CHAPTER LXVIIITHE GOSPEL OF SILENCE

Arise, then, ye people of the earth, arise, ye sorrow-stricken and oppressed. Ye, also, who vainly struggle to clothe the inner desolation of your hearts with the transient glory of riches, arise! Come and follow in my track with the joyful crowd, for I know not how to make distinction between those who follow me. There are but two peoples from henceforth on earth—the one which follows me, and the one which resists me. The one I will lead to happiness, but the other I will crush in my progress. For I am the Revolution, I am the new creating force. I am the divinity which discerns all life, which embraces, revives, and rewards.

The art work in which Wagner embodied these revolutionary ideas is known as “The Ring of the Nibelung.” It consists of four long operas, based upon the old German mythology. It begins with a charming fairy story and ends with a grim tragedy; and from first to last it is a study of the effects of economic power upon human life.

In the depths of the river dwell the Rhine-maidens, having a lump of gold which they admire because it shines, but for which they have no other use. An ugly little dwarf pursues them; and when he cannot get their love, he decides to get along with their gold. He steals it, and makes from it a magic ring, which represents the ability to build cities and palaces, to command luxury and pleasure—to be, in short, our present master class. Even the gods are seduced by this lure, and fall to quarreling and intriguing for the magic power of gold. The god Wotan wrests it from the dwarf Alberich; and the latter puts a curse upon it, to the effect that it can only be worn by those who have renounced love—which is just as you see it in our modern world, and just as Wagner saw it when he was a court servant in Dresden, and was driven mad by the insolence of hereditary privilege.

There are two giants, who represent our great captains of industry, and have built Wotan a palace known as Walhalla. The giants have been promised Wotan’s sister, the goddess of youthful beauty and goodness, as their pay for this labor; but they elect to take the ring instead. This is Wagner’s way of telling us his opinion of the great bankers and gentlemen of wealth whom he vainly besought to assist him in the production of his beautiful works of art.

There were no factories in old German mythology; but the scene shows us a cavern down in the bowels of the earth, where Alberich, by the power of his ring, compels all his fellow dwarfs to toil at making treasures for him. We see him wielding the lash, and the music snarls and whines, and it is precisely the atmosphere you find in every sweat-shop and cotton mill and coal mine under our blessed competitive system. And when we see one of the giants slay his brother, and carry off the ring, and turn himself into a dragon, to sit upon it and guard it for the balance of time, we know that Wagner hasvisited the millionaire clubs of Dresden, and seen the fat old plutocrats in their big leather arm-chairs.

Wotan, the old god, sees too late the ruin he has brought into the world; he decides that the only way of escape is to create a hero who shall slay the dragon of privilege and break the spell of economic might. This hero is the young Siegfried, the child of nature who knows no fear; Bernard Shaw says that he is Wagner’s young Anarchist associate, Bakunin. And note that in this Siegfried myth Wagner foreshadows the downfall not only of capitalism, but also of religion. The last of the four operas is called “The Twilight of the Gods,” and the two evil spells of gold and of superstition are broken by the strong arm and the clear mind of a human youth.

Wagner wrote the words of these four operas immediately after the Dresden revolution; the poem was privately published four years after his flight from the city. During the years of his exile he affords us a sublime example of a great man contending with obstacles for the sake of an ideal. He went ahead to compose his masterpiece in the face of poverty and debt, ridicule and ignominy. His works were absolutely new, they required an absolutely new method of presentation; so, even when he could get a chance of production, he had to face the stupidity and malice of singers and conductors and managers, who were sure in their own conceit and resented instructions from an upstart.

We find him in 1860, almost at the end of his exile, receiving from Louis Napoleon an opportunity to put on “Tannhäuser” in Paris. Now this opera is a music sermon in reprehension of sensual love; it portrays the ruin and ultimate repentance of a medieval knight who is lured into the Venusburg, the lurking place of the old heathen goddess. And this Sunday school lesson in music was to be presented in the great opera house, whose boxes were rented by members of the Jockey Club, the gilded youth of Paris who supported the opera in order to provide publicity for their mistresses in the ballet!

