women are especially absurd when applied to -scientific matters, in which personality is so entirely out of place; -but the same absurdities result from the first efforts of any -disinherited group or class or race to lift itself. We have seen -Shakespeare making fun of workingmen trying to produce a play; -similarly, we shall find Kipling ridiculing the notion that Hindoos can -master the English language, and become fit to hold government positions -in their own country. - -Molière’s last whack was at the doctors, whom he especially disliked. We -can understand that a man afflicted with a chronic disease, concerning -which the doctors of his time understood nothing, must have had -unsatisfactory results from their visits, must have submitted to their -purgings and their bleedings to no purpose, and paid them money which he -felt they did not earn. Anyhow, he goes after them again and again, and -in his “Imaginary Invalid” he portrays a man who thinks he is sick, and -all the various quacks who swarm around him. Three times the play was -given with great success, with Molière acting the leading part. A fourth -performance was due, and the poor playwright was ill; he thought of his -company and what would happen to them if he were to shut down, so he -went through the performance, and collapsed and died a few hours later. - -But his vivid and courageous propaganda did not die. It lives, even to -our time, as the greatest glory of the French drama; proving over and -over again our thesis that really great art has never been produced -except by men who wished to improve their fellow-men and to abolish -cruelty and greed and falsehood from the earth. - - - - -CHAPTER XLIII - -ÉCRASEZ L’INFAME - - -In his later years the “grand monarch” fell under the spell of a -priest-ridden woman, made her his queen, and turned over his court to -Jesuit intrigue. The law tolerating Protestants was repealed, the best -schools in France were closed, and half a million of the most -intelligent people were driven from the country. At the same time wars -of conquest were undertaken, and a series of military disasters befell. -The king’s reign closed in darkness and despair, and the crowds of Paris -mocked his funeral pageant. But the people’s wrath had to fester for -seventy years longer before it broke the tyranny of this “ancient -regime.” - -Two years after the “grand monarch’s” death, the regent sent to the -Bastille a young French poet and man of fashion, the son of a wealthy -lawyer of Paris. This youth, known to us as Voltaire, was accused of -having written a pamphlet ridiculing absolutist ideas; the charge -happened to be false, but needless to say, a year spent in prison -without redress did not increase the young man’s love for absolutism. He -was one of the wittiest mortals ever born on earth, and blessed, or -cursed, with an incessantly active mind. His jailers were comparatively -civilized--I mean, compared with jailers of capitalist absolutism in -America; they permitted the young man to write poetry and dramas, and -when he came out he continued the gay and dissolute life of a literary -fop of that period. He was welcomed in the salons of the great, and his -long epic poems and his rhymed verse tragedies were produced with great -success. - -But in his pride as a man of letters Voltaire forgot his place in the -great world of France; he presumed to resent an insult from a noble -gentleman, whereupon this gentleman brought his lackeys, armed with -sticks, and had the poet cruelly beaten, while the noble gentleman sat -in his sedan-chair, jeering and directing the punishment. To the -amazement of the French aristocracy, the victim failed to accept this as -a proper form of discipline; he, a mere lawyer’s son, proceeded to train -himself to fight a duel with the nobleman--whereupon his great friends -turned their backs on him, and he was again thrown into the Bastille, -and got out only upon promise to leave France. - -He went to England, where he lived for three years. It was a new -England, based upon the revolution which had driven out the Stuarts; a -Protestant England, prosperous, busy, and from the point of view of a -French refugee, amazingly free; an England in which Pope was preaching -common sense, and Swift was lashing hypocrisy, and Newton was -discovering the laws of the universe. When Voltaire returned to France, -it was no longer to be a society fop and darling of the aristocracy; it -was to be an intellectual pioneer, undermining the wall which French -absolutism had built about the country. - -Voltaire wrote a book dealing with the things he had learned in England, -all the ideas of the new science and the new philosophy and the new -toleration. Refused permission to publish it, he had it published -secretly, whereupon it was solemnly banned by authority, and a copy was -burned by the hangman. This made the fortune of the book; it had a big -circulation, and all intellectual France fell to arguing about it. And -that was to be Voltaire’s life for some forty-five years thereafter; -writing forbidden books and pamphlets under an infinity of pen names, -having them secretly printed in England, or in Holland, or in -Switzerland, having them publicly burned, and no less publicly debated. - -The name Voltaire thus means to us a champion of free thought, against -religious superstition; but we must get clear the fact that during his -life Voltaire was the most eminent poet and dramatist of France. Also it -is interesting to note that, revolutionary as he was in the field of -philosophy, he was a complete conservative in the field of art; -following the models of Corneille and Racine, and respecting the sacred -unities, the artificial laws whereby the French stage was fettered. -Among the discoveries he had made in England was a playwright by the -name of Shakespeare, whom he described as “a drunken savage, without the -smallest scrap of good taste, and without the least acquaintance with -the rules.” Voltaire was much annoyed when this dictum had the effect of -causing some Frenchmen to be curious about Shakespeare! As time passed, -he found that he had to give more and more energy to denouncing this -“drunken savage,” and rebuking those who professed to find merit in his -work. - -All of which has a vital lesson for us; it shows us how tight is the -grip of culture conventions upon the educated mind. It is possible for -men to think for themselves concerning God and immortality, concerning -the divine right of emperors and kings, and even of oil magnates and -international financiers. But it is extremely difficult for them to -think freely on the subject of what constitutes good taste, and whether -or not they ought to permit themselves to enjoy a new and strange work -of art. I note with interest that our own young intellectuals, who count -themselves thorough-going revolters, who boast of unorthodoxy in -religion, politics, economics, and morals, are usually of Tory -inclination in matters of culture; cherishing the aristocratic -superstition that art exists for cultured classes, and that whatever is -popular is obviously contemptible. - -We in America do not make any fuss about poets, so it is hard for us to -understand the power which Voltaire wielded over French society. He was -cynical, he was obscene, he was jealous and vain and exasperating; but -he was a kind of god, to whom critical authority bowed, even monarchs -with their worldly power. He produced a score of dramas, most of them -tragedies in the heroic style, and with few exceptions each was a -separate ovation, a coronation in the kingdom of letters. It never -occurred to anyone in Voltaire’s time that he was not the equal of -Racine, as a dramatist; while his epics were put above Homer and Virgil. -We today begin one of his plays with determination to go through to the -end, but we cannot make it; we desire some Greenwich Village wit to -produce it in mock heroic style, so that we can laugh heartily at these -pompous aristocrats raging and storming, stabbing and killing each -other. We laugh, because it is so apparent that the poet himself has -never felt any of this emotion, he has thought only how magnificent it -sounds. - -But at this time French culture was supreme throughout Europe, and -Voltaire, cynic and skeptic, was at once the idol and the terror of the -courts. He was a good business man, and invested the money he made from -his plays, and become enormously rich. He purchased an estate in -Switzerland, just over the French border; an admirable strategic -location, a sort of literary emplacement for a high-caliber gun. He -could have his pamphlets printed in Germany and Holland, and secretly -shipped into France, and the French police were powerless to touch him. -The Swiss Calvinists were glad to have attacks made upon French and -Catholic absolutism, so they let the poet alone. - -Voltaire was a frail ghost of a man, almost a skeleton, but with quick -bright eyes in his bare skull. He was ill most of his life; when he -visited King Frederick he described himself as suffering from four -mortal diseases, yet he lived to the age of eighty-four, and worked -under terrific pressure all the time. He carried on an enormous -correspondence--more than ten thousand of his letters have been edited -and published. He was capable of almost every kind of meanness and -malice, but he was also capable of heroic and unselfish idealism, as the -world was now to see. - -In the city of Toulouse, in southern France, a young man named Calas -committed suicide, as result of religious mania; he was a member of a -Protestant family, and the Catholic authorities in Toulouse accused the -father of having murdered the boy to keep him from turning Catholic. -They had no shred of evidence, but they cruelly tortured the old man, -and finally executed him, and confiscated the property of the family. -Voltaire took up the case in a frenzy of indignation; he employed -investigators and lawyers, he wrote pamphlets and circulated them, he -wrote innumerable letters and appeals; for three years he devoted his -time to making the case a political and religious issue in France. No -man could have displayed nobler public spirit, or more genuine human -sympathy; for three years, so he wrote, he never smiled without feeling -that he had committed a crime. When at last the verdict of the Toulouse -courts was reversed, he fell into the arms of one of the Calas lads, and -wept like a child. He said--he, the veteran playwright: “This is the -most splendid fifth act I have ever seen on any stage!” - -There came one such case after another. Just as in Russia the Black -Hundreds spread the rumor that the Jews were accustomed to shed the -blood of Christian children, so this Catholic machine made war on the -Protestants by accusing them of hideous crimes. Voltaire espoused the -“Sirven case” in the same fury of indignation; it had taken the courts -two hours to condemn the victims, he said, and nine years to do them -justice! Out of his agony of protest came one of his greatest works, the -“Treatise on Toleration”--burned by the hangman, like everything else. -Also there came his immortal slogan, which he took to putting on all his -letters: “Écrasez l’infame”--that is, crush the infamous thing, meaning -Catholic absolutism. - -Now America also has its “infame,” which is capitalist absolutism; and -we await the arrival of some man of letters, capable of the heroic and -unselfish idealism of Voltaire. To him there were brought ten or a dozen -cases of cruelty and torture in the course of twenty years; but hardly a -month passes that my mail does not contain a story of cruelty and -torture equally hideous, committed by the powers which are now -destroying liberty and enlightenment in America. Consider, for example, -the case of the Centralia prisoners, a story of brutality, torture, -murder, terrorism, and the subornation of the law by the lumber barons -of the Northwest; a story just as pitiful, just as revolting, just as -worthy of Voltaire’s immortal slogan. - -“If you are not careful,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you will be accused of putting -propaganda into this chapter!” - -It was as the champion of freedom of thought that Voltaire stood before -the French people; he, with his wealth and fame, was able to do what -they did not dare to do. From his mountain retreat he sent his ideas all -over Europe; and meantime the blind, deluded rulers of France did all -they could to plow the soil for his sowing. The great-grandson of the -“grand monarch,” who ascended the throne as a child in 1715, ruled for -almost sixty years. Beginning with the name of “the well-beloved,” he -squandered the revenues of the state upon his mistresses, and led his -country to a series of disasters, including the loss of the American -colonies and India. He left the nation bankrupt, and died with the -famous phrase, “After us the deluge.” - -Four years later, the old Voltaire, made bold by all his honors, came -down from his mountain fortress and entered Paris. He had a pageant like -a conquering hero; his plays were produced to enormous audiences, and -even the Academy of Richelieu welcomed him--strange irony of history! -It was like Tolstoi in Russia; the authorities would have liked to chop -off his head, but they could only gnash their teeth in impotence. -However, what their hatred could not do, the love of the people -accomplished; Voltaire was literally killed by kindness, and died amid -the excitements of this holiday. It is interesting to us to note that -among those he met in Paris was Benjamin Franklin, fellow skeptic, -scientist, and revolutionary propagandist from the new world. This was -in 1778, two years after the Declaration of Independence, and less than -ten years before the French revolution. - -In the case of Voltaire we see a man of letters who ranks as one of the -great world forces, and purely and simply because of his propaganda. If -he had written nothing but heroic tragedies and sublime epics, he would -be a forgotten name today; it was only because he took upon himself the -task of setting free the mind of his country, and labored at it -incessantly for the greater part of his life, that we know of him and -honor him as one of the glories of France. Great as were his faults, no -one can deny that he stood to all the world for the fundamental idea of -freedom of thought. - - - - -CHAPTER XLIV - -THE TRUMPETER OF REVOLUTION - - -We have seen that Voltaire was a Tory as to art; his revolution was of -the intellect. There was needed a revolutionist of the feelings, and he -appeared in the person of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a stormy, embittered, -unhappy man, the object of endless controversy, continuing to our own -day; a character full of contradictions, difficult to cover within the -limits of a chapter. - -His father was a watch-maker in Geneva; he ran away from home and became -a vagabond, and remained that all his life. He never had any property; -as for friends, he had them only for short periods, because he quarreled -with everyone. Among the occupations he followed in youth was that of a -footman, which ought to have barred him from rising in eighteenth -century France. But he wrote ballets, operas, comedies, and won an -entrée to the salons of the great. - -Here is another “pure” artist; and did you ever hear of him in that -“pure” capacity? Did you know that Jean-Jacques had written ballets, -operas and comedies? Could you name one of these works? Unless you are a -specialist in literary history, you could not; and if Rousseau had -followed that easy career, and kept his entrée to the Paris salons, you -would never have heard his name. It was only when he became a -propagandist that he earned world fame, and it is as a propagandist that -we know him. - -He was thirty-seven years old when Diderot, editor of the great -“Encyclopedia,” the Bible of the new learning in France, was put into -prison for writing an atheistical pamphlet. Rousseau went to visit him -and, while thus wrought up, he fell to thinking about the depraved state -of society, and the causes thereof; he wrote an essay, and so was -launched upon his career as maker of intellectual dynamite. He was -pursued by the authorities, until he acquired a persecution complex; -before he died he became convinced that everyone he knew was in a -conspiracy to destroy him. - -His first important book was “The Social Contract,” a study of the state -and its authority. What is the basis of sovereignty? What right has the -state to command my obedience? The answer of Rousseau’s time was that -God had appointed a king to rule you, and if you disobeyed this king you -were hanged, drawn and quartered, and later on roasted to eternity. -Rousseau’s thesis was that the basis of sovereignty is popular consent; -the state is made by the general will, and lacking such sanction, no -sovereignty exists. The opening words give the keynote of the book: “Man -was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” A study of history and -anthropology convinces us that the first part of this statement is -false; but that did not keep the words from becoming a revolutionary -slogan. - -The next important book was “The New Heloise,” a love story written in -the form of a series of letters. French women were rebelling against -being sold in marriage; their natural desire to marry the man of their -own choice was reaching a point dangerous to the old convention. To be -sure, Heloise obeyed her parents and married according to their command; -but her sufferings were so moving that she was more effective as an -inspirer of revolt than if she had herself revolted. - -Then came another novel, “Emile, or The Sentimental Education”--that is -to say, an education according to the dictates of the natural feelings. -The physical and moral soundness of the infant Emile were based upon the -fact that his mother suckled him, instead of turning him over to a wet -nurse, according to the fashion of the great world of France. The child -was raised in close contact with nature, and followed the dictates of -those natural desires, which Rousseau believed were always wholesome and -trustworthy. The youth was taught to work and be useful instead of being -a culture parasite; and in due course a pure and beautiful maiden -appeared to deserve his love. Today Rousseau’s ideas of education are -freely applied in the Ferrer schools; but in 1762 “Emile” was condemned -by the Sorbonne, and burned by the common executioner, and its author -was forced to flee to Switzerland, and finally to England. - -In his later years of desolation Rousseau produced the story of his -life, known as the “Confessions.” His other works are not easy for us to -read, but the “Confessions” will be read so long as man is interested in -his own heart. Here for the first time in the history of our race a man -of first-rate genius told the full truth about himself. A great deal of -it is painful truth; we read it with dismay, and on the basis of it -Rousseau’s enemies have condemned him to infamy. - -But never forget, we know these painful things because Rousseau tells -them to us; if he had concealed them, or dressed them up to look -romantic, then we should have had quite a different Rousseau in our -minds. Many authors have done that, and live enthroned in our regard. -But this man says to us: much as I care about myself--and I care a great -deal--I care still more about enabling my fellowmen to understand -reality. And that is the spirit in which we take the “Confessions.” We -realize that we are not dealing with one of those feeble natures which -first commit offenses, and then find pleasure in talking about them; we -are sharing life with a deeply serious man, who seeks in agony a cure -for human ills. - -I doubt if there has ever been a preacher of doctrine who delivered -himself more completely to his enemies than Jean-Jacques. He tells us -how, not knowing how to get his bread, he left his newly born children -in care of a foundling asylum. This was a custom of the time; but as a -rule those who followed the custom did not go away and write a book -advising other people how to rear and educate their children! For such -inconsistencies his critics ridiculed him unmercifully. And yet, in -spite of all they could say, he became the trumpeter of the revolution, -political, economic, and cultural, which was on the way in France. He -remains in our time a trumpeter of the social revolution which is -happening before our eyes. - -That does not mean that we are blind to the fallacies and absurdities in -his doctrines. We of today study education in the light of a mass of -psychological knowledge, we study government in the light of historical -and economic knowledge, we study the human soul in the light of biology, -sociology, chemistry, psychoanalysis--a host of sciences whose very -names were unknown to Rousseau. But how do we come to possess this -knowledge? We possess it because Jean-Jacques, with the divination of a -prophet and the fervor of a moral genius, proclaimed from the housetops -the right of the human spirit to be free, and to face the facts of life, -and to choose its path in accordance with its own happiness and health. - -With any critic of Rousseau there is one question to be settled at the -outset. Why do you quarrel with this man? Is it because you wish to -correct his errors, and clear the way to his goal of liberty, equality, -and fraternity? Or are you one of those who dread the torrent of new -ideas and new feelings which Rousseau let loose upon the world? Is it -your purpose to discredit the whole individualistic movement which he -fathered, and to take us back to the good old days when children obeyed -their parents, and servants obeyed their masters, and women obeyed their -husbands, and subjects obeyed their popes and kings, and students in -colleges accepted without question what their professors told them? - -Says Mrs. Ogi: “I suspect that last phrase is meant for Professor -Babbitt.” - -“It is wonderful,” says her husband, “that he should have that name. A -judgment of Providence, without doubt!” - - - - -CHAPTER XLV - -THE HARVARD MANNER - - -Let it be explained at the outset that we are setting out to discuss, -not a character in a novel, but a living person, Irving Babbitt, -professor of French literature in Harvard University; a scholar who has -set himself one goal in life, to deliver America from the evil influence -of Rousseau and “Rousseauism”--by which he means the whole modern -cultural movement. He has published a stately volume, “Rousseau and -Romanticism,” three hundred and ninety-three pages, plus twenty-three -pages of introduction, with an average of twelve quotations and -citations per page, illustrating the follies, absurdities and -monstrosities uttered or enacted by every man or woman who has at any -time during the past hundred and seventy-five years ever thought a new -thought, or tried an original experiment, or embodied an especially -intense emotion in art form. - -It makes a formidable catalogue. Because, you see, humanity proceeds by -the method of trial and error; there is no other way to proceed. The -pendulum of life swings to one extreme, and then it swings to the other. -Every movement has its lunatic fringe, people who show us where to stop; -and what our Harvard professor has done is to make a whole book of these -extravagances and insanities. He takes the fringe for the movement; and -so, of course, it is easy for him to prove that the human spirit ought -never to have been set free; it was a violation of “decorum.” That is -his favorite word, to which he comes back in every chapter. The rest of -America has another name for it; we call it “the Harvard manner.” - -“Of course,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you have to do up a Harvard Tory--that is -fore-ordained. But I recall the lunatics I have met in the radical -movement--not merely the harmless cranks, but the dangerous and hateful -beasts! What Rousseau means to me is that I used to hear his praises -sung by a man who has lived for twenty years by seducing young girls -and getting their money.” - -Says Ogi: “If you are going to judge a wave by its scum, I shall have to -make a study of the criminals of classicism: the horrors perpetrated by -perfect gentlemen who respected the three unities, and wrote triolets, -and wore exactly the right clothes. There will be a section in this -volume devoted to Harvard University--see ‘The Goose-Step,’ pages 62 to -91.” - -Says Mrs. Ogi: “Come back to Rousseau, and explain to us why a college -professor should take so much trouble to kill a man who died a hundred -and fifty years ago.” - -“The professor does not know why Rousseau is still alive, but I can tell -him--because Rousseau’s revolution is only half completed. The political -part happened, and gave us--world capitalism! We aren’t satisfied, and -we are gathering our muscles for another leap, and all the world’s -Tories are hanging to our coat-tails, trying to hold us back. They dig -out all the old mummies from their coffins, and dress them up and paint -them to look like life, and set them up to cry warnings to us. Even -Voltaire’s ‘l’Infame’! There is a clerical party in every country in -Europe, and Catholic trade unions, called ‘Christian Socialist,’ to -cheat the workers. In the United States there are the Knights of -Columbus, and Tammany Hall, and parades of priests and cardinals up -Fifth Avenue, generously financed by Wall Street. And naturally, in such -a crisis the three unities and the rest of the classical tradition are -not overlooked; so here comes our learned professor with his stately -volume, to prove to us that Rousseau did not have the Harvard manner. -The very same conspiracy, you see, that Rousseau faced during his life.” - -“The persecution complex?” asks Mrs. Ogi. - -“Don’t fool yourself; Rousseau actually was persecuted! And see what -evidence he would have, if he were alive today, and could investigate -this Babbitt case! The House of Morgan, on the corner of Broad and Wall -streets, just across the way from the United States Treasury building; -and the billion dollars which this House of Morgan made buying war -supplies for the Allies; and the thirty billion dollars which the United -States Treasury paid out to save the House of Morgan’s French and -British loans; and the Boston connections of the House of Morgan, Lee, -Higginson & Company, with their network of banks and trust companies; -and the Lee-Higginson and Morgan control of the governing bodies of -Harvard University; and Harvard’s answer to ‘The Goose-Step,’ the -election of its distinguished graduate, Mr. J. P. Morgan, to its sacred -band of overseers; and the Boston ‘Transcript,’ and the Harvard -‘Lampoon,’ and the Laski case, and the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and the -Boston police strike, and Cal Coolidge, the queer prank that fate played -on Boston’s aristocracy. Picture the situation in the year 1919, the -days of Attorney-General Palmer; the Harvard mob smashing that police -strike, and the hundred per cent patriotic plutocrats of Boston raiding -the offices of the ‘Reds,’ and cracking the skulls of everybody they -found there--” - -“The Harvard manner?” says Mrs. Ogi. - -“Throwing them into jail, or packing them by hundreds into rooms in -office buildings without toilets, and shipping them back to Europe where -they came from. And right in the midst of that campaign, in that same -anno mirabile of 1919, comes our Babbitt professor--I mean our Professor -Babbitt--with a schoolmaster’s ferule in one hand and a slung-shot in -the other, scolding and at the same time committing mayhem upon every -artist who in the past hundred and seventy-five years of history has -ever had a human feeling. It is supposed to be a work of scholarship, of -literary criticism; it is written to teach ‘decorum’--by such examples -as this: ‘The humanitarian, all adrip with brotherhood, and profoundly -convinced of the loveliness of his own soul.’ And again: ‘Both Rousseau -and his disciple Robespierre were reformers in the modern sense--that is -they are concerned not with reforming themselves, but other men.’ What -is one going to do with a man like that?” - -“What did they do with them in the French revolution?” asks Mrs. Ogi. - -“Les aristocrats à la lanterne!” says her husband. - -“I’ve forgotten all my French,” says Mrs. Ogi, “and so will most of your -readers. But I’ll tell you this--the professor sounds exactly like you, -except that he’s on the other side!” - - - - -CHAPTER XLVI - -THE POISONED RAT - - -While France has been moving toward its revolution, England has been -moving away from hers, and we now return to the foggy island to watch -the course of events through this eighteenth century. The crown has -submitted, and parliament has the last word in public affairs. A -parliament of the land-owning gentry, elected by corruption, we shall -see it in the course of two centuries being gradually changed into a -parliament of merchants and ship-owners, of steel and coal and diamond -and gold magnates, of brewers and publishers of capitalist propaganda. - -It was the task of eighteenth century England to create the bourgeois -soul. Machinery and standardized production, which were to make over the -world, had not yet appeared, but when they came, they found their -psychology and culture all prepared for them by this “nation of -shop-keepers.” It is a world of money, all other powers deposed, all -other standards a shell without life inside; honor, favor, virtue are -represented by money. Religion has become an affair of “livings” and of -“benefices.” Politics has become an affair of party rancor, a squabble -over the spoils of office. The difference between the two parties is -that one is in and the other is out; the purpose of the outs being to -prove rascality against the ins, and thus get a chance to do what the -ins are doing. - -In this bourgeois world the artist may be feeble of mind, not knowing -the reality of his time, believing sincerely in its shams. Or he may be -a cynic, jeering at his time, but taking what he can get. Or he may be a -rebel, speaking the truth--in which case he will starve in a garret, or -go insane, or be thrown into prison, or driven into exile. - -The first to greet this new century with his writings was a man who went -insane. One of the great masters of English prose, his fate in life was -to be brought up as a “poor relation,” and to eat the bitter bread of -dependence. He became a kind of educated servant to the wealthy, and -finally got a small job in the church. Ill most of his life, proud, -imperious, burning up with thwarted genius, Jonathan Swift was made into -a master ironist. - -His first great book was “The Tale of a Tub,” in which he ridiculed the -squabbles of the various church parties. Having thus shocked the church, -he applied to be a dean, but did not get the job, because somebody else -paid a thousand pound bribe to the official having the appointment. -Swift was told that he could have another deanery at the same price, but -he did not have the sum handy. - -The “ins” of those days were called Tories, and the “outs” were called -Whigs; they fought furiously, and literary rats, hiding in garrets and -cellars, wrote pamphlets of personal abuse, which were published -anonymously and circulated in the face of jail penalties. Like the -laureate Dryden, our would-be dean did this vile writing; he did it for -the Whigs, and when he got no preferment there, he joined the Tories, -and was made dean of the cathedral in Dublin. There he wrote his “Modest -Proposal” for eating the children of Ireland, one of the most terrific -pieces of irony in all literature. “Look,” says the ‘gloomy dean,’ “we -are letting a population starve to death, and, what a waste of national -resources, what a violation of our fundamental principles of business -economy. Let us feed these Irish babies, and when they are nice and fat, -serve them on our tables; they will be happy during their brief span of -life, and we shall no longer have to import food from foreign parts.” - -Then came “Gulliver’s Travels,” which took its place along with -“Pilgrim’s Progress” as required reading for children and adults. It is -an even more perfect allegory; you can read it as a story pure and -simple, without any idea of an ulterior meaning. The author helps you by -the perfect gravity with which he describes every detail of these -singular adventures. First we visit the land in which the people are -only six inches tall, and so we laugh at the pettiness of human affairs. -Then we visit the land where they are correspondingly big, and we learn -how brutal and gross and stupid we really are. So on, until we come to -the land of noble and beautiful horses, in which human beings are lewd -and filthy apes. So we learn the worst possible about a world which -appointed a man of genius to be dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin, when -he wanted to be dean of St. Paul’s in London. So we are ready to go -insane, and to die, as the dean himself phrased it, “like a poisoned rat -in a hole.” - - - - -CHAPTER XLVII - -VIRTUE REWARDED - - -Prose fiction up to this time had dealt for the most part with men; its -most popular variety was the “picaresque,” telling the adventures of -vagabonds and rascals. But now in this bourgeois England the fiction -writer settles down, and becomes respectable, and discovers the theme -which is to occupy him for the next two hundred years--the feminine -heart, and what goes on in it during the mating season. - -Watch the gentleman-turkey, stirred by erotic excitement; he struts up -and down, swells out his comb, spreads his feathers, scrapes the ground -with his stiff wings. And there stands the humble and retiring -lady-turkey, observing him with modest but attentive eye; she takes a -step or two away, but does not run far. What is going on in her mind? -What does she think of the blood-flushed comb and the spread feathers, -the heroic pose and the awe-inspiring gobble? We are not permitted to -enter into the psychology of a lady-turkey; but through the magic of -fiction we are permitted to watch the mind of the lady-human, and note -every detail of the process whereby she gets her mate. We share her -emotions, we analyze the devices she employs--and thus, if we belong to -her sex, we perfect our technique, or, if we belong to the male sex, we -learn how to write novels. - -In this bourgeois world, the emotions of mating are dominated by those -of money. Society has become settled, property relations are fixed, and -you live a routine life, without great change or adventure--except once, -which is at this mating period. Here is your great chance to rise above -your own class in a world of money classification. A beautiful and -charming maiden may catch the eye of some wealthy man; a handsome, -dashing youth may stumble upon an heiress. Such is the significance of -the heavenly smiles and the coy glances of bourgeois romance. Cupid -travels about, armed with a golden arrow, and in the love-glints from -the eyes of youth and beauty we see fortunes flying to and fro--diamonds -and rubies, manor-houses, estates, orders and offices, titles to -nobility. And always in the background sit the chaperons, keeping -watch--old women, whose function it is to know the grim facts of greed, -and to pass on such “worldly wisdom” to the young. - -The first old woman to take up this task in English fiction was Samuel -Richardson. He himself was a hero for any bourgeois novel--a printer who -had married his master’s daughter, and become publisher to the king. He -knew what money costs, and believed in it with all his heart and soul; -in his mature years he set out to warn young women of the value of their -virtue, and point out to them the importance of a life contract in love. -He wrote a novel called “Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded,” telling the story -of an innocent fifteen-year-old servant girl in the household of a great -gentleman who makes love to her. In a series of letters to her parents -she exposes to us the details of this love-making, and all her -bewilderments, agonies and fears. - -Pamela Andrews is the very soul of humility; but young as she is, she -knows the business facts concerning the life contract--“with all my -worldly goods I thee endow.” She knows that her master is a rake and -scoundrel--he gives her in the course of the story all possible evidence -of that; nevertheless, she stands firm, and in the end her virtue is -rewarded--by marriage with this rake and scoundrel. If that seems to you -a strange reward of virtue, it will be only because you do not -understand this eighteenth century world. What a man is personally -counts for little compared with the class he belongs to. He is a -gentleman, he owns houses and lands, and Pamela’s children will be -ladies and gentlemen, and will own houses and lands. This novel became -the sensation of the day, not merely in England, but all over Europe. -There were two large volumes, and a sequel with two more, but no one was -bored; great ladies sat up half the night, weeping their eyes red over -Pamela’s trials, and welcoming her--in imagination--into the class of -ladies. The writers learned how to make money, and a new profession, -that of the love-describers, came into being. - - - - -CHAPTER XLVIII - -THE GOOD FELLOW’S CODE - - -You will note in this bourgeois world two attitudes toward money; one -might be described as the attitude of the first generation, and the -other of the third. The first generation has had to make the money, and -knows what money costs. The third generation wants the money just as -much, but its knowledge is confined to what money will buy. There is war -between these two generations, and you find it reflected in the arts; -the young and saucy artists make propaganda for one side, while the -mature and sober artists make it for the other. - -There was in England at this time a gentleman whose ancestors had had -money for a long time, and who took toward it the attitude of jolly good -heartedness. He read this story of “Pamela,” and it filled him with -fury; what a loathsome world, in which, men and women spent their time -poring over cash-books and calling it virtue! What would be left in life -if a fashionable young gentleman could not have fun with a lower class -girl without tying himself to her for life! So Henry Fielding, -gentleman, barrister, and man of pleasure in London, sat himself down to -turn “Pamela” into screaming farce. He took Pamela’s brother, a young -footman, and pictured him in the household of a great lady who -endeavored to lure him from the path of virtue. The agonies of -temptation of Joseph Andrews reproduced those of his sister; but as -young men were not supposed to have any virtue, the tragedy was turned -upside down. - -This story is usually cited by the critics as an illustration of how a -man of genius began a piece of propaganda, and then got interested in -his story, and turned it into a real work of art. I should alter the -formula by saying that he changed from a negative to a positive kind of -propaganda. Joseph Andrews runs away from his wicked mistress, taking a -girl he truly loves, and the narrative turns from a satire on -Richardson’s pseudo-virtues into a portrayal of what Fielding considers -real virtue. Joseph and his girl fall into trouble, and their creator, -in pleading their cause, defends the poor and friendless all over -England, who do not get justice in the courts. Fielding knew, because -he had ridden the circuits; being a warm-hearted man, he created a model -English magistrate by the name of Squire Allworthy--an obvious enough -name--to show how the law ought to be administered. - -Fielding next took to writing plays. But he ventured to make satiric -allusions to “persons of quality”; therefore he ran afoul of the Lord -Chamberlain, and one of his plays was banned. He was disgusted, and -rather than conform, he gave up play-writing. There was no government -big-wig overseeing fiction; and so this new art form was destined to -become the vehicle of social criticism. - -In his next book this gentleman-novelist went on to write a deadly piece -of satire. Looking out over Europe, he saw Frederick, king of Prussia, -called “the great,” making a raid upon Silesia and seizing it; he saw -other royal and imperial conquerors tormenting mankind with war. He took -a notorious criminal, who had recently been hanged in London, and made -him the hero of a novel, which parodied in detail the glory-career of a -king. “Jonathan Wild the Great,” like all works of revolutionary -tendency, has received from the critics small part of its due praise. -There are few scenes more grim than the conclusion of the book, the -satire upon the “consolations of religion” when the arch-criminal dies. - -Then came “Tom Jones,” one of the greatest of English novels. Fielding’s -purpose in this story, as he declared it, was “to recommend Goodness and -Innocence.” In his hero he set out to show the truth about a man; not a -snuffling saint for a church-window, but a real, hearty good fellow, -according to Fielding’s notion. What may such a young fellow do, and -what may he not do? May he drink? Of course. May he spend money freely? -Fielding knew about that, having married a rich wife and run through her -fortune. May he take money from his friends? Yes, even ask for it. May -he take money from his mistresses? And here suddenly you see the -gentleman-author start up in anger. He may not! Here is an iron-clad -rule, which English gentlemen enforce without compromise. But then, may -he cohabit with girls of classes below his own? Yes, says Fielding, -certainly he may, and he will; let’s be honest, and not fool ourselves -with shams. Thackeray, who was loud in admiration of “Tom Jones,” -lamented that no novelist since then had dared to tell the truth about a -man. In our day, for better or worse, the novelists have dared, and -reticence as a literary virtue is dead. - -In conclusion, we note the fact that Fielding died at the age of -forty-three, “of dropsy, jaundice, and asthma.” So it appears that you -may take your choice; you may exercise self-restraint, and be accused of -hypocrisy, and of spoiling your friends’ pleasure; or you may throw the -reins upon the neck of desire, and go through life at a gallop--and have -your body give out just when your brain is ready for its best work. - - - - -CHAPTER XLIX - -THE GAUGER OF GENIUS - - -We have read about an English gentleman-novelist who wasted his health -and died at the age of forty-three; and we next have to hear the story -of a Scotch plowman-poet who treated himself in the same way and died at -the age of thirty-seven. Such men present a painful problem to their -friends, and also to their critics--since in art circles it is not -considered good form to set up moral standards. However, in this case -Robert Burns has solved the problem for us; he lacked nothing in -clearness of insight or plainness of speech concerning his own follies, -and spoke of his “self-contempt bitterer to drink than blood.” - -He was one of seven children of a peasant family, and was born on a -stormy January day, in a clay cottage of which the roof was blown off a -few days later. He followed the plow-tail all his early years, and wrote -that his life until sixteen was “the toil of a slave.” The few books -they could borrow the children would read at meal times, or snatching a -few words in the fields. Such peasant slaves are not supposed to acquire -culture, and if they do so, it is at the cost of health of mind and -body. Robert Burns was given to fits of melancholy, and to moods of wild -excess; he speaks of his “passions raging like demons.” He was a -headstrong, impatient youth, disgusted by the falsities and shams of -conventional religion. He had to find his own code in life, and the -fact that he found it too late to save himself is our loss. - -This peasant, toiling on a rocky tenant farm, discovered in himself the -gift of exquisite melody. His feelings poured themselves out in verses -in the homely Scotch dialect, then considered a barbarous thing, -unworthy of literature. He would compose these verses all day long while -guiding the plow, and then, coming home at night, he would sit in a -garret room and write them out. Not until he was twenty-seven years old -did he succeed in having them published. They appeared at a time when -the family was ruined, and the poet himself being pursued by officers of -the law, at the instance of the father of a girl he loved. The twenty -pounds which he got from this first volume saved his life, so he -declared. - -He leaped into fame all over Scotland, and spent a year in Edinburgh, -where he was fêted by the great. But he did not keep their favor, -because he persisted in intimacy with his humble friends, and also, -alas! with the taverns. He went back to the plow, more set than ever in -his bitterness against the world of privilege and rank. It was a time -when the great world was in the habit of pensioning its poets, but the -Tories controlled in Scotland, and “Bobbie” Burns was a Whig, and turned -into a Republican, the same thing as a Bolshevik today. The best that -lovers of his poetry could get him was a job as a gauger of liquor -barrels, at the princely salary of sixty pounds a years. - -Even that he had difficulty in holding; because the French revolution -came sweeping over Europe, and frightened the governing class of England -into just such a frenzy of reaction as we in America witnessed in 1919. -In his capacity as exciseman Burns captured a smuggling ship with four -cannon; he purchased the cannon at auction, and sent them to the French -Legislative Assembly as a mark of sympathy. Imagine, if you can, an -American customs officer in 1919 shipping four machine-guns to the -Soviet government of Russia, and you may realize how close the poet came -to losing the salary upon which his wife and children had to exist. - -We shall see other poets shrinking in horror from the execution of King -Louis, and throwing in their lot with reaction. But here is one who -stood by the down-trodden of the earth, and voiced their feelings to -the end. Not merely is he the national poet of Scotland; he is, in spite -of the handicap of dialect, the voice of the peasant and the land-slave -throughout the English-speaking world. When he writes “the rank is but -the guinea’s stamp,” he is the voice of the labor movement in England -and of democracy in America. His work is beloved by humble people; you -would be surprised to know how widely it is read--perhaps more widely -than any other poetry among the poor. - -The people know this voice, they know this heart, with all its loves and -hates, its longings and griefs. There is no man who has come from the -toiling masses, self-taught and self-made, who has expressed their -feelings so completely. And note that he has, not merely beauty and -passion, but keen insight and power of brain; he can think for his -people, as well as feel with them. He is not a bit afraid to use his art -to preach and to scold, to discuss moral problems, to storm at social -injustice and to ridicule church dogma. - -What though such a man did drink and squander himself; that also is a -part of the worker’s tragedy. He paid for it the price which the workers -pay, and life spared him no part of the suffering and shame, nor did he -spare himself the remorse. He wrote his own epitaph, in which he spoke -of himself as “the poor inhabitant below,” and recorded that -“thoughtless folly laid him low and stained his name.” Because there is -no spiritual value greater than honesty, the judgment of his people has -raised him high and crowned his name with immortality. - - - - -CHAPTER L - -THE BRAIN PROPRIETOR - - -“Why do you call this a work on art,” says Mrs. Ogi, “when you are -dealing entirely with literature?” - -“All the arts are one,” says her husband. “They are expressions of the -human spirit, and the material they use is comparatively unimportant. We -realize this when we see an artist like Michelangelo using blocks of -marble and molecules of paint and printed words, and giving us with each -medium the record of the same personality. There have been others who -used the acted drama and the lyric, like Shakespeare; or words and -music--” - -“Let us see how your thesis works out with music,” says Mrs. Ogi. - -Up to the end of the eighteenth century music has been either an adjunct -of religious propaganda, or else a leisure-class plaything and -decoration. The musicians are commanded to come and entertain their -lords and masters, while the latter feast and dance and gossip. The -musician as an artist, a lover of beauty for its own sake, exists at his -own peril. For example, Mozart; at the age of six he was a child -prodigy, exhibited as a curiosity before all the crowned heads of -Europe; but he grew up to a life of slow starvation, and a death from -tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five. The sum total of his earnings -from seven hundred and sixty-nine compositions was not enough to keep -his small family alive. - -But now comes a mighty genius, who discovers how to make music an art of -power, an expression of the deepest experiences of the human soul. -Beethoven was born in 1770, his mother being a cook and his father a -broken-down musician drinking himself to death. Beethoven became the -child slave of this drunkard; he was driven by beatings to practice the -piano at the age of four, and at the age of seven had a job in a theater -orchestra. I wonder, when we go to the “movies” and listen to the -banging and scraping, may there be among those servants of imbecility -some lad who is destined to raise the art of music to a new height, and -to die in misery for his pains? - -Beethoven went to Vienna to earn his living as entertainer to the -dilettante aristocracy of that pleasure-loving city. He was eccentric, -self-absorbed, possessed by his visions, never happy except when he was -composing, or out in the country where he could give free rein to his -delight in nature. It was his fate to teach music to the children of the -rich, and to play for grown-up rich children in their salons. They were -accustomed to chatter while men of genius attempted to entertain them; -but Beethoven thought his playing was of importance, and when they -failed to keep silence he struck his fist upon the piano keys, and -sprang up, exclaiming: “I will not play for such swine!” - -A terrible calamity befell him, the worst that a musician could -imagine--he began to grow deaf. At the age of thirty he could no longer -hear a musical note. That seemed the ruin of his life; his enemies -jeered, saying that he poured out his preposterous compositions because -he did not know how horrible they sounded. Also Beethoven suffered from -near-sightedness, caused by smallpox in childhood. His health at times -gave way entirely, and he contemplated suicide. “My art alone deterred -me,” he wrote. - -He was, like Milton, a Puritan, though he did not use the word. He had -an ideal of love, and did not squander himself in casual intrigues. His -profession brought him into intimacy with the ladies of the great world; -they would be overwhelmed by his genius, but then they would think it -over, and realize what it would mean to marry a social inferior--and a -deaf one at that. One brilliant young lady tortured the great man’s -heart, and then went off and married a count. So Beethoven withdrew into -himself, becoming more eccentric, more irritable, and more passionate -and terrifying in his compositions. Said Weber when he heard the Third -Symphony: “Beethoven is now quite mad.” - -The composer’s life was one long struggle with poverty and debt. There -were wealthy noblemen in Vienna who appreciated his genius, and wanted -him to stay and play for them; they subscribed an income for him, but -then forgot to pay it, and left him to struggle along. To be sure, he -was none too easy with his patrons; he went to stay with one, and the -good man persisted in taking off his hat every time he laid eyes on -Beethoven. The composer, who abhorred ceremony, ran away. - -Beethoven was a reader of Plutarch, and held the ideals of the old Roman -republic; he believed in universal suffrage, and in liberty, and had no -hesitation in voicing his convictions to anyone. He hailed Napoleon as a -defender of liberty, and dedicated his “Eroica” symphony to him. Later -on, when Napoleon accepted a crown, Beethoven changed this dedication, -“To the _memory_ of a great man.” He dedicated another symphony to a -French general, the conqueror of the Bastille; and you can imagine how -reactionary Vienna welcomed that. - -After the defeat of Napoleon, the monarchs entered into what they called -the “Holy Alliance,” to rivet Catholic absolutism upon the continent -forever. Vienna became the center of world reaction, and dungeon and -torture were the fate of men who raised their voices for human rights. -Here was Beethoven, old, deaf, and poverty-stricken; but he never -yielded an inch of his principles. “Words are bound in chains,” he said, -“but sounds are still free.” He poured his feelings into his wonderful -Ninth Symphony, which occasioned such a tornado of applause that the -police considered it necessary to interfere. - -Here, you see, was no maker of pretty sounds for the entertainment of -the rich; here was a great mind, one who read and thought for himself, -and understood not merely dancing and mating, but the nature of -organized society. In a time of universal subservience and fawning he -clenched his hands and behaved like a democrat. When his brother, full -of the pride of a newly rich bourgeois, presented him with a card -inscribed, “Johann van Beethoven, Land Proprietor,” the composer -scrawled under it, “Ludwig van Beethoven, Brain Proprietor.” - -There is a story of his meeting with the poet Goethe. As we shall see, -Goethe had made his way by conforming to the customs of a court; he was -now sixty-three years of age, stiff to the rest of the world, but -pliable to the nobility. Beethoven was forty-two, willing to be humble -to a poet of genius, but not to rank and arrogance. They met in the open -air, in a park where there were many people; and suddenly came word that -the duke and the empress were coming. The people formed two lines, and -stood, hats in hand, to do homage; and Goethe took his place among them. -Beethoven was furious; he remonstrated with the poet in vain, then he -jammed his hat down over his head and strode toward the duke and -empress, and they were the ones who did homage to him. Goethe never -forgot this scene, and he did not care to listen to Beethoven’s music, -because he said he found it “disturbing.” - -We are told by our “art for art’s sake” dilettanti that art has nothing -to do with moral questions. Let them take their answer from the father -of modern music, the greatest genius who has used that lofty art. No -higher authority could be found; and his words were these: “I recognize -no sign of superiority in mankind other than goodness.” By that -principle he lived, and by it he wrote; his art is overwhelmingly -ethical, and if we were to tear up every record of his life, every word -in the way of title or dedication or inscription upon his compositions, -if we had nothing but the musical notes of his sonatas and symphonies, -we should get precisely the same impressions; we should know that we -were in the presence of a titanic conflict of the human will against the -forces of fate, the blind cruelties of nature and the deliberate -cruelties of class. We might not know that this man became deaf at the -height of his powers; we might have no definite image to attach to the -terrible hammer strokes of the Fifth Symphony; but we should know that -here is torture, here is defeat and despair crying out, here is -loveliness broken to pieces, trampled, crushed out of life; here also is -man, clenching his hands and setting his teeth in grim resolve, -proclaiming the supremacy of his own spirit, and rising to heights of -power, in which he makes his joy out of the very materials of his -torment. Some friend in Beethoven’s presence called upon God; and the -composer answered with the motto of his life: “O man, help thyself!” - - - - -CHAPTER LI - -POLITICS IS FATE - - -We come now to one of the great intellects of modern times, a genius who -made the culture of Germany known to the rest of the world. He is cited, -along with Shakespeare, as an illustration of how great art holds itself -aloof from propaganda; so it will be worth our while to study him -carefully, and see how he lived and voiced the aristocratic ideals of -his age. - -Johann Wolfgang Goethe was born in Frankfort, his father being a wealthy -lawyer. Through his eighty-three years of life he never knew a moment’s -inconvenience or waste of time from poverty. He was sent to the -university, but was not interested in the study of law, which his father -tried to force upon him; he studied the things he cared for, and -incidentally gave himself to a life of pleasure, so that he came home at -the age of nineteen with a severe hemorrhage. - -It was the period of “Storm and Stress” in German literature; Rousseau -and his wicked “Romanticism” had crossed the Rhine, and here was all the -youth of Germany revolting against writing poetry in French; they -insisted upon dealing with German heroes and experiencing unrestrained -German emotions. Goethe was reading Shakespeare; and, spurning the -classical forms, he wrote a drama about Goetz von Berlichingen, a -medieval German knight who was big and bold and turbulent. This made -Goethe a hero of the new insurgency. Also he wrote a story entitled “The -Sorrows of Werther,” about a young man who yearned agonizingly for the -wife of his friend, and finally committed suicide. Goethe himself did -not commit suicide, but lived to regret these youthful extravagances. - -He fell in love more than once in these tumultuous days, his experience -being exactly the opposite to that of Beethoven; it was the poet who was -aristocratic and prudent, and it was the girl who suffered. Goethe had a -fear of marriage, because it would interfere with his genius; but it is -worth noting that the course he adopted brought him a great deal of -unhappiness and waste of time. - -At the age of twenty-six his destiny was decided by a meeting with the -young Duke of Weimar. The duke was twenty, and conceived an intense -admiration for the poet, and besought him to come and live at his court. -To tempt him, and to keep him there, he gave him a beautiful home, -together with some acres of land for a garden, and made him a state -councilor with a salary, and before long gave him a title, enabling him -to put the magic word “von” before his name. Thus Goethe became a court -writer and a court man. You may call him the greatest of court writers -and the most dignified of court men; nevertheless, there is a whole -universe of difference between such a life, and that of an outsider and -rebel like Beethoven. - -The only trace of his youthful revolt which Goethe kept was in matters -having to do with himself. He saved part of his time for his work, he -took to traveling to get away from court functions, and in his later -years, secure in his fame and power, he withdrew into his own home, and -the court had to come to him. Thus he maintained the dignity of the -intellectual man; but in his art ideals he became a strong conservative; -and as for political and social ideals, he solved the problem by having -nothing to do with them. - -It would be easy to make Goethe less attractive, by mentioning that the -court lady who became his mistress for the next ten years had a husband -somewhere in the background. But that would not be fair, because it was -the custom of the time, and nobody in court saw anything wrong with -adultery. But when Goethe, somewhere around the age of forty, fell very -much in love with a daughter of the people and made her his mistress, -court circles were shocked; they were still more shocked, when, after -she had borne him a son, he brought her to his home; they were -speechless, when in the end he married her. She justified their worst -expectations by turning into a drunkard; and that was hard for a very -dignified and reserved man of letters. - -Goethe traveled to Italy, and fell in love with the classical ideal of -art, and wrote an imitation Greek play. Coming back to Weimar, he took -up court duties, including the organizing of a fire brigade and going to -war. The French revolution had come, and King Louis of France was a -prisoner, together with his beautiful Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette, -who had asked why the people did not eat cake if they could not get -bread. The sovereigns of Europe hastened to rescue this brilliant wit, -and to overthrow the monster of revolution. Goethe’s duke went along, -with Goethe in his train. The poet showed his attitude toward the whole -matter by writing a musical comedy while at the training camp, and -gathering botanical specimens during the fighting. - -This attitude he explained by saying that he had to shut his eyes to the -events of his time, because otherwise he would have been driven mad. And -I admit that it was painful to see the movement for freedom run wild in -the Terror, and to see it betrayed by Napoleon, and to see the French -people lured into a war of conquest, so that Voltaire’s “l’Infame” was -able to pose as a champion of national freedom, and thus to rivet its -power upon the peoples once again. But why did these things happen? It -was because men of genius and intellect had been indifferent to the -misery of the French people, their degradation and enslavement. It was -because when the people did rise and throw off their tyrants, there were -so few voices to explain the meaning of this event, and to defend the -revolution’s right to be. When Goethe went out with his duke, and lent -the sanction of his name to the counter revolution, it was he who was -making inevitable the Terror, it was he who was delivering the -revolution to Napoleon. Bloodshed and misery overwhelmed Europe for -twenty-five years; and Goethe, by withdrawing to his study and occupying -himself with poetry and scientific research, encouraged the worst -weakness of German philosophy and letters--the tendency to lull itself -with high-sounding, abstract words, while the real life of the nation -goes to the devil. - -Reality broke in harshly enough upon this poet. Sixteen years after his -military foray into France, the tables were turned, and Napoleon’s -cannon-balls came tumbling through the beautiful gardens at Weimar. Here -were French troopers, flushed with the victory of Jena, pillaging the -town, robbing the poet of both his wine and his money, and threatening -to kill him in his bed. Two years later came the peace negotiations, and -the poet lent his presence to balls and fetes, and was summoned to an -audience with the master of Europe. He was then fifty-nine years old, a -world genius, and Napoleon was thirty-nine years old, a world conqueror; -the older man went, and permitted himself to be inspected by the -younger. Goethe had a handsome presence, and Napoleon was pleased. “You -are a man!” he exclaimed. “How old are you?” he demanded; and then: “You -are very well preserved”--as if this were a Grecian scholar being -purchased as a slave by a Roman proconsul! - -“You have written tragedies?” demanded Napoleon; and a courtier hastened -to mention that the poet had written several--also he had translated -Voltaire’s tragedy, “Mahomet.” “It is not a good piece,” said Napoleon, -and went on to disapprove of dramas in which fate played a part, “What -are they talking about with their fate? La politique est la fatalité.” -Here was an utterance that Goethe might well have applied through all -the rest of his life. I could take it as a motto for this book. -“Politics is fate!” Hardly could one pack more wisdom into five words of -French or three of English! - -But Goethe chose to keep his salary and position in the court, and to -overlook the power of organized society over the individual soul. When -the time came for the German people to revolt against Napoleon he had no -word of encouragement--quite the contrary, he pronounced it folly. Nor -had he any word of protest against the cruelties of the Holy Alliance. - -Yet, see the inconsistency! His greatest work is “Faust,” a study of the -problem of duty and happiness. Faust tries pleasure, he tries learning -for learning’s sake, and it brings him nothing. In the end he accepts -useful service as the only ideal, and the draining of swamps and -cultivating of land as a moral occupation. But what is the use of such -work, if statesmen are permitted to make war, and to destroy in a few -hours all that generations have built up? You may believe in -aristocratic politics or in democratic politics; but how can you believe -in the possibility of human happiness without wisdom in statesmen? - -There is a better side to Goethe, which must not be overlooked. He was -magnanimous, open-minded, and a friend to all men of genius. He met the -poet Schiller, ten years younger than himself, ill in health and -struggling with cruel poverty. Schiller was a poet of freedom, and -stayed that to the end of his life. His first successful drama was “The -Robbers,” a glorification of revolt against medieval tyranny; his last -was “William Tell,” whose hero set Switzerland free from the Austrian -yoke. The fact that Schiller was of humble origin made no difference to -Goethe; he brought the young poet to Weimar, and got him a pension from -the duke, and became his intimate friend. - -And that was the best thing that happened in Goethe’s life, for Schiller -with his fine sincerity and idealism drove the older man to work. We are -accustomed to see these two great names coupled together, and the -critics point out that Schiller was the enthusiast, the “propagandist,” -while Goethe, the serene Olympian temperament, was the greater poet. The -critics do not mention that Schiller had to waste most of his life doing -wretched hack work, and died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-six. If -Goethe, with all his leisure and independence, had died at that age, his -greatest work would have been lost. - -Can anyone deny that we get a world view from the writings of Goethe; -that he has definite conclusions as to every aspect of human life? Can -anyone deny that his dramas and his novels, even his lyric poems, are -saturated with philosophy? It so happens that his point of view is that -which has been accepted by tradition and critical authority through all -the ages; therefore it slides down easily, it does not taste like -medicine, and we do not think of it as propaganda. - -What is this point of view? The world is a place of blind and generally -aimless strife, and scholars and men of genius are powerless to control -it, and can only keep out of its way. “Renounce,” said Goethe; and what -is the first of all things you must renounce? Manifestly, the dream that -you can manage your own time. Live simply, develop your highest -faculties, leave a message and an example to the world; and somehow, at -some future date--you do not attempt to say when or how--this message -and this example may take effect, and truth and justice and mercy may -prevail. Meantime, since you must live, and since the ruling classes own -all the means of life, you must be polite to them, you must fit yourself -into their ways, you must be a gentleman, a courtier, a man of property. - -Thus by your example and daily practice you become a prop to the -established order; and by the automatic operation of economic forces you -become less and less tolerant of all rebels and disturbers of the peace. -Because you know only the wealthy and the noble, you come to deal with -them exclusively in your art works, you interpret their feelings, and -behold life from their point of view. All critics unite in declaring -that this is Reality, this is Nature, this is Art; while to object to -this, and voice any other point of view, is Idealism, Preaching, and -Propaganda. - - - - -CHAPTER LII - -BEHIND THE HEDGE-ROWS - - -Spreading the magic carpet of the imagination, we take flight from the -free and easy court of Weimar to the home of an English rector, where -impropriety is scarcely whispered, and where a little old maid of genius -lives amid tea-parties and the embroidering of linen and the visiting -of the poor, interrupted at intervals by the major crises of births, -marriages and deaths. - -Jane Austen was the youngest of seven children, who dwelt together in -that amity which the Bible recommends but which frail humanity -infrequently realizes. She was a genius without eccentricities, egotisms -or rebellions; never did a writer of immortal books live a more -conventional life or have less to write about. She had no literary -friends, not even at the end of her life. Her best work was done at the -age of twenty-two, and was a secret kept from the members of her family. -She wrote on little sheets of paper, which could be quickly hidden under -a blotter or a piece of “fancy work.” Her books were not published until -late in her life, and then they were published anonymously. She died of -tuberculosis at the age of forty-two. - -The characters in her novels are the people of the world she knew. Her -theme is, of course, the theme of all bourgeois fiction, the property -marriage. Here we see the golden love-glints flashing from Cupid’s eyes; -here we see the fortunes sailing about upon breezes of emotion; here we -see Sensibility controlled by Sense. - -Not great fortunes, you understand, but modest ones, such as entitle one -to be on the visiting list of an English country rector. A fortune -sufficient to enable the hero to escape the inconvenience of working, -and to live in the country and exhibit to mankind a beautiful and -graceful specimen of the human race. A fortune sufficient to enable him -to marry a lady of Sense and Sensibility, and to provide her with a -beautiful home and a garden, and a few servants, and maintenance for -whatever number of children it may please Providence to send. That is -the sort of fortune for which Jane Austen’s heroines are competing, and -which each of them invariably gets--the bourgeois happy ending. - -Do not misunderstand me: her heroines are not mercenary--that is, not -with their conscious minds. The mercenary elements in their lives are -instinctive and conventional; the laws of the British leisure classes, -of “gentlefolk.” These laws Jane Austen never questioned, nor does -anyone of her heroines ever question them. Therefore it is possible for -these ladies to be mercenary to the point of ferocity, yet at the same -time to be sentimental and even charming. - -If you travel through the Jane Austen country you find the roads lined -with hedge-rows, which bear flowers in the springtime, and are full of -birds, and afford opportunity for delightful descriptions in novels; -also they afford thrilling adventures, because a heroine can stand -behind a hedge-row and listen to her best friend discussing her to her -lover. Outside these hedge-rows walk common people of all sorts; farm -laborers on their way to fourteen hours of animal-like toil; factory -workers, pale and stunted; soldiers on the march; able seamen paying a -visit to home; tradesmen, tourists--all sorts of persons one does not -know. Behind the hedge-rows dwell the “gentlefolk,” carefully guarded by -the police magistrates; and the common people never by any chance -penetrate the hedge-rows, except in the capacity of servants. So the -young ladies of the “gentle” family meet no men save such as have been -carefully investigated and approved; so it is possible for these ladies -to be full of Sensibility--that is, quivering with excitement at the -male approach--and yet entirely innocent of mercenary motives, and -entirely safe from the danger of making an unmercenary match. - -How perfectly this system works you may note in Jane Austen’s novels. -There are eight heroines, and eight fortunes to be married. One of the -heroines takes the risk of marrying a clergyman who has no money except -his “living.” Two others marry clergymen who, in addition to their -“livings,” have good financial prospects. The other five marry -non-clerical gentlemen of wealth. Mostly these fortunes come from land; -everywhere over the Jane Austen novel there hovers a magic presence -known as the “entailed estate.” In only one case is there any hint of -vulgar origin for the fortune, in a recent connection with “trade.” Of -all the fortunes, only one has actually been gained by the man who -possesses it and bestows it upon the heroine; and this man has gained it -in a most respectable Christian way--that is to say, not by “trade,” but -by killing and robbery. He has been a naval captain, and brings home his -share of the prizes taken. - -The great crimes and horrors of the world lie outside the hedge-rows -surrounding the Jane Austen rectory. We can hear the guns and smell the -powder smoke, but the deadly missiles never pass the magic barrier. Two -of Jane’s brothers are naval officers, and they come and go in imposing -uniforms; the Napoleonic wars are on, and they are guarding the channel, -and in later life become admirals. An intimate friend of the family is -Warren Hastings, who conquered India for the British; when he was placed -on trial for wholesale graft, he explained by saying that when he -considered his opportunities, he marveled, not that he had taken so -much, but that he had not taken more. Nothing of anything like this -enters into the novels. - -What does enter are the quiverings of Sensibility, the ups and downs of -the “tender emotions.” When we were children we used to take a daisy and -pull off the petals, and with petal number one we would say: “He loves -me,” and with petal number two: “He loves me not,” and so on. With petal -number one our heart goes up, and with petal number two it goes down. -There is another question, equally thrilling: “Do I love him, or do I -not?” Many things get in the way; Pride and Prejudice, for example. It -is hard to know our own minds; and sometimes when we hesitate too long, -it is necessary for the older members of our family to apply Persuasion. -(I am making puns on the titles of the novels.) - -I would not be understood to disparage this little English old maid. She -did not make her world, in which the father of the family preaches in -the name of the Prince of Peace, and the sons go out to kill and loot. -She is a most charming and witty old maid, and her queer people are -alive in every throb of their quivering hearts. She was a sly little -body, and we suspect her of knowing more than she tells. There was a -terrible scandal whispered concerning her, which she vehemently denied; -we hate to pass it on, but this is a book of plain speaking and we have -to do our duty--so let it be recorded that some of the neighbors -suspected Jane Austen of watching them at tea-parties and church fairs, -with the intention of putting their peculiarities into her books! - - - - -CHAPTER LIII - -TORY ROMANCE - - -Upon our first visit to Scotland we kept low company; but now we return -to dwell in a castle, and play the host to our Sovereign Lord the King. - -Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh in 1771, the son of a prosperous -lawyer who held the high office of sheriff. The father made a specialty -of his country’s antiquities, and the boy was brought up, as it were, in -the property-room of a moving picture studio. He was lame, which made it -impossible for him to repeat the valorous deeds of his ancestors; so he -took to dreams, and gave the world a new form of art, the historical -romance. - -The French revolution occurred in his youth, and he reacted from it as -did all his class. It was the job of British Toryism to crush the -republican idea; with money derived from the trade of the whole world, -it subsidized the kings and emperors of Europe in their attacks upon -France. The result was to raise up Napoleon, and before Napoleon was -beaten Europe had waded through twenty-five years of blood. Walter -Scott’s function was to glorify the ancient loyalties and pieties in -whose name that world-crime was committed; and for his services he was -made a baronet, and paid a million dollars, equal to five or ten times -as much in our money. - -Personally he was a generous and kindly gentleman, but he lent his name -and influence to the most vicious rowdies of his party. Nor was he -content with writing; he turned out and did his part as a smasher of the -“Reds.” At the age of forty-one we find him writing to the poet Southey -like an earlier incarnation of Attorney-General Palmer. “You are quite -right in apprehending a _Jacquerie_; the country is mined below our -feet.” He goes on to tell how he discovered a meeting of weavers in a -large manufacturing village, and how he did his duty as an officer of -the law. “I apprehended the ringleaders and disconcerted the whole -project; but in the course of my inquiries, imagine my surprise at -discovering a bundle of letters and printed manifestoes, from which it -appeared that the Manchester Weavers’ Committee corresponds with every -manufacturing town in the South and West of Scotland, and levies a -subsidy of 2s. 6d. per man--(an immense sum)--for the ostensible purpose -of petitioning Parliament for redress of grievances, but doubtless to -sustain them in their revolutionary movements. An energetic -administration, which had the confidence of the country, would soon -check all this; but it is our misfortune to lose the pilot when the ship -is on the breakers. But it is sickening to think of our situation.” - -Walter Scott’s literary career began with narrative poems based upon the -love-makings and quarrelings of old Scottish chieftains. Then he began -writing novels on these same themes, and it was as if he had struck a -pick into a pit full of golden nuggets. To his Tory age he came as a -heaven-sent magician with exactly the right spells to prop up the -tottering old system. The public began to buy the Waverley novels so -fast that it was impossible to get them bound in time. England went wild -over them, and Europe as well; one million, four hundred thousand -volumes were sold in France alone. This was the time of the “Holy -Alliance,” and another King Louis had been set upon the French throne. - -It was not quite the proper thing for an eminent legal gentleman to -write novels, so Scott published the books anonymously, and always -denied their authorship; but he did not refuse to take the money. He was -a fluent writer, and could turn out a volume in a month or six weeks, -and would get a thousand pounds before he had finished it. Never was -there such prosperity, since the days of Aladdin and his wonderful lamp. - -Our Tory novelist was a big overgrown boy; he could never have written -such propaganda otherwise. He began to spend his money as a boy would -spend it--to make real the world of chivalry and romance in nineteenth -century Scotland, fully launched into the age of capitalist -industrialism! He built himself an imitation castle of colossal size, -“with a tall tower at either end ... sundry zigzagged gables ... a -myriad of indentations and parapets, and machicolated eaves; most -fantastic waterspouts; labelled windows, not a few of them painted glass -... stones carved with heraldries innumerable.” And inside, of course, -were all the stage properties, “cuirasses, helmets, swords of every -order, from the claymore and rapier to some German executioner’s -swords.” Here our hero kept open house to all the world of rank and -fashion, with gay hunting parties and dances, drinking bouts, and -singing of ballads and the sounding of pibrochs. It was his aim, in his -own words, “to found a family”; besides becoming a baron, he married his -eldest son to an heiress, and the climax of his career came when King -George IV came to visit his northern dominion, and to be the novelist’s -guest. - -It so happened that this king was an odious fat lecher; but that made no -difference, he was Sir Walter’s Most Gracious and Sovereign Lord. In an -ecstasy of loyalty, the novelist took possession of a glass from which -His Majesty had drunk a toast. This was to be preserved as the most -sacred of the treasures of Abbotsford; but, alas, the novelist put it in -his pocket, and in a moment of absent-mindedness sat down on it, and cut -himself severely! It did not occur to his pious soul that this might be -an effort of Providence to teach him something about drinking, or about -the worship of lecherous kings. - -Here in Hollywood we see these magic castles arise on the movie lots; we -see the costumes reproduced with minute exactitude, and then surmounting -them we see the heads of screen dolls, male and female, lounge lizards -and jazz dancers and queens from department stores and manicure parlors. -And just so it is in the novels of Sir Walter: the costumes and scenery -are those of old-time Scotland, but the characters are the gentlemen and -servants and tenants of Scott’s own neighborhood. He had creative energy -and a sense of humor, he makes the game very real, and we can enjoy it, -provided we know what we are getting. It is not even Scott’s own time, -it is merely the Tory propaganda of that time. It is medievalism and -absolutism dressed up and glorified, with every trace of blood and filth -and horror wiped away; a fictionized sermon upon the text: Vote the -Conservative ticket. - -But alas for the dreams of stand-pat poets! First came the ruin of his -personal hopes. Among the rascals of his gang were two who persuaded him -into a publishing business, to reap the millions out of his popularity. -They stole everything in sight, and then went bankrupt, and left him at -the age of fifty-five with a debt of a hundred and seventeen thousand -pounds. He set to work to write pot-boilers and pay it off; an action -which has made him a hero to his biographers. And of course, it is an -honorable thing for an artist to pay his debts; we all know that most -disagreeable of characters, the Bohemian genius who borrows from -everybody he meets and repays nothing. But it seems necessary to point -out that a novelist owes two debts; one to his business creditors, and -the other to those who are to read his books in future time. We are not -satisfied with Sir Walter’s pot-boilers, and we deny that a man of -genius has a right to drive himself to death and bring on a stroke of -paralysis in four years, in order to satisfy a romantic dream of honor. - -Equally pitiful was the wreck of Sir Walter’s political ideals. In vain -did he glorify the loyalty of the Scotch peasants, their fidelity to -their lairds; in vain was all his hounding of the rebellious weavers -with the weapons of the law. They continued to organize, and the -peasants began to mutter and snarl; they wanted the vote, they clamored -for rights both political and economic. A most wicked project known as -the Reform Bill came up before Parliament, to give the vote to common -working people; and Sir Walter, sixty years old and ill, persisted in -taking part in the campaign. He made a speech in which he warned the -audience that all these licentious movements came from France. This was -forty years after the French revolution, and the Bolshevik bogie had -lost its power to terrify; Sir Walter was hissed by his audience. Later -on he personally saw to the arrest of a radical rascal on the street, -and got himself stoned and mobbed. It was a shock he never got over, and -he carried the memory to his grave a year or two later. - -Fate is usually kind to aged Tories of this sort; it takes them off the -stage of life before the failure of their hopes is too apparent. Imagine -the shock to this chivalrous old soul if he could come out of his grave -today, and visit the House of Parliament, and hear the “left wing” -members, elected from his beloved highlands, shouting for the -Dictatorship of the Proletariat! Now indeed would he say: “The country -is mined below our feet!” - - - - -CHAPTER LIV - -THE MEANING OF MAGIC - - -The effect of the French revolution upon poets is a subject of especial -interest to us, because the period is so nearly identical with our own. -There were several English poets whose reactions to the great event it -will pay us to consider. - -Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a clergyman’s son, born in 1772, so that he -was twenty-one years old when King Louis’ head fell into the basket of -the guillotine. At that time Coleridge was traveling about giving -Unitarian lectures, a most revolutionary occupation. He met another -young enthusiast, Robert Southey, and they had a Utopian dream of a free -community on the banks of the Susquehanna River. It was to be called the -Pantisocracy, and to get funds Coleridge set out to canvass for his -Unitarian paper. The dream ended when the two poets married sisters. - -At the age of twenty-eight we find Coleridge in the full tide of the -reaction against France. One of the organs of the Tory party, the London -“Morning Post,” is paying him a salary to write articles clamoring for -renewal of the war on the French republic; it was said in Parliament -that the rupture of the peace was brought about by these articles. For -the balance of his days the one-time Unitarian was a pillar of the -Anglican church, and of every form of reaction. He had become a devotee -of German metaphysics, also of opium; a wanderer and a wreck, living on -charity, and planning colossal literary labors which came to nothing. He -was sent to a nursing-home under the charge of a physician, where he -died at the age of sixty-two. - -So much for the life; and now for the poetry. There are only a few -hundred lines of it, all written before the poet entered the Tory -service. A study of it makes clear the spiritual tragedy; it is poetry -of emotion and music, with a total absence of judgment and will. From -only one of the poems, “The Ancient Mariner,” can you extract a human -meaning; that if one man commits an act of cruelty against a bird, the -moral forces of the universe will punish a shipload of innocent men, -sparing only the one who is guilty! - -It is the poetry of opium. Indeed, the most famous of all the verses, -“Kubla Khan,” was actually an opium dream, transferred to paper after -return to consciousness-- - -“Now, hold on a moment,” says Mrs. Ogi. “Here is a letter from a Poet. -You are going to have a lot of them reading this book, and wanting to -pull your hair out; so you might as well have it out with them now. This -Poet names ‘Kubla Khan’ as the perfect type of the ‘pure’ poem.” - -“I know. Swinburne calls it, ‘for absolute melody and splendor the first -poem in the language.’ It happens that the first five lines sum up the -whole; so it will pay us to stop and analyze them, take them apart, -syllable by syllable, and see how the trick is done. I quote the lines; -and in order to play fair with the poet, shut your eyes and give -yourself up to his spell. If you have any feeling for beauty of words, -you will feel a chill running up and down your spine.” - - In Xanadu did Kubla Khan - A stately pleasure-dome decree: - Where Alph, the sacred river, ran - Through caverns measureless to man - Down to a sunless sea. - -First of all, note the meter; every long syllable is naturally long, and -every short syllable is naturally short; so the lines flow softly, like -running waves. Not merely are the rhymes perfect, there are hidden -rhymes scattered through the lines; the Xanadu and Khan, also the two -u’s in the first line, and the two a’s in the fourth line. Note the -repetition of the consonant sounds. The X in the first line is -pronounced as K; and we have seen shrewd business men in the United -States collect many millions of dollars from the American people by the -magic of the letter K three times repeated. There are two d’s in the -second line, four r’s in the third, two m’s in the fourth, two s’s in -the fifth. There is not a single harsh sound in the entire five lines; -they have every musical charm that is possible to words. - -So much for the sounds; and now for the sense. Let us take it word by -word, and see what it tells us. Xanadu: a place you never heard of, -therefore mysterious, stimulating to the imagination; taken in -connection with Kubla Khan, it suggests Tartar despotism, cruelty, -terror. “A stately pleasure-dome”: magnificence in the fashion of the -Arabian Nights, extravagance, a free rein to desire. The word “decree” -reinforces this; suggesting an Oriental despot, who follows his whims -without restraint. “Alph”: an unknown stream, therefore mysterious. “The -sacred river”: this reinforces the idea of despotism, adding to our fear -of earthly kings that of an all-powerful one in heaven. “Caverns -measureless to man”: again mystery, and the fear which the unknown -inspires. “Sunless sea”: this clenches the impression; for without the -sun there can be no life, and the picture is the last word in -desolation. - -The rest of the poem is in the same key. We hear about “ancestral voices -prophesying war,” and a stream haunted “by woman wailing for her demon -lover.” We are told about “an Abyssinian maid,” “a damsel with a -dulcimer,” etc. - -Note that everyone of these images appeals to reactionary emotions, fear -or sensuality; By sensuality the reason is dragged from its throne; -while fear destroys all activity of the mind, causing abasement and -submission. Moreover--and here is the point essential to our -argument--almost every image in this poem turns out on examination to be -a lie. There is no such place as Xanadu; and Kubla Khan has nothing to -teach us but avoidance. His pleasures were bloody and infamous, and -there was nothing “stately” about his “pleasure-dome.” There never was a -river Alph, and the sacredness of any river is a fiction of a priestly -caste, preying on the people. There are no “caverns measureless to man”; -while as for a “sunless sea,” a few arc-lights would solve the problem. -The “woman wailing for her demon lover” is a savage’s nightmare; while -as for the “Abyssinian maid,” she would have her teeth blackened and -would stink of rancid palm oil. - -From the beginning to the end, the poem deals with things which are -sensual, cruel, and fatal to hope. These old fears and cravings are -buried deep in our subconsciousness; the poet touches them, and they -quiver inside us, and we don’t know what it means, so we call it -“magic.” That is the favorite term of the art for art’s sakers; they -don’t know what this “magic” is, and they don’t want to know, but the -psychoanalyst tells them. - -Says Mrs. Ogi: “Our Poet will be pained. He lives by magic, and you seek -to destroy it!” - -Says Ogi: “There are emotions equally thrilling, equally wonderful, -which are stirred by the discovery of new truth and the contemplation of -progress. What I am trying to do is to persuade the poets to use their -brains and common sense, and apply melody and beauty of sound to the -good things of the future, instead of to the evil things of the past.” - -“Give them a few illustrations,” says Mrs. Ogi. - -“I will name eight things which have been in my daily newspapers during -the past week, any one of which is every bit as exciting, every bit as -provocative of ecstasy as ‘Kubla Khan.’ - -“Number One: The air is full of music, traveling half way round the -earth. Number Two: Aeroplanes are circling the earth for the first time -in history. Number Three: A scientist has given his life in the effort -to find a cure for cancer. Number Four: Mars is coming nearer, and we -have a chance to learn how the canals are made, and perhaps to get -messages from a new race. Number Five: In a physics laboratory, only two -or three miles from our home, men are taking the atom to pieces and -preparing to extract its energy. Number Six: We are discovering how to -take control of our subconscious minds and master our hidden life. -Number Seven: A group of scientists in New York are exploring, by means -of laboratory tests, the energies we call ‘psychic.’ Number Eight: In -every civilized country today the workers are organizing themselves to -put an end to parasitism based upon class privilege. - -“Here are eight themes for poets, every one of which has the advantage -of being real, and not fading away upon analysis. Here are -pleasure-domes that are truly “stately,” rivers that are truly “sacred,” -caverns that are truly “measureless to man.” These modern themes have -only one drawback, from the point of view of the poet; they require him -to think as well as to feel!” - - - - -CHAPTER LV - -THE TORY WHIP - - -Another poet who was frightened out of his wits by the French revolution -was Robert Southey. But he took to respectability instead of to opium. - -He was born in 1774, the son of a linen draper. At the age of nineteen -he was full of Rousseau, Goethe, and the “infidelity” of Gibbon. He was -so keen for France that he wrote an epic about Joan of Arc; also he -planned the “Pantisocracy” with Coleridge. But then he married the other -sister, and was shocked by the Terror; a wealthy man gave him an -annuity, and he settled down to write long and romantic poems about -princes and conquerors, Celtic, Mexican, Arab, Indian--stage properties -from all over the world, combined with standard British moralizing. - -In less than ten years we find Southey evolved into a pillar of -reaction; at the age of thirty-three he received a pension from the -government, and two years later he joined Walter Scott and Gifford as -the literary whips of the Tory party. They published the “Quarterly -Review,” and we shall see before long what they did to Byron, Shelley -and Keats. At thirty-nine Southey became the laureate, and delivered the -customary New Year’s ode in support of church and state; a procedure his -biographer defends by explaining that he “was earning a provision for -his girls.” It is of course a pleasant thing for a poet with many -daughters to save up the purchase price of a husband for each; but what -about the cotton spinners, whose ten-year-old daughters were working -fourteen and sixteen hours a day in the mills, with the Tory squirarchy -taxing the bread out of their mouths? - -For centuries the literary jackals who served the British ruling classes -had starved in garrets; but now their services were beginning to be -appreciated, and they were admitted to the class they defended. The -diligent Southey wrote a “Naval Biography,” a hymn of praise to -Britain’s sea-lords, and got five hundred pounds per volume for it, and -established himself as England’s leading man of letters. - -But alas, there was a skeleton in his literary closet. In his youth he -had written a poem in praise of Watt Tyler, proletarian rebel of old -England; and now someone got hold of the manuscript, and published it -secretly, and Southey’s frantic efforts in the courts failed to stop it. -Sixty thousand copies were sold, and a member of Parliament stood up and -read extracts from it, side by side with the laureate’s latest article -in the “Quarterly Review,” denouncing parliamentary reform. To the -respectability of Southey’s time this reading was an outrage, but for my -part, it is the only reading of Southey I ever enjoyed. Here was a -scholar, standing on his literary dignity--and what was his attitude to -his fellow authors who had not sold out? He clamored for Hunt and -Hazlitt to be deported to a penal settlement; while for Byron he wanted -“the whip and the branding-iron”! - -We today know Southey by his “Life of Nelson,” which serves as required -reading in most American high schools. We are told that this is because -it is a great work of literature, but the true reason is because it is a -work of propaganda for the Army and Navy League. If you want to study -the art of hero-making, note the biographer’s deft handling of the Lady -Hamilton episode of Nelson’s career. This regulation movie “vamp” had -married an English nobleman in his dotage; and she got hold of Nelson in -Naples, where she was the favorite of an unspeakably corrupt court. -Southey tells us there was nothing “criminal” in the hero’s relationship -to this lady; which is the English way of stating that Nelson did not -commit adultery. If this be true, it is rather singular that Nelson -should have believed himself the father of Lady Hamilton’s two children! - -The queen of this Neapolitan court was a sister of Marie Antoinette, the -French queen who had told the people to eat cake if they could not get -bread; and through Lady Hamilton’s hold on Nelson, he was led to use the -British fleet in furtherance of Neapolitan royalist conspiracies, and in -defiance of orders from home. But you don’t find any of that in Southey! -You are told that when Nelson returned to England, he “separated from” -his wife; the fact being that his wife left him because he insisted on -bringing the “vamp” lady to live in the home with her! In view of these -details, I asked Americans to consider whether it would not be better -for their children to read about the democratic English heroes, such as -John Milton and Oliver Cromwell and Isaac Newton and John Ruskin and -Keir Hardie? - - - - -CHAPTER LVI - -THE FEAR THAT KILLS - - -One more, and we are done with the melancholy tale of the poets who ran -away from the French revolution. - -William Wordsworth was born in 1770, his father being lawyer to a noble -earl who robbed him of five thousand pounds. That may possibly have -accounted for some of the early rebellious emotions of the poet. He was -graduated from Cambridge at the age of twenty-one, and went to France at -the height of the revolutionary fervor. He has told us in his verse of -the stirrings which then possessed him; to be young at such a time “was -very heaven.” - -But the poet, in telling us about his experiences in France, left out a -vital part thereof. The story had to wait a century and a quarter before -a professor of Princeton University dug it out. While Wordsworth was -abroad he carried on an affair with a young French girl of good family. -She bore him a daughter, but he did not marry her; instead, he came back -to England, and lived most piously with his sister, and became a -preacher of the proprieties. We can understand how, looking back on -France, it seemed to him a land of license, meriting stern rebuke from a -British moralist. - -His first book of poems, “Lyrical Ballads,” was published in 1798. He -had by then become a reactionary in religion and politics, but in poetry -he was an innovator, because he dealt with the simple, every-day -feelings of his own heart, and with the peasant people of his -neighborhood. He was mercilessly ridiculed by the critics, and retired -into himself, to live a frugal life upon an income of a hundred pounds a -year, bequeathed to him by a well-to-do friend. In the course of time -the British ruling class realized that there was no real harm in this -nature-mystic, and at the age of forty-three he received a salary as a -distributor of stamps; nine years later an annuity was allowed him, and -a year after that he became poet laureate. He passionately opposed every -political reform, and composed a series of “Ecclesiastical Sonnets,” -dealing with the church rigmarole of England; also a pamphlet bitterly -attacking the proposition to run a railroad into the country of his -dreams. At the age of seventy-five we find him, white-haired and -venerable, kneeling, in the presence of a large assembly, to kiss the -hand of an extremely dull young girl by the name of Victoria. - -Wordsworth was one of the teachers of my youth, and I do not want to be -unjust to him because he turned Tory before thirty. What we have to do -is to understand him, and to draw a moral from him. The worship of -Nature is like the worship of God; as a rule it is a reactionary -influence, cutting one off from real life; but here and there it may be -a source of inner energy, enabling a man to stand for his own -convictions against the world. To Wordsworth in his early days Nature -was that, and no poet has uttered in more noble and beautiful language -this sense of oneness with the great mother of all life. His writing at -its best is as beautiful, and also as sound, as anything in English. - -But here is the point to get clear: practically all this poetry was -written in eight years; you might count on your ten fingers and ten toes -all the lines that Wordsworth wrote after the age of thirty-five which -are worth anyone’s while to read. In my youth, when I was studying -poetry, it was my habit to go through a poet, beginning with the first -page of volume one and ending with the last page of volume five, or ten, -or whatever it might be. In the case of Wordsworth, it was volume -twelve, and he was the one poet with whom I fell down. The -“Ecclesiastical Sonnets” finished me; I testify that of all the dreary -drivel in the world’s literature, this carries the prize. - -There were two men in Wordsworth: the instinctive man, who experienced -overwhelming feelings, and the conscious man, who was terrified by those -feelings. This is no guess of mine, but something which Wordsworth -himself explained over and over again: “My apprehensions come in -crowds.... My former thoughts returned: the fear that kills.... Me this -unchartered freedom tires; I feel the weight of chance desires.” So the -Wordsworth who believed in the Tory party and the Thirty-nine Articles -put the screws on the poet, and not merely the emotions, but the brains -of a great genius withered before the age of forty. - -The cases of Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth suggest the inquiry: is -it possible for a great poet to be a conservative? In old times, yes; -for the conservatives then had something to say for themselves. But in -the last hundred years the meaning of the class struggle has become so -apparent, the consequences of class exploitation have become so obvious, -that a man who fails to see them must be deficient in intelligence, a -man who fails to care about them must be deficient in heart and -conscience; and these are things without which great poetry cannot be -made. - - - - -CHAPTER LVII - -THE FIRST LORD OF LETTERS - - -Fortunately not all the poets of England let themselves be frightened -into reaction by the French revolution. - -George Gordon, Lord Byron, was born in 1788. His father was a rake and -blackguard. “Your mother is a fool,” said a schoolmate; and Byron -answered, “I know it.” This, you must admit, was a poor start in life -for a boy. He had a club foot, concerning which he was frightfully -sensitive; but in other ways he was divinely handsome, and much sought -after by the ladies; so he alternated between fits of solitude and -melancholy, and other fits of amorous excess. Being a lord, he was a -great person all his life. Being a man of genius, he enormously -increased his greatness. He lived always before the world, in one -sublime pose or another, and composed whole epics about himself and his -moods. - -He traveled, and became a cosmopolitan figure, and wild tales were -spread concerning his adventures in Europe. Then he came back to -England, and published a poem, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” which made -such a sensation as Britain had never known before. “I awoke one morning -and found myself famous,” he said. But he affected to despise this fame; -he, a noble lord, must not be confused with vulgar writing fellows. He -would toss a manuscript to his publishers with a careless -gesture--though the manuscript might be worth one or two thousand -pounds. I cannot recall any high-up aristocrat who achieved literary -greatness to compare with Byron; he was the first lord of letters of -that age and of all ages. - -He composed a series of verse romances, tales of Eastern despots and -their crimes, in the fashion of the day. They were full of melody and -rhythm, and their heroes were always that melancholy, sublime, outlaw -figure which we known as “Byronic.” This autobiographic hero was eagerly -taken up by the fashionable world, especially the female part. One great -lady, already supplied with a husband, adored the poet wildly, then -despised him, threatened to kill him, attacked him in a novel, and -finally, when she met his funeral cortege in the street, fainted and -went insane. - -He married an heiress, quite cynically for her money, spent the money, -and had everything he owned attached by his creditors. Then his wife -left him, with hints of mysterious wickedness. He was overwhelmed by a -storm of abuse, and went into exile for the rest of his life. The wife -never told her story, but many years later the American novelist, -Harriet Beecher Stowe, published what she claimed was the truth, that -Byron had been guilty of incest with his half-sister. His lordship had -by that time become a “standard author,” and the critics were outraged -by Mrs. Stowe’s indiscretion; even now they do not speak out loud about -the matter. - -In Switzerland the poet met Shelley, the best influence that ever came -into his life. He recognized this new friend as the purest soul he knew, -and praised his character ardently in his letters, though he never paid -the public tribute to Shelley’s writings which they deserved. Shelley -turned Byron’s thoughts to politics, and he wrote “The Prisoner of -Chillon,” one of the noblest of his poems. But then he went off to -Venice, and amused himself with numerous intrigues, and got fat. He -began “Don Juan,” a new kind of epic poem, mocking itself, as well as -everything else. It is a hateful picture of a hateful world, but it has -almost infinite verve and energy, and we recognize in it a great spirit -trying to lift itself above an age of corruption by the instrument of -scorn. - -It was the time of the “Holy Alliance,” and the few men who cared for -freedom were living in exile or hiding from the police. Byron associated -with these revolutionists, and gave them both money and his name. He -became a neighbor of Shelley’s, and again immersed himself in politics -and literature. He wrote his drama “Cain,” in which he deals with the -problems of human fate from the revolutionary point of view. To the -religionists of the time, this was most awful blasphemy; the poet -Southey frothed at the mouth, and wrote his “Vision of Judgment,” -portraying the damnation of Byron. His angry lordship came back with a -poem of the same name--so effective that the publisher was jailed for -six months! One stanza, describing the poet laureate, will serve for a -sample of Byron’s fighting mood: - - He had written praises of a regicide; - He had written praises of all kings whatever; - He had written for republics far and wide, - And then against them bitterer than ever: - For pantisocracy he once had cried - Aloud, a scheme less moral than ’twas clever; - Then grew a hearty anti-jacobin-- - Had turned his coat--and would have turned his skin. - -Byron had now become the voice of liberty against reaction throughout -Europe. And this was a brand new thing, seeming a kind of insanity to -the Tories. There had been an abundance of dissipated lords, but never -before a lord of revolt! Byron joined the secret society of the -Carbonari, and took part in their attempt to free Italy. When they -failed, he was not discouraged, but wrote: “There will be blood shed -like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the -end.” In those words we know the voice of a thinker and a man. - -He was now thirty-five years of age, restless, tormented by a sense of -futility. The Greek people were carrying on a war for liberation against -the Turks, and Byron went to help them, and thus set a crown upon his -life. He died of a fever, early in the campaign; and so today, when we -think of him, we think not merely of a nobleman and a poet, but of a man -who laid down wealth and fame and worldly position for the greatest of -all human ideals. - -In the beginning he had written to amuse himself and his readers; he had -catered to their sentimentalism and their folly. But in the end he came -to despise his readers, and wrote only to shock them. They had made a -world of lies; and one man would tell them the truth. That is why today -we rank him as a world force in the history of letters. We are no longer -the least bit thrilled by his wickedness; we think of such things as -pathological and are moved only to pity. We do not see anything -picturesque about a great lord who travels over Europe with a train of -horses and carriages, dogs, fowls, monkeys, servants, and mistresses; -the Sunday supplements of our newspapers have over-supplied us with such -material. But we are interested in a poet who possessed a clear eye and -a clear brain, who saw the truth, and spoke it to all Europe, and helped -to set free the future of the race. - - - - -CHAPTER LVIII - -THE ANGEL OF REVOLT - - -Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792, which made him four years younger -than Byron. His father was the richest baronet in the county of Sussex, -a great landlord and a ferocious Tory, who typified the spirit of his -age and drove his son almost to madness. - -The boy was sent to school at Eton, a dreadful place inhabited by gnomes -who wear all day the clothes which our little rich boys wear to evening -parties, and the hats which our grown-up rich boys wear to the opera. -They had a system of child slavery known as “fagging,” and Shelley -revolted against it and was tortured. He was a swift, proud spirit, made -frantic by the sight or even the thought of tyranny; so sensitive that -he swooned at the scent of the flowers in the Alpine valleys. He was -gifted with a marvelous mind, ravenous for knowledge, and absorbing it -at incredible speed. - -He went to Oxford, where at the age of nineteen he published a pamphlet -entitled, “The Necessity for Atheism.” A reading discloses that the -title might better have been “The Necessity for Abolishing -Ecclesiasticism Masquerading as Christianity.” But it is not likely that -such a change of title would have helped Shelley, who was -unceremoniously kicked out of the university, and cast off by the Tory -baronet who controlled his purse-strings. - -So we find him, an outcast in London, living in lodgings and almost -starving. He met a girl of sixteen, the daughter of a coffee-house -proprietor, and hoping to convert her to his sublime faith, he ran away -and married her. At the age of twenty we find him in Ireland, issuing an -“Address to the Irish People” and circulating it on the streets. The -scholarly critics of Shelley speak of this as the absurd extravagance of -boyhood; whereas it was plain common sense and the obvious moral duty of -every English poet. Infinitely touching it is to read this pamphlet, and -note its beauty of spirit and sublimity of faith, not exceeded by the -utterances of Jesus. All that was wrong with Shelley’s advice was that -it was too good both for Ireland and England. For distributing it -Shelley’s servant was sent to jail for six months. - -The poet’s wife had no understanding of his ideals, and the couple were -unhappy. After two years of married life, Shelley met the -sixteen-year-old daughter of Godwin, revolutionary philosopher, and ran -away with her. That was the crime of his life, for which he was -condemned to infamy by his own time, and has hardly yet been pardoned. -Two years later his former wife drowned herself; and the British lord -chancellor deprived the poet of the custody of their two children, on -the ground that he was an unfit person. We shall discuss the ethics of -this affair later on. Suffice it for the moment to say that Shelley, -broken in heart but not in will, fled to the Continent for refuge, and -devoted the last four years of his life to the task of overthrowing the -British caste system. A hundred years have passed, and he has not yet -succeeded; but let no one be too sure that he will not succeed in the -end! - -He lived in Switzerland and Italy, and worked with desperate intensity, -so that he brought on tuberculosis. There are no four years in the life -of any other writer which gave us such treasures of the mind and spirit. -The critics of Shelley judge him by his boyhood and his horrible -scandal. But taking these last years, the impression we get is of -maturity of mind, dignity of spirit, firmness of judgment. If you want -to know this Shelley, read the wonderful letters he wrote from -Switzerland. Read his essay, recently discovered and published, “A -Philosophical View of Reform,” in which the whole program of radical -propaganda is laid out with perfect insight and beauty of utterance. -Read “The Defense of Poetry,” one of the finest pieces of eloquence in -English. Note the soundness of his critical judgment, which erred in -only one respect--an under-estimate of his own powers. He was humble to -Byron, a lesser person both as poet and as man. - -One after another Shelley now poured out the marvelous works on which -his fame is based. He took the old myth of Aeschylus and wrote a drama, -“Prometheus Unbound,” which might be described as the distilled essence -of revolt, the most modern of philosophical dramas, proclaiming the -defiance of the human spirit to all ordained gods. At the other extreme, -and written in the same year, was “The Cenci,” a tragic story out of -Renaissance Italy, human and simple, therefore poignant and real. The -poet Keats died, and Shelley wrote “Adonais”--and those who think that -art exists for art’s sake and beauty for beauty’s sake, make note that -here is a work which combines all the perfections of poetry, and yet has -a moral, a fighting message. - -He wrote also political comedies in the style of -Aristophanes--representing English society by an ecstatic chorus of -pigs. So savage is this lashing that even today English critics keep -silence about “Swellfoot the Tyrant.” The odious fat lecher, King George -IV, was sued for divorce by his wife, Queen Caroline, and it was a most -horrible scandal, which Britain hardly dared to whisper. I remember when -I was a student in college, twenty-five years ago, searching the -libraries in an effort to find out the contents of the “Green Bag” which -figures in Shelley’s drama; but no commentator would tell me--and I -don’t know yet! - -Shelley has the qualities of sublimity and fervor; also he has the -defects of these qualities--he is often windy and wordy and unreal. But -in his last miraculous years he shed these faults, and produced lyrics -of such loveliness that he is today the poet of poets, the soul -companion of generous and idealistic youth. In his “Mask of Anarchy” are -songs of revolt which have reached the workers--and which therefore -English critics still find it necessary to deprecate! A couple of years -ago was celebrated in London the anniversary of Shelley’s death, and -there assembled a great number of people of the sort who would have -skinned him while he was alive. A famous editor, Mr. J. C. Squires, -took occasion to quote the poem: “Men of England, wherefore plow?” How -obviously foolish! If the men of England did not plow, they would -starve! But it just happens that Shelley did not say that; what he said -was: “Men of England, wherefore plow for the lords who lay ye low?” And -five million, five hundred thousand labor votes echo: “Wherefore?” - -This poet of the future was scorned in his lifetime, as no other great -Englishman in history. He was the byword of the literary wits of London; -“Prometheus Unbound,” they said, an excellent name: who would bind it? -By Sir Walter Scott and his ruffians of the Tory “Review,” Shelley’s -name could not be spoken without crossing yourself. The poet Moore cried -out in horror--Tommy, little snob of the drawing-rooms, who “dearly -loved a lord.” And Wordsworth, ignorant and bigoted, living among his -peasants, reading nothing; and Southey, turncoat and prig. Even Byron -made no fight for Shelley’s fame; while Byron’s friends, the fashionable -idlers of the Continent, rebuked him for keeping such disreputable -company. - -Even two generations later the evil spell was not broken. Matthew -Arnold, standard English critic, read about Shelley’s friends, and -lifted his scholarly hands and cried: “What a set!” It did not occur to -the critic to ask what other kind of set Shelley might have had. What -people had he to choose among? Arnold had not tried being a radical, so -as to see what queer people swarm about you--especially when you are -known to have an income of four thousand pounds a year, and to give away -nearly all of it! A poet who believes everything good about his fellows, -and who lives in dreams of exalted nobleness, is the last person in the -world to discover the faults of those who gather about him. And after he -has made the discovery, he remains a dreamer; instead of casting them -off, in the fashion of the good, respectable world, he clings to them, -trying to help them, often in spite of themselves. - -Shelley believed in “free love,” and tried out his theories; and that -horrified Matthew Arnold, who said after reading the record, “One feels -sickened forever of the subject of irregular relationships.” Quite so; I -also have seen people try out this theory, and have felt sickened. But -consider the question, in which way will the race more quickly acquire -knowledge as to the rights and wrongs of sex--if men say honestly what -they believe, and tell frankly what they do, or if they preach one code -and practice another, and hide their sins in a dark corner? - -Shelley followed the former course; he was young, and knew no older -person who understood him and could give him wise advice. He believed -that if your heart was full of generosity and kindness and unselfishness -and a burning sense of justice, you could trust your desires, even those -of love. He tried it, and filled his life with pain and tragedy. And -seventy or eighty years later comes an eminent and well-established -critic, and in solemn tones protests that it is a crime against good -taste to give us these facts! Let poets follow the plan of Wordsworth, -who sowed his one wild oat in a foreign land, and put a heavy stone of -silence over the crop, and became a Tory laureate and pillar of -Churchianity! - -In the course of a hundred years we have got all the details of -Shelley’s two marriages; we know that when he eloped with Harriet -Westbrook, his first wife, he told her his ideas on the subject of love. -She professed to agree with him; but, of course, being a -sixteen-year-old child, that meant nothing. She was ignorant, and in no -way fitted to be the life companion of a great poet. When Shelley left -her he took care of her and the two children; her suicide two years -later was caused by the fact that she had an unhappy love affair with -another man, and was with child by this man. - -Here is a problem which will not be solved in our time, nor for a long -time to come: what is to be done when two people have loved, and one -ceases to love while the other goes on loving? For the present, our only -task is to get straight the facts about Shelley’s case; the central fact -being that he was damned for holding a revolutionary opinion and acting -on it. If all he had wanted was to indulge his passions and keep out of -trouble, the way was clear before him; the old Tory baronet, his father, -had explained with brutal frankness that he would never pardon a -marriage with a woman below Shelley’s rank in life, but he was willing -to assume responsibility for the support of any number of illegitimate -children the poet might wish to bring into existence. Such was the -moral code against which Shelley revolted; such was the world in which -he tried to live according to the principles of justice, freedom and -love. - -He died at the age of thirty, drowned in a storm while sailing a boat; -and with him perished the finest mind the English race had produced. I -make this statement deliberately, knowing the ridicule it will excite; -but I ask you, before you decide: take the men of genius of England one -by one, wipe out their lives after the age of thirty, and see what you -have left. Will you take Shakespeare? You will know him as the author of -“Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece” and “Love’s Labor Lost” and -“The Comedy of Errors,” and possibly “Richard III” and some sonnets. -Will you take Milton, with “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” and “Comus” -and “Lycidas,” and nothing else? Will you go to the Continent, and take -Goethe, who outlived Shelley? What would you think of Goethe if you had -only “Goetz” and “Werther” and a few lyric poems? - -Shelley was one among the sons of Rousseau who did not falter and turn -back to feudalism, Catholicism, or mysticism of any sort. He fixed his -eyes upon the future, and never wavered for a moment. He attacked class -privilege, not merely political, but industrial; and so he is the coming -poet of labor. Some day, and that not so far off, the strongholds of -class greed in Britain will be stormed, and when the liberated workers -take up the task of making a new culture, they will learn that there was -one inspired saint in their history who visioned that glad day, and gave -up everything in life to bring it nearer. They will honor Shelley by -making him their poet-laureate, and hailing him as the supreme glory of -English letters. - - - - -CHAPTER LIX - -THE STABLE-KEEPER’S SON - - -There is one more poet of this period with whom we must deal, and that -is John Keats. - -“And now you are going to have your hands full,” says Mrs. Ogi. -“Everyone is quite sure that Keats is one poet who cannot possibly be -accused of propaganda.” - -“Yes,” says her husband; “an amusing illustration of the extent to which -leisure-class criticism is able to take the guts out of art. Here is a -man whose life and personality constitute one of the greatest pieces of -radical propaganda in the history of English literature.” - -“At least the issue is fairly joined,” says Mrs. Ogi. “Go to it!” - -Let us first take the life and personality, and afterwards the writings. -John Keats was the son of a stable-keeper; and if you don’t know what -that meant to British snobbery there is no way I can convey it to you. -He did not attend a public school or a university; he did not learn to -walk and talk like an English gentleman. He was a simple, crude -fellow--a little chap not much over five feet high--and his social -experiences early taught him the lesson of extreme reserve; he held -himself aloof from everyone who might by any possibility spurn him -because of his low estate. Even with Shelley he would not forget that he -was dealing with the son of a baronet; everyone who surrounded Shelley -was trying to get money from him, and so Keats despised them and stayed -apart. - -“He was of the skeptical, republican school,” wrote one of his boyhood -intimates. “A fault finder with everything established.” And the first -poem which he got up the courage to show was a sonnet upon the release -of Leigh Hunt, who had been sent to prison for two years for writing an -article denouncing the prince regent. This poem was published in Hunt’s -paper, the “Examiner,” and the notorious editor became the friend and -champion of this twenty-year-old poet. - -Meantime Keats had been apprenticed to a surgeon, and became a dresser -in a hospital. He was called an apothecary’s apprentice; and so when he -published “Endymion,” the ruling-class critics of the day fell upon him. -The insolence of a low-bred fellow, imagining that he could write a poem -dealing with Greek mythology, the field above all others reserved to -university culture! “Back to your shop, John,” cried the “Quarterly -Review,” “back to plasters, pills and ointment boxes!” - -You see, it was not a literary issue at all; it was a political and -social issue. In “Blackwood’s” appeared a ferocious article, denouncing -not merely Keats, but the whole “cockney school,” as it was called; -this including Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Lamb, Shelley and Keats. “Cockney” -is the word by which the cultured gentry of England describe the vulgar -populace of London, who drop their h’s and talk about their “dyly -pyper.” The Tory reviewers were only incidentally men of letters; they -were young country squires amusing themselves with radical-baiting, they -were “athletes, outdoor men, sportsmen, salmon-fishers, deer-stalkers.” -They gathered at Ambrose’s and drank strong Scotch whiskey, and sang a -rollicking song of which the chorus ran: “Curse the people, blast the -people, damn the lower orders.” And when they attacked the “Cockney” -poets, it was not merely because of their verses, but because of their -clothing and their faces and even their complexions. “Pimply Hazlitt” -was their phrase for the greatest essayist of their time; they alleged -that both Hazlitt and Lamb drank gin--and gin was the drink for -washerwomen. - -Keats wrote “Endymion” at the age of twenty-one, and two years later he -suffered a hemorrhage, which meant the permanent breaking of his health. -He wrote his last lines at the age of twenty-four, and died early in his -twenty-fifth year. So you see he had not long to win his way against -these aristocratic rowdies. He was poor, and exquisitely sensitive; he -suffered under such brutal attacks, but he went on, and did the best -work he could, and said, very quietly: “I think I shall be among the -English poets after my death.” He realized the dignity of his calling, -and in his letters made clear that he did not take the ivory tower -attitude toward his art. “I am ambitious of doing the world some good,” -he wrote; “if I should be spared, that may be the work of future years.” -And in the course of his constant self-criticism and groping after new -methods and new powers, he traveled far from the naive sensuousness of -his early poems. His last work was a kind of prologue to “Hyperion,” in -which he discussed the poet and his function, and laid down the law that -only those can climb to the higher altar of art - - to whom the miseries of the world - Are misery and will not let them rest. - -How Keats felt on the subject of the class struggle was startlingly -indicated in the last days of his life. Dying of consumption, he took a -sea voyage to Italy, a journey which was a frightful strain upon him. He -landed in Naples; and Naples, as we know, is warm and beautiful, a place -for a poet to rest and dream in. But Keats would not dream; he smelt the -foul atmosphere of royalist intrigue and tyranny, and would not stay. A -friend took him to the theater, and he saw a gendarme standing on either -side of the stage, and took that for a symbol of censorship and -despotism, and would not sit out the performance! - -He died in Rome, and after his death Shelley wrote “Adonais,” a eulogy -of Keats and an attack on his detractors. Little by little his fame -began to spread, and everywhere it was recognized by the Tories as part -of the class struggle of the time. Sir Walter Scott had been pained by -the personal venom of Lockhart’s attack in “Blackwood’s”; but not enough -to cause him to withdraw his subsidy from the magazine, nor to prevent -his accepting Lockhart as his son-in-law and future biographer. A young -Englishman of radical sympathies defended Keats, and a friend of -Lockhart’s intervened in the argument, and forced a duel with Keats’ -defender, and killed him. That is the way literary questions were -settled in those days! - -When you fight for the fame of Keats you are asserting the idea that -genius is not a privilege of rank and wealth, but that the precious fire -smoulders also among the masses of the people, so that a stable-keeper’s -son, self-taught, may become one of his country’s greatest poets. Some -critics would accept that doctrine now; but not all, it would appear. -Here is Henry A. Beers, eminent scholar and professor of English -literature in Yale University, writing in the Yale “Review,” and saying: -“There _was_ something a little underbred about Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, -and even perhaps about Keats.” - -So much for the man; now for the poetry. The first thing to be got clear -is that it is _young_ poetry; it was all written before the age of -twenty-four. An ignorant boy, brought up in uncultured surroundings, -gropes his way out into the beauty and splendor of art. He is -enraptured, quivering with delight; nature to him is a perpetual -ecstasy, and words are jewels out of which he makes ravishment for the -senses. He has a marvelous gift of language, splendor like a flood of -moonlight flung out upon a mountain lake. He is in love, first with -nature, then with a young lady of eighteen, whom he describes by the -adjectives “stylish” and “ignorant”; nevertheless, he falls under her -spell, and after he is dead the young lady says that the kindest thing -people can do for him is to forget him. So little does a great poet’s -dream of feminine loveliness understand his true character and -greatness! We may be sure that if Keats had lived to marry Fanny Brawne -he would not have been happy, and would have realized only too quickly -that love is not merely a thrill of young sensibility, a rapturous -“Dream of St. Agnes,” but a grave problem requiring for its solution -both reason and conscience. - -The early poetry of Keats represents that stage of simple, instinctive, -unreflecting delight which we call by the name “Greek.” He chose Greek -themes and Greek imagery, and was never more Greek than when he tried to -be medieval. But the most significant thing about his work is the quick -maturing of it, even in those scant four years. A shadow of pain darkens -his being, the pangs of frustrated love wring cries of anguish from him; -and so we come to the second stage of the Greek spirit--the sense of -fate, of cruelty hidden at the heart of life, the terror and despair of -loveliness that knows it is doomed. Out of this mood came his greatest -poems, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the “Ode to a Nightingale,” the “Ode -to Melancholy.” If anyone denies that this poet is trying to teach us -something about life, if anyone thinks there is no message in this -infinite mournfulness, he has indeed a feeble apprehension. - -But let us, for the sake of argument, assume with the art for art’s -sakers that Keats was an esthete, and produced “pure beauty,” unalloyed -by any preaching. Would that mean that we had found some art which is -not propaganda? Assuredly not; and those who besiege us with contentious -examples--Keats, Gautier, Whistler, Hearn, etc.--simply show that they -have not understood what we mean by the thesis that all art is -propaganda. It is that, fundamentally, as an inescapable psychological -fact; and it does not cease to be that just because the artist preaches -enjoyment instead of effort. - -Use your common sense upon the proposition. When an artist takes the -trouble to embody his emotions in an art form, he does so because he -wishes to convey those emotions to other people; and insofar as he -succeeds in doing that, he will change the emotions of the other people, -and change their attitudes toward life and hence their actions. Is it -not just as much “teaching” to proclaim the supremacy of the sensuous -delights, as to proclaim the supremacy of reason, or of any system of -reasoned thought? When an artist composes a song on the theme, “Let us -eat, drink and be merry,” is he not setting forth a doctrine of life? If -not, why does he not go ahead and eat, drink and be merry? Why does he -trouble to give advice to you and me? When Keats writes, “A thing of -beauty is a joy forever,” it is perfectly plain that he is making -propaganda--and false propaganda, since standards of beauty are matters -of fashion, varying with every social change. He is making propaganda -when he declares that - - “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”--that is all - Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. - -Incidentally he is revealing to us that he has done very little thinking -about either truth or beauty, but is content to use abstract words -without meaning behind them. - -I have made clear, I hope, that I consider the art of Keats an -exquisitely beautiful art, fine and clean, and a perfectly proper art -for any lad to produce between the ages of twenty and twenty-four. There -is a stage of naïve trust in instinct through which youth passes, -especially poetical youth. But when this stage is continued into -maturity then it becomes something entirely different, neither fine, nor -clean, nor beautiful; it becomes stale self-indulgence, empty-minded -irresolution, dawdling decadence. All those things manifested themselves -in the later periods of Greek art, and they may be observed in our own -period of the breakdown of capitalism. - -The Tory party came in the end to realize that there was nothing really -dangerous in the poetry of this unhappy boy. Wise old Tories like Sir -Walter Scott had known it from the beginning, and young Tories like -Tennyson and Rossetti proclaimed it. Keats himself was no longer alive -to offend them with his Cockney manners, so they took up his writings, -and made them a bulwark of leisure-class culture in a stage of arrested -mentality, a resource of critics who wish to keep the young from -thinking about dangerous modern questions. But I venture the opinion -that if this Cockney stable-keeper’s son had grown to manhood, he would -have taken care of his own destiny, and seen to it that dilettanti -idlers and aesthetic decadents should find no comfort in his name and -example. His letters give abundant evidence of his capable mind, and -assure us that if he had been blessed with health he would have matured -into a thinker, even as John Milton, the great companion of his later -days. - -How much the lip-servers of Keats really understand him, was proven by a -peculiar incident which befell me in my own youth. Twenty-two years ago -I published “The Journal of Arthur Stirling,” a passionate defense of -the right of young poets to survive; and of course I sang enraptured -praise of Keats, and made him a text for excited tirades. At that time -there was a newspaper in New York called the “Evening Telegram,” owned -by James Gordon Bennett, a dissipated rowdy who might have been a blood -brother to the Tory crowd which conducted “Blackwood’s” and the -“Quarterly” a hundred years ago. This “Evening Telegram” published a -page of book reviews every Saturday, boasting it the most widely -circulated book page in the United States. Its opinion, therefore, was -of importance to a young writer hoping to live by his pen. It reviewed -“The Journal of Arthur Stirling,” saying that we might have sympathized -with the struggles of an unfortunate poet, had he not committed the -indiscretion of giving us samples of his writings, which enabled us to -be certain that he had no idea whatever of poetry. For example, said the -editor, here was one of Arthur Stirling’s effusions. Read it: - - Sit thee by the ingle, when - The sear faggot blazes bright, - Spirit of a winter’s night!-- - Sit thee there, and send abroad - With a mind self-overaw’d - Fancy, high-commission’d;--send her! - She has vassals to attend her; - She will bring, in spite of frost, - Beauties that the earth hath lost; - She will bring thee, all together, - All delights of summer weather; - All the buds and bells of May - From dewy sward or thorny spray; - All the heapèd Autumn’s wealth, - With a still, mysterious stealth; - She will mix these pleasures up, - Like three fit wines in a cup, - And thou shalt quaff it!-- - -Poor Arthur Stirling was supposed to be dead, so I asked a friend to -write to the editor of the “Evening Telegram” and point out to him that -he had misunderstood the book; the lines quoted were not submitted as -the work of Arthur Stirling, they happened to be the work of John Keats! -The editor published this reply with an easygoing comment; it made a -good joke, he said, but as a matter of fact he was justified in his -criticism, because the lines belonged to the very early work of Keats, -which was practically without poetic merit. My friend wrote again, -expressing surprise that the editor should make such a statement; for -this poem, entitled “Fancy,” belonged to the last two years of Keats’ -life, the wonderful years which produced all his greatest writings. -Palgrave, whose authority none would dispute, had included it in the -“Golden Treasury,” which contained only thirteen poems by Keats. The -editor of the “Evening Telegram” was unable to find space for that -letter! - - - - -CHAPTER LX - -THE PREDATORY ARTIST - - -Says Mrs. Ogi: “Here is Haldeman-Julius, discussing the thesis of your -book. He says: ‘You may say that because Balzac drew his characters -largely from the bourgeoisie he was conducting a subtle propaganda in -behalf of a class; or, in general, that he was a bourgeois author. But -such a view would be a travesty of literary criticism.’” - -Says Ogi: “That is what a great many people are going to call this book. -But let us see what we can make of Balzac.” - -At this point the mail arrives, and in it a letter to Mrs. Ogi, telling -some bad news about a friend. A look of deep distress comes upon her -face, and Ogi, watching her, is suddenly inspired. “Hold that -expression!” he cries. - -“What do you mean?” falters Mrs. Ogi. - -“It’s what I need for a story! I want to get all the details of it--the -trembling of your lips, the look in your eyes. Hold it now! It is copy!” - -“I think you are out of your mind,” says Mrs. Ogi; and her face assumes -a quite different expression. - -Says her husband: “I am the artist, and I feed on life. My fellow humans -suffer, and a voice within me cries: ‘Magnificent!’ Anguish writes -itself upon their features, and I whisper: ‘There is a great moment!’ -They are utterly abased, and I think: ‘Here is my chance of -immortality!’” - -Says Mrs. Ogi: “You are a monster! I have always known it.” - -“I am one among thousands of monsters, ranging the earth, competing -furiously for their prey. I explore the whole field of human experience; -I climb the mountain peaks, I ransack the starry spaces, I rummage the -dust-bins of history, collecting great significant moments, climaxes of -emotion, drama, suspense, thrill; when I find it, I slap my knee, like -Thackeray writing the scene of Becky Sharp caught in adultery, and -exclaiming: ‘There is a stroke of genius!’ I see tears falling, and I -think: ‘That will sell!’ Out of that cry of despair I shall make a -feast! From this tale of tragedy I shall build a new house! Upon this -heap of anguish I shall leap to fame! I shall enlarge my ego, expand in -the admiration of my fellow-men, enjoying dominion over their emotions -and their thoughts. Also, of course, I shall not forget my fellow-women, -their thrills and ecstasies; I shall have gorgeous apartments, furnished -with barbaric splendor, to which will come brilliant and fascinating -admirers--” - -Says Mrs. Ogi: “Is this a dream you want me to psychoanalyze?” - -“No,” says her husband, “it is simply the soul of Balzac which I am -putting before you: the most perfect type of the predatory artist that -has existed in human history; the art for art’s sake ideal incarnate; -genius divorced from conscience, save only as applied to the art work -itself--the inexorable duty of portraying the utmost conceivable energy, -fury, splendor, terror, sublimity, melodrama, pity, elegance, greed, -horror, cruelty, anguish, beauty, passion, worship, longing, -wickedness, glory, frenzy, majesty and delight.” - -This predatory artist, living in a predatory world, and portraying -predatory emotions, does not seem to us a propagandist, simply because -of the complete identity which exists between him and the thing he -portrays. It is the world which came into existence after the French -revolution, and has prevailed ever since. The masses made the -revolution, hoping to profit from it; but the merchants and bankers and -lawyers took over the power. Alone, this class in France could not have -succeeded; but they had the help of England--it is the triumph of -British gold, taking charge of the continent and making it over in the -image of the “shop-keeper”: the bourgeois world, a society in which -everybody seeks money, and having obtained it, spends it upon the -getting of more money, or upon the expansion of his personality through -the power of money to dominate and impress other men. Those who succeed -enjoy, while those who fail are trampled; such is the “Comédie Humaine,” -as Balzac exhibits it in a total of eighty-five works of prose fiction, -not counting dramas, essays and reviews. - -He was born of a bourgeois family and educated for a lawyer. But he -wanted to write, and because his family would not support him, he went -away and starved most hideously in a garret. The hunger which he there -acquired was not merely of the stomach and the senses, but of the -intellect and soul. He became a ferocious, almost an insane worker. He -was greedy for facts, and never forgot anything; he acquired a whole -universe of detail, names, places, technical terms, the appearances of -persons and things, human characteristics, anecdotes, conversations. He -wove these into his stories, he constructed vast panoramas of French -society, colossal processions marching past without end. The bulk of his -work is so enormous that you may spend your lifetime reading Balzac, -exploring the lives of his two or three thousand characters. - -What will you know when you get through? You will know French bourgeois -civilization, high and low, rich and poor, good and evil. You will -observe the rich growing richer and the poor growing poorer; you will -discover the greedy devouring the good and patient and honest--and then -coming to ruin through their own insensate desires. It is brilliant, -vivid, as real as genius can make it, and at first you are enthralled. -How marvelous, to learn about the world without the trouble of going -into it! But after you have read for a month or two, another feeling -steals over you, a feeling of familiarity: you know all this, why read -any more? Life is odious and cruel, it makes you ill; your one thought -becomes, can anything be done about it? Is there any remedy? And from -that moment you are done with Balzac. - -For, so far as this “Comédie Humaine” is concerned, there is no remedy. -Balzac was so much a part of his own corrupt age that he could not have -conceived of a co-operative world. He saw the class struggle, of -course--and took his stand on the side of his money. A passionate Tory, -he referred to “the two eternal truths, the monarchy and the Catholic -church.” His attitude to politics was summed up in the formula that the -people must be kept “under the most powerful yoke possible.” You find in -his novels tremendous loads of philosophic and scientific learning, -practically all of it utter trash. Henry James disposes of him in the -sentence: “He was incapable of a lucid reflexion.” The nearest approach -to a definite proposition to be got out of his writings is the notion -that desire, imagination and intellect are the destroyers of life. Of -course, if that be true, civilization is doomed, and it is a waste of -time to seek moral codes or understanding, or even to produce art. - -Such a view was, of course, simply the reflex of the predatory artist’s -own greed for money, luxury, fame and power. He lived alternately for -art and Mammon. He would shut himself up alone in a secret place and -write for weeks, even months, without seeing anyone. He would start work -at midnight, clad in a white Benedictine robe, with a black skull-cap, -by the light of a dozen candles, and under the stimulus of many pots of -coffee. Having thus completed a masterpiece, he would emerge to receive -the applause of Paris, carrying a cane with an enormous jeweled head. -Having made another fortune and paid a small part of what he called his -“floating debt,” he would plunge into the wholesale purchasing of silks -and satins and velvets, furniture and carpets and tapestries and jewels -and “objects of art,” vast store-rooms full of that junk whereby the -bourgeois world sets forth the emptiness of its mind and the futility of -its aims. Lacking money enough, his maniac imagination would evolve new -schemes--book publishing, paper manufacturing, a journal, a secret -society, silver mines in Sardinia, the buried treasure of Toussaint -l’Ouverture, each of which he was sure was going to turn him into a -millionaire overnight. - -Balzac gives prominence to that type of men whom the French call -“careerists”; that is to say, men who set out to make their fortune, at -any cost of honor, decency and fair play. Balzac admired such men--for -the simple reason that he himself was that kind. In his later years he -met a wealthy Polish lady, Madame Hanska, who became his mistress; -writing to his sister about it, he set forth what this meant to him, and -his language was such as a “confidence man” would use, writing to a -woman confederate. The alliance, he wrote, would give him access to the -great world, and “opportunity for domination.” - -Is the work of such a man propaganda? If you accept the common dogma -that blind egotistical instinct, and the portrayal and glorification -thereof, constitute art, while the effort to understand life, and to -reconstruct it into a thing of order and sense and dignity, is -propaganda--why then undoubtedly the “Comédie Humaine” of Honoré de -Balzac is pure and unadulterated art. If, on the other hand, you admit -my contention that a man who is born into a money-ravenous world, and -who absorbs its poisoned atmosphere, and sets himself to the task of -portraying it, not merely as real and inevitable, but as glorious, -magnificent, fascinating, sublime--if you admit with me that such a man -is a propagandist, why then you must reconcile yourself to enduring the -opposition of all orthodox literary critics. - - - - -CHAPTER LXI - -THE OLD COMMUNARD - - -Victor Hugo was born in 1802, three years later than Balzac. He grew up -in the same world, but was not satisfied to contemplate its diseases; he -sought remedies, and became a convert to revolutionary ideals, and so -all critics agree that his work is marred by propaganda. He lived to be -eighty-three years old, and went on writing and working to the very end, -so that the story of his life carries us through practically the whole -of the nineteenth century. We shall follow it, and then come back and -retrace parts of the same story in the lives of other artists, French, -German, British and American. - -Hugo’s father was a revolutionary soldier who rose to be a general in -Napoleon’s army. As a little boy the poet followed the armies from place -to place in Switzerland, Italy and Spain. His mother was a Royalist, and -the boy had an old Catholic priest for a tutor, and was taught the old -dogmas, literary as well as religious and political. His conversion into -a revolutionist was not completed until the age of forty-six. Having -been brought about by contact with daily events, this conversion was of -tremendous influence upon the thought of Europe. - -He was a child of genius, and his prodigious activity began early. We -find him composing a tragedy at the age of fourteen, and at the age of -seventeen publishing a journal with the title of the “Literary -Conservator.” He gets married upon a pension of a thousand francs, -conferred upon him by King Louis XVIII, who has been put upon the throne -to preserve Catholic reaction. Then comes King Charles X, who makes him -a knight of the Legion of Honor at the age of twenty-three. But -gradually the young poet’s “throne and altar stuff” begins to shown -signs of independent thought; he composes a play in which Richelieu is -portrayed as master of his king, and this is considered unsuitable for -such ticklish times; the censor bars it, and the young poet’s personal -intercession with the king does not avail. - -All this time, you understand, French art is still under the sway of the -so-called “classical” ideals of Voltaire and Racine; tragic dramatists -have to obey the “three unities,” or they cannot get produced. But by -1830 the French people are sick of reaction, and ready to make their -revolution again. As part of the change comes a surge of “romanticism” -in the arts. Shakespeare is played in Paris for the first time; and -Victor Hugo publishes a drama on the theme of Cromwell, with a preface -in which he commits the blasphemy of declaring that Racine is “not a -dramatist”! In the midst of the new revolution he produces a romantic -play, “Hernani,” dealing with a revolutionary Spaniard of the Byronic -type, who declaims all over the stage and dies sublimely. - -The production of this play resulted in one continuous riot for -forty-five nights. The leading lady protested, the hired claque -revolted; so Victor Hugo called for help to the young artists of the -studios, and they poured out of Montmartre and took possession of the -theater. In those days the first purpose of romantic youth was to “shock -the bourgeois” by strange costumes. Here was Théophile Gautier, nineteen -years old, with long locks hanging over his shoulders, a scarlet satin -waistcoat, pale sea-green trousers seamed with black, and a gray -overcoat lined with green satin. Night after night the rival factions -shouted and raged as long as the play lasted. All this in order to gain -for dramatists the right to show more than one scene in a play, and more -than twenty-four hours of their hero’s life! - -Victor Hugo also wrote fiction and prose, and in every field he became -the new sun of France. But he was not content with literary laurels; he -went on seeking a remedy for the bourgeois disease. He espoused the -cause of a poor workingman, who, having been tortured in prison, had -killed the governor of the prison. The young poet came upon a novel -remedy--to sow the Bible all over France. “Let there be a Bible in every -peasant’s hut.” Here in America the Gideonites have tried out the idea, -sowing a Bible in every hotel room--but for some reason there are more -crimes of violence in the United States than ever before in any -civilized country! - -The revolution of 1830 brought in a new king, Louis-Philippe, the ideal -bourgeois monarch, an amiable gentleman who stayed at home with his wife -and let the bankers and business men run the country. This king made -Victor Hugo into a peer of France. But there was a new revolutionary -outburst preparing, and in 1848 the bourgeois king was dethroned, and -Victor Hugo was elected deputy to the new parliament, styling himself a -“moderate Republican.” The French people at this time were in the same -position as the American people at present; that is, they believed what -they were told, and were ready to accept any tinseled circus-performer -as a statesman. They chose for their president a wretched creature who -happened to be a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, and promised a return of -all the old glories of France. - -It took only a year of his government for Victor Hugo to realize that -the one hope for progress lay in the program of the radicals. His two -grown sons were thrown into jail for editing a paper attacking the -policies of Louis Napoleon; and the father espoused the ideas of the old -revolution, “the rights of man.” Egged on by the terrified financiers, -Louis Napoleon overthrew the parliament and had himself made emperor. -Victor Hugo sought to rouse the people, barricades were raised in the -streets, and hundreds were shot down with cannon. The poet with great -difficulty made his escape to Brussels, from which city he denounced the -usurper--“Napoleon the Little” as he called him--with the result that -the Catholic government of Belgium passed a law expelling him. - -He fled to the channel island of Jersey, where he wrote a book of poems -called “The Chastisements,” one of the most terrific pieces of -denunciation in all the world’s literature. Shortly after this the -bourgeois government of England combined with the bourgeois government -of France to drive Russia out of the Crimea; there was a great war, and -the people of Jersey objected to the poet’s attacks on the French -emperor; they mobbed his home, and he had to flee to the neighboring -island of Guernsey, where he settled down to the true task of a great -artist, to reform the world by changing the ideals of the coming -generations. For nineteen years he stayed in exile, until “Napoleon the -Little” brought himself to ruin, and his country along with him. In the -meantime Victor Hugo had published several volumes of marvelous poetry, -and finally, after ten years’ labor, his masterpiece of fiction, “Les -Misérables,” which appeared simultaneously in eight capitals of the -world, and brought its author the sum of four hundred thousand francs. - -Into this novel Hugo poured all his passionate devotion to liberty, -equality and fraternity; likewise his blazing hatred of cruelty and -tyranny. He tells the story of an escaped convict who reforms and makes -a success of his life, but is pursued by the police and dragged back to -prison. Incidentally the poet gives us a vast picture of the France of -his own time, and the lives and struggles of the proletariat. The figure -of Jean Valjean is one of the great achievements of the human -imagination, and his story is a treasure of the revolutionary movement -in every modern land. - -“Napoleon the Little” led his country to war with Germany and was -overwhelmingly crushed. Hugo came home in this crisis, and took part in -the defense of Paris. Then came the terrible uprising of the starved and -tortured masses, the Paris Commune. By this time the bourgeois savages -had machine-guns, so that they could wipe out wholesale the idealism and -faith of the people; they stood some fifty thousand workers, men, women -and children, against the walls of Paris and shot them down in cold -blood. Victor Hugo defended these Communards, and once more had to flee -for his life. - -After the peace with Germany, France was left a republic, and her great -poet returned to live with his grandchildren, to labor for the working -classes, and to pour out floods of eloquence in behalf of his social -ideals. New movements arose, and the old man heard that he was -theatrical, bombastic, unreal. All that is true to a considerable -extent; for Hugo is like Shelley, having the defects of his great -qualities. When the inspiration does not come to him, he learns to -imitate it; he acquires mannerisms, he adopts poses. Following Milton’s -suggestion of making an art work of his life, he sets his personality up -as an embodiment of revolutionary idealism, he makes himself into a -legend, a living monument, a literary shrine, one might say a literary -cathedral. It is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, and we -often take that step with Victor Hugo. But the masses of the people knew -that the core of his being was a passionate devotion to liberty and -justice; therefore they took him to their hearts, and his life is so -blended with theirs that Victor Hugo and revolutionary France are two -phrases with one meaning. - - - - -CHAPTER LXII - -TYGER, TYGER! - - -What would Victor Hugo have been if he had had no social conscience? -What would the romantic movement have amounted to if it had confined -itself to the field of art? These questions are answered for us by -Théophile Gautier. - -We have seen him at the age of nineteen taking part in the battle of -“Hernani” in his scarlet satin waistcoat; we see him at the same age -leading the art students in mocking dances about a bust of Racine in a -public square of Paris. After that we see him for forty-two years -diligently following the art for art’s sake formula. He declares that he -has no religion, no politics; he has no concern with any moral or -intellectual question, he is purely and simply an artist, devoting -himself with passionate fervor to the production of works of pure -beauty. His fastidiousness is shown by the law he lays down, that a -young artist should write not less than fifty thousand verses for -practice before he writes one verse to be published. - -And what is the content of this art? Gautier believes in one thing, the -human body. He believes in it, not as an instrument of the mind, a house -of the spirit, but as a thing in itself, to be fed and pampered and -perfumed, and clad in silks and satins, and taken out to engage in -sexual adventures. The pretensions of art for art’s sake turn out to be -buncombe; the reality of the matter is art for orgy’s sake. - -At the age of twenty-four Gautier published a novel, “Mademoiselle de -Maupin,” which might be described as Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” -rewritten by the devil. A young lady of beauty and fashion goes -wandering in the costume of a man, and this affords endless -possibilities of sexual titillation; women fall in love with her, -thinking she is a man, and men fall in love with her by instinct, as it -were; the orgies thus postponed are especially thrilling when they -finally occur. - -Some men have written this kind of depravity at twenty-four, and learned -something better as they grew older; but Gautier learned absolutely -nothing. To the end of his long life he continued to produce novels and -tales of which the sole purpose is to glorify the orgy, to make it -romantic and thrilling by the elaborate squandering of wealth, the -heaping mountain high of the apparatus of luxury. The device fails, for -the simple reason that the senses are limited. When you are hungry a -dinner interests you, but ten thousand dinners appall; and the same -thing applies to coition. The men and women in these orgies remind us of -people in a besieged castle, living in deadly terror of an enemy who -never fails to get them in the end. The French have made a word for that -victorious enemy: _ennui_. - -It should hardly need to be said that the art of Théophile Gautier is a -leisure-class art. These orgies are possible only in a slave -civilization; they presuppose the fact that the masses shall toil to -heap up wealth for a privileged few to destroy in a night of riot. At -the very opening of “Mademoiselle de Maupin” the author portrays his -hero, living at ease with a valet to serve him, and nothing to do but be -discontented. “My idle passions growl dully in my heart, and prey upon -themselves for lack of other food.” He is consumed with imaginings--all, -needless to say, having to do with pleasures which he does not mean to -earn. “I wait for the heavens to open, and an angel to descend with a -revelation to me, for a revolution to break out and a throne to be given -me, for one of Raphael’s virgins to leave the canvas and come to embrace -me, for relations, whom I do not possess, to die and leave me what will -enable me to sail my fancy on a river of gold,” etc. - -His dream finally takes the form of a woman, and he spends many pages in -detailing her qualities. Needless to say, she belongs to the rioting -classes. “I consider beauty a diamond which should be mounted and set in -gold. I cannot imagine a beautiful woman without a carriage, horses, -serving-men, and all that belongs to an income of a hundred thousand a -year; there is harmony between beauty and wealth.” Of course this -dream-woman must be entirely subject to the sensual desires of man. “I -consider woman, after the manner of the ancients, as a beautiful slave -designed for our pleasure.” - -Victor Hugo was exiled by Louis Napoleon; while Gautier, having “no -political opinions,” remained in Paris and accepted financial favors -from the tyrant. What he considered his master work was published at the -age of forty-five, a volume of verse whose title explains its character, -“Enamels and Cameos.” The art of poetry has become identical with that -of the goldsmith; words are tiny jewels, fitted together with precise -and meticulous care. Words have beauty, quite apart from their meaning, -and the proper study for mankind is the dictionary. Poetry should have -neither feeling nor ideas; while as for the subject, the more unlikely -and unsuitable it is, the greater the triumph of the poet. This is not -an effort to caricature Gautier’s doctrine, it is his own statement, the -theme of one of his poems. But on no account are you to take this poem -for propaganda! - -You see how the proposition demonstrates its own absurdity. Théophile -Gautier was during his entire lifetime a fanatical preacher, a -propagandist of sensuality and materialism, a glorified barber and -tailor, a publicity man for the Association of Merchants of Tapestries, -Furniture and Jewelry. When he writes a poem on the subject of a -rose-colored dress, he asks you to believe that he is really interested -in the rose-colored dress, but you may be sure that he is no such fool; -he writes about the rose-colored dress as an act of social defiance. He -says: There are imbeciles in the world who believe in religion, in moral -sense, in virtue, self-restraint and idealism, subjects which bore me to -extinction; in order to show my contempt for such imbeciles, I proceed -to prove that the greatest poem in the world can be written on a -rose-colored dress or on a roof, or on my watch, or on smoke, or on -whatever unlikely subject crosses my mind; I consecrate myself to this -task, I become a moral anti-moralist, a propagandist of no-propaganda. - -What are the products of nature bearing most resemblance to enamels and -cameos? They are certain kinds of insects, beautiful, hard, shiny, -brilliantly colored, repulsive, cruel, and poisonous. Such is the art of -Théophile Gautier and his successors, who have made French literature a -curse for a hundred years. This literature possesses prestige because of -its perfection of form; therefore it is important to get clear in our -minds the fact that the ability to fit words together in intricate -patterns is a thing ranking very low in the scale of human faculties. -The feats of the art-for-art-sakers are precisely as important as those -of the man on the stage who balances three billiard-balls on the end of -his nose. The piano-gymnast who leaped to world fame by his ability to -wiggle his fingers more rapidly than any other living man has been -definitely put out of date by the mechanical piano-player; and some day -mankind will adopt a universal language, and forget all the enamels and -cameos in the old useless tongues. - -Get it clear in your mind that external beauty is entirely compatible -with deadly cruelty of intellect and spirit. A tiger is a marvelous -product, from the esthetic point of view, and offers a superb theme to -poets, as William Blake has shown us. “Tyger, tyger, burning -bright”--but who wants this gold-striped glory in his garden? In exactly -the same way, there is a mass of what is called literature, possessing -the graces of form--music and glamor, elegance, passion, energy--and -using all these virtues, precisely as the tiger uses his teeth and -claws, to rend and destroy human life. Literary criticism which fails to -take account of such vicious qualities in art works is just exactly as -sensible and trustworthy as the merchant who would sell you a _cobra de -capello_, with a gorgeous black and white striped hood, for a boudoir -ornament and pet. - - - - -CHAPTER LXIII - -THE CHILD OF HIS AGE - - -The middle of the nineteenth century was a hard time for generous-minded -and idealistic poets in France. The great revolution had failed, it -failed again in 1830 and in 1848, and cruelty and greed and corruption -seemed to be the final destiny of civilization. A few strong spirits -kept the faith, but the weaker ones drifted away and drowned their -sorrows in debauchery and drink. - -Alfred de Musset was one of these latter, a beautiful and charming -youth, gifted with all the graces of life and with the magic fire of -genius. He has told his own sad story in a book, “The Confessions of a -Child of His Age.” Most of the strong and healthy men of France had been -killed off in the Napoleonic wars, and the new generation were the -children of weaklings. They drifted aimlessly, having luxury but no -duties, and no vision or ideal to inspire them. - -Musset was born in 1810, of a well-to-do and cultured family. He was -impressionable, sensitive, and in the beginning plunged with ardor into -the poetical movement headed by Hugo. But soon he lost interest, and -gave himself to amorous adventures and to mournful self-pity, an elegant -young Byron of the boulevards. It was a time when a poet could make a -national reputation by comparing the moon above a church-steeple to a -dot on the letter i. Musset, from the beginning to the end of his short -life, had no experience of any sort except sexuality, alcohol, and the -poetry of men who likewise had no other experience. - -At the age of twenty-three he met George Sand, a woman of thirty who had -run away from her family and was supporting herself as a free-lance -novelist. She carried the young poet off to Italy, but their dream of -love broke up in a quarrel, and poor Musset had brain fever, and came -home, and sat all day in his room for four months, so his brother tells -us, doing nothing but crying, except when he played chess. But at the -end of the four months he went out and found another love, and then -another and another. Any woman would do, according to his philosophy, -poetically set forth in an exquisite verse: “What matters the flagon, -provided one is drunk?” - -The young poet was welcomed to the French Academy, but was not very -faithful to his duties. Said one of the members: “Musset absents himself -too much.” To which the answer was: “Musset absinthes himself too much.” -He was an old roué at the age of thirty, and there was nothing left but -to die. Long afterwards George Sand published a novel in which she told -the intimate details of their love affair; and that, of course, was fine -copy, and a tremendous thrill. The title of the novel was “She and He,” -and Musset’s brother came back with a book entitled “He and She.” It -appears that George Sand had been unfaithful to Musset in the midst of -their amour; but we cannot get up much sympathy for the unhappy “child -of his age.” His brother delicately tells us how, in the days of his -beautiful youth, lying in bed at night, the young poet would impart shy -confidences about his amorous triumphs. He was seducing other men’s -wives and daughters and sisters, and was apparently not concerning -himself with any brain fevers these men might have, or with any tears of -grief they might shed in between their games of chess. - -Two of the most beautiful and eloquent of Musset’s poems are entitled, -respectively, “A Night of May” and “A Night of December.” Each of them -portrays the poet as falling sorrowfully out of love. The world had -naturally assumed that the two poems related to the same mistress; but -the poet’s brother revealed that the two poems had a different “motive,” -and also that there was another “motive” in between the May “motive” and -the December “motive.” And there were many other “motives”--since -numbers of elegant ladies in Paris aspired to become the theme of one of -the “Nights” of this delicate if drunken genius. We shall see a long -string of poets of this sort for a hundred years in France--and some, -alas! in England and America. The lesson of their lives is always the -same--that poetry without social vision and moral backbone is merely a -snare for the human spirit. - - - - -CHAPTER LXIV - -PRAYER IN ADULTERY - - -The problem of the relationship of art to morality is most interestingly -illustrated by the case of George Sand. This woman-writer was -promiscuous, and she was predatory, in the sense that she turned her -adventures into copy and sold them in the market. But she had a mind, -and she used it to investigate all the new ideas of her time. She was -moved, not merely by her own desire for pleasure, but by the sufferings -and strivings of her fellow human beings. She poured all these things -into her books, and made herself one of the civilizing forces of her -time. - -She was born in 1804 and raised in a convent. Married at the age of -eighteen, and being unhappy, she kicked over the traces and became a -Bohemian adventurer, wearing trousers, proclaiming the rights of -passion, taking to herself one conspicuous lover after another, and -then putting them into books for the support of herself and her two -children. She was the founder of what we might call emotional feminism. -She was religious in a sentimental way, though a vigorous anti-clerical; -she became converted to Socialism, worked ardently for social reform, -and published many long novels in its support. - -George Sand had a romantic ancestry, of which she did not fail to make -literary use. On her father’s side she was descended from a royal -bastard. Her mother had been a camp follower in the army of Napoleon, “a -child of the old pavements of Paris.” Thus the novelist united in one -person the aristocratic and the proletarian impulses. A large percentage -of her collected ancestors were illegitimate, so she came honestly by -her free love ideas. On the other hand, she was a very respectable, -hard-working bourgeois woman, who preached interminably on virtue, and -paid all her debts, and got good prices for her manuscripts--things -which were regarded as extremely bad taste by the art-world of her time. - -France had had innumerable aristocratic ladies who had loved -promiscuously, proceeding from a king to a duke, and from a duke to an -abbé or a monseigneur. There had been women who had risen from the lower -classes by becoming the mistresses of noblemen. But here was a brand-new -phenomenon, a woman who went out and faced the world “on her own,” and -instead of taking the money of the men she loved, proceeded to earn the -money by writing about the men! It was an enormous scandal, and at the -same time an enormous literary success, for these were pot-boilers of -genius, full of eloquence and fire. Also they were full of ideas on a -hundred subjects, elementary instruction such as ladies on the women’s -pages of our Sunday supplements give to correspondents. But American -readers find it a little hard to understand the fusion of piety and -sexuality which George Sand pours into her romantic novels. “Oh, my dear -Octave,” writes an adulterous wife to her lover, “never shall we pass a -night together without kneeling and praying for Jacques!” It is just a -little shocking to us to learn that this Jacques is the husband whom the -pair are deceiving! - -George Sand lived like a healthy bourgeoise to the age of seventy-two; -in her later years she retired to the country, and the fires of free -love died, and she wrote novels about the peasants in her neighborhood. -They are very human and simple, and make standard reading for French -courses in American high schools. It is interesting to compare them with -the old-style handling of the peasants in French art. Gone are the fancy -pictures of beautiful young shepherds and shepherdesses in silks and -satins and high-heeled slippers. Now for the first time a French artist -finds it worth while to go out among the working people of the fields, -and observe the external details of their lives, and at least try to -imagine their feelings. We note the same thing happening also in -pictorial art; instead of the elegancies of Fragonard, we now have a -peasant painter, Millet, peasant born and peasant reared, making real -pictures full of real proletarian feeling. That much as least the -revolution has accomplished! - - - - -CHAPTER LXV - -MAIN STREET IN FRANCE - - -“Eighteen years ago,” says Ogi, “a lanky, red-headed youth from -Minnesota ran away from Yale University and showed up at Helicon Hall to -stoke our furnace. We were never entirely sure about the furnace, but we -could always count upon lively arguments on the literary side of our -four-sided fireplace. Now this youth has grown up and added a new phrase -to the American language--” - -“‘Main Street’ or ‘Babbitt’?” says Mrs. Ogi. - -“Recall the story of ‘Main Street.’ A young girl marries a doctor and -lives with him in one of the desolate, cultureless villages of the -Northwest. The novel is a long one, and the method that of minute -detail; we learn everything about the little place and the people in it, -their empty, sordid lives, the utter absence of vision. The girl is -lonely and restless, she craves something beautiful and inspiring. She -has luxurious tastes, and chafes at having to economize. She meets a -handsome, attractive young man, and after many agonies of soul she takes -him as her lover. In the end he leaves her; and after being heart-broken -for a while she takes another lover. He also deserts her, and she is -ill, in debt, and finally takes poison, and her husband, the doctor, -dies of grief--” - -“Hold on,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you must have been reading a sequel to ‘Main -Street.’ I don’t remember any of those things happening. Carol Kennicott -thought she loved the other man, but she didn’t deceive her husband, she -held herself back--” - -“It is another of my poor jokes,” says Ogi. “This is not the story of -‘Main Street,’ but of a famous French classic, ‘Madame Bovary’ by -Gustave Flaubert. You see, the themes of the two novels are identical, -and so is the method; the difference lies in the temperaments of two -races. The young man from Sauk Centre and the young man from Rouen alike -call themselves “realists”; but one proceeds upon the assumption that it -is possible to restrain passion, and on the whole, better to try, while -the other proceeds upon the assumption that it is impossible to restrain -passion, and that if you pretend to do it, you are a Puritan, and what -is worse, a hypocrite. So at the end of Carol Kennicott’s story we find -her still trying to introduce a little light into Gopher Prairie, while -Emma Bovary is dead and the town of Yonville-l’Abbaye is exactly what it -was before.” - -Flaubert is by many considered the greatest of all realists. He made his -religion out of a theory of style; and he was absolutely certain that -“Madame Bovary” was the final product of the “objective” method. He had -coldly observed reality, and no predisposition had been allowed to -interfere. My purpose in mixing him up with Main Street, Gopher Prairie, -Minn., is to bring out the contention that “Madame Bovary” is as -subjective as a lyric; from first to last an expression of its author’s -personal, or shall we say racial conviction, that the sexual impulse -dominates the lives of men and women. The great classic of realism is a -legal brief, in which every detail has been carefully selected and -arranged, and every sentence composed for the purpose of proving this -argument. We have once more the old Greek tragedy with its lurking -Nemesis; only this time the lurking-place is in the genital glands. - -Flaubert was born in 1821, so that he was a youngster to the group of -writers we have been considering: Balzac, Hugo, Gautier, George Sand. He -was a tall, lanky, provincial fellow, with drooping mustaches, looking -like a dragoon. He was epileptic and hysterical, and suffered agonies of -melancholy, for the most part over problems of style. He would pace the -floor all night in torment seeking for a missing word; he records that -he spent eight unhappy days in avoiding one dissonance. The action of -all his life which he repented most was a phrase in “Madame Bovary.” -Translated literally, this phrase is “a crown of flowers of -orange-tree”; the unforgivable sin lying in the two “ofs.” - -We are told that Flaubert originated a formula of art which Gautier -cherished all the rest of his life: “The form is the parent of the -idea.” In other words, you first think of a beautiful way to say -something, and then you think of something to say which can be said in -that way. It would be impossible for art perversity to go farther; and -you have only to consider “Madame Bovary” to realize how little Flaubert -followed his own theory. He did not first think of a prose work in two -parts, the first part having nine chapters and the second part fifteen; -what he thought of was the French formula, locating the seat of Nemesis -in the genital glands. The secret of his masterpiece is the fact that he -chose to illustrate this formula by means of characters which he knew -intimately and loved with all the power of his instinctive being. That -is the real basis of the greatness of “Madame Bovary”; the fact that -with all her faults and all her follies her creator loved her, and -believed in her, and made her real in every breath she drew and in every -word she uttered. The important idea which he put across is that we are -all of us, good or bad, wise or foolish, stupid or clever, passengers on -the same ship of life, tossed by the same storms, and bound for the same -unknown harbor. - -That is the propaganda which makes the greatness of every work of -realism, if it has greatness. And so we can understand the failure of -this unhappy genius in his other writings. He went back to ancient -Carthage, and following his rigid art theories, he laboriously -accumulated knowledge of detail, and wrote what he meant to be another -masterpiece of realism, “Salammbô.” He creates for us a whole gallery of -Carthaginian characters; but he doesn’t know these characters, he -doesn’t love them, he doesn’t make us know them or love them--and his -would-be masterpiece is therefore as lifeless as any gallery of wax -works. We read it with curiosity because of the historical detail, the -pictures of a far-off and cruel civilization; but we seldom finish it, -and we forget everything but what a history-book might have given us. - - - - -CHAPTER LXVI - -THE MATTRESS GRAVE - - -We have paid a long visit to France, and must now cross the Rhine and -see what is happening in Germany. It is interesting to note that the two -artists whom we are about to study are men who had to flee from Germany -and spend a considerable part of their lives as political exiles in -Paris. - -Heinrich Heine was born in 1799, the same year as Balzac. He was a Jew, -and it was a time when the Jews in Frankfort were penned up in a filthy -ghetto and subjected to insults and outrages; the “Jew-grief” was one of -the deep elements of this great poet’s soul. Another element was the -shame of the “poor relation”; he had a rich uncle, a millionaire banker -in the bourgeois city of Hamburg, who took the youthful genius into his -office at the age of nineteen, and soon afterwards kicked him out, -telling him that he was “a fool.” Among other follies, the young genius -had fallen in love with the rich banker’s daughter, and she toyed with -him for a while, and then married respectably, and gave the poet’s heart -a wound from which it never recovered. - -To get rid of him the uncle set him to studying law; but he made a poor -student and a worse lawyer. In order to be allowed to practice he had to -be baptized as a Christian; this doesn’t really do one any harm, but it -caused shame to Heine throughout his life. He had no real religion, -being a child of Voltaire, a rebel, and in due course a revolutionist. -He was a poet, a maker of exquisite verses, full of unutterable -tenderness. Also he was a lover; he wandered here and there with his -broken heart, trying many casual loves, and paying for his adventures a -frightful penalty, as will appear. - -We are back in the days of the “Holy Alliance,” and all the little -princelings of Germany are holding the thoughts of their subjects in a -vise. Heine put satirical and skeptical ideas into rhyme; he had a -bitter wit, and his words flew all over Germany, and the Hohenzollerns -of Prussia not merely suppressed one book, they paid him the compliment -of prohibiting everything he might write. “Put a sword on my coffin,” he -said, in one of his stanzas, “for I have been a soldier in the war for -the liberation of humanity.” The revolution of 1830 came in France, and -Heine was deeply stirred, and hoped for something to happen in Germany. -But he had to wait a long time, nearly a hundred years; then, strange -whim of history, three million American boys had to cross the ocean to -win the political battle of this German-Jewish rebel! - -Heine could stand Germany no longer, and went to live in Paris, where he -was welcomed by the whole romantic school. He wrote letters, articles -and verses, which went back to Germany and helped carry on the war for -freedom. His genius and wit were such that all the efforts to bar his -books only promoted their circulation. Fate played a queer prank upon -the Prussian Junkerdom--their most popular sentimental songs, which they -know by heart and sing on all possible occasions, were written by a -rebel exile whom they had chased about the streets in a Judenhetze; the -same man who wrote the terrible stanzas of “The Silesian Weavers,” -picturing the starving wretches sitting in their huts and weaving a -three-fold curse, against God, King and Fatherland--“Old Germany, we -weave thy shroud--we weave, we weave!” - -His was a strange, complex nature, with many contradictory qualities. He -was called “the German Aristophanes.” He met in the end a ghastly fate; -a spinal disease, the penalty of his casual loves, slowly ate him up, -and for years he lay on what he called “a mattress grave.” First he -could scarcely walk, then he could scarcely see, and all the time he -suffered hideously. But his mind lasted to the end, and he saw all -things clearly, including his own grim fate. “The Great Author of the -Universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, wished to show the petty, earthly, -so-called German Aristophanes that his mightiest sarcasms are but -feeble banter compared with His, and how immeasurably He excels me in -humor and in colossal wit.” - - - - -CHAPTER LXVII - -SIEGFRIED-BAKUNIN - - -In my interpretation of artists so far I have had to rely, for better or -for worse, upon myself; no one else, so far as I know, has analyzed art -works from the point of view of revolutionary economics. - -“Tolstoi?” suggests Mrs. Ogi. - -“Tolstoi considered them from the point of view of Christian -primitivism, a quite different thing. But now at last I have help; the -economic interpretation of Richard Wagner has been done by Bernard Shaw -in a little book, ‘The Perfect Wagnerite,’ published more than -twenty-five years ago. So I feel like a small boy taking shelter from -his enemies behind the back of his big brother.” - -“If you would talk like that more frequently,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you -wouldn’t have so many enemies!” - -Richard Wagner was a towering genius, a master of half a dozen arts, -perhaps the greatest compeller of emotion that has ever lived. He -invented a new art-form, the “music-drama,” in which the arts of the -musician, the poet, the dramatist, the actor, the scene-painter, and the -costumer are brought together and fused into a new thing, “the music of -the future.” It is a terrific engine for the evocation and -intensification of human feelings; in creating it, and forcing its -recognition by the world, Wagner performed a Titan’s task. - -He was born in 1813, which made him thirty-five years of age when the -revolution of 1848 drove King Louis Philippe from the throne of France -and sent an impulse of revolt all over Europe. Wagner at this time was -the conductor of the Royal Opera House at Dresden, having a life -position with a good salary and a pension. Previous to that time he had -had a ghastly struggle with poverty; a young and unknown genius, he had -almost starved to death in a garret in Paris. He had married an actress, -who had no understanding whatever of his power, but who had starved with -him, and now clung with frenzy to security. He himself had the full -consciousness of his destiny as an artist; he had already written three -great operas, and had sketched his later works. He had thus every reason -in the world to protect his future, and to shelter himself behind the -art for art’s sake formula. - -Instead of which, he attended a meeting of a revolutionary society of -Dresden, and delivered an address appealing to the king of Saxony--the -royal personage whose servant and pensioner he was--to establish -universal suffrage, to abolish the aristocracy and the standing army, -and to constitute a republic with His Majesty as president. Needless to -say, His Majesty did not follow this recommendation from his operatic -conductor; and next year the people of Dresden rose, and built -barricades in the streets, and Wagner joined the revolutionists and -actively took part in organizing their forces. When the Prussian troops -marched in and put down the insurrection, three men were proscribed in a -royal proclamation as “politically dangerous persons,” and condemned to -death. One was Roeckel, assistant conductor of the opera house, who was -captured and spent the next twelve years in a dungeon; another was -Michael Bakunin, who became the founder of the Anarchist movement; and -the third was Richard Wagner, royal operatic conductor. - -Germany’s greatest living genius spent his next twelve years as a -political exile in France and Switzerland. He utilized the time, in part -to pour out political pamphlets, and in part to embody his revolutionary -view of life in his greatest art work. Those who are interested in the -pamphlets may find extracts in “The Cry for Justice.” Here is a sample -from a manifesto entitled “Revolution,” published in the Dresden -“Volksblaetter”: - - Arise, then, ye people of the earth, arise, ye sorrow-stricken and - oppressed. Ye, also, who vainly struggle to clothe the inner - desolation of your hearts with the transient glory of riches, - arise! Come and follow in my track with the joyful crowd, for I - know not how to make distinction between those who follow me. There - are but two peoples from henceforth on earth--the one which follows - me, and the one which resists me. The one I will lead to happiness, - but the other I will crush in my progress. For I am the Revolution, - I am the new creating force. I am the divinity which discerns all - life, which embraces, revives, and rewards. - -The art work in which Wagner embodied these revolutionary ideas is known -as “The Ring of the Nibelung.” It consists of four long operas, based -upon the old German mythology. It begins with a charming fairy story and -ends with a grim tragedy; and from first to last it is a study of the -effects of economic power upon human life. - -In the depths of the river dwell the Rhine-maidens, having a lump of -gold which they admire because it shines, but for which they have no -other use. An ugly little dwarf pursues them; and when he cannot get -their love, he decides to get along with their gold. He steals it, and -makes from it a magic ring, which represents the ability to build cities -and palaces, to command luxury and pleasure--to be, in short, our -present master class. Even the gods are seduced by this lure, and fall -to quarreling and intriguing for the magic power of gold. The god Wotan -wrests it from the dwarf Alberich; and the latter puts a curse upon it, -to the effect that it can only be worn by those who have renounced -love--which is just as you see it in our modern world, and just as -Wagner saw it when he was a court servant in Dresden, and was driven mad -by the insolence of hereditary privilege. - -There are two giants, who represent our great captains of industry, and -have built Wotan a palace known as Walhalla. The giants have been -promised Wotan’s sister, the goddess of youthful beauty and goodness, as -their pay for this labor; but they elect to take the ring instead. This -is Wagner’s way of telling us his opinion of the great bankers and -gentlemen of wealth whom he vainly besought to assist him in the -production of his beautiful works of art. - -There were no factories in old German mythology; but the scene shows us -a cavern down in the bowels of the earth, where Alberich, by the power -of his ring, compels all his fellow dwarfs to toil at making treasures -for him. We see him wielding the lash, and the music snarls and whines, -and it is precisely the atmosphere you find in every sweat-shop and -cotton mill and coal mine under our blessed competitive system. And when -we see one of the giants slay his brother, and carry off the ring, and -turn himself into a dragon, to sit upon it and guard it for the balance -of time, we know that Wagner has visited the millionaire clubs of -Dresden, and seen the fat old plutocrats in their big leather -arm-chairs. - -Wotan, the old god, sees too late the ruin he has brought into the -world; he decides that the only way of escape is to create a hero who -shall slay the dragon of privilege and break the spell of economic -might. This hero is the young Siegfried, the child of nature who knows -no fear; Bernard Shaw says that he is Wagner’s young Anarchist -associate, Bakunin. And note that in this Siegfried myth Wagner -foreshadows the downfall not only of capitalism, but also of religion. -The last of the four operas is called “The Twilight of the Gods,” and -the two evil spells of gold and of superstition are broken by the strong -arm and the clear mind of a human youth. - -Wagner wrote the words of these four operas immediately after the -Dresden revolution; the poem was privately published four years after -his flight from the city. During the years of his exile he affords us a -sublime example of a great man contending with obstacles for the sake of -an ideal. He went ahead to compose his masterpiece in the face of -poverty and debt, ridicule and ignominy. His works were absolutely new, -they required an absolutely new method of presentation; so, even when he -could get a chance of production, he had to face the stupidity and -malice of singers and conductors and managers, who were sure in their -own conceit and resented instructions from an upstart. - -We find him in 1860, almost at the end of his exile, receiving from -Louis Napoleon an opportunity to put on “Tannhäuser” in Paris. Now this -opera is a music sermon in reprehension of sensual love; it portrays the -ruin and ultimate repentance of a medieval knight who is lured into the -Venusburg, the lurking place of the old heathen goddess. And this Sunday -school lesson in music was to be presented in the great opera house, -whose boxes were rented by members of the Jockey Club, the gilded youth -of Paris who supported the opera in order to provide publicity for their -mistresses in the ballet! - -The clash was embittered by the fact that the members of the Jockey Club -came late from their supper-parties, and wanted to see their mistresses -dance; therefore it was an iron-clad law of the opera that the ballet -came in the second act. But in Wagner’s Sunday school lesson the knight -is lured into the Venusburg in the first act, and the composer -stubbornly refused to change his story. Therefore the young gentlemen of -the Jockey Club yelled and hooted and blew penny-whistles all through -the performance, and kept that up night after night. They even took the -trouble to come on Sunday to make sure of breaking up Wagner’s show. - -It would be pleasant to have to record that this hero of the social -revolution stood by his guns until the end of his life; but alas, he -weakened, and sold out completely to the enemy. Bernard Shaw excuses him -on the ground that the social revolution was not yet ready, and that the -revolutionists were impractical men. But I say that it was Wagner’s task -to help make the social revolution ready, and to train the -revolutionists by setting them an example of probity. Instead of that, -he decided that the establishing of his own reputation was more -important than the salvation of society. He accepted amnesty from the -Saxon king, and came back and made himself into a great captain of the -music industry, and a national and patriotic hero. - -He became the intimate friend and pensioner of the king of Bavaria; and -for this king he wrote a highly confidential paper entitled “Of the -State and Religion,” wherein he explained that he had once been a -Socialist, but he now saw that the masses were gross and dull, incapable -of high achievement. The problem was to get them to serve ends which -they did not understand; they must be deceived, they must have -illusions. The first mass-illusion was patriotism; they must be taught -to reverence their king. The second mass-illusion was religion; they -must believe they were obeying the will of God. The difficulty of -government lay in the fact that the ruling class must see the truth, -they could not believe either in the State or in God. For them there -must be the higher illusions of the Wagnerian art. Needless to say, for -this secret service King Ludwig paid generously, and we find Wagner -spending his pension--I cite one item, three hundred yards of satin of -thirteen carefully specified colors, at a cost of three thousand -florins! - -He had craved luxury all his life, and in the end he got it--not merely -silks and satins and velvets, for which he had a sort of insanity, but -all kinds of splendor and homage, with kings and emperors to attend the -opening performances of his operas. When the Franco-Prussian war breaks -out we find our Siegfried-Bakunin drinking the cup of military glory and -pouring out a “Kaiser-march”; we find him stooping to an operatic -libretto in which he casts odium upon all the genius of France, not -sparing even Victor Hugo. He reads Schopenhauer, and decides that he is -a pessimist, and has always been a pessimist, and he tries to -reinterpret his revolutionary “Ring” accordingly. He composes a -religious festival play, a mixture of Christian mysticism and Buddhist -fatalism, called “Parsival,” which made the fortune of his Bayreuth -enterprise, a play-house built out of funds subscribed by his admirers. - -Wagner lived to old age, full of honors, and left a widow and a son, -poetically named Siegfried. The widow died recently, but the son still -survives, to bask in his father’s glory, and to gather in the shekels of -the music pilgrims. It is possible to appreciate to the full the -sublimity of the revolutionary Wagner without paying reverence to this -family institution which he has left behind, or for the hordes of -“Schwaermer” who come to eat sausages and drink beer and revel in -emotions which they have no idea of applying to life. Is there anything -in all the tragedies imagined by Richard Wagner more tragic than the -fate which has befallen the young Siegfried-Bakunin--whose prestige and -tradition are now the financial mainstay of the White Terror in Germany, -the Jew-baiting, Communist-shooting mob of the “Hakenkreutzler,” or -Bavarian Fascisti? - - - - -CHAPTER LXVIII - -THE GOSPEL OF SILENCE - - -Ogi has been wandering about the cave with a discontented expression on -his face, showing a disposition to growl at whatever gets in his way. -Mrs. Ogi, whose job is to notice domestic weather-signs, inquires: “What -is the matter with you?” - -Says Ogi: “I have to write an uninteresting chapter.” - -“Why don’t you skip it?” - -“I can’t, because it deals with an interesting man.” As she cannot guess -that riddle, he goes on to complain: “If only I had been writing this -book twenty-five years ago, when I thought ‘Sartor Resartus’ the most -delightful book ever penned! But I went on, and got an overdose of -Carlyle. I read almost all that Gospel of Silence in forty volumes; and -now I sit and ask: what did I learn from it? Some facts, of course: -history and biography. But did I get a single valid idea, one sound -conclusion about life?” - -“Explain it quickly, and pass on,” says Mrs. Ogi. - -“I explain the human race, blocked from the future by a sheet-steel -door. We need the acetylene torch of spiritual fervor; also we need the -engineering brain, to say: “Put it here, and here, and cut the hinges.” -In the face of this task, some of the wielders of the torch go off and -get drunk. Others fall down on their knees and pray. Others forbid us to -touch the door, because God made it and it is His will. Others write -noble verses with perfect rhymes, to the effect that man is born to -trouble, and great art teaches us to endure discomfort with dignity. -Others take fire with zeal, and proceed to butt the door down with their -heads. They butt and butt, until their heads ache. I realize how -undignified it is to describe a great master of English prose as a -‘sorehead’; yet there happens to be no other word in the language that -so tells the story of Thomas Carlyle.” - -He was the son of a carpenter in Scotland, and suffered from poverty and -neglect, and through a long life from indigestion. He complained -pathetically that Emerson ate pie and was well, while he ate plain -oatmeal and was miserable. He was irritable, and hard to get along -with--we are privileged to know about this, because both he and his wife -wrote endless letters to their friends, detailing their domestic -troubles, and these letters are published in many volumes, and we can -read both sides and take our choice. Tennyson refused assent to the -proposition that the Carlyles should have married elsewhere; because -then there would have been four miserable people instead of two. - -Carlyle made himself, and also his literary style; he was a hack writer, -biographer and translator, and struggled along with a dissatisfied young -wife in a lonely country cottage. “Sartor Resartus” was written at the -age of thirty-five, and sketches the philosophy of an imaginary German -professor, whose name translated means “Devil’s Dung”; this professor’s -philosophy being based upon the discovery that everything in -civilization is merely clothes, the outside of things, the shams and -pretensions and conventions. It is funny to imagine our statesmen and -diplomats and prominent society personages stripped, not merely of their -medals and ribbons, but also of their shirts and trousers; very few of -them would look imposing--and the same applies to civilization with its -proprieties, moralities and religions. This work of uproarious mischief -fell absolutely flat in well-dressed and well-mannered England, and -Emerson and a few people in far-off Boston had to inform the British -cultured classes that they had a new prophet among them. - -The teaching of “Sartor Resartus” is entirely negative; and when you ask -what Carlyle had to contribute to constructive thinking about our -hateful social system, the answer is: nonsense. He saw the evils, and -scolded at them--and scolded equally hard at the forces which are to -remedy the evils. Carlyle had contempt for the people, out of whose lap -he had sprung; he despised democracy and the whole machinery of popular -consent. He repaid America for discovering him by ridiculing the Union -cause; he denounced the reform bill of 1867 as “Shooting Niagara.” - -Carlyle’s way to set the world right is revealed to us in a book called -“Hero-Worship.” First we have to find the Great Man; and then we have to -obey him. “Obedience is the primary duty of man”--meaning, of course, -the man like you and me, who is spelled with a little m. The one who is -spelled with a capital letter is the Autocrat, who makes us do what we -ought to do. “A nation that has not been governed by so-called tyrants -never came to much in the world.” - -Our Great Tyrant sets us all hard at work. He makes us build houses and -cultivate farms--but no machinery or railroads, because these constitute -Industrialism, which is a Mammon-Monster. If we do our work by machinery -we have leisure, and that is dangerous; we must have Work, and then more -Work, our one safe Deliverance from Devil-Mischief--you see how one -picks up the style of the “Gospel of Silence”! - -Having got the houses built, what next? Why then, to save us from the -Idleness-Imp we set to work knocking the houses down with cannon-balls. -I don’t mean that Carlyle always advocated war; what he did was to -glorify systems of government which historically have resulted and -psychologically must result in war. At the age of fifty-eight, having -surveyed the whole of history, our Scotch hero-worshipper selected the -greatest of human heroes to become the subject of a grand state -biography in six volumes: and whom do you suppose this hero turns out to -be? Frederick of Prussia, who stole Silesia from his cousin, and seized -Poland and divided it up among Austria, Russia and himself; Jonathan -Wild the Great, founder of the Hohenzollern Heroism, and -great-great-grandfather of our World War! - -I dutifully read those six large volumes, and studied the series of -charts in which the strategy of Frederick’s military campaigns is set -forth. I learned a fascinating parlor game, which consists in moving -here and there little black and white oblongs representing regiments and -brigades and divisions and other military formations of human beings. -The white oblongs represent your own human beings, and the black oblongs -represent the human beings you propose to destroy; you pound them to -pieces with artillery, you sweep them with volleys of musketry, you -charge them with cavalry and chop them with sabres--and then you move up -other oblongs, called reserves, and continue the procedure. It is safer -to play this game on paper, because when you get through, you can throw -the paper into the waste-basket, and do not have some tens of thousands -of dead and mutilated men and horses decaying all over your back yard. - -A pitiful ending for a Prophet and Preacher who aspires to the Remaking -of Mankind in Capital Letters! Just a poor, bewildered old dotard, -dyspeptic and crotchety, helpless and blundering, aspiring to a certain -end and working to the opposite end. - -“But why should anyone consider such a man great?” asks Mrs. Ogi. - -“I have been trying to formulate that to myself. It is because he had -the grace to be unhappy about our modern world. He did not get drunk on -moonshine; he did not tell himself that God was going to do what it was -obviously the business of men to do. He didn’t persuade himself that -Evolution was going to do it, or that Time was going to do it, or that -Faith was going to do it. He didn’t prattle about one increasing purpose -running through the ages, or about one far-off divine event to which the -whole creation moves. He didn’t decide to dream his dream and hold it -true, or to have moments when he felt he could not die. He didn’t tell -us that Love will conquer at the last, or that his faith was large in -Time--” - -“This appears to be a transition,” says Mrs. Ogi. - -“Precisely. We are about to begin a new chapter: The Lullaby Laureate, -or Queen Victoria’s Super-Soothing Syrup.” - - - - -CHAPTER LXIX - -THE LULLABY LAUREATE - - -The story of my own soul is the story of Alfred Tennyson’s reputation -for the last thirty or forty years; so that is the easiest way for me to -tell about it. - -I was one of Tennyson’s cultural products. I cannot recall the age when -I did not know “Call me early, mother dear,” and “What does little -birdie say?” As soon as I had the idea of being anything, I had the idea -of being Sir Galahad. I attended very devoutly a church, which differed -from that of Alfred Tennyson in one fact--that it had a prayer for the -President of the United States in place of a prayer for the Queen. I -doubt if it ever occurred to me to think that Tennyson might be wrong in -anything--until the age of fifteen, when suddenly there dawned upon my -horrified mind the idea that Christianity was merely another mythology. - -I wrestled with this idea for a couple of years, and part of the -struggle consisted of a study of “In Memoriam,” recommended by my -spiritual adviser. The poem suggested a great many new reasons for -doubting the immortality of the soul; but it suggested no certainty that -the Creator of the universe, having given me one life, was under -obligation to give me two. Which meant that I was through with -Tennyson, whose whole product, on its religious side, is an agonized cry -that immortality must be. - -In politics and economics I experienced a similar revulsion from my -one-time idol. He seemed to me a victim of all the delusions, a -celebrator of all the shams of civilization. Even his poetical charms -now annoyed me, serving as trimming and decoration for second-rate -ideas. In my reaction I went too far, as have all the young people of -our time; for Tennyson was really a great poet, and a man of fine and -generous spirit. - -He was the son of a Church of England clergyman, and that is a fact -which must never be forgotten; he grew up in a rectory, and wrote Sunday -poetry. He was the elder brother of a big family, and took the position -of elder brother to all mankind. He was tall and imposing, dark and -romantic looking, cultivating long wavy black locks and a Spanish cloak -and a poet’s pipe. When he did not know anything to say, he puffed at -his pipe and looked magnificent, and everybody was awed. - -Culture came naturally in his family. He had written five thousand -octosyllabic rhymes at the age of twelve. His first verses were -published when he was young, and because one or two critics made fun of -them, he took refuge in his dignity and waited nine years to publish -again. “Ulysses” made his fame when he was thirty-three, and two years -later he received a pension from the Tory government. Two years after -that came “The Princess,” a dramatic composition in ridicule of the -higher education of women; it suited the lower-educated Victorian ladies -so perfectly that it ran into five editions. In 1850, at the age of -forty-one, Tennyson became the laureate; when he was seventy-four he was -raised to the peerage. No other English poet has earned this honor, -which is reserved to wholesale slaughterers of animals and men, to -brewers, whiskey distillers, diamond merchants, and publishers of -capitalist dope. - -Concerning Lord Tennyson as an artist in words, there is little that -needs to be said. He received his “ten talents” and put them to use; -everywhere he went he carefully collected poetical impressions, words, -phrases and ideas, and jotted them down. No one ever spent more time -filing and perfecting, and no one was more completely master of -beautiful utterance. - -He had an inquiring mind, and picked up ideas on all subjects and put -them into his poetry; but unfortunately he found consecutive thinking -very difficult, and you can find as many contradictory thoughts in him -as in the Bible. He has an invincible repugnance to the drawing of -uncomfortable conclusions; whenever his thinking leads to such, he -evaporates in a cloud of comforting words. His verse contains more -platitudes and cheap cheer-up stuff than any other poet known to me; and -so he was the darling of the antimacassar age. - -England had put down Napoleon and taken possession of the trade of the -world. There were revolutions on the continent, but at home nothing -worse than a few rioters to be clubbed by the police. The foggy islands -were a safe haven, administered by landlords and merchants. Everything -was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and the function of -a poet was to tell it to the people, in such beautiful language that -they would accept it as a revelation. - -Tennyson in his early days had shown traces of liberalism, but the -Chartist movement frightened him into reaction, and there he stayed. -“Shout for England!” says the chorus of one of his poems, and the -function of the shout in suppressing thought is understood by all -students of mob psychology. “Riflemen, form!” exhorted another poem, -published in the “Times”-- - - Let your reforms for a moment go; - Look to your butts, and take good aim. - -That was, so to speak, a “Timesly” sentiment; the riflemen hastened to -form, and the young aristocrats led them to slaughter, and the poet -laureate had to come forward again to glorify the British national habit -of blundering. