Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,Old time is still a-flying,And this same flower that smiles today,Tomorrow will be dying.
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,Old time is still a-flying,And this same flower that smiles today,Tomorrow will be dying.
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,Old time is still a-flying,And this same flower that smiles today,Tomorrow will be dying.
Here is an attitude of relaxation toward life; the poet gives his advice under a beautiful simile and with alluring melody, and therefore it is poetry. If we should call it propaganda, all critics would agree that we were “stretching the word,” and being absurd. But now, take four lines by Matthew Arnold:
Charge once more, then, and be dumb!Let the victors, when they come,When the forts of folly fall,Find your body by the wall.
Charge once more, then, and be dumb!Let the victors, when they come,When the forts of folly fall,Find your body by the wall.
Charge once more, then, and be dumb!Let the victors, when they come,When the forts of folly fall,Find your body by the wall.
Here is an utterance of exactly the opposite kind, an utterance of moral conviction and resolution; the poet is bidding us fight for truth and justice. Like Herrick, he has chosen an effective simile, and has put music and fervor into his message; as poetry his lines are exactly as good as Herrick’s; and yet, if we called them propaganda, how many critics would object?
This book will endeavor to demonstrate that exactly the same thing applies to the phenomena of the class struggle, as they appear either in real life or in works of art. It comes easy to human beings to accept society as it is, and to admire the great and strong and wealthy. On the other hand, it gives us a painful wrench to be told that there are moral excellences and heroic splendors in the souls of unwashed and unbeautiful workingmen. We resent such ideas, and likewise the persons who persist in forcing them into our minds; which explains why all orthodox critics agree that Jesus and Tolstoi are propagandists, while Shakespeare and Goethe are pure and unsullied creative artists. Such distinction between “art” and “propaganda” is purely a class distinction and a class weapon; itself a piece of ruling-class propaganda, a means of duping the minds of men, and keeping them enslaved to false standards both of art and of life.
We have promised to prove our thesis psychologically, by watching the art process at work, and historically, by studying the art works of the ages. We begin with the former task.
Let us investigate the art process in its elemental forms, as we have seen them in the story of Ogi. Art begins as the effort of man to represent reality; first, for the purpose of bringing it back to his own mind, and second, for the purpose of making it apprehensible to others. Just as Ogi would seek for ways to keep the meat of the aurochs for as long as possible so that he might eat it, so he would keep the memory of the aurochs so that he might contemplate it. And just as he would share the meat of the aurochs in a feast with his fellows, and derive honor and advantage therefrom, so he would use a picture of the aurochs, or a story of the hunt, or a song about it, or a dance reproducing it.
Thus we note two motives, the second of them predominantly social. It is this impulse to communicate ideas and emotions to others, that becomes the dominant motive in art, and is the determining factor in the greatness of art. We share Ogi’s memory of the hunt, his thrills of fear, his furious struggle, his triumph over a chunk of brutal and non-rational force. Try it on your own little Ogis, and you will find they never tire of hearing about the aurochs hunt; and—here is the essential point—while hearing, they are living in the minds of others, they are becoming social beings. So through the ages the race has developed its great civilizing force, the sympathetic imagination, which has brought the tribes together into nations, and ultimately may bring the nations into the human race.
The pleasures which we derive from a picture or representation of reality are many and complicated. There is, first of all, the pleasure of recognition. In its cruder form it is like guessing a puzzle; in more mature reproductions we have the pleasure of following the details. “That is old Smith,” we say—“even to the wart on his nose!” We say: “You can see the shine of the fish’s scales, you can wipe the fuzz off the peach, you can buryyour hands in the birds’ feathers!” But is that all there is to art? Manifestly not, for if it were, the sons and grandsons of Ogi would have been put out of business by the photographic camera. You can take a microscope to the product of a camera, and discover endless more details—a bigger magic than any son or grandson of Ogi has achieved.
But even supposing that a micro-photograph were the highest art, still you could not get away from the influence of personality. There would always remain the problem: Upon what shall the camera-lens be focussed?
The first artist I met in my life was a painter, the late J. G. Brown. He used to paint pictures of newsboys and country urchins, and the quaint-looking old fellows who loaf in cross-roads stores. As a boy I watched him at work, and roamed about the country with him when he selected his subjects. At this distance I remember only two things about him, his benevolent gray beard, and the intense repugnance he expressed when I pointed out an old war veteran who had lost an arm. Deformity and mutilation—oh, horrible! Never could an artist tolerate such a subject as that!
But growing older, I observed that some of the world’s greatest artists had made a habit of painting mutilations and deformities. I saw “Old Masters” portraying crucifixions and martyrdoms; I saw the nightmares of Doré, and the war paintings of Verestchagin. So I understand the difference between a man who wishes to probe the deeps of the human spirit, and one who wishes merely to be popular with children and childish-minded adults. The late J. G. Brown was a “realist,” according to the popular use of the term; that is, having selected a subject, he painted him exactly as he was; but by deliberately excluding from his artistic vision everything suggesting pain and failure, he left you as the sum total of his work an utterly false and sentimental view of life.
Most artists go even further in imposing their personality upon their work. Having selected a subject, they do not reproduce it exactly, but modify it, emphasizing this trait or that. This process is known as “idealizing.” The word is generally understood to mean making the thing more pretty, more to the beholder’s taste; but this is a misuse of the word. To idealize a subject means tomodify it according to an idea, to make it expressive of that idea, whether pleasing or otherwise. Henry James tells a story about a portrait painter, who takes as his subject a prominent man; divining the fundamental cheapness and falsity of the man’s character, he paints a portrait which brings out these qualities, and so for the first time reveals the man to the world, and causes the man’s wife to leave him. That is one kind of “idealizing”; but manifestly the portrait painter who practiced that method would have a hard time to find sitters.
What generally happens in such cases we saw when Ogi was invited to portray the Witch Doctor and the Old Man of his tribe. The last great hero of the Hohenzollerns, who paid for those white marble monsters at which I tittered in the Sieges Allée, is cursed with a withered left arm, a cause of agonies of humiliation to his strutting soul. In his photographs you will see him carefully posed, so that his left arm is partly turned away. But how about the countless paintings he had made of himself? Do you imagine that the painter ever failed to supply a sound and sturdy left arm? In the same way, in the pictorial labors of all the Ogis of Egypt, you will find the ruler always represented as of abnormal stature. Manifestly, in a settled empire the ruler will be of smaller stature than his fighting men, because he will be coddled in childhood; but the smaller he becomes in reality, the more rigid the art convention that he is big.
