The Poet
Social injustice as it bears upon the future generation;
pictures of child labor, and of the degradation of children in
slums; also hopes for the future deliverance of the child.
By-the-Way
(_From "Songs of the Dead End"_)
BY PATRICK MACGILL
(See pages 32, 47, 122, 406)
These be the little verses, rough and uncultured, which
I've written in hut and model, deep in the dirty ditch,
On the upturned hod by the palace made for the idle rich.
Out on the happy highway, or lines where the engines go,
Which fact you may hardly credit, still for your doubts 'tis so,
For I am the person who wrote them, and surely to God, I know!
Wrote them beside the hot-plate, or under the chilling skies,
Some of them true as death is, some of them merely lies,
Some of them very foolish, some of them otherwise.
Little sorrows and hopings, little and rugged Rhymes,
Some of them maybe distasteful to the moral men of our times,
Some of them marked against me in the Book of the Many Crimes.
These, the Songs of a Navvy, bearing the taint of the brute,
Unasked, uncouth, unworthy, out to the world I put,
Stamped with the brand of labor, the heel of a navvy's boot.
Democratic Vistas
BY WALT WHITMAN
(See pages 184, 268, 578)
Literature, strictly considered, has never recognized the
people, and, whatever may be said, does not today. Speaking
generally, the tendencies of literature, as hitherto pursued,
have been to make mostly critical and querulous men. It seems
as if, so far, there were some natural repugnance between a
literary and professional life, and the rude rank spirit of
the democracies. There is, in later literature, a treatment
of benevolence, a charity business, rife enough it is true;
but I know nothing more rare, even in this country, than a fit
scientific estimate and reverent appreciation of the People--of
their measureless wealth of latent worth and capacity, their
vast, artistic contrasts of lights and shades--with, in
America, their entire reliability in emergencies, and a certain
breadth of historic grandeur, of peace or war, far surpassing
all the vaunted samples of book-heroes, or any _haut ton_
coteries, in all the records of the world....
Dominion strong is the body's; dominion stronger is the mind's.
What has filled, and fills today our intellect, our fancy,
furnishing the standards therein, is yet foreign. The great
poems, Shakespeare's included, are poisonous to the idea of
the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of
democracy. The models of our literature, as we get it from
other lands, ultramarine, have had their birth in courts, and
basked and grown in castle sunshine; all smells of princes'
favors. Of workers of a certain sort, we have, indeed, plenty,
contributing after their kind; many elegant, many learned,
all complacent. But touched by the national test, or tried by
the standards of democratic personality, they wither to ashes.
I say I have not seen a single writer, artist, lecturer, or
what not, that has confronted the voiceless but ever erect and
active, pervading, underlying will and typic inspiration of the
land, in a spirit kindred to itself. Do you call these genteel
little creatures American poets? Do you term that perpetual,
pistareen, pastepot work, American art, American drama, taste,
verse? I think I hear, echoed as from some mountain-top afar in
the west, the scornful laugh of the Genius of these States....
Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for
elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy
is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower
and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction
between men, and their beliefs--in religion, literature,
colleges, and schools--democracy in all public and private
life, and in the army and navy.
Today
BY HELEN GRAY CONE
(Contemporary American poet)
Voice, with what emulous fire thou singest free hearts of old fashion,
English scorners of Spain, sweeping the blue sea-way,
Sing me the daring of life for life, the magnanimous passion
Of man for man in the mean populous streets of To-day!
Hand, with what color and power thou couldst show, in the ring
hot-sanded,
Brown Bestiarius holding the lean tawn tiger at bay,
Paint me the wrestle of Toil with the wild-beast Want, bare-handed;
Shadow me forth a soul steadily facing Today!
What Is Art?
BY LEO TOLSTOY
(See pages 88, 110, 148, 276, 374, 416, 555, 674)
Art of the future, that is to say, such part of art as will
be chosen from among all the art diffused among mankind,
will consist, not in transmitting feelings accessible only
to members of the rich classes, as is the case today, but in
transmitting such feelings as embody the highest religious
perceptions of our times. Only those productions will be
considered art which transmit feelings drawing men together
in brotherly union, or such universal feelings as can unite
all men. Art transmitting feelings flowing from antiquated,
worn-out religious teachings--church art, patriotic art,
voluptuous art, transmitting feelings of superstitious fear,
of pride, of vanity, of ecstatic admiration for national
heroes--art exciting exclusive love of one's own people, or
sensuality, will be considered bad, harmful art, and will be
censured and despised by public opinion. All the rest of art,
transmitting feelings accessible only to a section of the
people, will be considered unimportant, and will be neither
blamed nor praised. And the appraisement of art in general
will devolve, not, as is now the case, on a separate class
of rich people, but on the whole people; so that for a work
to be esteemed good, and to be approved of and diffused, it
will have to satisfy the demands, not of a few people living
in identical and often unnatural conditions, but it will have
to satisfy the demands of all those great masses of people who
are situated in the natural conditions of laborious life. And
the artists producing art will not be, as now, merely a few
people selected from a small section of the nation, members of
the upper classes or their hangers-on, but will consist of all
those gifted members of the whole people who prove capable of,
and are inclined towards, artistic activity.
A Catechism for Workers
BY AUGUST STRINDBERG
(Swedish poet, dramatist and novelist, 1849-1912; author of over a
hundred volumes, and probably the greatest genius that Sweden has
produced. It is not generally known that he was a Socialist, although
the labor unions and Social-democrats of his country marched in a body
at his funeral. The following are a few paragraphs from a "catechism"
covering every aspect of life from the worker's point of view)
_What is philosophy_?
A seeking of the truth.
_Then how can philosophy be the friend of the upper classes?_
The upper classes pay the philosopher, in order that he may
discover only such truths as are expedient in their eyes.
_But suppose uncomfortable truths should be discovered?_
They are called lies, and the philosopher gets no pay.
_What is history?_
The story of the past, presented in a light favorable to the
interests of the upper classes.
_Suppose the light is unfavorable?_
That is scandalous.
_What is a scandal?_
Anything offending the upper classes.
_What is esthetics?_
The art of praising or belittling works of art.
_What works of art must be praised?_
Those that glorify the upper classes.
Therefore Raphael and Michaelangelo are the most famous
artists, for they glorified the religious falsehoods of
the upper classes. Shakespeare magnified kings, and Goethe
magnified himself, the writer for the upper classes.
_But how about other works of art?_
There must not be others.
The Superior Classes
BY GEORGE D. HERRON
(American clergyman and college professor, born 1862; resigned
to become an active Socialist)
It is customary to speak of the unpreparedness of the
proletary for Socialism. But I am sure that, even today, the
working-class would give a vastly better organization of
industrial forces, a profoundly nobler and freer society, than
ever the world has had. The ignorance of the working-class
and the superior intelligence of the privileged class are
superstitions--are superstitions fostered by intellectual
mercenaries, by universities and churches, and by all
the centers of privilege. And the assumption of superior
intelligence on the part of the privileged is not warranted by
a single historical experience. The derangements and miseries
of mankind are precisely due to the ignorant and arrogant rule
of "superior" classes and persons. The mental and spiritual
capacity of these classes is a myth; their so-called culture
but thinly veneers their essential savagery, their social
rapacity and impudence....
The system that divides society into classes can bring forth no
true knowledge, no living truth, no industrial competence, no
fundamental social decency. It can only continue the desolation
of labor and increase the blindness and depravity of the
privileged. So long as some people own the tools upon which
others depend for bread, so long as the few possess themselves
of the fruits of the labor of the many, so long as the arts
and the institutions and the sciences are built upon exploited
workers, just so long will our so-called progress be through
the perennial exhaustion of generations and races; just so long
will successive civilizations be but voracious parasites upon
the spirit and body of mankind.
The Midnight Lunch Room
(_From "The Frozen Grail and Other Poems"_)
BY ELSA BARKER
(See pages 315, 359)
With little silver one may enter here,
And yet those hungry faces watch outside
The frosty window--and the door is wide!
The clatter to my unaccustomed ear
Of dishes and harsh tongues, is like a spear
Shaken within the sensitive wounded side
Of Silence. Soiled, indifferent hands provide
Pitiful fare, and cups of pallid cheer.