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” was so popular in its -day that it was printed on picture post cards; every school child -learned the duty of the lower classes under the Tory system-- - - Theirs not to make reply, - Theirs not to question why, - Theirs but to do and die. - -Bear in mind that the factory system was now in full flower, and little -children ten and twelve years old were slaving all night in cotton -mills, or dragging heavy cars in the depths of coal mines. English -manufacturers and landlords were taxing the lower classes to such a -condition that today, when you see them pouring out for their holidays -upon Hampstead Heath, they seem not human beings, but some lower -species, shambling and deformed. Once in a while a gleam of this horror -breaks into Tennyson’s verse; but even then the message is -reactionary--an English gentleman is scolding at commercialism because -it destroys the good old country life. - -But for the most part the Victorian way of dealing with uncomfortable -things was to hush them up. Poetry must select pure and sweet subjects; -poetry must be polite, it must use big words and preserve the home -comforts. It is our duty to believe what is proper, even when it is -obviously not true. - -I have referred to Tennyson’s long agony on the subject of immortality. -The deepest experience of his life was the death of his friend, Arthur -Hallam, a man who apparently knew how to think, and to drive the dreamy -poet to work. It is puzzling to us that a grown man should be so taken -aback by death; it would seem to be a common enough phenomenon to be -noted and prepared for. But Tennyson was struck down mentally and -spiritually, and his sufferings make clear to us that he did not really -believe his creed. Men who are seriously convinced of heaven don’t mind -waiting a few years to join their loved ones; but Tennyson was never -really sure that he would see Arthur Hallam again, and he spent -seventeen years brooding over this problem, and putting his broodings -into “In Memoriam.” - -The poet early fell in love with a young English lady, but could not -afford to marry her; so he waited twenty years, and she waited also. Now -there have been poets who married when they fell in love, and went off -and kept house in a garret or a cottage, and made out the best they -could. But Tennyson had to have his poet’s robe and his poet’s chair in -front of the fireplace; he had to be an English gentleman, and to keep -his wife like an English lady in the days of Victorian propriety. The -lady, when they were finally united, put an end to fretting over -immortality; she explained to her husband that “doubt is -devil-born”--and what gentleman wants a devil in his home? It is better -to become an oracle: to preach about peace in a far future, and meantime -wield a sword in the Crimea; to sing about justice, and vote the Tory -ticket; to have all the comforts that fine phrases can bring, without -sacrificing those other comforts of popularity and prosperity. - -Tennyson went back to the old days of Britain, and falsified the story -of King Arthur so as to make it sweetly sentimental. “Obedience is the -bond of rule,” he wrote; and so Queen Victoria’s husband came to call on -him. He preached submission to womanhood: “Lay thy sweet hands in mine -and trust to me”--and so he was summoned to Windsor Castle to kiss the -sweet hand of his queen. One thinks of the sweet hands of those English -ladies who took up hatchets and chopped the pictures in the National -Gallery! - -Victoria’s beloved husband died, and Tennyson wrote an ode to him; so he -became the dear pudgy old lady’s intimate friend, and she confided to -him the troubles of royalty. “How I wish you could suggest means of -crushing those horrible publications, whose object is to promulgate -scandal and calumny, which they invent themselves!” The poet did his -best; his most popular sentimental and patriotic stuff was published in -pamphlets which sold for thrippence; but in spite of everything the -labor movement continued to take root, and likewise Socialism--or -“Utopian idiocy,” to use the Tennysonian phrase. - -He sits upon his throne, eighty years of age and more, and hardly anyone -questions his supremacy; he is the greatest English poet since -Shakespeare, there is no living writer to be compared to him. We pity -him, for after all, he is a great man, and has written great -verse--“Ulysses,” for example, of which no one could ever wish to change -a line. He has written lyrics of beauty and real eloquence. But now he -sees the younger generation traveling another road from his, and he -wonders and fears and storms and scolds. He is too clear-sighted not to -see the wreck of his dreams-- - - Poor old voice of eighty crying after voices that have fled! - -He looks about and sees modern capitalism-- - - Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time, - City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime? - -It was no common Victorian who saw that at the age of eighty; and no -fair critic will deny him credit for such lines. But the elderly -poet-lord had no idea what to do about it, and capitalist society -continued to nourish its secret disease, which twenty-two years after -Tennyson’s death was to cover the whole earth with vomit. - - - - -CHAPTER LXX - -HIGH-BROW SOCIETY - - -There was another poet who grew up in this unpromising Victorian -England. His father and grandfather were bank officials, and he had a -comfortable income. In his youth he was a dandy, with lemon-colored -gloves and flowing poetical locks; he turned into a leading clubman and -a prominent diner-out. He believed in the Church of England, and in -those social conventions which guide the lives of English gentlemen; he -refused to permit his wife to have anything to do with George Sand’s -Bohemian set, and when she tried to investigate spiritualism he broke up -the show. - -And yet he managed to be a great and open-minded poet, and in many ways -a revolutionary force. He had in him a core of sound instinct, a healthy -belief in life and a trust in his own intellect. He fell in love with a -lady poet by the name of Elizabeth Barrett, who was an invalid, kept in -a kind of prison of duty by a tyrannical old father. The poet did not -wait twenty years for her; he persuaded her to slip around the corner -and marry him--a dreadful scandal in the polite world of England. - -When I was a lad we did not have the word “high-brow”; its place was -filled by the word “Browning.” Learned ladies and gentlemen had formed a -“Browning Society,” and held solemn meetings in which they tried to find -out what these poems were about. Apparently the task proved a difficult -one, for they are at it still. - -Now a poet may be obscure because he has something to say which is very -profound; but there is little of that kind of obscurity in Robert -Browning. When you decipher his message, it turns out to be something -quite obvious, like the immortality of the soul, or the rights of love, -or the fact that human motives are mixed. The cause of the obscurity is -that the poet has invented a perverse way of telling these things; he -likes to play around the outside of a subject, approach it from a dozen -different angles, and set you the task of piecing the thing together -from hints and glimpses. - -He is an enormously learned person, and has rummaged in a thousand old -dust-bins of history, and acquired a million details of names and places -and things; he pays you the generally quite undeserved compliment of -assuming that you know all this as well as he does. If he wishes to tell -you about some unknown musician in the court of some obscure Renaissance -ruler, he will begin by talking about a ring this musician used to wear, -and the first dozen lines of the poem will depend upon an ancient Greek -legend concerning the stone that is in the ring. If you don’t know the -legend about the stone in the ring of the musician in the court of the -Renaissance ruler, why then the opening of the poem has no meaning to -you, and the Browning Society might hold a hundred sessions on the -subject without making head or tail of it. Such writing is simply a bad -joke; it is one of the many forms of leisure-class art perversions. - -When Browning chooses to write real poetry, he can make it just as -simple and as melodious as Tennyson’s, and far more passionate. He -invented a new and fascinating poetical form, the dramatic lyric, or -dramatic soliloquy. He will take some strange and complicated character, -whom he has picked up in the junk-rooms of the past, and let this -character start to talk and reveal himself to you--not merely the things -he wants you to know, but the things he is trying to hide from you, and -which he lets slip between the lines. Thus we have Mr. Sludge, the -spiritualist medium, who would have converted Mrs. Browning if the poet -had not kicked him out of the house. Thus we have Bishop Blougram, an -elegant and thoroughly modern Catholic prelate, discussing with an -intimate friend over the wine and cigars the delicate question of how he -justifies himself for feeding base superstition to the people, who want -it and can’t get along without it. - -Browning knew how to be direct, when his feelings were deeply enough -stirred. He was direct when he dealt with the old poet Wordsworth and -his apostasy from the cause of freedom. Anyone can understand the title, -“The Lost Leader,” and the opening lines - - Just for a handful of silver he left us, - Just for a riband to stick in his coat. - -Likewise, when the Brownings went to Italy and took fire at the struggle -of the Italian people for freedom, everybody understood the poetry they -wrote home; even the Austrian police understood it, for they opened -Browning’s mail, to his furious indignation. Likewise, when Mrs. -Browning died and some persons proposed to write her biography without -her husband’s permission, the husband was able to make known his -opposition. He spoke of “the paws of these blackguards in my bowels,” -and said he would “stop the scamp’s knavery along with his breath.” - -For his master-work, to which he devoted his later years, Browning made -a peculiar selection. It was a time when democracy was breaking into the -world of culture, in spite of all the opposition of academic authority. -We shall find poets and novelists in every country persisting in dealing -with vulgar reality, instead of with mythological demigods and romantic -conquerors. Browning went for his story to an old scandal pamphlet he -picked up in a second-hand bookshop of Florence. He might as well have -picked up a scrap of a Hearst newspaper from the gutter, for it dealt -with a sensational murder story, what is called a “crime of passion.” An -elderly merchant in Rome had killed his wife, and at his trial he proved -that she had run away with a young priest. The priest maintained that -the elopement had been a chaste one; he was trying to save the girl from -the cruelty of her husband. - -Browning, in telling the story, adopts the ultra-modern device of the -open forum: all sides shall have a hearing. In “The Ring and the Book” -you read nine long narratives of the same events. You hear Half Rome, -which sides with the husband; then you hear the Other Half Rome, which -sides with the wife. You hear the husband, the wife, the young priest, -the lawyers for each side, and the pope, rendering judgment. When you -get through with all this reading you have learned several important -lessons: you have learned that life is a complicated thing, and truth -very difficult to arrive at; you have learned that good and evil live -side by side in the same human heart; you have learned to think for -yourself, and not to believe everything you hear; finally, you have -learned that the most sordid human events offer a potential literary -masterpiece--requiring only a man of genius to penetrate the hearts of -the persons involved! - - - - -CHAPTER LXXI - -OFFICIAL PESSIMISM - - -In this writer’s youth, when he was struggling to earn a living in New -York, there was one magazine which was open to new ideas, the -“Independent.” Its literary editor was Paul Elmer More, and he gave me a -chance to write book reviews for him--and then, alas! decided that he -could find other people whose writing he preferred. Mr. More evolved -into a critic, and has published I don’t know how many volumes of what -he calls the “Shelburne Essays.” Up to a few years ago, when Professor -Sherman made his appearance, I used to say that More was the one -literary conservative in America who was not intellectually -contemptible; the one man who combined scholarship with a perfectly -definite and consistent point of view, no sentimentality, and no -water-tight compartments in his brain. - -In the third volume of the “Shelburne Essays” Mr. More has one dealing -with Byron’s “Don Juan.” I smile when I reflect with what contempt Mr. -More would greet the proposition that he should read a modern writer as -slangy, as licentious, and as popular as Byron! But “Don Juan” was -written a hundred years ago; so it is a “classic,” and Mr. More greets -its author as the last of the great pessimists, one who had the wit to -recognize the futility of human life, and the courage to speak his -conclusions plainly. - -Things have changed since Byron’s day, Mr. More explains. “We, who have -approached the consummation of the world’s hope, know that happiness and -peace and the fulfilment of desires are about to settle down and brood -for ever more over the lot of mankind.” This, I had better explain, is -sarcasm on Mr. More’s part. He is irritated because modern scientific -people have presumed to think that human problems can be solved. He is -so much irritated that he turns his essay on Byron into a series of -sneers at “the new dispensation of official optimism.” For example, this -kind of thing: - - Next year, or the next, some divine invention shall come which will - prove this melancholy of the poets to have been only a childish - ignorance of man’s sublimer destiny; some discovery of a new - element more wonderful than radium will render the ancient brooding - over human feebleness a matter of laughter and astonishment; some - acceptance of the larger brotherhood of the race will wipe away all - tears and bring down upon earth the fair dream of heaven, a reality - and a possession forever; some new philosophy of the soul will - convert the old poems of conflict into meaningless fables, stale - and unprofitable. - -What is the meaning of this attitude of envenomed resentment at the idea -of a hope for mankind? We shall note it again and again among the poets -and critics of the ancient regime--of what we may call “the old -dispensation of official pessimism.” It used to puzzle me that scholars -and thinkers should be so malicious and perverted as to find pleasure in -trampling upon human aspiration; but after years of pondering I think I -understand it. These gentlemen are guests at a banquet, who, seeing the -food too long delayed, and despairing of anything better, have filled -their bellies with husks and straw; and now, when they are full, and can -no longer eat, they see the good food coming to the table! - -It was a perfectly natural thing for an ancient to be pessimistic. He -saw the world as a place of blind cruelty, the battle-ground of forces -which he did not understand; and what guarantee could he have that the -feeble intellect of man would ever tame these giants? So he made for -himself a philosophy of stern resignation, and an art of beautiful but -mournful despair. The scholars and lovers of old things have identified -themselves and their reputations with these ancient dignities and -renunciations, these tender and touching griefs; and how shall they -express their irritation when bumptious youth arises, and proceeds to -take charge of life, to abolish pestilence and famine, poverty, war, -crime--and perhaps, in the end, even old age and death? - -All this is preliminary to the introduction of another Victorian poet; -one who moved me deeply in my youth, and still holds my undimmed -affection. I would choose Matthew Arnold as the perfect exemplar of the -“classical” attitude toward life; that is, resignation, at once pathetic -and heroic, to the pitiful fate of mankind on earth. Listen to him at -his best: - - Ah, love, let us be true - To one another! for the world, which seems - To lie before us like a land of dreams, - So various, so beautiful, so new, - Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, - Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; - And we are here as on a darkling plain - Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, - Where ignorant armies clash by night. - -The author of these lines was the son of a great teacher, and therefore -had no money. He spent thirty years of his life as an inspector of -schools; a most pitiful destiny for a poet--traveling all over England -to hear little children recite the list of the kings and the counties, -and tell the number of legs on a spider. The fountain of his poetry -dried up, and he became a critic, not merely of English letters but of -English life; in many ways the most radical and most intelligent critic -that Victorian England had. He preached the gospel of sweetness and -light; also, alas, he went on the war-path against an infamous bill -which was being agitated in Parliament, to permit a man to violate the -old Mosaic code by marrying the sister of his deceased wife! - -Matthew Arnold insisted that it wasn’t on account of Moses, but on -account of a thing he called “delicacy.” You cannot travel in Victorian -England without encountering phenomena like this. You will be introduced -to what appears to you a perfectly sane and self-contained and -cultivated gentleman, wearing exactly the correct frock-coat and tie; -but then, you will happen to touch one of his tribal taboos, and -suddenly he will shriek, and tear off his shirt, and pull out a sharp -knife, and begin to slash himself, and dance and whirl in a holy frenzy. - ---Ogi, wishing to make sure about this point, goes to the source of all -information on the subject of refinement in sex matters. “Tell me,” he -says, “if you were to die, would it be indelicate of me to marry one of -your younger sisters?” - -Mrs. Ogi, who has never read the Mosaic code, and is not learned in the -Victorian lunacies, looks at her husband with a puzzled expression. “I -helped to raise my sisters,” she says. “Surely any wife would want to -leave her husband in safe hands!” - - - - -CHAPTER LXXII - -GOD SAVE THE PEOPLE - - -In the first half of this nineteenth century the British factory system -came to maturity; the capitalist class took charge of society, and -forced the working class into a condition of degradation hitherto -unknown upon this planet. The class struggle took definite -shape--Chartist agitations and suffrage reform bills and Corn Law -riots--and there arose in England a man of genius to tell about the -wrongs of the people from his own first-hand experience. - -His father was a wretchedly paid government clerk, who had no -acquaintance with the birth control movement. Charles Dickens was one of -eight half-starved children, and went to work at the age of ten in a -filthy, ramshackle blacking factory. The cruelties he there experienced -stamped his soul for life, and helped to make the radical movement of -the English-speaking world. - -Later on he got a chance to go to school, and became a court -stenographer and newspaper reporter, and saw the insides of ruling-class -rascality. He began writing humorous sketches which turned into the -“Pickwick Papers,” and so at the age of twenty-four he was carried up -into a golden cloud of glory. World fame and success were his for the -balance of his life; but he never entirely forgot the meaning of his -early days, and remained to some extent an apostle of the poor and -oppressed. - -When I say that Dickens is radical propaganda, I do not mean merely that -he wrote novel after novel exposing the abuses of his time, the -cruelties of the poor laws, the horrors of the debtors’ prisons, the -delays and corruptions of the courts, the knaveries and imbecilities of -politics. I do not mean merely that he hated by instinct and ridiculed -all through his life, lawyers and judges and newspaper editors and -preachers and priests of capitalist prosperity. I mean something more -deep and more fundamental than that: I mean that the very selection of -his themes and of his characters, the whole environment and atmosphere -of his novels, is a piece of propaganda. For Dickens proceeds to force -into the aristocratic and exclusive realms of art the revolutionary -notion that the poor and degraded are equally as interesting as the rich -and respectable. We are invited, not merely to laugh at the antics of -illiterate and unrefined people, as in Shakespeare; we are invited to -enter into their hearts and minds, to put ourselves in their place and -actually live their experiences. As reward for so doing, we are offered -treasures of laughter and tears and thrills. - -I don’t know how it is nowadays, but in my boyhood, which was some -twenty years after Dickens’ death, everybody read him--my rich -relatives, who read nothing else, and my poor relatives, broken-down -Southern aristocrats, who read nothing else except the life of Robert E. -Lee. And then in New York, the people I met in boarding-houses and -third-rate lodgings--all shuddered over Bill Sykes and wept over Paul -Dombey and laughed over Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller. - -Dickens was, and remained to the end, from the point of view of -leisure-class culture, a quite vulgar person. He took a naive delight in -his worldly triumphs, and counted the success of his books by sales and -money. He was a born actor, and loved to shine before the public; -devising dramatic readings of his works, and taking endless tours, both -in England and America, gathering great sums of money--though of course -not to be compared with the moving picture fortunes of our day. It was a -time when audiences liked to shed tears out loud, and Dickens liked to -join them; he has all the tremolo stops in his organ, and piles on -sentiment until we shudder. Fastidious and literary persons have now -made it fashionable to declare that Dickens is unreadable; but the -people have read him, and his sentiment as well as his humor are a part -of our racial heritage, and one of the fountain-heads of the Socialist -movement. His books are a five million word reiteration of the old -Chartist hymn-- - - When wilt thou save the people? - O God of mercy! when? - Not kings and lords, but nations! - Not thrones and crowns, but men! - -Dickens himself was entirely instinctive in his class feelings; his mind -was a typical middle-class muddle, and his remedy for the ills he -pictured was kindness and poor law reform and charity bazaars--hanging -paper garlands about the neck of the tiger of capitalism. The British -masses needed time in which to find out how to bind and destroy this -beast; but the first service was to proclaim the fact that this -capitalist world is a world impossible for sensitive and decent human -beings to endure--a world in which justice has become the Circumlocution -Office, and truth has become Thomas Gradgrind, and Christianity has -become Mr. Pecksniff and Uriah Heep. - - - - -CHAPTER LXXIII - -THE COLLECTOR OF SNOBS - - -Emerson, commenting upon the old saying that “No man is a hero to his -valet,” put the question: “What hero ever had a valet?” This goes to -prove that Emerson was not a reader of popular fiction; for if he had -been following the novels of William Makepeace Thackeray in “Fraser’s -Magazine,” he would have known that it is impossible for any hero to be -without a valet. In Dickens we enter into the lives of the poor, and in -Thackeray we enter into the lives of the rich, and it is hard for us to -decide which class has the greater claim to our pity. - -Thackeray was bom in India, his father being a government official. They -tried to educate him at Cambridge, but it didn’t take, because he was -incorrigibly desultory, a big, good-natured fellow who loved eating and -drinking and gambling and good fellowship--everything, in short, but -hard work. He early lost his fortune, trying to publish a paper; then he -had to work, and became a contributor to “Punch,” and developed a -faculty for burlesque verses and satiric sketches. - -In my youth there was general complaint that Thackeray was “a cynic.” -Let us settle that question at the outset; he was one of the most -sentimental souls that ever walked about the world in trousers. But he -had a pair of eyes, and he saw in the fashionable society around him a -hundred different varieties of snobs; he collected them into a “Book of -Snobs”--each one like a butterfly stuck on a pin. He went on to write a -series of novels, full of scoldings varied by ridicule of human vanity -and folly. - -His first great work remains entirely neglected by the critics. “Barry -Lyndon” is a marvelous piece of sustained irony, the story of a capable -scoundrel, who makes his way in the great world by being just a little -sharper than the people he meets, and a little more honest with himself. -You recall how Milton, a devout and orthodox Puritan, could not refrain -from making Satan heroic, because Satan was a rebel and Milton was -another. We notice the same phenomenon in this case of Barry Lyndon, who -does every kind of rascal thing; yet the fact remains, he is living by -his wits, he is surviving in a world of privilege and power, and -Thackeray is secretly thrilled by him. That doubtless accounts for the -unpopularity of the story; for the average novel reader likes to have -his villains labeled, and not to mix his blacks and his whites. - -The instinctive rebel in Thackeray shows himself still more plainly in -“Vanity Fair.” This time the villain is Becky Sharp, an utterly -heartless intriguer, selling her sex for money and power. Nevertheless, -she is a woman “on her own,” a little tiger-cat backed into a corner, -with all the world poking sticks at her; she fights back, and gets the -best of her enemies, and Thackeray cannot help making her the most -interesting figure in the book. - -As a respectable Victorian sentimentalist, he did his best to provide us -with a foil for Becky, giving us Amelia Sedley, the perfect, submissive, -adoring female. The daughter of a wealthy merchant, Amelia has never had -a moment’s discomfort in her life. She is a model of the Victorian -virtues; she honors and serves the male members of her family, no matter -how selfish and worthless they may be. She has the brains of a -medium-sized rabbit, and after we have got to know her, we understand -why Victorian gentlemen sought refuge in interesting mistresses. - -It has been said that in Thackeray’s novels all the good people are -fools and all the evil people are clever. Beatrix Esmond, the one woman -who rivals Becky Sharp in interest, is a cold, proud beauty, without -even Becky’s excuse of poverty; she schemes to marry a duke, and when he -is killed in a duel, she seeks to become the mistress of a prince, and -ends ignominously as the wife of a tutor and the widow of a bishop. The -Anti-Socialist Union of Great Britain, which exists to fight the “Reds,” -should begin its labors by excluding from all libraries these -devastating pictures of the manners and morals of the ruling classes. - -I do not mean by this that Thackeray was consciously a Socialist; quite -the contrary. As a member of the ruling classes, he pleads with them to -be worthy of their high and agreeable destiny. How completely he -believed in the “gentleman” you can see by the treatment he gives to his -hero, Pendennis, a perfectly worthless young idler, and to Major -Pendennis, a cynical and depraved old rascal. Thackeray condones the -former and loves and pities the latter, and expects us to weep over the -closing picture of the old martinet, having lost his fortune, obliged to -dwell in a charity home with other indigent parasites. I speak for one -reader, who could have borne with entire equanimity to see the major at -work on the rock-pile, accompanied by all the other idle clubmen of -London. - -Thackeray in his writings rebelled against some conventions of his -world, but in his every-day life he was as helpless as Amelia Sedley. -His wife became insane, so he fell victim of that superstition which -condemns the innocent partner in such a marriage to life-long celibacy. -Thackeray, enduring this infliction, seemed heroic to his friends, and -pitiful to us. He left it to a woman novelist, George Eliot, to set the -precedent of defiance to this especially idiotic tribal taboo. George -Eliot loved George Henry Lewes, who had an insane wife, and she went and -lived with Lewes for twenty-four years, until his death, and told all -the world about it. Thus we have one pleasant detail to record -concerning Victorian England. - -In his early days Thackeray had lived poorly, because he had to; but -later he acquired a taste for expensive food, and especially drink, and -thereby ruined his health and died at the age of fifty-two. This, of -course, was devoutly concealed by his daughters, and explains the fact -that no biography was published. Like other conventional gentlemen, he -felt bound to provide incomes for these daughters, so he wasted his -time trying to get some government sinecure, first in the post office, -and then in the diplomatic service--the very kind of thing he exposed in -his stories. He took to lecturing, following in the foot-steps of -Dickens, but not enjoying the work, because he had nothing of the -showman in him, but on the contrary the English gentleman’s intense -reserve. - -All this is what is called “gossip,” and is supposed to have nothing to -do with the works of a great writer. I record my belief, that the -character and life experiences of an artist make his works of art, in -the same way that a mold makes the image out of the liquid metal. The -quickest route to the understanding of any novelist or poet is to know -these personal details about him; and above all, his relationship to -those who paid him the money which kept him alive from day to day. -Whether he conforms, or whether he rebels, these money-forces condition -a man’s life. - - - - -CHAPTER LXXIV - -ARTS AND CRAFTS - - -Capitalist industrialism may be indicted on economic grounds because it -is wasteful, and on moral grounds because it is dishonest; also it may -be indicted upon esthetic grounds because it is ugly. The artistic -temperament objects to it for this last reason, and there were some -among the artists who set out to make war upon it. - -John Ruskin was the son of a wealthy English wine merchant; he devoted -himself to the study of art, and sought to carry it back to the simple -standards of the Christian primitives. He became a lecturer and teacher, -and founded a college for the sons of workingmen at Oxford. We find him -leading groups of British university students out to do manual labor -upon the roads--a pathetic effort to be useful and honest in a world of -cheating and exploiting. In the end Ruskin went out of his mind, as a -result of brooding over the ugliness and cruelty of his country’s -industrial system. - -Among his disciples was one who is entitled to a place in these pages, -because he was a working artist who strove to create beauty upon a sound -social basis; also because he was a Socialist who tried to teach the -principles of brotherhood and solidarity to a world of individualist and -capitalist art. - -William Morris was born in 1834; his parents were wealthy and he -inherited a comfortable income. His mother designed him for a bishop, -but he soon outgrew that career. He parted with his Christian faith on -the intellectual side, but he still kept its emotions; he was a -passionate lover of the Middle Ages, and of the Gothic spirit in art. He -managed to persuade himself that the Middle Ages had been happy, and -that the craftsmen in those days had been free to make what they loved -without reference to the profit motive. So all his life he yearned back -to those good old days, and made them a standard by which to judge -everything bad in his own time. - -He was a simple, whole-souled fellow, who loved to do things with his -hands, and possessed extraordinary aptitude for all the arts; he learned -to paint and to carve and to decorate, and to do every kind of hand -labor that contained any slightest element of artistry. He looked out -upon modern industrialism and saw wholesale, cheap production of ugly -and commonplace and unsubstantial goods. He hated it with his whole -soul, and attributed all the moral evils of the time to the fact that -the workers had lost their love for their job and their pride in -craftsmanship. He wanted a home to live in, and because no architect -knew how to design a beautiful home, Morris became his own architect; -because he could not buy any beautiful furniture, he designed his own -furniture and had a carpenter make it. Out of this came the -establishment of a firm to do such labor, and so grew the Arts and -Crafts movement. - -That brought Morris into touch with workingmen, a very dangerous thing; -because under our present social system it is better for a gentleman to -stay in his own class, and not find out what is happening to the -workers. Morris was drawn into politics--beginning, curiously enough, -with an effort to save old churches and other buildings from being -“restored” according to modern taste. Before long we find him evolved -into one of the leading Victorian rebels, a founder of the -Social-Democratic Federation, speaking afternoons and evenings at -soap-box meetings. The critics lamented this, just as they lamented the -political career of John Milton: it seemed such a waste of time for a -great poet and artist. But it was all a part of William Morris’s life; -if he had not been the kind of man he was, he could not have produced -the kind of art he did. - -In between all his other labors he wrote poetry; it flowed out of him -freely, wonder tales of all sorts, having to do with those old times -which he loved, and the beautiful things which he imagined happening -there. It is very good narrative verse, and all young people ought to -read “The Earthly Paradise”; also they ought to read “The Dream of John -Ball,” and learn what happened to the social rebels in the old days. - -Morris’s most popular piece of prose writing is “News from Nowhere.” He -had read Bellamy’s Utopia, “Looking Backward,” and he did not like it, -because Bellamy was an American, and had organized and systematized the -world. Nobody was going to organize and systematize William Morris; he -set about to make his own Utopia, in which everything is placid and -commonplace, healthy as the animals are healthy--but also abominably -dull. - -Says Mrs. Ogi: “You are discussing one of the classics of your movement, -and you know what the critics all say: the Socialists ought to begin by -agreeing on what they want.” - -“I know,” says Ogi, “and I’m sorry to disappoint them. But there are -many different kinds of people in the world, and some of each kind in -our movement. I am a Socialist who believes in machinery, and has no -interest in any world that does not develop machine power to the -greatest possible extent. We are like people traveling through a tunnel; -it is dark and smoky, and some want to turn back, but I want to go -through to the other end.” - -“Morris and Ruskin said the other end was in hell.” - -“Yes, but I think their eyes were blinded by the smoke. What is wrong is -not with machinery, but with the private ownership of machinery. There -is no reason why machines should not make beautiful and substantial -things, instead of making ugly and dishonest things--except the fact -that machines are owned by people who have no interest except to make a -profit out of the product. A thing is not less beautiful because there -are millions of other things exactly like it in the world. That is just -a snobbish notion, and Morris should have learned the lesson from any -field of daisies.” - -Here is Sherwood Anderson telling the story of his life. He is one -American who does not like machinery, and he has good reason; he has -worked in factories, and he knows. He agrees with Morris that the -monotony of the machine destroys the initiative and therefore the morals -of the workers; they cannot create, and so they tell smutty stories. But -you note that Anderson is not a Socialist, and has not the vision of -what a factory might be if it were democratically owned and managed by -the workers. The workers will then be very proud of their beautiful -machines, they will learn to understand and tend them all, and -administer the politics of the great industry of which the machines are -a part. The individual worker will travel from the factories to the -harvest fields and back, as many varieties of labor as he fancies. And -anyhow he won’t have to work but three or four hours a day, and the rest -of the time he can develop his faculties by making verses, or playing -music, or staging dramas, or baseball games, or whatever he pleases. And -every year the machines will become more automatic, until some day the -only labor of man will consist of pressing a few buttons every morning. -Whether you like that or not depends entirely upon whether or not you -have developed your brains, and want to develop them still further. - - - - -CHAPTER LXXV - -SEEING AMERICA FIRST - - -The spirit of John Milton and John Bunyan crossed the Atlantic Ocean and -settled in Massachusetts, and the spirit of their enemies crossed the -Atlantic Ocean and settled in Virginia. They made two civilizations, and -these civilizations fought a civil war in the new world, just as they -had done in the old. - -For the first two hundred years the colonists were busy killing Indians -and clearing the wilderness, so they had little time for art. They had -to break their ties with the old country; and just as we saw Voltaire -finding it easier to rebel in religion and politics than in the field of -culture, so in America we shall find that the Declaration of -Independence was signed a long time before any artist was bold enough to -revolt from British standards of taste. The first American writers were -concerned to handle American themes as they imagined Addison and Steele -and Burke and Dryden would have done. - -The first writer to escape this British tradition did so, not by making -an American tradition, but by ascending into the universal and -transcendental. Ralph Waldo Emerson read Goethe and Swedenborg and Plato -and the Hindus, and became a Yankee mystic and democratic saint. - -He was the son of a Unitarian clergyman, and followed in his father’s -footsteps. But early in life he realized that he no longer believed the -special doctrines which gave meaning to the communion service, so he -stood up in his church, and very quietly and simply told about his new -convictions, and went out into the world to earn his living as an -independent lecturer. - -Puritanism was now two hundred years ancient, but the temper of it still -survived in New England; that is, people were painfully anxious to do -right, and looked up to teachers who had studied such problems. They -were willing to gather in meeting places, and be advised what they -should do, and to pay a modest stipend to the adviser. So this young -rebel was able to earn the simple living which sufficed everyone in -Concord in those days. He studied the world’s best literature in several -languages, he thought earnestly and wrote honestly, and was a model of -dignity, kindness, and wisdom. - -His most popular lectures are known to us as “Emerson’s Essays.” I read -them in youth, and owe to them a tribute of gratitude. First of all, -they teach self-reliance, the most fundamental of the pioneer virtues. -It was by self-reliant men that New England was made; and in this -atmosphere of extreme individualism, it was impossible for a philosopher -to value the equally fundamental virtue of solidarity. Emerson has no -conception of a co-operative world, and believes that he has done his -duty to his fellows by courtesy and the speaking of the truth. - -The essays are formless, consisting of scattered paragraphs and random -reflections. They are not always easy to interpret, because they soar -into regions of the absolute, where every statement is equally as untrue -as it is true. The bearings depend upon the application; so that we have -to know Emerson’s whole thought, and his life. Applying the highest -tests, we find his doctrine a little thin and his example a little tame. -He lived through stern times, and while his voice was always on the -right side, we feel that he might have been more prompt and more -vigorous. His optimism is beautiful, but a trifle lacking in content. We -want a man to put more reality into his writings, to show us how to deal -with the grim and hateful facts of life. Emerson makes a cryptic -statement-- - - I am owner of the sphere, - Of the seven stars and the solar year, - Of Caesar’s hand, and Plato’s brain, - Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakespeare’s strain. - -We say: yes, perhaps; but most of us find it difficult to get the -Shakespeare strain to come out of us. Likewise, we do not know quite how -to reconcile Lord Christ with Caesar; nor can we always get Lord Christ -to agree with Shakespeare--watch the scoffing this book will cause among -the critics! You see how these mystic utterances are liable to be -misunderstood; and how it was possible for the transcendentalist -movement, which produced Emerson, to produce also the horrors of -“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.” - -On the other hand, when Emerson deals with justice and liberty in New -England he can deliver as heavy a punch as Byron: for example, his -“Boston Hymn,” discussing the question of compensation for the -enfranchised slaves-- - - Pay ransom to the owner, - And fill the bag to the brim. - Who is the owner? The slave is owner, - And ever was. Pay him. - -I have discussed these lines in “The Book of Life,” and suggested how -much cheaper it would have been to pay the owners than to fight the -Civil War. I overlooked the fact that this “Boston Hymn” was written -after the Civil War was on. Emerson, combining Yankee economy with wise -humanity, had all along been advocating the sensible course of freeing -the slaves by purchase. - -We think of this Concord sage as a philosopher, and less often as a -poet. But he was a great poet; at his best he is among the immortals. -Not only is there wisdom and moral beauty in his verse; there is love of -nature, and there is passion. People sometimes died young in Concord, -just as they did in old England and in Greece, and poets poured their -sorrow into song. Emerson’s “Threnody,” written upon the death of his -five-year-old son, is lacking in all the classical paraphernalia of -Milton’s “Lycidas,” but it is full of such beauty and fervor as are -native to our country, and I see no reason why we Americans should -devote all our time to the worship of foreign gods. If our colleges must -teach the classics, to the exclusion of modern work, let them at least -teach our native classics, which are easier for us to understand. - -I propose a motto for our youth: See Emerson first! - - - - -CHAPTER LXXVI - -THE AGE OF INNOCENCE - - -America at this time was an overgrown youthful body, ill-supplied with -mind; and a few ardent believers in culture set out to fill this need. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a student at Bowdoin College, and the -faculty decided that Cervantes and Dante and Goethe and Moliere and Hugo -ought to be more than names to the American people; somebody ought to -study these languages and literatures, and pass them on. They gave -Longfellow a traveling scholarship for three years, and he went abroad -and collected things romantic and beautiful and innocent in Spain and -Italy and Germany and France, and came home and spent the next twenty or -thirty years in teaching them, first at Bowdoin and then at Harvard. He -translated poetry, and also wrote poetry of his own, very much -resembling the translations. At the age of forty-seven he became a poet -exclusively, and lived to be a seventy-five-year-old boy, just as -romantic and beautiful and innocent as when he had first gone out to -gather nourishment for the hungry young soul of America. - -Longfellow was a moralist, and it was his purpose to draw useful -conclusions in his poetry. He would start by looking at the planet Mars, -and end by proving that human beings must be brave and self-reliant: not -that there is anything remotely suggesting such qualities in a “red -planet,” but because this planet happens to be named after the God of -war. He would look at a ship on the stocks, and draw conclusions about -the government of his country. He would look at the village blacksmith, -and thank him for a lesson in diligence and sobriety. - -That kind of poetry has now gone out of fashion. The young intellectuals -of America are no longer romantic and beautiful and innocent, and they -say that Longfellow is propaganda. But you know my thesis by now--theirs -is just as much propaganda, only it is on the other side. What -Longfellow called art is incitement towards diligence and sobriety, -while what our young sophisticates call art is incitement toward going -to hell in a hurry. Anything that pictures the delights of the senses -and the breakdown of the will is art; but poor Longfellow, in an -unguarded moment, had the misfortune to exclaim that - - Life is real! Life is earnest! - And the grave is not its goal. - -These two lines have been enough to damn him in the eyes of a whole -generation of coterie-litterateurs. - -Turning the pages of the art which Longfellow brought back from Europe, -there flashes to mind a memory of the days when I also traveled in -Europe, collecting culture. It was in Naples, a soft moonlit evening in -early spring, and I stood before a great statue, noting its dim -outlines. A figure slipped up beside me, and a soft voice began to -whisper, offering to take me to a place where there were beautiful boys: -“beautiful, sweet Neapolitan boys,” I remember the phrase. I wonder what -the traveling idealist from Bowdoin College would have made of such a -whisper in the moonlight! - -That was a dozen years ago, and we in America have learned something -about Europe since then. I am the last person in the world who would -desire a return to the age of innocence, or advocate, even for the -young, the blinking of grim and hideous facts. But this I do believe: a -time will come, and not so far in the future, when American youth will -react from the hip-pocket flask and petting-party stage of culture. -With full knowledge of vice and disease, it will choose virtue and -health, because these are the truly interesting and worth while things, -and the truly great themes of art. - -Pending the arrival of such a time, I record my notion, that poetry does -not cease to be great because it is declaimed by a million schoolboys. -“To be or not to be,” and “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” are great -poetry, even though we personally are tired of them. If it be permitted -to tell a story in verse, then assuredly “The Wreck of the Hesperus” is -a tragic story told in vivid and stirring language. I say that anyone -who does not know this for a great ballad simply does not know what a -ballad is. You may spend your time digging in Percy’s “Reliques” and -other old volumes, and find things less easy to read, but nothing more -worth reading. I go farther and admit that when I was young I found -delight in “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “Hiawatha” and “Evangeline,” and I -don’t believe that kind of young person is yet entirely extinct in -America. - - - - -CHAPTER LXXVII - -A SNOW-BOUND SAINT - - -The Puritans, having been driven from England by religious persecution, -set to work in their New England to persecute others. Among their -victims was a Massachusetts Quaker by the name of Whittier, who was -deprived of the franchise for daring to petition the town council for -liberty to preach. Undaunted by the punishment, this pioneer raised a -family of ten stalwart children in the Quaker faith, and became the -great-great-grandfather of a Quaker poet, who has received but scant -appreciation from the literary critics of his country. - -John Greenleaf Whittier was born in 1807, one of a large family, and -grew up to toil upon a rocky farm. He got his education in a country -school, and his first glimpse of poetry from a wandering Scotchman who -spent a night at the farm-house, and who sang the songs of Robert Burns. -The frail and sensitive lad who sat and listened enraptured was to grow -up to be the Burns of New England; a saintly Burns, having the Scotch -poet’s energy and rebellious ardor, but not his destroying vices. - -Independence, hard work, and religion were the three factors in -Whittier’s environment. He wanted to go to an academy to continue his -education, but there was no money, so he earned it by work as a cobbler. -You remember the sneer of the Tory critic--“Back to your gallipots, Mr. -Keats”; and here we find a critic satirizing our Quaker poet: “the wax -still sticking to his fingers’ ends.” You remember how Keats fell in -love with an elegant young lady; Whittier became a country editor and -presumed to aspire to the daughter of a local judge, and was spurned, -and went back home, ill, poverty-stricken and humiliated. - -But he continued to study and write verses, and found another job as -editor, and a prospect of success in politics. Then came the crisis in -his life; the anti-slavery movement was making its first feeble -beginnings in New England, and Whittier became the friend of William -Lloyd Garrison, and spent sleepless nights wrestling with the angel of -duty. At the age of twenty-seven he made the choice; he threw away his -career, and spent his hard-won savings to print and send out five -hundred copies of an address in opposition to chattel slavery. We who in -these days are daring to challenge wage slavery, and are witnessing -mobbings and jailings and torturing for the cause, must not forget that -back in the 1830’s this gentle Quaker poet was stoned and nearly lynched -in Massachusetts, and mobbed again and had his office burned about his -head in Philadelphia. - -He suffered from ill health all his life, yet he never gave up the -cause. He suffered from poverty; having a mother and sisters dependent -upon him, he was too poor ever to marry. He continued to edit papers, he -wrote and spoke against slavery, and composed verses which were taken up -and recopied by constantly increasing numbers of newspapers. Many of -these verses are now found in his collected works, and one who reads -them is surprised by their uniformly high quality, not merely the fervor -and energy, but the beauty of expression and the treasures of -imagination which this self-taught country boy poured into his -propaganda. You recall Browning’s rebuke to the old poet Wordsworth, -“The Lost Leader.” Here is Whittier’s “Ichabod,” rebuking Daniel -Webster for his apostasy to the cause of freedom-- - - All else is gone, from those great eyes - The soul has fled: - When faith is lost, when honor dies, - The man is dead! - -Whittier was not among the fanatics of the movement; on the contrary, he -was a shrewd politician, interested in moving the minds of his fellows -and in getting something done. He helped in the forming of the Abolition -party, which later became the Free Soil party, and then the Republican -party of Lincoln. As a Quaker he could not support the war, yet he -managed to write verses about it--for example, when Stonewall Jackson -was unwilling to kill old Barbara Frietchie for hanging out the Stars -and Stripes in Frederick. It is probable that this incident never -happened, but it made a very popular poem. - -Whittier never went to college, he never traveled in Europe to acquire a -foreign tone; he remained an American peasant. He voiced their thoughts -in their own language, and they have cherished him, and will some day -force the critics to give him his due place. If you are looking for -ballads made out of native material, read the story of old Skipper -Ireson, who roused the fury of his villagers by sailing away from a ship -in distress: - - Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart - Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart - By the women of Marblehead. - -If you are looking for American sentiment, for simple, untouched -democracy, read “Maud Muller.” Above all, if you want the inner essence -of New England farm life, the mingled harshness and beauty of its body, -and the mingled sternness and charm of its spirit, read “Snow-Bound” - - - - -CHAPTER LXXVIII - -PURITANISM IN DECAY - - -The Puritans of Massachusetts, having killed the Indians and fenced the -farms and built the towns, settled into the routine of getting one -another’s money. The more enterprising ones moved West, where there was -more money; the others sunk into slow decay. Puritanism came to mean, -not aggressive virtue, but negative avoidance. Before it passed away -entirely, it produced a man of genius who was of it enough to know it -thoroughly, yet sufficiently out of it to be able to embody it in art. - -Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, a port which had once been -prosperous, but had lost in competition with the great cities. It was a -mournful place, living in the memory of its past, which included the -drowning and hanging of witches, a frenzy of religious terror in which -an ancestor of Hawthorne had been a persecuting judge. One of this -judge’s victims had put a curse upon him, and the novelist pictures -himself, playfully, as the last sad relic of this curse. He was a -solitary man, born to poverty, shy, aloof and obscure. Recognition did -not come until the middle forties, and meantime he lived in ancient, -lonely houses, staying indoors by day and wandering the streets by -night. He had no political sense, no social sense; events in the world -outside meant little--he lived in the past. - -Yet, strangely enough, he did not accept the ideas of this past. He had -nothing of the robust Tory fervor of Sir Walter Scott; he was a modern -man, and a quiet, skeptical humor shines through his pages. What had -happened was that his faith had dried up, and nothing else had come to -take its place; so there he was, not knowing why, or how, or to what -end. He wrote elaborate diaries, full of minute details about the things -which happened hour by hour; things which only a child would consider -worth recording. He would produce and publish a sketch in which, with -really beautiful art, he would describe the sensations of walking about -the streets of Salem on a rainy night, and how the lights shone in the -puddles--yellow lights of the street-lamps and blue and green lights -from the drug-stores. - -He gathered strange legends of old-time people, living terror-haunted -lives, driven to sin by the very desperation of their efforts to avoid -it. The pangs of conscience are Hawthorne’s “local color” and artistic -tradition; he knows them in every detail, but he himself is not under -their spell--they are like bric-à-brac and objects of art which he -collects. “Twice-Told Tales” was the title of his first volume, and -this, you see, prepares us for conscious literary artifice. Then we -have “Mosses from an Old Manse” which promises mournfulness and -moldiness, desolation and decay. Then “The House of the Seven Gables,” -the hiding place of an old and dying family haunted by a curse. - -“The Scarlet Letter” brought its author instant recognition, and is -considered by many critics America’s most authentic masterpiece of -fiction. A young married woman in the old-time witch-hunting Salem has -yielded to adulterous love for a young clergyman. A child is born, and -the mother is publicly accused, and exhibited upon the scaffold, with -the letter “A” embroidered in scarlet cloth upon her dress. She will not -reveal the name of her lover, and so the young clergyman escapes -obloquy, but is haunted by that sense of guilt which is the principal -product of Puritanism in decay. - -The “eternal triangle,” you see; but it differs from other triangles in -that it is not a story of passion, but of punishment. We do not see the -guilty love in the days of its happiness, but only in the days of its -remorse. As in all Hawthorne’s stories, we meet, not people who are -acting, but people who are looking back upon actions long since -committed. This is one kind of art, and I admit the greatness of “The -Scarlet Letter” as a piece of technique. But we are here discussing art -works as human and social products; and I point out, as in the case of -so many other tragedies, how temporary and unsubstantial is the ground -upon which it rests. - -The ethical basis of “The Scarlet Letter” is the conviction that -marriage is indissoluble, and that a young woman who has been given in -marriage to an elderly man, and finds herself unhappy, is bound by the -laws of God to remain in the bonds of that unhappy marriage. But -suppose, for the sake of argument, that the ideas of mankind should -undergo a change; suppose we should come to the conviction that a young -woman who finds herself married to an elderly man whom she does not -love, and who conceives an intense and enduring passion for a younger -man, and desires to have children by that younger man--suppose we should -decide that this woman, in remaining with the older and unloved man, and -denying life to children by the younger man, is committing a crime -against posterity, violating a fundamental law upon which race progress -depends? You can see that in that case “The Scarlet Letter” would become -entirely archaic, an object of curiosity mingled with repugnance. - -The American government honored this eminently respectable novelist by -making him, first a gauger of customs, and then its consul to Liverpool. -He was a prematurely old man then, and fled from the cold fogs of -England to Rome--which he liked no better. But he patiently collected -information concerning Roman antiquities, and composed a novel called -“The Marble Faun,” which is dutifully read as a guide book by all -school-marms visiting the Eternal City. How well adapted this Puritan -genius was to interpret the Latin world, you may judge from the fact -that he was shocked by nude statues, and could not see why sculptors -continued to overlook the necessity for marble clothing. That skin was -made before clothing, and may continue to be worn after clothing is -forgotten, is a fact which did not occur to this traveler from Salem. - -He came back to pass his last days in an America torn by the agonies of -the Civil War. He was a Democrat by force of inertia, and had written a -campaign biography of the genial and bibulous President Pierce. He had -no understanding of the war, nor of the new America which was to be born -from it. In these last pathetic days he reminds us of the poor old Tory, -Sir Walter Scott, facing the Reform Bill and the Chartist riots and “the -country mined below our feet.” I plead with artists to step ahead of the -procession in their youth, so that in their old age. they may not be -left so pitifully far behind. - - - - -CHAPTER LXXIX - -THE ANGEL ISRAFEL - - -The Puritans who settled Massachusetts believed that happiness was to be -found in the repressing of the “carnal nature.” The Cavaliers who -settled Maryland and Virginia believed in enjoyment, and rode their -passions at a gallop. It was appropriate that these Cavaliers should -give to America an artist who taught that sensuous beauty is a mystic -revelation of God, and that poetry must be music, to the exclusion of -intellect and moral sense. - -A Maryland general’s son ran away and married a young actress, and these -two lived a wretched, hand-to-mouth existence, and died in a garret, -leaving three infants. One of the three was named Edgar Poe, and our -first glimpse of him shows a nurse feeding him upon a “sugar-tit” soaked -in gin. A little later we find him adopted by a sentimental lady named -Allan, and made into a kind of drawing-room pet, taught to pledge toasts -in drink. He was an exquisite little fellow, proud, sensitive and -self-willed; and in his early training we note the seeds of all his -later misery. - -He began writing poetry in childhood, and we still read verses which he -composed in his ’teens. He was sent to the University of Virginia, where -along with rich men’s sons he gambled and drank. He deserted the -University, quarreled with his benefactors, and enlisted in the army. -They got him out and sent him to West Point, which is famous for having -graduated a number of soldiers, and for having failed to graduate two -artists, Edgar Allan Poe and James McNeill Whistler. Poe wrote verses -and drank brandy with his room-mates, and finally set about to get -himself expelled from a life which he hated. - -So here he was at the age of twenty-two, a poet, a rebel and a drunkard. -He had eighteen years more to live, and during that time his life was -one long agony of struggle. He had brilliant gifts, his work found -recognition, and he got many editorial positions, but could not keep -them. He wandered from city to city, quarreled with both enemies and -friends, and exhibited all those forms of evasion and dishonesty for -which alcohol and opium are responsible.... - -“How much shall I say about the great curse of the South?” asks Ogi. - -“Say it all,” says his wife. - -“I recall those old Maryland and Virginia homesteads, dark and dusty, -falling to decay; a few sticks of furniture, moth-eaten hangings, and -silent, pale, in-door men and women--the former drinking, the latter -taking drugs and patent medicines. I remember also the well-to-do -families in the towns, the wild young cursing blades, and the old topers -with trembling hands. I remember the uncle who shot off his head in the -park, and that other uncle, with a distinguished naval record, who lived -into old age without ever being sober. I remember my own father, and my -childhood and youth of struggle to save him. All these men were kind and -gentle, idealistic, charming in manners--” - -“I, too, had an uncle,” says Mrs. Ogi; “the tenderest heart you ever -knew. He drank because he could not stand the life he saw about him, the -unsolvable race problem, the mass of ignorance and brutality. I would -get his bottle away from him and hide it, and then in his torment he -would go so far as a ‘damn’; but I never saw him so drunk that he failed -to apologize for such a word.” - -We must take Poe as one of the pitiful victims of these customs; we must -understand that his virtues were his own, while his vices were fed to -him in a “sugar-tit.” Of all American poets up to this time his was the -greatest genius; his was the true fire, the energy, the vision--and for -the most part it was wasted and lost. It was wasted, not merely because -he got drunk, because he was always on the verge of starvation, because -he was chained to slavery, and had to write pot-boilers under the orders -of men with routine or mercenary minds; it was wasted also because he -was a victim of perverse theories about art and life. He began, as a -child, with imitations of Byron, and then came under the spell of -Coleridge’s disorderly genius. We might take a great part of Poe’s work, -just as we took “Kubla Khan,” and show how his talent goes into the -portrayal of every imaginable kind of ruin, terror and despair. - -We cannot say to what extent Poe’s art theories were the product of his -vices, and to what extent the vices were the product of the theories. -After he left West Point, and was starving in Baltimore, he met his -cousin, a frail, sensitive child, as poor as himself. He married her -when she was less than fourteen years old; he adored her, but their life -was a long crucifixion, because of her failing health. Several times she -broke a blood vessel, and in the end she faded away from tuberculosis. -The shadow of that tragedy hung over Poe’s whole mature life, and you -will note that his loveliest poetry deals with beautiful women who are -dying or dead. - -In this tormented body there lived and wrought not merely a great -genius, but also a great mind. Poe was a critic, of a kind entirely new -to America. He did not distribute indiscriminate praise from motives of -patriotism and puffery; he had critical standards, right or wrong, and -was merciless to the swarms of art pretenders. Naturally, therefore, he -was hated and furiously attacked; and because of his weaknesses, he was -an easy mark for all. - -His art theories were those which we are here seeking to overthrow; how -false and dangerous they were, his life attests. It is interesting to -note that in one of his youthful poems, the first real utterance of his -genius, he took a quite different view. Quoting an imaginary passage -from the Koran about the angel Israfel, “whose heart-strings are a -lute,” he wrote: - - Therefore thou art not wrong, - Israfeli, who despisest - An unimpassioned song; - To thee the laurels belong, - Best bard, because the wisest. - -Well might this tormented Baltimore poet long for the wisdom of the -Mohammedan angel! He spent his great analytical powers in concocting a -“moon hoax,” and in solving all the cryptograms which empty-headed -people sent him. It was as if a man should build a mighty engine, and -then set it to fanning the air. In his last pitiful years he composed an -elaborate work on metaphysics, which he called “Eureka,” meaning that he -had solved the secret of the ages, the nature of existence and the -absolute. It is like all other metaphysics--a cobweb spun out of words; -the mighty engine has here been set to fanning a vacuum. - -Poe was a fighting man and an ardent propagandist. He fought for art, -for the freedom and the glory and the joy of art, as a thing apart from -humanity, and from the sense of brotherhood and human solidarity. Life -wreaked its vengeance upon him, his punishment was heavy enough, and we -should be content with voicing our pity--but for the fact that his art -theories are still alive in the world, wrecking other young artists. -This is what makes necessary the painful task of drawing moral lessons -over the graves of “mighty poets in their misery dead.” - - - - -CHAPTER LXXX - -THE GOOD GREY POET - - -Edgar Allan Poe lived and wrote to prove that art excludes morality. We -come now to another poet, who lived and wrote to prove that art excludes -everything else. He had a message and a faith, which was the dominating -motive in everything he wrote; in short, he was one of the major -prophets--like Dante, Milton, Tolstoi, Nietzsche, who used art as a -means of swaying the souls of men. - -Referring thus to Walt Whitman, we now have upon our side the weight of -critical authority; learned and entirely respectable college professors -write in this fashion about his books, and do not lose their positions -for so doing. But realize how different it was in Whitman’s lifetime; in -the early years respectable opinion looked upon him as a kind of obscene -maniac. His first edition of “Leaves of Grass,” a thousand copies -printed by himself, was left on his hands, except for those which he -sent out free--and even some of these were returned, one by the poet -Whittier! A critic wrote that Whitman was “as unacquainted with art as a -hog with mathematics.” Another wrote that he “deserved the whip of the -public executioner.” He was thrown out of a government position in -Washington for having a copy of his book locked up in his own desk, and -again and again his publishers were forced by threat of public -prosecution to withdraw the book from circulation. Alone among Whitman’s -contemporaries to recognize his genius was Emerson, and when Whitman -published Emerson’s letter in the second edition of “Leaves of Grass,” -Emerson was embarrassed--for in the meantime his horrified friends had -persuaded him to hesitate in his opinion. From all this we may learn how -difficult it is to judge one’s contemporaries. - -Walt Whitman was born of farmer folk in an isolated part of Long Island. -His father became a carpenter and moved to Brooklyn, then a small town. -Walt became an office boy at the age of twelve; he got hold of some good -reading, learned printing, and became a teacher, and something of an -orator. He was an abolitionist, a teetotaler and other kinds of “crank”; -a slow-moving, rather stubborn youth, who wandered about from place to -place, meeting all kinds of people, watching life with interest, but -caring nothing for success. He had a good job as a newspaper editor, but -gave it up because of his views on slavery. He set a new fashion in -life--a type of man now common in the radical movement, who does enough -manual labor to keep alive, and spends the rest of his time studying -literature and life. Walt’s people loved him, but could not make him -out; they thought he was lazy when he loafed and invited his soul. - -He was finding his own way, guided by the unfolding genius within. He -wanted to know people, every kind that lived; he wanted to talk with -them, to feel himself one with them. He worked with laborers on the job, -he rode in ferry-boats, he made friends with the drivers of busses. He -wanted to see America, so he wandered by slow stages to New Orleans and -back. He wanted to know literature, so he read, but according to his own -taste, taking no one’s opinions. When he was ready to express himself, -it was a self hitherto unknown in literature, and the most startling -voice yet lifted in America. - -It often happens that the student learns about new and vital movements -through the writings of their opponents. Thus the present writer was -made into a rationalist by the reading of Christian apologetics. In the -same way I learned about Whitman from an essay by Sidney Lanier, a -respectable gentleman-poet from the South, who demonstrated that -Whitman’s claim to be the voice of democracy was nonsense; the masses of -the people had no interest whatever in this eccentric poetry, and could -not understand what the poet was driving at. - -Does a poet necessarily have to be appreciated by those of whom he -writes? Or is it possible to tell something about people which they -themselves do not yet know? If a man is picking apples, he is obeying -the laws of gravitation, and the apples likewise are obeying it. Sir -Isaac Newton comes along, and interprets the behavior of the man and of -the apples. Does the truth of Newton’s law depend upon the assent of the -apple-picker? - -Walt Whitman did really know the American people, the masses, as -distinguished from the cultured few; he knew them as no man of letters -up to that time had known them. He believed there were tremendous, -instinctive forces working within them, and that he, as poet and seer, -could enter into that unconscious mass-being and understand it and guide -it. He believed that he was laying out the path which democracy would -follow, he was voicing the desires it would feel, the love and -fellowship and solidarity it would embody in institutions and arts. -Whether he was right in these intuitions and mystical prophesyings was -for the future to decide. Certainly there were two kinds of persons in -Whitman’s own day who could not decide; one was the average wage-slave, -ignorant and groping; and the other was a gentleman from Georgia, who -made excellent but customary rhymes about birds and brooks and flowers. - -Walt Whitman was one of those mystics to whom the inner essence of all -things is the same; all life is sacred, and all men are brothers in a -common Fatherhood. Jesus taught that, and in the nineteen hundred years -which have since passed new prophets have arisen every now and then to -revive it--but the Christians are just as much scandalized every time. -Whitman’s title, “Leaves of Grass,” under which he included all his -poems, means that he chose the most common and least distinguished -product of nature for his symbol of the human soul. The poet himself was -one of these “Leaves of Grass,” and celebrated himself as the -representative and voice of the rest. He sang the song of himself, and -his contemporaries thought this was crude and barbarous egotism. This -big bearded fellow who printed his own poems, with a preface to tell how -great they were, and his picture in a workingman’s dress without a -necktie--he was nothing but a hoodlum, and the critics called for the -police. - -The worst stumbling block was the portion of the book called “Children -of Adam,” dealing with sex. The Anglo-Saxon race was used to horrified -silence about sex, and also to sly leering about sex; the one thing it -had never encountered was simple frankness. What Whitman did was to take -sex exactly as it is, a part of life, and write about it as he wrote -about everything else. When I, as a student, first looked up “Leaves of -Grass” in the Columbia University library, I found this portion of the -book so thumbed and worn as to make plain that the young readers had not -been taught to understand Whitman. For he gave to this part of his -message its due proportion and no more. He was a clean man, living an -abstemious and even ascetic life, developing his mind as well as his -body. - -The Civil War came, and the moral greatness of Whitman was made -apparent. He went to Washington as a sort of amateur nurse; living on -almost nothing, he devoted his entire time to visiting in the hospitals, -bringing comfort and affection to tens of thousands of suffering and -neglected soldiers. His genius was for friendship, and everyone loved -him; there are many stories of men whose lives were saved by his -presence and his love. He was a big man, with ruddy cheeks and a full -beard, turned gray under the strain of these years. It is interesting to -note that Lincoln, meeting him, said the same words that Napoleon said -to Goethe: “This is a man!” - -“The good grey poet,” as one of his friends called him, wrecked his -health amid these frightful scenes, and was never the same again. He -published more poems, “Drum-Taps,” dealing with the war. All that which -was called egotism is now burned away, and we have a revelation of a -people uplifted by struggle. In 1871 came a prose work, “Democratic -Vistas,” in which his message is proclaimed even more clearly than in -his verse. It is a call for a new art, based upon brotherhood and -equality. Our New World democracy, declared Whitman, is “so far an -almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand -religious, moral, literary and aesthetic results.” - -Whitman suffered a stroke of paralysis, recovered partially, and then -suffered another stroke. He was more or less crippled through his last -twenty years, and lived in extreme poverty; but gradually his fame -spread and friends gathered about him. The labor movement was now -emerging--and its leaders were discovering that this old poet had indeed -forseen how they would feel. “My call is the call of battle--I nourish -active rebellion.” And each new generation of the young nourishers of -rebellion feeds its soul upon Whitman’s inspiration. - -Is it poetry? That is a question over which battles are fought. It seems -to me that words matter little; it is a kind of inspired chant, which -moves you if you are susceptible to its ideas. For two years I steeped -myself in the literature of the Civil War, while writing “Manassas”; and -to me at that time “Drum-Taps” seemed to contain all the fervor and -anguish of the conflict. But the everyday person, who does not rise to -those heights, prefers “O Captain, My Captain,” which has the easier -beauties of rhyme and fixed rhythm. - -The critics have by now got used to Whitman’s honesty about sex; the -only stumbling block is his long catalogues of things. He will sing the -human body, and give you a list of the parts thereof: and can that be -poetry? But you must bear in mind that Whitman is more a seer than a -poet. “Sermons in stones,” said Shakespeare; and if the stones had -names, Whitman would call the roll of them, and each would be a mystic -symbol, and the total effect would be a hypnotic spell. It is an old -trick of those who appeal to the subconscious mind; in the English -Prayer-Book, for example, there is a chant: “O, all ye Works of the -Lord, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him forever.” The hymn -goes on to name all the various aspects of nature: “O, all ye Showers -and Dew ... O, all ye Fire and Heat ... Ye Lightnings and Clouds ... Ye -Mountains and Hills ... Ye Seas and Floods ... Ye Fowls of the Air ... -Ye Beasts and Cattle.” ... and so on through the many Works of the Lord -which are invited to praise Him and magnify Him forever. So, if you are -a mystic, you may contemplate with awe each separate miraculous product -of that mysterious organizing force which has created a living human -body. - -The mystical life has its dangers, and also, alas! its boredoms. I have -stated in the chapter on Emerson that there is no absolute which is not -equally as false as it is true. Whitman has raised up a host of -imitators, and I have read their alleged “free verse,” and record the -fact that it was surely a waste of my time, and apparently a waste of -theirs. Also, I have known many followers of Walt Whitman, the greater -number of whom have chosen to follow the poet’s eccentricities, rather -than his virtues. You see, it is so much easier to leave off a necktie -and “loaf,” than it is to have genius and create a new art form! Whitman -is not alone in suffering through his disciples; Jesus had that tragic -fate, and Nietzsche, and Tolstoi, and many another major prophet! - - - - -CHAPTER LXXXI - -CABBAGE SOUP - - -We have been following the fortunes of a pioneer people breaking into -the field of world culture. Let us now travel part way round the earth -in either direction, and watch another pioneer people doing the same -thing. - -The differences between America and Russia are many and striking, and -before we enter upon a study of Russian literature we must understand -Russian life. Voltaire tells us that virtue and vice are products like -vinegar, and we shall find this applies also to the Russian soul with -its mysticism and melancholy. When the sun almost disappears for six -months at a time, and icy blizzards rage, human beings have a tendency -to stay by the fire and develop their inner natures; also they develop -congested livers, and brood upon the futility of life. - -Says Mrs. Ogi: “Don’t forget that it often gets cold in New England.” - -“Yes, and there is both mysticism and melancholy in New England art. But -the difference is that the people of New England escaped from the cradle -of despotism in Asia many centuries earlier than the Russians. So the -brooding of the New England colonist took the form of calling a town -meeting to plan for the building of a new road in the spring. But the -Russian could not do things for himself; he had to get the permission of -officials. If he tried to act for himself, they would strip him and beat -him with knouts until he swooned. So the Russian’s brooding turned to -despair, and he got drunk, and got into a fight and killed his neighbor, -and then tried to make up his mind whether God would forgive him, or -damn him to hell fire forever; he fretted over this problem until he -went insane or wrote a novel--” - -“Or both,” says Mrs. Ogi. - -The dominant fact in Russian art of the nineteenth century was -despotism. Here was a vast empire of a hundred million people, energetic -and aspiring; and the ruling class dreamed that they could introduce -modern material civilization, while keeping out the modern mind and -soul. Young Russians travelled, and learned to think as the rest of -Europe thought; then they came home, to find that the slightest attempt -to teach or to organize was met by imprisonment, torture, exile, hard -labor, or the scaffold. Wave after wave of rebellion swept Russia, to be -met by wave after wave of repression. Intellectual activity which New -England honored was in Russia a secret and criminal conspiracy; the -youth of the country was broken in a torture chamber; and so we have the -misery and distortion and impotence which we regard as characteristic -Slavic qualities. - -The Russian was supposed to be incapable of action, incapable of keeping -an appointment on time, incapable of doing anything but drinking a -hundred cups of tea and shedding tears over the fate of man. But now -comes the revolution, and in a flash we discover that all that was -buncombe. The Russians begin to act precisely like other men; they cease -to get drunk, they learn to keep appointments, they discover a sudden -admiration for those qualities we call Yankee--hustle and efficiency, -the adjusting of one’s desires to what can be immediately accomplished. -The Russian peasant, supposed to be a grown-up and bearded cherub, -lifting his eyes in adoration to his Little Father in the Winter Palace -and his Big Father in Heaven, is discovered to have precisely the same -desires as every other farmer in the world--that is to say, more land, -and fewer tax-collectors. - -Russian literature is a great literature, because it voices the hopes -and resolves of a great people groping their way to freedom and -understanding. It is, whether consciously or unconsciously, a literature -of revolt. It is full of ideas, because it has to take the place of the -prohibited subjects, science, politics, economics, and social -psychology. It is desperately serious, because it is produced by people -who are suffering. Some twenty years ago I remember meeting in New York -the adopted son of Maxim Gorki, who was earning his living as a printer -by day and studying our civilization by night. I recall his remark: -“Americans do not know what the intellectual life means.” The young man -had in mind a country where you adopted ideas with the knowledge that -they might cost you your liberty, and even your life. Under such -circumstances you think hard before you come to a decision. A lot of -Americans have had an opportunity to test their ideas that way during -the past ten years, and so they are now taking the intellectual life -seriously, and producing literature in many ways resembling the Russian. - -Says Mrs. Ogi: “Sherwood Anderson says it is because he was raised on -cabbage soup.” - -“People will read that,” says Ogi, “and think it a flash of humor; very -few will consider seriously the effect of a starvation diet upon the -soul of a sensitive boy. Neither will they stop to think about three -boys sleeping in one bed as a source of abnormal sexual imaginings, -which constitute one of the original elements in Sherwood Anderson’s -books. To me this seems a law: that wherever you have widespread and -long-continued poverty, maintained by policemen’s clubs, there you will -have a literature, extremely painful to its creators, but delightful to -high-brow critics, who will hail it as ‘strong,’ and up to the standard -of the great Russian masters.” - - - - -CHAPTER LXXXII - -DEAD SOULS - - -The poet who taught the Russian people the possibilities of their -language was Pushkin; one of those beautiful leisure-class youths who -live fast and die young. He was born of an aristocratic family, and when -he was twenty he was, like most poets, a hopeful idealist, and wrote an -ode to liberty, and was condemned to exile. He lived a wild life among -the gypsies, and wasted himself, and finally his family persuaded the -tsar to give him another chance. He was brought back to court and made a -small functionary, among illiterate, dull, supposed-to-be-great people -who had no understanding of his talents. He married a beautiful noble -lady, who betrayed him continuously and broke his heart. - -Pushkin now wrote folk tales, and a great quantity of love poems in the -Byronic manner. His idealism was dead; he was a court man, and went so -far as to glorify the rape of Poland. He wrote a long narrative poem, -“Eugene Onegin,” which tells about the tragic love troubles of an -aristocratic youth, together with all the details of his life, how he -got up in the morning, how he sipped his chocolate, how he read his -invitations to tea-parties and balls. You might not think there would -be great literature in such a story; but at least Pushkin dealt with -Russian themes and with reality; he made it interesting, lending it the -glamour of musical verse, and so he killed the old classical tradition -in Russia. The Greek nymphs and the French shepherdesses went out of -fashion, and the way was clear for Russian writers with something -important to say to their people. - -Then came Nikolai Gogol. He was a Little Russian; that is, he came from -the Ukraine, which is in the South, and like all Southern countries is -supposed to be warm-hearted and romantic. Gogol was a poor devil of a -clerk, who leaped to fame by writing humorous tales, in which the -laughter was mingled with tears. He did not put in any recognized -“propaganda,” for the simple reason, that this would have cost him his -liberty. In those days when you were discussing politics you announced -yourself as a Hegelian Moderate or a Hegelian Leftist, or whatever it -might be; in other words, you pretended to be discussing the ideas of a -German philosopher, a spinner of metaphysical cobwebs, instead of -dealing with the real problems of your country and time. - -Gogol wrote a play called “The Inspector-General,” which tells how a -government representative is expected to visit a small provincial town, -and all the functionaries are in a state of terror for fear their -various stealings will be exposed. It is understood that the -inspector-general will come in disguise, and so they mistake a youthful -traveler for this functionary, and insist on doing him honor, to his -great bewilderment. Finally the postmaster of the town, following his -custom of secretly reading the mail, opens a letter from the young man -to a friend, telling about his adventures and ridiculing the town -functionaries. The postmaster reads this aloud in the hearing of the -functionaries, to their great dismay. - -Somebody read this play to the tsar, and he was so delighted that he -ordered it produced. You remember King Louis of France, the “grand -monarch,” taking delight in Moliere’s ridicule of his courtiers. The -monarch can afford to laugh, or at least thinks he can; it is only the -functionaries who realize the destructive power of laughter. - -Then Gogol wrote a long novel, “Dead Souls.” He introduces us to a young -man who might be a graduate of any one of a thousand schools and -colleges and universities of “salesmanship” in the United States. So -brilliant are this young man’s talents: - - Whatsoever the conversation might be about, he always knew how to - support it. If people talked about horses, he spoke about horses; - if they began talking about the best hunting dogs, here also - Tchitchikov would make remarks to the point. If the conversation - related to some investigation which was being made by the - government, he would show that he also knew something about the - tricks of the civil service functionaries. When the talk was about - billiards, he showed that in billiards he could keep his own; if - people talked about virtue, he also spoke about virtue, even with - tears in his eyes; and if the conversation turned on making brandy, - he knew all about brandy. - -This expert in the psychology of salesmanship had a truly Yankee idea to -make his fortune. At that time the Russian peasants were sold with the -land, and the landlord had to pay taxes on all his serfs. A reckoning -was made at certain periods, and if any serfs died in between the -periods of reckoning, the landlord had to pay taxes just the same. Now, -said the salesman to himself, any landlord will be glad to sell me these -“dead souls”; and when I have bought a great number of them, I will get -hold of a piece of land, and move all these “dead souls” to that land, -and some bank will lend me a great sum of money, not knowing they are -dead. - -To travel over Russia and interview landlords on such an errand is in -itself high comedy. Gogol takes us to one estate after another, and lets -us see the misery of the serfs, and the incompetence and futility of the -landlords; the ones who are kind-hearted and sentimental don’t know what -to do, and cause just as much misery as the brutal ones. Such a -situation requires no comment from the novelist; merely to know about it -is to condemn it. So it happened that Gogol’s story became a -revolutionary document, and was copied out by hand and passed about -among the young rebels. The government intervened, preventing a second -edition of the book; and poor Gogol, a little later in his life, turned -into some kind of religious maniac, and repented of what he had written, -and burned great quantities of his manuscripts, including the latter -part of this novel. That gives us a glimpse of the “Russian soul,” and -makes us realize what a distance these people had to travel from -Oriental barbarism to modern individualism. - - - - -CHAPTER LXXXIII - -THE RUSSIAN HAMLET - - -The modern world was there, and it kept calling to the youth of Russia. -There came a skillful novelist, whose task it was to interpret his -country to the outside world, and at the same time to interpret the -outside world to Russia. He came of a family of wealthy landowners, and -received the best education available; but he ventured at the funeral of -Gogol to praise the work of this great master--which so incensed the -government that he was sentenced to exile upon his own estate. Three -years later he succeeded in getting permission to go abroad, and lived -the rest of his life in Germany and France, where he was free to write -as he pleased. - -The first work of Ivan Turgenev was called “A Sportsman’s Sketches”; -pictures of the peasant types he met while on shooting trips. It was a -safe, aristocratic occupation, that of killing birds for pleasure, and -surely no government could object to a gentleman’s describing the -peasants who went along to carry his guns and his lunch. The government -did not object; and so the reading public in Russia had brought vividly -before it the fact that human beings, of their own blood and their own -faith, were serfs at the mercy of landlords, to be sold like other -chattels. So the tsar was forced to free the serfs. - -Turgenev settled in Paris; a great, handsome giant, a wealthy bachelor, -amiable and simple, a charming literary lion. His friends were Gautier, -Flaubert, and other novelists, from whom he learned the perfections of -artistry, the pictorial charm, the “enamels and cameos” ideal. He had no -need to learn from them the bitter and corroding despair, because that -was his Russian heritage. - -He wrote seven novels, all short and simple; the theme of each being the -stock theme of leisure-class fiction, a man and a woman at the crisis of -their love. His girls are very much alike; direct and honest, they flame -up, and are ready to act upon their feelings, to go anywhere with the -man they love. But the man does not know where to go or what to do. The -hero of the first novel, Rudin, is a kind of modern Hamlet, who became -proverbial as the type of Russian intellectual. He is incapable of -anything but talk, and tells the girl that they must submit to her -family, which opposes the marriage. - -In the other novels the heroes do not always submit. There is, for -example, Bazarov, the Nihilist; he is a fighter, and ready for -action--but Turgenev tells us what he thinks of man’s dream of -accomplishment, when Bazarov scratches his finger and dies of blood -poisoning. Another hero is a Bulgarian, and there is a chance for action -in Bulgaria; but unfortunately this man’s lungs are weak, and he dies in -the arms of the brave girl who eloped with him. - -You see, it is hard for Turgenev to portray anyone who believes, because -he is an artist in the leisure-class tradition of fatalism and urbane -incredulity. Life is a malady; it is a malady in cruel and barbarous -Russia, and no less so in free but cynical and licentious Paris. -Turgenev, living safely abroad, describes heroes who also live abroad; -he has not the moral courage to face Russia and the Russian problem, -even in his thoughts. His people are the exiles and intellectuals, the -travelers and parasites, amusing themselves in the capitals of Europe. -He loathes this loafing class, and satirizes it without mercy; but also -he cannot help seeing the weaknesses of the revolutionists--and the -revolutionists were of course indignant at that, because they were -fighting for human freedom, and thought that a man of culture and -enlightenment ought to help them. - -So there was furious controversy over each of Turgenev’s novels, and it -hurt the feelings of the great, good-natured giant, and he did a lot of -explaining, some of it contradictory. The truth is that he did not know -quite what he believed; he was not a thinker, but merely an artist in -the narrow sense of the word, one who sees what exists and portrays it -with cunning skill. This makes him, of course, a darling of the -leisure-class critics, art for art sakers and dilettanti. The French -translations of his novels had an enormous vogue, likewise the English -translations, and men like Henry James thought him a god. But out of -Russia there now comes a new voice; the revolutionary proletariat is -making Russia over, and the young students report themselves bored with -Turgenev; he whines and moans and gets them nowhere. You see, the -Russians can now act, like other people; and so the Russian Hamlet is -laid on the shelf. - - - - -CHAPTER LXXXIV - -THE DEAD-HOUSE - - -A dozen years ago in Holland, talking about Dostoievski with my friend -Frederik van Eeden, I remarked that I had made several attempts, but had -never been able to read one of his novels through. Van Eeden replied -that Dostoievski was the world’s greatest novelist; and that is high -praise, because van Eeden is a great novelist himself. Now, under the -strain of the war, my old friend has turned into a Catholic mystic; and -so I understand his passion for the dark Russian, another of those -over-burdened spirits who despair of the human intellect, and seek -refuge in that most powerful auto-suggestion known as God. - -Feodor Dostoievski was born in a hospital, his father being a poor -surgeon with a big family. As a child he knew cold and hunger, and was -living in a garret when he wrote his first novel, “Poor People,” at the -age of twenty-four. It is a picture of two suffering, will-less -creatures; and so genuine, so completely “lived,” that it made an -instant impression. - -Its author was drawn into literary circles--which in those days meant -also revolutionary circles. In his feeble way he took up the ideas of -Fourier; he attended some radical gatherings, and went so far as to -identify himself with a printing press. The group were arrested, and -Dostoievski lay in a dungeon for many months, and finally with twenty -companions was brought out upon a public square before a scaffold and -prepared for death. At the last moment there came a reprieve from the -tsar, but meantime one of the victims had gone insane. The shock to -Dostoievski’s mind was such that he comes back to the incident again and -again in his books. - -He was sent to Siberia at hard labor; herded with common felons, beaten -and tormented--in short, receiving exactly the same treatment now meted -out to social idealists by the states of California and Washington, and -recently by the United States government at Leavenworth. After a few -years the tsar pardoned Dostoievski and impressed him into the army; he -was allowed to come back to Russia after ten years, and wrote the story -of his experiences in a book called “Memoirs of a Dead-House.” - -Dostoievski now took up the life of a hack writer. He had a large -following, but somebody else got the money; he was always in debt, his -wife and children starving and freezing. He wrote at terrific speed and -never stopped to revise. He was ill all the time, suffering an attack of -epilepsy every ten days. All this is in his writing; his characters are -drunkards, criminals, epileptics, idiots, and neurotics of every type. -He enters into their souls, and makes every moment of their lives, every -mood of their unhappy beings real to us. - -His greatest novel is “Crime and Punishment”; telling the story of a -student who, ambitious and starving, has an impulse to murder an old -woman money-lender and rob her. He commits the crime, but is too much -terrified to get the money; then he is pursued by remorse, and we follow -him through his inner torments. He meets a young girl who has become a -prostitute in order to save her family from starvation; she persuades -him to give himself up to the police, and she follows him to Siberia, -and together their souls are redeemed by love. - -I am conscientious in my attitude toward literature, and when I find the -critics raving over a great master, I feel obliged to read him. Some -years ago, I was in a hospital, recuperating from an operation, and that -seemed a good time to tackle an eight hundred-page volume, so I began -Dostoievski’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” There are several of these -brothers, also an old father, and all of them are drunk most of the -time, and tangled up with a stupid prostitute. The old father has money, -and so has the advantage over the sons, and apparently one of the sons -is on the way to murdering him. To cheer you up while the climax is -preparing, there is a monastery full of monks who hate one another like -poison, and one venerable and lovable saint, in whose spirituality you -are expected to find hope for Russia and mankind. But this saint dies, -and the youngest Karamazov brother, who loves him, has his faith in God -and his hope for humanity shattered forever, because the expected -miracle does not happen--Father Zossima stinks like any other -corpse!--That is as far as I got in the novel, and if you want to know -the outcome, you will have to do your own reading. - -This is called “realism”; but get my point clear, it is romantic and -subjective to the highest degree; it is impassioned, even frenzied, -propaganda. Dostoievski is an orthodox Eastern or Byzantine Christian; -also he is a Slavophile, or mystical Russian patriot, believing that the -Russian soul is something wonderful and special, having secret -relationship with God. This relationship is the old mediaeval orgy of -suffering and submission, a wallowing in repentance and self-abasement, -the glorification of sores, boils, rags, lice, beggary, and bad smells. -All degradation, if patiently endured, is penitential and holy, whereby -the character is lifted to exalted mystical states. When the young -student in “Crime and Punishment” awakens to the horror of having killed -a human being, he does not decide to redeem himself by devoting his -educated brain to some useful labor; no, he decides he must go to a -police station and deliver himself into the hands of officials who are -worse criminals than he. A government, itself the distilled essence of a -billion hideous crimes, will send him to Siberia, so that he and his -pious prostitute may endure ecstacies of torment. - -We see this still more clearly in another novel, whose purpose is to -reduce Christianity to idiocy. Do not take this for hyperbole or -epigram; it is merely the statement of Dostoievski’s thesis. The book is -called “The Idiot,” and the hero is an incarnation of that mystical, -psycho-neurotic Christianity which finds redemption through abasement -deliberately sought. You see, it is so easy to suffer, and it is so hard -to think! It is so easy to give yourself up to epileptic tremblings and -terrors, and call it God! Also, it appears to be easy for literary -critics to take mental disease at its own valuation. - -In the whole field of art there is no spiritual tragedy greater than -Dostoievski’s. This man made an attempt in the cause of liberty, and the -Tsardom made him into a martyr; but he came back, not to be a soldier of -enlightenment, but to crawl in the dust and lick the hand which had -lashed him. He came back as a propagandist of reaction, proclaiming a -Russia redeemed by monks. Well, he had his way, and the redeeming monk -appeared--Gregori Rasputin by name! - -Mind you, I do not quarrel with Dostoievski because he portrayed the -lost and abandoned, the hopelessly sick and tortured souls he knew. I do -not object because his characters are feverish and hysterical, because -they stare and glare and moan and cry and leap and tremble, because -their knees shake and their teeth chatter and they have nightmares -filling whole chapters. I am willing to read these things; but I want to -read them from the point of view of a scientist who can interpret them, -or of an economist who can remedy them; I do not want to read them as an -apotheosis of idiocy. I do not want them composed and idealized to prove -the divine nature of epilepsy. - -And when I hear perfectly sane and comfortable bourgeois critics in the -United States exalting this pathologic mysticism, I want to throw a -brick-bat at them. Here, for example, is Professor William Lyon Phelps -of Yale University, telling us that “of all the masters of fiction both -in Russia and elsewhere, Dostoievski is the most truly spiritual.” At -the beginning of his essay he says that this novelist “was brought up on -the Bible and the Christian religion. The teachings of the New Testament -were with him almost innate ideas. Thus, although his parents could not -give him wealth, or ease, or comfort, or health, they gave him something -better than all four put together.” - -“I think,” says Mrs. Ogi, “that you had better take a chapter off and -deal with that.” - -Says her husband: “I have a title already chosen--” - - - - -CHAPTER LXXXV - -THE CHRISTIAN BULL-DOG - - -Just what has a professor at Yale University to do with “the Christian -religion”? What do “the teachings of the New Testament” really mean to -him? How competent is he to judge about “masters of fiction” who are -“truly spiritual”? How much sincerity is there in such literary -criticism, emanating from the elm shadows of New Haven, Connecticut? - -Picture a great ruling-class university, founded on “the Bible, rum and -niggers”; that is to say, the African slave-trade, covered by a mantle -of religiosity. The students at this university are young aristocrats, -heirs-apparent of ruling-class families, who attend “prep” schools so -exclusive, and with so long a waiting list that you have to make your -application when you are born. In these schools they “make” certain -exclusive fraternities, and when they come to Yale they “make” certain -secret societies, whose spirit is symbolized by the “Skull and Bones.” -Their other ideal in life is to win athletic contests, whose temper they -embody in the “Bull-dog.” - -The trustees of this pious university you will find listed according to -their economic functions in “The Goose-Step.” Their favorite alumnus, -the high god of the present Yale religion is a three-hundred-pound -plutocrat by the name of William Howard Taft, who was made president of -the United States some years ago for the purpose of allowing the land -thieves to get away with the natural resources of Alaska. Having -fulfilled that function for his class, and having, when he came up for -re-election, succeeded in carrying the states of Vermont and Utah, he -was made chief justice of the Supreme Court, to serve as a bulwark of -the liberties of the American people: the liberty of the individual -hunky and wop to negotiate independently with the Steel Trust; the -liberty of railroad directors to compel their wage-slaves to toil when -the wage-slaves want to rest; the liberty of little children of Georgia -crackers and North Carolina clay-eaters to work all night in cotton -mills. Having solemnly delivered such pronouncements in defense of -liberty, this all-highest alumnus brings his three hundred pounds to the -commencement ceremonies, and walks in solemn procession clad in scarlet -and purple robes. - -That is Yale, and the spirit of Yale; the academic apologist of the most -efficient system of plunder yet seen upon the face of the earth. -Capitalistic exploitation is Yale’s religion; and you will note that in -all essentials it is identical with the religion of Rasputin and Tsar -Nicholas. When the tsar’s armies marched out to protect the lumber -concessions of the grand dukes on the Yalu River, the priests and -archbishops in the Kremlin officially blessed the ikons. And just so do -chaplains of New Haven bless the flags when the American marines set -out to shoot up natives in the West Indies and Central America, for -failing to pay their interest upon the bonds of J. P. Morgan and his -Yale trustees. - -This New England plutocracy selects with meticulous care the professors -who train its young. These trainers are required to be gentlemen of the -most extreme conventionality; and they are none of them drunkards, and -none of them epileptics, and they do not publicly manifest their -Christian sympathy for prostitutes, however beautiful in spirit. On the -contrary, they wear their neckties exactly right, and understand and -respect all those subtleties which mark the distinction between students -who have “made” the great secret societies and students who have failed. -William Lyon Phelps, “Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale -University,” signs himself also “Member of the National Institute of -Arts and Letters,” a most august body of literary nonentities. If anyone -of the characters in the novels of Dostoievski were to accompany -Professor Phelps to one of the sessions of this august body, the other -members would evacuate the hall. If Dostoievski himself were alive, and -writing in the United States today, the masters of this august body -would be just as apt to invite him to their membership as they are to -invite Theodore Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson. - -Very well then; what is the purpose of “the Christian religion,” what is -the meaning of the “spirituality” of Yale? Manifestly, it has no -relationship to the young plutocrats of New England. It is an official -religion, and its application is to the wealth-producing classes. Its -aim is to teach American wage-slaves to kiss the hand which lashes -them--precisely as poor sick Dostoievski kissed the Russian Tsardom. It -is to provide a mystical basis for the American Legion--just as -Dostoievski’s glorification of the Slavic soul prepared the way for the -“Black Hundreds.” When Professor Phelps says that “the teachings of the -New Testament” are better than all four of the gifts of “wealth or ease -or comfort or health,” he is not making a literary criticism, nor is he -saying anything that he means; he is peddling the standard dope which -priests and preachers of ruling classes have been feeding to the workers -through a hundred thousand years. - -Says Mrs. Ogi: “Some one ought to rewrite the Beatitudes according to -the Bull-dog.” - -Says Ogi: “I have put all ten of them into one. It runs as follows: -Blessed are the rich, for they have inherited the earth and you can’t -get it away from them.” - - - - -CHAPTER LXXXVI - -THE PEASANT COUNT - - -We come now to the great giant of the North, the most dynamic artist -that Russia has produced. Leo Tolstoi, when he died, was not only the -greatest literary man in the world; he was the incarnation to all -mankind of the Russian genius and moral power. His books had been -translated into forty-five languages, and read not merely by the -cultured few but by the great masses. The revolution which came seven -years after his death did not follow Tolstoi’s principles, and he would -have been shocked by many aspects of it; nevertheless it is true that, -just as Rousseau brought on the French revolution, Tolstoi brought on -the Russian revolution, and his invisible spirit had much to do with -shaping it. - -Leo Tolstoi was a member of the higher nobility. As a literary man, -therefore, he started with the same advantage as Byron; the critics were -ready to read his work, the public was curious about him, and all his -life, whatever he did or said was “copy.” His relatives and friends were -high in court circles, and he was able to speak to the tsar whenever he -pleased; therefore he and he alone was above the power of the police -system which strangled the life of Russia. - -He received a good education, according to the ruling-class standards of -his time, and lived a life of elegant idleness and dissipation. But even -in early youth he was tormented by religious and moral questionings. He -decided that he must do something useful, so he became an artillery -officer in the army of his tsar. Here he wrote an autobiographical -story, “Childhood,” which attracted immediate attention. Then came the -Crimean war, and he wrote a series of pictures of this conflict, -“Sevastopol,” which made him known as a great writer. - -He traveled abroad and met Turgenev in Paris; but still his conscience -troubled him, and at the age of thirty-one he went back to his estate at -Yasnaya Polyana, and undertook the task of educating the peasants who -tilled his fifteen thousand acres and provided his leisure and comfort. -Here came the police, during his absence, and searched his house and -closed the school. In those days Tolstoi was an artillery officer, and -not a Christian pacifist; he sent word to the tsar by his aunt that he -was armed, and if the police came to his estate again he would shoot the -first one who entered the house. - -Tolstoi married, and raised a large family upon this estate. His wife -was a devoted admirer of his literary work, and copied his manuscripts -many times over with infinite pains. During the years 1865-69 he wrote -“War and Peace,” which most critics consider one of the great novels of -the world. I will merely record my regrets. There are a vast number of -characters, scattered all over Russia; each character has several long -Russian names, and, according to Russian custom, will be called -different names by different groups of persons--to say nothing of -diminutives and nick-names. I labored diligently to keep track of these -characters, to remember which was which and what each was doing; but I -failed. - -Next came “Anna Karenina”: a sort of Russian high-society version of -“The Scarlet Letter.” Anna is a woman who has been sold in the usual way -to an elderly gentleman; she is a contented wife, until she meets a -young cavalry officer whom she truly loves. Instead of engaging in a -polite intrigue, according to the custom of her time, Anna takes the new -love affair more seriously than she takes her marriage, and so Tolstoi -drives her and her lover to suicide. This harshness greatly shocked the -critics of the time, who said that Tolstoi was “killing flies with an -ax.” - -There are several attitudes one can take to the problem of the “eternal -triangle.” You can say, as polite society said all over Europe, and -still says, that adulterous intrigue is a small matter, provided you -make a pretense of hiding it. Or you may say with me, that when a -married woman finds she truly and deeply loves another man, it is her -duty to get a divorce and marry the man she loves. Or you may say, with -most of the “heavy” novelists, that there is nothing for the various -characters to do but to die horrid deaths. - -Tolstoi was on the way to the great crisis of his life, a spiritual -conversion which involved a complete repudiation of the sexual element -in love. He decided that it was the duty of men and women to repress -their physical desires and become inspired Christian ascetics. When -people asked him how, in that event, the human race was to continue to -be propagated, his answer was that we didn’t have to worry about that, -because so few people would be able to practice the code he laid down. -It is difficult to see how a moral teacher could advance a doctrine more -obviously absurd than that. The better elements of the race are to -sterilize themselves, and posterity is to be begotten by weaklings and -conscious sinners! There is only one possible explanation of such a -doctrine; it is the reaction of a man whose passions are beyond his -control. We know that such was the case with Tolstoi; he was a gross -man, and Gorki reports that even in his old age his conversation was -unbearably obscene, and his attitude toward women low. Such a man can -conceive of asceticism, but he cannot conceive of true idealism in the -sex relationship. - -If Tolstoi’s conversion had had to do with sex matters alone, it would -have had but little significance. But it was something far greater than -that; it was the cry of anguish of a member of the privileged classes, -who realized that his whole life, all his equipment of leisure and -knowledge and power, was made out of the blood and sweat and tears of -the debased masses of his Russian people. He wanted to give up his -landed estates, and live as a peasant, and return to the workers what he -had taken from them. But, alas, in the meantime he had raised a large -family, and this family had something to say about the matter. The -Countess Tolstoi had been her husband’s devoted helper, so long as he -was content to remain a literary man; but when he wanted to become a -prophet and a saint, she thought he was mad. She had the children to -look out for, and the children, of course, wanted to grow up as their -father had done, in the great world of pleasure and fashion. - -Tolstoi himself retired to live in a hut; he put on peasant’s clothes -and spent his time cobbling shoes. He gave up his copyrights, but he -could never get the courage to give up his land; so he continued to grow -rich, in spite of all his agonized preachings, and the balance of his -life was continuous contradiction and disharmony. In the end he could -stand it no longer; he saw his children quarreling over the property, -like so many birds of prey over a carcass, and so he went out from his -home, with no one but his secretary. For a time no one knew where he -was, and at last he was discovered, ill and dying. His flight was one of -the great gestures of history, and the scenes which took place about his -death-bed summed up in dramatic form all the conflicting forces of the -time. - -Tolstoi had repudiated the Russian church as a creature of superstition -and exploitation. He had gone back to primitive Christianity, and the -church had excommunicated him. Now, when he was dying, they wanted to -get him back, realizing that their very existence depended upon it. If -they could not persuade him to confess and repent, they would lie about -it, and say that he had done so, as orthodox churches have done for many -other great heretics. So here were Tolstoi’s friends, mounting guard in -the railroad station where he lay dying, to keep the priests and the -bishops away! And here also were the police agents and spies, a swarm of -vermin, prying into the affairs of every person about the death-bed, and -telegraphing in panic to headquarters for instructions. When the great -soul had passed on, and the body had to be moved, some students tried to -sing a hymn, and there were the usual scenes of brutality to which the -Russian people were accustomed. - -Tolstoi had met some of the revolutionists of his time, but had been -cold to them; he was not interested in politics, only in religious and -moral questions. His conversion first took the form of absolute -non-resistance to evil. Later on he came to modify it to the doctrine -which Gandhi is now spreading throughout all Asia, “non-violent -resistance.” You shall not use physical force against your enemy, but -you oppose him by word and teaching, by your power of endurance and of -moral conviction; so you shame him, or rouse the moral forces of the -whole world to rebuke him. - -Tolstoi applied that treatment to the state church and to the police. Of -course, if he had been a peasant or a workingman, or even a poor -student or literary man, he would have been beaten to death with the -knout, or shipped off to Siberia to perish in a convict camp. But he was -a member of the nobility, and his family influence protected him, until -he had become so famous throughout the world that he was greater than -the Tsardom itself. In his last years he lived as a majestic symbol of -the protest of the Russian people; he poured out arguments against war, -against government cruelty, against landlordism, against priestcraft; -and all the powers of darkness in Russia did not dare to lay a finger -upon him. - -In his later years he wrote several novels, one of which I personally -consider his greatest. This is “Resurrection,” which tells the story of -a young Russian nobleman who seduces a peasant girl, and later on in -life discovers her as a prostitute. He becomes conscience-stricken -because of what he has done, and sets out to redeem her, follows her to -Siberia and saves her, and in the end they live that life of brotherly -and sisterly love which Tolstoi had come to preach. This story contains -frightful pictures of the whole Russian system; it was translated into -an immense number of languages, and it probably did more than any other -one book to undermine the Tsardom. - -Tolstoi published a work of criticism, and some people think that I got -my ideas from it. Therefore, let me say that if you want to find the -germ of “Mammonart,” you will do better to consult Walt Whitman’s -“Democratic Vistas,” published a generation before Tolstoi’s work. - -The thesis of Tolstoi’s “What is Art?” resembles mine in just one -particular; that is, we both believe that art has to do with moral -questions--a belief which we share with Aeschylus and Sophocles and -Euripedes and Aristophanes and Virgil and Dante and Cervantes and -Moliere and Victor Hugo and Dostoievski and Tennyson and Ibsen--and so -on through a long list of persons still to be considered. - -But from what point of view shall the artist approach morality? Tolstoi -answers as one who distrusts the intellect, distrusts science, and has -no use for or belief in progress, whether social or political or -intellectual. He believes that the one basis of hope for human beings is -in a return to the primitive, elemental forms of life; he wants art to -confine itself to those simple emotions which can be understood by the -uneducated peasant. I should say that the easiest way to make plain his -thesis would be to change his title from “What Is Art?” to “What Is -Children’s Art?” - -Whatever faults the critic may have to find with “Mammonart,” I beg him -to realize that its author is not a primitive Christian, but a -scientific Socialist; one who welcomes the achievements of the human -intellect, and looks forward to a complex social order, and to social -art which will possess an intensity and subtlety beyond the power of -comprehension, not merely of Russian peasants, but of the exclusive and -fastidious individualist culture of our time. - - - - -CHAPTER LXXXVII - -HEADACHES AND DYSPEPSIA - - -We left the French novel in the hands of Flaubert. We return now to -consider the influence of two French writers, who founded the school -known as “naturalism.” They were contemporaries of Flaubert, but their -influence counted later, for the reason that recognition was so long -delayed. - -Jules and Edmond de Goncourt were brothers, who collaborated in writing -to such an extent that they became as one mind and one pen. Jules, the -younger, died at the age of forty; his brother lived to old age. They -came of an aristocratic family, and inherited a competence; they were -bachelors and semi-invalids, and devoted themselves to the cause of art -with a kind of ascetic frenzy. They believed that true art could be -understood only by artists; but they achieved greatness in spite of that -theory, because of the intensity of their sensibility, and the vitality -they gave to the creatures of their brain. - -It was the Goncourts who first used the term “naturalism.” It was their -idea that characters are built up and a story made real by infinite -attention to detail. No attempt must be made to generalize, you must -deal with the particular, and you must make that particular known by the -massing of external circumstance. Everything must be subordinated to -that purpose; the style must be flexible, it must, like the music of -the Wagnerian opera, change at every moment, according to the scene it -portrays. These writers broke all the rules of French literary elegance, -they used barbarous and forbidden words, so the critics ridiculed them, -and the academy of Richelieu spurned them, and they had to start an -academy of their own. - -Their first work of significance was “Germinie Lacerteux,” which tells -the life history of a French serving-maid. Why should the genteel art of -fiction stoop to such a heroine? The authors answer this question in a -preface: - - Living in the nineteenth century, at a time of universal suffrage, - and democracy, and liberalism, we asked ourselves whether what are - called “the lower orders” had no claim upon the Novel; whether the - people--this world beneath a world--were to remain under the - literary ban and disdain of authors who have hitherto maintained - silence regarding any soul and heart that they might possess. We - asked ourselves whether, in these days of equality, there are still - for writer and reader unworthy classes, misfortunes that are too - low, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too base in their - terror. We became curious to know whether Tragedy, that - conventional form of a forgotten literature and a vanished society, - was finally dead; whether, in a country devoid of caste and legal - aristocracy, the miseries of the lowly and the poor would speak to - interest, to emotion, to pity, as loudly as the miseries of the - great and rich; whether, in a word, the tears that are wept below - could provoke weeping like those that are wept above. - -Fiction had dealt with serving-maids before this; for example, the -heroine of the first great English novel, Pamela, occupies that station. -But Pamela is an innocent child, and our interest is in seeing her -raised to the status of a lady. The Goncourts do not tell that kind of -story: quite the contrary, their serving-maid sinks to the depths of -degradation. The only other novelist of this time who was writing about -such “low life” was Charles Dickens. He will tell you about poverty, he -will even tell you about seduction, and the sufferings of a seduced -woman; but always he is a Victorian gentleman, remembering what is -proper for young girls to read. The French writers, on the other hand, -take up the sexual conduct and feelings of their women in the spirit of -a medical clinic; they make it a matter of honor to spare you no most -hideous detail, and if you go with them you will learn all there is to -know about sexual pathology. - -Now this degradation exists in the world, and it is the duty of every -thinking man and woman to know about it; to shrink from knowing, or from -telling others about it, is to evade our mental duty. But when we have -acquired this knowledge--when we have visited the hospitals and the -jails and the brothels and the morgues--our minds are automatically led -to the question: what is to be done about it? Not to follow this impulse -is to be mentally incompetent or morally diseased. - -And that is where we part company with the Goncourt brothers and their -theory of art. We learn from them all about the experiences of a Paris -prostitute; we learn the details of the life of a young society girl, -brought up in a hot-house environment, a prey to abnormal cravings; we -learn the symptoms of religious pathology, the half-sensuous hysteria of -a woman in the toils of Catholic priestcraft. There are eight or ten -such novels, each dealing with a different assortment of abnormalities; -but nowhere in these books is there a hint of anything to be done, -whether by individual conversion, the renewal of the moral forces, or by -political and economic readjustments. - -All such things are rigidly excluded by the “naturalist” formula; and it -is essential to get clear that the Goncourt brothers, who made the -formula, made it because they were sick and impotent men, the victims of -a decadent stage of civilization. They thought they were giving us -scientific reports upon human life, when as a matter of fact what they -were giving us were the by-products of their own headaches and -dyspepsias. They toiled with the devotion of martyrs to report every -quiver of their nervous sensibility; Edmond watched Jules while Jules -was dying--Jules even watched himself--in order to report the details of -this experience. Neither of them realized that, much as the world may -need information about the sensations of dying, it has even more need of -information about how to live. As for the Goncourt brothers, what they -needed was fresh air and exercise. - -Fiction, according to this “naturalist” formula, was to become “exact -science.” But then, there are many kinds of science. It is science to -put a beetle under the microscope, and diagram the epidermal cells in -its carapace. But science does not stop with such observation; it goes -on to experiment. Supposing this beetle be dyed pink; will there be any -trace of pink in its offspring, and does that prove the transmission of -acquired characteristics? - -We have here in California a plant wizard who raises fields of flowers -and fruits and vegetables. He is not content to accumulate facts about -them, but proceeds to alter them--to make cactus without spines, and -blackberries as big as your thumb, and wheat that is rust-proof and -peaches that are scale-proof. Will some member of the Goncourt Academy -explain why the “exact science” of fiction writing might not include an -effort to free human beings from alcoholism and syphilis? As it -happened, the greatest disciple of the Goncourt brothers, the man who -took up their formula and used it to make himself the most widely read -of all French novelists, came in the end to this very conclusion, and -evolved into a moralist as intense and determined as Tolstoi. - - - - -CHAPTER LXXXVIII - -THE TROUGHS OF ZOLAISM - - -Emile Zola was left an orphan in childhood, and experienced bitter -poverty. He began work as a bundle-clerk in a publishing house, and -trained himself to be a writer at night. He knew what it was to be -half-starved, and to write in bed with his fingers freezing in an -unheated room. His struggle for recognition was long; for more than a -score of years he wrote pot-boilers without success. But he had faith in -his own genius, he was a stubborn plodder, and in his grim, sober -fashion he worked his way to the top. - -When I was a boy this Frenchman’s name was a synonym for everything -loathsome; Tennyson wrote about “wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism.” -This writer had used words never before used in literature, and -described actions never before described; the critics could find but one -explanation--that he was a vile-minded wretch. But in fact he was one of -the most conscientious writers and most determined reformers that ever -lived. He wrote that “‘l’Assommoir’ is morality in action ... the first -story of the people that has the true scent of the people.” And he -added: “I do not defend myself, my work will defend me. It is a true -book.” - -He had set himself to tell the full truth about the world in which he -lived; to portray it as it actually was, both high and low, without -mercy, without fear or shame, without sparing the hideous facts. Having -such a picture before you, you might make what you pleased of it; you -might become a cynic or a sensualist, a saint or a revolutionist; but -until you had the facts, how could you judge what you ought to become? - -He planned a tremendous work, to consist of more than a score of -volumes, the “Rougon-Macquart series,” to tell the history of a family -under the Second Empire. We are back in the time of Napoleon the Little, -when Victor Hugo was driven into exile, and the French bourgeoisie set -up their puppet emperor. Zola had imbibed the materialistic science of -his time; he believed that human life was determined by heredity, and he -wished to exhibit this force working in society. He chose two people -suffering from a nervous disease, and showed their descendants, the rich -ones plundering and squandering, the poor ones sunk in drunkenness and -degradation. - -For years the critics spurned these books, and the public neglected -them; but at last came a masterpiece, “l’Assommoir,” which had an -enormous sale. The title means, literally, “The Slaughter-House”; it is -the name of a saloon in the working-class quarter of Paris, where the -poor are lured to their doom. It has been just twenty-five years since I -read this book, but I still see the procession of ghastly scenes: the -poor woman slave in a laundry, the husband a house-painter, and their -brood of wretched, neglected children. I gasp as I see the painter slip -and fall from the roof to his death; I shudder as I see the child Nana, -peeping through the key-hole at the obscenities her parents are -committing. - -Zola has no graces of style, no charms of personality, no humor, hardly -even any sentiment. He is hag-ridden by the misery of the modern world, -and in plodding, matter-of-fact, relentless fashion he proceeds to -overwhelm you with a mass of facts. A few such facts you might evade, -but the sum of them is irresistible; you know that this is the truth. -Over the whole picture you feel the brooding pity of a master spirit, to -whom these suffering millions are an obsession, haunting his imagination -and driving him to his task. - -There are no heroes and no heroines in Zola’s works; his hero is the -human swarms who breed like flies in our teeming cities, and struggle -and suffer and perish, without ever a gleam of understanding of their -fate. He takes us into the mining country, and in “Germinal” shows us -the slaves of the pits, coal-blackened hordes, starving, oppressed, -poisoned by alcohol, surging up in a blind fury of revolt. In “Nana” he -shows us prostitution; and to me this is the most frightful book of -all--the life-story of the little girl whom we saw getting her first -lessons in vice through the key-hole. This daughter of the working class -becomes their instrument of vengeance upon the exploiters; a seductress, -a wanton, luring men old and young to their doom, she is a kind of -symbol of wastefulness. Her life becomes a frenzy of destruction; silks, -jewels, food and wine are poured upon her in floods, and she throws them -about like a drunken giant wrecking a city. While she lies dying of -small-pox, we hear the mob outside shrieking: “To Berlin! To Berlin!” -The Franco-Prussian war is on, and Napoleon the Little is about to try -out his dream of glory, and provide Zola with the theme for yet another -masterpiece, “The Downfall,” showing war with all its horror of mass -suffering and national collapse. - -Zola, raved at and prosecuted as a sensationalist and corrupter, had now -become a national figure; and he met this responsibility by evolving -from a materialist and fatalist into a scientific Socialist, a -rationalist and preacher of humanity. He wrote three long novels, -“Lourdes,” “Rome” and “Paris,” which exposed the church as a bulwark of -hereditary privilege, and became the text-books of anti-clericalism in -France. Then came the Dreyfus case, calling for a hero to carry the -anti-clerical banner into action; and the man with the sewer name came -forward to answer the call. France had become a republic, but the army -had remained monarchist and clerical. Some of these pious aristocrats, -needing money to lavish on their Nanas, had been selling army secrets to -Germany, and were caught. They decided to put the blame upon a certain -cavalry officer, who happened to be guilty of a quite different crime, -that of being a Jew. Captain Dreyfus was convicted, and sentenced to -life imprisonment in the convict settlement on Devil’s Island. Another -officer, who investigated the case and attempted to defend Dreyfus, was -shipped off to Africa. - -It was nearly a hundred and fifty years since Voltaire had made his -fight in the Calas case; and here was “l’Infame” at the same old game of -the “frame-up.” Zola came forward with a terrific challenge entitled -“J’Accuse.” He was arrested, tried and convicted, and escaped from -France. For years this Dreyfus case remained an international scandal, -and finally it was proved that the documents used against Zola had been -forged, and later on one of the guilty men committed suicide, and -Dreyfus was released and reinstated. As I write this book the papers -record that Premier Herriot has abolished the penal settlement on -Devil’s Island, and so Zola’s task is completed. - -He had now become the leader of the French masses in the war against -reaction; and his last novels were tracts written in this cause. In -“Labor” he portrays his ideal of the free men and women of the -revolutionary movement, living frugal and abstemious lives, and -consecrating themselves to the cause of human emancipation. Another, -called “Truth,” deals with the Dreyfus case. Another had been planned, -“Justice,” but this he did not live to write. In all these works you -notice that the old theories of materialistic science have been modified -enough to permit men to fight for truth and freedom; and so Emile Zola -shares with Walt Whitman the rôle of prophet of democracy. He served the -masses even better than Whitman, because he achieved complete insight -into the economic forces of modern times, and pointed out to the people -the exact road they had to travel. More than any other artist of the -nineteenth century he voiced and guided the movement of proletarian -revolt, the mass action of the workers of factory and farm to whom the -future belongs. - - - - -CHAPTER LXXXIX - -THE SPORTIVE DEMON - - -What would Zola and his naturalism have been without social vision and -revolutionary hope? This question was answered for us by a disciple and -friend of Zola, ten years his junior, who proceeded to make a laboratory -test. - -Guy de Maupassant was a healthy young Norman animal, who came up to -Paris to make his way as a journalist. He was a tremendous worker; in -the course of his short life he wrote six novels and two hundred and -twelve short stories. He made himself master of the latter form, and has -had a dominating influence upon it. No one has been able to pack more -meaning into a brief episode, to give you the whole life and import of a -character in a couple of thousand words. Therefore all young writers of -short stories go to school to him. What has he to give them--aside from -the tricks of the trade? - -Maupassant himself would have answered: Nothing. For he was one of the -fighting art-for-art’s-sakers, to whom the idea of morality in an -art-work is an insult. But the fact is that he has a propaganda, as -definite, as deeply felt, as persistently hammered home as that of a -tub-thumper like John Bunyan or a prophet like Tolstoi. His message is -that life is a cheat and a snare, and that human beings are beasts -decked in fine clothing and pretenses. Maupassant dislikes them so that -he eats himself up. He tries to believe in play, in natural, animal -enjoyment of the passions; but instead of being content with such -pleasures, he shuts himself up like a hermit in a cell, to acquire -mastery of a difficult art, and have the satisfaction before he dies of -voicing his hatred of that fate, whatever it may be, which has created -his own life, and the bourgeois France which he sees about him. - -Maupassant watches with eager eye and alert fancy for a scene, an -episode, a trait of character, which will enable him to illustrate the -pettiness and ignominy of human destiny, and the falsity of man’s -dignities and honors. He collects such things, as a naturalist collects -biting bugs and stinging serpents. His characters are the French -peasants with their greed and cruelty, and the French bourgeois and -cultured classes, who, underneath their silks and satins, their -moralities and intellectualities, are the same vile animals as the -peasants. But Maupassant’s quarrel is not merely with men and women; it -is with life itself. The thing which brings him the keenest satisfaction -is an incident which shows the futility even of virtue; which exhibits -God as a sportive demon, amusing himself by pulling off the wings of the -butterflies he has created. - -Out of the two hundred and twelve specimens in the Maupassant museum, -any one will suffice. I choose one called “The Necklace,” simply because -it has stayed in my memory for twenty-five years. A lovely woman, -married to a poor clerk, and living a starved life, borrows from a -wealthy friend a beautiful diamond necklace, in order to make a show at -some function. She loses the necklace, and she and her husband pledge -everything they own, buy another to replace it, and take it to the owner -without revealing what has happened. For ten years they slave and drudge -to pay off their debts, and the lovely woman is turned into a haggard -wreck. The friend who loaned the necklace meets her, and is horrified at -her condition; the poor woman tells how she has drudged all these -years--and learns that she has wasted her life in order to replace an -imitation necklace, of no value worth considering! - -There is subtlety in the technique of Maupassant, but none in his view -of life. There can be no subtlety, when you lay down the law that human -beings are beasts. There are only a few beast emotions, and they never -vary; you can always be sure what a man will do in the presence of a -woman, and what the woman will let him do. And when God is a sportive -demon, all stories have the same ending. You may not foresee the -particular trick this demon will play--for example, that the lost -necklace would turn out to have been paste--but you can be sure that -something will happen to make a mockery of all human effort and hope. - -And likewise you can foresee the ending of such a man. If he takes life -seriously enough to become a great artist, he is apt to take it -seriously enough to act upon his convictions. He will seek refuge from -despair in debauchery and drink; not finding it, he will go on to opium -and hashish. He will be one of those who from fear of death commit -suicide, or who from brooding over insanity go insane. Maupassant was in -a strait-jacket at the age of forty; thus proving himself a moralist, -and a teacher of precious lessons: more than we can say about the art -dilettanti of our own time, who write delicately perfumed impropriety, -and live conventional and pampered lives upon the backs of the working -class. - - - - -CHAPTER XC - -THE FOE OF FORMULAS - - -Up in the gloomy, ice-bound North, where men dream about God and drink -strong liquor, another teacher was engaged in undermining bourgeois -morality, and raising a storm of controversy about his head. The name of -Henrik Ibsen brings before us a grim-faced old man with set mouth and -large spectacles and a fringe of defiant white whiskers. He was a -fighting man, a dogmatic antidogmatist, a propagandist if ever there was -one in the field of art. - -He also was born of the people, and educated in the school of hardship. -He was an apothecary’s assistant in a small Norwegian port, then a poor -student, journalist and poet, then the director of a provincial theater, -which struggled for six years in a vain fight against bankruptcy. -Finally, at the age of thirty-eight, Ibsen received a pension of four or -five hundred dollars a year from the king, and on this he lived a stern, -penurious life, raising a family, sewing the buttons on his own clothes, -and making over the theater and the moral ideas of the thinking world. - -Except for some pot-boilers written in his youth, all the works of Ibsen -have one theme, the problem of ideals in relation to reality. Men and -women form a conception of right conduct, and they try to apply it, and -it doesn’t work out as it is supposed to; in most of Ibsen’s plays it -works out exactly the opposite way. His thesis is that life cannot be -guided by formulas; those of democracy are just as dangerous as those of -authority; either will destroy you if you apply them blindly. Ibsen is -in revolt against religious creeds and social conventions which repress -the individual and thwart his full development. But you must not assume -that he is willing to make a formula out of self-realization; -straightway he will turn about and show you some selfish egotist engaged -in realizing himself and wrecking everyone else. - -Ibsen wrote two long poems, “Brand” and “Peer Gynt,” into which he put -ideas resembling those of “Don Quixote.” Brand is a Norwegian preacher, -who has his formula of perfect righteousness, the sacrifice of the -individual to God. He acts as blindly as Don Quixote tilting at -wind-mills, and destroys a number of people, himself included. “Peer -Gynt,” on the other hand, is a scamp who, like Sancho Panza, fools -himself by those very qualities of which he is most proud, his ability -to take care of himself, his unwillingness to consider anything but his -own interest. - -Ibsen also fell under the spell of gloomy materialistic science. Like -Maupassant, he sees men as the sport of circumstances. The difference is -that he believes, in spite of his theories, in fighting against -circumstance, and his whole being is absorbed in the task of helping men -and women to fight wisely and effectively. - -He took the French device of the “well-made play,” a simple, unadorned -picture of reality, compressing a great mass of character and incident -into a small space. He used this art form to deal, not with the great -world of fashion, but with the middle-class people he knew in small -Norwegian towns: doctors and lawyers and clergymen and merchants, with -their wives and sons and daughters. They are wretchedly unhappy people, -and Ibsen shows how they make their own unhappiness, because their ideas -are false, because they are slaves of traditions which have no relation -to present-day reality. “The Pillars of Society” tells about a business -man who makes his life a string of lies in order to hide an offense he -has committed; he is helping to preserve civilization, by not letting -anybody know that a business man can do wrong. “A Doll’s House” tells -about a woman who discovers that she is a pet and an ornament in her -household, and leaves her husband and children and goes out into the -world to become an individual. - -There are three stages in one’s attitude toward thesis plays of this -sort. First, the thesis is new, and whether it pleases you or angers -you, it rouses and stirs you. Second, you know the thesis by heart, and -have accepted it and lived it. At that stage the play bores you; you say -that you do not go to the theater for Sunday school lessons. The third -stage comes when the thesis has become so familiar that you no longer -think of the play in that way; it holds you then, if it holds you at -all, by the human realness of its characters and their fates. - -Eighteen years ago I saw “A Doll’s House” acted. I was at the second -stage of development, and it seemed to me a tiresome little sermon, I -could not stay to the end. But a few days later I saw “Hedda Gabler,” -and this was different; I forgot the thesis, and was interested in a -psychological study of the modern parasitic female. We all know Hedda; -some of us have been married to her. She has been brought up in -idleness, she lives by vanity, she is bored, and preys upon men, not -because she is sexual, but because she wants attention and applause, and -cannot endure that anyone else should have these things in her presence. -One of Hedda’s victims is a poet; he has labored to produce a -manuscript, and in his despair over her he tears it up. When Hedda hears -of that she is thrilled to the depths, and cries: “A deed! A deed!” Let -that be a symbol of the art-for-art’s-sake attitude to life! - -The greatest of Ibsen’s plays is “Ghosts.” It has a thesis so wicked -that the critics hardly yet dare to state it. This thesis happens to be -the exact opposite of the one in “The Scarlet Letter”: that a true and -good woman, unhappily married, who finds that she loves her clergyman, -ought to elope with the clergyman instead of staying with her husband. -In Ibsen’s play the woman stays with her husband, and helps to make him -comfortable, while he gets drunk and commits infidelities. She bears him -a son, and lavishes her love and devotion upon this son, only to see him -go the way of his father, and eventually die of syphilis. - -This unpleasant disease had never before appeared upon the stage, and -when “Ghosts” was produced in the pious city of London in the year 1891, -the critics and newspapers went out of their minds. You may find a -record of their opinions in Bernard Shaw’s “Quintessence of Ibsenism”; -starting with the London “Daily Telegraph,” which called the play “an -open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a -lazar-house with all its doors and windows open ... candid foulness ... -bestial and cynical ... offensive cynicism ... melancholy and malodorous -world ... absolutely loathsome and fetid ... gross, almost putrid -indecorum ... literary carrion ... crapulous stuff.” All this referring -to a play now recognized as one of the great tragic masterpieces of all -time! - -“An Enemy of the People” deals with Ibsen’s attitude toward politics and -social questions. The “enemy” is a young doctor in a Norwegian town, who -discovers that the famous baths, the basis of the town’s prosperity, are -infected with typhoid. The doctor insists upon making the facts public, -and so of course he has an unhappy time. Curiously enough, you will find -the same story in “The Goose-Step”; it happened at the University of -Oregon--quite a distance from Norway. The “enemy of the people” in this -latter case was a young professor, who was duly compelled to move on. - -The world is forty years older than when Ibsen wrote this play; we have -had time to analyze the economic forces in our society, and we are no -longer satisfied with a crude distrust of democracy. It is true that the -people stone the prophets; but later on they build monuments to them; -and the world must be saved by the people, if it is to be saved at all. -Ibsen’s attitude is the natural one for an artist, who has to take care -of his own mind, and does not want anyone to tell him what to think. He -is distrustful of discipline, preaches individualism--and finds the -reactionaries glad to quote his words. But you see, all the poet has to -do is to portray the world; the masses have a more difficult job--they -have to change it. So they cannot rest in the anarchist attitude; they -have to have discipline and solidarity, they have to organize and find -leaders, and learn to stand by those leaders, and at the same time to -control them. All that is a new task, and calls for new types of -thinkers, not merely critical, but constructive. - - - - -CHAPTER XCI - -THE BIOLOGICAL SUPERIOR - - -Sweden also had a great dramatist and poet in this nineteenth century. -He came some twenty years later than Ibsen, a tormented and highly -emotional man of genius, who just about boxed the compass of thought, -and believed everything there was for a man to believe. He was too much -of a propagandist, even for me; I like an artist to have ideas, but not -so many that they contradict! - -August Strindberg’s father was a bankrupt shop-keeper; his mother was a -bar-maid, and three illegitimate children had preceded him. He was -raised in a family of eleven in a small house, and the first emotions he -knew were fear and hunger. He was lonely and unhappy all his life, and -poured out his troubles in a torrent over Sweden. - -He began writing at twenty-one; he had the artist’s passion for all -kinds of knowledge, and in those early days he was a Socialist and a -champion of labor, also of the economic emancipation of women. But at -the age of twenty-six he chose a wife, and illustrated the formula we -used to sing in childhood: - - Needles and pins, needles and pins, - When a man marries his trouble begins! - -His wife bore him some children, and then wished to resume her career as -an actress. Strindberg objected to this, and they quarreled, and after -seven years they parted. The poet considered this an irremediable -tragedy; for he held a mystical idea, that marriage is an actual union -of flesh and spirit, and to tear a couple apart is to maim them both. -Strindberg put his agony into a book, “The Confessions of a Fool”; a -ghastly record, yet one can hardly keep from smiling over it. The author -preaches the doctrine that woman is inferior to man; he pounds upon this -theme--and then proceeds to tell you marital incidents which make it -clear that the woman was fully a match for him! - -Strindberg believes that woman is inferior, not merely physically, -intellectually and morally, but biologically; she is a half-way -creature between man and child, and it is her duty to submit herself in -all things to the biologically superior male. But nature for some reason -has failed to inform her that she is inferior, and the perverse creature -insists upon trying to act as if she were equal; so everything goes to -wreck. Somebody said that Herbert Spencer’s idea of a tragedy was a -generalization killed by a fact. Strindberg’s tragedy was the same, but -he never recognized it; he clung to his generalization, not merely -through this marriage, but through two others, which failed in the same -way, and for the same reason. - -It is true that some women are predatory; it is true that a great many -women abuse the power they get. That may be expected of every enslaved -race or class or sex. But the only way to become fit for power is to -exercise it, and the only way to get it is to take it. The women who -broke Strindberg’s three marriages were like the suffragettes with -hammers; they were using the only arguments their opponents would heed. -As a result of their efforts, some of us now live in a happier time, -having comrade-wives who do not abuse their share of power, but -co-operate with their husbands in carrying the burdens of life. - -But whatever you think about Strindberg’s biological superiority, you -cannot deny the power of the tragedy he wrote upon his thesis. It is -called “The Father,” and shows a man undermined and destroyed by a -cunning, determined woman, who sets out to break him to her will. Also -you have to admit the reality of “Miss Julia,” which portrays the -degeneracy of the ruling classes in Sweden. This high-born young lady, -who starts an intrigue with a man-servant in her household, might be a -page out of a “yellow” Sunday supplement in America. - -Strindberg came close to the line of insanity; he spent two or three -years in a sanitarium, and wrote a book about these borderland states, -“Inferno.” Then he took up with Swedenborg, and evolved into a Christian -mystic, and went back into a second childhood of bible-worship. But that -did not keep him from carrying on frantic quarrels with his enemies, and -pouring out many volumes of personalities. Strangely enough, there is a -kind of impersonality in it all, because the man is so tragically -earnest. He is trying to find the truth, and puts himself before us as -a document; no one but Rousseau has done this so completely. Therefore, -we think of Strindberg as one of the great teachers. Let the artist give -us truth, and we can always find use for it. - - - - -CHAPTER XCII - -THE OVERMAN - - -Another great writer of this time was troubled about the problem of the -ladies. August Strindberg married three, and experienced three -tragedies. Friedrich Nietzsche sought to marry one, but she would not -have him; after which he wrote contemptuously of them all. Despite the -fact that he was a clergyman’s son, he suffered from hereditary -syphilis, and went insane--a tragic waste of the greatest genius of -modern times. - -Nietzsche was born in 1844, and became a professor of philology at a -Swiss university. His health broke down from eye-strain at the age of -thirty-five, and he retired upon a small pension. His insanity came at -the age of forty-five, and he lived eleven years longer, slowly rotting -to pieces, and meantime growling like a wild beast. - -Nietzsche’s enemies, of course, made the most of this cruel fate; they -said that he was insane all the time. That is an easy way to dispose of -his writings--easy for the average person, who has never experienced -such emotional states as Nietzsche dealt with, and does not wish to be -troubled by them. But a few who have experienced these states are in -better position to decide. Nietzsche’s mature work is perfectly sane; it -contains many contradictions, but we have to permit an original mind to -grow. His masterpiece, “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” contains the greatest -imaginative writing of several centuries. - -But we must remember that these books were written by a man who was ill -and suffering atrociously. He declared that every year meant for him two -hundred days of pain. His view of life is the product of a pain-driven -mind, like the ecstasy experienced by martyrs undergoing torture. We do -not expect ordered and systematic thought from such persons; but we may -learn from them strange secrets concerning the possibilities of the -human spirit. - -One of Nietzsche’s doctrines is the exaltation of the aristocratic over -the democratic virtues. He was the son of a Prussian state pastor, and -he glorified war, and was taken as the spiritual director of the -invasion of Belgium. It would be easy for me to deal with him on that -basis, and draw and quarter him amid general acclamation. The only -trouble is that Nietzsche is one of the pioneers of the moral life, a -conqueror of new universes for our race. - -There are two sides to his message, the positive and the negative. On -the positive side it is the record of an exalted poet, proclaiming -brotherhood, service, and consecration. On its negative side it -represents the fears and repugnances of an invalid, shrinking from life -which was too much for him, and seeking refuge in his own visions, where -he could be master without interference from a hostile world. Where -Nietzsche loved something, you will generally find it something great -and noble; where he hated something, you will often find it a thing he -failed to understand. There were two subjects upon which he was entirely -ignorant; the first woman, and the second economics. This double -ignorance distorted all his thought, and has brought it about that his -influence counts on the side of the forces he hated. - -Nietzsche agreed with the proposition of the present book, that all the -arts are propaganda. He showed how those who were able to face life and -to conquer made themselves a philosophy and art of self-assertion and -development; those who were afraid of life made a philosophy and art of -self-sacrifice and renunciation. Nietzsche explained Christianity as a -slave religion, evolved by the victims of Roman imperialism; he -proclaimed himself Antichrist, and advocated a “master morality.” - -Nietzsche’s supreme contribution is the interpretation of evolution; he -became the prophet and seer of this doctrine, developing a concept of -the Overman, a higher being into which the human race is destined to -evolve. Bernard Shaw has popularized the term Superman; but I venture to -stick to Overman, which I used in “The Journal of Arthur Stirling,” -several years before “Man and Superman” was published. Nietzsche might -have chosen the term “Supermensch” if he had wished; but he wrote -“Uebermensch.” - -This concept Nietzsche set forth in “Zarathustra” with fervor and -splendor of imagery, a chant the like of which the German language had -never known before. Ten years ago, editing “The Cry for Justice,” made -up of the world’s revolutionary literature from thirty languages and -five thousand years of history, I gave the last place to a quotation -from “Zarathustra”; the reason being that it represents to me the -ultimate of modern thought, the greatest words in recent poetry. I quote -a portion of this passage: - - Man is a cord, tied between Beast and Overman--a, cord above an - abyss. - - A perilous arriving, a perilous traveling, a perilous looking - backward, a perilous trembling and standing still. - - What is great in man is that he is a bridge, and no goal; what can - be loved in man is that he is a going-over and a going-under. - - I love them that know not how to live, be it even as those going - under, for such are those going across. - - I love them that are great in scorn, because these are they that - are great in reverence, and arrows of longing toward the other - shore. - -You will note that these paragraphs celebrate the fame of the martyrs, -those who sacrifice themselves for the race. Are we not here right back -in the spirit of Jesus? I do not mean Christianity, the thing that is -taught in churches, the creeds of the other-worldly; I am referring to -the revolutionary carpenter, who taught brotherhood in its high heroic -sense, and proclaimed the kingdom of heaven upon earth. - -Nietzsche wrote and taught in that same heroic sense; but because of his -two great ignorances, concerning women and concerning economics, he -could not make distinctions, and save his message from being interpreted -in the interest of class greed and materialism. When we see the image of -Jesus set up in gold and jewels, and carried forth to bless wholesale -murder for the profit of the Russian Tsardom, or of J. P Morgan & -Company’s international loans, we are witnessing one of mankind’s -historic tragedies. We are witnessing another when the message of -Friedrich Nietzsche is taken up by Bernhardi and the Prussian Junkers, -and used to sanctify that power which during the war I described as “the -Beast with the Brains of an Engineer.” - -Nietzsche loathed the Prussian Junkers, and the whole Prussian state -machine. He lived the life of an ascetic, and wrote in spiritual terms; -when he talked about the “strong,” he meant those that are great in -reverence as well as in scorn. But he could not analyze the different -kinds of competition in which social beings engage; he could not -distinguish between those which encourage intellectual progress and -those which strangle it. He saw that in primitive societies war -eliminates the degenerate; he did not perceive that in modern capitalist -society war has exactly the opposite effect, preserving the weaklings -and parasites, and putting commercial hogs in power. Neither did he -perceive how a system of hereditary privilege enthrones the sensualists -and idlers, the human types he most despised. While young he came under -the influence of Richard Wagner; he read that pernicious secret document -which Wagner had prepared for his friend King Ludwig, explaining it as -the duty of the artist to devise illusions to keep the masses patriotic -and religious. Nietzsche absorbed that doctrine and it poisoned his -social thought for life. - -I have met with ridicule from sapient critics for praising Zarathustra -and at the same time proclaiming myself a Socialist. But just as it is -possible by a deeper view to reconcile Zarathustra and Jesus, so also it -is possible to reconcile Zarathustra and Marx. The free spirits and -lofty idealists whom Nietzsche dreamed will never be able to function in -the world of international profiteers; they are outcasts in such a -world, as Nietzsche was in the Junker world. Only when competition for -money has been replaced by co-operative order will mankind take -seriously those higher activities which were Nietzsche’s concern. - -Exactly the same thing applies to the war of the sexes; it is not in -quarreling with women, like Strindberg, or in avoiding them, like -Nietzsche, that the happiness of man is found. There is a saying of -Zarathustra most frequently quoted by his enemies: “When thou goest to -woman forget not the whip.” That is taken to mean that man should -dominate woman by brute power; but Georg Brandes tells me that it does -not mean that at all. It means that you must not forget that the woman -will seek to wield a whip over you if she can; in other words, the -Strindberg terror! Brandes declares that he has seen a photograph of -Nietzsche in company with the young lady whom he loved; Nietzsche in -this photograph had a child’s harness about his neck and shoulders, and -the woman had a whip in her hand. That, of course, was play; but Freud -has taught us that play is symbolic, and perhaps it was this picture -which Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote his famous sentence. - -Anyhow, this much is certain: Nietzsche did not know women. Except for -this one unhappy love affair, he took toward them the same attitude as -the Christian hermits and monks--and for the same reason, because he -wanted to live his inner life without disturbance. So extremes meet, and -history repeats itself--the “eternal recurrence” which Nietzsche taught! -Through much of his life he had the devoted services of his sister; she -nursed him and cared for him during those dreadful years when he -wandered about the room growling like a wild beast; and after he was -dead, she edited his books and his letters. Man flees from woman--but he -begins in a woman’s arms, and he ends there. - - - - -CHAPTER XCIII - -THE OCTOPUS CITIES - - -Modern civilization is a stepmother to poets; it is crowded, noisy and -ugly, and they run away and seek refuge in gardens, or monasteries, or -dreams of a happier past. But modern civilization is alive; it is the -life of hundreds of millions of human beings, forging a new future. And -there comes a new kind of poet, able to penetrate to the inner spirit of -that future. - -It was fitting that such a poet should be a Belgian; for Belgium is the -center of the new industrialism in Europe. Here are great iron and steel -plants, and vast cobwebs of railroads, and harbors to which the commerce -of the world pours in. The past and the future meet here, for Belgium -has an old history and art; it is a battle-ground of Catholicism and -Protestantism, of modern science and ancient mysticism, of French -revolution and German autocracy. It is wealthy, with all the class -contrasts and antagonisms which modern capitalism brings. - -Emile Verhaeren was born in 1855, of well-to-do retired parents. He -lived in the country, but in Belgium the country is close to the towns, -and the boy saw the river with the great ships, the factories and the -busy artisans, a teeming life, stimulating to the imagination. He was -educated in a Jesuit school, where they hoped to make a priest of him, -but did not succeed. He studied law, and led a wild, freakish youth. He -had been writing verses since childhood, Latin verses, and then the -classical French Alexandrines, under the spell of Victor Hugo. Then came -Zola, and young Verhaeren horrified his parents and friends by a volume -of poetry portraying the violent and brutal facts of Flemish life. They -are a gross and drunken people--we see them in the paintings of Rubens; -and it was a time when young poets were in revolt against false -idealism, and wanted to deal with reality, the more crude and hideous -the better. - -From excess of animalism the Belgian people revolt to the other extreme, -asceticism; so the country is full of monks, gloomy and sober, living -apart and contemplating the past with holy awe. Verhaeren wrote a second -book, in which he portrayed strange types of these devotees. But he was -content to admire them; he did not join them. - -The poet exists by virtue of the fact that he is more sensitive than the -average man; life hits him harder blows, and he flies from one extreme -to the other. Modern science took from Verhaeren his Catholic faith, and -there followed a period of pessimism, a terrible psychic crisis. Like -Dostoievski and Strindberg, he came close to the border-line of insanity -and suicide. But his restless mind would not give up to any suffering; -he was thrilled even by the adventure of pain; he loved life, even -though it held for him only the vision of death. All things are themes -for art; so he wrote a book of nightmares, a pilgrimage of neurasthenia. - -The sick poet had fled from the noisy and brutal world; he found his -deliverance by coming back to it. Redemption lay in loving and -understanding mankind in its manifold new activities. Those things which -the poets generally affect to despise Verhaeren now took up with -ecstasy: industrialism, machinery, the roar of cities, the manifold -activities of crowds, in all these things he discovered a new power, -promising an infinitude of beauty. - -Verhaeren wrote in French, and used a new form of rhymed free verse, -more obviously rhythmical than Whitman’s, marvelously responsive to -every throb of the poet’s imagination. It is a kind of verse to chant -aloud, an utterance of sweeping ecstasy. Verhaeren resembles Whitman in -many ways; in his identification of himself with the toiling masses, his -sense of the multitude as a new being, a thing with a life of its own. -Like Whitman he accepts the universe, he sings the chant of humanity -becoming God, conquering nature, and remaking existence in its own -image. - -Walt Whitman sang “these states,” and saw them as one mighty, triumphant -land. Verhaeren also had a vision, he was the prophet of the United -States of Europe. He had lived in all its great capitals, and knew and -interpreted the forces which were bringing them together and making them -one. Terrible places they are--“the octopus cities,” he calls them in -the title of one of his volumes, and portrays them as gigantic -tentacular monsters, sucking all the life-blood from the country. No -poet has ever approached Verhaeren in the portrayal of the cruelty and -loneliness and horror of these capitalist cities. You will find in “The -Cry for Justice” a translation of one of these poems, the most frightful -picture of prostitution ever given in verse. - -Verhaeren welcomed science, and proclaimed mass solidarity, the -surrender of the individual to the sweep of progress. He became a -prophet and preacher of what he called “cosmic enthusiasm.” He was, of -course, a Socialist and revolutionist. He wrote a lyrical drama called -“The Dawn,” which has been translated into English by Arthur Symonds. -Here in a mixture of prose and verse he celebrates a hero who surrenders -the citadel of capitalism to the masses, and gives his life in the -effort to abolish class conflict and build the happy future. Verhaeren -wrote other plays which have not yet been translated or produced; they -do not conform to the rules of the drama for profit, for they deal with -humanity and not with sex. But the new time is coming--and here is one -of its prophets. - - - - -CHAPTER XCIV - -THE INSPIRED PARRAKEET - - -I remember the first poet I ever met in my youth; one of the “pure” -poets, a dreamy soul, who lived in the ugly city of New York, and wrote -about beauty in distant Nineveh and Tyre. He earned his living in a -book-store, where he faded slowly, and his hair came to look as if the -moths had been feeding on it. Only once I saw fire in his eyes, and that -was when the name of Swinburne was mentioned. “Swinburne is a _god_!” he -exclaimed. - -Yes, Algernon Charles Swinburne is no mere poet; he is divinity, before -whose high altar the art-for-art’s-sakers perform obeisance. He was born -in 1837, of an aristocratic county family in the North of England. So he -always had plenty of money, and lived his own life in the aristocratic -fashion. They sent him to Eton at the age of twelve, and then to Oxford, -but respectability failed to “take” with him. - -He was the strangest figure in which the soul of a poet was ever housed. -As a child he had been beautiful, but something must have gone wrong -with his glands, so that his head grew faster than his body. He -developed a noble brow, but a weak mouth and receding chin; his enormous -head was lighted by two bright green eyes, and covered with a shock of -vivid red hair. When he became excited, which he was liable to do at a -moment’s notice, his arms and legs began to jerk convulsively, and he -would rush about the room, orating vehemently, perhaps hopping upon the -sofa, like a bright-colored parrakeet. He was an omnivorous reader, and -knew all the poetry there was in the world--most of it by heart, and -would pour it out by the hour, in Latin, Greek, French, Italian or -English. If he became too much excited, he would suddenly have a fit and -fall unconscious, to the terror of the company; but after a while he -would come to, just as lively and full of words as ever. - -In his childhood and youth, according to the English custom, they filled -him up with Greek and Latin verses; he absorbed the bad as well as the -good, wine and women as well as song. Then he came under the spell of -Victor Hugo, who filled him with a fervor for liberty. It is an -interesting illustration of the influence a great poet can exert. -Swinburne worshipped Hugo with frenzied extravagance, and remained a -disciple of republicanism all through his seventy-two years; and this -without the slightest actual contact with republicanism, without -anything in his environment or his actions to explain such revolutionary -fever. - -Worldly impracticability was carried to its last extreme in this -combustible youth; he always had to have somebody to take care of him, -and fell under the spell of one personality after another: Rossetti, -William Morris, Mazzini, and finally Watts-Dunton, who literally saved -his life. Swinburne would come up to London and engage in what he called -“racketing”--by which he meant stimulating his frenzies with alcohol. He -would keep this up until he was completely prostrated, and then his -father or one of his friends would carry him off to the country and -mount guard over him, and there he would live a quiet and placid -literary life until the world lured him forth again. By the time he was -forty he had carried his dissipation to such extremes that he was all -but wrecked. One by one his friends had to give him up, and he was -living in wretched lodgings at the point of death. - -It was then that Watts-Dunton took charge of his affairs once for all, -and turned his country house into a sort of literary sanitarium, and -kept the poet for thirty years, strictly forbidding any but respectable -citizens to call upon him. Here the queer little parrakeet hopped about -in the library, and gradually grew old and deaf, and wrote a great deal -of prose and verse of little consequence. Some critics fight with the -moralists over the question, Is it better for a poet to die drunk and -inspired, or to live sober and dull? My friend, George Sterling, writes -me on this point: “I still refuse, probably from personal experience, to -believe that alcohol helps the artist to function at his best.” - -Swinburne’s first great work, published at the age of twenty-eight, was -an imitation Greek play, “Atalanta in Calydon.” As poetry it is -marvelous; nobody since Shelley had poured out such a torrent of -glorious words. All the tricks of the trade are in it--how many you can -learn from Professor Saintsbury, who lists them: “equivalence and -substitution, alternative and repetition, rhymes and rhymeless -suspension of sound, volley and check of verse, stanza construction, -line-and pause-moulding, foot-conjunction and contrast.” Such are the -weapons in the armory of those who have read all the poetry there is in -the world! - -What else is there beside verbal splendor and technical tricks? The -answer is: The familiar Greek aristocratic personages, struggling in -vain against their gods; the old Greek fatalism and pessimism, taken up -as a literary exercise and carried to un-Hellenic extremes. It might -have puzzled you, perhaps, that a poet of republicanism and revolt -should also be a poet of pessimism; but you would have been ill-advised -to ask the question of Swinburne, for once, when a friend ventured to -criticize his work, he stared for a moment or two of horror, then -uttered a shrill scream, and rushed upstairs to his room, and seized his -manuscript and spent hours tearing it into shreds and throwing it into -the fire--and then spent the rest of the night rewriting it from memory! - -Swinburne could not think, he could only feel, and so he was capable of -pouring his poetic frenzy into absolutely contradictory ideas. So we -have these magnificent choruses of “Atalanta,” in which man’s despair at -his own fate is voiced with overwhelming poignancy: - - For a day and a night and a morrow, - That his strength might endure for a span - With travail and heavy sorrow, - The holy spirit of man.... - He weaves, and is clothed with derision; - Sows, and he shall not reap; - His life is a watch or a vision - Between a sleep and a sleep. - -But then, if that be true, what is the use of struggling for liberty and -overthrowing tyrants? What indeed is the use of writing beautiful verses -and reading proofs and wrangling with publishers and critics? -Manifestly, no use whatever. Nevertheless, Swinburne would read a news -item about Napoleon the Little, and he would fly into another frenzy, -and write a poem in which he called for the blood of tyrants. He -collected all these into his “Songs before Sunrise,” which constitute -one of the bibles of liberty. When I meet an art-for-art’s-saker, I -never fail to ask him if he has read Swinburne’s “Prelude,” in which -the poet describes his conversion to the cause of human service. - - Play then and sing; we too have played, - We likewise, in that subtle shade. - We too have twisted through our hair - Such tendrils as the wild Loves wear, - And heard what mirth the Mænads made. - -Such has been the poet’s life; but now he has reformed, and taken up the -duty of passing on the light of the intelligence to his fellows: - - A little time that we may fill - Or with such good works or such ill - As loose the bonds or make them strong - Wherein all manhood suffers wrong. - -And that leads us by a natural transition to the “Marching Song,” a -battle-cry of the revolution: - - Rise, ere the dawn be risen; - Come, and be all souls fed; - From field and street and prison - Come, for the feast is spread; - Live, for the truth is living; wake, for night is dead. - -“My other books are books,” Swinburne declared, “but ‘Songs before -Sunrise’ is myself.” His respectable biographer, Edmund Gosse, is both -puzzled and shocked by this, and points out how completely Swinburne’s -hopes of republicanism have failed to be realized in the modern world. -Yes; the poet failed to see that the lords of finance, the fat men of -the bourgeoisie, would subsidize autocracy and subsidize superstition, -as a means of riveting slavery upon the human mind and body for another -century. But let Professor Gosse take care of his health for a few years -more, and he may see that Daylight which was heralded in the “Songs -before Sunrise.” - -We have stepped ahead of our story and omitted to mention Swinburne’s -earlier volume of miscellaneous work, “Poems and Ballads,” which was -published shortly after “Atalanta,” and gave the Victorian age the worst -shock of its existence. This was the time of Tennyson at his most -mawkish, the time of “Maud” and “Enoch Arden”; literary England had not -seen anything really indecent since Byron’s “Don Juan,” nearly half a -century ago. But here came this young aristocrat--the son of an -admiral, and therefore beyond prosecution for anything that he might -do--throwing out upon the world an inspired glorification of sexual and -alcoholic riot. - -Swinburne was, of course, just as sincere in his praise of Venus and the -vine as he was in his praise of liberty; more sincere, in fact, because -he practiced what he preached in the former case, but he omitted to go -off and die in the cause of liberty as Byron had done. Some of his -licentious poetry is perfect from the technical point of view; but, on -the other hand, “Poems and Ballads” contains the worst combination of -words ever put into a poem: “the lilies and languors of virtue and the -roses and raptures of vice.” It is pleasant to be able to record that -Swinburne had the wit to ridicule his own habit of silly alliteration; -see the parody called “Nephelidia”: “From the depth of the dreamy -decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine,” and -so on. - -In “Thus Spake Zarathustra” there is a doctrine of freedom, which is -summed up: I ask you, not free _from_ what, but free _to_ what? And that -is what I should like to point out to young poets who uncritically -accept Swinburne as a god. It is possible to be entirely free to do what -you please, and yet not please to do many silly and destructive things. -Young poets are free to write as eloquent verses as they know how; and -they may put into those verses a celebration of all things beautiful and -just and noble in the world. On the other hand, they may put in a -celebration of debauchery; and they may try it out for themselves, and -fall slaves to alcohol and drugs, and end in the mad-house or a -suicide’s or drunkard’s grave--like Baudelaire and Verlaine and Musset -and Poe and Dowson, and that brilliant, unhappy genius whose story we -have next to read. - - - - -CHAPTER XCV - -THE GREEN CARNATION - - -Eight years ago Frank Harris published his two volumes entitled “Oscar -Wilde: His Life and Confessions.” I wrote him that it was one of the -half dozen greatest biographies in the English language, and he replied, -characteristically: “Name the other five.” That story never fails to -raise a laugh; but in fairness to Frank Harris I ought to add that when -I sat down and thought it over seriously I could not name the other -five. Here is the story of a terrific human tragedy, told plainly and -completely, with profound insight and deep pity. How can the man who -wrote it not know that it is great? - -The subject of this sermon in action was born in Dublin in 1854. His -father was a wealthy baronet, a physician who was accustomed to seduce -his women-patients; his mother was an excessively vain society poetess. -The son was burdened with the label Oscar Fingal O’Flahartie Wills -Wilde, and received the usual public school and Oxford education. In -these so-called “public” schools, which are ruling class -boarding-schools, the boys live semi-monastic lives, entirely withdrawn -from woman’s influence; they are fed upon Greek literature and art, -which glorifies homosexuality, and therefore English upper-class life is -rotten with this odious vice. Frank Harris narrates that at the time of -Wilde’s trial, when general exposures on this subject were threatened, -great numbers of London’s prominent club members suddenly discovered -that they had important business on the Continent. - -Oscar Wilde had extraordinary gifts; a vivid imagination, a flow of -eloquence, and charming wit. He was the perfect fine flower of -leisure-class art, a gentleman about town, a literary dandy who learned -the lesson that it pays to advertise, and made himself the most talked -about man in London by dressing in knee breeches and silk hose, carrying -a large sunflower in his hand, and greeting men and women with sweet -impertinences. There is a satiric portrait of this elegant “esthete” in -Robert Hichens’ novel, “The Green Carnation.” - -Oscar wrote comedies dealing with the London world of fashion in which -he lived. These plays delighted that world, and still delight audiences -of the fashionable. Frank Harris regards them as imperishable classics; -and all I can do is to record the fact that they put me to sleep. Nearly -twenty years ago I saw “The Importance of Being Earnest” in New York, -and cannot recall that I was ever more bored in a theater. The interest -of the play is supposed to lie in its “smart” dialogue, and the formula -for that smartness is one which anyone can learn in two minutes. Take -any statement involving the simple common sense of mankind, the moral -heritage of the race for countless ages; and then make an epigram -proclaiming the opposite, and you have a “line” for a society play. -“Charity creates a multitude of sins.... It is better to be good-looking -than to be good.... All charming people are spoiled.... A man can be -happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.... It is a -dangerous thing to reform anyone.... The real drawback to marriage is -that it makes one unselfish.... Democracy means simply the bludgeoning -of the people by the people for the people.... There is no such thing as -a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.... -The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and -separate.” - -A man who is absorbed in useful work, and therefore has few impulses to -depravity, can encounter such Wildeness with indifference; but the -average man, who is never sure of his own self-control, and who has sons -and daughters to train in as much decency as he can, is made frantic by -such perversity, the deliberate bedeviling of the wits of our blindly -struggling humanity. These “epigrams” of Oscar Wilde are like the -snapping of a whip-lash in the face of men’s everyday moral sensibility. -So naturally this too-clever young esthete was cordially loathed, and -his enemies whetted their knives for him. - -Oscar came over to America to exhibit his whimsicalities to the wives -and daughters of our steel kings and pork packers. To the custom’s -officer he remarked: “I have nothing to declare but my genius”; and so -his success was assured. He went back to London and wrote more plays, -one of them, “Salome,” assuredly the most cruel, cold, and disgusting -piece of lewdness in the English language. Its heroine is the young -daughter of King Herod, who attempts to seduce John the Baptist to her -sensual desires, and when he repels her, has him executed, and has his -head brought in upon a platter, and strips herself as nearly naked as -stage-customs allow, and dances before this bloody object and fondles -and kisses it. The climax of modern art depravity was reached when -Richard Strauss set this drama to elaborate and costly music. When I saw -audiences of bedizened and bejewelled fat beasts, male and female, -having their sick nerves thrilled by this “grand” opera, I knew that -European capitalism was ready for the slaughterman’s ax. - -Out of these plays Oscar reaped much money, and spent it in eating too -much, drinking too much, and pursuing his cultured vices. Among his -favorites was a young heir of the nobility, who has since become Lord -Alfred Douglas, assuredly the most disagreeable little wretch that ever -displayed himself in the British world of letters. Lord Alfred’s father, -the Marquis of Queensbury, made an effort to separate his son from -Wilde, and in so doing he wrote letters concerning Wilde which brought -about a great literary scandal. - -It is the privilege of elegant British gentlemen to pursue their vices -without interference; but they must display discretion, and not step -upon the toes of marquises. Oscar Wilde brought suit for slander against -Queensbury; and his lordship rallied his aristocratic friends, defended -himself successfully, and then had the audacious playwright arrested and -prosecuted for sodomy. - -The ordinary British citizen had, of course, no knowledge of the inside -circumstances of this case; all he saw was that a writer of nasty plays -tripped jauntily into the limelight and brought a libel suit against a -father for trying to save his son. Of the fact that the father was a bad -one, and the son worse, and that the courts were being used to maintain -a corrupt ruling class--those things the average Englishman did not -know. He will never know them until there is a Socialist daily press in -England, with the right to tell the truth about the ruling class, -something which at present the libel laws prevent. - -Here is material for a drama, far greater than any that Wilde wrote; and -Frank Harris gives us the whole story. In the early part of it he sees -Oscar clearly as the pitiful victim of his own will-less nature; but -when the tragedy of