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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
XXL Athens and Los Angeles . 56
XXII. The Slave Empire . 58
XXIII. Dumb Pious iEneas . 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
IV
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
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. Ecrasez l’lnfame . 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
LX IV. Prayer in Adultery . 204
LXV. Main Street in France . 206
LXVI. The Mattress Grave . 209
LXVII. Siegfried-Bakunin . 211
Contents y
CHAPTER PAGE
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
LXXVIL 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
Cl. Smiling America . 333
CII. The Eminent Tankard-Man . 337
VI
Contents
CHAPTER pAGE
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 be¬ fore 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 invol¬ untarily, 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.
1
2
Mammonart
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 tempta¬ tion came upon him; he remembered his marks, and ven¬ tured 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 home¬ made 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 Balti¬ more, 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!”)
3
Ogi, the Son of Og
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 Com- rnandment: 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
4 Mammonart
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 Old¬ est 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 hurits._ 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 lunters, 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
^ , H 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.
+, ha,ve walked trough the palaces of kings, and
t rough temples and cathedrals in many lands, and have seen long rows of portraits of the Old Men of many
5
Ogi, the Son of Og
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 col¬ lege 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 maid¬ ens 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 com¬ panion 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.)
6 Mammonart
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 Allee, 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 bar¬ barian, 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 bar¬ barians 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 civiliza¬ tion, 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.”) S
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 vil¬ lainous Red agitators with twisted faces, and at such other spectacles as the Old Men and the Witch Doctors
Who Owns the Artists? 7
prepare for them, according to instructions from the Great Hunter on the Holy Mountain.)
Three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three gener¬ ations have passed, and in every generation the descend¬ ants of Ogi have had to face the problem of their relation¬ ship to the Old Men and the Witch Doctors. Ogi him¬ self 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 proper¬ tied 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
8 Mammonart
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 inten¬ tion 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 instru¬ ments 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 at¬ tempt 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 m 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 tor himself, but who has also made it his business to know and judge the world’s best achievements.
• 6 concJusion to which he has come is that mankind
is today under the spell of utterly false conceptions of wiat art is and should be; of utterly vicious and per-
Who Owns the Artists? 9
verted 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 demon¬ strated 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 pres¬ ent-day technique is far and away superior to the tech¬ nique of any art period preceding.
Lie Number Four: the lie of Art Dilettantism; the notion that the purpose of art is entertainment and diver¬ sion, 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 no¬ tion that art has nothing to do with moral questions. It will be demonstrated that all art deals with moral ques¬ tions ; 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 deliber¬ ately, propaganda.
As commentary on the above, we add, that when artists or art critics make the assertion that art excludes prop¬ aganda, what they are saying is that their kind of propa¬ ganda is art, and other kinds of propaganda are not art. Orthodoxy is my doxy, and heterodoxy is the other fel¬ low’s doxy.
10
Mammonakt
As further commentary we explain that the word used *ts 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 pur¬ pose 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 i
^rt is a representation of life, modified by the person¬ ality of the artist, for the purpose of modifying other Per¬ sonalities, inciting them to changes of feeling, belief and
We put the further question : What is great art ? We answer :
• FrCtat art}s Pr°duced when propaganda of vitality and importance is put across with technical competence in terms of the art selected. F
n_AS c.ommentary we add that whether a certain prop-
decided h 7 vltaI.an.d ^portant is a question to be decided by the practical experience of mankind. The
? 2!- overwhelmingly convinced that his particular ?™Ja§™ 15 of supreme importance, whereas the experi¬ ence of the race may prove that it is of slight importance -
Zken ZX7 SUpP°,SedJ 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
find a real nmh Y ^ stern disciPline of hard thinking, hnd a real path of progress for the race; let him reveal
o^rcZe ne ** t0 ,thri11 to> perils for the m to overcome, new sacrifices for them to make new iovs for
techmmn°UeeXrrCe: 'IW make himself mastei of the technique of any one of the arts, and put that propaganda
Who Owns the Artists? 10a
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 propa¬ ganda” ; 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 carry¬ ing 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 fhe 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
2 — Feb. 2*
10& Mammonakt
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 “stretch¬ ing 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 ut¬ terance 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 propa¬ gandists, while Shakespeare and Goethe are pure and un¬ sullied 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.