In my warm, fragrant home an hour ago
I wrote a sonnet on the peace they win
Who worship Beauty! Let me breathe it low.
What would it mean if chanted in this din?
What would it say to those out in the snow,
Who hunger, and who may not enter in?
What Life Means to Me
(_From "Revolution"_)
BY JACK LONDON
(See pages 62, 125, 139, 519, 609, 649)
I was born into the working class. I early discovered
enthusiasm, ambition, and ideals; and to satisfy these became
the problem of my childlife. My environment was crude and rough
and raw. I had no outlook, but an uplook rather. My place
in society was at the bottom. Here life offered nothing but
sordidness and wretchedness, both of the flesh and the spirit;
for here flesh and spirit were alike starved and tormented.
Above me towered the colossal edifice of society, and to
my mind the only way out was up. Into this edifice I early
resolved to climb. Up above, men wore black clothes and boiled
shirts, and women dressed in beautiful gowns. Also, there were
good things to eat, and there was plenty to eat. This much for
the flesh. Then there were the things of the spirit. Up above
me, I knew, were unselfishness of the spirit, clean and noble
thinking, keen intellectual living. I knew all this because I
read "Seaside Library" novels, in which, with the exception
of the villains and adventuresses, all men and women thought
beautiful thoughts, spoke a beautiful tongue, and performed
glorious deeds. In short, as I accepted the rising of the sun,
I accepted that up above me was all that was fine and noble and
gracious, all that gave decency and dignity to life, all that
made life worth living and that remunerated one for his travail
and misery.
But it is not particularly easy for one to climb up out of
the working class--especially if he is handicapped by the
possession of ideals and illusions. I lived on a ranch in
California, and I was hard put to find the ladder whereby to
climb. I early inquired the rate of interest on invested money,
and worried my child's brain into an understanding of the
virtues and excellences of that remarkable invention of man,
compound interest. Further, I ascertained the current rates of
wages for workers of all ages, and the cost of living. From all
these data I concluded that if I began immediately and worked
and saved until I was fifty years of age, I could then stop
working and enter into participation in a fair portion of the
delights and goodnesses that would then be open to me higher up
in society. Of course, I resolutely determined not to marry,
while I quite forgot to consider at all that great rock of
disaster in the working class world--sickness.
But the life that was in me demanded more than a meager
existence of scraping and scrimping. Also, at ten years of
age, I became a newsboy on the streets of a city, and found
myself with a changed uplook. All about me were still the same
sordidness and wretchedness, and up above me was still the
same paradise waiting to be gained; but the ladder whereby to
climb was a different one. It was now the ladder of business.
Why save my earnings and invest in government bonds, when by
buying two newspapers for five cents, with a turn of the wrist
I could sell them for ten cents and double my capital? The
business ladder was the ladder for me, and I had a vision of
myself becoming a baldheaded and successful merchant prince....
[The author became the owner of an oyster-boat, and thereby a
capitalist; but was ruined by the burning of his boat.]
From then on I was mercilessly exploited by other capitalists.
I had the muscle, and they made money out of it while I made
but a very indifferent living out of it. I was a sailor before
the mast, a longshoreman, a roustabout; I worked in canneries,
and factories, and laundries; I mowed lawns, and cleaned
carpets, and washed windows. And I never got the full product
of my toil. I looked at the daughter of the cannery owner, in
her carriage, and knew that it was my muscle, in part, that
helped drag along that carriage on its rubber tires. I looked
at the son of the factory owner, going to college, and knew
that it was my muscle that helped, in part, to pay for the wine
and good-fellowship he enjoyed.
But I did not resent this. It was all in the game. They were
the strong. Very well, I was strong. I would carve my way to a
place among them, and make money out of the muscles of other
men. I was not afraid of work. I loved hard work. I would pitch
in and work harder than ever and eventually become a pillar of
society.
And just then, as luck would have it, I found an employer that
was of the same mind. I was willing to work, and he was more
than willing that I should work. I thought I was learning a
trade. In reality, I had displaced two men. I thought he was
making an electrician out of me; as a matter of fact, he was
making fifty dollars per month out of me. The two men I had
displaced had received forty dollars each per month; I was
doing the work of both for thirty dollars per month.
This employer worked me nearly to death. A man may love
oysters, but too many oysters will disincline him toward that
particular diet. And so with me. Too much work sickened me. I
did not wish ever to see work again. I fled from work. I became
a tramp, begging my way from door to door, wandering over the
United States, and sweating bloody sweats in slums and prisons.
I had been born in the working class, and I was now, at the age
of eighteen, beneath the point at which I had started. I was
down in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths
of misery about which it is neither nice nor proper to speak.
I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the shambles
and the charnel house of our civilization. This is the part of
the edifice of society that society chooses to ignore. Lack of
space compels me here to ignore it, and I shall say only that
the things I there saw gave me a terrible scare....
[The author reflected, and decided that it was better to sell
brains than muscle.] Then began a frantic pursuit of knowledge.
I returned to California and opened the books. While thus
equipping myself to become a brain merchant, it was inevitable
that I should delve into sociology. There I found, in a
certain class of books, scientifically formulated, the simple
sociological concepts I had already worked out for myself.
Other and greater minds, before I was born, had worked out all
that I had thought, and a vast deal more. I discovered that I
was a Socialist.
The Socialists were revolutionists, inasmuch as they
struggled to overthrow the society of the present, and out
of the material to build the society of the future. I, too,
was a Socialist, and a revolutionist. I joined the groups
of working-class and intellectual revolutionists, and for
the first time came into intelligent living. Here I found
keen-flashing intellects and brilliant wits; for here I met
strong and alert-brained, withal horny-handed, members of
the working class; unfrocked preachers too wide in their
Christianity for any congregation of Mammon-worshippers;
professors broken on the wheel of university subservience to
the ruling class and flung out because they were quick with
knowledge which they strove to apply to the affairs of mankind.
Here I found, also, warm faith in the human, glowing idealism,
sweetness of unselfishness, renunciation and martyrdom--all
the splendid, stinging things of the spirit. Here life was
clean, noble, and alive. Here life rehabilitated itself, became
wonderful and glorious; and I was glad to be alive. I was
in touch with great souls who exalted flesh and spirit over
dollars and cents; and to whom the thin wail of the starved
slum-child meant more than all the pomp and circumstance of
commercial expansion and world-empire. All about me were
nobleness of purpose and heroism of effort, and my days and
nights were sunshine and starshine, all fire and dew, with
before my eyes, ever burning and blazing, the Holy Grail,
Christ's own Grail, the warm human, long suffering and
maltreated, but to be rescued and saved at the last....
As a brain merchant I was a success. Society opened its
portals to me. I entered right in on the parlor floor, and my
disillusionment proceeded rapidly. I sat down to dinner with
the masters of society, and with the wives and daughters of
the masters of society. The women were gowned beautifully, I
admit; but to my naive surprise I discovered that they were of
the same clay as all the rest of the women I had known down
below in the cellar. "The colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady were
sisters under their skins"--and gowns.
It was not this, however, so much as their materialism, that
shocked me. It is true these beautifully gowned, beautiful
women prattled sweet little ideals and dear little moralities;
but in spite of their prattle the dominant key of the life
they lived was materialistic. And they were so sentimentally
selfish! They assisted in all kinds of sweet little charities,
and informed one of the fact, while all the time the food they
ate and the beautiful clothes they wore were bought out of
dividends stained with the blood of child labor, and sweated
labor, and of prostitution itself. When I mentioned such facts,
expecting in my innocence that these sisters of Judy O'Grady
would at once strip off their blood-dyed silks and jewels,
they became excited and angry, and read me preachments about
the lack of thrift, the drink, and the innate depravity that
caused all the misery in society's cellar. When I mentioned
that I couldn't quite see that it was the lack of thrift, the
intemperance, and the depravity of a half-starved child of six
that made it work twelve hours every night in a Southern cotton
mill, these sisters of Judy O'Grady attacked my private life
and called me an "agitator"--as though that, forsooth, settled
the argument.
