Eternal Father, strong to save,Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deepIts own appointed limits keep:O hear us when we cry to TheeFor those in peril on the sea.
Eternal Father, strong to save,Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deepIts own appointed limits keep:O hear us when we cry to TheeFor those in peril on the sea.
Eternal Father, strong to save,Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deepIts own appointed limits keep:O hear us when we cry to TheeFor those in peril on the sea.
No, in the fiction of Joseph Conrad the gods, both male and female, have shriveled up and crumbled and blown away as dust, and over the universe there broods a dark inscrutable fate. Conrad himself puts it into words: “a stealthy Nemesis lies in wait.” You see, he uses the classic symbol, and unites in one blending the terror of fourdifferent races—Greek, Polish, English and Malay. This “stealthy Nemesis” is the enemy of men, and they fight against it, and almost invariably it overcomes them and destroys them, the good and generous and capable as well as the cowardly and weak.
Such is the fact of man’s life; and the question then becomes: what shall man do? The first thing, obviously, is for him to understand; and so the great master toils incessantly and with religious ardor to embody his philosophic theory in human types and experiences. Do not let anyone lead you astray on this point: these dignified and noble art-works are “thesis novels,” composed for a didactic purpose, in exactly the same way as the Sunday school tales about little Bobbie who fell into the creek because he disobeyed his mother and went fishing on the Lord’s day. Great moral lessons do not get embodied in art-works by accident, any more than the wheels of a watch get put together by accident; so, while you absorb the elaborately contrived pessimism of Joseph Conrad, you must know that you are attending an Agnostic Sunday school.
Men have not merely to understand, but to act; therefore the pupils of this school are taught a moral code. They must stand together against the stealthy Nemesis which seeks to destroy them; and their rules of behavior must be so deeply graven in their souls that the reaction will be instinctive—for you never know at what moment the stealthy Nemesis will strike at you, in the form of fire at sea, or storm, or collision, or submerged reefs, or savages, or the slow, insidious action of physical or moral disease.
What is this code? The answer is, the code of the British merchant service. Its primary purpose is the protection of the ship, a valuable piece of property. So, in place of an imaginary God in a speculative heaven, we have a vaguely suggested Owner on the shore. This Owner is the force which creates the shipping industry and keeps it going; He is the goal of loyalty for officers and crew. Agnosticism upon closer study turns out to be Capitalism.
The ship has for ages been the source of a natural and spontaneous autocracy, begotten of the constant threat of danger; hence it comes that the naval officer is the mostcomplete and instinctive snob in the world, and the merchant officer the perfect task-master. And when the self-made, risen-from-the-ranks merchant officer comes on shore, and has to deal with shore questions, we are not surprised to find him a hearty and boisterous Tory. In “Chance” we meet—but assuredly not by chance!—a feminist woman, and learn what Conrad thinks of this species; he impresses us as a fuming old British clubman, who would like to get the heads of all thinking women upon one neck—and then wring the neck!
In the same way, in “Under Western Eyes” we get Conrad’s view of politics; in a book written in the days of the Tsardom, we learn that a Siberian refugee who devotes his life to the overthrow of this hideous tyranny is an odious and unspeakable creature, and that a woman of means who helps him is a gawk and a bundle of scandals. It is a picture of social revolutionists of a sort you may pick up at any tea-table where the wives of legation attachés shrug their delicate white shoulders and prattle snobbish wit. Published in 1911, this book is a prophecy of the White Terror, that combination of holy knavery and romantic reaction which has made Poland the curse of Europe.
But the proper place to study Conrad is at sea. And we find that, just as Meredith takes the British caste system to be God, just as O. Henry takes the Standard Oil Company to be God, so Conrad takes the capitalist ownership and control of marine transportation. Analyzing the stories in the light of economic science, we find the stealthy Nemesis revealed as organized greed exploiting unorganized ignorance.
Take that most fascinating of sea tales, one of the great imaginative feats of literature: take “Youth.” A young man puts out to sea in an old tub of a vessel, and the old tub goes to pieces beneath his feet. One after another comes a procession of calamities; but he is young, and what does he care for troubles and dangers? The ship goes down in the end, but it is all a glory and a thrill to Youth, which laughs at the stealthy Nemesis and lives to tackle it again.