11
Art and Personality
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 pre¬ dominantly 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 great¬ ness 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 hear¬ ing 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 rep¬ resentation 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 repro¬ ductions 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
12 Mammonart
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 cruci¬ fixions and martyrdoms ; I saw the nightmares of Dore, 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 exclud¬ ing 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 per¬ sonality 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
Art and Personality 13
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 sub¬ ject a prominent man; divining the fundamental cheap¬ ness and falsity of the man’s character, he paints a por¬ trait 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 Hohenzol- lerns, who paid for those white marble monsters at which I tittered in the Sieges Allee, 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 pic¬ torial labors of all the Ogis of Egypt, you will find the ruler always represented as of abnormal stature. Mani¬ festly, 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 pretend¬ ers, 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 sov¬ ereign is bigger in spirit ; and so, in making him bigger in body, the artist is acting as a seer and philosopher, bring¬ ing 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 brag¬ ging 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
14 Mammonart
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 con¬ sider 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 acci¬ dent 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 him¬ self 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
15
The Laborer and His Hire
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 her¬ self 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 crudest sentence ever penned : “Letters to posterity seldom reach their destina¬ tion !”
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 pub¬ lic? 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 in¬ spiring 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
16 M AMMON AET
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 ar¬ tists. 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 per¬ sons’ 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 per¬ sistent 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 fol¬ lowing 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 think¬ ing 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-
The Lord’s Anointed 17
stand the public which ordered and paid for that art prod¬ uct.
Some arts, of course, are cheaper than others. Bal¬ lads 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 ex¬ pensiveness, and to show that exactly in proportion to the cost of an art product is its aristocratic spirit, its sub¬ servience 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 indus¬ try, 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 suc¬ cessful 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 un¬ known. “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, shar¬ ing the interests and the prejudices, the hates and fears.
18 Mammonart
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 sup¬ port, 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, au¬ thentic 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.
Artificial Childhood
19
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 dif¬ ference between a work of art and an essay, a sermon, a speech or a mathematical demonstration; it is merely be¬ cause the play element in art is recognized by everyone, to the exclusion of the element of rational thought and pur¬ pose, 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 facul¬ ties ; 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
20
Mammonart
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 delib¬ erate 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 child¬ hood 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, h 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 con¬ sidered 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
21
Mrs. Ogi Emerges
ownership, this class controls culture and determines taste. It glorifies the scholar, the man who walks back¬ ward 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 arti¬ ficial childhood. Just as the Chinese bind the feet of their women in order to keep them helpless and acquies¬ cent, 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 con¬ tempt they feel for you.
CHAPTER VII
MRS. OGI EMERGES
We now assume as demonstrated the following propo¬ sitions. 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 sym¬ pathy 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?”
22 Mammonart
“That depends,” says Mrs. Ogi, “upon how stupid you are.”
She goes on to maintain that the purpose of all propa¬ ganda 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 dis¬ course 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-embroid¬ ered 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 chap¬ ter ‘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. Mean¬ time, 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 —
The Horse-Trade
23
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 per¬ suaded the author to rewrite the book, putting the horse- trade first, and making everything else in the novel sub¬ sidiary; this was done, and the result was the most sen¬ sational success in the history of American fiction. Young and old, rich and poor, high and low, all Americans rec¬ ognized 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 per¬ ceive 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
24
Mammonart
contempt for the victim ; the other trader has a sense of hatred, mingled with resolve to “get square.”
. It 1S 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 mat¬ ter how badly the deacon might have defeated him in com¬ mercial 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. 1 here 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 hsh, 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 oc¬ cupational 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, latsses faire and freedom of contract, the lie ot the horse-trader becomes the basis of all the really sig¬ nificant actions of men and women.