Nor did I fare better with the masters themselves. I had
expected to find men who were clean, noble and alive, whose
ideals were clean, noble and alive. I went out amongst the men
who sat in the high places, the preachers, the politicians, the
business men, the professors, and the editors. I ate meat with
them, drank wine with them, automobiled with them, and studied
them. It is true, I found many that were clean and noble; but,
with rare exceptions, they were not alive. I do verily believe
I could count the exceptions on the fingers of my two hands.
Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean
life, they were merely the unburied dead--clean and noble, like
well-preserved mummies, but not alive. In this connection I may
especially mention the professors I met, the men who live up
to that decadent university ideal, "the passionless pursuit of
passionless intelligence."
I met men who invoked the name of the Prince of Peace in
their diatribes against war, and who put rifles in the hands
of Pinkertons with which to shoot down strikers in their
own factories. I met men incoherent with indignation at the
brutality of prize-fighting, and who, at the same time, were
parties to the adulteration of food that killed each year more
babies than even red-handed Herod had killed....
I discovered that I did not like to live on the parlor floor of
society. Intellectually I was bored. Morally and spiritually
I was sickened. I remembered my intellectuals and idealists,
my unfrocked preachers, broken professors, and clean-minded,
class-conscious workingmen. I remembered my days and nights of
sunshine and starshine, where life was all a wild wonder, a
spiritual paradise of unselfish adventure and ethical romance.
And I saw before me, ever blazing and burning, the Holy Grail.
So I went back to the working-class, in which I had been born
and where I belonged. I care no longer to climb. This imposing
edifice of society above my head holds no delight for me. It
is the foundation of the edifice that interests me. There I am
content to labor, crowbar in hand, shoulder to shoulder with
intellectuals, idealists, and class-conscious workingmen,
getting a solid pry now and again and setting the whole edifice
rocking. Some day, when we get a few more hands and crowbars
to work, we'll topple it over, along with all its rotten
life and unburied dead, its monstrous selfishness and sodden
materialism. Then we'll cleanse the cellar and build a new
habitation for mankind, in which there will be no parlor floor,
in which all the rooms will be bright and airy, and where the
air that is breathed will be clean, noble and alive.
Fires
BY WILFRID WILSON GIBSON
(Contemporary English poet of the lives of the poor)
Snug in my easy chair,
I stirred the fire to flame.
Fantastically fair
The flickering fancies came,
Born of heart's desire:
Amber woodlands streaming;
Topaz islands dreaming,
Sunset-cities gleaming,
Spire on burning spire;
Ruddy-windowed taverns;
Sunshine-spilling wines;
Crystal-lighted caverns
Of Golconda's mines;
Summers, unreturning;
Passion's crater yearning;
Troy, the ever-burning;
Shelley's lustral pyre;
Dragon-eyes, unsleeping;
Witches' cauldrons leaping;
Golden galleys sweeping
Out from sea-walled Tyre:
Fancies, fugitive and fair,
Flashed with winging through the air;
Till, dazzled by the drowsy glare,
I shut my eyes to heat and light;
And saw, in sudden night,
Crouched in the dripping dark,
With streaming shoulders stark,
The man who hews the coal to feed my fire.
Alton Locke
BY CHARLES KINGSLEY
(A young poet is taken out by an old Scotchman, to make his
first acquaintance with the world of misery)
It was a foul, chilly, foggy Saturday night. From the butchers'
and greengrocers' shops the gas-lights flared and flickered,
wild and ghastly, over haggard groups of slip-shod dirty
women, bargaining for scraps of stale meat and frost-bitten
vegetables, wrangling about short weight and bad quality.
Fish-stalls and fruit-stalls lined the edge of the greasy
pavement, sending up odors as foul as the language of sellers
and buyers. Blood and sewer-water crawled from under doors
and out of spouts, and reeked down the gutters among the
offal, animal and vegetable, in every stage of putrefaction.
Foul vapors rose from cowsheds and slaughter-houses, and the
doorways of undrained alleys, where the inhabitants carried
the filth out on their shoes from the back-yard into the court,
and from the court up into the main street; while above,
hanging like cliffs over the streets--those narrow, brawling
torrents of filth, and poverty, and sin--the houses with their
teeming load of life were piled up into the dingy, choking
night. A ghastly, deafening, sickening sight it was. Go,
scented Belgravian! and see what London is! and then go to the
library which God has given thee--one often fears in vain--and
see what science says this London might be!
"Ay," he muttered to himself, as he strode along, "sing awa;
get yoursel' wi' child wi' pretty fancies and gran' words, like
the rest o' the poets, and gang to hell for it."
"To hell, Mr. Mackaye?"
"Ay, to a verra real hell, Alton Locke, laddie--a warse ane
than ony fiends' kitchen, or subterranean Smithfield that
ye'll hear o' in the pulpits--the hell on earth o' being a
flunkey, and a humbug, and a useless peacock, wasting God's
gifts on your ain lusts and pleasures--and kenning it--and
not being able to get oot o' it, for the chains o' vanity and
self-indulgence. I've warned ye. Now look there----"
He stopped suddenly before the entrance of a miserable alley--
"Look! there's not a soul down that yard but's either beggar,
drunkard, thief, or warse. Write anent that! Say how you
saw the mouth o' hell, and the two pillars thereof at the
entry--the pawn-broker's shop o' one side, and the gin palace
at the other--twa monstrous deevils, eating up men, and women,
and bairns, body and soul. Look at the jaws o' the monsters,
how they open and open, and swallow in anither victim and
anither. Write anent that."
"What jaws, Mr. Mackaye?"
"They faulding-doors o' the gin shop, goose. Are na they a
mair damnable man-devouring idol than ony red-hot statue o'
Moloch, or wicker Gogmagog, wherein thae auld Britons burnt
their prisoners? Look at thae bare-footed bare-backed hizzies,
with their arms roun' the men's necks, and their mouths full o'
vitriol and beastly words! Look at that Irishwoman pouring the
gin down the babbie's throat! Look at that rough o' a boy gaun
out o' the pawn shop, where he's been pledging the handkerchief
he stole the morning, into the gin shop, to buy beer poisoned
wi' grains o' paradise, and cocculus indicus, and saut, and a'
damnable, maddening, thirst-breeding, lust-breeding drugs! Look
at that girl that went in wi' a shawl on her back and cam' out
wi'out ane! Drunkards frae the breast! harlots frae the cradle!
damned before they're born! John Calvin had an inkling o' the
truth there, I'm a'most driven to think, wi' his reprobation
deevil's doctrines!"
"Well--but--Mr. Mackaye, I know nothing about these poor
creatures."
"Then ye ought. What do ye ken anent the Pacific? [Alton Locke
has been writing poems about the South Sea Islands.] Which is
maist to your business?--thae bare-backed hizzies that play
the harlot o' the other side o' the warld, or these--these
thousands o' bare-backed hizzies that play the harlot o' your
ain side--made out o' your ain flesh and blude? You a poet!
True poetry, like true charity, my laddie, begins at hame. If
ye'll be a poet at a', ye maun be a cockney poet; and while
the cockneys be what they be, ye maun write, like Jeremiah of
old, o' lamentation and mourning and woe, for the sins o' your
people. Gin you want to learn the spirit o' a people's poet,
down wi' your Bible and read thae auld Hebrew prophets; gin ye
wad learn the style, read your Burns frae morning till night;
and gin ye'd learn the matter, just gang after your nose, and
keep your eyes open, and ye'll no miss it."
"But all this is so--so unpoetical."
"Hech! Is there no the heeven above them there, and the hell
beneath them? and God frowning, and the deevil grinning? No
poetry there! Is no the verra idea of the classic tragedy
defined to be, man conquered by circumstance? Canna ye see it
there? And the verra idea of the modern tragedy, man conquering
circumstance?--and I'll show you that, too--in mony a garret
where no eye but the gude God's enters, to see the patience,
and the fortitude, and the self-sacrifice, and the luve
stronger than death, that's shining in thae dark places o' the
earth. Come wi' me, and see."