It was for offenses such as this that Plato drove the artists out of his Republic. They were liars and pretenders, the whole tribe, and destroyed men’s respect for truth. But as a matter of fact, this kind of idealizing of rulers and fighting men may be entirely sincere. The artist is more sensitive than his fellowmen—that is what makes him an artist; he shrinks from pain and violence, and feels a real awe for authority. He thinks his sovereign is bigger in spirit; and so, in making him bigger in body, the artist is acting as a seer and philosopher, bringing out an inner truth. Such is the clue to the greater part of our present-day art standards; snobbery and subservience, timidity and worship of tradition, also bragging and strutting and beating of tom-toms. Every little tea-party poet and semi-invalid cherishes a strong and cruel dream—Nietzsche with his Blond Beast, and Carlylewith his Hero-worship, and Henley with his Song of the Sword, and Kipling with his God of our Fathers, known of old, Lord of our far-flung battle-line.
Little by little we now begin to note the outlines of Ogi’s art code. Two negative propositions we may consider as clear: Ogi does not paint the thing as it really is; and he does not paint the thing as he sees it. The former he could not do, for he does not know what the thing really is; and the second he would consider bad manners, bad morals and bad taste. Ogi paints the thing as he thinks it ought to be; or, more commonly, he paints the thing as he thinks other people ought to think it to be.
And now comes the question: Why, having chosen his subject, does Ogi idealize it according to one idea, and not according to another? Are such decisions matters of accident or whim? Assuredly not; for human psychology has its laws, which we can learn to understand. We ask: What are the laws of Ogi, his hand and his eye and his brain? What forces determine that he shall present his “reality” in this way and not in that?
The first thing to say is: Don’t ask Ogi about it, for he cannot tell you. Ogi is not at all what he thinks he is, and does not produce his works of art from the motives he publishes to the world. We shall find that the fellow has been almost too shrewd—he has contrived a set of pretenses so clever that he has fooled, not merely his public, but himself. He who would produce a great work of art, said Milton, must first make a work of art of his own life. Ogi has taken this maxim literally, and got out a fancy line of trade-lies.
It is perfectly plain that the artist is a social product, a member of a tribe and swayed by tribal impulses. But you find him denying this with passion, and picturing himself as a solitary soul dwelling in an ivory tower, galloping through the sky on a winged horse, visited and directed by heaven-sent messengers, and wooed by mysterious lovely ladies called Muses. At the same time, however, he wants at least one lady love who is real; and this ladylove does not often share his interest in the imaginary lady loves. On the contrary, she is accustomed to point out the brutal fact that Ogi wants three good chunks of aurochs meat every twenty-four hours; also, the lady herself wants a little meat—and more important yet, she wants it served according to the best tribal conventions, those to which she was accustomed before she ran away and married an artist. The tribal law decrees that the glass on her table must be cut by hand, even though it is cut crooked; the linen on her table must be embroidered by hand, because, if it is done wholesale, by machinery, it is not “art.”
Theoretically, it is possible for an artist to produce his art-works for the approval of the imaginary Muses; but as a matter of fact you find that the most solitary old Ogi has somebody, a faithful friend, or an old housekeeper, or even a child, whose approval he craves. Even an artist on a desert island will be thinking that some day a ship will land there; while young and rebellious artists produce for a dream public in the future. I myself did all my early work from that motive; and in Voltaire I came upon what seemed to me the cruelest sentence ever penned: “Letters to posterity seldom reach their destination!”
Ogi must have an audience. So, in his selecting, his idealizing, and his other varieties of feigning, he has always before him the problem: Will this please my public? And to what extent? And for how long? There is no birth control movement in Ogi’s brain; vast numbers of dream children are born there, and he must select a few of them to be nourished and raised up to reality, while he sentences the others to be starved and buried.
Having become a professional, living by his work, Ogi is under the necessity of finding an audience that will feed him. And remember, it is not merely the three chunks of aurochs meat per day, and three more for Mrs. Ogi; it is the means of serving Mrs. Ogi’s meat in the fashion her social position requires. Surely I do not have to prove the proposition that Ogi cannot produce beautiful and inspiring works of art while Mrs. Ogi is raising ructions in the cave!
So comes the great struggle in the artist’s soul, a struggle which has gone on for three thousand, threehundred and thirty-three generations, and may continue for as many more. Among the children of Ogi’s brain are some he dearly loves, but who will not “sell.” There are others whom he despises, but whom he knows the public will acclaim and pay for. “Which shall it be?”
The answers have been as various as the souls of artists. We shall see how through the ages there have been hero artists and martyr artists, men who have produced what they believed to be the best, in the face of obloquy, ridicule, starvation, even the dungeon and the stake. But, manifestly, these conditions are not the most favorable for the birth of masterpieces. To develop an art technique requires decades of practice and study. To feel other persons’ emotions intensely and reproduce them according to some coherent plan; to devise new forms, and arrange millions of musical notes or words or molecules of paint in a complex design—all this requires intense and persistent concentration. Men cannot do such work without leisure; neither can they do it while they are despising themselves for doing it. So we may set down the following as one of the fundamental art laws:
The bulk of the successful artists of any time are men in harmony with the spirit of that time, and identified with the powers prevailing.
Who pays for art? The answer is that at every stage of social development there are certain groups able to pay for certain kinds of art. These groups may be large or small, but they constitute the public for that kind of art, and determine its quality and character; he who pays the piper calls the tune. It should need no stating that Rolls-Royce automobiles are not made according to the tastes of rag-pickers and ditch-diggers, nor yet of poets and saints; they are made according to the tastes of people who can afford to pay for Rolls-Royce automobiles. If our thinking about the arts were not so completely twisted by false propaganda, it would seem an axiom to say that the first essential to understanding any art product is to understand the public which ordered and paid for that art product.
Some arts, of course, are cheaper than others. Ballads cost nothing; you can make one up and sing it on any street corner. Hence we find the ballad close to the people, simple and human, frequently rebellious. The same thing applies to folk tales and love songs—until men take to printing them in books, after which they develop fancy forms, understandable only to people who have nothing to do with their time except to play with fancy things.