this nature reaches its climax, Harris lets himself -be tempted into offering Wilde to us in a new rôle, that of a persecuted -hero and martyred genius. Much as Harris may abhor Oscar’s sin, he -abhors the leading British virtues still more; so he is in the position -of Milton dealing with Satan--he cannot keep from sympathizing with his -character, in spite of logic. To be sure, he gives us the facts, so that -we can judge for ourselves, if we have the brains; and we must try to be -worthy of that trust! - -It seems evident enough that Oscar was sent to prison, not because of -his genius, nor yet because of his vices, but simply because he attacked -in a conspicuous and aggravating way a member of the hallowed ruling -caste of Britain. You may call that turning the tragedy into a Socialist -tract; but a man cannot interpret any case of social persecution unless -he sees its economic implications--unless, in other words, he -understands the class struggle. If Frank Harris had been a conscious -social revolutionist, his book would have been more powerful and -convincing, because he would have been less tempted to blame individuals -for evils which are social in their origin. He would have given us an -economic interpretation of Oscar, the spoiled darling of a putrescent -leisure class, thrown overboard, like Jonah, as a sacrifice in a -middle-class hurricane of virtue. - -Oscar Wilde was convicted and sent to prison; and of course Frank Harris -does not like prisons--he, too, has been sent there by the British -ruling caste. It is only natural that he should overlook in his book the -significance of the fact which he himself records, that this -imprisonment was the best thing that ever happened to Oscar. Harris -interceded for him, and was able to get him good food and the right to -have his books; he tells us that he noticed during his visits a -“spiritual deepening” in Oscar, due to the rigid disciplining of his -selfish nature. He was never so well or so much in possession of his -mental faculties as when he came out; but immediately he went back to -his vomit, and ate and drank and loafed himself to death, according to -the customs prevailing in that putrescent leisure class. - -It seems to me that the true conclusion to be drawn from Frank Harris’ -book is that decadent poets should be sent to prison and kept there -permanently. Anything to save them from smart society! While Oscar was -at large, the pet of the cultured rich, he idled and wrote futile plays; -but when he was locked up, he took life seriously, and wrote great -literature: “De Profundis,” a study of his spiritual reactions to his -disgrace; and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a supremely eloquent and -noble poem, the poet’s excuse for having lived. - -Reading these two works we say, by all means let us have prisons for -will-less men; places where such unhappy beings may have as much -self-government as they can use, together with plain wholesome food, -moderate work outdoors, and enforced abstinence from alcohol and tobacco -and drugs. Having set up such prisons, let us keep in them, not merely -all thieves and highwaymen and esthetes, but men of fashion, princes, -lords and dukes, bishops, stock-brokers and fat persons. - -Says Mrs. Ogi: “You said you were going to label all your jokes.” - -Her husband, after meditating, remarks: “What Oscar needed was the right -sort of a wife.” - -She answers: “Almost any wife would have told him that a guilty man -cannot bring a slander suit.” - - - - -CHAPTER XCVI - -THE WHITE CHRYSANTHEMUM - - -“What troubles me,” says Mrs. Ogi, “is that you call this a book of all -the arts, and continue to deal with literature.” - -“In modern times each of the arts has developed a complicated technique; -and in order to analyze them all and show what they mean, one would have -to know much more than I know. But every now and then it happens that a -musician or painter or sculptor is not satisfied with his own art, but -uses mine; and then I have him!” - -“Oh, that mine enemy would write a book,” says Mrs. Ogi. - -James McNeill Whistler wrote a book; he gave it a title: “The Gentle Art -of Making Enemies as Pleasingly Exemplified in Many Instances, Wherein -the Serious Ones of this Earth, Carefully Exasperated, Have Been -Prettily Spurred on to Unseemliness and Indiscretion, While Overcome by -an Undue Sense of Right.” The pages of this book are covered with -butterflies which the painter adopted as the signature for his work. -These butterflies are defiant, care-free, insolent; manifestly, some one -has taken great pains with them, and with the volume through which they -flutter. Studying it, we learn what kind of man it takes to succeed as a -leisure-class portrait-painter. - -Whistler was born in Boston, his father being a major in the United -States Army. We have seen him “let out” from West Point; he was -“deficient in chemistry.” He went to Paris and lived the Bohemian -student life for some years, and imbibed those ideas concerning the -non-moral nature of art, which are a symptom of the disintegration of -our ruling classes. - -Whistler settled in London. He was unknown and an American; he had new -ideas about painting, and the Royal Academy would have nothing to do -with him, so he had to fight his way. A fiery little man, with wavy -black locks and one very singular white lock over his forehead, he -trained his eyebrows to stand out fiercely, and wore a little imperial -and a monocle, and carried a very long cane, and a white chrysanthemum -always in his buttonhole. He cultivated truculence, and his life was a -succession of conspicuous libel suits and public quarrels, kept alive by -letters to the newspapers. - -To a little group of his intimates Whistler could be a charming -companion and host; but when he went out into the world, he put on armor -like a hard-shelled crab, and was ready to bite the head off the first -person who got in his way. He would hit a man in the eye for differing -with him indiscreetly; once in a theater he beat a critic over the head -with his cane. In deadly seriousness he challenged George Moore to a -duel, and appointed seconds, and published Moore’s failure to reply. -Because he was dissatisfied with the price paid him for the portrait of -a certain lady, he painted out the lady’s face. He undertook to decorate -a dining-room for a wealthy shipowner, and became fascinated with the -idea of covering walls and ceiling with an endless number of peacocks in -gold and blue. He worked over this in a frenzy for months. The shipowner -wanted his house, but could not have it; Whistler turned it into an art -gallery, and brought the critics as to a public show. The man had agreed -to pay five hundred guineas for the decorating; in consideration of the -unforeseen amount of work, he raised the price to a thousand. But -Whistler insisted upon two thousand, and flew into a furious rage with -the man, and carried the row into the newspapers, and painted most -odious caricatures of the man and exhibited them publicly. - -Whistler was not content to be a great painter; he was also a lecturer, -man of letters, and historian. His idea was that when he overcame one -of his enemies by a witty retort he made history, and when he collected -these retorts and the stories of his quarrels into a book, he wrote -history. The collecting was suggested to him by a journalist, who -proposed the title, and was authorized to gather the various items from -newspaper files. After the work was done and the book prepared and -printed, Whistler decided to take the credit for himself, so he sent the -journalist a check for ten pounds and dismissed him. Naturally the poor -fellow insisted that he had rights in the matter, and tried to bring out -the book in Belgium and in Paris. Whistler pursued him and had him -arrested and heavily fined; he took over the man’s idea and title, and -so we have the beautiful volume with the fancy butterflies. Whistler’s -conduct throughout the affair was brutal, and his book I am inclined to -call the most hateful thing in print. Its content is the egotism of a -highly intelligent and persistent hornet. - -Whistler has, to be sure, some ideas to advocate. He reprints a lecture -called “Ten O’clock,” named from the after-dinner hour at which it was -given in London. To his well-fed audience he explained that art is for -artists, who alone can understand it; art has nothing to do with the -people, who only degrade it when they touch it. Moreover, art has no -concern with morality, whether individual or national; “in no way do our -virtues minister to its worth, in no way do our vices impede its -triumph.” - -As for painting, Whistler declared it to be a matter of the arrangement -of line, form and color; it has nothing to do with any other idea, not -even with the subject being painted. To quote the painter’s own words: -“The subject matter has nothing to do with the harmony of color.” In -order to emphasize this point of view Whistler took to calling his -portraits by such names as “Harmony in Green and Rose,” “Caprice in Blue -and Silver,” “Symphony in White,” “Variations in Violet and Green,” -“Arrangement in Black and Gray.” One of his most famous paintings showed -fireworks at night, and was called “Nocturne in Black and Gold.” John -Ruskin wrote of it: “I never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred -guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” So there was -a picturesque and sensational libel suit, and the jury awarded Whistler -damages of one farthing, that is, half a cent. That was not enough to -pay his lawyer’s fees, and so the painter went into bankruptcy and spent -a few years in Europe. - -What is the meaning of this art doctrine so defiantly enunciated? The -answer is, it is an extension of the artist’s egotism; the snobbery of -his profession and his caste, in every way and from every point of view -an anti-social and predatory thing. Here we are in London, the heart and -brain of the British Empire, at that time the greatest agency of -exploitation in the world. Here is wealth and fashion, representing the -wrung-out sweat and blood, not merely of enslaved British workers, but -of enslaved hundreds of millions of black and brown and yellow races. -Here dwell the masters, and they wish to flaunt their splendor; heedless -of the groans and the agony, the clamor of all the misery of mankind, -they command a dining-room painted over with gold and blue peacocks, or -hung with portraits of their splendid predatory selves and their lovely -parasitic females. - -And here come the swarms of painters competing for their attention, -seeking to flatter their vanity and awe their ignorance. One hornet a -little more venomous than the rest is able to impress his hornetry upon -them, to stir their greed by the possibility that his paintings may some -day be sold for thousands of pounds. So they decide to have themselves -“done” by this strange genius. They come to his studio and spend months -of torment standing or sitting for him, while he fusses and frets, and -paints and wipes out and paints again, taking infinite pains to see that -the ladies’ dresses are made of exactly the right quality of muslin, cut -and stitched in exactly the right way--because there is one certain -precise kind of muslin dress which is art, and any other kind is -something else. - -All this is called “beauty”; all this has laws, so Whistler tells us, as -definite and determinable as the laws of physics or chemistry. Beauty is -a thing permanent and immortal, and independent of all other -qualities--morality, justice, health, truth, honesty. The answer is: all -this is poisonous nonsense, handed out to the rich by those who exploit -their vanity. Art without morality is simply art produced for patrons -who have no morality by artists who have no morality. As to the -permanence of such art, the answer is that its standards are at every -moment subject to the attack of more clever devisers of new forms of -folly and pretense. The proper way to cut a muslin dress today is an -absurd way to cut it tomorrow; and the same applies to harmonies of -color and outlines of form. The Turks cherish fatness in women, because -they like to be comfortable in their harems; the early Christians -thought that emaciation was beautiful, because it prepared them for -heaven; Whistler, wishing to flatter the aristocratic conceit of his -patrons, paints them abnormally tall and lean, because that is the -snobbish notion in fashion at the moment. - -Whistler was a great artist in the technical sense; that is, he learned -to put paint on canvas in such a way as to convey an impression of -reality, not merely physical but emotional and spiritual. He was a -terrific worker, as any man must be to succeed in the fierce competition -of modern life. He took his art with seriousness; and it happened that -twice in his lifetime something lifted him above the empty theories in -which he gloried. The first time was when he painted his mother. Here -was a gentle, sensitive, sweet-faced, devout Presbyterian old lady, with -whom all his childhood memories were bound up; he painted her sitting -with her hands in her lap, and her gray hair brushed down and covered -with an old-fashioned lace cap. He called it “Arrangement in Black and -Gray”; and that is all right, because black and gray are old lady’s -colors. But he would have described the painting even better if he had -given it a moral title: “Arrangement in Reverence and Affection.” - -And then came Carlyle; poor, bewildered, dyspeptic, struggling old -prophet from Scotland, he looked at Whistler’s portrait of his mother -and loved it, and consented to let the painter do the same thing for -him. So here is another study, posed in the same way, and called -“Arrangement in Black and Gray,” instead of “Arrangement in Pity and -Pathos.” These two pictures have human feeling and moral meaning; -therefore they are the two which have been reproduced, and which -everybody knows and loves. That is the answer to Whistler’s art -theories; but of course it is an answer which he himself would have -scorned--he would have made a witticism on it, and got out a new edition -of “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.” - -“This victory is not yours,” says Mrs. Ogi. “It is Death’s.” - - - - -CHAPTER XCVII - -THE DUEL OF WIT - - -Some years ago a story was told me concerning a certain eminent man in -England. This man came from the common people; he possesses one of the -finest minds in England, and he is the champion of all things generous -and free in letters and life. The lady who told me the story, herself a -well-known novelist, was writing about the particular section of society -from which this man sprung, and in which he had lived his boyhood; she -needed an item of local color, and asked him how such people pronounce a -certain word. The man flushed, and demanded: “How should I know?” I -thought this story one of the most awful I had ever heard; and the lady -novelist was shocked when she saw how I took it, for she had not meant -to tell anything so serious about her friend. She tried to explain to -me, it wasn’t really so bad as it seemed; the pressure of caste feeling -is so strong in England that a man is irresistibly driven to cover up -his humiliating past. - -I tell the incident as preliminary to a discussion of George Meredith. -Here was a devoted servant of the muses, a master of his craft, who won -a quite unique position among his contemporaries. The public knew him -not; to the end of his life his books had little sale, and he was -compelled to support himself by odd jobs of journalism and publisher’s -reading. But to the inner circle of letters his name became a kind of -secret password; he was the choice and precious one, the poet’s poet and -the novelist’s novelist, and the little country nook where he dwelt was -a shrine to which the distinguished pilgrims traveled from England and -America and the Continent. - -But over this great writer’s life there hung a dark shadow; a tragic -secret, hidden from the world, dimly guessed only by a few of the inner -circle. What had been the master’s early life? He never spoke of it. -Where had he spent his childhood? No one knew. Where had he been born? -The government was collecting some kind of census, and put the question -to its great novelist, and he lied; he invented an imaginary birthplace. -So he lived safe from scandal, and only after his death was the dreadful -truth revealed. His grandfather had been a tailor to naval officers! His -father likewise had been a tailor, and failing in business, had gone to -South Africa and become a tailor there. His son had nothing to do with -him and never spoke of him. - -What there is so especially dreadful about a tailor you will have to ask -some Englishman to explain to you. I personally have known tailors who -were exceedingly kind and generous men; I have known tailors who were -students and thinkers and devoted workers in the Socialist movement. All -that a tailor may be; I suppose he may even be a saint. There is only -one thing which he can never by any possibility be, and that is an -English gentleman. - -And George Meredith aspired to be an English gentleman; he wrote about -English gentlemen in all the infinite subtleties of their relationship -to other English gentlemen, and more especially to English ladies. He -wished to be, not an interloper and observer, tolerated because of his -cleverness with the pen; he wished to be an authentic member of the -caste, so secure that he might exercise that most cherished of all the -privileges of the caste--to ridicule other members who fall away from -the perfect caste ideal. - -Do you think that I am making too much of this frailty of George -Meredith? I answer that it is the key to the understanding of everything -he wrote. Stop and think what it means that a man who possessed one of -the great intellects of his time, who had all the wisdom of all the ages -at his command, should be so bowed down with awe before the spirit of -caste that he was willing to lie about himself. I do not mean merely -that such a man’s whole life would become a pose; that he would pretend -to be abnormally spiritual and ascetic, when as a matter of fact he was -strongly attracted to lark-pies; that he would study his features, and -observing that he had a refined and sensitive profile, would place -himself at the window in such a position that his adorers would gaze -upon this profile during the course of their visit. What I mean is that -this man would have a caste-ridden mind; the subtleties of caste -distinction, the minute details of appearance and conduct and thought by -which caste superiority is manifested and maintained--this is the stuff -out of which the man’s novels would be made, and the theme upon which -his superfine intellect would be concentrated. - -And so it is in the Meredithian universe. The dark, grim, vaguely -shadowed Nemesis of the Greeks is gone; Jehovah with his thunders has -been laid away with the other rubbish in the garret; what is left, to -dominate the lives of men and women, to blast their hopes and lure them -to ruin and despair, is social convention. And all such convention may -be boiled down into one formula: thou shalt not break into a caste -higher than that to which you were born. You may have money, and try it; -you may pretend to have money, and try it; but in both cases alike you -will fail. Meredith gives us masterpieces in the way of impostors trying -to break in; he is even willing, under the veil of art, to use his own -tragic life-story, and in “Evan Harrington” he tells about a tailor’s -son who tries to break in. He turned such blasts of ridicule upon the -poor tailor family and the poor tailor state of being, that Meredith’s -tailor father down in South Africa was shriveled up with shame, and -could not thereafter endure to hear his son’s novels discussed. - -Likewise, women fail to break into the sacred caste. They have beauty, -they have wit, but nothing avails. The creator of “Diana of the -Crossways” lays himself out to convince us that this heroine is the most -brilliant conversationalist that ever graced a London dinner-table. But -she had to have money, and so she sells a government secret to a great -newspaper, and being discovered, is thrown out. And if Diana failed, -with all her worldly gifts, what hope for poor Lucy Feverel, who had -nothing but country graces, natural loveliness of body, and sweetness -and kindness and unselfishness of spirit? The “ordeal” of Richard -Feverel lies in the fact that being a son of a rigid English gentleman, -rigidly trained according to an ideal system, he falls in love with a -country flower, and instead of seducing her according to the custom of -the caste, he marries her. So, of course, the pair of them are trampled. - -The defenders of Meredith will say that he does not desire such a state -of affairs; he merely portrays it, because it exists. My answer to that -is the familiar one, that art is propaganda. If George Meredith had -believed in overthrowing the caste system in England he could surely -have found ways to convey that fact to us. He might have begun with his -own life; he might have taken his stand on a pedestal and said: “I, who -know myself to be a highly intellectual novelist, am the son and -grandson of tailors, and be pleased to make what you can of that.” If -Meredith had realized vitally and vividly the anti-social nature of the -caste system, and especially how that system is the very negation and -death of art--surely he would have found space in his many novels for at -least one character who has a little success in the effort to hold his -head up against the power of snobbery. Remember, this was a time in -which Alfred Harmsworth, gutter-journalist, became an earl, and Keir -Hardie, pit-boy, became a labor hero. But Meredith’s caste-bound -characters fail, and fail without any hint that they might have -succeeded. - -I do not wish to be unjust to this brilliant novelist, who was a modern -man in many ways. He was entirely free from that religiosity which -blighted Tennyson’s mind. He was clear-sighted about love, seeing that -it is a thing of flesh and spirit, and must be both, or neither. Also he -stood valiantly for the rights of ladies to be educated, and to have -their talents recognized, and to dispose of their own personalities. In -his old age he advanced the proposition that all marriages should be for -a term of years, and that at the end of the term the parties should be -free to remarry or not, as they wished. That this most sensible idea did -not raise more of a storm was because most persons in Britain took it -for granted that the novelist must be joking. - -But as a rule what we get from Meredith is not social criticism in its -broad sense, but merely caste criticism, the self-discipline of the -privileged orders. Meredith’s greatest novel is “The Egoist,” a quite -amazing study of one of these superior males, a creature who has been -brought up from infancy to regard his sublime self as the purpose for -which his own family exists, and one of a small group of select persons -for whom the British Empire, and therefore the world exist. Meredith -lays him bare for us in every turn and movement of his being, and we -loathe him heartily, and sympathize with the series of females with whom -he dallies in courtship. - -Meredith is one of those super-sophisticated novelists who are unwilling -to allow us to be interested in a course of events. The intellect in him -has eaten up and sterilized the emotions. In reading him we are -tormented by a feeling that his story and his characters would be -delightful if only he would give them a chance; but he has such a -brilliant style, he has so many ideas to convey to us, and so much -shining wit and corruscating metaphor to display. It is like an exhibit -of fireworks, which can be most ravishing for a few minutes; you catch -your breath, and think you have never seen anything more lovely. But -after an hour or so you decide that fireworks lack variety. - -This infinitely subtle and delicate, witty and charming personality -invites us to sit with him as gods upon Olympus, to look down upon the -tragic fate of mortals, and find pleasure in the irony of their -failures. As in the case of Corneille, we are concerned with the strife -and clash of aristocratic egotisms; we take part in deadly intrigues, -and in duels without mercy. But times have changed, and now no blood is -shed, no corpses cover the ground; it is a duel of wit, with a -death-blow in a phrase or the lifting of an eye-brow. Watching the -conflict, we find ourselves asking, precisely as we asked with -Corneille: What have we to do with these puppets? How do they concern -us? What reality is there, what permanence to the conventions which -dominate their puppet minds? What real wisdom is there behind their -volleys of cleverness? So we realize that we are still in the Victorian -age; and Victoria and boredom are two words for one thing. - - - - -CHAPTER XCVIII - -THE CULTURED-CLASS HISTORIAN - - -We are getting down to modern times, and have come to the first great -artist of whom I can say that with my own eyes I saw him. Shortly before -the war, coming out of the dining-room of the New Reform Club in -London, my host, H. G. Wells, stopped me and whispered: “There sits the -Great Cham.” He may have said “Great Buddha” or “Great Jupiter”; anyhow, -I looked, and seated at a table in solitary state was a large elderly -gentleman, with large bald head shining whitely, and jaws moving -meditatively. I knew him from his pictures; and besides, there was at -that time only one Great Cham, or Great Buddha, or Great Jupiter of -international letters. - -I did not ask to meet him, because, having read him, I understood the -aesthetic proprieties, and did not wish to surprise a Great Master with -his mouth full of lunch. Also, the days of my discipleship had long -since passed, and I was not sure if I would be able to think of just the -proper delicate subtlety with which to convey my attitude to one whom I -had once revered, and now regarded with affection because of reverence -remembered. That sentence is a little longer and more subtle than I -usually write--such being the effect upon one’s style of merely thinking -about Henry James. - -In my youth I wanted to know the great world, and who could tell me with -such compelling authority? I read everything he had written up to that -time--no small task, some forty volumes, many of them fat. I stuck to it -day and night for a couple of months, and then wrote an essay, “The -Leisure-Class Historian,” which, alas, no editor could be found to -publish, and which was consumed, with all the rest of my belongings -except one night-shirt, in the Helicon Hall fire. - -Coming back to the task at this interval, I realize that I gave Henry -James too broad a title; he is “the cultured-class historian.” He knows -of the existence of the uncultivated mob of idle rich, the -“high-feeding, champagne-quaffing, orchid-arranging,” as he describes -them; but his theme is that small section of the rich who possess -aesthetic sensibilities, and withdraw in haughty aloofness from -high-feeding, champagne-quaffing, and orchid-arranging, and live -fastidious lives devoted to the cultivation of beauty. The word “beauty” -Henry James understands in the broadest sense; it covers not merely the -things you look at, but the things you do and the things you think. You -recognize it by its being elegant, dignified and restrained. - -To an outsider it might appear cold, but the Master admits you to the -inside, and you discover that it is passionate, quivering with feeling. -But it sternly checks its impulses, and seldom permits itself to do -anything except to think about the problems confronting it, to analyze -these problems in minute detail, to pile up subtlety and complication -concerning them--literally whole mountains of complication; or perhaps -(since, when you are reading or writing or discussing Henry James, you -anticipate many variations of metaphor, and endless subtle shadings of -metaphor, and parenthetical disquisitions interpreting and qualifying, -and still further, as it were, intensifying metaphor--each separate -complication, you will note, set apart from other complications by a -comma) it would convey a more accurate impression of the authentic -Jamesian manner, if I were to say that he builds towering structures of -subtle sophistication, which structures you, with joy and excitement of -the mind, see rising, unexpectedly splendid, before you, revealing new -possibilities of penetration into the refinements of sensibility, as -well as new possibilities of sentence structure, which convey, by -infinite variation of shadings, a sense, or, as it were, almost a -sensation, of the actuality of exceptional mental experience. - -Such are the great rambling sentences, through which you stagger and -gasp your way. You keep on, because you find that the old boy is really -saying something. He is not delighting in intricacy and smartness for -their own sake, as you so often feel to your annoyance with Meredith; he -is not deliberately confusing you with useless obscure detail like -Browning; he is really making a heroic effort to convey some complicated -intricacy in the mental processes of people who not merely think, but -who think about thinking, and think about thinking about thinking. - -Henry James was born in New York in 1843, his father being a theological -writer. His elder brother, William, became a popular professor of -psychology at Harvard, thus giving rise to the jest that “William is a -psychologist who writes like a novelist, and Henry is a novelist who -writes like a psychologist.” Henry was taken abroad and educated in -England, France and Switzerland, which had the effect of cutting his -roots from under him. At the age of twenty-six he moved permanently to -England, and from that time made his home there, with occasional trips -to the Continent. - -He was a sensitive youth, quiet and shy; he suffered from spinal -trouble, and liked to sit quietly in drawing-rooms and listen to other -people talk. Then he would go apart for long periods, and reflect upon -what he had heard, and weave it into stories. He was grateful to his -friends if they would tell him their troubles, because that provided him -with copy; but he never told anyone his own troubles, and his friends -lost sight of the possibility that anything might ever have happened to -him personally. Edmund Gosse, who became his intimate, tells how in his -old age James, walking up and down in a garden one evening, was suddenly -moved to open his heart. Looking up at a light in the house, he was -reminded of a scene long, long ago, when he had stood in a street one -rainy night, looking up thus to a lighted window, expecting to see a -face, but the face had not come. That was all of the story; but Mr. -Gosse was thrilled, even appalled. Actually, once upon a time, something -had happened to the Master! - -It would perhaps not be indelicate of us to feel warranted in assuming -that this something had to do with the relation of the sexes. We note -that this relation is, like everything else in the Henry James world, -fastidious, reserved, and governed by the aesthetic sensibilities. These -people do not love, they talk about loving; and as years pass, and the -later manner grows, their talk comes more and more to deal with the -condition of having been loved. - -In “Daisy Miller,” an early story which made the young author famous, we -see an innocent American girl in Rome, who to her horror receives an -improper advance from a young Italian. In “Madame de Mauves” we see an -American lady, unhappily married to a Frenchman in Paris, tempted by -passion for a true young American. But when we come to the great long -novels with the great long sentences of the “third manner,” we find -ourselves dealing with the fact that once upon a time, long, long ago, a -man and a woman committed an impropriety, and now somebody else is -slowly finding out about it, to the general horror and dismay. Thus “The -Golden Bowl,” seven hundred and eighty-nine closely printed pages, -dealing with the mental and emotional reactions of a woman who has an -intimate woman friend, and discovers that her husband has at some past -period been the lover of this friend. Or “What Maisie Knew,” in which we -discover an ancient intrigue through the eyes of the little daughter of -the intriguing woman. Perhaps you think you know what obscenity is, but -you get a new revelation of its possibilities when you proceed through -the mind of a child to pick up hints and allusions of the elders, and -piece them into a pattern of fornication. - -Henry James, the son of an American theological writer, acquired, like -Hawthorne, an inside knowledge of Puritanism, and in his early novels he -took the New England point of view toward intrigues and improprieties. -Thus Daisy Miller is innocent and free, and the dark, wicked Italian -misunderstands her freedom, and thinks she is what a girl with such -manners would be in Europe. Madame de Mauves, a loyal wife, is married -to a Frenchman of no morals, and when she loves a true and good -American, she scorns to sin, for the reason that she would be imitating -the Frenchman, she would be doing what the Frenchman expects her to do. -“The American” is a novel about a “man from home,” who has made money, -and seeks a cultured wife among the French nobility, and gradually finds -that he is in a nest of murders. All regulation hundred percent -patriotic stuff! - -But Europe grew upon Henry James, and America faded, and the aesthetic -sensibilities became less Puritanical and more cosmopolitan. So we have -“The Ambassadors,” the world’s great international novel. Something over -twenty years ago I went with a friend on a canoeing trip in the far -Northern wilds, and for six weeks we saw only one white man, the keeper -of a Hudson Bay trading post. Baggage had to be limited on such a trip, -and I took only one book. Evening after evening I would read it, a few -pages at a time, lying in a tent by candle light. So I had plenty of -time to note every subtlety, and before I got through I was talking -Henry James in my sleep. Now the twenty years are as a day, and the -characters and their story are as vivid as ever in my mind. - -A young New Englander, son of a wealthy family, has come to Paris and -settled there, refusing to go home. His family send an elderly friend as -ambassador to bring back the prodigal. This ambassador, whose name is -Strether, discovers that a crude young barbarian has been changed by his -Parisian life into a cultured and self-possessed man of the world. -Strether is duly impressed by the change, and attributes it to the -influence of a middle-aged French lady, who has been the young man’s -good angel. - -He writes about the situation, but the family is not satisfied, and -another ambassador comes, this time the young man’s elder sister, the -incarnation of the acidulous propriety of New England. This sister is -not in the least impressed by the French lady, but on the contrary -suspects the very worst between the lady and her brother. Strether is -shocked by her crude ideas; but then comes the climax of the drama--a -scene wherein it is accidentally revealed to Strether that the acidulous -sister is right; a part of the process whereby the charming French lady -has civilized the young barbarian has been to take him as her lover. So -two civilizations meet, and in the clash between them we see the hearts -of both revealed. - -You note that in all these stories we are dealing with well-to-do -people. No other kind of people exist in the world of Henry James. Such -highly complicated and subtle aesthetic sensibilities are only possible -in connection with large sums of money, freely furnished to the -characters without effort on their part. It is impossible to imagine any -person in the “third manner” being so vulgar as to make, or even to take -money. What they do is to spend money elegantly, and when they meet -persons who spend it inelegantly, they turn away in dignified disdain. -There are only a few passages in which the novelist condescends to be -aware of the existence of the lower orders, who by their toil produce -the wealth which makes the aesthetic sensibilities possible. We get one -such glimpse in “The Princess Casamassima”; the hero glances at the -women and girls of the working classes, and then: - - “What remedy but another deluge, what alchemy but annihilation?” he - asked himself as he went his way; and he wondered what fate there - could be, in the great scheme of things, for a planet overgrown - with such vermin, what redemption but to be hurled against a ball - of consuming fire. - -This cultured-class hero fails to ask himself what would happen to his -cultured self if the working-class vermin were to be wiped out. -Manifestly, these vermin have to be allowed to go on working, in order -that elegant illuminati from America and England and Italy and France -may gather in the great capitals to listen to beautiful music and attend -the newest art exhibitions and discuss the newest books. It is necessary -that hundreds of millions of peasants should drudge on the rack-rented -soil of Europe, it is necessary that mill slaves in New England and -sweat-shop slaves in New York and mine slaves in Pennsylvania should -wear out their bodies, in order that culture ambassadors may acquire old -world subtlety and understanding; may watch the “European scene” and, by -reporting it for us, enable us, at least in imagination, to escape the -crudity and provinciality of our home lives. - -Henry James wrote a biography of Hawthorne, who as a fellow sufferer -under Puritanism he greatly admired; and in the course of that biography -he drew a picture of the “American scene,” which enables us to -understand why a cultured-class novelist fled from it at the age of -twenty-six, and came back for only one visit in a long lifetime. Read -the list of our deficiencies--and do not read it hurriedly, but stop -and, as Henry James would say, “savour” each phrase, realizing the mass -of content it has to the aesthetically sensitive mind: - - No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no - church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country - gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, no manors, nor old - country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied - ruins; no cathedrals, no abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no - great Universities nor public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor - Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no - political society, no sporting class--no Epsom nor Ascot! - - - - -CHAPTER XCIX - -THE PREMIER NOVELIST - - -We have studied two great novelists of the later Victorian age who -failed of wide popularity. We shall not understand that age completely -unless we study one who was crowned, not merely by the critics, but by -the mass of novel-reading ladies. - -Mrs. Humphry Ward was her name, and she takes me back to the days when -I was a poor devil of a would-be writer, half starving in a New York -lodging-house. What made success in the world of books? I had to know, -or die; and the New York “Times” was kind enough to publish a weekly -review to give me the information. Every year or two there would appear -a new novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward; and always this novel would be the -occasion for a grand state review, signed by the name of some eminent -pundit, occupying pages one and two, with a large portrait on page one. -So I knew that Mrs. Humphry Ward was modern literature, and read each -novel as part of my life training. - -I read it with a mingling of interest and fear; interest, because it -told me about a set of people whom I knew did actually exist, and did -actually govern the world in which I lived; and fear, because this set -of people, so obviously both predaceous and stupid, were so powerfully -buttressed by the prestige of snobbery, and protected by the holy mantle -of religion. No novelist every worshipped Mammon-respectability more -piously or portrayed it with more patient devotion than Mrs. Humphry -Ward in her later years. - -She was brought up in the inner circle of culture; her father was an -Oxford big-wig, and Matthew Arnold was her “Uncle Matt.” Everything that -education could do for a young girl was done for her, and she was -writing a history of Spain at the age of twenty. Incidentally, she was -dreaming a wonderful dream--that some day she might be presented at -court. - -Her first novel, “Robert Elsmere,” dealt with the subject of religion. A -large section of the idling classes of England get their incomes by -believing that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Jonah swallowed a -whale; and with the progress of science they were naturally finding this -more and more difficult. A school of ingenious Bible-twisters arose, to -invent symbolical and literary meanings for fairy-tales, in order that -people who no longer believed could continue with good conscience to -collect the salaries of belief. Mrs. Ward made her hero one of these -new-style clergymen, and somebody persuaded Gladstone to read the novel, -and he wrote a long refutation of it, which caused a tremendous fuss. -Statesmen in England, as a rule, read only Thucydides and Homer, while -in the United States they read only the “Saturday Evening Post.” There -were a great many people who never saw a modern novel, who hastened to -read it when Gladstone called it dangerous. Half a million copies were -sold in our country, and Mrs. Ward’s fortune was made. - -She had begun, you see, as a radical; and in her next novel, “The -History of David Grieve,” she glorifies a young hero who devotes himself -to social reform. But in a very few years success and wealth and the -applause of the great changed the hue of this lady novelist’s -reflections. She wrote “Marcella,” a complete recantation of her -unorthodoxy, and a picture of what had gone on in her mind. Leaders of -labor and social reformers now turn out to be dangerous demagogs; and a -beautiful heroine, who loves one, discovers the error of her way, and -comes back to safety as the wife of a nobleman’s son. From which time on -Mrs. Humphry Ward was safe for aristocracy. - -She moved to a mansion in Grosvenor Place, where she had a view of the -garden of Buckingham Palace. She became an intimate of duchesses, and a -great figure in society and politics. Her publisher would negotiate with -America before breakfast, and get her seven thousand pounds advance on a -new novel; so the good lady spent the rest of her life grinding out a -series of glorified pot-boilers in support of the Tory principles of -government. Each novel was an Anglo-Saxon world event, and the counters -of book-stores in the fashionable shopping districts of America were -piled to the ceiling with the new volume. Mrs. Ward’s following was the -Anglomaniac mob, people who have but one idea in life, to imitate the -British governing classes; the sort of people who study those page -advertisements and speculate anxiously: “What is Wrong with this -Picture?” - -Says Mrs. Ogi: “I was in that mob. In our town in Mississippi there was -no book-store, but an adventurous Jew who kept a cigar-store had the -idea of getting a shelf of modern novels and renting them for ten cents -a volume. I was the first young lady in the town who had the courage to -go into a cigar-store, and I set all the other young ladies to reading -Mrs. Humphry Ward.” - -“What did you get out of it?” - -“I never could find out. It was all about British political life; -people were pulling and hauling and intriguing, but I never could -understand what their principles were, or what they expected to do when -they got elected.” - -“That’s the point exactly; there are no principles, there are only -parties. Whichever one gets in constitutes the ‘government,’ and its -task is to hold labor by the throat while capital picks its pockets. -Labor produces a sovereign a day, and capital takes it, and gives labor -four shillings wages, and labor tips its cap and is grateful. And then -capital’s favorite lady-novelist comes round with a market basket -containing sixpence worth of food and medicine; which is called charity, -and is the means of getting labor’s vote at election time.” - -Such was the private life of Mrs. Humphry Ward. She was what is called -“philanthropic”; that is, she was prominent in those society activities -which help the poor by playing upon the vanity and love of display of -the rich. Her life consisted in rushing about from one meeting to -another, shaking hands and chatting, rushing home to dress and dine with -prominent people, and then reading about it in the next day’s -newspapers. She was so busy with all this that she could only find half -an hour a day in which to read Greek! - -The characters in her books are busy with the same kind of activities. -The leading man is a handsome young aristocrat, whose occupation is -becoming premier. We never have any idea why he wants to be premier, -except that as hero that is his function. The idea that the people of -England should ask reasons for making an empty-headed noodle into their -premier is one that never occurs to anyone in the novels. What interests -us is the efforts of the young man’s friends to push him in, and the -efforts of his enemies to bar him out. - -Success or failure in all such “political novels” depends on one factor, -an entanglement of sex. It appears that the English voters insist -rigidly upon one requirement--that the statesman who holds them by the -throat while their pockets are being picked shall be ostensibly chaste. -The law may be summed up by saying that he is permitted to have only one -leisure-class female during his life. Of course, if she dies, he is -permitted one more leisure-class female; but for the rest, he is -required to satisfy his needs with females of lower classes. Political -novels derive their plots from the fact that occasionally some -statesman fails to conform to this law; there is a statesman who wants -two ladies, or there are two ladies who want the statesman. Nature has -not created man exclusively for the purpose of wearing a top-hat and a -frock-coat, and making speeches in Parliament; nor do all women find -complete satisfaction, like Mrs. Humphry Ward, in political labors to -keep other women from getting the vote. There are women with mischief in -them, who endeavor to tempt statesmen from exclusive devotion to -“careers.” And the statesmen are tempted; they commit indiscretions, -such as taking walks in the moonlight with the evil females; and a -thrill runs through all “society,” and the tongues of the gossips wag -furiously. Did they? Or did they not? The friends of the statesman rally -to save him; and the enemies of the statesman sharpen their tomahawks; -and Anglomaniacs, watching the scene, are thrilled as when Blondin on -the tight-rope sets out to walk across Niagara Falls. - -“We don’t really need to worry,” says Mrs. Ogi; “a hero is always a -hero, and in all the books that I got from the little cigar-store in the -Mississippi town, I cannot recall that one hero ever failed to become -premier.” - -“It would be interesting,” says Ogi, “to compile statistics on the -question: How many premiers have there been in the novels of Mrs. -Humphry Ward, and how many in the recent history of the British Empire?” - - - - -CHAPTER C - -THE UNCROWNED KING - - -We come now to study America in the second half of the nineteenth -century. - -The dominating factor in this period was the Civil War, a conflict in -which the physical and moral energy of the country was exhausted. There -followed the inevitable reaction: Abraham Lincoln was succeeded by the -carpetbagger in the South and the tariff-boodler in the North. The very -hero who had led the nation to victory, and had said, “Let us have -peace,” entered the White House to turn the government over to -corruptionists. In the two generations following the Civil War America -made enormous material and some intellectual progress, but no moral -progress discernible. As I write this book, our political morals are -embodied in a post-campaign jest: “The Republicans should have stolen -the Washington monument, and then Coolidge would have carried Florida -and South Carolina.” - -Provincial America in the decades following the Civil War based its -religion upon the dogma that it was the most perfect nation upon God’s -footstool. The whisky-drinking, tobacco-chewing, obscenity-narrating, -Grand Old Party-voting mob would tolerate no criticism, not even that -kind implied by living differently. To it an artist was a freak, whom it -punished with mockery and practical jokes. There were only two possible -ways for him to survive; one was to flee to New York and be lost in the -crowd; the other was to turn into a clown and join in laughing at -himself, and at everything he knew to be serious and beautiful in life. -This latter course was adopted by a man of truly great talent, who might -have become one of the world’s satiric masters if he had not been -overpowered by the spirit of America. His tragic story has been told in -a remarkable study, “The Ordeal of Mark Twain,” by Van Wyck Brooks. - -For something like forty years Mark Twain lived as an uncrowned American -king; his friends referred to him thus--“the King.” His was a life which -seemed to have come out of the Arabian Nights’ enchantment. His -slightest move was good for columns in the newspapers; when he traveled -about the world he was his country’s ambassador at large--his baggage -traveled free under consular dispensation, and in London and Vienna the -very traffic regulations were suspended. When he went to Washington to -plead for copyright laws, the two houses adjourned to hear him, and the -speaker of the House turned over his private office to the king of -letters. He made three hundred thousand dollars out of a single book, he -made a fortune out of anything he chose to write. The greatest -millionaires of the country were his intimate friends; he had a happy -family, a strong constitution, inexhaustible energy--what more could a -human being ask? - -And yet Mark Twain was not happy. He grew less and less happy as time -passed. Bitterness and despair began to creep into his writings; -sentences like this: “Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.” -Stranger yet, it began to be whispered that America’s uncrowned king was -a radical! In times of stress some of us would go to him for help, for a -word of sympathy or backing, and always this strange thing was noticed; -he was full of understanding, and would agree with everything we said; -yes, he was one of us. But when we asked for a public action, a -declaration, he was not there. - -“The Jungle” was published, and he wrote me a letter. It was burned in -the Helicon Hall fire, and I recall only one statement: he had had to -put the book down in the middle, because he could not endure the anguish -it caused him. Naturally, I had my thoughts about such a remark. What -right has a man to refuse to endure the anguish of knowing what other -human beings are suffering? If these sufferings cannot be helped, why -then perhaps we may flee from them; but think what the uncrowned king of -America could have done, in the way of backing a young author who had -aimed at the public’s heart and by accident had hit it in the stomach! - -Then came the Gorki case. The great Russian writer came to America to -plead for freedom for his country, and to raise money for the cause. The -intriguers of the tsar set out to ruin him, and turned the bloodhounds -of the capitalist press upon him. A dinner in Gorki’s honor had been -planned, and Mark Twain and William Dean Howells were among the -sponsors. The storm of scandal broke, and these two great ones of -American letters turned tail and fled to cover. - -A year or two later Mark Twain was visiting Bermuda, and came to see me. -He had taken to wearing a conspicuous white costume, and with his -snow-white hair and mustache he was a picturesque figure. He chatted -about past times, as old men like to do. I saw that he was kind, -warm-hearted, and also full of rebellion against capitalist greed and -knavery; but he was an old man, and a sick man, and I did not try to -probe the mystery of his life. The worm which was gnawing at his heart -was not revealed, until in the course of time his letters were given to -the public. Now we know the amazing story--that Mark Twain lived a -double life; he, the uncrowned king of America, was the most repressed -personality, the most completely cowed, shamed, and tormented great man -in the history of letters. - -He was born in a Missouri River town in 1835. His father was a futile -dreamer with a perpetual motion machine. His mother was a victim of -patent medicines, who had seen better days, and reared a family of -ragged brats in a foul and shabby environment, where a boy saw four -separate murders with his own eyes. “Little Sam” was a shy, sensitive -child, his mother’s darling, and she raised him in a fierce -determination to have him grow up respectable and rich. He became a -printer, then a pilot on the Mississippi River. This latter was a great -career; the river pilot was the uncrowned king of this western country. -He saw all the world in glorious fashion; he was a real artist, and at -the same time carried a solemn responsibility. - -The Civil War destroyed this career, and Mark Twain went out to Nevada -to become a gold miner, promising his mother that he would never return -until he had made a fortune. He failed as a miner, and was forced to -live by journalism. So he drifted into becoming the world’s buffoon. He -always despised it--so much so that he put a pistol to his head. But he -lacked the courage to pull the trigger, and had to go on and be a -writer. His “Jumping Frog” story went around the world; after which he -came East, and wrote “Innocents Abroad,” and made his three hundred -thousand dollars. - -Shortly after that he exchanged the domination of his mother for that of -a wife. He fell in love with the daughter of a wealthy coal-dealer in -Elmira, New York. There was a terrible “to do” about it in respectable -“up-State” circles, for Samuel Clemens was a wild and woolly westerner, -who didn’t know how to handle a knife and fork, while the daughter of -the coal-dealer had been brought up on an income of forty thousand -dollars a year. However, this strange lover was a “lion,” so they -decided to accept him and teach him parlor tricks. They gave the young -couple a carriage and coachman, and a house which had cost twenty-five -thousand dollars; it wasn’t long before he was completely justifying -their faith, by living at the rate of a hundred thousand a year. - -The wife was a frail woman, a semi-invalid, and Mark Twain adored her; -also, he was awe-stricken before her, because of her extremely high -social position. She was ignorant, provincial, rigidly fixed in a narrow -church-going respectability; by these standards she brought him up, and -raised a couple of daughters to help him. As Clemens phrased it, his -wife “edited” him; as his daughters phrased it, they “dusted papa off.” - -What these women did to America’s greatest humorist makes one of the -most amazing stories in the history of culture. They went over -everything he wrote and revised it according to the standards of the -Elmira bourgeoisie. They suppressed the greater part of his most vital -ideas, and kept him from finishing his most important works. When he -wrote something commonplace and conventional they fell on his neck with -delight, and helped to spend the fortune which it brought in. When he -told the truth about America, or voiced his own conclusions about life, -they forced him to burn it, or hide it in the bottom of a trunk. His one -masterpiece, “Huckleberry Finn,” he wrote secretly at odd moments, -taking many years at the task, and finally publishing it with anxiety. -Mrs. Clemens came home from church one day, horrified by a rumor that -her husband had put some swear words into a story; she made him produce -the manuscript, in which poor Huck, telling how he can’t live in the -respectable world, exclaims: “They comb me all to hell.” Now when you -read “Huckleberry Finn,” you read: “They comb me all to thunder!” - -Mark Twain had in him the making of one of the world’s great satirists. -He might have made over American civilization, by laughing it out of its -shams and pretensions. But he was not permitted to express himself as an -artist; he must emulate his father-in-law, the Elmira coal-dealer. The -unhappy wretch turned his attention to business ventures, and started a -huge publishing business, to publish his own and other books. He sold -three hundred thousand copies of General Grant’s Memoirs, and sold -hundreds of thousands of copies of other books, utterly worthless from -the literary point of view. - -He was always at the mercy of inventors with some new scheme to make -millions. For example, there was a typesetting machine; he sunk a huge -fortune into that, and would spend his time figuring what he was going -to make--so many millions that it almost made a billion. He was a -wretched business man, and failed ignominously and went into bankruptcy, -losing his wife’s money as well as his own. H. H. Rogers, master pirate -of Standard Oil, came forward and took charge of his affairs, -incidentally playing billiards with him until four o’clock every -morning. And then some young radical brought him an exposure of the -Standard Oil Company, expecting him to publish this book as a public -service! - -Going back to Mark Twain’s books, we can read these facts between the -lines, and see that he put his balked and cheated self, or some aspect -of this self, into his characters. We understand how he poured his soul -into Huck Finn; this poor henpecked genius, dressed up and made to go -through the paces of a literary lion, yearns back to the days when he -was a ragged urchin and was happy; Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer represent -all that daring, that escape from the bourgeois world, which Sam Clemens -dreamed but never achieved. He put another side of himself into Colonel -Sellers, who imagined fortunes; and yet another side into Pudd’nhead -Wilson, the village atheist who mocked at the shams of religion. -Secretly Mark Twain himself loathed Christianity, and wrote a letter of -cordial praise to Robert Ingersoll; but publicly he went to church every -Sunday, escorting his saintly wife, according to the customs of Elmira! - -The more you read this story the more appalling you find it. This -uncrowned king of America built up literally a double personality; he -took to writing two sets of letters, one containing what he really -wanted to say, and the other what his official public self was obliged -to say. He accumulated a volume of “unmailed letters,” one of the -weirdest phenomena in literary history. He was indignant at the ending -of the Russian-Japanese war, because he believed that if it had -continued for a couple of months more the tsar would have been -overthrown. When Colonel George Harvey invited him to dine with the -Russian emissaries to the Portsmouth Conference, he wrote a blistering -telegram, in which he declared himself inferior as a humorist to those -statesmen who had “turned the tragedy of a tremendous war into a gay and -blithesome comedy.” But he did not send that telegram; he sent another, -full of such enraptured praise of the Russian diplomats that Count Witte -sent it to the tsar! - -That is only one sample out of many. He wrote a War Prayer, a grim -satire upon the Christian custom of praying for victory. “I have told -the whole truth in that,” he said to a friend; and then added the -lamentable conclusion: “Only dead men can tell the truth in this world. -It can be published after I am dead.” He explained the reason--this -financier who had fortunes to blow in upon mechanical inventions: “I -have a family to support, and I can’t afford this kind of dissipation.” -And again: “The silent, colossal National Lie that is the support and -confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and -unfairnesses that afflict the peoples--that is the one to throw bricks -and sermons at. But let us be judicious and let somebody else begin.” - -Of course a man who wrote like this despised himself. It was the tragedy -of Tolstoi, but in a far more humiliating form; Tolstoi at least wrote -what he pleased, and did in the end break with his family. But Mark -Twain stayed in the chains of love and respectability--his bitterness -boiling and steaming in him like a volcano, and breaking out here and -there with glare and sulphurous fumes. “The damned and mangy human -race,” was one of his phrases; and again he wrote: “My idea of our -civilization is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, -vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies. As for the word, I -hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, -I wish it was in hell, where it belongs.” - -In the effort to excuse himself, this repressed personality evolved a -philosophy of fatalism. Man was merely a machine, and could not help -doing what he did. This was put into a book, “What is Man?” But then he -dared not publish the book! “Am I honest?” he wrote, to a friend. “I -give you my word of honor (privately) I am not. For seven years I have -suppressed a book, which my conscience tells me I ought to publish. I -hold it my duty to publish it. There are other difficult tasks I am -equal to, but I am not equal to that one.” He did publish the book at -last, but anonymously, and with a preface explaining that he dared not -sign his name. - -He, America’s greatest humorist, had a duty laid upon him; he saw that -duty clearly--how clearly we learn from a story, “The Mysterious -Stranger,” a ferocious satire upon the human race, published after his -death. In this book Satan asks: “Will a day come when the race will -detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them--and by -laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has -unquestionably one really effective weapon--laughter. Power, money, -persuasion, supplication, persecution--these can lift at a colossal -humbug--push it a little--weaken it a little, century by century; but -only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast.... As a race, do -you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage.” Such was -the spiritual tragedy going on in the soul of a man who was going about -New York, clad in a fancy white costume, smiled upon and applauded by -all beholders, crowned by all critics, wined and dined by Standard Oil -millionaires, dancing inexhaustibly until three or four o’clock in the -morning, and nicknamed in higher social circles “the belle of New York.” - -Mrs. Ogi from Mississippi reads this onslaught upon Mrs. Ogi from -Elmira; and her husband wonders a little while he waits. But she only -smiles, and remarks: “In our family the men have a traditional saying: -‘It’s all right to be henpecked, but be sure you get the right hen!’” - - - - -CHAPTER CI - -SMILING AMERICA - - -We come now to an American artist who played the part of his own wife; -that is to say, Ogi and Mrs. Ogi combined in one person. - -His name was William Dean Howells, and he was born in 1837 in an Ohio -town. He began life as a typesetter in a newspaper office, then he -became a reporter, and was made United States consul in Venice at the -age of twenty-four. It was a job which left time for art, and young -Howells trained himself diligently. He became editor of the “Atlantic -Monthly,” the first non-Bostonian to hold that high ecclesiastical -office. For years he presided at the dying bedside of New England -literature, and after the patient was buried he came to New York and -found a permanent berth with “Harper’s Magazine.” He wrote for sixty -years, and published over a hundred volumes of poetry, criticism and -fiction. He had ease and grace and charm, all the drawing-room literary -virtues; he displayed the same virtues in real life, and so everybody -loved him, and he became, according to Mark Twain, “the critical Court -of Last Resort in this country, from whose decisions there is no -appeal.” - -The principle upon which the success of Howells was based is revealed to -us in his autobiography. He tells how as a young reporter on an Ohio -newspaper, he was sent to a police court, and he quit. “If all my work -could have been the reporting of sermons, with intervals of sketching -the graduating ceremonies of young ladies’ seminaries”--why, then he -might have become a city editor! He tells of coming upon a sordid -tragedy, and resolving that forever after he would avert his eyes from -the darker side of life; “the more smiling aspects of life are the more -American.” You can see why he needed no Mrs. Ogi from Elmira, or from -any other place, to edit his manuscripts. - -To dignify this program of portraying the more smiling and therefore -more American aspects of life, Howells gave it the name of “realism.” -All his life long he published critical articles in defense of this -program, and he described these articles as “a polemic, a battle.” Also -he wrote novels, which he regarded as pure, undiluted works of art. It -never occurred to the dear soul that the novels were merely a -continuation of his “polemic,” another phase of his “battle.” Not -content with rebuking men who did wrong, Howells wished to provide -examples of what was right; therefore he invented characters and -contrived situations to exhibit the virtues and charms of that -middle-class gentility which was always smiling and therefore always -American. - -The apologia of this school of “realism” may be formulated as follows: I -am a gentleman of placid disposition and quiet feelings, with no -devastating passions tormenting me, no cosmic idealisms driving my soul. -I am comfortable in the bourgeois world, having always earned a good -salary and taken care of my family. I believe this is the proper thing -for men to do, and if they fail to do it it is their own fault. I love -to read good books, and I cultivate a mild and gentle imagination. I -write about my sort of people, and I call such books art. If men persist -in having violent and stormy passions and intense and overwhelming -convictions; if they persist in going to extremes, whether base and -cruel, or heroic and sublime--then I am disturbed in my literary -dignity, and I denounce such writing, and call it romanticism, -propaganda, and pose. And since I am “the critical Court of Last Resort -in this country, from whose decisions there is no appeal,” it follows -that young writers who persist in displeasing me are sentenced to move -into garrets and be starved and frozen into submission. - -Upon the above formula Howells founded and maintained a school of “local -color” in the United States. Men and women who had been brought up in -different parts of the country wrote stories describing in detail the -peculiarities of speech and costume and manners there prevailing. -Confining themselves to the everyday and obvious events of humdrum life, -and being content to observe and not to think, they were sure of a -cordial reception from Howells, and of publication and payment by the -great magazine and publishing house which took the great critic’s -advice. By enforcing these standards for half a century, Howells and a -group of editors like him put a blight upon American literature from -which it is only now escaping. - -I do not want to be unfair to a gracious and kindly gentleman. In his -later years he fell under the spell of Tolstoi, and took to calling -himself a Socialist. He wrote a story, “The Traveler from Altruria,” a -gentle and winning satire upon the stupidities of capitalism. I would -love him more ardently for having written that book if he had been -willing to fight for it; if he had put any trace of social protest into -his magazine editing and contributing. But he joined with Mark Twain in -deserting poor Gorki, and he continued to hold his comfortable position -and to collect his salary and royalties from Harper and Brothers, after -that concern went into bankruptcy and was turned into the propaganda -department of J. P. Morgan and Company. - -I have told in “The Brass Check” the curious story of my own experience -with this publishing house; I will repeat it here, so far as it bears on -Howells. Ten years ago I was collecting material for my anthology of -revolutionary literature, “The Cry for Justice,” and I applied to one or -two hundred authors for permission to quote briefly from their writings. -Having got the authors’ permission, I then applied to the publishers; -whereupon I received from Messrs. Harper and Brothers a letter, -forbidding me to quote from any book published by them, even with the -author’s permission. I took the trouble to call upon the gentleman who -had this matter in charge, and was informed that the firm considered my -reputation to be so bad that I would do injury to any author whom I -quoted. I had with me a letter from Howells, saying that he would be -very glad to be quoted. But no matter; I was not to quote him; neither -was I to quote Mark Twain, nor Charles Rann Kennedy, nor H. G. Wells! - -It happened that Howells’ editorial office was in that same dingy old -Franklin Square building, so I took the matter to him. He was courteous -and friendly--but he did not feel that it would be proper for him to -oppose the objections of his publishers. My plea, that he owed something -to a fellow-Socialist, and still more to the movement, did not avail. - -And lest the reader think that I am unduly prejudiced against the -publication department of J. P. Morgan & Company, let me quote a couple -of sentences from a letter written to the editor of “Harper’s” Magazine -by Lafcadio Hearn: “Your firm is a hundred years behind; ignorant, -brutal, mean, absurdly ignorant--incredibly ignorant of what art is, -what literature is, what good taste is. But it makes money like pork -packeries and butcheries and loan offices.” - -History has its curious ironies, and this would be one--if it should -turn out that Howells, in refusing to be quoted in “The Cry for -Justice,” had lost his best chance of being read in the future. And lest -this remark be taken for megalomania, let me add that I am not the -author of the anthology, merely its editor, and others could have done -the job as well, perhaps better. The point is that this is the kind of -literature which the future will read. The whirlwinds of social -revolution are gathering to sweep the world; and when they have passed, -there will be a new generation of clear-eyed young workers, who will -look upon the fiction-characters of William Dean Howells with puzzled -dismay. Characters so mild and gentle, so tolerant in the presence of -intolerable wrong! Characters so very respectable in the getting and -spending of their incomes, so anxious in their conformity to pecuniary -conventions! The young workers will not be able to imagine themselves -in the place of such characters; but will study them as one studies -relics in a museum, or queer-shaped insects under a microscope. - - - - -CHAPTER CII - -THE EMINENT TANKARD-MAN - - -Through the latter part of the nineteenth century there existed in the -United States a peculiar literary phenomenon, the underground reputation -of Ambrose Bierce. The fiction reading public did not know this man; the -readers of “yellow” journalism knew him as a Hearst writer, even more -brilliant and cynical than the average. But now and then you would come -upon an expert in the literary craft, who would tell you that Ambrose -Bierce was a short-story writer and satirist without equal in America, -the greatest genius our literature had produced. You would set out to -look for these obscure writings, and could not find them in the -libraries or the book-stores. At last you might get someone to lend you -a copy, and then you would join the campaign of whispering. - -Now Bierce is coming into his own. The public is hearing about him. He -is of especial interest to us here, because he spent his energy in -attacking, with the utmost possible fury, the thesis of this book; while -at the same time, both in his life and his writings, he vindicated that -thesis to the last syllable. - -Ambrose Bierce was bom in 1842, the son of a poor farmer in Ohio. At the -age of nineteen he enlisted and fought through the Civil war, being -twice wounded and brevetted major. Then he became a journalist, first in -San Francisco, then in London, finally in Washington and New York. - -He was one of the most ethical men that ever lived, a born preacher, as -vehement and persistent as Carlyle. He fought for his beliefs, and -shrank from no sacrifice in their behalf. He was no man’s man, but said -what he thought, no matter how bitter and fierce it might be. He paid -the penalty in a host of enemies and a lifetime of struggle. - -That such a man should have taken up with art-for-art’s-sake theories -is assuredly a quaint incongruity in the history of literature. But so -it happened. He looked out upon America, and saw the grafters thriving, -he saw corruption enthroned as a political system, and he gave up the -human race in despair: “a world of fools and rogues, blind with -superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, -cruel, cursed with illusions--frothing mad.” These phrases occur in an -article, “To Train a Writer”; and you can see what sort of writer it -would train! A writer who renounces solidarity, and seeks refuge in his -own talent, the one place where a man is master, where he can make -beauty, order and dignity. So let us live in the world of art, let us -consecrate ourselves to its service, and waste no love upon “the -irreclaimable mass of brutality that we know as ‘mankind.’” - -This conviction Bierce holds in the fashion of a religious zealot. He -has reached the stage of knowing that the rest of the world doubts his -faith; therefore he asserts it the more vehemently, and flies into a -rage with all who question it. His letters have been published; and in -the first one, addressed to a young girl who aspires to write, he storms -at the viciousness of those who would use the writer’s craft in the -service of human progress. “Such ends are a prostitution of art.” And -later on in the letters this champion of the art-for-art’s-sake theory -reveals the terror that gnaws at his soul. “If poets saw things as they -are they would write no more poetry.” - -Some twenty years ago Jack London sent me the first book of a San -Francisco poet, and in an inscription he described the author: “I have a -friend, the dearest in this world.” The book was “The Testimony of the -Suns,” by George Sterling; and friendship being an unlimited thing, I -also took over a share of it. For twenty years I have been puzzled at -finding in this gracious companion and maker of exquisite verses certain -qualities of bitterness and aching despair. When I read these letters of -Ambrose Bierce I discovered a plausible explanation; for here is the -young poet, submitting his first efforts; and here is the savage -misanthropist using his power as a preacher and an elder, in an effort -to set the poet’s feet in the paths of futility and waste. - -Ambrose Bierce, among his host of antagonisms, had one which amounted to -an insanity--his dislike of Socialists; and he saw both London and -Sterling lending their influence to the hellish cult. Bierce was one of -those subtle opponents who say that they have a certain amount of -sympathy with the Socialist ideal, were it not for the fact that the -partisans of the cause make themselves so objectionable. Yes; they would -truly be willing to see mankind delivered from poverty, crime, -prostitution and war, were it not for creatures of the lunatic fringe, -who wear their hair long and tie their neck-ties into a bow! - -There is something pathological about the ravings of Bierce on this -subject, and we are not surprised to learn that in his early days a -prominent Socialist writer, Laurence Gronlund, took a girl away from -him, and thus excited his animosity. We find him quarreling with one -person after another who persists in dallying with Socialist ideas, and -in the end he quarreled even with Sterling, and wrote him letters of -harsh abuse, which Sterling out of kindness to his memory destroyed. - -The published letters are full of literary criticism; it is always -consistent--and in every case exactly the opposite of what you find in -this book. Ibsen and Shaw are “very small men--pets of the drawing-room -and gods of the hour.” Tolstoi is “not an artist,” and Burns is -“gibberish”; Gorki is “not only a peasant, but an anarchist and an -advocate of assassination.” Bierce was living in Washington, serving the -Hearst newspapers, when Gorki came to America. Bierce had never met him, -and really knew nothing about him, but he swallowed with greedy -eagerness the propaganda emanating from the Russian embassy in -Washington; he writes to Sterling mysterious hints from inside -information: “It isn’t merely the woman matter. You’d understand if you -were on this side of the country.” - -All this has become familiar to us with the passage of the years; it is -the thing known as hundred percent American boobery. The capitalist -system sets up its colossal slander-mills, with a staff of secret -agents, forgers and safe-crackers and confidence men, a devil’s crew. -The people of course have no conception of this machinery for the -manipulating of their minds; and how pitiful to find a haughty -intellectual as credulous as the poorest clodhopper! It is one more -demonstration of the fact that a modern man who does not understand -revolutionary economics is a child wandering in a forest at midnight. - -There were other factors in the making of Bierce’s irascibility. He -describes himself as “an eminent tankard-man,” and he found in San -Francisco plenty of people willing to practice art for art’s sake, not -troubling themselves or him with hopes for the human race. There is a -tale of a riotous crew, resolving to put an end to Christianity by -pulling down a cross which stood upon the highway. They tied themselves -to the cross with ropes and pulled their hardest, only to sink down -exhausted in drunken slumber. I wonder that some Catholic poet does not -take this for a piece of symbolism. Maybe it has been done--I admit -there are gaps in my knowledge of Catholic poetry! - -What had this man to give the world, if anything? The answer is: love of -truth, and loathing of corruption and hypocrisy. He wrote all those -things which Mark Twain knew, but suppressed. He was the only one of -those who fought through the war to tell the truth about it. And -therein lies his power and significance as an artist; he, the -art-for-art’s-saker pure and simple, writes tales which make us hate -mass-murder. - -The formula of these tales is the one with which Maupassant has made us -familiar. Men aspire, and fate knocks them down and tramples their faces -into the mud. When we see in the chances of battle a son shoot his own -father, we may draw the conclusion that all human life is futile, as -Bierce wishes us to; or we may elect to draw a different conclusion, and -join the League to Outlaw War. - -Bierce’s verses were shafts of satire aimed at the social kites and -buzzards of his time. They have a quality of personal ferocity seldom -equalled in the world’s literature. There are two volumes of them, -“Black Beetles in Amber” and “Shapes of Clay.” Readers of “The Brass -Check” may remember a sample there quoted, dealing with Mike de Young, -publisher of the San Francisco “Chronicle,” and concluding: - - A dream of broken necks and swollen tongues-- - A whole world’s gibbets loaded with de Youngs! - -Here, as in so much of Bierce’s work, his ignorance of social forces -rendered him impotent. He writes about individual scoundrels, but he -does not understand what makes them, nor how to remedy them; so his -writing is useless to himself, to his victims, and to us. - -Once upon a time Ambrose Bierce went to sleep at night on a flat stone -in a graveyard. We are not told whether his exploits as “an eminent -tankard-man” had anything to do with this, but we are told that as a -result he became a lifelong sufferer from rheumatism and asthma. So his -old age was bitter, and he found insufficient consolation in producing -literary masterpieces for a hypothetical posterity. He wandered off into -Mexico and disappeared. “To be a gringo in Mexico at the present time is -a cheap form of euthanasia,” he told his friends. So apparently it -proved; and so this book has another vindication, provided by a leading -opponent. - -“Be careful,” says Mrs. Ogi; “the Mexican bandits may not have got him -after all.” - -“He has already had a few whacks at me. George Sterling sent him an -article of mine, published twenty years ago, ‘Our Bourgeois Literature,’ -and he ridiculed my thesis that the qualities of American literature are -explained by American social conditions: ‘The political and economical -situation has about as much to do with it as the direction of our rivers -and the prevailing color of our hair.’ Also he read ‘The Journal of -Arthur Stirling,’ and called my poor poet ‘the most disagreeable -character in fiction.’” - -Says Mrs. Ogi: “He did not even trouble to get the poor poet’s name -right!” - -Her husband answers: “The officers in the British army have a saying: -‘What is fame? To die in battle and have your name misspelled in the -“Gazette”.’” - - - - -CHAPTER CIII - -THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE - - -Having considered a fiction writer whom the great public rejected, let -us now consider one whom it enthusiastically acclaimed. - -Richard Harding Davis was born in Philadelphia in 1864. His father was a -famous editor, and he was raised among cultured people, with every -advantage of prestige and social position. He was handsome, full of -energy, and all his life made hosts of friends. After getting through -college, he took a job with Arthur Brisbane on the New York “Evening -Sun,” where his brother tells us he underwent “considerable privation,” -his salary being only thirty dollars a week at the start, plus his -earnings from short stories. During this same period the present writer -was living in New York upon four and one-half a week, and never sure of -having that; so you see that standards of “considerable privation” vary -considerably. - -Davis’s first stories dealt with a hero named Van Bibber, a scion of the -Fifth Avenue plutocracy, handsome, debonair, wearing his clothes with -irreproachable taste, and devoting his abundant leisure to the reforming -of New York; Haroun-al-Raschid brought down to date, Sir Galahad in a -dress-suit. Happy, care-free, he wanders, with innocent heart and open -purse, making things right wherever he finds them wrong. He has the -entrée behind the scenes of theatres, but not to seduce the chorus -girls--ah, nothing like that, but to rescue a sweet, innocent child and -carry her home to a cold, proud, cruel Fifth Avenue father who has -refused to acknowledge his wild oat. That done, Van Bibber roams again, -and jumps on the neck of a burglar, and kicks his pistol out of his -hand, and then gets sorry for him, and buys him a ticket to Montana, -where his wife and daughter wait for him to come and reform. Then he -wanders to the Bowery, and sees a rowdy insulting a lady; it is not -enough for him to demonstrate the natural superiority of the plutocracy -by putting this one rowdy to flight, he must crown the demonstration by -accepting a challenge from three of “the purest specimens of the tough -of the East Side waterfront,” and routing them in the presence of the -proud aristocratic beauty. The charm of the story lies in the truly -elegant insouciance with which young Van Bibber does all these -things--the manner of a juggler keeping six billiard-balls in the air. - -Here, you see, is the perfect type of the ruling-class glorifier: Homer -and the Arabian Nights, Don Quixote and King Arthur, Dumas, Ouida, -Rudyard Kipling and Mrs. Humphry Ward all rolled into one. No wonder our -grandfathers were captivated, or that the innocent souls who edited -“Harper’s” and “Scribner’s” extended the freedom of their columns to -this inspired creator of plutocratic romance! It is interesting to note -that our “Dick” came from the most English place in the United States, -and looked like an Englishman and, perhaps as a matter of instinct, -dressed and talked like an Englishman. In his early writing days he -lived for a few months at Oxford, and the students of Balliol College -took him in on equal footing, an honor never before accorded to a -non-student American. - -The English ruling class had taken upon itself the task of colonizing -and exploiting the rest of the world, and the American ruling class was -following suit, and Richard Harding Davis became the prophet of both. -Throughout Central America and the West Indies the process is -invariable: American capitalists bribe the governments of these -countries and get enormously valuable concessions, then they send in -engineers and other handsome young heroes clad in khaki and puttees and -with automatics in their belts. These heroes engage the natives of the -country to exploit the natural resources and ship out the wealth of the -country, to be spent upon monkey dinners at Newport and champagne -suppers in Broadway lobster palaces. Sooner or later the natives become -irritated at the sight of their natural resources being exported for -such purposes, so they revolt against the native government which has -sold them to the Yankees. Then the handsome young Yankee heroes draw -their automatics and bring up machine guns, and gloriously defend the -native government which they have bought and paid for. The ending comes -triumphantly with a Yankee gunboat in the harbor, and some marines -charging up the slope of a hill waving Old Glory, while the audience -leaps from its seats and cheers for five minutes. - -“Soldiers of Fortune” was “Dick” Davis’s biggest success. It brought him -reservoirs of money, first as a serial, then as a novel, then as a -drama, and finally as a movie. His other novels were like it, in that -they dealt with members of the ruling class gloriously making or -marrying fortunes. The next was called “The Princess Aline,” and told -about a young, wealthy, handsome and aristocratic artist--so many -elements of good fortune!--who falls in love with the photograph of a -German princess. The model for this exquisite heroine was the future -Empress of Russia; but Davis did not live to write a sequel, showing the -final destiny of his heroine, her mangled body dumped into a well along -with her husband and four exquisite daughters. Recalling these novels at -the present hour, I see the international plutocracy with all its -exquisite wives and daughters, crouched trembling upon the top of a -mountain of gold and jewels, while all around them the handsome young -hired heroes peer out over the sights of machine guns at the massed fury -of the exploited millions of mankind--white, black, yellow, brown, red, -and mixed. - -Davis became a war correspondent and spent his time racing over the -earth from one scene of excitement to another. I have run through the -volume of his letters and jotted down a few date lines in the order they -occur: Cuba, London, Egypt, Gibraltar, Paris, Central America, South -America, Moscow, Budapest, Havana, London, Florence, Greece, Havana, -Cape Town, Pretoria, Aix-les-Bains, Massachusetts, Madrid, London, San -Francisco, Tokio, Manchuria, Havana, the Congo, New York, London, -Santiago, Vera Cruz, Belgium, Plattsburg, Paris, Athens, Rome. If you -know the history of the world for twenty-five years beginning with 1890 -you can connect each of these geographical names with a coronation, a -jubilee, a war, or other ruling-class recreation. - -All through the letters runs the theme of money, the Aladdin’s tale of a -soldier of literary fortune. He gets five thousand dollars for the -serial rights of “Soldiers of Fortune” from “Scribner’s Magazine”; he -gets five hundred dollars for reporting a foot-ball game; he gets three -thousand dollars and expenses for a month’s reporting of the Cuban -struggle with Spain, and when America enters the conflict, he gets ten -cents a word from “Scribner’s Magazine” and four hundred dollars a week -and expenses from the New York “Times.” - -Everywhere he goes he is, of course, a lion, and moves only in the -highest circles. His letters are full of diplomats and generals and -lords and ladies and kings and queens, together with the most famous -actors and literary lights. He is presented at Court--and by this, -needless to say, I mean the Court of their Majesties the King and Queen -of Great Britain and Ireland, and Emperor and Empress of India. And all -through the letters we note dinner-parties and banquets and -champagne-suppers and cocktails--interrupted by a siege with sciatica, -preparing us for the quick curtain, when our ruling-class hero departs -his successful life at the age of fifty-two. - -New York is a place of mean and envious gossip, and one of its -diversions was telling anecdotes illustrating the snobbery and -self-importance of Richard Harding Davis. It appears that in the days of -his extraordinary prosperity he did not always recognize his former -newspaper cronies when he met them on the street. Perhaps he had noted -that so many of these former cronies took the occasion to borrow money -from him. Anyhow, I have one anecdote to contribute to the collection. - -It was early in 1914, a period of great depression in my own life and -fortunes. Davis, of course, never had any depressions; he had just come -back from Cuba, where he had turned “Soldiers of Fortune” into a moving -picture film, and it was now being launched on Broadway with enormous -éclat. I happened to know the manager, and was invited to the opening -performance, where in the lobby I was introduced to the great author and -lion of the occasion. When he heard my name his face lighted up, and he -gave me a warm hand-clasp, exclaiming, “Ah, now! You write books because -you really have something to say, while I write only to make money!” It -was so different from what I expected that I was completely taken aback, -and could only make a deprecating murmur. “It is true,” he said; “I know -it, and so do you.” - -The reader may say that in telling this story I do more credit to Davis -than to myself. But that is not my concern. What I have to do here is to -report the statement of America’s leading soldier of literary fortune -concerning his own work and its reason for being. - - - - -CHAPTER CIV - -THE BOWERY BOY - - -We come now to another one of those unhappy tales of young rebellious -geniuses who cannot or will not fit themselves into the bourgeois world. -This time it is Stephen Crane, who was the fourteenth child of a -Methodist preacher and an evangelist mother, and was born in Newark, -New Jersey; which goes to prove that a genius may spring up anywhere in -the world. - -There is an old saying that a preacher’s son always turns out to be a -rake. I don’t suppose that statistically this statement could be -justified, but psychologically we should expect such cases; for other -children get religion once a week, but the children of clergymen get it -all the time. The tragedy of poor “Stevie” Crane reveals to us the folly -of attaching fundamental moral principles to incredible fairy tales. -When the child grows up and finds that he no longer believes the tales, -he is apt to conclude that the moral principles are equally false and -superfluous. - -Little “Stevie” was a frail and sensitive child. His father died when he -was young, and then his evangelist mother died, and he was left to grope -his way alone. We find him turning up at a military academy with a -reputation as a baseball player, also with six pipes--which was six too -many for a lad who was to die from tuberculosis at the age of -twenty-nine. He picked up a living doing odd newspaper jobs, and then he -went to Syracuse University. Most singular, prank of history, that James -Roscoe Day, D.D., Sc.D., LL.D., D.C.L., L.H.D., Chancellor of the -University of Heaven (see “The Goose-Step”), should have had in charge -the intellectual and moral training of the author of “Maggie: A Girl of -the Street”! - -This boy had pathetic courage, and absolutely original opinions, even -from the beginning. His young verdict was that Tennyson was “swill” and -Oscar Wilde “a mildewed chump.” That, of course, was merely calling -names; but in addition he had the oddest and most charming gift of -humor. Of his mother he said, “You could argue as well with a wave.” - -Having got through with college at the age of twenty, he went to New -York to live in a garret and starve for the sake of his independence. He -chose the Bowery for his school of art; these being the old days of the -wicked street, before the respectable, hard-working Jews took -possession; the days when all New York gloried in its “toughness,” and -when now and again in the filthy old alleys they raked out a human -corpse from a pile of ill-smelling rubbish. Here the boy wrote his first -novel, “Maggie,” dealing with a girl whose drunken parents beat her and -drove her on to the streets. It was an entirely new note in American -literature, because it told the truth about these things quite simply -and as a matter of course, without apology or sentimentality. - -The young author took it to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the -“Century Magazine,” and went back, hungry and shivering with cold, to -get the verdict. The “Century” was one of the four great magazines which -determined the destiny of American authors; its policy was guided by the -fact that it had “half the expectant mothers in America” on its -subscription list. Gilder said that he could not publish “Maggie”; and -after he had made long-winded explanations, Stephen boiled them down to -one sentence, as was his custom. “You mean that the story is too -honest?” And Gilder was honest enough to answer that he did. - -Reading about this garret existence sends shivers over my skin; because -it was only ten years later that I was to live the same life, and have -the same experiences in the same editorial offices. I also took -manuscripts to Gilder and was turned down. The same publisher who -accepted “The Red Badge of Courage,” and made a fortune out of it, -accepted also “The Journal of Arthur Stirling,” and tricked me into -signing a contract out of which I never got a cent. - -All his life Stephen Crane had heard the war stories of old -soldiers--not what you read in the official history books, but the real -things that men had felt and done. He decided upon this theme, and read -up his “local color,” and in ten quivering nights he produced “The Red -Badge of Courage.” At last he had a success; a newspaper syndicate paid -him a hundred dollars for the serial rights! He waited a year or two -longer, and then it came out in book form. It sold fairly well, until -suddenly the English critics went wild over it, and then New York knew -that it had a man of genius. - -The realists had been ruling the literary roost, insisting that you must -portray life by describing its external details. But this boy had a new -idea; the interesting thing to him was the way people felt, and details -merely served to reveal the human spirit. He was not afraid to describe -emotions as having colors. So here was a new kind of fiction, called -“impressionism”; and the realists were laid on the shelf for a while. - -“Stevie” made a small fortune, and no longer drank his drinks in the -saloons of the Bowery, but in the high-priced cafés on Broadway. He -wrote short stories and sketches, and verses without rhyme or rhythm, -which puzzled the critics--I remember that in my student days they were -the joke of the newspaper paragraphers. The gossips got busy with him, -of course, and a legend was built up concerning the extent of his revolt -against social conventions. His biographer, Thomas Beer, defends him -vigorously against these tales. It seems clear that he did not take -drugs; while, as to his drinking, we can only repeat what we said about -the pipes--any drinking at all was too much for a man who was to die of -tuberculosis in a few years. - -As to the women stories, they seem to have been partly blackmail, and -partly the young writer’s imprudent notions of chivalry. He was talking -with a girl of the streets in a saloon, and a policeman arrested the -girl, and Crane came into court to testify in her behalf, and so of -course got himself in for a lot of disagreeable publicity. It would have -been so easy for him to avoid that, by having the ordinary caution of a -man of the world. If only he had been willing to learn from Mark Twain -and William Dean Howells how to dodge the shadow of a scandal! - -The life of this wayward child of genius is one more illustration of -that disagreeable alternative which life so often presents us. You may -have self-restraint, plus more or less hypocrisy, and live long and -successfully; or you may have do-as-you-please, plus absolute honesty, -and undermine your constitution and die at the age of twenty-nine. The -mind of Stephen Crane was like an acid which dissolved the shams and -pretenses of civilization. But he has nothing to put in the place of -these things. In “The Red Badge of Courage” he shows us a hero blind -with fear; and the theme of all his short stories and later novels is -that life is a matter of accident, and the universe a thing without -moral sense or meaning. This belief Crane put also into his conduct; he -knew nothing to do with his life, except that he had a childish wish to -see a real war with his own eyes. First he tried to get to Cuba, and was -shipwrecked; and while he got a good story out of that, “The Open Boat,” -he paid with a part of his very small store of vitality. Then he went to -Greece, but the cooking made him ill. Finally he saw our war in Cuba, -and displayed such indifference to his own fate that the tongues of the -gossips wagged faster than ever. He must be seeking death, because of -some dark scandal hanging over his head! - -He was altogether out of step with the 1890’s; but now a new generation -has come, and all our young intellectuals are cold and objective and -cynical, agreeing that pity is a mistake and life nothing in particular. -They leave to me the unpleasant task of holding uninvited post-mortems -over the ardent unhappy dead. - -Let me put it briefly: that some day there will be yet another -generation, which will realize that no man can get along without a -religion, least of all the creative artist. It will not be the Methodist -religion, but it will be something that gives young geniuses a reason -for taking care of themselves and their gifts. - -There was one religion which Stephen Crane adopted for a period of two -weeks. He was a Socialist for that long--so he explains in a letter; but -he met two other Socialists, who told him his doctrines were wrong, and -then fell to quarreling as to which of the two was right. I say: Oh, -young Stephen Cranes of the future, judge truth by the tests of truth, -and not by our personal frailties and follies! - - - - -CHAPTER CV - -THE CALIFORNIA OCTOPUS - - -The mind of America at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of -the twentieth century was controlled by elderly maiden aunts and hired -men of privilege; and it seemed that behind the scenes of our national -life some evil jinx was operating to keep us in this double thrall. -There arose five independent and original-minded artists, and here is -what happened to them: Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis at the age of -twenty-nine, Frank Norris died of appendicitis at the age of thirty-two, -David Graham Phillips was killed by a lunatic at the age of forty-four, -O. Henry died of alcoholism at the age of forty-eight, and Jack London -killed himself at the age of forty. - -Frank Norris was born in California in 1870, the son of well-to-do -parents. All through his childhood and boyhood he liked to tell stories -and make sketches; he wasn’t sure which he liked to do best. He studied -art in Paris for a couple of years, and published a long narrative poem -at the age of twenty. Then he came home and tried to learn something -about writing at the University of California, but without success. He -took a graduate course at Harvard, and here he wrote “McTeague,” his -first successful novel. - -He had been absorbing Zola, and set out to apply the Zola method to -America. He is going to give you the brutal reality of life, he is going -to write about big animal men with heavy muscles and prominent jaws, and -broad-bosomed women with large quantities of alluring hair. He is going -to give you the great open spaces, and also the sordidness and smells of -cities--as much as America can be got to stand. The theme of “McTeague” -is avarice, and we see a dentist’s office with a big gold tooth for a -sign, and all through the tragic story we run upon the motif of gold in -everything from sunsets to decorations. - -Then came “The Octopus,” and here we are in outdoor California, dealing -with crude people and nature on a large scale. “The Octopus” has two -themes. It is the Epic of the Wheat, and we see the great unfenced -plains upon which wheat is raised wholesale, and the golden flood of -grain on its way to feed the millions in the cities, a torrent of food -so vast and heavy that it symbolically suffocates a man on its way. And -then there is the railroad, the Octopus which has seized the wheat -country and is devouring the settlers. I read this novel before I read -anything of Zola’s, and so I got the shock of a great discovery. I was -one of many youngsters who were set on fire. Here was power, here was a -new grasp of reality; this was the way to write novels! - -Also I was horrified and bewildered: could it be that things like this -happened in America? Could it be that railroads set themselves up as the -ruling power in a community, that they defeated the laws, deprived -people of their homes and drove them into exile or outlawry? You see, I -was the naive and innocent product of American public schools and of Mr. -J. P. Morgan’s university; I really thought that I lived in a democracy, -and under the protection of a Constitution. At that very time I was -raising campaign funds and helping to elect the president of our -university--mine and Mr. Morgan’s--as a “reform” mayor of New York City! - -I tried to find out about this railroad Octopus, and there was no way to -find out. It was a dark secret of American life, crushed completely -underground. There was no literature about it, nothing in the newspapers -or the magazines, no books or pamphlets in the library of the great -university. Now, twenty-three years later, I can tell you of a book in -which you may read the life-story of one of these men of the San -Joaquin, who were driven to outlawry by the Southern Pacific Railroad. -The name of the man is Ed Morrell, and Jack London made him the hero of -a novel, “The Star Rover.” They caught him finally and put him in -prison, and that is the story he tells in his book, “The Twenty-fifth -Man,” one of the most appalling narratives ever penned by a human being. - -Frank Norris, who taught me something new about my country, had set out -deliberately to do that very thing. He explained his ideas in a book, -“The Responsibilities of the Novelist”; and I might, if I wanted to take -the time, play a trick upon you, by quoting sentences from his book, -mixed in with sentences from my book, and you could not tell the -difference. For example, who is it that says: “No art that is not in the -end understood by the People can live or ever did live a single -generation”? Who says: “It is the complaint of the coward, this cry -against the novel with a purpose”? Who says: “The muse is a teacher, not -a trickster”? Who says: “Truth in fiction is just as real and just as -important as truth anywhere else”? It is Frank Norris who says all these -things. - -He goes on to point out that the pulpit reaches us only on Sundays, and -the newspaper is quickly forgotten, but the novel stays with us all the -time. And yet, facing this responsibility, there are novelists who admit -that they write for money, and “you and I and the rest of us do not -consider this disreputable!” Norris goes on to voice his own attitude -toward his work: “I never truckled; I never took off the hat to Fashion -and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth. They liked -it or they didn’t like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the -truth.” - -He qualifies his doctrine by the statement that the novelist must not -let his purpose run away with his story. I have an idea he must have let -publishers and critics persuade him he had done that in “The Octopus”; -for in “The Pit,” the second volume of his proposed trilogy, he is more -tame and conventional. He tries to interest us in a grain broker and his -wife as human beings--and he cannot do that, because parasites are not -and cannot be interesting, except in satire after the fashion of -“Babbitt.” We miss the epic sweep and bigness of “The Octopus,” and we -are not consoled by the fact that “The Pit” had twice the sale. - -The relationship between the novelist’s purpose and his story is very -simple; the two things are one, and of equal importance, and the -novelist must have them both in hand at every moment of his work. The -consequence of losing either is equally fatal. The novelist who loses -his grip upon the story and the characters who are living the story, -begins at once to write a tract or a sermon--I know all about that, -having done it. But equally fatal it is to lose your grip upon your -purpose; for then you are doing meaningless reporting, and becoming a -camera instead of a creative intellect. - -I am prepared to hear it said many times that the author of this book -does not know the difference between a tract or sermon and a work of -art. But those who read the book, not to get material for ridicule, but -to learn the truth about art, will note that I have praised in this book -only the artists who were big enough and strong enough to keep both -their imaginative impulse and their intellectual control; I have failed -to mention a goodly company of artists who fought valiantly for freedom -and justice, but who do not belong among the greatest, for precisely the -reason that their impulse to teach and to preach ran away with their -inspiration. That is why you miss such names as Plato and Sir Thomas -More and Ferdinand Lassalle and Bertha von Suttner and John Ruskin and -Walter Besant and Charles Kingsley and Charles Reade and Robert Buchanan -and John Davidson and Richard Whiteing and Francis Adams and Harriet -Beecher Stowe and Edward Bellamy. - - - - -CHAPTER CVI - -THE OLD-FASHIONED AMERICAN - - -David Graham Phillips affords an interesting illustration of the power -of bourgeois criticism to suppress and abolish those writers who -threaten its ideology. He was by all odds the greatest novelist of the -period in which he wrote, a sturdy and vigorous personality, who looked -at the world about him with his own eyes and really had something to -say. He was worth a dozen of the imitation novelists who were acclaimed -as great during the first ten years of the century. But Phillips was a -“muck-rake man,” a prophet and a satirist; therefore the critics -patronized him, and since his death they have forgotten him. No -biography has been published, and a new generation will have to make the -discovery that he wrote the biggest piece of American fiction of his -time. - -Phillips was eleven years older than myself, but we arrived upon the -literary scene together, and I used to meet him now and then in New -York. I have an idea that I annoyed him; he was generous in praising my -books, but that did not satisfy me--I wanted to make a Socialist out of -him, and he would not have it! He was the genuine old-fashioned -American, the wearer of square-toed shoes and a string tie. I do not -mean that I ever saw him in that costume, but that his view of human -society was derived from that period. He came from the Middle West, and -believed in the simple, small-town democracy he had there known. A man -of common sense, he hated all forms of social pretense and finickyness. -Like a good American, he respected money and the power of money, but he -wanted the people who had this power to behave like sensible human -beings, and he was infuriated because they took to putting on “side,” -getting English butlers and five footmen in livery. - -He blamed this especially on the women. He loathed the modern parasitic -female, to the extent of some twenty volumes, exposing every aspect of -her foolishness and empty-headedness. She it was who dragged men to -ruin, she caused the corruption of government and a general riot of -greed, in order that she might have silk stockings and jewels and -servants. She had spurned the jobs of cooking and sewing and making -home, without ever having taken the trouble to learn to do these -efficiently. Now she couldn’t do even her foolish society job; she -couldn’t run a rich man’s household and be an intelligent companion, she -couldn’t bear healthy children, or raise them to be anything but -shirkers. - -Proper people were shocked by Phillips because he talked so plainly, and -fastidious people considered him coarse. As a matter of fact, he was a -man of tender heart and true refinement, who put on an aspect of rough -common sense as a matter of principle. Cut out all this nonsense, he -seems to say to his readers; you know we all want money, we all like -comfort, we are all selfish creatures; you women especially are making -silly pretenses, you know you have to be kept, and you prefer a man who -is self-willed and masterful, a fighting man. So he recorded “The -Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig,” and irritated many fine ladies. -So in “Old Wives for New” he preaches the common sense idea, that if a -woman is lazy and sluttish and refuses to work at her job as wife, her -husband is justified in getting rid of her and marrying a young and -attractive woman. In “The Hungry Heart” he deals with the eternal -triangle, and shows a husband forgiving an erring wife--which you would -think was good Christian doctrine, but which is contrary to fancy -notions of sexual implacability. In “The Husband’s Story” he portrays a -wife who marries a man because she believes he will succeed; she helps -him to succeed, and they rise high, but finding that the higher they -get, the less interest there is in life. - -Phillips was not content with preaching in his novels; he wrote a book, -a general scolding at “The Age of Gilt.” Here you see the old-fashioned -gentleman from Indiana, an individualist, but a hater of monopoly and -privilege, a modern Isaiah denouncing graft and greed. The “Cosmopolitan -Magazine” lured him into writing a series of articles about the gang -which was selling out our government; “The Treason of the Senate,” the -articles were called, and they made an enormous uproar. Theodore -Roosevelt made a speech denouncing “muck-rake men,” which was very -plainly aimed at Phillips. Afterwards, in his character as Mr. -Facing-Bothways, Roosevelt made an attempt to get information from -Phillips, for use in his fight against the Senate. Let me testify that -only a few weeks before Roosevelt made this “muck-rake” speech, I sat at -his dinner-table in the White House and heard him call the roll of these -very same senators, naming them according to the interests they -served--the senator from the Steel Trust, the senator from the Copper -Trust, and so on. I recall the description of Hale of Maine, the senator -from the Shipping Trust: “the most innately and essentially malevolent -scoundrel that God Almighty ever put on earth!” - -The entire writing life of Phillips was barely ten years, and in that -period he worked incessantly, rewriting and revising with painful -conscientiousness. His stories were successful as serials, and I -remember once teasing him because they were always of the right length -for the purpose; I wished that mine would behave in that convenient way. -The jest apparently troubled him, for he referred to it on several -occasions. He did not tell me that for ten years he had been working in -secret upon a novel of three hundred thousand words! - -He left that when he died, and it waited five years for a magazine to -get up the courage to print extracts from it. We have it now in two -volumes, “Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise.” Its heroine is a girl who -bears the brand of illegitimacy, and runs away from home to escape it; -but they bring her back and marry her off to an elderly farmer, and the -picture of her bridal night is one of the unforgettable scenes of -American fiction. Susan is ignorant of the world, a flower in the mud. -Groping for light, she escapes again, and tries to earn her living in a -box factory, and undergoes all the horrors of tenement life. Starved -out, she takes to the streets in Cincinnati, and we see the graft and -cruelty of city government. She is taken up as the mistress of a -politician and travels with him in Europe. But always she is reaching -toward something better; her spirit remains untarnished, and in the end -she becomes a successful actress. - -This story, of course, shocked the orthodox and respectable. It was a -new kind of romanticism, familiar enough to Europe, but not to us. Could -a woman’s soul remain pure while her body was sullied? The critics -denied it; but, as it happens, several women of that sort have made -their appearance since Phillips wrote--for example, the author of -“Madeleine,” who had equally degrading experiences to tell, and yet kept -her soul, and is working to help the downtrodden part of her sex. - -Nothing offends bourgeois respectables more than the statement that -women are driven to prostitution by economic forces. They like to -believe that the women of the poor are naturally depraved; also, they -don’t want working girls made discontented with their lot, and they -don’t want social reformers poking their noses into box factories and -department-stores. So they call “Susan Lenox” an immoral book, and it is -taboo in libraries and reviews. - -But as a matter of fact, David Graham Phillips shows himself in this -book a thoroughly bourgeois person, safely and wholesomely “American” in -his whole-hearted acceptance of the doctrine that a woman cannot and -ought not try to live without comfort. Susan’s experience in the box -factory is brief; she suffers, both in mind and body, but not so deeply -that she cannot bear to leave the working class, and rise above it, and -win fame and fortune by entertaining the master class, in that kind of -prostitution known as the capitalist theatre. It does not occur to her -to conceive a passionate ideal of sisterhood with all the oppressed -factory workers; to hang on to her job with them, and teach and organize -them, and lead them in a strike for better working conditions and higher -wages. - -That, you see, is another method by which a heroine could develop a -beautiful soul; another path by which she could break into the world of -intellect and power--the way of class-consciousness and solidarity. But -David Graham Phillips did not understand the revolutionary psychology, -and could not have imparted it to his heroine; he was bound by the -limitations of a small-town man from Indiana, a graduate of Princeton -University, a city editor of capitalist newspapers. I read the scant -records of his life, and find a leading critic praising him because he -had “no panaceas”; meaning that the critic liked him because his -thinking was as muddled as the critic’s. - -The old-fashioned American has preached us a tremendous and moving -sermon, putting his whole heart into it; and it would be pleasant to be -able to express for it the same unquestioning reverence as Mr. Robert W. -Chambers, who writes the introduction to the book. But truth requires -me to point out that Phillips avoids having his heroine contract -venereal disease--something which might decidedly have affected the -beauty of her soul. Also, she manages to preserve her beauty, in spite -of the part which getting men drunk plays in the life of a -street-walker. In other words, he idealizes prostitution as a career for -women, in order to give it the advantage over the box factory. - -It is very significant that he fails to take us into this factory and -show us the work; all we get is Susan’s interviews with the boss in his -office. We do not meet the other women, except the one with whom Susan -starves in her tenement room. So we fail to realize that Susan’s -solution of her problem is not the solution for all women. There have to -be boxes, as well as sex gratification, in the capitalist world; and -thousands of women must hold their box-making jobs. They lose their hair -and teeth, sometimes their fingers, and always their beauty; but they -acquire class-consciousness; and here and there a genius among them, by -incredible heroic labors, gets a bit of knowledge and becomes a leader. -So, out of the whole mass-misery results organization, and that labor -movement which is the germ of the new society, taking form, according to -the wondrous process of nature, inside the shell of the old. - -But of all this we get no hint in “Susan Lenox”; a middle-class story, -written by a middle-class man about a middle-class girl who descends for -a short period into the inferno of working-class life, and then -magically rises out of it again. If David Graham Phillips had written -the story of a working-class girl, who stayed with the working class and -learned working-class lessons--why then all critics would have indicted -him for the crime of having a “panacea,” and “Susan Lenox” would have -waited, not five years, but fifty years, for publication in a popular -magazine! - - - - -CHAPTER CVII - -BAGDAD-ON-THE-SUBWAY - - -The short story writer who signed the pen name O. Henry burst like a -meteor upon the magazine world of New York. His first stories appeared -in 1902, when he had only eight years of life before him. In that time -he became the recognized king of the craft; everybody read him, high -and low, those skilled in writing as well as the plain people with whose -fates he dealt. He poured out his stories at the rate of one or two -every week, and if he did not get the highest prices ever heard of, it -was because he cared nothing about money and did not trouble to claim -his own. - -He was a strange, reserved man, deeply loved by his few friends, but -hard to get at, and resentful of the intrusion of lion hunters. He had -the tenderness and sentimentality of the Southern gentleman, -combined with a secretiveness which puzzled the denizens of his -Bagdad-on-the-Subway. Only a few facts about his life were known; that -he had lived on a ranch in Texas, had been a drugstore clerk, had -written for papers in New Orleans, had traveled in Central America, and -was a widower and had a young daughter--that was all his best friends -knew. There was a gap in his life, and no one ventured to question him. -But several years after his death a biography was published, and the -disclosure was made that America’s short story king had served three -years and three months as a federal prisoner in the Ohio penitentiary. -That was where he had begun his career as a story writer; that was where -he had got his intimate knowledge of gentle grafters and chivalrous -highwaymen; that was where he had acquired the pathos and the -heart-break. - -It was characteristic of America that there should have been a great -fuss over this disclosure. There was the daughter, and also a new wife, -and these thought that the dreadful secret so long hidden should have -stayed hidden. Likewise some editors and reviewers thought it. Here was -a man who was assumed to belong to the ages, and here was a story more -moving and more instructive than any volume O. Henry had published; but -they wanted to bury it in his grave--because, forsooth, America is the -land of respectability, and the deepest tragedies of the human soul are -of no consequence compared with the desire of two ladies to escape -humiliation in a matter for which neither was in any way to be blamed. - -It appears that O. Henry was a teller of a bank in Texas, the affairs of -which were very loosely handled. Something over a thousand dollars was -missing; somebody else got it, and O. Henry got the trouble. He was on -his way to stand trial, when he fell into a panic; he could not face the -ordeal, and ran away to Honduras. But then, learning that his wife was -dying of tuberculosis, he could not stand that either, and came home. -His wife died, and he went through his trial in a daze of shame, and -went to prison, to witness that infinity of horrors which America heaps -upon those who have threatened its property interests. - -While in Honduras “Bill” Porter--that was his real name--had made a -strange acquaintance, Al Jennings, a train-bandit much wanted by -Wells-Fargo detectives. The two men came back to America and fate -brought them to the same penitentiary. Jennings has since reformed, and -has given us the story of himself and his literary friend in a book -called “Through the Shadows with O. Henry.” So we are privileged to see -the raw material out of which the stories were made, and to watch the -maker at his work. - -He had become the drug clerk of the prison, and in his spare hours he -wrote incessantly, in order to forget the human anguish about him. He -would take the outlaw stories of Jennings, the stories of all varieties -of offenders in the prison, and transform them to his own uses. Outside -was his little daughter, carefully kept in ignorance as to her father’s -whereabouts; he must have money to send her a Christmas present, and so -he ground out manuscripts and mailed them to magazines. - -And so once more, as in the case of Mark Twain, we see the spirit of -bourgeois America, embodied in the personality of a woman, engaged in -remodeling the soul of a genius. Here was a mass of material, -palpitating with life, and ready to be shaped into one of the great -tragic records of the ages. And here was a loving and tender-hearted, -humorous and blundering Southern gentleman, with no grasp of social -forces and no understanding of what had happened to him, engaged in -sentimentalizing and feminizing that mass of material. - -Take one example, the story of “Jimmy Valentine,” the most popular -character O. Henry created. This story was made into a play, which had -enormous success both in America and England; it was stolen and -dramatized several times in France and Spain; it was the source of a new -stage variety, what is known as the “crook play.” The story tells about -a little child who is locked by accident in a bank vault, and will be -suffocated in a few hours. A famous safe-cracker learns of her plight -and opens the safe, and thereby reveals himself to a detective who has -been hunting him. But the detective, being a magazine detective, is -kind-hearted and easily moved to tears; he foregoes the glory and reward -of capturing a famous crook, and the crook retires to be good and happy -ever afterwards in the company of the little child. Such is the -underworld according to American magazine mythology. - -And now, what was the true story of “Jimmy Valentine”? There was a great -scandal in the state of Ohio; some high-class crooks, of the kind who -never go to the penitentiary, had stolen millions of dollars, and locked -all the papers in a vault and escaped. These papers must be had, and it -was not possible to blow open the vault with dynamite, for fear of -destroying them. So the governor applied to the penitentiary for a -competent safe-cracking artist. A man came forward. He had been a -gutter-rat, starving in childhood, like Al Jennings, who tells his -story. At the age of eleven, a “ravenous little rag-picker,” he had -broken into a box-car and stolen ten cents worth of crackers, and had -been sent to a “reformatory,” and turned out a master-crook, at -eighteen. A year later they had sent him to the penitentiary for -life--an “habitual criminal.” Now he was dying of tuberculosis, and his -old mother was dying of grief, because she had not been permitted to see -her son, or even to hear from him for sixteen years. - -This man had a method of opening safes, which consisted of filing his -finger-nails off, so that with the quivering raw flesh he could feel the -dropping of the “tumblers,” as he turned the dial of the lock. He was -promised his liberty if he would open the vault for the great state of -Ohio. He did it in ten seconds; and then the promise was broken, and he -went back to die in prison. When his coffin was carted out, there was -his old heart-broken mother in the slush and snow, toddling along with -streaming eyes and stretched-out hands behind the cart. - -That was a real story, you see; and O. Henry was in the prison when it -happened, he felt the thrill of horror and fury that ran through the -place when the pardon was denied. But, you see, if he had written that -story, he would not have had any Christmas gifts to send to his little -daughter, nor would he have been invited to Bagdad-on-the-Subway to be -crowned the short story king. So unwilling was he to face reality that -he did not even use the detail about Jimmy Valentine’s filing off his -finger-nails. No, the crook in his story has to open the safe with a -special fancy set of tools! - -You see, O. Henry simply could not face the pain of life; he did not -know what to do about it, and so he dodged it--just like the magazine -writers and the magazine public of his period. He could not even face -his own disgrace; his heart was dead in that prison, even the thought of -freedom was a terror, because of the awful secret he would carry. -Jennings quotes him: “The prison label is worse than the brand of Cain. -If the world once sees it, you are doomed. It shall not see it on me. I -will not become an outcast.” - -Understand, he knew himself to be innocent; and yet he took the position -of an ex-convict, crouching and trembling. There were other men who went -to prison, for example, ‘Gene Debs, who also knew himself to be -innocent; he came out a warrior and a saint. But O. Henry accepted the -social system as permanent, identical with destiny. - -He was often compared to Maupassant, and that hurt his feelings, for he -said that he had never written a filthy line in his life, and he did not -wish to be compared to a filthy writer. You see here the limitations of -his understanding; morality means sex, and he is revolted by Gallic -brutality, and practices sentimental Southern reticence. But in a more -fundamental way his point of view is identical with that of Maupassant; -for to both writers class greed has taken the place of God in control of -the universe. The French writer jeers and hates, while the American -smiles and weeps; but each finds the point of his story in the -incongruities and absurdities which this artificial economic fate -inflicts upon its helpless and uncomprehending victims. - -Strike through the pathos and the tragedy of O. Henry at any point, and -what do you find? Everywhere and inevitably one thing, the Big Business -system of America. Here is a waitress in a restaurant with white -porcelain walls and glass-topped tables and a ceaseless clatter of -crockery. Yes, it is pathetic for a girl to carry loads of crockery all -day, and try to keep virtuous on a starvation wage. Then close the O. -Henry book, and consult Moody’s Manual of Corporations, and you discover -that the great chain of restaurants has been bought by Standard Oil; -America’s “great clamorer for dividends” has doubled the prices of the -food without improving its quality, and has failed to raise wages to -keep pace with the cost of living. - -Or take James Turner, who presses hats all day and has to stand on his -feet, which makes them sore; he finds his escape in reading Clark -Russell’s sea-tales, and having got a copy, he is happy even in jail. -Consult a study of the sweated trades, and you note that hat pressing is -a secondary and parasitic industry, incapable of being organized; -therefore the poor devil has no one to protect his sore feet. A part of -his equipment is a jeering scorn for those who are striving to enlighten -him. “Say,” he asks, “do I look like I’d climbed down one of them -missing fire-escapes at Helicon Hall?” That is his way of saying that he -has no vision of a better world; it is O. Henry’s idea of being a -sociologist. (If you have any curiosity concerning Helicon Hall and its -fire-escapes, the story is in “The Brass Check.”) - -The obscure and exploited masses of New York, the waitresses and -hat-pressers and soda-jerkers and bums and taxi drivers and policemen, -O. Henry’s Four Million, adopted him as their favorite writer, because -he knew their lives, he loved them, and they felt that love under the -cover of his laughter. And in truth it is a pleasant thing when you are -in trouble to find a heart which feels with you; but it is an even more -important thing to find a head which understands the causes of your -trouble and can help you to escape it. The Four Million will have to -look elsewhere than to O. Henry for that head. - -There was an essential fact about him which his official biographer -fails to mention; he was a true Southern gentleman in another -respect--that he drank too much. Al Jennings records that he was half -drunk when Jennings encountered him, sitting in front of the American -consulate in the little town of Trujillo, Honduras. They proceeded to -get all the way drunk, and to celebrate the Fourth of July by shooting -up the place. And there is much other drinking scattered through the -story. In the prison O. Henry was in charge of certain supplies, and he -found that contractors were robbing the prison, and he wanted to expose -them; but Jennings showed him that if he did so, he would get himself -thrown into the hole, and beaten to death by the prison powers who were -sharing in the graft. So our poor Southern gentleman kept silence, and -received large presents of wine and liquor. When he came to New York, -this habit had him in its grip, and never let him go. - -So here is a point about the O. Henry stories; they are alcoholic -stories, and take the alcoholic attitude toward life. The friends of O. -Henry, who spent their time trying to save him, will understand what all -of us know who have had to do with Southern gentlemen of the old school: -that a victim of alcohol can weep with pity and can mingle laughter with -his tears; he can be charming and beautiful, gentle and kind; but one -thing he can rarely have, and that is a firm grasp of the realities -about him; another thing he can never by any possibility have, and that -is an attitude of persistent and unflinching resolve. Yet these are -exactly the qualities which the Four Million will have to develop before -they can escape from their slavery in Bagdad-of-the-Traction-Trust. - - - - -CHAPTER CVIII - -SUPERMANHOOD - - -We come now to the first of the writers of our time who was born of the -working class, and carried his working-class consciousness into his -literary career. He was the true king of our story tellers, the -brightest star that flashed upon our skies. He brought us the greatest -endowment both of genius and of brain, and the story of what America did -to him is a painful one. - -Jack London was born in San Francisco, in 1876, which made him two years -my senior. We took to exchanging our first books, and a controversy -started between us, which lasted the rest of his life; the last letter I -received from him was an invitation to come up to the ranch and continue -it. “You and I ought to have some ‘straight from the shoulder’ talk with -each other. It is coming to you, it may be coming to me. It may -illuminate one or the other or both of us.” I answered that I was -finishing a job of writing; but that as soon as the job was done I would -come and “stand the gaff.” And then I read that he was dead! - -It was the old question, several times stated in this book, of -self-discipline versus self-indulgence; or, as Jack would have put it, -asceticism versus self-expression. Which way will a man get the most out -of life? Believing in his own nature and giving it rein, living -intensely and fast; or distrusting his nature, all nature, stooping to -mean cautions and fears, imposing a rule upon his impulses--and so -cutting himself off from his joyful fellows, and exposing himself to -painful sneers? - -I see Jack vividly, as he was at our first meeting, when he came to New -York in 1904 or 1905. At that time he was in the full glory of his -newly-won fame, and we young Socialists had got up a big meeting for him -at Grand Central Palace. Our hero came on a belated train from Florida, -arriving when our hearts were sick with despair; he came, radiant and -thrilling, in spite of an attack of tonsilitis, and strode upon the -platform amid the waving of red handkerchiefs, and in a voice of calm -defiance read to the city of New York his essay, “Revolution.” - -New York did not like it, needless to say. But I liked it so well that I -was prepared to give my hero the admiration of a slave. But we spent the -next day together, chatting of the things we were both absorbed in; and -all that day the hero smoked cigarettes and drank--I don’t remember what -it was, for all these red and brown and green and golden concoctions are -equally painful to me, and the sight of them deprives me of the control -of my facial muscles. Jack, of course, soon noted this; he was the -red-blood, and I was the mollycoddle, and he must have his fun with me, -in the mood of the oyster pirate and roustabout. Tales of incredible -debauches; tales of opium and hashish, and I know not what other strange -ingredients; tales of whisky bouts lasting for weeks! I remember a -picture of two sailor boys at sea in a small boat, unable to escape from -each other, conceiving a furious hatred of each other, and when they got -ashore, retiring behind the sand-dunes to fight. They fought until they -could hardly walk--and then they repaired to town to heal their bruises -with alcohol. - -The next time we met was six or eight years later; and this time the -controversy was more serious. For now Jack had read “Love’s Pilgrimage,” -and was exasperated by what seemed to him a still less excusable form of -asceticism, that of sex. Here was a so-called hero, a prig of a poet, -driving a young wife to unhappiness by notions born in the dark corners -of Christian monkeries. I am not sure just how I defended poor Thyrsis; -I am not sure how clearly I myself saw at that time the peculiar working -of sex-idealism which had manifested itself in that novel; the impulse a -man has to be ashamed of advantages given to him by nature and society, -and so to put himself chivalrously under the feet of a woman--raising -her, an image of perfection, upon a pedestal of his own self-reproach. -Sometimes she refuses to stay upon this pedestal; and so results a -comical plight for a too-imaginative ascetic! - -The argument between Jack and myself was handicapped on that occasion by -the fact that his voice was almost entirely gone because of a sore -throat. He was trying the alcohol treatment; my last picture of him in -the flesh was very much of the flesh, alas!--with a flask of gin before -him, and the stumps of many cigarettes in his dinner-plate, and his eyes -red and unwholesome-looking. He has told the story of his travels in the -Kingdom of Alcoholia himself, told it bravely and completely, so I am -not obliged to use any reserve in speaking of this aspect of his life. I -went away, more than ever confirmed as a mollycoddle! - -But Jack London was a man with a magnificent mind, and a giant’s will. -He fought tremendous battles in his own soul--battles in despite of his -own false philosophy, battles which he was fighting even while he was -quarreling at other men’s self-restraint. He went on a trip around the -Horn, which lasted several months, and drank nothing all that time; -also, he wrote that shining book, “John Barleycorn,” one of the most -useful and most entertaining ever penned by a man. - -It was our habit to send each other our new books, and to exchange -comments on them. When I read “John Barleycorn” I wrote that the book -had made me realize a new aspect of the drink problem, a wrong it did -to men who never touched it--in depriving them of companionship, making -them exiles among their fellows. So much of men’s intercourse depends -upon and is colored by drinking! I, for example, had always felt that my -friendship with Jack London had been limited by that disharmony. - -He wrote in reply that I was mistaken; it was especially with my -attitude towards sex that he disagreed. We exchanged some letters about -the matter, and mentally prepared ourselves for that duel which will -never be fought. In concluding the subject of alcohol, let me point out -that Jack himself settled the controversy by voting for “California Dry” -at the election held a few days before his death. His explanation was -that while he enjoyed drinking, he was willing to forego that enjoyment -for the sake of the younger generation; and it would indeed be a -graceless ascetic who asked more than that! - -So far as concerns the matter of sex, the test of a man’s philosophy is -that at the age of forty he has kept his belief in womankind, in the joy -and satisfaction that true love may give. Where the philosophy of -“self-expression” had led Jack London was known to many who heard him -tell of a book he planned to write, giving the whole story of his -experiences with women. He meant to write it with the same ruthless -honesty he had used in “John Barleycorn”; revealing his tragic -disillusionment, and his contempt for woman as a parasite, a creature of -vanity and self-indulgence. - -Jack’s conquests among the sex had been many, and too easy, it would -seem; like most fighters, he despised an unworthy antagonist. The women -who threw themselves at his head came from all classes of society, drawn -to him as moths to a flame; but it is evident that his philosophy was to -blame for the fact that there were so few among them he could respect. -There were surely many able to hold the interest of a great man, who did -not share his philosophy, and therefore remained unnoticed by him. - -It is not generally the custom to write of these things in plain words; -but in the case of Jack London it would be futile to do otherwise, -because he spoke of them freely, and would have written of them in the -same way. His whole attitude was a challenge to truth-telling, a call -for frankness, even to the point of brutality. The book he planned was -to be published under some such name as “Jack Liverpool”--which you must -admit would hardly have been a very adequate disguise. I have heard one -of his best friends say that he is glad Jack never lived to write it. - -For my part, believing as I do that the salvation of the race depends -upon unmasking the falsehoods of our class-morality--the institution -which I call “marriage plus prostitution”--I cannot but sigh for this -lost story. What an awakening it would have brought to the mothers of -our so-called “better classes,” if Jack London had ever given to the -world the true story of his experiences with their daughters! As a -school boy in Oakland, for example, with the young girls of the -comfortable classes in that city! He and his companions, sons of -workingmen and poor people, looking up to the great world above them -inquiringly, made the strange discovery that these shining, -golden-haired pets of luxury, guarded at home and in their relations -with their social equals by the thousand sleepless eyes of scandal, -found it safe and pleasant to repair to secret rendezvous among the -willow thickets of Lake Merritt, and there play the nymph to handsome -and sturdy fauns of a class below the level ever reached by the thousand -sleepless eyes! - -When you listened to a narrative such as that, you realized the grim -meaning that Jack London put into his essay, “What Life Means to Me,” -telling of the embitterment that came to him when he, the oyster pirate -and roustabout, broke into the “parlor floor of society”: - - Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, - they were merely the unburied dead.... The women were gowned - beautifully, I admit; but to my naive surprise I discovered that - they were of the same clay as all the rest of the women I had known - down below in the cellar.... It is true these beautifully gowned, - beautiful women prattled sweet little ideals and dear little - moralities; but, in spite of their prattle, the dominant key of the - life they lived was materialistic. And they were so sentimentally - selfish! They assisted in all kinds of sweet little charities and - informed one of the fact, while all the time the food they ate and - the beautiful clothes they wore were bought out of dividends - stained with the blood of child labor, and sweated labor, and - prostitution itself. - -Jack London had a dream of another kind of love; the dream of a strong, -free, proud woman, the mate for a strong, free, proud man. This dream -came into his writings at the start; into “A Daughter of the Snows,” his -third novel--the very name of it, you perceive. This story, published in -the second year of the present century, was crude and boyish, but it had -the promise of his dawning greatness, and was the occasion of my first -letter to him, and the beginning of our friendship. Afterwards he told -this same dream of the perfect mating, over and over again; he continued -to tell it long after he had ceased to believe in it. - -This necessity of writing about sex in a way that was utterly insincere -must have been the main cause of that contempt for his own fiction which -London was so swift and vehement to proclaim. The expression of this -contempt was the most startling thing about him, to any one who admired -his work. “I loathe the stuff when I have done it. I do it because I -want money and it’s an easy way to get it. But if I could have my choice -about it I never would put pen to paper--except to write a Socialist -essay, to tell the bourgeois world how much I despise it.” I remember -trying to persuade him that he must have enjoyed writing the best of his -stories--“The Sea Wolf” and “The Call of the Wild”; but he would not -have it so. He was a man of action; he liked to sail a boat, to run a -ranch, to fight for Socialism. - -His real attitude towards woman was expressed in “Martin Eden,” his most -autobiographical novel, whose hero gives his final conclusion about life -by dropping himself out of the porthole of an ocean steamer at night. -This hero is a working boy, who makes a desperate struggle to rise from -poverty; but the girl of the world of culture, whom he idealizes and -worships, proves a coward and fails him in his need. That is one wrong -an uncomprehending woman can do to a man; and yet another is to -comprehend his weaker part too well. I have heard friends of London’s -boyhood tell how he came back from the Klondike with the flush of his -youthful dream upon him--the dream of the primitive female, the “mate” -of the strong and proud and free man; and how a shrewd young woman saw -her chance and proceeded to play the primitive female in drawing-rooms, -leaping over tables and chairs, and otherwise exhibiting abounding -energy. But when this game had accomplished its purpose she did no more -leaping, but “settled down,” as the phrase is; and so came a divorce. - -This “Martin Eden” is assuredly one of Jack London’s greatest works; he -put his real soul into it, and the fact that it was so little known and -read, must have been of evil significance to him. It taught him that if -an American writer wants to earn a living with his pen--especially an -extravagant living--it is necessary that he should avoid dealing in any -true and vital way with the theme of sex. Either he must write over and -over again the dream of primitive and perfect mating, a phenomenon -unreal and unconvincing to people who are not primitive, but who have -intellects as well as bodies to mate; or else, if he deals with modern -life, he must give us details of the splendid and devastating passions -of the prosperous--the kind of perfumed poison now all the rage. One saw -the beginning of that in “The Little Lady of the Big House,” and I count -this book the most sinister sign in the life of Jack London. A man can -hardly have a thirty-six thousand dollar a year contract with the Hearst -magazines and still keep his soul alive! - -I would say to myself, mournfully, that America had “got” Jack London, -just as it “got” Mark Twain! But then something would happen to show me -that I had given up hope too soon. Jack had a mind which worked -unceasingly, and impelled him irresistibly; he had a love of truth that -was a passion, a hatred of injustice that burned volcanic fires. He was -a deeply sad man, a bitterly, cruelly suffering man, and no one could -tell what new vision he would forge in the heat of his genius. If I -write of him here severely it is because I believe in the rigid truth, -which he himself preached; but I would not leave anyone with the idea -that I do not appreciate his greatness, both as a writer and a man. - -There were many among his friends and mine who gave him up. He went to -Hawaii, and the “smart set” there made a lion of him, and he -condescended to refer appreciatively to their “sweet little charities” -on behalf of the races they were exploiting. He went to Mexico, and fell -under the spell of the efficiency of oil engineers, and wrote for -“Collier’s Weekly” a series of articles which caused radicals to break -out in rage. Jack was a boy to the end, and must make new discoveries -and have new enthusiasms. If a naval officer took him over a -battleship, he would perceive that it was a marvelous and thrilling -machine; but then in the quiet hours of the night he would see the -pitiful white faces of the stokers, to whom as a guest of an officer he -had not been introduced! - -Yes, for he had been in the place of these stokers, and their feelings -had been stamped upon his soul. He might set up to be a country -gentleman, and fall into a fury with his “hands” for their stupidity and -incompetence; but if you said to him, “How about the class war?” -instantly he would be there with his mind. “Yes, of course, I know how -they feel; if I were in their place I would never do a stroke of work I -did not have to.” It is a stressful thing to have an imagination, and to -see many sides of life at once! - -Jack had a divine pity, he had wept over the East End of London as Jesus -wept over Jerusalem. For years afterwards the memories of this stunted -and debased population haunted him beyond all peace; the pictures he -wrote of them in “The People of the Abyss” will be read by posterity -with horror and incredulity, and recognized as among the most powerful -products of his pen. Those, with his vivid and intensely felt Socialist -essays, constitute him one of the great revolutionary figures of our -history. I know that he kept a spark of that sacred fire burning to the -very end, for a little over a year before his death I tried him with the -bulky manuscript of “The Cry for Justice.” The preface he wrote for it -is one of the finest things he ever did, and some of it will be carved -upon his monument: - - It is so simple a remedy, merely service. Not one ignoble thought - or act is demanded of any one of all men and women in the world to - make fair the world. The call is for nobility of thinking, nobility - of doing. The call is for service, and such is the wholesomeness of - it, he who serves all best serves himself. - -That is what life had taught him at the end. But it was not easy for him -to learn such a lesson, for he had an imperious nature, fierce in its -demands, and never entirely to be tamed. The struggle between -individualism and Socialism was going on in his whole being all the -time. In the copy of “Martin Eden” which he sent me he wrote: “One of my -motifs in this book was an attack on individualism (in the person of the -hero). I must have bungled for so far not a single reviewer has -discovered it.” After reading the book I replied that it was easy to -understand the befuddlement of the critics; for he had shown such -sympathy with his hard-driving individualist hero that it would hardly -occur to anyone to take the character as a warning and a reproach. - -You feel that same thing in all his books--in “The Sea Wolf,” and -especially in “The Mutiny of the Elsinore”; the Nietzschean -world-conqueror has conquered London’s imagination, in spite of his -reason and his conscience. If I have written here with cruel frankness -about the personal tragedies of his life, it is because I would not have -posterity continue in the misunderstanding of which he complained in the -case of “Martin Eden.” No, do not make that mistake about his life and -its meaning; most certainly it is not a glorification of the red-blooded -superman, trampling all things under his feet, gratifying his imperious -desires. Rather is it a demonstration of the fact that the -world-conquering superman, trampling all things under his feet and -gratifying all his desires, commits suicide by swallowing laudanum at -the age of forty, because pleasure and wealth and fame have turned to -ashes on his lips. Jack’s friends say that the cause was a desire for -two women at the same time; but I don’t believe that a mature, -intellectual man will kill himself for such a reason, unless his moral -forces have been sapped by years of self-indulgence. - -It was the “Martin Eden” ending, which had haunted Jack London all his -life, and which in the end he made a reality. What a shame, and what a -tragedy to our literature, that capitalist America, the philosophy of -individualist greed and selfishness, should have stolen away the soul of -this man, with all his supreme and priceless gifts! He had seen so -clearly our vision of fellowship and social justice--how clearly, let -him tell you in his own words, the last words he wrote upon ethical -matters: - - He, who by understanding becomes converted to the gospel of - service, will serve truth to confute liars and make them - truth-tellers; will serve kindness so that brutality will perish; - will serve beauty to the erasement of all that is not beautiful. - And he who is strong will serve the weak that they may become - strong. He will devote his strength not to the debasement and - defilement of his weaker fellows, but to the making of opportunity - for them to make themselves into men rather than into slaves and - beasts. - -These words are from “The Cry for Justice,” “this humanist Holy Book,” -as London called it. Such words, and actions based upon them, make -precious his memory, and will preserve it as long as anything in -American literature is preserved. Perhaps the best thing I can add to -this chapter is a statement of what I personally owed to him--the utmost -one writer can owe to another. When he was at the height of his fame, -and I was unknown, I sent him proofs of “The Jungle,” explaining that I -had been unable to find a publisher, and wished to raise money to -publish the book myself. There are many jealousies in the literary -world; some who win its laurels by bitter struggle are not eager to -raise up rivals. But Jack was not one of these; he wrote a letter about -the book, hailing it as “The ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of Wage Slavery,” and -rallying the Socialist movement as by a bugle-call to its support. If -that book went all over the world, it was Jack London’s push that -started it; and I am only one of a score of authors who might tell the -same story of generous and eager support. - - - - -CHAPTER CIX - -THE STEALTHY NEMESIS - - -While I am writing this book death swings his scythe, and two more -artists enter the ghostly marathon of Fame. - -The first of them is Joseph Conrad. Away back in my early days someone -sent me from England a copy of his first novel, “Almayer’s Folly,” and -after that I kept watch, and managed somehow to get hold of “Heart of -Darkness” and “Lord Jim” and “Youth.” I used to rave about these books -to everyone I knew; but when at last Conrad became famous I had a secret -resentment--he had been mine for so long that I did not like to give him -up to those who did not understand him! In his later writings he -deteriorated, as many old men do, and I saw the critics giving to these -inferior books the praise which belonged to the earlier ones. - -Conrad’s death has been the occasion for much discussion of the -“romanticism” of his novels. The fact is that he was as realistic as he -knew how to be. The reason he seems “romantic” is because the scenes and -characters of his stories are remote and strange to us. But they were -not at all strange to Conrad; he had sailed these Eastern seas and met -these people, and their tragic fates were as commonplace to him as -street-car traffic to us. - -One other thing the obituary reviews agree upon--that he was the perfect -type of the “pure” artist, who gave us immortal fiction without trace of -purpose. And that I call a joke for the ages: Joseph Conrad being as -grim and determined a propagandist as ever used fiction for a medium. -Most of the time he carries on this propaganda with the Olympian calm of -one who is sure of his thesis and fears no dispute. But now and then he -stumbles upon some personality or point of view which seems to threaten -his doctrine; and then suddenly the front of Jove becomes wrinkled, and -the eyes of Jove shoot flames, and we discover the great Olympian in a -venomous fury. - -The strangest fact about this master of English prose is that he was -born in Poland, and began life as a sailor, shipping on French craft in -the Mediterranean. He was born in 1857 and came to England at the age of -twenty-one; he rose in the British merchant service to become a captain, -and was nearly forty before his first novel was published. - -This man paces the quarter-deck through the long night watches in lonely -silent seas. He reflects upon life, and comes to a conclusion about it. -But it is not the conclusion officially recommended by his native -countrymen; this merchant captain does not pray to the Virgin Mary for -the safety of his ship and the souls of those on board; neither does he -accept the official formula of his adopted country, in whose churches -the congregations implore: - - Eternal Father, strong to save, - Whose arm hath bound the restless wave, - Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep - Its own appointed limits keep: - O hear us when we cry to Thee - For those in peril on the sea. - -No, in the fiction of Joseph Conrad the gods, both male and female, have -shriveled up and crumbled and blown away as dust, and over the universe -there broods a dark inscrutable fate. Conrad himself puts it into words: -“a stealthy Nemesis lies in wait.” You see, he uses the classic symbol, -and unites in one blending the terror of four different races--Greek, -Polish, English and Malay. This “stealthy Nemesis” is the enemy of men, -and they fight against it, and almost invariably it overcomes them and -destroys them, the good and generous and capable as well as the cowardly -and weak. - -Such is the fact of man’s life; and the question then becomes: what -shall man do? The first thing, obviously, is for him to understand; and -so the great master toils incessantly and with religious ardor to embody -his philosophic theory in human types and experiences. Do not let anyone -lead you astray on this point: these dignified and noble art-works are -“thesis novels,” composed for a didactic purpose, in exactly the same -way as the Sunday school tales about little Bobbie who fell into the -creek because he disobeyed his mother and went fishing on the Lord’s -day. Great moral lessons do not get embodied in art-works by accident, -any more than the wheels of a watch get put together by accident; so, -while you absorb the elaborately contrived pessimism of Joseph Conrad, -you must know that you are attending an Agnostic Sunday school. - -Men have not merely to understand, but to act; therefore the pupils of -this school are taught a moral code. They must stand together against -the stealthy Nemesis which seeks to destroy them; and their rules of -behavior must be so deeply graven in their souls that the reaction will -be instinctive--for you never know at what moment the stealthy Nemesis -will strike at you, in the form of fire at sea, or storm, or collision, -or submerged reefs, or savages, or the slow, insidious action of -physical or moral disease. - -What is this code? The answer is, the code of the British merchant -service. Its primary purpose is the protection of the ship, a valuable -piece of property. So, in place of an imaginary God in a speculative -heaven, we have a vaguely suggested Owner on the shore. This Owner is -the force which creates the shipping industry and keeps it going; He is -the goal of loyalty for officers and crew. Agnosticism upon closer study -turns out to be Capitalism. - -The ship has for ages been the source of a natural and spontaneous -autocracy, begotten of the constant threat of danger; hence it comes -that the naval officer is the most complete and instinctive snob in the -world, and the merchant officer the perfect task-master. And when the -self-made, risen-from-the-ranks merchant officer comes on shore, and has -to deal with shore questions, we are not surprised to find him a hearty -and boisterous Tory. In “Chance” we meet--but assuredly not by -chance!--a feminist woman, and learn what Conrad thinks of this species; -he impresses us as a fuming old British clubman, who would like to get -the heads of all thinking women upon one neck--and then wring the neck! - -In the same way, in “Under Western Eyes” we get Conrad’s view of -politics; in a book written in the days of the Tsardom, we learn that a -Siberian refugee who devotes his life to the overthrow of this hideous -tyranny is an odious and unspeakable creature, and that a woman of means -who helps him is a gawk and a bundle of scandals. It is a picture of -social revolutionists of a sort you may pick up at any tea-table where -the wives of legation attachés shrug their delicate white shoulders and -prattle snobbish wit. Published in 1911, this book is a prophecy of the -White Terror, that combination of holy knavery and romantic reaction -which has made Poland the curse of Europe. - -But the proper place to study Conrad is at sea. And we find that, just -as Meredith takes the British caste system to be God, just as O. Henry -takes the Standard Oil Company to be God, so Conrad takes the capitalist -ownership and control of marine transportation. Analyzing the stories in -the light of economic science, we find the stealthy Nemesis revealed as -organized greed exploiting unorganized ignorance. - -Take that most fascinating of sea tales, one of the great imaginative -feats of literature: take “Youth.” A young man puts out to sea in an old -tub of a vessel, and the old tub goes to pieces beneath his feet. One -after another comes a procession of calamities; but he is young, and -what does he care for troubles and dangers? The ship goes down in the -end, but it is all a glory and a thrill to Youth, which laughs at the -stealthy Nemesis and lives to tackle it again. - -When we are young we read this, and our hearts are lifted up, and we -know ourselves to be gods. But with maturing years and understanding, we -come back to it, and what do we find? The cruel power which we took to -be Nature, the perils of the deep, turns out to be nothing more romantic -than the practice of marine insurance! If you own a ship and it becomes -old and unseaworthy, you would in the ordinary course of events not -trust a valuable cargo and a score of human lives to that ship. But -finding that you can insure both ship and cargo, and get more money by -sinking her than by selling her for junk, you continue to send her out -until she falls to pieces; and Youth, deliberately kept in ignorance by -capitalist control of schools and colleges, thinks it glory and wonder -to sail out and fight a losing battle with “Nature.” - -There is a story concerning Joseph Conrad, that when he became master of -a ship, he conceived a desire to bring her home through the Torres -Straits, which are especially dangerous waters. He had the fantastic -idea that he wanted to sail in them, because he had read stories about -them. The owners permitted him to have his way, and the critics and -reviewers are thrilled by this sign of “romance” in ship owners. Critics -and reviewers, you see, are sweet and innocent souls; only an -evil-minded “muck-rake man” would make inquiries as to the age of that -ship and the amount of insurance she carried through the Torres Straits! - -The capitalist shipping industry is full of facts of this sort. Take, -for example, the “Plimsoll line.” There was an English workingman who -became a rich manufacturer, and did not forget his class, but devoted -his life to trying to save the seamen and officers who were sent out in -these “coffin ships.” He was elected to Parliament, and brought in a -bill providing that ships should not be loaded beyond a certain -line--the “Plimsoll line,” it was called. When his fellow-members voted -it down, he shook his fist at them and called them “villains.” Of course -they were shocked, and wanted to expel him, but they didn’t quite dare; -they gave him ten days to think it over, and then he apologized, and -they passed his bill--a most admirable form of compromise for a -reformer! - -For a generation after this, as cold statistics showed, some thousands -of British seamen and officers escaped all the cruelties of Nature, the -stealthy Nemesis of Joseph Conrad. For years this “Plimsoll line” served -these thousands of seamen and officers in place of the Holy Trinity, -the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the Gentle Jesus meek and mild, the -Virgin Mary, Mother of God, and likewise all the Saints in the calendar, -the glorious company of the Apostles, the goodly fellowship of the -Prophets, the noble Army of Martyrs, the heavenly choir of Angels and -Archangels, the Cherubim and Seraphim, and the Holy Church throughout -all the world. But this divine supervision cost British shipping owners -a certain number of millions of pounds of profit every year, and so they -paid the campaign funds of their Tory and Liberal parties and got their -henchman, David Lloyd-George, in authority and repealed that law; so now -those thousands of seamen and officers are once more falling victims to -the stealthy Nemesis! - -And Joseph Conrad--what has he to say about this? As a man of the sea, -he knows the facts; and in “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” that most -cruel-souled book, he takes occasion to pour his jeering scorn upon -those who try to save the lives of seamen. You have to read the actual -text to get the full effect of his venom. A seaman is talking: - - “I mind I once seed in Cardiff the crew of an overloaded - ship--leastways she weren’t overloaded, only a fatherly old - gentleman with a white beard and an umbreller came along the quay - and talked to the hands. Said as how it was crool hard to be - drownded in winter just for the sake of a few pounds more for the - owner--he said. Nearly cried over them--he did; and he had a square - mainsail coat, and a gaff-topsail hat too--all proper. So they - chaps, they said they wouldn’t go to be drownded in - winter--depending upon that ’ere Plimsoll man to see ’em through - the court. They thought to have a bloomin’ lark and two or three - days’ spree. And the beak giv’ ’em six weeks--coss the ship warn’t - overloaded. Anyways they made it out in court that she wasn’t. - There wasn’t one overloaded ship in Penarth Dock at all. ‘Pears - that old coon he was only on pay and allowance for some kind - people, under orders to look for overloaded ships, and he couldn’t - see no further than the length of his umbreller. Some of us in the - boarding-house, where I live when I’m looking for a ship in - Cardiff, stood by to duck that old weeping spunger in the dock. We - kept a good look out, too--but he topped his boom directly he was - outside the court.... Yes. They got six weeks’ hard....” - -The coast of California, near which I live, is a favored lurking place -of the stealthy Nemesis. The entire coast is a line of jagged rocks, -with very few harbors, and vessels continually strike upon the rocks and -are pounded to pieces. Sometimes they are great passenger steamers, and -hundreds of people are in danger and have to be taken off on tugs; the -newspapers give us hourly bulletins of what is happening, and their -correspondents perform prodigies of daring and speed to get us -photographs of the disaster in the first editions. The public reads of -these tragedies, and is awed by the spectacle of man struggling in vain -against the stealthy Nemesis. - -What is the fact about this matter? It is very simple: the Nemesis here -consists of the fact that the Pacific Coast from Seattle to San Diego -makes a convex curve; so ships of all sorts, the great lumber schooners, -the little salmon steamers, the great passenger liners, have to go a few -miles farther out to sea in order to be safe. But that additional -distance at sea means so many million dollars a year out of the pockets -of the owners. It means not merely that more fuel has to be burned, it -means that more of the ship’s time has to be taken, and more wages paid -to officers and crew; in the case of the great liners it means that -several hundred passengers have to be fed an additional meal! - -So naturally the owners, being fully covered by insurance, are clamorous -in their demands, and the ship’s officers are bending all their energies -to save every yard of distance and every second of time. Always and -everywhere up and down the coast they are gliding past the rocky points, -and in the darkness and fogs and storms they risk an inch too much. To -me this seems an eminently “romantic” situation; I can imagine a great -imaginative artist rearing it into a tremendous symbol of human guilt. -But this artist would make the discovery that the principal magazines on -the Pacific Coast are published by the railroad companies which own and -operate the steamship lines! - -Every hour the progress of science increases man’s control over nature, -and therefore the safety of travel at sea. If it were not for private -ownership and the blind race for profits, these dangers would be largely -a memory, and the stealthy Nemesis of Conrad, like the gods of the -Polish Catholic and the Anglican Protestant churches, would shrivel up -and crumble and blow away as dust. Would Conrad like that? Or would he -feel the irritation of an old man who has staked his reputation upon a -bad guess? He gives you the answer in “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” a -whole novel written to satirize the altruistic impulse, and expose it as -a destroyer of discipline and character. He assigns the role of -“agitator” at sea to an odious little Cockney rat; and when this -creature has got the poor crew stirred up to mutiny, what sport Conrad -has with them! Such lofty sarcasm: - - Our little world went on its curved and unswerving path carrying a - discontented and aspiring population. They found comfort of a - gloomy kind in an interminable and conscientious analysis of their - unappreciated worth; and inspired by Donkin’s hopeful doctrines - they dreamed enthusiastically of the time when every lonely ship - would travel over a serene sea, manned by a wealthy and well-fed - crew of satisfied skippers. - -In the chapter on Matthew Arnold I mentioned Paul Elmer More as a critic -who has based his reputation upon the thesis of man’s helplessness in -the presence of the universe; I explained Matthew Arnold as a poet who -finds his ideal both moral and poetical in a dignified and mournful -resignation to the evils of life. And here is another of these Great -Mourners, a zealot of Pessimism. Woe to you, if in his Agnostic Sunday -school you venture to breathe a hope for mankind! Woe to you if you -commit the supreme offense of art, the suggesting of a happy ending for -a novel! Woe to you, beyond all land-woes; for now you are in Neptune’s -empire, and there is no Bill of Rights, no freedom of speech, press or -assemblage; he who murmurs an optimistic thought hears the dread word -Mutiny--and the “beak” gives him “six months hard!” - - - - -CHAPTER CX - -THE REBEL IMMORTAL - - -Henry James remarks somewhere that an American has to study for fifty -years of his life in order to attain, culturally speaking, the point -from which a European starts at birth. Just what does he mean by this -unpatriotic utterance? I am reminded of it when I think of Anatole -France, and recall his characteristic sayings. Consider the following: - - ’Tis a great infirmity to think. God preserve you from it, my son, - as He has preserved His greatest saints, and the souls whom He - loves with especial tenderness and destines to eternal felicity. - -Now it is possible to conceive of a Catholic bishop or a Methodist -missionary or a Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan who might be too stupid to -understand that remark; but it is difficult to conceive how, -understanding it, he could withhold the tribute of a smile. Into this -remark a great master of words has distilled the essence of a -civilization, the precious flavor of centuries of culture. There are -only thirty-four words in it, and yet you can afford to meditate upon it -for a long time. The writer of such a paragraph possesses a mind -emancipated from the shams and delusions of the ages; he is skeptical, -realistic, and as witty as it is possible for a man to be; yet also he -is urbane--he does not seize you by the shoulders and shake you, for he -has learned that there are all kinds of strange people in the world, and -he asks merely that you consent to smile with him. - -How is such a man brought into existence? His father was a book-seller, -and so he breathed culture in his childhood; he read everything from -every part of the world, especially things written by men long since -dead; things full of that beauty mingled with sadness which is one of -the gifts of time. Anatole France learned to be at home in strange -cultures, and at the same time he studied the masters of his own -country, whose specialties are precision and lucidity and charm of -phrase. At the age of twenty-seven he published a story, “The Crime of -Sylvestre Bonnard,” a sentimental pretty tale about an elderly, -kind-hearted French antiquarian, who rescues a little girl from cruel -mistreatment, and then discovers that under the French law he is guilty -of abduction. It might have been written by any of our magazine writers -of the cheer-up, God’s-in-His-Heaven school--provided only that these -writers had possessed a thousand years of culture. - -It was just what the Academy of Richelieu loved, and they crowned it. -The young writer was taken up by an exquisite French lady, who became -his mistress, and set up a salon for him, and helped him to meet all the -editors and critics--which is how you make fame and fortune in Paris, -and sometimes in America, I am told. This Frenchman was clever and -witty, sensual, cynical, but not too much so for his elegant -free-thinking tradition. He wrote other novels and a great quantity of -miscellaneous writings, and in 1896, at the age of fifty-two, his -labors were rewarded by the great French honor, he became one of -Richelieu’s forty Immortals. In the ordinary course of events there was -nothing more for him to do, save to sink back in his comfortable -arm-chair and listen to the plaudits of Paris. - -But a strange and alarming thing happened. The struggle over the Dreyfus -case arose, and Anatole France leaped into the arena, joining Zola, whom -he had previously denounced as a beastly writer. Here was something -absolutely without precedent--that an Academician should turn into a -Socialist, and take to attending meetings of workingmen, and addressing -to them remarks unfit to be quoted in respectable newspapers. Worse even -yet, he, the pride and glory of art-for-art’s-sake culture, took to -putting radical propaganda into novels! They had let him in among the -Immortals, and there was no way to get him out; so here was one of the -pillars of literary authority, portraying his country as an island of -penguins, and the pillars of his church and state as grotesque, wingless -birds, dressing themselves in frock-coats and silk hats and hopping -about upon obscene errands. Have a glimpse of them: - - “Do you see, my son,” he exclaimed, “that madman who with his teeth - is biting the nose of the adversary he has overthrown, and that - other one who is pounding a woman’s head with a huge stone?” - - “I see them,” said Bulloch. “They are creating law; they are - founding property; they are establishing the principles of - civilization, the basis of society, the foundations of the State.” - - “How is that?” asked old Maël. - - “By setting bounds to their fields. That is the origin of all - government. Your penguins, O Master, are performing the most august - of functions. Throughout the ages their work will be consecrated by - lawyers, and magistrates will confirm it.” - -“Penguin Island” was published in 1908; and then came the war, and this -elderly antiquarian--he was seventy then--came forward and enlisted to -fight for his country. But that did not mean, as with many others of -lesser judgment, that he gave up his hopes for the working class, and -surrendered to the propaganda of capitalist nationalism. We find him at -the age of seventy-five, carrying a red flag in a procession of French -radicals, protesting against the acquittal of the assassin of Jaurès. -We find him ready to break an engagement to a literary banquet in order -to address a working-class meeting in protest against capitalist church -and state. He, the greatest of all the Immortals, sets himself against -the other thirty-nine; he, the old man, sets himself against the -cultured youth of his country, who have abandoned themselves to a -mixture of Catholic mysticism with homosexuality, of Dadaist imbecility -with athleticism having for its goal the turning of machine-guns upon -the workers. - -The books of Anatole France afford a curious study of struggle between -the old pessimistic, cynical culture of capitalism and the new creative -culture of the awakening proletariat. These cultures are absolutely -irreconcilable, but Anatole France believed in both. He was a social -revolutionist with his conscious mind and judgment, while he remained a -fatalist and a scoffer with his hereditary culture, that ancient -accumulation of despair and terror which he had breathed in with the -dust in his father’s old book-shop. - -So he writes “The Gods Are Athirst,” in which he portrays mankind as -given up to endless misery and destruction; or “The Revolt of the -Angels,” in which again the heavens are drowned in blood and there is no -hope. After which he issues a manifesto upholding Russia, or calling -upon the workers to rally to the Third International. He goes before a -convention of the organized teachers of France, and delivers to them an -address of such magnificent eloquence as to move the assemblage to -tears. I have quoted from this address in “The Goslings”; I repeat one -paragraph--because it is the duty of a writer to spread these words on -every possible occasion, to bring to the great master the help upon -which he relies: - - Reason, wisdom, intelligence, forces of the mind and heart, whom I - have always devoutly invoked, come to me, aid me, sustain my feeble - voice; carry it, if that may be, to all the peoples of the world, - and diffuse it everywhere where there are men of good will to hear - the beneficent truth! A new order of things is born. The powers of - evil die, poisoned by their crime. The greedy and the cruel, the - devourers of peoples, are bursting with an indigestion of blood. - However sorely stricken by the sins of their blind or corrupt - masters, mutilated, decimated, the proletarians remain erect; they - will unite to form one universal proletariat, and we shall see - fulfilled the great Socialist prophecy: “The union of the workers - will be the peace of the world.” - -It was interesting to note, in the obituaries which the death of Anatole -France brought forth, how almost universally this aspect of his life was -glossed over. Our literary reviews told all about him as a master of -French prose, a supreme ironist in the tradition of Rabelais, Voltaire, -and Renan. But they left it for the radical papers to celebrate Anatole -France, the crusader, the carrier of the red flag. I am urged to believe -that our literary Tories are honest, but all this moves me to wonder. - -I ask them, once for all, what is it they want? What proof will content -our cultural stand-patters? Here is their crowned favorite, their -revered master, the man who was as witty as it is possible for a human -being to be; and he sets out to prove to them that it is just as easy to -be witty in the service of Justice as in the service of Mammon. I ask -you, gentlemen of letters, do you know how a sentence can be wittier -than this: “The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as -the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal -bread.” - - - - -CHAPTER CXI - -A TEXT-BOOK FOR RUSSIA - - -Mrs. Ogi has been silent for some time; saving her energies in -anticipation of that greatest satisfaction known to wives. Now she takes -it. “I told you so!” - -“What did you tell me?” asks Ogi, uneasily. - -“You have filled up a book, and haven’t got in a word about Gloria -Swanson’s salary, nor what Rupert Hughes really got for ‘The Sins of -Hollywood’!” - -“It’s this way,” says her husband. “I found I had so much material that -I’d have to make two volumes, one dealing with the artists of the past, -and the other with living artists.” - -“I remember, eight years ago,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you started out to write -a criticism of the world’s culture in one volume; and presently you came -to me looking worried, and said you had so much about Religion it would -need a volume to itself. So you took a hundred thousand words for -Religion. And when you started after Journalism, and took a hundred -thousand words to tell the story of your own life, and another hundred -thousand to tell about the newspapers. And then Education; you came -again and said you had so much about the colleges, you’d have to give a -whole volume to them. You took two hundred and five thousand words for -the colleges, and then a hundred and ninety-five thousand for the -schools!” - -As Ogi has no answer to this indictment, she continues: “Just what do -you think you’ve written now?” - -“I’ve written a text-book of culture.” - -“For the schools?”--very sarcastically. - -“It will be serving as a text-book in the high schools of Russia within -six months.” - -“In Russia, yes--” - -“In every country in Europe, as soon as the social revolution comes. The -workers, taking power, bring a new psychology and a new ethics; -naturally they have to have a new art, and new art standards.” - -“They may want to write their own text-books,” suggests Mrs. Ogi. - -“No doubt they will--and better than mine. But so far no one has done -it--and they will have to use such weapons as they find ready.” - -Mrs. Ogi is one of those who observe the phenomena of religion with a -mingling of fear and longing. It would be wonderful to believe like -that! “Of course,” she says, “if your side has its way--” - -“That is how history is made,” says Ogi. “Once upon a time a wealthy -Virginia planter, with other wealthy gentlemen from Pennsylvania and -Massachusetts, rose up and declared rebellion against his king. A war -was fought, and the rebel planter won; therefore he is known as the -Father of His Country, and all little boys in school learn how he could -not tell a lie. If he had lost his war against his king, he would have -been a vile and traitorous varlet, and every little boy in school would -have learned by heart a long list of the lies he had told. And just so -it is with writers who take up the cause of the dispossessed and -disinherited. If the proletariat wins in its war against capitalism, -these outcast writers will become leading men of letters. On the other -hand, if the proletariat loses, they will remain ‘propagandists,’ and -‘tub-thumpers,’ and ‘buzzards,’ and ‘muckrakers’--you recognize those -terms.” - -Yes, Mrs. Ogi admits that she recognizes them; and he continues: - -“I have given the workers an honest book, a sound book, from the point -of view of their hopes and needs. I say to them: Why should you read the -books of your enemies, those who make their glory and their greatness -out of your misery and humiliation? Why should you walk into the traps -that are set for you? Life is very cruel, but assuredly this is the most -cruel thing in your fate--that you should admire those actions which -crush you, those tastes which spurn you, those standards which have as -their beginning and end your enslavement and degradation.” - -“None but workers are to see this book?” asks Mrs. Ogi. - -“I use the word in its revolutionary sense, the strict scientific sense -of those who do the useful and necessary labor, whether of hand or -brain. I am pleading especially with the young brain-workers, the -intellectuals. For the hand-worker is a slave by compulsion, but the -young thinker, the student, has the ancient choice of Hercules, between -virtue and vice. He may sell himself to the exploiters, he may take the -dress-suit bribe, the motor-cars and the ‘hooch’ parties, and the -beautiful, soft-skinned, hard-souled women; or he may heed my plea, and -steel his soul, and go back to the garret which is the cradle of the -arts, back to the ancient and honorable occupation of cultivating -literature upon a little oatmeal. - -“To this young intellectual, hesitating at the parting of ways, I say: -Comrade, this world of organized gambling and predation in which we live -seems powerful and permanent, but it is an evil dream of but a few more -years; the seeds of its own destruction are sprouting in its heart. I am -not referring to its moral failure, the fact that it thwarts the most -fundamental of human cravings, for justice and for freedom; I mean in -the bare material sense--it fails to employ its own workers, it makes -misery out of its own plenty, and war and destruction of its abounding -prosperity. It is as certain to fall as a pyramid standing on its tip; -and when it falls, what is left but the workers? What other force is -there, having solidarity, the sense of brotherhood, the ideal of -service, of useful labor, as against the buying and selling and -exploiting, the robbing, killing and enslaving which is capitalism? - -“This great new force is shaping itself in our world, preparing for the -making of the future. And shall this new life not have an art? Shall men -not thrill to this vision, and rouse others to make it real? Here lies -your task, young comrade; here is your future--and not the timid service -of convention, the million-times-over repetition of ancient lies, the -endless copying of copies of folly and cruelty and greed. The artists of -our time are like men hypnotized, repeating over and over a dreary -formula of futility. And I say: Break this evil spell, young comrade; go -out and meet the new dawning life, take your part in the battle, and put -it into new art; do this service for a new public, which you yourselves -will make. That is the message of this book, the last word I have to -say: that your creative gift shall not be content to make art works, but -shall at the same time make a world; shall make new souls, moved by a -new ideal of fellowship, a new impulse of love, and faith--and not -merely hope, but determination. - -“That is what this book is about,” says Ogi; “and maybe not many will -get me, but a few will, and they will be the ones I am after.” - -Mrs. Ogi comes to him and puts her arms about him, trembling a little. -“Yes, of course,” she says; “and I’m glad you wrote it, in spite of all -my terrors.” - -“Ah, now!” says Ogi, smiling. “We ought to have a picture of this! A -happy ending, in the very best bourgeois style!” - - - - -INDEX - -Roman numerals refer to chapters, Arabic numerals to pages - - -Adams, Francis, 352 - -Adams, F. P., 64 - -Æschylus, 49, 94, 180 - -Alcibiades, XVII - -Alexander, 41 - -Amos, 31 - -Anderson, 239, 260, 270 - -Archimedes, 41 - -Ariosto, 89 - -Aristophanes, XX, 129, 210 - -Aristotle, 117 - -Arnold, 47, 181, LXXI, 323, 379 - -Assisi, 74 - -Austen, LII - - -Babbitt, 138, XLV - -Bacon, 95 - -Bakunin, 212 - -Balzac, LX - -Barrett, 225 - -Baudelaire, 302 - -Beer, 348 - -Beers, 186 - -Beethoven, L - -Bellamy, 238, 352 - -Bennett, 189 - -Bernhardi, 293 - -Bernhardt, 123 - -Besant, 352 - -Bierce, CII - -Blake, 202 - -Boccaccio, XXVIII - -Borgia, 80 - -Brandes, 294 - -Brawne, 187 - -Brooks, 327 - -Brown, Bishop, 74 - -Brown, J. G., 12 - -Browning, 80, LXX - -Buchanan, 352 - -Buddha, 39 - -Bunyan, XXXVIII, 239, 283 - -Burbank, 279 - -Burns, XLIX, 244, 339 - -Byron, LVII, 181, 203, 228, 241, 251, 301 - - -Cade, 103 - -Calas, 133 - -Carlyle, 13, 77, LXVIII, 311, 337 - -Caroline, 180 - -Cartier, 95 - -Cervantes, XXXII - -Chambers, 114, 356 - -Charles I, 106 - -Charles X, 195 - -Clemens, C, 91, 334, 340, 348, 359, 369 - -Cleon, 53 - -Coleridge, LIV, 251 - -Collier, 115 - -Collins, 20 - -Comstock, 105 - -Congreve, 114 - -Conrad, CIX - -Coolidge, 141, 327 - -Corneille, XL, 316 - -Crane, CIV - -Cromwell, 113, 173, 195 - - -Dana, 32, 53 - -Dante, XXIX - -Davidson, 352 - -Davis, CIII - -Dawes, 57 - -Day, 346 - -Debs, 361 - -de Mille, 114 - -de Young, 340 - -Dickens, LXXII, 236, 277 - -Diderot, 136 - -Dobson, 64 - -Doré, 12 - -Dostoievski, LXXXIV-V - -Douglas, 305 - -Dreiser, 270 - -Dreyfus, 282, 381 - -Dryden, XXXIX, 143 - - -Eddy, 241 - -Edison, 41 - -Edward, 123 - -Elijah, 31 - -Eliot, 235 - -Emerson, 58, 217, 233, LXXV, 253 - -Euripedes, 51, 52, 54 - - -Fielding, XLVIII - -Flaubert, LXV, 276 - -Fox, 74 - -France, CX - -Frederick, 133, 147, 219 - - -Galileo, 106, 117 - -Gandhi, 274 - -Garrison, 245 - -Gautier, 187, 196, LXII, 208 - -George IV, 165, 180 - -Gibbon, 171 - -Gifford, 171 - -Gilder, 347 - -Gladstone, 48, 323 - -Glyn, 114 - -Goethe, 39, 153, LI, 183 - -Gogol, LXXXII, 263 - -Goncourt, LXXXVII - -Gorki, 259, 273, 328, 335, 339 - -Gosse, 301, 319 - -Gracchus, 59 - -Grant, 330 - -Gronlund, 339 - - -Haldeman-Julius, 190 - -Hale, 355 - -Hallam, 223 - -Hamilton, 172 - -Hanska, 194 - -Hardie, 173 - -Harper, 335-6 - -Harris, 98, 99, XCV - -Harvey, 331 - -Hastings, 162 - -Hawthorne, LXXVIII, 322 - -Hazlitt, 185 - -Hearn, 187, 336 - -Heine, 64, LXVI - -Henley, 14 - -Henry, CVII, 349, 375 - -Herriot, 282 - -Hichens, 303 - -Hippocrates, 41 - -Hohenzollern, 219 - -Homer, XVIII, 60 - -Horace, XXIV - -Howells, CI, 328, 348 - -Hughes, 28, 383 - -Hugo, 200, 203, 216, LXI, 280, 296, 298 - -Hunt, 184, 185, 186 - - -Ibsen, XC, 339 - -Ingersoll, 331 - -Irwin, 53 - -Isaiah, 30 - - -Jackson, 246 - -James, H., 13, 73, 82, 193, 264, XCVIII, 379 - -James, W., 318 - -Jaurès, 381 - -Jennings, 359-60, 362 - -Jeremiah, 30 - -Jesus, 38, 39, 257, 293 - -Joan, 102 - -John, 31 - -Johnson, 34 - -Juvenal, XXIV - - -Keats, LIX, 180, 245 - -Kingsley, 352 - -Kipling, 14, 129 - -Kubla Khan, 168 - - -Lamb, 185 - -Lanier, 254 - -Lassalle, 352 - -Leacock, 53 - -Lee, 232 - -Lee-Higginson, 141 - -Lenin, 36 - -Lewes, 39, 235 - -Lewis, 206 - -Lincoln, 256 - -Lloyd-George, 377 - -Lockhart, 186 - -London, CVIII, 338, 349, 351 - -Longfellow, LXXVI - -Louis XIV, XLI - -Louis XVIII, 195 - -Louis Napoleon, 197, 214 - -Louis-Philippe, 196 - -l’Ouverture, 194 - -Ludwig, 215, 294 - -Luther, 74, 83 - - -Mackail, 43 - -Mæcenas, 64 - -Marie Antoinette, 156, 172 - -Marlowe, 96 - -Martin, XV - -Marx, 294 - -Maupassant, LXXXIX, 286, 340, 361 - -Medici, 86, 120 - -Mencken, 105 - -Meredith, XCVII, 375 - -Micah, 31 - -Michelangelo, XXXI, 150 - -Millet, 206 - -Milton, 14, XXXVII, 152, 173, 183, 189, 198, 234, 239, 242, 305 - -Moliere, XLII, 261 - -Moore, G., 308 - -Moore, T., 181 - -Mordell, 78, 108, 111 - -More, P. E., 228, 229, 379 - -More, Sir T., 352 - -Morgan, 140, 141, 270, 293, 350-1 - -Morrell, 351 - -Morris, LXXIV - -Mozart, 151 - -Murray, 57 - -Musset, LXIII, 302 - - -Napoleon, 152, 156, 157, 163, 222 - -Nelson, 172 - -Newton, 131, 173, 254 - -Nicholas, 269 - -Nietzsche, 13, XCII, 257 - -Norris, CV - - -Palgrave, 109, 190 - -Palmer, 79, 141, 163 - -Pasteur, 41 - -Patrick, 20 - -Pericles, 41 - -Phelps, 268, LXXXV - -Phillips, CVI, 349 - -Pindar, 50 - -Plato, 13, 352 - -Plimsoll, 376 - -Plutarch, 152 - -Poe, LXXIX, 302, 253 - -Pope, 131 - -Porter, CVII, 349, 375 - -Pushkin, 260, 261 - - -Queensbury, 305 - - -Rabelais, 383 - -Racine, XLI, 195, 199 - -Raphael, XXX, 200 - -Rasputin, 268, 269 - -Reade, 352 - -Reed, 37, 38 - -Renan, 383 - -Richardson, XLVII, 277 - -Richelieu, 117 - -Robespierre, 141 - -Rockefeller, 109 - -Roeckel, 212 - -Rogers, 331 - -Roland, 88 - -Roosevelt, 354 - -Rossetti, 188 - -Rousseau, 117, 118, XLIV, XLV, 155, 271, 291 - -Ruskin, 173, 236, 238, 309, 352 - -Russell, 362 - - -Saintsbury, 113, 115, 299 - -Sand, 203, LXIV, 225 - -Savonarola, 74, 84 - -Schiller, 158 - -Schopenhauer, 216 - -Scott, LIII, 171, 181, 186, 188, 247, 249 - -Shakespeare, 39, 48, XXXIII-VI, 129, 131, 151, 183, 195, 241 - -Shaw, 17, 63, 93, 211, 215, 287, 292, 339 - -Shelley, 176, 177, LVIII, 185, 198 - -Sherman, 228 - -Sinclair, 107, 328, 335, 345, 347, 353, 363-6, 372 - -Socrates, 41, 54 - -Sophocles, 51 - -Southey, 163, 167, LV, 177 - -Spencer, 290 - -Squires, 181 - -Sterling, 93, 94, 338-9, 341 - -Stowe, 176, 352 - -Strauss, 304 - -Strindberg, XCI, 291, 294 - -Swanson, 28, 383 - -Swift, 131, XLVI - -Swinburne, 168, XCIV - -Symonds, 297 - - -Taft, 269 - -Tennyson, LXIX, 109, 188, 217, 279, 301, 346 - -Thackeray, LXXIII, 191 - -Tolstoi, 135, 211, LXXXVI, 257, 279, 283, 332, 335, 339 - -Turgenev, LXXXIII, 271 - -Twain, 91, C, 334, 340, 348, 359, 369 - - -Untermeyer, 64 - - -van Eeden, 265 - -Vasari, 83 - -Verestchagin, 12 - -Verhaeren, XCIII - -Verlaine, 302 - -Victoria, 174, 220, 224, 316 - -Virgil, XXIII, 79 - -Voltaire, XLIII, 195, 209, 240, 282, 383 - -von Suttner, 352 - - -Wagner, LXVII, 294 - -Ward, XCIX - -Washington, 41, 384 - -Watts-Dunton, 299 - -Weber, 152 - -Webster, 246 - -Wells, 317 - -Westbrook, 182 - -Whistler, 187, XCVI, 250 - -Whiteing, 352 - -Whitman, LXXX, 275, 282, 297 - -Whittier, LXXVII, 253 - -Wilde, XCV, 346 - -Witte, 331 - -Wood, 110 - -Wordsworth, LVI, 181, 182 - -Wycherley, 114 - - -Zola, LXXXVIII, 296, 349, 381 - - - W. B. C. - - * * * * * - - Who Owns the Press, and Why? - - -=When you read your daily paper, are you reading facts or propaganda? And -whose propaganda?= - -=Who furnishes the raw material for your thoughts about life? Is it -honest material?= - -=No man can ask more important questions than these; and here for the -first time the questions are answered in a book.= - - - THE BRASS CHECK - - A Study of American Journalism - - By UPTON SINCLAIR - -Read the record of this book to August, 1920: Published in February, -1920; first edition, 23,000 paper-bound copies, sold in two weeks. -Second edition, 21,000 paper-bound, sold before it could be put to -press. Third edition, 15,000 and fourth edition, 12,000, sold. Fifth -edition, 15,000, in press. Paper for sixth edition, 110,000, just -shipped from the mill. The third and fourth editions are printed on -“number one news”; the sixth will be printed on a carload of lightweight -brown wrapping paper--all we could get in a hurry. - -The first cloth edition, 16,500 copies, all sold; a carload of paper for -the second edition, 40,000 copies, has just reached our printer--and so -we dare to advertise! - -Ninety thousand copies of a book sold in six months--and published by -the author, with no advertising, and only a few scattered reviews! What -this means is that the American people want to know the truth about -their newspapers. They have found the truth in “The Brass Check” and -they are calling for it by telegraph. Put these books on your counter, -and you will see, as one doctor wrote us--“they melt away like the -snow.” - -From the pastor of the Community Church, New York: - - “I am writing to thank you for sending me a copy of your new book, - ‘The Brass Check.’ Although it arrived only a few days ago, I have - already read it through, every word, and have loaned it to one of - my colleagues for reading. The book is tremendous. I have never - read a more strongly consistent argument or one so formidably - buttressed by facts. You have proved your case to the handle. I - again take satisfaction in saluting you not only as a great - novelist, but as the ablest pamphleteer in America today. I am - already passing around the word in my church and taking orders for - the book.”--John Haynes Holmes. - - -=440 pages. Single copy, paper, 60c postpaid; three copies, $1.50; ten -copies, $4.50. Single copy, cloth, $1.20 postpaid; three copies, $3.00; -ten copies, $9.00= - - - Address: UPTON SINCLAIR, Pasadena, Cal. - - * * * * * - - THE GOOSE-STEP - - A Study of American Education - - By Upton Sinclair - - - =Who owns the colleges, and why?= - - =Are your sons and daughters getting education, or propaganda?= - - =And whose propaganda?= - - =No man can ask more important questions than these; and here for - the first time the questions are answered in a book.