The Prophetic Book "Milton"
BY WILLIAM BLAKE
(See pages 98, 213)
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountain green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear: O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
BY HEINRICH HEINE
(See pages 97, 222)
I know not if I deserve that a laurel-wreath should one day
be laid on my coffin. Poetry, dearly as I have loved it, has
always been to me but a divine plaything. I have never attached
any great value to poetical fame; and I trouble myself very
little whether people praise my verses or blame them. But
lay on my coffin a _sword_; for I was a brave soldier in the
Liberation War of humanity.
[Illustration: THE MILITANT
CHARLES A. WINTER
(_Contemporary American illustrator_)]
[Illustration:
THE DEATH OF HATTERTON
HENRY WALLIS
(_English painter, born 1830_)
]
The Last Word
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
(See page 203)
They out-talk'd thee, hiss'd thee, tore thee.
Better men fared thus before thee;
Fired their ringing shot and pass'd,
Hotly charged--and broke at last.
Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall.
An Appeal to the Young
BY PETER KROPOTKIN
(See pages 308, 312)
If your heart really beats in unison with that of humanity, if
like a true poet you have an ear for Life, then, gazing out
upon this sea of sorrow whose tide sweeps up around you, face
to face with these people dying of hunger, in the presence of
these corpses piled up in the mines, and these mutilated bodies
lying in heaps on the barricades, looking on these long lines
of exiles who are going to bury themselves in the snows of
Siberia and in the marshes of tropical islands; in full view
of this desperate battle which is being fought, amid the cries
of pain from the conquered and the orgies of the victors, of
heroism in conflict with cowardice, of noble determination face
to face with contemptible cunning--you cannot remain neutral;
you will come and take the side of the oppressed because you
know that the beautiful, the sublime, the spirit of life itself
is on the side of those who fight for light, for humanity, for
justice!...
It rests with you either to palter continually with your
conscience, and in the end to say, one fine day: "Perish
humanity, provided I can have plenty of pleasures and enjoy
them to the full, so long as the people are foolish enough to
let me." Or, once more the inevitable alternative, to take
part with the Socialists and work with them for the complete
transformation of society. That is the logical conclusion which
every intelligent man must perforce arrive at, provided that he
reasons honestly about what passes around him, and discards the
sophisms which his bourgeois education and the interested views
of those about him whisper in his ear.
FROM THE BOOK OF PROVERBS
Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the
poor and needy.
Chants Communal
BY HORACE TRAUBEL
(See page 185)
What can I do? I can talk out when others are silent. I can
say man when others say money. I can stay up when others are
asleep. I can keep on working when others have stopped to play.
I can give life big meanings when others give life little
meanings. I can say love when others say hate. I can say every
man when others say one man. I can try events by a hard test
when others try it by an easy test.
What can I do? I can give myself to life when other men refuse
themselves to life.
No Enemies
BY CHARLES MACKAY
(See page 657)
You have no enemies, you say?
Alas! my friend, the boast is poor;
He who has mingled in the fray
Of duty, that the brave endure,
_Must_ have made foes! If you have none,
Small is the work that you have done.
You've hit no traitor on the hip,
You've dashed no cup from perjured lip,
You've never turned the wrong to right,
You've been a coward in the fight.
The Revolution
BY RICHARD WAGNER
(See page 236)
Unhappy man! uplift thine eyes, look up to where a thousand
thousand gather on the hills in joyous expectation of the
dawn! Regard them, they are all thy brothers, sisters, the
troops of those poor wights who hitherto knew naught of life
but suffering, have been but strangers on this earth of Joy;
they all are waiting for that Revolution which affrights thee,
their redeemer from this world of sorrow, creator of a new
world that blesses all! See there, there stream the legions
from the factories; they have made and fashioned lordly
stuffs,--themselves and children, they are naked, frozen,
hungry; for not to them belongs the fruit of all their labor,
but to the rich and mighty one who calls men and the earth his
own! So, there they troop, from fields and farmyards; they have
tilled the earth and turned it to a smiling garden, and fruits
in plenty, enough for all who live, have paid their pains,--yet
poor are they, and naked, starving; for not to them, nor to
others who are needy, belongs earth's blessing, but solely to
the rich and mighty one who calls men and the earth his own.
They all, the hundred-thousands, millions, are camped upon
the hills and gaze into the distance, where thickening clouds
proclaim the advent of emancipating Revolution; they all, to
whom nothing is left to grieve for, from whom men rob the sons
to train them into sturdy gaolers of their fathers; whose
daughters walk the city's streets with burden of their shame,
an offering to the baser lusts of rich and mighty; they all,
with the sallow, careworn faces, the limbs devoured by frost
and hunger, they all who have never known joy, encamp there on
the heights and strain their eyes in blissful expectation of
its coming, and listen in rapt silence to the rustle of the
rising storm, which fills their ears with Revolution's greeting.
The Refusal
(_Addressed to General Sebastiani_)
BY PIERRE JEAN DE BERANGER
(French lyric poet, of great popularity, 1780-1857; twice
prosecuted by the government for his republican utterances)
A minister offers me gold!
Not a creature, of course, to be told,
Not a word to appear in the press!
My wants are but few, to be sure,
And yet, when I think of the poor,
I long to be rich, I confess!
With the poor, as the world is aware,
Stars and ribands one cannot well share,
But gold is a different thing!
Yes, just for a hundred francs down
I'd cheerfully pawn both my crown
And my sceptre, if I were king!
When money does come in my way,
It goes the next moment astray,
How and where I can't really explain;
My pocket is cursed with a hole
Which my grandmother, excellent soul,
All her days would have stitched at in vain!
All the same, my good friend, keep your gold!
In my teens, if the truth must be told,
Proud Freedom I fervently woo'd;
Yes, I, who have vaunted in song
Lax loveliness all my life long,
Am wedded in fact to a prude!
Ay, Liberty, Sir, you must learn,
Is a bigot inflexibly stern,
Who, heedless of time and of place,
Directly the tinsel she spies
On Servility's livery, cries,
"Away with the rascally lace!"
Your dross she an insult would deem!
But, frankly, how came you to dream
Of attempting to treat with _my_ muse?
As it is, I'm at least a good "sou,"
But lacquer me over, and you
Make me counterfeit ev'n among "sous."
Keep your pelf; I'm no hero, I fear,
But if the world happens to hear
Of this secret you think so profound,
You'll know whence the story has sprung--
My heart's like a lyre newly strung,
One touch, and you make it resound!
To the Retainers
(_From "Socialism and Success"_)
BY W. J. GHENT
(American Socialist writer, born 1866)
You retainers and servitors of the men of wealth--you who
from rostrum, pulpit and sanctum, from bar and bench, defend
the existing régime and oppose the struggles of the working
class for a better life; you whose business it is to find a
practical, a judicial, an ethical and even a spiritual sanction
for things as they exist, and who devise the cheap moralities
which are the reflex of the interests of the class that employs
you--there is a word to say to you which needs to be spoken.
Upon those who take part in the forward movement of the time no
more pressing duty is laid than that of telling you in plain
words what millions of men are thinking of you....
With what eager impulse and with what compliant will do you
make yourselves the defenders of the present scheme of things
and the assailants of the coming order! Now that in every
civilized land the working class, sick of the reign of cruelty
and wrong, is awakening to a consciousness of its power, and
to a determination to ordain a fairer life, you take upon
yourselves the mission to ridicule its aims and ideals and to
discredit its leaders.
It is only the unsuccessful, you say, who attack our existing
institutions. You cannot understand, such is your subservient
complacence, that multitudes among this revolutionary working
class are proud of their unsuccess and wear it as a badge of
honor. Pray you, under the existing scheme of things, how many,
and what quality of men achieve "success," and what must they
do to achieve it? It is not, except in rare cases, probity,
honor, truthfulness, nor humaneness, nor fellow service, that
wins this fallacious good. It is, in the majority of cases,
grafting and lying, fawning and cringing, selfishness and
brutality, restrained only by that Chinese ethical standard,
the necessity of "saving your face," that give victory in the
struggle. And the men who are seeking the overthrow of this
system disdain to make use of these means. They leave that
function to you. They do not, like your bishops, lend their
presence to chambers of commerce at banquets, and give to the
gamblers in the world's wealth the benediction of divine favor.