Beginning with the primitive art forms, it would be possible to arrange the arts in an ascending scale of expensiveness, and to show that exactly in proportion to the cost of an art product is its aristocratic spirit, its subservience to ruling class ideals. Of all the art forms thus far devised, the most expensive per capita is the so-called “grand opera”; this grandeur has to be subscribed for in advance by the “diamond horseshoe,” and consequently there has never been such a thing as a proletarian grand opera—if you except the “Niebelung Ring,” which was so effectively disguised as a fairy story that nobody but Bernard Shaw has been able to decipher its incendiary message.
Many years ago I was talking with a captain of industry, prominent in New York political life. I spoke of the corruption of the judges, and he contradicted me with a smile. “Our judges are not bought; they are selected.” And exactly so it has been with our recognized and successful artists; they have been men who looked up to the ruling classes by instinct, and served their masters gladly and freely. If they did not do so, they paid the penalty by a life of conflict and exile; if they happened to be poor and friendless, they do not even receive the gratitude of posterity, because their dream-children died unborn, and were buried, along with their parents, in graves unknown. “Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest.”
It will be our task to study the great art periods one after another, taking the leading artists and showing what they were, what they believed, how they got their livings, and what they did for those who paid them. We shall find that everywhere they were members of their group, sharing the interests and the prejudices, the hates and fears,the jealousies and loves and admirations of that group. We shall find them subject to all the social stresses and strains of the time, and fighting ardently the battles of their class. For life is never a static thing, it is always changing, always subjecting its victims to new dangers, forcing them to new efforts. Either the ruling class is threatened by the attacks of outside enemies, or else there is a new class arising inside the community. In times of internal order and prosperity, there come luxury and idleness, the degeneration of the tribe; there come all sorts of novelties startling the elders—modernists sapping the old time creeds, and flappers adopting the vices of men.
Such evils must be corrected; such enemies of the tribe must be put down; and in the course of these labors, what chance is there that the ruling classes will fail to make use of their most powerful weapon, that of art? There is simply no chance whatever. Ogi will be called on by his masters; or else he will act of his own impulse—he will lead the crusade, singing the praises of the old time ways, “idealizing” the ancestral heroes, the holy saints and the founding fathers, and pouring ridicule upon the bobbed heads of the flappers. The critics will leap to Ogi’s support, hailing him as the Lord’s own anointed, a creator of masterpieces, dignified, serene, secure in immortality. This is art, the critics will aver, this is real, genuine, authentic art; while out there in the wilderness somewhere howls a lone gray rebellious wolf, attacking and seeking to devour everything that is beautiful and sacred in life—and the howling of this wolf is not art, it is vile and cheap propaganda.
The critics are certain that the decision is purely a question of aesthetics; and we answer that it is purely a question of class prestige. They are certain that art standards are eternal; and we answer that they are blown about by the winds of politics. Social classes struggle; some lose, and their glory fades, their arts decay; others win, and set new standards, according to their interests. The only permanent factors are the permanent needs of humanity, for justice, brotherhood, wisdom; and the arts stand a chance of immortality, to the extent that they serve such ideals.
The reader who shares the art beliefs now prevalent in the world will be quite certain that the ideas here being expounded are fantastic and absurd. Among those who thus differ is a friend of mine, a very great poet who is patiently reading the manuscript and suffering, both for himself, and for all poets who will follow him. He writes: “There is and should be such a thing as the enjoyment of what we are pleased to term ‘pure’ beauty.” And again: “You must believe either that we have a right to play, in which case the poet-who-doesn’t-preach is justified, or believe the contrary, with its corollary of a coming race of solemn scientific monsters.”
I do not want to gain an argument by the easy device of omitting everything that does not help me; therefore I take up this friend’s contentions. Manifestly an element of play is essential to all art; it is what distinguishes art from other forms of expression, essays, sermons, speeches, mathematical demonstrations. If we do not emphasize this play element, it is not from failure to realize the difference between a work of art and an essay, a sermon, a speech or a mathematical demonstration; it is merely because the play element in art is recognized by everyone, to the exclusion of the element of rational thought and purpose, which is no less essential.
Let us ask: what is play? The answer is: play is nature’s device whereby the young train themselves for reality. Two puppies pretending to bite each other’s throats, learn to fight without having their throats torn in the process. So all young creatures develop their faculties; and this function is carried right up into modern art products. From many new novels I may learn, without risking the fatal experiment, what will happen to me if I permit the wild beast of lust to get me by the throat.
Let us have another principle, to guide us in our analysis:
Art is play, having for its purpose the development of human faculties, and experiment with the possibilities of life.
But notice this distinction. Two puppies, leaping ateach other’s throats and dodging away, do not reason about what they are doing; they are guided by instinct. But a modern novelist knows what he is doing; he is thinking ordered thoughts about life, and making a deliberate record thereof. So we have a second principle:
Art is play, to the extent that it is instinctive; it is propaganda when it becomes mature and conscious.
Manifestly, art can never be entirely play, because no human being is entirely instinctive; nor can it be entirely propaganda—if it is to remain art, it must keep the play form. Moreover, the play element must be real, not simply a sham; the work must be a representation of life so skillful that we can pretend to take it for actuality. Wilkie Collins gave his formula for success as a fiction writer: “Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait.” In other words, make ’em do just what they would have to do, if they were taking part in actual life. This is the one indispensable element: the artist, by whatever trick, must persuade us that this is no trick, but reality.
The function of play in adults has been ably studied in Dr. Patrick’s book, “The Psychology of Relaxation.” We humans have only recently developed the upper lobes of the brain, and cannot stand using them all the time; it is necessary occasionally to let them rest, and to live in the lower centers; in other words, to go back into childhood and play. To my friend the Poet, who asks if I believe in play, I answer by pointing to my tennis racquet. But what shall we say about adults who play all the time? Modern science has a name for such people; it calls them morons.
If you are a moron artist, producing for a moron public, it will not avail to argue with you. But we have to inquire: how comes it that the art of morons is glorified and defended as “true” and “pure” art? How comes it that the quality of enjoyment without thought, which is characteristic of puppies and infants, comes to be considered a great quality in adults? In the fields of industry and education, we know that pitiful thing, the mind of a child in the body of a grown man. How comes it that such defective mentality is glorified in the field of art?