, °kvi°us is this, so clearly is it set forth in the wis- 0 le race> that at first thought it seems surprising that anyone could be led into believing a trade-lie. But
“Tf- thEi thfMtest a competent liar is that he gets himself believed; like the endless struggle between the
25
The Class Lie
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 repug¬ nance 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 institu¬ tions and ethical systems, philanthropic endowments, pro¬ fessional codes, political platforms; we have honors, of¬ fices and titles, proprieties and respectabilities, graces, re¬ finements, 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 advan¬ tage; 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 sell¬ ers learn to combine ; they form partnerships,, firms, cor¬ porations, 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 transpor¬ tation, and his phrase has become the corner-stone of capi¬ talist civilization.
3
26 Mammonart
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 con¬ tinually 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 com¬ petitive 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 combi¬ nations of capital, called “trusts,” which present them¬ selves 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 gams. _ 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 be¬ come 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 main-
27
Mrs. Ogi Orders Jazz
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-protec¬ tive 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-con¬ trolled 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 cruel¬ ties, conventions and attitudes to life which have been pro¬ duced as automatic reactions to economic forces ; the indi¬ vidual 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 evolu- tion.”
“Almost !” sniffs Mrs. Ogi. “How much more ?
28 Mammonart
“Well, I have to show how successive classes emerge and acquire power — ”
“Until at last we see the inevitable triumph of the pro¬ letariat and the establishment of the Co-operative Com¬ monwealth ! That will be so new to your readers, and so delightfully exciting! And meantime they sit and won¬ der when the scandals begin.”
“Scandals?” says Ogi. “Have I said anything about scandals ?”
“You tell your readers you’re going to turn the art¬ ists’ 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 mar¬ riage 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 some¬ thing!”
“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
The Populist Convention 29
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 1 “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
30 Mammonakt
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 capi¬ tal; 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 preda¬ tory 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 exhorta¬ tions, 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 judg¬ ment, and to take away the rights from the poor of my people, that widows may be their prey, and that they mav rob the fatherless ! J
Isaiah is known as a “prophet” among this prairie pop¬ ulation ; 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
The Populist Convention 31
hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to pro¬ claim 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 ver¬ batim: “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 Wash¬ ington 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, to¬ gether with wild honey furnished by friendly bees in the cottonwoods along the creek bottoms. Apparently, how¬ ever, 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 to¬ morrow; 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 com¬ pel 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
32
Mammonart
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 for¬ bidden 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 Sun¬ day 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 Amer¬ ica, 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
Kansas and Judea 33
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 per¬ sonal 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 de¬ mocracy evolved into a plutocratic imperialism. The land¬ lords and the tax collectors left them nothing but a bare living; the fruits of their labor paid for palaces and tem¬ ples 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 or¬ phans. 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 propa¬ ganda, having no remotest idea of anything else. Now¬ adays our docile population reads it and accepts it as the literal inspired Word — not realizing that the book is di¬ vided between two kinds of propaganda, which exactly cancel each other : the propaganda of a ruling class, teach¬ ing 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 litera¬ ture classes, so it will be worth our while to consider it from that point of view. Manifestly there is much of it
34 Mammonart
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 specifi¬ cations for the temple, and rules of hygiene — all impor¬ tant to a historian, but rubbish to anybody else. There are a great number of legends which are eternally delight¬ ful to children, stories of the creation and the fall of man, and of gods and devils and miracles, precisely as impor¬ tant 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 feel¬ ing 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 com¬ mon 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 rit¬ ual, 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 preach¬ ing 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
The Communist Almanac 35
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 judg¬ ing the Old Testament strictly, as literature, not as an¬ tiquity, 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 vol¬ umes 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, bear¬ ing 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 ren¬ der themselves liable to the lethal gas chamber. Never¬ theless, 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, in¬ stead 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 pro¬ scribed opinions should see themselves as martyrs, and endeavor to capitalize their sufferings for political advan¬ tage. So, ever since the extermination of the Soviet gov-
36 Mammonart
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 per¬ version 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 Petchni- koff. 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 can¬ not even agree about his ancestry! In fact, they cannot agree about anything, except that he was the most re¬ markable 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 Communist Almanac 37
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 sev¬ eral of American birth and ancestry. One of the easy ways of achieving sanctification under the Bolshevik sys¬ tem 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 follow¬ ers. 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 “epis¬ tle” being Russian for letter.