They do not, like your Board of Foreign Missions, solicit the
profits of law breaking and theft for their propaganda, and
promise an intercession at the throne of grace. They do not,
like your college heads, prescribe the dainty punishment of
"social ostracism" for the world's robbers, crying out from
their gables, "Bring on your tainted money!" Nor do they, like
your journalists, make themselves the servile lackeys of the
ruling class; nor, like your economists, constitute themselves
the secular priests of capital, perpetually renewing their
character of "pests of society and persecutors of the poor."
Many of them might be "successful" if they chose to do these
things. Rather they chose, like Francis of Assisi, the bride of
Poverty, instead of the harlot Success. And so you are right in
your statement. But you utter your own condemnation when you
speak it.
Ad Valorem
BY JOHN RUSKIN
(See pages 106, 491)
In a community regulated by laws of demand and supply, but
protected from open violence, the persons who become rich are,
generally speaking, industrious, resolute, proud, covetous,
prompt, methodical, sensible, unimaginative, insensitive, and
ignorant. The persons who remain poor are the entirely foolish,
the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the humble, the
thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the
well-informed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively
wicked, the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the entirely
merciful, just, and godly person.
The Lost Leader
BY ROBERT BROWNING
(Celebrated English poet, 1812-1889. The present poem has been
generally taken to refer to Wordsworth, who became in his old age a
conservative and the poet-laureate of a reactionary government)
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat--
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others she lets us devote;
They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver,
So much was theirs who so little allowed:
How all our copper had gone for his service!
Rags--were they purple, his heart had been proud!
We that had loved him so, followed him, honored him,
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him our pattern to live and to die!
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,
Burns, Shelley, were with us,--they watch from their graves!
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,
He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!
We shall march prospering,--not thro' his presence;
Songs may inspirit us,--not from his lyre;
Deeds will be done,--while he boasts his quiescence,
Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire:
Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,
One more devil's-triumph and sorrow for angels,
One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!
Journalism
BY JOHN SWINTON
(One of America's oldest and most beloved journalists was
tendered a banquet by his fellow-editors, and surprised his
hosts by the following words)
There is no such thing in America as an independent press,
unless it is in the country towns.
You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to
write his honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand
that it would never appear in print.
I am paid $150.00 a week for keeping my honest opinions out of
the paper I am connected with--others of you are paid similar
salaries for similar things--and any of you who would be so
foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the
streets looking for another job.
The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the
truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the
feet of Mammon, and to sell his race and his country for his
daily bread.
You know this and I know it, and what folly is this to be
toasting an "Independent Press."
We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We
are the jumping-jacks; they pull the strings and we dance. Our
talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property
of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
The Rebel
BY HILAIRE BELLOC
(English historian and poet, born 1871; resigned from
parliament to conduct a campaign against the control of
England's political machinery by vested wealth)
There is a wall of which the stones
Are lies and bribes and dead men's bones.
And wrongfully this evil wall
Denies what all men made for all,
And shamelessly this wall surrounds
Our homestead and our native grounds.
But I will gather and I will ride,
And I will summon a countryside,
And many a man shall hear my halloa
Who never had thought the horn to follow;
And many a man shall ride with me
Who never had thought on earth to see
High Justice in her armoury.
When we find them where they stand,
A mile of men on either hand,
I mean to charge from right away
And force the flanks of their array,
And press them inward from the plains,
And drive them clamoring down the lanes,
And gallop and harry and have them down,
And carry the gates and hold the town.
Then shall I rest me from my ride
With my great anger satisfied.
Only, before I eat and drink,
When I have killed them all, I think
That I will batter their carven names,
And slit the pictures in their frames,
And burn for scent their cedar door,
And melt the gold their women wore,
And hack their horses at the knees,
And hew to death their timber trees,
And plough their gardens deep and through--
And all these things I mean to do
For fear perhaps my little son
Should break his hands, as I have done.
BY JOHN RUSKIN
(See pages 106, 491, 752)
I feel the force of mechanism and the fury of avaricious
commerce to be at present so irresistible, that I have seceded
from the study not only of architecture, but nearly of all art;
and have given myself, as I would in a besieged city, to seek
the best modes of getting bread and water for its multitudes.
BY Ō-SHI-O
(Japanese scholar of the Eighteenth Century)
I have a suit of new clothes in this happy new year;
Hot rice cake soup is excellent to my taste;
But when I think of the hungry people in this city,
I am ashamed of my fortune in the presence of God.
Jean-Christophe
BY ROMAIN ROLLAND
(French novelist and critic, born 1866; lecturer at the University
of Paris. This epoch-making ten-volume novel, probably the greatest
published in France since "Les Miserables," tells the life story of
a German-born musician. The following passage describes his attitude
towards the revolutionary movement in Paris)
Christophe was dragged into the wake of force in the track of
the army of the working-classes in revolt. But he was hardly
aware that it was so; and he would tell his companions in the
restaurant that he was not with them.
"As long as you are only out for material interests," he would
say, "you don't interest me. The day when you march out for a
belief, then I shall be with you. Otherwise, what have I to
do with the conflict between one man's belly and another's? I
am an artist; it is my duty to defend art; I have no right to
enroll myself in the service of a party. I am perfectly aware
that recently certain ambitious writers, impelled by a desire
for an unwholesome popularity, have set a bad example. It seems
to me that they have not rendered any great service to the
cause which they defended in that way; but they have certainly
betrayed art. It is our business--the artists'--to save the
light of the intellect. We have no right to obscure it with
your blind struggles. Who shall hold the light aloft if we let
it fall? You will be glad enough to find it still intact after
the battle. There must always be workers busy keeping up the
fire in the engine, while there is fighting on the deck of the
ship. To understand everything is to hate nothing. The artist
is the compass which, through the raging of the storm, points
steadily to the north."
They regarded him as a maker of phrases, and said that, if he
were talking of compasses, it was very clear that he had lost
his: and they gave themselves the pleasure of indulging in
a little friendly contempt at his expense. In their eyes an
artist was a shirker who contrived to work as little and as
agreeably as possible.
He replied that he worked as hard as they did, even harder, and
that he was not nearly so afraid of work. Nothing disgusted him
so much as _sabotage_, the deliberate bungling of work, and
skulking raised to the level of a principle.
"All these wretched people," he would say, "afraid for their
own skins!... Good Lord! I've never stopped working since I was
eight. You people don't love your work; at heart you're just
common men.... If only you were capable of destroying the old
world! But you can't do it. You don't even want to. No, you
don't even want to. It is all very well for you to go about
shrieking menace and pretending you're going to exterminate the
human race. You have only one thought: to get the upper hand
and lie snugly in the warm beds of the middle classes...."
Thereupon they would all lose their tempers and all talk at
once. And in the heat of the argument it would often happen
that Christophe, whirled away by his passion, would become more
revolutionary than the others. In vain did he fight against
it; his intellectual pride, his complacent conception of a
purely esthetic world, made for the joy of the spirit, would
sink deep into the ground at the sight of injustice. Esthetic,
a world in which eight men out of ten live in nakedness and
want, in physical and moral wretchedness? Oh, come! A man must
be an impudent creature of privilege who would dare to claim
as much. An artist like Christophe, in his inmost conscience,
could not but be on the side of the working-classes. What
man more than the spiritual worker has to suffer from the
immorality of social conditions, from the scandalously unequal
partition of wealth among men? The artist dies of hunger or
becomes a millionaire for no other reason than the caprice
of fashion and of those who speculate on fashion. A society
which suffers its best men to die or gives them extravagant
rewards is a monstrous society: it must be swept and put
in order. Every man, whether he works or no, has a right
to a living minimum. Every kind of work, good or mediocre,
should be rewarded, not according to its real value--(who
can be the infallible judge of that?)--but according to the
normal legitimate needs of the worker. Society can and should
assure the artist, the scientist, and the inventor an income
sufficient to guarantee that they have the means and the time
yet further to grace and honor it. Nothing more. The _Gioconda_
is not worth a million. There is no relation between a sum
of money and a work of art: a work of art is neither above
nor below money: it is outside it. It is not a question of
payment: it is a question of allowing the artist to live. Give
him enough to feed him, and allow him to work in peace. It is
absurd and horrible to try to make him a robber of another's
property. This thing must be put bluntly: every man who has
more than is necessary for his livelihood and that of his
family, and for the normal development of his intelligence, is
a thief and a robber. If he has too much, it means that others
have too little. How often have we smiled sadly to hear tell
of the inexhaustible wealth of France, and the number of great
fortunes--we workers, and toilers, and intellectuals, and men
and women who from our very birth have been given up to the
wearying task of keeping ourselves from dying of hunger, often
struggling in vain, often seeing the very best of us succumbing
to the pain of it all,--we who are the moral and intellectual
treasure of the nation! You who have more than your share of
the wealth of the world are rich at the cost of our suffering
and our poverty. That troubles you not at all; you have
sophistries and to spare to reassure you: the sacred rights of
property, the fair struggle for life, the supreme interests of
that Moloch, the State, and Progress, that fabulous monster,
that problematical Better to which men sacrifice the Good,--the
Good of other men. But for all that, the fact remains, and all
your sophistries will never manage to deny it: "You have too
much to live on. We have not enough. And we are as good as
you. And some of us are better than the whole lot of you put
together."
