*EXPLANATION*
In order to warn off trespassers, I have begun my novel with four
chapters that an expert bookmaker--indeed, my own book-maker--has
pronounced dull: I knew that only those to whom the book belonged would
persevere. By the same token, being aware that the story which is
prefaced by an apology is ended with suspicion, I preface this story
with an apology: I want to apologize to my friends for using them and to
my enemies for not giving them what they have expected; I want to create
in the minds of the former the suspicion that I am darker than I have
been painted, and in the minds of the latter the suspicion that I am not
a whited sepulcher but a blackened altar.
In 1909 I projected, vaguely it is true, a cycle of four novels, each to
be independent of the others in plot and character, but all carrying
forward a definite view of life. As, however, the announcement of a
cycle is the surest means of alienating readers, not to mention
publishers, I held my tongue about the general plan and concerned
myself, in public, only with its separate parts. These were "The House
of Bondage," "The Sentence of Silence," "Running Sands" and "The
Spider's Web."
Privately, the first question demanding answer was that of method. In
what I had to say I believed burningly, as I still believe deeply, and
the great thing with me was not to say it in the manner that most people
would call Art, but to say it in the manner that would convert as many
readers as possible to my way of thinking. I did not want to produce
the effect of a work of Art; I wanted to produce conviction of truth.
On the one hand, I must avoid even the appearance of a personal interest
in my characters, because that would divert my readers into the charge
of sentimentality; and on the other, I must not hesitate to marshal my
events in their largest force, even though the reviewers called this
melodrama.
Here is a choice that is sure to come sooner or later to every writer of
fiction: the choice between what he has considered Art for Art's sake
and what he considers art for Man's sake. He has kept in mind the day
when his books will be judged solely by their own merits, when the
causes with which he sympathizes have been defeated and forgotten or
established and beyond the need of sympathy; when new evils demand new
remedies and old wounds are healed. He knows, as few of his
contemporary readers can know, that then he will be heavily handicapped
by all that is immediate or local in what he writes; that by nothing
save adherence to the eternal standards of Art can he endure. He may be
certain, in his own mind, that any true art is the expression, in the
manner best calculated to secure a desired effect, of the ideas
essential to the effect, but he will be equally sure that the world will
not so consider. If he sets any propaganda above Art, the future will
forget his work, the present meet it with prejudice, probably with
opposition; and against all this he has to set only his own faith in the
righteousness of the thing he has to say.
I made my choice and began my cycle with that one of my four novels
which I knew would receive the readiest hearing. In "The House of
Bondage" I wanted to put before my readers the theory that the
superimposing of one human being's will, or the will of any group of
human beings, upon any other's is the Great Crime. For the purposes of
illustration, I chose for attack the chief present means of such
imposition or compulsion, the pressure of our economic system, and
depicted its effects in forcing women into prostitution. The result was
amazing: the book sold and, they tell me, is still selling in my own and
several other countries and tongues; it either originated or promoted a
series of sociological crusades and legislative investigations
concerning themselves with the symptoms and neglecting the disease, and
by no persons was it so heartily welcomed as by those who are themselves
the instruments of compulsion. I began to think that the instruments
were becoming conscious and that I might not be so unpopular after all.
I was never more mistaken. In "The Sentence of Silence" I proceeded to
show other effects of the same evil compulsion: the effects of our
failure to instruct our children in sex-hygiene; of imposing upon our
heirs the moral code that our economic system has imposed upon us, and
of imposing upon our daughters an abstinence from which we absolve our
sons. In its circulation, this book left its publishers nothing to
complain of; but its reception was of a sort vastly different from that
of its predecessor. Parents that were loath to see other people's
daughters forced into prostitution were shocked at a proposal to educate
their own sons against the practice of seduction; husbands that lived in
secret polygamy were aghast at the idea of instructing their wives in
any code save that which they preached, but did not follow; and men that
took any woman's body they could get were horrified at the notion of any
woman sharing their liberty.
The remarkable book-reviewer of the generally sane Philadelphia
"Inquirer" upbraided me because, after I had dragged my central
character, Dan Barnes, through the sewers of debauchery and venereal
disease, I did not "save" him by marrying him to a "pure" woman!