Finally, there is a collection of miscellaneous prophe- syings, attributed to a former commissar under the Rus¬ sian 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 Depart¬ ment 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 coun¬ try return to the old days of the Democratic and Repub¬ lican 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 hun¬ dred per cent Americans set to work with vigor to pre¬ serve their country from the fanatical propagandists of class greed.
38
Mammonart
CHAPTER XIV
GOD’S PROPAGANDA
We have before us another literary criticism, clipped from the “Roman Times Weekly Review of Books” dur¬ ing 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 cru¬ cified for disturbing the public peace under the Emperor Augustus Caesar. His followers have been hiding in cat¬ acombs 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 Uto¬ pians, 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 cen¬ turies of offensive propaganda warfare. If he is shocked by stories he has read about the Tcheka and its torturing
39
God’s Propaganda
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 hun¬ dred 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 argu¬ ment 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 “sub¬ jective” artists, who “seek in realities only visible illus¬ trations 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.
40
Mammonart
CHAPTER XV
MRS. PRESTONIA ORDERS PLUMBING
When I was a young man, groping my way into Social¬ ism, 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 Adirondack's. 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 laun¬ dry; you met sedate philosophers, and listened to Pres¬ tonia 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 out¬ standing example of one variety of culture superstition; it reduces to absurdity the arguments of one group of tra¬ dition worshipers. My old friend Prestonia has dis¬ covered 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
Mrs. Prestonia Orders Plumbing 41
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 gen¬ ius ; 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, vul¬ gar, 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
42 Mammonart
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 ac¬ quired 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 scan¬ dal?”
“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 move¬ ment, 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 try¬ ing 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.”
43
Mrs. Ogi Orders Etiquette
“The Greeks were a beauty-loving race and a joy-seek¬ ing 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 with¬ out 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 An¬ thology,’ 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
44 Mammonart
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 melo¬ dious language to the rhythm of beautiful music and the graceful motions of a chorus — that is the final achieve¬ ment 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. Never¬ theless, 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 —
William Randolph Alcibiades
45
CHAPTER XVII
WILLIAM RANDOLPH ALCIBIADES
From “The American Plutarch: Our Leading States¬ men 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 him¬ self 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 expe¬ dition 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 expedi¬ tion sailed, he had committed an act of sacrilege by chop¬ ping 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 ap¬ peals 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 Ran¬ dolph 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
46 Mammonart
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 emis¬ saries 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, com¬ bined with Judge Gary and J. P. Morgan and other gen¬ tlemen 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 man¬ ner : it is also necessary that he be taught to attend Sun¬ day school in his youth.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE AGE OF HERO-WORSHIP
Greek civilization was made by a large number of dif¬ ferent 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-
47
The Age of Hero-Worship
cratic classes, based on landlordism, held the government, while the proletariat, crowding into the towns, clamored for power; popular leaders arose, and there were con¬ spiracies 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, re¬ turning 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 dal¬ liance 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 ex¬ actly 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 “he¬ roic” 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
48
Mammonart
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 neg¬ lect to flatter their masters by showing some rebel thus being taught his place. We shall find Shakespeare treat¬ ing 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 epi¬ gram :
Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead,
Through which the living Homer begged his bread.