The Problem Play
BY G. BERNARD SHAW
(See pages 193, 212, 263, 402)
When we succeed in adjusting our social structure in such a
way as to enable us to solve social questions as fast as they
become really pressing, they will no longer force their way
into the theatre. Had Ibsen, for instance, had any reason to
believe that the abuses to which he called attention in his
prose plays would have been adequately attended to without his
interference, he would no doubt have gladly left them alone.
The same exigency drove William Morris in England from his
tapestries, his epics, and his masterpieces of printing, to try
and bring his fellow citizens to their senses by the summary
process of shouting at them in the streets and in Trafalgar
Square. John Ruskin's writing began with Modern Painters;
Carlyle began with literary studies of German culture and the
like; both were driven to become revolutionary pamphleteers. If
people are rotting and starving in all directions, and nobody
else has the heart or brains to make a disturbance about it,
the great writers must.
Fleet Street Eclogues
BY JOHN DAVIDSON
(In these dialogues a number of English journalists discuss their
views of life. The author, by his tragic death, may be said to have
put the seal of sincerity upon his bitter utterances. See page 216)
I too, for light the world explore,
And, trembling, tread where angels trod;
Devout at every shrine adore,
And follow after each new god.
But by the altar everywhere
I find the money-changer's stall;
And littering every temple-stair
The sick and sore like maggots crawl....
And always divers undertones
Within the roaring tempest throb--
The chink of gold, the laborer's groans,
The infant's wail, the woman's sob.
Hoarsely they beg of Fate to give
A little lightening of their woe,
A little time to love, to live,
A little time to think and know.
I see where from the slums may rise
Some unexpected dreadful dawn--
The gleam of steeled and scowling eyes,
A flash of women's faces wan!
To a Bourgeois Litterateur
(_Who referred to a group of agitators as "Professional
Hoboes"_)
BY MAX EASTMAN
(See page 408)
How old, my friend, is that fine-pointed pen
Wherewith in smiling quietude you trace
The maiden maxims of your writing-place,
And o'er this gripped and mortal-sweating den
And battle-pit of hunger, now and then
Dip out, with nice and intellectual grace,
The faultless wisdoms of a nurtured race
Of pale-eyed, pink, and perfect gentlemen?
How long have art and wit and poetry,
With all their power, been content, like you,
To gild the smiling fineness of the few,
To filmy-curtain what they dare not see
In multudinous reality--
The rough and bloody soul of what is true?
The Scholar as Revolutionist
(_From "Anatole France"_)
BY GEORG BRANDES
(Danish critic, born 1842)
What gives Anatole France his lasting hold over his hearers is
not his cleverness, but himself--the fact that this savant who
bears the heavy load of three cultures, nay, who is in himself
a whole little culture--this sage, to whom the whole life of
the earth is but an ephemeral eruption on its surface, and who
consequently regards all human endeavor as finally vain--this
thinker, who can see everything from innumerable sides and
might have come to the conclusion that, things being bad at the
best, the existing state of matters was probably as good as the
untried: that this man should proclaim himself a son of the
Revolution, side with the workingman, acknowledge his belief
in liberty, throw away his load and draw his sword--this is
what moves a popular audience, this is what plain people can
understand and can prize. It has shown them that behind the
author there dwells a man--behind the great author a brave man.
A Warning
BY HEINRICH HEINE
(_Translated by Louis Untermeyer_)
(See pages 97, 222, 744)
You will print such books as these!
Then you're lost, my friend, that's certain.
If you wish for gold and honor,
Write more humbly--bend your knees!
Aye, you must have lost your senses
Thus to speak before the people;
Thus to dare to speak of Preachers
And of Potentates and Princes.
Friend, you're lost--so it appears--
For the Princes have long arms,
And the Preachers have long tongues,
--And the masses have long ears!
Stoning the Prophets
(On page 623 appears a sample of the weapons with which Privilege
defends itself upon the political field. It seems worth while to
include at this place a sample of what the revolutionary poet has to
encounter. The following are comments of newspapers and weekly reviews
in London at the time of the first productions of the plays of Henrik
Ibsen, in 1891. They are taken partly from an article by William
Archer, "Ghosts and Gibberings," _Pall Mall Gazette_, April 8, 1891;
and partly from another article by the same writer, "The Mausoleum of
Ibsen," _Fortnightly Review_, July, 1893)
London _Truth_, March 19, 1891, discussing a reading of
"Ghosts":
An obscure Scandinavian dramatist and poet, a crazy fanatic, and
determined Socialist, is to be trumpeted into fame for the sake of the
estimable gentleman who can translate his works, and the enterprising
tradesmen who publish them.... The unwomanly woman, the unsexed
female, and the whole army of unprepossessing cranks in petticoats
... sat open-mouthed and without a blush on their faces, whilst a
Socialist orator read aloud "Ghosts," the most loathsome of Ibsen's
plays.... If you have seen one play by Ibsen you have seen them all.
A disagreeable and nasty woman; an egotistical and preachy man; a
philosophical sensualist; dull and undramatic dialogue. The few
independent people who have sat out a play by Ibsen ... have said to
themselves, Put this stuff before the play-going public, risk it at
the evening theatre, remove your claque, exhaust your attendance of
the Socialistic and the sexless, and then see where your Ibsen will
be. I have never known an audience yet that cared to pay to be bored.
* * * * *
London _Daily Telegraph_, reviewing the first performance of
"Ghosts":
Ibsen's positively abominable play.... This disgusting
representation.... Reprobation due to such as aim at infecting the
modern theatre with poison after desperately inoculating themselves
and others.... An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act
done publicly; a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open....
Candid foulness.... Kotzebue turned bestial and cynical.... Offensive
cynicism.... Ibsen's melancholy and malodorous world.... Absolutely
loathsome and fetid.... Gross, almost putrid indecorum.... Literary
carrion.... Crapulous stuff.... Novel and perilous nuisance.
* * * * *
Other London reviews of "Ghosts":
Unutterably offensive.... Prosecution under Lord Campbell's Act....
Abominable piece.... Scandalous.--_Standard._
Naked loathsomeness.... Most dismal and revolting production.--_Daily
News._
Revolting, suggestive and blasphemous.... Characters either
contradictory in themselves, uninteresting or abhorrent.--_Daily
Chronicle._
A repulsive and degrading work.--_Queen._
Morbid, unhealthy, unwholesome, disgusting story.... A piece to bring
the stage into disrepute and dishonor with every right-thinking man
and woman.--_Lloyds._
Merely dull dirt long drawn out.--_Hawk._
If any repetition of this outrage be attempted, the authorities will
doubtless wake from their lethargy.--_Sporting and Dramatic News._
Most loathsome of all Ibsen's plays.... Garbage and offal.--_Truth._
Ibsen's putrid play called "Ghosts." ... So loathsome.--_Academy._
As foul and filthy a concoction as has ever been allowed to disgrace
the boards in an English theatre.... Dull and disgusting.... Nastiness
and malodorousness laid on thickly as with a trowel.--_Era._
Noisome corruption.--_Stage._
For Hire
BY MORRIS ROSENFELD
(See page 56. Translation by Rose Pastor Stokes)
Work with might and main,
Or with hand or heart,
Work with soul and brain,
Or with holy art,
Thread, or genius' fire--
Make a vest, or verse--
If 'tis done for hire,
It is done the worse.