The answer is what you will expect from me. There is a class which owns and runs the world, and wishes everything to stay as it is. As one of the functions ofownership, this class controls culture and determines taste. It glorifies the scholar, the man who walks backward through life; and likewise it glorifies the art-moron, the man who has emotions without brains.
The so-called “purity” of art is thus a form of artificial childhood. Just as the Chinese bind the feet of their women in order to keep them helpless and acquiescent, so ruling-class culture binds the imagination of the race so that it may not stride into the future. And if you think that those who run the world’s thinking for the ruling class are not intelligent enough to formulate such a purpose as this—my reply is that you are as unintelligent as they would wish you to be, and you justify all the contempt they feel for you.
We now assume as demonstrated the following propositions. First:
The artist is a social product, his psychology and that of his art works being determined by the economic forces prevailing in his time.
And second:
The established artist of any period is a man in sympathy with the ruling classes of that period, and voicing their interests and ideals.
If this be true, the next step to the understanding of art, and the history of art periods past and present, is to understand the economic forces controlling mankind; the evolution and struggle of classes.
We get that far, when the argument is broken in upon by the particular Mrs. Ogi who inhabits the cave where this manuscript is produced. Says Mrs. Ogi: “In other words, you are going to give them your Socialist lecture.”
Says Mrs. Ogi’s husband: “But—”
Says Mrs. Ogi, who finishes her husband’s sentences, as well as his manuscripts: “You promised me to write one book without propaganda!”
“But—” once more—“this is a book to prove that all books are propaganda! And can I conduct a propaganda for propaganda that isn’t propaganda?”
“That depends,” says Mrs. Ogi, “upon how stupid you are.”
She goes on to maintain that the purpose of all propaganda is to put itself across; the essence of it being a new camouflage, which keeps the reader from knowing what he is getting. “If you imagine that people who take up a discussion of art standards are going to read a discourse on the history of social revolutions, I call you silly, and you aren’t going to alter my opinion by calling me Mrs. Ogi.”
“My dear,” says the husband, in haste, “all that is not to be taken literally. Mrs. Ogi is the wife of the artist in general; she is the human tie that binds him to the group, and forces him to conform to group conventions.”
“I know—like all men, you want to have it both ways. Everybody will assume—”
“I won’t let them assume! It shall be explicitly stated that you are not Mrs. Ogi.”
“Let it be explicitly stated that there has never been any hand-embroidered table-linen in this cave—never any sort of table-linen but paper napkins since I’ve been in it!”
“My dear,” says Ogi, patiently, “you were the one who first pointed out to me the significance of hand-embroidered table-linen in the history of art. You remember that time when we went to the dinner-party at Mrs. Heavy Seller’s—”
“Yes, I remember; and what you ought to do is to put that dinner-party into your book. Entitle your next chapter ‘The Influence of Lingerie on Literature,’ or, ‘The Soul of Man Under Silk Hosiery.’”
“That’s not bad,” says Ogi, “I’ll use it later. Meantime, I’ll do my best to liven up the argument as you request.” And so he retires and cudgels his brain, and comes back with a new chapter—bearing, not the dignified title of “The Evolution of Social Classes,” as he had planned, but instead, a device to catch the fancy of the idle and frivolous—
Twenty-five years ago an American, himself a victim of the commercial system and dying of consumption, wrote a novel which contained a description of a horse-trade. The novel was rejected by many publishers, but came finally to one reader who recognized this horse-trading scene as the epitome of American civilization. He persuaded the author to rewrite the book, putting the horse-trade first, and making everything else in the novel subsidiary; this was done, and the result was the most sensational success in the history of American fiction. Young and old, rich and poor, high and low, all Americans recognized in the opening scene of “David Harum” the creed they believed in, the code they followed, the success they sought: they bought six hundred thousand copies of the book. I was young at the time, but I recall how all the people I knew were shaking their sides with laughter, discussing the story with one another, delighting in every step of the process whereby David got the better of the deacon.
Let us analyze this horse-trade, taking our data from the book. First, there is the lie of the seller, describing a horse which he believes to be useless. “He’s wuth two hundred jest as he stands. He ain’t had no trainin’, an’ he c’n draw two men in a road wagin better’n fifty.” And second, there is the lie of the purchaser, as the purchaser himself boasts about it afterwards: “Wa’al, the more I looked at him, the better I liked him, but I only says, ‘Jes so, jes so, he may be wuth the money, but jes as I’m fixed now he ain’t wuth it tome, an’ I hain’t got that much money with me if he was,’ I says.”
So we see that in a horse-trade both the traders lie; and further we see that each pretends to be telling the truth, and makes an effort to persuade the other that he is telling the truth. Watching the ignoble process, we perceive that neither of the traders is ever sure how far his own lies are being accepted; nor is he sure what modicum of truth there may be in the other’s lies. So each is in a state of uncertainty and fear. When the process has been completed, one trader has a sense of triumph, mingled withcontempt for the victim; the other trader has a sense of hatred, mingled with resolve to “get square.”
It is further to be pointed out that this conflict of wits, this modern form of the duello, while it seems ruthless and cruel, yet has its own strict ethical code. David would lie to the deacon, but he would not pick the deacon’s pocket, nor would he stab the deacon in the back, no matter how badly the deacon might have defeated him in commercial war. We observe also that the author feels under the necessity of persuading us that David would not have cheated the deacon unless he had first been cheatedbythe deacon; this being the conventional lie of the horse-trader turned novelist. We may also observe that next to the impulse to acquisitiveness, the supreme quality of this Yankee farmer, comes the impulse to sociability; having consummated his bargain, he tells his sister about it, and the humanness of the story lies not merely in the triumph of David, but in his pleasure in telling his sister. And observe that David tells her the truth without reservation. There might be other matters about which he would lie to his sister, but so far as concerns this horse-trade, he knows that she will not betray him to the deacon.
When the first savage offered a fish in exchange for a cocoanut, and made statements as to the freshness of the fish, and the difficulties and perils of fishing, the trade-lie was a comparatively simple thing. But in the process of industrial evolution, there have been developed so many variations and complexities that an encyclopedia of occupational deceptions would be required. Suffice it to say that the principle is understood in every nation and clime, being embodied in innumerable maxims and witticisms:caveat emptor: business is business; dog eat dog; the devil take the hindmost; look out for Number One; do others or they will do you; self-preservation is the first law of Nature. In a civilization based upon commercial competition,laissez faireand freedom of contract, the lie of the horse-trader becomes the basis of all the really significant actions of men and women.