The clash was embittered by the fact that the members of the Jockey Club came late from their supper-parties, and wanted to see their mistresses dance; therefore it was an iron-clad law of the opera that theballet came in the second act. But in Wagner’s Sunday school lesson the knight is lured into the Venusburg in the first act, and the composer stubbornly refused to change his story. Therefore the young gentlemen of the Jockey Club yelled and hooted and blew penny-whistles all through the performance, and kept that up night after night. They even took the trouble to come on Sunday to make sure of breaking up Wagner’s show.

It would be pleasant to have to record that this hero of the social revolution stood by his guns until the end of his life; but alas, he weakened, and sold out completely to the enemy. Bernard Shaw excuses him on the ground that the social revolution was not yet ready, and that the revolutionists were impractical men. But I say that it was Wagner’s task to help make the social revolution ready, and to train the revolutionists by setting them an example of probity. Instead of that, he decided that the establishing of his own reputation was more important than the salvation of society. He accepted amnesty from the Saxon king, and came back and made himself into a great captain of the music industry, and a national and patriotic hero.

He became the intimate friend and pensioner of the king of Bavaria; and for this king he wrote a highly confidential paper entitled “Of the State and Religion,” wherein he explained that he had once been a Socialist, but he now saw that the masses were gross and dull, incapable of high achievement. The problem was to get them to serve ends which they did not understand; they must be deceived, they must have illusions. The first mass-illusion was patriotism; they must be taught to reverence their king. The second mass-illusion was religion; they must believe they were obeying the will of God. The difficulty of government lay in the fact that the ruling class must see the truth, they could not believe either in the State or in God. For them there must be the higher illusions of the Wagnerian art. Needless to say, for this secret service King Ludwig paid generously, and we find Wagner spending his pension—I cite one item, three hundred yards of satin of thirteen carefully specified colors, at a cost of three thousand florins!

He had craved luxury all his life, and in the end he got it—not merely silks and satins and velvets, for whichhe had a sort of insanity, but all kinds of splendor and homage, with kings and emperors to attend the opening performances of his operas. When the Franco-Prussian war breaks out we find our Siegfried-Bakunin drinking the cup of military glory and pouring out a “Kaiser-march”; we find him stooping to an operatic libretto in which he casts odium upon all the genius of France, not sparing even Victor Hugo. He reads Schopenhauer, and decides that he is a pessimist, and has always been a pessimist, and he tries to reinterpret his revolutionary “Ring” accordingly. He composes a religious festival play, a mixture of Christian mysticism and Buddhist fatalism, called “Parsival,” which made the fortune of his Bayreuth enterprise, a play-house built out of funds subscribed by his admirers.

Wagner lived to old age, full of honors, and left a widow and a son, poetically named Siegfried. The widow died recently, but the son still survives, to bask in his father’s glory, and to gather in the shekels of the music pilgrims. It is possible to appreciate to the full the sublimity of the revolutionary Wagner without paying reverence to this family institution which he has left behind, or for the hordes of “Schwaermer” who come to eat sausages and drink beer and revel in emotions which they have no idea of applying to life. Is there anything in all the tragedies imagined by Richard Wagner more tragic than the fate which has befallen the young Siegfried-Bakunin—whose prestige and tradition are now the financial mainstay of the White Terror in Germany, the Jew-baiting, Communist-shooting mob of the “Hakenkreutzler,” or Bavarian Fascisti?

Ogi has been wandering about the cave with a discontented expression on his face, showing a disposition to growl at whatever gets in his way. Mrs. Ogi, whose job is to notice domestic weather-signs, inquires: “What is the matter with you?”

Says Ogi: “I have to write an uninteresting chapter.”

“Why don’t you skip it?”

“I can’t, because it deals with an interesting man.” As she cannot guess that riddle, he goes on to complain: “If only I had been writing this book twenty-five years ago, when I thought ‘Sartor Resartus’ the most delightful book ever penned! But I went on, and got an overdose of Carlyle. I read almost all that Gospel of Silence in forty volumes; and now I sit and ask: what did I learn from it? Some facts, of course: history and biography. But did I get a single valid idea, one sound conclusion about life?”

“Explain it quickly, and pass on,” says Mrs. Ogi.