= - - -From H. L. MENCKEN: - -“‘The Goose-Step’ came in at last yesterday afternoon, and I fell on it -last night. My very sincere congratulations. I have read on and on with -constant joy in the adept marshalling of facts, the shrewd presentation -of personalities, the lively and incessant humor. It is not only a fine -piece of writing; it is also a sound piece of research. It presents a -devastating, but, I believe, thoroughly fair and accurate picture of the -American universities today. The faults of ‘The Brass Check’ and ‘The -Profits of Religion’ are not in it. It is enormously more judicial and -convincing than either of those books. You are here complaining of -nothing. You simply offer the bald and horrible facts--but with -liveliness, shrewdness, good humor. An appalling picture of a moral and -mental debasement! Let every American read it and ponder it!” - -A few questions considered in “The Goose-Step”: Do you know the extent -to which the interlocking directors of railroads and steel and oil and -coal and credit in the United States are also the interlocking trustees -of American “higher” education? Do you think that our colleges and -universities should be modeled on the lines of our government, or on the -lines of our department-stores? Do you know that eighty-five percent of -college and university professors are dissatisfied with being managed by -floor-walkers? Do you know for how many different actions and opinions a -professor may lose his job? Do you know how many professors have to do -their own laundry? Do you know why American college presidents with few -exceptions are men who do not tell the truth? Do you know to what extent -“social position” takes precedence over scholarship in American academic -life? Do you know to what extent our education has become a by-product -of gladiatorial combats? - -A few of the institutions dealt with: - -The University of the House of Morgan; The University of Lee-Higginson; -The University of U. G. I.; The Tiger’s Lair; The Bull-dog’s Den; The -University of the Black Hand; The University of the Lumber Trust; The -University of the Chimes; The Universities of the Anaconda; The -University of the Latter Day Saints; The Mining Camp University; The -Colleges of the Smelter Trust; The University of Wheat; The University -of the Ore Trust; The University of Standard Oil; The University of -Judge Gary; The University of the Grand Duchess; The University of -Automobiles; The University of the Steel Trust; The University of -Heaven; The University of Jabbergrab. - - -500 pages, cloth $2.00, paper $1.00, postpaid. - - -UPTON SINCLAIR, PASADENA, CALIFORNIA - - * * * * * - -Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber: - -series of chonicle=> series of chronicle {pg 101} - -here we seen Sensibility=> here we see Sensibility {pg 160} - -be became poet laureate he became poet laureate {pg 173} - -Two laters later his=> Two years later his {pg 179} - -a crime aganist=> a crime against {pg 182} - -the old god, see too late=> the old god, sees too late {pg 214} - -enlightment ought to help them=> enlightenment ought to help them {pg -264} - -worse criminals that he=> worse criminals than he {pg 267} - -most efficient sytem=> most efficient system {pg 269} - -out of thir minds=> out of their minds {pg 287} - -be became the prophet=> he became the prophet {pg 292} - -to feel wraranted=> to feel warranted {pg 319} - -long and successfuly=> long and successfully {pg 348} - -live a single genration=> live a single generation {pg 351} - -him to suceed=> him to succeed {pg 354} - -presents a devasting=> presents a devastating {ad page} - - - -*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAMMONART *** - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the -United States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms -of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online -at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you -are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the -country where you are located before using this eBook. -</div> - -<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Mammonart</p> -<p style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:0; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:1em;'>An essay in economic interpretation</p> -<p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Upton Sinclair</p> -<p style='display:block; text-indent:0; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: September 22, 2022 [eBook #69027]</p> -<p style='display:block; text-indent:0; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</p> - <p style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em; text-align:left'>Produced by: Tim Lindell, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)</p> -<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAMMONART ***</div> -<hr class="full" /> - -<p class="figcenter"> -<a href="images/cover.jpg"> -<img src="images/cover.jpg" -height="550" alt="[The image of -the book's cover is unavailable.]" /></a> -</p> - -<table style="border: 2px black solid;margin:auto auto;max-width:50%; -padding:1%;"> -<tr><td> - -<p class="c"><a href="#CONTENTS">Contents.</a><br /> -<a href="#INDEX">Index.</a></p> -<p class="c">Some typographical errors have been corrected; -<a href="#transcrib">a list follows the text</a>.</p> -<p class="c">(etext transcriber's note)</p></td></tr> -</table> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_i">{i}</a></span>  </p> - -<div class="blk"> -<h1>MAMMONART</h1> - -<p class="cb"><i>An Essay in Economic Interpretation</i><br /><br /><br /> - -BY<br /> -UPTON SINCLAIR<br /><br /><br /> -<span class="smcap">Published by the Author -Pasadena, California</span> -<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_ii">{ii}</a></span><br /><br /><br /> -<small><span class="smcap">Copyright</span>, 1924, 1925 -BY<br /> -UPTON SINCLAIR<br /> -<br /> -First edition, February, 1925, 4,000 copies, clothbound,<br /> -4,000 copies, paperbound.<br /></small> -<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_iii">{iii}</a></span></p> -</div> - -<h2><a id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2> - -<table> -<tr><td class="rt"><small>CHAPTER</small></td><td> </td> -<td class="rt"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">I.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">Ogi, the Son of Og</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_1">1</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">II.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">Who Owns the Artists?</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_7">7</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">III.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">Art and Personality</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_11">11</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">IV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">The Laborer and His Hire</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_14">14</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">V.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">The Lord’s Anointed</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_16">16</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">VI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">Artificial Childhood</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_19">19</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">VII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">Mrs. Ogi Emerges</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_21">21</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">VIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">The Horse-Trade</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_23">23</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">IX.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">The Class Lie</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_25">25</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">X.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">Mrs. Ogi Orders Jazz</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_27">27</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">XI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">The Populist Convention</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_29">29</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">XII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">Kansas and Judea</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_32">32</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">XIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">The Communist Almanac</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_35">35</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">XIV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">God’s Propaganda</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_38">38</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">XV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">Mrs. Prestonia Orders Plumbing</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_40">40</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">XVI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">Mrs. Ogi Orders Etiquette</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_42">42</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">XVII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">William Randolph Alcibiades</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_45">45</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">XVIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">The Age of Hero-Worship</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_46">46</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">XIX.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">Hundred Per Cent Athenian</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_49">49</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XX">XX.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XX">The Funny Man of Reaction</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_52">52</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">XXI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">Athens and Los Angeles</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_56">56</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">XXII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">The Slave Empire</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_58">58</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">XXIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">Dumb Pious Æneas</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_60">60</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV">XXIV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV">The Roman Four Hundred</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_63">63</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXV">XXV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXV">The American Empire</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_68">68</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVI">XXVI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVI">The Christian Revolution</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_70">70</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVII">XXVII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVII">The Ins and the Outs</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_71">71</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVIII">XXVIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVIII">The Heaven of Elegance</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_74">74</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIX">XXIX.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIX">The Muckraker’s Hell</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_77">77</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXX">XXX.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXX">The Pious Poisoners</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_80">80</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXI">XXXI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXI">The Papal Paymasters</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_84">84</a> -<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_iv">{iv}</a></span></td></tr> - -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXII">XXXII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXII">Who Is Crazy?</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_88">88</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIII">XXXIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIII">Ogi, Anglomaniac</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_92">92</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIV">XXXIV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIV">Phosphorescence and Decay</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_95">95</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXV">XXXV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXV">The Good Man Theory</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_98">98</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVI">XXXVI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVI">Comic Relief</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_101">101</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVII">XXXVII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVII">Praise for Puritans</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_105">105</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVIII">XXXVIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVIII">Comrade’s Progress</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_110">110</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIX">XXXIX.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIX">Vanity Fair</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_113">113</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XL">XL.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XL">Glory Propaganda</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_116">116</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLI">XLI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLI">Unbridled Desires</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_120">120</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLII">XLII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLII">The Harpooner of Hypocrisy</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_124">124</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLIII">XLIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLIII">Écrasez l’Infame</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_130">130</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLIV">XLIV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLIV">The Trumpeter of Revolution</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_135">135</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLV">XLV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLV">The Harvard Manner</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_139">139</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLVI">XLVI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLVI">The Poisoned Rat</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_142">142</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLVII">XLVII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLVII">Virtue Rewarded</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_144">144</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLVIII">XLVIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLVIII">The Good Fellow’s Code</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_146">146</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLIX">XLIX.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XLIX">The Gauger of Genius</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_148">148</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_L">L.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_L">The Brain Proprietor</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_150">150</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LI">LI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LI">Politics Is Fate</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_154">154</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LII">LII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LII">Behind the Hedge-Rows</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_159">159</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LIII">LIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LIII">Tory Romance</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_163">163</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LIV">LIV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LIV">The Meaning of Magic</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_167">167</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LV">LV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LV">The Tory Whip</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_171">171</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LVI">LVI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LVI">The Fear That Kills</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_173">173</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LVII">LVII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LVII">The First Lord of Letters</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_175">175</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LVIII">LVIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LVIII">The Angel of Revolt</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_178">178</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LIX">LIX.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LIX">The Stable-Keeper’s Son</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_183">183</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LX">LX.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LX">The Predatory Artist</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_190">190</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXI">LXI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXI">The Old Communard</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_194">194</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXII">LXII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXII">Tyger, Tyger!</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_199">199</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXIII">LXIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXIII">The Child of His Age</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_202">202</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXIV">LXIV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXIV">Prayer in Adultery</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_204">204</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXV">LXV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXV">Main Street in France</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_206">206</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXVI">LXVI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXVI">The Mattress Grave</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_209">209</a> -<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_v">{v}</a></span></td></tr> - -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXVII">LXVII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXVII">Siegfried-Bakunin</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_211">211</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXVIII">LXVIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXVIII">The Gospel of Silence</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_216">216</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXIX">LXIX.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXIX">The Lullaby Laureate</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_220">220</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXX">LXX.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXX">High-Brow Society</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_225">225</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXI">LXXI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXI">Official Pessimism</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_228">228</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXII">LXXII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXII">God Save the People</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_231">231</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXIII">LXXIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXIII">The Collector of Snobs</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_233">233</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXIV">LXXIV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXIV">Arts and Crafts</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_236">236</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXV">LXXV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXV">Seeing America First</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_239">239</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXVI">LXXVI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXVI">The Age of Innocence</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_242">242</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXVII">LXXVII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXVII">A Snow-Bound Saint</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_244">244</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXVIII">LXXVIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXVIII">Puritanism in Decay</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_246">246</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXIX">LXXIX.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXIX">The Angel Israfel</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_249">249</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXX">LXXX.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXX">The Good Grey Poet</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_253">253</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXI">LXXXI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXI">Cabbage Soup</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_258">258</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXII">LXXXII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXII">Dead Souls</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_260">260</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXIII">LXXXIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXIII">The Russian Hamlet</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_263">263</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXIV">LXXXIV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXIV">The Dead-House</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_265">265</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXV">LXXXV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXV">The Christian Bull-Dog</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_268">268</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXVI">LXXXVI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXVI">The Peasant Count</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_271">271</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXVII">LXXXVII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXVII">Headaches and Dyspepsia</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_276">276</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXVIII">LXXXVIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXVIII">The Troughs of Zolaism</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_279">279</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXIX">LXXXIX.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXIX">The Sportive Demon</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_283">283</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XC">XC.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XC">The Foe of Formulas</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_285">285</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XCI">XCI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XCI">The Biological Superior</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_289">289</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XCII">XCII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XCII">The Overman</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_291">291</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XCIII">XCIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XCIII">The Octopus Cities</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_295">295</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XCIV">XCIV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XCIV">The Inspired Parrakeet</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_298">298</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XCV">XCV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XCV">The Green Carnation</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_302">302</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XCVI">XCVI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XCVI">The White Chrysanthemum</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_307">307</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XCVII">XCVII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XCVII">The Duel of Wit</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_312">312</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XCVIII">XCVIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XCVIII">The Cultured-Class Historian</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_316">316</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XCIX">XCIX.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_XCIX">The Premier Novelist</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_322">322</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_C">C.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_C">The Uncrowned King</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_326">326</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_CI">CI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_CI">Smiling America</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_333">333</a> -<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_vi">{vi}</a></span></td></tr> - -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_CII">CII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_CII">The Eminent Tankard-Man</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_337">337</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_CIII">CIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_CIII">The Soldier of Fortune</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_341">341</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_CIV">CIV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_CIV">The Bowery Boy</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_345">345</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_CV">CV.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_CV">The California Octopus</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_349">349</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_CVI">CVI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_CVI">The Old-Fashioned American</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_353">353</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_CVII">CVII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_CVII">Badgad-on-the-Subway</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_357">357</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_CVIII">CVIII.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_CVIII">Supermanhood</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_363">363</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_CIX">CIX.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_CIX">The Stealthy Nemesis</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_372">372</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_CX">CX.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_CX">The Rebel Immortal</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_379">379</a></td></tr> -<tr><td class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_CXI">CXI.</a></td><td class="pdd"><a href="#CHAPTER_CXI">A Text-Book for Russia</a></td><td class="rtb"><a href="#page_383">383</a></td></tr> -</table> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_1">{1}</a></span>  </p> - -<h2><a id="MAMMONART"></a>MAMMONART</h2> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I<br /><br /> -OGI, THE SON OF OG</h2> - -<p>One evening in the year minus ninety-eight thousand and -seventy-six—that is, one hundred thousand years ago—Ogi, the son of -Og, sat in front of a blazing fire in the cave, licking his greasy lips -and wiping his greasy fingers upon the thick brown hair of his chest. -The grease on Ogi’s lips and fingers had come from a chunk out of an -aurochs, which Ogi had roasted on a sharpened stick before the fire. The -tribe had been hunting that day, and Ogi himself had driven the spear -through the eye of the great creature. Being young, he was a hero; and -now he had a hero’s share of meat in him, and sat before the fire, -sleepy-eyed, retracing in dull, slow revery the incidents of the hunt.</p> - -<p>In his hand was the toasting-stick, and he toyed with it, making marks -upon the ground. Presently, half involuntarily, there came a pattern -into these marks: a long mark—that was how the body of the aurochs -went; two marks in front, the forelegs of the aurochs; two marks in -back, the hind legs; a big scratch in front, the head. And suddenly Ogi -found a thrill running over him. There was the great beast before him, -brought magically back to life by markings in the dirt. Ogi had made the -first picture!</p> - -<p>But then terror seized him. He lived in a world of terror, and always -had to act before he dared to think. Hastily he scratched over the dirt, -until every trace of the magic beast was gone. He gazed behind him, -expecting to see the spirit of the aurochs, summoned into the cave by -this fearful new magic. He glanced at the other members of his tribe, -crouching sleepily about the fire, to see if they had noticed his daring -venture.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_2">{2}</a></span></p> - -<p>But nothing evil happened; the meat in Ogi’s stomach did not develop bad -spirits that summer night, neither did the lightning poke him with its -dagger, nor a tree-limb crash upon his head. Therefore, next evening a -temptation came upon him; he remembered his marks, and ventured to bring -back his magic aurochs, and sit before the fire and watch him toss his -head and snort at his enemies. As time passed Ogi did a thing yet -bolder; he made a straight up-and-down mark, with two prongs underneath, -and a round circle on top; Ogi himself, a double Ogi, with his long -spear stopping the monster’s charge!</p> - -<p>Even that did not prove bad magic; Ogi did not sicken, no -lightning-daggers or tree-branches struck him. With practice, another -idea came; he indicated the body of the aurochs by two marks, one above -and one below, where the creature vanished into space. Between these -were other scratches indicating a shaggy coat; and in the head a round -spot, with a black hole punched deep by the toasting-stick—the eye of -the monster, glaring balefully at Ogi, and filling him with such thrills -as had never before passed along the nerves of a living organism.</p> - -<p>Of course such big magic could not long remain a secret. Ogi was -irresistibly driven to show his homemade aurochs to the tribe, and there -was a tremendous commotion. It was a miracle, all made clear by their -gruntings; they knew the monster instantly—an aurochs, and nothing -else! They cried out with delight at the cleverness of the -representation.</p> - -<p>(And ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and sixty-six years later, when -the writer was a little boy, he used to see in a certain home of wealth -which he visited, three pictures hanging in the dining-room, and -appealing to gastronomic emotions. One picture represented several -peaches on a platter, another represented half a dozen fish on a string, -the third showed two partridges hanging by their necks. The members of -the tribe of Ogi, now called the Merchants and Manufacturers Association -of Baltimore, would gather at supper parties and marvel at this big -magic. Here were works of art, and all knew they were works of art, and -knew exactly why; they would say of the fish: “You can see the very -shine of the scales!” Of the peaches: “You can rub the fuzz off them!” -Of the birds: “You can bury your hands in the feathers!<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_3">{3}</a></span>”)</p> - -<p>But when the first thrills had passed, the dwellers in the cave with Ogi -fell victims to panic. An aurochs was a fearful and destructive beast; -it was hard enough to have to kill him for food—but now to bring back -his angry spirit was tempting fate. In the Holy Mountain fronting the -cave dwelt the Great Hunter, who made all aurochs, and would be jealous -of usurpers. The Witch Doctor of the tribe, who visited the Great Hunter -and made spells for good luck—he was the proper person to make magic, -and not an up-start boy. So the Witch Doctor trampled out the drawing of -Ogi, and the Old Man of the tribe, who made the laws, drove him out from -the cave, and into the night where the sabre-toothed tiger roamed.</p> - -<p>(And last winter the writer stood one night at 43rd Street and Broadway, -a busy corner of New York, and across the front of a building a whole -block long he beheld great letters of violet fire, spelling three words: -THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. He entered the building, and there upon a silver -screen he saw a flash of lightning, followed by a burst of clouds and a -terrifying clatter of stage thunder, and out of the lightning and clouds -and thunder was unrolled before his eyes the Second Commandment: <i>Thou -shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything -that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in -the water under the earth.</i>)</p> - -<p>Ogi found a cave of his own, and escaped the sabre-tooth tiger. And not -all the furies of the Witch Doctor, nor even the Ten Commandments of the -Great Hunter, could take from his mind the memory of those delicious -thrills which had stolen over him when he made the magic aurochs in the -dirt. Being now alone, he had time for magic, and he got red stones and -covered the walls of his cave with pictured beasts of many sorts. And -presently came young men from the tribe, and beholding what he had done, -they took to visiting him in secret to share the forbidden thrills.</p> - -<p>(And on Main Street in our Great City, I can take you to a cave with -letters of fire over the top, called an “arcade,” and you may go in, and -find the magic of Ogi hidden in little boxes, into which you drop a -token made of copper, and see what is to be seen. One part of this cave -is labeled, <i>For Men Only</i>. I have never been into<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_4">{4}</a></span> this part, and -therefore do not know what magic the descendants of Ogi have there -hidden; but it is interesting to know that a nerve channel, once -established in a living organism, can be handed down through generations -to the number of three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three.)</p> - -<p>Now in the course of time it happened that there was war in the tribe -between the Old Man and the Next Oldest Man; and also between the Old -Witch Doctor and the Next Doctor. The rebels, having learned about the -magic of Ogi, desired to make use of it. There was a secret meeting, at -which the rebel Witch Doctor declared that he had had an interview with -the Great Hunter on the Holy Mountain, and the Great Hunter Himself had -given Ogi power to make the magic aurochs, and to kill them in magic -hunts. In other words, said the Witch Doctor, Ogi was an Inspired -Artist; and if he and his friends would help the new party into power, -Ogi would become Court Painter, and his scratches would be raised to the -status of Ritual. Needless to say, Ogi was delighted at that, and -likewise his friends, some of whom had learned to make scratches almost -as good as Ogi’s, and who desired now to become Inspired Artists, and to -decorate the cave walls and weapons of the tribe.</p> - -<p>But one provision must be made clear, said the rebel Witch Doctor; Ogi -and his friends must understand that they were to glorify the magic of -this particular Witch Doctor. When they portrayed hunting, they must -make it plain that it was the new Old Man who was head of the hunt; they -must make him wonderful and fearful to the tribe. Ogi and his pupils -answered that so long as they were permitted to make drawings of aurochs -and of hunters, it made not the slightest difference what aurochs and -what hunters they portrayed. Art was a thing entirely aloof from -politics and propaganda. And so the bargain was settled; the banner of -insurrection was raised, and the new Old Man became head of the tribe, -and the new Witch Doctor set up his magic behind the aurochs-skin -curtains in the far end of the cave; and Ogi made many pictures of both -of them.</p> - -<p>(And I have walked through the palaces of kings, and through temples and -cathedrals in many lands, and have seen long rows of portraits of the -Old Men of many<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_5">{5}</a></span> tribes, clad in robes of gorgeous colors, and wearing -upon their heads crowns of gold and flashing jewels; they were called -kings and emperors and dukes and earls and princes and captains of -industry and presidents of chambers of commerce. I have seen also the -portraits and statues of Witch Doctors of many varieties of magic; they -were called popes and priests and cardinals and abbots and college -presidents and doctors of divinity. And always the paintings were called -Old Masters.)</p> - -<p>So Ogi became Court Painter and painted the exploits of his tribe. And -when the tribe went out to battle with other tribes, Ogi made pictures -to show the transcendent beauty of his tribe, and the unloveliness of -the tribe they were to destroy.</p> - -<p>(And when my tribe went out to battle, its highly paid magazine -illustrators made pictures of noble-faced maidens shouting war-cries, -and it was called a Liberty Bond Campaign. And the story-tellers of my -tribe became martial, and called themselves Vigilantes.)</p> - -<p>Now Ogi throve greatly, developing his technique, so that he could show -all kinds of beasts and men. The fame of his magic spread, and other -tribes came to visit the caves and to marvel at his skill, and to gaze -reverently upon the Inspired Artist.</p> - -<p>(And in a certain hotel restaurant in New York I was admitted behind the -magic red cord which separates the great from the unheard of, and -sitting at a table my companion enlightened me with discreet nods and -whispers, saying: “That is Heywood Broun; and next to him is Rita -Weiman; and that’s Mencken just coming in; and that round little man in -the brown suit and the big spectacles is Hergesheimer.”)</p> - -<p>The fame of Ogi, and the magic of which he was master, brought thrills -to the young women of the tribe, and they cast themselves at his feet, -and so his talent was not lost to future generations.</p> - -<p>(And in the galleries of Europe I gazed upon miles of madonnas—madonnas -mournful and madonnas smiling, madonnas with wavy golden hair and -madonnas with straight black hair—but never a madonna that was not -plump, manicured and polished and robed in silks and satins, as became -the mistresses of court painters, and of popes and cardinals and abbots -able to pay for publicity.)<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_6">{6}</a></span></p> - -<p>The sons and grandsons of Ogi cultivated his magic, and found new ways -to intensify the thrills of art. They learned to make clay figures, and -to carve the Old Men of the tribe and the Witch Doctors out of wood and -stone.</p> - -<p>(And just before the war, being in Berlin, I was taken by a friend for a -drive down the Sieges Allée, between rows of white marble monsters in -halberd and helm and cowl and royal robes, brandishing sceptres and -mitres, battle-axes and two-bladed swords. Being myself a barbarian, I -ventured to titter at this spectacle; whereupon my friend turned pale, -and put his fingers upon my lips, indicating the driver of the hack, and -whispering how more than once it had happened that presumptuous -barbarians who tittered at the Old Men of the Hohenzollern tribe had -been driven by a loyal hackman straight to the police station and to -jail.)</p> - -<p>Likewise the sons of Ogi learned to make noises in imitation of the -songs of birds, and so they were able to bring back the thrills of first -love. They learned to imitate the rolling of thunder, and the clash of -clubs and spears in battle fury, and so they were able to renew the -glory of the hunt and the slaughter.</p> - -<p>(And in the year 1870 the Khedive of Egypt offered a prize of ten -thousand pounds to that descendant of Ogi who should make the most -powerful magic out of his ancestral slaughterings; and now, throughout -all civilization, the masters of the machines of slaughter put on their -honorific raiment, and escort their pudgy wives, bedecked with jewels, -to performances of their favorite grand opera, “Aida.”)</p> - -<p>Likewise the descendants of Ogi learned to enact their adventures in -imitation hunts. Inspired by music, they would dance about the -camp-fire, thrusting their weapons into a magic aurochs, shouting when -they saw him fall, and licking their chops at the taste of imaginary -flesh.</p> - -<p>(And in thirty thousand “movie” houses throughout the United States the -tribes now gather to woo and win magic darlings of luxury, and lick -their chops over the acquirement of imaginary millions; also to shudder -at wicked Russian Bolsheviks with bristling beards, at villainous “Red” -agitators with twisted faces, and at such other spectacles as the Old -Men and the Witch Doctors<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_7">{7}</a></span> prepare for them, according to instructions -from the Great Hunter on the Holy Mountain.)</p> - -<p>Three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three generations have passed, -and in every generation the descendants of Ogi have had to face the -problem of their relationship to the Old Men and the Witch Doctors. Ogi -himself was a hunter, who slew his aurochs with his own hand, and -butchered and cooked his meat before he ate it. But now it has been long -since any descendant of Ogi has driven a spear through the eye of a -charging aurochs. They have become specialists in the imaginary; their -hands adjusted, not to spears and stone hatchets, but to brushes and -pencils, fountain-pens and typewriter keys. So, when they are cast out -from the tribe they can no longer face the sabre-toothed tiger and find -meat for themselves and their beautiful women; so, more than ever, the -grip of the Old Men and the Witch Doctors grows tight upon them. More -than ever it is required that their pictures and stories shall deal with -things of which the Old Men and the Witch Doctors approve; more than -ever they are called upon to honor and praise the customs of their -tribe, as against the customs of all other tribes of men or angels.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II<br /><br /> -WHO OWNS THE ARTISTS?</h2> - -<p>Many and various are the art-forms which the sons and grandsons of Ogi -have invented; but of all these forms, the one which bores us most -quickly is the parable—a little story made up for the purpose of -illustrating a special lesson. Therefore, I hasten to drop Ogi and his -sons and grandsons, and to say in plain English that this book is a -study of the artist in his relation to the propertied classes. Its -thesis is that from the dawn of human history, the path to honor and -success in the arts has been through the service and glorification of -the ruling classes; entertaining them, making them pleasant to -themselves, and teaching their subjects and slaves to stand in awe of -them.</p> - -<p>Throughout this book the word artist is used, not in the narrow sense -popular in America, as a man who paints pictures and illustrates -magazines; but in its broad<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_8">{8}</a></span> sense, as one who represents life -imaginatively by any device, whether picture or statue or poem or song -or symphony or opera or drama or novel. It is my intention to study -these artists from a point of view so far as I know entirely new; to ask -how they get their living, and what they do for it; to turn their -pockets inside out, and see what is in them and where it came from; to -put to them the question already put to priests and preachers, editors -and journalists, college presidents and professors, school -superintendents and teachers: WHO OWNS YOU, AND WHY?</p> - -<p>The book will present an interpretation of the arts from the point of -view of the class struggle. It will study art works as instruments of -propaganda and repression, employed by the ruling classes of the -community; or as weapons of attack, employed by new classes rising into -power. It will study the artists who are recognized and honored by -critical authority, and ask to what extent they have been servants of -ruling class prestige and instruments of ruling class safety. It will -consider also the rebel artists, who have failed to serve their masters, -and ask what penalties they have paid for their rebellion.</p> - -<p>The book purposes to investigate the whole process of art creation, and -to place the art function in relation to the sanity, health and progress -of mankind. It will attempt to set up new canons in the arts, -overturning many of the standards now accepted. A large part of the -world’s art treasures will be taken out to the scrap-heap, and a still -larger part transferred from the literature shelves to the history -shelves of the world’s library.</p> - -<p>Since childhood the writer has lived most of his life in the world’s -art. For thirty years he has been studying it consciously, and for -twenty-five years he has been shaping in his mind the opinions here -recorded; testing and revising them by the art-works which he has -produced, and by the stream of other men’s work which has flowed through -his mind. His decisions are those of a working artist, one who has been -willing to experiment and blunder for himself, but who has also made it -his business to know and judge the world’s best achievements.</p> - -<p>The conclusion to which he has come is that mankind is today under the -spell of utterly false conceptions of what art is and should be; of -utterly vicious and per<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_9">{9}</a></span>verted standards of beauty and dignity. We list -six great art lies now prevailing in the world, which this book will -discuss:</p> - -<p>Lie Number One: the Art for Art’s Sake lie; the notion that the end of -art is in the art work, and that the artist’s sole task is perfection of -form. It will be demonstrated that this lie is a defensive mechanism of -artists run to seed, and that its prevalence means degeneracy, not -merely in art, but in the society where such art appears.</p> - -<p>Lie Number Two: the lie of Art Snobbery; the notion that art is -something esoteric, for the few, outside the grasp of the masses. It -will be demonstrated that with few exceptions of a special nature, great -art has always been popular art, and great artists have swayed the -people.</p> - -<p>Lie Number Three: the lie of Art Tradition; the notion that new artists -must follow old models, and learn from the classics how to work. It will -be demonstrated that vital artists make their own technique; and that -present-day technique is far and away superior to the technique of any -art period preceding.</p> - -<p>Lie Number Four: the lie of Art Dilettantism; the notion that the -purpose of art is entertainment and diversion, an escape from reality. -It will be demonstrated that this lie is a product of mental -inferiority, and that the true purpose of art is to alter reality.</p> - -<p>Lie Number Five: the lie of the Art Pervert; the notion that art has -nothing to do with moral questions. It will be demonstrated that all art -deals with moral questions; since there are no other questions.</p> - -<p>Lie Number Six: the lie of Vested Interest; the notion that art excludes -propaganda and has nothing to do with freedom and justice. Meeting that -issue without equivocation, we assert:</p> - -<p><i>All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; -sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.</i></p> - -<p>As commentary on the above, we add, that when artists or art critics -make the assertion that art excludes propaganda, what they are saying is -that their kind of propaganda is art, and other kinds of propaganda are -not art. Orthodoxy is my doxy, and heterodoxy is the other fellow’s -doxy.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_10">{10}</a></span></p> - -<p>As further commentary we explain that the word morality is not used in -its popular sense, as a set of rules forbidding you to steal your -neighbor’s purse or his wife. Morality is the science of conduct; and -since all life is conduct it follows that all art—whether it knows it -or not—deals with the question of how to be happy, and how to unfold -the possibilities of the human spirit. Some artists preach -self-restraint, and some preach self-indulgence; and both are preachers. -Some artists says that the purpose of art is beauty, and they produce -beautiful art works to demonstrate the truth of this doctrine; when such -art works are completed, they are beautiful demonstrations of the fact -that the purpose of art is to embody the artist’s ideas of truth and -desirable behavior.</p> - -<p>What is art? We shall give a definition, and take the rest of the book -to prove it. We hope to prove it both psychologically, by watching the -art process at work, and historically, by analyzing the art works of the -ages. We assert:</p> - -<p><i>Art is a representation of life, modified by the personality of the -artist, for the purpose of modifying other personalities, inciting them -to changes of feeling, belief and action.</i></p> - -<p>We put the further question: What is great art? We answer:</p> - -<p><i>Great art is produced when propaganda of vitality and importance is put -across with technical competence in terms of the art selected.</i></p> - -<p>As commentary we add that whether a certain propaganda is really vital -and important is a question to be decided by the practical experience of -mankind. The artist may be overwhelmingly convinced that his particular -propaganda is of supreme importance, whereas the experience of the race -may prove that it is of slight importance; therefore, what was supposed -to be, and was for centuries taken to be a sublime work of art, turns -out to be a piece of trumpery and rubbish. But let the artist in the -labor of his spirit and by the stern discipline of hard thinking, find a -real path of progress for the race; let him reveal new impulses for men -to thrill to, new perils for them to overcome, new sacrifices for them -to make, new joys for them to experience; let him make himself master of -the technique of any one of the arts, and put that propaganda -adequately and vitally before his fellows—and so, and so alone, he may -produce real and enduring works of art.</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Postscript</span></p> - -<p>Manifestly, all this depends upon the meaning given to the term -propaganda. The writer thought that he could trust his critics to look -it up in the dictionary; but during the serial publication of the book -he discovered that the critics share that false idea of the word which -was brought into fashion during the World War—this idea being itself a -piece of propaganda. Our own martial fervor was of course not -propaganda, it was truth and justice; but there crept in an evil enemy -thing, known as “German propaganda”; and so the word bears a stigma, and -when this book applies it to some honorable variety of teaching, the -critics say that we are “stretching its meaning,” and being absurd.</p> - -<p>But all we are doing is to use the word correctly. The Standard -Dictionary defines propaganda as: “Effort directed systematically toward -the gaining of support for an opinion or course of action.” This, you -note, contains no suggestion of reprobation. Propaganda may be either -good or bad, according to the nature of the teaching and the motives of -the teacher. The Jesuits have been carrying on a propaganda of their -faith for three hundred years, and one does not have to share this faith -in order to admit their right to advocate it. The present writer has for -twenty-one years been carrying on a propaganda for Socialism, and has a -sturdy conviction that his time has not been wasted.</p> - -<p>We take certain opinions and courses of action for granted; they come to -us easily, and when in a poem or other work of art we encounter the -advocacy of such things, it does not seem to us propaganda. Take, for -example, that favorite theme of poets, the following of our natural -impulses; it is pleasant to do this, and the poet who gives such advice -awakens no opposition. But it is different in the case of ideas which -require concentration of the attention and effort of will; such ideas -trouble and repel us, we resent them, and the term “propaganda” is our -expression of resentment. For example, the old poet Herrick advises:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Old time is still a-flying,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And this same flower that smiles today,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Tomorrow will be dying.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">Here is an attitude of relaxation toward life; the poet gives his advice -under a beautiful simile and with alluring melody, and therefore it is -poetry. If we should call it propaganda, all critics would agree that we -were “stretching the word,” and being absurd. But now, take four lines -by Matthew Arnold:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Charge once more, then, and be dumb!<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Let the victors, when they come,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When the forts of folly fall,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Find your body by the wall.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">Here is an utterance of exactly the opposite kind, an utterance of moral -conviction and resolution; the poet is bidding us fight for truth and -justice. Like Herrick, he has chosen an effective simile, and has put -music and fervor into his message; as poetry his lines are exactly as -good as Herrick’s; and yet, if we called them propaganda, how many -critics would object?</p> - -<p>This book will endeavor to demonstrate that exactly the same thing -applies to the phenomena of the class struggle, as they appear either in -real life or in works of art. It comes easy to human beings to accept -society as it is, and to admire the great and strong and wealthy. On the -other hand, it gives us a painful wrench to be told that there are moral -excellences and heroic splendors in the souls of unwashed and -unbeautiful workingmen. We resent such ideas, and likewise the persons -who persist in forcing them into our minds; which explains why all -orthodox critics agree that Jesus and Tolstoi are propagandists, while -Shakespeare and Goethe are pure and unsullied creative artists. Such -distinction between “art” and “propaganda” is purely a class distinction -and a class weapon; itself a piece of ruling-class propaganda, a means -of duping the minds of men, and keeping them enslaved to false standards -both of art and of life.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_11">{11}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III<br /><br /> -ART AND PERSONALITY</h2> - -<p>We have promised to prove our thesis psychologically, by watching the -art process at work, and historically, by studying the art works of the -ages. We begin with the former task.</p> - -<p>Let us investigate the art process in its elemental forms, as we have -seen them in the story of Ogi. Art begins as the effort of man to -represent reality; first, for the purpose of bringing it back to his own -mind, and second, for the purpose of making it apprehensible to others. -Just as Ogi would seek for ways to keep the meat of the aurochs for as -long as possible so that he might eat it, so he would keep the memory of -the aurochs so that he might contemplate it. And just as he would share -the meat of the aurochs in a feast with his fellows, and derive honor -and advantage therefrom, so he would use a picture of the aurochs, or a -story of the hunt, or a song about it, or a dance reproducing it.</p> - -<p>Thus we note two motives, the second of them predominantly social. It is -this impulse to communicate ideas and emotions to others, that becomes -the dominant motive in art, and is the determining factor in the -greatness of art. We share Ogi’s memory of the hunt, his thrills of -fear, his furious struggle, his triumph over a chunk of brutal and -non-rational force. Try it on your own little Ogis, and you will find -they never tire of hearing about the aurochs hunt; and—here is the -essential point—while hearing, they are living in the minds of others, -they are becoming social beings. So through the ages the race has -developed its great civilizing force, the sympathetic imagination, which -has brought the tribes together into nations, and ultimately may bring -the nations into the human race.</p> - -<p>The pleasures which we derive from a picture or representation of -reality are many and complicated. There is, first of all, the pleasure -of recognition. In its cruder form it is like guessing a puzzle; in more -mature reproductions we have the pleasure of following the details. -“That is old Smith,” we say—“even to the wart on his nose!” We say: -“You can see the shine of the fish’s scales, you can wipe the fuzz off -the peach, you can bury<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_12">{12}</a></span> your hands in the birds’ feathers!” But is that -all there is to art? Manifestly not, for if it were, the sons and -grandsons of Ogi would have been put out of business by the photographic -camera. You can take a microscope to the product of a camera, and -discover endless more details—a bigger magic than any son or grandson -of Ogi has achieved.</p> - -<p>But even supposing that a micro-photograph were the highest art, still -you could not get away from the influence of personality. There would -always remain the problem: Upon what shall the camera-lens be focussed?</p> - -<p>The first artist I met in my life was a painter, the late J. G. Brown. -He used to paint pictures of newsboys and country urchins, and the -quaint-looking old fellows who loaf in cross-roads stores. As a boy I -watched him at work, and roamed about the country with him when he -selected his subjects. At this distance I remember only two things about -him, his benevolent gray beard, and the intense repugnance he expressed -when I pointed out an old war veteran who had lost an arm. Deformity and -mutilation—oh, horrible! Never could an artist tolerate such a subject -as that!</p> - -<p>But growing older, I observed that some of the world’s greatest artists -had made a habit of painting mutilations and deformities. I saw “Old -Masters” portraying crucifixions and martyrdoms; I saw the nightmares of -Doré, and the war paintings of Verestchagin. So I understand the -difference between a man who wishes to probe the deeps of the human -spirit, and one who wishes merely to be popular with children and -childish-minded adults. The late J. G. Brown was a “realist,” according -to the popular use of the term; that is, having selected a subject, he -painted him exactly as he was; but by deliberately excluding from his -artistic vision everything suggesting pain and failure, he left you as -the sum total of his work an utterly false and sentimental view of life.</p> - -<p>Most artists go even further in imposing their personality upon their -work. Having selected a subject, they do not reproduce it exactly, but -modify it, emphasizing this trait or that. This process is known as -“idealizing.” The word is generally understood to mean making the thing -more pretty, more to the beholder’s taste; but this is a misuse of the -word. To idealize a subject means to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_13">{13}</a></span> modify it according to an idea, to -make it expressive of that idea, whether pleasing or otherwise. Henry -James tells a story about a portrait painter, who takes as his subject a -prominent man; divining the fundamental cheapness and falsity of the -man’s character, he paints a portrait which brings out these qualities, -and so for the first time reveals the man to the world, and causes the -man’s wife to leave him. That is one kind of “idealizing”; but -manifestly the portrait painter who practiced that method would have a -hard time to find sitters.</p> - -<p>What generally happens in such cases we saw when Ogi was invited to -portray the Witch Doctor and the Old Man of his tribe. The last great -hero of the Hohenzollerns, who paid for those white marble monsters at -which I tittered in the Sieges Allée, is cursed with a withered left -arm, a cause of agonies of humiliation to his strutting soul. In his -photographs you will see him carefully posed, so that his left arm is -partly turned away. But how about the countless paintings he had made of -himself? Do you imagine that the painter ever failed to supply a sound -and sturdy left arm? In the same way, in the pictorial labors of all the -Ogis of Egypt, you will find the ruler always represented as of abnormal -stature. Manifestly, in a settled empire the ruler will be of smaller -stature than his fighting men, because he will be coddled in childhood; -but the smaller he becomes in reality, the more rigid the art convention -that he is big.</p> - -<p>It was for offenses such as this that Plato drove the artists out of his -Republic. They were liars and pretenders, the whole tribe, and destroyed -men’s respect for truth. But as a matter of fact, this kind of -idealizing of rulers and fighting men may be entirely sincere. The -artist is more sensitive than his fellowmen—that is what makes him an -artist; he shrinks from pain and violence, and feels a real awe for -authority. He thinks his sovereign is bigger in spirit; and so, in -making him bigger in body, the artist is acting as a seer and -philosopher, bringing out an inner truth. Such is the clue to the -greater part of our present-day art standards; snobbery and -subservience, timidity and worship of tradition, also bragging and -strutting and beating of tom-toms. Every little tea-party poet and -semi-invalid cherishes a strong and cruel dream—Nietzsche with his -Blond Beast, and Carlyle<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_14">{14}</a></span> with his Hero-worship, and Henley with his -Song of the Sword, and Kipling with his God of our Fathers, known of -old, Lord of our far-flung battle-line.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV<br /><br /> -THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE</h2> - -<p>Little by little we now begin to note the outlines of Ogi’s art code. -Two negative propositions we may consider as clear: Ogi does not paint -the thing as it really is; and he does not paint the thing as he sees -it. The former he could not do, for he does not know what the thing -really is; and the second he would consider bad manners, bad morals and -bad taste. Ogi paints the thing as he thinks it ought to be; or, more -commonly, he paints the thing as he thinks other people ought to think -it to be.</p> - -<p>And now comes the question: Why, having chosen his subject, does Ogi -idealize it according to one idea, and not according to another? Are -such decisions matters of accident or whim? Assuredly not; for human -psychology has its laws, which we can learn to understand. We ask: What -are the laws of Ogi, his hand and his eye and his brain? What forces -determine that he shall present his “reality” in this way and not in -that?</p> - -<p>The first thing to say is: Don’t ask Ogi about it, for he cannot tell -you. Ogi is not at all what he thinks he is, and does not produce his -works of art from the motives he publishes to the world. We shall find -that the fellow has been almost too shrewd—he has contrived a set of -pretenses so clever that he has fooled, not merely his public, but -himself. He who would produce a great work of art, said Milton, must -first make a work of art of his own life. Ogi has taken this maxim -literally, and got out a fancy line of trade-lies.</p> - -<p>It is perfectly plain that the artist is a social product, a member of a -tribe and swayed by tribal impulses. But you find him denying this with -passion, and picturing himself as a solitary soul dwelling in an ivory -tower, galloping through the sky on a winged horse, visited and directed -by heaven-sent messengers, and wooed by mysterious lovely ladies called -Muses. At the same time, however, he wants at least one lady love who is -real; and this lady<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_15">{15}</a></span> love does not often share his interest in the -imaginary lady loves. On the contrary, she is accustomed to point out -the brutal fact that Ogi wants three good chunks of aurochs meat every -twenty-four hours; also, the lady herself wants a little meat—and more -important yet, she wants it served according to the best tribal -conventions, those to which she was accustomed before she ran away and -married an artist. The tribal law decrees that the glass on her table -must be cut by hand, even though it is cut crooked; the linen on her -table must be embroidered by hand, because, if it is done wholesale, by -machinery, it is not “art.”</p> - -<p>Theoretically, it is possible for an artist to produce his art-works for -the approval of the imaginary Muses; but as a matter of fact you find -that the most solitary old Ogi has somebody, a faithful friend, or an -old housekeeper, or even a child, whose approval he craves. Even an -artist on a desert island will be thinking that some day a ship will -land there; while young and rebellious artists produce for a dream -public in the future. I myself did all my early work from that motive; -and in Voltaire I came upon what seemed to me the cruelest sentence ever -penned: “Letters to posterity seldom reach their destination!”</p> - -<p>Ogi must have an audience. So, in his selecting, his idealizing, and his -other varieties of feigning, he has always before him the problem: Will -this please my public? And to what extent? And for how long? There is no -birth control movement in Ogi’s brain; vast numbers of dream children -are born there, and he must select a few of them to be nourished and -raised up to reality, while he sentences the others to be starved and -buried.</p> - -<p>Having become a professional, living by his work, Ogi is under the -necessity of finding an audience that will feed him. And remember, it is -not merely the three chunks of aurochs meat per day, and three more for -Mrs. Ogi; it is the means of serving Mrs. Ogi’s meat in the fashion her -social position requires. Surely I do not have to prove the proposition -that Ogi cannot produce beautiful and inspiring works of art while Mrs. -Ogi is raising ructions in the cave!</p> - -<p>So comes the great struggle in the artist’s soul, a struggle which has -gone on for three thousand, three<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_16">{16}</a></span> hundred and thirty-three generations, -and may continue for as many more. Among the children of Ogi’s brain are -some he dearly loves, but who will not “sell.” There are others whom he -despises, but whom he knows the public will acclaim and pay for. “Which -shall it be?”</p> - -<p>The answers have been as various as the souls of artists. We shall see -how through the ages there have been hero artists and martyr artists, -men who have produced what they believed to be the best, in the face of -obloquy, ridicule, starvation, even the dungeon and the stake. But, -manifestly, these conditions are not the most favorable for the birth of -masterpieces. To develop an art technique requires decades of practice -and study. To feel other persons’ emotions intensely and reproduce them -according to some coherent plan; to devise new forms, and arrange -millions of musical notes or words or molecules of paint in a complex -design—all this requires intense and persistent concentration. Men -cannot do such work without leisure; neither can they do it while they -are despising themselves for doing it. So we may set down the following -as one of the fundamental art laws:</p> - -<p><i>The bulk of the successful artists of any time are men in harmony with -the spirit of that time, and identified with the powers prevailing.</i></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V<br /><br /> -THE LORD’S ANOINTED</h2> - -<p>Who pays for art? The answer is that at every stage of social -development there are certain groups able to pay for certain kinds of -art. These groups may be large or small, but they constitute the public -for that kind of art, and determine its quality and character; he who -pays the piper calls the tune. It should need no stating that -Rolls-Royce automobiles are not made according to the tastes of -rag-pickers and ditch-diggers, nor yet of poets and saints; they are -made according to the tastes of people who can afford to pay for -Rolls-Royce automobiles. If our thinking about the arts were not so -completely twisted by false propaganda, it would seem an axiom to say -that the first essential to understanding any art product is to -under<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_17">{17}</a></span>stand the public which ordered and paid for that art product.</p> - -<p>Some arts, of course, are cheaper than others. Ballads cost nothing; you -can make one up and sing it on any street corner. Hence we find the -ballad close to the people, simple and human, frequently rebellious. The -same thing applies to folk tales and love songs—until men take to -printing them in books, after which they develop fancy forms, -understandable only to people who have nothing to do with their time -except to play with fancy things.</p> - -<p>Beginning with the primitive art forms, it would be possible to arrange -the arts in an ascending scale of expensiveness, and to show that -exactly in proportion to the cost of an art product is its aristocratic -spirit, its subservience to ruling class ideals. Of all the art forms -thus far devised, the most expensive per capita is the so-called “grand -opera”; this grandeur has to be subscribed for in advance by the -“diamond horseshoe,” and consequently there has never been such a thing -as a proletarian grand opera—if you except the “Niebelung Ring,” which -was so effectively disguised as a fairy story that nobody but Bernard -Shaw has been able to decipher its incendiary message.</p> - -<p>Many years ago I was talking with a captain of industry, prominent in -New York political life. I spoke of the corruption of the judges, and he -contradicted me with a smile. “Our judges are not bought; they are -selected.” And exactly so it has been with our recognized and successful -artists; they have been men who looked up to the ruling classes by -instinct, and served their masters gladly and freely. If they did not do -so, they paid the penalty by a life of conflict and exile; if they -happened to be poor and friendless, they do not even receive the -gratitude of posterity, because their dream-children died unborn, and -were buried, along with their parents, in graves unknown. “Some mute, -inglorious Milton here may rest.”</p> - -<p>It will be our task to study the great art periods one after another, -taking the leading artists and showing what they were, what they -believed, how they got their livings, and what they did for those who -paid them. We shall find that everywhere they were members of their -group, sharing the interests and the prejudices, the hates and fears,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_18">{18}</a></span> -the jealousies and loves and admirations of that group. We shall find -them subject to all the social stresses and strains of the time, and -fighting ardently the battles of their class. For life is never a static -thing, it is always changing, always subjecting its victims to new -dangers, forcing them to new efforts. Either the ruling class is -threatened by the attacks of outside enemies, or else there is a new -class arising inside the community. In times of internal order and -prosperity, there come luxury and idleness, the degeneration of the -tribe; there come all sorts of novelties startling the -elders—modernists sapping the old time creeds, and flappers adopting -the vices of men.</p> - -<p>Such evils must be corrected; such enemies of the tribe must be put -down; and in the course of these labors, what chance is there that the -ruling classes will fail to make use of their most powerful weapon, that -of art? There is simply no chance whatever. Ogi will be called on by his -masters; or else he will act of his own impulse—he will lead the -crusade, singing the praises of the old time ways, “idealizing” the -ancestral heroes, the holy saints and the founding fathers, and pouring -ridicule upon the bobbed heads of the flappers. The critics will leap to -Ogi’s support, hailing him as the Lord’s own anointed, a creator of -masterpieces, dignified, serene, secure in immortality. This is art, the -critics will aver, this is real, genuine, authentic art; while out there -in the wilderness somewhere howls a lone gray rebellious wolf, attacking -and seeking to devour everything that is beautiful and sacred in -life—and the howling of this wolf is not art, it is vile and cheap -propaganda.</p> - -<p>The critics are certain that the decision is purely a question of -aesthetics; and we answer that it is purely a question of class -prestige. They are certain that art standards are eternal; and we answer -that they are blown about by the winds of politics. Social classes -struggle; some lose, and their glory fades, their arts decay; others -win, and set new standards, according to their interests. The only -permanent factors are the permanent needs of humanity, for justice, -brotherhood, wisdom; and the arts stand a chance of immortality, to the -extent that they serve such ideals.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_19">{19}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI<br /><br /> -ARTIFICIAL CHILDHOOD</h2> - -<p>The reader who shares the art beliefs now prevalent in the world will be -quite certain that the ideas here being expounded are fantastic and -absurd. Among those who thus differ is a friend of mine, a very great -poet who is patiently reading the manuscript and suffering, both for -himself, and for all poets who will follow him. He writes: “There is and -should be such a thing as the enjoyment of what we are pleased to term -‘pure’ beauty.” And again: “You must believe either that we have a right -to play, in which case the poet-who-doesn’t-preach is justified, or -believe the contrary, with its corollary of a coming race of solemn -scientific monsters.”</p> - -<p>I do not want to gain an argument by the easy device of omitting -everything that does not help me; therefore I take up this friend’s -contentions. Manifestly an element of play is essential to all art; it -is what distinguishes art from other forms of expression, essays, -sermons, speeches, mathematical demonstrations. If we do not emphasize -this play element, it is not from failure to realize the difference -between a work of art and an essay, a sermon, a speech or a mathematical -demonstration; it is merely because the play element in art is -recognized by everyone, to the exclusion of the element of rational -thought and purpose, which is no less essential.</p> - -<p>Let us ask: what is play? The answer is: play is nature’s device whereby -the young train themselves for reality. Two puppies pretending to bite -each other’s throats, learn to fight without having their throats torn -in the process. So all young creatures develop their faculties; and this -function is carried right up into modern art products. From many new -novels I may learn, without risking the fatal experiment, what will -happen to me if I permit the wild beast of lust to get me by the throat.</p> - -<p>Let us have another principle, to guide us in our analysis:</p> - -<p><i>Art is play, having for its purpose the development of human faculties, -and experiment with the possibilities of life.</i></p> - -<p>But notice this distinction. Two puppies, leaping at<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_20">{20}</a></span> each other’s -throats and dodging away, do not reason about what they are doing; they -are guided by instinct. But a modern novelist knows what he is doing; he -is thinking ordered thoughts about life, and making a deliberate record -thereof. So we have a second principle:</p> - -<p><i>Art is play, to the extent that it is instinctive; it is propaganda -when it becomes mature and conscious.</i></p> - -<p>Manifestly, art can never be entirely play, because no human being is -entirely instinctive; nor can it be entirely propaganda—if it is to -remain art, it must keep the play form. Moreover, the play element must -be real, not simply a sham; the work must be a representation of life so -skillful that we can pretend to take it for actuality. Wilkie Collins -gave his formula for success as a fiction writer: “Make ’em laugh, make -’em cry, make ’em wait.” In other words, make ’em do just what they -would have to do, if they were taking part in actual life. This is the -one indispensable element: the artist, by whatever trick, must persuade -us that this is no trick, but reality.</p> - -<p>The function of play in adults has been ably studied in Dr. Patrick’s -book, “The Psychology of Relaxation.” We humans have only recently -developed the upper lobes of the brain, and cannot stand using them all -the time; it is necessary occasionally to let them rest, and to live in -the lower centers; in other words, to go back into childhood and play. -To my friend the Poet, who asks if I believe in play, I answer by -pointing to my tennis racquet. But what shall we say about adults who -play all the time? Modern science has a name for such people; it calls -them morons.</p> - -<p>If you are a moron artist, producing for a moron public, it will not -avail to argue with you. But we have to inquire: how comes it that the -art of morons is glorified and defended as “true” and “pure” art? How -comes it that the quality of enjoyment without thought, which is -characteristic of puppies and infants, comes to be considered a great -quality in adults? In the fields of industry and education, we know that -pitiful thing, the mind of a child in the body of a grown man. How comes -it that such defective mentality is glorified in the field of art?</p> - -<p>The answer is what you will expect from me. There is a class which owns -and runs the world, and wishes everything to stay as it is. As one of -the functions of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_21">{21}</a></span> ownership, this class controls culture and determines -taste. It glorifies the scholar, the man who walks backward through -life; and likewise it glorifies the art-moron, the man who has emotions -without brains.</p> - -<p>The so-called “purity” of art is thus a form of artificial childhood. -Just as the Chinese bind the feet of their women in order to keep them -helpless and acquiescent, so ruling-class culture binds the imagination -of the race so that it may not stride into the future. And if you think -that those who run the world’s thinking for the ruling class are not -intelligent enough to formulate such a purpose as this—my reply is that -you are as unintelligent as they would wish you to be, and you justify -all the contempt they feel for you.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII<br /><br /> -MRS. OGI EMERGES</h2> - -<p>We now assume as demonstrated the following propositions. First:</p> - -<p><i>The artist is a social product, his psychology and that of his art -works being determined by the economic forces prevailing in his time.</i></p> - -<p>And second:</p> - -<p><i>The established artist of any period is a man in sympathy with the -ruling classes of that period, and voicing their interests and ideals.</i></p> - -<p>If this be true, the next step to the understanding of art, and the -history of art periods past and present, is to understand the economic -forces controlling mankind; the evolution and struggle of classes.</p> - -<p>We get that far, when the argument is broken in upon by the particular -Mrs. Ogi who inhabits the cave where this manuscript is produced. Says -Mrs. Ogi: “In other words, you are going to give them your Socialist -lecture.”</p> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi’s husband: “But—”</p> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi, who finishes her husband’s sentences, as well as his -manuscripts: “You promised me to write one book without propaganda!”</p> - -<p>“But—” once more—“this is a book to prove that all books are -propaganda! And can I conduct a propaganda for propaganda that isn’t -propaganda?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_22">{22}</a></span>”</p> - -<p>“That depends,” says Mrs. Ogi, “upon how stupid you are.”</p> - -<p>She goes on to maintain that the purpose of all propaganda is to put -itself across; the essence of it being a new camouflage, which keeps the -reader from knowing what he is getting. “If you imagine that people who -take up a discussion of art standards are going to read a discourse on -the history of social revolutions, I call you silly, and you aren’t -going to alter my opinion by calling me Mrs. Ogi.”</p> - -<p>“My dear,” says the husband, in haste, “all that is not to be taken -literally. Mrs. Ogi is the wife of the artist in general; she is the -human tie that binds him to the group, and forces him to conform to -group conventions.”</p> - -<p>“I know—like all men, you want to have it both ways. Everybody will -assume—”</p> - -<p>“I won’t let them assume! It shall be explicitly stated that you are not -Mrs. Ogi.”</p> - -<p>“Let it be explicitly stated that there has never been any -hand-embroidered table-linen in this cave—never any sort of table-linen -but paper napkins since I’ve been in it!”</p> - -<p>“My dear,” says Ogi, patiently, “you were the one who first pointed out -to me the significance of hand-embroidered table-linen in the history of -art. You remember that time when we went to the dinner-party at Mrs. -Heavy Seller’s—”</p> - -<p>“Yes, I remember; and what you ought to do is to put that dinner-party -into your book. Entitle your next chapter ‘The Influence of Lingerie on -Literature,’ or, ‘The Soul of Man Under Silk Hosiery.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>“That’s not bad,” says Ogi, “I’ll use it later. Meantime, I’ll do my -best to liven up the argument as you request.” And so he retires and -cudgels his brain, and comes back with a new chapter—bearing, not the -dignified title of “The Evolution of Social Classes,” as he had planned, -but instead, a device to catch the fancy of the idle and frivolous<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_23">{23}</a></span>—</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII<br /><br /> -THE HORSE-TRADE</h2> - -<p>Twenty-five years ago an American, himself a victim of the commercial -system and dying of consumption, wrote a novel which contained a -description of a horse-trade. The novel was rejected by many publishers, -but came finally to one reader who recognized this horse-trading scene -as the epitome of American civilization. He persuaded the author to -rewrite the book, putting the horse-trade first, and making everything -else in the novel subsidiary; this was done, and the result was the most -sensational success in the history of American fiction. Young and old, -rich and poor, high and low, all Americans recognized in the opening -scene of “David Harum” the creed they believed in, the code they -followed, the success they sought: they bought six hundred thousand -copies of the book. I was young at the time, but I recall how all the -people I knew were shaking their sides with laughter, discussing the -story with one another, delighting in every step of the process whereby -David got the better of the deacon.</p> - -<p>Let us analyze this horse-trade, taking our data from the book. First, -there is the lie of the seller, describing a horse which he believes to -be useless. “He’s wuth two hundred jest as he stands. He ain’t had no -trainin’, an’ he c’n draw two men in a road wagin better’n fifty.” And -second, there is the lie of the purchaser, as the purchaser himself -boasts about it afterwards: “Wa’al, the more I looked at him, the better -I liked him, but I only says, ‘Jes so, jes so, he may be wuth the money, -but jes as I’m fixed now he ain’t wuth it to <i>me</i>, an’ I hain’t got that -much money with me if he was,’ I says.”</p> - -<p>So we see that in a horse-trade both the traders lie; and further we see -that each pretends to be telling the truth, and makes an effort to -persuade the other that he is telling the truth. Watching the ignoble -process, we perceive that neither of the traders is ever sure how far -his own lies are being accepted; nor is he sure what modicum of truth -there may be in the other’s lies. So each is in a state of uncertainty -and fear. When the process has been completed, one trader has a sense of -triumph, mingled with<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_24">{24}</a></span> contempt for the victim; the other trader has a -sense of hatred, mingled with resolve to “get square.”</p> - -<p>It is further to be pointed out that this conflict of wits, this modern -form of the duello, while it seems ruthless and cruel, yet has its own -strict ethical code. David would lie to the deacon, but he would not -pick the deacon’s pocket, nor would he stab the deacon in the back, no -matter how badly the deacon might have defeated him in commercial war. -We observe also that the author feels under the necessity of persuading -us that David would not have cheated the deacon unless he had first been -cheated <i>by</i> the deacon; this being the conventional lie of the -horse-trader turned novelist. We may also observe that next to the -impulse to acquisitiveness, the supreme quality of this Yankee farmer, -comes the impulse to sociability; having consummated his bargain, he -tells his sister about it, and the humanness of the story lies not -merely in the triumph of David, but in his pleasure in telling his -sister. And observe that David tells her the truth without reservation. -There might be other matters about which he would lie to his sister, but -so far as concerns this horse-trade, he knows that she will not betray -him to the deacon.</p> - -<p>When the first savage offered a fish in exchange for a cocoanut, and -made statements as to the freshness of the fish, and the difficulties -and perils of fishing, the trade-lie was a comparatively simple thing. -But in the process of industrial evolution, there have been developed so -many variations and complexities that an encyclopedia of occupational -deceptions would be required. Suffice it to say that the principle is -understood in every nation and clime, being embodied in innumerable -maxims and witticisms: <i>caveat emptor</i>: business is business; dog eat -dog; the devil take the hindmost; look out for Number One; do others or -they will do you; self-preservation is the first law of Nature. In a -civilization based upon commercial competition, <i>laissez faire</i> and -freedom of contract, the lie of the horse-trader becomes the basis of -all the really significant actions of men and women.</p> - -<p>So obvious is this, so clearly is it set forth in the wisdom of the -race, that at first thought it seems surprising that anyone could be led -into believing a trade-lie. But it is obvious that the test of a -competent liar is that he gets himself believed; like the endless -struggle between the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_25">{25}</a></span> gun-maker and the armor-plate maker, is the -struggle between the trader and his victim. The trader is aided by the -fact that an impulse towards constructiveness has been planted in the -human heart, which breeds a repugnance to dishonesty. So there are -ideals and aspirations, religions, loyalties and patriotisms; there are -the Christs and Galileos of history, the Parsivals and Don Quixotes of -legend. As the trader himself puts it, there is a sucker born every -minute. The trader kills a silly sheep, and puts the skin over his -wolf’s hide; so we have religious institutions and ethical systems, -philanthropic endowments, professional codes, political platforms; we -have honors, offices and titles, proprieties and respectabilities, -graces, refinements, etiquettes and standards of good taste. Many of -these things begin naively and in good faith; but in a society given up -to commercial competition, and dominated by systems of greed, they all -become trade-lies, and are used as weapons in the war of the classes.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX<br /><br /> -THE CLASS LIE</h2> - -<p>In the stage of economic evolution where the savage exchanges a fish for -a cocoanut, the balance of advantage in the trade may be equal. The -fisherman may need the cocoanut as badly as the cocoanut-gatherer needs -the fish. But as soon as we come to the stage where tokens are accepted, -there begins a shifting of the balance of advantage; for the reason that -the seller comes to specialize in the selling of one thing, whereas the -more complex the society, the more different things the buyer must buy, -and so he remains an amateur as to each. Moreover, the sellers learn to -combine; they form partnerships, firms, corporations, alliances, -leagues, associations, parties, classes; the buyer, on the other hand, -remains unorganized and helpless. He is the consumer, who takes what he -can get; he is the proletarian, who has only his chains to lose; he is -that plaything of the competitive process, that jest of the trader -through the ages, the general public. “The public be damned,” said a -great seller of railway transportation, and his phrase has become the -corner-stone of capitalist civilization.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_26">{26}</a></span></p> - -<p>Nineteen hundred years ago a revolutionary economist remarked, “To him -that hath shall be given; while from him that hath not shall be taken -away even that which he hath.” And this economic process is one which -tends continually to accelerate, multiplying itself by geometrical -progression. In present-day society, the sellers are nearly all -organized, while labor is only ten per cent organized, and the ultimate -consumer is not organized at all. We have thus the combination of a -monopoly price with a competitive wage, and the surplus wealth of the -world is drawn by automatic process into the hands of a small class. The -world’s selling power is now vested in combinations of capital, called -“trusts,” which present themselves in the aspect of enormous fortresses -of lies.</p> - -<p>Merely to give a catalogue of the various trade-lies embodied in the -daily operations of such a “trust” would require a volume. There are so -many kinds of lies that no one man can know them all. There are lies -carried in the heads and embodied in the practice of petty chiefs of -departments. There are lies so generally accepted and conventionalized -that the very liars do not know them as such, and are amazed and wounded -in the feelings when their attention is called to the truth. There are -lies so complicated that highly trained lawyers have been paid millions -of dollars to contrive them. There are lies so cleverly hidden that it -would take the restoring of tons of burned account-books to prove them. -There are lies so blazoned forth on billboards and in newspapers that -they have become part of the daily thought of the people, and have given -new words and phrases to the language.</p> - -<p>So comes the next stage in the evolution of the trade-lie. The owners of -trusts and combinations unite into parties, classes and governments for -the defense of their gains. They combine and endow and perpetuate their -trade-lies, making them into systems and institutions; and so we have -the Lie Wholesale, the Lie Sublimated, the Lie Traditional, the Lie -Classical; we have the Lie become Religion, Philosophy, History, -Literature, and Art.</p> - -<p>Turn back to Chapter II, and read the list of the six great art lies; -you may now understand who made them and why. Lie Number One, the Art -for Art’s Sake lie, the notion that the end of art is in the art work, -is a trade lie of the art specialist, the effort of a sacred caste to -main<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_27">{27}</a></span>tain its prestige and selling price. Lie Number Two, the lie of Art -Snobbery, the notion that art is for the chosen few, and outside the -grasp of the masses, is the same. Lie Number Three, the lie of Art -Tradition, the notion that new artists must follow old models, is a -self-protective device of those in power. Lie Number Four, the lie of -Art Dilettantism, the notion that the purpose of art is entertainment -and diversion, is a device of the culturally powerful to weaken and -degrade those upon whom they prey; just as the creatures of the -underworld get their victims drunk before they rob them. Lie Number -Five, the lie of the Art Pervert, the notion that art has nothing to do -with moral questions, is the same. Lie Number Six, the lie of Vested -Interest, is the sum of all the other lies, of all the infinite -cruelties of predatory, class-controlled culture.</p> - -<p>The sarcastic critic will say that I make the artist an extremely -knavish and dangerous person. My answer is that he may be, and -frequently is, an amiable and guileless child. His knaveries are class -knaveries, collective cruelties, conventions and attitudes to life which -have been produced as automatic reactions to economic forces; the -individual acquires them with no more conscious thought than is involved -in the assimilation of his food. Ogi lies and pretends, he cheats, robs -and murders, imaginatively speaking, by the same instincts that cause -him to blink his eyes in a bright light.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X<br /><br /> -MRS. OGI ORDERS JAZZ</h2> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi: “Well, I see you are having your way.”</p> - -<p>Now this is a sore subject in the cave. Each of the residents is -absolutely certain that it is always the other who has his or her way; -and each is able to cite chapter and verse, and frequently does so. -However, at present Ogi has a guilty conscience, so he speaks softly. “I -am almost through with my explanation of industrial evolution.”</p> - -<p>“Almost!” sniffs Mrs. Ogi. “How much more?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_28">{28}</a></span>”</p> - -<p>“Well, I have to show how successive classes emerge and acquire power—”</p> - -<p>“Until at last we see the inevitable triumph of the proletariat and the -establishment of the Co-operative Commonwealth! That will be so new to -your readers, and so delightfully exciting! And meantime they sit and -wonder when the scandals begin.”</p> - -<p>“Scandals?” says Ogi. “Have I said anything about scandals?”</p> - -<p>“You tell your readers you’re going to turn the artists’ pockets inside -out and show what is in them! If you don’t do it, they’ll say, ‘This -show is a frost!’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>I mention that Mrs. Ogi was brought up in exclusive social circles, -where never a breath of slang could pass her lips without some female -relative raising a finger and whispering: “Hush!” But times are -changing, and marriage becomes more and more a lottery.</p> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi’s husband: “Of course I intend to muck-rake individual -artists—”</p> - -<p>“Which artists?”</p> - -<p>“Well, I have to begin at the beginning—”</p> - -<p>“But you’ve already begun with the beginning of the world!”</p> - -<p>“I have to begin now with the first significant art.”</p> - -<p>Mrs. Ogi’s snort reminds her husband of the old days of the aurochs -hunt. “What the American people want to know is how many thousand -dollars a week Gloria Swanson is really getting, and what was Rupert -Hughes’ total income from ‘The Sins of Hollywood.’ Is all that to be put -off to the end of your book?”</p> - -<p>“But how can I deal with present-day art ahead of ancient art?”</p> - -<p>“You make me think of those interminable English novels, which begin -with the infancy of the hero, and get through public school at page -three hundred and something!”</p> - -<p>“But, my dear, there is some old literature that people are really -interested in. The Bible for example—”</p> - -<p>“The Hundred Best Books! Number two, Homer; number three, Shakespeare; -Number four, Paradise Lost—”</p> - -<p>“But you overlook the fact—the Bible is a best-seller!”</p> - -<p>“The people who buy it are not people who read about<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_29">{29}</a></span> art, or would ever -hear of a book on art theories. They are people like Mamma! Once upon a -time a book-agent offered her a set of the World’s Great Orations, and -she decided the dark red leather binding would go well with the -draperies in the drawing-room. Then a couple of weeks later came another -man, selling a set of books in dark green cloth. She decided these would -match the decorations in the billiard-room, so she bought them also, and -it wasn’t until afterwards that somebody noticed the family had two sets -of the same World’s Great Orations!”</p> - -<p>“But, my dear, there really is literature in the Bible.”</p> - -<p>“People have been told about literature in the Bible since they were -children in Sunday school, and there’s no idea in the whole world that -bores them quite so much.”</p> - -<p>“But that’s exactly the point! That’s what this book is for—to show how -real literature was alive in its own day, and is just as much alive in -the present day. Don’t you see what a fascinating theme: they had in -Judea the very same class struggle—”</p> - -<p>There has come that fanatical light into his eyes which Mrs. Ogi knows -so well; he means to make her sit and listen to a whole chapter—and -when she has the laundry to count, and the apples to boil for his -supper! “Go ahead and write it,” she says, in a weary voice. “But take -my advice and jazz it up!”</p> - -<p>So Ogi goes away and postpones his exposition of the successive -emergence of social classes; and instead of an impressive title such as -“Agrarian Revolt in Ancient Judea,” he begins—</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI<br /><br /> -THE POPULIST CONVENTION</h2> - -<p>From the New York “Sun,” July 4, the early 1890s:</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Kansas Kicking</span></p> - -<p><i>Cranks’ Convention in Tumult at Topeka</i></p> - -<p><i>Wild Asses of Prairie Bray</i></p> - -<p><i>Millennium by Majority Vote Scheduled for Next November</i></p> - -<p>Topeka, Kan., July 3. (Special to the “Sun.”) The open season for -devil-hunting is on in Topeka today. From<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_30">{30}</a></span> Nemaha County on the North to -Comanche on the South, from Cherokee County on the East to Cheyenne on -the West, the hunters are pouring into their state capital; money-devil -hunters and speculator-devil hunters, railroad-devil hunters and -rum-devil hunters. The streets of the city swarm with them, the lobbies -of the hotels are packed with them, spell-binders and oratorical -wizards, political quack-doctors and prohibitionist cranks, long-haired -men and short-haired women, partisans of free money, free land and free -love. For months they have been looking forward to this convention, -which is to wrest the powers of government from the hands of a predatory -plutocracy; today, if there is a lunatic in Kansas who is not in Topeka, -it is only because the Wall Street devil has got him behind bars in one -of the asylums.</p> - -<p>The lobby of the American House this evening is more like the menagerie -tent of a circus than like anything else ever seen in the effete East. -The convention opens at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, and tonight every -orator has a last chance to save the nation before the platform is made -up. Audiences are not necessary, everybody talks at once, and there are -a dozen men delivering exhortations, standing on the leather seats of -hotel-lobby chairs. Here is “Sockless” Jeremiah Simpson, expecting to be -nominated for Congress tomorrow. Coatless and tieless, his collar wilted -flat, he shouts to the corn-field cohorts his denunciations of the -blood-sucking leeches which have picked the bones of the farmers of -Kansas. Here is Isaiah Woe, weird figure having whiskers almost to his -belt and pants almost to his shoe-tops, waving his skinny arms and -justifying his surname—“Woe, woe, woe—woe unto this and woe unto -that—woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write -grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from -judgment, and to take away the rights from the poor of my people, that -widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless!”</p> - -<p>Isaiah is known as a “prophet” among this prairie population; he roars -the grievances of the dear peepul of the prairie-country, and shakes the -hayseeds and corn-dust out of his white whiskers until his audience -really believes it sees a halo about his head. He does not hesitate to -claim divine inspiration, declaring to the mob: “The Lord<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_31">{31}</a></span> hath anointed -me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the -broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives.”</p> - -<p>Isaiah has no rival in lung-power, unless it be Micah, the Pottawatomie -Prophet—“Mournful Mike,” as he is known in the state capital. This aged -replica of Uncle Sam is out on a cracker-box in front of the Elks’ Club, -and your reporter took down some of his sentences verbatim: “They build -up Washington with blood, and New York with iniquity. The heads thereof -judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the -prophets thereof divine for money.... Therefore shall Washington for -your sake be plowed as a field, and New York shall become heaps, and the -buildings of Wall Street as the high places of a forest.”</p> - -<p>There is a regiment of such calamity howlers and kickers, thirsting for -the blood of the money-devil. There is Elijah, known as the “boy orator” -from Kiowa County, and Angry Amos, the “Wild Man of Neosho.” There is -one John, who calls himself the Baptist, and has adopted the singular -habit of dipping his followers into water—though it must be stated that -few of them show the effects after a blistering hot day in Topeka. It is -reported and generally believed that the water-dipping prophet lives -upon the locusts which infest the Kansas corn-fields, together with wild -honey furnished by friendly bees in the cottonwoods along the creek -bottoms. Apparently, however, the prophet has not brought along a supply -of his customary provender, for your correspondent observed him this -afternoon partaking of sinkers and coffee in the railroad restaurant, -with a bunch of other wild asses from the prairie.</p> - -<p>Kansas is scheduled to have a new political party tomorrow; a party of -the peepul, to be run by prophets, none of whom will take their salaries -when they get elected to office. And what is to be the platform of this -party? Well, the government is to fix the price of wheat, and -freight-rates are to be reduced to a point which will compel holders of -railway securities to live on locusts and wild honey. All interest on -money is to be abolished; the prophets of the Lord call it “usury,” and -the plank in their platform on the subject reads as follows:</p> - -<p>“If thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_32">{32}</a></span> with thee, then thou -shalt relieve him, yea, though he be a stranger or a sojourner, that he -may live with thee: Take thou no interest of him, or increase; but fear -thy God that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him any -money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase.”</p> - -<p>And if that be not enough, bond slavery is to be forbidden by law, and -beginning with the year 1900, and every fifty years thereafter, all -debts are to be forgiven, and everybody is to have a fresh start. Well -may Jabez Smith, chairman of the State Committee of the Republican -party, watching this outfit of wild men and listening to their -conglomeration of lunacy, lift up his hands and cry out: “Was ist los -mit Kansas?”...</p> - -<p> </p> - -<p>Such was news according to the New York “Sun” of Charles A. Dana’s time; -the sort of news from which I got all my political ideas during boyhood. -Seven times every week I would read articles and editorials in that -tone, and laugh with glee over them; and then, every Sunday morning and -evening I would go to church, and listen while the preacher read the -words of Jeremiah and Isaiah and Micah and Elijah and Amos and John the -Baptist, and I would accept them all as the divinely inspired words of -God. How was I, poor lad, to know that the very same prophets were back -on earth, living the very same lives and making the very same -speeches—trying to save America, as of old they had tried to save -Judea, from the hands of the defilers and the despoilers?</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII<br /><br /> -KANSAS AND JUDEA</h2> - -<p>How did it happen that political agitators, living in the Mississippi -Valley at the end of the nineteenth century, were identical in spirit -with religious prophets in Asia Minor five hundred years before Christ? -The answer is that civilizations rise and fall, and history repeats -itself. Let me describe one historic process, and you watch my statement -phrase by phrase, and see if you can tell whether I am referring to -ancient Judea or to modern Kansas.</p> - -<p>A people traveled for a long distance, fleeing from<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_33">{33}</a></span> despotism and -seeking religious liberty. They were a primitive, hardy people, having a -stern faith in one God who personally directed their lives. They came to -a rich land, and conquered it by hard fighting, under this personal -direction of their God. They built homes, they gathered flocks and -herds, they accumulated wealth; and they saw this wealth pouring into -cities, to be absorbed by governing and trading classes. Their -agricultural democracy evolved into a plutocratic imperialism. The -landlords and the tax collectors left them nothing but a bare living; -the fruits of their labor paid for palaces and temples with golden -roofs, and for golden calves and monkey dinners, and rulers with a -thousand chorus girls.</p> - -<p>So there was revolt in the country districts, and one after another came -prophets of discontent. Always these prophets were radical in the -economic sense, voicing the wrongs of the poor and helpless, the widows -and the orphans. Always they were conservative in the social and -religious sense, calling the people back to simplicity and honesty of -life, to faith in the one true God. Always they used the symbols of the -old tribal creed; repudiating new-fangled divinities such as Baal and -Darwin, and gathering at Armageddon to battle for the Lord. Throughout -their lives they were stoned and persecuted and covered with ridicule; -when they died they became their country’s glory, and their words were -cherished and embodied in sacred records which school children were made -to study.</p> - -<p>Now, how much of that is Judea, and how much is Kansas?</p> - -<p>Let us make clear the point, essential to our present argument, that -from cover to cover the “Old Testament” is propaganda. Those who created -it created it as propaganda, having no remotest idea of anything else. -Nowadays our docile population reads it and accepts it as the literal -inspired Word—not realizing that the book is divided between two kinds -of propaganda, which exactly cancel each other: the propaganda of a -ruling class, teaching reverence for kings and priests, and the -propaganda of rebels, clamoring for the overthrow of these same kings -and priests!</p> - -<p>This Old Testament is also offered to us in the literature classes, so -it will be worth our while to consider it from that point of view. -Manifestly there is much of it<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_34">{34}</a></span> which never pretended to be literature. -There are weary chronicles of the doings of kings, and lists of their -sons and grandsons. You may find acres of this in our big libraries, but -it is classified as genealogy, not literature. Likewise there are the -laws of the Hebrews, which belong in the legal department. There are -architectural specifications for the temple, and rules of hygiene—all -important to a historian, but rubbish to anybody else. There are a great -number of legends which are eternally delightful to children, stories of -the creation and the fall of man, and of gods and devils and miracles, -precisely as important as similar stories among the ancient -Anglo-Saxons, or the ancient Greeks, or the ancient Egyptians, or the -ancient Hopis.</p> - -<p>Among these stories are a few which display fine feeling and narrative -skill, and so for the first time we have literature. There is one -attempt at a drama; it is crude and confused—any sophomore, having -taken a course in dramatic construction at a state university, could -show the author of the Book of Job how to clarify his theme and cut out -the repetitions. But in the midst of such crudities is magnificent -poetry, which our university courses have not yet taught us to equal. -Likewise there is some shrewd philosophy—and it is amusing to note that -our verbal inspirationalists accept the worldly-wise common sense of the -Proverbs and the bleak cynicism of Ecclesiastes as equally divine with -the fervor of Isaiah and the fanatical rage of Jeremiah.</p> - -<p>Finally, there is some lyric poetry of a spiritual nature, this also -full of repetition. If you are judging it as ritual, that is all right, -because ritual is intended to affect the subconscious, and repetition is -the essence of the process. The difference between ritual and literature -is that the latter makes its appeal to the conscious mind, where a -little repetition goes a long way.</p> - -<p>Dr. Johnson was asked his opinion of the feminist movement in religion, -and he said that “a woman preaching is like a dog walking on two legs; -it is not well done, but we are surprised that it is done at all.” I -think that if we examine our judgments carefully, we shall find that our -high opinion of ancient writings is on this basis. We do not really -judge them by modern standards, any more than we judge a child by adult -standards when he tries to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_35">{35}</a></span> wield a pen, or a hoe, or an oar. Our -pleasure in reading ancient writings is to note the beginnings of real -thinking, of mature attitudes toward life. We say: “By George, those old -fellows had a lot of sense after all!” But judging the Old Testament -strictly, as literature, not as antiquity, I say that everything which -is of serious value to a modern adult person could be gathered into an -extremely small volume, certainly not over thirty thousand words, or -four per cent of the total.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII<br /><br /> -THE COMMUNIST ALMANAC</h2> - -<p>From the “American Times” Sunday Review of Books, A. D. 1944</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">Satan Sanctified</span></p> - -<p><i>A New Religion Enters the Lists</i></p> - -<p>There come to the desk of a literary editor many volumes which could not -by any stretch of the imagination be considered as literature. But they -are printed and bound, and those who write them believe them of -importance, and others may be of the same opinion. So it becomes the -task of a reviewer to give an account of these volumes.</p> - -<p>The book now before us came through the mails, bearing no indication as -to the sender; and examination of the contents quickly reveals the -reason. Those who print and circulate the volume know that in so doing -they render themselves liable to the lethal gas chamber. Nevertheless, -they are impelled by fanaticism to incur the risk, so here is the result -on our desk. Technically, we believe the editor incurs penalties by -keeping the volume, instead of turning it over to the police -authorities. But it seems to us a matter of importance that the public -should know what sort of material is now being circulated among the -populace, and for that reason we give an account of the contents of the -“Communist Almanac for 1944.”</p> - -<p>It is perhaps a natural tendency of the human mind, an inevitable -process of history, that holders of proscribed opinions should see -themselves as martyrs, and endeavor to capitalize their sufferings for -political advantage. So, ever since the extermination of the Soviet -gov<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_36">{36}</a></span>ernment by the armed forces of the civilized world, the surviving -Communists, hiding in forests and holes in the ground, have been seeing -themselves as founders of a new religion. In this document which they -now put before us, we find the creed and ritual of this monstrous -perversion of the so-called proletarian mind, together with the -biographies of its founder and the acts of its leading martyrs.</p> - -<p>The founder is Nikolai Lenin, and, incredible as it may seem, this -person has been selected for sanctification! A couple of years before -his death, an almost successful attempt was made to assassinate him, and -the bullets then shot into his body are said to have been the final -cause of his death. That is sufficient to constitute martyrdom in the -Soviet formula, and to entitle Vladimir Ulianov to become a legend. For -a year after his death the Soviet government attempted to preserve his -body in mummy form; but this kind of immortality being unattainable, the -body was buried, and soon afterwards rumors began to spring up all over -Russia to the effect that Lenin had come back to life, and was -reappearing to his followers, giving them advice about the management of -his Bolshevik dictatorship. That was a miracle; so now Lenin is a divine -personage, and those who died in the faith of the “proletarian” -revolution are martyrs and saints. At least, that is the thesis of the -“Communist Almanac for 1944.”</p> - -<p>The volume opens with no less than four biographies of the founder, -alleged to have been composed by different followers who knew him -intimately, Mattiu Shipinsky, Marco Sugarmann, Luka Herzkovitz, and Ivan -Petchnikoff. The last, it appears, is a kind of philosopher, and -provides for the Bolshevik cult the mantle of a mystical and -metaphysical system. It is amusing to note that the four biographies go -into minute detail—and differ as to many of these details! They purport -to quote their founder verbatim—and his words on the same occasions are -seldom the same words! Most absurd yet, they cannot even agree about his -ancestry! In fact, they cannot agree about anything, except that he was -the most remarkable person who has ever lived on earth, the bearer of a -new revelation to mankind.</p> - -<p>Following the biographies, the “Almanac” proceeds to a long recital of -the doings of various propagandists of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_37">{37}</a></span> the cult, their travels over the -world in the interest of the “class struggle,” and the persecutions to -which they were subjected in various countries. It is a melancholy duty -to record that among these emissaries of disaster were several of -American birth and ancestry. One of the easy ways of achieving -sanctification under the Bolshevik system is to be bitten by a -body-louse, and to die of typhus. So among the Soviet apostles we find -the figure of John Reed, graduate of Harvard University, and traitor to -his country and his race.</p> - -<p>Next we have various communications from these agents of social chaos, -addressed to their deluded followers. This part of the volume is almost -comical, in the solemnity with which these precious words are recorded -and preserved for the benefit of posterity. Needless to say, the -communications contain exhortations to the party members to remain -steadfast in the faith, and to carry the message to their fellow -“wage-slaves.” This portion of the volume is known as the -“Epistles”—the word “epistle” being Russian for letter.</p> - -<p>Finally, there is a collection of miscellaneous prophesyings, attributed -to a former commissar under the Russian Bolshevik government. All we can -say concerning this part of the volume is that we have been unable to -find out what it means, and it seems destined to serve as an inspiration -to all the lunatics and would-be prophets of the next two thousand -years. It is called “Revelations,” and closes the amazing volume.</p> - -<p>We think the time has come when public sentiment should make plain that -the present laxity of the Department of Justice toward Communist -agitators, and the whole tribe of “parlor Bolsheviks” and “pinks,” will -no longer be tolerated. We should be sorry to see this country return to -the old days of the Democratic and Republican parties, and the oil -scandals of the Harding-Coolidge era. But when we read a collection of -perversities such as this “Communist Almanac,” we cannot but sigh for -the return of Palmer and Daugherty, when red-blooded hundred per cent -Americans set to work with vigor to preserve their country from the -fanatical propagandists of class greed.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_38">{38}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV<br /><br /> -GOD’S PROPAGANDA</h2> - -<p>We have before us another literary criticism, clipped from the “Roman -Times Weekly Review of Books” during the year 300, under the Emperor -Diocletian. It is word for word the same as that from the “American -Times” of 1944—the only difference being that one deals with an outlaw -party known as Bolsheviks, while the other deals with an outlaw sect -known as Christians. The Founder of this latter sect is described by the -“Roman Times” as a proletarian criminal, who was crucified for -disturbing the public peace under the Emperor Augustus Cæsar. His -followers have been hiding in catacombs and tombs, carrying on incessant -propaganda in defiance of the Roman law. In place of John Reed, the -“Roman Times” refers to a certain Paul, a renegade Roman gentleman and -former official of the empire. The good old days to which the “Roman -Times” looks back with longing, are the days of Nero, when these -incendiary fanatics were boiled in oil or fed to the lions. Under the -prodding of this most respectable “Times,” the Emperor Diocletian -undertook a new and ferocious persecution of the sect; but twenty-four -years afterwards the successor of Diocletian became converted to -Christianity, and adopted it as the official religion of the state, -entitled to persecute other religions.</p> - -<p>The reader who is a Christian will remind me that Jesus was a pacifist, -he was meek and gentle. To this I answer, the early social -revolutionists were likewise Utopians, appealing to love and -brotherhood. At the time the New Testament became fixed in its present -form, the Christians had never held power in any part of the world. When -they took power under the Emperor Constantine, they behaved like every -government in history—that is, they kept their power, using as much -force as necessary for the purpose. If the reader is shocked by the fact -that the Soviet government of Russia fought for two years a defensive -war on twenty-six fronts against its enemies, I invite him to consider -the Christian crusades, two centuries of offensive propaganda warfare. -If he is shocked by stories he has read about the Tcheka and its -torturing<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_39">{39}</a></span> of prisoners, I invite him to consult Lea’s “History of the -Spanish Inquisition.” Considering the series of religious wars which -made of Europe a shambles for more than a thousand years, it is safe to -assert that for every human life sacrificed by the Soviet revolution in -Russia, a hundred thousand lives have been taken in the name of the -gentle and lowly Jesus.</p> - -<p>But these are questions which will not be settled in a generation, nor -in a century; therefore we pass on, and take up the question of the New -Testament as literature. It has been generally so recognized, and we may -doubt if any writing ever collected in one volume has exercised as great -an influence upon the human race. And let it be noted that this -literature is propaganda, pure and simple; we may defy anyone to find a -single line in the Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, or the Book of -Revelations which was not produced as conscious and deliberate -propaganda.</p> - -<p>A critic highly regarded by the academic authorities when I was a -student in college was George Henry Lewes. I read his “Life of Goethe,” -and made note of his argument on behalf of “realist” as opposed to -“idealist” art. Goethe and Shakespeare are his examples of the former -type; and how obvious is their superiority to those “subjective” -artists, who “seek in realities only visible illustrations of a deeper -existence!” The critic takes as his test the production of “the grandest -generalizations and the most elevated types”; but it was evident to me, -even in my student days, that he reached his conclusion by the simple -device of overlooking the evidence on the other side. I introduce to you -four “idealist” artists who bear the names—perhaps pen-names—of -Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Will anyone maintain that the works of -Shakespeare and Goethe contain “grander generalizations” or “more -elevated types” than the Four Gospels? We set Jesus against Shakespeare, -and Buddha against Goethe, and leave it for the common sense of mankind -to decide.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_40">{40}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV<br /><br /> -MRS. PRESTONIA ORDERS PLUMBING</h2> - -<p>When I was a young man, groping my way into Socialism, I discovered that -the movement in and about New York had a patroness. Mrs. Prestonia -Martin was her name, and she had a beautiful home in the suburbs, and -another up in the Adirondacks. An assortment of well-bred radicals would -gather, and wait on themselves at table, and do their own laundry, and -scratch a bit in the garden, and feel they were on the front door-step -of the Co-operative Commonwealth. John Martin had been a member of the -Fabian Society in London, so we knew we were under the best possible -auspices, doing the exactly correct advanced things.</p> - -<p>But time committed its ravages upon the minds of my friends Prestonia -and John. They lost their vision of the Co-operative Commonwealth, and -when you went to the beautiful “camp” overlooking Keene Valley, you no -longer met young radicals, and no longer helped with the laundry; you -met sedate philosophers, and listened to Prestonia expounding the -mournful conclusion that humanity had never made any advance. The couple -took up a new crusade—to avert from womankind the horrors of politics. -The last time I met John, just before the war, he was an entirely -respectable member of the New York school board and smiled at me a -patronizing smile when I ventured to prophesy that inside of ten years -women would be voting in New York state. “You will never live to see -that!” said the prophet John.</p> - -<p>The psalmist expresses the wish that “mine enemy would write a book”; -and in this case mine enemy’s wife committed the indiscretion. I have -before me a scholarly-looking volume, published in 1910, entitled “Is -Mankind Advancing?” by Mrs. John Martin. I cite it as an outstanding -example of one variety of culture superstition; it reduces to absurdity -the arguments of one group of tradition worshipers. My old friend -Prestonia has discovered that the Greeks achieved a higher civilization -than has ever since existed on earth, and her demonstration that mankind -is not advancing is based on the exaltation<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_41">{41}</a></span> of Greek civilization over -everything that has since come along.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Prestonia does not really know very much about Greek civilization; -I can state that, because I had many discussions with her at the time -she was writing this book. What she has done is to take a history of -Greece and list the leading names, higgledy-piggledy, regardless of -their ideas, or of the parts they played, regardless of the fact that -they fought and even killed one another, regardless of the fact that -their doctrines contradict and cancel one another. They were Greeks, and -therefore they were great. Two or three hundred are listed, all men of -genius; and what names can you put against them?</p> - -<p>I ventured to suggest a number of names to my friend Prestonia; but you -see, my men were modern men, vulgar, common fellows who wore trousers, -and ate pie, and worked for dollars! Think of comparing Edison with -Archimedes—could anything be more absurd? Think of comparing Pasteur -with Hippocrates! “But, my dear lady,” I would argue, “Hippocrates -believed that disease was caused by ‘humors’; he believed that crises in -disease followed numerical systems.” Maybe that was true, said -Prestonia, but nevertheless, Hippocrates was the greatest physician that -ever lived. And she would have Socrates listed as one of the glories of -Athenian civilization—in spite of the fact that Athenian civilization -had compelled him to drink the hemlock! In her queer hall of fame the -imperialist Pericles, who led his country to ruin, and was convicted of -the theft of public money, takes rank as the greatest statesman in all -history, outranking Lincoln, who saved the American Union, and freed -several million slaves. A dissolute young despot, Alexander, who sighed -for new worlds to conquer, outranks George Washington, who founded a -nation of free men, and then retired to his plantation.</p> - -<p>After running over the list of all the achievements of modern literature -and art, politics and philosophy, science and industry, I was able at -last to find one thing which my friend Prestonia was unwilling to get -along without. She wanted to live in ancient Athens—but to have her -modern plumbing! And never once had it occurred to her that plumbing -means lead and copper and steel and brass and nickel and porcelain and -paint! Also mills in which these<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_42">{42}</a></span> things are produced, railroads or -motor trucks on which they are transported, factories in which the cars -and trucks are made! Also telegraph and telephone and electric light, -and bookkeeping systems and credit systems, and capital and labor, and -the Republican party and the Socialist movement!</p> - -<p>All this is preliminary to a study of the literature and art of ancient -Greece; to help us clear our minds of cant, and persuade us to face the -question: how much do we really admire Greek literature and Greek art, -and how much do we just pretend to admire it? How much is the -superiority of Greek civilization a reality, and how much is it a -superstition maintained by gentlemen who have acquired honorific -university degrees, which represent to them a meal ticket for the -balance of their sojourns on earth?</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI<br /><br /> -MRS. OGI ORDERS ETIQUETTE</h2> - -<p>“Well,” says Mrs. Ogi, “I see you have got down to the scandal.”</p> - -<p>Her husband looks pained. “Do you call that scandal?”</p> - -<p>“You accept people’s hospitality, and then come away and ridicule them, -and reveal secrets about how they got the family washing done—”</p> - -<p>“Secrets!” cries Ogi. “But that was a reform movement, a crusade!” After -reflection, he adds: “If I really wanted to tell scandals, I could do -it. I might hint that John lost his faith in the radical movement as a -result of auto-intoxication.”</p> - -<p>“Well, all I can say is that if you tell that, I’ll never speak to you -again.”</p> - -<p>Ogi answers meekly, “Excuse me.” And then: “What do you think of my -thesis?”</p> - -<p>“Well,” says Mrs. Ogi, “I see, of course—you are trying to irritate and -shock people as much as possible. Are you going to say that Greek art is -propaganda?”</p> - -<p>“I can’t possibly help saying it.”</p> - -<p>“You know that this art is always cited as the perfect type of pure art, -the expression of joy and love of beauty.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_43">{43}</a></span>”</p> - -<p>“The Greeks were a beauty-loving race and a joy-seeking race, and they -embodied their ideals in the figures of gods and goddesses—extremely -lovely figures. No one can do better with the human body than they did; -but if you take those divinities on their good looks, you’ll simply be -repeating the bitter mistake of the Greeks—and without their excuse of -inexperience.”</p> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi: “We’re to have a Christian sermon on naked marble idols?”</p> - -<p>“We are going to understand the total art product of the Greeks, to draw -out of it what they put into it. These people constituted themselves an -experiment station to try out beauty-loving—that is, trust in -Nature—as a basis of civilization; and they found it didn’t work. It -led them into pain and failure and despair, and the record is written -all over their art. There is a book, Mackail’s ‘Greek Anthology,’ a -collection of various kinds of inscriptions, brief verses and sentiments -from all sources; and you search the pages and hardly find one happy -word. You discover that their art was to put sadness into beautiful and -melodious language. ‘Of all things,’ says Theognis, ‘it is best for men -not to be born.’ And Anacreon, poet of the joy-lovers, compares life to -a chariot wheel that ‘runs fast away.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>“Well, but so it does!”</p> - -<p>“Something endures, and we have to find out what. We have to take hold -of life, and learn to direct it; we cannot just play in a garden, like -happy children. The Greeks played, and their garden turned into a -charnel-house, a place of horror. I call it an amazing blunder of -criticism—the notion that Greek art is one of joy and freedom. The -culmination of their art impulse was the tragedies which the whole -community helped to create and maintain. These performances were -religious ritual, their supreme civic events; and what do they tell us? -There is one theme, immutably fixed, the helplessness of the human -spirit in the grip of fate. A black shadow hangs over the life of men, -they grope blindly in the darkness. Whole families, mighty dynasties of -kings and rulers are condemned to destruction. They are pursued by -bitter and fierce and relentless Nemesis. Somber prophecies are spoken -before men are born, and then we see these men, striving with all their -wit to evade their<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_44">{44}</a></span> destiny—in vain. Our pleasure as spectators is to -watch this process, and be convinced of the helplessness of our kind. We -are lifted up to the heaven of the gods, we are endowed with omniscience -and omnipotence—in order to drive a dagger into our own bosoms, to -cohabit with our own mothers and sisters, to stab our own fathers and -brothers, to tear out our own eyeballs. Enacting such things with -majesty and solemnity, reciting them in melodious language to the rhythm -of beautiful music and the graceful motions of a chorus—that is the -final achievement of these lovers of beauty and joy!”</p> - -<p>“You are becoming eloquent,” says Mrs. Ogi, who distrusts eloquence in -her cave. “What conclusion do you draw about this art?”</p> - -<p>“We are physicians, called to a case after the patient is dead. We want -to know what killed this man, so that we can advise living patients. -From this post-mortem we learn that sensuous charm does not suffice to -secure life; it is not enough for people to carve beautiful figures of -the nude human body, and build marble temples to joy and love, while -their civic affairs are full of jealousy and greed and corruption.”</p> - -<p>“Was there corruption in Greek public life?”</p> - -<p>“So much that we in modern times cannot conceive it. Yes, I know about -the Teapot Dome and the black satchel with a hundred thousand dollars -worth of bills. Nevertheless, if anyone were to tell us about corruption -such as the Greeks took for granted, not even a movie audience would -swallow it.”</p> - -<p>“Now that sounds interesting,” says Mrs. Ogi. “Tell us scandals about -these reverend ancients!”</p> - -<p>“First I want to explain the class struggle in Greek society, and the -economic basis of their state—”</p> - -<p>“You take my advice,” says Mrs. Ogi; “leave that lecture until the end, -and then forget it. Take your muck-rake and poke it into the Parthenon!”</p> - -<p>“What I want to do,” says Ogi, “is to take a character out of ancient -Greece, and set him down in our world and see how he’d sound to us. -Something like this<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_45">{45}</a></span>—”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII<br /><br /> -WILLIAM RANDOLPH ALCIBIADES</h2> - -<p>From “The American Plutarch: Our Leading Statesmen Portrayed for the -Young; with Moral Inferences.” New York: A. D. 2124.</p> - -<p>The career of William Randolph Alcibiades, publisher, soldier and -politician, coincided with the era of the Great Wars. He was born to a -position of power and luxury, being a nephew of the greatest statesman -of his time, and having as his private tutor the leading philosopher of -his time. He had rare gifts of personal beauty and charm; but his youth -was wild and dissipated, and he spurned the conventional career which -lay open to him, and set himself up as a leader of the Democratic party. -His enemies called him a demagogue, and denied him any sincerity in his -popular appeals.</p> - -<p>In the first World War the young statesman was chosen commander-in-chief -of the American forces in France. Returning home, he organized and led -the expedition for the conquest of South America, and laid siege to the -city of Buenos Ayres. He was recalled, because his enemies charged that -on the night before the expedition sailed, he had committed an act of -sacrilege by chopping off the nose of the statue of George Washington in -front of the Treasury Building, New York. History will never know who -committed this vandalism; a young man confessed, and some of those whom -he charged with guilt were executed, but the enemies of William Randolph -maintained that he had purchased this confession, in order to get rid of -certain persons who stood in his way.</p> - -<p>William Randolph, while being conducted back to his country under -arrest, made his escape to England. In order to punish his enemies at -home, he made fervent appeals to the British government to enter the war -on the side of South America, and against his own country. His eloquence -prevailed, and both England and France sent ships to the relief of -Buenos Ayres. But William Randolph had to flee from England to France, -because the English king made the discovery that the young American had -seduced his wife.</p> - -<p>William Randolph now lived in retirement until the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_46">{46}</a></span> second World War -broke out—between the United States on the one hand, and Japan and -China, aided by England and France, on the other. William Randolph had -always been ardent in promoting hostility against Japan, but he now fled -to the court of the Japanese emperor, and with money furnished by this -wealthy monarch he sent emissaries to foment a conspiracy in the United -States. The conflict between the Republican and Democratic parties had -reached a stage of such bitterness that the wealthy classes were ready -to listen to any scheme which promised them power. William Randolph -having deserted the Democrats and gone over to the Republicans, his -agents approached the naval officers of the fleet, and these, combined -with Judge Gary and J. P. Morgan and other gentlemen of wealth, -overthrew the established government, and set up a new constitution, -which confined the voting power to five thousand of the richest -citizens.</p> - -<p>The new government made an alliance with Japan and China against England -and France; and William Randolph returned to the United States and -became a general in command of the American army. But his failure to win -victories caused his popularity to wane, and he fled to a castle he had -built for himself in Mexico. The British government, enraged by what he -had done to turn the Japanese emperor against them, sent emissaries to -set fire to his castle, and William Randolph Alcibiades was shot while -trying to make his escape from the flames.</p> - -<p>From this career we learn that it is not enough for a statesman to be -beautiful in person and charming in manner: it is also necessary that he -be taught to attend Sunday school in his youth.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER XVIII<br /><br /> -THE AGE OF HERO-WORSHIP</h2> - -<p>Greek civilization was made by a large number of different tribes, -inhabiting islands, or fertile valleys and plains separated by mountain -ranges. Among these tribes there was incessant rivalry and bitter -jealousy. They were never able to form a national or racial union, and -their history is a succession of inter-tribal intrigues and wars. In -addition to this came the class struggle. The aristo<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_47">{47}</a></span>cratic classes, -based on landlordism, held the government, while the proletariat, -crowding into the towns, clamored for power; popular leaders arose, and -there were conspiracies and civic tumults. Invariably the leaders of the -dispossessed party would form alliances with outside states for war upon -their own state. More significant yet, some would take the money and -serve the cause of the Persian kings, who represented barbarian -despotism.</p> - -<p>In the beginning of their written record we find the Greeks just -emerging from the family stage. The old men ruled; they were the wise -and the rich, and no one disputed their authority. They formed alliances -and led expeditions for the plundering of other states; then, returning -to their ancestral halls, they hired musicians to entertain them by -chanting the story of their exploits. So we have the Homeric poems, -ruling-class propaganda, written to glorify the ancestors of powerful -chieftains and fighting men, and to inculcate the spirit of obedience -and martial pride in the new generations.</p> - -<p>Every device of the poet’s art is employed to lend prominence and -splendor to the Homeric heroes. They are frequently demigods, the result -of some mood of dalliance on the part of one of the high gods of -Olympus, who came down to earth and encountered a lovely Greek maiden -wandering in a meadow. This divine illegitimacy entitles the heroes to -the center of the stage, and they take it. They are a set of extremely -greedy, jealous, vain and capricious school-boys; and, what is still -more significant, their gods, the highest ideal they could conceive, are -exactly as greedy, jealous, vain and capricious. The only beautiful -emotion in the poems is when some of the mothers and fathers, the wives -and children of those heroes express for them an affection of which they -are unworthy.</p> - -<p>We are accustomed to use the words “Homeric” and “epic” to signify -something vast, elemental, portentous. How is it that Homer secures to -his characters this “heroic” effect? By causing all the rest of the -world to bow to their pretensions, by interesting the gods in their -fate—and, above all else, by portraying them as unrestrained in their -emotions and limitless in their desires. These are the familiar devices -whereby aristocracy signifies itself.</p> - -<p>And that explains why such men as Matthew Arnold<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_48">{48}</a></span> and Gladstone write -volumes of rhapsody over Homer. There is in England a class which has -invented ways of setting forth to the world the fact that it does not -have to work for a living. There are things this class can do which the -vulgar herd cannot do; and one of these things is to read and appreciate -Latin and Greek literature. Homer is to the British world of culture -what the top-hat is to the British world sartorial.</p> - -<p>Homer serves these purposes, because he has the aristocratic point of -view, and gives the aristocratic mind what it craves. Just as we cherish -genealogy volumes to prove that our ancestors came over in the -<i>Mayflower</i>, so the Homeric minstrel chanted a catalogue of the ships -which had taken part in the Trojan war. And just as our members of good -society preach “law and order” to the lower classes, so in the Homeric -poems it is made clear that the common soldier exists to shed his blood -for the glory of his chief. Only once does a common man lift his voice -in the “Iliad”—the famous scene in the council where Thersites dares to -rise up. He is represented as a hunchbacked and offensive brawler; he is -overwhelmed with ridicule, and finally receives a sound thrashing from -Ulysses, called “the wily,” the Greek ideal of the shrewd and sensible -man of the world. “The sovereignty of the many is not good,” declares -this “wily” one; “let there be one sovereign, one king.”</p> - -<p>We shall find that the bards of aristocracy seldom neglect to flatter -their masters by showing some rebel thus being taught his place. We -shall find Shakespeare treating Jack Cade precisely as Homer treats -Thersites; neither stopping for a moment to inquire whether the grumbler -had any just cause to grumble. We shall find also that leisure-class -critics always accept these scenes as pure and undefiled “art,” and are -shocked by the suggestion of their mighty minstrels stooping to -propaganda in the interest of those who pay them. In those early days -the pay was poor; if legend is to be trusted, Homer wandered blind and -friendless among the Greek towns, which afterwards claimed the honor of -being his birthplace. Says the epigram:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Through which the living Homer begged his bread.<br /></span> -<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_49">{49}</a></span></div></div> -</div> - -<p>Taking the “Iliad” on the basis of literature, we say it contains fine -poetry, and vivid pictures of old-time manners, fascinating to read -about—if you come on them while you are young. There is a stage of life -when we are naïve and uncritical in our acceptance of “heroism.” We -adopt a certain shining person, we share his glories, we go out to -battle with him, we thrill to every stroke of his broad sword, we shout -when he wins the victory—and never reflect that we might exactly as -well be interested in the other fellow, who has exactly as much right to -survive. The average person reaches that age of hero-worship at twelve -years, and passes it at sixteen, if he passes it at all. Let children -read the “Odyssey” in a good translation; they will enjoy these perils -and later on they will discover that the universe has not yet been -entirely explored—there are perils in the starry spaces, and in the -deeps of our minds.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER XIX<br /><br /> -HUNDRED PER CENT ATHENIAN</h2> - -<p>Once in their history fate provided the Greeks with a great cause; that -was in the fifth century, when the gigantic Juggernaut of Persia came -rolling down upon them. King Xerxes assembled his barbarian hordes, his -tribes of wild horsemen and his phalanxes of slaves, his war elephants -and his chariots. Compared with these invaders, the Greeks were modern -civilized men; free men, holding in their minds all the treasures of the -future. They forgot their state jealousies and civic factions, and -rallied and saved their culture. From that national impulse came -practically everything that is worth while in the “classics.” It was -here that the Greek spirit achieved self-consciousness; it was here that -Greek patriotism and Greek religion found their justification, their -validity as propaganda for great art.</p> - -<p>Among the Athenian captains who fought at Marathon was one by the name -of Æschylus. He returned, full of the pride of his race, and wrote a -tragedy, “The Persians,” around the story of the king whom he had helped -to defeat; the climax of the drama being the battle in which the poet -had been a leader. It was Greek patri<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_50">{50}</a></span>otic and religious propaganda -without any thought of disguise; its purpose being to portray the -downfall of despotism. The play was a popular success, and made Æschylus -the national poet, not merely of Athens, but of all the Greeks.</p> - -<p>He wrote other plays of the same religious and patriotic sort, and he -never feared to put in whatever moral teachings he thought his audience -needed. “Obedience is the mother of success, bringing safety,” summed up -his political creed; so, needless to say, he belonged to the -conservative party. So little was he afraid of “propaganda” that in “The -Seven Against Thebes” he praised by name the statesman Aristides, who -was present in the audience. This kind of topical illusion “brought down -the house” in ancient Athens, precisely as it would in New York today.</p> - -<p>The sculptors and architects and other artists of Greece felt the same -patriotic and religious thrill, the same consciousness of a sublime -destiny; they labored with burning faith to glorify the gods and -demigods, the ancestors and rulers who had made them masters of the -land. As a memorial to the victory of Marathon the Greeks instituted -national games, which took place every four years, and were a means of -uniting the various tribes in worship of their gods. There was the -keenest rivalry, and the ambition of Greek gentlemen was to win the -crowns and laurel wreaths. When they had won, they wanted the fact to be -known; so they paid poets who could sing their achievements in glorious -verses. The poet Pindar became a high-class publicity man for these -aristocratic sportsmen; also he sang the praises of whatever tyrants -held power in the Greek cities, making them splendid and heroic, -regardless of how unprincipled and cruel they might be.</p> - -<p>The production of the dramas was also a kind of game. Each playwright -found a wealthy patron to pay the expenses of drilling and equipping the -chorus for his play; then, if the play carried off the prize, the -wealthy gentleman built a monument to his own generosity; and so we saw, -lining the streets of Athens, the choregic monuments of Andrew Carnegie -and John D. Rockefeller and Otto H. Kahn. Each poet seeking the prize -would take the demigods and ancestral rulers, and portray them<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_51">{51}</a></span> -according to his own interpretation; incidentally he would use the -chorus to discuss the current events of politics, and to express his own -convictions. Thus Æschylus wrote his “Eumenides” to oppose the -abolishing of the Areopagiticus, an ancient court which met on the -Sacred Hill: just as if today a poet should produce a drama to combat -the radical attacks on the United States Supreme Court.</p> - -<p>Another dramatist arose, the son of a noble family, Sophocles by name. -He wrote some thirty plays, and carried off the prize nineteen times, -and his rivals and enemies took pleasure in charging that he was greedy -for money, a regular old miser, besides being exceptionally fond of the -ladies, and raising a large illegitimate family. Sophocles produced -serene and beautiful works, because he believed in the patriotic and -pious traditions he served, accepting the hideous stories of the -old-time Greek heroes and demi-gods as the natural fate of mortals. He -is the perfect type of the ruling-class artist who achieves perfection -without strife, because he is completely at one with his environment, -identifying the interests of his class with the will of the gods. We -shall encounter a line of such poets—Virgil, Spenser, Shakespeare, -Racine, Goethe, Tennyson. They feel love and pity for the unhappy -children of their brains, and they move us to grief and awe, but never -do they move us to revolt.</p> - -<p>But now came another dramatist, in a different mood. This man looked at -the Greek legends and decided that they were not true. He looked at -Greek institutions, private property, and state patriotism, and the -sovereignty of old men in family and tribe, and he decided that these -were not necessarily wise and permanent arrangements. He set himself up -as a propagandist of things that we call “modern,” and that the Greeks -called blasphemy and infidelity. His name was Euripides, and he took the -heroes and heroines of the old legends and turned them into plain human -beings, suffering the cruelties of fate, but fighting back, voicing -protests and doubts. So came a string of plays, jeering at militarism -and false patriotism, denouncing slavery and the subjection of women in -the home, rebuking religious bigotry, undermining the noble and wealthy -classes. A play in which the women get together to rebel against war! A -play in which a devoted<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_52">{52}</a></span> wife gives her life to an angry god in order to -save her husband’s life—but the husband is shown as an egotistical cad, -not worthy of this dutiful and pious Greek sacrifice! Read a passage of -the dramatic propaganda of Euripides, and realize how this must have -sounded to hundred per cent Athenian patriots—and right in the midst of -a war to the death with Sparta:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Doth some one say that there be gods above?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Look at the facts themselves, yielding my words<br /></span> -<span class="i0">No undue credence; for I say that kings<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Kill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And doing thus are happier than those<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who live calm pious lives day after day.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">How many little states that serve the gods<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Are subject to the godless but more strong,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Made slaves by might of a superior army!<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XX"></a>CHAPTER XX<br /><br /> -THE FUNNY MAN OF REACTION</h2> - -<p>Needless to say, the Bolshevik sentiments of Euripides were not -proclaimed before the altar of Dionysus without protest on the part of -the orthodox. There rose up another dramatist, this time a comedian, to -champion the ancient and honorable traditions of Athens. Aristophanes -was his name, and he was one of the world’s great masters of the comic -line. He had infinite verve and wit and imagination; you can read him -today and laugh out loud—even while his reactionary ideas make you -cross.</p> - -<p>The point to be got clear is that right or wrong, this poet is -altogether a propagandist; a political campaigner, full of the most -bitter fury against his enemies, attacking them by name, lampooning -them, ridiculing them, not scrupling even to tell vicious falsehoods -about them. He wrote his plays to advocate this thesis or that thesis; -he arranged his incidents to exhibit this or that aspect of the thesis; -he chose his characters, either to voice his own convictions, or to make -the opposite convictions absurd. Not merely do his characters make long -speeches in which they set forth the poet’s ideas; at any time in the -course<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_53">{53}</a></span> of the action the poet will wave these characters one side, and -step out in the form of the chorus and say what he thinks, arguing and -pleading with the audience, scolding at them, denouncing his enemies, -explaining his previous actions, discussing his present play—even going -so far as to explain to the audience why they should award the prize to -Aristophanes and not to somebody else! I doubt if there has ever been a -bolder propagandist using the stage; I doubt if the propertied classes -and the partisans of tradition ever had a more vigorous defender; and -this, don’t fail to note, in a world dramatist, a “classic” of history’s -greatest “art for art’s sake” period!</p> - -<p>The amazing modernness of Aristophanes is what strikes us most. There is -hardly a single one of our present-day contentious questions he does not -discuss at length. He has the malicious wit of the New York “Sun” in the -days of Dana; he has the fun of Stephen Leacock, whose comical tales -ridicule every new and sensible idea the human mind can conceive. Again, -one thinks of the verses of Wallace Irwin—except that Aristophanes -sincerely held his convictions, whereas Mr. Irwin’s wit appears to be -directed by his newest publisher.</p> - -<p>Aristophanes was a gentleman, in the English sense of the word, and -wrote for other gentlemen. Just as in England during the late war we -observed the manufacturers of beer and munitions rising to power and -turning the aristocracy out of their castles, so during the -Peloponnesian war Aristophanes saw his cultured class dispossessed by -newly rich traders. There is a scene in the “Knights” in which he -denounces them; they are “mongers,” a whole succession of -“mongers”—topical allusions which the audience received with roars of -laughter. First came a rope-monger to govern the state, and then a -mutton-monger; now there was a leather-monger—Cleon, ruler of the city, -who sat in the audience and heard himself abused. Athens could go only -one stage lower, said Aristophanes, and he produced an offal-monger, and -recited to this person a list of his vices, which proved him fit to take -charge of public affairs.</p> - -<p>As to Cleon, the poet objected that his political manners were rude; and -in order to set him a good example,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_54">{54}</a></span> described him as “a whale that -keeps a public house and has a voice like a pig on fire!” This was in -war-time—and imagine what would have happened to a playwright who -produced a play in Washington, D. C., in the year 1918, describing the -President of the United States in similar language!</p> - -<p>Again, Aristophanes produced a play denouncing his city for its shabby -treatment of its tributary states. He produced this play while -ambassadors from those states were in the audience, attending a council -of the empire. For this Cleon had the poet prosecuted and fined; so in -his next production Aristophanes comes back, proposing that the people -shall kick out a number of rascals, including</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">All statesmen retrenching the fees and the salaries<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of theatrical bards, in revenge for the railleries,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And jests, and lampoons, of this holy solemnity,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Profanely pursuing their personal enmity,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For having been flouted, and scoff’d, and scorn’d—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">All such are admonish’d and heartily warn’d!<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>Aristophanes loathed Euripides for having turned the ancestral heroes -into weak mortals, with sentiments and whinings about their rights and -wrongs. He dragged the poet down into hell, and there beat him with all -the weapons he could lay hold of. He took the poet’s play of feminism, -the “Lysistrata,” and turned it to farce by that most modern of devices, -a strike of mothers! A play in which the women of Athens refuse to -co-habit with their husbands until the husbands have ended the war with -Sparta!</p> - -<p>Also Aristophanes loathed Socrates, because that philosopher taught the -youths of Athens to think for themselves. To this the poet attributed -the corruption of Alcibiades, the young aristocrat who had been a pupil -of Socrates, and had sold out his country to the Persian king. He wrote -a play called “The Clouds,” in which he represented Socrates as a -cunning trickster, teaching men how to advocate any cause for money. He -portrayed the philosopher sitting in a hanging basket in front of his -house, performing absurdities with his pupils. It is exactly the tone of -a “Saturday Evening Post” editorial, jeering at “parlor pinks,” and -college professors who teach their pupils “mugwumpery.” The<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_55">{55}</a></span> time came -when the mob voted death to Socrates; and this was the great triumph of -the funny man of reaction.</p> - -<p>But alas, the death of one free-thinker did not suffice to bring the -citizens of Athens back to the simple life of their ancestors. They -continued to make money and enjoy themselves, and to hire soldiers to do -their fighting. Their dramatists developed the so-called “social -comedy”—that is, pictures of the fashions and follies of the leisure -class, without any propaganda. It is an invariable rule that the absence -of propaganda in the art of a people means that this people is in -process of intellectual and moral decay. So now a strong man came down -out of the north and took charge of Greece, and Greek literature moved -into the Alexandrine period.</p> - -<p>The center of this new culture was the city of Alexandria, in Egypt. The -poets now took pride in their technical skill, and wrote delicate and -charming portrayals of the delights of love. A horde of learned scholars -busied themselves with criticism and interpretation of the works of the -past, and composed long epic poems dealing with grammar and rhetoric and -similar subjects. This too was “propaganda”; but you note that it was -propaganda of a secondary and imitative sort, it was not produced by men -who were doing great deeds, and creating new forms of life. Alexandria -was a cosmopolitan center, ruled by a despot, the home of some wealthy -and cultured gentlemen, who supported painters and sculptors and poets -and musicians and actors to while away their boredom, and to serve as -their press-agents and trumpeters. But the art of classical Greece was -the work of free men, citizens of a state ruled by a larger proportion -of its inhabitants than had ever before held authority in civilized -times. That meant throughout the community the joy and thrill of -intellectual adventure, it meant a great leap of achievement for the -whole group. Such invariably is the origin of art which we now regard as -“classical”—and which we use to hold the minds of new generations in -chain to tradition and conformity!<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_56">{56}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXI"></a>CHAPTER XXI<br /><br /> -ATHENS AND LOS ANGELES</h2> - -<p>There has been peace in the cave for a while, because Mrs. Ogi has been -interested in learning about the Greeks. “I perceive,” she says, “that -there are superstitions in the arts, just as in religion.”</p> - -<p>“Exactly,” says Ogi; “and they serve the same purpose. They begin as -honest ignorance, and are then taken up and used as a source of income -and a shield to privilege.”</p> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi, “It strikes me the Greeks lived in a country very much -like Southern California.”</p> - -<p>“Quite so. The climate is the same; and the rocky hills and fertile -valleys, and people living the outdoor life, and giving their time to -sports. The one-piece bathing-suits that have come into fashion in our -‘beauty parades’ are about the same thing as the Greek maidens running -naked in the games. And if you want to parallel the darker side of Greek -sensuousness—”</p> - -<p>“There is Hollywood,” says Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“There is all smart society, as much luxury and wantonness as your -thesis requires.”</p> - -<p>“But then, why has Los Angeles never had any art? I know what you are -going to say—our mental energy goes into real estate advertisements. -But joking aside, why?”</p> - -<p>“Because the people here have never had a struggle. They came into a -country already prepared for them, inhabited by tame Indians living on -piñon nuts. All the settlers had to do was to subdivide the land, and -raise the price once every year. They are too polite to have an art; if -anybody makes a crude effort, it is a masterpiece, and we all get -together and boost. You can write one feeble book, and live a life-time -on your reputation. Los Angeles is a fruit that was rotten before it was -ripe.”</p> - -<p>“What are we going to do?” asks Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“We are going to take our choice between a social revolution and a slave -empire.”</p> - -<p>Mrs. Ogi is not certain about her choice; she sits, watching the -entrance of the cave out of the corner of her eye—the ancestral habit -of expecting some hostile in<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_57">{57}</a></span>truder. After a while she remarks, “I -notice you didn’t say anything about slavery in Greece.”</p> - -<p>“It will be better to deal with slavery in the case of the Romans, where -its effects show so plainly. The Greeks had slavery, but the force which -destroyed their civilization was faction. They had their ‘world war,’ -and Sir Gilbert Murray, who knows them by heart, has drawn a parallel -between that war and ours; it is so exact that it makes you laugh—or -weep, according to your temperament. The Greek struggle was between the -Athenian empire, a democratic sea power, and the Spartans, an -aristocratic, military people with no nonsense about them. The war -lasted for two generations, off and on; they hadn’t developed the -technique of extermination as we have. But they had all the social and -psychic factors of our ‘war for democracy’—‘defeatists’ and -‘bitter-enders,’ poets and propagandists of hate, statesmen promising -utopias after victory, spies and informers and provocateurs, refugees -crowding into the cities, landlords raising rents, food famines, -rationing of supplies, and profiteers coining fortunes out of the -general misery. And of course the demagogues and haters had their way; -Athens was ruined and Sparta was bled white, and the Greeks became -subjects, first of Macedonia, then of the Romans, then of the Turks.”</p> - -<p>“Thus endeth the first lesson,” says Mrs. Ogi. “And now for the Romans.”</p> - -<p>“Well, the Romans didn’t bleed themselves to death; they were practical -fellows, with a business man’s point of view. They turned their deadly -short swords against other races; and when they had conquered somebody, -they put him to work for the glory of the Grand Old Party. They were -‘hard-boiled,’ as we say; our big business men of the rougher type—old -P. D. Armour, and Pullman, and ‘Jesse James’ Hill, and Harriman, and the -elder Morgan, and Judge Gary. This banker in Chicago that the Republican -party has just put over on us as vice-president, General ‘Helen Maria’ -Dawes—he commanded an army against the Germans, and having conquered -them, he goes back to put them under bond, to set them at work for long -hours, and drain the milk out of the mothers’ breasts, and feed it to -the international bankers, instead of to the German infants. That was a -perfect Roman job,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_58">{58}</a></span> and General Helen Maria would have been the boy -after the Romans’ own heart; they would have made him a prefect over the -whole of Asia Minor, or Northern Africa, or Spain, and he would have -come home a millionaire—but never so rich as the head of one of the -Morgan banks in Chicago!”</p> - -<p>“I shouldn’t think you’d get much art out of people like that,” says -Mrs. Ogi. “But go ahead and tell us the story.”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXII"></a>CHAPTER XXII<br /><br /> -THE SLAVE EMPIRE</h2> - -<p>Rome, like all other nations, was founded by stern, determined men, who -believed in themselves and in their tribal gods. They conquered the -peninsula of Italy, and built mighty cities, and a net-work of military -roads, and aqueducts which endure even today. All that time their state -was a republic; in fact, they made the word for us—res publicæ mean -public affairs, and all Roman citizens took part in them, discussed and -voted, passed laws and enforced the laws. They raised armies, and built -fleets of ships, and conquered Carthage, and ultimately the whole -Mediterranean world. But, according to the custom of the time, they -enslaved their prisoners in war; and so, in the course of six or eight -centuries, Rome provided the classic demonstration of what slavery does -to civilization.</p> - -<p>Emerson has said that wherever you find a chain fastened to the wrist of -a slave, you find the other end fastened to the wrist of a master. It is -possible for a slave-holder to be a virtuous man, but it is impossible -for him to raise virtuous children. Slaves are tricky and dishonest, -full of suppressions and secret vices; even where they mean well, they -debauch the young by waiting upon them and depriving them of initiative. -Why should a young aristocrat work, when he knows he will grow up to -inherit papa’s money? In a few generations he is too effeminate even to -fight. Why should he risk his precious life, when he can hire common -soldiers?</p> - -<p>Not only that, but slavery undermines free labor, and breaks down the -farming class. Cheap food poured into<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_59">{59}</a></span> Rome, and the farmers were -ruined, and their sons drifted into the cities. The lands of Italy were -mortgaged, and the money-lenders got them. Wealthy merchants and -officials returning from the provinces became owners of vast estates, -while the cities were crowded with a hungry mob, idle, dissolute—and -victimized by the owners of slum tenements. You may see every bit of -that reproduced in the United States today, for chattel slavery and wage -slavery are in their economic effects the same. The only difference is -that a process which took six or eight centuries in Rome is taking one -century under the stimulus of machinery.</p> - -<p>The Roman mob had the vote, and they used it to get something for -themselves. There came class struggles, bitter and ferocious. Two young -brothers of the aristocracy, Caius and Tiberius Gracchus, became -champions of the common people—what we call “parlor Socialists.” They -were assassinated, and the partisans of privilege, the “old gang,” -proceeded to slaughter everybody in Italy who threatened their power. -There followed two generations of civil strife, and then came a strong -man, Julius Cæsar, who put an end to political democracy. In history -books that are taught to our school children today you will read that -Cæsar was a great and virtuous protector of law and order; because the -class which is paying for school text-books in capitalist America is -waiting hopefully for the arrival of exactly such a man to put an end to -the threat of industrial democracy.</p> - -<p>So Rome became in form what it was in fact, an empire, the most colossal -machine for plundering that had ever been seen on earth. A little inside -gang of rich men ran it, and kept the mob satisfied by bread and -circuses and gladiatorial shows. The Roman emperors tried every form of -debauchery and blood-thirsty cruelty, incest and unnatural vice, and -crowned it by having themselves made into gods with their statues set up -to be worshiped in the temples. Their heirs took to murdering and -poisoning each other, and Rome was governed by palace revolutions. Then -the army discovered that it could share the graft, and the troops took -to revolting and setting up their leaders as emperors and gods. All the -while the tribute continued to roll in—the wealth of the whole world -squandered in one mad orgy<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_60">{60}</a></span>—</p> - -<p>“Look here,” says Mrs. Ogi; “you have got in a solid chapter of -preaching—and we are trying to find out about art!”</p> - -<p>“I’m all through now,” says her husband, humbly. “But no one could -understand Roman art without understanding the economics of slavery.”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXIII<br /><br /> -DUMB PIOUS ÆNEAS</h2> - -<p>In the beginning the Romans didn’t bother very much with art. In their -public buildings they were content to take over the Greek styles—but -making them heavy and solid, so as to last to the end of time. The -attitude of a Roman gentleman toward the fine arts reminds me of a -wealthy Southern planter whose son wanted to become a violinist, and the -father said, “I can hire all the fiddler-fellows I want.” The Roman -gentleman bought people of that sort—musicians, dancers and poets with -skill handed down from “the glory that was Greece.”</p> - -<p>Until the republic was dead and the Emperor Augustus took the throne. -Then came a time of peace, and a Roman scholar, the son of a country -proprietor, looked about him, and seeing the perils of internal decay -and outside barbarism looming over his world, he recalled the stern -sobriety of the good old days, and yearned to bring back the governing -class of Rome to reverence for their ancestors. There is a report that -the Emperor Augustus himself suggested the task to the poet; anyhow, Mr. -Publius Vergilius Maro, known to us as Virgil, set himself with sober -deliberation to the making of a piece of Roman national and religious -propaganda.</p> - -<p>It was to be an epic after the fashion of Homer, written in dactylic -hexameter, like Homer. Virgil cast about him for a hero, and selected a -legendary Trojan named Æneas, who was said to have fled from the Greeks -and to have founded Rome. The characters in Homer carried an adjective -before their names, “the wily Ulysses,” “the swift-footed Achilles,” and -so on. Therefore this hero must have an adjective, and he becomes “the -pious Æneas”—the man who respects the old-time<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_61">{61}</a></span> faith, and preserves -the old-time traditions of virtue, sobriety and public service.</p> - -<p>So here is an epic poem, wrought with verbal skill and sincerity of -feeling, conveying to us the dream of Rome as it ought to be, but was -not. We see the wanderings of Æneas and his ship-load of companions. We -see him land at Carthage, and carry on a love affair with Queen Dido, -and then desert her—not a serious impropriety in Roman days. We see the -founding father celebrating the old-time religious rites, consulting the -auguries and asking the blessing of those gods, of which every Roman had -a little image in his home, just as orthodox Russians and Roman -Catholics do today.</p> - -<p>The “Æneid” is considered ideal for infliction upon helpless school -boys; it being full of that careful propriety and decorous tameness -which represent what our children ought to be, but are not. The old -professor of Latin who inflicted the poem upon me was an ardent -propagandist of the Catholic faith, and it was his hope that if we -learned proper respect for the established religion of ancient Rome, we -might some day be lured into similar respect for the established -religion of modern Rome. We read, or made up, a phrase: “Dum pius -Æneas,” meaning: “While the pious Æneas”—. We boys knew we were being -propaganded, and we resented it, and this phrase gave us a chance to -express our feelings. “The dumb pious Æneas” became our formula. “What’s -your next hour?” “Oh, I’ve got the dumb pious Æneas!”</p> - -<p>We would sit and solemnly translate a long account of a prize-fight—a -religious prize-fight, part of the pious games. The antagonists wore no -vulgar boxing-gloves, but a mysterious, romantic thing called a -“cestus,” which we did not recognize as plain “brass knucks.” And woe to -the student if the dumb pious professor happened to catch him with a -morning newspaper under his desk, reading an account of a prize-fight -which had happened the night before in Madison Square Garden! Woe -likewise to the student who, translating the rage of the deserted Queen -Dido—“furens quid femina possit”—happened to be caught reading the -story of some queen of the stage or the grand opera who had committed -suicide because of a faithless lover!</p> - -<p>Does anyone question that the “Æneid” is propa<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_62">{62}</a></span>ganda? If so, I mention -that the poet lost his country estate in one of the civil wars; and on -account of his beautiful verses the Emperor Augustus restored the -property to him, and made him a court favorite. So in the “Æneid” we -find this pious emperor described in the following fashion:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">This, this is he—long promised, oft foretold—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Augustus Cæsar. He the age of gold,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">God-born himself, in Latium shall restore<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And rule the land that Saturn ruled before.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>That is a more direct and personal kind of propaganda, the propaganda of -a hungry poet in search of his dinner. We shall find a great deal of it -through the history of art, and it is, I am told, not entirely unknown -in art circles today.</p> - -<p>“I have here,” says Mrs. Ogi, “a letter from a Professor who has been -reading this manuscript. He protests, ‘not in a professorial fashion’—”</p> - -<p>“Naturally not,” says Ogi.</p> - -<p>“That you cannot possibly know the old authors as well as he does, who -has given the greater part of his life to studying them. ‘To say that -Virgil was a sycophant of a Roman emperor is a very superficial -estimate, which overlooks the really deep matter in his writings. To say -that somehow there has constantly been a conscious trick played on -humanity, in defending and glorifying the ruling classes, is merely -silly. There was no knowledge of a social question then, any more than -there was electric machinery.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>“That is important,” answers Ogi, “and I want to get it straight. I -should like to put an arrow on the cover of this book, directing the -attention of all professors to the fact that I do not state or imply -that the great leisure-class artists were playing a ‘conscious trick.’ -Sometimes they knew what they were doing; but most of the time they just -wrote that way, because they were that kind of men. I have tried to make -this plain; but evidently the Professor missed it, so let me give an -illustration:</p> - -<p>“Here is a hive of bees; each of these bees all day long diligently -labors to collect the juices of flowers and make it into honey; or to -collect wax, and build exact hexagonal architectural structures in which -to store<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_63">{63}</a></span> the honey. Now comes an entomologist, and studies the life -cycle of the bee, and says that the purpose of the hexagonal structures -is to hold the honey in the most economical fashion; the purpose of the -honey is to nourish the infant bees which will be hatched in the -hexagonal cells. Now shall a critic say that this entomologist is -‘silly,’ because no bee can have understood the principles of economy -involved in the hexagonal structure, nor can it have performed chemical -tests necessary to determine the nutritive qualities of carbohydrates?</p> - -<p>“The class feelings of human beings are instinctive and automatic -reactions to economic pressure. The reactions of the artist, who seeks -fame and success by voicing these class feelings, may be just as -instinctive. But now mankind is emerging into consciousness, and social -life is becoming rational and deliberate. I say that one of the steps in -this process is to go back and study the life cycle of the artist, and -find out where he collected his honey, and how he stored it, and what -use was made of it by the hive.”</p> - -<p>At this point Mrs. Ogi, who has been reading in her Bible—known to the -rest of the world as the Works of G. B. S.—produces a text from “The -Quintessence of Ibsenism,” reading as follows: “The existence of a -discoverable and perfectly definite thesis in a poet’s work by no means -depends on the completeness of his own intellectual consciousness of -it.”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXIV"></a>CHAPTER XXIV<br /><br /> -THE ROMAN FOUR HUNDRED</h2> - -<p>A few years after Virgil came another Roman poet, whom I learned to read -as a lad. He also was taken up by the Emperor Augustus, and wrote -fulsome odes in praise of this emperor. Also he found a patron, a -wealthy gentleman by the name of Mæcenas, who was really fond of the -arts, and gave the poet a Sabine farm to live on. This poet was, I -believe, the first author who invited the public into his home, and told -them his private affairs, pleasant or otherwise. Being that kind of a -tactless author myself, I early conceived a feeling of affection for Mr. -Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known to us as Horace.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_64">{64}</a></span></p> - -<p>For one thing, this worldly wise poet knows how to tip us a wink, even -while handing out flattery to his patron. For another thing, his Mæcenas -seems to have been a really worthy soul. I know how easy it is to love a -rich man; but in Rome it must have been hard to find a rich man who -could be loved at any price. Horace was a man of humble tastes; all he -wanted was to live in his books, and to escape the brawl and fury of -politics. We might have expected him to fall down on his knees and kiss -the hand of a man who gave him a quiet home, with fruit-trees around -him, and snow-capped mountains in the distance, and a crackling log fire -in winter-time.</p> - -<p>But, as a matter of fact, the poet was quite decent about it. He -asserted the right of a man of letters to live an independent -life—quite a “modern” idea, and hard for brutal rich Romans to -understand. Every now and then Horace would have to visit his patron and -friend, and meet some of these haughty conquerors of the world, and be -put in his place by them. The father of Horace was what the Romans -called a “freedman”; that is, he had formerly been a slave, and the -great world sneered at the poet on that account. But instead of being -ashamed of his ancestry, and trying to hide it, Horace put his old -father into his books, for all Rome to meet. Yes, said the poet, that -fond old freedman father brought his little boy to Rome to get an -education, and walked every day to school with him, carrying his books -and slate.</p> - -<p>We can honor this honest gentleman, and read his charming verses with -pleasure—but without committing the absurdities of the classical -tradition, which ranks Horace as a great poet. He was a pioneer man of -letters, and in that way made history; but there is nothing he wrote -that the world has not learned to write better today. There are a score -of young fellows writing verses for the columns of American newspapers -who can turn out just as witty and clever and human stuff. “F. P. A.” -has written “take-offs” on Horace, which shock the purists, but would -have delighted Horace. Louis Untermeyer has published volumes of such -mingled wisdom and wit; and there is Austin Dobson, and above all, -Heine—a man who writes verse of loveliness to tear your heart-strings, -and at the same time had the nerve to hit out at the ruling-class brutes -of his age.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_65">{65}</a></span></p> - -<p>“Wasn’t there a single artist in Rome who revolted?” asks Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“Yes, there was one. He also was the son of a freedman, and came nearly -a century after Virgil and Horace, in the reign of the infamous -Domitian. His name was Juvenal, and he wrote satires in which he flayed -the aristocracy of the empire for their vileness and materialism. I once -published a novel, ‘The Metropolis,’ in which I did the same thing for -the so-called ‘Four Hundred’ of New York; and it is interesting to -compare the two pictures—”</p> - -<p>“Now don’t you start talking about your own books!” cries Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“I don’t offer ‘The Metropolis’ as literature, but merely as a record of -things I saw in New York twenty years ago. Afterwards I’ll show what -Juvenal has to say on the same topics. First, ‘The Metropolis,’ page -278, listing the health-cures of ladies in high society:</p> - -<p>“One of the consequences of the furious pace was that people’s health -broke down very quickly; and there were all sorts of bizarre ways of -restoring it. One person would be eating nothing but spinach, and -another would be living on grass. One would chew a mouthful of soup -thirty-two times; another would eat every two hours, and another only -once a week. Some went out in the early morning and walked barefooted in -the grass, and others went hopping about the floor on their hands and -knees to take off fat. There were ‘rest cures’ and ‘water cures,’ ‘new -thought’ and ‘metaphysical healing’ and ‘Christian Science’; there was -an automatic horse, which one might ride indoors, with a register -showing the distance traveled. Montague met one man who had an electric -machine, which cost thirty thousand dollars, and which took hold of his -arms and feet and exercised him while he waited. He met a woman who told -him she was riding an electric camel!</p> - -<p>“But of course they could not really succeed in reducing weight, because -they were incapable of self-restraint. Mrs. Billy Alden gave Montague a -delightfully malicious account of a certain lordly fat lady of her set, -who had got the Turkish-bath habit. Terrible to encounter, most awful in -visage, she would enter the baths by night, and all the attendants would -rush into instant action. ‘She delights in perspiring with great -tumult,’ said Mrs. Billy.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_66">{66}</a></span> ‘And when her arms have sunk down, wearied -with the heavy dumb-bells, the sly masseur omits to rub down no part of -her person. Meantime, perhaps there are a number of guests assembled for -dinner at home. They wait, overcome with drowsiness and hunger. At last -the lady comes, flushed, and declaring that she is thirsty enough for a -whole ‘magnum.’ As soon as she is seated at the table, the footman -brings her a bucket of ice, packed about her own special quart of -champagne. She drinks half of this before she tastes any food—calling -it an appetizer. She drinks so much that it won’t stay down, but returns -as a cascade on the floor’—and Montague had to stop Mrs. Billy in her -too vivid description of the sights which a certain unhappy banker, the -husband of this lady, had to witness at his dinner-parties. Said Mrs. -Billy, with her usual vividness of metaphor: ‘It is like a snake that -has crawled into a cask of wine; it takes in and gives out again.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Mrs. Ogi interrupts. “There is one thing I want to make plain—that you -weren’t married to me when you published that disgusting stuff.”</p> - -<p>“All right,” says Ogi; “it shall be entered in the record. But you must -understand that I am not to blame for Mrs. Billy’s stories.”</p> - -<p>“You were to blame for the company you kept,” declares Mrs. Ogi. “I call -that sort of writing inexcusable.”</p> - -<p>“Well, I’ll try again,” says her husband. “On page 351 of ‘The -Metropolis’ you find a glimpse of the underworld of New York:</p> - -<p>“So far had the specialization in evil proceeded that there were places -of prostitution which did a telephone business exclusively, and would -send a woman in a cab to any address; and there were high-class -assignation-houses, which furnished exquisite apartments and the -services of maids and valets. And in this world of vice the modern -doctrine of the equality of the sexes was fully recognized; there were -gambling-houses and pool-rooms and opium-joints for women, and -drinking-places which catered especially to them. In the ‘orange room’ -of one of the big hotels, you might see rich women of every rank and -type, fingering the dainty leather-bound and gold-embossed wine cards. -In this room alone were sold over ten thousand drinks every day; and the -hotel paid a rental<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_67">{67}</a></span> of a million a year to the Devon estate. Not far -away the Devons also owned negro-dives, where, in the early hours of the -morning, you might see richly gowned white women drinking.</p> - -<p>“Montague was told by a certain captain of police a terrible story about -the wife of our very greatest railroad magnate, who lived in a colossal -marble palace on Fifth Avenue. As soon as she perceived that her husband -was asleep, she would put on a yellow wig as a disguise, and wearing an -overcoat which she kept for this purpose, she would quit the palace on -foot, with only a single attendant. She would enter one of the brothels -in the ‘Tenderloin,’ where she had a room set apart for herself. There -she took her stand, with naked breasts and gilded nipples, bearing the -name of Zaza, and displaying the person of the mother of one of our most -magnificent young lords of society and finance. She would receive all -comers with caresses, and when the madame dismissed her customers, she -would take her leave sadly, lingering, and being the last to close the -door of her room. Still unsatisfied in her desires, she would retire -with her sullied cheeks, bearing back the odors of the brothel to the -pillow of her mighty railroad magnate. And shall I speak of the -love-charms—”</p> - -<p>“Most emphatically you shall not!” cries Mrs. Ogi, “I think we’ve had -enough of ‘The Metropolis’ and I won’t hear of its being reproduced in -this new book. It’s your crudest Socialist propaganda—”</p> - -<p>“You’re quite sure it’s propaganda?” says Ogi.</p> - -<p>“Of course. Who would question that?”</p> - -<p>“Well then, I’ve proved one point!” says the other.</p> - -<p>“I don’t understand.”</p> - -<p>“I have made you the victim of a mean little trick. Each of those -passages starts out as ‘The Metropolis’; but then it slides into -Juvenal—the sixth satire, dealing with the ladies of ancient Rome. The -point of my joke is that you will have to consult the books in order to -be sure which is Juvenal and which is me. Of course I’ve had to change -names and phrases, replacing Roman things with New York things. And I’ve -had to tone Juvenal down, because there are some of his phrases I -couldn’t reproduce—”</p> - -<p>“There are some you have tried to reproduce, and that<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_68">{68}</a></span> you’re going to -cut out,” says Mrs. Ogi. And as always, she has her way, and so it is a -Bowdlerized Juvenal you have been reading!</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXV"></a>CHAPTER XXV<br /><br /> -THE AMERICAN EMPIRE</h2> - -<p>“You had your fun out of that,” says Mrs. Ogi. “But of course I can’t -judge; somebody who knows about Rome may come along and show that it’s -all nonsense.”</p> - -<p>“Those who know about Rome,” says Ogi, “don’t always know about -capitalist America. There has never been such a parallel of two -civilizations in all history. I could write, quite literally, a whole -book of mystifications—quoting American poets and statesmen and -journalists, and mixing in passages from the same kind of people in -Rome, and unless you knew the different passages you couldn’t tell which -was which.”</p> - -<p>“We still have our republic, have we not?”</p> - -<p>“In every presidential election for the past fifty years that candidate -has won who has had the campaign-funds; and he has had the -campaign-funds because he was the candidate of the plutocracy. Right now -we are at the critical moment—the age of the Gracchi. We are trying to -rouse the people to action; and whether we succeed, or whether we are -going to be slaughtered, as our industrial masters desire and intend—”</p> - -<p>Mrs. Ogi’s hand tightens upon her husband’s arm. She never has this -thought out of mind; and whenever in the midnight hours a cat or dog -sets foot upon the porch of her home, she leaps up, expecting to see a -company of bankers and merchants, clad in their new uniform of white -night-shirts and hoods. Our aristocratic party has what it calls the -“Better Roman Federation,” and collects lists of the proscribed, and -issues secret bulletins to its mobbing parties. Last week, down at -Brundisium, our naval harbor, their subsidized mob raided a meeting of -wage slaves, beat some of them insensible with clubs, threw a little -girl into a great receptacle of boiling coffee, scalding her almost to -death, and dragged six men off into the woods and tarred and feathered -them.</p> - -<p>“What do you really think is coming?” asks Mrs. Ogi.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_69">{69}</a></span></p> - -<p>“There are two factors in modern civilization that did not exist in -Rome. First there is the printing press, a means of spreading -information. So far as the master class can control it, it is a machine -for debauching the race mind; but in spite of everything the masters can -do, the workers get presses of their own, and so get information which -was denied the slaves of Rome.”</p> - -<p>“And the other factor?”</p> - -<p>“The labor movement. In Rome there were some labor unions, but they were -weak and the slaves were an unorganized mob; when they revolted, as they -did again and again, they were slaughtered wholesale. But the modern -labor movement goes on growing; it trains its members, and gives them -sound ideas. So, out of the final struggle we may have, not another -empire, and another collapse of civilization, but the co-operative -commonwealth of our dreams.”</p> - -<p>This, of course, is outright preaching; but it happens that Mrs. Ogi has -just received a letter about the child who was thrown into the scalding -coffee, so her husband gets his way for once. Besides, as he explains, -there is nothing more to be said about Roman art, because there is no -more Roman art. The plutocracy of the empire had brought themselves to a -state where they were incapable of sustained thinking or effort of any -sort. The barbarian hordes, which had been besieging the frontiers, -broke through and overwhelmed the Roman empire, and so came what history -knows as the Dark Ages.</p> - -<p>When I was a lad, my Catholic teachers explained to me that these ages -were called dark, not because they had no culture, but because we were -so unfortunate as not to know about it. I was not able to answer the -Catholic gentlemen in those days, but I can answer them now. When groups -of human beings kindle the precious light of the intellect, they make it -into a torch and pass it on to posterity. That is always their first -impulse; and so we may be sure that if an age had no art, it was a dark -age.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_70">{70}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXVI"></a>CHAPTER XXVI<br /><br /> -THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTION</h2> - -<p>It took several centuries for the peoples of Europe to lift themselves -out of barbarism and chaos. Then we find a new art developing, an -altogether different art, built upon Babylonian and Hebrew foundations, -instead of Greek and Roman. It meant an overthrowing of standards, and a -setting-up of new values—a precedent of enormous importance to social -revolutionists.</p> - -<p>What exactly was the difference between Pagan and Christian art? The -Greeks said: The human body is the most beautiful thing in the world. To -which the Christians replied: All flesh is grass. The Greeks said: -Because the body is beautiful, we immortalize it in statues. The -Christians replied: We are iconoclasts—that is to say, breakers of -marble idols. The Romans said: Material wealth is the basis of -individual and national safety. The Christians replied: What shall it -profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?</p> - -<p>These Christian sayings meant that mankind had discovered new -satisfactions, replacing, for a time at any rate, the customary ones of -physical pleasure and domination over others. These new joys came from -inside the self, and required a new word, spiritual. To the artist was -set the task of making these inner qualities apprehensible, and for this -he had to have a new technique. Where the Greeks had carved the body -graceful, the Christians carved it with that ugliness which results from -the ascetic life. Where the Romans had represented their great men -muscular and mighty, the Christians represented them frail and sickly. -The Christians reveled in wounds, disease and deformity, taking a -perverse pleasure in defying old standards—a process known to the -psychologist as “over-correction.” The two favorite themes of Christian -art became a man-god who accepted all suffering and humiliation, and a -woman-god who allowed the erring soul an unlimited number of new -opportunities.</p> - -<p>Because this new art was trying so often to express the inexpressible, -it was driven to symbolism. The painters and sculptors invented outward -and visible signs of the inward and spiritual graces: the cross, the -crown of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_71">{71}</a></span> thorns, the sacrificial lamb. The Virgin Mary would have a -heart of radiant fire, with perhaps a white dove perched on top of it. -The saints and martyrs wore halos of light about their heads, so as not -to be mistaken for ordinary beggars, or for patients in the last stages -of tuberculosis. One should hardly need to state that all this art was -propaganda; it was permitted on that basis alone.</p> - -<p>The significance of all this to social revolutionists lies in the fact -that they also plan an art revolution. What the Christians did to Pagan -art, the Socialists now seek to do to bourgeois art; metaphorically -speaking, to smash the idols and burn the temples dedicated to the -worship of individual and class aggrandizement, and to set up new art -standards, based on the abolition of classes, and the assertion of -brotherhood and solidarity. Just as the stone which was rejected of the -Pagan builders became the cornerstone of the Christian temple, so those -things which are despised and rejected of plutocratic snobbery will -become the glory of revolutionary art; the very phrases of contempt will -become battle-cries—the great unwashed, the vulgar herd, the common -man. The revolutionary artist, clasping the toiling masses to his -bosom—</p> - -<p>“Over-correction?” suggests Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“Partly that; but also the longing for solidarity, the enlargement of -the personality through mass feeling.”</p> - -<p>“But beauty came back into art,” says Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“Yes, and that is an interesting story; a drama of the conflict between -God and Mammon, and the triumph of what I am calling Mammonart. I have -pondered a title for the drama—something like this: Christianity as a -Social Success; or the admission of the Martyr to the Four Hundred!”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXVII"></a>CHAPTER XXVII<br /><br /> -THE INS AND THE OUTS</h2> - -<p>There are two types of human temperament and attitude which manifest -themselves in the world’s art product: the Art of Beauty and the Art of -Power.