So obvious is this, so clearly is it set forth in the wisdom of the race, that at first thought it seems surprising that anyone could be led into believing a trade-lie. But it is obvious that the test of a competent liar is that he gets himself believed; like the endless struggle between thegun-maker and the armor-plate maker, is the struggle between the trader and his victim. The trader is aided by the fact that an impulse towards constructiveness has been planted in the human heart, which breeds a repugnance to dishonesty. So there are ideals and aspirations, religions, loyalties and patriotisms; there are the Christs and Galileos of history, the Parsivals and Don Quixotes of legend. As the trader himself puts it, there is a sucker born every minute. The trader kills a silly sheep, and puts the skin over his wolf’s hide; so we have religious institutions and ethical systems, philanthropic endowments, professional codes, political platforms; we have honors, offices and titles, proprieties and respectabilities, graces, refinements, etiquettes and standards of good taste. Many of these things begin naively and in good faith; but in a society given up to commercial competition, and dominated by systems of greed, they all become trade-lies, and are used as weapons in the war of the classes.
In the stage of economic evolution where the savage exchanges a fish for a cocoanut, the balance of advantage in the trade may be equal. The fisherman may need the cocoanut as badly as the cocoanut-gatherer needs the fish. But as soon as we come to the stage where tokens are accepted, there begins a shifting of the balance of advantage; for the reason that the seller comes to specialize in the selling of one thing, whereas the more complex the society, the more different things the buyer must buy, and so he remains an amateur as to each. Moreover, the sellers learn to combine; they form partnerships, firms, corporations, alliances, leagues, associations, parties, classes; the buyer, on the other hand, remains unorganized and helpless. He is the consumer, who takes what he can get; he is the proletarian, who has only his chains to lose; he is that plaything of the competitive process, that jest of the trader through the ages, the general public. “The public be damned,” said a great seller of railway transportation, and his phrase has become the corner-stone of capitalist civilization.
Nineteen hundred years ago a revolutionary economist remarked, “To him that hath shall be given; while from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” And this economic process is one which tends continually to accelerate, multiplying itself by geometrical progression. In present-day society, the sellers are nearly all organized, while labor is only ten per cent organized, and the ultimate consumer is not organized at all. We have thus the combination of a monopoly price with a competitive wage, and the surplus wealth of the world is drawn by automatic process into the hands of a small class. The world’s selling power is now vested in combinations of capital, called “trusts,” which present themselves in the aspect of enormous fortresses of lies.
Merely to give a catalogue of the various trade-lies embodied in the daily operations of such a “trust” would require a volume. There are so many kinds of lies that no one man can know them all. There are lies carried in the heads and embodied in the practice of petty chiefs of departments. There are lies so generally accepted and conventionalized that the very liars do not know them as such, and are amazed and wounded in the feelings when their attention is called to the truth. There are lies so complicated that highly trained lawyers have been paid millions of dollars to contrive them. There are lies so cleverly hidden that it would take the restoring of tons of burned account-books to prove them. There are lies so blazoned forth on billboards and in newspapers that they have become part of the daily thought of the people, and have given new words and phrases to the language.
So comes the next stage in the evolution of the trade-lie. The owners of trusts and combinations unite into parties, classes and governments for the defense of their gains. They combine and endow and perpetuate their trade-lies, making them into systems and institutions; and so we have the Lie Wholesale, the Lie Sublimated, the Lie Traditional, the Lie Classical; we have the Lie become Religion, Philosophy, History, Literature, and Art.
Turn back to Chapter II, and read the list of the six great art lies; you may now understand who made them and why. Lie Number One, the Art for Art’s Sake lie, the notion that the end of art is in the art work, is a trade lie of the art specialist, the effort of a sacred caste to maintain its prestige and selling price. Lie Number Two, the lie of Art Snobbery, the notion that art is for the chosen few, and outside the grasp of the masses, is the same. Lie Number Three, the lie of Art Tradition, the notion that new artists must follow old models, is a self-protective device of those in power. Lie Number Four, the lie of Art Dilettantism, the notion that the purpose of art is entertainment and diversion, is a device of the culturally powerful to weaken and degrade those upon whom they prey; just as the creatures of the underworld get their victims drunk before they rob them. Lie Number Five, the lie of the Art Pervert, the notion that art has nothing to do with moral questions, is the same. Lie Number Six, the lie of Vested Interest, is the sum of all the other lies, of all the infinite cruelties of predatory, class-controlled culture.
The sarcastic critic will say that I make the artist an extremely knavish and dangerous person. My answer is that he may be, and frequently is, an amiable and guileless child. His knaveries are class knaveries, collective cruelties, conventions and attitudes to life which have been produced as automatic reactions to economic forces; the individual acquires them with no more conscious thought than is involved in the assimilation of his food. Ogi lies and pretends, he cheats, robs and murders, imaginatively speaking, by the same instincts that cause him to blink his eyes in a bright light.
Says Mrs. Ogi: “Well, I see you are having your way.”
Now this is a sore subject in the cave. Each of the residents is absolutely certain that it is always the other who has his or her way; and each is able to cite chapter and verse, and frequently does so. However, at present Ogi has a guilty conscience, so he speaks softly. “I am almost through with my explanation of industrial evolution.”
“Almost!” sniffs Mrs. Ogi. “How much more?”
“Well, I have to show how successive classes emerge and acquire power—”
“Until at last we see the inevitable triumph of the proletariat and the establishment of the Co-operative Commonwealth! That will be so new to your readers, and so delightfully exciting! And meantime they sit and wonder when the scandals begin.”
“Scandals?” says Ogi. “Have I said anything about scandals?”
“You tell your readers you’re going to turn the artists’ pockets inside out and show what is in them! If you don’t do it, they’ll say, ‘This show is a frost!’”
I mention that Mrs. Ogi was brought up in exclusive social circles, where never a breath of slang could pass her lips without some female relative raising a finger and whispering: “Hush!” But times are changing, and marriage becomes more and more a lottery.
Says Mrs. Ogi’s husband: “Of course I intend to muck-rake individual artists—”
“Which artists?”
“Well, I have to begin at the beginning—”
“But you’ve already begun with the beginning of the world!”
“I have to begin now with the first significant art.”