“I explain the human race, blocked from the future by a sheet-steel door. We need the acetylene torch of spiritual fervor; also we need the engineering brain, to say: “Put it here, and here, and cut the hinges.” In the face of this task, some of the wielders of the torch go off and get drunk. Others fall down on their knees and pray. Others forbid us to touch the door, because God made it and it is His will. Others write noble verses with perfect rhymes, to the effect that man is born to trouble, and great art teaches us to endure discomfort with dignity. Others take fire with zeal, and proceed to butt the door down with their heads. They butt and butt, until their heads ache. I realize how undignified it is to describe a great master of English prose as a ‘sorehead’; yet there happens to be no other word in the language that so tells the story of Thomas Carlyle.”

He was the son of a carpenter in Scotland, and suffered from poverty and neglect, and through a long life from indigestion. He complained pathetically that Emerson ate pie and was well, while he ate plain oatmeal and was miserable. He was irritable, and hard to get along with—we are privileged to know about this, because both he and his wife wrote endless letters to their friends, detailing their domestic troubles, and these letters are published in many volumes, and we can read both sides and take our choice. Tennyson refused assent to the proposition that the Carlyles should have married elsewhere; because then there would have been four miserable people instead of two.

Carlyle made himself, and also his literary style; he was a hack writer, biographer and translator, and struggled along with a dissatisfied young wife in a lonelycountry cottage. “Sartor Resartus” was written at the age of thirty-five, and sketches the philosophy of an imaginary German professor, whose name translated means “Devil’s Dung”; this professor’s philosophy being based upon the discovery that everything in civilization is merely clothes, the outside of things, the shams and pretensions and conventions. It is funny to imagine our statesmen and diplomats and prominent society personages stripped, not merely of their medals and ribbons, but also of their shirts and trousers; very few of them would look imposing—and the same applies to civilization with its proprieties, moralities and religions. This work of uproarious mischief fell absolutely flat in well-dressed and well-mannered England, and Emerson and a few people in far-off Boston had to inform the British cultured classes that they had a new prophet among them.

The teaching of “Sartor Resartus” is entirely negative; and when you ask what Carlyle had to contribute to constructive thinking about our hateful social system, the answer is: nonsense. He saw the evils, and scolded at them—and scolded equally hard at the forces which are to remedy the evils. Carlyle had contempt for the people, out of whose lap he had sprung; he despised democracy and the whole machinery of popular consent. He repaid America for discovering him by ridiculing the Union cause; he denounced the reform bill of 1867 as “Shooting Niagara.”

Carlyle’s way to set the world right is revealed to us in a book called “Hero-Worship.” First we have to find the Great Man; and then we have to obey him. “Obedience is the primary duty of man”—meaning, of course, the man like you and me, who is spelled with a little m. The one who is spelled with a capital letter is the Autocrat, who makes us do what we ought to do. “A nation that has not been governed by so-called tyrants never came to much in the world.”

Our Great Tyrant sets us all hard at work. He makes us build houses and cultivate farms—but no machinery or railroads, because these constitute Industrialism, which is a Mammon-Monster. If we do our work by machinery we have leisure, and that is dangerous; we must have Work, and then more Work, our one safe Deliverancefrom Devil-Mischief—you see how one picks up the style of the “Gospel of Silence”!

Having got the houses built, what next? Why then, to save us from the Idleness-Imp we set to work knocking the houses down with cannon-balls. I don’t mean that Carlyle always advocated war; what he did was to glorify systems of government which historically have resulted and psychologically must result in war. At the age of fifty-eight, having surveyed the whole of history, our Scotch hero-worshipper selected the greatest of human heroes to become the subject of a grand state biography in six volumes: and whom do you suppose this hero turns out to be? Frederick of Prussia, who stole Silesia from his cousin, and seized Poland and divided it up among Austria, Russia and himself; Jonathan Wild the Great, founder of the Hohenzollern Heroism, and great-great-grandfather of our World War!

I dutifully read those six large volumes, and studied the series of charts in which the strategy of Frederick’s military campaigns is set forth. I learned a fascinating parlor game, which consists in moving here and there little black and white oblongs representing regiments and brigades and divisions and other military formations of human beings. The white oblongs represent your own human beings, and the black oblongs represent the human beings you propose to destroy; you pound them to pieces with artillery, you sweep them with volleys of musketry, you charge them with cavalry and chop them with sabres—and then you move up other oblongs, called reserves, and continue the procedure. It is safer to play this game on paper, because when you get through, you can throw the paper into the waste-basket, and do not have some tens of thousands of dead and mutilated men and horses decaying all over your back yard.