When we are young we read this, and our hearts are lifted up, and we know ourselves to be gods. But with maturing years and understanding, we come back to it,and what do we find? The cruel power which we took to be Nature, the perils of the deep, turns out to be nothing more romantic than the practice of marine insurance! If you own a ship and it becomes old and unseaworthy, you would in the ordinary course of events not trust a valuable cargo and a score of human lives to that ship. But finding that you can insure both ship and cargo, and get more money by sinking her than by selling her for junk, you continue to send her out until she falls to pieces; and Youth, deliberately kept in ignorance by capitalist control of schools and colleges, thinks it glory and wonder to sail out and fight a losing battle with “Nature.”
There is a story concerning Joseph Conrad, that when he became master of a ship, he conceived a desire to bring her home through the Torres Straits, which are especially dangerous waters. He had the fantastic idea that he wanted to sail in them, because he had read stories about them. The owners permitted him to have his way, and the critics and reviewers are thrilled by this sign of “romance” in ship owners. Critics and reviewers, you see, are sweet and innocent souls; only an evil-minded “muck-rake man” would make inquiries as to the age of that ship and the amount of insurance she carried through the Torres Straits!
The capitalist shipping industry is full of facts of this sort. Take, for example, the “Plimsoll line.” There was an English workingman who became a rich manufacturer, and did not forget his class, but devoted his life to trying to save the seamen and officers who were sent out in these “coffin ships.” He was elected to Parliament, and brought in a bill providing that ships should not be loaded beyond a certain line—the “Plimsoll line,” it was called. When his fellow-members voted it down, he shook his fist at them and called them “villains.” Of course they were shocked, and wanted to expel him, but they didn’t quite dare; they gave him ten days to think it over, and then he apologized, and they passed his bill—a most admirable form of compromise for a reformer!
For a generation after this, as cold statistics showed, some thousands of British seamen and officers escaped all the cruelties of Nature, the stealthy Nemesis of Joseph Conrad. For years this “Plimsoll line” served these thousands of seamen and officers in place of the Holy Trinity,the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the Gentle Jesus meek and mild, the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, and likewise all the Saints in the calendar, the glorious company of the Apostles, the goodly fellowship of the Prophets, the noble Army of Martyrs, the heavenly choir of Angels and Archangels, the Cherubim and Seraphim, and the Holy Church throughout all the world. But this divine supervision cost British shipping owners a certain number of millions of pounds of profit every year, and so they paid the campaign funds of their Tory and Liberal parties and got their henchman, David Lloyd-George, in authority and repealed that law; so now those thousands of seamen and officers are once more falling victims to the stealthy Nemesis!
And Joseph Conrad—what has he to say about this? As a man of the sea, he knows the facts; and in “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” that most cruel-souled book, he takes occasion to pour his jeering scorn upon those who try to save the lives of seamen. You have to read the actual text to get the full effect of his venom. A seaman is talking:
“I mind I once seed in Cardiff the crew of an overloaded ship—leastways she weren’t overloaded, only a fatherly old gentleman with a white beard and an umbreller came along the quay and talked to the hands. Said as how it was crool hard to be drownded in winter just for the sake of a few pounds more for the owner—he said. Nearly cried over them—he did; and he had a square mainsail coat, and a gaff-topsail hat too—all proper. So they chaps, they said they wouldn’t go to be drownded in winter—depending upon that ’ere Plimsoll man to see ’em through the court. They thought to have a bloomin’ lark and two or three days’ spree. And the beak giv’ ’em six weeks—coss the ship warn’t overloaded. Anyways they made it out in court that she wasn’t. There wasn’t one overloaded ship in Penarth Dock at all. ‘Pears that old coon he was only on pay and allowance for some kind people, under orders to look for overloaded ships, and he couldn’t see no further than the length of his umbreller. Some of us in the boarding-house, where I live when I’m looking for a ship in Cardiff, stood by to duck that old weeping spunger in the dock. We kept a good look out, too—but he topped his boom directly he was outside the court.... Yes. They got six weeks’ hard....”
“I mind I once seed in Cardiff the crew of an overloaded ship—leastways she weren’t overloaded, only a fatherly old gentleman with a white beard and an umbreller came along the quay and talked to the hands. Said as how it was crool hard to be drownded in winter just for the sake of a few pounds more for the owner—he said. Nearly cried over them—he did; and he had a square mainsail coat, and a gaff-topsail hat too—all proper. So they chaps, they said they wouldn’t go to be drownded in winter—depending upon that ’ere Plimsoll man to see ’em through the court. They thought to have a bloomin’ lark and two or three days’ spree. And the beak giv’ ’em six weeks—coss the ship warn’t overloaded. Anyways they made it out in court that she wasn’t. There wasn’t one overloaded ship in Penarth Dock at all. ‘Pears that old coon he was only on pay and allowance for some kind people, under orders to look for overloaded ships, and he couldn’t see no further than the length of his umbreller. Some of us in the boarding-house, where I live when I’m looking for a ship in Cardiff, stood by to duck that old weeping spunger in the dock. We kept a good look out, too—but he topped his boom directly he was outside the court.... Yes. They got six weeks’ hard....”