Hundred Per Cent Athenian 49
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 naive 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 vic¬ tory — 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 en¬ tirely 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 in¬ vaders, 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 im¬ pulse 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 Mara¬ thon was one by the name of Hfschylus. 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-
50 Mammonaet
otic and religious propaganda without any thought of dis¬ guise ; its purpose being to portray the downfall of des¬ potism. The play was a popular success, and made ^Eschylus 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. “Obe¬ dience 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 con¬ sciousness of a sublime destiny; they labored with burn¬ ing 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 am¬ bition 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 sports¬ men; 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
Hundred Per Cent Athenian 51
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 zEschylus 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 per¬ fection 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 un¬ happy 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 to¬ gether to rebel against war ! A play in which a devoted
52 Mammonart
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 an¬ other 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
53
The Funny Man of Reaction
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 de¬ fender; and this, don’t fail to note, in a world drama¬ tist, 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 sin¬ cerely held his convictions, whereas Mr. Irwin’s wit ap¬ pears 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 manu¬ facturers 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 au¬ dience 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 man¬ ners were rude ; and in order to set him a good example,
54 Mammonart
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, teach¬ ing 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
55
The Funny Man of Reaction
time came when the mob voted death to Socrates; and this was the great triumph of the funny man of re¬ action.
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 Alexan¬ dria, in Egypt. The poets now took pride in their tech¬ nical 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 achieve¬ ment 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 !
56
Mammonart
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 pur¬ pose. 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 wan¬ tonness 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 pinon 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 in-
Athens and Los Angeles 57
truder. 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 tem¬ perament. 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 busi¬ ness 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.
58 Mammonart
and General Helen Maria would have been the boy after the Romans’ own heart ; they would have made him a pre¬ fect 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 publicae 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 civiliza¬ tion.
Emerson has said that wherever you find a chain fas¬ tened 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
59
The Slave Empire
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 offi¬ cials 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 cen¬ turies 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 aris¬ tocracy, 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 genera¬ tions of civil strife, and then came a strong man, Julius Caesar, who put an end to political democracy. In history books that are taught to our school children today you will read that Caesar 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 hope¬ fully 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 lead¬ ers as emperors and gods. All the while the tribute con¬ tinued to roll in — the wealth of the whole world squan¬ dered in one mad orgy —
60
Mammonart
“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 under¬ standing the economics of slavery.”
CHAPTER XXIII
DUMB PIOUS iENEAS
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 firing 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 Htneas, 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. There¬ fore this hero must have an adjective, and he becomes “the pious H£neas” — the man who respects the old-time
Dumb Pious ZEneas 61
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 ZEneas 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 “ZEneid” 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 propa¬ gandist 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 ZEneas,” mean¬ ing: “While the pious ZEneas” — . 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 ZEneas” became our formula. “What’s your next hour ?” “Oh, I’ve got the dumb pious ZEneas !”
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 like¬ wise to the student who, translating the rage of the de¬ serted Queen Dido — “furens quid femina possit” — hap¬ pened 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 “ZEneid” is propa-
62 Mammonart
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 prop¬ erty to him, and made him a court favorite. So in the “SEneid” we find this pious emperor described in the following fashion :
This, this is he — long promised, oft foretold — Augustus Caesar. He the age of gold,
God-born himself, in Latiurp 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 Pro¬ fessor who has been reading this manuscript. Pie pro¬ tests, ‘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 Roman Four Hundred 63
the honey. Now conies 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 reac¬ tions 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 dis¬ coverable and perfectly definite thesis in a poet’s work by no means depends on the completeness of his own intel¬ lectual 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 Maecenas, 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.
64 Mammonart
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 Meecenas 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.
The Roman Four Hundred
65
“Wasn’t there a single artist in Rome who revolted?” asks Mrs. Ogi.
“Yes, there was one. He also was the son of a f reed- man, 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 aris¬ tocracy 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 trav¬ eled. 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 reduc¬ ing 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 nighty and all the attendants would rush into instant action. ‘She delights in perspiring with great tumult,’ said Mrs. Billy.