Mrs. Ogi’s snort reminds her husband of the old days of the aurochs hunt. “What the American people want to know is how many thousand dollars a week Gloria Swanson is really getting, and what was Rupert Hughes’ total income from ‘The Sins of Hollywood.’ Is all that to be put off to the end of your book?”
“But how can I deal with present-day art ahead of ancient art?”
“You make me think of those interminable English novels, which begin with the infancy of the hero, and get through public school at page three hundred and something!”
“But, my dear, there is some old literature that people are really interested in. The Bible for example—”
“The Hundred Best Books! Number two, Homer; number three, Shakespeare; Number four, Paradise Lost—”
“But you overlook the fact—the Bible is a best-seller!”
“The people who buy it are not people who read aboutart, or would ever hear of a book on art theories. They are people like Mamma! Once upon a time a book-agent offered her a set of the World’s Great Orations, and she decided the dark red leather binding would go well with the draperies in the drawing-room. Then a couple of weeks later came another man, selling a set of books in dark green cloth. She decided these would match the decorations in the billiard-room, so she bought them also, and it wasn’t until afterwards that somebody noticed the family had two sets of the same World’s Great Orations!”
“But, my dear, there really is literature in the Bible.”
“People have been told about literature in the Bible since they were children in Sunday school, and there’s no idea in the whole world that bores them quite so much.”
“But that’s exactly the point! That’s what this book is for—to show how real literature was alive in its own day, and is just as much alive in the present day. Don’t you see what a fascinating theme: they had in Judea the very same class struggle—”
There has come that fanatical light into his eyes which Mrs. Ogi knows so well; he means to make her sit and listen to a whole chapter—and when she has the laundry to count, and the apples to boil for his supper! “Go ahead and write it,” she says, in a weary voice. “But take my advice and jazz it up!”
So Ogi goes away and postpones his exposition of the successive emergence of social classes; and instead of an impressive title such as “Agrarian Revolt in Ancient Judea,” he begins—
From the New York “Sun,” July 4, the early 1890s:
Kansas Kicking
Cranks’ Convention in Tumult at Topeka
Wild Asses of Prairie Bray
Millennium by Majority Vote Scheduled for Next November
Topeka, Kan., July 3. (Special to the “Sun.”) The open season for devil-hunting is on in Topeka today. FromNemaha County on the North to Comanche on the South, from Cherokee County on the East to Cheyenne on the West, the hunters are pouring into their state capital; money-devil hunters and speculator-devil hunters, railroad-devil hunters and rum-devil hunters. The streets of the city swarm with them, the lobbies of the hotels are packed with them, spell-binders and oratorical wizards, political quack-doctors and prohibitionist cranks, long-haired men and short-haired women, partisans of free money, free land and free love. For months they have been looking forward to this convention, which is to wrest the powers of government from the hands of a predatory plutocracy; today, if there is a lunatic in Kansas who is not in Topeka, it is only because the Wall Street devil has got him behind bars in one of the asylums.
The lobby of the American House this evening is more like the menagerie tent of a circus than like anything else ever seen in the effete East. The convention opens at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, and tonight every orator has a last chance to save the nation before the platform is made up. Audiences are not necessary, everybody talks at once, and there are a dozen men delivering exhortations, standing on the leather seats of hotel-lobby chairs. Here is “Sockless” Jeremiah Simpson, expecting to be nominated for Congress tomorrow. Coatless and tieless, his collar wilted flat, he shouts to the corn-field cohorts his denunciations of the blood-sucking leeches which have picked the bones of the farmers of Kansas. Here is Isaiah Woe, weird figure having whiskers almost to his belt and pants almost to his shoe-tops, waving his skinny arms and justifying his surname—“Woe, woe, woe—woe unto this and woe unto that—woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the rights from the poor of my people, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless!”
Isaiah is known as a “prophet” among this prairie population; he roars the grievances of the dear peepul of the prairie-country, and shakes the hayseeds and corn-dust out of his white whiskers until his audience really believes it sees a halo about his head. He does not hesitate to claim divine inspiration, declaring to the mob: “The Lordhath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives.”
Isaiah has no rival in lung-power, unless it be Micah, the Pottawatomie Prophet—“Mournful Mike,” as he is known in the state capital. This aged replica of Uncle Sam is out on a cracker-box in front of the Elks’ Club, and your reporter took down some of his sentences verbatim: “They build up Washington with blood, and New York with iniquity. The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money.... Therefore shall Washington for your sake be plowed as a field, and New York shall become heaps, and the buildings of Wall Street as the high places of a forest.”
There is a regiment of such calamity howlers and kickers, thirsting for the blood of the money-devil. There is Elijah, known as the “boy orator” from Kiowa County, and Angry Amos, the “Wild Man of Neosho.” There is one John, who calls himself the Baptist, and has adopted the singular habit of dipping his followers into water—though it must be stated that few of them show the effects after a blistering hot day in Topeka. It is reported and generally believed that the water-dipping prophet lives upon the locusts which infest the Kansas corn-fields, together with wild honey furnished by friendly bees in the cottonwoods along the creek bottoms. Apparently, however, the prophet has not brought along a supply of his customary provender, for your correspondent observed him this afternoon partaking of sinkers and coffee in the railroad restaurant, with a bunch of other wild asses from the prairie.
Kansas is scheduled to have a new political party tomorrow; a party of the peepul, to be run by prophets, none of whom will take their salaries when they get elected to office. And what is to be the platform of this party? Well, the government is to fix the price of wheat, and freight-rates are to be reduced to a point which will compel holders of railway securities to live on locusts and wild honey. All interest on money is to be abolished; the prophets of the Lord call it “usury,” and the plank in their platform on the subject reads as follows:
“If thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decaywith thee, then thou shalt relieve him, yea, though he be a stranger or a sojourner, that he may live with thee: Take thou no interest of him, or increase; but fear thy God that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him any money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase.”
And if that be not enough, bond slavery is to be forbidden by law, and beginning with the year 1900, and every fifty years thereafter, all debts are to be forgiven, and everybody is to have a fresh start. Well may Jabez Smith, chairman of the State Committee of the Republican party, watching this outfit of wild men and listening to their conglomeration of lunacy, lift up his hands and cry out: “Was ist los mit Kansas?”...