The coast of California, near which I live, is a favored lurking place of the stealthy Nemesis. The entire coast is a line of jagged rocks, with very few harbors, and vessels continually strike upon the rocks and are pounded to pieces. Sometimes they are great passenger steamers, andhundreds of people are in danger and have to be taken off on tugs; the newspapers give us hourly bulletins of what is happening, and their correspondents perform prodigies of daring and speed to get us photographs of the disaster in the first editions. The public reads of these tragedies, and is awed by the spectacle of man struggling in vain against the stealthy Nemesis.
What is the fact about this matter? It is very simple: the Nemesis here consists of the fact that the Pacific Coast from Seattle to San Diego makes a convex curve; so ships of all sorts, the great lumber schooners, the little salmon steamers, the great passenger liners, have to go a few miles farther out to sea in order to be safe. But that additional distance at sea means so many million dollars a year out of the pockets of the owners. It means not merely that more fuel has to be burned, it means that more of the ship’s time has to be taken, and more wages paid to officers and crew; in the case of the great liners it means that several hundred passengers have to be fed an additional meal!
So naturally the owners, being fully covered by insurance, are clamorous in their demands, and the ship’s officers are bending all their energies to save every yard of distance and every second of time. Always and everywhere up and down the coast they are gliding past the rocky points, and in the darkness and fogs and storms they risk an inch too much. To me this seems an eminently “romantic” situation; I can imagine a great imaginative artist rearing it into a tremendous symbol of human guilt. But this artist would make the discovery that the principal magazines on the Pacific Coast are published by the railroad companies which own and operate the steamship lines!
Every hour the progress of science increases man’s control over nature, and therefore the safety of travel at sea. If it were not for private ownership and the blind race for profits, these dangers would be largely a memory, and the stealthy Nemesis of Conrad, like the gods of the Polish Catholic and the Anglican Protestant churches, would shrivel up and crumble and blow away as dust. Would Conrad like that? Or would he feel the irritation of an old man who has staked his reputation upon a bad guess? He gives you the answer in “The Nigger of theNarcissus,” a whole novel written to satirize the altruistic impulse, and expose it as a destroyer of discipline and character. He assigns the role of “agitator” at sea to an odious little Cockney rat; and when this creature has got the poor crew stirred up to mutiny, what sport Conrad has with them! Such lofty sarcasm:
Our little world went on its curved and unswerving path carrying a discontented and aspiring population. They found comfort of a gloomy kind in an interminable and conscientious analysis of their unappreciated worth; and inspired by Donkin’s hopeful doctrines they dreamed enthusiastically of the time when every lonely ship would travel over a serene sea, manned by a wealthy and well-fed crew of satisfied skippers.
Our little world went on its curved and unswerving path carrying a discontented and aspiring population. They found comfort of a gloomy kind in an interminable and conscientious analysis of their unappreciated worth; and inspired by Donkin’s hopeful doctrines they dreamed enthusiastically of the time when every lonely ship would travel over a serene sea, manned by a wealthy and well-fed crew of satisfied skippers.
In the chapter on Matthew Arnold I mentioned Paul Elmer More as a critic who has based his reputation upon the thesis of man’s helplessness in the presence of the universe; I explained Matthew Arnold as a poet who finds his ideal both moral and poetical in a dignified and mournful resignation to the evils of life. And here is another of these Great Mourners, a zealot of Pessimism. Woe to you, if in his Agnostic Sunday school you venture to breathe a hope for mankind! Woe to you if you commit the supreme offense of art, the suggesting of a happy ending for a novel! Woe to you, beyond all land-woes; for now you are in Neptune’s empire, and there is no Bill of Rights, no freedom of speech, press or assemblage; he who murmurs an optimistic thought hears the dread word Mutiny—and the “beak” gives him “six months hard!”
Henry James remarks somewhere that an American has to study for fifty years of his life in order to attain, culturally speaking, the point from which a European starts at birth. Just what does he mean by this unpatriotic utterance? I am reminded of it when I think of Anatole France, and recall his characteristic sayings. Consider the following:
’Tis a great infirmity to think. God preserve you from it, my son, as He has preserved His greatest saints, and the souls whom He loves with especial tenderness and destines to eternal felicity.