A Man of Genius
(_From "The New Grub Street"_)
BY GEORGE GISSING
(A novel portraying the lives of the innumerable hack-writers
who starve in the garrets of modern London. See page 104)
His name was Harold Biffen, and, to judge from his appearance,
he did not belong to the race of common mortals. His excessive
meagerness would all but have qualified him to enter an
exhibition in the capacity of living skeleton, and the garments
which hung upon this framework would perhaps have sold for
three and sixpence at an old-clothes dealer's. But the man was
superior to these accidents of flesh and raiment. He had a fine
face: large, gentle eyes, nose slightly aquiline, small and
delicate mouth. Thick black hair fell to his coat-collar; he
wore a heavy moustache and a full beard. In his gait there was
a singular dignity; only a man of cultivated mind and grateful
character could move and stand as he did.
His first act on entering the room was to take from his pocket
a pipe, a pouch, a little tobacco-stopper, and a box of
matches, all of which he arranged carefully on a corner of the
central table. Then he drew forward a chair and seated himself.
"Take your top-coat off," said Reardon.
"Thanks, not this evening."
"Why the deuce not?"
"Not this evening, thanks."
The reason, as soon as Reardon sought for it, was obvious.
Biffen had no ordinary coat beneath the other. To have referred
to this fact would have been indelicate; the novelist of
course understood it, and smiled, but with no mirth.
"Let me have your Sophocles," were the visitor's next words.
Reardon offered him a volume of the Oxford Pocket Classics.
"I prefer the Wunder, please."
"It's gone, my boy."
"Gone?"
"Wanted a little cash."
Biffen uttered a sound in which remonstrance and sympathy were
blended.
"I'm sorry to hear that; very sorry. Well, this must do. Now, I
want to know how you scan this chorus in the 'Oedipus Rex.'"
Reardon took the volume, considered, and began to read aloud
with metric emphasis.
"Choriambics, eh?" cried the other. "Possible, of course; but
treat them as Ionics _a minore_ with an anacrusis, and see if
they don't go better."
He involved himself in terms of pedantry, and with such delight
that his eyes gleamed. Having delivered a technical lecture,
he began to read in illustration, producing quite a different
effect from that of the rhythm as given by his friend. And the
reading was by no means that of a pedant, rather of a poet.
For half an hour the two men talked Greek metres as if they
lived in a world where the only hunger known could be satisfied
by grand or sweet cadences....
Biffen was always in dire poverty, and lived in the oddest
places; he had seen harder trials than even Reardon himself.
The teaching by which he partly lived was of a kind quite
unknown to the respectable tutorial world. In these days
of examinations, numbers of men in a poor position--clerks
chiefly--conceive a hope that by "passing" this, that, or the
other formal test they may open for themselves a new career.
Not a few such persons nourish preposterous ambitions; there
are warehouse clerks privately preparing (without any means or
prospect of them) for a call to the Bar, drapers' assistants
who "go in" for the preliminary examination of the College
of Surgeons, and untaught men innumerable, who desire to
procure enough show of education to be eligible for a curacy.
Candidates of this stamp frequently advertise in the newspapers
for cheap tuition, or answer advertisements which are intended
to appeal to them; they pay from sixpence to half a crown
an hour--rarely as much as the latter sum. Occasionally it
happened that Harold Biffen had three or four such pupils in
hand, and extraordinary stories he could draw from his large
experience in this sphere....
_Biffen Falls in Love_
A fatal day. There was an end of all his peace, all his
capacity for labor, his patient endurance of penury. Once,
when he was about three and twenty, he had been in love with
a girl of gentle nature and fair intelligence; on account
of his poverty, he could not even hope that his love might
be returned, and he went away to bear the misery as best he
might. Since then the life he had led precluded the forming of
such attachments; it would never have been possible for him
to support a wife of however humble origin. At intervals he
felt the full weight of his loneliness, but there were happily
long periods during which his Greek studies and his efforts in
realistic fiction made him indifferent to the curse laid upon
him. But after that hour of intimate speech with Amy, he never
again knew rest of mind or heart....
He was not the kind of man that deceives himself as to his own
aspect in the eyes of others. Be as kind as she might, Amy
could not set him strutting Malvolio-wise; she viewed him as
a poor devil who often had to pound his coat--a man of parts
who could never get on in the world--a friend to be thought
of kindly because her dead husband had valued him. Nothing
more than that; he understood perfectly the limits of her
feeling. But this could not put restraint upon the emotion
with which he received any trifling utterance of kindness from
her. He did not think of what was, but of what, under changed
circumstances, might be. To encourage such fantasy was the
idlest self-torment, but he had gone too far in this form of
indulgence. He became the slave of his inflamed imagination....
Companionless, inert, he suffered the tortures which are so
ludicrous and contemptible to the happily married. Life was
barren to him, and would soon grow hateful; only in sleep could
he cast off the unchanging thoughts and desires which made all
else meaningless. And rightly meaningless; he revolted against
the unnatural constraints forbidding him to complete his
manhood. By what fatality was he alone of men withheld from the
winning of a woman's love?
He could not bear to walk the streets where the faces of
beautiful women would encounter him. When he must needs leave
the house, he went about in the poor, narrow ways, where only
spectacles of coarseness, and want, and toil would be presented
to him. Yet even here he was too often reminded that the
poverty-stricken of the class to which poverty is natural were
not condemned to endure in solitude. Only he who belonged to
no class, who was rejected alike by his fellows in privation
and by his equals in intellect, must die without having known
the touch of a loving woman's hand.
The summer went by, and he was unconscious of its warmth and
light. How his days passed he could not have said....
One evening in early autumn, as he stood before the book-stall
at the end of Goodge Street, a familiar voice accosted him. It
was Whelpdale's. A month or two ago he had stubbornly refused
an invitation to dine with Whelpdale and other acquaintances,
and since then the prosperous young man had not crossed his
path.
"I've something to tell you," said the assailer, taking hold
of his arm. "I'm in a tremendous state of mind, and want
someone to share my delight.... You know Dora Milvain; I have
asked her to marry me, and, by the Powers! she has given me an
encouraging answer! Not an actual yes, but encouraging! She's
away in the Channel Islands, and I wrote----"
He talked on for a quarter of an hour. Then, with a sudden
movement, the listener freed himself.
"I can't go any farther," he said hoarsely. "Goodbye!"
Whelpdale was disconcerted.
"I have been boring you. That's a confounded fault of mine; I
know it."
Biffen had waved his hand, and was gone.
A week or two would see him at the end of his money. He had no
lessons now, and could not write; from his novel nothing was
to be expected. He might apply again to his brother, but such
dependence was unjust and unworthy. And why should he struggle
to preserve a life which had no prospect but of misery?...
It was in the hours following his encounter with Whelpdale
that he first knew the actual desire of death, the simple
longing for extinction. One must go far in suffering before
the innate will-to-live is thus truly overcome; weariness of
bodily anguish may induce this perversion of the instincts;
less often, that despair of suppressed emotion which had fallen
upon Harold. Through the night he kept his thoughts fixed on
death in its aspect of repose, of eternal oblivion. And herein
he found solace.
The next night it was the same. Moving among many common needs
and occupations, he knew not a moment's cessation of heartache,
but when he lay down in the darkness a hopeful summons
whispered to him. Night, which had been the worst season of his
pain, had now grown friendly; it came as an anticipation of the
sleep that is everlasting.
A few more days, and he was possessed by a calm of spirit such
as he had never known. His resolve was taken, not in a moment
of supreme conflict, but as the result of a subtle process by
which his imagination had become in love with death. Turning
from contemplation of life's one rapture, he looked with the
same intensity of desire to a state that had neither fear nor
hope.