</p> - -<p>The Art of Beauty is produced by ruling classes when they are -established and safe, and wish to be entertained, and to have their -homes and surroundings set apart from<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_72">{72}</a></span> the common mass. I do not mean -that simple and primitive people do not produce beauty of a naïve sort; -but for such art to develop and mature, it must be taken up by the -privileged classes, patronizing and encouraging the artist, and making -his work a form of class distinction. The fact that the men who produce -this art have come from the people is a fact of no significance; for the -ruling classes take what they want where they find it, and shape it to -their own class ends. The characteristics of the Art of Beauty, whether -in painting, or sculpture, or music, or words, or actions, are those of -rest and serenity, pleasure in things as they actually exist; also -clarity of form—because the leisure-class artist has time to study -technique, and knows what he wants to do.</p> - -<p>In every human society there is one group which controls, and another -which struggles for control; the “ins” versus the “outs,” the “haves” -versus the “have-nots.” In every well-developed civilization this latter -class will be strong enough to have its art, which is apt to be crude -and instinctive, full of surging, half-expressed and half-realized -emotion. Such art lays stress upon substance, rather than form; it aims, -or at any rate tends, to arouse to action; and so we call it the Art of -Power.</p> - -<p>This is the art which is generally described as “propaganda” by -established criticism; the distinction being, as we have previously -explained, itself a piece of propaganda. The Art of Beauty is equally -propaganda; it is the gas-barrage of the “haves,” and the essence of its -deadliness lies in the fact that it looks so little like a weapon. But -to me it seems clear enough that when a leisure-class artist portrays -the graces and refinements of the civilization which maintains him, when -he paints the noble features, and quotes the imaginary golden words of -ruling-class ladies and gentlemen, he is doing the best he knows how to -protect those who give him a living. Nor is he, as a rule, without some -awareness of the harsh and rough and dangerous forces which surround -him, besieging the ivory tower, or the temple, or the sacred grove, or -wherever it is that he keeps his working tools. But even where the -artist is instinctive and naïve, the class which employs him knows what -he is doing; it knows what is “safe and sane,” and “of sound tendency”; -it approves of such art, and pays its money to maintain such art.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_73">{73}</a></span></p> - -<p>Unless the society is stagnant, like China, its social life is marked by -changes of power. The revolutionary classes succeed, and replace the old -rulers; whereupon we note at once a change in their art. Those who were -dissatisfied now find peace; those whose emotions overwhelmed them now -find themselves able to order their thoughts; those who were interested -in what they had to say now achieve triumphs of technique; in short, -those who were producing an Art of Power now begin to produce an Art of -Beauty. And so we are in position to understand what happened to -Christian art, when the martyrs and the saints broke into “good -society.”</p> - -<p>The Roman Empire fell about five hundred years after Christ, and for -another five hundred years the Italian peninsula was a battle-ground of -invading barbarian hordes. When finally things settled down, the land -was held by a great number of feudal princes and plundering groups, -having their lairs in castles and walled cities. Christianity was the -official religion, and abbots and bishops and popes were robber chiefs -commanding armies. In between their military campaigns they took their -pleasures like other princes; and among their pleasures were those of -art.</p> - -<p>The inner emotions which Christianity cultivated were free to those who -sought them in monks’ cells and hermits’ caves, but they could not be -purchased nor rented out, and they wilted in the atmosphere of palaces -and courts. So gradually we find Italian religious art undergoing a -change. The saints become gentlemen of refinement wearing scholars’ -robes; Jesus becomes a heavenly prince, in spotless linen garments and a -golden crown, casting benevolent looks upon the clergy; the Virgin Mary -becomes the favorite mistress of a duke or abbot or pope—or perhaps the -painter’s own mistress. This latter arrangement is common, for business -reasons easy to understand. The lady is at hand, and has nothing to do -while the painter is painting; he gets the service of a model free, he -flatters his lady love’s vanity, and at the same time he keeps her safe -from other painters. So the poison of luxury creeps into what is -supposed to be religious art; and we see the symbols of martyrdom and -holy sacrifice employed to glorify the vanities and cloak the vices of -the predatory classes.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_74">{74}</a></span></p> - -<p>But the soul of man never dies; it goes on struggling for justice and -brotherhood, in spite of all betrayal and persecution. So inside the -church and outside comes a long line of heroic souls, fighting to -restore the primitive simplicity and honesty of the faith. The struggle -between the “ins” and the “outs,” the “haves” and the “have-nots,” takes -the form of heresy and schism, of mendicant and preaching orders and -Protestant sects. Young and obscure servants of God arise, denouncing -the corruption of the church machine. Some retire to monasteries, -spurning the wicked world; others take literally the words of Jesus, and -go out upon the road without scrip or cloak, preaching to whoever will -hear them, and living on charity. They are denounced and excommunicated, -their followers are slaughtered by the tens and hundreds of thousands; -but the movement persists, and when the leaders die they are canonized, -and become in their turn themes for artists—to be “idealized,” and -dressed in spotless raiment, and made fit for stained glass windows and -the art galleries of prelates and princes. St. Francis of Assisi in the -thirteenth century, putting on beggar’s clothing and being publicly -disinherited by his father; Savonarola in the fifteenth century, -persuading the rich to throw their jewels into the flames, and being -publicly hanged in Florence; Martin Luther in the sixteenth century, -preaching against the sale of indulgences and nailing his theses to the -church door; George Fox in the eighteenth century, crying out against -priestly corruption in the streets, and jailed time after time; Bishop -Brown in the twentieth century, kicked out of the Episcopal church for -repudiating dogma and defending Communism—such are the figures which -have kept the Christian religion alive, and such are the themes of vital -religious art.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXVIII"></a>CHAPTER XXVIII<br /><br /> -THE HEAVEN OF ELEGANCE</h2> - -<p>It was in Italy first that the language of the people became the -language of culture, replacing Latin; and the two greatest writers of -this age afford us an interesting contrast between the Art of Beauty and -the Art of Power.</p> - -<p>The favorite ruling-class poet and novelist of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_75">{75}</a></span> medieval Italy was the -illegitimate son of a merchant, who was recognized by his father and -given the best education of his time. He chose as his mistress the -natural daughter of a king; with this married lady he carried on an -intrigue for many years, and wrote to her long epic poems about Greek -heroes, weaving into the poems elaborate acrostics and secret codes. The -first letters of the lints, taken according to certain numerical -systems, made three other separate poems; other letters, chosen -according to other systems, spelled the names of other lady loves. In -such ways the skillful artists of the Italian courts were accustomed to -beguile their leisure, wrung from the toil of a wretched enslaved -peasantry.</p> - -<p>This poet rose to fame, and became the darling of the ruling classes. He -was sent as an ambassador on various important missions to popes and -princes; he became the favorite of a queen, and did not reject her favor -even when she turned into a murderess. He learned to write beautiful -Italian prose, a great service to his country. He used his skill to -compose a collection of short stories dealing with the sojourn in a -country villa of a number of Italian ladies and gentlemen of wealth and -charm, the occasion being an outbreak of the plague in Florence. These -ladies and gentlemen did not feel impelled by their religion to nurse -the suffering; they were of too great importance to be risked in such -crude fashion, so they retired, and passed their time listening to -charmingly narrated tales of sexual promiscuity.</p> - -<p>I do not mean to imply that there is nothing but smut in the “Decameron” -of Boccaccio. We shall find it a rule throughout history that -leisure-class ladies and gentlemen do not spend their entire time in -trying new sexual combinations. They have to eat, and so their artists -give us delightful, appetizing accounts of banquets. They have to drink, -and so their artists give us an entire lore of intoxicating liquors. -They have to cover their nakedness, so we have a complicated art of -dress, a mass of subtlety constantly changing, and affording traps to -catch the feet of the unwary, so that the sacred inner circles may be -protected from those individuals who have disgraced themselves by doing -useful work, or by having parents or grandparents who did useful work.</p> - -<p>Also, the ladies and gentlemen have palaces to live in,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_76">{76}</a></span> and country -estates to which they may flee from pestilence, famine and war; so we -have the art of architecture. Because these homes have walls which must -be decorated, we have the art of painting; and so on through a long list -of cultural accomplishments. Moreover, not all ladies and gentlemen have -been able to exclude the natural human emotions from their hearts; so in -leisure-class art we have sentiments and sentimentalities. We like to be -sorry for the poor, provided they are “worthy”; so we have “idylls” and -other sad, sweet tales. When we are sick with ennui, we like to imagine -going back to the country; so we have a long line of “return to nature” -arts—eclogues and bucolics and pastorals, with beautiful shepherds and -shepherdesses dancing on the green, and country lads and lasses giving -touchingly quaint imitations of the manners of their betters.</p> - -<p>Also we have in this leisure-class world vestigial traces of the sense -of duty. We take this sense and refine it or exaggerate it, making it -into something fantastic, stimulating to jaded tastes. So we find in -Boccaccio the famous story of the “patient Griselda,” a leisure-class -model of wifely fidelity and humility. She is married to a monster, who -subjects her to every indignity the perverted imagination can conceive; -but she endures all things, and continues to be his patient and devoted -slave, and in the end she conquers her tormentor, and brings about the -necessary happy ending. The legend of this most convenient lady -represents a popular form of masculine wish-fulfillment.</p> - -<p>Giovanni Boccaccio died in ripe old age, and the Catholic Church took -cognizance of his popularity among the Italian people by preparing an -expurgated and authorized edition of his “Decameron.” From this edition -they omitted no word of the obscenities, but they changed each of the -stories so that wherever Boccaccio described indecencies committed by -priests and monks and holy popes, the said indecencies were transferred -to laymen! The tales of this darling of the Italian leisure class remain -today one of the most popular of books, which every dirty old boy keeps -hidden in his trunk, and every dirty young boy reads under his desk -while the professor of moral philosophy is lecturing on the social -responsibilities of great wealth.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_77">{77}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXIX"></a>CHAPTER XXIX<br /><br /> -THE MUCKRAKER’S HELL</h2> - -<p>Now by way of contrast we take the Italian poet of revolt and moral -indignation. We have only to look at the pictures of this man to see -that he is a crusader; a lean, hawk-like face, stern, bitter, lined with -suffering; “the mournfulest face,” says Carlyle, “that ever was painted -from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face.” There has -never been a world poet so deliberately ethical, preoccupied with moral -problems, and using his art as a means of teaching mankind what he -believed to be sound ideas about conduct.</p> - -<p>Dante Alighieri was born to comfortable circumstances in Florence; he -had the education of a scholar, and might have lived a life of literary -ease. Instead, he chose to take part in the tumultuous and dangerous -politics of his city, becoming one of the leaders of the republican -party. When the forces of the pope conquered Italy, he fled for his -life, and a sentence of exile was pronounced upon him. This exile was a -cruel hardship; he describes himself as “a pilgrim, almost a beggar, -displaying against my will the wounds of fortune.... Truly have I been a -vessel without sail and without rudder, borne to divers ports and shores -and havens by the dry wind that blows from dolorous poverty.” Yet he -never wavered in his convictions; on the contrary, by his writings he -brought upon himself a confirmation of the decree of exile, and an exile -he died.</p> - -<p>We shall not go into the details of medieval politics, the complicated -wranglings among various cities and principalities, the warring factions -in each, plus the partisans of papal dominion and those of the Holy -Roman Empire. Suffice it here to point out that one of the greatest -world poets was from the beginning to the end of his life a politician, -and took a vigorous part in the practical affairs of his time, fighting -his enemies hard, hating them implacably, and not hesitating to use his -literary art to punish them in a future world. When Dante goes down into -hell he encounters in the lowest pits of torment various Florentine -politicians, who have betrayed and debauched his city. How he regards -them may be judged by the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_78">{78}</a></span> case of Bocca degli Abbati, a gentleman who -is found locked helpless up to his neck in ice; the poet grabs his hair -and tears it out by the handful!</p> - -<p>The quality which Dante especially loathed was greed, “cupiditia.” He -raged at the church of his time, because it had accepted the “fatal -gift” from the Emperor Constantine—the temporal possessions which made -the popes into worldly potentates, intriguers and heads of armies. The -two popes of his own time Dante flung into hell, and portrayed heaven -itself as reddening with anger at their deeds. St. Peter declares that -each of them “has of my cemetery made a sewer of blood and filth.” This -is plain muck-raking; and how undignified and unliterary it must have -seemed to the cultured prelates of the fourteenth century!</p> - -<p>It seems that way to modern critics also. Albert Mordell has published a -book entitled “Dante and Other Waning Classics,” in which he argues that -the “Divine Comedy” is ugly, as well as out of date, with its elaborate -symbolism derived from church legend, and from Greek and Latin -mythology, combined and complicated by scholastic subtlety. Mr. Mordell -is one of those who think that art ought not to preach; and certainly -Dante does not shirk this issue—he tells us in plain words: “The kind -of philosophy under which we proceed in the whole and in the part is -moral philosophy or ethics; because the whole was undertaken not for -speculation but for use.”</p> - -<p>What are the moral problems which occupied the soul of Dante, and have -these problems any interest for us? There are two which I believe will -always concern mankind. First, the problem of divine justice. How does -it happen that the wicked flourish? How shall we explain their power to -oppress the innocent? If God has power to prevent it, why does He not -use that power? Dante traveled to the depths of hell and ascended -through purgatory to heaven, seeking answers to these questions. Our -only advantage over him is that we do not even think we can answer.</p> - -<p>The second great problem is that of love. The Christian revolution had -brought with it a new attitude toward womanhood. Mankind made the -discovery of what the psycho-analysts call the sublimation of sex, that -gratification withheld acts as a stimulus to all the psychic being. So<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_79">{79}</a></span> -the simple naturalism of the Greeks was replaced by the romanticism of -the Middle Ages; and Dante’s whole being, his total art product, was -illuminated by the vision of a great and wonderful love, which began by -a chance meeting with a nine-year-old girl, and continued without -physical expression through the poet’s whole life. No student of the -science of sex today would accept Dante’s attitude as sound or sensible; -nevertheless, we are stirred by his exaltation of the ideal woman, and -the Beatific Vision which she brings to his soul.</p> - -<p>In Dante’s pilgrimage through hell he accepted the leadership of Virgil. -This was because he honored in the Roman poet those factors we have -stressed—the moral earnestness, the effort of a lofty soul to rescue a -civilization. In Dante’s time the cultured world was just making the -discovery of Greek and Roman art, and was all a-thrill with the wonder -of a past age, rescued after a thousand years: the Renaissance, or -re-birth, we call it.</p> - -<p>We may understand how it was by recalling our own excitement over the -tomb of King Tutankhamen. Let us suppose that in that tomb had been -found Egyptian literary masterpieces, which revealed the existence of a -Socialist civilization in ancient Egypt. There was a mighty king who had -been just to the poor, who had abolished exploitation by the landlords, -and had kept the peace with other nations. A Socialist poet of our day, -wishing to satirize the “war for democracy” by locating its leaders in -hell, would take this ancient Egyptian king for a guide, and would -exchange fraternal greetings with his royal comrade, and discuss with -him political conditions both in ancient Egypt and in modern America.</p> - -<p>And in the nethermost pits the poet would meet Lloyd George and -Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson, together with the rowdies and bullies -whom these statesmen turned loose upon mankind. Attorney-General Palmer, -for example, would be represented as a devil with a long barbed tail; -the poet would seize this tail and twist it, and the attorney-general -would howl and shriek, and a radical audience would be delighted. But -respectable critics would turn up their noses, saying that of course no -one would take such a thing for art; it was the most obvious soap-box -propaganda.</p> - -<p>So the cultured Renaissance critics looked upon<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_80">{80}</a></span> Dante as a crude and -“popular” person; the highly cultured Bishop della Casa spoke -patronizingly concerning “the rustic homeliness of his language and -style, his lack of decorum and grace.” If space permitted I could show -you that every truly vital artist who has ever lived has been thus dealt -with by the academic critics of his own time.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXX"></a>CHAPTER XXX<br /><br /> -THE PIOUS POISONERS</h2> - -<p>The Italian princes were no more influenced by the moral austerity of -Dante than the Roman ruling class had been by Virgil. Medieval Italy -traveled the same road as imperial Rome, and two centuries after Dante -we find the vicars of God on earth reproducing the worst crimes of the -Neros and Caligulas. Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, purchased his high -office, and then set to work to plunder the cities of Italy and harry -the whole peninsula with war. Among his children by his numerous -mistresses was Cesare Borgia, who became the commander of the papal -armies, and slaughtered and poisoned all who stood in his way, including -his own brother. Returning from his wars, he would amuse himself by -using his prisoners of war as targets for archery practice in the -courtyard of the Vatican. In the end Cesare died of wounds, Alexander -died by poison, and his daughter Lucrezia poisoned her own son and then -herself.</p> - -<p>Here was an ideal environment for the development of leisure-class art. -These popes and princes built themselves magnificent palaces, and as a -measure of soul-insurance they built cathedrals and churches. They were -willing to spend fortunes upon famous artists; and the artists, needless -to say, were willing to take the money. Browning has a poem, “The Bishop -Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church,” a vivid picture of the attitude -of mind of these pious poisoners and artistic assassins. The bishop lies -upon his couch dying, and his sons, politely known as “nephews,” gather -about him to hear his vision of a tomb which is to preserve his memory -and bring peace to his soul. He describes the treasures of beauty which -are to go upon the tomb<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_81">{81}</a></span>—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There’s plenty jasper somewhere in the world—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And have I not St. Praxed’s ear to pray<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Horses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>The pious soul goes on to specify his epitaph; it must be “choice Latin, -picked phrase,” from Cicero. Having got this—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">And then how I shall lie through centuries,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And see God made and eaten all day long,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>The true “art for art’s sake” attitude, you perceive; and under the -patronage of such esthetic prelates, the poets and musicians, the -painters and sculptors flourished in sixteenth century Italy. Among -those who were employed by the poisoner pope, Alexander VI, was a -youthful painter of extraordinary ability, Raphael Sanzio by name. This -pope was succeeded by two others, who conquered many cities for the -glory of God, and spent millions of their plunder upon religious art. So -this young painter of genius was floated through life upon a flood of -gold ducats, and with his magic brushes he turned the blood and sweat -and tears of the peasantry of Italy into beautiful images of serenely -smiling madonnas, and enraptured saints, and ineffably gracious Jesuses. -Raphael is ranked by many as the greatest painter in history; we stand, -therefore, within the very holy of holies, before the shrine of “pure” -beauty, and it will repay us to dig into the roots of his life, and see -from what soil this precious flower grows.</p> - -<p>He was the son of a court painter, and his life was one of ease, swift -achievement, and applause. He was gifted with all the graces of body, -also a genial and winning nature. He studied the work of one painter -after another, and acquired all the powers of each. He became so famous -that his life was “not that of a painter, but of a prince.” Ambassadors -from the wealthy and powerful besieged his doors, and waited for months -in hope of an interview. He went about accompanied by a band of more -than fifty youths, pupils and adorers of his art.</p> - -<p>He had one weakness, which was for the ladies. The<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_82">{82}</a></span> popes and princes -who cherished him sought to put loving restraint upon him, and planned -wealthy marriages for him, but he could not bring himself to stoop to -matrimony. At this time he was decorating the palace of a Sienese -millionaire, Chigi, owner of ships and of salt and alum mines throughout -Italy; this gentleman, discovering that Raphael was so wrapped up in his -mistress that he was neglecting the palace decorations, solved the -problem by a brilliant move—bringing the mistress to live in the -palace! In the end this darling of fortune died at the age of -thirty-seven, of a fever brought on by self-indulgence. His adoring -biographer, Vasari, tells us that when he knew his last hour had come, -he sent away his mistress from his home, “as a good Christian should,” -and so passed on to decorate the palaces of heaven.</p> - -<p>What was the secret of Raphael’s fortune? The answer is, he painted the -ruling class of Italy, in their physical beauty and their material -luxury and splendor. In order to flatter their vanity, he painted them -as all the saints and demigods of the Catholic mythology. Every trace of -asceticism is now gone out of church art; the Christian gentlemen and -mistresses and virgins and gods and saints of Raphael and his -contemporaries are full-throated and full-bosomed and ruddy-cheeked -pictures of prosperity; their ecstasies have never been permitted to -interfere with their digestions. The angel comes to the Virgin Mary to -bring to her the sacred tidings of her divine pregnancy, and finds her -seated, not in a carpenter’s hut, but in a palace. Even when Jesus is -crucified and borne to the sepulchre, the mourning ladies have not -forgotten the proper arrangement of their hair and the proper costumes -for the historic occasion. Says Vasari: “Our Lady is seen to be -insensible, and the heads of all the weeping figures are exceedingly -graceful.”</p> - -<p>Needless to say, Raphael painted portraits of all the Old Men and the -Witch Doctors of his time, and he made them magnificent and thrilling. -Of the portrait of Pope Julius II, valiant war-maker, Vasari writes: -“The picture impresses on all beholders a sense of awe, as if it were -indeed the living object.” Later on came another pope, Leo X, who in -order to get the millions necessary for his family monuments, and for -the art glories of St. Peter’s, started a sale of indulgences, which -brought about the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_83">{83}</a></span> church revolt known to us as the Reformation. His -portrait by Raphael shows a Tammany politician of the bar-room type; and -Vasari tells us—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>The velvet softness of the skin is rendered with the utmost -fidelity; the vestments in which the Pope is clothed are also most -faithfully depicted, the damask shines with a glossy luster; the -furs which form the linings of his robes are soft and natural, -while the gold and silk are copied in such a manner that they do -not seem to be painted, but really appear to be silk and gold. -There is also a book in parchment decorated with miniatures, a most -vivid imitation of the object represented, with a silver bell, -finely chased, of which it would not be possible adequately to -describe the beauty. Among other accessories, there is, moreover, a -ball of burnished gold on the seat of the Pope, and in this—such -is its clearness—the divisions of the opposite window, the -shoulders of the Pope, and the walls of the room, are faithfully -reflected; all these things are executed with so much care, that I -fully believe no master ever has done, or ever can do anything -better.</p></div> - -<p>A man who can perform such miracles for the rich and powerful can -command his own price, and is master of everything except his own -passions. Raphael’s old uncle wrote, begging him to return to his home -town and take himself a respectable wife. The young painter’s reply has -come down to us. “If I had done as you wished,” he says, “I should not -be where I am now.” And he goes on to tell where he is—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>At the present time I have property in Rome worth three thousand -gold ducats, and an income of fifty gold crowns, as his Holiness -gives me a salary of three hundred gold ducats for superintending -the fabric of St. Peter, which will continue as long as I live; and -I am sure to earn more from other sources and am paid whatever I -choose to ask for my work. And I have begun to paint another room -for his Holiness which will bring me one thousand two hundred gold -ducats, so that you see, my dearest uncle, that I do honor to you -and to all my family and to my country.... What city in the world -can compare with Rome, what enterprise is more worthy than this of -Peter, which is the first temple in the world? And these are the -grandest works which have ever been seen, and will cost more than a -million in gold, and the Pope has decided to spend sixty thousand -ducats a year on the fabric and can think of nothing else.</p></div> - -<p>While Raphael was thus flourishing and proud of his world, a German monk -by the name of Martin Luther was nailing his condemnation of the papacy -upon the door of the church at Wittenberg. But our painter-prince was so -busy, he had so many commissions to portray new<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_84">{84}</a></span> popes and cardinals, -new annunciations and transfigurations and illuminations and immaculate -conceptions, that he probably never even heard of the barbarian rebel in -the far North. He remained to the end the perfect exemplar of -leisure-class art, and is today the darling of pious peasant-wives, and -sentimental school-marms doing culture-pilgrimages: in short, of all who -wish to develop their emotions at the expense of their brains, and to -shut their eyes to the grim realities of life, out of which alone true -and vital beauty can grow.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXXI"></a>CHAPTER XXXI<br /><br /> -THE PAPAL PAYMASTERS</h2> - -<p>Among its numerous artists of beauty Renaissance Italy produced one man -who did not find life a garden of pleasure; one man who, when he sinned, -did not do it with easy grace and cheerful heart; a man who faced the -mysteries of life, and took seriously the terrors which the medieval -mind has conjured for itself. This man was a rebel against the wanton -and cruel spirit of his age; a rebel also against nature, those -cruelties which time and death inflict upon our race. He was a lonely -man, pursued by the jealousies and greeds of his rivals, tortured by his -own sensuality and by fears of eternal torment. He lived a life of -futile and agonized revolt, and produced some magnificent and terrible -art.</p> - -<p>In this book it is our task to study the artist in relation to the -masters of money; and we shall find no more tragic illustrations of the -waste that is wrought in the life of genius by the powers of greed, than -are revealed to us in the story of Michelangelo Buonarroti. He is ranked -as one of the greatest sculptors of all time; he was also one of the -greatest of painters, and a great poet. Like most of those who have -visioned the sublime and the colossal, he was a man of frail physique, -fear-haunted all his life. As a child he was beaten by his father, who -sought to break him of the desire to become an artist. At the age of -nine he was taken to hear the thunderings of Savonarola, another frail -prophet who had arisen to denounce the vices of the church in Florence. -When Michelangelo was twenty-three, Savonarola was publicly hanged, -after<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_85">{85}</a></span> having been excommunicated by the Borgia pope. The young painter -at that time was beguiling himself with Greek beauty; but the terrible -fate of the prophet cannot have failed to impress him, and helps to -account for the religious fervors of his later years. Two worlds -struggled in his soul, the world of pagan beauty and luxurious pleasure, -and the world of heavenly raptures and fanatical asceticism.</p> - -<p>This artist’s abilities were quickly recognized. The same pope, Julius -II, who was showering Raphael with golden ducats, adopted Michelangelo -as his chief glorifier, and the two of them spent a year or two -preparing colossal plans for the pope’s tomb, something greater than any -tomb ever seen on earth before, a perfect mountain of marble, with more -than forty statues of colossal size. Here we see Michelangelo’s fate; -one of the great masters of life, with a mighty message concerning the -destiny of man, he is obliged to get the money by which he lives, and -the marble which he carves, from a vain and greedy politician in -churchly raiment. He is permitted to make statues of David and of Moses, -of Day and Night and Morning and Evening, and other great symbolic -ideas; but he must carve them for the tomb of some pope or potentate, -and must spend the greater part of his life in quarreling—not merely -with this pope or potentate, but with officials and subordinates, all -hating, intriguing, threatening to stab or to poison.</p> - -<p>In the sentimental rubbish which historians and art critic’s write about -the Middle Ages, we are told that mighty cathedrals and temples were -produced by the co-operative devotion and reverence of whole communities -of worshipers. When you come to investigate the facts, you find that -they were produced amid a chaos of wrangling and cheating and lying, -exactly as a modern public building, or a battleship, or a fleet of -aeroplanes is produced. The chief architect of Pope Julius II was a -dissipated and murderous rascal, who was putting rotten walls into the -Vatican buildings—walls which have had to be repaired incessantly ever -since. He carried on intrigues against Michelangelo, and succeeded in -persuading the pope that it was bad luck for anyone to build his own -tomb while he was alive. So the pope dropped the project, and -Michelangelo was left in debt, having to pay out of his<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_86">{86}</a></span> own pocket the -costs of transporting the mountain of marble. The sculptor stormed the -Vatican and insisted upon being paid, and the pope had him put out by a -groom.</p> - -<p>Next he was required to make a bronze statue of his most holy pope. He -protested that he did not know anything about casting bronze, but he -worked at it for more than a year, making a wretched failure of it, and -ruining his health. Then he was ordered to paint the ceiling of the -Sistine Chapel. He protested that he did not know how to paint ceilings, -it was hard and exhausting work; but again the pope insisted, and -Michelangelo spent four years at this, painting his colossal and -terrifying symbols upside down. Because he took so long at it, the pope -was enraged, insisting upon seeing the work and criticizing it, flying -into a fury and beating Michelangelo with his staff, then sending a -messenger with five hundred ducats to salve his feelings.</p> - -<p>Julius II died and Leo X came in. Michelangelo had made a new contract -with the heirs of the dead pope to complete the tomb, and had started -work on thirty-two colossal statues. But the new pope wanted -Michelangelo’s fame for himself, and so for ten years the poor sculptor -was pulled and hauled between two rival groups. It was the fashion of -other sculptors and painters, when thus loaded down with work, to hire a -number of assistants and put the job through in a hurry. But -Michelangelo suffered from conscientiousness; he thought that nobody -else could do his work as he wanted it done, and he sweated and agonized -and groaned under the burden of these contracts. More marble was needed, -and he was dragged about between the rival owners of marble quarries. -The unsuccessful owners intrigued with the boatmen to make it impossible -for the marble to be moved; just like a certain teamsters’ strike which -I had occasion to investigate in Chicago some twenty years ago—the -riots and mobbings and showers of brick-bats and broken heads and -bullet-riddled bodies were caused by a great mail-order house having -paid for a strike against a rival mail-order house!</p> - -<p>There came another pope, this time a Medici. He wanted a tomb to his -ancestors, who were splendid and wealthy merchants in Florence. Also -there was to be a colossus in the Medici gardens, a difficult matter, -because of the lack of room; Michelangelo discussed the problem<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_87">{87}</a></span> in a -letter to a friend, which has come down to us. Read this picture of a -man of genius trying to please a wealthy and fastidious patron:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>I have thought about the Colossus; I have indeed thought a great -deal about it. It seems to me that it would not be well placed -outside the Medici gardens because it would take up too much room -in the street. A better place, I think, would be where the barber’s -shop is. There it would not be so much in the way. As for the -expenses of expropriation, I think to reduce them we could make the -figure seated, and as it could be hollowed, the shop could be -placed inside so the rent would not be lost. It seems to me a good -idea to put in the hand of the Colossus a horn of abundance, and -this could be hollow and would serve as a chimney. The head could -also be made use of, I should think; for the poultryman, my very -good friend who lives on the square, said to me secretly that it -would make a wonderful dovecote. I have another and still better -idea—but in that case the statue must be made very much larger, -which would not be impossible, for towers are made with stone—and -that is that the head should serve as a bell-tower to S. Lorenzo, -which now has none. By placing the bells so that the sound would -come out of the mouth it would seem as if the giant cried for -mercy, especially on holidays when they use the big bells.</p></div> - -<p>Michelangelo was in Florence when the republican revolution against the -Medici took place. The artist sympathized with the revolutionists, -against his patrons; he proposed to make for the revolutionists a -gigantic statue of David and Goliath, but they decided he had better use -his energies in fortifying the walls! When the city was taken, and the -slaughter of the rebels began, Michelangelo hid for a month or two. Then -he was commanded to come forth and resume his task of glorifying his -conquerors! He did so, and was put to work on the tomb of the Medici. -Needless to say, the figures on the tomb are not figures of serene -contentment and spiritual peace! Romain Rolland describes them as an -“outburst of despair” whereby the sculptor “drowned his shame at raising -this monument of slavery.”</p> - -<p>Another pope came, and wanted Michelangelo for his chief glorifier. The -artist pleaded his old contracts, but the pope was furious, and -commanded him to tear them up. He was put to work on the ceiling of the -Sistine Chapel, and the result was the marvelous painting, “The Last -Judgment,” in which all the terrors and torments of the Middle Ages are -summed up. It was one of the world’s greatest paintings; but the pious -of the time were shocked,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_88">{88}</a></span> and the pope put some of his other painters -to putting panties on the nude saints. From time to time other shocked -ecclesiastics had this or that article of clothing painted into the -picture; and because they used any color they happened to have lying -about, we can now form little idea of Michelangelo’s vision of the Day -of Doom.</p> - -<p>All this time the artist was being hounded by the heirs of his first -pope; but the present pope insisted that he should be the architect of -St. Peter’s; so here we see the old man, over seventy, still fighting -the grafters and hounded by conspirators. It appears that in Renaissance -Rome, when a grafter was caught, and threatened to expose his -fellow-grafters, he was shot, and the world was told that he had -committed suicide; exactly as it happens in Washington, D. C., in these -our days of oil-thieves and bootleggers! Michelangelo was still afraid, -as he had been all his life; but he was still more afraid of God, and -determined to finish St. Peter’s as a means of saving his soul at the -Last Judgment.</p> - -<p>So he stuck and fought the grafters. There came yet another pope—the -artist had to win each one in turn, thwarting a whole new set of -intriguing enemies. We find him at the age of eighty-eight, exposing -thieves who are building the walls of St. Peter’s out of rotten -materials—and around him the thieves are stabbing each other. At last, -at the age of ninety, he lies on his death-bed, his terrific labors at -an end; and between his dying gasps he confides to a friend his one -regret, that he has to die just when he has succeeded in learning the -alphabet of his art!</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXXII"></a>CHAPTER XXXII<br /><br /> -WHO IS CRAZY?</h2> - -<p>When civilization emerged from the Dark Ages, the fighting man went -about with a hard-shell covering, like a crab, and was called a knight. -Both he and his horse underwent a long training, and when it was -finished he was a fighting engine which could roll over anything else -existing in the world. He went on crusades, and drove back the Saracen -and the Turk from Europe. In these days of real and cruel danger he -produced a genuine Art of Power: for example, “The Song of Roland,” an -eleventh<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_89">{89}</a></span> century French poem, telling of a terrific all-day battle -against invading infidel hordes.</p> - -<p>But afterwards, when chivalry had become established, it developed its -Art of Beauty; a fantastic literature about ideal beings, who conformed -to an artificial and complicated code of etiquette, and spent their time -rescuing beautiful young ladies from the claws of various monsters. -There grew up a whole genealogy of these literary knights, and enormous -long poems were composed about them. When I was at Columbia University, -acquiring culture, one of the tasks set me was the reading of Ariosto, -an Italian poet of the sixteenth century, and I valiantly struggled -through a dozen cantos of these absurd adventures. They resemble a -Griffith moving picture, in which there is a villain engaged in an -elaborate process of raping a beautiful virgin, while the gallant hero -is galloping on his way to a rescue. But Ariosto regales us with more -details of the attempted rape; for in these old times people were not -afraid of the animal aspects of life.</p> - -<p>In the distant island of Britain some rough country fellows trained -themselves to shoot arrows through the joints of the knightly armor. A -little later came the invention of gunpowder, and that finished the -hard-shell crabs on horseback. But the literary world also resembles a -crab, in that it walks backward, with its eyes on the past. Invariably -you find that what is called scholarship and culture is several -generations behind the practical life of men; and so the poets went on -composing elaborate and fantastic romances of chivalry. The test of -excellence in literature was the refinement and elegance and remoteness -from life of this perverted leisure-class art: until Cervantes came -along and laughed it to death.</p> - -<p>He was born in Spain in the middle of the sixteenth century, noble but -poor. He first lived his great book, and then in old age he wrote it. He -went to Rome in the retinue of a papal ambassador, and later on took up -the chivalrous career, a crusade. The Turks were in possession of the -Mediterranean, and the Spaniards were trying to drive them out; -Cervantes, though ill of a fever, fought desperately at the battle of -Lepanto, and was twice wounded. After five years of such war he was -sailing home, when the Turks captured him, and for several years he was -a slave in Algiers—a gallant and romantic<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_90">{90}</a></span> slave, the darling of his -companions and the terror of his masters. He made several attempts to -escape, and finally was ransomed by his relatives, and came home to -Spain, crippled and poor—to reflect, like so many returned soldiers, -upon the bitterness of dead glory.</p> - -<p>He became a government agent, collecting naval stores. He was not a -great success: one of his subordinates defaulted, and he was put in -prison. He lived in straitened circumstances, in a household with five -women relatives and his sense of humor. Then he tried writing; for -twenty years he wrote every kind of thing which a man of his time could -imagine would bring a living, but all in vain. He was not a university -man and so the critics of his time considered him presumptuous in -attempting to break into their sacred ranks. Until he was fifty-eight -his life was a failure.</p> - -<p>Then he hit upon the idea of ridiculing the established literature of -chivalry, by bringing it into contact with the every-day realities of -Spain. He created a character very much like himself; except that the -old Don Quixote had read so many romances that his head was turned, and -he began to take them seriously, mounted his old nag and rode out to -rescue damsels, and to mistake a barber’s basin shining in the sun for a -helmet, and wind-mills for giants who must be overthrown. The story -rambles along from one comical adventure to the next, and brings in -almost every type of person in Spain. It became an instant and -enormously popular success; but poor Cervantes got practically nothing -out of it, because editions were pirated all over the country. He was a -failure to the end—and curiously enough, did not get any satisfaction -even from his fame. He was ashamed of his popular book, and quite sure -that mankind would some day appreciate his long poems, “The Journey to -Parnassus,” and the pastoral romance, “Galatea,” and the romantic poem, -“Persiles and Sigismunda.”</p> - -<p>Many of the world’s greatest writers have thus fallen victim to -culture-snobbery. Shakespeare was despised by the academic critics of -his own time, and apparently did not think enough of his own plays to -see that posterity got a correct edition of them. When I was a boy we -all read “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn,” and “laughed our heads -off” over them; but if anybody had<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_91">{91}</a></span> suggested to us that Mark Twain -might be one of the world’s great writers, we should have thought it a -Mark Twain joke.</p> - -<p>“Don Quixote” was produced, definitely and deliberately, as a piece of -propaganda. We no longer know even the names of these long-winded -romances of chivalry, so we do not realize that the author, in -ridiculing them, is trying to teach us something. Also, there is another -kind of propaganda that Cervantes put into the book, his ideas -concerning one of the gravest problems confronting mankind through the -ages. What shall be the relation of the idealist, the dreamer of good -and beautiful things, to the world of ugliness and greed in which he -finds himself? He has a vision of something splendid, but the world -knows nothing about that vision, and cannot be made to understand it; if -he tries to apply it, the world will call him crazy, it will treat him -so badly that before he gets through he may be really crazy. But what, -after all, is it to be crazy? Is it to believe in the possibility of -something splendid in life? Or is it to believe that life must always be -the hateful and ugly thing we now see it?</p> - -<p>Nobody can be sure just how much Cervantes realized all this himself. -There are many cases of men of genius writing, out of their sorrow and -their laughter, things more wise and more deep than they know. Did -Shakespeare intend Shylock to be a comic character, to be howled at and -pelted by the Jew-hating mob of his time, or did he realize that in this -half-comic, half-tragic figure he was voicing the grief and protest of a -persecuted race?</p> - -<p>What Cervantes has done in “Don Quixote” is to supply the critics and -interpreters with material for speculation through many ages to come. He -gave his crack-brained old gentleman a devoted servant, with no particle -of his master’s idealism or insanity. Sancho Panza is entirely normal, -from the world’s point of view, a sturdy and practical fellow; yet he -gets into just as many absurd scrapes as his master—because he is -ignorant, and is betrayed by his own greed. So we are brought back again -and again to the question: Who is it that is really crazy in this -shifting and uncertain world? Is a reader of literature insane because -he sets out to apply the ideas of that<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_92">{92}</a></span> literature in real life? Or does -insanity lie with writers who produce and critics who praise literature -which cannot be applied to real life, and is not intended to be so -applied? If, as I believe, the latter answer is correct—then how many -foolish persons there are writing books today!</p> - -<p>It is interesting to note how many of the world’s great monuments of art -were produced by men who saw their country traveling the road to ruin, -and pleaded in vain with the ruling classes. Cervantes himself was a -devout Catholic, and would not have understood us if we had told him -that Don Quixote typified the Spain of his time; the Spain which -believed that the human mind could be shackled by religious bigotry, and -forced by dungeon and torture and the stake to accept a set of -theological dogmas. The Spaniards slaughtered or drove into exile their -most intelligent population, the Moors; and Cervantes approved it. They -set out to conquer the world for their hateful faith, and Cervantes saw -their powerful Armada overthrown and destroyed by the little ships of -sturdy, independent Englishmen, who had recently kicked out the pope -from their country and taken charge of their own thinking. This pope had -by formal decree presented England to Spain; but the old, crack-brained -Don Quixote empire had been unable to take possession, and the sad -gentleman-soldier, Cervantes, died without having understood any of -these world-events.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXXIII<br /><br /> -OGI, ANGLOMANIAC</h2> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi: “This is getting to be quite a respectable literary book: -the very thing for club ladies here in Southern California, who hire -somebody to read books for them, and tell them what the books are about. -Here you’ve read thousands of books for them!”</p> - -<p>Says Ogi: “They’ll get all the culture of the ages in a lecture lasting -three-quarters of an hour. I remember your telling how the Negro mammies -chew up the babies’ food for them, and then feed it back into the -babies’ mouths.”</p> - -<p>“Yes, but don’t you tell that!” cries Mrs. Ogi.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_93">{93}</a></span></p> - -<p>“A little too Renaissancy?” laughs her husband.</p> - -<p>“With reasonable care,” persists the other, “you can break into literary -society with this book. I understand you’re leading up to English -literature; and that is where respectability begins and ends.”</p> - -<p>“You forget my Russian and German readers. Also, I’m sorry to report, we -have to have another chapter of economics and politics.”</p> - -<p>“What’s happened now?”</p> - -<p>“Free institutions have got a new start, and we have to understand the -process. We have to make an appraisal of the parliamentary system; and -if we make one that is just, we shall displease all parties to the -controversy. You remember how during the war this Ogi family used to -argue until three o’clock in the morning. The most difficult question in -all history had to be decided, and kept decided for four years. Was -there really a choice between British capitalism and German autocracy? -Was there any real life left in the parliamentary system, anything worth -saving in political democracy; or must we go over to working class -dictatorship? We listened to the partisans of each side as they stormed -at us; there were millions of separate facts, and we had to appraise -them and strike a balance. And just when we thought we had it, some -Irishman or Hindoo would come along with fresh examples of British -governmental imbecility.”</p> - -<p>“But what’s that got to do with the book?” demands Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“We have to make the same decision in our study of world culture. Here -is Elizabethan England, and we have to appraise it, and appraise -Shakespeare. Are we going to agree with Bernard Shaw and scold him -because he isn’t a Socialist? Are we going to agree with Tolstoy and -scrap him because he isn’t a saint? Evidently I’m expected to do those -things. Here’s a letter from George Sterling, who disapproves most -strenuously of my thesis, but who says, ‘From your point of view -Shakespeare is your biggest and most vulnerable game.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>“Well,” says Mrs. Ogi, “what’s Shakespeare to you, or you to -Shakespeare?”</p> - -<p>“For one thing, he’s an old friend. For another, he’s a whole universe -in himself<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_94">{94}</a></span>—”</p> - -<p>“Surely a respectable opinion!”</p> - -<p>“I’m sorry to be respectable, but I want to be just. It is easy to name -great and important qualities that Shakespeare lacked, and damn him for -that lack. On the other hand, one can think of hideous qualities he -lacked—and honor him for their absence. Most important of all, he -wasn’t a medieval bigot. If he doesn’t ascend to the heights of moral -idealism, at least he avoids wallowing in what Sterling calls ‘the -liquid manure of superstition.’ He is a modern man, who looks at life -with clear eyes, and judges it on its own merits. Coming from Catholic -Europe to Elizabethan England is like coming out of a morgue, and -standing on a headland where the wind blows from the sea. Shakespeare -knew that, and all the men of his time knew it; they were defending -themselves from the Inquisition, they were saving the race-mind.</p> - -<p>“The future world poet was twenty-four years old when the Spanish Armada -was harried down the English channel by the little ships of Drake and -Frobisher. He had already come up to London, and perhaps he heard the -guns. Anyhow, all England knew that the pope had by formal decree turned -over their country to be a vassal of Spain; they knew that King Philip -was preparing against them the most powerful fleet in history. They -waited, in just such an agony of suspense as we knew during the long -struggle in France. And just as Æschylus was inspired by the battle of -Marathon to write Greek patriotic propaganda, so Shakespeare was -inspired by the defeat of the Armada to write English patriotic -propaganda. Now, in weighing the value of that propaganda, we have to -judge the society in which Shakespeare lived, the balance of democratic -and aristocratic forces, of progress and reaction it contained. We can’t -do that without a theory of political evolution—”</p> - -<p>“I’ll tell you what you do,” says Mrs. Ogi. “You start in and tell us -some facts about Shakespeare’s plays, and what’s in them, and work in -your theory of political evolution as you go along. Then, as I go along, -I’ll take a pencil and mark most of it out!<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_95">{95}</a></span>”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXXIV"></a>CHAPTER XXXIV<br /><br /> -PHOSPHORESCENCE AND DECAY</h2> - -<p>A few months ago I had the pleasure of spending twenty-four hours with a -Chicago millionaire who specializes in knowing all there is to know on -the subject of ciphers. During the war he gave our army practically all -its information on this subject; so precious was his knowledge that, for -fear the enemy might get him, he was kept for a year and a half locked -up in the fire-proof, bomb-proof, burglar-proof and bullet-proof vault -where his books and manuscripts are preserved.</p> - -<p>Sitting in this vault, the owner showed me the greatest collection of -Bacon and Shakespeare first editions in America. For several hours he -pointed out the ciphers in these editions, and coming home on the train -I read the narrative which is hidden in these ciphers, the secret life -of Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, wherein he claims to have been a natural -son of Queen Elizabeth, and the author of most of the plays attributed -to William Shakespeare. It seems strange that one has to learn about -these things in French; but so it stands, in a series of articles by -General Cartier, published in the “Mercure de France,” September, 1922.</p> - -<p>If I were going to have an opinion on this subject, I should want at -least two years to devote, without interruption, to a study of this -cipher literature, and to the lives of Bacon and Shakespeare, and a -comparison of their literary styles. Lacking this leisure in the present -crisis of man’s fate, I content myself with saying that here is one of -the most fascinating mysteries in the world, and that I am not one of -those comfortable people who know a thing to be impossible, merely -because it is new and strange. Having said this much, I proceed upon the -orthodox assumption that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare -were written by the actor of that name.</p> - -<p>He was born in 1564 at Stratford-on-Avon, his father being a merchant -who early fell into misfortune. There are legends that the son was wild, -and ran away to London to escape prosecution for deer-stealing. He -became a hanger-on of theatrical companies, held horses at the doors of -theaters, became connected with the Duke of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_96">{96}</a></span> Leicester’s company, acted -in various plays, was called upon to revise and patch up manuscripts, -and finally wrote plays of his own which were popular successes. He made -money, bought several pieces of property at Stratford, won the -friendship of some of the powerful and great, and finally returned to -his home town, to die at the age of fifty-two.</p> - -<p>That is all we know about the greatest poet of all time. How he managed -to escape attention, how above all he failed to see to it that the world -got authentic copies of his plays, is a mystery only partly explained by -the fact that playwriting and acting were disreputable occupations. -Actors had been strolling vagabonds, liable to be thrown into jail by -any constable, like a workingman out of a job in the United States. Only -by getting the protection of some noble earl could they be safe from -persecution; and if you had become a friend of noble earls, and a -gentleman of property in your home-town, you did not boast of plays you -had written, any more than if you lived on Fifth Avenue today you would -boast of a saloon you had once kept.</p> - -<p>Shakespeare’s first plays are romantic comedies in the style of the -time. It was the tradition of the pastoral, fostered by elegant ladies -and gentlemen who know nature as a place for picnics. It is a world of -beauty, wit and “charm”; everybody is young, everybody’s occupation is -falling in love with some other pretty body, and problems exist only to -be solved in the last act.</p> - -<p>When I was young I saw Julia Marlowe in “As You Like It,” and was -ravished with delight. Now I look back on it, in the broad daylight of -my present knowledge about life; I recall the thousand traps into which -I fell because of ignorance of sex, ignorance of money, ignorance of -almost everything about my fellow human beings. I recall the people I -have known who fell into these same traps, and were not able to -extricate themselves, but paid for their romantic illusions with -poverty, drunkenness, disease, divorce, insanity, suicide. So I am -compelled to declare that these “charming” comedies are as false to life -as the average moving picture of our time, in which the problems of -labor and capital are solved by the honest labor leader marrying the -daughter of the great captain of industry.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_97">{97}</a></span></p> - -<p>I have to go further and maintain that this betrayal of life was -deliberate; the writer himself knew more than he told us. Shakespeare is -fond of jeering at the “groundlings,” and those who stoop to tickle -their unwashed ears. In the Shakespearean theater the cheap seats were -in the pit, or what we call the orchestra; the aristocrats sat on the -sides of the stage, and frequently got drunk, and amused themselves by -sprawling in their seats and tripping up the actors and guying the show. -These elegant ones were not “groundlings,” and it was no disgrace to a -romantic poet to rise in the world by giving them what they wanted. -Shakespeare was even cynical enough to laugh at them for their silly -taste; he called one of his comedy successes “As You Like It,” and -another “Twelfth Night, or What you Will.”</p> - -<p>This man was gifted with the most marvelous tongue that has yet appeared -on earth. Golden, glowing, gorgeous words poured out of him at a -moment’s notice all his life; he covered everything he wrote with the -glamour of poetry. This gift was his fortune; but also it was a trap, -because it saved him the need of thinking. It is a trap for us, because -it tempts us into sharing his emotions without thinking. But force -yourself to think, ask yourself what is the actual value of the ideas -the mighty poet is expressing, and you discover that many of them are -commonplace, many are worldly and cheap, many are the harsh prejudices -of his time and class.</p> - -<p>In these early days Shakespeare wrote a long narrative poem, which helps -us to know him. It is dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton, his -patron, and is called “Venus and Adonis”; a typical example of the -pseudo-classical romantic rubbish which the cultured world of that time -called “art.” Nature has provided for the mixing and distributing of the -qualities of living creatures by a system of sex exchanges. Throughout -the higher forms of life, and with men and women in their primitive, -natural condition, the act of sex fertilization occupies less than the -entire time of the creature. But now a leisure-class arises, parasitic -upon its fellows; and the members of this class seek to divert their -idle time by the endless elaboration of the sex function.</p> - -<p>“Venus and Adonis” tells the story of an effort of the goddess of love -to secure the sexual attentions of a reluc<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_98">{98}</a></span>tant youth. The striking -thing about the poem is the extent to which the Greek ideal of the -goddess of fecundity has been debased—I will not say to the animal -level, because the animals are decent and sensible in their sex affairs; -I say to the level of the high-priced brothel, where the jaded rich are -beguiled. Venus in this poem has no idea of making herself spiritually -or intellectually attractive to the youth; she does not know how to be -sublime and goddess-like, she does not know how to be wise, or even to -be witty and gay. She only knows how to force her unwanted flesh more -and more persistently upon the youth, to wallow upon his body, -disgusting both the youth and the reader.</p> - -<p>The fact that “Venus and Adonis” is full of verbal splendor, like -everything else that Shakespeare wrote, makes it more and not less -offensive to an intelligent person. By means of our intelligence we have -invented the microscope, and thereby we know that decay is not less -decay because it happens to be phosphorescent. We can surely say that -there was decay in the fashionable world of Shakespeare’s time, when -twelve editions of “Venus and Adonis” were called for, while for a -mighty tragedy like “Othello” there was not demand enough to secure its -printing until six years after its author was dead!</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXXV"></a>CHAPTER XXXV<br /><br /> -THE GOOD MAN THEORY</h2> - -<p>When I was young the orthodox critics of Shakespeare taught, and -everybody accepted the idea, that there was no poet who had been more -aloof from his own work, and that it was impossible to tell anything -about him from the characters he portrayed. But now comes Frank Harris -with his book, “The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life-Story.” Harris -contends that no poet has revealed himself more continuously than -Shakespeare; the character speaking out of the plays is that of a man -tormented all his life by sensuality, and fighting in pain and -bewilderment to save a brilliant intellect from ruin by excess.</p> - -<p>Frank Harris is such a man himself; he makes no secret of the fact that -this has been his tragic life-story. So, as we read the book, our first -question is, to what<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_99">{99}</a></span> extent has Frank Harris read himself into -Shakespeare. It has been a long time since I read the plays straight -through, and I should want to do it again before I felt I had an -opinion. Meantime, we can say this much: if the Shakespeare of Frank -Harris is not Shakespeare, but a work of imagination, it is one of the -most fascinating works of imagination in the world, fully as significant -as any character in any of Shakespeare’s plays.</p> - -<p>All critics would assent to the statement that Shakespeare began with -youthful glorification of his leisure-class friends, their graces and -their charms; and that as the years passed he met with a series of -disillusionments, which drove him to bitterness, almost to madness. But -it is to be noted that throughout this period of disillusionment he -remains purely personal, he never rises above the “good man” theory of -life. You know how it is in our politics; if there is corruption, it is -because we have elected bad men to office. The test of one’s ability to -think straight on social questions is the outgrowing of this “good man” -theory.</p> - -<p>“Just a moment,” says Mrs. Ogi, who has not entirely outgrown this -theory herself. “Do you deny that there are some things a good man can -do in the world that would not be done otherwise?”</p> - -<p>“Of course; I’m willing to admit that any social system would work, if -we could manage to get good men in charge, and to keep them there. The -trouble about evil systems is that they keep good men out of power; they -turn good men into bad men, even before they get into office. They keep -us from finding the good men; they make us think that bad men are -good—until ruin has come and it’s too late.”</p> - -<p>“But think of the frightful pictures that Shakespeare drew of evil men -in power!”</p> - -<p>“Shakespeare was a man of refinement, he loathed brutality and cruelty. -That was a part of his propaganda, his hatred of power blindly used; he -comes back again and again to cry out against it, to defend the gentle -and the innocent and the kind. In those ways he was far ahead of his -time; for those things we love him, they help to make him a world poet. -But here is the point—with Shakespeare it is all a family matter, -inside the leisure class. Some bad member of the family has got power,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_100">{100}</a></span> -and our attention is concentrated upon turning him out, and putting in -some good member of the family, who will make wiser use of power.</p> - -<p>“We shall find that the leisure-class artist is frequently permitted -this kind of criticism. He has his friends among the ruling class, he -comes to think of himself as belonging; so he has a right to find fault. -You know how it is with Mrs. Ogi; she will say things about her own -family—they are ignorant, they are arrogant, they are this and that. -But it is the part of discretion for her husband to remain silent at -such times. Mrs. Ogi will entertain the company with tales about the -absent-mindedness and general absurdity of her own husband; but it will -be the part of discretion for the company to dissent gently from such -ridicule.”</p> - -<p>“If you stay married to me long enough,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you will know -enough about human nature to be able to write a novel. But now we are -talking about Shakespeare. Aren’t you ahead of the time in expecting him -to have revolutionary feelings?”</p> - -<p>“Not at all. There was plenty of revolt, both political and social, in -Shakespeare’s day; there had been two centuries of social protest before -he was born. John Ball, the rebel priest, had been hanged and quartered -for asking the dangerous question:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">‘When Adam delved and Eve span<br /></span> -<span class="i1">Who then was the gentleman?’<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>“So, if Shakespeare had wanted to cast in his lot with the poor he had -his opportunity. But there was nothing of that sort in him. He was a -brilliant youth who had come up to London, poor and friendless, to -become intimate with noble earls and wealthy gentlemen, to dedicate his -poems and sonnets to them, and have his plays produced by their licensed -companies. If they proved faithless, if they insulted and humiliated a -man of genius, if their brilliant ladies and dashing maids of honor -intrigued with him and then betrayed him—he would fly into a rage and -write plays of almost insane fury, such as ‘Timon of Athens’ and ‘King -Lear,’ or pictures of grim and somber cruelty such as ‘Measure for -Measure.’ But when these plays failed, he would learn his lesson and go -back to writing romantic dreams, pretty fairy stories like<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_101">{101}</a></span> ‘A Winter’s -Tale’ and ‘The Tempest.’ In these latter we find the wistful sadness of -the old man who has learned that life is not the beautiful thing it -ought to be, but who sighs in vain for an all-powerful magician to come -and set it right. Again, you see, the ‘good man’ theory; while the -social classes whose destiny it is to abolish parasitism are the object -of Shakespeare’s haughty and aristocratic sneers.”</p> - -<p>“Ah, now!” says Mrs. Ogi. “That’s the part of the story you’re saving -for a climax!”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXXVI"></a>CHAPTER XXXVI<br /><br /> -COMIC RELIEF</h2> - -<p>Shakespeare’s historical plays cover a period of three hundred years; -the breakdown of the feudal system, and its replacement by a monarchy -more or less controlled by a parliament. We have ten plays dealing with -this period. Some of them Shakespeare wrote entirely, getting his data -from old chronicles; others he worked over from older plays. He was -careless about his facts; and how little grasp he had of fundamentals -you may judge from the circumstance that “King John” does not even refer -to the signing of Magna Charta. He might easily have had a character in -this play make a speech on the subject of the people binding the -insolence of their rulers. But he had no interest in such matters.</p> - -<p>What Shakespeare did was to make a series of chronicle plays dealing -with the intrigues and quarrels and fightings of the English nobility. -He followed tradition, but never hesitated to change the characters in -order to heighten the dramatic interest. The result has replaced English -history in the minds of all English school-boys, and those grown-up -school-boys called statesmen. Their national poet flatters their -vanities and encourages their insular prejudices. He did not like the -Irish, he did not like the Welsh, he did not like the Scotch, he did not -like the French, and of course he did not like the Spaniards. He liked -the Romans, apparently because they resembled the English ruling -classes.</p> - -<p>John of Gaunt in his dying speech proclaims England in a series of -<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_102">{102}</a></span>rapturous similes “this other Eden, demi-paradise ... this happy breed -of men, this little world, this precious stone set in the silver sea ... -this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”... And that -is all right, that is the correct way for Englishmen to feel about -England. But do they permit Frenchmen to feel that way about France, to -love and defend their country, and manage it in their own way? The -answer is, they do not. Frenchmen are to see English kings laying claim -to their throne; they are to see English armies invading their country, -destroying their cities and laying waste their fields; and they are to -hear the great poet of England cheering on the invader with his golden -eloquence, burdening his play with wearisome speeches to prove the -validity of the English claim to the throne of France, and explaining to -Frenchmen that it is for their own good that their country is invaded by -a superior race.</p> - -<p>Stranger yet, we shall find American scholars and critics enraptured -over such English imperialist poetry! I go to my local library to see -what the learned gentry have to say on this subject, and the most -up-to-date thing I find is a book called “English History in -Shakespeare’s Plays,” by a professor of a university in Louisiana. He -quotes the passage in which Henry V incites his troops to the attack on -Harfleur:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Or close the wall up with our English dead.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>Says our scholar: “We are now greeted by the noble strain; a strain -unworn by constant quotation, unhackneyed by trite allusions. Like the -splendid harmonies of a master-musician it throbs and thrills us as we -read, in spite of the declamations of the schoolroom and the parsing -exercises of childhood.”</p> - -<p>Joan of Arc arose to inspire her people to drive out these invaders; and -the English burned her as a witch. A hundred and sixty years had -passed—surely time enough for sober second thought, surely time for -England’s national poet to do what he could to wipe this blot from his -country’s good name. But the maid of Orleans had to look elsewhere for -vindication than to Shakespeare, friend of the rich and powerful, who -never advocated an unpopular cause in all his forty plays. He represents -Joan according to the basest of the prejudices of his “ground<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_103">{103}</a></span>lings”; a -vain, boastful creature, unchaste, and not denying her unchastity.</p> - -<p>In the series of plays dealing with King Henry VI comes a still more -significant incident, the rebellion of Jack Cade. For three hundred -years the blood and treasure of the English people had been wasted in -these foreign wars, and incessant civil wars of rival earls and dukes -and barons. In the middle of the fifteenth century there was widespread -distress, and in Kent occurred an uprising; a popular leader took the -city of London, and forced some promises of reforms, and was then -betrayed and killed. This incident fell into Shakespeare’s lap—an -opportunity for delicious gentlemanly wit at the expense of the -exploited workers. “Be brave, then,” cries Cade, “for your captain is -brave and vows reformation. There shall be in England seven half-penny -loaves sold for a penny, the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and -I will make it felony to drink small beer.”</p> - -<p>Just as soon as the Cade of Shakespeare gets power he sets himself up to -be a nobleman, and offers to strike one of his followers dead for -failing to recognize his claim. He addresses Lord Say, one of the -persons against whom the indignation of the people had been roused:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in -erecting a grammar school; and whereas, before, our fathers had no -other book but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing -to be used; and contrary to the king, his crown and dignity, thou -hast erected a paper mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou -hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun, and a verb, and -such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear.</p></div> - -<p>Such is the wit of our gentleman poet; and what is the comment of our -Louisiana scholar? He tells us: “This savors of modern times.... The -demagogue has the ignorance of his audience on his side. He has in -behalf of his appeals that sullen jealousy of the masses who are -conscious of classes, that is, of a caste above them and more -accomplished.” To be sure, the Louisiana professor admits that -Shakespeare is here handling a great historic scene “flippantly”; but -then, you see, the poet had such a good excuse! He was “sorely in need -of comedy for the tragic drama of ‘Henry VI’<span class="lftspc">”</span>! But I ask: why could he -not have made up some comedy dealing with noble lords and gentlemen?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_104">{104}</a></span></p> - -<p>The answer is: It is a tradition of the leisure-class literature of -England that the sufferings of the rich and powerful are dignified -tragedy, while the sufferings of the poor are “comic relief.” The only -way a poor person of any sort can get Shakespeare to take him seriously -is by being a devoted servant of some wealthy and powerful person; for -example, Old Adam in “As You Like It,” a part which, according to -tradition, was played by Shakespeare himself. But when the common people -try to do something for themselves, they are clowns and fools, yokels -and tavern roysterers.</p> - -<p>Take the comedy scenes in “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” when working people -actually attempt to give a play. Shakespeare thinks that no idea could -be more absurd. But nowadays working people give many plays in England; -there are radical theater groups producing a new dramatic literature, in -which it does not always happen that poor people are boobs, while ladies -and gentlemen are refined and gracious. More significant yet, the -descendants of those Jack Cade rebels, whom Shakespeare represents as -objecting to grammar schools, have by a century-long struggle forced the -establishment of free schools for the children of the people in every -corner of England. They have some three thousand branches of the -Workers’ Education Association, in which the people learn about nouns -and verbs at their own expense. Was ever a national poet more sternly -rebuked by the people of his own nation?</p> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi: “It is time for Jack Cade to make it felony to read -Shakespeare.”</p> - -<p>“No,” says Ogi; “we have to follow the example of the Catholic Church, -whose priests are allowed to read prohibited books for purposes of -controversy. But certainly it is time for us to get clear in our minds -that Shakespeare is a poet and propagandist of the enemy; for the -present, at any rate, a burden upon the race mind. He is the crown and -glory of the system of class supremacy, and a magic word used by every -snob and every time-server in the place of straight thinking and the -reality of life.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_105">{105}</a></span>”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXXVII"></a>CHAPTER XXXVII<br /><br /> -PRAISE FOR PURITANS</h2> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi: “From the title of this chapter I judge that we here -begin our long-anticipated debate with H. L. Mencken!”</p> - -<p>“No,” replies her husband, “we shall hew to the line of John Milton; but -of course, if one of the chips happens to hit Mencken in the eye—”</p> - -<p>“He will let us know,” says Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“First we have to have some of the despised sociology. We have to -mention that human institutions arise, and serve their day, and then -degenerate. The shell which at one time protects the crab becomes an -encumbrance and has to be split and cast off. The English monarchy once -served to break the power of the rebellious nobles, and to give the -country unity; but now came Parliament, pushing the kings aside. The -people who brought about that change were the Puritans: and for a -century they represented such freedom of conscience and freedom of -intellect as England had. Incidentally, they settled the North American -continent, cleared out the savages, and made a civilization. We owe them -more than we owe to any other single group; and if nowadays we identify -Puritanism with the Society for the Prevention of Vice, we shall be just -as narrow and as bigoted as Anthony Comstock himself.”</p> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi: “There goes a chip straight for Mencken’s eye!”</p> - -<p>The society in which John Milton grew up was very much like the -Harding-Coolidge era which we know. There was the same raffish crew in -control of government, selling everything in sight, and trampling civil -rights. Men were thrown wholesale into prison, they were beaten and -tortured for their opinions’ sake. A small handful stood out, and -suffered martyrdom; they appealed to the public, and the public seemed -dead and indifferent—exactly as it seems today.</p> - -<p>John Milton had a fortunate and happy youth. His father was prosperous, -and gave his son the best guidance and education. At Christ’s College -they called the boy “the lady,” because he was beautiful and refined. He -re<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_106">{106}</a></span>turned to his father’s home to live a life of quiet study, and to -write poems of imperishable beauty. If “art for art’s sake” degenerates -care to know how poetry can have all the graces and sensuous charms, and -still be clean, they are referred to these early poems of the young -English Puritan. It is worth while to point out explicitly how little -his creed meant narrowness and contempt for art. All that came later, as -a result of the civil war. But Milton in his youth acquired all the -culture of his time; he was a thorough-going humanist, personally -graceful and attractive; he traveled in Italy and met the leading men of -his age, including the old blind Galileo, who had been forced under -threat of torture to recant his belief that the earth moves around the -sun.</p> - -<p>The efforts of the most Catholic King Charles I to break the parliament -of England brought Milton home from Italy. The parliament resisted, and -civil war broke out, and he put aside his poetry and teaching, and -plunged into the work of saving free government. Even today we find -leisure-class critics bewailing the fact that a great poet should have -wasted himself in a political career. But I venture the opinion that -John Milton has given us more great poetry than we take time to -appreciate; and it was worth while also to give us a life, and -demonstrate that a poet can be a man.</p> - -<p>For twenty years John Milton was the world voice of the Republican -cause. In order to defend it he made himself master of the finest -English prose style known up to that time. He defended his cause also in -Latin, in French, and in Italian; he defended it so well that it now -prevails over most of the world, and so we fail to realize what it -seemed in the poet’s day. The parliamentary army met the king in battle, -and took him prisoner, held him for three years, and then, because of -his infinite and incurable treachery, tried him and cut off his head. To -the orthodox respectability of the seventeenth century this was the most -horrible thing that had happened since the crucifixion of Christ.</p> - -<p>You know how Bolsheviks and Socialists are reputed to practice free -love, and worse yet, to preach it. John Milton was that kind of wicked -person, also. He married a giddy young Royalist wife, and she left him; -whereupon he wrote two pamphlets in favor of divorce.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_107">{107}</a></span> When he could not -get permission to print such diabolical documents, he printed them -without license; and when he was attacked for this, he published another -pamphlet, maintaining the unthinkable theory that men should be free to -print what they pleased. I have seen, within a few miles of my own home, -bookstores and printing offices raided, and their contents smashed and -burned, both by mobs and by officers of the law; I have seen one of my -friends fined thirty thousand dollars for publishing a book in favor of -the atrocious idea that human beings should not shed one another’s -blood; so I believe that I can understand how this Puritan poet was -regarded by the cultured world of his time.</p> - -<p>He was a grim fighter. It was the fashion in those days to abuse your -opponents, and Milton gave as good as he got. People who think that -Upton Sinclair is too personal in his controversial writing—</p> - -<p>“Won’t think it any the less because he compares himself with Milton!” -says Mrs. Ogi. “Go on with your story.”</p> - -<p>So her husband confines his statement to the fact that Milton never -engaged in a fight except for human liberty. At the crisis of his -country’s peril he was told he had abused his eyes, and that if he did -not rest them, he would go blind. He wrote another pamphlet in defense -of his cause, thus deliberately sacrificing his sight in the effort to -save the republican government. The sacrifice was in vain, for Cromwell -died, and the government went to pieces, and the raffish rout came back; -“bonnie Prince Charlie,” lecherous, treacherous and vile, with all his -herd of noble plunderers. John Milton, foreign secretary out of a job, -went into hiding, and his books were burned by the public hangman; later -he was arrested and fined—they would have liked to have the hangman -deal with him also, but did not quite dare.</p> - -<p>However, he lost most of his property; and there he was, old, blind and -helpless—his very daughters caught the spirit of the new time, and -stole his books and sold them to gratify their own desires. That is what -happens to men who consecrate their art to a cause; and somehow they -have to rise above such circumstances, maintain the supremacy of the -human spirit, “and justify the ways of God to man.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_108">{108}</a></span>”</p> - -<p>The psychoanalysts have made us familiar with the word “sublimation.” -Without ever hearing the word, John Milton proceeded to sublimate his -sufferings and his balked hopes into one of the greatest of the world’s -poems. The first point to get clear about this poem is that it was a -piece of propaganda, pure and simple, deliberately so made. Beauty and -culture and charm—these things John Milton had known, and in his bitter -old age he did not forget them; but the task to which he now set himself -was the same task as Dante’s to explain the universe and its divine -governance.</p> - -<p>The epic of English Puritanism has never won its due recognition abroad; -the Continental critics have given preference to Byron, who was also a -rebel, but a man of the world, a lover, and a lord. Albert Mordell of -course includes “Paradise Lost” among his “waning classics”; he has an -easy time pointing out the absurdities of its theology, and argues that -the interest of the poem is bound up with these. For my part I say about -it what I said about Dante; some of its propaganda is out of date, and -some of it will be out of date when men cease to consecrate their lives -to ends greater than themselves.</p> - -<p>It is interesting to note how the spirit of Milton broke the fetters of -his theology. According to that theology Satan was the father of evil, -and there was no excuse for him; he had rebelled against a heavenly king -who was all-wise and all-good. But Milton also had rebelled against a -king, and could not forget the feeling; he poured his own revolt into -the speeches of Satan, making him the most interesting character in the -poem.</p> - -<p>If you live in New York or visit there, you may see in the public -library a painting of Milton as he sat in his home, dictating “Paradise -Lost.” We have a description from the pen of a visitor; it was a poor -little house, with only one room to the floor, and the poet sat in a -chair, in a rusty black suit, old and blind, pale and tormented with -rheumatism. Ten pounds he got for England’s great epic, and thirteen -hundred copies of it were sold during his lifetime. Yet his spirit never -wavered, and he lived to write “Samson Agonistes,” a drama in the Greek -style, neglected by the critics. As a rule there is nothing more futile -than imitations of outworn art forms; but once in a while it happens -that a man lives the old life, and can write in the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_109">{109}</a></span> old manner. Milton -writes a Greek drama about a Jewish strong man—and it turns out to be a -picture of the poet’s own soul at bay!</p> - -<p>Having praised Milton highly in this chapter, I recall my opening -statement as to the superiority of present-day technique. You will -expect me to justify this, and an interesting opportunity presents -itself here. In 1655 occurred a massacre of Swiss Protestants by Italian -Catholics under the Duke of Savoy. Milton, being then in office as -foreign secretary, wrote a sonnet voicing his indignation. It is rated -by critics as one of the greatest of English sonnets. For your -convenience I quote it:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<p class="c">ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONT</p> -<span class="i0">Avenge, O Lord! thy slaughter’d Saints, whose bones<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Lie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold;<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Even them who kept Thy truth so pure of old<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When all our fathers worshipt stocks and stones.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Forget not: In Thy book record their groans<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Who were Thy sheep, and in their ancient fold<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that roll’d<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The vales redoubled to the hills, and they<br /></span> -<span class="i1">To Heaven. Their martyr’d blood and ashes sow<br /></span> -<span class="i0">O’er all the Italian field, where still doth sway<br /></span> -<span class="i2">The triple Tyrant, that from these may grow<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A hundred-fold, who, having learnt Thy way,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Early may fly the Babylonian woe.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>Francis Turner Palgrave, named by Tennyson as the best judge of poetry -of his time, says in the notes to his “Golden Treasury”: “this ‘collect -in verse,’ as it has been justly called, is the most mighty Sonnet in -any language known to the Editor.” So you see, we are setting a high -standard. What modern work shall we compare with it?</p> - -<p>In the year 1914 there occurred in Colorado, in the Rocky Mountains -cold, the “Ludlow massacre” of the wives and children of miners on -strike. It caused a demonstration in front of the office of John D. -Rockefeller, Jr., at 26 Broadway, New York, about which you may read in -“The Brass Check.” A young poet who happened at that time to be my -secretary, and who has since made a success as a novelist, was moved by -these events to write a sonnet, which I sent to the Scripps newspapers, -getting for the poet the unprecedented sum of twenty-five dollars. I now -quote the sonnet, and invite you to study the two,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_110">{110}</a></span> comparing them by -all tests of poetry known to you. I give my own opinion: that in their -propaganda impulse these two sonnets are identical; that in simplicity, -directness, and fervor of feeling they are as nearly identical as two -art works can be; and that in technical skill the modern work is -superior.</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<p class="c">TO A CERTAIN RICH YOUNG RULER</p> - -<p class="c">By Clement Wood</p> -<span class="i0">White-fingered lord of murderous events,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Well are you guarding what your father gained;<br /></span> -<span class="i2">With torch and rifle you have well maintained<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The lot to which a heavenly providence<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Has called you; laborers risen in defense<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Of liberty and life, lie charred and brained<br /></span> -<span class="i2">About your mines, whose gutted hills are stained<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With slaughter of these newer innocents.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Ah, but your bloody fingers clenched in prayer!<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Your piety, which all the world has seen!<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The godly odor spreading through the air<br /></span> -<span class="i2">From your efficient charity machine!<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Thus you rehearse for your high rôle up there,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Ruling beside the lowly Nazarene!<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXXVIII"></a>CHAPTER XXXVIII<br /><br /> -COMRADE’S PROGRESS</h2> - -<p>There is another artist of English Puritanism we must not overlook. We -shall have no trouble in proving this one a propagandist; so obviously -was he preaching, that the critics of his own time overlooked him -entirely. The elegant men of letters of the Restoration period, -gossiping in their coffee houses, dicing in their taverns, and carrying -on their fashionable intrigues, would have been moved to witty couplets -by the notion that an ignorant tinker, a street-corner tub-thumper -locked up in Bedford gaol, was engaged in composing one of the immortal -classics of English literature. As soon might you attempt to tell one of -the clever “colyumnists” of the New York newspapers, stumping his last -cigarette in his coffee saucer at luncheon in the Algonquin, that an -immortal classic of American literature was running serially in the -“Appeal to Reason” or the “Daily Worker.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_111">{111}</a></span>”</p> - -<p>John Bunyan came from the lowest ranks of the people, those same louts -and clowns whom Shakespeare delighted to ridicule. And he was quite as -ridiculous as Shakespeare could have wished him; he saw visions, and was -pursued by devils, and rushed out onto the street to save the souls of -people as ignorant and unimportant as himself. Under the laws of England -the saving of souls was a privilege reserved to the younger sons of the -gentry, who got “livings” out of it; so John Bunyan was persecuted, -precisely as ignorant and unimportant I. W. W. are persecuted in my -neighborhood today. And he behaved exactly as the I. W. W. behave; that -is, he stubbornly declined to change his opinions, or to cease -proclaiming them on the streets. Sent to prison, he did what a number of -the I. W. W. did in Leavenworth; despite the fact that he had a pregnant -wife and four small children, one of them blind, he refused to give a -purely formal promise to behave himself. This caused extreme -embarrassment to humane magistrates, who didn’t want to be hard on a -poor crack-brain, but were sworn to uphold the majesty of the law.</p> - -<p>So for twelve years John Bunyan stayed in jail and wrote “Pilgrim’s -Progress.” Now my friend, Albert Mordell, includes it among his “waning -classics.” He says: “The story that children delight in the book and -read it through is mythical; many children try to read it but usually -drop it.” Well, it so happened that when I read those words, I had been -making a test on a ten-year-old boy, my own. We used to read it aloud, -sitting in front of the fireplace on winter evenings; and of all the -books we read, none created such excitement. It was difficult to keep on -reading, because of the stream of questions: “What does that mean, -Papa?” You see, allegories, which bore us adults, are fascinating to the -child mind. Such a wonderful idea, when you first think of it—to embody -moral qualities in living beings, and give them names, and send them -walking out over the earth, to engage in adventures and contend with -each other! To see the every-day problems of your own conduct unrolled -before you in the form of a story!</p> - -<p>My young friends of the radical intelligentsia, who used to live in -Greenwich Village, but have now moved to Croton and Provincetown and -Stelton to get away from the bally-hoo wagons, have been calling me a -Puritan ever<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_112">{112}</a></span> since they knew me; and now they will smile a patronizing -smile, hearing me endorse this old-fashioned Sunday school story. I can -only record my conviction, that one does not escape the need of personal -morality by espousing proletarian revolution. Even after the revolution, -there will be moral struggles fought out in the hearts of men and women. -I realize that morality is destined to become a science, and that by the -study of psychology we shall abolish many problems of conduct; -nevertheless, life will still require effort—there will remain the -question of whether to study or not to study, and why!</p> - -<p>I suggest to my young radical friends that they amuse an idle hour by -applying “Pilgrim’s Progress” to the great movement of our day. Instead -of Christian, read Comrade; instead of Christian’s burden, read a -soap-box. You can always find some youngster to serve as traveling -companion under the name of Hopeful. And very soon in your journey you -will enter the Valley of Humiliation; very soon you will begin to meet -Mr. Money-Love and Mr. Pliable; also Mr. Talkative will come in swarms -to your studio parties. And By-Ends—he works beside you in every -office; the fellow who takes care of himself and does not believe in -going to extremes. And Mr. Worldly-Wiseman—perhaps you have a rich -uncle who will serve; you can see him sitting in the padded leather -chairs of any club. And when Comrade’s Pilgrimage brings him to New -York, he will see Vanity Fair, flaunting its glories up and down the -avenue, protected by plate glass. And the fiend Appolyon—we have had -two attorney-generals exactly cut for the rôle. If you think that a -joke, it means that you have been playing the part of Mr. Facing -Both-ways during the past ten years, and do not know about the realities -of government by gunmen.</p> - -<p>The forms of things change, but the inner essence remains the same, and -you must learn to recognize it. The Slough of Despond, for example, is -discovered in the bottom of the coffee-cups in which Greenwich Village -now gets its bootleg gin. As for the Giant Despair—a singular -transformation!—he is a pale-colored microscopic organism of cork-screw -shape, lurking in the delicious intrigues of our gay and saucy young -folks. As for the Interpreter’s House, it is out of repair just now, -having been hit by H-E shells in 1917. As for the Celestial City, which<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_113">{113}</a></span> -we old fogies used to vision under the name of the Co-operative -Commonwealth—the young people won’t let us mention it any more; they -tell us that propaganda is out of style, in these days of -petting-parties and hip-pocket flasks.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XXXIX"></a>CHAPTER XXXIX<br /><br /> -VANITY FAIR</h2> - -<p>We have been keeping low company for so long that the reader may be -wondering: Were there no writers for ladies and gentlemen in the time of -Milton and Bunyan? The answer is, yes; and we should pay a brief visit -to that Vanity Fair which Bunyan saw through the bars of his prison.</p> - -<p>There was a poet laureate, who did not go to prison but became the idol -of his age, and the most prosperous writer up to that time. John Dryden -was his name, and like Milton, he was born of a well-to-do Puritan -family, and received the best education going. He was twenty-seven years -old when Cromwell died, and he wrote heroic stanzas on the Lord -Protector. He attached himself to his cousin, an official of the Puritan -republic, expecting advancement; but he did not get it, so two years -later, when the “bonnie Prince Charlie” came back to be crowned, the -young poet welcomed him with a panegyric ode, several pages of ecstatic -compliment—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">How shall I speak of that triumphant day<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When you renewed the expiring pomp of May?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A month that owns an interest in your name,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">You and the flowers are its peculiar claim.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>I am following the life of Dryden by Professor Saintsbury, an eminent -scholar of the Tory way of thought, who has just immortalized himself by -publishing a whole volume devoted to the literature of alcoholic liquor. -This professor says everything that can be said in defense of Dryden, -but the best he can say about this “Astræa Redux” is that in order to -appreciate its beauties, you must forget the facts about the “bonnie -Prince Charlie” and his reign. The professor lists a few of the facts -you must forget: “the treaty of Dover and the closed exchequer,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_114">{114}</a></span> Madam -Carwell’s twelve thousand a year and Lord Russell’s scaffold.” That is -the way to read literature under the guidance of a leisure-class critic! -As we used to say when we were children: “Open your mouth and shut your -eyes, and I’ll give you something to make you wise!”</p> - -<p>The elegant literature of that time was described by the term -“metaphysical,” which meant that the poet exhausted his imagination in -inventing quaint and startling conceits. For example, one of Dryden’s -noble patrons contracted smallpox, and the poet, describing his -appearance, records that</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Each little dimple had a tear in it,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To wail the fault its rising did commit.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>By such personal attention to the rich and powerful John Dryden became -the greatest poet of his century, and married the daughter of an earl. -He took to writing heroic plays in the style of his time, such -preposterous bombast that if I were to tell you about them you would -think I was making them up. Then he wrote society comedies, also in the -style of his time, which was such high-toned sex nastiness that if I -were to write it today I should be taken up by the Shuberts and the -Laskys, and paid as much as Cecil de Mille and Robert W. Chambers and -Elinor Glyn rolled into one.</p> - -<p>The “Restoration comedies” were much the same thing as our “bedroom -farces,” except that they were long drawn out; the seventeenth century -audience was satisfied to listen to smart people gossiping about their -vices, while our audience wants to see the smart people climbing through -the transom in their pajamas. Also, the old comedies are difficult for -us to understand, because the language of polite obscenity changes from -age to age, and we don’t always know what Dryden and Congreve and -Wycherley are talking about. But we need not rack our brains; we may be -sure that all their witticisms have reference to fornication and -adultery. There was no other occupation for these “restored” ladies and -gentlemen—except gambling and eating and drinking, and cheating and -lying in order to get the money to pay for their elegant pleasures.</p> - -<p>Dryden gained by this writing an income of a couple of thousand pounds a -year, which was the top-notch for a<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_115">{115}</a></span> literary fellow in England. Also he -became poet laureate, and an intimate of the king; in short, he reached -the heights. But alas, greatness has its penalties, as the poet soon -discovered, caught in the poisonous intrigues of a vile court. He was -accused of having written a slanderous poem, and one of his noble -enemies hired some bullies to beat him up one night. Also, a muck-raking -parson by the name of Jeremy Collier came along and lashed him in a book -entitled “A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English -Stage.” To all his other literary and political enemies the poet showed -himself a voluble antagonist; but to the Reverend Jeremy he had nothing -to answer.</p> - -<p>He began, apparently, to realize the seriousness of life, and took to -writing propaganda for his gang. He produced a series of political -tracts, satirical and didactic verses upon which he expended great -technical skill. Professor Saintsbury points out these literary -beauties; but again he specifies: in appreciating them, the reader has -to bear in mind that what Dryden proved today he may have disproved -yesterday, and he may prove something different tomorrow. Lacking this -acrobatic ability, I can only record my opinion, that these most famous -verses are snarling and odious quarrels, of exactly as much importance -to mankind as the yelps in a dog-fight.</p> - -<p>One of them was a poem full of enraptured praise for the Anglican -church. The poet at this time was listed for a salary of a hundred -pounds a year as poet laureate; but the salary was badly in arrears, and -somebody must have pointed out to him that his new sovereign, King James -II, was an ardent Catholic. So the poet became converted to Catholicism, -and wrote an equally enraptured poem in praise of that. But, alas! it -was a bad guess; shortly afterwards His Most Catholic Majesty was kicked -out of England, and William of Orange was brought over, and the country -was Protestant again. This was the period when the Vicar of Bray had -such a hard time holding his job; and our court poet also suffered, -losing most of his perquisites, and having to go to work again.</p> - -<p>He was an old man now, and decided to play safe; he made a verse -translation of Virgil, for which nobody could scold him. Nobody did, and -he died full of honors, and had a “sufficiently splendid funeral” in -Westminster Ab<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_116">{116}</a></span>bey, “with a great procession, preceded at the College by -a Latin oration, and by the singing of Exegi Monumentum to music.”</p> - -<p>And so, if you like that sort of thing, there you have what you like; -and if you have Dryden’s talents, and are willing to sell them to the -ruling classes, I can drive you over to Hollywood any day, and introduce -you to the fellows who will start you off at twenty thousand a year, and -raise you to two hundred thousand as soon as you have begun to deliver -the goods.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XL"></a>CHAPTER XL<br /><br /> -GLORY PROPAGANDA</h2> - -<p>In order to make a consecutive story we have followed the development of -English art for a century and a half. We now go back to cover the same -period on the Continent, where a new ruling class has acquired wealth -and power and has ordered a supply of new artists.</p> - -<p>The difference between France and England during the sixteenth and -seventeenth centuries may be summed up briefly. The English revolt -against the Catholic machine was successful, therefore the spirit of the -English race expanded, and new art forms were created. In France, on the -other hand, the Catholic machine succeeded in crushing the Protestants; -something over fifty thousand were slaughtered on St. Bartholomew’s Eve; -and therefore the art of France was held within the mold of the -classical tradition. The Elizabethan drama grew out of the old miracle -and mystery plays, a native product, crude, but popular and democratic. -There existed such a native drama also in France; but it was scorned and -repressed by authority, and cultured art followed the tragedies of -Seneca, a Roman millionaire of the time of Nero, who had of course -derived from the Greeks.</p> - -<p>It may seem strange that Catholic absolutism should have made Greek and -Latin art forms a part of its sacred dogma; but so it was. The doctors -of the church in the Middle Ages had put together a theology, in part -from the early Christian fathers, and in part from Athenian and -Alexandrian philosophers. It was for denying Ptolemy’s doctrine that the -sun moved round the earth that<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_117">{117}</a></span> Galileo was forced to recant under -threat of torture by the pope; and it was for denying the sacred “three -unities,” derived from Aristotle’s “Poetics,” that playwrights were -critically tortured by the priests of orthodox culture.</p> - -<p>These three dogmas of play-writing were unity of theme, unity of time, -and unity of place. The first is, within reasonable limits, a natural -requirement of any work of art; but unity of time, meaning that the play -must happen within twenty-four hours, and unity of place, meaning that -it must happen on one physical spot, are absurdities. It is hard for us -to realize that such rules were compulsory upon any dramatist who wished -to see his work upon the stage; it is harder yet for us to realize that -such rules were used as weapons in the class struggle, along with the -infallibility of the pope and the divine right of kings.</p> - -<p>There arose in France a prelate of the grim and bloody kind, who became -the king’s minister, and directed the slaughtering of the Huguenots, and -chopped off the heads of the rebellious nobles; he even forced the -church to submit itself, and made his king the absolute ruler of France, -so that a year after Richelieu’s death it was possible for the king’s -son to ascend the throne, and to say, “I am the State,” and have no one -dispute him through his reign of seventy-two years. One of the engines -of repression that Richelieu devised was the French Academy, to take -charge of the language and art of the monarchy, and impose law and order -by chopping off the literary heads of all rebels. This Academy became -the ruling authority in cultured France, and has filled that rôle for -three hundred years. Not merely has it served the ruling classes by -maintaining tradition and discrediting every innovation in French -letters; it has issued formal pronouncements against unorthodox social -and political books—for example, Rousseau’s “Social Contract.” A list -of the French men of letters who have been excluded from the “immortals” -includes Descartes, Pascal, Molière, Saint-Simon, LeSage, Rousseau, -Beaumarchais, Diderot, Compte, Proudhon, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, -Zola, Goncourt, Maupassant, Jaurès, Barbusse, Rolland.</p> - -<p>The polite literature which reigned in Richelieu’s time was known as -“précieuse,” and occupied itself in the making up of elaborate long -similes, extending sometimes<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_118">{118}</a></span> through several pages. It was foppish and -fantastic to the point of imbecility; and the makers of it were the -darlings of Richelieu’s Academy. There came up from the provinces a -young lawyer by the name of Pierre Corneille, who began to write -successful comedies, and received the high honor of being picked by -Richelieu as one of five men to write dramas under his august direction. -But Corneille, a man of genius, could not long submit himself to the -head-chopping cardinal. He went his own way, and incurred the raging -enmity of both Richelieu and his Academy.</p> - -<p>He wrote a tragedy in Alexandrine verse called “The Cid,” which was an -enormous popular success. This Cid was a legendary hero of Spain, a -“free captain”—that is, the head of an army of hired mercenaries, who -went about fighting for anybody who would pay him. We are used to this -system of “free captains” in the United States, where they are called -private detective bureaus and strike-breaking agencies. They have armies -of tens of thousands of fighting men, horse, foot and artillery, whom -they move about from place to place for the crushing of union labor. So -before long we shall see on Broadway or in Hollywood some young writer -making a tremendous ruling-class drama out of the legendary career of -Alan Pinkerton or William J. Burns. The great detective will be shown in -love with the beautiful daughter of some labor leader, the tragedy -coming when in the course of his duty the great detective has to kill -the labor leader. That is the story which Corneille developed—except -that of course, it was a rival prince whom the Cid was fighting. -Needless to say, in order not to have his head chopped off by Richelieu, -the playwright put his hero in the position of defending legitimacy.</p> - -<p>But the poet had failed to respect the “three unities” in his tragedy; -so, although acclaimed by audiences, he was viciously attacked by the -academicians—one of them even challenged him to a duel! The Academy as -a body was afraid to attack the play, but Richelieu forced it to take -action. Corneille was not strong enough to withstand opposition such as -this; in his future work he conformed to the rules, and became a humble -pensioner of the cardinal. It is interesting to note that his genius -began quickly to decline, and he had the humiliation of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_119">{119}</a></span> living to old -age and seeing himself scorned and neglected by the new generation. Thus -Richelieu’s Academy fulfilled at the outset its function, destroying the -greatest tragic dramatist that France had produced, and suppressing for -two hundred years the romantic movement in the French theater.</p> - -<p>It is important to get clear the difference between the real classical -art of the Greeks, and this imitation classical art of French -absolutism. The Greek stage rules had been made to fit the facts of the -Greek stage. Their tragedies had been enacted in a large open-air -theater, and to keep the actors from looking too small they had worn -high shoes, almost stilts, and had shouted to the audience through a -megaphone disguised as a mask. Needless to say, they could not move -quickly, and could not do anything but talk. Their tendency was to talk -at great length—like mighty ships, which, having got under way, were -not easily to be stopped.</p> - -<p>But in the time of Corneille and his successors all that was gone; plays -were acted in small, indoor theaters, and the characters might have been -human and real. But the critical authorities ordained that the Greek -conventions were sacred; so the characters of Corneille are stiff and -stately, and stalk about hurling long, impassioned tirades at one -another.</p> - -<p>Nevertheless, two thousand years have not failed to make an impression -upon the minds of men. The dark, overshadowing fate of the Greeks is -gone, its place as director of events being taken by human ambition. -Corneille’s characters are embodiments of this or that passion. They -are, of course, always aristocrats, the mighty and powerful of the -earth; they are intended to be morally sublime, but to us they seem -monsters of egotism. They want what they want when they want it, they -smite their breasts and exclaim: “Moi! Moi! Moi!” There is war, splendid -war, in which they gain the admiration and attention known as “glory.” -The tragedy comes because they cannot get all they want; they have -weaknesses, especially love, which get in the way, and paralyze the will -of mighty princes engaged in prevailing over each other.</p> - -<p>At this time the Thirty Years’ War was devastating Europe. It had begun -as a religious war, an effort of Catholic Austria to crush German -Protestantism; but it<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_120">{120}</a></span> had now degenerated into a clash of rival -dynasties, with Richelieu, master intriguer, using the Protestants to -put down the enemies of the French monarchy. The mother of the French -king had been an Austrian princess, Catherine de’ Medici, and she was -intriguing against her son’s country. She had been driven into exile by -Richelieu, and was raising up armies against him; so, all over Europe, -the people were being led out to slaughter at the whim of this vicious -old woman. They were led out for one greedy prince or another; they were -led out because the mistress of some king had been snubbed by the wife -of some emperor; they were led out for an endless tangle of royal -jealousies and noble spites.</p> - -<p>And the function of the dramas of Corneille is to take us into the souls -of these lawless aristocrats; all the powers of genius, all the -resources of the stage are expended in order that we may share their -furies, may strut the stage with them and deliver tumultuous tirades. -For a time or two the experience is interesting; but then the novelty -wears off, and we ask ourselves: Do I really care anything about these -heroes? Do I want to share their feelings—or do I want to change the -world, so that there may be no corner where such dangerous and -destructive creatures can lurk? And so ends the glory propaganda of -Corneille.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XLI"></a>CHAPTER XLI<br /><br /> -UNBRIDLED DESIRES</h2> - -<p>Louis XIV, the “grand monarch,” ascended the throne of France in the -year 1643, while Cromwell’s “Ironsides” were fighting their king, and -only six years before they cut off his head. A greater difference -between two kingdoms could scarcely be imagined; and this difference is -completely reflected in French and English art.</p> - -<p>All the life of France was centered at the court. The monarch who was -“the State” withdrew himself from Paris, and built a magnificent -play-ground at Versailles; aqueducts were constructed, a barren waste -was turned into a pleasure-park, whole forests of trees being moved and -replanted. Great palaces arose; the architects and landscape gardeners, -the sculptors and painters poured<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_121">{121}</a></span> out their treasures, to make this -most wonderful garden of delight.</p> - -<p>All over the land was a ruined peasantry; misery, starvation and -ignorance, freedom crushed, justice flaunted, superstition and despotism -enthroned. A nation was taxed bare to make the beauty and glory and -luxury of this court. You might see the “grand monarch,” with a huge -powdered periwig on top of his head, in a costume of crimson and white -brocaded with gold, advancing with solemn steps upon red-heeled shoes, -and wielding a golden snuff-box covered with jewels. About him flock the -courtiers, great nobles and ecclesiastics, now deprived both of their -powers and their duties, and with nothing to do but dance attendance at -court. Here also are the swarms of fine ladies, trained in the arts of -seduction. In the morning the court rides forth in enormous hunting -parties, pursuing stags imported from all over Europe. They spend the -afternoons and evenings in feasting, gaming, gossiping, intriguing.</p> - -<p>And here, of course, come the artists; poets and painters, dramatists -and musicians, dancing masters and jugglers and makers of ballets and -masques. The king who said, “I am the State,” might equally have said, -“I am Art.” He and his court constituted audience and critics; either -you pleased them, or as an artist you were dead.</p> - -<p>It is interesting to note that the famous artists of that time all came -from the middle classes. The great gentlemen scorned to work at art, as -at anything else; they paid others to work for them. They were exacting -paymasters, having high standards of perfection in technique, and the -middle-class Ogis slaved diligently to polish and refine and beautify -their productions.</p> - -<p>War was far off from this splendid court, an echo of trouble in another -world; so the sternness and sublimity of Corneille went out of fashion. -Love was no longer a temptation and a weakness, but the delight and -glory of the “great world.” The source of human impulse was located in -what the poets of those days called “the heart”—though we, by surgical -investigations, have ascertained that it is located below the diaphragm.</p> - -<p>There came a new dramatist to thrill this amorous company. His name was -Jean Racine, and he also came from the middle classes. His genius -brought him instant<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_122">{122}</a></span> success; he wrote an ode to the king, was awarded a -pension of six hundred livres, and became an assiduous and successful -courtier. He is, like Raphael, the perfect type of the ruling-class -artist; fitting exactly to his age, with no ideals below it and none -above it. His works represent perfection of technique, the ideal harmony -of content and form, the Art of Beauty as it had not been seen upon the -stage since the time of Sophocles.</p> - -<p>Until late in Racine’s life religion is purely formal in his work; his -plays deal with the princely world. Society is fixed, and its forms -ordained; nobody is rising and displacing anybody else, hence there can -be no social drama. You play your part “in that state of life to which -it has pleased God to call you”; and tragedy happens when somebody takes -away from you the sexual gratification you crave. Everything has become -personal; we are concerned with the jealousies, the fears, the loves and -hates of aristocratic individuals. The heroes and heroines abandon -themselves to their passions, they pour out floods of exquisite emotion. -The scene is laid in “an apartment in a palace,” and murder, suicide, -insanity and despair lurk just outside the door.</p> - -<p>They do not come upon the stage, because the classical tradition ordains -that violent actions happen off the stage, and people rush on and tell -us about them. We get the echoes of horror in the eyes and the voices of -these people. It is curious to compare Racine’s tragedies with those of -Shakespeare, which jump you about among a score or two of places all -over the earth, and bring on swarms of characters from every social -class. In Racine, not merely are the lower classes excluded from the -stage, the lower classes are excluded from existence. Three or four -noble ladies and gentlemen stand in a room, and come and go, and make -speeches to one another in marvelously polished rhymed couplets. They -address long soliloquies to the air, they address imaginary beings, the -heavenly powers of Christian mythology and Roman and Greek and Turkish -and Celtic mythology; they call earth and sea and sky to witness the -infinite wickedness and cruelty of their not being able to have what -they want.</p> - -<p>This is the height and perfection of art, according to the most -fastidious and exacting of French standards. And is it propaganda? I do -not see how anyone capable<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_123">{123}</a></span> of putting two thoughts together can -question the fact. Here are the gods of a new hierarchy, princes and -potentates, absorbing to themselves by divine right all the treasures of -civilization. Here they are exhibited in all their splendor, one of the -world’s greatest poets devoting his technical skill to glorifying and -exalting them. Storms of thrilling emotion are poured forth, and the -crowds go mad with excitement. So ideals are created and standards set, -which govern, not merely the art life, but the social and political and -business life of the whole of society.</p> - -<p>The poet himself lived this life of elegant egotistical passion; he was -jealous and quarrelsome, and he followed the custom of the painters in -using his mistresses as models for his female types. One of his -tragedies became the cause of a ferocious court quarrel; a duchess hired -another playwright and produced a rival play on the same theme, and -hired a claque to applaud his play, and to hiss Racine’s. This -apparently frightened the poet; he lost his joy in the courtier life, -became sick, and in orthodox Catholic fashion retired into mysticism, -and wrote a play of religion, as unwholesome and remote from reality as -his worldly plays.</p> - -<p>The most famous of his tragedies is “Phedre,” which tells about the wife -of an Athenian king, who conceives an adulterous passion for her -step-son, and when the youth repels her advances, accuses him falsely to -his father, and brings about his death; after which, in a transport of -shame, she poisons herself. For two centuries and a half this portrayal -of unbridled desire has been the test of genius upon the French stage; -eight generations of actresses have exhausted their skill in portraying -it to eight generations of elegant ladies and gentlemen, living lives of -the same unbridled desire.</p> - -<p>In our time the great Phedre was Sarah Bernhardt, the “divine Sarah,” as -she was known to the leisure-class critics of my boyhood. Upon the stage -she exhibited the unbridled desires of an ancient Greek queen, and in -real life she exhibited the unbridled desires of a modern stage queen; a -woman who never felt a social emotion, but squandered the treasure of -various royal and plutocratic and literary lovers, who likewise had -never felt a social emotion. We are privileged now to read the extremely -stupid love-letters which King Edward of England wrote<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_124">{124}</a></span> to her, and -learn what sums of money be paid to her, and what dignified court -gentlemen he sent to make his assignations with her. We read also about -her passion for Sardou, leisure-class playwright of her time, who -created a host of splendid prostitutes and lustful queens, to enable -this leisure-class divinity to sweep her audiences into ecstasy.</p> - -<p>We today, possessing means of exploring the subconscious mind, -understand these unbridled desires as symptoms of infantilism. Here are -babies, still reaching out for the moon, and shrieking because they -cannot have it; here are spoiled children, flattered by servants and -fawned upon by slaves, indulged and petted, never adjusting themselves -to the realities of life, but growing up to make heroes and heroines of -tragedy. We no longer consider these creations sublime; we call them -psychopaths, and the art which portrays them we call a bore.</p> - -<p>As economists we have explored the social causes of such raging -egotisms, and also the social consequences. The plutocracy is not the -only class which has unbridled desires; the proletariat has its share, -and if one class is permitted to gratify them, and to flaunt them before -the world, the only possible consequence is a revolution of blind and -bloody revenge. Queen Phedre, frenzied and horror-smitten, saw hell -looming hideous before her staring eyes; but she saw no hell compared -with what Racine’s audience might have seen, had they been able to look -forward a hundred years in French history, and to watch the starved and -brutalized mob of Paris dancing the “Carmagnole” in the streets, while -the guillotine rolled into its bloody basket the heads of the -great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of those splendid, unbridled -ladies and gentlemen who made up the “grand monarch’s” splendid, -unbridled court.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XLII"></a>CHAPTER XLII<br /><br /> -THE HARPOONER OF HYPOCRISY</h2> - -<p>In vain do kings and emperors set up the doctrine that art exists for -courts; that only the great ones of the earth are the proper theme for -art works, and courtiers and court critics the true judges of taste. -Deeply planted in<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_125">{125}</a></span> the human heart is an instinct, declaring that all -human beings are of consequence; and men of genius arise who follow that -instinct, and write about ordinary people, and appeal to wider and wider -groups of the community. We shall now see this happening to the -exclusive and haughty court of the “grand monarch.” A world genius -appears, who breaks the established barriers, sets all France to arguing -over his ideas, and helps to make the drama of Europe the social force -which it is today.</p> - -<p>He was the son of the royal upholsterer in Paris; that is to say, of a -tradesman who had the job of repairing the soft and expensive cushions -upon which this court reclined. But Molière, a volcano of energy and -enterprise, did not take long to discover that he was not interested in -cushioning a court. At the age of twenty-one he sold his claims to the -family job, and started a theater on a tennis-court in Paris. It was a -failure, and the young Molière was three times imprisoned for debt. But -he would not give up; he organized a company to tour the provinces, and -for thirteen years he lived a life of “one-night stands.” It is a dog’s -life today, and must have been worse three hundred years ago, when -actors were outcasts and almost outlaws. Catholic bigotry in France was -as bitter against them as Puritan bigotry in England.</p> - -<p>It was a hard school, in which Molière made no money and lost his -health. But it was a way to make a tragi-comic dramatist, for it brought -him into contact with every kind of human being. When he came to -Versailles to become the king’s favorite dramatist, he brought with him -knowledge of something more than courtly intrigue; he brought the -fighting spirit of a man who had been roughly handled, who had been poor -and in jail, and who knew France as it was to the plain people.</p> - -<p>Molière got a chance to produce plays before the king, including a -couple of his own little farces. The king was then twenty-one years of -age, curious about life, and not entirely in the hands of women and -priests as he later became. Molière was thirty-seven when he produced -his first significant work, “Les Précieuses Ridicules,” a satire on the -literary fashions of the time, according to which a mirror was called -“the counsellor of the graces,” and a chair “the commodity of -conversation.” Great ladies were accustomed to assemble to display their -wit to one another,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_126">{126}</a></span> and it was exactly like the literary tea-parties we -have nowadays. I have pictured them in a chapter in “The Metropolis”—</p> - -<p>“Go ahead with Molière!” says Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“I just want to quote a dozen lines,” pleads her husband. “This shows -you what happens to literature, when it becomes ‘the rage’ among fine -ladies: ‘We learn thereby, every day, the latest gallantries, and the -prettiest novelties in prose and verse; we are told just in the nick of -time, that such a one has composed the prettiest piece in the world on -such a subject; that some one else has written words to such an air; -that this person has made a madrigal upon an enjoyment, and that his -friend has composed some stanzas upon an infidelity; that Mr. So-and-so -sent half a dozen verses yesterday evening to Miss Such-and-such, and -that she sent back an answer at eight o’clock this morning; that one -celebrated author has just sketched a plan for a new book, that another -has got to the third part of his romance, and that a third is passing -his works through the press.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>“Is that in ‘The Metropolis’?” asks Mrs. Ogi, suspiciously.</p> - -<p>Whereat, her husband grins with malice. “Look for it; and if you don’t -find it, try the tenth scene of ‘Les Précieuses Ridicules.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>It was insolence for a mere tradesman’s son to make fun of high-born -ladies, and the ladies were furious, and succeeded in keeping the play -off the stage for five days. That was the beginning of a fight, which -lasted the rest of Molière’s life. At any time he chose to write a silly -farce or a ballet he could have it produced safely and with applause; -but whenever he wrote a play with a serious purpose he raised up a swarm -of enemies, who kept his play off the boards anywhere from five days to -five years. And here is where the man showed his spirit; he was sick, he -was always struggling with debt, he had his theatrical company to look -out for—people whom he loved and whose burdens he carried. -Nevertheless, truth blazed in him like a white-hot flame, and he could -not let his enemies alone. He would quit the fight for a year or two, -then come back to it with a piece of ridicule yet more stinging, or a -picture of cruelty and falsehood so grim that it was hard to pass off -for a comedy.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_127">{127}</a></span></p> - -<p>Molière hated hypocrisy with a deadly hatred; he hated the church of his -time, because it was an organized system of hypocrisy for cash. He hated -vain fops, and empty-headed, pretentious women, and the snobbish and -self-seeking great ones of the earth. Also he hated the enslaving and -imprisoning of love. In his time the French girl was raised in a -convent, and when she was somewhere between thirteen and eighteen her -parents, with the aid of the family lawyer, sold her in marriage to some -mature man of the world, who possessed rank and fortune, and was apt to -possess vices and diseases. In no less than nine of Molière’s plays -there is such a situation; also there is an amiable young man in love -with the girl, and the couple find a way to thwart the schemes of their -elders. The plays thus become a plea for common sense and human feeling, -as opposed to avarice and worldly pride. This has become a familiar -theme of comedy; the poet’s first instinctive revolt against the -money-power.</p> - -<p>It is Molière’s custom to take some propaganda theme, and to construct -upon it a sermon in picture form. He chooses very simple characters to -illustrate the theme, and in the conversations he pounds upon it like a -man driving in a spike with a sledge. Every bit of knowledge and skill -he possesses goes into those hard strokes; all his wit and verve, his -insight into human character, his amazing vividness, his palpitating -sense of life.</p> - -<p>The greatest evil of the time was unquestionably the church, which -controlled the mind and conscience of the nation and repressed all -independent thinking. The life of France was beset by a horde of spies, -the secret agents of a predatory power, the Jesuits; nothing could be -hid from them, because they controlled the salvation of souls, and -through the instrument of the confessional were able to dominate -political and social life. They worked, as always, upon the ignorance -and emotionalism of women; they beset the mind of the king, and in the -end they got him, forcing the revocation of the law tolerating -Protestants, and beginning another monstrous persecution. Molière saw -all that going on around him, and he wrote about it one of the most -terrible plays in the world. It is called “Tartuffe, or The Hypocrite,” -and shows a religious intriguer, worming his way into a middle-class -family and seducing the wife of his benefactor. The drama<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_128">{128}</a></span> is an -utterance of blazing anger, a veritable harpooning of hypocrisy. As a -weapon of propaganda it is exactly as powerful today as it was three -hundred years ago.</p> - -<p>Of course it raised a storm in the little world of Paris and Versailles. -The clerical party besieged the king, and the play was barred from -public performance, though it was shown privately to some of the great -nobles. The archbishop threatened to excommunicate those who even read -the play, and Bossuet, the ruling-class literary pope of the time, took -Molière’s untimely death from tuberculosis as a divine judgment upon him -for the writing of this infamous work. Two years later the king again -permitted the play to be shown; but when the performance came on he was -away at one of his wars, and an official closed the theater, and -Molière’s appeals to the king were in vain. For five years the fight -over this play went on, before at last it could be freely shown.</p> - -<p>They were years of incessant struggle for Molière. He produced “Don -Juan,” and the clerical critics objected to that also, because it -portrayed an intellectual and free thinker. To be sure, it portrayed him -as a very immoral man; but that did not satisfy the clerical party, for -few of them could meet that test. It was the irony of fate that the -archbishop, who forbade to Molière’s body a church service, was himself -a man of notoriously vile habits.</p> - -<p>Then came a play called “The Misanthrope,” a name doubtless given as a -sop to Molière’s critics. There is really nothing misanthropic about the -hero; he is simply a man of fine ideals, who is stunned by his discovery -of the powers of evil in the world about him, and their ability to -destroy human life. He is married to a woman whom he loves, but who will -not give up this evil world, and gives up her husband instead. Molière -himself had made a bitterly unhappy marriage with a young actress who -preferred the world to her husband, and the hero of this play is -generally taken as Molière’s own voice, just as Hamlet is taken as -Shakespeare’s voice.</p> - -<p>This greatest comic dramatist of France had to waste much of his time -producing farces and ballets for his exacting king. He now wrote a farce -comedy, which I suppose is produced a thousand times every year in -American high schools, “The Bourgeois Gentleman.” The play makes merry -with a crude, newly-rich merchant who tries<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_129">{129}</a></span> to acquire a little culture -in his prosperous years. Molière was thus catering to high-born -snobbery, and also voicing the dislike which all artists feel for those -who buy and sell. You will recall the scorn of Aristophanes for -“mongers” of all sorts—“mutton-mongers” and “rope-mongers” and -“leather-mongers” and “offal-mongers.”</p> - -<p>In another play, “The Learned Ladies,” Molière joins Aristophanes in -poking fun at the idea that women should or could be educated. It is -true that the vanities of women are especially absurd when applied to -scientific matters, in which personality is so entirely out of place; -but the same absurdities result from the first efforts of any -disinherited group or class or race to lift itself. We have seen -Shakespeare making fun of workingmen trying to produce a play; -similarly, we shall find Kipling ridiculing the notion that Hindoos can -master the English language, and become fit to hold government positions -in their own country.</p> - -<p>Molière’s last whack was at the doctors, whom he especially disliked. We -can understand that a man afflicted with a chronic disease, concerning -which the doctors of his time understood nothing, must have had -unsatisfactory results from their visits, must have submitted to their -purgings and their bleedings to no purpose, and paid them money which he -felt they did not earn. Anyhow, he goes after them again and again, and -in his “Imaginary Invalid” he portrays a man who thinks he is sick, and -all the various quacks who swarm around him. Three times the play was -given with great success, with Molière acting the leading part. A fourth -performance was due, and the poor playwright was ill; he thought of his -company and what would happen to them if he were to shut down, so he -went through the performance, and collapsed and died a few hours later.</p> - -<p>But his vivid and courageous propaganda did not die. It lives, even to -our time, as the greatest glory of the French drama; proving over and -over again our thesis that really great art has never been produced -except by men who wished to improve their fellow-men and to abolish -cruelty and greed and falsehood from the earth.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_130">{130}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XLIII"></a>CHAPTER XLIII<br /><br /> -ÉCRASEZ L’INFAME</h2> - -<p>In his later years the “grand monarch” fell under the spell of a -priest-ridden woman, made her his queen, and turned over his court to -Jesuit intrigue. The law tolerating Protestants was repealed, the best -schools in France were closed, and half a million of the most -intelligent people were driven from the country. At the same time wars -of conquest were undertaken, and a series of military disasters befell. -The king’s reign closed in darkness and despair, and the crowds of Paris -mocked his funeral pageant. But the people’s wrath had to fester for -seventy years longer before it broke the tyranny of this “ancient -regime.”</p> - -<p>Two years after the “grand monarch’s” death, the regent sent to the -Bastille a young French poet and man of fashion, the son of a wealthy -lawyer of Paris. This youth, known to us as Voltaire, was accused of -having written a pamphlet ridiculing absolutist ideas; the charge -happened to be false, but needless to say, a year spent in prison -without redress did not increase the young man’s love for absolutism. He -was one of the wittiest mortals ever born on earth, and blessed, or -cursed, with an incessantly active mind. His jailers were comparatively -civilized—I mean, compared with jailers of capitalist absolutism in -America; they permitted the young man to write poetry and dramas, and -when he came out he continued the gay and dissolute life of a literary -fop of that period. He was welcomed in the salons of the great, and his -long epic poems and his rhymed verse tragedies were produced with great -success.</p> - -<p>But in his pride as a man of letters Voltaire forgot his place in the -great world of France; he presumed to resent an insult from a noble -gentleman, whereupon this gentleman brought his lackeys, armed with -sticks, and had the poet cruelly beaten, while the noble gentleman sat -in his sedan-chair, jeering and directing the punishment. To the -amazement of the French aristocracy, the victim failed to accept this as -a proper form of discipline; he, a mere lawyer’s son, proceeded to train -himself to fight a duel with the nobleman—whereupon his great friends -turned<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_131">{131}</a></span> their backs on him, and he was again thrown into the Bastille, -and got out only upon promise to leave France.</p> - -<p>He went to England, where he lived for three years. It was a new -England, based upon the revolution which had driven out the Stuarts; a -Protestant England, prosperous, busy, and from the point of view of a -French refugee, amazingly free; an England in which Pope was preaching -common sense, and Swift was lashing hypocrisy, and Newton was -discovering the laws of the universe. When Voltaire returned to France, -it was no longer to be a society fop and darling of the aristocracy; it -was to be an intellectual pioneer, undermining the wall which French -absolutism had built about the country.</p> - -<p>Voltaire wrote a book dealing with the things he had learned in England, -all the ideas of the new science and the new philosophy and the new -toleration. Refused permission to publish it, he had it published -secretly, whereupon it was solemnly banned by authority, and a copy was -burned by the hangman. This made the fortune of the book; it had a big -circulation, and all intellectual France fell to arguing about it. And -that was to be Voltaire’s life for some forty-five years thereafter; -writing forbidden books and pamphlets under an infinity of pen names, -having them secretly printed in England, or in Holland, or in -Switzerland, having them publicly burned, and no less publicly debated.</p> - -<p>The name Voltaire thus means to us a champion of free thought, against -religious superstition; but we must get clear the fact that during his -life Voltaire was the most eminent poet and dramatist of France. Also it -is interesting to note that, revolutionary as he was in the field of -philosophy, he was a complete conservative in the field of art; -following the models of Corneille and Racine, and respecting the sacred -unities, the artificial laws whereby the French stage was fettered. -Among the discoveries he had made in England was a playwright by the -name of Shakespeare, whom he described as “a drunken savage, without the -smallest scrap of good taste, and without the least acquaintance with -the rules.” Voltaire was much annoyed when this dictum had the effect of -causing some Frenchmen to be curious about Shakespeare! As time passed, -he found that he had to give more and more energy<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_132">{132}</a></span> to denouncing this -“drunken savage,” and rebuking those who professed to find merit in his -work.</p> - -<p>All of which has a vital lesson for us; it shows us how tight is the -grip of culture conventions upon the educated mind. It is possible for -men to think for themselves concerning God and immortality, concerning -the divine right of emperors and kings, and even of oil magnates and -international financiers. But it is extremely difficult for them to -think freely on the subject of what constitutes good taste, and whether -or not they ought to permit themselves to enjoy a new and strange work -of art. I note with interest that our own young intellectuals, who count -themselves thorough-going revolters, who boast of unorthodoxy in -religion, politics, economics, and morals, are usually of Tory -inclination in matters of culture; cherishing the aristocratic -superstition that art exists for cultured classes, and that whatever is -popular is obviously contemptible.</p> - -<p>We in America do not make any fuss about poets, so it is hard for us to -understand the power which Voltaire wielded over French society. He was -cynical, he was obscene, he was jealous and vain and exasperating; but -he was a kind of god, to whom critical authority bowed, even monarchs -with their worldly power. He produced a score of dramas, most of them -tragedies in the heroic style, and with few exceptions each was a -separate ovation, a coronation in the kingdom of letters. It never -occurred to anyone in Voltaire’s time that he was not the equal of -Racine, as a dramatist; while his epics were put above Homer and Virgil. -We today begin one of his plays with determination to go through to the -end, but we cannot make it; we desire some Greenwich Village wit to -produce it in mock heroic style, so that we can laugh heartily at these -pompous aristocrats raging and storming, stabbing and killing each -other. We laugh, because it is so apparent that the poet himself has -never felt any of this emotion, he has thought only how magnificent it -sounds.</p> - -<p>But at this time French culture was supreme throughout Europe, and -Voltaire, cynic and skeptic, was at once the idol and the terror of the -courts. He was a good business man, and invested the money he made from -his plays, and become enormously rich. He purchased an estate in -Switzerland, just over the French border; an admirable<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_133">{133}</a></span> strategic -location, a sort of literary emplacement for a high-caliber gun. He -could have his pamphlets printed in Germany and Holland, and secretly -shipped into France, and the French police were powerless to touch him. -The Swiss Calvinists were glad to have attacks made upon French and -Catholic absolutism, so they let the poet alone.</p> - -<p>Voltaire was a frail ghost of a man, almost a skeleton, but with quick -bright eyes in his bare skull. He was ill most of his life; when he -visited King Frederick he described himself as suffering from four -mortal diseases, yet he lived to the age of eighty-four, and worked -under terrific pressure all the time. He carried on an enormous -correspondence—more than ten thousand of his letters have been edited -and published. He was capable of almost every kind of meanness and -malice, but he was also capable of heroic and unselfish idealism, as the -world was now to see.</p> - -<p>In the city of Toulouse, in southern France, a young man named Calas -committed suicide, as result of religious mania; he was a member of a -Protestant family, and the Catholic authorities in Toulouse accused the -father of having murdered the boy to keep him from turning Catholic. -They had no shred of evidence, but they cruelly tortured the old man, -and finally executed him, and confiscated the property of the family. -Voltaire took up the case in a frenzy of indignation; he employed -investigators and lawyers, he wrote pamphlets and circulated them, he -wrote innumerable letters and appeals; for three years he devoted his -time to making the case a political and religious issue in France. No -man could have displayed nobler public spirit, or more genuine human -sympathy; for three years, so he wrote, he never smiled without feeling -that he had committed a crime. When at last the verdict of the Toulouse -courts was reversed, he fell into the arms of one of the Calas lads, and -wept like a child. He said—he, the veteran playwright: “This is the -most splendid fifth act I have ever seen on any stage!”</p> - -<p>There came one such case after another. Just as in Russia the Black -Hundreds spread the rumor that the Jews were accustomed to shed the -blood of Christian children, so this Catholic machine made war on the -Protestants by accusing them of hideous crimes. Voltaire<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_134">{134}</a></span> espoused the -“Sirven case” in the same fury of indignation; it had taken the courts -two hours to condemn the victims, he said, and nine years to do them -justice! Out of his agony of protest came one of his greatest works, the -“Treatise on Toleration”—burned by the hangman, like everything else. -Also there came his immortal slogan, which he took to putting on all his -letters: “Écrasez l’infame”—that is, crush the infamous thing, meaning -Catholic absolutism.</p> - -<p>Now America also has its “infame,” which is capitalist absolutism; and -we await the arrival of some man of letters, capable of the heroic and -unselfish idealism of Voltaire. To him there were brought ten or a dozen -cases of cruelty and torture in the course of twenty years; but hardly a -month passes that my mail does not contain a story of cruelty and -torture equally hideous, committed by the powers which are now -destroying liberty and enlightenment in America. Consider, for example, -the case of the Centralia prisoners, a story of brutality, torture, -murder, terrorism, and the subornation of the law by the lumber barons -of the Northwest; a story just as pitiful, just as revolting, just as -worthy of Voltaire’s immortal slogan.</p> - -<p>“If you are not careful,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you will be accused of putting -propaganda into this chapter!”</p> - -<p>It was as the champion of freedom of thought that Voltaire stood before -the French people; he, with his wealth and fame, was able to do what -they did not dare to do. From his mountain retreat he sent his ideas all -over Europe; and meantime the blind, deluded rulers of France did all -they could to plow the soil for his sowing. The great-grandson of the -“grand monarch,” who ascended the throne as a child in 1715, ruled for -almost sixty years. Beginning with the name of “the well-beloved,” he -squandered the revenues of the state upon his mistresses, and led his -country to a series of disasters, including the loss of the American -colonies and India. He left the nation bankrupt, and died with the -famous phrase, “After us the deluge.”</p> - -<p>Four years later, the old Voltaire, made bold by all his honors, came -down from his mountain fortress and entered Paris. He had a pageant like -a conquering hero; his plays were produced to enormous audiences, and -even<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_135">{135}</a></span> the Academy of Richelieu welcomed him—strange irony of history! -It was like Tolstoi in Russia; the authorities would have liked to chop -off his head, but they could only gnash their teeth in impotence. -However, what their hatred could not do, the love of the people -accomplished; Voltaire was literally killed by kindness, and died amid -the excitements of this holiday. It is interesting to us to note that -among those he met in Paris was Benjamin Franklin, fellow skeptic, -scientist, and revolutionary propagandist from the new world. This was -in 1778, two years after the Declaration of Independence, and less than -ten years before the French revolution.</p> - -<p>In the case of Voltaire we see a man of letters who ranks as one of the -great world forces, and purely and simply because of his propaganda. If -he had written nothing but heroic tragedies and sublime epics, he would -be a forgotten name today; it was only because he took upon himself the -task of setting free the mind of his country, and labored at it -incessantly for the greater part of his life, that we know of him and -honor him as one of the glories of France. Great as were his faults, no -one can deny that he stood to all the world for the fundamental idea of -freedom of thought.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XLIV"></a>CHAPTER XLIV<br /><br /> -THE TRUMPETER OF REVOLUTION</h2> - -<p>We have seen that Voltaire was a Tory as to art; his revolution was of -the intellect. There was needed a revolutionist of the feelings, and he -appeared in the person of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a stormy, embittered, -unhappy man, the object of endless controversy, continuing to our own -day; a character full of contradictions, difficult to cover within the -limits of a chapter.</p> - -<p>His father was a watch-maker in Geneva; he ran away from home and became -a vagabond, and remained that all his life. He never had any property; -as for friends, he had them only for short periods, because he quarreled -with everyone. Among the occupations he followed in youth was that of a -footman, which ought to have barred him from rising in eighteenth -century France. But he<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_136">{136}</a></span> wrote ballets, operas, comedies, and won an -entrée to the salons of the great.</p> - -<p>Here is another “pure” artist; and did you ever hear of him in that -“pure” capacity? Did you know that Jean-Jacques had written ballets, -operas and comedies? Could you name one of these works? Unless you are a -specialist in literary history, you could not; and if Rousseau had -followed that easy career, and kept his entrée to the Paris salons, you -would never have heard his name. It was only when he became a -propagandist that he earned world fame, and it is as a propagandist that -we know him.</p> - -<p>He was thirty-seven years old when Diderot, editor of the great -“Encyclopedia,” the Bible of the new learning in France, was put into -prison for writing an atheistical pamphlet. Rousseau went to visit him -and, while thus wrought up, he fell to thinking about the depraved state -of society, and the causes thereof; he wrote an essay, and so was -launched upon his career as maker of intellectual dynamite. He was -pursued by the authorities, until he acquired a persecution complex; -before he died he became convinced that everyone he knew was in a -conspiracy to destroy him.</p> - -<p>His first important book was “The Social Contract,” a study of the state -and its authority. What is the basis of sovereignty? What right has the -state to command my obedience? The answer of Rousseau’s time was that -God had appointed a king to rule you, and if you disobeyed this king you -were hanged, drawn and quartered, and later on roasted to eternity. -Rousseau’s thesis was that the basis of sovereignty is popular consent; -the state is made by the general will, and lacking such sanction, no -sovereignty exists. The opening words give the keynote of the book: “Man -was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” A study of history and -anthropology convinces us that the first part of this statement is -false; but that did not keep the words from becoming a revolutionary -slogan.</p> - -<p>The next important book was “The New Heloise,” a love story written in -the form of a series of letters. French women were rebelling against -being sold in marriage; their natural desire to marry the man of their -own choice was reaching a point dangerous to the old conven<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_137">{137}</a></span>tion. To be -sure, Heloise obeyed her parents and married according to their command; -but her sufferings were so moving that she was more effective as an -inspirer of revolt than if she had herself revolted.</p> - -<p>Then came another novel, “Emile, or The Sentimental Education”—that is -to say, an education according to the dictates of the natural feelings. -The physical and moral soundness of the infant Emile were based upon the -fact that his mother suckled him, instead of turning him over to a wet -nurse, according to the fashion of the great world of France. The child -was raised in close contact with nature, and followed the dictates of -those natural desires, which Rousseau believed were always wholesome and -trustworthy. The youth was taught to work and be useful instead of being -a culture parasite; and in due course a pure and beautiful maiden -appeared to deserve his love. Today Rousseau’s ideas of education are -freely applied in the Ferrer schools; but in 1762 “Emile” was condemned -by the Sorbonne, and burned by the common executioner, and its author -was forced to flee to Switzerland, and finally to England.</p> - -<p>In his later years of desolation Rousseau produced the story of his -life, known as the “Confessions.” His other works are not easy for us to -read, but the “Confessions” will be read so long as man is interested in -his own heart. Here for the first time in the history of our race a man -of first-rate genius told the full truth about himself. A great deal of -it is painful truth; we read it with dismay, and on the basis of it -Rousseau’s enemies have condemned him to infamy.</p> - -<p>But never forget, we know these painful things because Rousseau tells -them to us; if he had concealed them, or dressed them up to look -romantic, then we should have had quite a different Rousseau in our -minds. Many authors have done that, and live enthroned in our regard. -But this man says to us: much as I care about myself—and I care a great -deal—I care still more about enabling my fellowmen to understand -reality. And that is the spirit in which we take the “Confessions.” We -realize that we are not dealing with one of those feeble natures which -first commit offenses, and then find pleasure in talking about them; we -are sharing life with a deeply serious man, who seeks in agony a cure -for human ills.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_138">{138}</a></span></p> - -<p>I doubt if there has ever been a preacher of doctrine who delivered -himself more completely to his enemies than Jean-Jacques. He tells us -how, not knowing how to get his bread, he left his newly born children -in care of a foundling asylum. This was a custom of the time; but as a -rule those who followed the custom did not go away and write a book -advising other people how to rear and educate their children! For such -inconsistencies his critics ridiculed him unmercifully. And yet, in -spite of all they could say, he became the trumpeter of the revolution, -political, economic, and cultural, which was on the way in France. He -remains in our time a trumpeter of the social revolution which is -happening before our eyes.</p> - -<p>That does not mean that we are blind to the fallacies and absurdities in -his doctrines. We of today study education in the light of a mass of -psychological knowledge, we study government in the light of historical -and economic knowledge, we study the human soul in the light of biology, -sociology, chemistry, psychoanalysis—a host of sciences whose very -names were unknown to Rousseau. But how do we come to possess this -knowledge? We possess it because Jean-Jacques, with the divination of a -prophet and the fervor of a moral genius, proclaimed from the housetops -the right of the human spirit to be free, and to face the facts of life, -and to choose its path in accordance with its own happiness and health.</p> - -<p>With any critic of Rousseau there is one question to be settled at the -outset. Why do you quarrel with this man? Is it because you wish to -correct his errors, and clear the way to his goal of liberty, equality, -and fraternity? Or are you one of those who dread the torrent of new -ideas and new feelings which Rousseau let loose upon the world? Is it -your purpose to discredit the whole individualistic movement which he -fathered, and to take us back to the good old days when children obeyed -their parents, and servants obeyed their masters, and women obeyed their -husbands, and subjects obeyed their popes and kings, and students in -colleges accepted without question what their professors told them?</p> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi: “I suspect that last phrase is meant for Professor -Babbitt.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_139">{139}</a></span>”</p> - -<p>“It is wonderful,” says her husband, “that he should have that name. A -judgment of Providence, without doubt!”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XLV"></a>CHAPTER XLV<br /><br /> -THE HARVARD MANNER</h2> - -<p>Let it be explained at the outset that we are setting out to discuss, -not a character in a novel, but a living person, Irving Babbitt, -professor of French literature in Harvard University; a scholar who has -set himself one goal in life, to deliver America from the evil influence -of Rousseau and “Rousseauism”—by which he means the whole modern -cultural movement. He has published a stately volume, “Rousseau and -Romanticism,” three hundred and ninety-three pages, plus twenty-three -pages of introduction, with an average of twelve quotations and -citations per page, illustrating the follies, absurdities and -monstrosities uttered or enacted by every man or woman who has at any -time during the past hundred and seventy-five years ever thought a new -thought, or tried an original experiment, or embodied an especially -intense emotion in art form.</p> - -<p>It makes a formidable catalogue. Because, you see, humanity proceeds by -the method of trial and error; there is no other way to proceed. The -pendulum of life swings to one extreme, and then it swings to the other. -Every movement has its lunatic fringe, people who show us where to stop; -and what our Harvard professor has done is to make a whole book of these -extravagances and insanities. He takes the fringe for the movement; and -so, of course, it is easy for him to prove that the human spirit ought -never to have been set free; it was a violation of “decorum.” That is -his favorite word, to which he comes back in every chapter. The rest of -America has another name for it; we call it “the Harvard manner.”</p> - -<p>“Of course,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you have to do up a Harvard Tory—that is -fore-ordained. But I recall the lunatics I have met in the radical -movement—not merely the harmless cranks, but the dangerous and hateful -beasts! What Rousseau means to me is that I used to hear his praises -sung by a man who has lived for twenty<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_140">{140}</a></span> years by seducing young girls -and getting their money.”</p> - -<p>Says Ogi: “If you are going to judge a wave by its scum, I shall have to -make a study of the criminals of classicism: the horrors perpetrated by -perfect gentlemen who respected the three unities, and wrote triolets, -and wore exactly the right clothes. There will be a section in this -volume devoted to Harvard University—see ‘The Goose-Step,’ pages 62 to -91.”</p> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi: “Come back to Rousseau, and explain to us why a college -professor should take so much trouble to kill a man who died a hundred -and fifty years ago.”</p> - -<p>“The professor does not know why Rousseau is still alive, but I can tell -him—because Rousseau’s revolution is only half completed. The political -part happened, and gave us—world capitalism! We aren’t satisfied, and -we are gathering our muscles for another leap, and all the world’s -Tories are hanging to our coat-tails, trying to hold us back. They dig -out all the old mummies from their coffins, and dress them up and paint -them to look like life, and set them up to cry warnings to us. Even -Voltaire’s ‘l’Infame’! There is a clerical party in every country in -Europe, and Catholic trade unions, called ‘Christian Socialist,’ to -cheat the workers. In the United States there are the Knights of -Columbus, and Tammany Hall, and parades of priests and cardinals up -Fifth Avenue, generously financed by Wall Street. And naturally, in such -a crisis the three unities and the rest of the classical tradition are -not overlooked; so here comes our learned professor with his stately -volume, to prove to us that Rousseau did not have the Harvard manner. -The very same conspiracy, you see, that Rousseau faced during his life.”</p> - -<p>“The persecution complex?” asks Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“Don’t fool yourself; Rousseau actually was persecuted! And see what -evidence he would have, if he were alive today, and could investigate -this Babbitt case! The House of Morgan, on the corner of Broad and Wall -streets, just across the way from the United States Treasury building; -and the billion dollars which this House of Morgan made buying war -supplies for the Allies; and the thirty billion dollars which the United -States Treasury paid out to save the House of Morga<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_141">{141}</a></span>n’s French and -British loans; and the Boston connections of the House of Morgan, Lee, -Higginson & Company, with their network of banks and trust companies; -and the Lee-Higginson and Morgan control of the governing bodies of -Harvard University; and Harvard’s answer to ‘The Goose-Step,’ the -election of its distinguished graduate, Mr. J. P. Morgan, to its sacred -band of overseers; and the Boston ‘Transcript,’ and the Harvard -‘Lampoon,’ and the Laski case, and the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and the -Boston police strike, and Cal Coolidge, the queer prank that fate played -on Boston’s aristocracy. Picture the situation in the year 1919, the -days of Attorney-General Palmer; the Harvard mob smashing that police -strike, and the hundred per cent patriotic plutocrats of Boston raiding -the offices of the ‘Reds,’ and cracking the skulls of everybody they -found there—”</p> - -<p>“The Harvard manner?” says Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“Throwing them into jail, or packing them by hundreds into rooms in -office buildings without toilets, and shipping them back to Europe where -they came from. And right in the midst of that campaign, in that same -anno mirabile of 1919, comes our Babbitt professor—I mean our Professor -Babbitt—with a schoolmaster’s ferule in one hand and a slung-shot in -the other, scolding and at the same time committing mayhem upon every -artist who in the past hundred and seventy-five years of history has -ever had a human feeling. It is supposed to be a work of scholarship, of -literary criticism; it is written to teach ‘decorum’—by such examples -as this: ‘The humanitarian, all adrip with brotherhood, and profoundly -convinced of the loveliness of his own soul.’ And again: ‘Both Rousseau -and his disciple Robespierre were reformers in the modern sense—that is -they are concerned not with reforming themselves, but other men.’ What -is one going to do with a man like that?”</p> - -<p>“What did they do with them in the French revolution?” asks Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“Les aristocrats à la lanterne!” says her husband.</p> - -<p>“I’ve forgotten all my French,” says Mrs. Ogi, “and so will most of your -readers. But I’ll tell you this—the professor sounds exactly like you, -except that he’s on the other side!<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_142">{142}</a></span>”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XLVI"></a>CHAPTER XLVI<br /><br /> -THE POISONED RAT</h2> - -<p>While France has been moving toward its revolution, England has been -moving away from hers, and we now return to the foggy island to watch -the course of events through this eighteenth century. The crown has -submitted, and parliament has the last word in public affairs. A -parliament of the land-owning gentry, elected by corruption, we shall -see it in the course of two centuries being gradually changed into a -parliament of merchants and ship-owners, of steel and coal and diamond -and gold magnates, of brewers and publishers of capitalist propaganda.</p> - -<p>It was the task of eighteenth century England to create the bourgeois -soul. Machinery and standardized production, which were to make over the -world, had not yet appeared, but when they came, they found their -psychology and culture all prepared for them by this “nation of -shop-keepers.” It is a world of money, all other powers deposed, all -other standards a shell without life inside; honor, favor, virtue are -represented by money. Religion has become an affair of “livings” and of -“benefices.” Politics has become an affair of party rancor, a squabble -over the spoils of office. The difference between the two parties is -that one is in and the other is out; the purpose of the outs being to -prove rascality against the ins, and thus get a chance to do what the -ins are doing.</p> - -<p>In this bourgeois world the artist may be feeble of mind, not knowing -the reality of his time, believing sincerely in its shams. Or he may be -a cynic, jeering at his time, but taking what he can get. Or he may be a -rebel, speaking the truth—in which case he will starve in a garret, or -go insane, or be thrown into prison, or driven into exile.</p> - -<p>The first to greet this new century with his writings was a man who went -insane. One of the great masters of English prose, his fate in life was -to be brought up as a “poor relation,” and to eat the bitter bread of -dependence. He became a kind of educated servant to the wealthy, and -finally got a small job in the church. Ill<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_143">{143}</a></span> most of his life, proud, -imperious, burning up with thwarted genius, Jonathan Swift was made into -a master ironist.</p> - -<p>His first great book was “The Tale of a Tub,” in which he ridiculed the -squabbles of the various church parties. Having thus shocked the church, -he applied to be a dean, but did not get the job, because somebody else -paid a thousand pound bribe to the official having the appointment. -Swift was told that he could have another deanery at the same price, but -he did not have the sum handy.</p> - -<p>The “ins” of those days were called Tories, and the “outs” were called -Whigs; they fought furiously, and literary rats, hiding in garrets and -cellars, wrote pamphlets of personal abuse, which were published -anonymously and circulated in the face of jail penalties. Like the -laureate Dryden, our would-be dean did this vile writing; he did it for -the Whigs, and when he got no preferment there, he joined the Tories, -and was made dean of the cathedral in Dublin. There he wrote his “Modest -Proposal” for eating the children of Ireland, one of the most terrific -pieces of irony in all literature. “Look,” says the ‘gloomy dean,’ “we -are letting a population starve to death, and, what a waste of national -resources, what a violation of our fundamental principles of business -economy. Let us feed these Irish babies, and when they are nice and fat, -serve them on our tables; they will be happy during their brief span of -life, and we shall no longer have to import food from foreign parts.”</p> - -<p>Then came “Gulliver’s Travels,” which took its place along with -“Pilgrim’s Progress” as required reading for children and adults. It is -an even more perfect allegory; you can read it as a story pure and -simple, without any idea of an ulterior meaning. The author helps you by -the perfect gravity with which he describes every detail of these -singular adventures. First we visit the land in which the people are -only six inches tall, and so we laugh at the pettiness of human affairs. -Then we visit the land where they are correspondingly big, and we learn -how brutal and gross and stupid we really are. So on, until we come to -the land of noble and beautiful horses, in which human beings are lewd -and filthy apes. So we learn the worst possible about a world which -appointed a man of genius to be dean of St. Patric<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_144">{144}</a></span>k’s in Dublin, when -he wanted to be dean of St. Paul’s in London. So we are ready to go -insane, and to die, as the dean himself phrased it, “like a poisoned rat -in a hole.”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XLVII"></a>CHAPTER XLVII<br /><br /> -VIRTUE REWARDED</h2> - -<p>Prose fiction up to this time had dealt for the most part with men; its -most popular variety was the “picaresque,” telling the adventures of -vagabonds and rascals. But now in this bourgeois England the fiction -writer settles down, and becomes respectable, and discovers the theme -which is to occupy him for the next two hundred years—the feminine -heart, and what goes on in it during the mating season.</p> - -<p>Watch the gentleman-turkey, stirred by erotic excitement; he struts up -and down, swells out his comb, spreads his feathers, scrapes the ground -with his stiff wings. And there stands the humble and retiring -lady-turkey, observing him with modest but attentive eye; she takes a -step or two away, but does not run far. What is going on in her mind? -What does she think of the blood-flushed comb and the spread feathers, -the heroic pose and the awe-inspiring gobble? We are not permitted to -enter into the psychology of a lady-turkey; but through the magic of -fiction we are permitted to watch the mind of the lady-human, and note -every detail of the process whereby she gets her mate. We share her -emotions, we analyze the devices she employs—and thus, if we belong to -her sex, we perfect our technique, or, if we belong to the male sex, we -learn how to write novels.</p> - -<p>In this bourgeois world, the emotions of mating are dominated by those -of money. Society has become settled, property relations are fixed, and -you live a routine life, without great change or adventure—except once, -which is at this mating period. Here is your great chance to rise above -your own class in a world of money classification. A beautiful and -charming maiden may catch the eye of some wealthy man; a handsome, -dashing youth may stumble upon an heiress. Such is the significance of -the heavenly smiles and the coy glances of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_145">{145}</a></span> bourgeois romance. Cupid -travels about, armed with a golden arrow, and in the love-glints from -the eyes of youth and beauty we see fortunes flying to and fro—diamonds -and rubies, manor-houses, estates, orders and offices, titles to -nobility. And always in the background sit the chaperons, keeping -watch—old women, whose function it is to know the grim facts of greed, -and to pass on such “worldly wisdom” to the young.</p> - -<p>The first old woman to take up this task in English fiction was Samuel -Richardson. He himself was a hero for any bourgeois novel—a printer who -had married his master’s daughter, and become publisher to the king. He -knew what money costs, and believed in it with all his heart and soul; -in his mature years he set out to warn young women of the value of their -virtue, and point out to them the importance of a life contract in love. -He wrote a novel called “Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded,” telling the story -of an innocent fifteen-year-old servant girl in the household of a great -gentleman who makes love to her. In a series of letters to her parents -she exposes to us the details of this love-making, and all her -bewilderments, agonies and fears.</p> - -<p>Pamela Andrews is the very soul of humility; but young as she is, she -knows the business facts concerning the life contract—“with all my -worldly goods I thee endow.” She knows that her master is a rake and -scoundrel—he gives her in the course of the story all possible evidence -of that; nevertheless, she stands firm, and in the end her virtue is -rewarded—by marriage with this rake and scoundrel. If that seems to you -a strange reward of virtue, it will be only because you do not -understand this eighteenth century world. What a man is personally -counts for little compared with the class he belongs to. He is a -gentleman, he owns houses and lands, and Pamela’s children will be -ladies and gentlemen, and will own houses and lands. This novel became -the sensation of the day, not merely in England, but all over Europe. -There were two large volumes, and a sequel with two more, but no one was -bored; great ladies sat up half the night, weeping their eyes red over -Pamela’s trials, and welcoming her—in imagination—into the class of -ladies. The writers learned how to make money, and a new profession, -that of the love-describers, came into being.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_146">{146}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XLVIII"></a>CHAPTER XLVIII<br /><br /> -THE GOOD FELLOW’S CODE</h2> - -<p>You will note in this bourgeois world two attitudes toward money; one -might be described as the attitude of the first generation, and the -other of the third. The first generation has had to make the money, and -knows what money costs. The third generation wants the money just as -much, but its knowledge is confined to what money will buy. There is war -between these two generations, and you find it reflected in the arts; -the young and saucy artists make propaganda for one side, while the -mature and sober artists make it for the other.</p> - -<p>There was in England at this time a gentleman whose ancestors had had -money for a long time, and who took toward it the attitude of jolly good -heartedness. He read this story of “Pamela,” and it filled him with -fury; what a loathsome world, in which, men and women spent their time -poring over cash-books and calling it virtue! What would be left in life -if a fashionable young gentleman could not have fun with a lower class -girl without tying himself to her for life! So Henry Fielding, -gentleman, barrister, and man of pleasure in London, sat himself down to -turn “Pamela” into screaming farce. He took Pamela’s brother, a young -footman, and pictured him in the household of a great lady who -endeavored to lure him from the path of virtue. The agonies of -temptation of Joseph Andrews reproduced those of his sister; but as -young men were not supposed to have any virtue, the tragedy was turned -upside down.</p> - -<p>This story is usually cited by the critics as an illustration of how a -man of genius began a piece of propaganda, and then got interested in -his story, and turned it into a real work of art. I should alter the -formula by saying that he changed from a negative to a positive kind of -propaganda. Joseph Andrews runs away from his wicked mistress, taking a -girl he truly loves, and the narrative turns from a satire on -Richardson’s pseudo-virtues into a portrayal of what Fielding considers -real virtue. Joseph and his girl fall into trouble, and their creator, -in pleading their cause, defends the poor and friendless all over -England, who do not get justice in the courts. Fielding knew,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_147">{147}</a></span> because -he had ridden the circuits; being a warm-hearted man, he created a model -English magistrate by the name of Squire Allworthy—an obvious enough -name—to show how the law ought to be administered.</p> - -<p>Fielding next took to writing plays. But he ventured to make satiric -allusions to “persons of quality”; therefore he ran afoul of the Lord -Chamberlain, and one of his plays was banned. He was disgusted, and -rather than conform, he gave up play-writing. There was no government -big-wig overseeing fiction; and so this new art form was destined to -become the vehicle of social criticism.</p> - -<p>In his next book this gentleman-novelist went on to write a deadly piece -of satire. Looking out over Europe, he saw Frederick, king of Prussia, -called “the great,” making a raid upon Silesia and seizing it; he saw -other royal and imperial conquerors tormenting mankind with war. He took -a notorious criminal, who had recently been hanged in London, and made -him the hero of a novel, which parodied in detail the glory-career of a -king. “Jonathan Wild the Great,” like all works of revolutionary -tendency, has received from the critics small part of its due praise. -There are few scenes more grim than the conclusion of the book, the -satire upon the “consolations of religion” when the arch-criminal dies.</p> - -<p>Then came “Tom Jones,” one of the greatest of English novels. Fielding’s -purpose in this story, as he declared it, was “to recommend Goodness and -Innocence.” In his hero he set out to show the truth about a man; not a -snuffling saint for a church-window, but a real, hearty good fellow, -according to Fielding’s notion. What may such a young fellow do, and -what may he not do? May he drink? Of course. May he spend money freely? -Fielding knew about that, having married a rich wife and run through her -fortune. May he take money from his friends? Yes, even ask for it. May -he take money from his mistresses? And here suddenly you see the -gentleman-author start up in anger. He may not! Here is an iron-clad -rule, which English gentlemen enforce without compromise. But then, may -he cohabit with girls of classes below his own? Yes, says Fielding, -certainly he may, and he will; let’s be honest, and not fool ourselves -with shams. Thackeray, who was loud in admiration of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_148">{148}</a></span> “Tom Jones,” -lamented that no novelist since then had dared to tell the truth about a -man. In our day, for better or worse, the novelists have dared, and -reticence as a literary virtue is dead.</p> - -<p>In conclusion, we note the fact that Fielding died at the age of -forty-three, “of dropsy, jaundice, and asthma.” So it appears that you -may take your choice; you may exercise self-restraint, and be accused of -hypocrisy, and of spoiling your friends’ pleasure; or you may throw the -reins upon the neck of desire, and go through life at a gallop—and have -your body give out just when your brain is ready for its best work.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XLIX"></a>CHAPTER XLIX<br /><br /> -THE GAUGER OF GENIUS</h2> - -<p>We have read about an English gentleman-novelist who wasted his health -and died at the age of forty-three; and we next have to hear the story -of a Scotch plowman-poet who treated himself in the same way and died at -the age of thirty-seven. Such men present a painful problem to their -friends, and also to their critics—since in art circles it is not -considered good form to set up moral standards. However, in this case -Robert Burns has solved the problem for us; he lacked nothing in -clearness of insight or plainness of speech concerning his own follies, -and spoke of his “self-contempt bitterer to drink than blood.”</p> - -<p>He was one of seven children of a peasant family, and was born on a -stormy January day, in a clay cottage of which the roof was blown off a -few days later. He followed the plow-tail all his early years, and wrote -that his life until sixteen was “the toil of a slave.” The few books -they could borrow the children would read at meal times, or snatching a -few words in the fields. Such peasant slaves are not supposed to acquire -culture, and if they do so, it is at the cost of health of mind and -body. Robert Burns was given to fits of melancholy, and to moods of wild -excess; he speaks of his “passions raging like demons.” He was a -headstrong, impatient youth, disgusted by the falsities and shams of -conventional religion.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_149">{149}</a></span> He had to find his own code in life, and the -fact that he found it too late to save himself is our loss.</p> - -<p>This peasant, toiling on a rocky tenant farm, discovered in himself the -gift of exquisite melody. His feelings poured themselves out in verses -in the homely Scotch dialect, then considered a barbarous thing, -unworthy of literature. He would compose these verses all day long while -guiding the plow, and then, coming home at night, he would sit in a -garret room and write them out. Not until he was twenty-seven years old -did he succeed in having them published. They appeared at a time when -the family was ruined, and the poet himself being pursued by officers of -the law, at the instance of the father of a girl he loved. The twenty -pounds which he got from this first volume saved his life, so he -declared.</p> - -<p>He leaped into fame all over Scotland, and spent a year in Edinburgh, -where he was fêted by the great. But he did not keep their favor, -because he persisted in intimacy with his humble friends, and also, -alas! with the taverns. He went back to the plow, more set than ever in -his bitterness against the world of privilege and rank. It was a time -when the great world was in the habit of pensioning its poets, but the -Tories controlled in Scotland, and “Bobbie” Burns was a Whig, and turned -into a Republican, the same thing as a Bolshevik today. The best that -lovers of his poetry could get him was a job as a gauger of liquor -barrels, at the princely salary of sixty pounds a years.</p> - -<p>Even that he had difficulty in holding; because the French revolution -came sweeping over Europe, and frightened the governing class of England -into just such a frenzy of reaction as we in America witnessed in 1919. -In his capacity as exciseman Burns captured a smuggling ship with four -cannon; he purchased the cannon at auction, and sent them to the French -Legislative Assembly as a mark of sympathy. Imagine, if you can, an -American customs officer in 1919 shipping four machine-guns to the -Soviet government of Russia, and you may realize how close the poet came -to losing the salary upon which his wife and children had to exist.</p> - -<p>We shall see other poets shrinking in horror from the execution of King -Louis, and throwing in their lot with reaction. But here is one who -stood by the down-trodden<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_150">{150}</a></span> of the earth, and voiced their feelings to -the end. Not merely is he the national poet of Scotland; he is, in spite -of the handicap of dialect, the voice of the peasant and the land-slave -throughout the English-speaking world. When he writes “the rank is but -the guinea’s stamp,” he is the voice of the labor movement in England -and of democracy in America. His work is beloved by humble people; you -would be surprised to know how widely it is read—perhaps more widely -than any other poetry among the poor.</p> - -<p>The people know this voice, they know this heart, with all its loves and -hates, its longings and griefs. There is no man who has come from the -toiling masses, self-taught and self-made, who has expressed their -feelings so completely. And note that he has, not merely beauty and -passion, but keen insight and power of brain; he can think for his -people, as well as feel with them. He is not a bit afraid to use his art -to preach and to scold, to discuss moral problems, to storm at social -injustice and to ridicule church dogma.</p> - -<p>What though such a man did drink and squander himself; that also is a -part of the worker’s tragedy. He paid for it the price which the workers -pay, and life spared him no part of the suffering and shame, nor did he -spare himself the remorse. He wrote his own epitaph, in which he spoke -of himself as “the poor inhabitant below,” and recorded that -“thoughtless folly laid him low and stained his name.” Because there is -no spiritual value greater than honesty, the judgment of his people has -raised him high and crowned his name with immortality.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_L"></a>CHAPTER L<br /><br /> -THE BRAIN PROPRIETOR</h2> - -<p>“Why do you call this a work on art,” says Mrs. Ogi, “when you are -dealing entirely with literature?”</p> - -<p>“All the arts are one,” says her husband. “They are expressions of the -human spirit, and the material they use is comparatively unimportant. We -realize this when we see an artist like Michelangelo using blocks of -marble and molecules of paint and printed words, and giving us with each -medium the record of the same personality. There<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_151">{151}</a></span> have been others who -used the acted drama and the lyric, like Shakespeare; or words and -music—”</p> - -<p>“Let us see how your thesis works out with music,” says Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>Up to the end of the eighteenth century music has been either an adjunct -of religious propaganda, or else a leisure-class plaything and -decoration. The musicians are commanded to come and entertain their -lords and masters, while the latter feast and dance and gossip. The -musician as an artist, a lover of beauty for its own sake, exists at his -own peril. For example, Mozart; at the age of six he was a child -prodigy, exhibited as a curiosity before all the crowned heads of -Europe; but he grew up to a life of slow starvation, and a death from -tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five. The sum total of his earnings -from seven hundred and sixty-nine compositions was not enough to keep -his small family alive.</p> - -<p>But now comes a mighty genius, who discovers how to make music an art of -power, an expression of the deepest experiences of the human soul. -Beethoven was born in 1770, his mother being a cook and his father a -broken-down musician drinking himself to death. Beethoven became the -child slave of this drunkard; he was driven by beatings to practice the -piano at the age of four, and at the age of seven had a job in a theater -orchestra. I wonder, when we go to the “movies” and listen to the -banging and scraping, may there be among those servants of imbecility -some lad who is destined to raise the art of music to a new height, and -to die in misery for his pains?</p> - -<p>Beethoven went to Vienna to earn his living as entertainer to the -dilettante aristocracy of that pleasure-loving city. He was eccentric, -self-absorbed, possessed by his visions, never happy except when he was -composing, or out in the country where he could give free rein to his -delight in nature. It was his fate to teach music to the children of the -rich, and to play for grown-up rich children in their salons. They were -accustomed to chatter while men of genius attempted to entertain them; -but Beethoven thought his playing was of importance, and when they -failed to keep silence he struck his fist upon the piano keys, and -sprang up, exclaiming: “I will not play for such swine!”</p> - -<p>A terrible calamity befell him, the worst that a<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_152">{152}</a></span> musician could -imagine—he began to grow deaf. At the age of thirty he could no longer -hear a musical note. That seemed the ruin of his life; his enemies -jeered, saying that he poured out his preposterous compositions because -he did not know how horrible they sounded. Also Beethoven suffered from -near-sightedness, caused by smallpox in childhood. His health at times -gave way entirely, and he contemplated suicide. “My art alone deterred -me,” he wrote.</p> - -<p>He was, like Milton, a Puritan, though he did not use the word. He had -an ideal of love, and did not squander himself in casual intrigues. His -profession brought him into intimacy with the ladies of the great world; -they would be overwhelmed by his genius, but then they would think it -over, and realize what it would mean to marry a social inferior—and a -deaf one at that. One brilliant young lady tortured the great man’s -heart, and then went off and married a count. So Beethoven withdrew into -himself, becoming more eccentric, more irritable, and more passionate -and terrifying in his compositions. Said Weber when he heard the Third -Symphony: “Beethoven is now quite mad.”</p> - -<p>The composer’s life was one long struggle with poverty and debt. There -were wealthy noblemen in Vienna who appreciated his genius, and wanted -him to stay and play for them; they subscribed an income for him, but -then forgot to pay it, and left him to struggle along. To be sure, he -was none too easy with his patrons; he went to stay with one, and the -good man persisted in taking off his hat every time he laid eyes on -Beethoven. The composer, who abhorred ceremony, ran away.</p> - -<p>Beethoven was a reader of Plutarch, and held the ideals of the old Roman -republic; he believed in universal suffrage, and in liberty, and had no -hesitation in voicing his convictions to anyone. He hailed Napoleon as a -defender of liberty, and dedicated his “Eroica” symphony to him. Later -on, when Napoleon accepted a crown, Beethoven changed this dedication, -“To the <i>memory</i> of a great man.” He dedicated another symphony to a -French general, the conqueror of the Bastille; and you can imagine how -reactionary Vienna welcomed that.</p> - -<p>After the defeat of Napoleon, the monarchs entered into what they called -the “Holy Alliance,” to rivet Cath<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_153">{153}</a></span>olic absolutism upon the continent -forever. Vienna became the center of world reaction, and dungeon and -torture were the fate of men who raised their voices for human rights. -Here was Beethoven, old, deaf, and poverty-stricken; but he never -yielded an inch of his principles. “Words are bound in chains,” he said, -“but sounds are still free.” He poured his feelings into his wonderful -Ninth Symphony, which occasioned such a tornado of applause that the -police considered it necessary to interfere.</p> - -<p>Here, you see, was no maker of pretty sounds for the entertainment of -the rich; here was a great mind, one who read and thought for himself, -and understood not merely dancing and mating, but the nature of -organized society. In a time of universal subservience and fawning he -clenched his hands and behaved like a democrat. When his brother, full -of the pride of a newly rich bourgeois, presented him with a card -inscribed, “Johann van Beethoven, Land Proprietor,” the composer -scrawled under it, “Ludwig van Beethoven, Brain Proprietor.”</p> - -<p>There is a story of his meeting with the poet Goethe. As we shall see, -Goethe had made his way by conforming to the customs of a court; he was -now sixty-three years of age, stiff to the rest of the world, but -pliable to the nobility. Beethoven was forty-two, willing to be humble -to a poet of genius, but not to rank and arrogance. They met in the open -air, in a park where there were many people; and suddenly came word that -the duke and the empress were coming. The people formed two lines, and -stood, hats in hand, to do homage; and Goethe took his place among them. -Beethoven was furious; he remonstrated with the poet in vain, then he -jammed his hat down over his head and strode toward the duke and -empress, and they were the ones who did homage to him. Goethe never -forgot this scene, and he did not care to listen to Beethoven’s music, -because he said he found it “disturbing.”