’Tis a great infirmity to think. God preserve you from it, my son, as He has preserved His greatest saints, and the souls whom He loves with especial tenderness and destines to eternal felicity.
Now it is possible to conceive of a Catholic bishop or a Methodist missionary or a Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan who might be too stupid to understand that remark; but it is difficult to conceive how, understanding it, he could withhold the tribute of a smile. Into this remark a great master of words has distilled the essence of a civilization, the precious flavor of centuries of culture. There are only thirty-four words in it, and yet you can afford to meditate upon it for a long time. The writer of such a paragraph possesses a mind emancipated from the shams and delusions of the ages; he is skeptical, realistic, and as witty as it is possible for a man to be; yet also he is urbane—he does not seize you by the shoulders and shake you, for he has learned that there are all kinds of strange people in the world, and he asks merely that you consent to smile with him.
How is such a man brought into existence? His father was a book-seller, and so he breathed culture in his childhood; he read everything from every part of the world, especially things written by men long since dead; things full of that beauty mingled with sadness which is one of the gifts of time. Anatole France learned to be at home in strange cultures, and at the same time he studied the masters of his own country, whose specialties are precision and lucidity and charm of phrase. At the age of twenty-seven he published a story, “The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard,” a sentimental pretty tale about an elderly, kind-hearted French antiquarian, who rescues a little girl from cruel mistreatment, and then discovers that under the French law he is guilty of abduction. It might have been written by any of our magazine writers of the cheer-up, God’s-in-His-Heaven school—provided only that these writers had possessed a thousand years of culture.
It was just what the Academy of Richelieu loved, and they crowned it. The young writer was taken up by an exquisite French lady, who became his mistress, and set up a salon for him, and helped him to meet all the editors and critics—which is how you make fame and fortune in Paris, and sometimes in America, I am told. This Frenchman was clever and witty, sensual, cynical, but not too much so for his elegant free-thinking tradition. He wrote other novels and a great quantity of miscellaneouswritings, and in 1896, at the age of fifty-two, his labors were rewarded by the great French honor, he became one of Richelieu’s forty Immortals. In the ordinary course of events there was nothing more for him to do, save to sink back in his comfortable arm-chair and listen to the plaudits of Paris.
But a strange and alarming thing happened. The struggle over the Dreyfus case arose, and Anatole France leaped into the arena, joining Zola, whom he had previously denounced as a beastly writer. Here was something absolutely without precedent—that an Academician should turn into a Socialist, and take to attending meetings of workingmen, and addressing to them remarks unfit to be quoted in respectable newspapers. Worse even yet, he, the pride and glory of art-for-art’s-sake culture, took to putting radical propaganda into novels! They had let him in among the Immortals, and there was no way to get him out; so here was one of the pillars of literary authority, portraying his country as an island of penguins, and the pillars of his church and state as grotesque, wingless birds, dressing themselves in frock-coats and silk hats and hopping about upon obscene errands. Have a glimpse of them:
“Do you see, my son,” he exclaimed, “that madman who with his teeth is biting the nose of the adversary he has overthrown, and that other one who is pounding a woman’s head with a huge stone?”“I see them,” said Bulloch. “They are creating law; they are founding property; they are establishing the principles of civilization, the basis of society, the foundations of the State.”“How is that?” asked old Maël.“By setting bounds to their fields. That is the origin of all government. Your penguins, O Master, are performing the most august of functions. Throughout the ages their work will be consecrated by lawyers, and magistrates will confirm it.”
“Do you see, my son,” he exclaimed, “that madman who with his teeth is biting the nose of the adversary he has overthrown, and that other one who is pounding a woman’s head with a huge stone?”
“I see them,” said Bulloch. “They are creating law; they are founding property; they are establishing the principles of civilization, the basis of society, the foundations of the State.”
“How is that?” asked old Maël.
“By setting bounds to their fields. That is the origin of all government. Your penguins, O Master, are performing the most august of functions. Throughout the ages their work will be consecrated by lawyers, and magistrates will confirm it.”
