But there is another dangerous shoal, another literary Goodwin Sands
strewn with the wreckage of ambitious but unskilled voyagers. For of
all people urged to write, those generous souls eager to lend a hand
in the making of a paradise on earth are hardest pressed. The very
fact that a young author hates tyranny and injustice in a thorough and
unhesitating way, results in a kind of distortion. For him the evil
pit of controversiality and partisanship yawns darkly. In his excess
of zeal he paints with pigments too glaringly bright and too muddily
brown. He makes his characters too black or too white, all evil or all
good, according to their position in society. He is afflicted with an
egoism of class, a fault every whit as gross as the reflex egoism
called patriotism. His judgment is warped by class prejudice. Because
he burns with zeal, because he is carried away with enthusiasm, there
is distortion. His heroes are those poor in this world’s goods, his
villains the wealthy, the powerful, the aristocratic. That wealth as
well as poverty may entail hardship and unhappiness, the author with
sociological bent often refuses to see, or seeing, wilfully denies.
That worry and weariness and disappointment is not removed when one
has mounted a little out of the pit, is a fact that escapes him.
That injustices suffered by wage earners would be no less were the
administration of affairs discharged by men taken from their own ranks,
is entirely lost sight of. So there comes about a gross exaggeration
and a painting of types. You may see something of this in George
Bernard Shaw’s “Unsocial Socialist.” Walt Whitman sinned in like manner
in his earlier days of writing. The fictional literature of advanced
movements is full of class consciousness.
That kind of thing, of course, is fundamentally due to a kind of
disguised self-interest once removed. It is really the inordinate
love of self, or of class, as such. Consequently, it is bad art. And
being that, it accomplishes nothing, because the reader sees through
the ulterior motive. Furthermore, to do that kind of thing is to set
down the thing as it is not. For, as you know, there are both rascals
as well as gentlemen among wage-earners, just as there are rascals as
well as gentlemen among capitalists. There are scoundrelly poor people
just as there are scoundrelly rich people. Honesty and dishonesty,
truthfulness and lying, fair dealing and foul dealing are matters
entirely apart from rank and position. Indeed, a story or a novel
based on such insecure foundation, must, of necessity, ring false from
first to last. There will be no health in it. The characters will be
shown with glib phrases rolling off their tongues, talking as no man
ever talks who expects to be taken seriously. The dialogue will be
false and strained, and rich man and poor will talk like fourth-rate
evangelists, camp-meeting hot-gospellers or insane tub thumpers. As a
terrible example, turn to the socialistic speech made in a drawing room
by _Cashel Byron_, the pugilist, in George Bernard Shaw’s novel. The
older, more experienced Shaw makes no such mistake. Contrast _Cashel
Byron_ for instance with his _Major Barbara_.
On the other hand, to see what a master craftsman can do, you must
take “The Dream of John Ball” by William Morris, No. 37 of this
series. If you have read it, you will not have forgotten the good,
earnest priest, a most uncompromising truth-teller who had so profound
a belief in realities and held an equally profound hatred of sham,
cruelty and injustice. Looking back, you will recall in the little
story a peculiar vein of pleasantry and delicate fancy with occasional
touches of tenderness and of pathos that is extremely attractive. I
call your particular attention to that story because it was written by
a man actuated by a passionate sympathy for humanity. For Morris was
a radical to be sure, but his radicalism was tempered by a profound
and logical sense of justice, by devotion to truth and reality and by
intellectual ability and clarity. Perhaps in the whole field of English
literature there is no better instance of pure intellect combined with
enthusiasm for justice. And yet with all this, the aim of the story
was to lead people to an understanding of the cause he had at heart,
which was socialism. Yet withal, any one utterly opposed to that cause
may read the book with keen pleasure, and not only that, but will
inevitably be led to sympathize with the aims of _John Ball_.
Why is this? How does it come that one man burning with zeal for a
cause will repel those he seeks to win to his side, while Morris won
opposing minds to a sympathy with a doctrine they had denounced? If
for a moment you try to imagine a Baptist, we will say, writing a book
in such fashion that Catholics will not only read it with enjoyment
but by its means will become interested in the Baptist creed, the
magnitude of the task Morris accomplished will be manifest. The fact of
the matter is that Morris did his work so well, felt the joys and the
griefs of his characters so keenly, in a word was so sincere, that the
reader lost his prejudices in the ideal life portrayed and was impelled
to identify himself with the creatures of Morris’ fancy in such wise
that what hurt them, also hurt him. Both writer and reader overlooked
the social philosophy by reason of immense delight in the characters
themselves. So also it was with those who read Dickens’ “Nicholas
Nickelby” and “Little Dorrit” and both books had so far-reaching an
influence that the first resulted in the reformation of the private
school system and the second in the abolition of imprisonment for debt.
In this connection I think that you will gain much advantage and
get some good ideas if you will read “The Man of Property,” by
John Galsworthy, “The Growth of the Soil,” by Knut Hamsun, and
by Cunninghame Graham, “Success,” “Brought Forward,” “Faith” and
“Progress.” I find in this series as valuable, “He Renounced the
Faith,” by Jack London and “The Miraculous Revenge” by George Bernard
Shaw.