Such was news according to the New York “Sun” of Charles A. Dana’s time; the sort of news from which I got all my political ideas during boyhood. Seven times every week I would read articles and editorials in that tone, and laugh with glee over them; and then, every Sunday morning and evening I would go to church, and listen while the preacher read the words of Jeremiah and Isaiah and Micah and Elijah and Amos and John the Baptist, and I would accept them all as the divinely inspired words of God. How was I, poor lad, to know that the very same prophets were back on earth, living the very same lives and making the very same speeches—trying to save America, as of old they had tried to save Judea, from the hands of the defilers and the despoilers?
How did it happen that political agitators, living in the Mississippi Valley at the end of the nineteenth century, were identical in spirit with religious prophets in Asia Minor five hundred years before Christ? The answer is that civilizations rise and fall, and history repeats itself. Let me describe one historic process, and you watch my statement phrase by phrase, and see if you can tell whether I am referring to ancient Judea or to modern Kansas.
A people traveled for a long distance, fleeing fromdespotism and seeking religious liberty. They were a primitive, hardy people, having a stern faith in one God who personally directed their lives. They came to a rich land, and conquered it by hard fighting, under this personal direction of their God. They built homes, they gathered flocks and herds, they accumulated wealth; and they saw this wealth pouring into cities, to be absorbed by governing and trading classes. Their agricultural democracy evolved into a plutocratic imperialism. The landlords and the tax collectors left them nothing but a bare living; the fruits of their labor paid for palaces and temples with golden roofs, and for golden calves and monkey dinners, and rulers with a thousand chorus girls.
So there was revolt in the country districts, and one after another came prophets of discontent. Always these prophets were radical in the economic sense, voicing the wrongs of the poor and helpless, the widows and the orphans. Always they were conservative in the social and religious sense, calling the people back to simplicity and honesty of life, to faith in the one true God. Always they used the symbols of the old tribal creed; repudiating new-fangled divinities such as Baal and Darwin, and gathering at Armageddon to battle for the Lord. Throughout their lives they were stoned and persecuted and covered with ridicule; when they died they became their country’s glory, and their words were cherished and embodied in sacred records which school children were made to study.
Now, how much of that is Judea, and how much is Kansas?
Let us make clear the point, essential to our present argument, that from cover to cover the “Old Testament” is propaganda. Those who created it created it as propaganda, having no remotest idea of anything else. Nowadays our docile population reads it and accepts it as the literal inspired Word—not realizing that the book is divided between two kinds of propaganda, which exactly cancel each other: the propaganda of a ruling class, teaching reverence for kings and priests, and the propaganda of rebels, clamoring for the overthrow of these same kings and priests!
This Old Testament is also offered to us in the literature classes, so it will be worth our while to consider it from that point of view. Manifestly there is much of itwhich never pretended to be literature. There are weary chronicles of the doings of kings, and lists of their sons and grandsons. You may find acres of this in our big libraries, but it is classified as genealogy, not literature. Likewise there are the laws of the Hebrews, which belong in the legal department. There are architectural specifications for the temple, and rules of hygiene—all important to a historian, but rubbish to anybody else. There are a great number of legends which are eternally delightful to children, stories of the creation and the fall of man, and of gods and devils and miracles, precisely as important as similar stories among the ancient Anglo-Saxons, or the ancient Greeks, or the ancient Egyptians, or the ancient Hopis.
Among these stories are a few which display fine feeling and narrative skill, and so for the first time we have literature. There is one attempt at a drama; it is crude and confused—any sophomore, having taken a course in dramatic construction at a state university, could show the author of the Book of Job how to clarify his theme and cut out the repetitions. But in the midst of such crudities is magnificent poetry, which our university courses have not yet taught us to equal. Likewise there is some shrewd philosophy—and it is amusing to note that our verbal inspirationalists accept the worldly-wise common sense of the Proverbs and the bleak cynicism of Ecclesiastes as equally divine with the fervor of Isaiah and the fanatical rage of Jeremiah.
Finally, there is some lyric poetry of a spiritual nature, this also full of repetition. If you are judging it as ritual, that is all right, because ritual is intended to affect the subconscious, and repetition is the essence of the process. The difference between ritual and literature is that the latter makes its appeal to the conscious mind, where a little repetition goes a long way.
Dr. Johnson was asked his opinion of the feminist movement in religion, and he said that “a woman preaching is like a dog walking on two legs; it is not well done, but we are surprised that it is done at all.” I think that if we examine our judgments carefully, we shall find that our high opinion of ancient writings is on this basis. We do not really judge them by modern standards, any more than we judge a child by adult standards when he tries towield a pen, or a hoe, or an oar. Our pleasure in reading ancient writings is to note the beginnings of real thinking, of mature attitudes toward life. We say: “By George, those old fellows had a lot of sense after all!” But judging the Old Testament strictly, as literature, not as antiquity, I say that everything which is of serious value to a modern adult person could be gathered into an extremely small volume, certainly not over thirty thousand words, or four per cent of the total.
From the “American Times” Sunday Review of Books, A. D. 1944
Satan Sanctified
A New Religion Enters the Lists
There come to the desk of a literary editor many volumes which could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered as literature. But they are printed and bound, and those who write them believe them of importance, and others may be of the same opinion. So it becomes the task of a reviewer to give an account of these volumes.
The book now before us came through the mails, bearing no indication as to the sender; and examination of the contents quickly reveals the reason. Those who print and circulate the volume know that in so doing they render themselves liable to the lethal gas chamber. Nevertheless, they are impelled by fanaticism to incur the risk, so here is the result on our desk. Technically, we believe the editor incurs penalties by keeping the volume, instead of turning it over to the police authorities. But it seems to us a matter of importance that the public should know what sort of material is now being circulated among the populace, and for that reason we give an account of the contents of the “Communist Almanac for 1944.”
It is perhaps a natural tendency of the human mind, an inevitable process of history, that holders of proscribed opinions should see themselves as martyrs, and endeavor to capitalize their sufferings for political advantage. So, ever since the extermination of the Soviet government by the armed forces of the civilized world, the surviving Communists, hiding in forests and holes in the ground, have been seeing themselves as founders of a new religion. In this document which they now put before us, we find the creed and ritual of this monstrous perversion of the so-called proletarian mind, together with the biographies of its founder and the acts of its leading martyrs.