Came the third novel, "Running Sands," and came a louder protest. I had
here tried to take a step further my argument against compulsion and to
show that, if I had been right before, then compulsion by matrimony--the
marriage of the old to the young and the knowing to the ignorant, rape
within wedlock and forcing of wives to become mothers against their
will--was wrong. Here again the people read and the instruments of
compulsion condemned me. Those persons who, without a wry face among
them, swallow the funny but futile jokes of another type of fiction were
so whole-hearted in their curses of my book that I was inclined to
believe their present bitterness enhanced by their recollection of how
they had once praised me.
Now I have written "The Spider's Web," the last of my four, and I have
read that it is expected to be to its predecessors what Landor said the
fourth George was to his. For a good pair of eyes at the conventional
point of view, it is all this and more; but then there are no good eyes
at the conventional point of view, and so I fear that, without help, the
condemners of "The Sentence of Silence" and "Running Sands" may find
this novel innocent: there is only one "bad" woman among its
speaking-roles, and she appears but three brief times. In order that my
condemners may not miss what they want to find in me, I shall tell them
in a simpler form than the dramatic what I have done.
I have made Luke Huber a man that comes to see the sin of compulsion
exerting itself against humanity in all the powers that conduct modern
society; in the ownership of men and things; in our entire system of
production and distribution, and in the creatures and ministers of that
system: Government, Politics, Law, and what passes by the name of
Religion.
Such a mind as Huber's comes to Dora Marsden's conclusion: "Life is no
two days the same: the same measure never fits twice exactly; hence the
futility of state-making, law-making, moral-making, when all that is of
importance is life-augmenting, and that is the individual's affair." He
sees that only Labor creates wealth, and that nothing should be robbed
of a fraction of what it creates. He sees that actually government is
"not the president, congress and the courts, not any body or power
created by the Constitution, but always a combination of important
business interests,"[#] not even any individual, and that even if it
were completely constitutional it would still be compulsion--that to
"consent" to be governed is to consent to be compelled.
[#] Charles Edward Russell.
He would argue of politics:
"We Americans pretend to hate kings, and so we devise a republic;
finding the rule of one man bad, we believe we can better it by
multiplying it by ninety millions; finding an ounce has evil effects, we
take a ton. We simply change the tyranny of one for the tyranny of
many. Even if the will of our fifteen million voters ruled us as they
tell us it does, then each one of the fifteen million would be giving
all the 14,999,999 others the right to interfere with him in return for
his one fifteen-millionth right to take a hand in interfering with them.
For that fraction of power over others, he would be giving away all his
power over himself."
Huber would say of religion and law:
"Both are tools in the hands of compulsion. Both try to belittle divine
humanity, the first making Man a pygmy before God and the second making
Man a pygmy before a few men. There can be no crime against God, since
God, or the force that created the world, is omnipotent; no crime
against law, since law is an instrument of the great crime. The law a
deterrent? It isn't. The statistics prove that, so far as statistics
can prove anything. But you prove it yourself. Why do you try to
refrain from conscious wrong? Not because you're afraid of the law in
heaven or on earth--you're not a coward. You simply want to do the
decent thing because it _is_ the decent thing. The desire to do the
decent thing: that's all the religion and law there is to-day among even
the people that make laws and religions for the purpose of ruling other
people by them. The rulers sin only because their system has dimmed
their judgment of the decent thing, and so they go on maintaining their
law and their religion. The ruled will want to do the decent thing just
as soon as they become responsible creatures through the abolition of
these compulsions, exactly as the rulers, though dulled by keeping up
their system, wanted to do it as soon as they became responsible
creatures by growing above the dictates of these compulsions."
Other men, other religions. For some faith; for some denial. Huber's
religion was the Gospel of Negation.
He came to this by conversion, which means the sudden revelation by the
sub-conscious self to the conscious self of the meanings that the
sub-conscious self has long been drawing from the conscious self's
experiences. The outward phenomena of such conversions--"being saved,"
"receiving grace," "being regenerated," "experiencing religion"--are
perfectly familiar to all persons that have attended evangelical
churches, know the work of the Salvation Army, or have read Harold
Begbie's "Broken Earthenware." The psychology of the force causing them
has been elaborately, but not always scientifically, treated in William
James's stimulating volume, "Some Varieties of Religious Experience."