“Penguin Island” was published in 1908; and then came the war, and this elderly antiquarian—he was seventy then—came forward and enlisted to fight for his country. But that did not mean, as with many others of lesser judgment, that he gave up his hopes for the working class, and surrendered to the propaganda of capitalist nationalism. We find him at the age of seventy-five, carrying a red flag in a procession of French radicals, protesting against the acquittal of the assassin of Jaurès. Wefind him ready to break an engagement to a literary banquet in order to address a working-class meeting in protest against capitalist church and state. He, the greatest of all the Immortals, sets himself against the other thirty-nine; he, the old man, sets himself against the cultured youth of his country, who have abandoned themselves to a mixture of Catholic mysticism with homosexuality, of Dadaist imbecility with athleticism having for its goal the turning of machine-guns upon the workers.
The books of Anatole France afford a curious study of struggle between the old pessimistic, cynical culture of capitalism and the new creative culture of the awakening proletariat. These cultures are absolutely irreconcilable, but Anatole France believed in both. He was a social revolutionist with his conscious mind and judgment, while he remained a fatalist and a scoffer with his hereditary culture, that ancient accumulation of despair and terror which he had breathed in with the dust in his father’s old book-shop.
So he writes “The Gods Are Athirst,” in which he portrays mankind as given up to endless misery and destruction; or “The Revolt of the Angels,” in which again the heavens are drowned in blood and there is no hope. After which he issues a manifesto upholding Russia, or calling upon the workers to rally to the Third International. He goes before a convention of the organized teachers of France, and delivers to them an address of such magnificent eloquence as to move the assemblage to tears. I have quoted from this address in “The Goslings”; I repeat one paragraph—because it is the duty of a writer to spread these words on every possible occasion, to bring to the great master the help upon which he relies:
Reason, wisdom, intelligence, forces of the mind and heart, whom I have always devoutly invoked, come to me, aid me, sustain my feeble voice; carry it, if that may be, to all the peoples of the world, and diffuse it everywhere where there are men of good will to hear the beneficent truth! A new order of things is born. The powers of evil die, poisoned by their crime. The greedy and the cruel, the devourers of peoples, are bursting with an indigestion of blood. However sorely stricken by the sins of their blind or corrupt masters, mutilated, decimated, the proletarians remain erect; they will unite to form one universal proletariat, and we shall see fulfilled the great Socialist prophecy: “The union of the workers will be the peace of the world.”
Reason, wisdom, intelligence, forces of the mind and heart, whom I have always devoutly invoked, come to me, aid me, sustain my feeble voice; carry it, if that may be, to all the peoples of the world, and diffuse it everywhere where there are men of good will to hear the beneficent truth! A new order of things is born. The powers of evil die, poisoned by their crime. The greedy and the cruel, the devourers of peoples, are bursting with an indigestion of blood. However sorely stricken by the sins of their blind or corrupt masters, mutilated, decimated, the proletarians remain erect; they will unite to form one universal proletariat, and we shall see fulfilled the great Socialist prophecy: “The union of the workers will be the peace of the world.”
It was interesting to note, in the obituaries which the death of Anatole France brought forth, how almost universally this aspect of his life was glossed over. Our literary reviews told all about him as a master of French prose, a supreme ironist in the tradition of Rabelais, Voltaire, and Renan. But they left it for the radical papers to celebrate Anatole France, the crusader, the carrier of the red flag. I am urged to believe that our literary Tories are honest, but all this moves me to wonder.
I ask them, once for all, what is it they want? What proof will content our cultural stand-patters? Here is their crowned favorite, their revered master, the man who was as witty as it is possible for a human being to be; and he sets out to prove to them that it is just as easy to be witty in the service of Justice as in the service of Mammon. I ask you, gentlemen of letters, do you know how a sentence can be wittier than this: “The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
Mrs. Ogi has been silent for some time; saving her energies in anticipation of that greatest satisfaction known to wives. Now she takes it. “I told you so!”
“What did you tell me?” asks Ogi, uneasily.
“You have filled up a book, and haven’t got in a word about Gloria Swanson’s salary, nor what Rupert Hughes really got for ‘The Sins of Hollywood’!”
“It’s this way,” says her husband. “I found I had so much material that I’d have to make two volumes, one dealing with the artists of the past, and the other with living artists.”
“I remember, eight years ago,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you started out to write a criticism of the world’s culture in one volume; and presently you came to me looking worried, and said you had so much about Religion it would need a volume to itself. So you took a hundred thousand words for Religion. And when you started after Journalism, and took a hundred thousand words to tell thestory of your own life, and another hundred thousand to tell about the newspapers. And then Education; you came again and said you had so much about the colleges, you’d have to give a whole volume to them. You took two hundred and five thousand words for the colleges, and then a hundred and ninety-five thousand for the schools!”
As Ogi has no answer to this indictment, she continues: “Just what do you think you’ve written now?”