The founder is Nikolai Lenin, and, incredible as it may seem, this person has been selected for sanctification! A couple of years before his death, an almost successful attempt was made to assassinate him, and the bullets then shot into his body are said to have been the final cause of his death. That is sufficient to constitute martyrdom in the Soviet formula, and to entitle Vladimir Ulianov to become a legend. For a year after his death the Soviet government attempted to preserve his body in mummy form; but this kind of immortality being unattainable, the body was buried, and soon afterwards rumors began to spring up all over Russia to the effect that Lenin had come back to life, and was reappearing to his followers, giving them advice about the management of his Bolshevik dictatorship. That was a miracle; so now Lenin is a divine personage, and those who died in the faith of the “proletarian” revolution are martyrs and saints. At least, that is the thesis of the “Communist Almanac for 1944.”
The volume opens with no less than four biographies of the founder, alleged to have been composed by different followers who knew him intimately, Mattiu Shipinsky, Marco Sugarmann, Luka Herzkovitz, and Ivan Petchnikoff. The last, it appears, is a kind of philosopher, and provides for the Bolshevik cult the mantle of a mystical and metaphysical system. It is amusing to note that the four biographies go into minute detail—and differ as to many of these details! They purport to quote their founder verbatim—and his words on the same occasions are seldom the same words! Most absurd yet, they cannot even agree about his ancestry! In fact, they cannot agree about anything, except that he was the most remarkable person who has ever lived on earth, the bearer of a new revelation to mankind.
Following the biographies, the “Almanac” proceeds to a long recital of the doings of various propagandists ofthe cult, their travels over the world in the interest of the “class struggle,” and the persecutions to which they were subjected in various countries. It is a melancholy duty to record that among these emissaries of disaster were several of American birth and ancestry. One of the easy ways of achieving sanctification under the Bolshevik system is to be bitten by a body-louse, and to die of typhus. So among the Soviet apostles we find the figure of John Reed, graduate of Harvard University, and traitor to his country and his race.
Next we have various communications from these agents of social chaos, addressed to their deluded followers. This part of the volume is almost comical, in the solemnity with which these precious words are recorded and preserved for the benefit of posterity. Needless to say, the communications contain exhortations to the party members to remain steadfast in the faith, and to carry the message to their fellow “wage-slaves.” This portion of the volume is known as the “Epistles”—the word “epistle” being Russian for letter.
Finally, there is a collection of miscellaneous prophesyings, attributed to a former commissar under the Russian Bolshevik government. All we can say concerning this part of the volume is that we have been unable to find out what it means, and it seems destined to serve as an inspiration to all the lunatics and would-be prophets of the next two thousand years. It is called “Revelations,” and closes the amazing volume.
We think the time has come when public sentiment should make plain that the present laxity of the Department of Justice toward Communist agitators, and the whole tribe of “parlor Bolsheviks” and “pinks,” will no longer be tolerated. We should be sorry to see this country return to the old days of the Democratic and Republican parties, and the oil scandals of the Harding-Coolidge era. But when we read a collection of perversities such as this “Communist Almanac,” we cannot but sigh for the return of Palmer and Daugherty, when red-blooded hundred per cent Americans set to work with vigor to preserve their country from the fanatical propagandists of class greed.
We have before us another literary criticism, clipped from the “Roman Times Weekly Review of Books” during the year 300, under the Emperor Diocletian. It is word for word the same as that from the “American Times” of 1944—the only difference being that one deals with an outlaw party known as Bolsheviks, while the other deals with an outlaw sect known as Christians. The Founder of this latter sect is described by the “Roman Times” as a proletarian criminal, who was crucified for disturbing the public peace under the Emperor Augustus Cæsar. His followers have been hiding in catacombs and tombs, carrying on incessant propaganda in defiance of the Roman law. In place of John Reed, the “Roman Times” refers to a certain Paul, a renegade Roman gentleman and former official of the empire. The good old days to which the “Roman Times” looks back with longing, are the days of Nero, when these incendiary fanatics were boiled in oil or fed to the lions. Under the prodding of this most respectable “Times,” the Emperor Diocletian undertook a new and ferocious persecution of the sect; but twenty-four years afterwards the successor of Diocletian became converted to Christianity, and adopted it as the official religion of the state, entitled to persecute other religions.
The reader who is a Christian will remind me that Jesus was a pacifist, he was meek and gentle. To this I answer, the early social revolutionists were likewise Utopians, appealing to love and brotherhood. At the time the New Testament became fixed in its present form, the Christians had never held power in any part of the world. When they took power under the Emperor Constantine, they behaved like every government in history—that is, they kept their power, using as much force as necessary for the purpose. If the reader is shocked by the fact that the Soviet government of Russia fought for two years a defensive war on twenty-six fronts against its enemies, I invite him to consider the Christian crusades, two centuries of offensive propaganda warfare. If he is shocked by stories he has read about the Tcheka and its torturingof prisoners, I invite him to consult Lea’s “History of the Spanish Inquisition.” Considering the series of religious wars which made of Europe a shambles for more than a thousand years, it is safe to assert that for every human life sacrificed by the Soviet revolution in Russia, a hundred thousand lives have been taken in the name of the gentle and lowly Jesus.
But these are questions which will not be settled in a generation, nor in a century; therefore we pass on, and take up the question of the New Testament as literature. It has been generally so recognized, and we may doubt if any writing ever collected in one volume has exercised as great an influence upon the human race. And let it be noted that this literature is propaganda, pure and simple; we may defy anyone to find a single line in the Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, or the Book of Revelations which was not produced as conscious and deliberate propaganda.
A critic highly regarded by the academic authorities when I was a student in college was George Henry Lewes. I read his “Life of Goethe,” and made note of his argument on behalf of “realist” as opposed to “idealist” art. Goethe and Shakespeare are his examples of the former type; and how obvious is their superiority to those “subjective” artists, who “seek in realities only visible illustrations of a deeper existence!” The critic takes as his test the production of “the grandest generalizations and the most elevated types”; but it was evident to me, even in my student days, that he reached his conclusion by the simple device of overlooking the evidence on the other side. I introduce to you four “idealist” artists who bear the names—perhaps pen-names—of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Will anyone maintain that the works of Shakespeare and Goethe contain “grander generalizations” or “more elevated types” than the Four Gospels? We set Jesus against Shakespeare, and Buddha against Goethe, and leave it for the common sense of mankind to decide.