A pitiful ending for a Prophet and Preacher who aspires to the Remaking of Mankind in Capital Letters! Just a poor, bewildered old dotard, dyspeptic and crotchety, helpless and blundering, aspiring to a certain end and working to the opposite end.

“But why should anyone consider such a man great?” asks Mrs. Ogi.

“I have been trying to formulate that to myself. It is because he had the grace to be unhappy about ourmodern world. He did not get drunk on moonshine; he did not tell himself that God was going to do what it was obviously the business of men to do. He didn’t persuade himself that Evolution was going to do it, or that Time was going to do it, or that Faith was going to do it. He didn’t prattle about one increasing purpose running through the ages, or about one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves. He didn’t decide to dream his dream and hold it true, or to have moments when he felt he could not die. He didn’t tell us that Love will conquer at the last, or that his faith was large in Time—”

“This appears to be a transition,” says Mrs. Ogi.

“Precisely. We are about to begin a new chapter: The Lullaby Laureate, or Queen Victoria’s Super-Soothing Syrup.”

The story of my own soul is the story of Alfred Tennyson’s reputation for the last thirty or forty years; so that is the easiest way for me to tell about it.

I was one of Tennyson’s cultural products. I cannot recall the age when I did not know “Call me early, mother dear,” and “What does little birdie say?” As soon as I had the idea of being anything, I had the idea of being Sir Galahad. I attended very devoutly a church, which differed from that of Alfred Tennyson in one fact—that it had a prayer for the President of the United States in place of a prayer for the Queen. I doubt if it ever occurred to me to think that Tennyson might be wrong in anything—until the age of fifteen, when suddenly there dawned upon my horrified mind the idea that Christianity was merely another mythology.

I wrestled with this idea for a couple of years, and part of the struggle consisted of a study of “In Memoriam,” recommended by my spiritual adviser. The poem suggested a great many new reasons for doubting the immortality of the soul; but it suggested no certainty that the Creator of the universe, having given me one life, was under obligation to give me two. Which meantthat I was through with Tennyson, whose whole product, on its religious side, is an agonized cry that immortality must be.

In politics and economics I experienced a similar revulsion from my one-time idol. He seemed to me a victim of all the delusions, a celebrator of all the shams of civilization. Even his poetical charms now annoyed me, serving as trimming and decoration for second-rate ideas. In my reaction I went too far, as have all the young people of our time; for Tennyson was really a great poet, and a man of fine and generous spirit.

He was the son of a Church of England clergyman, and that is a fact which must never be forgotten; he grew up in a rectory, and wrote Sunday poetry. He was the elder brother of a big family, and took the position of elder brother to all mankind. He was tall and imposing, dark and romantic looking, cultivating long wavy black locks and a Spanish cloak and a poet’s pipe. When he did not know anything to say, he puffed at his pipe and looked magnificent, and everybody was awed.

Culture came naturally in his family. He had written five thousand octosyllabic rhymes at the age of twelve. His first verses were published when he was young, and because one or two critics made fun of them, he took refuge in his dignity and waited nine years to publish again. “Ulysses” made his fame when he was thirty-three, and two years later he received a pension from the Tory government. Two years after that came “The Princess,” a dramatic composition in ridicule of the higher education of women; it suited the lower-educated Victorian ladies so perfectly that it ran into five editions. In 1850, at the age of forty-one, Tennyson became the laureate; when he was seventy-four he was raised to the peerage. No other English poet has earned this honor, which is reserved to wholesale slaughterers of animals and men, to brewers, whiskey distillers, diamond merchants, and publishers of capitalist dope.

Concerning Lord Tennyson as an artist in words, there is little that needs to be said. He received his “ten talents” and put them to use; everywhere he went he carefully collected poetical impressions, words, phrases and ideas, and jotted them down. No one ever spentmore time filing and perfecting, and no one was more completely master of beautiful utterance.

He had an inquiring mind, and picked up ideas on all subjects and put them into his poetry; but unfortunately he found consecutive thinking very difficult, and you can find as many contradictory thoughts in him as in the Bible. He has an invincible repugnance to the drawing of uncomfortable conclusions; whenever his thinking leads to such, he evaporates in a cloud of comforting words. His verse contains more platitudes and cheap cheer-up stuff than any other poet known to me; and so he was the darling of the antimacassar age.