</p> - -<p>We are told by our “art for art’s sake” dilettanti that art has nothing -to do with moral questions. Let them take their answer from the father -of modern music, the greatest genius who has used that lofty art. No -higher authority could be found; and his words were these: “I recognize -no sign of superiority in mankind other than<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_154">{154}</a></span> goodness.” By that -principle he lived, and by it he wrote; his art is overwhelmingly -ethical, and if we were to tear up every record of his life, every word -in the way of title or dedication or inscription upon his compositions, -if we had nothing but the musical notes of his sonatas and symphonies, -we should get precisely the same impressions; we should know that we -were in the presence of a titanic conflict of the human will against the -forces of fate, the blind cruelties of nature and the deliberate -cruelties of class. We might not know that this man became deaf at the -height of his powers; we might have no definite image to attach to the -terrible hammer strokes of the Fifth Symphony; but we should know that -here is torture, here is defeat and despair crying out, here is -loveliness broken to pieces, trampled, crushed out of life; here also is -man, clenching his hands and setting his teeth in grim resolve, -proclaiming the supremacy of his own spirit, and rising to heights of -power, in which he makes his joy out of the very materials of his -torment. Some friend in Beethoven’s presence called upon God; and the -composer answered with the motto of his life: “O man, help thyself!”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LI"></a>CHAPTER LI<br /><br /> -POLITICS IS FATE</h2> - -<p>We come now to one of the great intellects of modern times, a genius who -made the culture of Germany known to the rest of the world. He is cited, -along with Shakespeare, as an illustration of how great art holds itself -aloof from propaganda; so it will be worth our while to study him -carefully, and see how he lived and voiced the aristocratic ideals of -his age.</p> - -<p>Johann Wolfgang Goethe was born in Frankfort, his father being a wealthy -lawyer. Through his eighty-three years of life he never knew a moment’s -inconvenience or waste of time from poverty. He was sent to the -university, but was not interested in the study of law, which his father -tried to force upon him; he studied the things he cared for, and -incidentally gave himself to a life of pleasure, so that he came home at -the age of nineteen with a severe hemorrhage.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_155">{155}</a></span></p> - -<p>It was the period of “Storm and Stress” in German literature; Rousseau -and his wicked “Romanticism” had crossed the Rhine, and here was all the -youth of Germany revolting against writing poetry in French; they -insisted upon dealing with German heroes and experiencing unrestrained -German emotions. Goethe was reading Shakespeare; and, spurning the -classical forms, he wrote a drama about Goetz von Berlichingen, a -medieval German knight who was big and bold and turbulent. This made -Goethe a hero of the new insurgency. Also he wrote a story entitled “The -Sorrows of Werther,” about a young man who yearned agonizingly for the -wife of his friend, and finally committed suicide. Goethe himself did -not commit suicide, but lived to regret these youthful extravagances.</p> - -<p>He fell in love more than once in these tumultuous days, his experience -being exactly the opposite to that of Beethoven; it was the poet who was -aristocratic and prudent, and it was the girl who suffered. Goethe had a -fear of marriage, because it would interfere with his genius; but it is -worth noting that the course he adopted brought him a great deal of -unhappiness and waste of time.</p> - -<p>At the age of twenty-six his destiny was decided by a meeting with the -young Duke of Weimar. The duke was twenty, and conceived an intense -admiration for the poet, and besought him to come and live at his court. -To tempt him, and to keep him there, he gave him a beautiful home, -together with some acres of land for a garden, and made him a state -councilor with a salary, and before long gave him a title, enabling him -to put the magic word “von” before his name. Thus Goethe became a court -writer and a court man. You may call him the greatest of court writers -and the most dignified of court men; nevertheless, there is a whole -universe of difference between such a life, and that of an outsider and -rebel like Beethoven.</p> - -<p>The only trace of his youthful revolt which Goethe kept was in matters -having to do with himself. He saved part of his time for his work, he -took to traveling to get away from court functions, and in his later -years, secure in his fame and power, he withdrew into his own home, and -the court had to come to him. Thus he maintained the dignity of the -intellectual man; but in his art ideals he became a strong conservative; -and as for political and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_156">{156}</a></span> social ideals, he solved the problem by having -nothing to do with them.</p> - -<p>It would be easy to make Goethe less attractive, by mentioning that the -court lady who became his mistress for the next ten years had a husband -somewhere in the background. But that would not be fair, because it was -the custom of the time, and nobody in court saw anything wrong with -adultery. But when Goethe, somewhere around the age of forty, fell very -much in love with a daughter of the people and made her his mistress, -court circles were shocked; they were still more shocked, when, after -she had borne him a son, he brought her to his home; they were -speechless, when in the end he married her. She justified their worst -expectations by turning into a drunkard; and that was hard for a very -dignified and reserved man of letters.</p> - -<p>Goethe traveled to Italy, and fell in love with the classical ideal of -art, and wrote an imitation Greek play. Coming back to Weimar, he took -up court duties, including the organizing of a fire brigade and going to -war. The French revolution had come, and King Louis of France was a -prisoner, together with his beautiful Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette, -who had asked why the people did not eat cake if they could not get -bread. The sovereigns of Europe hastened to rescue this brilliant wit, -and to overthrow the monster of revolution. Goethe’s duke went along, -with Goethe in his train. The poet showed his attitude toward the whole -matter by writing a musical comedy while at the training camp, and -gathering botanical specimens during the fighting.</p> - -<p>This attitude he explained by saying that he had to shut his eyes to the -events of his time, because otherwise he would have been driven mad. And -I admit that it was painful to see the movement for freedom run wild in -the Terror, and to see it betrayed by Napoleon, and to see the French -people lured into a war of conquest, so that Voltaire’s “l’Infame” was -able to pose as a champion of national freedom, and thus to rivet its -power upon the peoples once again. But why did these things happen? It -was because men of genius and intellect had been indifferent to the -misery of the French people, their degradation and enslavement. It was -because when the people did rise and throw off their tyrants, there were -so<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_157">{157}</a></span> few voices to explain the meaning of this event, and to defend the -revolution’s right to be. When Goethe went out with his duke, and lent -the sanction of his name to the counter revolution, it was he who was -making inevitable the Terror, it was he who was delivering the -revolution to Napoleon. Bloodshed and misery overwhelmed Europe for -twenty-five years; and Goethe, by withdrawing to his study and occupying -himself with poetry and scientific research, encouraged the worst -weakness of German philosophy and letters—the tendency to lull itself -with high-sounding, abstract words, while the real life of the nation -goes to the devil.</p> - -<p>Reality broke in harshly enough upon this poet. Sixteen years after his -military foray into France, the tables were turned, and Napoleon’s -cannon-balls came tumbling through the beautiful gardens at Weimar. Here -were French troopers, flushed with the victory of Jena, pillaging the -town, robbing the poet of both his wine and his money, and threatening -to kill him in his bed. Two years later came the peace negotiations, and -the poet lent his presence to balls and fetes, and was summoned to an -audience with the master of Europe. He was then fifty-nine years old, a -world genius, and Napoleon was thirty-nine years old, a world conqueror; -the older man went, and permitted himself to be inspected by the -younger. Goethe had a handsome presence, and Napoleon was pleased. “You -are a man!” he exclaimed. “How old are you?” he demanded; and then: “You -are very well preserved”—as if this were a Grecian scholar being -purchased as a slave by a Roman proconsul!</p> - -<p>“You have written tragedies?” demanded Napoleon; and a courtier hastened -to mention that the poet had written several—also he had translated -Voltaire’s tragedy, “Mahomet.” “It is not a good piece,” said Napoleon, -and went on to disapprove of dramas in which fate played a part, “What -are they talking about with their fate? La politique est la fatalité.” -Here was an utterance that Goethe might well have applied through all -the rest of his life. I could take it as a motto for this book. -“Politics is fate!” Hardly could one pack more wisdom into five words of -French or three of English!</p> - -<p>But Goethe chose to keep his salary and position in the court, and to -overlook the power of organized society<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_158">{158}</a></span> over the individual soul. When -the time came for the German people to revolt against Napoleon he had no -word of encouragement—quite the contrary, he pronounced it folly. Nor -had he any word of protest against the cruelties of the Holy Alliance.</p> - -<p>Yet, see the inconsistency! His greatest work is “Faust,” a study of the -problem of duty and happiness. Faust tries pleasure, he tries learning -for learning’s sake, and it brings him nothing. In the end he accepts -useful service as the only ideal, and the draining of swamps and -cultivating of land as a moral occupation. But what is the use of such -work, if statesmen are permitted to make war, and to destroy in a few -hours all that generations have built up? You may believe in -aristocratic politics or in democratic politics; but how can you believe -in the possibility of human happiness without wisdom in statesmen?</p> - -<p>There is a better side to Goethe, which must not be overlooked. He was -magnanimous, open-minded, and a friend to all men of genius. He met the -poet Schiller, ten years younger than himself, ill in health and -struggling with cruel poverty. Schiller was a poet of freedom, and -stayed that to the end of his life. His first successful drama was “The -Robbers,” a glorification of revolt against medieval tyranny; his last -was “William Tell,” whose hero set Switzerland free from the Austrian -yoke. The fact that Schiller was of humble origin made no difference to -Goethe; he brought the young poet to Weimar, and got him a pension from -the duke, and became his intimate friend.</p> - -<p>And that was the best thing that happened in Goethe’s life, for Schiller -with his fine sincerity and idealism drove the older man to work. We are -accustomed to see these two great names coupled together, and the -critics point out that Schiller was the enthusiast, the “propagandist,” -while Goethe, the serene Olympian temperament, was the greater poet. The -critics do not mention that Schiller had to waste most of his life doing -wretched hack work, and died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-six. If -Goethe, with all his leisure and independence, had died at that age, his -greatest work would have been lost.</p> - -<p>Can anyone deny that we get a world view from the writings of Goethe; -that he has definite conclusions as to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_159">{159}</a></span> every aspect of human life? Can -anyone deny that his dramas and his novels, even his lyric poems, are -saturated with philosophy? It so happens that his point of view is that -which has been accepted by tradition and critical authority through all -the ages; therefore it slides down easily, it does not taste like -medicine, and we do not think of it as propaganda.</p> - -<p>What is this point of view? The world is a place of blind and generally -aimless strife, and scholars and men of genius are powerless to control -it, and can only keep out of its way. “Renounce,” said Goethe; and what -is the first of all things you must renounce? Manifestly, the dream that -you can manage your own time. Live simply, develop your highest -faculties, leave a message and an example to the world; and somehow, at -some future date—you do not attempt to say when or how—this message -and this example may take effect, and truth and justice and mercy may -prevail. Meantime, since you must live, and since the ruling classes own -all the means of life, you must be polite to them, you must fit yourself -into their ways, you must be a gentleman, a courtier, a man of property.</p> - -<p>Thus by your example and daily practice you become a prop to the -established order; and by the automatic operation of economic forces you -become less and less tolerant of all rebels and disturbers of the peace. -Because you know only the wealthy and the noble, you come to deal with -them exclusively in your art works, you interpret their feelings, and -behold life from their point of view. All critics unite in declaring -that this is Reality, this is Nature, this is Art; while to object to -this, and voice any other point of view, is Idealism, Preaching, and -Propaganda.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LII"></a>CHAPTER LII<br /><br /> -BEHIND THE HEDGE-ROWS</h2> - -<p>Spreading the magic carpet of the imagination, we take flight from the -free and easy court of Weimar to the home of an English rector, where -impropriety is scarcely whispered, and where a little old maid of genius -lives amid tea-parties and the embroidering of linen and the visiting -of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_160">{160}</a></span> the poor, interrupted at intervals by the major crises of births, -marriages and deaths.</p> - -<p>Jane Austen was the youngest of seven children, who dwelt together in -that amity which the Bible recommends but which frail humanity -infrequently realizes. She was a genius without eccentricities, egotisms -or rebellions; never did a writer of immortal books live a more -conventional life or have less to write about. She had no literary -friends, not even at the end of her life. Her best work was done at the -age of twenty-two, and was a secret kept from the members of her family. -She wrote on little sheets of paper, which could be quickly hidden under -a blotter or a piece of “fancy work.” Her books were not published until -late in her life, and then they were published anonymously. She died of -tuberculosis at the age of forty-two.</p> - -<p>The characters in her novels are the people of the world she knew. Her -theme is, of course, the theme of all bourgeois fiction, the property -marriage. Here we see the golden love-glints flashing from Cupid’s eyes; -here we see the fortunes sailing about upon breezes of emotion; here we -see Sensibility controlled by Sense.</p> - -<p>Not great fortunes, you understand, but modest ones, such as entitle one -to be on the visiting list of an English country rector. A fortune -sufficient to enable the hero to escape the inconvenience of working, -and to live in the country and exhibit to mankind a beautiful and -graceful specimen of the human race. A fortune sufficient to enable him -to marry a lady of Sense and Sensibility, and to provide her with a -beautiful home and a garden, and a few servants, and maintenance for -whatever number of children it may please Providence to send. That is -the sort of fortune for which Jane Austen’s heroines are competing, and -which each of them invariably gets—the bourgeois happy ending.</p> - -<p>Do not misunderstand me: her heroines are not mercenary—that is, not -with their conscious minds. The mercenary elements in their lives are -instinctive and conventional; the laws of the British leisure classes, -of “gentlefolk.” These laws Jane Austen never questioned, nor does -anyone of her heroines ever question them. Therefore it is possible for -these ladies to be mercenary to the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_161">{161}</a></span> point of ferocity, yet at the same -time to be sentimental and even charming.</p> - -<p>If you travel through the Jane Austen country you find the roads lined -with hedge-rows, which bear flowers in the springtime, and are full of -birds, and afford opportunity for delightful descriptions in novels; -also they afford thrilling adventures, because a heroine can stand -behind a hedge-row and listen to her best friend discussing her to her -lover. Outside these hedge-rows walk common people of all sorts; farm -laborers on their way to fourteen hours of animal-like toil; factory -workers, pale and stunted; soldiers on the march; able seamen paying a -visit to home; tradesmen, tourists—all sorts of persons one does not -know. Behind the hedge-rows dwell the “gentlefolk,” carefully guarded by -the police magistrates; and the common people never by any chance -penetrate the hedge-rows, except in the capacity of servants. So the -young ladies of the “gentle” family meet no men save such as have been -carefully investigated and approved; so it is possible for these ladies -to be full of Sensibility—that is, quivering with excitement at the -male approach—and yet entirely innocent of mercenary motives, and -entirely safe from the danger of making an unmercenary match.</p> - -<p>How perfectly this system works you may note in Jane Austen’s novels. -There are eight heroines, and eight fortunes to be married. One of the -heroines takes the risk of marrying a clergyman who has no money except -his “living.” Two others marry clergymen who, in addition to their -“livings,” have good financial prospects. The other five marry -non-clerical gentlemen of wealth. Mostly these fortunes come from land; -everywhere over the Jane Austen novel there hovers a magic presence -known as the “entailed estate.” In only one case is there any hint of -vulgar origin for the fortune, in a recent connection with “trade.” Of -all the fortunes, only one has actually been gained by the man who -possesses it and bestows it upon the heroine; and this man has gained it -in a most respectable Christian way—that is to say, not by “trade,” but -by killing and robbery. He has been a naval captain, and brings home his -share of the prizes taken.</p> - -<p>The great crimes and horrors of the world lie outside<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_162">{162}</a></span> the hedge-rows -surrounding the Jane Austen rectory. We can hear the guns and smell the -powder smoke, but the deadly missiles never pass the magic barrier. Two -of Jane’s brothers are naval officers, and they come and go in imposing -uniforms; the Napoleonic wars are on, and they are guarding the channel, -and in later life become admirals. An intimate friend of the family is -Warren Hastings, who conquered India for the British; when he was placed -on trial for wholesale graft, he explained by saying that when he -considered his opportunities, he marveled, not that he had taken so -much, but that he had not taken more. Nothing of anything like this -enters into the novels.</p> - -<p>What does enter are the quiverings of Sensibility, the ups and downs of -the “tender emotions.” When we were children we used to take a daisy and -pull off the petals, and with petal number one we would say: “He loves -me,” and with petal number two: “He loves me not,” and so on. With petal -number one our heart goes up, and with petal number two it goes down. -There is another question, equally thrilling: “Do I love him, or do I -not?” Many things get in the way; Pride and Prejudice, for example. It -is hard to know our own minds; and sometimes when we hesitate too long, -it is necessary for the older members of our family to apply Persuasion. -(I am making puns on the titles of the novels.)</p> - -<p>I would not be understood to disparage this little English old maid. She -did not make her world, in which the father of the family preaches in -the name of the Prince of Peace, and the sons go out to kill and loot. -She is a most charming and witty old maid, and her queer people are -alive in every throb of their quivering hearts. She was a sly little -body, and we suspect her of knowing more than she tells. There was a -terrible scandal whispered concerning her, which she vehemently denied; -we hate to pass it on, but this is a book of plain speaking and we have -to do our duty—so let it be recorded that some of the neighbors -suspected Jane Austen of watching them at tea-parties and church fairs, -with the intention of putting their peculiarities into her books!<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_163">{163}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LIII"></a>CHAPTER LIII<br /><br /> -TORY ROMANCE</h2> - -<p>Upon our first visit to Scotland we kept low company; but now we return -to dwell in a castle, and play the host to our Sovereign Lord the King.</p> - -<p>Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh in 1771, the son of a prosperous -lawyer who held the high office of sheriff. The father made a specialty -of his country’s antiquities, and the boy was brought up, as it were, in -the property-room of a moving picture studio. He was lame, which made it -impossible for him to repeat the valorous deeds of his ancestors; so he -took to dreams, and gave the world a new form of art, the historical -romance.</p> - -<p>The French revolution occurred in his youth, and he reacted from it as -did all his class. It was the job of British Toryism to crush the -republican idea; with money derived from the trade of the whole world, -it subsidized the kings and emperors of Europe in their attacks upon -France. The result was to raise up Napoleon, and before Napoleon was -beaten Europe had waded through twenty-five years of blood. Walter -Scott’s function was to glorify the ancient loyalties and pieties in -whose name that world-crime was committed; and for his services he was -made a baronet, and paid a million dollars, equal to five or ten times -as much in our money.</p> - -<p>Personally he was a generous and kindly gentleman, but he lent his name -and influence to the most vicious rowdies of his party. Nor was he -content with writing; he turned out and did his part as a smasher of the -“Reds.” At the age of forty-one we find him writing to the poet Southey -like an earlier incarnation of Attorney-General Palmer. “You are quite -right in apprehending a <i>Jacquerie</i>; the country is mined below our -feet.” He goes on to tell how he discovered a meeting of weavers in a -large manufacturing village, and how he did his duty as an officer of -the law. “I apprehended the ringleaders and disconcerted the whole -project; but in the course of my inquiries, imagine my surprise at -discovering a bundle of letters and printed manifestoes, from which it -appeared that the Manchester Weavers’ Committee corresponds with every -manufacturing town in the South and West of Scotland,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_164">{164}</a></span> and levies a -subsidy of 2s. 6d. per man—(an immense sum)—for the ostensible purpose -of petitioning Parliament for redress of grievances, but doubtless to -sustain them in their revolutionary movements. An energetic -administration, which had the confidence of the country, would soon -check all this; but it is our misfortune to lose the pilot when the ship -is on the breakers. But it is sickening to think of our situation.”</p> - -<p>Walter Scott’s literary career began with narrative poems based upon the -love-makings and quarrelings of old Scottish chieftains. Then he began -writing novels on these same themes, and it was as if he had struck a -pick into a pit full of golden nuggets. To his Tory age he came as a -heaven-sent magician with exactly the right spells to prop up the -tottering old system. The public began to buy the Waverley novels so -fast that it was impossible to get them bound in time. England went wild -over them, and Europe as well; one million, four hundred thousand -volumes were sold in France alone. This was the time of the “Holy -Alliance,” and another King Louis had been set upon the French throne.</p> - -<p>It was not quite the proper thing for an eminent legal gentleman to -write novels, so Scott published the books anonymously, and always -denied their authorship; but he did not refuse to take the money. He was -a fluent writer, and could turn out a volume in a month or six weeks, -and would get a thousand pounds before he had finished it. Never was -there such prosperity, since the days of Aladdin and his wonderful lamp.</p> - -<p>Our Tory novelist was a big overgrown boy; he could never have written -such propaganda otherwise. He began to spend his money as a boy would -spend it—to make real the world of chivalry and romance in nineteenth -century Scotland, fully launched into the age of capitalist -industrialism! He built himself an imitation castle of colossal size, -“with a tall tower at either end ... sundry zigzagged gables ... a -myriad of indentations and parapets, and machicolated eaves; most -fantastic waterspouts; labelled windows, not a few of them painted glass -... stones carved with heraldries innumerable.” And inside, of course, -were all the stage properties, “cuirasses, helmets, swords of every -order, from the claymore and rapier to some German executioner’s -<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_165">{165}</a></span>swords.” Here our hero kept open house to all the world of rank and -fashion, with gay hunting parties and dances, drinking bouts, and -singing of ballads and the sounding of pibrochs. It was his aim, in his -own words, “to found a family”; besides becoming a baron, he married his -eldest son to an heiress, and the climax of his career came when King -George IV came to visit his northern dominion, and to be the novelist’s -guest.</p> - -<p>It so happened that this king was an odious fat lecher; but that made no -difference, he was Sir Walter’s Most Gracious and Sovereign Lord. In an -ecstasy of loyalty, the novelist took possession of a glass from which -His Majesty had drunk a toast. This was to be preserved as the most -sacred of the treasures of Abbotsford; but, alas, the novelist put it in -his pocket, and in a moment of absent-mindedness sat down on it, and cut -himself severely! It did not occur to his pious soul that this might be -an effort of Providence to teach him something about drinking, or about -the worship of lecherous kings.</p> - -<p>Here in Hollywood we see these magic castles arise on the movie lots; we -see the costumes reproduced with minute exactitude, and then surmounting -them we see the heads of screen dolls, male and female, lounge lizards -and jazz dancers and queens from department stores and manicure parlors. -And just so it is in the novels of Sir Walter: the costumes and scenery -are those of old-time Scotland, but the characters are the gentlemen and -servants and tenants of Scott’s own neighborhood. He had creative energy -and a sense of humor, he makes the game very real, and we can enjoy it, -provided we know what we are getting. It is not even Scott’s own time, -it is merely the Tory propaganda of that time. It is medievalism and -absolutism dressed up and glorified, with every trace of blood and filth -and horror wiped away; a fictionized sermon upon the text: Vote the -Conservative ticket.</p> - -<p>But alas for the dreams of stand-pat poets! First came the ruin of his -personal hopes. Among the rascals of his gang were two who persuaded him -into a publishing business, to reap the millions out of his popularity. -They stole everything in sight, and then went bankrupt, and left him at -the age of fifty-five with a debt of a hundred and seventeen thousand -pounds. He set to work to write pot-boilers and pay it off; an action -which has made him<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_166">{166}</a></span> a hero to his biographers. And of course, it is an -honorable thing for an artist to pay his debts; we all know that most -disagreeable of characters, the Bohemian genius who borrows from -everybody he meets and repays nothing. But it seems necessary to point -out that a novelist owes two debts; one to his business creditors, and -the other to those who are to read his books in future time. We are not -satisfied with Sir Walter’s pot-boilers, and we deny that a man of -genius has a right to drive himself to death and bring on a stroke of -paralysis in four years, in order to satisfy a romantic dream of honor.</p> - -<p>Equally pitiful was the wreck of Sir Walter’s political ideals. In vain -did he glorify the loyalty of the Scotch peasants, their fidelity to -their lairds; in vain was all his hounding of the rebellious weavers -with the weapons of the law. They continued to organize, and the -peasants began to mutter and snarl; they wanted the vote, they clamored -for rights both political and economic. A most wicked project known as -the Reform Bill came up before Parliament, to give the vote to common -working people; and Sir Walter, sixty years old and ill, persisted in -taking part in the campaign. He made a speech in which he warned the -audience that all these licentious movements came from France. This was -forty years after the French revolution, and the Bolshevik bogie had -lost its power to terrify; Sir Walter was hissed by his audience. Later -on he personally saw to the arrest of a radical rascal on the street, -and got himself stoned and mobbed. It was a shock he never got over, and -he carried the memory to his grave a year or two later.</p> - -<p>Fate is usually kind to aged Tories of this sort; it takes them off the -stage of life before the failure of their hopes is too apparent. Imagine -the shock to this chivalrous old soul if he could come out of his grave -today, and visit the House of Parliament, and hear the “left wing” -members, elected from his beloved highlands, shouting for the -Dictatorship of the Proletariat! Now indeed would he say: “The country -is mined below our feet!<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_167">{167}</a></span>”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LIV"></a>CHAPTER LIV<br /><br /> -THE MEANING OF MAGIC</h2> - -<p>The effect of the French revolution upon poets is a subject of especial -interest to us, because the period is so nearly identical with our own. -There were several English poets whose reactions to the great event it -will pay us to consider.</p> - -<p>Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a clergyman’s son, born in 1772, so that he -was twenty-one years old when King Louis’ head fell into the basket of -the guillotine. At that time Coleridge was traveling about giving -Unitarian lectures, a most revolutionary occupation. He met another -young enthusiast, Robert Southey, and they had a Utopian dream of a free -community on the banks of the Susquehanna River. It was to be called the -Pantisocracy, and to get funds Coleridge set out to canvass for his -Unitarian paper. The dream ended when the two poets married sisters.</p> - -<p>At the age of twenty-eight we find Coleridge in the full tide of the -reaction against France. One of the organs of the Tory party, the London -“Morning Post,” is paying him a salary to write articles clamoring for -renewal of the war on the French republic; it was said in Parliament -that the rupture of the peace was brought about by these articles. For -the balance of his days the one-time Unitarian was a pillar of the -Anglican church, and of every form of reaction. He had become a devotee -of German metaphysics, also of opium; a wanderer and a wreck, living on -charity, and planning colossal literary labors which came to nothing. He -was sent to a nursing-home under the charge of a physician, where he -died at the age of sixty-two.</p> - -<p>So much for the life; and now for the poetry. There are only a few -hundred lines of it, all written before the poet entered the Tory -service. A study of it makes clear the spiritual tragedy; it is poetry -of emotion and music, with a total absence of judgment and will. From -only one of the poems, “The Ancient Mariner,” can you extract a human -meaning; that if one man commits an act of cruelty against a bird, the -moral forces of the universe will punish<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_168">{168}</a></span> a shipload of innocent men, -sparing only the one who is guilty!</p> - -<p>It is the poetry of opium. Indeed, the most famous of all the verses, -“Kubla Khan,” was actually an opium dream, transferred to paper after -return to consciousness—</p> - -<p>“Now, hold on a moment,” says Mrs. Ogi. “Here is a letter from a Poet. -You are going to have a lot of them reading this book, and wanting to -pull your hair out; so you might as well have it out with them now. This -Poet names ‘Kubla Khan’ as the perfect type of the ‘pure’ poem.”</p> - -<p>“I know. Swinburne calls it, ‘for absolute melody and splendor the first -poem in the language.’ It happens that the first five lines sum up the -whole; so it will pay us to stop and analyze them, take them apart, -syllable by syllable, and see how the trick is done. I quote the lines; -and in order to play fair with the poet, shut your eyes and give -yourself up to his spell. If you have any feeling for beauty of words, -you will feel a chill running up and down your spine.”</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">In Xanadu did Kubla Khan<br /></span> -<span class="i2">A stately pleasure-dome decree:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Where Alph, the sacred river, ran<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Through caverns measureless to man<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Down to a sunless sea.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>First of all, note the meter; every long syllable is naturally long, and -every short syllable is naturally short; so the lines flow softly, like -running waves. Not merely are the rhymes perfect, there are hidden -rhymes scattered through the lines; the Xanadu and Khan, also the two -u’s in the first line, and the two a’s in the fourth line. Note the -repetition of the consonant sounds. The X in the first line is -pronounced as K; and we have seen shrewd business men in the United -States collect many millions of dollars from the American people by the -magic of the letter K three times repeated. There are two d’s in the -second line, four r’s in the third, two m’s in the fourth, two s’s in -the fifth. There is not a single harsh sound in the entire five lines; -they have every musical charm that is possible to words.</p> - -<p>So much for the sounds; and now for the sense. Let us take it word by -word, and see what it tells us. Xanadu:<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_169">{169}</a></span> a place you never heard of, -therefore mysterious, stimulating to the imagination; taken in -connection with Kubla Khan, it suggests Tartar despotism, cruelty, -terror. “A stately pleasure-dome”: magnificence in the fashion of the -Arabian Nights, extravagance, a free rein to desire. The word “decree” -reinforces this; suggesting an Oriental despot, who follows his whims -without restraint. “Alph”: an unknown stream, therefore mysterious. “The -sacred river”: this reinforces the idea of despotism, adding to our fear -of earthly kings that of an all-powerful one in heaven. “Caverns -measureless to man”: again mystery, and the fear which the unknown -inspires. “Sunless sea”: this clenches the impression; for without the -sun there can be no life, and the picture is the last word in -desolation.</p> - -<p>The rest of the poem is in the same key. We hear about “ancestral voices -prophesying war,” and a stream haunted “by woman wailing for her demon -lover.” We are told about “an Abyssinian maid,” “a damsel with a -dulcimer,” etc.</p> - -<p>Note that everyone of these images appeals to reactionary emotions, fear -or sensuality; By sensuality the reason is dragged from its throne; -while fear destroys all activity of the mind, causing abasement and -submission. Moreover—and here is the point essential to our -argument—almost every image in this poem turns out on examination to be -a lie. There is no such place as Xanadu; and Kubla Khan has nothing to -teach us but avoidance. His pleasures were bloody and infamous, and -there was nothing “stately” about his “pleasure-dome.” There never was a -river Alph, and the sacredness of any river is a fiction of a priestly -caste, preying on the people. There are no “caverns measureless to man”; -while as for a “sunless sea,” a few arc-lights would solve the problem. -The “woman wailing for her demon lover” is a savage’s nightmare; while -as for the “Abyssinian maid,” she would have her teeth blackened and -would stink of rancid palm oil.</p> - -<p>From the beginning to the end, the poem deals with things which are -sensual, cruel, and fatal to hope. These old fears and cravings are -buried deep in our subconsciousness; the poet touches them, and they -quiver inside us, and we don’t know what it means, so we call it -“magic.” That is the favorite term of the art for ar<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_170">{170}</a></span>t’s sakers; they -don’t know what this “magic” is, and they don’t want to know, but the -psychoanalyst tells them.</p> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi: “Our Poet will be pained. He lives by magic, and you seek -to destroy it!”</p> - -<p>Says Ogi: “There are emotions equally thrilling, equally wonderful, -which are stirred by the discovery of new truth and the contemplation of -progress. What I am trying to do is to persuade the poets to use their -brains and common sense, and apply melody and beauty of sound to the -good things of the future, instead of to the evil things of the past.”</p> - -<p>“Give them a few illustrations,” says Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“I will name eight things which have been in my daily newspapers during -the past week, any one of which is every bit as exciting, every bit as -provocative of ecstasy as ‘Kubla Khan.’</p> - -<p>“Number One: The air is full of music, traveling half way round the -earth. Number Two: Aeroplanes are circling the earth for the first time -in history. Number Three: A scientist has given his life in the effort -to find a cure for cancer. Number Four: Mars is coming nearer, and we -have a chance to learn how the canals are made, and perhaps to get -messages from a new race. Number Five: In a physics laboratory, only two -or three miles from our home, men are taking the atom to pieces and -preparing to extract its energy. Number Six: We are discovering how to -take control of our subconscious minds and master our hidden life. -Number Seven: A group of scientists in New York are exploring, by means -of laboratory tests, the energies we call ‘psychic.’ Number Eight: In -every civilized country today the workers are organizing themselves to -put an end to parasitism based upon class privilege.</p> - -<p>“Here are eight themes for poets, every one of which has the advantage -of being real, and not fading away upon analysis. Here are -pleasure-domes that are truly “stately,” rivers that are truly “sacred,” -caverns that are truly “measureless to man.” These modern themes have -only one drawback, from the point of view of the poet; they require him -to think as well as to feel!<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_171">{171}</a></span>”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LV"></a>CHAPTER LV<br /><br /> -THE TORY WHIP</h2> - -<p>Another poet who was frightened out of his wits by the French revolution -was Robert Southey. But he took to respectability instead of to opium.</p> - -<p>He was born in 1774, the son of a linen draper. At the age of nineteen -he was full of Rousseau, Goethe, and the “infidelity” of Gibbon. He was -so keen for France that he wrote an epic about Joan of Arc; also he -planned the “Pantisocracy” with Coleridge. But then he married the other -sister, and was shocked by the Terror; a wealthy man gave him an -annuity, and he settled down to write long and romantic poems about -princes and conquerors, Celtic, Mexican, Arab, Indian—stage properties -from all over the world, combined with standard British moralizing.</p> - -<p>In less than ten years we find Southey evolved into a pillar of -reaction; at the age of thirty-three he received a pension from the -government, and two years later he joined Walter Scott and Gifford as -the literary whips of the Tory party. They published the “Quarterly -Review,” and we shall see before long what they did to Byron, Shelley -and Keats. At thirty-nine Southey became the laureate, and delivered the -customary New Year’s ode in support of church and state; a procedure his -biographer defends by explaining that he “was earning a provision for -his girls.” It is of course a pleasant thing for a poet with many -daughters to save up the purchase price of a husband for each; but what -about the cotton spinners, whose ten-year-old daughters were working -fourteen and sixteen hours a day in the mills, with the Tory squirarchy -taxing the bread out of their mouths?</p> - -<p>For centuries the literary jackals who served the British ruling classes -had starved in garrets; but now their services were beginning to be -appreciated, and they were admitted to the class they defended. The -diligent Southey wrote a “Naval Biography,” a hymn of praise to -Britain’s sea-lords, and got five hundred pounds per volume for it, and -established himself as England’s leading man of letters.</p> - -<p>But alas, there was a skeleton in his literary closet. In<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_172">{172}</a></span> his youth he -had written a poem in praise of Watt Tyler, proletarian rebel of old -England; and now someone got hold of the manuscript, and published it -secretly, and Southey’s frantic efforts in the courts failed to stop it. -Sixty thousand copies were sold, and a member of Parliament stood up and -read extracts from it, side by side with the laureate’s latest article -in the “Quarterly Review,” denouncing parliamentary reform. To the -respectability of Southey’s time this reading was an outrage, but for my -part, it is the only reading of Southey I ever enjoyed. Here was a -scholar, standing on his literary dignity—and what was his attitude to -his fellow authors who had not sold out? He clamored for Hunt and -Hazlitt to be deported to a penal settlement; while for Byron he wanted -“the whip and the branding-iron”!</p> - -<p>We today know Southey by his “Life of Nelson,” which serves as required -reading in most American high schools. We are told that this is because -it is a great work of literature, but the true reason is because it is a -work of propaganda for the Army and Navy League. If you want to study -the art of hero-making, note the biographer’s deft handling of the Lady -Hamilton episode of Nelson’s career. This regulation movie “vamp” had -married an English nobleman in his dotage; and she got hold of Nelson in -Naples, where she was the favorite of an unspeakably corrupt court. -Southey tells us there was nothing “criminal” in the hero’s relationship -to this lady; which is the English way of stating that Nelson did not -commit adultery. If this be true, it is rather singular that Nelson -should have believed himself the father of Lady Hamilton’s two children!</p> - -<p>The queen of this Neapolitan court was a sister of Marie Antoinette, the -French queen who had told the people to eat cake if they could not get -bread; and through Lady Hamilton’s hold on Nelson, he was led to use the -British fleet in furtherance of Neapolitan royalist conspiracies, and in -defiance of orders from home. But you don’t find any of that in Southey! -You are told that when Nelson returned to England, he “separated from” -his wife; the fact being that his wife left him because he insisted on -bringing the “vamp” lady to live in the home with her! In view of these -details, I asked Americans to consider whether it would not be better -for their children<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_173">{173}</a></span> to read about the democratic English heroes, such as -John Milton and Oliver Cromwell and Isaac Newton and John Ruskin and -Keir Hardie?</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LVI"></a>CHAPTER LVI<br /><br /> -THE FEAR THAT KILLS</h2> - -<p>One more, and we are done with the melancholy tale of the poets who ran -away from the French revolution.</p> - -<p>William Wordsworth was born in 1770, his father being lawyer to a noble -earl who robbed him of five thousand pounds. That may possibly have -accounted for some of the early rebellious emotions of the poet. He was -graduated from Cambridge at the age of twenty-one, and went to France at -the height of the revolutionary fervor. He has told us in his verse of -the stirrings which then possessed him; to be young at such a time “was -very heaven.”</p> - -<p>But the poet, in telling us about his experiences in France, left out a -vital part thereof. The story had to wait a century and a quarter before -a professor of Princeton University dug it out. While Wordsworth was -abroad he carried on an affair with a young French girl of good family. -She bore him a daughter, but he did not marry her; instead, he came back -to England, and lived most piously with his sister, and became a -preacher of the proprieties. We can understand how, looking back on -France, it seemed to him a land of license, meriting stern rebuke from a -British moralist.</p> - -<p>His first book of poems, “Lyrical Ballads,” was published in 1798. He -had by then become a reactionary in religion and politics, but in poetry -he was an innovator, because he dealt with the simple, every-day -feelings of his own heart, and with the peasant people of his -neighborhood. He was mercilessly ridiculed by the critics, and retired -into himself, to live a frugal life upon an income of a hundred pounds a -year, bequeathed to him by a well-to-do friend. In the course of time -the British ruling class realized that there was no real harm in this -nature-mystic, and at the age of forty-three he received a salary as a -distributor of stamps; nine years later an annuity was allowed him, and -a year after that he became poet laureate. He passionately opposed every -political reform,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_174">{174}</a></span> and composed a series of “Ecclesiastical Sonnets,” -dealing with the church rigmarole of England; also a pamphlet bitterly -attacking the proposition to run a railroad into the country of his -dreams. At the age of seventy-five we find him, white-haired and -venerable, kneeling, in the presence of a large assembly, to kiss the -hand of an extremely dull young girl by the name of Victoria.</p> - -<p>Wordsworth was one of the teachers of my youth, and I do not want to be -unjust to him because he turned Tory before thirty. What we have to do -is to understand him, and to draw a moral from him. The worship of -Nature is like the worship of God; as a rule it is a reactionary -influence, cutting one off from real life; but here and there it may be -a source of inner energy, enabling a man to stand for his own -convictions against the world. To Wordsworth in his early days Nature -was that, and no poet has uttered in more noble and beautiful language -this sense of oneness with the great mother of all life. His writing at -its best is as beautiful, and also as sound, as anything in English.</p> - -<p>But here is the point to get clear: practically all this poetry was -written in eight years; you might count on your ten fingers and ten toes -all the lines that Wordsworth wrote after the age of thirty-five which -are worth anyone’s while to read. In my youth, when I was studying -poetry, it was my habit to go through a poet, beginning with the first -page of volume one and ending with the last page of volume five, or ten, -or whatever it might be. In the case of Wordsworth, it was volume -twelve, and he was the one poet with whom I fell down. The -“Ecclesiastical Sonnets” finished me; I testify that of all the dreary -drivel in the world’s literature, this carries the prize.</p> - -<p>There were two men in Wordsworth: the instinctive man, who experienced -overwhelming feelings, and the conscious man, who was terrified by those -feelings. This is no guess of mine, but something which Wordsworth -himself explained over and over again: “My apprehensions come in -crowds.... My former thoughts returned: the fear that kills.... Me this -unchartered freedom tires; I feel the weight of chance desires.” So the -Wordsworth who believed in the Tory party and the Thirty-nine Articles -put the screws on the poet, and not<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_175">{175}</a></span> merely the emotions, but the brains -of a great genius withered before the age of forty.</p> - -<p>The cases of Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth suggest the inquiry: is -it possible for a great poet to be a conservative? In old times, yes; -for the conservatives then had something to say for themselves. But in -the last hundred years the meaning of the class struggle has become so -apparent, the consequences of class exploitation have become so obvious, -that a man who fails to see them must be deficient in intelligence, a -man who fails to care about them must be deficient in heart and -conscience; and these are things without which great poetry cannot be -made.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LVII"></a>CHAPTER LVII<br /><br /> -THE FIRST LORD OF LETTERS</h2> - -<p>Fortunately not all the poets of England let themselves be frightened -into reaction by the French revolution.</p> - -<p>George Gordon, Lord Byron, was born in 1788. His father was a rake and -blackguard. “Your mother is a fool,” said a schoolmate; and Byron -answered, “I know it.” This, you must admit, was a poor start in life -for a boy. He had a club foot, concerning which he was frightfully -sensitive; but in other ways he was divinely handsome, and much sought -after by the ladies; so he alternated between fits of solitude and -melancholy, and other fits of amorous excess. Being a lord, he was a -great person all his life. Being a man of genius, he enormously -increased his greatness. He lived always before the world, in one -sublime pose or another, and composed whole epics about himself and his -moods.</p> - -<p>He traveled, and became a cosmopolitan figure, and wild tales were -spread concerning his adventures in Europe. Then he came back to -England, and published a poem, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” which made -such a sensation as Britain had never known before. “I awoke one morning -and found myself famous,” he said. But he affected to despise this fame; -he, a noble lord, must not be confused with vulgar writing fellows. He -would toss a manuscript to his publishers with a careless -gesture—though the manuscript might be worth one or two thou<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_176">{176}</a></span>sand -pounds. I cannot recall any high-up aristocrat who achieved literary -greatness to compare with Byron; he was the first lord of letters of -that age and of all ages.</p> - -<p>He composed a series of verse romances, tales of Eastern despots and -their crimes, in the fashion of the day. They were full of melody and -rhythm, and their heroes were always that melancholy, sublime, outlaw -figure which we known as “Byronic.” This autobiographic hero was eagerly -taken up by the fashionable world, especially the female part. One great -lady, already supplied with a husband, adored the poet wildly, then -despised him, threatened to kill him, attacked him in a novel, and -finally, when she met his funeral cortege in the street, fainted and -went insane.</p> - -<p>He married an heiress, quite cynically for her money, spent the money, -and had everything he owned attached by his creditors. Then his wife -left him, with hints of mysterious wickedness. He was overwhelmed by a -storm of abuse, and went into exile for the rest of his life. The wife -never told her story, but many years later the American novelist, -Harriet Beecher Stowe, published what she claimed was the truth, that -Byron had been guilty of incest with his half-sister. His lordship had -by that time become a “standard author,” and the critics were outraged -by Mrs. Stowe’s indiscretion; even now they do not speak out loud about -the matter.</p> - -<p>In Switzerland the poet met Shelley, the best influence that ever came -into his life. He recognized this new friend as the purest soul he knew, -and praised his character ardently in his letters, though he never paid -the public tribute to Shelley’s writings which they deserved. Shelley -turned Byron’s thoughts to politics, and he wrote “The Prisoner of -Chillon,” one of the noblest of his poems. But then he went off to -Venice, and amused himself with numerous intrigues, and got fat. He -began “Don Juan,” a new kind of epic poem, mocking itself, as well as -everything else. It is a hateful picture of a hateful world, but it has -almost infinite verve and energy, and we recognize in it a great spirit -trying to lift itself above an age of corruption by the instrument of -scorn.</p> - -<p>It was the time of the “Holy Alliance,” and the few men who cared for -freedom were living in exile or hiding from the police. Byron associated -with these revolution<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_177">{177}</a></span>ists, and gave them both money and his name. He -became a neighbor of Shelley’s, and again immersed himself in politics -and literature. He wrote his drama “Cain,” in which he deals with the -problems of human fate from the revolutionary point of view. To the -religionists of the time, this was most awful blasphemy; the poet -Southey frothed at the mouth, and wrote his “Vision of Judgment,” -portraying the damnation of Byron. His angry lordship came back with a -poem of the same name—so effective that the publisher was jailed for -six months! One stanza, describing the poet laureate, will serve for a -sample of Byron’s fighting mood:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">He had written praises of a regicide;<br /></span> -<span class="i2">He had written praises of all kings whatever;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He had written for republics far and wide,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">And then against them bitterer than ever:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">For pantisocracy he once had cried<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Aloud, a scheme less moral than ’twas clever;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Then grew a hearty anti-jacobin—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Had turned his coat—and would have turned his skin.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>Byron had now become the voice of liberty against reaction throughout -Europe. And this was a brand new thing, seeming a kind of insanity to -the Tories. There had been an abundance of dissipated lords, but never -before a lord of revolt! Byron joined the secret society of the -Carbonari, and took part in their attempt to free Italy. When they -failed, he was not discouraged, but wrote: “There will be blood shed -like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the -end.” In those words we know the voice of a thinker and a man.</p> - -<p>He was now thirty-five years of age, restless, tormented by a sense of -futility. The Greek people were carrying on a war for liberation against -the Turks, and Byron went to help them, and thus set a crown upon his -life. He died of a fever, early in the campaign; and so today, when we -think of him, we think not merely of a nobleman and a poet, but of a man -who laid down wealth and fame and worldly position for the greatest of -all human ideals.</p> - -<p>In the beginning he had written to amuse himself and his readers; he had -catered to their sentimentalism and their folly. But in the end he came -to despise his readers, and wrote only to shock them. They had made a -world<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_178">{178}</a></span> of lies; and one man would tell them the truth. That is why today -we rank him as a world force in the history of letters. We are no longer -the least bit thrilled by his wickedness; we think of such things as -pathological and are moved only to pity. We do not see anything -picturesque about a great lord who travels over Europe with a train of -horses and carriages, dogs, fowls, monkeys, servants, and mistresses; -the Sunday supplements of our newspapers have over-supplied us with such -material. But we are interested in a poet who possessed a clear eye and -a clear brain, who saw the truth, and spoke it to all Europe, and helped -to set free the future of the race.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LVIII"></a>CHAPTER LVIII<br /><br /> -THE ANGEL OF REVOLT</h2> - -<p>Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792, which made him four years younger -than Byron. His father was the richest baronet in the county of Sussex, -a great landlord and a ferocious Tory, who typified the spirit of his -age and drove his son almost to madness.</p> - -<p>The boy was sent to school at Eton, a dreadful place inhabited by gnomes -who wear all day the clothes which our little rich boys wear to evening -parties, and the hats which our grown-up rich boys wear to the opera. -They had a system of child slavery known as “fagging,” and Shelley -revolted against it and was tortured. He was a swift, proud spirit, made -frantic by the sight or even the thought of tyranny; so sensitive that -he swooned at the scent of the flowers in the Alpine valleys. He was -gifted with a marvelous mind, ravenous for knowledge, and absorbing it -at incredible speed.</p> - -<p>He went to Oxford, where at the age of nineteen he published a pamphlet -entitled, “The Necessity for Atheism.” A reading discloses that the -title might better have been “The Necessity for Abolishing -Ecclesiasticism Masquerading as Christianity.” But it is not likely that -such a change of title would have helped Shelley, who was -unceremoniously kicked out of the university, and cast off by the Tory -baronet who controlled his purse-strings.</p> - -<p>So we find him, an outcast in London, living in<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_179">{179}</a></span> lodgings and almost -starving. He met a girl of sixteen, the daughter of a coffee-house -proprietor, and hoping to convert her to his sublime faith, he ran away -and married her. At the age of twenty we find him in Ireland, issuing an -“Address to the Irish People” and circulating it on the streets. The -scholarly critics of Shelley speak of this as the absurd extravagance of -boyhood; whereas it was plain common sense and the obvious moral duty of -every English poet. Infinitely touching it is to read this pamphlet, and -note its beauty of spirit and sublimity of faith, not exceeded by the -utterances of Jesus. All that was wrong with Shelley’s advice was that -it was too good both for Ireland and England. For distributing it -Shelley’s servant was sent to jail for six months.</p> - -<p>The poet’s wife had no understanding of his ideals, and the couple were -unhappy. After two years of married life, Shelley met the -sixteen-year-old daughter of Godwin, revolutionary philosopher, and ran -away with her. That was the crime of his life, for which he was -condemned to infamy by his own time, and has hardly yet been pardoned. -Two years later his former wife drowned herself; and the British lord -chancellor deprived the poet of the custody of their two children, on -the ground that he was an unfit person. We shall discuss the ethics of -this affair later on. Suffice it for the moment to say that Shelley, -broken in heart but not in will, fled to the Continent for refuge, and -devoted the last four years of his life to the task of overthrowing the -British caste system. A hundred years have passed, and he has not yet -succeeded; but let no one be too sure that he will not succeed in the -end!</p> - -<p>He lived in Switzerland and Italy, and worked with desperate intensity, -so that he brought on tuberculosis. There are no four years in the life -of any other writer which gave us such treasures of the mind and spirit. -The critics of Shelley judge him by his boyhood and his horrible -scandal. But taking these last years, the impression we get is of -maturity of mind, dignity of spirit, firmness of judgment. If you want -to know this Shelley, read the wonderful letters he wrote from -Switzerland. Read his essay, recently discovered and published, “A -Philosophical View of Reform,” in which the whole program of radical -propaganda is laid out with perfect insight and beauty of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_180">{180}</a></span> utterance. -Read “The Defense of Poetry,” one of the finest pieces of eloquence in -English. Note the soundness of his critical judgment, which erred in -only one respect—an under-estimate of his own powers. He was humble to -Byron, a lesser person both as poet and as man.</p> - -<p>One after another Shelley now poured out the marvelous works on which -his fame is based. He took the old myth of Aeschylus and wrote a drama, -“Prometheus Unbound,” which might be described as the distilled essence -of revolt, the most modern of philosophical dramas, proclaiming the -defiance of the human spirit to all ordained gods. At the other extreme, -and written in the same year, was “The Cenci,” a tragic story out of -Renaissance Italy, human and simple, therefore poignant and real. The -poet Keats died, and Shelley wrote “Adonais”—and those who think that -art exists for art’s sake and beauty for beauty’s sake, make note that -here is a work which combines all the perfections of poetry, and yet has -a moral, a fighting message.</p> - -<p>He wrote also political comedies in the style of -Aristophanes—representing English society by an ecstatic chorus of -pigs. So savage is this lashing that even today English critics keep -silence about “Swellfoot the Tyrant.” The odious fat lecher, King George -IV, was sued for divorce by his wife, Queen Caroline, and it was a most -horrible scandal, which Britain hardly dared to whisper. I remember when -I was a student in college, twenty-five years ago, searching the -libraries in an effort to find out the contents of the “Green Bag” which -figures in Shelley’s drama; but no commentator would tell me—and I -don’t know yet!</p> - -<p>Shelley has the qualities of sublimity and fervor; also he has the -defects of these qualities—he is often windy and wordy and unreal. But -in his last miraculous years he shed these faults, and produced lyrics -of such loveliness that he is today the poet of poets, the soul -companion of generous and idealistic youth. In his “Mask of Anarchy” are -songs of revolt which have reached the workers—and which therefore -English critics still find it necessary to deprecate! A couple of years -ago was celebrated in London the anniversary of Shelley’s death, and -there assembled a great number of people of the sort who would have -skinned him while he was alive. A<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_181">{181}</a></span> famous editor, Mr. J. C. Squires, -took occasion to quote the poem: “Men of England, wherefore plow?” How -obviously foolish! If the men of England did not plow, they would -starve! But it just happens that Shelley did not say that; what he said -was: “Men of England, wherefore plow for the lords who lay ye low?” And -five million, five hundred thousand labor votes echo: “Wherefore?”</p> - -<p>This poet of the future was scorned in his lifetime, as no other great -Englishman in history. He was the byword of the literary wits of London; -“Prometheus Unbound,” they said, an excellent name: who would bind it? -By Sir Walter Scott and his ruffians of the Tory “Review,” Shelley’s -name could not be spoken without crossing yourself. The poet Moore cried -out in horror—Tommy, little snob of the drawing-rooms, who “dearly -loved a lord.” And Wordsworth, ignorant and bigoted, living among his -peasants, reading nothing; and Southey, turncoat and prig. Even Byron -made no fight for Shelley’s fame; while Byron’s friends, the fashionable -idlers of the Continent, rebuked him for keeping such disreputable -company.</p> - -<p>Even two generations later the evil spell was not broken. Matthew -Arnold, standard English critic, read about Shelley’s friends, and -lifted his scholarly hands and cried: “What a set!” It did not occur to -the critic to ask what other kind of set Shelley might have had. What -people had he to choose among? Arnold had not tried being a radical, so -as to see what queer people swarm about you—especially when you are -known to have an income of four thousand pounds a year, and to give away -nearly all of it! A poet who believes everything good about his fellows, -and who lives in dreams of exalted nobleness, is the last person in the -world to discover the faults of those who gather about him. And after he -has made the discovery, he remains a dreamer; instead of casting them -off, in the fashion of the good, respectable world, he clings to them, -trying to help them, often in spite of themselves.</p> - -<p>Shelley believed in “free love,” and tried out his theories; and that -horrified Matthew Arnold, who said after reading the record, “One feels -sickened forever of the subject of irregular relationships.” Quite so; I -also<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_182">{182}</a></span> have seen people try out this theory, and have felt sickened. But -consider the question, in which way will the race more quickly acquire -knowledge as to the rights and wrongs of sex—if men say honestly what -they believe, and tell frankly what they do, or if they preach one code -and practice another, and hide their sins in a dark corner?</p> - -<p>Shelley followed the former course; he was young, and knew no older -person who understood him and could give him wise advice. He believed -that if your heart was full of generosity and kindness and unselfishness -and a burning sense of justice, you could trust your desires, even those -of love. He tried it, and filled his life with pain and tragedy. And -seventy or eighty years later comes an eminent and well-established -critic, and in solemn tones protests that it is a crime against good -taste to give us these facts! Let poets follow the plan of Wordsworth, -who sowed his one wild oat in a foreign land, and put a heavy stone of -silence over the crop, and became a Tory laureate and pillar of -Churchianity!</p> - -<p>In the course of a hundred years we have got all the details of -Shelley’s two marriages; we know that when he eloped with Harriet -Westbrook, his first wife, he told her his ideas on the subject of love. -She professed to agree with him; but, of course, being a -sixteen-year-old child, that meant nothing. She was ignorant, and in no -way fitted to be the life companion of a great poet. When Shelley left -her he took care of her and the two children; her suicide two years -later was caused by the fact that she had an unhappy love affair with -another man, and was with child by this man.</p> - -<p>Here is a problem which will not be solved in our time, nor for a long -time to come: what is to be done when two people have loved, and one -ceases to love while the other goes on loving? For the present, our only -task is to get straight the facts about Shelley’s case; the central fact -being that he was damned for holding a revolutionary opinion and acting -on it. If all he had wanted was to indulge his passions and keep out of -trouble, the way was clear before him; the old Tory baronet, his father, -had explained with brutal frankness that he would never pardon a -marriage with a woman below Shelley’s rank in life, but he was willing -to assume responsibility for the support of any number of illegitimate -children the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_183">{183}</a></span> poet might wish to bring into existence. Such was the -moral code against which Shelley revolted; such was the world in which -he tried to live according to the principles of justice, freedom and -love.</p> - -<p>He died at the age of thirty, drowned in a storm while sailing a boat; -and with him perished the finest mind the English race had produced. I -make this statement deliberately, knowing the ridicule it will excite; -but I ask you, before you decide: take the men of genius of England one -by one, wipe out their lives after the age of thirty, and see what you -have left. Will you take Shakespeare? You will know him as the author of -“Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece” and “Love’s Labor Lost” and -“The Comedy of Errors,” and possibly “Richard III” and some sonnets. -Will you take Milton, with “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” and “Comus” -and “Lycidas,” and nothing else? Will you go to the Continent, and take -Goethe, who outlived Shelley? What would you think of Goethe if you had -only “Goetz” and “Werther” and a few lyric poems?</p> - -<p>Shelley was one among the sons of Rousseau who did not falter and turn -back to feudalism, Catholicism, or mysticism of any sort. He fixed his -eyes upon the future, and never wavered for a moment. He attacked class -privilege, not merely political, but industrial; and so he is the coming -poet of labor. Some day, and that not so far off, the strongholds of -class greed in Britain will be stormed, and when the liberated workers -take up the task of making a new culture, they will learn that there was -one inspired saint in their history who visioned that glad day, and gave -up everything in life to bring it nearer. They will honor Shelley by -making him their poet-laureate, and hailing him as the supreme glory of -English letters.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LIX"></a>CHAPTER LIX<br /><br /> -THE STABLE-KEEPER’S SON</h2> - -<p>There is one more poet of this period with whom we must deal, and that -is John Keats.</p> - -<p>“And now you are going to have your hands full,” says Mrs. Ogi. -“Everyone is quite sure that Keats is<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_184">{184}</a></span> one poet who cannot possibly be -accused of propaganda.”</p> - -<p>“Yes,” says her husband; “an amusing illustration of the extent to which -leisure-class criticism is able to take the guts out of art. Here is a -man whose life and personality constitute one of the greatest pieces of -radical propaganda in the history of English literature.”</p> - -<p>“At least the issue is fairly joined,” says Mrs. Ogi. “Go to it!”</p> - -<p>Let us first take the life and personality, and afterwards the writings. -John Keats was the son of a stable-keeper; and if you don’t know what -that meant to British snobbery there is no way I can convey it to you. -He did not attend a public school or a university; he did not learn to -walk and talk like an English gentleman. He was a simple, crude -fellow—a little chap not much over five feet high—and his social -experiences early taught him the lesson of extreme reserve; he held -himself aloof from everyone who might by any possibility spurn him -because of his low estate. Even with Shelley he would not forget that he -was dealing with the son of a baronet; everyone who surrounded Shelley -was trying to get money from him, and so Keats despised them and stayed -apart.</p> - -<p>“He was of the skeptical, republican school,” wrote one of his boyhood -intimates. “A fault finder with everything established.” And the first -poem which he got up the courage to show was a sonnet upon the release -of Leigh Hunt, who had been sent to prison for two years for writing an -article denouncing the prince regent. This poem was published in Hunt’s -paper, the “Examiner,” and the notorious editor became the friend and -champion of this twenty-year-old poet.</p> - -<p>Meantime Keats had been apprenticed to a surgeon, and became a dresser -in a hospital. He was called an apothecary’s apprentice; and so when he -published “Endymion,” the ruling-class critics of the day fell upon him. -The insolence of a low-bred fellow, imagining that he could write a poem -dealing with Greek mythology, the field above all others reserved to -university culture! “Back to your shop, John,” cried the “Quarterly -Review,” “back to plasters, pills and ointment boxes!”</p> - -<p>You see, it was not a literary issue at all; it was a political and -social issue. In “Blackwood’s” appeared a ferocious article, denouncing -not merely Keats, but the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_185">{185}</a></span> whole “cockney school,” as it was called; -this including Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Lamb, Shelley and Keats. “Cockney” -is the word by which the cultured gentry of England describe the vulgar -populace of London, who drop their h’s and talk about their “dyly -pyper.” The Tory reviewers were only incidentally men of letters; they -were young country squires amusing themselves with radical-baiting, they -were “athletes, outdoor men, sportsmen, salmon-fishers, deer-stalkers.” -They gathered at Ambrose’s and drank strong Scotch whiskey, and sang a -rollicking song of which the chorus ran: “Curse the people, blast the -people, damn the lower orders.” And when they attacked the “Cockney” -poets, it was not merely because of their verses, but because of their -clothing and their faces and even their complexions. “Pimply Hazlitt” -was their phrase for the greatest essayist of their time; they alleged -that both Hazlitt and Lamb drank gin—and gin was the drink for -washerwomen.</p> - -<p>Keats wrote “Endymion” at the age of twenty-one, and two years later he -suffered a hemorrhage, which meant the permanent breaking of his health. -He wrote his last lines at the age of twenty-four, and died early in his -twenty-fifth year. So you see he had not long to win his way against -these aristocratic rowdies. He was poor, and exquisitely sensitive; he -suffered under such brutal attacks, but he went on, and did the best -work he could, and said, very quietly: “I think I shall be among the -English poets after my death.” He realized the dignity of his calling, -and in his letters made clear that he did not take the ivory tower -attitude toward his art. “I am ambitious of doing the world some good,” -he wrote; “if I should be spared, that may be the work of future years.” -And in the course of his constant self-criticism and groping after new -methods and new powers, he traveled far from the naive sensuousness of -his early poems. His last work was a kind of prologue to “Hyperion,” in -which he discussed the poet and his function, and laid down the law that -only those can climb to the higher altar of art</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i2">to whom the miseries of the world<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Are misery and will not let them rest.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>How Keats felt on the subject of the class struggle was startlingly -indicated in the last days of his life.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_186">{186}</a></span> Dying of consumption, he took a -sea voyage to Italy, a journey which was a frightful strain upon him. He -landed in Naples; and Naples, as we know, is warm and beautiful, a place -for a poet to rest and dream in. But Keats would not dream; he smelt the -foul atmosphere of royalist intrigue and tyranny, and would not stay. A -friend took him to the theater, and he saw a gendarme standing on either -side of the stage, and took that for a symbol of censorship and -despotism, and would not sit out the performance!</p> - -<p>He died in Rome, and after his death Shelley wrote “Adonais,” a eulogy -of Keats and an attack on his detractors. Little by little his fame -began to spread, and everywhere it was recognized by the Tories as part -of the class struggle of the time. Sir Walter Scott had been pained by -the personal venom of Lockhart’s attack in “Blackwood’s”; but not enough -to cause him to withdraw his subsidy from the magazine, nor to prevent -his accepting Lockhart as his son-in-law and future biographer. A young -Englishman of radical sympathies defended Keats, and a friend of -Lockhart’s intervened in the argument, and forced a duel with Keats’ -defender, and killed him. That is the way literary questions were -settled in those days!</p> - -<p>When you fight for the fame of Keats you are asserting the idea that -genius is not a privilege of rank and wealth, but that the precious fire -smoulders also among the masses of the people, so that a stable-keeper’s -son, self-taught, may become one of his country’s greatest poets. Some -critics would accept that doctrine now; but not all, it would appear. -Here is Henry A. Beers, eminent scholar and professor of English -literature in Yale University, writing in the Yale “Review,” and saying: -“There <i>was</i> something a little underbred about Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, -and even perhaps about Keats.”</p> - -<p>So much for the man; now for the poetry. The first thing to be got clear -is that it is <i>young</i> poetry; it was all written before the age of -twenty-four. An ignorant boy, brought up in uncultured surroundings, -gropes his way out into the beauty and splendor of art. He is -enraptured, quivering with delight; nature to him is a perpetual -ecstasy, and words are jewels out of which he makes ravishment for the -senses. He has a marvelous gift of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_187">{187}</a></span> language, splendor like a flood of -moonlight flung out upon a mountain lake. He is in love, first with -nature, then with a young lady of eighteen, whom he describes by the -adjectives “stylish” and “ignorant”; nevertheless, he falls under her -spell, and after he is dead the young lady says that the kindest thing -people can do for him is to forget him. So little does a great poet’s -dream of feminine loveliness understand his true character and -greatness! We may be sure that if Keats had lived to marry Fanny Brawne -he would not have been happy, and would have realized only too quickly -that love is not merely a thrill of young sensibility, a rapturous -“Dream of St. Agnes,” but a grave problem requiring for its solution -both reason and conscience.</p> - -<p>The early poetry of Keats represents that stage of simple, instinctive, -unreflecting delight which we call by the name “Greek.” He chose Greek -themes and Greek imagery, and was never more Greek than when he tried to -be medieval. But the most significant thing about his work is the quick -maturing of it, even in those scant four years. A shadow of pain darkens -his being, the pangs of frustrated love wring cries of anguish from him; -and so we come to the second stage of the Greek spirit—the sense of -fate, of cruelty hidden at the heart of life, the terror and despair of -loveliness that knows it is doomed. Out of this mood came his greatest -poems, the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the “Ode to a Nightingale,” the “Ode -to Melancholy.” If anyone denies that this poet is trying to teach us -something about life, if anyone thinks there is no message in this -infinite mournfulness, he has indeed a feeble apprehension.</p> - -<p>But let us, for the sake of argument, assume with the art for art’s -sakers that Keats was an esthete, and produced “pure beauty,” unalloyed -by any preaching. Would that mean that we had found some art which is -not propaganda? Assuredly not; and those who besiege us with contentious -examples—Keats, Gautier, Whistler, Hearn, etc.—simply show that they -have not understood what we mean by the thesis that all art is -propaganda. It is that, fundamentally, as an inescapable psychological -fact; and it does not cease to be that just because the artist preaches -enjoyment instead of effort.</p> - -<p>Use your common sense upon the proposition. When<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_188">{188}</a></span> an artist takes the -trouble to embody his emotions in an art form, he does so because he -wishes to convey those emotions to other people; and insofar as he -succeeds in doing that, he will change the emotions of the other people, -and change their attitudes toward life and hence their actions. Is it -not just as much “teaching” to proclaim the supremacy of the sensuous -delights, as to proclaim the supremacy of reason, or of any system of -reasoned thought? When an artist composes a song on the theme, “Let us -eat, drink and be merry,” is he not setting forth a doctrine of life? If -not, why does he not go ahead and eat, drink and be merry? Why does he -trouble to give advice to you and me? When Keats writes, “A thing of -beauty is a joy forever,” it is perfectly plain that he is making -propaganda—and false propaganda, since standards of beauty are matters -of fashion, varying with every social change. He is making propaganda -when he declares that</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all<br /></span> -<span class="i1">Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">Incidentally he is revealing to us that he has done very little thinking -about either truth or beauty, but is content to use abstract words -without meaning behind them.</p> - -<p>I have made clear, I hope, that I consider the art of Keats an -exquisitely beautiful art, fine and clean, and a perfectly proper art -for any lad to produce between the ages of twenty and twenty-four. There -is a stage of naïve trust in instinct through which youth passes, -especially poetical youth. But when this stage is continued into -maturity then it becomes something entirely different, neither fine, nor -clean, nor beautiful; it becomes stale self-indulgence, empty-minded -irresolution, dawdling decadence. All those things manifested themselves -in the later periods of Greek art, and they may be observed in our own -period of the breakdown of capitalism.</p> - -<p>The Tory party came in the end to realize that there was nothing really -dangerous in the poetry of this unhappy boy. Wise old Tories like Sir -Walter Scott had known it from the beginning, and young Tories like -Tennyson and Rossetti proclaimed it. Keats himself was no longer alive -to offend them with his Cockney manners, so they took up his writings, -and made them a bulwark<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_189">{189}</a></span> of leisure-class culture in a stage of arrested -mentality, a resource of critics who wish to keep the young from -thinking about dangerous modern questions. But I venture the opinion -that if this Cockney stable-keeper’s son had grown to manhood, he would -have taken care of his own destiny, and seen to it that dilettanti -idlers and aesthetic decadents should find no comfort in his name and -example. His letters give abundant evidence of his capable mind, and -assure us that if he had been blessed with health he would have matured -into a thinker, even as John Milton, the great companion of his later -days.</p> - -<p>How much the lip-servers of Keats really understand him, was proven by a -peculiar incident which befell me in my own youth. Twenty-two years ago -I published “The Journal of Arthur Stirling,” a passionate defense of -the right of young poets to survive; and of course I sang enraptured -praise of Keats, and made him a text for excited tirades. At that time -there was a newspaper in New York called the “Evening Telegram,” owned -by James Gordon Bennett, a dissipated rowdy who might have been a blood -brother to the Tory crowd which conducted “Blackwood’s” and the -“Quarterly” a hundred years ago. This “Evening Telegram” published a -page of book reviews every Saturday, boasting it the most widely -circulated book page in the United States. Its opinion, therefore, was -of importance to a young writer hoping to live by his pen. It reviewed -“The Journal of Arthur Stirling,” saying that we might have sympathized -with the struggles of an unfortunate poet, had he not committed the -indiscretion of giving us samples of his writings, which enabled us to -be certain that he had no idea whatever of poetry. For example, said the -editor, here was one of Arthur Stirling’s effusions. Read it:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Sit thee by the ingle, when<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The sear faggot blazes bright,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Spirit of a winter’s night!—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Sit thee there, and send abroad<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With a mind self-overaw’d<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Fancy, high-commission’d;—send her!<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She has vassals to attend her;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She will bring, in spite of frost,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Beauties that the earth hath lost;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She will bring thee, all together,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">All delights of summer weather;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">All the buds and bells of May<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_190">{190}</a></span><br /></span> -<span class="i0">From dewy sward or thorny spray;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">All the heapèd Autumn’s wealth,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With a still, mysterious stealth;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">She will mix these pleasures up,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Like three fit wines in a cup,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And thou shalt quaff it!—<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>Poor Arthur Stirling was supposed to be dead, so I asked a friend to -write to the editor of the “Evening Telegram” and point out to him that -he had misunderstood the book; the lines quoted were not submitted as -the work of Arthur Stirling, they happened to be the work of John Keats! -The editor published this reply with an easygoing comment; it made a -good joke, he said, but as a matter of fact he was justified in his -criticism, because the lines belonged to the very early work of Keats, -which was practically without poetic merit. My friend wrote again, -expressing surprise that the editor should make such a statement; for -this poem, entitled “Fancy,” belonged to the last two years of Keats’ -life, the wonderful years which produced all his greatest writings. -Palgrave, whose authority none would dispute, had included it in the -“Golden Treasury,” which contained only thirteen poems by Keats. The -editor of the “Evening Telegram” was unable to find space for that -letter!</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LX"></a>CHAPTER LX<br /><br /> -THE PREDATORY ARTIST</h2> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi: “Here is Haldeman-Julius, discussing the thesis of your -book. He says: ‘You may say that because Balzac drew his characters -largely from the bourgeoisie he was conducting a subtle propaganda in -behalf of a class; or, in general, that he was a bourgeois author. But -such a view would be a travesty of literary criticism.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Says Ogi: “That is what a great many people are going to call this book. -But let us see what we can make of Balzac.”</p> - -<p>At this point the mail arrives, and in it a letter to Mrs. Ogi, telling -some bad news about a friend. A look of deep distress comes upon her -face, and Ogi, watching her, is suddenly inspired. “Hold that -expression!” he cries.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_191">{191}</a></span></p> - -<p>“What do you mean?” falters Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“It’s what I need for a story! I want to get all the details of it—the -trembling of your lips, the look in your eyes. Hold it now! It is copy!”</p> - -<p>“I think you are out of your mind,” says Mrs. Ogi; and her face assumes -a quite different expression.</p> - -<p>Says her husband: “I am the artist, and I feed on life. My fellow humans -suffer, and a voice within me cries: ‘Magnificent!’ Anguish writes -itself upon their features, and I whisper: ‘There is a great moment!’ -They are utterly abased, and I think: ‘Here is my chance of -immortality!’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi: “You are a monster! I have always known it.”</p> - -<p>“I am one among thousands of monsters, ranging the earth, competing -furiously for their prey. I explore the whole field of human experience; -I climb the mountain peaks, I ransack the starry spaces, I rummage the -dust-bins of history, collecting great significant moments, climaxes of -emotion, drama, suspense, thrill; when I find it, I slap my knee, like -Thackeray writing the scene of Becky Sharp caught in adultery, and -exclaiming: ‘There is a stroke of genius!’ I see tears falling, and I -think: ‘That will sell!’ Out of that cry of despair I shall make a -feast! From this tale of tragedy I shall build a new house! Upon this -heap of anguish I shall leap to fame! I shall enlarge my ego, expand in -the admiration of my fellow-men, enjoying dominion over their emotions -and their thoughts. Also, of course, I shall not forget my fellow-women, -their thrills and ecstasies; I shall have gorgeous apartments, furnished -with barbaric splendor, to which will come brilliant and fascinating -admirers—”</p> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi: “Is this a dream you want me to psychoanalyze?”</p> - -<p>“No,” says her husband, “it is simply the soul of Balzac which I am -putting before you: the most perfect type of the predatory artist that -has existed in human history; the art for art’s sake ideal incarnate; -genius divorced from conscience, save only as applied to the art work -itself—the inexorable duty of portraying the utmost conceivable energy, -fury, splendor, terror, sublimity, melodrama, pity, elegance, greed, -horror, cruelty, anguish,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_192">{192}</a></span> beauty, passion, worship, longing, -wickedness, glory, frenzy, majesty and delight.”</p> - -<p>This predatory artist, living in a predatory world, and portraying -predatory emotions, does not seem to us a propagandist, simply because -of the complete identity which exists between him and the thing he -portrays. It is the world which came into existence after the French -revolution, and has prevailed ever since. The masses made the -revolution, hoping to profit from it; but the merchants and bankers and -lawyers took over the power. Alone, this class in France could not have -succeeded; but they had the help of England—it is the triumph of -British gold, taking charge of the continent and making it over in the -image of the “shop-keeper”: the bourgeois world, a society in which -everybody seeks money, and having obtained it, spends it upon the -getting of more money, or upon the expansion of his personality through -the power of money to dominate and impress other men. Those who succeed -enjoy, while those who fail are trampled; such is the “Comédie Humaine,” -as Balzac exhibits it in a total of eighty-five works of prose fiction, -not counting dramas, essays and reviews.</p> - -<p>He was born of a bourgeois family and educated for a lawyer. But he -wanted to write, and because his family would not support him, he went -away and starved most hideously in a garret. The hunger which he there -acquired was not merely of the stomach and the senses, but of the -intellect and soul. He became a ferocious, almost an insane worker. He -was greedy for facts, and never forgot anything; he acquired a whole -universe of detail, names, places, technical terms, the appearances of -persons and things, human characteristics, anecdotes, conversations. He -wove these into his stories, he constructed vast panoramas of French -society, colossal processions marching past without end. The bulk of his -work is so enormous that you may spend your lifetime reading Balzac, -exploring the lives of his two or three thousand characters.</p> - -<p>What will you know when you get through? You will know French bourgeois -civilization, high and low, rich and poor, good and evil. You will -observe the rich growing richer and the poor growing poorer; you will -discover the greedy devouring the good and patient and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_193">{193}</a></span> honest—and then -coming to ruin through their own insensate desires. It is brilliant, -vivid, as real as genius can make it, and at first you are enthralled. -How marvelous, to learn about the world without the trouble of going -into it! But after you have read for a month or two, another feeling -steals over you, a feeling of familiarity: you know all this, why read -any more? Life is odious and cruel, it makes you ill; your one thought -becomes, can anything be done about it? Is there any remedy? And from -that moment you are done with Balzac.</p> - -<p>For, so far as this “Comédie Humaine” is concerned, there is no remedy. -Balzac was so much a part of his own corrupt age that he could not have -conceived of a co-operative world. He saw the class struggle, of -course—and took his stand on the side of his money. A passionate Tory, -he referred to “the two eternal truths, the monarchy and the Catholic -church.” His attitude to politics was summed up in the formula that the -people must be kept “under the most powerful yoke possible.” You find in -his novels tremendous loads of philosophic and scientific learning, -practically all of it utter trash. Henry James disposes of him in the -sentence: “He was incapable of a lucid reflexion.” The nearest approach -to a definite proposition to be got out of his writings is the notion -that desire, imagination and intellect are the destroyers of life. Of -course, if that be true, civilization is doomed, and it is a waste of -time to seek moral codes or understanding, or even to produce art.</p> - -<p>Such a view was, of course, simply the reflex of the predatory artist’s -own greed for money, luxury, fame and power. He lived alternately for -art and Mammon. He would shut himself up alone in a secret place and -write for weeks, even months, without seeing anyone. He would start work -at midnight, clad in a white Benedictine robe, with a black skull-cap, -by the light of a dozen candles, and under the stimulus of many pots of -coffee. Having thus completed a masterpiece, he would emerge to receive -the applause of Paris, carrying a cane with an enormous jeweled head. -Having made another fortune and paid a small part of what he called his -“floating debt,” he would plunge into the wholesale purchasing of silks -and satins and velvets, furniture and carpets and tapestries and jewels -and “objects of art,” vast store-rooms<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_194">{194}</a></span> full of that junk whereby the -bourgeois world sets forth the emptiness of its mind and the futility of -its aims. Lacking money enough, his maniac imagination would evolve new -schemes—book publishing, paper manufacturing, a journal, a secret -society, silver mines in Sardinia, the buried treasure of Toussaint -l’Ouverture, each of which he was sure was going to turn him into a -millionaire overnight.</p> - -<p>Balzac gives prominence to that type of men whom the French call -“careerists”; that is to say, men who set out to make their fortune, at -any cost of honor, decency and fair play. Balzac admired such men—for -the simple reason that he himself was that kind. In his later years he -met a wealthy Polish lady, Madame Hanska, who became his mistress; -writing to his sister about it, he set forth what this meant to him, and -his language was such as a “confidence man” would use, writing to a -woman confederate. The alliance, he wrote, would give him access to the -great world, and “opportunity for domination.”</p> - -<p>Is the work of such a man propaganda? If you accept the common dogma -that blind egotistical instinct, and the portrayal and glorification -thereof, constitute art, while the effort to understand life, and to -reconstruct it into a thing of order and sense and dignity, is -propaganda—why then undoubtedly the “Comédie Humaine” of Honoré de -Balzac is pure and unadulterated art. If, on the other hand, you admit -my contention that a man who is born into a money-ravenous world, and -who absorbs its poisoned atmosphere, and sets himself to the task of -portraying it, not merely as real and inevitable, but as glorious, -magnificent, fascinating, sublime—if you admit with me that such a man -is a propagandist, why then you must reconcile yourself to enduring the -opposition of all orthodox literary critics.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXI"></a>CHAPTER LXI<br /><br /> -THE OLD COMMUNARD</h2> - -<p>Victor Hugo was born in 1802, three years later than Balzac. He grew up -in the same world, but was not satisfied to contemplate its diseases; he -sought remedies, and became a convert to revolutionary ideals, and so -all critics<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_195">{195}</a></span> agree that his work is marred by propaganda. He lived to be -eighty-three years old, and went on writing and working to the very end, -so that the story of his life carries us through practically the whole -of the nineteenth century. We shall follow it, and then come back and -retrace parts of the same story in the lives of other artists, French, -German, British and American.</p> - -<p>Hugo’s father was a revolutionary soldier who rose to be a general in -Napoleon’s army. As a little boy the poet followed the armies from place -to place in Switzerland, Italy and Spain. His mother was a Royalist, and -the boy had an old Catholic priest for a tutor, and was taught the old -dogmas, literary as well as religious and political. His conversion into -a revolutionist was not completed until the age of forty-six. Having -been brought about by contact with daily events, this conversion was of -tremendous influence upon the thought of Europe.</p> - -<p>He was a child of genius, and his prodigious activity began early. We -find him composing a tragedy at the age of fourteen, and at the age of -seventeen publishing a journal with the title of the “Literary -Conservator.” He gets married upon a pension of a thousand francs, -conferred upon him by King Louis XVIII, who has been put upon the throne -to preserve Catholic reaction. Then comes King Charles X, who makes him -a knight of the Legion of Honor at the age of twenty-three. But -gradually the young poet’s “throne and altar stuff” begins to shown -signs of independent thought; he composes a play in which Richelieu is -portrayed as master of his king, and this is considered unsuitable for -such ticklish times; the censor bars it, and the young poet’s personal -intercession with the king does not avail.</p> - -<p>All this time, you understand, French art is still under the sway of the -so-called “classical” ideals of Voltaire and Racine; tragic dramatists -have to obey the “three unities,” or they cannot get produced. But by -1830 the French people are sick of reaction, and ready to make their -revolution again. As part of the change comes a surge of “romanticism” -in the arts. Shakespeare is played in Paris for the first time; and -Victor Hugo publishes a drama on the theme of Cromwell, with a preface -in which he commits the blasphemy of declaring that Racine is “not a -dramatist”! In the midst of the new<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_196">{196}</a></span> revolution he produces a romantic -play, “Hernani,” dealing with a revolutionary Spaniard of the Byronic -type, who declaims all over the stage and dies sublimely.</p> - -<p>The production of this play resulted in one continuous riot for -forty-five nights. The leading lady protested, the hired claque -revolted; so Victor Hugo called for help to the young artists of the -studios, and they poured out of Montmartre and took possession of the -theater. In those days the first purpose of romantic youth was to “shock -the bourgeois” by strange costumes. Here was Théophile Gautier, nineteen -years old, with long locks hanging over his shoulders, a scarlet satin -waistcoat, pale sea-green trousers seamed with black, and a gray -overcoat lined with green satin. Night after night the rival factions -shouted and raged as long as the play lasted. All this in order to gain -for dramatists the right to show more than one scene in a play, and more -than twenty-four hours of their hero’s life!</p> - -<p>Victor Hugo also wrote fiction and prose, and in every field he became -the new sun of France. But he was not content with literary laurels; he -went on seeking a remedy for the bourgeois disease. He espoused the -cause of a poor workingman, who, having been tortured in prison, had -killed the governor of the prison. The young poet came upon a novel -remedy—to sow the Bible all over France. “Let there be a Bible in every -peasant’s hut.” Here in America the Gideonites have tried out the idea, -sowing a Bible in every hotel room—but for some reason there are more -crimes of violence in the United States than ever before in any -civilized country!</p> - -<p>The revolution of 1830 brought in a new king, Louis-Philippe, the ideal -bourgeois monarch, an amiable gentleman who stayed at home with his wife -and let the bankers and business men run the country. This king made -Victor Hugo into a peer of France. But there was a new revolutionary -outburst preparing, and in 1848 the bourgeois king was dethroned, and -Victor Hugo was elected deputy to the new parliament, styling himself a -“moderate Republican.” The French people at this time were in the same -position as the American people at present; that is, they believed what -they were told, and were ready to accept any tinseled circus-performer -as a statesman. They chose for their president a wretched<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_197">{197}</a></span> creature who -happened to be a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, and promised a return of -all the old glories of France.</p> - -<p>It took only a year of his government for Victor Hugo to realize that -the one hope for progress lay in the program of the radicals. His two -grown sons were thrown into jail for editing a paper attacking the -policies of Louis Napoleon; and the father espoused the ideas of the old -revolution, “the rights of man.” Egged on by the terrified financiers, -Louis Napoleon overthrew the parliament and had himself made emperor. -Victor Hugo sought to rouse the people, barricades were raised in the -streets, and hundreds were shot down with cannon. The poet with great -difficulty made his escape to Brussels, from which city he denounced the -usurper—“Napoleon the Little” as he called him—with the result that -the Catholic government of Belgium passed a law expelling him.</p> - -<p>He fled to the channel island of Jersey, where he wrote a book of poems -called “The Chastisements,” one of the most terrific pieces of -denunciation in all the world’s literature. Shortly after this the -bourgeois government of England combined with the bourgeois government -of France to drive Russia out of the Crimea; there was a great war, and -the people of Jersey objected to the poet’s attacks on the French -emperor; they mobbed his home, and he had to flee to the neighboring -island of Guernsey, where he settled down to the true task of a great -artist, to reform the world by changing the ideals of the coming -generations. For nineteen years he stayed in exile, until “Napoleon the -Little” brought himself to ruin, and his country along with him. In the -meantime Victor Hugo had published several volumes of marvelous poetry, -and finally, after ten years’ labor, his masterpiece of fiction, “Les -Misérables,” which appeared simultaneously in eight capitals of the -world, and brought its author the sum of four hundred thousand francs.</p> - -<p>Into this novel Hugo poured all his passionate devotion to liberty, -equality and fraternity; likewise his blazing hatred of cruelty and -tyranny. He tells the story of an escaped convict who reforms and makes -a success of his life, but is pursued by the police and dragged back to -prison. Incidentally the poet gives us a vast picture<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_198">{198}</a></span> of the France of -his own time, and the lives and struggles of the proletariat. The figure -of Jean Valjean is one of the great achievements of the human -imagination, and his story is a treasure of the revolutionary movement -in every modern land.</p> - -<p>“Napoleon the Little” led his country to war with Germany and was -overwhelmingly crushed. Hugo came home in this crisis, and took part in -the defense of Paris. Then came the terrible uprising of the starved and -tortured masses, the Paris Commune. By this time the bourgeois savages -had machine-guns, so that they could wipe out wholesale the idealism and -faith of the people; they stood some fifty thousand workers, men, women -and children, against the walls of Paris and shot them down in cold -blood. Victor Hugo defended these Communards, and once more had to flee -for his life.</p> - -<p>After the peace with Germany, France was left a republic, and her great -poet returned to live with his grandchildren, to labor for the working -classes, and to pour out floods of eloquence in behalf of his social -ideals. New movements arose, and the old man heard that he was -theatrical, bombastic, unreal. All that is true to a considerable -extent; for Hugo is like Shelley, having the defects of his great -qualities. When the inspiration does not come to him, he learns to -imitate it; he acquires mannerisms, he adopts poses. Following Milton’s -suggestion of making an art work of his life, he sets his personality up -as an embodiment of revolutionary idealism, he makes himself into a -legend, a living monument, a literary shrine, one might say a literary -cathedral. It is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, and we -often take that step with Victor Hugo. But the masses of the people knew -that the core of his being was a passionate devotion to liberty and -justice; therefore they took him to their hearts, and his life is so -blended with theirs that Victor Hugo and revolutionary France are two -phrases with one meaning.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_199">{199}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXII"></a>CHAPTER LXII<br /><br /> -TYGER, TYGER!</h2> - -<p>What would Victor Hugo have been if he had had no social conscience? -What would the romantic movement have amounted to if it had confined -itself to the field of art? These questions are answered for us by -Théophile Gautier.</p> - -<p>We have seen him at the age of nineteen taking part in the battle of -“Hernani” in his scarlet satin waistcoat; we see him at the same age -leading the art students in mocking dances about a bust of Racine in a -public square of Paris. After that we see him for forty-two years -diligently following the art for art’s sake formula. He declares that he -has no religion, no politics; he has no concern with any moral or -intellectual question, he is purely and simply an artist, devoting -himself with passionate fervor to the production of works of pure -beauty. His fastidiousness is shown by the law he lays down, that a -young artist should write not less than fifty thousand verses for -practice before he writes one verse to be published.</p> - -<p>And what is the content of this art? Gautier believes in one thing, the -human body. He believes in it, not as an instrument of the mind, a house -of the spirit, but as a thing in itself, to be fed and pampered and -perfumed, and clad in silks and satins, and taken out to engage in -sexual adventures. The pretensions of art for art’s sake turn out to be -buncombe; the reality of the matter is art for orgy’s sake.</p> - -<p>At the age of twenty-four Gautier published a novel, “Mademoiselle de -Maupin,” which might be described as Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” -rewritten by the devil. A young lady of beauty and fashion goes -wandering in the costume of a man, and this affords endless -possibilities of sexual titillation; women fall in love with her, -thinking she is a man, and men fall in love with her by instinct, as it -were; the orgies thus postponed are especially thrilling when they -finally occur.</p> - -<p>Some men have written this kind of depravity at twenty-four, and learned -something better as they grew older; but Gautier learned absolutely -nothing. To the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_200">{200}</a></span> end of his long life he continued to produce novels and -tales of which the sole purpose is to glorify the orgy, to make it -romantic and thrilling by the elaborate squandering of wealth, the -heaping mountain high of the apparatus of luxury. The device fails, for -the simple reason that the senses are limited. When you are hungry a -dinner interests you, but ten thousand dinners appall; and the same -thing applies to coition. The men and women in these orgies remind us of -people in a besieged castle, living in deadly terror of an enemy who -never fails to get them in the end. The French have made a word for that -victorious enemy: <i>ennui</i>.</p> - -<p>It should hardly need to be said that the art of Théophile Gautier is a -leisure-class art. These orgies are possible only in a slave -civilization; they presuppose the fact that the masses shall toil to -heap up wealth for a privileged few to destroy in a night of riot. At -the very opening of “Mademoiselle de Maupin” the author portrays his -hero, living at ease with a valet to serve him, and nothing to do but be -discontented. “My idle passions growl dully in my heart, and prey upon -themselves for lack of other food.” He is consumed with imaginings—all, -needless to say, having to do with pleasures which he does not mean to -earn. “I wait for the heavens to open, and an angel to descend with a -revelation to me, for a revolution to break out and a throne to be given -me, for one of Raphael’s virgins to leave the canvas and come to embrace -me, for relations, whom I do not possess, to die and leave me what will -enable me to sail my fancy on a river of gold,” etc.</p> - -<p>His dream finally takes the form of a woman, and he spends many pages in -detailing her qualities. Needless to say, she belongs to the rioting -classes. “I consider beauty a diamond which should be mounted and set in -gold. I cannot imagine a beautiful woman without a carriage, horses, -serving-men, and all that belongs to an income of a hundred thousand a -year; there is harmony between beauty and wealth.” Of course this -dream-woman must be entirely subject to the sensual desires of man. “I -consider woman, after the manner of the ancients, as a beautiful slave -designed for our pleasure.”</p> - -<p>Victor Hugo was exiled by Louis Napoleon; while Gautier, having “no -political opinions,” remained in Paris<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_201">{201}</a></span> and accepted financial favors -from the tyrant. What he considered his master work was published at the -age of forty-five, a volume of verse whose title explains its character, -“Enamels and Cameos.” The art of poetry has become identical with that -of the goldsmith; words are tiny jewels, fitted together with precise -and meticulous care. Words have beauty, quite apart from their meaning, -and the proper study for mankind is the dictionary. Poetry should have -neither feeling nor ideas; while as for the subject, the more unlikely -and unsuitable it is, the greater the triumph of the poet. This is not -an effort to caricature Gautier’s doctrine, it is his own statement, the -theme of one of his poems. But on no account are you to take this poem -for propaganda!</p> - -<p>You see how the proposition demonstrates its own absurdity. Théophile -Gautier was during his entire lifetime a fanatical preacher, a -propagandist of sensuality and materialism, a glorified barber and -tailor, a publicity man for the Association of Merchants of Tapestries, -Furniture and Jewelry. When he writes a poem on the subject of a -rose-colored dress, he asks you to believe that he is really interested -in the rose-colored dress, but you may be sure that he is no such fool; -he writes about the rose-colored dress as an act of social defiance. He -says: There are imbeciles in the world who believe in religion, in moral -sense, in virtue, self-restraint and idealism, subjects which bore me to -extinction; in order to show my contempt for such imbeciles, I proceed -to prove that the greatest poem in the world can be written on a -rose-colored dress or on a roof, or on my watch, or on smoke, or on -whatever unlikely subject crosses my mind; I consecrate myself to this -task, I become a moral anti-moralist, a propagandist of no-propaganda.</p> - -<p>What are the products of nature bearing most resemblance to enamels and -cameos? They are certain kinds of insects, beautiful, hard, shiny, -brilliantly colored, repulsive, cruel, and poisonous. Such is the art of -Théophile Gautier and his successors, who have made French literature a -curse for a hundred years. This literature possesses prestige because of -its perfection of form; therefore it is important to get clear in our -minds the fact that the ability to fit words together in intricate -patterns is a thing ranking very low in the scale of human faculties.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_202">{202}</a></span> -The feats of the art-for-art-sakers are precisely as important as those -of the man on the stage who balances three billiard-balls on the end of -his nose. The piano-gymnast who leaped to world fame by his ability to -wiggle his fingers more rapidly than any other living man has been -definitely put out of date by the mechanical piano-player; and some day -mankind will adopt a universal language, and forget all the enamels and -cameos in the old useless tongues.</p> - -<p>Get it clear in your mind that external beauty is entirely compatible -with deadly cruelty of intellect and spirit. A tiger is a marvelous -product, from the esthetic point of view, and offers a superb theme to -poets, as William Blake has shown us. “Tyger, tyger, burning -bright”—but who wants this gold-striped glory in his garden? In exactly -the same way, there is a mass of what is called literature, possessing -the graces of form—music and glamor, elegance, passion, energy—and -using all these virtues, precisely as the tiger uses his teeth and -claws, to rend and destroy human life. Literary criticism which fails to -take account of such vicious qualities in art works is just exactly as -sensible and trustworthy as the merchant who would sell you a <i>cobra de -capello</i>, with a gorgeous black and white striped hood, for a boudoir -ornament and pet.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXIII"></a>CHAPTER LXIII<br /><br /> -THE CHILD OF HIS AGE</h2> - -<p>The middle of the nineteenth century was a hard time for generous-minded -and idealistic poets in France. The great revolution had failed, it -failed again in 1830 and in 1848, and cruelty and greed and corruption -seemed to be the final destiny of civilization. A few strong spirits -kept the faith, but the weaker ones drifted away and drowned their -sorrows in debauchery and drink.</p> - -<p>Alfred de Musset was one of these latter, a beautiful and charming -youth, gifted with all the graces of life and with the magic fire of -genius. He has told his own sad story in a book, “The Confessions of a -Child of His Age.” Most of the strong and healthy men of France had been -killed off in the Napoleonic wars, and the new<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_203">{203}</a></span> generation were the -children of weaklings. They drifted aimlessly, having luxury but no -duties, and no vision or ideal to inspire them.</p> - -<p>Musset was born in 1810, of a well-to-do and cultured family. He was -impressionable, sensitive, and in the beginning plunged with ardor into -the poetical movement headed by Hugo. But soon he lost interest, and -gave himself to amorous adventures and to mournful self-pity, an elegant -young Byron of the boulevards. It was a time when a poet could make a -national reputation by comparing the moon above a church-steeple to a -dot on the letter i. Musset, from the beginning to the end of his short -life, had no experience of any sort except sexuality, alcohol, and the -poetry of men who likewise had no other experience.</p> - -<p>At the age of twenty-three he met George Sand, a woman of thirty who had -run away from her family and was supporting herself as a free-lance -novelist. She carried the young poet off to Italy, but their dream of -love broke up in a quarrel, and poor Musset had brain fever, and came -home, and sat all day in his room for four months, so his brother tells -us, doing nothing but crying, except when he played chess. But at the -end of the four months he went out and found another love, and then -another and another. Any woman would do, according to his philosophy, -poetically set forth in an exquisite verse: “What matters the flagon, -provided one is drunk?”</p> - -<p>The young poet was welcomed to the French Academy, but was not very -faithful to his duties. Said one of the members: “Musset absents himself -too much.” To which the answer was: “Musset absinthes himself too much.” -He was an old roué at the age of thirty, and there was nothing left but -to die. Long afterwards George Sand published a novel in which she told -the intimate details of their love affair; and that, of course, was fine -copy, and a tremendous thrill. The title of the novel was “She and He,” -and Musset’s brother came back with a book entitled “He and She.” It -appears that George Sand had been unfaithful to Musset in the midst of -their amour; but we cannot get up much sympathy for the unhappy “child -of his age.” His brother delicately tells us how, in the days of his -beautiful youth,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_204">{204}</a></span> lying in bed at night, the young poet would impart shy -confidences about his amorous triumphs. He was seducing other men’s -wives and daughters and sisters, and was apparently not concerning -himself with any brain fevers these men might have, or with any tears of -grief they might shed in between their games of chess.</p> - -<p>Two of the most beautiful and eloquent of Musset’s poems are entitled, -respectively, “A Night of May” and “A Night of December.” Each of them -portrays the poet as falling sorrowfully out of love. The world had -naturally assumed that the two poems related to the same mistress; but -the poet’s brother revealed that the two poems had a different “motive,” -and also that there was another “motive” in between the May “motive” and -the December “motive.” And there were many other “motives”—since -numbers of elegant ladies in Paris aspired to become the theme of one of -the “Nights” of this delicate if drunken genius. We shall see a long -string of poets of this sort for a hundred years in France—and some, -alas! in England and America. The lesson of their lives is always the -same—that poetry without social vision and moral backbone is merely a -snare for the human spirit.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXIV"></a>CHAPTER LXIV<br /><br /> -PRAYER IN ADULTERY</h2> - -<p>The problem of the relationship of art to morality is most interestingly -illustrated by the case of George Sand. This woman-writer was -promiscuous, and she was predatory, in the sense that she turned her -adventures into copy and sold them in the market. But she had a mind, -and she used it to investigate all the new ideas of her time. She was -moved, not merely by her own desire for pleasure, but by the sufferings -and strivings of her fellow human beings. She poured all these things -into her books, and made herself one of the civilizing forces of her -time.</p> - -<p>She was born in 1804 and raised in a convent. Married at the age of -eighteen, and being unhappy, she kicked over the traces and became a -Bohemian adventurer, wearing trousers, proclaiming the rights of -passion, taking to herself one conspicuous lover after another, and -then<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_205">{205}</a></span> putting them into books for the support of herself and her two -children. She was the founder of what we might call emotional feminism. -She was religious in a sentimental way, though a vigorous anti-clerical; -she became converted to Socialism, worked ardently for social reform, -and published many long novels in its support.</p> - -<p>George Sand had a romantic ancestry, of which she did not fail to make -literary use. On her father’s side she was descended from a royal -bastard. Her mother had been a camp follower in the army of Napoleon, “a -child of the old pavements of Paris.” Thus the novelist united in one -person the aristocratic and the proletarian impulses. A large percentage -of her collected ancestors were illegitimate, so she came honestly by -her free love ideas. On the other hand, she was a very respectable, -hard-working bourgeois woman, who preached interminably on virtue, and -paid all her debts, and got good prices for her manuscripts—things -which were regarded as extremely bad taste by the art-world of her time.</p> - -<p>France had had innumerable aristocratic ladies who had loved -promiscuously, proceeding from a king to a duke, and from a duke to an -abbé or a monseigneur. There had been women who had risen from the lower -classes by becoming the mistresses of noblemen. But here was a brand-new -phenomenon, a woman who went out and faced the world “on her own,” and -instead of taking the money of the men she loved, proceeded to earn the -money by writing about the men! It was an enormous scandal, and at the -same time an enormous literary success, for these were pot-boilers of -genius, full of eloquence and fire. Also they were full of ideas on a -hundred subjects, elementary instruction such as ladies on the women’s -pages of our Sunday supplements give to correspondents. But American -readers find it a little hard to understand the fusion of piety and -sexuality which George Sand pours into her romantic novels. “Oh, my dear -Octave,” writes an adulterous wife to her lover, “never shall we pass a -night together without kneeling and praying for Jacques!” It is just a -little shocking to us to learn that this Jacques is the husband whom the -pair are deceiving!</p> - -<p>George Sand lived like a healthy bourgeoise to the age of seventy-two; -in her later years she retired to the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_206">{206}</a></span> country, and the fires of free -love died, and she wrote novels about the peasants in her neighborhood. -They are very human and simple, and make standard reading for French -courses in American high schools. It is interesting to compare them with -the old-style handling of the peasants in French art. Gone are the fancy -pictures of beautiful young shepherds and shepherdesses in silks and -satins and high-heeled slippers. Now for the first time a French artist -finds it worth while to go out among the working people of the fields, -and observe the external details of their lives, and at least try to -imagine their feelings. We note the same thing happening also in -pictorial art; instead of the elegancies of Fragonard, we now have a -peasant painter, Millet, peasant born and peasant reared, making real -pictures full of real proletarian feeling. That much as least the -revolution has accomplished!</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXV"></a>CHAPTER LXV<br /><br /> -MAIN STREET IN FRANCE</h2> - -<p>“Eighteen years ago,” says Ogi, “a lanky, red-headed youth from -Minnesota ran away from Yale University and showed up at Helicon Hall to -stoke our furnace. We were never entirely sure about the furnace, but we -could always count upon lively arguments on the literary side of our -four-sided fireplace. Now this youth has grown up and added a new phrase -to the American language—”</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Main Street’ or ‘Babbitt’?” says Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“Recall the story of ‘Main Street.’ A young girl marries a doctor and -lives with him in one of the desolate, cultureless villages of the -Northwest. The novel is a long one, and the method that of minute -detail; we learn everything about the little place and the people in it, -their empty, sordid lives, the utter absence of vision. The girl is -lonely and restless, she craves something beautiful and inspiring. She -has luxurious tastes, and chafes at having to economize. She meets a -handsome, attractive young man, and after many agonies of soul she takes -him as her lover. In the end he leaves her; and after being heart-broken -for a while she takes another lover. He<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_207">{207}</a></span> also deserts her, and she is -ill, in debt, and finally takes poison, and her husband, the doctor, -dies of grief—”</p> - -<p>“Hold on,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you must have been reading a sequel to ‘Main -Street.’ I don’t remember any of those things happening. Carol Kennicott -thought she loved the other man, but she didn’t deceive her husband, she -held herself back—”</p> - -<p>“It is another of my poor jokes,” says Ogi. “This is not the story of -‘Main Street,’ but of a famous French classic, ‘Madame Bovary’ by -Gustave Flaubert. You see, the themes of the two novels are identical, -and so is the method; the difference lies in the temperaments of two -races. The young man from Sauk Centre and the young man from Rouen alike -call themselves “realists”; but one proceeds upon the assumption that it -is possible to restrain passion, and on the whole, better to try, while -the other proceeds upon the assumption that it is impossible to restrain -passion, and that if you pretend to do it, you are a Puritan, and what -is worse, a hypocrite. So at the end of Carol Kennicott’s story we find -her still trying to introduce a little light into Gopher Prairie, while -Emma Bovary is dead and the town of Yonville-l’Abbaye is exactly what it -was before.”</p> - -<p>Flaubert is by many considered the greatest of all realists. He made his -religion out of a theory of style; and he was absolutely certain that -“Madame Bovary” was the final product of the “objective” method. He had -coldly observed reality, and no predisposition had been allowed to -interfere. My purpose in mixing him up with Main Street, Gopher Prairie, -Minn., is to bring out the contention that “Madame Bovary” is as -subjective as a lyric; from first to last an expression of its author’s -personal, or shall we say racial conviction, that the sexual impulse -dominates the lives of men and women. The great classic of realism is a -legal brief, in which every detail has been carefully selected and -arranged, and every sentence composed for the purpose of proving this -argument. We have once more the old Greek tragedy with its lurking -Nemesis; only this time the lurking-place is in the genital glands.</p> - -<p>Flaubert was born in 1821, so that he was a youngster to the group of -writers we have been considering: Balzac, Hugo, Gautier, George Sand. He -was a tall, lanky, pro<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_208">{208}</a></span>vincial fellow, with drooping mustaches, looking -like a dragoon. He was epileptic and hysterical, and suffered agonies of -melancholy, for the most part over problems of style. He would pace the -floor all night in torment seeking for a missing word; he records that -he spent eight unhappy days in avoiding one dissonance. The action of -all his life which he repented most was a phrase in “Madame Bovary.” -Translated literally, this phrase is “a crown of flowers of -orange-tree”; the unforgivable sin lying in the two “ofs.”</p> - -<p>We are told that Flaubert originated a formula of art which Gautier -cherished all the rest of his life: “The form is the parent of the -idea.” In other words, you first think of a beautiful way to say -something, and then you think of something to say which can be said in -that way. It would be impossible for art perversity to go farther; and -you have only to consider “Madame Bovary” to realize how little Flaubert -followed his own theory. He did not first think of a prose work in two -parts, the first part having nine chapters and the second part fifteen; -what he thought of was the French formula, locating the seat of Nemesis -in the genital glands. The secret of his masterpiece is the fact that he -chose to illustrate this formula by means of characters which he knew -intimately and loved with all the power of his instinctive being. That -is the real basis of the greatness of “Madame Bovary”; the fact that -with all her faults and all her follies her creator loved her, and -believed in her, and made her real in every breath she drew and in every -word she uttered. The important idea which he put across is that we are -all of us, good or bad, wise or foolish, stupid or clever, passengers on -the same ship of life, tossed by the same storms, and bound for the same -unknown harbor.</p> - -<p>That is the propaganda which makes the greatness of every work of -realism, if it has greatness. And so we can understand the failure of -this unhappy genius in his other writings. He went back to ancient -Carthage, and following his rigid art theories, he laboriously -accumulated knowledge of detail, and wrote what he meant to be another -masterpiece of realism, “Salammbô.” He creates for us a whole gallery of -Carthaginian characters; but he doesn’t know these characters, he -doesn’t love them,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_209">{209}</a></span> he doesn’t make us know them or love them—and his -would-be masterpiece is therefore as lifeless as any gallery of wax -works. We read it with curiosity because of the historical detail, the -pictures of a far-off and cruel civilization; but we seldom finish it, -and we forget everything but what a history-book might have given us.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXVI"></a>CHAPTER LXVI<br /><br /> -THE MATTRESS GRAVE</h2> - -<p>We have paid a long visit to France, and must now cross the Rhine and -see what is happening in Germany. It is interesting to note that the two -artists whom we are about to study are men who had to flee from Germany -and spend a considerable part of their lives as political exiles in -Paris.</p> - -<p>Heinrich Heine was born in 1799, the same year as Balzac. He was a Jew, -and it was a time when the Jews in Frankfort were penned up in a filthy -ghetto and subjected to insults and outrages; the “Jew-grief” was one of -the deep elements of this great poet’s soul. Another element was the -shame of the “poor relation”; he had a rich uncle, a millionaire banker -in the bourgeois city of Hamburg, who took the youthful genius into his -office at the age of nineteen, and soon afterwards kicked him out, -telling him that he was “a fool.” Among other follies, the young genius -had fallen in love with the rich banker’s daughter, and she toyed with -him for a while, and then married respectably, and gave the poet’s heart -a wound from which it never recovered.</p> - -<p>To get rid of him the uncle set him to studying law; but he made a poor -student and a worse lawyer. In order to be allowed to practice he had to -be baptized as a Christian; this doesn’t really do one any harm, but it -caused shame to Heine throughout his life. He had no real religion, -being a child of Voltaire, a rebel, and in due course a revolutionist. -He was a poet, a maker of exquisite verses, full of unutterable -tenderness. Also he was a lover; he wandered here and there with his -broken heart, trying many casual loves, and paying for his adventures a -frightful penalty, as will appear.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_210">{210}</a></span></p> - -<p>We are back in the days of the “Holy Alliance,” and all the little -princelings of Germany are holding the thoughts of their subjects in a -vise. Heine put satirical and skeptical ideas into rhyme; he had a -bitter wit, and his words flew all over Germany, and the Hohenzollerns -of Prussia not merely suppressed one book, they paid him the compliment -of prohibiting everything he might write. “Put a sword on my coffin,” he -said, in one of his stanzas, “for I have been a soldier in the war for -the liberation of humanity.” The revolution of 1830 came in France, and -Heine was deeply stirred, and hoped for something to happen in Germany. -But he had to wait a long time, nearly a hundred years; then, strange -whim of history, three million American boys had to cross the ocean to -win the political battle of this German-Jewish rebel!</p> - -<p>Heine could stand Germany no longer, and went to live in Paris, where he -was welcomed by the whole romantic school. He wrote letters, articles -and verses, which went back to Germany and helped carry on the war for -freedom. His genius and wit were such that all the efforts to bar his -books only promoted their circulation. Fate played a queer prank upon -the Prussian Junkerdom—their most popular sentimental songs, which they -know by heart and sing on all possible occasions, were written by a -rebel exile whom they had chased about the streets in a Judenhetze; the -same man who wrote the terrible stanzas of “The Silesian Weavers,” -picturing the starving wretches sitting in their huts and weaving a -three-fold curse, against God, King and Fatherland—“Old Germany, we -weave thy shroud—we weave, we weave!”</p> - -<p>His was a strange, complex nature, with many contradictory qualities. He -was called “the German Aristophanes.” He met in the end a ghastly fate; -a spinal disease, the penalty of his casual loves, slowly ate him up, -and for years he lay on what he called “a mattress grave.” First he -could scarcely walk, then he could scarcely see, and all the time he -suffered hideously. But his mind lasted to the end, and he saw all -things clearly, including his own grim fate. “The Great Author of the -Universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, wished to show the petty, earthly, -so-called German Aristophanes that<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_211">{211}</a></span> his mightiest sarcasms are but -feeble banter compared with His, and how immeasurably He excels me in -humor and in colossal wit.”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXVII"></a>CHAPTER LXVII<br /><br /> -SIEGFRIED-BAKUNIN</h2> - -<p>In my interpretation of artists so far I have had to rely, for better or -for worse, upon myself; no one else, so far as I know, has analyzed art -works from the point of view of revolutionary economics.</p> - -<p>“Tolstoi?” suggests Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“Tolstoi considered them from the point of view of Christian -primitivism, a quite different thing. But now at last I have help; the -economic interpretation of Richard Wagner has been done by Bernard Shaw -in a little book, ‘The Perfect Wagnerite,’ published more than -twenty-five years ago. So I feel like a small boy taking shelter from -his enemies behind the back of his big brother.”</p> - -<p>“If you would talk like that more frequently,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you -wouldn’t have so many enemies!”</p> - -<p>Richard Wagner was a towering genius, a master of half a dozen arts, -perhaps the greatest compeller of emotion that has ever lived. He -invented a new art-form, the “music-drama,” in which the arts of the -musician, the poet, the dramatist, the actor, the scene-painter, and the -costumer are brought together and fused into a new thing, “the music of -the future.” It is a terrific engine for the evocation and -intensification of human feelings; in creating it, and forcing its -recognition by the world, Wagner performed a Titan’s task.</p> - -<p>He was born in 1813, which made him thirty-five years of age when the -revolution of 1848 drove King Louis Philippe from the throne of France -and sent an impulse of revolt all over Europe. Wagner at this time was -the conductor of the Royal Opera House at Dresden, having a life -position with a good salary and a pension. Previous to that time he had -had a ghastly struggle with poverty; a young and unknown genius, he had -almost starved to death in a garret in Paris. He had married an actress, -who had no understanding whatever of his power, but who had starved with -him, and now clung<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_212">{212}</a></span> with frenzy to security. He himself had the full -consciousness of his destiny as an artist; he had already written three -great operas, and had sketched his later works. He had thus every reason -in the world to protect his future, and to shelter himself behind the -art for art’s sake formula.</p> - -<p>Instead of which, he attended a meeting of a revolutionary society of -Dresden, and delivered an address appealing to the king of Saxony—the -royal personage whose servant and pensioner he was—to establish -universal suffrage, to abolish the aristocracy and the standing army, -and to constitute a republic with His Majesty as president. Needless to -say, His Majesty did not follow this recommendation from his operatic -conductor; and next year the people of Dresden rose, and built -barricades in the streets, and Wagner joined the revolutionists and -actively took part in organizing their forces. When the Prussian troops -marched in and put down the insurrection, three men were proscribed in a -royal proclamation as “politically dangerous persons,” and condemned to -death. One was Roeckel, assistant conductor of the opera house, who was -captured and spent the next twelve years in a dungeon; another was -Michael Bakunin, who became the founder of the Anarchist movement; and -the third was Richard Wagner, royal operatic conductor.</p> - -<p>Germany’s greatest living genius spent his next twelve years as a -political exile in France and Switzerland. He utilized the time, in part -to pour out political pamphlets, and in part to embody his revolutionary -view of life in his greatest art work. Those who are interested in the -pamphlets may find extracts in “The Cry for Justice.” Here is a sample -from a manifesto entitled “Revolution,” published in the Dresden -“Volksblaetter”:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>Arise, then, ye people of the earth, arise, ye sorrow-stricken and -oppressed. Ye, also, who vainly struggle to clothe the inner -desolation of your hearts with the transient glory of riches, -arise! Come and follow in my track with the joyful crowd, for I -know not how to make distinction between those who follow me. There -are but two peoples from henceforth on earth—the one which follows -me, and the one which resists me. The one I will lead to happiness, -but the other I will crush in my progress. For I am the Revolution, -I am the new creating force. I am the divinity which discerns all -life, which embraces, revives, and rewards.</p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_213">{213}</a></span></p> - -<p>The art work in which Wagner embodied these revolutionary ideas is known -as “The Ring of the Nibelung.” It consists of four long operas, based -upon the old German mythology. It begins with a charming fairy story and -ends with a grim tragedy; and from first to last it is a study of the -effects of economic power upon human life.</p> - -<p>In the depths of the river dwell the Rhine-maidens, having a lump of -gold which they admire because it shines, but for which they have no -other use. An ugly little dwarf pursues them; and when he cannot get -their love, he decides to get along with their gold. He steals it, and -makes from it a magic ring, which represents the ability to build cities -and palaces, to command luxury and pleasure—to be, in short, our -present master class. Even the gods are seduced by this lure, and fall -to quarreling and intriguing for the magic power of gold. The god Wotan -wrests it from the dwarf Alberich; and the latter puts a curse upon it, -to the effect that it can only be worn by those who have renounced -love—which is just as you see it in our modern world, and just as -Wagner saw it when he was a court servant in Dresden, and was driven mad -by the insolence of hereditary privilege.</p> - -<p>There are two giants, who represent our great captains of industry, and -have built Wotan a palace known as Walhalla. The giants have been -promised Wotan’s sister, the goddess of youthful beauty and goodness, as -their pay for this labor; but they elect to take the ring instead. This -is Wagner’s way of telling us his opinion of the great bankers and -gentlemen of wealth whom he vainly besought to assist him in the -production of his beautiful works of art.</p> - -<p>There were no factories in old German mythology; but the scene shows us -a cavern down in the bowels of the earth, where Alberich, by the power -of his ring, compels all his fellow dwarfs to toil at making treasures -for him. We see him wielding the lash, and the music snarls and whines, -and it is precisely the atmosphere you find in every sweat-shop and -cotton mill and coal mine under our blessed competitive system. And when -we see one of the giants slay his brother, and carry off the ring, and -turn himself into a dragon, to sit upon it and guard it for the balance -of time, we know that Wagner has<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_214">{214}</a></span> visited the millionaire clubs of -Dresden, and seen the fat old plutocrats in their big leather -arm-chairs.</p> - -<p>Wotan, the old god, sees too late the ruin he has brought into the -world; he decides that the only way of escape is to create a hero who -shall slay the dragon of privilege and break the spell of economic -might. This hero is the young Siegfried, the child of nature who knows -no fear; Bernard Shaw says that he is Wagner’s young Anarchist -associate, Bakunin. And note that in this Siegfried myth Wagner -foreshadows the downfall not only of capitalism, but also of religion. -The last of the four operas is called “The Twilight of the Gods,” and -the two evil spells of gold and of superstition are broken by the strong -arm and the clear mind of a human youth.</p> - -<p>Wagner wrote the words of these four operas immediately after the -Dresden revolution; the poem was privately published four years after -his flight from the city. During the years of his exile he affords us a -sublime example of a great man contending with obstacles for the sake of -an ideal. He went ahead to compose his masterpiece in the face of -poverty and debt, ridicule and ignominy. His works were absolutely new, -they required an absolutely new method of presentation; so, even when he -could get a chance of production, he had to face the stupidity and -malice of singers and conductors and managers, who were sure in their -own conceit and resented instructions from an upstart.</p> - -<p>We find him in 1860, almost at the end of his exile, receiving from -Louis Napoleon an opportunity to put on “Tannhäuser” in Paris. Now this -opera is a music sermon in reprehension of sensual love; it portrays the -ruin and ultimate repentance of a medieval knight who is lured into the -Venusburg, the lurking place of the old heathen goddess. And this Sunday -school lesson in music was to be presented in the great opera house, -whose boxes were rented by members of the Jockey Club, the gilded youth -of Paris who supported the opera in order to provide publicity for their -mistresses in the ballet!</p> - -<p>The clash was embittered by the fact that the members of the Jockey Club -came late from their supper-parties, and wanted to see their mistresses -dance; therefore it was an iron-clad law of the opera that the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_215">{215}</a></span> ballet -came in the second act. But in Wagner’s Sunday school lesson the knight -is lured into the Venusburg in the first act, and the composer -stubbornly refused to change his story. Therefore the young gentlemen of -the Jockey Club yelled and hooted and blew penny-whistles all through -the performance, and kept that up night after night. They even took the -trouble to come on Sunday to make sure of breaking up Wagner’s show.</p> - -<p>It would be pleasant to have to record that this hero of the social -revolution stood by his guns until the end of his life; but alas, he -weakened, and sold out completely to the enemy. Bernard Shaw excuses him -on the ground that the social revolution was not yet ready, and that the -revolutionists were impractical men. But I say that it was Wagner’s task -to help make the social revolution ready, and to train the -revolutionists by setting them an example of probity. Instead of that, -he decided that the establishing of his own reputation was more -important than the salvation of society. He accepted amnesty from the -Saxon king, and came back and made himself into a great captain of the -music industry, and a national and patriotic hero.</p> - -<p>He became the intimate friend and pensioner of the king of Bavaria; and -for this king he wrote a highly confidential paper entitled “Of the -State and Religion,” wherein he explained that he had once been a -Socialist, but he now saw that the masses were gross and dull, incapable -of high achievement. The problem was to get them to serve ends which -they did not understand; they must be deceived, they must have -illusions. The first mass-illusion was patriotism; they must be taught -to reverence their king. The second mass-illusion was religion; they -must believe they were obeying the will of God. The difficulty of -government lay in the fact that the ruling class must see the truth, -they could not believe either in the State or in God. For them there -must be the higher illusions of the Wagnerian art. Needless to say, for -this secret service King Ludwig paid generously, and we find Wagner -spending his pension—I cite one item, three hundred yards of satin of -thirteen carefully specified colors, at a cost of three thousand -florins!</p> - -<p>He had craved luxury all his life, and in the end he got it—not merely -silks and satins and velvets, for which<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_216">{216}</a></span> he had a sort of insanity, but -all kinds of splendor and homage, with kings and emperors to attend the -opening performances of his operas. When the Franco-Prussian war breaks -out we find our Siegfried-Bakunin drinking the cup of military glory and -pouring out a “Kaiser-march”; we find him stooping to an operatic -libretto in which he casts odium upon all the genius of France, not -sparing even Victor Hugo. He reads Schopenhauer, and decides that he is -a pessimist, and has always been a pessimist, and he tries to -reinterpret his revolutionary “Ring” accordingly. He composes a -religious festival play, a mixture of Christian mysticism and Buddhist -fatalism, called “Parsival,” which made the fortune of his Bayreuth -enterprise, a play-house built out of funds subscribed by his admirers.</p> - -<p>Wagner lived to old age, full of honors, and left a widow and a son, -poetically named Siegfried. The widow died recently, but the son still -survives, to bask in his father’s glory, and to gather in the shekels of -the music pilgrims. It is possible to appreciate to the full the -sublimity of the revolutionary Wagner without paying reverence to this -family institution which he has left behind, or for the hordes of -“Schwaermer” who come to eat sausages and drink beer and revel in -emotions which they have no idea of applying to life. Is there anything -in all the tragedies imagined by Richard Wagner more tragic than the -fate which has befallen the young Siegfried-Bakunin—whose prestige and -tradition are now the financial mainstay of the White Terror in Germany, -the Jew-baiting, Communist-shooting mob of the “Hakenkreutzler,” or -Bavarian Fascisti?</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXVIII"></a>CHAPTER LXVIII<br /><br /> -THE GOSPEL OF SILENCE</h2> - -<p>Ogi has been wandering about the cave with a discontented expression on -his face, showing a disposition to growl at whatever gets in his way. -Mrs. Ogi, whose job is to notice domestic weather-signs, inquires: “What -is the matter with you?”</p> - -<p>Says Ogi: “I have to write an uninteresting chapter.”</p> - -<p>“Why don’t you skip it?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_217">{217}</a></span>”</p> - -<p>“I can’t, because it deals with an interesting man.” As she cannot guess -that riddle, he goes on to complain: “If only I had been writing this -book twenty-five years ago, when I thought ‘Sartor Resartus’ the most -delightful book ever penned! But I went on, and got an overdose of -Carlyle. I read almost all that Gospel of Silence in forty volumes; and -now I sit and ask: what did I learn from it? Some facts, of course: -history and biography. But did I get a single valid idea, one sound -conclusion about life?”</p> - -<p>“Explain it quickly, and pass on,” says Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“I explain the human race, blocked from the future by a sheet-steel -door. We need the acetylene torch of spiritual fervor; also we need the -engineering brain, to say: “Put it here, and here, and cut the hinges.” -In the face of this task, some of the wielders of the torch go off and -get drunk. Others fall down on their knees and pray. Others forbid us to -touch the door, because God made it and it is His will. Others write -noble verses with perfect rhymes, to the effect that man is born to -trouble, and great art teaches us to endure discomfort with dignity. -Others take fire with zeal, and proceed to butt the door down with their -heads. They butt and butt, until their heads ache. I realize how -undignified it is to describe a great master of English prose as a -‘sorehead’; yet there happens to be no other word in the language that -so tells the story of Thomas Carlyle.”</p> - -<p>He was the son of a carpenter in Scotland, and suffered from poverty and -neglect, and through a long life from indigestion. He complained -pathetically that Emerson ate pie and was well, while he ate plain -oatmeal and was miserable. He was irritable, and hard to get along -with—we are privileged to know about this, because both he and his wife -wrote endless letters to their friends, detailing their domestic -troubles, and these letters are published in many volumes, and we can -read both sides and take our choice. Tennyson refused assent to the -proposition that the Carlyles should have married elsewhere; because -then there would have been four miserable people instead of two.</p> - -<p>Carlyle made himself, and also his literary style; he was a hack writer, -biographer and translator, and struggled along with a dissatisfied young -wife in a lonely<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_218">{218}</a></span> country cottage. “Sartor Resartus” was written at the -age of thirty-five, and sketches the philosophy of an imaginary German -professor, whose name translated means “Devil’s Dung”; this professor’s -philosophy being based upon the discovery that everything in -civilization is merely clothes, the outside of things, the shams and -pretensions and conventions. It is funny to imagine our statesmen and -diplomats and prominent society personages stripped, not merely of their -medals and ribbons, but also of their shirts and trousers; very few of -them would look imposing—and the same applies to civilization with its -proprieties, moralities and religions. This work of uproarious mischief -fell absolutely flat in well-dressed and well-mannered England, and -Emerson and a few people in far-off Boston had to inform the British -cultured classes that they had a new prophet among them.</p> - -<p>The teaching of “Sartor Resartus” is entirely negative; and when you ask -what Carlyle had to contribute to constructive thinking about our -hateful social system, the answer is: nonsense. He saw the evils, and -scolded at them—and scolded equally hard at the forces which are to -remedy the evils. Carlyle had contempt for the people, out of whose lap -he had sprung; he despised democracy and the whole machinery of popular -consent. He repaid America for discovering him by ridiculing the Union -cause; he denounced the reform bill of 1867 as “Shooting Niagara.”</p> - -<p>Carlyle’s way to set the world right is revealed to us in a book called -“Hero-Worship.” First we have to find the Great Man; and then we have to -obey him. “Obedience is the primary duty of man”—meaning, of course, -the man like you and me, who is spelled with a little m. The one who is -spelled with a capital letter is the Autocrat, who makes us do what we -ought to do. “A nation that has not been governed by so-called tyrants -never came to much in the world.”</p> - -<p>Our Great Tyrant sets us all hard at work. He makes us build houses and -cultivate farms—but no machinery or railroads, because these constitute -Industrialism, which is a Mammon-Monster. If we do our work by machinery -we have leisure, and that is dangerous; we must have Work, and then more -Work, our one safe Deliverance<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_219">{219}</a></span> from Devil-Mischief—you see how one -picks up the style of the “Gospel of Silence”!</p> - -<p>Having got the houses built, what next? Why then, to save us from the -Idleness-Imp we set to work knocking the houses down with cannon-balls. -I don’t mean that Carlyle always advocated war; what he did was to -glorify systems of government which historically have resulted and -psychologically must result in war. At the age of fifty-eight, having -surveyed the whole of history, our Scotch hero-worshipper selected the -greatest of human heroes to become the subject of a grand state -biography in six volumes: and whom do you suppose this hero turns out to -be? Frederick of Prussia, who stole Silesia from his cousin, and seized -Poland and divided it up among Austria, Russia and himself; Jonathan -Wild the Great, founder of the Hohenzollern Heroism, and -great-great-grandfather of our World War!</p> - -<p>I dutifully read those six large volumes, and studied the series of -charts in which the strategy of Frederick’s military campaigns is set -forth. I learned a fascinating parlor game, which consists in moving -here and there little black and white oblongs representing regiments and -brigades and divisions and other military formations of human beings. -The white oblongs represent your own human beings, and the black oblongs -represent the human beings you propose to destroy; you pound them to -pieces with artillery, you sweep them with volleys of musketry, you -charge them with cavalry and chop them with sabres—and then you move up -other oblongs, called reserves, and continue the procedure. It is safer -to play this game on paper, because when you get through, you can throw -the paper into the waste-basket, and do not have some tens of thousands -of dead and mutilated men and horses decaying all over your back yard.</p> - -<p>A pitiful ending for a Prophet and Preacher who aspires to the Remaking -of Mankind in Capital Letters! Just a poor, bewildered old dotard, -dyspeptic and crotchety, helpless and blundering, aspiring to a certain -end and working to the opposite end.</p> - -<p>“But why should anyone consider such a man great?” asks Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“I have been trying to formulate that to myself. It is because he had -the grace to be unhappy about our<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_220">{220}</a></span> modern world. He did not get drunk on -moonshine; he did not tell himself that God was going to do what it was -obviously the business of men to do. He didn’t persuade himself that -Evolution was going to do it, or that Time was going to do it, or that -Faith was going to do it. He didn’t prattle about one increasing purpose -running through the ages, or about one far-off divine event to which the -whole creation moves. He didn’t decide to dream his dream and hold it -true, or to have moments when he felt he could not die. He didn’t tell -us that Love will conquer at the last, or that his faith was large in -Time—”</p> - -<p>“This appears to be a transition,” says Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“Precisely. We are about to begin a new chapter: The Lullaby Laureate, -or Queen Victoria’s Super-Soothing Syrup.”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXIX"></a>CHAPTER LXIX<br /><br /> -THE LULLABY LAUREATE</h2> - -<p>The story of my own soul is the story of Alfred Tennyson’s reputation -for the last thirty or forty years; so that is the easiest way for me to -tell about it.</p> - -<p>I was one of Tennyson’s cultural products. I cannot recall the age when -I did not know “Call me early, mother dear,” and “What does little -birdie say?” As soon as I had the idea of being anything, I had the idea -of being Sir Galahad. I attended very devoutly a church, which differed -from that of Alfred Tennyson in one fact—that it had a prayer for the -President of the United States in place of a prayer for the Queen. I -doubt if it ever occurred to me to think that Tennyson might be wrong in -anything—until the age of fifteen, when suddenly there dawned upon my -horrified mind the idea that Christianity was merely another mythology.</p> - -<p>I wrestled with this idea for a couple of years, and part of the -struggle consisted of a study of “In Memoriam,” recommended by my -spiritual adviser. The poem suggested a great many new reasons for -doubting the immortality of the soul; but it suggested no certainty that -the Creator of the universe, having given me one life, was under -obligation to give me two. Which meant<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_221">{221}</a></span> that I was through with -Tennyson, whose whole product, on its religious side, is an agonized cry -that immortality must be.</p> - -<p>In politics and economics I experienced a similar revulsion from my -one-time idol. He seemed to me a victim of all the delusions, a -celebrator of all the shams of civilization. Even his poetical charms -now annoyed me, serving as trimming and decoration for second-rate -ideas. In my reaction I went too far, as have all the young people of -our time; for Tennyson was really a great poet, and a man of fine and -generous spirit.</p> - -<p>He was the son of a Church of England clergyman, and that is a fact -which must never be forgotten; he grew up in a rectory, and wrote Sunday -poetry. He was the elder brother of a big family, and took the position -of elder brother to all mankind. He was tall and imposing, dark and -romantic looking, cultivating long wavy black locks and a Spanish cloak -and a poet’s pipe. When he did not know anything to say, he puffed at -his pipe and looked magnificent, and everybody was awed.</p> - -<p>Culture came naturally in his family. He had written five thousand -octosyllabic rhymes at the age of twelve. His first verses were -published when he was young, and because one or two critics made fun of -them, he took refuge in his dignity and waited nine years to publish -again. “Ulysses” made his fame when he was thirty-three, and two years -later he received a pension from the Tory government. Two years after -that came “The Princess,” a dramatic composition in ridicule of the -higher education of women; it suited the lower-educated Victorian ladies -so perfectly that it ran into five editions. In 1850, at the age of -forty-one, Tennyson became the laureate; when he was seventy-four he was -raised to the peerage. No other English poet has earned this honor, -which is reserved to wholesale slaughterers of animals and men, to -brewers, whiskey distillers, diamond merchants, and publishers of -capitalist dope.</p> - -<p>Concerning Lord Tennyson as an artist in words, there is little that -needs to be said. He received his “ten talents” and put them to use; -everywhere he went he carefully collected poetical impressions, words, -phrases and ideas, and jotted them down. No one ever spent<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_222">{222}</a></span> more time -filing and perfecting, and no one was more completely master of -beautiful utterance.</p> - -<p>He had an inquiring mind, and picked up ideas on all subjects and put -them into his poetry; but unfortunately he found consecutive thinking -very difficult, and you can find as many contradictory thoughts in him -as in the Bible. He has an invincible repugnance to the drawing of -uncomfortable conclusions; whenever his thinking leads to such, he -evaporates in a cloud of comforting words. His verse contains more -platitudes and cheap cheer-up stuff than any other poet known to me; and -so he was the darling of the antimacassar age.</p> - -<p>England had put down Napoleon and taken possession of the trade of the -world. There were revolutions on the continent, but at home nothing -worse than a few rioters to be clubbed by the police. The foggy islands -were a safe haven, administered by landlords and merchants. Everything -was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and the function of -a poet was to tell it to the people, in such beautiful language that -they would accept it as a revelation.</p> - -<p>Tennyson in his early days had shown traces of liberalism, but the -Chartist movement frightened him into reaction, and there he stayed. -“Shout for England!” says the chorus of one of his poems, and the -function of the shout in suppressing thought is understood by all -students of mob psychology. “Riflemen, form!” exhorted another poem, -published in the “Times”—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Let your reforms for a moment go;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Look to your butts, and take good aim.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">That was, so to speak, a “Timesly” sentiment; the riflemen hastened to -form, and the young aristocrats led them to slaughter, and the poet -laureate had to come forward again to glorify the British national habit -of blundering. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” was so popular in its -day that it was printed on picture post cards; every school child -learned the duty of the lower classes under the Tory system—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Theirs not to make reply,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Theirs not to question why,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Theirs but to do and die.<br /></span> -<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_223">{223}</a></span></div></div> -</div> - -<p>Bear in mind that the factory system was now in full flower, and little -children ten and twelve years old were slaving all night in cotton -mills, or dragging heavy cars in the depths of coal mines. English -manufacturers and landlords were taxing the lower classes to such a -condition that today, when you see them pouring out for their holidays -upon Hampstead Heath, they seem not human beings, but some lower -species, shambling and deformed. Once in a while a gleam of this horror -breaks into Tennyson’s verse; but even then the message is -reactionary—an English gentleman is scolding at commercialism because -it destroys the good old country life.</p> - -<p>But for the most part the Victorian way of dealing with uncomfortable -things was to hush them up. Poetry must select pure and sweet subjects; -poetry must be polite, it must use big words and preserve the home -comforts. It is our duty to believe what is proper, even when it is -obviously not true.</p> - -<p>I have referred to Tennyson’s long agony on the subject of immortality. -The deepest experience of his life was the death of his friend, Arthur -Hallam, a man who apparently knew how to think, and to drive the dreamy -poet to work. It is puzzling to us that a grown man should be so taken -aback by death; it would seem to be a common enough phenomenon to be -noted and prepared for. But Tennyson was struck down mentally and -spiritually, and his sufferings make clear to us that he did not really -believe his creed. Men who are seriously convinced of heaven don’t mind -waiting a few years to join their loved ones; but Tennyson was never -really sure that he would see Arthur Hallam again, and he spent -seventeen years brooding over this problem, and putting his broodings -into “In Memoriam.”</p> - -<p>The poet early fell in love with a young English lady, but could not -afford to marry her; so he waited twenty years, and she waited also. Now -there have been poets who married when they fell in love, and went off -and kept house in a garret or a cottage, and made out the best they -could. But Tennyson had to have his poet’s robe and his poet’s chair in -front of the fireplace; he had to be an English gentleman, and to keep -his wife like an English lady in the days of Victorian propriety. The -lady, when they were finally united, put an end to fretting<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_224">{224}</a></span> over -immortality; she explained to her husband that “doubt is -devil-born”—and what gentleman wants a devil in his home? It is better -to become an oracle: to preach about peace in a far future, and meantime -wield a sword in the Crimea; to sing about justice, and vote the Tory -ticket; to have all the comforts that fine phrases can bring, without -sacrificing those other comforts of popularity and prosperity.</p> - -<p>Tennyson went back to the old days of Britain, and falsified the story -of King Arthur so as to make it sweetly sentimental. “Obedience is the -bond of rule,” he wrote; and so Queen Victoria’s husband came to call on -him. He preached submission to womanhood: “Lay thy sweet hands in mine -and trust to me”—and so he was summoned to Windsor Castle to kiss the -sweet hand of his queen. One thinks of the sweet hands of those English -ladies who took up hatchets and chopped the pictures in the National -Gallery!</p> - -<p>Victoria’s beloved husband died, and Tennyson wrote an ode to him; so he -became the dear pudgy old lady’s intimate friend, and she confided to -him the troubles of royalty. “How I wish you could suggest means of -crushing those horrible publications, whose object is to promulgate -scandal and calumny, which they invent themselves!” The poet did his -best; his most popular sentimental and patriotic stuff was published in -pamphlets which sold for thrippence; but in spite of everything the -labor movement continued to take root, and likewise Socialism—or -“Utopian idiocy,” to use the Tennysonian phrase.</p> - -<p>He sits upon his throne, eighty years of age and more, and hardly anyone -questions his supremacy; he is the greatest English poet since -Shakespeare, there is no living writer to be compared to him. We pity -him, for after all, he is a great man, and has written great -verse—“Ulysses,” for example, of which no one could ever wish to change -a line. He has written lyrics of beauty and real eloquence. But now he -sees the younger generation traveling another road from his, and he -wonders and fears and storms and scolds. He is too clear-sighted not to -see the wreck of his dreams—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Poor old voice of eighty crying after voices that have fled!<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">He looks about and sees modern capitalism<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_225">{225}</a></span>—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time, -City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?</p></div> - -<p>It was no common Victorian who saw that at the age of eighty; and no -fair critic will deny him credit for such lines. But the elderly -poet-lord had no idea what to do about it, and capitalist society -continued to nourish its secret disease, which twenty-two years after -Tennyson’s death was to cover the whole earth with vomit.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXX"></a>CHAPTER LXX<br /><br /> -HIGH-BROW SOCIETY</h2> - -<p>There was another poet who grew up in this unpromising Victorian -England. His father and grandfather were bank officials, and he had a -comfortable income. In his youth he was a dandy, with lemon-colored -gloves and flowing poetical locks; he turned into a leading clubman and -a prominent diner-out. He believed in the Church of England, and in -those social conventions which guide the lives of English gentlemen; he -refused to permit his wife to have anything to do with George Sand’s -Bohemian set, and when she tried to investigate spiritualism he broke up -the show.</p> - -<p>And yet he managed to be a great and open-minded poet, and in many ways -a revolutionary force. He had in him a core of sound instinct, a healthy -belief in life and a trust in his own intellect. He fell in love with a -lady poet by the name of Elizabeth Barrett, who was an invalid, kept in -a kind of prison of duty by a tyrannical old father. The poet did not -wait twenty years for her; he persuaded her to slip around the corner -and marry him—a dreadful scandal in the polite world of England.</p> - -<p>When I was a lad we did not have the word “high-brow”; its place was -filled by the word “Browning.” Learned ladies and gentlemen had formed a -“Browning Society,” and held solemn meetings in which they tried to find -out what these poems were about. Apparently the task proved a difficult -one, for they are at it still.</p> - -<p>Now a poet may be obscure because he has something to say which is very -profound; but there is little of that kind of obscurity in Robert -Browning. When you<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_226">{226}</a></span> decipher his message, it turns out to be something -quite obvious, like the immortality of the soul, or the rights of love, -or the fact that human motives are mixed. The cause of the obscurity is -that the poet has invented a perverse way of telling these things; he -likes to play around the outside of a subject, approach it from a dozen -different angles, and set you the task of piecing the thing together -from hints and glimpses.</p> - -<p>He is an enormously learned person, and has rummaged in a thousand old -dust-bins of history, and acquired a million details of names and places -and things; he pays you the generally quite undeserved compliment of -assuming that you know all this as well as he does. If he wishes to tell -you about some unknown musician in the court of some obscure Renaissance -ruler, he will begin by talking about a ring this musician used to wear, -and the first dozen lines of the poem will depend upon an ancient Greek -legend concerning the stone that is in the ring. If you don’t know the -legend about the stone in the ring of the musician in the court of the -Renaissance ruler, why then the opening of the poem has no meaning to -you, and the Browning Society might hold a hundred sessions on the -subject without making head or tail of it. Such writing is simply a bad -joke; it is one of the many forms of leisure-class art perversions.</p> - -<p>When Browning chooses to write real poetry, he can make it just as -simple and as melodious as Tennyson’s, and far more passionate. He -invented a new and fascinating poetical form, the dramatic lyric, or -dramatic soliloquy. He will take some strange and complicated character, -whom he has picked up in the junk-rooms of the past, and let this -character start to talk and reveal himself to you—not merely the things -he wants you to know, but the things he is trying to hide from you, and -which he lets slip between the lines. Thus we have Mr. Sludge, the -spiritualist medium, who would have converted Mrs. Browning if the poet -had not kicked him out of the house. Thus we have Bishop Blougram, an -elegant and thoroughly modern Catholic prelate, discussing with an -intimate friend over the wine and cigars the delicate question of how he -justifies himself for feeding base superstition to the people, who want -it and can’t get along without it.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_227">{227}</a></span></p> - -<p>Browning knew how to be direct, when his feelings were deeply enough -stirred. He was direct when he dealt with the old poet Wordsworth and -his apostasy from the cause of freedom. Anyone can understand the title, -“The Lost Leader,” and the opening lines</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Just for a handful of silver he left us,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Just for a riband to stick in his coat.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">Likewise, when the Brownings went to Italy and took fire at the struggle -of the Italian people for freedom, everybody understood the poetry they -wrote home; even the Austrian police understood it, for they opened -Browning’s mail, to his furious indignation. Likewise, when Mrs. -Browning died and some persons proposed to write her biography without -her husband’s permission, the husband was able to make known his -opposition. He spoke of “the paws of these blackguards in my bowels,” -and said he would “stop the scamp’s knavery along with his breath.”</p> - -<p>For his master-work, to which he devoted his later years, Browning made -a peculiar selection. It was a time when democracy was breaking into the -world of culture, in spite of all the opposition of academic authority. -We shall find poets and novelists in every country persisting in dealing -with vulgar reality, instead of with mythological demigods and romantic -conquerors. Browning went for his story to an old scandal pamphlet he -picked up in a second-hand bookshop of Florence. He might as well have -picked up a scrap of a Hearst newspaper from the gutter, for it dealt -with a sensational murder story, what is called a “crime of passion.” An -elderly merchant in Rome had killed his wife, and at his trial he proved -that she had run away with a young priest. The priest maintained that -the elopement had been a chaste one; he was trying to save the girl from -the cruelty of her husband.</p> - -<p>Browning, in telling the story, adopts the ultra-modern device of the -open forum: all sides shall have a hearing. In “The Ring and the Book” -you read nine long narratives of the same events. You hear Half Rome, -which sides with the husband; then you hear the Other Half Rome, which -sides with the wife. You hear the husband, the wife, the young priest, -the lawyers for each side, and the pope, rendering judgment. When you -get through<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_228">{228}</a></span> with all this reading you have learned several important -lessons: you have learned that life is a complicated thing, and truth -very difficult to arrive at; you have learned that good and evil live -side by side in the same human heart; you have learned to think for -yourself, and not to believe everything you hear; finally, you have -learned that the most sordid human events offer a potential literary -masterpiece—requiring only a man of genius to penetrate the hearts of -the persons involved!</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXXI"></a>CHAPTER LXXI<br /><br /> -OFFICIAL PESSIMISM</h2> - -<p>In this writer’s youth, when he was struggling to earn a living in New -York, there was one magazine which was open to new ideas, the -“Independent.” Its literary editor was Paul Elmer More, and he gave me a -chance to write book reviews for him—and then, alas! decided that he -could find other people whose writing he preferred. Mr. More evolved -into a critic, and has published I don’t know how many volumes of what -he calls the “Shelburne Essays.” Up to a few years ago, when Professor -Sherman made his appearance, I used to say that More was the one -literary conservative in America who was not intellectually -contemptible; the one man who combined scholarship with a perfectly -definite and consistent point of view, no sentimentality, and no -water-tight compartments in his brain.</p> - -<p>In the third volume of the “Shelburne Essays” Mr. More has one dealing -with Byron’s “Don Juan.” I smile when I reflect with what contempt Mr. -More would greet the proposition that he should read a modern writer as -slangy, as licentious, and as popular as Byron! But “Don Juan” was -written a hundred years ago; so it is a “classic,” and Mr. More greets -its author as the last of the great pessimists, one who had the wit to -recognize the futility of human life, and the courage to speak his -conclusions plainly.</p> - -<p>Things have changed since Byron’s day, Mr. More explains. “We, who have -approached the consummation of the world’s hope, know that happiness and -peace and the fulfilment of desires are about to settle down and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_229">{229}</a></span> brood -for ever more over the lot of mankind.” This, I had better explain, is -sarcasm on Mr. More’s part. He is irritated because modern scientific -people have presumed to think that human problems can be solved. He is -so much irritated that he turns his essay on Byron into a series of -sneers at “the new dispensation of official optimism.” For example, this -kind of thing:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>Next year, or the next, some divine invention shall come which will -prove this melancholy of the poets to have been only a childish -ignorance of man’s sublimer destiny; some discovery of a new -element more wonderful than radium will render the ancient brooding -over human feebleness a matter of laughter and astonishment; some -acceptance of the larger brotherhood of the race will wipe away all -tears and bring down upon earth the fair dream of heaven, a reality -and a possession forever; some new philosophy of the soul will -convert the old poems of conflict into meaningless fables, stale -and unprofitable.</p></div> - -<p>What is the meaning of this attitude of envenomed resentment at the idea -of a hope for mankind? We shall note it again and again among the poets -and critics of the ancient regime—of what we may call “the old -dispensation of official pessimism.” It used to puzzle me that scholars -and thinkers should be so malicious and perverted as to find pleasure in -trampling upon human aspiration; but after years of pondering I think I -understand it. These gentlemen are guests at a banquet, who, seeing the -food too long delayed, and despairing of anything better, have filled -their bellies with husks and straw; and now, when they are full, and can -no longer eat, they see the good food coming to the table!</p> - -<p>It was a perfectly natural thing for an ancient to be pessimistic. He -saw the world as a place of blind cruelty, the battle-ground of forces -which he did not understand; and what guarantee could he have that the -feeble intellect of man would ever tame these giants? So he made for -himself a philosophy of stern resignation, and an art of beautiful but -mournful despair. The scholars and lovers of old things have identified -themselves and their reputations with these ancient dignities and -renunciations, these tender and touching griefs; and how shall they -express their irritation when bumptious youth arises, and proceeds to -take charge of life, to abolish pestilence and famine, poverty, war, -crime—and perhaps, in the end, even old age and death?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_230">{230}</a></span></p> - -<p>All this is preliminary to the introduction of another Victorian poet; -one who moved me deeply in my youth, and still holds my undimmed -affection. I would choose Matthew Arnold as the perfect exemplar of the -“classical” attitude toward life; that is, resignation, at once pathetic -and heroic, to the pitiful fate of mankind on earth. Listen to him at -his best:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Ah, love, let us be true<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To one another! for the world, which seems<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To lie before us like a land of dreams,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So various, so beautiful, so new,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And we are here as on a darkling plain<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Where ignorant armies clash by night.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>The author of these lines was the son of a great teacher, and therefore -had no money. He spent thirty years of his life as an inspector of -schools; a most pitiful destiny for a poet—traveling all over England -to hear little children recite the list of the kings and the counties, -and tell the number of legs on a spider. The fountain of his poetry -dried up, and he became a critic, not merely of English letters but of -English life; in many ways the most radical and most intelligent critic -that Victorian England had. He preached the gospel of sweetness and -light; also, alas, he went on the war-path against an infamous bill -which was being agitated in Parliament, to permit a man to violate the -old Mosaic code by marrying the sister of his deceased wife!</p> - -<p>Matthew Arnold insisted that it wasn’t on account of Moses, but on -account of a thing he called “delicacy.” You cannot travel in Victorian -England without encountering phenomena like this. You will be introduced -to what appears to you a perfectly sane and self-contained and -cultivated gentleman, wearing exactly the correct frock-coat and tie; -but then, you will happen to touch one of his tribal taboos, and -suddenly he will shriek, and tear off his shirt, and pull out a sharp -knife, and begin to slash himself, and dance and whirl in a holy frenzy.</p> - -<p>—Ogi, wishing to make sure about this point, goes to the source of all -information on the subject of refinement in sex matters. “Tell me,” he -says, “if you were to die,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_231">{231}</a></span> would it be indelicate of me to marry one of -your younger sisters?”</p> - -<p>Mrs. Ogi, who has never read the Mosaic code, and is not learned in the -Victorian lunacies, looks at her husband with a puzzled expression. “I -helped to raise my sisters,” she says. “Surely any wife would want to -leave her husband in safe hands!”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXXII"></a>CHAPTER LXXII<br /><br /> -GOD SAVE THE PEOPLE</h2> - -<p>In the first half of this nineteenth century the British factory system -came to maturity; the capitalist class took charge of society, and -forced the working class into a condition of degradation hitherto -unknown upon this planet. The class struggle took definite -shape—Chartist agitations and suffrage reform bills and Corn Law -riots—and there arose in England a man of genius to tell about the -wrongs of the people from his own first-hand experience.</p> - -<p>His father was a wretchedly paid government clerk, who had no -acquaintance with the birth control movement. Charles Dickens was one of -eight half-starved children, and went to work at the age of ten in a -filthy, ramshackle blacking factory. The cruelties he there experienced -stamped his soul for life, and helped to make the radical movement of -the English-speaking world.</p> - -<p>Later on he got a chance to go to school, and became a court -stenographer and newspaper reporter, and saw the insides of ruling-class -rascality. He began writing humorous sketches which turned into the -“Pickwick Papers,” and so at the age of twenty-four he was carried up -into a golden cloud of glory. World fame and success were his for the -balance of his life; but he never entirely forgot the meaning of his -early days, and remained to some extent an apostle of the poor and -oppressed.</p> - -<p>When I say that Dickens is radical propaganda, I do not mean merely that -he wrote novel after novel exposing the abuses of his time, the -cruelties of the poor laws, the horrors of the debtors’ prisons, the -delays and corruptions of the courts, the knaveries and imbecilities of -politics. I do not mean merely that he hated by instinct and ridi<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_232">{232}</a></span>culed -all through his life, lawyers and judges and newspaper editors and -preachers and priests of capitalist prosperity. I mean something more -deep and more fundamental than that: I mean that the very selection of -his themes and of his characters, the whole environment and atmosphere -of his novels, is a piece of propaganda. For Dickens proceeds to force -into the aristocratic and exclusive realms of art the revolutionary -notion that the poor and degraded are equally as interesting as the rich -and respectable. We are invited, not merely to laugh at the antics of -illiterate and unrefined people, as in Shakespeare; we are invited to -enter into their hearts and minds, to put ourselves in their place and -actually live their experiences. As reward for so doing, we are offered -treasures of laughter and tears and thrills.</p> - -<p>I don’t know how it is nowadays, but in my boyhood, which was some -twenty years after Dickens’ death, everybody read him—my rich -relatives, who read nothing else, and my poor relatives, broken-down -Southern aristocrats, who read nothing else except the life of Robert E. -Lee. And then in New York, the people I met in boarding-houses and -third-rate lodgings—all shuddered over Bill Sykes and wept over Paul -Dombey and laughed over Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller.</p> - -<p>Dickens was, and remained to the end, from the point of view of -leisure-class culture, a quite vulgar person. He took a naive delight in -his worldly triumphs, and counted the success of his books by sales and -money. He was a born actor, and loved to shine before the public; -devising dramatic readings of his works, and taking endless tours, both -in England and America, gathering great sums of money—though of course -not to be compared with the moving picture fortunes of our day. It was a -time when audiences liked to shed tears out loud, and Dickens liked to -join them; he has all the tremolo stops in his organ, and piles on -sentiment until we shudder. Fastidious and literary persons have now -made it fashionable to declare that Dickens is unreadable; but the -people have read him, and his sentiment as well as his humor are a part -of our racial heritage, and one of the fountain-heads of the Socialist -movement. His books are a five million word reiteration of the old -Chartist hymn<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_233">{233}</a></span>—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">When wilt thou save the people?<br /></span> -<span class="i2">O God of mercy! when?<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Not kings and lords, but nations!<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Not thrones and crowns, but men!<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>Dickens himself was entirely instinctive in his class feelings; his mind -was a typical middle-class muddle, and his remedy for the ills he -pictured was kindness and poor law reform and charity bazaars—hanging -paper garlands about the neck of the tiger of capitalism. The British -masses needed time in which to find out how to bind and destroy this -beast; but the first service was to proclaim the fact that this -capitalist world is a world impossible for sensitive and decent human -beings to endure—a world in which justice has become the Circumlocution -Office, and truth has become Thomas Gradgrind, and Christianity has -become Mr. Pecksniff and Uriah Heep.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXXIII"></a>CHAPTER LXXIII<br /><br /> -THE COLLECTOR OF SNOBS</h2> - -<p>Emerson, commenting upon the old saying that “No man is a hero to his -valet,” put the question: “What hero ever had a valet?” This goes to -prove that Emerson was not a reader of popular fiction; for if he had -been following the novels of William Makepeace Thackeray in “Fraser’s -Magazine,” he would have known that it is impossible for any hero to be -without a valet. In Dickens we enter into the lives of the poor, and in -Thackeray we enter into the lives of the rich, and it is hard for us to -decide which class has the greater claim to our pity.</p> - -<p>Thackeray was bom in India, his father being a government official. They -tried to educate him at Cambridge, but it didn’t take, because he was -incorrigibly desultory, a big, good-natured fellow who loved eating and -drinking and gambling and good fellowship—everything, in short, but -hard work. He early lost his fortune, trying to publish a paper; then he -had to work, and became a contributor to “Punch,” and developed a -faculty for burlesque verses and satiric sketches.</p> - -<p>In my youth there was general complaint that Thackeray was “a cynic.” -Let us settle that question at the outset; he was one of the most -sentimental souls that ever<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_234">{234}</a></span> walked about the world in trousers. But he -had a pair of eyes, and he saw in the fashionable society around him a -hundred different varieties of snobs; he collected them into a “Book of -Snobs”—each one like a butterfly stuck on a pin. He went on to write a -series of novels, full of scoldings varied by ridicule of human vanity -and folly.</p> - -<p>His first great work remains entirely neglected by the critics. “Barry -Lyndon” is a marvelous piece of sustained irony, the story of a capable -scoundrel, who makes his way in the great world by being just a little -sharper than the people he meets, and a little more honest with himself. -You recall how Milton, a devout and orthodox Puritan, could not refrain -from making Satan heroic, because Satan was a rebel and Milton was -another. We notice the same phenomenon in this case of Barry Lyndon, who -does every kind of rascal thing; yet the fact remains, he is living by -his wits, he is surviving in a world of privilege and power, and -Thackeray is secretly thrilled by him. That doubtless accounts for the -unpopularity of the story; for the average novel reader likes to have -his villains labeled, and not to mix his blacks and his whites.</p> - -<p>The instinctive rebel in Thackeray shows himself still more plainly in -“Vanity Fair.” This time the villain is Becky Sharp, an utterly -heartless intriguer, selling her sex for money and power. Nevertheless, -she is a woman “on her own,” a little tiger-cat backed into a corner, -with all the world poking sticks at her; she fights back, and gets the -best of her enemies, and Thackeray cannot help making her the most -interesting figure in the book.</p> - -<p>As a respectable Victorian sentimentalist, he did his best to provide us -with a foil for Becky, giving us Amelia Sedley, the perfect, submissive, -adoring female. The daughter of a wealthy merchant, Amelia has never had -a moment’s discomfort in her life. She is a model of the Victorian -virtues; she honors and serves the male members of her family, no matter -how selfish and worthless they may be. She has the brains of a -medium-sized rabbit, and after we have got to know her, we understand -why Victorian gentlemen sought refuge in interesting mistresses.</p> - -<p>It has been said that in Thackeray’s novels all the good people are -fools and all the evil people are clever. Beatrix Esmond, the one woman -who rivals Becky Sharp in in<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_235">{235}</a></span>terest, is a cold, proud beauty, without -even Becky’s excuse of poverty; she schemes to marry a duke, and when he -is killed in a duel, she seeks to become the mistress of a prince, and -ends ignominously as the wife of a tutor and the widow of a bishop. The -Anti-Socialist Union of Great Britain, which exists to fight the “Reds,” -should begin its labors by excluding from all libraries these -devastating pictures of the manners and morals of the ruling classes.</p> - -<p>I do not mean by this that Thackeray was consciously a Socialist; quite -the contrary. As a member of the ruling classes, he pleads with them to -be worthy of their high and agreeable destiny. How completely he -believed in the “gentleman” you can see by the treatment he gives to his -hero, Pendennis, a perfectly worthless young idler, and to Major -Pendennis, a cynical and depraved old rascal. Thackeray condones the -former and loves and pities the latter, and expects us to weep over the -closing picture of the old martinet, having lost his fortune, obliged to -dwell in a charity home with other indigent parasites. I speak for one -reader, who could have borne with entire equanimity to see the major at -work on the rock-pile, accompanied by all the other idle clubmen of -London.</p> - -<p>Thackeray in his writings rebelled against some conventions of his -world, but in his every-day life he was as helpless as Amelia Sedley. -His wife became insane, so he fell victim of that superstition which -condemns the innocent partner in such a marriage to life-long celibacy. -Thackeray, enduring this infliction, seemed heroic to his friends, and -pitiful to us. He left it to a woman novelist, George Eliot, to set the -precedent of defiance to this especially idiotic tribal taboo. George -Eliot loved George Henry Lewes, who had an insane wife, and she went and -lived with Lewes for twenty-four years, until his death, and told all -the world about it. Thus we have one pleasant detail to record -concerning Victorian England.</p> - -<p>In his early days Thackeray had lived poorly, because he had to; but -later he acquired a taste for expensive food, and especially drink, and -thereby ruined his health and died at the age of fifty-two. This, of -course, was devoutly concealed by his daughters, and explains the fact -that no biography was published. Like other conventional gentlemen, he -felt bound to provide incomes for these daugh<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_236">{236}</a></span>ters, so he wasted his -time trying to get some government sinecure, first in the post office, -and then in the diplomatic service—the very kind of thing he exposed in -his stories. He took to lecturing, following in the foot-steps of -Dickens, but not enjoying the work, because he had nothing of the -showman in him, but on the contrary the English gentleman’s intense -reserve.</p> - -<p>All this is what is called “gossip,” and is supposed to have nothing to -do with the works of a great writer. I record my belief, that the -character and life experiences of an artist make his works of art, in -the same way that a mold makes the image out of the liquid metal. The -quickest route to the understanding of any novelist or poet is to know -these personal details about him; and above all, his relationship to -those who paid him the money which kept him alive from day to day. -Whether he conforms, or whether he rebels, these money-forces condition -a man’s life.