One afternoon he went to the Museum Reading Room, and was busy
for a few minutes in consultation of a volume which he took
from the shelves of medical literature. On his way homeward
he entered two or three chemists' shops. Something of which
he had need could be procured only in very small quantities;
but repetition of his demand in different places supplied him
sufficiently. When he reached his room, he emptied the contents
of sundry little bottles into one larger, and put this in his
pocket. Then he wrote rather a long letter, addressed to his
brother in Liverpool....
* * * * *
"Really," said Jasper, "one can't grieve. There seemed no
possibility of his ever earning enough to live decently
upon. But why the deuce did he go all the way out there?
Consideration for the people in whose house he lived, I dare
say; Biffen had a good deal of native delicacy...."
"Was he still so very poor?" asked Amy, compassionately.
"I'm afraid so. His book failed utterly."
"Oh, if I had imagined him still in such distress, surely I
might have done something to help him!"--So often the regretful
remark of one's friends, when one has been permitted to perish.
Letter to the Earl of Chesterfield
BY SAMUEL JOHNSON
(English man of letters, 1709-1784; maker of a celebrated English
dictionary, and the subject of one of the world's most famous
biographies. Dr. Johnson might be called the first professional
literary man; the first who lived by his trade and was respected for
it. So the present letter, addressed to one of the most powerful
personages of the time, may be said to mark the end of the age of
patronage in the literary world: the system whereby authors dedicated
their works to noblemen, and received food and favors in return)
My Lord, I have been lately informed, by the proprietor
of the World, that two papers, in which my Dictionary is
recommended to the publick, were written by your Lordship. To
be so distinguished, is an honour, which, being very little
accustomed to favours from the great, I know not well how to
receive, or in what terms to acknowledge.
When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your
Lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by
the enchantment of your address, and could not forbear to
wish that I might boast myself _Le vainquer du vainqueur de
la terre_;--that I might obtain that regard for which I saw
the world contending; but I found my attendance so little
encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me
to continue it. When I had once addressed your Lordship in
publick, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing which a
retired and uncourtly scholar can possess. I had done all that
I could; and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected,
be it ever so little.
Seven years, my Lord, have now past, since I waited in your
outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which
time I have been pushing my work through difficulties, of which
it is useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the
verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word
of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did
not expect, for I never had a Patron before.
The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and
found him a native of the rocks.
Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a
man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached
ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have
been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had
been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and
cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till
I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical
asperity, not to confess obligations where no benefit has been
received, or to be unwilling that the Publick should consider
me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me
to do for myself.
Having carried my work thus far with so little obligation to
any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though
I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I
have been long wakened from that dream of hope in which I once
boasted myself with so much exultation,
My Lord,
Your Lordship's most humble
Most obedient servant,
SAM. JOHNSON.
Mother Hubbard's Tale
BY EDMUND SPENSER
(See page 493)
Full little knowest thou that hast not tride,
What hell it is in suing long to bide:
To loose good dayes, that might be better spent;
To waste long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow;
To fret thy soule with crosses and with cares;
To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires;
To fawne, to crowche, to waite, to ride, to ronne,
To spend, to give, to want, to be undonne.
Unhappie wight, borne to desastrous end,
That doth his life in so long tendence spend!
The Journal of Arthur Stirling
BY UPTON SINCLAIR
(A young poet, starving and about to commit suicide, leaves his
farewell testament to the world)
The poet! He comes with a heart trembling with gladness; he
comes with tears of rapture in his eyes. He comes with bosom
heaving and throat choking and heart breaking. He comes with
tenderness and with trust, with joy in the beauty that he
beholds. He comes a minstrel, with a harp in his hand--and you
set your dogs upon him, you drive him torn and bleeding from
your gates!
The poet! You make him go out into the market and chaffer for
his bread! You subject him to the same law to which you subject
your loafers and your louts--that he who will not work cannot
eat! Your drones and your drunkards--and your poets! Every man
must earn for himself, every man must pay his way! No man must
ask favors, no man must be helped, no man shall be different
from other men! For shame! For shame!...
I am to die now, therefore let me write it: that I was a man
of Genius. And that you have trodden me down in the struggle
for existence. I saw things that no other man has ever seen,
I would have written things that no other man can ever write.
And you have trodden me down in the struggle for existence--you
have trodden me down because I could not earn my bread!
This is what I tell you--this is what I cry out to you, that
the man of Genius _cannot_ earn his bread; that the work by
which he develops his power is something absolutely and utterly
different from the work by which he earns his bread; and that
every hour which he gives to the one, he lessens his power and
his capacity for the other. Every hour that he gives to the
earning of his bread, he takes from his soul, he weakens his
work, he destroys beauty which never again can he know or dream.
And this again is what I tell you, this again is what I cry
out to you: that the power by which a man of Genius does his
work, and the power by which he earns his bread, are things so
entirely distinct that _they may not occur together at all_!
The man may have both, but then again he may only have the
former. And in that case he will die like a poisoned rat in a
hole.
Last Verses
BY THOMAS CHATTERTON
(This boy, 1752-1770, came to London friendless and unknown, and on
account of starvation committed suicide at the age of eighteen. He has
become the classic example of the world's mistreatment of its poets.
The reference to Bristol is to his native city)
Farewell, Bristolia's dingy piles of brick,
Lovers of mammon, worshippers of trick!
Ye spurned the boy who gave you antique lays,
And paid for learning with your empty praise.
Farewell, ye guzzling aldermanic fools,
By nature fitted for corruption's tools!
I go to where celestial anthems swell;
But you, when you depart, will sink to hell.
Farewell, my mother!--cease, my anguished soul,
Nor let distraction's billows o'er me roll!
Have mercy, Heaven! when here I cease to live,
And this last act of wretchedness forgive.
The "Pinch of Poverty"
BY FRANCIS THOMPSON
(English poet, 1860-1907, who lived neglected and died in
misery)
'Tis the convinced belief of mankind that to make a poet sing
you must pinch his belly, as if the Almighty had constructed
him like a certain rudimentary vocal doll.
Man as God
(_From "A Ballad in Blank Verse"_)
BY JOHN DAVIDSON
(See pages 216, 761)
How vain! he cried. A God? a mole, a worm!
An engine frail, of brittle bones conjoined;
With tissue packed; with nerves, transmitting force;
And driven by water, thick and coloured red:
That may for some few pence a day be hired
In thousands to be shot at! Oh, a God,
That lies and steals and murders! Such a God
Passionate, dissolute, incontinent!
A God that starves in thousands, and ashamed,
Or shameless in the workhouse lurks; that sweats
In mines and foundries! An enchanted God,
Whose nostrils in a palace breathe perfume,
Whose cracking shoulders hold the palace up,
Whose shoeless feet are rotting in the mire!
A Preface to Politics
BY WALTER LIPPMANN
(American writer upon public questions, born 1889)
We have almost no spiritual weapons against classicalism:
universities, churches, newspapers are by-products of a
commercial success; we have no tradition of intellectual
revolt. The American college student has the gravity and
mental habits of a Supreme Court judge; his "wild oats" are
rarely spiritual; the critical, analytical habit of mind is
distrusted. We say that "knocking" is a sign of the "sorehead"
and we sublimate criticism by saying that "every knock is a
boost." America does not play with ideas; generous speculation
is regarded as insincere, and shunned as if it might endanger
the optimism which underlies success. All this becomes such an
insulation against new ideas that when the Yankee goes abroad
he takes his environment with him.
Learning
(_From "Thus Spake Zarathustra"_)
BY FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
(German philosopher, 1844-1900, whose lofty utterance has
suffered from materialistic interpreters)
As I lay in sleep a sheep ate up the ivy crown of my head--ate
and then said: "Zarathustra is no more a scholar."
Said it and went strutting away, and proud. A child told it to
me....
This is the truth. I am gone out of the house of the scholars,
and have slammed to the door behind me....
I am too hot, and burning with my own thoughts; oft will it
take away my breath. I must into the open and out of all dusty
rooms.
But they sit cool in cool shadows; they wish in all things to
be but spectators, and guard themselves lest they sit where the
sun burn the steps.
Like those who stand upon the street and stare at the people
who go by; so they wait also and stare at the thoughts that
others have thought.
If one touches them with the hands, they make dust around them
like meal-sacks, and involuntarily; but who could guess that
their dust comes from corn and the golden rapture of the summer
fields?