England had put down Napoleon and taken possession of the trade of the world. There were revolutions on the continent, but at home nothing worse than a few rioters to be clubbed by the police. The foggy islands were a safe haven, administered by landlords and merchants. Everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and the function of a poet was to tell it to the people, in such beautiful language that they would accept it as a revelation.

Tennyson in his early days had shown traces of liberalism, but the Chartist movement frightened him into reaction, and there he stayed. “Shout for England!” says the chorus of one of his poems, and the function of the shout in suppressing thought is understood by all students of mob psychology. “Riflemen, form!” exhorted another poem, published in the “Times”—

Let your reforms for a moment go;Look to your butts, and take good aim.

That was, so to speak, a “Timesly” sentiment; the riflemen hastened to form, and the young aristocrats led them to slaughter, and the poet laureate had to come forward again to glorify the British national habit of blundering. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” was so popular in its day that it was printed on picture post cards; every school child learned the duty of the lower classes under the Tory system—

Theirs not to make reply,Theirs not to question why,Theirs but to do and die.

Bear in mind that the factory system was now in full flower, and little children ten and twelve years old were slaving all night in cotton mills, or dragging heavy cars in the depths of coal mines. English manufacturers and landlords were taxing the lower classes to such a condition that today, when you see them pouring out for their holidays upon Hampstead Heath, they seem not human beings, but some lower species, shambling and deformed. Once in a while a gleam of this horror breaks into Tennyson’s verse; but even then the message is reactionary—an English gentleman is scolding at commercialism because it destroys the good old country life.

But for the most part the Victorian way of dealing with uncomfortable things was to hush them up. Poetry must select pure and sweet subjects; poetry must be polite, it must use big words and preserve the home comforts. It is our duty to believe what is proper, even when it is obviously not true.

I have referred to Tennyson’s long agony on the subject of immortality. The deepest experience of his life was the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam, a man who apparently knew how to think, and to drive the dreamy poet to work. It is puzzling to us that a grown man should be so taken aback by death; it would seem to be a common enough phenomenon to be noted and prepared for. But Tennyson was struck down mentally and spiritually, and his sufferings make clear to us that he did not really believe his creed. Men who are seriously convinced of heaven don’t mind waiting a few years to join their loved ones; but Tennyson was never really sure that he would see Arthur Hallam again, and he spent seventeen years brooding over this problem, and putting his broodings into “In Memoriam.”

The poet early fell in love with a young English lady, but could not afford to marry her; so he waited twenty years, and she waited also. Now there have been poets who married when they fell in love, and went off and kept house in a garret or a cottage, and made out the best they could. But Tennyson had to have his poet’s robe and his poet’s chair in front of the fireplace; he had to be an English gentleman, and to keep his wife like an English lady in the days of Victorian propriety. The lady, when they were finally united, put an end to frettingover immortality; she explained to her husband that “doubt is devil-born”—and what gentleman wants a devil in his home? It is better to become an oracle: to preach about peace in a far future, and meantime wield a sword in the Crimea; to sing about justice, and vote the Tory ticket; to have all the comforts that fine phrases can bring, without sacrificing those other comforts of popularity and prosperity.

Tennyson went back to the old days of Britain, and falsified the story of King Arthur so as to make it sweetly sentimental. “Obedience is the bond of rule,” he wrote; and so Queen Victoria’s husband came to call on him. He preached submission to womanhood: “Lay thy sweet hands in mine and trust to me”—and so he was summoned to Windsor Castle to kiss the sweet hand of his queen. One thinks of the sweet hands of those English ladies who took up hatchets and chopped the pictures in the National Gallery!

Victoria’s beloved husband died, and Tennyson wrote an ode to him; so he became the dear pudgy old lady’s intimate friend, and she confided to him the troubles of royalty. “How I wish you could suggest means of crushing those horrible publications, whose object is to promulgate scandal and calumny, which they invent themselves!” The poet did his best; his most popular sentimental and patriotic stuff was published in pamphlets which sold for thrippence; but in spite of everything the labor movement continued to take root, and likewise Socialism—or “Utopian idiocy,” to use the Tennysonian phrase.