66 Mammonart
‘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 num¬ ber 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 appe¬ tizer. 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,” de¬ clares 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 under¬ world 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
The Roman Four Hundred 67
of a million a year to the Devon estate. Not far away the Devons also owmed 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 rail¬ road magnate, who lived in a colossal marble palace on Fifth Avenue. As soon as she perceived that her hus¬ band 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
68 Mammonart
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 in^°« ^ie w00(^s anc^ tarred and feathered them.
“What do you really think is coming?” asks Mrs. Ogi.
The American Empire 69
“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 informa¬ tion 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 bar¬ barian 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.
70
Mammonart
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 stand¬ ards, 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 Chris¬ tians replied : All flesh is grass. The Greeks said : Be¬ cause 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 dis¬ covered new satisfactions, replacing, for a time at any rate, the customary ones of physical pleasure and domina¬ tion 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 apprehen¬ sible, 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, dis¬ ease 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 paint¬ ers and sculptors invented outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual graces: the cross, the crown of
The Ins and Outs
71
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 ordi¬ nary beggars, or for patients in the last stages of tuber¬ culosis. 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 be¬ come 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 art¬ ist, 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 atti¬ tude 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
72 Mammonart
the common mass. I do not mean that simple and primi¬ tive people do not produce beauty of a naive 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 con¬ trols, 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 “propa¬ ganda” 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 civiliza¬ tion which maintains him, when he paints the noble fea¬ tures, 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 wher¬ ever it is that he keeps his working tools. But even where the artist is instinctive and naive, 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.
73
The Ins and Outs
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 pleas¬ ures 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 wear¬ ing scholars’ robes; Jesus becomes a heavenly prince, in spotless linen garments and a golden crown, casting benevolent looks upon the clergy; the Virgin Mary be¬ comes the favorite mistress of a duke or abbot or pope — or perhaps the painter’s own mistress. This latter ar¬ rangement is common, for business reasons easy to under¬ stand. 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.
74 Mammonart
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 ob¬ scure 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 spot¬ less 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 cloth¬ ing and being publicly disinherited by his father ; Savon¬ arola 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, preach¬ ing 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 repudi¬ ating dogma and defending Communism — such are the fig¬ ures 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
75
The Heaven of Elegance
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 elabo¬ rate acrostics and secret codes. The first letters of the lines, taken according to certain numerical systems, made three other separate poems ; other letters, chosen accord¬ ing 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 sufifering; 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 com¬ binations. 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 them¬ selves by doing useful work, or by having parents or grandparents who did useful work.
Also, the ladies and gentlemen have palaces to live in.
76 Mammonart
and country estates to which they may flee from pesti¬ lence, 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, stimu¬ lating 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 mon¬ ster, 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 Catho¬ lic 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 in¬ decencies 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.
The Muckraker’s Hell
77
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 him¬ self 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 prin¬ cipalities, 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 im¬ placably, 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
78 Mammonart
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 Con¬ stantine — 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 purga¬ tory 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 Chris¬ tian 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 gratifica¬ tion withheld acts as a stimulus to all the psychic being. So
79
The Muckraker’s Hell
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 meet¬ ing 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 civiliza¬ tion. 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 condi¬ tions 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 exam¬ ple, 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
80
Mammonart
Dante as a crude and “popular” person ; the highly cul¬ tured 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, Alexan¬ der 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 them¬ selves magnificent palaces, and as a measure of soul-insur¬ ance they built cathedrals and churches. They were will¬ ing to spend fortunes upon famous artists ; and the artists, needless to say, were willing to take the money. Brown¬ ing 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 —
81
The Pious Poisoners
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 em¬ ployed by the poisoner pope, Alexander VI, was a youth¬ ful painter of extraordinary ability, Raphael Sanzio by name. This pope was succeeded by two others, who con¬ quered many cities for the glory of God, and spent mil¬ lions 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 en¬ raptured 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 fa¬ mous 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
82
Mammonart
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 matri¬ mony. 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