The force itself can, and often does, change the entire life of a man
from evil to good. The men so changed that we most hear of are changed
by an affirmation of faith, because they are men whose only spiritual
experience has been in connection with accepted religions and because
their change is generally first exhibited in the public meeting-place of
the followers of some such religion; but there are other men similarly
changed by a denial of faith, because they have had spiritual
experiences distinct from any accepted religion, and of them we hear
little, because their change is generally wrought in the solitude in
which they have had those spiritual experiences which are unconnected
with accepted religion.
Huber was a man of the latter sort. Being of that sort, he says the
last word that follows logically from an acceptance of "The House of
Bondage."
About the manner of this last word I should, perhaps, say something
more. I have not, I confess with shame, read M. Fabre's book on the
habits of the spider, but I have read other books and studied the spider
in my own garden; and the more I learned of web and spider the more I
realize how Huber would see their simulacra in our civilization and
learn at last that there the web outlived many spiders. That is how I
got my title, and that is why I have tried to construct my chapters with
a certain rough resemblance to the female diadem-spider's web. At the
end, both the web and Huber win: the former because it catches its fly
and goes on catching other and larger flies; the latter because his soul
has found itself.
The method of procuring data requires a fuller explanation. The writer
who endeavors to present actual conditions in fictional form has
constantly to choose between truth and facts, and if his readers accept
his facts, they are inclined to doubt his imagination. In all of these
four books, I have been careful to present only types, but I have tried
to endow each type with character, and each character has assumed a
living personality in my own mind. I have used no person and no event
that was isolated; but, having individualized my types and chosen my
typical events, I have felt free to employ the latter in whatever way
seemed to me best fitted to enforce my argument, and at liberty to
imagine what the former would think and do under the stress of the
latter. I have heard of a dozen women in real life designated as the
originals of Mary Denbigh, three wives selected as Muriel Stainton, and
one man--myself--named as Dan Barnes. The discoverers of these
prototypes only flattered my powers of detection and portraiture at the
expense of my imagination and good taste.
I intended to present, and I have presented, simply certain types
produced by our civilization and working in the media of our economic
system. I spent considerable time in New York last winter to procure
certain data; I found the data, selected what was typical as I saw it,
and made my story. "The Spider's Web," whether well done or ill, has
been done by my own imagination.
Help I have had and eagerly sought. An historian always cites his
authorities and acknowledges his assistants; I could never see why a
novelist should be less honest or less courteous, since every realist
must delegate some of his research-work, and even the writer of that
fiction farthest from life must take something from the fancy of his
acquaintances. I know, and I shall not soon forget, how much "The House
of Bondage" owes to the encouragement given my work by its publishers.
During the latter part of the actual writing of "The Spider's Web," it
was impossible for either my wife or me to be in New York, and I taxed
the generous patience of many a friend by inquiries. I exacted tribute
from Max Eastman's editorials in "The Masses," Walter Lippmann's papers
in "The Forum," and C. P. Connolly's in "Everybody's Magazine" as
expressing three current phases of American opinion; I even seized a
picture from Mary Macdonald Brown's accounts of New York and secured
from an editorial in "The Nation" my reference to the past of the Astor
House. Moliere took his own where he found it; I have taken other men's
at my need. To all of these my score is long; to those few and fine
newspaper and magazine critics and reviewers who have seen my purpose
and helped it--who, when they have differed or blamed, blamed or
differed honestly--to them, from whom I have learned so much, my
obligation is still greater.
No opinions that are worth while are unalterable; only the insincere
have fixed convictions: my cycle of four books expresses an attitude
toward life that I may some day very well change. This series
completed, I am left with my conscience free and my brain at liberty to
turn toward work that I may try to design only by the more lasting
standards of Art, but no change of belief or work will make me regret
having expressed what I believed. I am thoroughly aware of how, if they
understood it, the condemners of "The Sentence of Silence" and "Running
Sands" would condemn this book. I am equally aware of how many persons
that are my comrades, friends, and well-wishers will alter their
relations toward me when they have read "The Spider's Web"; but, though
I shall be sorry to lose these, I shall not be sorry for the reason of
their loss. Horace Traubel, who puts most things well, has put this
well:
"I have tried to stay in the house of comfort,
to sleep in my bed of ease,
But something not outside of me, something inside of me says:
This will not do....
I have tried the easy way: it was hard:
Now I will try the hard way: I guess it will be easier."