He sits upon his throne, eighty years of age and more, and hardly anyone questions his supremacy; he is the greatest English poet since Shakespeare, there is no living writer to be compared to him. We pity him, for after all, he is a great man, and has written great verse—“Ulysses,” for example, of which no one could ever wish to change a line. He has written lyrics of beauty and real eloquence. But now he sees the younger generation traveling another road from his, and he wonders and fears and storms and scolds. He is too clear-sighted not to see the wreck of his dreams—

Poor old voice of eighty crying after voices that have fled!

He looks about and sees modern capitalism—

Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time, City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?

It was no common Victorian who saw that at the age of eighty; and no fair critic will deny him credit for such lines. But the elderly poet-lord had no idea what to do about it, and capitalist society continued to nourish its secret disease, which twenty-two years after Tennyson’s death was to cover the whole earth with vomit.

There was another poet who grew up in this unpromising Victorian England. His father and grandfather were bank officials, and he had a comfortable income. In his youth he was a dandy, with lemon-colored gloves and flowing poetical locks; he turned into a leading clubman and a prominent diner-out. He believed in the Church of England, and in those social conventions which guide the lives of English gentlemen; he refused to permit his wife to have anything to do with George Sand’s Bohemian set, and when she tried to investigate spiritualism he broke up the show.

And yet he managed to be a great and open-minded poet, and in many ways a revolutionary force. He had in him a core of sound instinct, a healthy belief in life and a trust in his own intellect. He fell in love with a lady poet by the name of Elizabeth Barrett, who was an invalid, kept in a kind of prison of duty by a tyrannical old father. The poet did not wait twenty years for her; he persuaded her to slip around the corner and marry him—a dreadful scandal in the polite world of England.

When I was a lad we did not have the word “high-brow”; its place was filled by the word “Browning.” Learned ladies and gentlemen had formed a “Browning Society,” and held solemn meetings in which they tried to find out what these poems were about. Apparently the task proved a difficult one, for they are at it still.

Now a poet may be obscure because he has something to say which is very profound; but there is little of that kind of obscurity in Robert Browning. When youdecipher his message, it turns out to be something quite obvious, like the immortality of the soul, or the rights of love, or the fact that human motives are mixed. The cause of the obscurity is that the poet has invented a perverse way of telling these things; he likes to play around the outside of a subject, approach it from a dozen different angles, and set you the task of piecing the thing together from hints and glimpses.

He is an enormously learned person, and has rummaged in a thousand old dust-bins of history, and acquired a million details of names and places and things; he pays you the generally quite undeserved compliment of assuming that you know all this as well as he does. If he wishes to tell you about some unknown musician in the court of some obscure Renaissance ruler, he will begin by talking about a ring this musician used to wear, and the first dozen lines of the poem will depend upon an ancient Greek legend concerning the stone that is in the ring. If you don’t know the legend about the stone in the ring of the musician in the court of the Renaissance ruler, why then the opening of the poem has no meaning to you, and the Browning Society might hold a hundred sessions on the subject without making head or tail of it. Such writing is simply a bad joke; it is one of the many forms of leisure-class art perversions.

When Browning chooses to write real poetry, he can make it just as simple and as melodious as Tennyson’s, and far more passionate. He invented a new and fascinating poetical form, the dramatic lyric, or dramatic soliloquy. He will take some strange and complicated character, whom he has picked up in the junk-rooms of the past, and let this character start to talk and reveal himself to you—not merely the things he wants you to know, but the things he is trying to hide from you, and which he lets slip between the lines. Thus we have Mr. Sludge, the spiritualist medium, who would have converted Mrs. Browning if the poet had not kicked him out of the house. Thus we have Bishop Blougram, an elegant and thoroughly modern Catholic prelate, discussing with an intimate friend over the wine and cigars the delicate question of how he justifies himself for feeding base superstition to the people, who want it and can’t get along without it.

Browning knew how to be direct, when his feelings were deeply enough stirred. He was direct when he dealt with the old poet Wordsworth and his apostasy from the cause of freedom. Anyone can understand the title, “The Lost Leader,” and the opening lines

Just for a handful of silver he left us,Just for a riband to stick in his coat.

Likewise, when the Brownings went to Italy and took fire at the struggle of the Italian people for freedom, everybody understood the poetry they wrote home; even the Austrian police understood it, for they opened Browning’s mail, to his furious indignation. Likewise, when Mrs. Browning died and some persons proposed to write her biography without her husband’s permission, the husband was able to make known his opposition. He spoke of “the paws of these blackguards in my bowels,” and said he would “stop the scamp’s knavery along with his breath.”