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXXIV"></a>CHAPTER LXXIV<br /><br /> -ARTS AND CRAFTS</h2> - -<p>Capitalist industrialism may be indicted on economic grounds because it -is wasteful, and on moral grounds because it is dishonest; also it may -be indicted upon esthetic grounds because it is ugly. The artistic -temperament objects to it for this last reason, and there were some -among the artists who set out to make war upon it.</p> - -<p>John Ruskin was the son of a wealthy English wine merchant; he devoted -himself to the study of art, and sought to carry it back to the simple -standards of the Christian primitives. He became a lecturer and teacher, -and founded a college for the sons of workingmen at Oxford. We find him -leading groups of British university students out to do manual labor -upon the roads—a pathetic effort to be useful and honest in a world of -cheating and exploiting. In the end Ruskin went out of his mind, as a -result of brooding over the ugliness and cruelty of his country’s -industrial system.</p> - -<p>Among his disciples was one who is entitled to a place in these pages, -because he was a working artist who strove to create beauty upon a sound -social basis; also because<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_237">{237}</a></span> he was a Socialist who tried to teach the -principles of brotherhood and solidarity to a world of individualist and -capitalist art.</p> - -<p>William Morris was born in 1834; his parents were wealthy and he -inherited a comfortable income. His mother designed him for a bishop, -but he soon outgrew that career. He parted with his Christian faith on -the intellectual side, but he still kept its emotions; he was a -passionate lover of the Middle Ages, and of the Gothic spirit in art. He -managed to persuade himself that the Middle Ages had been happy, and -that the craftsmen in those days had been free to make what they loved -without reference to the profit motive. So all his life he yearned back -to those good old days, and made them a standard by which to judge -everything bad in his own time.</p> - -<p>He was a simple, whole-souled fellow, who loved to do things with his -hands, and possessed extraordinary aptitude for all the arts; he learned -to paint and to carve and to decorate, and to do every kind of hand -labor that contained any slightest element of artistry. He looked out -upon modern industrialism and saw wholesale, cheap production of ugly -and commonplace and unsubstantial goods. He hated it with his whole -soul, and attributed all the moral evils of the time to the fact that -the workers had lost their love for their job and their pride in -craftsmanship. He wanted a home to live in, and because no architect -knew how to design a beautiful home, Morris became his own architect; -because he could not buy any beautiful furniture, he designed his own -furniture and had a carpenter make it. Out of this came the -establishment of a firm to do such labor, and so grew the Arts and -Crafts movement.</p> - -<p>That brought Morris into touch with workingmen, a very dangerous thing; -because under our present social system it is better for a gentleman to -stay in his own class, and not find out what is happening to the -workers. Morris was drawn into politics—beginning, curiously enough, -with an effort to save old churches and other buildings from being -“restored” according to modern taste. Before long we find him evolved -into one of the leading Victorian rebels, a founder of the -Social-Democratic Federation, speaking afternoons and evenings at<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_238">{238}</a></span> -soap-box meetings. The critics lamented this, just as they lamented the -political career of John Milton: it seemed such a waste of time for a -great poet and artist. But it was all a part of William Morris’s life; -if he had not been the kind of man he was, he could not have produced -the kind of art he did.</p> - -<p>In between all his other labors he wrote poetry; it flowed out of him -freely, wonder tales of all sorts, having to do with those old times -which he loved, and the beautiful things which he imagined happening -there. It is very good narrative verse, and all young people ought to -read “The Earthly Paradise”; also they ought to read “The Dream of John -Ball,” and learn what happened to the social rebels in the old days.</p> - -<p>Morris’s most popular piece of prose writing is “News from Nowhere.” He -had read Bellamy’s Utopia, “Looking Backward,” and he did not like it, -because Bellamy was an American, and had organized and systematized the -world. Nobody was going to organize and systematize William Morris; he -set about to make his own Utopia, in which everything is placid and -commonplace, healthy as the animals are healthy—but also abominably -dull.</p> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi: “You are discussing one of the classics of your movement, -and you know what the critics all say: the Socialists ought to begin by -agreeing on what they want.”</p> - -<p>“I know,” says Ogi, “and I’m sorry to disappoint them. But there are -many different kinds of people in the world, and some of each kind in -our movement. I am a Socialist who believes in machinery, and has no -interest in any world that does not develop machine power to the -greatest possible extent. We are like people traveling through a tunnel; -it is dark and smoky, and some want to turn back, but I want to go -through to the other end.”</p> - -<p>“Morris and Ruskin said the other end was in hell.”</p> - -<p>“Yes, but I think their eyes were blinded by the smoke. What is wrong is -not with machinery, but with the private ownership of machinery. There -is no reason why machines should not make beautiful and substantial -things, instead of making ugly and dishonest things—except the fact -that machines are owned by people<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_239">{239}</a></span> who have no interest except to make a -profit out of the product. A thing is not less beautiful because there -are millions of other things exactly like it in the world. That is just -a snobbish notion, and Morris should have learned the lesson from any -field of daisies.”</p> - -<p>Here is Sherwood Anderson telling the story of his life. He is one -American who does not like machinery, and he has good reason; he has -worked in factories, and he knows. He agrees with Morris that the -monotony of the machine destroys the initiative and therefore the morals -of the workers; they cannot create, and so they tell smutty stories. But -you note that Anderson is not a Socialist, and has not the vision of -what a factory might be if it were democratically owned and managed by -the workers. The workers will then be very proud of their beautiful -machines, they will learn to understand and tend them all, and -administer the politics of the great industry of which the machines are -a part. The individual worker will travel from the factories to the -harvest fields and back, as many varieties of labor as he fancies. And -anyhow he won’t have to work but three or four hours a day, and the rest -of the time he can develop his faculties by making verses, or playing -music, or staging dramas, or baseball games, or whatever he pleases. And -every year the machines will become more automatic, until some day the -only labor of man will consist of pressing a few buttons every morning. -Whether you like that or not depends entirely upon whether or not you -have developed your brains, and want to develop them still further.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXXV"></a>CHAPTER LXXV<br /><br /> -SEEING AMERICA FIRST</h2> - -<p>The spirit of John Milton and John Bunyan crossed the Atlantic Ocean and -settled in Massachusetts, and the spirit of their enemies crossed the -Atlantic Ocean and settled in Virginia. They made two civilizations, and -these civilizations fought a civil war in the new world, just as they -had done in the old.</p> - -<p>For the first two hundred years the colonists were busy killing Indians -and clearing the wilderness, so they had little time for art. They had -to break their ties with<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_240">{240}</a></span> the old country; and just as we saw Voltaire -finding it easier to rebel in religion and politics than in the field of -culture, so in America we shall find that the Declaration of -Independence was signed a long time before any artist was bold enough to -revolt from British standards of taste. The first American writers were -concerned to handle American themes as they imagined Addison and Steele -and Burke and Dryden would have done.</p> - -<p>The first writer to escape this British tradition did so, not by making -an American tradition, but by ascending into the universal and -transcendental. Ralph Waldo Emerson read Goethe and Swedenborg and Plato -and the Hindus, and became a Yankee mystic and democratic saint.</p> - -<p>He was the son of a Unitarian clergyman, and followed in his father’s -footsteps. But early in life he realized that he no longer believed the -special doctrines which gave meaning to the communion service, so he -stood up in his church, and very quietly and simply told about his new -convictions, and went out into the world to earn his living as an -independent lecturer.</p> - -<p>Puritanism was now two hundred years ancient, but the temper of it still -survived in New England; that is, people were painfully anxious to do -right, and looked up to teachers who had studied such problems. They -were willing to gather in meeting places, and be advised what they -should do, and to pay a modest stipend to the adviser. So this young -rebel was able to earn the simple living which sufficed everyone in -Concord in those days. He studied the world’s best literature in several -languages, he thought earnestly and wrote honestly, and was a model of -dignity, kindness, and wisdom.</p> - -<p>His most popular lectures are known to us as “Emerson’s Essays.” I read -them in youth, and owe to them a tribute of gratitude. First of all, -they teach self-reliance, the most fundamental of the pioneer virtues. -It was by self-reliant men that New England was made; and in this -atmosphere of extreme individualism, it was impossible for a philosopher -to value the equally fundamental virtue of solidarity. Emerson has no -conception of a co-operative world, and believes that he has done his -duty to his fellows by courtesy and the speaking of the truth.</p> - -<p>The essays are formless, consisting of scattered para<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_241">{241}</a></span>graphs and random -reflections. They are not always easy to interpret, because they soar -into regions of the absolute, where every statement is equally as untrue -as it is true. The bearings depend upon the application; so that we have -to know Emerson’s whole thought, and his life. Applying the highest -tests, we find his doctrine a little thin and his example a little tame. -He lived through stern times, and while his voice was always on the -right side, we feel that he might have been more prompt and more -vigorous. His optimism is beautiful, but a trifle lacking in content. We -want a man to put more reality into his writings, to show us how to deal -with the grim and hateful facts of life. Emerson makes a cryptic -statement—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">I am owner of the sphere,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of the seven stars and the solar year,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of Caesar’s hand, and Plato’s brain,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakespeare’s strain.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>We say: yes, perhaps; but most of us find it difficult to get the -Shakespeare strain to come out of us. Likewise, we do not know quite how -to reconcile Lord Christ with Caesar; nor can we always get Lord Christ -to agree with Shakespeare—watch the scoffing this book will cause among -the critics! You see how these mystic utterances are liable to be -misunderstood; and how it was possible for the transcendentalist -movement, which produced Emerson, to produce also the horrors of -“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.”</p> - -<p>On the other hand, when Emerson deals with justice and liberty in New -England he can deliver as heavy a punch as Byron: for example, his -“Boston Hymn,” discussing the question of compensation for the -enfranchised slaves—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Pay ransom to the owner,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">And fill the bag to the brim.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who is the owner? The slave is owner,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">And ever was. Pay him.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>I have discussed these lines in “The Book of Life,” and suggested how -much cheaper it would have been to pay the owners than to fight the -Civil War. I overlooked the fact that this “Boston Hymn” was written -after the Civil War was on. Emerson, combining Yankee economy<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_242">{242}</a></span> with wise -humanity, had all along been advocating the sensible course of freeing -the slaves by purchase.</p> - -<p>We think of this Concord sage as a philosopher, and less often as a -poet. But he was a great poet; at his best he is among the immortals. -Not only is there wisdom and moral beauty in his verse; there is love of -nature, and there is passion. People sometimes died young in Concord, -just as they did in old England and in Greece, and poets poured their -sorrow into song. Emerson’s “Threnody,” written upon the death of his -five-year-old son, is lacking in all the classical paraphernalia of -Milton’s “Lycidas,” but it is full of such beauty and fervor as are -native to our country, and I see no reason why we Americans should -devote all our time to the worship of foreign gods. If our colleges must -teach the classics, to the exclusion of modern work, let them at least -teach our native classics, which are easier for us to understand.</p> - -<p>I propose a motto for our youth: See Emerson first!</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXXVI"></a>CHAPTER LXXVI<br /><br /> -THE AGE OF INNOCENCE</h2> - -<p>America at this time was an overgrown youthful body, ill-supplied with -mind; and a few ardent believers in culture set out to fill this need. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a student at Bowdoin College, and the -faculty decided that Cervantes and Dante and Goethe and Moliere and Hugo -ought to be more than names to the American people; somebody ought to -study these languages and literatures, and pass them on. They gave -Longfellow a traveling scholarship for three years, and he went abroad -and collected things romantic and beautiful and innocent in Spain and -Italy and Germany and France, and came home and spent the next twenty or -thirty years in teaching them, first at Bowdoin and then at Harvard. He -translated poetry, and also wrote poetry of his own, very much -resembling the translations. At the age of forty-seven he became a poet -exclusively, and lived to be a seventy-five-year-old boy, just as -romantic and beautiful and innocent as when he had first gone out to -gather nourishment for the hungry young soul of America.</p> - -<p>Longfellow was a moralist, and it was his purpose to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_243">{243}</a></span> draw useful -conclusions in his poetry. He would start by looking at the planet Mars, -and end by proving that human beings must be brave and self-reliant: not -that there is anything remotely suggesting such qualities in a “red -planet,” but because this planet happens to be named after the God of -war. He would look at a ship on the stocks, and draw conclusions about -the government of his country. He would look at the village blacksmith, -and thank him for a lesson in diligence and sobriety.</p> - -<p>That kind of poetry has now gone out of fashion. The young intellectuals -of America are no longer romantic and beautiful and innocent, and they -say that Longfellow is propaganda. But you know my thesis by now—theirs -is just as much propaganda, only it is on the other side. What -Longfellow called art is incitement towards diligence and sobriety, -while what our young sophisticates call art is incitement toward going -to hell in a hurry. Anything that pictures the delights of the senses -and the breakdown of the will is art; but poor Longfellow, in an -unguarded moment, had the misfortune to exclaim that</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Life is real! Life is earnest!<br /></span> -<span class="i2">And the grave is not its goal.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">These two lines have been enough to damn him in the eyes of a whole -generation of coterie-litterateurs.</p> - -<p>Turning the pages of the art which Longfellow brought back from Europe, -there flashes to mind a memory of the days when I also traveled in -Europe, collecting culture. It was in Naples, a soft moonlit evening in -early spring, and I stood before a great statue, noting its dim -outlines. A figure slipped up beside me, and a soft voice began to -whisper, offering to take me to a place where there were beautiful boys: -“beautiful, sweet Neapolitan boys,” I remember the phrase. I wonder what -the traveling idealist from Bowdoin College would have made of such a -whisper in the moonlight!</p> - -<p>That was a dozen years ago, and we in America have learned something -about Europe since then. I am the last person in the world who would -desire a return to the age of innocence, or advocate, even for the -young, the blinking of grim and hideous facts. But this I do believe: a -time will come, and not so far in the future, when American youth will -react from the hip-pocket flask and petting-<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_244">{244}</a></span>party stage of culture. -With full knowledge of vice and disease, it will choose virtue and -health, because these are the truly interesting and worth while things, -and the truly great themes of art.</p> - -<p>Pending the arrival of such a time, I record my notion, that poetry does -not cease to be great because it is declaimed by a million schoolboys. -“To be or not to be,” and “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” are great -poetry, even though we personally are tired of them. If it be permitted -to tell a story in verse, then assuredly “The Wreck of the Hesperus” is -a tragic story told in vivid and stirring language. I say that anyone -who does not know this for a great ballad simply does not know what a -ballad is. You may spend your time digging in Percy’s “Reliques” and -other old volumes, and find things less easy to read, but nothing more -worth reading. I go farther and admit that when I was young I found -delight in “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “Hiawatha” and “Evangeline,” and I -don’t believe that kind of young person is yet entirely extinct in -America.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXXVII"></a>CHAPTER LXXVII<br /><br /> -A SNOW-BOUND SAINT</h2> - -<p>The Puritans, having been driven from England by religious persecution, -set to work in their New England to persecute others. Among their -victims was a Massachusetts Quaker by the name of Whittier, who was -deprived of the franchise for daring to petition the town council for -liberty to preach. Undaunted by the punishment, this pioneer raised a -family of ten stalwart children in the Quaker faith, and became the -great-great-grandfather of a Quaker poet, who has received but scant -appreciation from the literary critics of his country.</p> - -<p>John Greenleaf Whittier was born in 1807, one of a large family, and -grew up to toil upon a rocky farm. He got his education in a country -school, and his first glimpse of poetry from a wandering Scotchman who -spent a night at the farm-house, and who sang the songs of Robert Burns. -The frail and sensitive lad who sat and listened enraptured was to grow -up to be the Burns of New Eng<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_245">{245}</a></span>land; a saintly Burns, having the Scotch -poet’s energy and rebellious ardor, but not his destroying vices.</p> - -<p>Independence, hard work, and religion were the three factors in -Whittier’s environment. He wanted to go to an academy to continue his -education, but there was no money, so he earned it by work as a cobbler. -You remember the sneer of the Tory critic—“Back to your gallipots, Mr. -Keats”; and here we find a critic satirizing our Quaker poet: “the wax -still sticking to his fingers’ ends.” You remember how Keats fell in -love with an elegant young lady; Whittier became a country editor and -presumed to aspire to the daughter of a local judge, and was spurned, -and went back home, ill, poverty-stricken and humiliated.</p> - -<p>But he continued to study and write verses, and found another job as -editor, and a prospect of success in politics. Then came the crisis in -his life; the anti-slavery movement was making its first feeble -beginnings in New England, and Whittier became the friend of William -Lloyd Garrison, and spent sleepless nights wrestling with the angel of -duty. At the age of twenty-seven he made the choice; he threw away his -career, and spent his hard-won savings to print and send out five -hundred copies of an address in opposition to chattel slavery. We who in -these days are daring to challenge wage slavery, and are witnessing -mobbings and jailings and torturing for the cause, must not forget that -back in the 1830’s this gentle Quaker poet was stoned and nearly lynched -in Massachusetts, and mobbed again and had his office burned about his -head in Philadelphia.</p> - -<p>He suffered from ill health all his life, yet he never gave up the -cause. He suffered from poverty; having a mother and sisters dependent -upon him, he was too poor ever to marry. He continued to edit papers, he -wrote and spoke against slavery, and composed verses which were taken up -and recopied by constantly increasing numbers of newspapers. Many of -these verses are now found in his collected works, and one who reads -them is surprised by their uniformly high quality, not merely the fervor -and energy, but the beauty of expression and the treasures of -imagination which this self-taught country boy poured into his -propaganda. You recall Browning’s rebuke to the old poet Wordsworth, -“The Lost Leader.” Here is Whit<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_246">{246}</a></span>tier’s “Ichabod,” rebuking Daniel -Webster for his apostasy to the cause of freedom—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">All else is gone, from those great eyes<br /></span> -<span class="i2">The soul has fled:<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When faith is lost, when honor dies,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">The man is dead!<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>Whittier was not among the fanatics of the movement; on the contrary, he -was a shrewd politician, interested in moving the minds of his fellows -and in getting something done. He helped in the forming of the Abolition -party, which later became the Free Soil party, and then the Republican -party of Lincoln. As a Quaker he could not support the war, yet he -managed to write verses about it—for example, when Stonewall Jackson -was unwilling to kill old Barbara Frietchie for hanging out the Stars -and Stripes in Frederick. It is probable that this incident never -happened, but it made a very popular poem.</p> - -<p>Whittier never went to college, he never traveled in Europe to acquire a -foreign tone; he remained an American peasant. He voiced their thoughts -in their own language, and they have cherished him, and will some day -force the critics to give him his due place. If you are looking for -ballads made out of native material, read the story of old Skipper -Ireson, who roused the fury of his villagers by sailing away from a ship -in distress:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart<br /></span> -<span class="i2">By the women of Marblehead.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>If you are looking for American sentiment, for simple, untouched -democracy, read “Maud Muller.” Above all, if you want the inner essence -of New England farm life, the mingled harshness and beauty of its body, -and the mingled sternness and charm of its spirit, read “Snow-Bound”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXXVIII"></a>CHAPTER LXXVIII<br /><br /> -PURITANISM IN DECAY</h2> - -<p>The Puritans of Massachusetts, having killed the Indians and fenced the -farms and built the towns, settled into the routine of getting one -another’s money. The more enterprising ones moved West, where there was -more<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_247">{247}</a></span> money; the others sunk into slow decay. Puritanism came to mean, -not aggressive virtue, but negative avoidance. Before it passed away -entirely, it produced a man of genius who was of it enough to know it -thoroughly, yet sufficiently out of it to be able to embody it in art.</p> - -<p>Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, a port which had once been -prosperous, but had lost in competition with the great cities. It was a -mournful place, living in the memory of its past, which included the -drowning and hanging of witches, a frenzy of religious terror in which -an ancestor of Hawthorne had been a persecuting judge. One of this -judge’s victims had put a curse upon him, and the novelist pictures -himself, playfully, as the last sad relic of this curse. He was a -solitary man, born to poverty, shy, aloof and obscure. Recognition did -not come until the middle forties, and meantime he lived in ancient, -lonely houses, staying indoors by day and wandering the streets by -night. He had no political sense, no social sense; events in the world -outside meant little—he lived in the past.</p> - -<p>Yet, strangely enough, he did not accept the ideas of this past. He had -nothing of the robust Tory fervor of Sir Walter Scott; he was a modern -man, and a quiet, skeptical humor shines through his pages. What had -happened was that his faith had dried up, and nothing else had come to -take its place; so there he was, not knowing why, or how, or to what -end. He wrote elaborate diaries, full of minute details about the things -which happened hour by hour; things which only a child would consider -worth recording. He would produce and publish a sketch in which, with -really beautiful art, he would describe the sensations of walking about -the streets of Salem on a rainy night, and how the lights shone in the -puddles—yellow lights of the street-lamps and blue and green lights -from the drug-stores.</p> - -<p>He gathered strange legends of old-time people, living terror-haunted -lives, driven to sin by the very desperation of their efforts to avoid -it. The pangs of conscience are Hawthorne’s “local color” and artistic -tradition; he knows them in every detail, but he himself is not under -their spell—they are like bric-à-brac and objects of art which he -collects. “Twice-Told Tales” was the title of his first volume, and -this, you see, prepares us for con<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_248">{248}</a></span>scious literary artifice. Then we -have “Mosses from an Old Manse” which promises mournfulness and -moldiness, desolation and decay. Then “The House of the Seven Gables,” -the hiding place of an old and dying family haunted by a curse.</p> - -<p>“The Scarlet Letter” brought its author instant recognition, and is -considered by many critics America’s most authentic masterpiece of -fiction. A young married woman in the old-time witch-hunting Salem has -yielded to adulterous love for a young clergyman. A child is born, and -the mother is publicly accused, and exhibited upon the scaffold, with -the letter “A” embroidered in scarlet cloth upon her dress. She will not -reveal the name of her lover, and so the young clergyman escapes -obloquy, but is haunted by that sense of guilt which is the principal -product of Puritanism in decay.</p> - -<p>The “eternal triangle,” you see; but it differs from other triangles in -that it is not a story of passion, but of punishment. We do not see the -guilty love in the days of its happiness, but only in the days of its -remorse. As in all Hawthorne’s stories, we meet, not people who are -acting, but people who are looking back upon actions long since -committed. This is one kind of art, and I admit the greatness of “The -Scarlet Letter” as a piece of technique. But we are here discussing art -works as human and social products; and I point out, as in the case of -so many other tragedies, how temporary and unsubstantial is the ground -upon which it rests.</p> - -<p>The ethical basis of “The Scarlet Letter” is the conviction that -marriage is indissoluble, and that a young woman who has been given in -marriage to an elderly man, and finds herself unhappy, is bound by the -laws of God to remain in the bonds of that unhappy marriage. But -suppose, for the sake of argument, that the ideas of mankind should -undergo a change; suppose we should come to the conviction that a young -woman who finds herself married to an elderly man whom she does not -love, and who conceives an intense and enduring passion for a younger -man, and desires to have children by that younger man—suppose we should -decide that this woman, in remaining with the older and unloved man, and -denying life to children by the younger man, is committing a crime -against posterity, violating a fundamental law upon which<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_249">{249}</a></span> race progress -depends? You can see that in that case “The Scarlet Letter” would become -entirely archaic, an object of curiosity mingled with repugnance.</p> - -<p>The American government honored this eminently respectable novelist by -making him, first a gauger of customs, and then its consul to Liverpool. -He was a prematurely old man then, and fled from the cold fogs of -England to Rome—which he liked no better. But he patiently collected -information concerning Roman antiquities, and composed a novel called -“The Marble Faun,” which is dutifully read as a guide book by all -school-marms visiting the Eternal City. How well adapted this Puritan -genius was to interpret the Latin world, you may judge from the fact -that he was shocked by nude statues, and could not see why sculptors -continued to overlook the necessity for marble clothing. That skin was -made before clothing, and may continue to be worn after clothing is -forgotten, is a fact which did not occur to this traveler from Salem.</p> - -<p>He came back to pass his last days in an America torn by the agonies of -the Civil War. He was a Democrat by force of inertia, and had written a -campaign biography of the genial and bibulous President Pierce. He had -no understanding of the war, nor of the new America which was to be born -from it. In these last pathetic days he reminds us of the poor old Tory, -Sir Walter Scott, facing the Reform Bill and the Chartist riots and “the -country mined below our feet.” I plead with artists to step ahead of the -procession in their youth, so that in their old age. they may not be -left so pitifully far behind.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXXIX"></a>CHAPTER LXXIX<br /><br /> -THE ANGEL ISRAFEL</h2> - -<p>The Puritans who settled Massachusetts believed that happiness was to be -found in the repressing of the “carnal nature.” The Cavaliers who -settled Maryland and Virginia believed in enjoyment, and rode their -passions at a gallop. It was appropriate that these Cavaliers should -give to America an artist who taught that sensuous beauty is a mystic -revelation of God, and that poetry must be music, to the exclusion of -intellect and moral sense.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_250">{250}</a></span></p> - -<p>A Maryland general’s son ran away and married a young actress, and these -two lived a wretched, hand-to-mouth existence, and died in a garret, -leaving three infants. One of the three was named Edgar Poe, and our -first glimpse of him shows a nurse feeding him upon a “sugar-tit” soaked -in gin. A little later we find him adopted by a sentimental lady named -Allan, and made into a kind of drawing-room pet, taught to pledge toasts -in drink. He was an exquisite little fellow, proud, sensitive and -self-willed; and in his early training we note the seeds of all his -later misery.</p> - -<p>He began writing poetry in childhood, and we still read verses which he -composed in his ’teens. He was sent to the University of Virginia, where -along with rich men’s sons he gambled and drank. He deserted the -University, quarreled with his benefactors, and enlisted in the army. -They got him out and sent him to West Point, which is famous for having -graduated a number of soldiers, and for having failed to graduate two -artists, Edgar Allan Poe and James McNeill Whistler. Poe wrote verses -and drank brandy with his room-mates, and finally set about to get -himself expelled from a life which he hated.</p> - -<p>So here he was at the age of twenty-two, a poet, a rebel and a drunkard. -He had eighteen years more to live, and during that time his life was -one long agony of struggle. He had brilliant gifts, his work found -recognition, and he got many editorial positions, but could not keep -them. He wandered from city to city, quarreled with both enemies and -friends, and exhibited all those forms of evasion and dishonesty for -which alcohol and opium are responsible....</p> - -<p>“How much shall I say about the great curse of the South?” asks Ogi.</p> - -<p>“Say it all,” says his wife.</p> - -<p>“I recall those old Maryland and Virginia homesteads, dark and dusty, -falling to decay; a few sticks of furniture, moth-eaten hangings, and -silent, pale, in-door men and women—the former drinking, the latter -taking drugs and patent medicines. I remember also the well-to-do -families in the towns, the wild young cursing blades, and the old topers -with trembling hands. I remember the uncle who shot off his head in the -park, and that other uncle, with a distinguished naval record, who lived -into old age<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_251">{251}</a></span> without ever being sober. I remember my own father, and my -childhood and youth of struggle to save him. All these men were kind and -gentle, idealistic, charming in manners—”</p> - -<p>“I, too, had an uncle,” says Mrs. Ogi; “the tenderest heart you ever -knew. He drank because he could not stand the life he saw about him, the -unsolvable race problem, the mass of ignorance and brutality. I would -get his bottle away from him and hide it, and then in his torment he -would go so far as a ‘damn’; but I never saw him so drunk that he failed -to apologize for such a word.”</p> - -<p>We must take Poe as one of the pitiful victims of these customs; we must -understand that his virtues were his own, while his vices were fed to -him in a “sugar-tit.” Of all American poets up to this time his was the -greatest genius; his was the true fire, the energy, the vision—and for -the most part it was wasted and lost. It was wasted, not merely because -he got drunk, because he was always on the verge of starvation, because -he was chained to slavery, and had to write pot-boilers under the orders -of men with routine or mercenary minds; it was wasted also because he -was a victim of perverse theories about art and life. He began, as a -child, with imitations of Byron, and then came under the spell of -Coleridge’s disorderly genius. We might take a great part of Poe’s work, -just as we took “Kubla Khan,” and show how his talent goes into the -portrayal of every imaginable kind of ruin, terror and despair.</p> - -<p>We cannot say to what extent Poe’s art theories were the product of his -vices, and to what extent the vices were the product of the theories. -After he left West Point, and was starving in Baltimore, he met his -cousin, a frail, sensitive child, as poor as himself. He married her -when she was less than fourteen years old; he adored her, but their life -was a long crucifixion, because of her failing health. Several times she -broke a blood vessel, and in the end she faded away from tuberculosis. -The shadow of that tragedy hung over Poe’s whole mature life, and you -will note that his loveliest poetry deals with beautiful women who are -dying or dead.</p> - -<p>In this tormented body there lived and wrought not merely a great -genius, but also a great mind. Poe was a critic, of a kind entirely new -to America. He did not<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_252">{252}</a></span> distribute indiscriminate praise from motives of -patriotism and puffery; he had critical standards, right or wrong, and -was merciless to the swarms of art pretenders. Naturally, therefore, he -was hated and furiously attacked; and because of his weaknesses, he was -an easy mark for all.</p> - -<p>His art theories were those which we are here seeking to overthrow; how -false and dangerous they were, his life attests. It is interesting to -note that in one of his youthful poems, the first real utterance of his -genius, he took a quite different view. Quoting an imaginary passage -from the Koran about the angel Israfel, “whose heart-strings are a -lute,” he wrote:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Therefore thou art not wrong,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Israfeli, who despisest<br /></span> -<span class="i0">An unimpassioned song;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To thee the laurels belong,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Best bard, because the wisest.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>Well might this tormented Baltimore poet long for the wisdom of the -Mohammedan angel! He spent his great analytical powers in concocting a -“moon hoax,” and in solving all the cryptograms which empty-headed -people sent him. It was as if a man should build a mighty engine, and -then set it to fanning the air. In his last pitiful years he composed an -elaborate work on metaphysics, which he called “Eureka,” meaning that he -had solved the secret of the ages, the nature of existence and the -absolute. It is like all other metaphysics—a cobweb spun out of words; -the mighty engine has here been set to fanning a vacuum.</p> - -<p>Poe was a fighting man and an ardent propagandist. He fought for art, -for the freedom and the glory and the joy of art, as a thing apart from -humanity, and from the sense of brotherhood and human solidarity. Life -wreaked its vengeance upon him, his punishment was heavy enough, and we -should be content with voicing our pity—but for the fact that his art -theories are still alive in the world, wrecking other young artists. -This is what makes necessary the painful task of drawing moral lessons -over the graves of “mighty poets in their misery dead.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_253">{253}</a></span>”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXXX"></a>CHAPTER LXXX<br /><br /> -THE GOOD GREY POET</h2> - -<p>Edgar Allan Poe lived and wrote to prove that art excludes morality. We -come now to another poet, who lived and wrote to prove that art excludes -everything else. He had a message and a faith, which was the dominating -motive in everything he wrote; in short, he was one of the major -prophets—like Dante, Milton, Tolstoi, Nietzsche, who used art as a -means of swaying the souls of men.</p> - -<p>Referring thus to Walt Whitman, we now have upon our side the weight of -critical authority; learned and entirely respectable college professors -write in this fashion about his books, and do not lose their positions -for so doing. But realize how different it was in Whitman’s lifetime; in -the early years respectable opinion looked upon him as a kind of obscene -maniac. His first edition of “Leaves of Grass,” a thousand copies -printed by himself, was left on his hands, except for those which he -sent out free—and even some of these were returned, one by the poet -Whittier! A critic wrote that Whitman was “as unacquainted with art as a -hog with mathematics.” Another wrote that he “deserved the whip of the -public executioner.” He was thrown out of a government position in -Washington for having a copy of his book locked up in his own desk, and -again and again his publishers were forced by threat of public -prosecution to withdraw the book from circulation. Alone among Whitman’s -contemporaries to recognize his genius was Emerson, and when Whitman -published Emerson’s letter in the second edition of “Leaves of Grass,” -Emerson was embarrassed—for in the meantime his horrified friends had -persuaded him to hesitate in his opinion. From all this we may learn how -difficult it is to judge one’s contemporaries.</p> - -<p>Walt Whitman was born of farmer folk in an isolated part of Long Island. -His father became a carpenter and moved to Brooklyn, then a small town. -Walt became an office boy at the age of twelve; he got hold of some good -reading, learned printing, and became a teacher, and something of an -orator. He was an abolitionist, a teetotaler and other kinds of “crank”; -a slow-moving, rather<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_254">{254}</a></span> stubborn youth, who wandered about from place to -place, meeting all kinds of people, watching life with interest, but -caring nothing for success. He had a good job as a newspaper editor, but -gave it up because of his views on slavery. He set a new fashion in -life—a type of man now common in the radical movement, who does enough -manual labor to keep alive, and spends the rest of his time studying -literature and life. Walt’s people loved him, but could not make him -out; they thought he was lazy when he loafed and invited his soul.</p> - -<p>He was finding his own way, guided by the unfolding genius within. He -wanted to know people, every kind that lived; he wanted to talk with -them, to feel himself one with them. He worked with laborers on the job, -he rode in ferry-boats, he made friends with the drivers of busses. He -wanted to see America, so he wandered by slow stages to New Orleans and -back. He wanted to know literature, so he read, but according to his own -taste, taking no one’s opinions. When he was ready to express himself, -it was a self hitherto unknown in literature, and the most startling -voice yet lifted in America.</p> - -<p>It often happens that the student learns about new and vital movements -through the writings of their opponents. Thus the present writer was -made into a rationalist by the reading of Christian apologetics. In the -same way I learned about Whitman from an essay by Sidney Lanier, a -respectable gentleman-poet from the South, who demonstrated that -Whitman’s claim to be the voice of democracy was nonsense; the masses of -the people had no interest whatever in this eccentric poetry, and could -not understand what the poet was driving at.</p> - -<p>Does a poet necessarily have to be appreciated by those of whom he -writes? Or is it possible to tell something about people which they -themselves do not yet know? If a man is picking apples, he is obeying -the laws of gravitation, and the apples likewise are obeying it. Sir -Isaac Newton comes along, and interprets the behavior of the man and of -the apples. Does the truth of Newton’s law depend upon the assent of the -apple-picker?</p> - -<p>Walt Whitman did really know the American people, the masses, as -distinguished from the cultured few; he knew them as no man of letters -up to that time had known them. He believed there were tremendous, -instinctive<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_255">{255}</a></span> forces working within them, and that he, as poet and seer, -could enter into that unconscious mass-being and understand it and guide -it. He believed that he was laying out the path which democracy would -follow, he was voicing the desires it would feel, the love and -fellowship and solidarity it would embody in institutions and arts. -Whether he was right in these intuitions and mystical prophesyings was -for the future to decide. Certainly there were two kinds of persons in -Whitman’s own day who could not decide; one was the average wage-slave, -ignorant and groping; and the other was a gentleman from Georgia, who -made excellent but customary rhymes about birds and brooks and flowers.</p> - -<p>Walt Whitman was one of those mystics to whom the inner essence of all -things is the same; all life is sacred, and all men are brothers in a -common Fatherhood. Jesus taught that, and in the nineteen hundred years -which have since passed new prophets have arisen every now and then to -revive it—but the Christians are just as much scandalized every time. -Whitman’s title, “Leaves of Grass,” under which he included all his -poems, means that he chose the most common and least distinguished -product of nature for his symbol of the human soul. The poet himself was -one of these “Leaves of Grass,” and celebrated himself as the -representative and voice of the rest. He sang the song of himself, and -his contemporaries thought this was crude and barbarous egotism. This -big bearded fellow who printed his own poems, with a preface to tell how -great they were, and his picture in a workingman’s dress without a -necktie—he was nothing but a hoodlum, and the critics called for the -police.</p> - -<p>The worst stumbling block was the portion of the book called “Children -of Adam,” dealing with sex. The Anglo-Saxon race was used to horrified -silence about sex, and also to sly leering about sex; the one thing it -had never encountered was simple frankness. What Whitman did was to take -sex exactly as it is, a part of life, and write about it as he wrote -about everything else. When I, as a student, first looked up “Leaves of -Grass” in the Columbia University library, I found this portion of the -book so thumbed and worn as to make plain that the young readers had not -been taught to understand Whitman. For he gave to this part of his -message its due proportion and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_256">{256}</a></span> no more. He was a clean man, living an -abstemious and even ascetic life, developing his mind as well as his -body.</p> - -<p>The Civil War came, and the moral greatness of Whitman was made -apparent. He went to Washington as a sort of amateur nurse; living on -almost nothing, he devoted his entire time to visiting in the hospitals, -bringing comfort and affection to tens of thousands of suffering and -neglected soldiers. His genius was for friendship, and everyone loved -him; there are many stories of men whose lives were saved by his -presence and his love. He was a big man, with ruddy cheeks and a full -beard, turned gray under the strain of these years. It is interesting to -note that Lincoln, meeting him, said the same words that Napoleon said -to Goethe: “This is a man!”</p> - -<p>“The good grey poet,” as one of his friends called him, wrecked his -health amid these frightful scenes, and was never the same again. He -published more poems, “Drum-Taps,” dealing with the war. All that which -was called egotism is now burned away, and we have a revelation of a -people uplifted by struggle. In 1871 came a prose work, “Democratic -Vistas,” in which his message is proclaimed even more clearly than in -his verse. It is a call for a new art, based upon brotherhood and -equality. Our New World democracy, declared Whitman, is “so far an -almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand -religious, moral, literary and aesthetic results.”</p> - -<p>Whitman suffered a stroke of paralysis, recovered partially, and then -suffered another stroke. He was more or less crippled through his last -twenty years, and lived in extreme poverty; but gradually his fame -spread and friends gathered about him. The labor movement was now -emerging—and its leaders were discovering that this old poet had indeed -forseen how they would feel. “My call is the call of battle—I nourish -active rebellion.” And each new generation of the young nourishers of -rebellion feeds its soul upon Whitman’s inspiration.</p> - -<p>Is it poetry? That is a question over which battles are fought. It seems -to me that words matter little; it is a kind of inspired chant, which -moves you if you are susceptible to its ideas. For two years I steeped -myself in the literature of the Civil War, while writing “Manassas”; and -to me at that time “Drum-Taps” seemed to contain all the fervor and -anguish of the conflict. But the every<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_257">{257}</a></span>day person, who does not rise to -those heights, prefers “O Captain, My Captain,” which has the easier -beauties of rhyme and fixed rhythm.</p> - -<p>The critics have by now got used to Whitman’s honesty about sex; the -only stumbling block is his long catalogues of things. He will sing the -human body, and give you a list of the parts thereof: and can that be -poetry? But you must bear in mind that Whitman is more a seer than a -poet. “Sermons in stones,” said Shakespeare; and if the stones had -names, Whitman would call the roll of them, and each would be a mystic -symbol, and the total effect would be a hypnotic spell. It is an old -trick of those who appeal to the subconscious mind; in the English -Prayer-Book, for example, there is a chant: “O, all ye Works of the -Lord, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him forever.” The hymn -goes on to name all the various aspects of nature: “O, all ye Showers -and Dew ... O, all ye Fire and Heat ... Ye Lightnings and Clouds ... Ye -Mountains and Hills ... Ye Seas and Floods ... Ye Fowls of the Air ... -Ye Beasts and Cattle.” ... and so on through the many Works of the Lord -which are invited to praise Him and magnify Him forever. So, if you are -a mystic, you may contemplate with awe each separate miraculous product -of that mysterious organizing force which has created a living human -body.</p> - -<p>The mystical life has its dangers, and also, alas! its boredoms. I have -stated in the chapter on Emerson that there is no absolute which is not -equally as false as it is true. Whitman has raised up a host of -imitators, and I have read their alleged “free verse,” and record the -fact that it was surely a waste of my time, and apparently a waste of -theirs. Also, I have known many followers of Walt Whitman, the greater -number of whom have chosen to follow the poet’s eccentricities, rather -than his virtues. You see, it is so much easier to leave off a necktie -and “loaf,” than it is to have genius and create a new art form! Whitman -is not alone in suffering through his disciples; Jesus had that tragic -fate, and Nietzsche, and Tolstoi, and many another major prophet!<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_258">{258}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXXXI"></a>CHAPTER LXXXI<br /><br /> -CABBAGE SOUP</h2> - -<p>We have been following the fortunes of a pioneer people breaking into -the field of world culture. Let us now travel part way round the earth -in either direction, and watch another pioneer people doing the same -thing.</p> - -<p>The differences between America and Russia are many and striking, and -before we enter upon a study of Russian literature we must understand -Russian life. Voltaire tells us that virtue and vice are products like -vinegar, and we shall find this applies also to the Russian soul with -its mysticism and melancholy. When the sun almost disappears for six -months at a time, and icy blizzards rage, human beings have a tendency -to stay by the fire and develop their inner natures; also they develop -congested livers, and brood upon the futility of life.</p> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi: “Don’t forget that it often gets cold in New England.”</p> - -<p>“Yes, and there is both mysticism and melancholy in New England art. But -the difference is that the people of New England escaped from the cradle -of despotism in Asia many centuries earlier than the Russians. So the -brooding of the New England colonist took the form of calling a town -meeting to plan for the building of a new road in the spring. But the -Russian could not do things for himself; he had to get the permission of -officials. If he tried to act for himself, they would strip him and beat -him with knouts until he swooned. So the Russian’s brooding turned to -despair, and he got drunk, and got into a fight and killed his neighbor, -and then tried to make up his mind whether God would forgive him, or -damn him to hell fire forever; he fretted over this problem until he -went insane or wrote a novel—”</p> - -<p>“Or both,” says Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>The dominant fact in Russian art of the nineteenth century was -despotism. Here was a vast empire of a hundred million people, energetic -and aspiring; and the ruling class dreamed that they could introduce -modern material civilization, while keeping out the modern mind and -soul. Young Russians travelled, and learned to think as the rest of -Europe thought; then they came home, to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_259">{259}</a></span> find that the slightest attempt -to teach or to organize was met by imprisonment, torture, exile, hard -labor, or the scaffold. Wave after wave of rebellion swept Russia, to be -met by wave after wave of repression. Intellectual activity which New -England honored was in Russia a secret and criminal conspiracy; the -youth of the country was broken in a torture chamber; and so we have the -misery and distortion and impotence which we regard as characteristic -Slavic qualities.</p> - -<p>The Russian was supposed to be incapable of action, incapable of keeping -an appointment on time, incapable of doing anything but drinking a -hundred cups of tea and shedding tears over the fate of man. But now -comes the revolution, and in a flash we discover that all that was -buncombe. The Russians begin to act precisely like other men; they cease -to get drunk, they learn to keep appointments, they discover a sudden -admiration for those qualities we call Yankee—hustle and efficiency, -the adjusting of one’s desires to what can be immediately accomplished. -The Russian peasant, supposed to be a grown-up and bearded cherub, -lifting his eyes in adoration to his Little Father in the Winter Palace -and his Big Father in Heaven, is discovered to have precisely the same -desires as every other farmer in the world—that is to say, more land, -and fewer tax-collectors.</p> - -<p>Russian literature is a great literature, because it voices the hopes -and resolves of a great people groping their way to freedom and -understanding. It is, whether consciously or unconsciously, a literature -of revolt. It is full of ideas, because it has to take the place of the -prohibited subjects, science, politics, economics, and social -psychology. It is desperately serious, because it is produced by people -who are suffering. Some twenty years ago I remember meeting in New York -the adopted son of Maxim Gorki, who was earning his living as a printer -by day and studying our civilization by night. I recall his remark: -“Americans do not know what the intellectual life means.” The young man -had in mind a country where you adopted ideas with the knowledge that -they might cost you your liberty, and even your life. Under such -circumstances you think hard before you come to a decision. A lot of -Americans have had an opportunity to test their ideas that way during -the past ten years, and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_260">{260}</a></span> so they are now taking the intellectual life -seriously, and producing literature in many ways resembling the Russian.</p> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi: “Sherwood Anderson says it is because he was raised on -cabbage soup.”</p> - -<p>“People will read that,” says Ogi, “and think it a flash of humor; very -few will consider seriously the effect of a starvation diet upon the -soul of a sensitive boy. Neither will they stop to think about three -boys sleeping in one bed as a source of abnormal sexual imaginings, -which constitute one of the original elements in Sherwood Anderson’s -books. To me this seems a law: that wherever you have widespread and -long-continued poverty, maintained by policemen’s clubs, there you will -have a literature, extremely painful to its creators, but delightful to -high-brow critics, who will hail it as ‘strong,’ and up to the standard -of the great Russian masters.”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXXXII"></a>CHAPTER LXXXII<br /><br /> -DEAD SOULS</h2> - -<p>The poet who taught the Russian people the possibilities of their -language was Pushkin; one of those beautiful leisure-class youths who -live fast and die young. He was born of an aristocratic family, and when -he was twenty he was, like most poets, a hopeful idealist, and wrote an -ode to liberty, and was condemned to exile. He lived a wild life among -the gypsies, and wasted himself, and finally his family persuaded the -tsar to give him another chance. He was brought back to court and made a -small functionary, among illiterate, dull, supposed-to-be-great people -who had no understanding of his talents. He married a beautiful noble -lady, who betrayed him continuously and broke his heart.</p> - -<p>Pushkin now wrote folk tales, and a great quantity of love poems in the -Byronic manner. His idealism was dead; he was a court man, and went so -far as to glorify the rape of Poland. He wrote a long narrative poem, -“Eugene Onegin,” which tells about the tragic love troubles of an -aristocratic youth, together with all the details of his life, how he -got up in the morning, how he sipped his chocolate, how he read his -invitations to tea-parties and balls. You might not think there would -be<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_261">{261}</a></span> great literature in such a story; but at least Pushkin dealt with -Russian themes and with reality; he made it interesting, lending it the -glamour of musical verse, and so he killed the old classical tradition -in Russia. The Greek nymphs and the French shepherdesses went out of -fashion, and the way was clear for Russian writers with something -important to say to their people.</p> - -<p>Then came Nikolai Gogol. He was a Little Russian; that is, he came from -the Ukraine, which is in the South, and like all Southern countries is -supposed to be warm-hearted and romantic. Gogol was a poor devil of a -clerk, who leaped to fame by writing humorous tales, in which the -laughter was mingled with tears. He did not put in any recognized -“propaganda,” for the simple reason, that this would have cost him his -liberty. In those days when you were discussing politics you announced -yourself as a Hegelian Moderate or a Hegelian Leftist, or whatever it -might be; in other words, you pretended to be discussing the ideas of a -German philosopher, a spinner of metaphysical cobwebs, instead of -dealing with the real problems of your country and time.</p> - -<p>Gogol wrote a play called “The Inspector-General,” which tells how a -government representative is expected to visit a small provincial town, -and all the functionaries are in a state of terror for fear their -various stealings will be exposed. It is understood that the -inspector-general will come in disguise, and so they mistake a youthful -traveler for this functionary, and insist on doing him honor, to his -great bewilderment. Finally the postmaster of the town, following his -custom of secretly reading the mail, opens a letter from the young man -to a friend, telling about his adventures and ridiculing the town -functionaries. The postmaster reads this aloud in the hearing of the -functionaries, to their great dismay.</p> - -<p>Somebody read this play to the tsar, and he was so delighted that he -ordered it produced. You remember King Louis of France, the “grand -monarch,” taking delight in Moliere’s ridicule of his courtiers. The -monarch can afford to laugh, or at least thinks he can; it is only the -functionaries who realize the destructive power of laughter.</p> - -<p>Then Gogol wrote a long novel, “Dead Souls.” He introduces us to a young -man who might be a graduate<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_262">{262}</a></span> of any one of a thousand schools and -colleges and universities of “salesmanship” in the United States. So -brilliant are this young man’s talents:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>Whatsoever the conversation might be about, he always knew how to -support it. If people talked about horses, he spoke about horses; -if they began talking about the best hunting dogs, here also -Tchitchikov would make remarks to the point. If the conversation -related to some investigation which was being made by the -government, he would show that he also knew something about the -tricks of the civil service functionaries. When the talk was about -billiards, he showed that in billiards he could keep his own; if -people talked about virtue, he also spoke about virtue, even with -tears in his eyes; and if the conversation turned on making brandy, -he knew all about brandy.</p></div> - -<p>This expert in the psychology of salesmanship had a truly Yankee idea to -make his fortune. At that time the Russian peasants were sold with the -land, and the landlord had to pay taxes on all his serfs. A reckoning -was made at certain periods, and if any serfs died in between the -periods of reckoning, the landlord had to pay taxes just the same. Now, -said the salesman to himself, any landlord will be glad to sell me these -“dead souls”; and when I have bought a great number of them, I will get -hold of a piece of land, and move all these “dead souls” to that land, -and some bank will lend me a great sum of money, not knowing they are -dead.</p> - -<p>To travel over Russia and interview landlords on such an errand is in -itself high comedy. Gogol takes us to one estate after another, and lets -us see the misery of the serfs, and the incompetence and futility of the -landlords; the ones who are kind-hearted and sentimental don’t know what -to do, and cause just as much misery as the brutal ones. Such a -situation requires no comment from the novelist; merely to know about it -is to condemn it. So it happened that Gogol’s story became a -revolutionary document, and was copied out by hand and passed about -among the young rebels. The government intervened, preventing a second -edition of the book; and poor Gogol, a little later in his life, turned -into some kind of religious maniac, and repented of what he had written, -and burned great quantities of his manuscripts, including the latter -part of this novel. That gives us a glimpse of the “Russian soul,” and -makes us realize what a distance these people had to travel from -Oriental barbarism to modern individualism.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_263">{263}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXXXIII"></a>CHAPTER LXXXIII<br /><br /> -THE RUSSIAN HAMLET</h2> - -<p>The modern world was there, and it kept calling to the youth of Russia. -There came a skillful novelist, whose task it was to interpret his -country to the outside world, and at the same time to interpret the -outside world to Russia. He came of a family of wealthy landowners, and -received the best education available; but he ventured at the funeral of -Gogol to praise the work of this great master—which so incensed the -government that he was sentenced to exile upon his own estate. Three -years later he succeeded in getting permission to go abroad, and lived -the rest of his life in Germany and France, where he was free to write -as he pleased.</p> - -<p>The first work of Ivan Turgenev was called “A Sportsman’s Sketches”; -pictures of the peasant types he met while on shooting trips. It was a -safe, aristocratic occupation, that of killing birds for pleasure, and -surely no government could object to a gentleman’s describing the -peasants who went along to carry his guns and his lunch. The government -did not object; and so the reading public in Russia had brought vividly -before it the fact that human beings, of their own blood and their own -faith, were serfs at the mercy of landlords, to be sold like other -chattels. So the tsar was forced to free the serfs.</p> - -<p>Turgenev settled in Paris; a great, handsome giant, a wealthy bachelor, -amiable and simple, a charming literary lion. His friends were Gautier, -Flaubert, and other novelists, from whom he learned the perfections of -artistry, the pictorial charm, the “enamels and cameos” ideal. He had no -need to learn from them the bitter and corroding despair, because that -was his Russian heritage.</p> - -<p>He wrote seven novels, all short and simple; the theme of each being the -stock theme of leisure-class fiction, a man and a woman at the crisis of -their love. His girls are very much alike; direct and honest, they flame -up, and are ready to act upon their feelings, to go anywhere with the -man they love. But the man does not know where to go or what to do. The -hero of the first novel, Rudin, is a kind of modern Hamlet, who became -pro<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_264">{264}</a></span>verbial as the type of Russian intellectual. He is incapable of -anything but talk, and tells the girl that they must submit to her -family, which opposes the marriage.</p> - -<p>In the other novels the heroes do not always submit. There is, for -example, Bazarov, the Nihilist; he is a fighter, and ready for -action—but Turgenev tells us what he thinks of man’s dream of -accomplishment, when Bazarov scratches his finger and dies of blood -poisoning. Another hero is a Bulgarian, and there is a chance for action -in Bulgaria; but unfortunately this man’s lungs are weak, and he dies in -the arms of the brave girl who eloped with him.</p> - -<p>You see, it is hard for Turgenev to portray anyone who believes, because -he is an artist in the leisure-class tradition of fatalism and urbane -incredulity. Life is a malady; it is a malady in cruel and barbarous -Russia, and no less so in free but cynical and licentious Paris. -Turgenev, living safely abroad, describes heroes who also live abroad; -he has not the moral courage to face Russia and the Russian problem, -even in his thoughts. His people are the exiles and intellectuals, the -travelers and parasites, amusing themselves in the capitals of Europe. -He loathes this loafing class, and satirizes it without mercy; but also -he cannot help seeing the weaknesses of the revolutionists—and the -revolutionists were of course indignant at that, because they were -fighting for human freedom, and thought that a man of culture and -enlightenment ought to help them.</p> - -<p>So there was furious controversy over each of Turgenev’s novels, and it -hurt the feelings of the great, good-natured giant, and he did a lot of -explaining, some of it contradictory. The truth is that he did not know -quite what he believed; he was not a thinker, but merely an artist in -the narrow sense of the word, one who sees what exists and portrays it -with cunning skill. This makes him, of course, a darling of the -leisure-class critics, art for art sakers and dilettanti. The French -translations of his novels had an enormous vogue, likewise the English -translations, and men like Henry James thought him a god. But out of -Russia there now comes a new voice; the revolutionary proletariat is -making Russia over, and the young students report themselves bored with -Turgenev; he whines and moans and gets them nowhere.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_265">{265}</a></span> You see, the -Russians can now act, like other people; and so the Russian Hamlet is -laid on the shelf.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXXXIV"></a>CHAPTER LXXXIV<br /><br /> -THE DEAD-HOUSE</h2> - -<p>A dozen years ago in Holland, talking about Dostoievski with my friend -Frederik van Eeden, I remarked that I had made several attempts, but had -never been able to read one of his novels through. Van Eeden replied -that Dostoievski was the world’s greatest novelist; and that is high -praise, because van Eeden is a great novelist himself. Now, under the -strain of the war, my old friend has turned into a Catholic mystic; and -so I understand his passion for the dark Russian, another of those -over-burdened spirits who despair of the human intellect, and seek -refuge in that most powerful auto-suggestion known as God.</p> - -<p>Feodor Dostoievski was born in a hospital, his father being a poor -surgeon with a big family. As a child he knew cold and hunger, and was -living in a garret when he wrote his first novel, “Poor People,” at the -age of twenty-four. It is a picture of two suffering, will-less -creatures; and so genuine, so completely “lived,” that it made an -instant impression.</p> - -<p>Its author was drawn into literary circles—which in those days meant -also revolutionary circles. In his feeble way he took up the ideas of -Fourier; he attended some radical gatherings, and went so far as to -identify himself with a printing press. The group were arrested, and -Dostoievski lay in a dungeon for many months, and finally with twenty -companions was brought out upon a public square before a scaffold and -prepared for death. At the last moment there came a reprieve from the -tsar, but meantime one of the victims had gone insane. The shock to -Dostoievski’s mind was such that he comes back to the incident again and -again in his books.</p> - -<p>He was sent to Siberia at hard labor; herded with common felons, beaten -and tormented—in short, receiving exactly the same treatment now meted -out to social idealists by the states of California and Washington, and -recently by the United States government at Leavenworth.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_266">{266}</a></span> After a few -years the tsar pardoned Dostoievski and impressed him into the army; he -was allowed to come back to Russia after ten years, and wrote the story -of his experiences in a book called “Memoirs of a Dead-House.”</p> - -<p>Dostoievski now took up the life of a hack writer. He had a large -following, but somebody else got the money; he was always in debt, his -wife and children starving and freezing. He wrote at terrific speed and -never stopped to revise. He was ill all the time, suffering an attack of -epilepsy every ten days. All this is in his writing; his characters are -drunkards, criminals, epileptics, idiots, and neurotics of every type. -He enters into their souls, and makes every moment of their lives, every -mood of their unhappy beings real to us.</p> - -<p>His greatest novel is “Crime and Punishment”; telling the story of a -student who, ambitious and starving, has an impulse to murder an old -woman money-lender and rob her. He commits the crime, but is too much -terrified to get the money; then he is pursued by remorse, and we follow -him through his inner torments. He meets a young girl who has become a -prostitute in order to save her family from starvation; she persuades -him to give himself up to the police, and she follows him to Siberia, -and together their souls are redeemed by love.</p> - -<p>I am conscientious in my attitude toward literature, and when I find the -critics raving over a great master, I feel obliged to read him. Some -years ago, I was in a hospital, recuperating from an operation, and that -seemed a good time to tackle an eight hundred-page volume, so I began -Dostoievski’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” There are several of these -brothers, also an old father, and all of them are drunk most of the -time, and tangled up with a stupid prostitute. The old father has money, -and so has the advantage over the sons, and apparently one of the sons -is on the way to murdering him. To cheer you up while the climax is -preparing, there is a monastery full of monks who hate one another like -poison, and one venerable and lovable saint, in whose spirituality you -are expected to find hope for Russia and mankind. But this saint dies, -and the youngest Karamazov brother, who loves him, has his faith in God -and his hope for humanity shattered forever, because the expected -miracle does not<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_267">{267}</a></span> happen—Father Zossima stinks like any other -corpse!—That is as far as I got in the novel, and if you want to know -the outcome, you will have to do your own reading.</p> - -<p>This is called “realism”; but get my point clear, it is romantic and -subjective to the highest degree; it is impassioned, even frenzied, -propaganda. Dostoievski is an orthodox Eastern or Byzantine Christian; -also he is a Slavophile, or mystical Russian patriot, believing that the -Russian soul is something wonderful and special, having secret -relationship with God. This relationship is the old mediaeval orgy of -suffering and submission, a wallowing in repentance and self-abasement, -the glorification of sores, boils, rags, lice, beggary, and bad smells. -All degradation, if patiently endured, is penitential and holy, whereby -the character is lifted to exalted mystical states. When the young -student in “Crime and Punishment” awakens to the horror of having killed -a human being, he does not decide to redeem himself by devoting his -educated brain to some useful labor; no, he decides he must go to a -police station and deliver himself into the hands of officials who are -worse criminals than he. A government, itself the distilled essence of a -billion hideous crimes, will send him to Siberia, so that he and his -pious prostitute may endure ecstacies of torment.</p> - -<p>We see this still more clearly in another novel, whose purpose is to -reduce Christianity to idiocy. Do not take this for hyperbole or -epigram; it is merely the statement of Dostoievski’s thesis. The book is -called “The Idiot,” and the hero is an incarnation of that mystical, -psycho-neurotic Christianity which finds redemption through abasement -deliberately sought. You see, it is so easy to suffer, and it is so hard -to think! It is so easy to give yourself up to epileptic tremblings and -terrors, and call it God! Also, it appears to be easy for literary -critics to take mental disease at its own valuation.</p> - -<p>In the whole field of art there is no spiritual tragedy greater than -Dostoievski’s. This man made an attempt in the cause of liberty, and the -Tsardom made him into a martyr; but he came back, not to be a soldier of -enlightenment, but to crawl in the dust and lick the hand which had -lashed him. He came back as a propagandist of reaction, proclaiming a -Russia redeemed by monks.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_268">{268}</a></span> Well, he had his way, and the redeeming monk -appeared—Gregori Rasputin by name!</p> - -<p>Mind you, I do not quarrel with Dostoievski because he portrayed the -lost and abandoned, the hopelessly sick and tortured souls he knew. I do -not object because his characters are feverish and hysterical, because -they stare and glare and moan and cry and leap and tremble, because -their knees shake and their teeth chatter and they have nightmares -filling whole chapters. I am willing to read these things; but I want to -read them from the point of view of a scientist who can interpret them, -or of an economist who can remedy them; I do not want to read them as an -apotheosis of idiocy. I do not want them composed and idealized to prove -the divine nature of epilepsy.</p> - -<p>And when I hear perfectly sane and comfortable bourgeois critics in the -United States exalting this pathologic mysticism, I want to throw a -brick-bat at them. Here, for example, is Professor William Lyon Phelps -of Yale University, telling us that “of all the masters of fiction both -in Russia and elsewhere, Dostoievski is the most truly spiritual.” At -the beginning of his essay he says that this novelist “was brought up on -the Bible and the Christian religion. The teachings of the New Testament -were with him almost innate ideas. Thus, although his parents could not -give him wealth, or ease, or comfort, or health, they gave him something -better than all four put together.”</p> - -<p>“I think,” says Mrs. Ogi, “that you had better take a chapter off and -deal with that.”</p> - -<p>Says her husband: “I have a title already chosen—”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXXXV"></a>CHAPTER LXXXV<br /><br /> -THE CHRISTIAN BULL-DOG</h2> - -<p>Just what has a professor at Yale University to do with “the Christian -religion”? What do “the teachings of the New Testament” really mean to -him? How competent is he to judge about “masters of fiction” who are -“truly spiritual”? How much sincerity is there in such literary -criticism, emanating from the elm shadows of New Haven, Connecticut?<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_269">{269}</a></span></p> - -<p>Picture a great ruling-class university, founded on “the Bible, rum and -niggers”; that is to say, the African slave-trade, covered by a mantle -of religiosity. The students at this university are young aristocrats, -heirs-apparent of ruling-class families, who attend “prep” schools so -exclusive, and with so long a waiting list that you have to make your -application when you are born. In these schools they “make” certain -exclusive fraternities, and when they come to Yale they “make” certain -secret societies, whose spirit is symbolized by the “Skull and Bones.” -Their other ideal in life is to win athletic contests, whose temper they -embody in the “Bull-dog.”</p> - -<p>The trustees of this pious university you will find listed according to -their economic functions in “The Goose-Step.” Their favorite alumnus, -the high god of the present Yale religion is a three-hundred-pound -plutocrat by the name of William Howard Taft, who was made president of -the United States some years ago for the purpose of allowing the land -thieves to get away with the natural resources of Alaska. Having -fulfilled that function for his class, and having, when he came up for -re-election, succeeded in carrying the states of Vermont and Utah, he -was made chief justice of the Supreme Court, to serve as a bulwark of -the liberties of the American people: the liberty of the individual -hunky and wop to negotiate independently with the Steel Trust; the -liberty of railroad directors to compel their wage-slaves to toil when -the wage-slaves want to rest; the liberty of little children of Georgia -crackers and North Carolina clay-eaters to work all night in cotton -mills. Having solemnly delivered such pronouncements in defense of -liberty, this all-highest alumnus brings his three hundred pounds to the -commencement ceremonies, and walks in solemn procession clad in scarlet -and purple robes.</p> - -<p>That is Yale, and the spirit of Yale; the academic apologist of the most -efficient system of plunder yet seen upon the face of the earth. -Capitalistic exploitation is Yale’s religion; and you will note that in -all essentials it is identical with the religion of Rasputin and Tsar -Nicholas. When the tsar’s armies marched out to protect the lumber -concessions of the grand dukes on the Yalu River, the priests and -archbishops in the Kremlin officially blessed the ikons. And just so do -chaplains of New<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_270">{270}</a></span> Haven bless the flags when the American marines set -out to shoot up natives in the West Indies and Central America, for -failing to pay their interest upon the bonds of J. P. Morgan and his -Yale trustees.</p> - -<p>This New England plutocracy selects with meticulous care the professors -who train its young. These trainers are required to be gentlemen of the -most extreme conventionality; and they are none of them drunkards, and -none of them epileptics, and they do not publicly manifest their -Christian sympathy for prostitutes, however beautiful in spirit. On the -contrary, they wear their neckties exactly right, and understand and -respect all those subtleties which mark the distinction between students -who have “made” the great secret societies and students who have failed. -William Lyon Phelps, “Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale -University,” signs himself also “Member of the National Institute of -Arts and Letters,” a most august body of literary nonentities. If anyone -of the characters in the novels of Dostoievski were to accompany -Professor Phelps to one of the sessions of this august body, the other -members would evacuate the hall. If Dostoievski himself were alive, and -writing in the United States today, the masters of this august body -would be just as apt to invite him to their membership as they are to -invite Theodore Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson.</p> - -<p>Very well then; what is the purpose of “the Christian religion,” what is -the meaning of the “spirituality” of Yale? Manifestly, it has no -relationship to the young plutocrats of New England. It is an official -religion, and its application is to the wealth-producing classes. Its -aim is to teach American wage-slaves to kiss the hand which lashes -them—precisely as poor sick Dostoievski kissed the Russian Tsardom. It -is to provide a mystical basis for the American Legion—just as -Dostoievski’s glorification of the Slavic soul prepared the way for the -“Black Hundreds.” When Professor Phelps says that “the teachings of the -New Testament” are better than all four of the gifts of “wealth or ease -or comfort or health,” he is not making a literary criticism, nor is he -saying anything that he means; he is peddling the standard dope which -priests and preachers of ruling classes have been feeding to the workers -through a hundred thousand years.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_271">{271}</a></span></p> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi: “Some one ought to rewrite the Beatitudes according to -the Bull-dog.”</p> - -<p>Says Ogi: “I have put all ten of them into one. It runs as follows: -Blessed are the rich, for they have inherited the earth and you can’t -get it away from them.”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXXXVI"></a>CHAPTER LXXXVI<br /><br /> -THE PEASANT COUNT</h2> - -<p>We come now to the great giant of the North, the most dynamic artist -that Russia has produced. Leo Tolstoi, when he died, was not only the -greatest literary man in the world; he was the incarnation to all -mankind of the Russian genius and moral power. His books had been -translated into forty-five languages, and read not merely by the -cultured few but by the great masses. The revolution which came seven -years after his death did not follow Tolstoi’s principles, and he would -have been shocked by many aspects of it; nevertheless it is true that, -just as Rousseau brought on the French revolution, Tolstoi brought on -the Russian revolution, and his invisible spirit had much to do with -shaping it.</p> - -<p>Leo Tolstoi was a member of the higher nobility. As a literary man, -therefore, he started with the same advantage as Byron; the critics were -ready to read his work, the public was curious about him, and all his -life, whatever he did or said was “copy.” His relatives and friends were -high in court circles, and he was able to speak to the tsar whenever he -pleased; therefore he and he alone was above the power of the police -system which strangled the life of Russia.</p> - -<p>He received a good education, according to the ruling-class standards of -his time, and lived a life of elegant idleness and dissipation. But even -in early youth he was tormented by religious and moral questionings. He -decided that he must do something useful, so he became an artillery -officer in the army of his tsar. Here he wrote an autobiographical -story, “Childhood,” which attracted immediate attention. Then came the -Crimean war, and he wrote a series of pictures of this conflict, -“Sevastopol,” which made him known as a great writer.</p> - -<p>He traveled abroad and met Turgenev in Paris; but<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_272">{272}</a></span> still his conscience -troubled him, and at the age of thirty-one he went back to his estate at -Yasnaya Polyana, and undertook the task of educating the peasants who -tilled his fifteen thousand acres and provided his leisure and comfort. -Here came the police, during his absence, and searched his house and -closed the school. In those days Tolstoi was an artillery officer, and -not a Christian pacifist; he sent word to the tsar by his aunt that he -was armed, and if the police came to his estate again he would shoot the -first one who entered the house.</p> - -<p>Tolstoi married, and raised a large family upon this estate. His wife -was a devoted admirer of his literary work, and copied his manuscripts -many times over with infinite pains. During the years 1865-69 he wrote -“War and Peace,” which most critics consider one of the great novels of -the world. I will merely record my regrets. There are a vast number of -characters, scattered all over Russia; each character has several long -Russian names, and, according to Russian custom, will be called -different names by different groups of persons—to say nothing of -diminutives and nick-names. I labored diligently to keep track of these -characters, to remember which was which and what each was doing; but I -failed.</p> - -<p>Next came “Anna Karenina”: a sort of Russian high-society version of -“The Scarlet Letter.” Anna is a woman who has been sold in the usual way -to an elderly gentleman; she is a contented wife, until she meets a -young cavalry officer whom she truly loves. Instead of engaging in a -polite intrigue, according to the custom of her time, Anna takes the new -love affair more seriously than she takes her marriage, and so Tolstoi -drives her and her lover to suicide. This harshness greatly shocked the -critics of the time, who said that Tolstoi was “killing flies with an -ax.”</p> - -<p>There are several attitudes one can take to the problem of the “eternal -triangle.” You can say, as polite society said all over Europe, and -still says, that adulterous intrigue is a small matter, provided you -make a pretense of hiding it. Or you may say with me, that when a -married woman finds she truly and deeply loves another man, it is her -duty to get a divorce and marry the man she loves. Or you may say, with -most of the “heavy” novelists, that<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_273">{273}</a></span> there is nothing for the various -characters to do but to die horrid deaths.</p> - -<p>Tolstoi was on the way to the great crisis of his life, a spiritual -conversion which involved a complete repudiation of the sexual element -in love. He decided that it was the duty of men and women to repress -their physical desires and become inspired Christian ascetics. When -people asked him how, in that event, the human race was to continue to -be propagated, his answer was that we didn’t have to worry about that, -because so few people would be able to practice the code he laid down. -It is difficult to see how a moral teacher could advance a doctrine more -obviously absurd than that. The better elements of the race are to -sterilize themselves, and posterity is to be begotten by weaklings and -conscious sinners! There is only one possible explanation of such a -doctrine; it is the reaction of a man whose passions are beyond his -control. We know that such was the case with Tolstoi; he was a gross -man, and Gorki reports that even in his old age his conversation was -unbearably obscene, and his attitude toward women low. Such a man can -conceive of asceticism, but he cannot conceive of true idealism in the -sex relationship.</p> - -<p>If Tolstoi’s conversion had had to do with sex matters alone, it would -have had but little significance. But it was something far greater than -that; it was the cry of anguish of a member of the privileged classes, -who realized that his whole life, all his equipment of leisure and -knowledge and power, was made out of the blood and sweat and tears of -the debased masses of his Russian people. He wanted to give up his -landed estates, and live as a peasant, and return to the workers what he -had taken from them. But, alas, in the meantime he had raised a large -family, and this family had something to say about the matter. The -Countess Tolstoi had been her husband’s devoted helper, so long as he -was content to remain a literary man; but when he wanted to become a -prophet and a saint, she thought he was mad. She had the children to -look out for, and the children, of course, wanted to grow up as their -father had done, in the great world of pleasure and fashion.</p> - -<p>Tolstoi himself retired to live in a hut; he put on peasant’s clothes -and spent his time cobbling shoes. He<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_274">{274}</a></span> gave up his copyrights, but he -could never get the courage to give up his land; so he continued to grow -rich, in spite of all his agonized preachings, and the balance of his -life was continuous contradiction and disharmony. In the end he could -stand it no longer; he saw his children quarreling over the property, -like so many birds of prey over a carcass, and so he went out from his -home, with no one but his secretary. For a time no one knew where he -was, and at last he was discovered, ill and dying. His flight was one of -the great gestures of history, and the scenes which took place about his -death-bed summed up in dramatic form all the conflicting forces of the -time.</p> - -<p>Tolstoi had repudiated the Russian church as a creature of superstition -and exploitation. He had gone back to primitive Christianity, and the -church had excommunicated him. Now, when he was dying, they wanted to -get him back, realizing that their very existence depended upon it. If -they could not persuade him to confess and repent, they would lie about -it, and say that he had done so, as orthodox churches have done for many -other great heretics. So here were Tolstoi’s friends, mounting guard in -the railroad station where he lay dying, to keep the priests and the -bishops away! And here also were the police agents and spies, a swarm of -vermin, prying into the affairs of every person about the death-bed, and -telegraphing in panic to headquarters for instructions. When the great -soul had passed on, and the body had to be moved, some students tried to -sing a hymn, and there were the usual scenes of brutality to which the -Russian people were accustomed.</p> - -<p>Tolstoi had met some of the revolutionists of his time, but had been -cold to them; he was not interested in politics, only in religious and -moral questions. His conversion first took the form of absolute -non-resistance to evil. Later on he came to modify it to the doctrine -which Gandhi is now spreading throughout all Asia, “non-violent -resistance.” You shall not use physical force against your enemy, but -you oppose him by word and teaching, by your power of endurance and of -moral conviction; so you shame him, or rouse the moral forces of the -whole world to rebuke him.</p> - -<p>Tolstoi applied that treatment to the state church and to the police. Of -course, if he had been a peasant or<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_275">{275}</a></span> a workingman, or even a poor -student or literary man, he would have been beaten to death with the -knout, or shipped off to Siberia to perish in a convict camp. But he was -a member of the nobility, and his family influence protected him, until -he had become so famous throughout the world that he was greater than -the Tsardom itself. In his last years he lived as a majestic symbol of -the protest of the Russian people; he poured out arguments against war, -against government cruelty, against landlordism, against priestcraft; -and all the powers of darkness in Russia did not dare to lay a finger -upon him.</p> - -<p>In his later years he wrote several novels, one of which I personally -consider his greatest. This is “Resurrection,” which tells the story of -a young Russian nobleman who seduces a peasant girl, and later on in -life discovers her as a prostitute. He becomes conscience-stricken -because of what he has done, and sets out to redeem her, follows her to -Siberia and saves her, and in the end they live that life of brotherly -and sisterly love which Tolstoi had come to preach. This story contains -frightful pictures of the whole Russian system; it was translated into -an immense number of languages, and it probably did more than any other -one book to undermine the Tsardom.</p> - -<p>Tolstoi published a work of criticism, and some people think that I got -my ideas from it. Therefore, let me say that if you want to find the -germ of “Mammonart,” you will do better to consult Walt Whitman’s -“Democratic Vistas,” published a generation before Tolstoi’s work.</p> - -<p>The thesis of Tolstoi’s “What is Art?” resembles mine in just one -particular; that is, we both believe that art has to do with moral -questions—a belief which we share with Aeschylus and Sophocles and -Euripedes and Aristophanes and Virgil and Dante and Cervantes and -Moliere and Victor Hugo and Dostoievski and Tennyson and Ibsen—and so -on through a long list of persons still to be considered.</p> - -<p>But from what point of view shall the artist approach morality? Tolstoi -answers as one who distrusts the intellect, distrusts science, and has -no use for or belief in progress, whether social or political or -intellectual. He believes that the one basis of hope for human beings is -in a return to the primitive, elemental forms of life; he<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_276">{276}</a></span> wants art to -confine itself to those simple emotions which can be understood by the -uneducated peasant. I should say that the easiest way to make plain his -thesis would be to change his title from “What Is Art?” to “What Is -Children’s Art?”</p> - -<p>Whatever faults the critic may have to find with “Mammonart,” I beg him -to realize that its author is not a primitive Christian, but a -scientific Socialist; one who welcomes the achievements of the human -intellect, and looks forward to a complex social order, and to social -art which will possess an intensity and subtlety beyond the power of -comprehension, not merely of Russian peasants, but of the exclusive and -fastidious individualist culture of our time.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXXXVII"></a>CHAPTER LXXXVII<br /><br /> -HEADACHES AND DYSPEPSIA</h2> - -<p>We left the French novel in the hands of Flaubert. We return now to -consider the influence of two French writers, who founded the school -known as “naturalism.” They were contemporaries of Flaubert, but their -influence counted later, for the reason that recognition was so long -delayed.</p> - -<p>Jules and Edmond de Goncourt were brothers, who collaborated in writing -to such an extent that they became as one mind and one pen. Jules, the -younger, died at the age of forty; his brother lived to old age. They -came of an aristocratic family, and inherited a competence; they were -bachelors and semi-invalids, and devoted themselves to the cause of art -with a kind of ascetic frenzy. They believed that true art could be -understood only by artists; but they achieved greatness in spite of that -theory, because of the intensity of their sensibility, and the vitality -they gave to the creatures of their brain.</p> - -<p>It was the Goncourts who first used the term “naturalism.” It was their -idea that characters are built up and a story made real by infinite -attention to detail. No attempt must be made to generalize, you must -deal with the particular, and you must make that particular known by the -massing of external circumstance. Everything must be subordinated to -that purpose; the style must<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_277">{277}</a></span> be flexible, it must, like the music of -the Wagnerian opera, change at every moment, according to the scene it -portrays. These writers broke all the rules of French literary elegance, -they used barbarous and forbidden words, so the critics ridiculed them, -and the academy of Richelieu spurned them, and they had to start an -academy of their own.</p> - -<p>Their first work of significance was “Germinie Lacerteux,” which tells -the life history of a French serving-maid. Why should the genteel art of -fiction stoop to such a heroine? The authors answer this question in a -preface:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>Living in the nineteenth century, at a time of universal suffrage, -and democracy, and liberalism, we asked ourselves whether what are -called “the lower orders” had no claim upon the Novel; whether the -people—this world beneath a world—were to remain under the -literary ban and disdain of authors who have hitherto maintained -silence regarding any soul and heart that they might possess. We -asked ourselves whether, in these days of equality, there are still -for writer and reader unworthy classes, misfortunes that are too -low, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too base in their -terror. We became curious to know whether Tragedy, that -conventional form of a forgotten literature and a vanished society, -was finally dead; whether, in a country devoid of caste and legal -aristocracy, the miseries of the lowly and the poor would speak to -interest, to emotion, to pity, as loudly as the miseries of the -great and rich; whether, in a word, the tears that are wept below -could provoke weeping like those that are wept above.</p></div> - -<p>Fiction had dealt with serving-maids before this; for example, the -heroine of the first great English novel, Pamela, occupies that station. -But Pamela is an innocent child, and our interest is in seeing her -raised to the status of a lady. The Goncourts do not tell that kind of -story: quite the contrary, their serving-maid sinks to the depths of -degradation. The only other novelist of this time who was writing about -such “low life” was Charles Dickens. He will tell you about poverty, he -will even tell you about seduction, and the sufferings of a seduced -woman; but always he is a Victorian gentleman, remembering what is -proper for young girls to read. The French writers, on the other hand, -take up the sexual conduct and feelings of their women in the spirit of -a medical clinic; they make it a matter of honor to spare<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_278">{278}</a></span> you no most -hideous detail, and if you go with them you will learn all there is to -know about sexual pathology.</p> - -<p>Now this degradation exists in the world, and it is the duty of every -thinking man and woman to know about it; to shrink from knowing, or from -telling others about it, is to evade our mental duty. But when we have -acquired this knowledge—when we have visited the hospitals and the -jails and the brothels and the morgues—our minds are automatically led -to the question: what is to be done about it? Not to follow this impulse -is to be mentally incompetent or morally diseased.</p> - -<p>And that is where we part company with the Goncourt brothers and their -theory of art. We learn from them all about the experiences of a Paris -prostitute; we learn the details of the life of a young society girl, -brought up in a hot-house environment, a prey to abnormal cravings; we -learn the symptoms of religious pathology, the half-sensuous hysteria of -a woman in the toils of Catholic priestcraft. There are eight or ten -such novels, each dealing with a different assortment of abnormalities; -but nowhere in these books is there a hint of anything to be done, -whether by individual conversion, the renewal of the moral forces, or by -political and economic readjustments.</p> - -<p>All such things are rigidly excluded by the “naturalist” formula; and it -is essential to get clear that the Goncourt brothers, who made the -formula, made it because they were sick and impotent men, the victims of -a decadent stage of civilization. They thought they were giving us -scientific reports upon human life, when as a matter of fact what they -were giving us were the by-products of their own headaches and -dyspepsias. They toiled with the devotion of martyrs to report every -quiver of their nervous sensibility; Edmond watched Jules while Jules -was dying—Jules even watched himself—in order to report the details of -this experience. Neither of them realized that, much as the world may -need information about the sensations of dying, it has even more need of -information about how to live. As for the Goncourt brothers, what they -needed was fresh air and exercise.</p> - -<p>Fiction, according to this “naturalist” formula, was to become “exact -science.” But then, there are many kinds of science. It is science to -put a beetle under the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_279">{279}</a></span> microscope, and diagram the epidermal cells in -its carapace. But science does not stop with such observation; it goes -on to experiment. Supposing this beetle be dyed pink; will there be any -trace of pink in its offspring, and does that prove the transmission of -acquired characteristics?</p> - -<p>We have here in California a plant wizard who raises fields of flowers -and fruits and vegetables. He is not content to accumulate facts about -them, but proceeds to alter them—to make cactus without spines, and -blackberries as big as your thumb, and wheat that is rust-proof and -peaches that are scale-proof. Will some member of the Goncourt Academy -explain why the “exact science” of fiction writing might not include an -effort to free human beings from alcoholism and syphilis? As it -happened, the greatest disciple of the Goncourt brothers, the man who -took up their formula and used it to make himself the most widely read -of all French novelists, came in the end to this very conclusion, and -evolved into a moralist as intense and determined as Tolstoi.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXXXVIII"></a>CHAPTER LXXXVIII<br /><br /> -THE TROUGHS OF ZOLAISM</h2> - -<p>Emile Zola was left an orphan in childhood, and experienced bitter -poverty. He began work as a bundle-clerk in a publishing house, and -trained himself to be a writer at night. He knew what it was to be -half-starved, and to write in bed with his fingers freezing in an -unheated room. His struggle for recognition was long; for more than a -score of years he wrote pot-boilers without success. But he had faith in -his own genius, he was a stubborn plodder, and in his grim, sober -fashion he worked his way to the top.</p> - -<p>When I was a boy this Frenchman’s name was a synonym for everything -loathsome; Tennyson wrote about “wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism.” -This writer had used words never before used in literature, and -described actions never before described; the critics could find but one -explanation—that he was a vile-minded wretch. But in fact he was one of -the most conscientious writers and most determined reformers that ever -<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_280">{280}</a></span>lived. He wrote that “<span class="lftspc">‘</span>l’Assommoir’ is morality in action ... the first -story of the people that has the true scent of the people.” And he -added: “I do not defend myself, my work will defend me. It is a true -book.”</p> - -<p>He had set himself to tell the full truth about the world in which he -lived; to portray it as it actually was, both high and low, without -mercy, without fear or shame, without sparing the hideous facts. Having -such a picture before you, you might make what you pleased of it; you -might become a cynic or a sensualist, a saint or a revolutionist; but -until you had the facts, how could you judge what you ought to become?</p> - -<p>He planned a tremendous work, to consist of more than a score of -volumes, the “Rougon-Macquart series,” to tell the history of a family -under the Second Empire. We are back in the time of Napoleon the Little, -when Victor Hugo was driven into exile, and the French bourgeoisie set -up their puppet emperor. Zola had imbibed the materialistic science of -his time; he believed that human life was determined by heredity, and he -wished to exhibit this force working in society. He chose two people -suffering from a nervous disease, and showed their descendants, the rich -ones plundering and squandering, the poor ones sunk in drunkenness and -degradation.</p> - -<p>For years the critics spurned these books, and the public neglected -them; but at last came a masterpiece, “l’Assommoir,” which had an -enormous sale. The title means, literally, “The Slaughter-House”; it is -the name of a saloon in the working-class quarter of Paris, where the -poor are lured to their doom. It has been just twenty-five years since I -read this book, but I still see the procession of ghastly scenes: the -poor woman slave in a laundry, the husband a house-painter, and their -brood of wretched, neglected children. I gasp as I see the painter slip -and fall from the roof to his death; I shudder as I see the child Nana, -peeping through the key-hole at the obscenities her parents are -committing.</p> - -<p>Zola has no graces of style, no charms of personality, no humor, hardly -even any sentiment. He is hag-ridden by the misery of the modern world, -and in plodding, matter-of-fact, relentless fashion he proceeds to -overwhelm you with a mass of facts. A few such facts you might evade, -but the sum of them is irresistible; you<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_281">{281}</a></span> know that this is the truth. -Over the whole picture you feel the brooding pity of a master spirit, to -whom these suffering millions are an obsession, haunting his imagination -and driving him to his task.</p> - -<p>There are no heroes and no heroines in Zola’s works; his hero is the -human swarms who breed like flies in our teeming cities, and struggle -and suffer and perish, without ever a gleam of understanding of their -fate. He takes us into the mining country, and in “Germinal” shows us -the slaves of the pits, coal-blackened hordes, starving, oppressed, -poisoned by alcohol, surging up in a blind fury of revolt. In “Nana” he -shows us prostitution; and to me this is the most frightful book of -all—the life-story of the little girl whom we saw getting her first -lessons in vice through the key-hole. This daughter of the working class -becomes their instrument of vengeance upon the exploiters; a seductress, -a wanton, luring men old and young to their doom, she is a kind of -symbol of wastefulness. Her life becomes a frenzy of destruction; silks, -jewels, food and wine are poured upon her in floods, and she throws them -about like a drunken giant wrecking a city. While she lies dying of -small-pox, we hear the mob outside shrieking: “To Berlin! To Berlin!” -The Franco-Prussian war is on, and Napoleon the Little is about to try -out his dream of glory, and provide Zola with the theme for yet another -masterpiece, “The Downfall,” showing war with all its horror of mass -suffering and national collapse.</p> - -<p>Zola, raved at and prosecuted as a sensationalist and corrupter, had now -become a national figure; and he met this responsibility by evolving -from a materialist and fatalist into a scientific Socialist, a -rationalist and preacher of humanity. He wrote three long novels, -“Lourdes,” “Rome” and “Paris,” which exposed the church as a bulwark of -hereditary privilege, and became the text-books of anti-clericalism in -France. Then came the Dreyfus case, calling for a hero to carry the -anti-clerical banner into action; and the man with the sewer name came -forward to answer the call. France had become a republic, but the army -had remained monarchist and clerical. Some of these pious aristocrats, -needing money to lavish on their Nanas, had been selling army secrets to -Germany, and were caught. They decided to put the blame upon<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_282">{282}</a></span> a certain -cavalry officer, who happened to be guilty of a quite different crime, -that of being a Jew. Captain Dreyfus was convicted, and sentenced to -life imprisonment in the convict settlement on Devil’s Island. Another -officer, who investigated the case and attempted to defend Dreyfus, was -shipped off to Africa.</p> - -<p>It was nearly a hundred and fifty years since Voltaire had made his -fight in the Calas case; and here was “l’Infame” at the same old game of -the “frame-up.” Zola came forward with a terrific challenge entitled -“J’Accuse.” He was arrested, tried and convicted, and escaped from -France. For years this Dreyfus case remained an international scandal, -and finally it was proved that the documents used against Zola had been -forged, and later on one of the guilty men committed suicide, and -Dreyfus was released and reinstated. As I write this book the papers -record that Premier Herriot has abolished the penal settlement on -Devil’s Island, and so Zola’s task is completed.</p> - -<p>He had now become the leader of the French masses in the war against -reaction; and his last novels were tracts written in this cause. In -“Labor” he portrays his ideal of the free men and women of the -revolutionary movement, living frugal and abstemious lives, and -consecrating themselves to the cause of human emancipation. Another, -called “Truth,” deals with the Dreyfus case. Another had been planned, -“Justice,” but this he did not live to write. In all these works you -notice that the old theories of materialistic science have been modified -enough to permit men to fight for truth and freedom; and so Emile Zola -shares with Walt Whitman the rôle of prophet of democracy. He served the -masses even better than Whitman, because he achieved complete insight -into the economic forces of modern times, and pointed out to the people -the exact road they had to travel. More than any other artist of the -nineteenth century he voiced and guided the movement of proletarian -revolt, the mass action of the workers of factory and farm to whom the -future belongs.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_283">{283}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_LXXXIX"></a>CHAPTER LXXXIX<br /><br /> -THE SPORTIVE DEMON</h2> - -<p>What would Zola and his naturalism have been without social vision and -revolutionary hope? This question was answered for us by a disciple and -friend of Zola, ten years his junior, who proceeded to make a laboratory -test.</p> - -<p>Guy de Maupassant was a healthy young Norman animal, who came up to -Paris to make his way as a journalist. He was a tremendous worker; in -the course of his short life he wrote six novels and two hundred and -twelve short stories. He made himself master of the latter form, and has -had a dominating influence upon it. No one has been able to pack more -meaning into a brief episode, to give you the whole life and import of a -character in a couple of thousand words. Therefore all young writers of -short stories go to school to him. What has he to give them—aside from -the tricks of the trade?</p> - -<p>Maupassant himself would have answered: Nothing. For he was one of the -fighting art-for-art’s-sakers, to whom the idea of morality in an -art-work is an insult. But the fact is that he has a propaganda, as -definite, as deeply felt, as persistently hammered home as that of a -tub-thumper like John Bunyan or a prophet like Tolstoi. His message is -that life is a cheat and a snare, and that human beings are beasts -decked in fine clothing and pretenses. Maupassant dislikes them so that -he eats himself up. He tries to believe in play, in natural, animal -enjoyment of the passions; but instead of being content with such -pleasures, he shuts himself up like a hermit in a cell, to acquire -mastery of a difficult art, and have the satisfaction before he dies of -voicing his hatred of that fate, whatever it may be, which has created -his own life, and the bourgeois France which he sees about him.</p> - -<p>Maupassant watches with eager eye and alert fancy for a scene, an -episode, a trait of character, which will enable him to illustrate the -pettiness and ignominy of human destiny, and the falsity of man’s -dignities and honors. He collects such things, as a naturalist collects -biting bugs and stinging serpents. His characters are the French -peasants with their greed and cruelty, and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_284">{284}</a></span> the French bourgeois and -cultured classes, who, underneath their silks and satins, their -moralities and intellectualities, are the same vile animals as the -peasants. But Maupassant’s quarrel is not merely with men and women; it -is with life itself. The thing which brings him the keenest satisfaction -is an incident which shows the futility even of virtue; which exhibits -God as a sportive demon, amusing himself by pulling off the wings of the -butterflies he has created.</p> - -<p>Out of the two hundred and twelve specimens in the Maupassant museum, -any one will suffice. I choose one called “The Necklace,” simply because -it has stayed in my memory for twenty-five years. A lovely woman, -married to a poor clerk, and living a starved life, borrows from a -wealthy friend a beautiful diamond necklace, in order to make a show at -some function. She loses the necklace, and she and her husband pledge -everything they own, buy another to replace it, and take it to the owner -without revealing what has happened. For ten years they slave and drudge -to pay off their debts, and the lovely woman is turned into a haggard -wreck. The friend who loaned the necklace meets her, and is horrified at -her condition; the poor woman tells how she has drudged all these -years—and learns that she has wasted her life in order to replace an -imitation necklace, of no value worth considering!</p> - -<p>There is subtlety in the technique of Maupassant, but none in his view -of life. There can be no subtlety, when you lay down the law that human -beings are beasts. There are only a few beast emotions, and they never -vary; you can always be sure what a man will do in the presence of a -woman, and what the woman will let him do. And when God is a sportive -demon, all stories have the same ending. You may not foresee the -particular trick this demon will play—for example, that the lost -necklace would turn out to have been paste—but you can be sure that -something will happen to make a mockery of all human effort and hope.</p> - -<p>And likewise you can foresee the ending of such a man. If he takes life -seriously enough to become a great artist, he is apt to take it -seriously enough to act upon his convictions. He will seek refuge from -despair in debauchery and drink; not finding it, he will go on to<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_285">{285}</a></span> opium -and hashish. He will be one of those who from fear of death commit -suicide, or who from brooding over insanity go insane. Maupassant was in -a strait-jacket at the age of forty; thus proving himself a moralist, -and a teacher of precious lessons: more than we can say about the art -dilettanti of our own time, who write delicately perfumed impropriety, -and live conventional and pampered lives upon the backs of the working -class.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XC"></a>CHAPTER XC<br /><br /> -THE FOE OF FORMULAS</h2> - -<p>Up in the gloomy, ice-bound North, where men dream about God and drink -strong liquor, another teacher was engaged in undermining bourgeois -morality, and raising a storm of controversy about his head. The name of -Henrik Ibsen brings before us a grim-faced old man with set mouth and -large spectacles and a fringe of defiant white whiskers. He was a -fighting man, a dogmatic antidogmatist, a propagandist if ever there was -one in the field of art.</p> - -<p>He also was born of the people, and educated in the school of hardship. -He was an apothecary’s assistant in a small Norwegian port, then a poor -student, journalist and poet, then the director of a provincial theater, -which struggled for six years in a vain fight against bankruptcy. -Finally, at the age of thirty-eight, Ibsen received a pension of four or -five hundred dollars a year from the king, and on this he lived a stern, -penurious life, raising a family, sewing the buttons on his own clothes, -and making over the theater and the moral ideas of the thinking world.</p> - -<p>Except for some pot-boilers written in his youth, all the works of Ibsen -have one theme, the problem of ideals in relation to reality. Men and -women form a conception of right conduct, and they try to apply it, and -it doesn’t work out as it is supposed to; in most of Ibsen’s plays it -works out exactly the opposite way. His thesis is that life cannot be -guided by formulas; those of democracy are just as dangerous as those of -authority; either will destroy you if you apply them blindly. Ibsen is -in revolt against religious creeds and social conventions which repress -the individual and thwart his full development. But<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_286">{286}</a></span> you must not assume -that he is willing to make a formula out of self-realization; -straightway he will turn about and show you some selfish egotist engaged -in realizing himself and wrecking everyone else.</p> - -<p>Ibsen wrote two long poems, “Brand” and “Peer Gynt,” into which he put -ideas resembling those of “Don Quixote.” Brand is a Norwegian preacher, -who has his formula of perfect righteousness, the sacrifice of the -individual to God. He acts as blindly as Don Quixote tilting at -wind-mills, and destroys a number of people, himself included. “Peer -Gynt,” on the other hand, is a scamp who, like Sancho Panza, fools -himself by those very qualities of which he is most proud, his ability -to take care of himself, his unwillingness to consider anything but his -own interest.</p> - -<p>Ibsen also fell under the spell of gloomy materialistic science. Like -Maupassant, he sees men as the sport of circumstances. The difference is -that he believes, in spite of his theories, in fighting against -circumstance, and his whole being is absorbed in the task of helping men -and women to fight wisely and effectively.</p> - -<p>He took the French device of the “well-made play,” a simple, unadorned -picture of reality, compressing a great mass of character and incident -into a small space. He used this art form to deal, not with the great -world of fashion, but with the middle-class people he knew in small -Norwegian towns: doctors and lawyers and clergymen and merchants, with -their wives and sons and daughters. They are wretchedly unhappy people, -and Ibsen shows how they make their own unhappiness, because their ideas -are false, because they are slaves of traditions which have no relation -to present-day reality. “The Pillars of Society” tells about a business -man who makes his life a string of lies in order to hide an offense he -has committed; he is helping to preserve civilization, by not letting -anybody know that a business man can do wrong. “A Doll’s House” tells -about a woman who discovers that she is a pet and an ornament in her -household, and leaves her husband and children and goes out into the -world to become an individual.</p> - -<p>There are three stages in one’s attitude toward thesis plays of this -sort. First, the thesis is new, and whether it pleases you or angers -you, it rouses and stirs you.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_287">{287}</a></span> Second, you know the thesis by heart, and -have accepted it and lived it. At that stage the play bores you; you say -that you do not go to the theater for Sunday school lessons. The third -stage comes when the thesis has become so familiar that you no longer -think of the play in that way; it holds you then, if it holds you at -all, by the human realness of its characters and their fates.</p> - -<p>Eighteen years ago I saw “A Doll’s House” acted. I was at the second -stage of development, and it seemed to me a tiresome little sermon, I -could not stay to the end. But a few days later I saw “Hedda Gabler,” -and this was different; I forgot the thesis, and was interested in a -psychological study of the modern parasitic female. We all know Hedda; -some of us have been married to her. She has been brought up in -idleness, she lives by vanity, she is bored, and preys upon men, not -because she is sexual, but because she wants attention and applause, and -cannot endure that anyone else should have these things in her presence. -One of Hedda’s victims is a poet; he has labored to produce a -manuscript, and in his despair over her he tears it up. When Hedda hears -of that she is thrilled to the depths, and cries: “A deed! A deed!” Let -that be a symbol of the art-for-art’s-sake attitude to life!</p> - -<p>The greatest of Ibsen’s plays is “Ghosts.” It has a thesis so wicked -that the critics hardly yet dare to state it. This thesis happens to be -the exact opposite of the one in “The Scarlet Letter”: that a true and -good woman, unhappily married, who finds that she loves her clergyman, -ought to elope with the clergyman instead of staying with her husband. -In Ibsen’s play the woman stays with her husband, and helps to make him -comfortable, while he gets drunk and commits infidelities. She bears him -a son, and lavishes her love and devotion upon this son, only to see him -go the way of his father, and eventually die of syphilis.</p> - -<p>This unpleasant disease had never before appeared upon the stage, and -when “Ghosts” was produced in the pious city of London in the year 1891, -the critics and newspapers went out of their minds. You may find a -record of their opinions in Bernard Shaw’s “Quintessence of Ibsenism”; -starting with the London “Daily Telegraph,” which called the play “an -open drain; a<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_288">{288}</a></span> loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a -lazar-house with all its doors and windows open ... candid foulness ... -bestial and cynical ... offensive cynicism ... melancholy and malodorous -world ... absolutely loathsome and fetid ... gross, almost putrid -indecorum ... literary carrion ... crapulous stuff.” All this referring -to a play now recognized as one of the great tragic masterpieces of all -time!</p> - -<p>“An Enemy of the People” deals with Ibsen’s attitude toward politics and -social questions. The “enemy” is a young doctor in a Norwegian town, who -discovers that the famous baths, the basis of the town’s prosperity, are -infected with typhoid. The doctor insists upon making the facts public, -and so of course he has an unhappy time. Curiously enough, you will find -the same story in “The Goose-Step”; it happened at the University of -Oregon—quite a distance from Norway. The “enemy of the people” in this -latter case was a young professor, who was duly compelled to move on.</p> - -<p>The world is forty years older than when Ibsen wrote this play; we have -had time to analyze the economic forces in our society, and we are no -longer satisfied with a crude distrust of democracy. It is true that the -people stone the prophets; but later on they build monuments to them; -and the world must be saved by the people, if it is to be saved at all. -Ibsen’s attitude is the natural one for an artist, who has to take care -of his own mind, and does not want anyone to tell him what to think. He -is distrustful of discipline, preaches individualism—and finds the -reactionaries glad to quote his words. But you see, all the poet has to -do is to portray the world; the masses have a more difficult job—they -have to change it. So they cannot rest in the anarchist attitude; they -have to have discipline and solidarity, they have to organize and find -leaders, and learn to stand by those leaders, and at the same time to -control them. All that is a new task, and calls for new types of -thinkers, not merely critical, but constructive.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_289">{289}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XCI"></a>CHAPTER XCI<br /><br /> -THE BIOLOGICAL SUPERIOR</h2> - -<p>Sweden also had a great dramatist and poet in this nineteenth century. -He came some twenty years later than Ibsen, a tormented and highly -emotional man of genius, who just about boxed the compass of thought, -and believed everything there was for a man to believe. He was too much -of a propagandist, even for me; I like an artist to have ideas, but not -so many that they contradict!</p> - -<p>August Strindberg’s father was a bankrupt shop-keeper; his mother was a -bar-maid, and three illegitimate children had preceded him. He was -raised in a family of eleven in a small house, and the first emotions he -knew were fear and hunger. He was lonely and unhappy all his life, and -poured out his troubles in a torrent over Sweden.</p> - -<p>He began writing at twenty-one; he had the artist’s passion for all -kinds of knowledge, and in those early days he was a Socialist and a -champion of labor, also of the economic emancipation of women. But at -the age of twenty-six he chose a wife, and illustrated the formula we -used to sing in childhood:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Needles and pins, needles and pins,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When a man marries his trouble begins!<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>His wife bore him some children, and then wished to resume her career as -an actress. Strindberg objected to this, and they quarreled, and after -seven years they parted. The poet considered this an irremediable -tragedy; for he held a mystical idea, that marriage is an actual union -of flesh and spirit, and to tear a couple apart is to maim them both. -Strindberg put his agony into a book, “The Confessions of a Fool”; a -ghastly record, yet one can hardly keep from smiling over it. The author -preaches the doctrine that woman is inferior to man; he pounds upon this -theme—and then proceeds to tell you marital incidents which make it -clear that the woman was fully a match for him!</p> - -<p>Strindberg believes that woman is inferior, not merely physically, -intellectually and morally, but biologically;<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_290">{290}</a></span> she is a half-way -creature between man and child, and it is her duty to submit herself in -all things to the biologically superior male. But nature for some reason -has failed to inform her that she is inferior, and the perverse creature -insists upon trying to act as if she were equal; so everything goes to -wreck. Somebody said that Herbert Spencer’s idea of a tragedy was a -generalization killed by a fact. Strindberg’s tragedy was the same, but -he never recognized it; he clung to his generalization, not merely -through this marriage, but through two others, which failed in the same -way, and for the same reason.</p> - -<p>It is true that some women are predatory; it is true that a great many -women abuse the power they get. That may be expected of every enslaved -race or class or sex. But the only way to become fit for power is to -exercise it, and the only way to get it is to take it. The women who -broke Strindberg’s three marriages were like the suffragettes with -hammers; they were using the only arguments their opponents would heed. -As a result of their efforts, some of us now live in a happier time, -having comrade-wives who do not abuse their share of power, but -co-operate with their husbands in carrying the burdens of life.</p> - -<p>But whatever you think about Strindberg’s biological superiority, you -cannot deny the power of the tragedy he wrote upon his thesis. It is -called “The Father,” and shows a man undermined and destroyed by a -cunning, determined woman, who sets out to break him to her will. Also -you have to admit the reality of “Miss Julia,” which portrays the -degeneracy of the ruling classes in Sweden. This high-born young lady, -who starts an intrigue with a man-servant in her household, might be a -page out of a “yellow” Sunday supplement in America.</p> - -<p>Strindberg came close to the line of insanity; he spent two or three -years in a sanitarium, and wrote a book about these borderland states, -“Inferno.” Then he took up with Swedenborg, and evolved into a Christian -mystic, and went back into a second childhood of bible-worship. But that -did not keep him from carrying on frantic quarrels with his enemies, and -pouring out many volumes of personalities. Strangely enough, there is a -kind of impersonality in it all, because the man is so tragically -earnest. He is trying to find the truth, and puts himself before us<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_291">{291}</a></span> as -a document; no one but Rousseau has done this so completely. Therefore, -we think of Strindberg as one of the great teachers. Let the artist give -us truth, and we can always find use for it.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XCII"></a>CHAPTER XCII<br /><br /> -THE OVERMAN</h2> - -<p>Another great writer of this time was troubled about the problem of the -ladies. August Strindberg married three, and experienced three -tragedies. Friedrich Nietzsche sought to marry one, but she would not -have him; after which he wrote contemptuously of them all. Despite the -fact that he was a clergyman’s son, he suffered from hereditary -syphilis, and went insane—a tragic waste of the greatest genius of -modern times.</p> - -<p>Nietzsche was born in 1844, and became a professor of philology at a -Swiss university. His health broke down from eye-strain at the age of -thirty-five, and he retired upon a small pension. His insanity came at -the age of forty-five, and he lived eleven years longer, slowly rotting -to pieces, and meantime growling like a wild beast.</p> - -<p>Nietzsche’s enemies, of course, made the most of this cruel fate; they -said that he was insane all the time. That is an easy way to dispose of -his writings—easy for the average person, who has never experienced -such emotional states as Nietzsche dealt with, and does not wish to be -troubled by them. But a few who have experienced these states are in -better position to decide. Nietzsche’s mature work is perfectly sane; it -contains many contradictions, but we have to permit an original mind to -grow. His masterpiece, “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” contains the greatest -imaginative writing of several centuries.</p> - -<p>But we must remember that these books were written by a man who was ill -and suffering atrociously. He declared that every year meant for him two -hundred days of pain. His view of life is the product of a pain-driven -mind, like the ecstasy experienced by martyrs undergoing torture. We do -not expect ordered and systematic thought from such persons; but we may -learn from them strange secrets concerning the possibilities of the -human spirit.</p> - -<p>One of Nietzsche’s doctrines is the exaltation of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_292">{292}</a></span> aristocratic over -the democratic virtues. He was the son of a Prussian state pastor, and -he glorified war, and was taken as the spiritual director of the -invasion of Belgium. It would be easy for me to deal with him on that -basis, and draw and quarter him amid general acclamation. The only -trouble is that Nietzsche is one of the pioneers of the moral life, a -conqueror of new universes for our race.</p> - -<p>There are two sides to his message, the positive and the negative. On -the positive side it is the record of an exalted poet, proclaiming -brotherhood, service, and consecration. On its negative side it -represents the fears and repugnances of an invalid, shrinking from life -which was too much for him, and seeking refuge in his own visions, where -he could be master without interference from a hostile world. Where -Nietzsche loved something, you will generally find it something great -and noble; where he hated something, you will often find it a thing he -failed to understand. There were two subjects upon which he was entirely -ignorant; the first woman, and the second economics. This double -ignorance distorted all his thought, and has brought it about that his -influence counts on the side of the forces he hated.</p> - -<p>Nietzsche agreed with the proposition of the present book, that all the -arts are propaganda. He showed how those who were able to face life and -to conquer made themselves a philosophy and art of self-assertion and -development; those who were afraid of life made a philosophy and art of -self-sacrifice and renunciation. Nietzsche explained Christianity as a -slave religion, evolved by the victims of Roman imperialism; he -proclaimed himself Antichrist, and advocated a “master morality.”</p> - -<p>Nietzsche’s supreme contribution is the interpretation of evolution; he -became the prophet and seer of this doctrine, developing a concept of -the Overman, a higher being into which the human race is destined to -evolve. Bernard Shaw has popularized the term Superman; but I venture to -stick to Overman, which I used in “The Journal of Arthur Stirling,” -several years before “Man and Superman” was published. Nietzsche might -have chosen the term “Supermensch” if he had wished; but he wrote -“Uebermensch.”</p> - -<p>This concept Nietzsche set forth in “Zarathustra” with<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_293">{293}</a></span> fervor and -splendor of imagery, a chant the like of which the German language had -never known before. Ten years ago, editing “The Cry for Justice,” made -up of the world’s revolutionary literature from thirty languages and -five thousand years of history, I gave the last place to a quotation -from “Zarathustra”; the reason being that it represents to me the -ultimate of modern thought, the greatest words in recent poetry. I quote -a portion of this passage:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>Man is a cord, tied between Beast and Overman—a, cord above an -abyss.</p> - -<p>A perilous arriving, a perilous traveling, a perilous looking -backward, a perilous trembling and standing still.</p> - -<p>What is great in man is that he is a bridge, and no goal; what can -be loved in man is that he is a going-over and a going-under.</p> - -<p>I love them that know not how to live, be it even as those going -under, for such are those going across.</p> - -<p>I love them that are great in scorn, because these are they that -are great in reverence, and arrows of longing toward the other -shore.</p></div> - -<p>You will note that these paragraphs celebrate the fame of the martyrs, -those who sacrifice themselves for the race. Are we not here right back -in the spirit of Jesus? I do not mean Christianity, the thing that is -taught in churches, the creeds of the other-worldly; I am referring to -the revolutionary carpenter, who taught brotherhood in its high heroic -sense, and proclaimed the kingdom of heaven upon earth.</p> - -<p>Nietzsche wrote and taught in that same heroic sense; but because of his -two great ignorances, concerning women and concerning economics, he -could not make distinctions, and save his message from being interpreted -in the interest of class greed and materialism. When we see the image of -Jesus set up in gold and jewels, and carried forth to bless wholesale -murder for the profit of the Russian Tsardom, or of J. P Morgan & -Company’s international loans, we are witnessing one of mankind’s -historic tragedies. We are witnessing another when the message of -Friedrich Nietzsche is taken up by Bernhardi and the Prussian Junkers, -and used to sanctify that power which during the war I described as “the -Beast with the Brains of an Engineer.”</p> - -<p>Nietzsche loathed the Prussian Junkers, and the whole<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_294">{294}</a></span> Prussian state -machine. He lived the life of an ascetic, and wrote in spiritual terms; -when he talked about the “strong,” he meant those that are great in -reverence as well as in scorn. But he could not analyze the different -kinds of competition in which social beings engage; he could not -distinguish between those which encourage intellectual progress and -those which strangle it. He saw that in primitive societies war -eliminates the degenerate; he did not perceive that in modern capitalist -society war has exactly the opposite effect, preserving the weaklings -and parasites, and putting commercial hogs in power. Neither did he -perceive how a system of hereditary privilege enthrones the sensualists -and idlers, the human types he most despised. While young he came under -the influence of Richard Wagner; he read that pernicious secret document -which Wagner had prepared for his friend King Ludwig, explaining it as -the duty of the artist to devise illusions to keep the masses patriotic -and religious. Nietzsche absorbed that doctrine and it poisoned his -social thought for life.</p> - -<p>I have met with ridicule from sapient critics for praising Zarathustra -and at the same time proclaiming myself a Socialist. But just as it is -possible by a deeper view to reconcile Zarathustra and Jesus, so also it -is possible to reconcile Zarathustra and Marx. The free spirits and -lofty idealists whom Nietzsche dreamed will never be able to function in -the world of international profiteers; they are outcasts in such a -world, as Nietzsche was in the Junker world. Only when competition for -money has been replaced by co-operative order will mankind take -seriously those higher activities which were Nietzsche’s concern.</p> - -<p>Exactly the same thing applies to the war of the sexes; it is not in -quarreling with women, like Strindberg, or in avoiding them, like -Nietzsche, that the happiness of man is found. There is a saying of -Zarathustra most frequently quoted by his enemies: “When thou goest to -woman forget not the whip.” That is taken to mean that man should -dominate woman by brute power; but Georg Brandes tells me that it does -not mean that at all. It means that you must not forget that the woman -will seek to wield a whip over you if she can; in other words, the -Strindberg terror! Brandes declares that he has seen a<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_295">{295}</a></span> photograph of -Nietzsche in company with the young lady whom he loved; Nietzsche in -this photograph had a child’s harness about his neck and shoulders, and -the woman had a whip in her hand. That, of course, was play; but Freud -has taught us that play is symbolic, and perhaps it was this picture -which Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote his famous sentence.</p> - -<p>Anyhow, this much is certain: Nietzsche did not know women. Except for -this one unhappy love affair, he took toward them the same attitude as -the Christian hermits and monks—and for the same reason, because he -wanted to live his inner life without disturbance. So extremes meet, and -history repeats itself—the “eternal recurrence” which Nietzsche taught! -Through much of his life he had the devoted services of his sister; she -nursed him and cared for him during those dreadful years when he -wandered about the room growling like a wild beast; and after he was -dead, she edited his books and his letters. Man flees from woman—but he -begins in a woman’s arms, and he ends there.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XCIII"></a>CHAPTER XCIII<br /><br /> -THE OCTOPUS CITIES</h2> - -<p>Modern civilization is a stepmother to poets; it is crowded, noisy and -ugly, and they run away and seek refuge in gardens, or monasteries, or -dreams of a happier past. But modern civilization is alive; it is the -life of hundreds of millions of human beings, forging a new future. And -there comes a new kind of poet, able to penetrate to the inner spirit of -that future.</p> - -<p>It was fitting that such a poet should be a Belgian; for Belgium is the -center of the new industrialism in Europe. Here are great iron and steel -plants, and vast cobwebs of railroads, and harbors to which the commerce -of the world pours in. The past and the future meet here, for Belgium -has an old history and art; it is a battle-ground of Catholicism and -Protestantism, of modern science and ancient mysticism, of French -revolution and German autocracy. It is wealthy, with all the class -contrasts and antagonisms which modern capitalism brings.</p> - -<p>Emile Verhaeren was born in 1855, of well-to-do re<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_296">{296}</a></span>tired parents. He -lived in the country, but in Belgium the country is close to the towns, -and the boy saw the river with the great ships, the factories and the -busy artisans, a teeming life, stimulating to the imagination. He was -educated in a Jesuit school, where they hoped to make a priest of him, -but did not succeed. He studied law, and led a wild, freakish youth. He -had been writing verses since childhood, Latin verses, and then the -classical French Alexandrines, under the spell of Victor Hugo. Then came -Zola, and young Verhaeren horrified his parents and friends by a volume -of poetry portraying the violent and brutal facts of Flemish life. They -are a gross and drunken people—we see them in the paintings of Rubens; -and it was a time when young poets were in revolt against false -idealism, and wanted to deal with reality, the more crude and hideous -the better.</p> - -<p>From excess of animalism the Belgian people revolt to the other extreme, -asceticism; so the country is full of monks, gloomy and sober, living -apart and contemplating the past with holy awe. Verhaeren wrote a second -book, in which he portrayed strange types of these devotees. But he was -content to admire them; he did not join them.</p> - -<p>The poet exists by virtue of the fact that he is more sensitive than the -average man; life hits him harder blows, and he flies from one extreme -to the other. Modern science took from Verhaeren his Catholic faith, and -there followed a period of pessimism, a terrible psychic crisis. Like -Dostoievski and Strindberg, he came close to the border-line of insanity -and suicide. But his restless mind would not give up to any suffering; -he was thrilled even by the adventure of pain; he loved life, even -though it held for him only the vision of death. All things are themes -for art; so he wrote a book of nightmares, a pilgrimage of neurasthenia.</p> - -<p>The sick poet had fled from the noisy and brutal world; he found his -deliverance by coming back to it. Redemption lay in loving and -understanding mankind in its manifold new activities. Those things which -the poets generally affect to despise Verhaeren now took up with -ecstasy: industrialism, machinery, the roar of cities, the manifold -activities of crowds, in all these things he discovered a new power, -promising an infinitude of beauty.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_297">{297}</a></span></p> - -<p>Verhaeren wrote in French, and used a new form of rhymed free verse, -more obviously rhythmical than Whitman’s, marvelously responsive to -every throb of the poet’s imagination. It is a kind of verse to chant -aloud, an utterance of sweeping ecstasy. Verhaeren resembles Whitman in -many ways; in his identification of himself with the toiling masses, his -sense of the multitude as a new being, a thing with a life of its own. -Like Whitman he accepts the universe, he sings the chant of humanity -becoming God, conquering nature, and remaking existence in its own -image.</p> - -<p>Walt Whitman sang “these states,” and saw them as one mighty, triumphant -land. Verhaeren also had a vision, he was the prophet of the United -States of Europe. He had lived in all its great capitals, and knew and -interpreted the forces which were bringing them together and making them -one. Terrible places they are—“the octopus cities,” he calls them in -the title of one of his volumes, and portrays them as gigantic -tentacular monsters, sucking all the life-blood from the country. No -poet has ever approached Verhaeren in the portrayal of the cruelty and -loneliness and horror of these capitalist cities. You will find in “The -Cry for Justice” a translation of one of these poems, the most frightful -picture of prostitution ever given in verse.</p> - -<p>Verhaeren welcomed science, and proclaimed mass solidarity, the -surrender of the individual to the sweep of progress. He became a -prophet and preacher of what he called “cosmic enthusiasm.” He was, of -course, a Socialist and revolutionist. He wrote a lyrical drama called -“The Dawn,” which has been translated into English by Arthur Symonds. -Here in a mixture of prose and verse he celebrates a hero who surrenders -the citadel of capitalism to the masses, and gives his life in the -effort to abolish class conflict and build the happy future. Verhaeren -wrote other plays which have not yet been translated or produced; they -do not conform to the rules of the drama for profit, for they deal with -humanity and not with sex. But the new time is coming—and here is one -of its prophets.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_298">{298}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XCIV"></a>CHAPTER XCIV<br /><br /> -THE INSPIRED PARRAKEET</h2> - -<p>I remember the first poet I ever met in my youth; one of the “pure” -poets, a dreamy soul, who lived in the ugly city of New York, and wrote -about beauty in distant Nineveh and Tyre. He earned his living in a -book-store, where he faded slowly, and his hair came to look as if the -moths had been feeding on it. Only once I saw fire in his eyes, and that -was when the name of Swinburne was mentioned. “Swinburne is a <i>god</i>!” he -exclaimed.</p> - -<p>Yes, Algernon Charles Swinburne is no mere poet; he is divinity, before -whose high altar the art-for-art’s-sakers perform obeisance. He was born -in 1837, of an aristocratic county family in the North of England. So he -always had plenty of money, and lived his own life in the aristocratic -fashion. They sent him to Eton at the age of twelve, and then to Oxford, -but respectability failed to “take” with him.</p> - -<p>He was the strangest figure in which the soul of a poet was ever housed. -As a child he had been beautiful, but something must have gone wrong -with his glands, so that his head grew faster than his body. He -developed a noble brow, but a weak mouth and receding chin; his enormous -head was lighted by two bright green eyes, and covered with a shock of -vivid red hair. When he became excited, which he was liable to do at a -moment’s notice, his arms and legs began to jerk convulsively, and he -would rush about the room, orating vehemently, perhaps hopping upon the -sofa, like a bright-colored parrakeet. He was an omnivorous reader, and -knew all the poetry there was in the world—most of it by heart, and -would pour it out by the hour, in Latin, Greek, French, Italian or -English. If he became too much excited, he would suddenly have a fit and -fall unconscious, to the terror of the company; but after a while he -would come to, just as lively and full of words as ever.</p> - -<p>In his childhood and youth, according to the English custom, they filled -him up with Greek and Latin verses; he absorbed the bad as well as the -good, wine and women as well as song. Then he came under the spell of -Victor Hugo, who filled him with a fervor for liberty. It is an<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_299">{299}</a></span> -interesting illustration of the influence a great poet can exert. -Swinburne worshipped Hugo with frenzied extravagance, and remained a -disciple of republicanism all through his seventy-two years; and this -without the slightest actual contact with republicanism, without -anything in his environment or his actions to explain such revolutionary -fever.</p> - -<p>Worldly impracticability was carried to its last extreme in this -combustible youth; he always had to have somebody to take care of him, -and fell under the spell of one personality after another: Rossetti, -William Morris, Mazzini, and finally Watts-Dunton, who literally saved -his life. Swinburne would come up to London and engage in what he called -“racketing”—by which he meant stimulating his frenzies with alcohol. He -would keep this up until he was completely prostrated, and then his -father or one of his friends would carry him off to the country and -mount guard over him, and there he would live a quiet and placid -literary life until the world lured him forth again. By the time he was -forty he had carried his dissipation to such extremes that he was all -but wrecked. One by one his friends had to give him up, and he was -living in wretched lodgings at the point of death.</p> - -<p>It was then that Watts-Dunton took charge of his affairs once for all, -and turned his country house into a sort of literary sanitarium, and -kept the poet for thirty years, strictly forbidding any but respectable -citizens to call upon him. Here the queer little parrakeet hopped about -in the library, and gradually grew old and deaf, and wrote a great deal -of prose and verse of little consequence. Some critics fight with the -moralists over the question, Is it better for a poet to die drunk and -inspired, or to live sober and dull? My friend, George Sterling, writes -me on this point: “I still refuse, probably from personal experience, to -believe that alcohol helps the artist to function at his best.”</p> - -<p>Swinburne’s first great work, published at the age of twenty-eight, was -an imitation Greek play, “Atalanta in Calydon.” As poetry it is -marvelous; nobody since Shelley had poured out such a torrent of -glorious words. All the tricks of the trade are in it—how many you can -learn from Professor Saintsbury, who lists them: “equivalence and -substitution, alternative and repetition, rhymes and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_300">{300}</a></span> rhymeless -suspension of sound, volley and check of verse, stanza construction, -line-and pause-moulding, foot-conjunction and contrast.” Such are the -weapons in the armory of those who have read all the poetry there is in -the world!</p> - -<p>What else is there beside verbal splendor and technical tricks? The -answer is: The familiar Greek aristocratic personages, struggling in -vain against their gods; the old Greek fatalism and pessimism, taken up -as a literary exercise and carried to un-Hellenic extremes. It might -have puzzled you, perhaps, that a poet of republicanism and revolt -should also be a poet of pessimism; but you would have been ill-advised -to ask the question of Swinburne, for once, when a friend ventured to -criticize his work, he stared for a moment or two of horror, then -uttered a shrill scream, and rushed upstairs to his room, and seized his -manuscript and spent hours tearing it into shreds and throwing it into -the fire—and then spent the rest of the night rewriting it from memory!</p> - -<p>Swinburne could not think, he could only feel, and so he was capable of -pouring his poetic frenzy into absolutely contradictory ideas. So we -have these magnificent choruses of “Atalanta,” in which man’s despair at -his own fate is voiced with overwhelming poignancy:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">For a day and a night and a morrow,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">That his strength might endure for a span<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With travail and heavy sorrow,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">The holy spirit of man....<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He weaves, and is clothed with derision;<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Sows, and he shall not reap;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">His life is a watch or a vision<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Between a sleep and a sleep.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>But then, if that be true, what is the use of struggling for liberty and -overthrowing tyrants? What indeed is the use of writing beautiful verses -and reading proofs and wrangling with publishers and critics? -Manifestly, no use whatever. Nevertheless, Swinburne would read a news -item about Napoleon the Little, and he would fly into another frenzy, -and write a poem in which he called for the blood of tyrants. He -collected all these into his “Songs before Sunrise,” which constitute -one of the bibles of liberty. When I meet an art-for-art’s-saker, I -never fail to ask him if he has read Swinburne’s “Prelude,” in<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_301">{301}</a></span> which -the poet describes his conversion to the cause of human service.</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Play then and sing; we too have played,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">We likewise, in that subtle shade.<br /></span> -<span class="i2">We too have twisted through our hair<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Such tendrils as the wild Loves wear,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And heard what mirth the Mænads made.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">Such has been the poet’s life; but now he has reformed, and taken up the -duty of passing on the light of the intelligence to his fellows:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">A little time that we may fill<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Or with such good works or such ill<br /></span> -<span class="i2">As loose the bonds or make them strong<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Wherein all manhood suffers wrong.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">And that leads us by a natural transition to the “Marching Song,” a -battle-cry of the revolution:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i10">Rise, ere the dawn be risen;<br /></span> -<span class="i12">Come, and be all souls fed;<br /></span> -<span class="i10">From field and street and prison<br /></span> -<span class="i12">Come, for the feast is spread;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Live, for the truth is living; wake, for night is dead.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>“My other books are books,” Swinburne declared, “but ‘Songs before -Sunrise’ is myself.” His respectable biographer, Edmund Gosse, is both -puzzled and shocked by this, and points out how completely Swinburne’s -hopes of republicanism have failed to be realized in the modern world. -Yes; the poet failed to see that the lords of finance, the fat men of -the bourgeoisie, would subsidize autocracy and subsidize superstition, -as a means of riveting slavery upon the human mind and body for another -century. But let Professor Gosse take care of his health for a few years -more, and he may see that Daylight which was heralded in the “Songs -before Sunrise.”</p> - -<p>We have stepped ahead of our story and omitted to mention Swinburne’s -earlier volume of miscellaneous work, “Poems and Ballads,” which was -published shortly after “Atalanta,” and gave the Victorian age the worst -shock of its existence. This was the time of Tennyson at his most -mawkish, the time of “Maud” and “Enoch Arden”; literary England had not -seen anything really indecent since Byron’s “Don Juan,” nearly half a -century ago. But here came this young aristocrat—the son of an<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_302">{302}</a></span> -admiral, and therefore beyond prosecution for anything that he might -do—throwing out upon the world an inspired glorification of sexual and -alcoholic riot.</p> - -<p>Swinburne was, of course, just as sincere in his praise of Venus and the -vine as he was in his praise of liberty; more sincere, in fact, because -he practiced what he preached in the former case, but he omitted to go -off and die in the cause of liberty as Byron had done. Some of his -licentious poetry is perfect from the technical point of view; but, on -the other hand, “Poems and Ballads” contains the worst combination of -words ever put into a poem: “the lilies and languors of virtue and the -roses and raptures of vice.” It is pleasant to be able to record that -Swinburne had the wit to ridicule his own habit of silly alliteration; -see the parody called “Nephelidia”: “From the depth of the dreamy -decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine,” and -so on.</p> - -<p>In “Thus Spake Zarathustra” there is a doctrine of freedom, which is -summed up: I ask you, not free <i>from</i> what, but free <i>to</i> what? And that -is what I should like to point out to young poets who uncritically -accept Swinburne as a god. It is possible to be entirely free to do what -you please, and yet not please to do many silly and destructive things. -Young poets are free to write as eloquent verses as they know how; and -they may put into those verses a celebration of all things beautiful and -just and noble in the world. On the other hand, they may put in a -celebration of debauchery; and they may try it out for themselves, and -fall slaves to alcohol and drugs, and end in the mad-house or a -suicide’s or drunkard’s grave—like Baudelaire and Verlaine and Musset -and Poe and Dowson, and that brilliant, unhappy genius whose story we -have next to read.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XCV"></a>CHAPTER XCV<br /><br /> -THE GREEN CARNATION</h2> - -<p>Eight years ago Frank Harris published his two volumes entitled “Oscar -Wilde: His Life and Confessions.” I wrote him that it was one of the -half dozen greatest biographies in the English language, and he replied, -characteristically: “Name the other five.” That story never<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_303">{303}</a></span> fails to -raise a laugh; but in fairness to Frank Harris I ought to add that when -I sat down and thought it over seriously I could not name the other -five. Here is the story of a terrific human tragedy, told plainly and -completely, with profound insight and deep pity. How can the man who -wrote it not know that it is great?</p> - -<p>The subject of this sermon in action was born in Dublin in 1854. His -father was a wealthy baronet, a physician who was accustomed to seduce -his women-patients; his mother was an excessively vain society poetess. -The son was burdened with the label Oscar Fingal O’Flahartie Wills -Wilde, and received the usual public school and Oxford education. In -these so-called “public” schools, which are ruling class -boarding-schools, the boys live semi-monastic lives, entirely withdrawn -from woman’s influence; they are fed upon Greek literature and art, -which glorifies homosexuality, and therefore English upper-class life is -rotten with this odious vice. Frank Harris narrates that at the time of -Wilde’s trial, when general exposures on this subject were threatened, -great numbers of London’s prominent club members suddenly discovered -that they had important business on the Continent.</p> - -<p>Oscar Wilde had extraordinary gifts; a vivid imagination, a flow of -eloquence, and charming wit. He was the perfect fine flower of -leisure-class art, a gentleman about town, a literary dandy who learned -the lesson that it pays to advertise, and made himself the most talked -about man in London by dressing in knee breeches and silk hose, carrying -a large sunflower in his hand, and greeting men and women with sweet -impertinences. There is a satiric portrait of this elegant “esthete” in -Robert Hichens’ novel, “The Green Carnation.”</p> - -<p>Oscar wrote comedies dealing with the London world of fashion in which -he lived. These plays delighted that world, and still delight audiences -of the fashionable. Frank Harris regards them as imperishable classics; -and all I can do is to record the fact that they put me to sleep. Nearly -twenty years ago I saw “The Importance of Being Earnest” in New York, -and cannot recall that I was ever more bored in a theater. The interest -of the play is supposed to lie in its “smart” dialogue, and the formula -for that smartness is one which anyone can learn in two minutes. Take -any statement involving the simple com<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_304">{304}</a></span>mon sense of mankind, the moral -heritage of the race for countless ages; and then make an epigram -proclaiming the opposite, and you have a “line” for a society play. -“Charity creates a multitude of sins.... It is better to be good-looking -than to be good.... All charming people are spoiled.... A man can be -happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.... It is a -dangerous thing to reform anyone.... The real drawback to marriage is -that it makes one unselfish.... Democracy means simply the bludgeoning -of the people by the people for the people.... There is no such thing as -a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.... -The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and -separate.”</p> - -<p>A man who is absorbed in useful work, and therefore has few impulses to -depravity, can encounter such Wildeness with indifference; but the -average man, who is never sure of his own self-control, and who has sons -and daughters to train in as much decency as he can, is made frantic by -such perversity, the deliberate bedeviling of the wits of our blindly -struggling humanity. These “epigrams” of Oscar Wilde are like the -snapping of a whip-lash in the face of men’s everyday moral sensibility. -So naturally this too-clever young esthete was cordially loathed, and -his enemies whetted their knives for him.</p> - -<p>Oscar came over to America to exhibit his whimsicalities to the wives -and daughters of our steel kings and pork packers. To the custom’s -officer he remarked: “I have nothing to declare but my genius”; and so -his success was assured. He went back to London and wrote more plays, -one of them, “Salome,” assuredly the most cruel, cold, and disgusting -piece of lewdness in the English language. Its heroine is the young -daughter of King Herod, who attempts to seduce John the Baptist to her -sensual desires, and when he repels her, has him executed, and has his -head brought in upon a platter, and strips herself as nearly naked as -stage-customs allow, and dances before this bloody object and fondles -and kisses it. The climax of modern art depravity was reached when -Richard Strauss set this drama to elaborate and costly music. When I saw -audiences of bedizened and bejewelled fat beasts, male and female, -having their sick nerves thrilled<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_305">{305}</a></span> by this “grand” opera, I knew that -European capitalism was ready for the slaughterman’s ax.</p> - -<p>Out of these plays Oscar reaped much money, and spent it in eating too -much, drinking too much, and pursuing his cultured vices. Among his -favorites was a young heir of the nobility, who has since become Lord -Alfred Douglas, assuredly the most disagreeable little wretch that ever -displayed himself in the British world of letters. Lord Alfred’s father, -the Marquis of Queensbury, made an effort to separate his son from -Wilde, and in so doing he wrote letters concerning Wilde which brought -about a great literary scandal.</p> - -<p>It is the privilege of elegant British gentlemen to pursue their vices -without interference; but they must display discretion, and not step -upon the toes of marquises. Oscar Wilde brought suit for slander against -Queensbury; and his lordship rallied his aristocratic friends, defended -himself successfully, and then had the audacious playwright arrested and -prosecuted for sodomy.</p> - -<p>The ordinary British citizen had, of course, no knowledge of the inside -circumstances of this case; all he saw was that a writer of nasty plays -tripped jauntily into the limelight and brought a libel suit against a -father for trying to save his son. Of the fact that the father was a bad -one, and the son worse, and that the courts were being used to maintain -a corrupt ruling class—those things the average Englishman did not -know. He will never know them until there is a Socialist daily press in -England, with the right to tell the truth about the ruling class, -something which at present the libel laws prevent.</p> - -<p>Here is material for a drama, far greater than any that Wilde wrote; and -Frank Harris gives us the whole story. In the early part of it he sees -Oscar clearly as the pitiful victim of his own will-less nature; but -when the tragedy of this nature reaches its climax, Harris lets himself -be tempted into offering Wilde to us in a new rôle, that of a persecuted -hero and martyred genius. Much as Harris may abhor Oscar’s sin, he -abhors the leading British virtues still more; so he is in the position -of Milton dealing with Satan—he cannot keep from sympathizing with his -character, in spite of logic. To be sure, he gives us the facts, so that -we can judge for ourselves, if we have the brains; and we must try to be -worthy of that trust!<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_306">{306}</a></span></p> - -<p>It seems evident enough that Oscar was sent to prison, not because of -his genius, nor yet because of his vices, but simply because he attacked -in a conspicuous and aggravating way a member of the hallowed ruling -caste of Britain. You may call that turning the tragedy into a Socialist -tract; but a man cannot interpret any case of social persecution unless -he sees its economic implications—unless, in other words, he -understands the class struggle. If Frank Harris had been a conscious -social revolutionist, his book would have been more powerful and -convincing, because he would have been less tempted to blame individuals -for evils which are social in their origin. He would have given us an -economic interpretation of Oscar, the spoiled darling of a putrescent -leisure class, thrown overboard, like Jonah, as a sacrifice in a -middle-class hurricane of virtue.</p> - -<p>Oscar Wilde was convicted and sent to prison; and of course Frank Harris -does not like prisons—he, too, has been sent there by the British -ruling caste. It is only natural that he should overlook in his book the -significance of the fact which he himself records, that this -imprisonment was the best thing that ever happened to Oscar. Harris -interceded for him, and was able to get him good food and the right to -have his books; he tells us that he noticed during his visits a -“spiritual deepening” in Oscar, due to the rigid disciplining of his -selfish nature. He was never so well or so much in possession of his -mental faculties as when he came out; but immediately he went back to -his vomit, and ate and drank and loafed himself to death, according to -the customs prevailing in that putrescent leisure class.</p> - -<p>It seems to me that the true conclusion to be drawn from Frank Harris’ -book is that decadent poets should be sent to prison and kept there -permanently. Anything to save them from smart society! While Oscar was -at large, the pet of the cultured rich, he idled and wrote futile plays; -but when he was locked up, he took life seriously, and wrote great -literature: “De Profundis,” a study of his spiritual reactions to his -disgrace; and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a supremely eloquent and -noble poem, the poet’s excuse for having lived.</p> - -<p>Reading these two works we say, by all means let us have prisons for -will-less men; places where such unhappy<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_307">{307}</a></span> beings may have as much -self-government as they can use, together with plain wholesome food, -moderate work outdoors, and enforced abstinence from alcohol and tobacco -and drugs. Having set up such prisons, let us keep in them, not merely -all thieves and highwaymen and esthetes, but men of fashion, princes, -lords and dukes, bishops, stock-brokers and fat persons.</p> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi: “You said you were going to label all your jokes.”</p> - -<p>Her husband, after meditating, remarks: “What Oscar needed was the right -sort of a wife.”</p> - -<p>She answers: “Almost any wife would have told him that a guilty man -cannot bring a slander suit.”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XCVI"></a>CHAPTER XCVI<br /><br /> -THE WHITE CHRYSANTHEMUM</h2> - -<p>“What troubles me,” says Mrs. Ogi, “is that you call this a book of all -the arts, and continue to deal with literature.”</p> - -<p>“In modern times each of the arts has developed a complicated technique; -and in order to analyze them all and show what they mean, one would have -to know much more than I know. But every now and then it happens that a -musician or painter or sculptor is not satisfied with his own art, but -uses mine; and then I have him!”</p> - -<p>“Oh, that mine enemy would write a book,” says Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>James McNeill Whistler wrote a book; he gave it a title: “The Gentle Art -of Making Enemies as Pleasingly Exemplified in Many Instances, Wherein -the Serious Ones of this Earth, Carefully Exasperated, Have Been -Prettily Spurred on to Unseemliness and Indiscretion, While Overcome by -an Undue Sense of Right.” The pages of this book are covered with -butterflies which the painter adopted as the signature for his work. -These butterflies are defiant, care-free, insolent; manifestly, some one -has taken great pains with them, and with the volume through which they -flutter. Studying it, we learn what kind of man it takes to succeed as a -leisure-class portrait-painter.</p> - -<p>Whistler was born in Boston, his father being a major<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_308">{308}</a></span> in the United -States Army. We have seen him “let out” from West Point; he was -“deficient in chemistry.” He went to Paris and lived the Bohemian -student life for some years, and imbibed those ideas concerning the -non-moral nature of art, which are a symptom of the disintegration of -our ruling classes.</p> - -<p>Whistler settled in London. He was unknown and an American; he had new -ideas about painting, and the Royal Academy would have nothing to do -with him, so he had to fight his way. A fiery little man, with wavy -black locks and one very singular white lock over his forehead, he -trained his eyebrows to stand out fiercely, and wore a little imperial -and a monocle, and carried a very long cane, and a white chrysanthemum -always in his buttonhole. He cultivated truculence, and his life was a -succession of conspicuous libel suits and public quarrels, kept alive by -letters to the newspapers.</p> - -<p>To a little group of his intimates Whistler could be a charming -companion and host; but when he went out into the world, he put on armor -like a hard-shelled crab, and was ready to bite the head off the first -person who got in his way. He would hit a man in the eye for differing -with him indiscreetly; once in a theater he beat a critic over the head -with his cane. In deadly seriousness he challenged George Moore to a -duel, and appointed seconds, and published Moore’s failure to reply. -Because he was dissatisfied with the price paid him for the portrait of -a certain lady, he painted out the lady’s face. He undertook to decorate -a dining-room for a wealthy shipowner, and became fascinated with the -idea of covering walls and ceiling with an endless number of peacocks in -gold and blue. He worked over this in a frenzy for months. The shipowner -wanted his house, but could not have it; Whistler turned it into an art -gallery, and brought the critics as to a public show. The man had agreed -to pay five hundred guineas for the decorating; in consideration of the -unforeseen amount of work, he raised the price to a thousand. But -Whistler insisted upon two thousand, and flew into a furious rage with -the man, and carried the row into the newspapers, and painted most -odious caricatures of the man and exhibited them publicly.</p> - -<p>Whistler was not content to be a great painter; he was also a lecturer, -man of letters, and historian. His<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_309">{309}</a></span> idea was that when he overcame one -of his enemies by a witty retort he made history, and when he collected -these retorts and the stories of his quarrels into a book, he wrote -history. The collecting was suggested to him by a journalist, who -proposed the title, and was authorized to gather the various items from -newspaper files. After the work was done and the book prepared and -printed, Whistler decided to take the credit for himself, so he sent the -journalist a check for ten pounds and dismissed him. Naturally the poor -fellow insisted that he had rights in the matter, and tried to bring out -the book in Belgium and in Paris. Whistler pursued him and had him -arrested and heavily fined; he took over the man’s idea and title, and -so we have the beautiful volume with the fancy butterflies. Whistler’s -conduct throughout the affair was brutal, and his book I am inclined to -call the most hateful thing in print. Its content is the egotism of a -highly intelligent and persistent hornet.</p> - -<p>Whistler has, to be sure, some ideas to advocate. He reprints a lecture -called “Ten O’clock,” named from the after-dinner hour at which it was -given in London. To his well-fed audience he explained that art is for -artists, who alone can understand it; art has nothing to do with the -people, who only degrade it when they touch it. Moreover, art has no -concern with morality, whether individual or national; “in no way do our -virtues minister to its worth, in no way do our vices impede its -triumph.”</p> - -<p>As for painting, Whistler declared it to be a matter of the arrangement -of line, form and color; it has nothing to do with any other idea, not -even with the subject being painted. To quote the painter’s own words: -“The subject matter has nothing to do with the harmony of color.” In -order to emphasize this point of view Whistler took to calling his -portraits by such names as “Harmony in Green and Rose,” “Caprice in Blue -and Silver,” “Symphony in White,” “Variations in Violet and Green,” -“Arrangement in Black and Gray.” One of his most famous paintings showed -fireworks at night, and was called “Nocturne in Black and Gold.” John -Ruskin wrote of it: “I never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred -guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” So there was -a picturesque and sensational libel suit, and the jury awarded Whistler -damages of one farthing, that is, half<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_310">{310}</a></span> a cent. That was not enough to -pay his lawyer’s fees, and so the painter went into bankruptcy and spent -a few years in Europe.</p> - -<p>What is the meaning of this art doctrine so defiantly enunciated? The -answer is, it is an extension of the artist’s egotism; the snobbery of -his profession and his caste, in every way and from every point of view -an anti-social and predatory thing. Here we are in London, the heart and -brain of the British Empire, at that time the greatest agency of -exploitation in the world. Here is wealth and fashion, representing the -wrung-out sweat and blood, not merely of enslaved British workers, but -of enslaved hundreds of millions of black and brown and yellow races. -Here dwell the masters, and they wish to flaunt their splendor; heedless -of the groans and the agony, the clamor of all the misery of mankind, -they command a dining-room painted over with gold and blue peacocks, or -hung with portraits of their splendid predatory selves and their lovely -parasitic females.</p> - -<p>And here come the swarms of painters competing for their attention, -seeking to flatter their vanity and awe their ignorance. One hornet a -little more venomous than the rest is able to impress his hornetry upon -them, to stir their greed by the possibility that his paintings may some -day be sold for thousands of pounds. So they decide to have themselves -“done” by this strange genius. They come to his studio and spend months -of torment standing or sitting for him, while he fusses and frets, and -paints and wipes out and paints again, taking infinite pains to see that -the ladies’ dresses are made of exactly the right quality of muslin, cut -and stitched in exactly the right way—because there is one certain -precise kind of muslin dress which is art, and any other kind is -something else.</p> - -<p>All this is called “beauty”; all this has laws, so Whistler tells us, as -definite and determinable as the laws of physics or chemistry. Beauty is -a thing permanent and immortal, and independent of all other -qualities—morality, justice, health, truth, honesty. The answer is: all -this is poisonous nonsense, handed out to the rich by those who exploit -their vanity. Art without morality is simply art produced for patrons -who have no morality by artists who have no morality. As to the -permanence of such art, the answer is that its standards are at every<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_311">{311}</a></span> -moment subject to the attack of more clever devisers of new forms of -folly and pretense. The proper way to cut a muslin dress today is an -absurd way to cut it tomorrow; and the same applies to harmonies of -color and outlines of form. The Turks cherish fatness in women, because -they like to be comfortable in their harems; the early Christians -thought that emaciation was beautiful, because it prepared them for -heaven; Whistler, wishing to flatter the aristocratic conceit of his -patrons, paints them abnormally tall and lean, because that is the -snobbish notion in fashion at the moment.</p> - -<p>Whistler was a great artist in the technical sense; that is, he learned -to put paint on canvas in such a way as to convey an impression of -reality, not merely physical but emotional and spiritual. He was a -terrific worker, as any man must be to succeed in the fierce competition -of modern life. He took his art with seriousness; and it happened that -twice in his lifetime something lifted him above the empty theories in -which he gloried. The first time was when he painted his mother. Here -was a gentle, sensitive, sweet-faced, devout Presbyterian old lady, with -whom all his childhood memories were bound up; he painted her sitting -with her hands in her lap, and her gray hair brushed down and covered -with an old-fashioned lace cap. He called it “Arrangement in Black and -Gray”; and that is all right, because black and gray are old lady’s -colors. But he would have described the painting even better if he had -given it a moral title: “Arrangement in Reverence and Affection.”</p> - -<p>And then came Carlyle; poor, bewildered, dyspeptic, struggling old -prophet from Scotland, he looked at Whistler’s portrait of his mother -and loved it, and consented to let the painter do the same thing for -him. So here is another study, posed in the same way, and called -“Arrangement in Black and Gray,” instead of “Arrangement in Pity and -Pathos.” These two pictures have human feeling and moral meaning; -therefore they are the two which have been reproduced, and which -everybody knows and loves. That is the answer to Whistler’s art -theories; but of course it is an answer which he himself would have -scorned—he would have made a witticism on it, and got out a new edition -of “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_312">{312}</a></span>”</p> - -<p>“This victory is not yours,” says Mrs. Ogi. “It is Death’s.”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XCVII"></a>CHAPTER XCVII<br /><br /> -THE DUEL OF WIT</h2> - -<p>Some years ago a story was told me concerning a certain eminent man in -England. This man came from the common people; he possesses one of the -finest minds in England, and he is the champion of all things generous -and free in letters and life. The lady who told me the story, herself a -well-known novelist, was writing about the particular section of society -from which this man sprung, and in which he had lived his boyhood; she -needed an item of local color, and asked him how such people pronounce a -certain word. The man flushed, and demanded: “How should I know?” I -thought this story one of the most awful I had ever heard; and the lady -novelist was shocked when she saw how I took it, for she had not meant -to tell anything so serious about her friend. She tried to explain to -me, it wasn’t really so bad as it seemed; the pressure of caste feeling -is so strong in England that a man is irresistibly driven to cover up -his humiliating past.</p> - -<p>I tell the incident as preliminary to a discussion of George Meredith. -Here was a devoted servant of the muses, a master of his craft, who won -a quite unique position among his contemporaries. The public knew him -not; to the end of his life his books had little sale, and he was -compelled to support himself by odd jobs of journalism and publisher’s -reading. But to the inner circle of letters his name became a kind of -secret password; he was the choice and precious one, the poet’s poet and -the novelist’s novelist, and the little country nook where he dwelt was -a shrine to which the distinguished pilgrims traveled from England and -America and the Continent.</p> - -<p>But over this great writer’s life there hung a dark shadow; a tragic -secret, hidden from the world, dimly guessed only by a few of the inner -circle. What had been the master’s early life? He never spoke of it. -Where had he spent his childhood? No one knew. Where had<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_313">{313}</a></span> he been born? -The government was collecting some kind of census, and put the question -to its great novelist, and he lied; he invented an imaginary birthplace. -So he lived safe from scandal, and only after his death was the dreadful -truth revealed. His grandfather had been a tailor to naval officers! His -father likewise had been a tailor, and failing in business, had gone to -South Africa and become a tailor there. His son had nothing to do with -him and never spoke of him.</p> - -<p>What there is so especially dreadful about a tailor you will have to ask -some Englishman to explain to you. I personally have known tailors who -were exceedingly kind and generous men; I have known tailors who were -students and thinkers and devoted workers in the Socialist movement. All -that a tailor may be; I suppose he may even be a saint. There is only -one thing which he can never by any possibility be, and that is an -English gentleman.</p> - -<p>And George Meredith aspired to be an English gentleman; he wrote about -English gentlemen in all the infinite subtleties of their relationship -to other English gentlemen, and more especially to English ladies. He -wished to be, not an interloper and observer, tolerated because of his -cleverness with the pen; he wished to be an authentic member of the -caste, so secure that he might exercise that most cherished of all the -privileges of the caste—to ridicule other members who fall away from -the perfect caste ideal.</p> - -<p>Do you think that I am making too much of this frailty of George -Meredith? I answer that it is the key to the understanding of everything -he wrote. Stop and think what it means that a man who possessed one of -the great intellects of his time, who had all the wisdom of all the ages -at his command, should be so bowed down with awe before the spirit of -caste that he was willing to lie about himself. I do not mean merely -that such a man’s whole life would become a pose; that he would pretend -to be abnormally spiritual and ascetic, when as a matter of fact he was -strongly attracted to lark-pies; that he would study his features, and -observing that he had a refined and sensitive profile, would place -himself at the window in such a position that his adorers would gaze -upon this profile during the course of their visit. What I mean is<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_314">{314}</a></span> that -this man would have a caste-ridden mind; the subtleties of caste -distinction, the minute details of appearance and conduct and thought by -which caste superiority is manifested and maintained—this is the stuff -out of which the man’s novels would be made, and the theme upon which -his superfine intellect would be concentrated.</p> - -<p>And so it is in the Meredithian universe. The dark, grim, vaguely -shadowed Nemesis of the Greeks is gone; Jehovah with his thunders has -been laid away with the other rubbish in the garret; what is left, to -dominate the lives of men and women, to blast their hopes and lure them -to ruin and despair, is social convention. And all such convention may -be boiled down into one formula: thou shalt not break into a caste -higher than that to which you were born. You may have money, and try it; -you may pretend to have money, and try it; but in both cases alike you -will fail. Meredith gives us masterpieces in the way of impostors trying -to break in; he is even willing, under the veil of art, to use his own -tragic life-story, and in “Evan Harrington” he tells about a tailor’s -son who tries to break in. He turned such blasts of ridicule upon the -poor tailor family and the poor tailor state of being, that Meredith’s -tailor father down in South Africa was shriveled up with shame, and -could not thereafter endure to hear his son’s novels discussed.</p> - -<p>Likewise, women fail to break into the sacred caste. They have beauty, -they have wit, but nothing avails. The creator of “Diana of the -Crossways” lays himself out to convince us that this heroine is the most -brilliant conversationalist that ever graced a London dinner-table. But -she had to have money, and so she sells a government secret to a great -newspaper, and being discovered, is thrown out. And if Diana failed, -with all her worldly gifts, what hope for poor Lucy Feverel, who had -nothing but country graces, natural loveliness of body, and sweetness -and kindness and unselfishness of spirit? The “ordeal” of Richard -Feverel lies in the fact that being a son of a rigid English gentleman, -rigidly trained according to an ideal system, he falls in love with a -country flower, and instead of seducing her according to the custom of -the caste, he marries her. So, of course, the pair of them are trampled.</p> - -<p>The defenders of Meredith will say that he does not<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_315">{315}</a></span> desire such a state -of affairs; he merely portrays it, because it exists. My answer to that -is the familiar one, that art is propaganda. If George Meredith had -believed in overthrowing the caste system in England he could surely -have found ways to convey that fact to us. He might have begun with his -own life; he might have taken his stand on a pedestal and said: “I, who -know myself to be a highly intellectual novelist, am the son and -grandson of tailors, and be pleased to make what you can of that.” If -Meredith had realized vitally and vividly the anti-social nature of the -caste system, and especially how that system is the very negation and -death of art—surely he would have found space in his many novels for at -least one character who has a little success in the effort to hold his -head up against the power of snobbery. Remember, this was a time in -which Alfred Harmsworth, gutter-journalist, became an earl, and Keir -Hardie, pit-boy, became a labor hero. But Meredith’s caste-bound -characters fail, and fail without any hint that they might have -succeeded.</p> - -<p>I do not wish to be unjust to this brilliant novelist, who was a modern -man in many ways. He was entirely free from that religiosity which -blighted Tennyson’s mind. He was clear-sighted about love, seeing that -it is a thing of flesh and spirit, and must be both, or neither. Also he -stood valiantly for the rights of ladies to be educated, and to have -their talents recognized, and to dispose of their own personalities. In -his old age he advanced the proposition that all marriages should be for -a term of years, and that at the end of the term the parties should be -free to remarry or not, as they wished. That this most sensible idea did -not raise more of a storm was because most persons in Britain took it -for granted that the novelist must be joking.</p> - -<p>But as a rule what we get from Meredith is not social criticism in its -broad sense, but merely caste criticism, the self-discipline of the -privileged orders. Meredith’s greatest novel is “The Egoist,” a quite -amazing study of one of these superior males, a creature who has been -brought up from infancy to regard his sublime self as the purpose for -which his own family exists, and one of a small group of select persons -for whom the British Empire, and therefore the world exist. Meredith -lays him bare for us<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_316">{316}</a></span> in every turn and movement of his being, and we -loathe him heartily, and sympathize with the series of females with whom -he dallies in courtship.</p> - -<p>Meredith is one of those super-sophisticated novelists who are unwilling -to allow us to be interested in a course of events. The intellect in him -has eaten up and sterilized the emotions. In reading him we are -tormented by a feeling that his story and his characters would be -delightful if only he would give them a chance; but he has such a -brilliant style, he has so many ideas to convey to us, and so much -shining wit and corruscating metaphor to display. It is like an exhibit -of fireworks, which can be most ravishing for a few minutes; you catch -your breath, and think you have never seen anything more lovely. But -after an hour or so you decide that fireworks lack variety.</p> - -<p>This infinitely subtle and delicate, witty and charming personality -invites us to sit with him as gods upon Olympus, to look down upon the -tragic fate of mortals, and find pleasure in the irony of their -failures. As in the case of Corneille, we are concerned with the strife -and clash of aristocratic egotisms; we take part in deadly intrigues, -and in duels without mercy. But times have changed, and now no blood is -shed, no corpses cover the ground; it is a duel of wit, with a -death-blow in a phrase or the lifting of an eye-brow. Watching the -conflict, we find ourselves asking, precisely as we asked with -Corneille: What have we to do with these puppets? How do they concern -us? What reality is there, what permanence to the conventions which -dominate their puppet minds? What real wisdom is there behind their -volleys of cleverness? So we realize that we are still in the Victorian -age; and Victoria and boredom are two words for one thing.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XCVIII"></a>CHAPTER XCVIII<br /><br /> -THE CULTURED-CLASS HISTORIAN</h2> - -<p>We are getting down to modern times, and have come to the first great -artist of whom I can say that with my own eyes I saw him. Shortly before -the war, coming out of the dining-room of the New Reform Club in -London,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_317">{317}</a></span> my host, H. G. Wells, stopped me and whispered: “There sits the -Great Cham.” He may have said “Great Buddha” or “Great Jupiter”; anyhow, -I looked, and seated at a table in solitary state was a large elderly -gentleman, with large bald head shining whitely, and jaws moving -meditatively. I knew him from his pictures; and besides, there was at -that time only one Great Cham, or Great Buddha, or Great Jupiter of -international letters.</p> - -<p>I did not ask to meet him, because, having read him, I understood the -aesthetic proprieties, and did not wish to surprise a Great Master with -his mouth full of lunch. Also, the days of my discipleship had long -since passed, and I was not sure if I would be able to think of just the -proper delicate subtlety with which to convey my attitude to one whom I -had once revered, and now regarded with affection because of reverence -remembered. That sentence is a little longer and more subtle than I -usually write—such being the effect upon one’s style of merely thinking -about Henry James.</p> - -<p>In my youth I wanted to know the great world, and who could tell me with -such compelling authority? I read everything he had written up to that -time—no small task, some forty volumes, many of them fat. I stuck to it -day and night for a couple of months, and then wrote an essay, “The -Leisure-Class Historian,” which, alas, no editor could be found to -publish, and which was consumed, with all the rest of my belongings -except one night-shirt, in the Helicon Hall fire.</p> - -<p>Coming back to the task at this interval, I realize that I gave Henry -James too broad a title; he is “the cultured-class historian.” He knows -of the existence of the uncultivated mob of idle rich, the -“high-feeding, champagne-quaffing, orchid-arranging,” as he describes -them; but his theme is that small section of the rich who possess -aesthetic sensibilities, and withdraw in haughty aloofness from -high-feeding, champagne-quaffing, and orchid-arranging, and live -fastidious lives devoted to the cultivation of beauty. The word “beauty” -Henry James understands in the broadest sense; it covers not merely the -things you look at, but the things you do and the things you think. You -recognize it by its being elegant, dignified and restrained.</p> - -<p>To an outsider it might appear cold, but the Master<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_318">{318}</a></span> admits you to the -inside, and you discover that it is passionate, quivering with feeling. -But it sternly checks its impulses, and seldom permits itself to do -anything except to think about the problems confronting it, to analyze -these problems in minute detail, to pile up subtlety and complication -concerning them—literally whole mountains of complication; or perhaps -(since, when you are reading or writing or discussing Henry James, you -anticipate many variations of metaphor, and endless subtle shadings of -metaphor, and parenthetical disquisitions interpreting and qualifying, -and still further, as it were, intensifying metaphor—each separate -complication, you will note, set apart from other complications by a -comma) it would convey a more accurate impression of the authentic -Jamesian manner, if I were to say that he builds towering structures of -subtle sophistication, which structures you, with joy and excitement of -the mind, see rising, unexpectedly splendid, before you, revealing new -possibilities of penetration into the refinements of sensibility, as -well as new possibilities of sentence structure, which convey, by -infinite variation of shadings, a sense, or, as it were, almost a -sensation, of the actuality of exceptional mental experience.</p> - -<p>Such are the great rambling sentences, through which you stagger and -gasp your way. You keep on, because you find that the old boy is really -saying something. He is not delighting in intricacy and smartness for -their own sake, as you so often feel to your annoyance with Meredith; he -is not deliberately confusing you with useless obscure detail like -Browning; he is really making a heroic effort to convey some complicated -intricacy in the mental processes of people who not merely think, but -who think about thinking, and think about thinking about thinking.