“I’ve written a text-book of culture.”
“For the schools?”—very sarcastically.
“It will be serving as a text-book in the high schools of Russia within six months.”
“In Russia, yes—”
“In every country in Europe, as soon as the social revolution comes. The workers, taking power, bring a new psychology and a new ethics; naturally they have to have a new art, and new art standards.”
“They may want to write their own text-books,” suggests Mrs. Ogi.
“No doubt they will—and better than mine. But so far no one has done it—and they will have to use such weapons as they find ready.”
Mrs. Ogi is one of those who observe the phenomena of religion with a mingling of fear and longing. It would be wonderful to believe like that! “Of course,” she says, “if your side has its way—”
“That is how history is made,” says Ogi. “Once upon a time a wealthy Virginia planter, with other wealthy gentlemen from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, rose up and declared rebellion against his king. A war was fought, and the rebel planter won; therefore he is known as the Father of His Country, and all little boys in school learn how he could not tell a lie. If he had lost his war against his king, he would have been a vile and traitorous varlet, and every little boy in school would have learned by heart a long list of the lies he had told. And just so it is with writers who take up the cause of the dispossessed and disinherited. If the proletariat wins in its war against capitalism, these outcast writers will become leading men of letters. On the other hand, if the proletariat loses, they will remain ‘propagandists,’ and ‘tub-thumpers,’ and ‘buzzards,’ and ‘muckrakers’—you recognize those terms.”
Yes, Mrs. Ogi admits that she recognizes them; and he continues:
“I have given the workers an honest book, a sound book, from the point of view of their hopes and needs. I say to them: Why should you read the books of your enemies, those who make their glory and their greatness out of your misery and humiliation? Why should you walk into the traps that are set for you? Life is very cruel, but assuredly this is the most cruel thing in your fate—that you should admire those actions which crush you, those tastes which spurn you, those standards which have as their beginning and end your enslavement and degradation.”
“None but workers are to see this book?” asks Mrs. Ogi.
“I use the word in its revolutionary sense, the strict scientific sense of those who do the useful and necessary labor, whether of hand or brain. I am pleading especially with the young brain-workers, the intellectuals. For the hand-worker is a slave by compulsion, but the young thinker, the student, has the ancient choice of Hercules, between virtue and vice. He may sell himself to the exploiters, he may take the dress-suit bribe, the motor-cars and the ‘hooch’ parties, and the beautiful, soft-skinned, hard-souled women; or he may heed my plea, and steel his soul, and go back to the garret which is the cradle of the arts, back to the ancient and honorable occupation of cultivating literature upon a little oatmeal.
“To this young intellectual, hesitating at the parting of ways, I say: Comrade, this world of organized gambling and predation in which we live seems powerful and permanent, but it is an evil dream of but a few more years; the seeds of its own destruction are sprouting in its heart. I am not referring to its moral failure, the fact that it thwarts the most fundamental of human cravings, for justice and for freedom; I mean in the bare material sense—it fails to employ its own workers, it makes misery out of its own plenty, and war and destruction of its abounding prosperity. It is as certain to fall as a pyramid standing on its tip; and when it falls, what is left but the workers? What other force is there, having solidarity, the sense of brotherhood, the ideal of service, of usefullabor, as against the buying and selling and exploiting, the robbing, killing and enslaving which is capitalism?
“This great new force is shaping itself in our world, preparing for the making of the future. And shall this new life not have an art? Shall men not thrill to this vision, and rouse others to make it real? Here lies your task, young comrade; here is your future—and not the timid service of convention, the million-times-over repetition of ancient lies, the endless copying of copies of folly and cruelty and greed. The artists of our time are like men hypnotized, repeating over and over a dreary formula of futility. And I say: Break this evil spell, young comrade; go out and meet the new dawning life, take your part in the battle, and put it into new art; do this service for a new public, which you yourselves will make. That is the message of this book, the last word I have to say: that your creative gift shall not be content to make art works, but shall at the same time make a world; shall make new souls, moved by a new ideal of fellowship, a new impulse of love, and faith—and not merely hope, but determination.
“That is what this book is about,” says Ogi; “and maybe not many will get me, but a few will, and they will be the ones I am after.”
Mrs. Ogi comes to him and puts her arms about him, trembling a little. “Yes, of course,” she says; “and I’m glad you wrote it, in spite of all my terrors.”
“Ah, now!” says Ogi, smiling. “We ought to have a picture of this! A happy ending, in the very best bourgeois style!”
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