</p> - -<p>Henry James was born in New York in 1843, his father being a theological -writer. His elder brother, William, became a popular professor of -psychology at Harvard, thus giving rise to the jest that “William is a -psychologist who writes like a novelist, and Henry is a novelist who -writes like a psychologist.” Henry was taken abroad and educated in -England, France and Switzerland, which had the effect of cutting his -roots from under him. At the age of twenty-six he moved permanently to -Eng<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_319">{319}</a></span>land, and from that time made his home there, with occasional trips -to the Continent.</p> - -<p>He was a sensitive youth, quiet and shy; he suffered from spinal -trouble, and liked to sit quietly in drawing-rooms and listen to other -people talk. Then he would go apart for long periods, and reflect upon -what he had heard, and weave it into stories. He was grateful to his -friends if they would tell him their troubles, because that provided him -with copy; but he never told anyone his own troubles, and his friends -lost sight of the possibility that anything might ever have happened to -him personally. Edmund Gosse, who became his intimate, tells how in his -old age James, walking up and down in a garden one evening, was suddenly -moved to open his heart. Looking up at a light in the house, he was -reminded of a scene long, long ago, when he had stood in a street one -rainy night, looking up thus to a lighted window, expecting to see a -face, but the face had not come. That was all of the story; but Mr. -Gosse was thrilled, even appalled. Actually, once upon a time, something -had happened to the Master!</p> - -<p>It would perhaps not be indelicate of us to feel warranted in assuming -that this something had to do with the relation of the sexes. We note -that this relation is, like everything else in the Henry James world, -fastidious, reserved, and governed by the aesthetic sensibilities. These -people do not love, they talk about loving; and as years pass, and the -later manner grows, their talk comes more and more to deal with the -condition of having been loved.</p> - -<p>In “Daisy Miller,” an early story which made the young author famous, we -see an innocent American girl in Rome, who to her horror receives an -improper advance from a young Italian. In “Madame de Mauves” we see an -American lady, unhappily married to a Frenchman in Paris, tempted by -passion for a true young American. But when we come to the great long -novels with the great long sentences of the “third manner,” we find -ourselves dealing with the fact that once upon a time, long, long ago, a -man and a woman committed an impropriety, and now somebody else is -slowly finding out about it, to the general horror and dismay. Thus “The -Golden Bowl,” seven hundred and eighty-nine closely printed pages,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_320">{320}</a></span> -dealing with the mental and emotional reactions of a woman who has an -intimate woman friend, and discovers that her husband has at some past -period been the lover of this friend. Or “What Maisie Knew,” in which we -discover an ancient intrigue through the eyes of the little daughter of -the intriguing woman. Perhaps you think you know what obscenity is, but -you get a new revelation of its possibilities when you proceed through -the mind of a child to pick up hints and allusions of the elders, and -piece them into a pattern of fornication.</p> - -<p>Henry James, the son of an American theological writer, acquired, like -Hawthorne, an inside knowledge of Puritanism, and in his early novels he -took the New England point of view toward intrigues and improprieties. -Thus Daisy Miller is innocent and free, and the dark, wicked Italian -misunderstands her freedom, and thinks she is what a girl with such -manners would be in Europe. Madame de Mauves, a loyal wife, is married -to a Frenchman of no morals, and when she loves a true and good -American, she scorns to sin, for the reason that she would be imitating -the Frenchman, she would be doing what the Frenchman expects her to do. -“The American” is a novel about a “man from home,” who has made money, -and seeks a cultured wife among the French nobility, and gradually finds -that he is in a nest of murders. All regulation hundred percent -patriotic stuff!</p> - -<p>But Europe grew upon Henry James, and America faded, and the aesthetic -sensibilities became less Puritanical and more cosmopolitan. So we have -“The Ambassadors,” the world’s great international novel. Something over -twenty years ago I went with a friend on a canoeing trip in the far -Northern wilds, and for six weeks we saw only one white man, the keeper -of a Hudson Bay trading post. Baggage had to be limited on such a trip, -and I took only one book. Evening after evening I would read it, a few -pages at a time, lying in a tent by candle light. So I had plenty of -time to note every subtlety, and before I got through I was talking -Henry James in my sleep. Now the twenty years are as a day, and the -characters and their story are as vivid as ever in my mind.</p> - -<p>A young New Englander, son of a wealthy family, has come to Paris and -settled there, refusing to go home. His family send an elderly friend as -ambassador to bring<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_321">{321}</a></span> back the prodigal. This ambassador, whose name is -Strether, discovers that a crude young barbarian has been changed by his -Parisian life into a cultured and self-possessed man of the world. -Strether is duly impressed by the change, and attributes it to the -influence of a middle-aged French lady, who has been the young man’s -good angel.</p> - -<p>He writes about the situation, but the family is not satisfied, and -another ambassador comes, this time the young man’s elder sister, the -incarnation of the acidulous propriety of New England. This sister is -not in the least impressed by the French lady, but on the contrary -suspects the very worst between the lady and her brother. Strether is -shocked by her crude ideas; but then comes the climax of the drama—a -scene wherein it is accidentally revealed to Strether that the acidulous -sister is right; a part of the process whereby the charming French lady -has civilized the young barbarian has been to take him as her lover. So -two civilizations meet, and in the clash between them we see the hearts -of both revealed.</p> - -<p>You note that in all these stories we are dealing with well-to-do -people. No other kind of people exist in the world of Henry James. Such -highly complicated and subtle aesthetic sensibilities are only possible -in connection with large sums of money, freely furnished to the -characters without effort on their part. It is impossible to imagine any -person in the “third manner” being so vulgar as to make, or even to take -money. What they do is to spend money elegantly, and when they meet -persons who spend it inelegantly, they turn away in dignified disdain. -There are only a few passages in which the novelist condescends to be -aware of the existence of the lower orders, who by their toil produce -the wealth which makes the aesthetic sensibilities possible. We get one -such glimpse in “The Princess Casamassima”; the hero glances at the -women and girls of the working classes, and then:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“What remedy but another deluge, what alchemy but annihilation?” he -asked himself as he went his way; and he wondered what fate there -could be, in the great scheme of things, for a planet overgrown -with such vermin, what redemption but to be hurled against a ball -of consuming fire.</p></div> - -<p>This cultured-class hero fails to ask himself what<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_322">{322}</a></span> would happen to his -cultured self if the working-class vermin were to be wiped out. -Manifestly, these vermin have to be allowed to go on working, in order -that elegant illuminati from America and England and Italy and France -may gather in the great capitals to listen to beautiful music and attend -the newest art exhibitions and discuss the newest books. It is necessary -that hundreds of millions of peasants should drudge on the rack-rented -soil of Europe, it is necessary that mill slaves in New England and -sweat-shop slaves in New York and mine slaves in Pennsylvania should -wear out their bodies, in order that culture ambassadors may acquire old -world subtlety and understanding; may watch the “European scene” and, by -reporting it for us, enable us, at least in imagination, to escape the -crudity and provinciality of our home lives.</p> - -<p>Henry James wrote a biography of Hawthorne, who as a fellow sufferer -under Puritanism he greatly admired; and in the course of that biography -he drew a picture of the “American scene,” which enables us to -understand why a cultured-class novelist fled from it at the age of -twenty-six, and came back for only one visit in a long lifetime. Read -the list of our deficiencies—and do not read it hurriedly, but stop -and, as Henry James would say, “savour” each phrase, realizing the mass -of content it has to the aesthetically sensitive mind:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no -church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country -gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, no manors, nor old -country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied -ruins; no cathedrals, no abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no -great Universities nor public schools—no Oxford, nor Eton, nor -Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no -political society, no sporting class—no Epsom nor Ascot!</p></div> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_XCIX"></a>CHAPTER XCIX<br /><br /> -THE PREMIER NOVELIST</h2> - -<p>We have studied two great novelists of the later Victorian age who -failed of wide popularity. We shall not understand that age completely -unless we study one who was crowned, not merely by the critics, but by -the mass of novel-reading ladies.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Humphry Ward was her name, and she takes<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_323">{323}</a></span> me back to the days when -I was a poor devil of a would-be writer, half starving in a New York -lodging-house. What made success in the world of books? I had to know, -or die; and the New York “Times” was kind enough to publish a weekly -review to give me the information. Every year or two there would appear -a new novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward; and always this novel would be the -occasion for a grand state review, signed by the name of some eminent -pundit, occupying pages one and two, with a large portrait on page one. -So I knew that Mrs. Humphry Ward was modern literature, and read each -novel as part of my life training.</p> - -<p>I read it with a mingling of interest and fear; interest, because it -told me about a set of people whom I knew did actually exist, and did -actually govern the world in which I lived; and fear, because this set -of people, so obviously both predaceous and stupid, were so powerfully -buttressed by the prestige of snobbery, and protected by the holy mantle -of religion. No novelist every worshipped Mammon-respectability more -piously or portrayed it with more patient devotion than Mrs. Humphry -Ward in her later years.</p> - -<p>She was brought up in the inner circle of culture; her father was an -Oxford big-wig, and Matthew Arnold was her “Uncle Matt.” Everything that -education could do for a young girl was done for her, and she was -writing a history of Spain at the age of twenty. Incidentally, she was -dreaming a wonderful dream—that some day she might be presented at -court.</p> - -<p>Her first novel, “Robert Elsmere,” dealt with the subject of religion. A -large section of the idling classes of England get their incomes by -believing that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Jonah swallowed a -whale; and with the progress of science they were naturally finding this -more and more difficult. A school of ingenious Bible-twisters arose, to -invent symbolical and literary meanings for fairy-tales, in order that -people who no longer believed could continue with good conscience to -collect the salaries of belief. Mrs. Ward made her hero one of these -new-style clergymen, and somebody persuaded Gladstone to read the novel, -and he wrote a long refutation of it, which caused a tremendous fuss. -Statesmen in England, as a rule, read only Thucydides and Homer, while -in the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_324">{324}</a></span> United States they read only the “Saturday Evening Post.” There -were a great many people who never saw a modern novel, who hastened to -read it when Gladstone called it dangerous. Half a million copies were -sold in our country, and Mrs. Ward’s fortune was made.</p> - -<p>She had begun, you see, as a radical; and in her next novel, “The -History of David Grieve,” she glorifies a young hero who devotes himself -to social reform. But in a very few years success and wealth and the -applause of the great changed the hue of this lady novelist’s -reflections. She wrote “Marcella,” a complete recantation of her -unorthodoxy, and a picture of what had gone on in her mind. Leaders of -labor and social reformers now turn out to be dangerous demagogs; and a -beautiful heroine, who loves one, discovers the error of her way, and -comes back to safety as the wife of a nobleman’s son. From which time on -Mrs. Humphry Ward was safe for aristocracy.</p> - -<p>She moved to a mansion in Grosvenor Place, where she had a view of the -garden of Buckingham Palace. She became an intimate of duchesses, and a -great figure in society and politics. Her publisher would negotiate with -America before breakfast, and get her seven thousand pounds advance on a -new novel; so the good lady spent the rest of her life grinding out a -series of glorified pot-boilers in support of the Tory principles of -government. Each novel was an Anglo-Saxon world event, and the counters -of book-stores in the fashionable shopping districts of America were -piled to the ceiling with the new volume. Mrs. Ward’s following was the -Anglomaniac mob, people who have but one idea in life, to imitate the -British governing classes; the sort of people who study those page -advertisements and speculate anxiously: “What is Wrong with this -Picture?”</p> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi: “I was in that mob. In our town in Mississippi there was -no book-store, but an adventurous Jew who kept a cigar-store had the -idea of getting a shelf of modern novels and renting them for ten cents -a volume. I was the first young lady in the town who had the courage to -go into a cigar-store, and I set all the other young ladies to reading -Mrs. Humphry Ward.”</p> - -<p>“What did you get out of it?”</p> - -<p>“I never could find out. It was all about British polit<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_325">{325}</a></span>ical life; -people were pulling and hauling and intriguing, but I never could -understand what their principles were, or what they expected to do when -they got elected.”</p> - -<p>“That’s the point exactly; there are no principles, there are only -parties. Whichever one gets in constitutes the ‘government,’ and its -task is to hold labor by the throat while capital picks its pockets. -Labor produces a sovereign a day, and capital takes it, and gives labor -four shillings wages, and labor tips its cap and is grateful. And then -capital’s favorite lady-novelist comes round with a market basket -containing sixpence worth of food and medicine; which is called charity, -and is the means of getting labor’s vote at election time.”</p> - -<p>Such was the private life of Mrs. Humphry Ward. She was what is called -“philanthropic”; that is, she was prominent in those society activities -which help the poor by playing upon the vanity and love of display of -the rich. Her life consisted in rushing about from one meeting to -another, shaking hands and chatting, rushing home to dress and dine with -prominent people, and then reading about it in the next day’s -newspapers. She was so busy with all this that she could only find half -an hour a day in which to read Greek!</p> - -<p>The characters in her books are busy with the same kind of activities. -The leading man is a handsome young aristocrat, whose occupation is -becoming premier. We never have any idea why he wants to be premier, -except that as hero that is his function. The idea that the people of -England should ask reasons for making an empty-headed noodle into their -premier is one that never occurs to anyone in the novels. What interests -us is the efforts of the young man’s friends to push him in, and the -efforts of his enemies to bar him out.</p> - -<p>Success or failure in all such “political novels” depends on one factor, -an entanglement of sex. It appears that the English voters insist -rigidly upon one requirement—that the statesman who holds them by the -throat while their pockets are being picked shall be ostensibly chaste. -The law may be summed up by saying that he is permitted to have only one -leisure-class female during his life. Of course, if she dies, he is -permitted one more leisure-class female; but for the rest, he is -required to satisfy his needs with females of lower classes. Political -novels derive<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_326">{326}</a></span> their plots from the fact that occasionally some -statesman fails to conform to this law; there is a statesman who wants -two ladies, or there are two ladies who want the statesman. Nature has -not created man exclusively for the purpose of wearing a top-hat and a -frock-coat, and making speeches in Parliament; nor do all women find -complete satisfaction, like Mrs. Humphry Ward, in political labors to -keep other women from getting the vote. There are women with mischief in -them, who endeavor to tempt statesmen from exclusive devotion to -“careers.” And the statesmen are tempted; they commit indiscretions, -such as taking walks in the moonlight with the evil females; and a -thrill runs through all “society,” and the tongues of the gossips wag -furiously. Did they? Or did they not? The friends of the statesman rally -to save him; and the enemies of the statesman sharpen their tomahawks; -and Anglomaniacs, watching the scene, are thrilled as when Blondin on -the tight-rope sets out to walk across Niagara Falls.</p> - -<p>“We don’t really need to worry,” says Mrs. Ogi; “a hero is always a -hero, and in all the books that I got from the little cigar-store in the -Mississippi town, I cannot recall that one hero ever failed to become -premier.”</p> - -<p>“It would be interesting,” says Ogi, “to compile statistics on the -question: How many premiers have there been in the novels of Mrs. -Humphry Ward, and how many in the recent history of the British Empire?”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_C"></a>CHAPTER C<br /><br /> -THE UNCROWNED KING</h2> - -<p>We come now to study America in the second half of the nineteenth -century.</p> - -<p>The dominating factor in this period was the Civil War, a conflict in -which the physical and moral energy of the country was exhausted. There -followed the inevitable reaction: Abraham Lincoln was succeeded by the -carpetbagger in the South and the tariff-boodler in the North. The very -hero who had led the nation to victory, and had said, “Let us have -peace,” entered the White House to turn the government over to -corruptionists. In the two generations following the Civil War America -made enor<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_327">{327}</a></span>mous material and some intellectual progress, but no moral -progress discernible. As I write this book, our political morals are -embodied in a post-campaign jest: “The Republicans should have stolen -the Washington monument, and then Coolidge would have carried Florida -and South Carolina.”</p> - -<p>Provincial America in the decades following the Civil War based its -religion upon the dogma that it was the most perfect nation upon God’s -footstool. The whisky-drinking, tobacco-chewing, obscenity-narrating, -Grand Old Party-voting mob would tolerate no criticism, not even that -kind implied by living differently. To it an artist was a freak, whom it -punished with mockery and practical jokes. There were only two possible -ways for him to survive; one was to flee to New York and be lost in the -crowd; the other was to turn into a clown and join in laughing at -himself, and at everything he knew to be serious and beautiful in life. -This latter course was adopted by a man of truly great talent, who might -have become one of the world’s satiric masters if he had not been -overpowered by the spirit of America. His tragic story has been told in -a remarkable study, “The Ordeal of Mark Twain,” by Van Wyck Brooks.</p> - -<p>For something like forty years Mark Twain lived as an uncrowned American -king; his friends referred to him thus—“the King.” His was a life which -seemed to have come out of the Arabian Nights’ enchantment. His -slightest move was good for columns in the newspapers; when he traveled -about the world he was his country’s ambassador at large—his baggage -traveled free under consular dispensation, and in London and Vienna the -very traffic regulations were suspended. When he went to Washington to -plead for copyright laws, the two houses adjourned to hear him, and the -speaker of the House turned over his private office to the king of -letters. He made three hundred thousand dollars out of a single book, he -made a fortune out of anything he chose to write. The greatest -millionaires of the country were his intimate friends; he had a happy -family, a strong constitution, inexhaustible energy—what more could a -human being ask?</p> - -<p>And yet Mark Twain was not happy. He grew less and less happy as time -passed. Bitterness and despair began to creep into his writings; -sentences like this: “Pity<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_328">{328}</a></span> is for the living, envy is for the dead.” -Stranger yet, it began to be whispered that America’s uncrowned king was -a radical! In times of stress some of us would go to him for help, for a -word of sympathy or backing, and always this strange thing was noticed; -he was full of understanding, and would agree with everything we said; -yes, he was one of us. But when we asked for a public action, a -declaration, he was not there.</p> - -<p>“The Jungle” was published, and he wrote me a letter. It was burned in -the Helicon Hall fire, and I recall only one statement: he had had to -put the book down in the middle, because he could not endure the anguish -it caused him. Naturally, I had my thoughts about such a remark. What -right has a man to refuse to endure the anguish of knowing what other -human beings are suffering? If these sufferings cannot be helped, why -then perhaps we may flee from them; but think what the uncrowned king of -America could have done, in the way of backing a young author who had -aimed at the public’s heart and by accident had hit it in the stomach!</p> - -<p>Then came the Gorki case. The great Russian writer came to America to -plead for freedom for his country, and to raise money for the cause. The -intriguers of the tsar set out to ruin him, and turned the bloodhounds -of the capitalist press upon him. A dinner in Gorki’s honor had been -planned, and Mark Twain and William Dean Howells were among the -sponsors. The storm of scandal broke, and these two great ones of -American letters turned tail and fled to cover.</p> - -<p>A year or two later Mark Twain was visiting Bermuda, and came to see me. -He had taken to wearing a conspicuous white costume, and with his -snow-white hair and mustache he was a picturesque figure. He chatted -about past times, as old men like to do. I saw that he was kind, -warm-hearted, and also full of rebellion against capitalist greed and -knavery; but he was an old man, and a sick man, and I did not try to -probe the mystery of his life. The worm which was gnawing at his heart -was not revealed, until in the course of time his letters were given to -the public. Now we know the amazing story—that Mark Twain lived a -double life; he, the uncrowned king of America, was the most repressed -personality, the most<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_329">{329}</a></span> completely cowed, shamed, and tormented great man -in the history of letters.</p> - -<p>He was born in a Missouri River town in 1835. His father was a futile -dreamer with a perpetual motion machine. His mother was a victim of -patent medicines, who had seen better days, and reared a family of -ragged brats in a foul and shabby environment, where a boy saw four -separate murders with his own eyes. “Little Sam” was a shy, sensitive -child, his mother’s darling, and she raised him in a fierce -determination to have him grow up respectable and rich. He became a -printer, then a pilot on the Mississippi River. This latter was a great -career; the river pilot was the uncrowned king of this western country. -He saw all the world in glorious fashion; he was a real artist, and at -the same time carried a solemn responsibility.</p> - -<p>The Civil War destroyed this career, and Mark Twain went out to Nevada -to become a gold miner, promising his mother that he would never return -until he had made a fortune. He failed as a miner, and was forced to -live by journalism. So he drifted into becoming the world’s buffoon. He -always despised it—so much so that he put a pistol to his head. But he -lacked the courage to pull the trigger, and had to go on and be a -writer. His “Jumping Frog” story went around the world; after which he -came East, and wrote “Innocents Abroad,” and made his three hundred -thousand dollars.</p> - -<p>Shortly after that he exchanged the domination of his mother for that of -a wife. He fell in love with the daughter of a wealthy coal-dealer in -Elmira, New York. There was a terrible “to do” about it in respectable -“up-State” circles, for Samuel Clemens was a wild and woolly westerner, -who didn’t know how to handle a knife and fork, while the daughter of -the coal-dealer had been brought up on an income of forty thousand -dollars a year. However, this strange lover was a “lion,” so they -decided to accept him and teach him parlor tricks. They gave the young -couple a carriage and coachman, and a house which had cost twenty-five -thousand dollars; it wasn’t long before he was completely justifying -their faith, by living at the rate of a hundred thousand a year.</p> - -<p>The wife was a frail woman, a semi-invalid, and Mark Twain adored her; -also, he was awe-stricken before her,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_330">{330}</a></span> because of her extremely high -social position. She was ignorant, provincial, rigidly fixed in a narrow -church-going respectability; by these standards she brought him up, and -raised a couple of daughters to help him. As Clemens phrased it, his -wife “edited” him; as his daughters phrased it, they “dusted papa off.”</p> - -<p>What these women did to America’s greatest humorist makes one of the -most amazing stories in the history of culture. They went over -everything he wrote and revised it according to the standards of the -Elmira bourgeoisie. They suppressed the greater part of his most vital -ideas, and kept him from finishing his most important works. When he -wrote something commonplace and conventional they fell on his neck with -delight, and helped to spend the fortune which it brought in. When he -told the truth about America, or voiced his own conclusions about life, -they forced him to burn it, or hide it in the bottom of a trunk. His one -masterpiece, “Huckleberry Finn,” he wrote secretly at odd moments, -taking many years at the task, and finally publishing it with anxiety. -Mrs. Clemens came home from church one day, horrified by a rumor that -her husband had put some swear words into a story; she made him produce -the manuscript, in which poor Huck, telling how he can’t live in the -respectable world, exclaims: “They comb me all to hell.” Now when you -read “Huckleberry Finn,” you read: “They comb me all to thunder!”</p> - -<p>Mark Twain had in him the making of one of the world’s great satirists. -He might have made over American civilization, by laughing it out of its -shams and pretensions. But he was not permitted to express himself as an -artist; he must emulate his father-in-law, the Elmira coal-dealer. The -unhappy wretch turned his attention to business ventures, and started a -huge publishing business, to publish his own and other books. He sold -three hundred thousand copies of General Grant’s Memoirs, and sold -hundreds of thousands of copies of other books, utterly worthless from -the literary point of view.</p> - -<p>He was always at the mercy of inventors with some new scheme to make -millions. For example, there was a typesetting machine; he sunk a huge -fortune into that, and would spend his time figuring what he was going -to make—so many millions that it almost made a billion. He<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_331">{331}</a></span> was a -wretched business man, and failed ignominously and went into bankruptcy, -losing his wife’s money as well as his own. H. H. Rogers, master pirate -of Standard Oil, came forward and took charge of his affairs, -incidentally playing billiards with him until four o’clock every -morning. And then some young radical brought him an exposure of the -Standard Oil Company, expecting him to publish this book as a public -service!</p> - -<p>Going back to Mark Twain’s books, we can read these facts between the -lines, and see that he put his balked and cheated self, or some aspect -of this self, into his characters. We understand how he poured his soul -into Huck Finn; this poor henpecked genius, dressed up and made to go -through the paces of a literary lion, yearns back to the days when he -was a ragged urchin and was happy; Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer represent -all that daring, that escape from the bourgeois world, which Sam Clemens -dreamed but never achieved. He put another side of himself into Colonel -Sellers, who imagined fortunes; and yet another side into Pudd’nhead -Wilson, the village atheist who mocked at the shams of religion. -Secretly Mark Twain himself loathed Christianity, and wrote a letter of -cordial praise to Robert Ingersoll; but publicly he went to church every -Sunday, escorting his saintly wife, according to the customs of Elmira!</p> - -<p>The more you read this story the more appalling you find it. This -uncrowned king of America built up literally a double personality; he -took to writing two sets of letters, one containing what he really -wanted to say, and the other what his official public self was obliged -to say. He accumulated a volume of “unmailed letters,” one of the -weirdest phenomena in literary history. He was indignant at the ending -of the Russian-Japanese war, because he believed that if it had -continued for a couple of months more the tsar would have been -overthrown. When Colonel George Harvey invited him to dine with the -Russian emissaries to the Portsmouth Conference, he wrote a blistering -telegram, in which he declared himself inferior as a humorist to those -statesmen who had “turned the tragedy of a tremendous war into a gay and -blithesome comedy.” But he did not send that telegram; he sent another, -full of such enraptured praise of the Russian diplomats that Count Witte -sent it to the tsar!<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_332">{332}</a></span></p> - -<p>That is only one sample out of many. He wrote a War Prayer, a grim -satire upon the Christian custom of praying for victory. “I have told -the whole truth in that,” he said to a friend; and then added the -lamentable conclusion: “Only dead men can tell the truth in this world. -It can be published after I am dead.” He explained the reason—this -financier who had fortunes to blow in upon mechanical inventions: “I -have a family to support, and I can’t afford this kind of dissipation.” -And again: “The silent, colossal National Lie that is the support and -confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and -unfairnesses that afflict the peoples—that is the one to throw bricks -and sermons at. But let us be judicious and let somebody else begin.”</p> - -<p>Of course a man who wrote like this despised himself. It was the tragedy -of Tolstoi, but in a far more humiliating form; Tolstoi at least wrote -what he pleased, and did in the end break with his family. But Mark -Twain stayed in the chains of love and respectability—his bitterness -boiling and steaming in him like a volcano, and breaking out here and -there with glare and sulphurous fumes. “The damned and mangy human -race,” was one of his phrases; and again he wrote: “My idea of our -civilization is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, -vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies. As for the word, I -hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, -I wish it was in hell, where it belongs.”</p> - -<p>In the effort to excuse himself, this repressed personality evolved a -philosophy of fatalism. Man was merely a machine, and could not help -doing what he did. This was put into a book, “What is Man?” But then he -dared not publish the book! “Am I honest?” he wrote, to a friend. “I -give you my word of honor (privately) I am not. For seven years I have -suppressed a book, which my conscience tells me I ought to publish. I -hold it my duty to publish it. There are other difficult tasks I am -equal to, but I am not equal to that one.” He did publish the book at -last, but anonymously, and with a preface explaining that he dared not -sign his name.</p> - -<p>He, America’s greatest humorist, had a duty laid upon him; he saw that -duty clearly—how clearly we learn from a story, “The Mysterious -Stranger,” a ferocious satire<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_333">{333}</a></span> upon the human race, published after his -death. In this book Satan asks: “Will a day come when the race will -detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them—and by -laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has -unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, money, -persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal -humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little, century by century; but -only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast.... As a race, do -you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage.” Such was -the spiritual tragedy going on in the soul of a man who was going about -New York, clad in a fancy white costume, smiled upon and applauded by -all beholders, crowned by all critics, wined and dined by Standard Oil -millionaires, dancing inexhaustibly until three or four o’clock in the -morning, and nicknamed in higher social circles “the belle of New York.”</p> - -<p>Mrs. Ogi from Mississippi reads this onslaught upon Mrs. Ogi from -Elmira; and her husband wonders a little while he waits. But she only -smiles, and remarks: “In our family the men have a traditional saying: -‘It’s all right to be henpecked, but be sure you get the right hen!’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_CI"></a>CHAPTER CI<br /><br /> -SMILING AMERICA</h2> - -<p>We come now to an American artist who played the part of his own wife; -that is to say, Ogi and Mrs. Ogi combined in one person.</p> - -<p>His name was William Dean Howells, and he was born in 1837 in an Ohio -town. He began life as a typesetter in a newspaper office, then he -became a reporter, and was made United States consul in Venice at the -age of twenty-four. It was a job which left time for art, and young -Howells trained himself diligently. He became editor of the “Atlantic -Monthly,” the first non-Bostonian to hold that high ecclesiastical -office. For years he presided at the dying bedside of New England -literature, and after the patient was buried he came to New York and -found a permanent berth with “Harper’s Magazine.” He wrote for sixty -years, and published over a hundred volumes of poetry, criticism and -fiction. He had ease and grace and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_334">{334}</a></span> charm, all the drawing-room literary -virtues; he displayed the same virtues in real life, and so everybody -loved him, and he became, according to Mark Twain, “the critical Court -of Last Resort in this country, from whose decisions there is no -appeal.”</p> - -<p>The principle upon which the success of Howells was based is revealed to -us in his autobiography. He tells how as a young reporter on an Ohio -newspaper, he was sent to a police court, and he quit. “If all my work -could have been the reporting of sermons, with intervals of sketching -the graduating ceremonies of young ladies’ seminaries”—why, then he -might have become a city editor! He tells of coming upon a sordid -tragedy, and resolving that forever after he would avert his eyes from -the darker side of life; “the more smiling aspects of life are the more -American.” You can see why he needed no Mrs. Ogi from Elmira, or from -any other place, to edit his manuscripts.</p> - -<p>To dignify this program of portraying the more smiling and therefore -more American aspects of life, Howells gave it the name of “realism.” -All his life long he published critical articles in defense of this -program, and he described these articles as “a polemic, a battle.” Also -he wrote novels, which he regarded as pure, undiluted works of art. It -never occurred to the dear soul that the novels were merely a -continuation of his “polemic,” another phase of his “battle.” Not -content with rebuking men who did wrong, Howells wished to provide -examples of what was right; therefore he invented characters and -contrived situations to exhibit the virtues and charms of that -middle-class gentility which was always smiling and therefore always -American.</p> - -<p>The apologia of this school of “realism” may be formulated as follows: I -am a gentleman of placid disposition and quiet feelings, with no -devastating passions tormenting me, no cosmic idealisms driving my soul. -I am comfortable in the bourgeois world, having always earned a good -salary and taken care of my family. I believe this is the proper thing -for men to do, and if they fail to do it it is their own fault. I love -to read good books, and I cultivate a mild and gentle imagination. I -write about my sort of people, and I call such books art. If men persist -in having violent and stormy passions and intense and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_335">{335}</a></span> overwhelming -convictions; if they persist in going to extremes, whether base and -cruel, or heroic and sublime—then I am disturbed in my literary -dignity, and I denounce such writing, and call it romanticism, -propaganda, and pose. And since I am “the critical Court of Last Resort -in this country, from whose decisions there is no appeal,” it follows -that young writers who persist in displeasing me are sentenced to move -into garrets and be starved and frozen into submission.</p> - -<p>Upon the above formula Howells founded and maintained a school of “local -color” in the United States. Men and women who had been brought up in -different parts of the country wrote stories describing in detail the -peculiarities of speech and costume and manners there prevailing. -Confining themselves to the everyday and obvious events of humdrum life, -and being content to observe and not to think, they were sure of a -cordial reception from Howells, and of publication and payment by the -great magazine and publishing house which took the great critic’s -advice. By enforcing these standards for half a century, Howells and a -group of editors like him put a blight upon American literature from -which it is only now escaping.</p> - -<p>I do not want to be unfair to a gracious and kindly gentleman. In his -later years he fell under the spell of Tolstoi, and took to calling -himself a Socialist. He wrote a story, “The Traveler from Altruria,” a -gentle and winning satire upon the stupidities of capitalism. I would -love him more ardently for having written that book if he had been -willing to fight for it; if he had put any trace of social protest into -his magazine editing and contributing. But he joined with Mark Twain in -deserting poor Gorki, and he continued to hold his comfortable position -and to collect his salary and royalties from Harper and Brothers, after -that concern went into bankruptcy and was turned into the propaganda -department of J. P. Morgan and Company.</p> - -<p>I have told in “The Brass Check” the curious story of my own experience -with this publishing house; I will repeat it here, so far as it bears on -Howells. Ten years ago I was collecting material for my anthology of -revolutionary literature, “The Cry for Justice,” and I applied to one or -two hundred authors for permission to quote briefly from their writings. -Having got the authors’ per<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_336">{336}</a></span>mission, I then applied to the publishers; -whereupon I received from Messrs. Harper and Brothers a letter, -forbidding me to quote from any book published by them, even with the -author’s permission. I took the trouble to call upon the gentleman who -had this matter in charge, and was informed that the firm considered my -reputation to be so bad that I would do injury to any author whom I -quoted. I had with me a letter from Howells, saying that he would be -very glad to be quoted. But no matter; I was not to quote him; neither -was I to quote Mark Twain, nor Charles Rann Kennedy, nor H. G. Wells!</p> - -<p>It happened that Howells’ editorial office was in that same dingy old -Franklin Square building, so I took the matter to him. He was courteous -and friendly—but he did not feel that it would be proper for him to -oppose the objections of his publishers. My plea, that he owed something -to a fellow-Socialist, and still more to the movement, did not avail.</p> - -<p>And lest the reader think that I am unduly prejudiced against the -publication department of J. P. Morgan & Company, let me quote a couple -of sentences from a letter written to the editor of “Harper’s” Magazine -by Lafcadio Hearn: “Your firm is a hundred years behind; ignorant, -brutal, mean, absurdly ignorant—incredibly ignorant of what art is, -what literature is, what good taste is. But it makes money like pork -packeries and butcheries and loan offices.”</p> - -<p>History has its curious ironies, and this would be one—if it should -turn out that Howells, in refusing to be quoted in “The Cry for -Justice,” had lost his best chance of being read in the future. And lest -this remark be taken for megalomania, let me add that I am not the -author of the anthology, merely its editor, and others could have done -the job as well, perhaps better. The point is that this is the kind of -literature which the future will read. The whirlwinds of social -revolution are gathering to sweep the world; and when they have passed, -there will be a new generation of clear-eyed young workers, who will -look upon the fiction-characters of William Dean Howells with puzzled -dismay. Characters so mild and gentle, so tolerant in the presence of -intolerable wrong! Characters so very respectable in the getting and -spending of their incomes, so anxious in their conformity to pecuniary -con<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_337">{337}</a></span>ventions! The young workers will not be able to imagine themselves -in the place of such characters; but will study them as one studies -relics in a museum, or queer-shaped insects under a microscope.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_CII"></a>CHAPTER CII<br /><br /> -THE EMINENT TANKARD-MAN</h2> - -<p>Through the latter part of the nineteenth century there existed in the -United States a peculiar literary phenomenon, the underground reputation -of Ambrose Bierce. The fiction reading public did not know this man; the -readers of “yellow” journalism knew him as a Hearst writer, even more -brilliant and cynical than the average. But now and then you would come -upon an expert in the literary craft, who would tell you that Ambrose -Bierce was a short-story writer and satirist without equal in America, -the greatest genius our literature had produced. You would set out to -look for these obscure writings, and could not find them in the -libraries or the book-stores. At last you might get someone to lend you -a copy, and then you would join the campaign of whispering.</p> - -<p>Now Bierce is coming into his own. The public is hearing about him. He -is of especial interest to us here, because he spent his energy in -attacking, with the utmost possible fury, the thesis of this book; while -at the same time, both in his life and his writings, he vindicated that -thesis to the last syllable.</p> - -<p>Ambrose Bierce was bom in 1842, the son of a poor farmer in Ohio. At the -age of nineteen he enlisted and fought through the Civil war, being -twice wounded and brevetted major. Then he became a journalist, first in -San Francisco, then in London, finally in Washington and New York.</p> - -<p>He was one of the most ethical men that ever lived, a born preacher, as -vehement and persistent as Carlyle. He fought for his beliefs, and -shrank from no sacrifice in their behalf. He was no man’s man, but said -what he thought, no matter how bitter and fierce it might be. He paid -the penalty in a host of enemies and a lifetime of struggle.</p> - -<p>That such a man should have taken up with art-for-<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_338">{338}</a></span>art’s-sake theories -is assuredly a quaint incongruity in the history of literature. But so -it happened. He looked out upon America, and saw the grafters thriving, -he saw corruption enthroned as a political system, and he gave up the -human race in despair: “a world of fools and rogues, blind with -superstition, tormented with envy, consumed with vanity, selfish, false, -cruel, cursed with illusions—frothing mad.” These phrases occur in an -article, “To Train a Writer”; and you can see what sort of writer it -would train! A writer who renounces solidarity, and seeks refuge in his -own talent, the one place where a man is master, where he can make -beauty, order and dignity. So let us live in the world of art, let us -consecrate ourselves to its service, and waste no love upon “the -irreclaimable mass of brutality that we know as ‘mankind.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>This conviction Bierce holds in the fashion of a religious zealot. He -has reached the stage of knowing that the rest of the world doubts his -faith; therefore he asserts it the more vehemently, and flies into a -rage with all who question it. His letters have been published; and in -the first one, addressed to a young girl who aspires to write, he storms -at the viciousness of those who would use the writer’s craft in the -service of human progress. “Such ends are a prostitution of art.” And -later on in the letters this champion of the art-for-art’s-sake theory -reveals the terror that gnaws at his soul. “If poets saw things as they -are they would write no more poetry.”</p> - -<p>Some twenty years ago Jack London sent me the first book of a San -Francisco poet, and in an inscription he described the author: “I have a -friend, the dearest in this world.” The book was “The Testimony of the -Suns,” by George Sterling; and friendship being an unlimited thing, I -also took over a share of it. For twenty years I have been puzzled at -finding in this gracious companion and maker of exquisite verses certain -qualities of bitterness and aching despair. When I read these letters of -Ambrose Bierce I discovered a plausible explanation; for here is the -young poet, submitting his first efforts; and here is the savage -misanthropist using his power as a preacher and an elder, in an effort -to set the poet’s feet in the paths of futility and waste.</p> - -<p>Ambrose Bierce, among his host of antagonisms, had one which amounted to -an insanity—his dislike of Social<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_339">{339}</a></span>ists; and he saw both London and -Sterling lending their influence to the hellish cult. Bierce was one of -those subtle opponents who say that they have a certain amount of -sympathy with the Socialist ideal, were it not for the fact that the -partisans of the cause make themselves so objectionable. Yes; they would -truly be willing to see mankind delivered from poverty, crime, -prostitution and war, were it not for creatures of the lunatic fringe, -who wear their hair long and tie their neck-ties into a bow!</p> - -<p>There is something pathological about the ravings of Bierce on this -subject, and we are not surprised to learn that in his early days a -prominent Socialist writer, Laurence Gronlund, took a girl away from -him, and thus excited his animosity. We find him quarreling with one -person after another who persists in dallying with Socialist ideas, and -in the end he quarreled even with Sterling, and wrote him letters of -harsh abuse, which Sterling out of kindness to his memory destroyed.</p> - -<p>The published letters are full of literary criticism; it is always -consistent—and in every case exactly the opposite of what you find in -this book. Ibsen and Shaw are “very small men—pets of the drawing-room -and gods of the hour.” Tolstoi is “not an artist,” and Burns is -“gibberish”; Gorki is “not only a peasant, but an anarchist and an -advocate of assassination.” Bierce was living in Washington, serving the -Hearst newspapers, when Gorki came to America. Bierce had never met him, -and really knew nothing about him, but he swallowed with greedy -eagerness the propaganda emanating from the Russian embassy in -Washington; he writes to Sterling mysterious hints from inside -information: “It isn’t merely the woman matter. You’d understand if you -were on this side of the country.”</p> - -<p>All this has become familiar to us with the passage of the years; it is -the thing known as hundred percent American boobery. The capitalist -system sets up its colossal slander-mills, with a staff of secret -agents, forgers and safe-crackers and confidence men, a devil’s crew. -The people of course have no conception of this machinery for the -manipulating of their minds; and how pitiful to find a haughty -intellectual as credulous as the poorest clodhopper! It is one more -demonstration of the fact that a<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_340">{340}</a></span> modern man who does not understand -revolutionary economics is a child wandering in a forest at midnight.</p> - -<p>There were other factors in the making of Bierce’s irascibility. He -describes himself as “an eminent tankard-man,” and he found in San -Francisco plenty of people willing to practice art for art’s sake, not -troubling themselves or him with hopes for the human race. There is a -tale of a riotous crew, resolving to put an end to Christianity by -pulling down a cross which stood upon the highway. They tied themselves -to the cross with ropes and pulled their hardest, only to sink down -exhausted in drunken slumber. I wonder that some Catholic poet does not -take this for a piece of symbolism. Maybe it has been done—I admit -there are gaps in my knowledge of Catholic poetry!</p> - -<p>What had this man to give the world, if anything? The answer is: love of -truth, and loathing of corruption and hypocrisy. He wrote all those -things which Mark Twain knew, but suppressed. He was the only one of -those who fought through the war to tell the truth about it. And therein -lies his power and significance as an artist; he, the -art-for-art’s-saker pure and simple, writes tales which make us hate -mass-murder.</p> - -<p>The formula of these tales is the one with which Maupassant has made us -familiar. Men aspire, and fate knocks them down and tramples their faces -into the mud. When we see in the chances of battle a son shoot his own -father, we may draw the conclusion that all human life is futile, as -Bierce wishes us to; or we may elect to draw a different conclusion, and -join the League to Outlaw War.</p> - -<p>Bierce’s verses were shafts of satire aimed at the social kites and -buzzards of his time. They have a quality of personal ferocity seldom -equalled in the world’s literature. There are two volumes of them, -“Black Beetles in Amber” and “Shapes of Clay.” Readers of “The Brass -Check” may remember a sample there quoted, dealing with Mike de Young, -publisher of the San Francisco “Chronicle,” and concluding:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">A dream of broken necks and swollen tongues—<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A whole world’s gibbets loaded with de Youngs!<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">Here, as in so much of Bierce’s work, his ignorance of social forces -rendered him impotent. He writes about in<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_341">{341}</a></span>dividual scoundrels, but he -does not understand what makes them, nor how to remedy them; so his -writing is useless to himself, to his victims, and to us.</p> - -<p>Once upon a time Ambrose Bierce went to sleep at night on a flat stone -in a graveyard. We are not told whether his exploits as “an eminent -tankard-man” had anything to do with this, but we are told that as a -result he became a lifelong sufferer from rheumatism and asthma. So his -old age was bitter, and he found insufficient consolation in producing -literary masterpieces for a hypothetical posterity. He wandered off into -Mexico and disappeared. “To be a gringo in Mexico at the present time is -a cheap form of euthanasia,” he told his friends. So apparently it -proved; and so this book has another vindication, provided by a leading -opponent.</p> - -<p>“Be careful,” says Mrs. Ogi; “the Mexican bandits may not have got him -after all.”</p> - -<p>“He has already had a few whacks at me. George Sterling sent him an -article of mine, published twenty years ago, ‘Our Bourgeois Literature,’ -and he ridiculed my thesis that the qualities of American literature are -explained by American social conditions: ‘The political and economical -situation has about as much to do with it as the direction of our rivers -and the prevailing color of our hair.’ Also he read ‘The Journal of -Arthur Stirling,’ and called my poor poet ‘the most disagreeable -character in fiction.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Says Mrs. Ogi: “He did not even trouble to get the poor poet’s name -right!”</p> - -<p>Her husband answers: “The officers in the British army have a saying: -‘What is fame? To die in battle and have your name misspelled in the -“Gazette”.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_CIII"></a>CHAPTER CIII<br /><br /> -THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE</h2> - -<p>Having considered a fiction writer whom the great public rejected, let -us now consider one whom it enthusiastically acclaimed.</p> - -<p>Richard Harding Davis was born in Philadelphia in 1864. His father was a -famous editor, and he was raised among cultured people, with every -advantage of prestige<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_342">{342}</a></span> and social position. He was handsome, full of -energy, and all his life made hosts of friends. After getting through -college, he took a job with Arthur Brisbane on the New York “Evening -Sun,” where his brother tells us he underwent “considerable privation,” -his salary being only thirty dollars a week at the start, plus his -earnings from short stories. During this same period the present writer -was living in New York upon four and one-half a week, and never sure of -having that; so you see that standards of “considerable privation” vary -considerably.</p> - -<p>Davis’s first stories dealt with a hero named Van Bibber, a scion of the -Fifth Avenue plutocracy, handsome, debonair, wearing his clothes with -irreproachable taste, and devoting his abundant leisure to the reforming -of New York; Haroun-al-Raschid brought down to date, Sir Galahad in a -dress-suit. Happy, care-free, he wanders, with innocent heart and open -purse, making things right wherever he finds them wrong. He has the -entrée behind the scenes of theatres, but not to seduce the chorus -girls—ah, nothing like that, but to rescue a sweet, innocent child and -carry her home to a cold, proud, cruel Fifth Avenue father who has -refused to acknowledge his wild oat. That done, Van Bibber roams again, -and jumps on the neck of a burglar, and kicks his pistol out of his -hand, and then gets sorry for him, and buys him a ticket to Montana, -where his wife and daughter wait for him to come and reform. Then he -wanders to the Bowery, and sees a rowdy insulting a lady; it is not -enough for him to demonstrate the natural superiority of the plutocracy -by putting this one rowdy to flight, he must crown the demonstration by -accepting a challenge from three of “the purest specimens of the tough -of the East Side waterfront,” and routing them in the presence of the -proud aristocratic beauty. The charm of the story lies in the truly -elegant insouciance with which young Van Bibber does all these -things—the manner of a juggler keeping six billiard-balls in the air.</p> - -<p>Here, you see, is the perfect type of the ruling-class glorifier: Homer -and the Arabian Nights, Don Quixote and King Arthur, Dumas, Ouida, -Rudyard Kipling and Mrs. Humphry Ward all rolled into one. No wonder our -grandfathers were captivated, or that the innocent souls who edited -“Harper’s” and “Scribner’s” extended the free<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_343">{343}</a></span>dom of their columns to -this inspired creator of plutocratic romance! It is interesting to note -that our “Dick” came from the most English place in the United States, -and looked like an Englishman and, perhaps as a matter of instinct, -dressed and talked like an Englishman. In his early writing days he -lived for a few months at Oxford, and the students of Balliol College -took him in on equal footing, an honor never before accorded to a -non-student American.</p> - -<p>The English ruling class had taken upon itself the task of colonizing -and exploiting the rest of the world, and the American ruling class was -following suit, and Richard Harding Davis became the prophet of both. -Throughout Central America and the West Indies the process is -invariable: American capitalists bribe the governments of these -countries and get enormously valuable concessions, then they send in -engineers and other handsome young heroes clad in khaki and puttees and -with automatics in their belts. These heroes engage the natives of the -country to exploit the natural resources and ship out the wealth of the -country, to be spent upon monkey dinners at Newport and champagne -suppers in Broadway lobster palaces. Sooner or later the natives become -irritated at the sight of their natural resources being exported for -such purposes, so they revolt against the native government which has -sold them to the Yankees. Then the handsome young Yankee heroes draw -their automatics and bring up machine guns, and gloriously defend the -native government which they have bought and paid for. The ending comes -triumphantly with a Yankee gunboat in the harbor, and some marines -charging up the slope of a hill waving Old Glory, while the audience -leaps from its seats and cheers for five minutes.</p> - -<p>“Soldiers of Fortune” was “Dick” Davis’s biggest success. It brought him -reservoirs of money, first as a serial, then as a novel, then as a -drama, and finally as a movie. His other novels were like it, in that -they dealt with members of the ruling class gloriously making or -marrying fortunes. The next was called “The Princess Aline,” and told -about a young, wealthy, handsome and aristocratic artist—so many -elements of good fortune!—who falls in love with the photograph of a -German princess. The model for this exquisite heroine was the future<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_344">{344}</a></span> -Empress of Russia; but Davis did not live to write a sequel, showing the -final destiny of his heroine, her mangled body dumped into a well along -with her husband and four exquisite daughters. Recalling these novels at -the present hour, I see the international plutocracy with all its -exquisite wives and daughters, crouched trembling upon the top of a -mountain of gold and jewels, while all around them the handsome young -hired heroes peer out over the sights of machine guns at the massed fury -of the exploited millions of mankind—white, black, yellow, brown, red, -and mixed.</p> - -<p>Davis became a war correspondent and spent his time racing over the -earth from one scene of excitement to another. I have run through the -volume of his letters and jotted down a few date lines in the order they -occur: Cuba, London, Egypt, Gibraltar, Paris, Central America, South -America, Moscow, Budapest, Havana, London, Florence, Greece, Havana, -Cape Town, Pretoria, Aix-les-Bains, Massachusetts, Madrid, London, San -Francisco, Tokio, Manchuria, Havana, the Congo, New York, London, -Santiago, Vera Cruz, Belgium, Plattsburg, Paris, Athens, Rome. If you -know the history of the world for twenty-five years beginning with 1890 -you can connect each of these geographical names with a coronation, a -jubilee, a war, or other ruling-class recreation.</p> - -<p>All through the letters runs the theme of money, the Aladdin’s tale of a -soldier of literary fortune. He gets five thousand dollars for the -serial rights of “Soldiers of Fortune” from “Scribner’s Magazine”; he -gets five hundred dollars for reporting a foot-ball game; he gets three -thousand dollars and expenses for a month’s reporting of the Cuban -struggle with Spain, and when America enters the conflict, he gets ten -cents a word from “Scribner’s Magazine” and four hundred dollars a week -and expenses from the New York “Times.”</p> - -<p>Everywhere he goes he is, of course, a lion, and moves only in the -highest circles. His letters are full of diplomats and generals and -lords and ladies and kings and queens, together with the most famous -actors and literary lights. He is presented at Court—and by this, -needless to say, I mean the Court of their Majesties the King and Queen -of Great Britain and Ireland, and Emperor and Empress of India. And all -through the letters we note<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_345">{345}</a></span> dinner-parties and banquets and -champagne-suppers and cocktails—interrupted by a siege with sciatica, -preparing us for the quick curtain, when our ruling-class hero departs -his successful life at the age of fifty-two.</p> - -<p>New York is a place of mean and envious gossip, and one of its -diversions was telling anecdotes illustrating the snobbery and -self-importance of Richard Harding Davis. It appears that in the days of -his extraordinary prosperity he did not always recognize his former -newspaper cronies when he met them on the street. Perhaps he had noted -that so many of these former cronies took the occasion to borrow money -from him. Anyhow, I have one anecdote to contribute to the collection.</p> - -<p>It was early in 1914, a period of great depression in my own life and -fortunes. Davis, of course, never had any depressions; he had just come -back from Cuba, where he had turned “Soldiers of Fortune” into a moving -picture film, and it was now being launched on Broadway with enormous -éclat. I happened to know the manager, and was invited to the opening -performance, where in the lobby I was introduced to the great author and -lion of the occasion. When he heard my name his face lighted up, and he -gave me a warm hand-clasp, exclaiming, “Ah, now! You write books because -you really have something to say, while I write only to make money!” It -was so different from what I expected that I was completely taken aback, -and could only make a deprecating murmur. “It is true,” he said; “I know -it, and so do you.”</p> - -<p>The reader may say that in telling this story I do more credit to Davis -than to myself. But that is not my concern. What I have to do here is to -report the statement of America’s leading soldier of literary fortune -concerning his own work and its reason for being.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_CIV"></a>CHAPTER CIV<br /><br /> -THE BOWERY BOY</h2> - -<p>We come now to another one of those unhappy tales of young rebellious -geniuses who cannot or will not fit themselves into the bourgeois world. -This time it is Stephen Crane, who was the fourteenth child of a -Methodist preacher and an evangelist mother, and was born in<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_346">{346}</a></span> Newark, -New Jersey; which goes to prove that a genius may spring up anywhere in -the world.</p> - -<p>There is an old saying that a preacher’s son always turns out to be a -rake. I don’t suppose that statistically this statement could be -justified, but psychologically we should expect such cases; for other -children get religion once a week, but the children of clergymen get it -all the time. The tragedy of poor “Stevie” Crane reveals to us the folly -of attaching fundamental moral principles to incredible fairy tales. -When the child grows up and finds that he no longer believes the tales, -he is apt to conclude that the moral principles are equally false and -superfluous.</p> - -<p>Little “Stevie” was a frail and sensitive child. His father died when he -was young, and then his evangelist mother died, and he was left to grope -his way alone. We find him turning up at a military academy with a -reputation as a baseball player, also with six pipes—which was six too -many for a lad who was to die from tuberculosis at the age of -twenty-nine. He picked up a living doing odd newspaper jobs, and then he -went to Syracuse University. Most singular, prank of history, that James -Roscoe Day, D.D., Sc.D., LL.D., D.C.L., L.H.D., Chancellor of the -University of Heaven (see “The Goose-Step”), should have had in charge -the intellectual and moral training of the author of “Maggie: A Girl of -the Street”!</p> - -<p>This boy had pathetic courage, and absolutely original opinions, even -from the beginning. His young verdict was that Tennyson was “swill” and -Oscar Wilde “a mildewed chump.” That, of course, was merely calling -names; but in addition he had the oddest and most charming gift of -humor. Of his mother he said, “You could argue as well with a wave.”</p> - -<p>Having got through with college at the age of twenty, he went to New -York to live in a garret and starve for the sake of his independence. He -chose the Bowery for his school of art; these being the old days of the -wicked street, before the respectable, hard-working Jews took -possession; the days when all New York gloried in its “toughness,” and -when now and again in the filthy old alleys they raked out a human -corpse from a pile of ill-smelling rubbish. Here the boy wrote his first -novel, “Maggie,” dealing with a girl whose drunken parents beat her and -drove her on to the streets. It was an entirely<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_347">{347}</a></span> new note in American -literature, because it told the truth about these things quite simply -and as a matter of course, without apology or sentimentality.</p> - -<p>The young author took it to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the -“Century Magazine,” and went back, hungry and shivering with cold, to -get the verdict. The “Century” was one of the four great magazines which -determined the destiny of American authors; its policy was guided by the -fact that it had “half the expectant mothers in America” on its -subscription list. Gilder said that he could not publish “Maggie”; and -after he had made long-winded explanations, Stephen boiled them down to -one sentence, as was his custom. “You mean that the story is too -honest?” And Gilder was honest enough to answer that he did.</p> - -<p>Reading about this garret existence sends shivers over my skin; because -it was only ten years later that I was to live the same life, and have -the same experiences in the same editorial offices. I also took -manuscripts to Gilder and was turned down. The same publisher who -accepted “The Red Badge of Courage,” and made a fortune out of it, -accepted also “The Journal of Arthur Stirling,” and tricked me into -signing a contract out of which I never got a cent.</p> - -<p>All his life Stephen Crane had heard the war stories of old -soldiers—not what you read in the official history books, but the real -things that men had felt and done. He decided upon this theme, and read -up his “local color,” and in ten quivering nights he produced “The Red -Badge of Courage.” At last he had a success; a newspaper syndicate paid -him a hundred dollars for the serial rights! He waited a year or two -longer, and then it came out in book form. It sold fairly well, until -suddenly the English critics went wild over it, and then New York knew -that it had a man of genius.</p> - -<p>The realists had been ruling the literary roost, insisting that you must -portray life by describing its external details. But this boy had a new -idea; the interesting thing to him was the way people felt, and details -merely served to reveal the human spirit. He was not afraid to describe -emotions as having colors. So here was a new kind of fiction, called -“impressionism”; and the realists were laid on the shelf for a while.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_348">{348}</a></span></p> - -<p>“Stevie” made a small fortune, and no longer drank his drinks in the -saloons of the Bowery, but in the high-priced cafés on Broadway. He -wrote short stories and sketches, and verses without rhyme or rhythm, -which puzzled the critics—I remember that in my student days they were -the joke of the newspaper paragraphers. The gossips got busy with him, -of course, and a legend was built up concerning the extent of his revolt -against social conventions. His biographer, Thomas Beer, defends him -vigorously against these tales. It seems clear that he did not take -drugs; while, as to his drinking, we can only repeat what we said about -the pipes—any drinking at all was too much for a man who was to die of -tuberculosis in a few years.</p> - -<p>As to the women stories, they seem to have been partly blackmail, and -partly the young writer’s imprudent notions of chivalry. He was talking -with a girl of the streets in a saloon, and a policeman arrested the -girl, and Crane came into court to testify in her behalf, and so of -course got himself in for a lot of disagreeable publicity. It would have -been so easy for him to avoid that, by having the ordinary caution of a -man of the world. If only he had been willing to learn from Mark Twain -and William Dean Howells how to dodge the shadow of a scandal!</p> - -<p>The life of this wayward child of genius is one more illustration of -that disagreeable alternative which life so often presents us. You may -have self-restraint, plus more or less hypocrisy, and live long and -successfully; or you may have do-as-you-please, plus absolute honesty, -and undermine your constitution and die at the age of twenty-nine. The -mind of Stephen Crane was like an acid which dissolved the shams and -pretenses of civilization. But he has nothing to put in the place of -these things. In “The Red Badge of Courage” he shows us a hero blind -with fear; and the theme of all his short stories and later novels is -that life is a matter of accident, and the universe a thing without -moral sense or meaning. This belief Crane put also into his conduct; he -knew nothing to do with his life, except that he had a childish wish to -see a real war with his own eyes. First he tried to get to Cuba, and was -shipwrecked; and while he got a good story out of that, “The Open Boat,” -he paid with a part of his very small store of vitality. Then he went to -Greece, but the <span class="pagenum"><a id="page_349">{349}</a></span>cooking made him ill. Finally he saw our war in Cuba, -and displayed such indifference to his own fate that the tongues of the -gossips wagged faster than ever. He must be seeking death, because of -some dark scandal hanging over his head!</p> - -<p>He was altogether out of step with the 1890’s; but now a new generation -has come, and all our young intellectuals are cold and objective and -cynical, agreeing that pity is a mistake and life nothing in particular. -They leave to me the unpleasant task of holding uninvited post-mortems -over the ardent unhappy dead.</p> - -<p>Let me put it briefly: that some day there will be yet another -generation, which will realize that no man can get along without a -religion, least of all the creative artist. It will not be the Methodist -religion, but it will be something that gives young geniuses a reason -for taking care of themselves and their gifts.</p> - -<p>There was one religion which Stephen Crane adopted for a period of two -weeks. He was a Socialist for that long—so he explains in a letter; but -he met two other Socialists, who told him his doctrines were wrong, and -then fell to quarreling as to which of the two was right. I say: Oh, -young Stephen Cranes of the future, judge truth by the tests of truth, -and not by our personal frailties and follies!</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_CV"></a>CHAPTER CV<br /><br /> -THE CALIFORNIA OCTOPUS</h2> - -<p>The mind of America at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of -the twentieth century was controlled by elderly maiden aunts and hired -men of privilege; and it seemed that behind the scenes of our national -life some evil jinx was operating to keep us in this double thrall. -There arose five independent and original-minded artists, and here is -what happened to them: Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis at the age of -twenty-nine, Frank Norris died of appendicitis at the age of thirty-two, -David Graham Phillips was killed by a lunatic at the age of forty-four, -O. Henry died of alcoholism at the age of forty-eight, and Jack London -killed himself at the age of forty.</p> - -<p>Frank Norris was born in California in 1870, the son<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_350">{350}</a></span> of well-to-do -parents. All through his childhood and boyhood he liked to tell stories -and make sketches; he wasn’t sure which he liked to do best. He studied -art in Paris for a couple of years, and published a long narrative poem -at the age of twenty. Then he came home and tried to learn something -about writing at the University of California, but without success. He -took a graduate course at Harvard, and here he wrote “McTeague,” his -first successful novel.</p> - -<p>He had been absorbing Zola, and set out to apply the Zola method to -America. He is going to give you the brutal reality of life, he is going -to write about big animal men with heavy muscles and prominent jaws, and -broad-bosomed women with large quantities of alluring hair. He is going -to give you the great open spaces, and also the sordidness and smells of -cities—as much as America can be got to stand. The theme of “McTeague” -is avarice, and we see a dentist’s office with a big gold tooth for a -sign, and all through the tragic story we run upon the motif of gold in -everything from sunsets to decorations.</p> - -<p>Then came “The Octopus,” and here we are in outdoor California, dealing -with crude people and nature on a large scale. “The Octopus” has two -themes. It is the Epic of the Wheat, and we see the great unfenced -plains upon which wheat is raised wholesale, and the golden flood of -grain on its way to feed the millions in the cities, a torrent of food -so vast and heavy that it symbolically suffocates a man on its way. And -then there is the railroad, the Octopus which has seized the wheat -country and is devouring the settlers. I read this novel before I read -anything of Zola’s, and so I got the shock of a great discovery. I was -one of many youngsters who were set on fire. Here was power, here was a -new grasp of reality; this was the way to write novels!</p> - -<p>Also I was horrified and bewildered: could it be that things like this -happened in America? Could it be that railroads set themselves up as the -ruling power in a community, that they defeated the laws, deprived -people of their homes and drove them into exile or outlawry? You see, I -was the naive and innocent product of American public schools and of Mr. -J. P. Morgan’s university; I really thought that I lived in a democracy, -and under the protection of a Constitution. At that very time I was<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_351">{351}</a></span> -raising campaign funds and helping to elect the president of our -university—mine and Mr. Morgan’s—as a “reform” mayor of New York City!</p> - -<p>I tried to find out about this railroad Octopus, and there was no way to -find out. It was a dark secret of American life, crushed completely -underground. There was no literature about it, nothing in the newspapers -or the magazines, no books or pamphlets in the library of the great -university. Now, twenty-three years later, I can tell you of a book in -which you may read the life-story of one of these men of the San -Joaquin, who were driven to outlawry by the Southern Pacific Railroad. -The name of the man is Ed Morrell, and Jack London made him the hero of -a novel, “The Star Rover.” They caught him finally and put him in -prison, and that is the story he tells in his book, “The Twenty-fifth -Man,” one of the most appalling narratives ever penned by a human being.</p> - -<p>Frank Norris, who taught me something new about my country, had set out -deliberately to do that very thing. He explained his ideas in a book, -“The Responsibilities of the Novelist”; and I might, if I wanted to take -the time, play a trick upon you, by quoting sentences from his book, -mixed in with sentences from my book, and you could not tell the -difference. For example, who is it that says: “No art that is not in the -end understood by the People can live or ever did live a single -generation”? Who says: “It is the complaint of the coward, this cry -against the novel with a purpose”? Who says: “The muse is a teacher, not -a trickster”? Who says: “Truth in fiction is just as real and just as -important as truth anywhere else”? It is Frank Norris who says all these -things.</p> - -<p>He goes on to point out that the pulpit reaches us only on Sundays, and -the newspaper is quickly forgotten, but the novel stays with us all the -time. And yet, facing this responsibility, there are novelists who admit -that they write for money, and “you and I and the rest of us do not -consider this disreputable!” Norris goes on to voice his own attitude -toward his work: “I never truckled; I never took off the hat to Fashion -and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth. They liked -it or they didn’t like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the -truth.”</p> - -<p>He qualifies his doctrine by the statement that the nov<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_352">{352}</a></span>elist must not -let his purpose run away with his story. I have an idea he must have let -publishers and critics persuade him he had done that in “The Octopus”; -for in “The Pit,” the second volume of his proposed trilogy, he is more -tame and conventional. He tries to interest us in a grain broker and his -wife as human beings—and he cannot do that, because parasites are not -and cannot be interesting, except in satire after the fashion of -“Babbitt.” We miss the epic sweep and bigness of “The Octopus,” and we -are not consoled by the fact that “The Pit” had twice the sale.</p> - -<p>The relationship between the novelist’s purpose and his story is very -simple; the two things are one, and of equal importance, and the -novelist must have them both in hand at every moment of his work. The -consequence of losing either is equally fatal. The novelist who loses -his grip upon the story and the characters who are living the story, -begins at once to write a tract or a sermon—I know all about that, -having done it. But equally fatal it is to lose your grip upon your -purpose; for then you are doing meaningless reporting, and becoming a -camera instead of a creative intellect.</p> - -<p>I am prepared to hear it said many times that the author of this book -does not know the difference between a tract or sermon and a work of -art. But those who read the book, not to get material for ridicule, but -to learn the truth about art, will note that I have praised in this book -only the artists who were big enough and strong enough to keep both -their imaginative impulse and their intellectual control; I have failed -to mention a goodly company of artists who fought valiantly for freedom -and justice, but who do not belong among the greatest, for precisely the -reason that their impulse to teach and to preach ran away with their -inspiration. That is why you miss such names as Plato and Sir Thomas -More and Ferdinand Lassalle and Bertha von Suttner and John Ruskin and -Walter Besant and Charles Kingsley and Charles Reade and Robert Buchanan -and John Davidson and Richard Whiteing and Francis Adams and Harriet -Beecher Stowe and Edward Bellamy.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_353">{353}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_CVI"></a>CHAPTER CVI<br /><br /> -THE OLD-FASHIONED AMERICAN</h2> - -<p>David Graham Phillips affords an interesting illustration of the power -of bourgeois criticism to suppress and abolish those writers who -threaten its ideology. He was by all odds the greatest novelist of the -period in which he wrote, a sturdy and vigorous personality, who looked -at the world about him with his own eyes and really had something to -say. He was worth a dozen of the imitation novelists who were acclaimed -as great during the first ten years of the century. But Phillips was a -“muck-rake man,” a prophet and a satirist; therefore the critics -patronized him, and since his death they have forgotten him. No -biography has been published, and a new generation will have to make the -discovery that he wrote the biggest piece of American fiction of his -time.</p> - -<p>Phillips was eleven years older than myself, but we arrived upon the -literary scene together, and I used to meet him now and then in New -York. I have an idea that I annoyed him; he was generous in praising my -books, but that did not satisfy me—I wanted to make a Socialist out of -him, and he would not have it! He was the genuine old-fashioned -American, the wearer of square-toed shoes and a string tie. I do not -mean that I ever saw him in that costume, but that his view of human -society was derived from that period. He came from the Middle West, and -believed in the simple, small-town democracy he had there known. A man -of common sense, he hated all forms of social pretense and finickyness. -Like a good American, he respected money and the power of money, but he -wanted the people who had this power to behave like sensible human -beings, and he was infuriated because they took to putting on “side,” -getting English butlers and five footmen in livery.</p> - -<p>He blamed this especially on the women. He loathed the modern parasitic -female, to the extent of some twenty volumes, exposing every aspect of -her foolishness and empty-headedness. She it was who dragged men to -ruin, she caused the corruption of government and a general riot of -greed, in order that she might have silk stockings and jewels and -servants. She had spurned the jobs of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_354">{354}</a></span> cooking and sewing and making -home, without ever having taken the trouble to learn to do these -efficiently. Now she couldn’t do even her foolish society job; she -couldn’t run a rich man’s household and be an intelligent companion, she -couldn’t bear healthy children, or raise them to be anything but -shirkers.</p> - -<p>Proper people were shocked by Phillips because he talked so plainly, and -fastidious people considered him coarse. As a matter of fact, he was a -man of tender heart and true refinement, who put on an aspect of rough -common sense as a matter of principle. Cut out all this nonsense, he -seems to say to his readers; you know we all want money, we all like -comfort, we are all selfish creatures; you women especially are making -silly pretenses, you know you have to be kept, and you prefer a man who -is self-willed and masterful, a fighting man. So he recorded “The -Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig,” and irritated many fine ladies. -So in “Old Wives for New” he preaches the common sense idea, that if a -woman is lazy and sluttish and refuses to work at her job as wife, her -husband is justified in getting rid of her and marrying a young and -attractive woman. In “The Hungry Heart” he deals with the eternal -triangle, and shows a husband forgiving an erring wife—which you would -think was good Christian doctrine, but which is contrary to fancy -notions of sexual implacability. In “The Husband’s Story” he portrays a -wife who marries a man because she believes he will succeed; she helps -him to succeed, and they rise high, but finding that the higher they -get, the less interest there is in life.</p> - -<p>Phillips was not content with preaching in his novels; he wrote a book, -a general scolding at “The Age of Gilt.” Here you see the old-fashioned -gentleman from Indiana, an individualist, but a hater of monopoly and -privilege, a modern Isaiah denouncing graft and greed. The “Cosmopolitan -Magazine” lured him into writing a series of articles about the gang -which was selling out our government; “The Treason of the Senate,” the -articles were called, and they made an enormous uproar. Theodore -Roosevelt made a speech denouncing “muck-rake men,” which was very -plainly aimed at Phillips. Afterwards, in his character as Mr. -Facing-Bothways, Roosevelt made an attempt to get information from -Phillips, for use in his<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_355">{355}</a></span> fight against the Senate. Let me testify that -only a few weeks before Roosevelt made this “muck-rake” speech, I sat at -his dinner-table in the White House and heard him call the roll of these -very same senators, naming them according to the interests they -served—the senator from the Steel Trust, the senator from the Copper -Trust, and so on. I recall the description of Hale of Maine, the senator -from the Shipping Trust: “the most innately and essentially malevolent -scoundrel that God Almighty ever put on earth!”</p> - -<p>The entire writing life of Phillips was barely ten years, and in that -period he worked incessantly, rewriting and revising with painful -conscientiousness. His stories were successful as serials, and I -remember once teasing him because they were always of the right length -for the purpose; I wished that mine would behave in that convenient way. -The jest apparently troubled him, for he referred to it on several -occasions. He did not tell me that for ten years he had been working in -secret upon a novel of three hundred thousand words!</p> - -<p>He left that when he died, and it waited five years for a magazine to -get up the courage to print extracts from it. We have it now in two -volumes, “Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise.” Its heroine is a girl who -bears the brand of illegitimacy, and runs away from home to escape it; -but they bring her back and marry her off to an elderly farmer, and the -picture of her bridal night is one of the unforgettable scenes of -American fiction. Susan is ignorant of the world, a flower in the mud. -Groping for light, she escapes again, and tries to earn her living in a -box factory, and undergoes all the horrors of tenement life. Starved -out, she takes to the streets in Cincinnati, and we see the graft and -cruelty of city government. She is taken up as the mistress of a -politician and travels with him in Europe. But always she is reaching -toward something better; her spirit remains untarnished, and in the end -she becomes a successful actress.</p> - -<p>This story, of course, shocked the orthodox and respectable. It was a -new kind of romanticism, familiar enough to Europe, but not to us. Could -a woman’s soul remain pure while her body was sullied? The critics -denied it; but, as it happens, several women of that sort have made -their appearance since Phillips wrote—for<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_356">{356}</a></span> example, the author of -“Madeleine,” who had equally degrading experiences to tell, and yet kept -her soul, and is working to help the downtrodden part of her sex.</p> - -<p>Nothing offends bourgeois respectables more than the statement that -women are driven to prostitution by economic forces. They like to -believe that the women of the poor are naturally depraved; also, they -don’t want working girls made discontented with their lot, and they -don’t want social reformers poking their noses into box factories and -department-stores. So they call “Susan Lenox” an immoral book, and it is -taboo in libraries and reviews.</p> - -<p>But as a matter of fact, David Graham Phillips shows himself in this -book a thoroughly bourgeois person, safely and wholesomely “American” in -his whole-hearted acceptance of the doctrine that a woman cannot and -ought not try to live without comfort. Susan’s experience in the box -factory is brief; she suffers, both in mind and body, but not so deeply -that she cannot bear to leave the working class, and rise above it, and -win fame and fortune by entertaining the master class, in that kind of -prostitution known as the capitalist theatre. It does not occur to her -to conceive a passionate ideal of sisterhood with all the oppressed -factory workers; to hang on to her job with them, and teach and organize -them, and lead them in a strike for better working conditions and higher -wages.</p> - -<p>That, you see, is another method by which a heroine could develop a -beautiful soul; another path by which she could break into the world of -intellect and power—the way of class-consciousness and solidarity. But -David Graham Phillips did not understand the revolutionary psychology, -and could not have imparted it to his heroine; he was bound by the -limitations of a small-town man from Indiana, a graduate of Princeton -University, a city editor of capitalist newspapers. I read the scant -records of his life, and find a leading critic praising him because he -had “no panaceas”; meaning that the critic liked him because his -thinking was as muddled as the critic’s.</p> - -<p>The old-fashioned American has preached us a tremendous and moving -sermon, putting his whole heart into it; and it would be pleasant to be -able to express for it the same unquestioning reverence as Mr. Robert W. -Chambers, who writes the introduction to the book. But truth<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_357">{357}</a></span> requires -me to point out that Phillips avoids having his heroine contract -venereal disease—something which might decidedly have affected the -beauty of her soul. Also, she manages to preserve her beauty, in spite -of the part which getting men drunk plays in the life of a -street-walker. In other words, he idealizes prostitution as a career for -women, in order to give it the advantage over the box factory.</p> - -<p>It is very significant that he fails to take us into this factory and -show us the work; all we get is Susan’s interviews with the boss in his -office. We do not meet the other women, except the one with whom Susan -starves in her tenement room. So we fail to realize that Susan’s -solution of her problem is not the solution for all women. There have to -be boxes, as well as sex gratification, in the capitalist world; and -thousands of women must hold their box-making jobs. They lose their hair -and teeth, sometimes their fingers, and always their beauty; but they -acquire class-consciousness; and here and there a genius among them, by -incredible heroic labors, gets a bit of knowledge and becomes a leader. -So, out of the whole mass-misery results organization, and that labor -movement which is the germ of the new society, taking form, according to -the wondrous process of nature, inside the shell of the old.</p> - -<p>But of all this we get no hint in “Susan Lenox”; a middle-class story, -written by a middle-class man about a middle-class girl who descends for -a short period into the inferno of working-class life, and then -magically rises out of it again. If David Graham Phillips had written -the story of a working-class girl, who stayed with the working class and -learned working-class lessons—why then all critics would have indicted -him for the crime of having a “panacea,” and “Susan Lenox” would have -waited, not five years, but fifty years, for publication in a popular -magazine!</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_CVII"></a>CHAPTER CVII<br /><br /> -BAGDAD-ON-THE-SUBWAY</h2> - -<p>The short story writer who signed the pen name O. Henry burst like a -meteor upon the magazine world of New York. His first stories appeared -in 1902, when he had only eight years of life before him. In that time -he<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_358">{358}</a></span> became the recognized king of the craft; everybody read him, high -and low, those skilled in writing as well as the plain people with whose -fates he dealt. He poured out his stories at the rate of one or two -every week, and if he did not get the highest prices ever heard of, it -was because he cared nothing about money and did not trouble to claim -his own.</p> - -<p>He was a strange, reserved man, deeply loved by his few friends, but -hard to get at, and resentful of the intrusion of lion hunters. He had -the tenderness and sentimentality of the Southern gentleman, combined -with a secretiveness which puzzled the denizens of his -Bagdad-on-the-Subway. Only a few facts about his life were known; that -he had lived on a ranch in Texas, had been a drugstore clerk, had -written for papers in New Orleans, had traveled in Central America, and -was a widower and had a young daughter—that was all his best friends -knew. There was a gap in his life, and no one ventured to question him. -But several years after his death a biography was published, and the -disclosure was made that America’s short story king had served three -years and three months as a federal prisoner in the Ohio penitentiary. -That was where he had begun his career as a story writer; that was where -he had got his intimate knowledge of gentle grafters and chivalrous -highwaymen; that was where he had acquired the pathos and the -heart-break.</p> - -<p>It was characteristic of America that there should have been a great -fuss over this disclosure. There was the daughter, and also a new wife, -and these thought that the dreadful secret so long hidden should have -stayed hidden. Likewise some editors and reviewers thought it. Here was -a man who was assumed to belong to the ages, and here was a story more -moving and more instructive than any volume O. Henry had published; but -they wanted to bury it in his grave—because, forsooth, America is the -land of respectability, and the deepest tragedies of the human soul are -of no consequence compared with the desire of two ladies to escape -humiliation in a matter for which neither was in any way to be blamed.</p> - -<p>It appears that O. Henry was a teller of a bank in Texas, the affairs of -which were very loosely handled. Something over a thousand dollars was -missing; somebody else got it, and O. Henry got the trouble. He was<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_359">{359}</a></span> on -his way to stand trial, when he fell into a panic; he could not face the -ordeal, and ran away to Honduras. But then, learning that his wife was -dying of tuberculosis, he could not stand that either, and came home. -His wife died, and he went through his trial in a daze of shame, and -went to prison, to witness that infinity of horrors which America heaps -upon those who have threatened its property interests.</p> - -<p>While in Honduras “Bill” Porter—that was his real name—had made a -strange acquaintance, Al Jennings, a train-bandit much wanted by -Wells-Fargo detectives. The two men came back to America and fate -brought them to the same penitentiary. Jennings has since reformed, and -has given us the story of himself and his literary friend in a book -called “Through the Shadows with O. Henry.” So we are privileged to see -the raw material out of which the stories were made, and to watch the -maker at his work.</p> - -<p>He had become the drug clerk of the prison, and in his spare hours he -wrote incessantly, in order to forget the human anguish about him. He -would take the outlaw stories of Jennings, the stories of all varieties -of offenders in the prison, and transform them to his own uses. Outside -was his little daughter, carefully kept in ignorance as to her father’s -whereabouts; he must have money to send her a Christmas present, and so -he ground out manuscripts and mailed them to magazines.</p> - -<p>And so once more, as in the case of Mark Twain, we see the spirit of -bourgeois America, embodied in the personality of a woman, engaged in -remodeling the soul of a genius. Here was a mass of material, -palpitating with life, and ready to be shaped into one of the great -tragic records of the ages. And here was a loving and tender-hearted, -humorous and blundering Southern gentleman, with no grasp of social -forces and no understanding of what had happened to him, engaged in -sentimentalizing and feminizing that mass of material.</p> - -<p>Take one example, the story of “Jimmy Valentine,” the most popular -character O. Henry created. This story was made into a play, which had -enormous success both in America and England; it was stolen and -dramatized several times in France and Spain; it was the source of a new -stage variety, what is known as the “crook play.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_360">{360}</a></span>” The story tells about -a little child who is locked by accident in a bank vault, and will be -suffocated in a few hours. A famous safe-cracker learns of her plight -and opens the safe, and thereby reveals himself to a detective who has -been hunting him. But the detective, being a magazine detective, is -kind-hearted and easily moved to tears; he foregoes the glory and reward -of capturing a famous crook, and the crook retires to be good and happy -ever afterwards in the company of the little child. Such is the -underworld according to American magazine mythology.</p> - -<p>And now, what was the true story of “Jimmy Valentine”? There was a great -scandal in the state of Ohio; some high-class crooks, of the kind who -never go to the penitentiary, had stolen millions of dollars, and locked -all the papers in a vault and escaped. These papers must be had, and it -was not possible to blow open the vault with dynamite, for fear of -destroying them. So the governor applied to the penitentiary for a -competent safe-cracking artist. A man came forward. He had been a -gutter-rat, starving in childhood, like Al Jennings, who tells his -story. At the age of eleven, a “ravenous little rag-picker,” he had -broken into a box-car and stolen ten cents worth of crackers, and had -been sent to a “reformatory,” and turned out a master-crook, at -eighteen. A year later they had sent him to the penitentiary for -life—an “habitual criminal.” Now he was dying of tuberculosis, and his -old mother was dying of grief, because she had not been permitted to see -her son, or even to hear from him for sixteen years.</p> - -<p>This man had a method of opening safes, which consisted of filing his -finger-nails off, so that with the quivering raw flesh he could feel the -dropping of the “tumblers,” as he turned the dial of the lock. He was -promised his liberty if he would open the vault for the great state of -Ohio. He did it in ten seconds; and then the promise was broken, and he -went back to die in prison. When his coffin was carted out, there was -his old heart-broken mother in the slush and snow, toddling along with -streaming eyes and stretched-out hands behind the cart.</p> - -<p>That was a real story, you see; and O. Henry was in the prison when it -happened, he felt the thrill of horror and fury that ran through the -place when the pardon was denied. But, you see, if he had written that -story, he<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_361">{361}</a></span> would not have had any Christmas gifts to send to his little -daughter, nor would he have been invited to Bagdad-on-the-Subway to be -crowned the short story king. So unwilling was he to face reality that -he did not even use the detail about Jimmy Valentine’s filing off his -finger-nails. No, the crook in his story has to open the safe with a -special fancy set of tools!</p> - -<p>You see, O. Henry simply could not face the pain of life; he did not -know what to do about it, and so he dodged it—just like the magazine -writers and the magazine public of his period. He could not even face -his own disgrace; his heart was dead in that prison, even the thought of -freedom was a terror, because of the awful secret he would carry. -Jennings quotes him: “The prison label is worse than the brand of Cain. -If the world once sees it, you are doomed. It shall not see it on me. I -will not become an outcast.”</p> - -<p>Understand, he knew himself to be innocent; and yet he took the position -of an ex-convict, crouching and trembling. There were other men who went -to prison, for example, ‘Gene Debs, who also knew himself to be -innocent; he came out a warrior and a saint. But O. Henry accepted the -social system as permanent, identical with destiny.</p> - -<p>He was often compared to Maupassant, and that hurt his feelings, for he -said that he had never written a filthy line in his life, and he did not -wish to be compared to a filthy writer. You see here the limitations of -his understanding; morality means sex, and he is revolted by Gallic -brutality, and practices sentimental Southern reticence. But in a more -fundamental way his point of view is identical with that of Maupassant; -for to both writers class greed has taken the place of God in control of -the universe. The French writer jeers and hates, while the American -smiles and weeps; but each finds the point of his story in the -incongruities and absurdities which this artificial economic fate -inflicts upon its helpless and uncomprehending victims.</p> - -<p>Strike through the pathos and the tragedy of O. Henry at any point, and -what do you find? Everywhere and inevitably one thing, the Big Business -system of America. Here is a waitress in a restaurant with white -porcelain walls and glass-topped tables and a ceaseless clatter of<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_362">{362}</a></span> -crockery. Yes, it is pathetic for a girl to carry loads of crockery all -day, and try to keep virtuous on a starvation wage. Then close the O. -Henry book, and consult Moody’s Manual of Corporations, and you discover -that the great chain of restaurants has been bought by Standard Oil; -America’s “great clamorer for dividends” has doubled the prices of the -food without improving its quality, and has failed to raise wages to -keep pace with the cost of living.</p> - -<p>Or take James Turner, who presses hats all day and has to stand on his -feet, which makes them sore; he finds his escape in reading Clark -Russell’s sea-tales, and having got a copy, he is happy even in jail. -Consult a study of the sweated trades, and you note that hat pressing is -a secondary and parasitic industry, incapable of being organized; -therefore the poor devil has no one to protect his sore feet. A part of -his equipment is a jeering scorn for those who are striving to enlighten -him. “Say,” he asks, “do I look like I’d climbed down one of them -missing fire-escapes at Helicon Hall?” That is his way of saying that he -has no vision of a better world; it is O. Henry’s idea of being a -sociologist. (If you have any curiosity concerning Helicon Hall and its -fire-escapes, the story is in “The Brass Check.”)</p> - -<p>The obscure and exploited masses of New York, the waitresses and -hat-pressers and soda-jerkers and bums and taxi drivers and policemen, -O. Henry’s Four Million, adopted him as their favorite writer, because -he knew their lives, he loved them, and they felt that love under the -cover of his laughter. And in truth it is a pleasant thing when you are -in trouble to find a heart which feels with you; but it is an even more -important thing to find a head which understands the causes of your -trouble and can help you to escape it. The Four Million will have to -look elsewhere than to O. Henry for that head.</p> - -<p>There was an essential fact about him which his official biographer -fails to mention; he was a true Southern gentleman in another -respect—that he drank too much. Al Jennings records that he was half -drunk when Jennings encountered him, sitting in front of the American -consulate in the little town of Trujillo, Honduras. They proceeded to -get all the way drunk, and to celebrate the Fourth of July by shooting -up the place. And there is<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_363">{363}</a></span> much other drinking scattered through the -story. In the prison O. Henry was in charge of certain supplies, and he -found that contractors were robbing the prison, and he wanted to expose -them; but Jennings showed him that if he did so, he would get himself -thrown into the hole, and beaten to death by the prison powers who were -sharing in the graft. So our poor Southern gentleman kept silence, and -received large presents of wine and liquor. When he came to New York, -this habit had him in its grip, and never let him go.</p> - -<p>So here is a point about the O. Henry stories; they are alcoholic -stories, and take the alcoholic attitude toward life. The friends of O. -Henry, who spent their time trying to save him, will understand what all -of us know who have had to do with Southern gentlemen of the old school: -that a victim of alcohol can weep with pity and can mingle laughter with -his tears; he can be charming and beautiful, gentle and kind; but one -thing he can rarely have, and that is a firm grasp of the realities -about him; another thing he can never by any possibility have, and that -is an attitude of persistent and unflinching resolve. Yet these are -exactly the qualities which the Four Million will have to develop before -they can escape from their slavery in Bagdad-of-the-Traction-Trust.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_CVIII"></a>CHAPTER CVIII<br /><br /> -SUPERMANHOOD</h2> - -<p>We come now to the first of the writers of our time who was born of the -working class, and carried his working-class consciousness into his -literary career. He was the true king of our story tellers, the -brightest star that flashed upon our skies. He brought us the greatest -endowment both of genius and of brain, and the story of what America did -to him is a painful one.</p> - -<p>Jack London was born in San Francisco, in 1876, which made him two years -my senior. We took to exchanging our first books, and a controversy -started between us, which lasted the rest of his life; the last letter I -received from him was an invitation to come up to the ranch and continue -it. “You and I ought to have some ‘straight from the shoulder’ talk with -each other. It is<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_364">{364}</a></span> coming to you, it may be coming to me. It may -illuminate one or the other or both of us.” I answered that I was -finishing a job of writing; but that as soon as the job was done I would -come and “stand the gaff.” And then I read that he was dead!</p> - -<p>It was the old question, several times stated in this book, of -self-discipline versus self-indulgence; or, as Jack would have put it, -asceticism versus self-expression. Which way will a man get the most out -of life? Believing in his own nature and giving it rein, living -intensely and fast; or distrusting his nature, all nature, stooping to -mean cautions and fears, imposing a rule upon his impulses—and so -cutting himself off from his joyful fellows, and exposing himself to -painful sneers?</p> - -<p>I see Jack vividly, as he was at our first meeting, when he came to New -York in 1904 or 1905. At that time he was in the full glory of his -newly-won fame, and we young Socialists had got up a big meeting for him -at Grand Central Palace. Our hero came on a belated train from Florida, -arriving when our hearts were sick with despair; he came, radiant and -thrilling, in spite of an attack of tonsilitis, and strode upon the -platform amid the waving of red handkerchiefs, and in a voice of calm -defiance read to the city of New York his essay, “Revolution.”</p> - -<p>New York did not like it, needless to say. But I liked it so well that I -was prepared to give my hero the admiration of a slave. But we spent the -next day together, chatting of the things we were both absorbed in; and -all that day the hero smoked cigarettes and drank—I don’t remember what -it was, for all these red and brown and green and golden concoctions are -equally painful to me, and the sight of them deprives me of the control -of my facial muscles. Jack, of course, soon noted this; he was the -red-blood, and I was the mollycoddle, and he must have his fun with me, -in the mood of the oyster pirate and roustabout. Tales of incredible -debauches; tales of opium and hashish, and I know not what other strange -ingredients; tales of whisky bouts lasting for weeks! I remember a -picture of two sailor boys at sea in a small boat, unable to escape from -each other, conceiving a furious hatred of each other, and when they got -ashore, retiring behind the sand-dunes to fight. They fought until they<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_365">{365}</a></span> -could hardly walk—and then they repaired to town to heal their bruises -with alcohol.</p> - -<p>The next time we met was six or eight years later; and this time the -controversy was more serious. For now Jack had read “Love’s Pilgrimage,” -and was exasperated by what seemed to him a still less excusable form of -asceticism, that of sex. Here was a so-called hero, a prig of a poet, -driving a young wife to unhappiness by notions born in the dark corners -of Christian monkeries. I am not sure just how I defended poor Thyrsis; -I am not sure how clearly I myself saw at that time the peculiar working -of sex-idealism which had manifested itself in that novel; the impulse a -man has to be ashamed of advantages given to him by nature and society, -and so to put himself chivalrously under the feet of a woman—raising -her, an image of perfection, upon a pedestal of his own self-reproach. -Sometimes she refuses to stay upon this pedestal; and so results a -comical plight for a too-imaginative ascetic!</p> - -<p>The argument between Jack and myself was handicapped on that occasion by -the fact that his voice was almost entirely gone because of a sore -throat. He was trying the alcohol treatment; my last picture of him in -the flesh was very much of the flesh, alas!—with a flask of gin before -him, and the stumps of many cigarettes in his dinner-plate, and his eyes -red and unwholesome-looking. He has told the story of his travels in the -Kingdom of Alcoholia himself, told it bravely and completely, so I am -not obliged to use any reserve in speaking of this aspect of his life. I -went away, more than ever confirmed as a mollycoddle!</p> - -<p>But Jack London was a man with a magnificent mind, and a giant’s will. -He fought tremendous battles in his own soul—battles in despite of his -own false philosophy, battles which he was fighting even while he was -quarreling at other men’s self-restraint. He went on a trip around the -Horn, which lasted several months, and drank nothing all that time; -also, he wrote that shining book, “John Barleycorn,” one of the most -useful and most entertaining ever penned by a man.</p> - -<p>It was our habit to send each other our new books, and to exchange -comments on them. When I read “John Barleycorn” I wrote that the book -had made me realize a<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_366">{366}</a></span> new aspect of the drink problem, a wrong it did -to men who never touched it—in depriving them of companionship, making -them exiles among their fellows. So much of men’s intercourse depends -upon and is colored by drinking! I, for example, had always felt that my -friendship with Jack London had been limited by that disharmony.</p> - -<p>He wrote in reply that I was mistaken; it was especially with my -attitude towards sex that he disagreed. We exchanged some letters about -the matter, and mentally prepared ourselves for that duel which will -never be fought. In concluding the subject of alcohol, let me point out -that Jack himself settled the controversy by voting for “California Dry” -at the election held a few days before his death. His explanation was -that while he enjoyed drinking, he was willing to forego that enjoyment -for the sake of the younger generation; and it would indeed be a -graceless ascetic who asked more than that!</p> - -<p>So far as concerns the matter of sex, the test of a man’s philosophy is -that at the age of forty he has kept his belief in womankind, in the joy -and satisfaction that true love may give. Where the philosophy of -“self-expression” had led Jack London was known to many who heard him -tell of a book he planned to write, giving the whole story of his -experiences with women. He meant to write it with the same ruthless -honesty he had used in “John Barleycorn”; revealing his tragic -disillusionment, and his contempt for woman as a parasite, a creature of -vanity and self-indulgence.</p> - -<p>Jack’s conquests among the sex had been many, and too easy, it would -seem; like most fighters, he despised an unworthy antagonist. The women -who threw themselves at his head came from all classes of society, drawn -to him as moths to a flame; but it is evident that his philosophy was to -blame for the fact that there were so few among them he could respect. -There were surely many able to hold the interest of a great man, who did -not share his philosophy, and therefore remained unnoticed by him.</p> - -<p>It is not generally the custom to write of these things in plain words; -but in the case of Jack London it would be futile to do otherwise, -because he spoke of them freely, and would have written of them in the -same way. His whole attitude was a challenge to truth-telling, a call -for<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_367">{367}</a></span> frankness, even to the point of brutality. The book he planned was -to be published under some such name as “Jack Liverpool”—which you must -admit would hardly have been a very adequate disguise. I have heard one -of his best friends say that he is glad Jack never lived to write it.</p> - -<p>For my part, believing as I do that the salvation of the race depends -upon unmasking the falsehoods of our class-morality—the institution -which I call “marriage plus prostitution”—I cannot but sigh for this -lost story. What an awakening it would have brought to the mothers of -our so-called “better classes,” if Jack London had ever given to the -world the true story of his experiences with their daughters! As a -school boy in Oakland, for example, with the young girls of the -comfortable classes in that city! He and his companions, sons of -workingmen and poor people, looking up to the great world above them -inquiringly, made the strange discovery that these shining, -golden-haired pets of luxury, guarded at home and in their relations -with their social equals by the thousand sleepless eyes of scandal, -found it safe and pleasant to repair to secret rendezvous among the -willow thickets of Lake Merritt, and there play the nymph to handsome -and sturdy fauns of a class below the level ever reached by the thousand -sleepless eyes!</p> - -<p>When you listened to a narrative such as that, you realized the grim -meaning that Jack London put into his essay, “What Life Means to Me,” -telling of the embitterment that came to him when he, the oyster pirate -and roustabout, broke into the “parlor floor of society”:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, -they were merely the unburied dead.... The women were gowned -beautifully, I admit; but to my naive surprise I discovered that -they were of the same clay as all the rest of the women I had known -down below in the cellar.... It is true these beautifully gowned, -beautiful women prattled sweet little ideals and dear little -moralities; but, in spite of their prattle, the dominant key of the -life they lived was materialistic. And they were so sentimentally -selfish! They assisted in all kinds of sweet little charities and -informed one of the fact, while all the time the food they ate and -the beautiful clothes they wore were bought out of dividends -stained with the blood of child labor, and sweated labor, and -prostitution itself.</p></div> - -<p>Jack London had a dream of another kind of love; the dream of a strong, -free, proud woman, the mate for a<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_368">{368}</a></span> strong, free, proud man. This dream -came into his writings at the start; into “A Daughter of the Snows,” his -third novel—the very name of it, you perceive. This story, published in -the second year of the present century, was crude and boyish, but it had -the promise of his dawning greatness, and was the occasion of my first -letter to him, and the beginning of our friendship. Afterwards he told -this same dream of the perfect mating, over and over again; he continued -to tell it long after he had ceased to believe in it.</p> - -<p>This necessity of writing about sex in a way that was utterly insincere -must have been the main cause of that contempt for his own fiction which -London was so swift and vehement to proclaim. The expression of this -contempt was the most startling thing about him, to any one who admired -his work. “I loathe the stuff when I have done it. I do it because I -want money and it’s an easy way to get it. But if I could have my choice -about it I never would put pen to paper—except to write a Socialist -essay, to tell the bourgeois world how much I despise it.” I remember -trying to persuade him that he must have enjoyed writing the best of his -stories—“The Sea Wolf” and “The Call of the Wild”; but he would not -have it so. He was a man of action; he liked to sail a boat, to run a -ranch, to fight for Socialism.</p> - -<p>His real attitude towards woman was expressed in “Martin Eden,” his most -autobiographical novel, whose hero gives his final conclusion about life -by dropping himself out of the porthole of an ocean steamer at night. -This hero is a working boy, who makes a desperate struggle to rise from -poverty; but the girl of the world of culture, whom he idealizes and -worships, proves a coward and fails him in his need. That is one wrong -an uncomprehending woman can do to a man; and yet another is to -comprehend his weaker part too well. I have heard friends of London’s -boyhood tell how he came back from the Klondike with the flush of his -youthful dream upon him—the dream of the primitive female, the “mate” -of the strong and proud and free man; and how a shrewd young woman saw -her chance and proceeded to play the primitive female in drawing-rooms, -leaping over tables and chairs, and otherwise exhibiting abounding -energy. But when this game had accomplished its purpose she did<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_369">{369}</a></span> no more -leaping, but “settled down,” as the phrase is; and so came a divorce.</p> - -<p>This “Martin Eden” is assuredly one of Jack London’s greatest works; he -put his real soul into it, and the fact that it was so little known and -read, must have been of evil significance to him. It taught him that if -an American writer wants to earn a living with his pen—especially an -extravagant living—it is necessary that he should avoid dealing in any -true and vital way with the theme of sex. Either he must write over and -over again the dream of primitive and perfect mating, a phenomenon -unreal and unconvincing to people who are not primitive, but who have -intellects as well as bodies to mate; or else, if he deals with modern -life, he must give us details of the splendid and devastating passions -of the prosperous—the kind of perfumed poison now all the rage. One saw -the beginning of that in “The Little Lady of the Big House,” and I count -this book the most sinister sign in the life of Jack London. A man can -hardly have a thirty-six thousand dollar a year contract with the Hearst -magazines and still keep his soul alive!</p> - -<p>I would say to myself, mournfully, that America had “got” Jack London, -just as it “got” Mark Twain! But then something would happen to show me -that I had given up hope too soon. Jack had a mind which worked -unceasingly, and impelled him irresistibly; he had a love of truth that -was a passion, a hatred of injustice that burned volcanic fires. He was -a deeply sad man, a bitterly, cruelly suffering man, and no one could -tell what new vision he would forge in the heat of his genius. If I -write of him here severely it is because I believe in the rigid truth, -which he himself preached; but I would not leave anyone with the idea -that I do not appreciate his greatness, both as a writer and a man.</p> - -<p>There were many among his friends and mine who gave him up. He went to -Hawaii, and the “smart set” there made a lion of him, and he -condescended to refer appreciatively to their “sweet little charities” -on behalf of the races they were exploiting. He went to Mexico, and fell -under the spell of the efficiency of oil engineers, and wrote for -“Collier’s Weekly” a series of articles which caused radicals to break -out in rage. Jack was a boy to the end, and must make new discoveries -and have new<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_370">{370}</a></span> enthusiasms. If a naval officer took him over a -battleship, he would perceive that it was a marvelous and thrilling -machine; but then in the quiet hours of the night he would see the -pitiful white faces of the stokers, to whom as a guest of an officer he -had not been introduced!</p> - -<p>Yes, for he had been in the place of these stokers, and their feelings -had been stamped upon his soul. He might set up to be a country -gentleman, and fall into a fury with his “hands” for their stupidity and -incompetence; but if you said to him, “How about the class war?” -instantly he would be there with his mind. “Yes, of course, I know how -they feel; if I were in their place I would never do a stroke of work I -did not have to.” It is a stressful thing to have an imagination, and to -see many sides of life at once!</p> - -<p>Jack had a divine pity, he had wept over the East End of London as Jesus -wept over Jerusalem. For years afterwards the memories of this stunted -and debased population haunted him beyond all peace; the pictures he -wrote of them in “The People of the Abyss” will be read by posterity -with horror and incredulity, and recognized as among the most powerful -products of his pen. Those, with his vivid and intensely felt Socialist -essays, constitute him one of the great revolutionary figures of our -history. I know that he kept a spark of that sacred fire burning to the -very end, for a little over a year before his death I tried him with the -bulky manuscript of “The Cry for Justice.” The preface he wrote for it -is one of the finest things he ever did, and some of it will be carved -upon his monument:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>It is so simple a remedy, merely service. Not one ignoble thought -or act is demanded of any one of all men and women in the world to -make fair the world. The call is for nobility of thinking, nobility -of doing. The call is for service, and such is the wholesomeness of -it, he who serves all best serves himself.</p></div> - -<p>That is what life had taught him at the end. But it was not easy for him -to learn such a lesson, for he had an imperious nature, fierce in its -demands, and never entirely to be tamed. The struggle between -individualism and Socialism was going on in his whole being all the -time. In the copy of “Martin Eden” which he sent me he wrote: “One of my -motifs in this book was an attack on individualism (in the person of the -hero). I must have<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_371">{371}</a></span> bungled for so far not a single reviewer has -discovered it.” After reading the book I replied that it was easy to -understand the befuddlement of the critics; for he had shown such -sympathy with his hard-driving individualist hero that it would hardly -occur to anyone to take the character as a warning and a reproach.</p> - -<p>You feel that same thing in all his books—in “The Sea Wolf,” and -especially in “The Mutiny of the Elsinore”; the Nietzschean -world-conqueror has conquered London’s imagination, in spite of his -reason and his conscience. If I have written here with cruel frankness -about the personal tragedies of his life, it is because I would not have -posterity continue in the misunderstanding of which he complained in the -case of “Martin Eden.” No, do not make that mistake about his life and -its meaning; most certainly it is not a glorification of the red-blooded -superman, trampling all things under his feet, gratifying his imperious -desires. Rather is it a demonstration of the fact that the -world-conquering superman, trampling all things under his feet and -gratifying all his desires, commits suicide by swallowing laudanum at -the age of forty, because pleasure and wealth and fame have turned to -ashes on his lips. Jack’s friends say that the cause was a desire for -two women at the same time; but I don’t believe that a mature, -intellectual man will kill himself for such a reason, unless his moral -forces have been sapped by years of self-indulgence.</p> - -<p>It was the “Martin Eden” ending, which had haunted Jack London all his -life, and which in the end he made a reality. What a shame, and what a -tragedy to our literature, that capitalist America, the philosophy of -individualist greed and selfishness, should have stolen away the soul of -this man, with all his supreme and priceless gifts! He had seen so -clearly our vision of fellowship and social justice—how clearly, let -him tell you in his own words, the last words he wrote upon ethical -matters:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>He, who by understanding becomes converted to the gospel of -service, will serve truth to confute liars and make them -truth-tellers; will serve kindness so that brutality will perish; -will serve beauty to the erasement of all that is not beautiful. -And he who is strong will serve the weak that they may become -strong. He will devote his strength not to the debasement and -defilement of his weaker fellows, but to the making of opportunity -for them to make themselves into men rather than into slaves and -beasts.</p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_372">{372}</a></span></p> - -<p>These words are from “The Cry for Justice,” “this humanist Holy Book,” -as London called it. Such words, and actions based upon them, make -precious his memory, and will preserve it as long as anything in -American literature is preserved. Perhaps the best thing I can add to -this chapter is a statement of what I personally owed to him—the utmost -one writer can owe to another. When he was at the height of his fame, -and I was unknown, I sent him proofs of “The Jungle,” explaining that I -had been unable to find a publisher, and wished to raise money to -publish the book myself. There are many jealousies in the literary -world; some who win its laurels by bitter struggle are not eager to -raise up rivals. But Jack was not one of these; he wrote a letter about -the book, hailing it as “The ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of Wage Slavery,” and -rallying the Socialist movement as by a bugle-call to its support. If -that book went all over the world, it was Jack London’s push that -started it; and I am only one of a score of authors who might tell the -same story of generous and eager support.</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_CIX"></a>CHAPTER CIX<br /><br /> -THE STEALTHY NEMESIS</h2> - -<p>While I am writing this book death swings his scythe, and two more -artists enter the ghostly marathon of Fame.</p> - -<p>The first of them is Joseph Conrad. Away back in my early days someone -sent me from England a copy of his first novel, “Almayer’s Folly,” and -after that I kept watch, and managed somehow to get hold of “Heart of -Darkness” and “Lord Jim” and “Youth.” I used to rave about these books -to everyone I knew; but when at last Conrad became famous I had a secret -resentment—he had been mine for so long that I did not like to give him -up to those who did not understand him! In his later writings he -deteriorated, as many old men do, and I saw the critics giving to these -inferior books the praise which belonged to the earlier ones.</p> - -<p>Conrad’s death has been the occasion for much discussion of the -“romanticism” of his novels. The fact is that he was as realistic as he -knew how to be. The reason he seems “romantic” is because the scenes and -char<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_373">{373}</a></span>acters of his stories are remote and strange to us. But they were -not at all strange to Conrad; he had sailed these Eastern seas and met -these people, and their tragic fates were as commonplace to him as -street-car traffic to us.</p> - -<p>One other thing the obituary reviews agree upon—that he was the perfect -type of the “pure” artist, who gave us immortal fiction without trace of -purpose. And that I call a joke for the ages: Joseph Conrad being as -grim and determined a propagandist as ever used fiction for a medium. -Most of the time he carries on this propaganda with the Olympian calm of -one who is sure of his thesis and fears no dispute. But now and then he -stumbles upon some personality or point of view which seems to threaten -his doctrine; and then suddenly the front of Jove becomes wrinkled, and -the eyes of Jove shoot flames, and we discover the great Olympian in a -venomous fury.</p> - -<p>The strangest fact about this master of English prose is that he was -born in Poland, and began life as a sailor, shipping on French craft in -the Mediterranean. He was born in 1857 and came to England at the age of -twenty-one; he rose in the British merchant service to become a captain, -and was nearly forty before his first novel was published.</p> - -<p>This man paces the quarter-deck through the long night watches in lonely -silent seas. He reflects upon life, and comes to a conclusion about it. -But it is not the conclusion officially recommended by his native -countrymen; this merchant captain does not pray to the Virgin Mary for -the safety of his ship and the souls of those on board; neither does he -accept the official formula of his adopted country, in whose churches -the congregations implore:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Eternal Father, strong to save,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Its own appointed limits keep:<br /></span> -<span class="i2">O hear us when we cry to Thee<br /></span> -<span class="i2">For those in peril on the sea.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>No, in the fiction of Joseph Conrad the gods, both male and female, have -shriveled up and crumbled and blown away as dust, and over the universe -there broods a dark inscrutable fate. Conrad himself puts it into words: -“a stealthy Nemesis lies in wait.” You see, he uses the classic symbol, -and unites in one blending the terror of four<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_374">{374}</a></span> different races—Greek, -Polish, English and Malay. This “stealthy Nemesis” is the enemy of men, -and they fight against it, and almost invariably it overcomes them and -destroys them, the good and generous and capable as well as the cowardly -and weak.</p> - -<p>Such is the fact of man’s life; and the question then becomes: what -shall man do? The first thing, obviously, is for him to understand; and -so the great master toils incessantly and with religious ardor to embody -his philosophic theory in human types and experiences. Do not let anyone -lead you astray on this point: these dignified and noble art-works are -“thesis novels,” composed for a didactic purpose, in exactly the same -way as the Sunday school tales about little Bobbie who fell into the -creek because he disobeyed his mother and went fishing on the Lord’s -day. Great moral lessons do not get embodied in art-works by accident, -any more than the wheels of a watch get put together by accident; so, -while you absorb the elaborately contrived pessimism of Joseph Conrad, -you must know that you are attending an Agnostic Sunday school.</p> - -<p>Men have not merely to understand, but to act; therefore the pupils of -this school are taught a moral code. They must stand together against -the stealthy Nemesis which seeks to destroy them; and their rules of -behavior must be so deeply graven in their souls that the reaction will -be instinctive—for you never know at what moment the stealthy Nemesis -will strike at you, in the form of fire at sea, or storm, or collision, -or submerged reefs, or savages, or the slow, insidious action of -physical or moral disease.</p> - -<p>What is this code? The answer is, the code of the British merchant -service. Its primary purpose is the protection of the ship, a valuable -piece of property. So, in place of an imaginary God in a speculative -heaven, we have a vaguely suggested Owner on the shore. This Owner is -the force which creates the shipping industry and keeps it going; He is -the goal of loyalty for officers and crew. Agnosticism upon closer study -turns out to be Capitalism.</p> - -<p>The ship has for ages been the source of a natural and spontaneous -autocracy, begotten of the constant threat of danger; hence it comes -that the naval officer is the most<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_375">{375}</a></span> complete and instinctive snob in the -world, and the merchant officer the perfect task-master. And when the -self-made, risen-from-the-ranks merchant officer comes on shore, and has -to deal with shore questions, we are not surprised to find him a hearty -and boisterous Tory. In “Chance” we meet—but assuredly not by -chance!—a feminist woman, and learn what Conrad thinks of this species; -he impresses us as a fuming old British clubman, who would like to get -the heads of all thinking women upon one neck—and then wring the neck!</p> - -<p>In the same way, in “Under Western Eyes” we get Conrad’s view of -politics; in a book written in the days of the Tsardom, we learn that a -Siberian refugee who devotes his life to the overthrow of this hideous -tyranny is an odious and unspeakable creature, and that a woman of means -who helps him is a gawk and a bundle of scandals. It is a picture of -social revolutionists of a sort you may pick up at any tea-table where -the wives of legation attachés shrug their delicate white shoulders and -prattle snobbish wit. Published in 1911, this book is a prophecy of the -White Terror, that combination of holy knavery and romantic reaction -which has made Poland the curse of Europe.</p> - -<p>But the proper place to study Conrad is at sea. And we find that, just -as Meredith takes the British caste system to be God, just as O. Henry -takes the Standard Oil Company to be God, so Conrad takes the capitalist -ownership and control of marine transportation. Analyzing the stories in -the light of economic science, we find the stealthy Nemesis revealed as -organized greed exploiting unorganized ignorance.</p> - -<p>Take that most fascinating of sea tales, one of the great imaginative -feats of literature: take “Youth.” A young man puts out to sea in an old -tub of a vessel, and the old tub goes to pieces beneath his feet. One -after another comes a procession of calamities; but he is young, and -what does he care for troubles and dangers? The ship goes down in the -end, but it is all a glory and a thrill to Youth, which laughs at the -stealthy Nemesis and lives to tackle it again.</p> - -<p>When we are young we read this, and our hearts are lifted up, and we -know ourselves to be gods. But with maturing years and understanding, we -come back to it,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_376">{376}</a></span> and what do we find? The cruel power which we took to -be Nature, the perils of the deep, turns out to be nothing more romantic -than the practice of marine insurance! If you own a ship and it becomes -old and unseaworthy, you would in the ordinary course of events not -trust a valuable cargo and a score of human lives to that ship. But -finding that you can insure both ship and cargo, and get more money by -sinking her than by selling her for junk, you continue to send her out -until she falls to pieces; and Youth, deliberately kept in ignorance by -capitalist control of schools and colleges, thinks it glory and wonder -to sail out and fight a losing battle with “Nature.”</p> - -<p>There is a story concerning Joseph Conrad, that when he became master of -a ship, he conceived a desire to bring her home through the Torres -Straits, which are especially dangerous waters. He had the fantastic -idea that he wanted to sail in them, because he had read stories about -them. The owners permitted him to have his way, and the critics and -reviewers are thrilled by this sign of “romance” in ship owners. Critics -and reviewers, you see, are sweet and innocent souls; only an -evil-minded “muck-rake man” would make inquiries as to the age of that -ship and the amount of insurance she carried through the Torres Straits!</p> - -<p>The capitalist shipping industry is full of facts of this sort. Take, -for example, the “Plimsoll line.” There was an English workingman who -became a rich manufacturer, and did not forget his class, but devoted -his life to trying to save the seamen and officers who were sent out in -these “coffin ships.” He was elected to Parliament, and brought in a -bill providing that ships should not be loaded beyond a certain -line—the “Plimsoll line,” it was called. When his fellow-members voted -it down, he shook his fist at them and called them “villains.” Of course -they were shocked, and wanted to expel him, but they didn’t quite dare; -they gave him ten days to think it over, and then he apologized, and -they passed his bill—a most admirable form of compromise for a -reformer!</p> - -<p>For a generation after this, as cold statistics showed, some thousands -of British seamen and officers escaped all the cruelties of Nature, the -stealthy Nemesis of Joseph Conrad. For years this “Plimsoll line” served -these thousands of seamen and officers in place of the Holy Trinity,<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_377">{377}</a></span> -the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the Gentle Jesus meek and mild, the -Virgin Mary, Mother of God, and likewise all the Saints in the calendar, -the glorious company of the Apostles, the goodly fellowship of the -Prophets, the noble Army of Martyrs, the heavenly choir of Angels and -Archangels, the Cherubim and Seraphim, and the Holy Church throughout -all the world. But this divine supervision cost British shipping owners -a certain number of millions of pounds of profit every year, and so they -paid the campaign funds of their Tory and Liberal parties and got their -henchman, David Lloyd-George, in authority and repealed that law; so now -those thousands of seamen and officers are once more falling victims to -the stealthy Nemesis!</p> - -<p>And Joseph Conrad—what has he to say about this? As a man of the sea, -he knows the facts; and in “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” that most -cruel-souled book, he takes occasion to pour his jeering scorn upon -those who try to save the lives of seamen. You have to read the actual -text to get the full effect of his venom. A seaman is talking:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“I mind I once seed in Cardiff the crew of an overloaded -ship—leastways she weren’t overloaded, only a fatherly old -gentleman with a white beard and an umbreller came along the quay -and talked to the hands. Said as how it was crool hard to be -drownded in winter just for the sake of a few pounds more for the -owner—he said. Nearly cried over them—he did; and he had a square -mainsail coat, and a gaff-topsail hat too—all proper. So they -chaps, they said they wouldn’t go to be drownded in -winter—depending upon that ’ere Plimsoll man to see ’em through -the court. They thought to have a bloomin’ lark and two or three -days’ spree. And the beak giv’ ’em six weeks—coss the ship warn’t -overloaded. Anyways they made it out in court that she wasn’t. -There wasn’t one overloaded ship in Penarth Dock at all. ‘Pears -that old coon he was only on pay and allowance for some kind -people, under orders to look for overloaded ships, and he couldn’t -see no further than the length of his umbreller. Some of us in the -boarding-house, where I live when I’m looking for a ship in -Cardiff, stood by to duck that old weeping spunger in the dock. We -kept a good look out, too—but he topped his boom directly he was -outside the court.... Yes. They got six weeks’ hard....”</p></div> - -<p>The coast of California, near which I live, is a favored lurking place -of the stealthy Nemesis. The entire coast is a line of jagged rocks, -with very few harbors, and vessels continually strike upon the rocks and -are pounded to pieces. Sometimes they are great passenger steamers, and<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_378">{378}</a></span> -hundreds of people are in danger and have to be taken off on tugs; the -newspapers give us hourly bulletins of what is happening, and their -correspondents perform prodigies of daring and speed to get us -photographs of the disaster in the first editions. The public reads of -these tragedies, and is awed by the spectacle of man struggling in vain -against the stealthy Nemesis.</p> - -<p>What is the fact about this matter? It is very simple: the Nemesis here -consists of the fact that the Pacific Coast from Seattle to San Diego -makes a convex curve; so ships of all sorts, the great lumber schooners, -the little salmon steamers, the great passenger liners, have to go a few -miles farther out to sea in order to be safe. But that additional -distance at sea means so many million dollars a year out of the pockets -of the owners. It means not merely that more fuel has to be burned, it -means that more of the ship’s time has to be taken, and more wages paid -to officers and crew; in the case of the great liners it means that -several hundred passengers have to be fed an additional meal!</p> - -<p>So naturally the owners, being fully covered by insurance, are clamorous -in their demands, and the ship’s officers are bending all their energies -to save every yard of distance and every second of time. Always and -everywhere up and down the coast they are gliding past the rocky points, -and in the darkness and fogs and storms they risk an inch too much. To -me this seems an eminently “romantic” situation; I can imagine a great -imaginative artist rearing it into a tremendous symbol of human guilt. -But this artist would make the discovery that the principal magazines on -the Pacific Coast are published by the railroad companies which own and -operate the steamship lines!</p> - -<p>Every hour the progress of science increases man’s control over nature, -and therefore the safety of travel at sea. If it were not for private -ownership and the blind race for profits, these dangers would be largely -a memory, and the stealthy Nemesis of Conrad, like the gods of the -Polish Catholic and the Anglican Protestant churches, would shrivel up -and crumble and blow away as dust. Would Conrad like that? Or would he -feel the irritation of an old man who has staked his reputation upon a -bad guess? He gives you the answer in “The Nigger of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_379">{379}</a></span> Narcissus,” a -whole novel written to satirize the altruistic impulse, and expose it as -a destroyer of discipline and character. He assigns the role of -“agitator” at sea to an odious little Cockney rat; and when this -creature has got the poor crew stirred up to mutiny, what sport Conrad -has with them! Such lofty sarcasm:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>Our little world went on its curved and unswerving path carrying a -discontented and aspiring population. They found comfort of a -gloomy kind in an interminable and conscientious analysis of their -unappreciated worth; and inspired by Donkin’s hopeful doctrines -they dreamed enthusiastically of the time when every lonely ship -would travel over a serene sea, manned by a wealthy and well-fed -crew of satisfied skippers.</p></div> - -<p>In the chapter on Matthew Arnold I mentioned Paul Elmer More as a critic -who has based his reputation upon the thesis of man’s helplessness in -the presence of the universe; I explained Matthew Arnold as a poet who -finds his ideal both moral and poetical in a dignified and mournful -resignation to the evils of life. And here is another of these Great -Mourners, a zealot of Pessimism. Woe to you, if in his Agnostic Sunday -school you venture to breathe a hope for mankind! Woe to you if you -commit the supreme offense of art, the suggesting of a happy ending for -a novel! Woe to you, beyond all land-woes; for now you are in Neptune’s -empire, and there is no Bill of Rights, no freedom of speech, press or -assemblage; he who murmurs an optimistic thought hears the dread word -Mutiny—and the “beak” gives him “six months hard!”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_CX"></a>CHAPTER CX<br /><br /> -THE REBEL IMMORTAL</h2> - -<p>Henry James remarks somewhere that an American has to study for fifty -years of his life in order to attain, culturally speaking, the point -from which a European starts at birth. Just what does he mean by this -unpatriotic utterance? I am reminded of it when I think of Anatole -France, and recall his characteristic sayings. Consider the following:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>’Tis a great infirmity to think. God preserve you from it, my son, -as He has preserved His greatest saints, and the souls whom He -loves with especial tenderness and destines to eternal felicity.</p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_380">{380}</a></span></p> - -<p>Now it is possible to conceive of a Catholic bishop or a Methodist -missionary or a Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan who might be too stupid to -understand that remark; but it is difficult to conceive how, -understanding it, he could withhold the tribute of a smile. Into this -remark a great master of words has distilled the essence of a -civilization, the precious flavor of centuries of culture. There are -only thirty-four words in it, and yet you can afford to meditate upon it -for a long time. The writer of such a paragraph possesses a mind -emancipated from the shams and delusions of the ages; he is skeptical, -realistic, and as witty as it is possible for a man to be; yet also he -is urbane—he does not seize you by the shoulders and shake you, for he -has learned that there are all kinds of strange people in the world, and -he asks merely that you consent to smile with him.</p> - -<p>How is such a man brought into existence? His father was a book-seller, -and so he breathed culture in his childhood; he read everything from -every part of the world, especially things written by men long since -dead; things full of that beauty mingled with sadness which is one of -the gifts of time. Anatole France learned to be at home in strange -cultures, and at the same time he studied the masters of his own -country, whose specialties are precision and lucidity and charm of -phrase. At the age of twenty-seven he published a story, “The Crime of -Sylvestre Bonnard,” a sentimental pretty tale about an elderly, -kind-hearted French antiquarian, who rescues a little girl from cruel -mistreatment, and then discovers that under the French law he is guilty -of abduction. It might have been written by any of our magazine writers -of the cheer-up, God’s-in-His-Heaven school—provided only that these -writers had possessed a thousand years of culture.</p> - -<p>It was just what the Academy of Richelieu loved, and they crowned it. -The young writer was taken up by an exquisite French lady, who became -his mistress, and set up a salon for him, and helped him to meet all the -editors and critics—which is how you make fame and fortune in Paris, -and sometimes in America, I am told. This Frenchman was clever and -witty, sensual, cynical, but not too much so for his elegant -free-thinking tradition. He wrote other novels and a great quantity of -miscellaneous<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_381">{381}</a></span> writings, and in 1896, at the age of fifty-two, his -labors were rewarded by the great French honor, he became one of -Richelieu’s forty Immortals. In the ordinary course of events there was -nothing more for him to do, save to sink back in his comfortable -arm-chair and listen to the plaudits of Paris.</p> - -<p>But a strange and alarming thing happened. The struggle over the Dreyfus -case arose, and Anatole France leaped into the arena, joining Zola, whom -he had previously denounced as a beastly writer. Here was something -absolutely without precedent—that an Academician should turn into a -Socialist, and take to attending meetings of workingmen, and addressing -to them remarks unfit to be quoted in respectable newspapers. Worse even -yet, he, the pride and glory of art-for-art’s-sake culture, took to -putting radical propaganda into novels! They had let him in among the -Immortals, and there was no way to get him out; so here was one of the -pillars of literary authority, portraying his country as an island of -penguins, and the pillars of his church and state as grotesque, wingless -birds, dressing themselves in frock-coats and silk hats and hopping -about upon obscene errands. Have a glimpse of them:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“Do you see, my son,” he exclaimed, “that madman who with his teeth -is biting the nose of the adversary he has overthrown, and that -other one who is pounding a woman’s head with a huge stone?”</p> - -<p>“I see them,” said Bulloch. “They are creating law; they are -founding property; they are establishing the principles of -civilization, the basis of society, the foundations of the State.”</p> - -<p>“How is that?” asked old Maël.</p> - -<p>“By setting bounds to their fields. That is the origin of all -government. Your penguins, O Master, are performing the most august -of functions. Throughout the ages their work will be consecrated by -lawyers, and magistrates will confirm it.”</p></div> - -<p>“Penguin Island” was published in 1908; and then came the war, and this -elderly antiquarian—he was seventy then—came forward and enlisted to -fight for his country. But that did not mean, as with many others of -lesser judgment, that he gave up his hopes for the working class, and -surrendered to the propaganda of capitalist nationalism. We find him at -the age of seventy-five, carrying a red flag in a procession of French -radicals, protesting against the acquittal of the assassin of Jaurès. -We<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_382">{382}</a></span> find him ready to break an engagement to a literary banquet in order -to address a working-class meeting in protest against capitalist church -and state. He, the greatest of all the Immortals, sets himself against -the other thirty-nine; he, the old man, sets himself against the -cultured youth of his country, who have abandoned themselves to a -mixture of Catholic mysticism with homosexuality, of Dadaist imbecility -with athleticism having for its goal the turning of machine-guns upon -the workers.</p> - -<p>The books of Anatole France afford a curious study of struggle between -the old pessimistic, cynical culture of capitalism and the new creative -culture of the awakening proletariat. These cultures are absolutely -irreconcilable, but Anatole France believed in both. He was a social -revolutionist with his conscious mind and judgment, while he remained a -fatalist and a scoffer with his hereditary culture, that ancient -accumulation of despair and terror which he had breathed in with the -dust in his father’s old book-shop.</p> - -<p>So he writes “The Gods Are Athirst,” in which he portrays mankind as -given up to endless misery and destruction; or “The Revolt of the -Angels,” in which again the heavens are drowned in blood and there is no -hope. After which he issues a manifesto upholding Russia, or calling -upon the workers to rally to the Third International. He goes before a -convention of the organized teachers of France, and delivers to them an -address of such magnificent eloquence as to move the assemblage to -tears. I have quoted from this address in “The Goslings”; I repeat one -paragraph—because it is the duty of a writer to spread these words on -every possible occasion, to bring to the great master the help upon -which he relies:</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>Reason, wisdom, intelligence, forces of the mind and heart, whom I -have always devoutly invoked, come to me, aid me, sustain my feeble -voice; carry it, if that may be, to all the peoples of the world, -and diffuse it everywhere where there are men of good will to hear -the beneficent truth! A new order of things is born. The powers of -evil die, poisoned by their crime. The greedy and the cruel, the -devourers of peoples, are bursting with an indigestion of blood. -However sorely stricken by the sins of their blind or corrupt -masters, mutilated, decimated, the proletarians remain erect; they -will unite to form one universal proletariat, and we shall see -fulfilled the great Socialist prophecy: “The union of the workers -will be the peace of the world.”</p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a id="page_383">{383}</a></span></p> - -<p>It was interesting to note, in the obituaries which the death of Anatole -France brought forth, how almost universally this aspect of his life was -glossed over. Our literary reviews told all about him as a master of -French prose, a supreme ironist in the tradition of Rabelais, Voltaire, -and Renan. But they left it for the radical papers to celebrate Anatole -France, the crusader, the carrier of the red flag. I am urged to believe -that our literary Tories are honest, but all this moves me to wonder.</p> - -<p>I ask them, once for all, what is it they want? What proof will content -our cultural stand-patters? Here is their crowned favorite, their -revered master, the man who was as witty as it is possible for a human -being to be; and he sets out to prove to them that it is just as easy to -be witty in the service of Justice as in the service of Mammon. I ask -you, gentlemen of letters, do you know how a sentence can be wittier -than this: “The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as -the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal -bread.”</p> - -<h2><a id="CHAPTER_CXI"></a>CHAPTER CXI<br /><br /> -A TEXT-BOOK FOR RUSSIA</h2> - -<p>Mrs. Ogi has been silent for some time; saving her energies in -anticipation of that greatest satisfaction known to wives. Now she takes -it. “I told you so!”</p> - -<p>“What did you tell me?” asks Ogi, uneasily.</p> - -<p>“You have filled up a book, and haven’t got in a word about Gloria -Swanson’s salary, nor what Rupert Hughes really got for ‘The Sins of -Hollywood’!”</p> - -<p>“It’s this way,” says her husband. “I found I had so much material that -I’d have to make two volumes, one dealing with the artists of the past, -and the other with living artists.”</p> - -<p>“I remember, eight years ago,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you started out to write -a criticism of the world’s culture in one volume; and presently you came -to me looking worried, and said you had so much about Religion it would -need a volume to itself. So you took a hundred thousand words for -Religion. And when you started after Journalism, and took a hundred -thousand words to tell the<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_384">{384}</a></span> story of your own life, and another hundred -thousand to tell about the newspapers. And then Education; you came -again and said you had so much about the colleges, you’d have to give a -whole volume to them. You took two hundred and five thousand words for -the colleges, and then a hundred and ninety-five thousand for the -schools!”</p> - -<p>As Ogi has no answer to this indictment, she continues: “Just what do -you think you’ve written now?”</p> - -<p>“I’ve written a text-book of culture.”</p> - -<p>“For the schools?”—very sarcastically.</p> - -<p>“It will be serving as a text-book in the high schools of Russia within -six months.”</p> - -<p>“In Russia, yes—”</p> - -<p>“In every country in Europe, as soon as the social revolution comes. The -workers, taking power, bring a new psychology and a new ethics; -naturally they have to have a new art, and new art standards.”</p> - -<p>“They may want to write their own text-books,” suggests Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“No doubt they will—and better than mine. But so far no one has done -it—and they will have to use such weapons as they find ready.”</p> - -<p>Mrs. Ogi is one of those who observe the phenomena of religion with a -mingling of fear and longing. It would be wonderful to believe like -that! “Of course,” she says, “if your side has its way—”</p> - -<p>“That is how history is made,” says Ogi. “Once upon a time a wealthy -Virginia planter, with other wealthy gentlemen from Pennsylvania and -Massachusetts, rose up and declared rebellion against his king. A war -was fought, and the rebel planter won; therefore he is known as the -Father of His Country, and all little boys in school learn how he could -not tell a lie. If he had lost his war against his king, he would have -been a vile and traitorous varlet, and every little boy in school would -have learned by heart a long list of the lies he had told. And just so -it is with writers who take up the cause of the dispossessed and -disinherited. If the proletariat wins in its war against capitalism, -these outcast writers will become leading men of letters. On the other -hand, if the proletariat loses, they will remain ‘propagandists,’ and -‘tub-thumpers,’ and ‘buzzards,’ and ‘muckrakers’—you recognize those -terms.<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_385">{385}</a></span>”</p> - -<p>Yes, Mrs. Ogi admits that she recognizes them; and he continues:</p> - -<p>“I have given the workers an honest book, a sound book, from the point -of view of their hopes and needs. I say to them: Why should you read the -books of your enemies, those who make their glory and their greatness -out of your misery and humiliation? Why should you walk into the traps -that are set for you? Life is very cruel, but assuredly this is the most -cruel thing in your fate—that you should admire those actions which -crush you, those tastes which spurn you, those standards which have as -their beginning and end your enslavement and degradation.”</p> - -<p>“None but workers are to see this book?” asks Mrs. Ogi.</p> - -<p>“I use the word in its revolutionary sense, the strict scientific sense -of those who do the useful and necessary labor, whether of hand or -brain. I am pleading especially with the young brain-workers, the -intellectuals. For the hand-worker is a slave by compulsion, but the -young thinker, the student, has the ancient choice of Hercules, between -virtue and vice. He may sell himself to the exploiters, he may take the -dress-suit bribe, the motor-cars and the ‘hooch’ parties, and the -beautiful, soft-skinned, hard-souled women; or he may heed my plea, and -steel his soul, and go back to the garret which is the cradle of the -arts, back to the ancient and honorable occupation of cultivating -literature upon a little oatmeal.</p> - -<p>“To this young intellectual, hesitating at the parting of ways, I say: -Comrade, this world of organized gambling and predation in which we live -seems powerful and permanent, but it is an evil dream of but a few more -years; the seeds of its own destruction are sprouting in its heart. I am -not referring to its moral failure, the fact that it thwarts the most -fundamental of human cravings, for justice and for freedom; I mean in -the bare material sense—it fails to employ its own workers, it makes -misery out of its own plenty, and war and destruction of its abounding -prosperity. It is as certain to fall as a pyramid standing on its tip; -and when it falls, what is left but the workers? What other force is -there, having solidarity, the sense of brotherhood, the ideal of -service, of useful<span class="pagenum"><a id="page_386">{386}</a></span> labor, as against the buying and selling and -exploiting, the robbing, killing and enslaving which is capitalism?</p> - -<p>“This great new force is shaping itself in our world, preparing for the -making of the future. And shall this new life not have an art? Shall men -not thrill to this vision, and rouse others to make it real? Here lies -your task, young comrade; here is your future—and not the timid service -of convention, the million-times-over repetition of ancient lies, the -endless copying of copies of folly and cruelty and greed. The artists of -our time are like men hypnotized, repeating over and over a dreary -formula of futility. And I say: Break this evil spell, young comrade; go -out and meet the new dawning life, take your part in the battle, and put -it into new art; do this service for a new public, which you yourselves -will make. That is the message of this book, the last word I have to -say: that your creative gift shall not be content to make art works, but -shall at the same time make a world; shall make new souls, moved by a -new ideal of fellowship, a new impulse of love, and faith—and not -merely hope, but determination.</p> - -<p>“That is what this book is about,” says Ogi; “and maybe not many will -get me, but a few will, and they will be the ones I am after.”</p> - -<p>Mrs. Ogi comes to him and puts her arms about him, trembling a little. -“Yes, of course,” she says; “and I’m glad you wrote it, in spite of all -my terrors.”</p> - -<p>“Ah, now!” says Ogi, smiling. “We ought to have a picture of this! A -happy ending, in the very best bourgeois style!”</p> - -<h2><a id="INDEX"></a>INDEX<br /><br /><small> -Roman numerals refer to chapters, Arabic numerals to pages</small></h2> - -<p class="c"><a href="#A">A</a>, -<a href="#B">B</a>, -<a href="#C">C</a>, -<a href="#D">D</a>, -<a href="#E">E</a>, -<a href="#F">F</a>, -<a href="#G">G</a>, -<a href="#H">H</a>, -<a href="#I">I</a>, -<a href="#J">J</a>, -<a href="#K">K</a>, -<a href="#L">L</a>, -<a href="#M">M</a>, -<a href="#N">N</a>, -<a href="#P">P</a>, -<a href="#Q">Q</a>, -<a href="#R">R</a>, -<a href="#S">S</a>, -<a href="#T">T</a>, -<a href="#U">U</a>, -<a href="#W">W</a>, -<a href="#Z">Z</a></p> - -<p class="nind"> -<a id="A"></a>Adams, Francis, <a href="#page_352">352</a><br /> - -Adams, F. P., <a href="#page_64">64</a><br /> - -Æschylus, <a href="#page_49">49</a>, <a href="#page_94">94</a>, <a href="#page_180">180</a><br /> - -Alcibiades, <a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">XVII</a><br /> - -Alexander, <a href="#page_41">41</a><br /> - -Amos, <a href="#page_31">31</a><br /> - -Anderson, <a href="#page_239">239</a>, <a href="#page_260">260</a>, <a href="#page_270">270</a><br /> - -Archimedes, <a href="#page_41">41</a><br /> - -Ariosto, <a href="#page_89">89</a><br /> - -Aristophanes, <a href="#CHAPTER_XX">XX</a>, <a href="#page_129">129</a>, <a href="#page_210">210</a><br /> - -Aristotle, <a href="#page_117">117</a><br /> - -Arnold, <a href="#page_47">47</a>, <a href="#page_181">181</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXXI">LXXI</a>, <a href="#page_323">323</a>, <a href="#page_379">379</a><br /> - -Assisi, <a href="#page_74">74</a><br /> - -Austen, <a href="#CHAPTER_LII">LII</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="B"></a>Babbitt, <a href="#page_138">138</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_XLV">XLV</a><br /> - -Bacon, <a href="#page_95">95</a><br /> - -Bakunin, <a href="#page_212">212</a><br /> - -Balzac, <a href="#CHAPTER_LX">LX</a><br /> - -Barrett, <a href="#page_225">225</a><br /> - -Baudelaire, <a href="#page_302">302</a><br /> - -Beer, <a href="#page_348">348</a><br /> - -Beers, <a href="#page_186">186</a><br /> - -Beethoven, <a href="#CHAPTER_L">L</a><br /> - -Bellamy, <a href="#page_238">238</a>, <a href="#page_352">352</a><br /> - -Bennett, <a href="#page_189">189</a><br /> - -Bernhardi, <a href="#page_293">293</a><br /> - -Bernhardt, <a href="#page_123">123</a><br /> - -Besant, <a href="#page_352">352</a><br /> - -Bierce, <a href="#CHAPTER_CII">CII</a><br /> - -Blake, <a href="#page_202">202</a><br /> - -Boccaccio, <a href="#CHAPTER_XXVIII">XXVIII</a><br /> - -Borgia, <a href="#page_80">80</a><br /> - -Brandes, <a href="#page_294">294</a><br /> - -Brawne, <a href="#page_187">187</a><br /> - -Brooks, <a href="#page_327">327</a><br /> - -Brown, Bishop, <a href="#page_74">74</a><br /> - -Brown, J. G., <a href="#page_12">12</a><br /> - -Browning, <a href="#page_80">80</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXX">LXX</a><br /> - -Buchanan, <a href="#page_352">352</a><br /> - -Buddha, <a href="#page_39">39</a><br /> - -Bunyan, <a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVIII">XXXVIII</a>, <a href="#page_239">239</a>, <a href="#page_283">283</a><br /> - -Burbank, <a href="#page_279">279</a><br /> - -Burns, <a href="#CHAPTER_XLIX">XLIX</a>, <a href="#page_244">244</a>, <a href="#page_339">339</a><br /> - -Byron, <a href="#CHAPTER_LVII">LVII</a>, <a href="#page_181">181</a>, <a href="#page_203">203</a>, <a href="#page_228">228</a>, <a href="#page_241">241</a>, <a href="#page_251">251</a>, <a href="#page_301">301</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="C"></a>Cade, <a href="#page_103">103</a><br /> - -Calas, <a href="#page_133">133</a><br /> - -Carlyle, <a href="#page_13">13</a>, <a href="#page_77">77</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXVIII">LXVIII</a>, <a href="#page_311">311</a>, <a href="#page_337">337</a><br /> - -Caroline, <a href="#page_180">180</a><br /> - -Cartier, <a href="#page_95">95</a><br /> - -Cervantes, <a href="#CHAPTER_XXXII">XXXII</a><br /> - -Chambers, <a href="#page_114">114</a>, <a href="#page_356">356</a><br /> - -Charles <a href="#CHAPTER_I">I</a>, <a href="#page_106">106</a><br /> - -Charles <a href="#CHAPTER_X">X</a>, <a href="#page_195">195</a><br /> - -Clemens, <a href="#CHAPTER_C">C</a>, <a href="#page_91">91</a>, <a href="#page_334">334</a>, <a href="#page_340">340</a>, <a href="#page_348">348</a>, <a href="#page_359">359</a>, <a href="#page_369">369</a><br /> - -Cleon, <a href="#page_53">53</a><br /> - -Coleridge, <a href="#CHAPTER_LIV">LIV</a>, <a href="#page_251">251</a><br /> - -Collier, <a href="#page_115">115</a><br /> - -Collins, <a href="#page_20">20</a><br /> - -Comstock, <a href="#page_105">105</a><br /> - -Congreve, <a href="#page_114">114</a><br /> - -Conrad, <a href="#CHAPTER_CIX">CIX</a><br /> - -Coolidge, <a href="#page_141">141</a>, <a href="#page_327">327</a><br /> - -Corneille, <a href="#CHAPTER_XL">XL</a>, <a href="#page_316">316</a><br /> - -Crane, <a href="#CHAPTER_CIV">CIV</a><br /> - -Cromwell, <a href="#page_113">113</a>, <a href="#page_173">173</a>, <a href="#page_195">195</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="D"></a>Dana, <a href="#page_32">32</a>, <a href="#page_53">53</a><br /> - -Dante, <a href="#CHAPTER_XXIX">XXIX</a><br /> - -Davidson, <a href="#page_352">352</a><br /> - -Davis, <a href="#CHAPTER_CIII">CIII</a><br /> - -Dawes, <a href="#page_57">57</a><br /> - -Day, <a href="#page_346">346</a><br /> - -Debs, <a href="#page_361">361</a><br /> - -de Mille, <a href="#page_114">114</a><br /> - -de Young, <a href="#page_340">340</a><br /> - -Dickens, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXXII">LXXII</a>, <a href="#page_236">236</a>, <a href="#page_277">277</a><br /> - -Diderot, <a href="#page_136">136</a><br /> - -Dobson, <a href="#page_64">64</a><br /> - -Doré, <a href="#page_12">12</a><br /> - -Dostoievski, LXXXIV-<a href="#CHAPTER_V">V</a><br /> - -Douglas, <a href="#page_305">305</a><br /> - -Dreiser, <a href="#page_270">270</a><br /> - -Dreyfus, <a href="#page_282">282</a>, <a href="#page_381">381</a><br /> - -Dryden, <a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIX">XXXIX</a>, <a href="#page_143">143</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="E"></a>Eddy, <a href="#page_241">241</a><br /> - -Edison, <a href="#page_41">41</a><br /> - -Edward, <a href="#page_123">123</a><br /> - -Elijah, <a href="#page_31">31</a><br /> - -Eliot, <a href="#page_235">235</a><br /> - -Emerson, <a href="#page_58">58</a>, <a href="#page_217">217</a>, <a href="#page_233">233</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXXV">LXXV</a>, <a href="#page_253">253</a><br /> - -Euripedes, <a href="#page_51">51</a>, <a href="#page_52">52</a>, <a href="#page_54">54</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="F"></a>Fielding, <a href="#CHAPTER_XLVIII">XLVIII</a><br /> - -Flaubert, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXV">LXV</a>, <a href="#page_276">276</a><br /> - -Fox, <a href="#page_74">74</a><br /> - -France, <a href="#CHAPTER_CX">CX</a><br /> - -Frederick, <a href="#page_133">133</a>, <a href="#page_147">147</a>, <a href="#page_219">219</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="G"></a>Galileo, <a href="#page_106">106</a>, <a href="#page_117">117</a><br /> - -Gandhi, <a href="#page_274">274</a><br /> - -Garrison, <a href="#page_245">245</a><br /> - -Gautier, <a href="#page_187">187</a>, <a href="#page_196">196</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXII">LXII</a>, <a href="#page_208">208</a><br /> - -George <a href="#CHAPTER_IV">IV</a>, <a href="#page_165">165</a>, <a href="#page_180">180</a><br /> - -Gibbon, <a href="#page_171">171</a><br /> - -Gifford, <a href="#page_171">171</a><br /> - -Gilder, <a href="#page_347">347</a><br /> - -Gladstone, <a href="#page_48">48</a>, <a href="#page_323">323</a><br /> - -Glyn, <a href="#page_114">114</a><br /> - -Goethe, <a href="#page_39">39</a>, <a href="#page_153">153</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_LI">LI</a>, <a href="#page_183">183</a><br /> - -Gogol, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXII">LXXXII</a>, <a href="#page_263">263</a><br /> - -Goncourt, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXVII">LXXXVII</a><br /> - -Gorki, <a href="#page_259">259</a>, <a href="#page_273">273</a>, <a href="#page_328">328</a>, <a href="#page_335">335</a>, <a href="#page_339">339</a><br /> - -Gosse, <a href="#page_301">301</a>, <a href="#page_319">319</a><br /> - -Gracchus, <a href="#page_59">59</a><br /> - -Grant, <a href="#page_330">330</a><br /> - -Gronlund, <a href="#page_339">339</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="H"></a>Haldeman-Julius, <a href="#page_190">190</a><br /> - -Hale, <a href="#page_355">355</a><br /> - -Hallam, <a href="#page_223">223</a><br /> - -Hamilton, <a href="#page_172">172</a><br /> - -Hanska, <a href="#page_194">194</a><br /> - -Hardie, <a href="#page_173">173</a><br /> - -Harper, <a href="#page_335">335-6</a><br /> - -Harris, <a href="#page_98">98</a>, <a href="#page_99">99</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_XCV">XCV</a><br /> - -Harvey, <a href="#page_331">331</a><br /> - -Hastings, <a href="#page_162">162</a><br /> - -Hawthorne, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXXVIII">LXXVIII</a>, <a href="#page_322">322</a><br /> - -Hazlitt, <a href="#page_185">185</a><br /> - -Hearn, <a href="#page_187">187</a>, <a href="#page_336">336</a><br /> - -Heine, <a href="#page_64">64</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXVI">LXVI</a><br /> - -Henley, <a href="#page_14">14</a><br /> - -Henry, <a href="#CHAPTER_CVII">CVII</a>, <a href="#page_349">349</a>, <a href="#page_375">375</a><br /> - -Herriot, <a href="#page_282">282</a><br /> - -Hichens, <a href="#page_303">303</a><br /> - -Hippocrates, <a href="#page_41">41</a><br /> - -Hohenzollern, <a href="#page_219">219</a><br /> - -Homer, <a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">XVIII</a>, <a href="#page_60">60</a><br /> - -Horace, <a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV">XXIV</a><br /> - -Howells, <a href="#CHAPTER_CI">CI</a>, <a href="#page_328">328</a>, <a href="#page_348">348</a><br /> - -Hughes, <a href="#page_28">28</a>, <a href="#page_383">383</a><br /> - -Hugo, <a href="#page_200">200</a>, <a href="#page_203">203</a>, <a href="#page_216">216</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXI">LXI</a>, <a href="#page_280">280</a>, <a href="#page_296">296</a>, <a href="#page_298">298</a><br /> - -Hunt, <a href="#page_184">184</a>, <a href="#page_185">185</a>, <a href="#page_186">186</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="I"></a>Ibsen, <a href="#CHAPTER_XC">XC</a>, <a href="#page_339">339</a><br /> - -Ingersoll, <a href="#page_331">331</a><br /> - -Irwin, <a href="#page_53">53</a><br /> - -Isaiah, <a href="#page_30">30</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="J"></a>Jackson, <a href="#page_246">246</a><br /> - -James, H., <a href="#page_13">13</a>, <a href="#page_73">73</a>, <a href="#page_82">82</a>, <a href="#page_193">193</a>, <a href="#page_264">264</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_XCVIII">XCVIII</a>, <a href="#page_379">379</a><br /> - -James, W., <a href="#page_318">318</a><br /> - -Jaurès, <a href="#page_381">381</a><br /> - -Jennings, <a href="#page_359">359-60</a>, <a href="#page_362">362</a><br /> - -Jeremiah, <a href="#page_30">30</a><br /> - -Jesus, <a href="#page_38">38</a>, <a href="#page_39">39</a>, <a href="#page_257">257</a>, <a href="#page_293">293</a><br /> - -Joan, <a href="#page_102">102</a><br /> - -John, <a href="#page_31">31</a><br /> - -Johnson, <a href="#page_34">34</a><br /> - -Juvenal, <a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV">XXIV</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="K"></a>Keats, <a href="#CHAPTER_LIX">LIX</a>, <a href="#page_180">180</a>, <a href="#page_245">245</a><br /> - -Kingsley, <a href="#page_352">352</a><br /> - -Kipling, <a href="#page_14">14</a>, <a href="#page_129">129</a><br /> - -Kubla Khan, <a href="#page_168">168</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="L"></a>Lamb, <a href="#page_185">185</a><br /> - -Lanier, <a href="#page_254">254</a><br /> - -Lassalle, <a href="#page_352">352</a><br /> - -Leacock, <a href="#page_53">53</a><br /> - -Lee, <a href="#page_232">232</a><br /> - -Lee-Higginson, <a href="#page_141">141</a><br /> - -Lenin, <a href="#page_36">36</a><br /> - -Lewes, <a href="#page_39">39</a>, <a href="#page_235">235</a><br /> - -Lewis, <a href="#page_206">206</a><br /> - -Lincoln, <a href="#page_256">256</a><br /> - -Lloyd-George, <a href="#page_377">377</a><br /> - -Lockhart, <a href="#page_186">186</a><br /> - -London, <a href="#CHAPTER_CVIII">CVIII</a>, <a href="#page_338">338</a>, <a href="#page_349">349</a>, <a href="#page_351">351</a><br /> - -Longfellow, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXXVI">LXXVI</a><br /> - -Louis <a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">XIV</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_XLI">XLI</a><br /> - -Louis <a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">XVIII</a>, <a href="#page_195">195</a><br /> - -Louis Napoleon, <a href="#page_197">197</a>, <a href="#page_214">214</a><br /> - -Louis-Philippe, <a href="#page_196">196</a><br /> - -l’Ouverture, <a href="#page_194">194</a><br /> - -Ludwig, <a href="#page_215">215</a>, <a href="#page_294">294</a><br /> - -Luther, <a href="#page_74">74</a>, <a href="#page_83">83</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="M"></a>Mackail, <a href="#page_43">43</a><br /> - -Mæcenas, <a href="#page_64">64</a><br /> - -Marie Antoinette, <a href="#page_156">156</a>, <a href="#page_172">172</a><br /> - -Marlowe, <a href="#page_96">96</a><br /> - -Martin, <a href="#CHAPTER_XV">XV</a><br /> - -Marx, <a href="#page_294">294</a><br /> - -Maupassant, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXIX">LXXXIX</a>, <a href="#page_286">286</a>, <a href="#page_340">340</a>, <a href="#page_361">361</a><br /> - -Medici, <a href="#page_86">86</a>, <a href="#page_120">120</a><br /> - -Mencken, <a href="#page_105">105</a><br /> - -Meredith, <a href="#CHAPTER_XCVII">XCVII</a>, <a href="#page_375">375</a><br /> - -Micah, <a href="#page_31">31</a><br /> - -Michelangelo, <a href="#CHAPTER_XXXI">XXXI</a>, <a href="#page_150">150</a><br /> - -Millet, <a href="#page_206">206</a><br /> - -Milton, <a href="#page_14">14</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVII">XXXVII</a>, <a href="#page_152">152</a>, <a href="#page_173">173</a>, <a href="#page_183">183</a>, <a href="#page_189">189</a>, <a href="#page_198">198</a>, <a href="#page_234">234</a>, <a href="#page_239">239</a>, <a href="#page_242">242</a>, <a href="#page_305">305</a><br /> - -Moliere, <a href="#CHAPTER_XLII">XLII</a>, <a href="#page_261">261</a><br /> - -Moore, G., <a href="#page_308">308</a><br /> - -Moore, T., <a href="#page_181">181</a><br /> - -Mordell, <a href="#page_78">78</a>, <a href="#page_108">108</a>, <a href="#page_111">111</a><br /> - -More, P. E., <a href="#page_228">228</a>, <a href="#page_229">229</a>, <a href="#page_379">379</a><br /> - -More, Sir T., <a href="#page_352">352</a><br /> - -Morgan, <a href="#page_140">140</a>, <a href="#page_141">141</a>, <a href="#page_270">270</a>, <a href="#page_293">293</a>, <a href="#page_350">350-1</a><br /> - -Morrell, <a href="#page_351">351</a><br /> - -Morris, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXXIV">LXXIV</a><br /> - -Mozart, <a href="#page_151">151</a><br /> - -Murray, <a href="#page_57">57</a><br /> - -Musset, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXIII">LXIII</a>, <a href="#page_302">302</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="N"></a>Napoleon, <a href="#page_152">152</a>, <a href="#page_156">156</a>, <a href="#page_157">157</a>, <a href="#page_163">163</a>, <a href="#page_222">222</a><br /> - -Nelson, <a href="#page_172">172</a><br /> - -Newton, <a href="#page_131">131</a>, <a href="#page_173">173</a>, <a href="#page_254">254</a><br /> - -Nicholas, <a href="#page_269">269</a><br /> - -Nietzsche, <a href="#page_13">13</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_XCII">XCII</a>, <a href="#page_257">257</a><br /> - -Norris, <a href="#CHAPTER_CV">CV</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="P"></a>Palgrave, <a href="#page_109">109</a>, <a href="#page_190">190</a><br /> - -Palmer, <a href="#page_79">79</a>, <a href="#page_141">141</a>, <a href="#page_163">163</a><br /> - -Pasteur, <a href="#page_41">41</a><br /> - -Patrick, <a href="#page_20">20</a><br /> - -Pericles, <a href="#page_41">41</a><br /> - -Phelps, <a href="#page_268">268</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXV">LXXXV</a><br /> - -Phillips, <a href="#CHAPTER_CVI">CVI</a>, <a href="#page_349">349</a><br /> - -Pindar, <a href="#page_50">50</a><br /> - -Plato, <a href="#page_13">13</a>, <a href="#page_352">352</a><br /> - -Plimsoll, <a href="#page_376">376</a><br /> - -Plutarch, <a href="#page_152">152</a><br /> - -Poe, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXXIX">LXXIX</a>, <a href="#page_302">302</a>, <a href="#page_253">253</a><br /> - -Pope, <a href="#page_131">131</a><br /> - -Porter, <a href="#CHAPTER_CVII">CVII</a>, <a href="#page_349">349</a>, <a href="#page_375">375</a><br /> - -Pushkin, <a href="#page_260">260</a>, <a href="#page_261">261</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="Q"></a>Queensbury, <a href="#page_305">305</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="R"></a>Rabelais, <a href="#page_383">383</a><br /> - -Racine, <a href="#CHAPTER_XLI">XLI</a>, <a href="#page_195">195</a>, <a href="#page_199">199</a><br /> - -Raphael, <a href="#CHAPTER_XXX">XXX</a>, <a href="#page_200">200</a><br /> - -Rasputin, <a href="#page_268">268</a>, <a href="#page_269">269</a><br /> - -Reade, <a href="#page_352">352</a><br /> - -Reed, <a href="#page_37">37</a>, <a href="#page_38">38</a><br /> - -Renan, <a href="#page_383">383</a><br /> - -Richardson, <a href="#CHAPTER_XLVII">XLVII</a>, <a href="#page_277">277</a><br /> - -Richelieu, <a href="#page_117">117</a><br /> - -Robespierre, <a href="#page_141">141</a><br /> - -Rockefeller, <a href="#page_109">109</a><br /> - -Roeckel, <a href="#page_212">212</a><br /> - -Rogers, <a href="#page_331">331</a><br /> - -Roland, <a href="#page_88">88</a><br /> - -Roosevelt, <a href="#page_354">354</a><br /> - -Rossetti, <a href="#page_188">188</a><br /> - -Rousseau, <a href="#page_117">117</a>, <a href="#page_118">118</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_XLIV">XLIV</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_XLV">XLV</a>, <a href="#page_155">155</a>, <a href="#page_271">271</a>, <a href="#page_291">291</a><br /> - -Ruskin, <a href="#page_173">173</a>, <a href="#page_236">236</a>, <a href="#page_238">238</a>, <a href="#page_309">309</a>, <a href="#page_352">352</a><br /> - -Russell, <a href="#page_362">362</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="S"></a>Saintsbury, <a href="#page_113">113</a>, <a href="#page_115">115</a>, <a href="#page_299">299</a><br /> - -Sand, <a href="#page_203">203</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXIV">LXIV</a>, <a href="#page_225">225</a><br /> - -Savonarola, <a href="#page_74">74</a>, <a href="#page_84">84</a><br /> - -Schiller, <a href="#page_158">158</a><br /> - -Schopenhauer, <a href="#page_216">216</a><br /> - -Scott, <a href="#CHAPTER_LIII">LIII</a>, <a href="#page_171">171</a>, <a href="#page_181">181</a>, <a href="#page_186">186</a>, <a href="#page_188">188</a>, <a href="#page_247">247</a>, <a href="#page_249">249</a><br /> - -Shakespeare, <a href="#page_39">39</a>, <a href="#page_48">48</a>, XXXIII-<a href="#CHAPTER_VI">VI</a>, <a href="#page_129">129</a>, <a href="#page_131">131</a>, <a href="#page_151">151</a>, <a href="#page_183">183</a>, <a href="#page_195">195</a>, <a href="#page_241">241</a><br /> - -Shaw, <a href="#page_17">17</a>, <a href="#page_63">63</a>, <a href="#page_93">93</a>, <a href="#page_211">211</a>, <a href="#page_215">215</a>, <a href="#page_287">287</a>, <a href="#page_292">292</a>, <a href="#page_339">339</a><br /> - -Shelley, <a href="#page_176">176</a>, <a href="#page_177">177</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_LVIII">LVIII</a>, <a href="#page_185">185</a>, <a href="#page_198">198</a><br /> - -Sherman, <a href="#page_228">228</a><br /> - -Sinclair, <a href="#page_107">107</a>, <a href="#page_328">328</a>, <a href="#page_335">335</a>, <a href="#page_345">345</a>, <a href="#page_347">347</a>, <a href="#page_353">353</a>, <a href="#page_363">363-6</a>, <a href="#page_372">372</a><br /> - -Socrates, <a href="#page_41">41</a>, <a href="#page_54">54</a><br /> - -Sophocles, <a href="#page_51">51</a><br /> - -Southey, <a href="#page_163">163</a>, <a href="#page_167">167</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_LV">LV</a>, <a href="#page_177">177</a><br /> - -Spencer, <a href="#page_290">290</a><br /> - -Squires, <a href="#page_181">181</a><br /> - -Sterling, <a href="#page_93">93</a>, <a href="#page_94">94</a>, <a href="#page_338">338-9</a>, <a href="#page_341">341</a><br /> - -Stowe, <a href="#page_176">176</a>, <a href="#page_352">352</a><br /> - -Strauss, <a href="#page_304">304</a><br /> - -Strindberg, <a href="#CHAPTER_XCI">XCI</a>, <a href="#page_291">291</a>, <a href="#page_294">294</a><br /> - -Swanson, <a href="#page_28">28</a>, <a href="#page_383">383</a><br /> - -Swift, <a href="#page_131">131</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_XLVI">XLVI</a><br /> - -Swinburne, <a href="#page_168">168</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_XCIV">XCIV</a><br /> - -Symonds, <a href="#page_297">297</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="T"></a>Taft, <a href="#page_269">269</a><br /> - -Tennyson, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXIX">LXIX</a>, <a href="#page_109">109</a>, <a href="#page_188">188</a>, <a href="#page_217">217</a>, <a href="#page_279">279</a>, <a href="#page_301">301</a>, <a href="#page_346">346</a><br /> - -Thackeray, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXXIII">LXXIII</a>, <a href="#page_191">191</a><br /> - -Tolstoi, <a href="#page_135">135</a>, <a href="#page_211">211</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXVI">LXXXVI</a>, <a href="#page_257">257</a>, <a href="#page_279">279</a>, <a href="#page_283">283</a>, <a href="#page_332">332</a>, <a href="#page_335">335</a>, <a href="#page_339">339</a><br /> - -Turgenev, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXIII">LXXXIII</a>, <a href="#page_271">271</a><br /> - -Twain, <a href="#page_91">91</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_C">C</a>, <a href="#page_334">334</a>, <a href="#page_340">340</a>, <a href="#page_348">348</a>, <a href="#page_359">359</a>, <a href="#page_369">369</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="U"></a>Untermeyer, <a href="#page_64">64</a><br /> - -<br /> -van Eeden, <a href="#page_265">265</a><br /> - -Vasari, <a href="#page_83">83</a><br /> - -Verestchagin, <a href="#page_12">12</a><br /> - -Verhaeren, <a href="#CHAPTER_XCIII">XCIII</a><br /> - -Verlaine, <a href="#page_302">302</a><br /> - -Victoria, <a href="#page_174">174</a>, <a href="#page_220">220</a>, <a href="#page_224">224</a>, <a href="#page_316">316</a><br /> - -Virgil, <a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">XXIII</a>, <a href="#page_79">79</a><br /> - -Voltaire, <a href="#CHAPTER_XLIII">XLIII</a>, <a href="#page_195">195</a>, <a href="#page_209">209</a>, <a href="#page_240">240</a>, <a href="#page_282">282</a>, <a href="#page_383">383</a><br /> - -von Suttner, <a href="#page_352">352</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="W"></a>Wagner, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXVII">LXVII</a>, <a href="#page_294">294</a><br /> - -Ward, <a href="#CHAPTER_XCIX">XCIX</a><br /> - -Washington, <a href="#page_41">41</a>, <a href="#page_384">384</a><br /> - -Watts-Dunton, <a href="#page_299">299</a><br /> - -Weber, <a href="#page_152">152</a><br /> - -Webster, <a href="#page_246">246</a><br /> - -Wells, <a href="#page_317">317</a><br /> - -Westbrook, <a href="#page_182">182</a><br /> - -Whistler, <a href="#page_187">187</a>, <a href="#CHAPTER_XCVI">XCVI</a>, <a href="#page_250">250</a><br /> - -Whiteing, <a href="#page_352">352</a><br /> - -Whitman, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXXX">LXXX</a>, <a href="#page_275">275</a>, <a href="#page_282">282</a>, <a href="#page_297">297</a><br /> - -Whittier, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXXVII">LXXVII</a>, <a href="#page_253">253</a><br /> - -Wilde, <a href="#CHAPTER_XCV">XCV</a>, <a href="#page_346">346</a><br /> - -Witte, <a href="#page_331">331</a><br /> - -Wood, <a href="#page_110">110</a><br /> - -Wordsworth, <a href="#CHAPTER_LVI">LVI</a>, <a href="#page_181">181</a>, <a href="#page_182">182</a><br /> - -Wycherley, <a href="#page_114">114</a><br /> - -<br /> -<a id="Z"></a>Zola, <a href="#CHAPTER_LXXXVIII">LXXXVIII</a>, <a href="#page_296">296</a>, <a href="#page_349">349</a>, <a href="#page_381">381</a><br /> -</p> - -<p class="r"> -W. B. C.<br /> -</p> - -<div class="bbox"> - -<p class="c"><span class="big">Who Owns the Press, and Why?</span></p> - -<p><b>When you read your daily paper, are you reading facts or propaganda? And -whose propaganda?</b></p> - -<p><b>Who furnishes the raw material for your thoughts about life? Is it -honest material?</b></p> - -<p><b>No man can ask more important questions than these; and here for the -first time the questions are answered in a book.</b></p> - -<p class="c"><span class="cbig250">THE BRASS CHECK</span></p> - -<p class="cb">A Study of American Journalism</p> - -<p class="cb">By UPTON SINCLAIR</p> - -<p>Read the record of this book to August, 1920: Published in February, -1920; first edition, 23,000 paper-bound copies, sold in two weeks. -Second edition, 21,000 paper-bound, sold before it could be put to -press. Third edition, 15,000 and fourth edition, 12,000, sold. Fifth -edition, 15,000, in press. Paper for sixth edition, 110,000, just -shipped from the mill. The third and fourth editions are printed on -“number one news”; the sixth will be printed on a carload of lightweight -brown wrapping paper—all we could get in a hurry.</p> - -<p>The first cloth edition, 16,500 copies, all sold; a carload of paper for -the second edition, 40,000 copies, has just reached our printer—and so -we dare to advertise!</p> - -<p>Ninety thousand copies of a book sold in six months—and published by -the author, with no advertising, and only a few scattered reviews! What -this means is that the American people want to know the truth about -their newspapers. They have found the truth in “The Brass Check” and -they are calling for it by telegraph. Put these books on your counter, -and you will see, as one doctor wrote us—“they melt away like the -snow.”</p> - -<div class="blockquott"> -<p class="nind">From the pastor of the Community Church, New York:</p> -<p>“I am writing to thank you for sending me a copy of your new book, -‘The Brass Check.’ Although it arrived only a few days ago, I have -already read it through, every word, and have loaned it to one of -my colleagues for reading. The book is tremendous. I have never -read a more strongly consistent argument or one so formidably -buttressed by facts. You have proved your case to the handle. I -again take satisfaction in saluting you not only as a great -novelist, but as the ablest pamphleteer in America today. I am -already passing around the word in my church and taking orders for -the book.”—John Haynes Holmes.</p></div> - -<p class="cb"><b>440 pages. Single copy, paper, 60c postpaid; three copies, $1.50; ten -copies, $4.50. Single copy, cloth, $1.20 postpaid; three copies, $3.00; -ten copies, $9.00</b></p> - -<p class="cb">Address: UPTON SINCLAIR, Pasadena, Cal.</p> -</div> - -<div class="bboxx"> - -<p class="cbig250">THE GOOSE-STEP</p> - -<p class="cb">A Study of American Education</p> - -<p class="cb"><small>By Upton Sinclair</small></p> - -<p class="nind"><b>Who owns the colleges, and why?</b></p> - -<p class="nind"><b>Are your sons and daughters getting education, or propaganda?</b></p> - -<p class="nind"><b>And whose propaganda?</b></p> - -<p class="nind"><b>No man can ask more important questions than these; and here for -the first time the questions are answered in a book.</b></p> - -<p class="nind">From H. L. MENCKEN:</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>The Goose-Step’ came in at last yesterday afternoon, and I fell on it -last night. My very sincere congratulations. I have read on and on with -constant joy in the adept marshalling of facts, the shrewd presentation -of personalities, the lively and incessant humor. It is not only a fine -piece of writing; it is also a sound piece of research. It presents a -devastating, but, I believe, thoroughly fair and accurate picture of the -American universities today. The faults of ‘The Brass Check’ and ‘The -Profits of Religion’ are not in it. It is enormously more judicial and -convincing than either of those books. You are here complaining of -nothing. You simply offer the bald and horrible facts—but with -liveliness, shrewdness, good humor. An appalling picture of a moral and -mental debasement! Let every American read it and ponder it!”</p> - -<p>A few questions considered in “The Goose-Step”: Do you know the extent -to which the interlocking directors of railroads and steel and oil and -coal and credit in the United States are also the interlocking trustees -of American “higher” education? Do you think that our colleges and -universities should be modeled on the lines of our government, or on the -lines of our department-stores? Do you know that eighty-five percent of -college and university professors are dissatisfied with being managed by -floor-walkers? Do you know for how many different actions and opinions a -professor may lose his job? Do you know how many professors have to do -their own laundry? Do you know why American college presidents with few -exceptions are men who do not tell the truth? Do you know to what extent -“social position” takes precedence over scholarship in American academic -life? Do you know to what extent our education has become a by-product -of gladiatorial combats?</p> - -<p>A few of the institutions dealt with:</p> - -<p>The University of the House of Morgan; The University of Lee-Higginson; -The University of U. G. I.; The Tiger’s Lair; The Bull-dog’s Den; The -University of the Black Hand; The University of the Lumber Trust; The -University of the Chimes; The Universities of the Anaconda; The -University of the Latter Day Saints; The Mining Camp University; The -Colleges of the Smelter Trust; The University of Wheat; The University -of the Ore Trust; The University of Standard Oil; The University of -Judge Gary; The University of the Grand Duchess; The University of -Automobiles; The University of the Steel Trust; The University of -Heaven; The University of Jabbergrab.</p> - -<p class="c">500 pages, cloth $2.00, paper $1.00, postpaid.</p> - -<p class="cb">UPTON SINCLAIR, PASADENA, CALIFORNIA</p> -</div> - -<table style="padding:2%;border:3px dotted gray;" -id="transcrib"> -<tr><th>Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:</th></tr> -<tr><td> - -<p>series of chonicle=> series of chronicle {pg 101}</p> - -<p>here we seen Sensibility=> here we see Sensibility {pg 160}</p> - -<p>be became poet laureate he became poet laureate {pg 173}</p> - -<p>Two laters later his=> Two years later his {pg 179}</p> - -<p>a crime aganist=> a crime against {pg 182}</p> - -<p>the old god, see too late=> the old god, sees too late {pg 214}</p> - -<p>enlightment ought to help them=> enlightenment ought to help them {pg -264}</p> - -<p>worse criminals that he=> worse criminals than he {pg 267}</p> - -<p>most efficient sytem=> most efficient system {pg 269}</p> - -<p>out of thir minds=> out of their minds {pg 287}</p> - -<p>be became the prophet=> he became the prophet {pg 292}</p> - -<p>to feel wraranted=> to feel warranted {pg 319}</p> - -<p>long and successfuly=> long and successfully {pg 348}</p> - -<p>live a single genration=> live a single generation {pg 351}</p> - -<p>him to suceed=> him to succeed {pg 354}</p> - -<p>presents a devasting=> presents a devastating {ad page}</p> - -</td></tr> -</table> - -<hr class="full" /> -<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAMMONART ***</div> -<div style='text-align:left'> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will -be renamed. -</div> - -<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'> -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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