For his master-work, to which he devoted his later years, Browning made a peculiar selection. It was a time when democracy was breaking into the world of culture, in spite of all the opposition of academic authority. We shall find poets and novelists in every country persisting in dealing with vulgar reality, instead of with mythological demigods and romantic conquerors. Browning went for his story to an old scandal pamphlet he picked up in a second-hand bookshop of Florence. He might as well have picked up a scrap of a Hearst newspaper from the gutter, for it dealt with a sensational murder story, what is called a “crime of passion.” An elderly merchant in Rome had killed his wife, and at his trial he proved that she had run away with a young priest. The priest maintained that the elopement had been a chaste one; he was trying to save the girl from the cruelty of her husband.

Browning, in telling the story, adopts the ultra-modern device of the open forum: all sides shall have a hearing. In “The Ring and the Book” you read nine long narratives of the same events. You hear Half Rome, which sides with the husband; then you hear the Other Half Rome, which sides with the wife. You hear the husband, the wife, the young priest, the lawyers for each side, and the pope, rendering judgment. When you get throughwith all this reading you have learned several important lessons: you have learned that life is a complicated thing, and truth very difficult to arrive at; you have learned that good and evil live side by side in the same human heart; you have learned to think for yourself, and not to believe everything you hear; finally, you have learned that the most sordid human events offer a potential literary masterpiece—requiring only a man of genius to penetrate the hearts of the persons involved!

In this writer’s youth, when he was struggling to earn a living in New York, there was one magazine which was open to new ideas, the “Independent.” Its literary editor was Paul Elmer More, and he gave me a chance to write book reviews for him—and then, alas! decided that he could find other people whose writing he preferred. Mr. More evolved into a critic, and has published I don’t know how many volumes of what he calls the “Shelburne Essays.” Up to a few years ago, when Professor Sherman made his appearance, I used to say that More was the one literary conservative in America who was not intellectually contemptible; the one man who combined scholarship with a perfectly definite and consistent point of view, no sentimentality, and no water-tight compartments in his brain.

In the third volume of the “Shelburne Essays” Mr. More has one dealing with Byron’s “Don Juan.” I smile when I reflect with what contempt Mr. More would greet the proposition that he should read a modern writer as slangy, as licentious, and as popular as Byron! But “Don Juan” was written a hundred years ago; so it is a “classic,” and Mr. More greets its author as the last of the great pessimists, one who had the wit to recognize the futility of human life, and the courage to speak his conclusions plainly.

Things have changed since Byron’s day, Mr. More explains. “We, who have approached the consummation of the world’s hope, know that happiness and peace and the fulfilment of desires are about to settle down andbrood for ever more over the lot of mankind.” This, I had better explain, is sarcasm on Mr. More’s part. He is irritated because modern scientific people have presumed to think that human problems can be solved. He is so much irritated that he turns his essay on Byron into a series of sneers at “the new dispensation of official optimism.” For example, this kind of thing:

Next year, or the next, some divine invention shall come which will prove this melancholy of the poets to have been only a childish ignorance of man’s sublimer destiny; some discovery of a new element more wonderful than radium will render the ancient brooding over human feebleness a matter of laughter and astonishment; some acceptance of the larger brotherhood of the race will wipe away all tears and bring down upon earth the fair dream of heaven, a reality and a possession forever; some new philosophy of the soul will convert the old poems of conflict into meaningless fables, stale and unprofitable.

What is the meaning of this attitude of envenomed resentment at the idea of a hope for mankind? We shall note it again and again among the poets and critics of the ancient regime—of what we may call “the old dispensation of official pessimism.” It used to puzzle me that scholars and thinkers should be so malicious and perverted as to find pleasure in trampling upon human aspiration; but after years of pondering I think I understand it. These gentlemen are guests at a banquet, who, seeing the food too long delayed, and despairing of anything better, have filled their bellies with husks and straw; and now, when they are full, and can no longer eat, they see the good food coming to the table!

It was a perfectly natural thing for an ancient to be pessimistic. He saw the world as a place of blind cruelty, the battle-ground of forces which he did not understand; and what guarantee could he have that the feeble intellect of man would ever tame these giants? So he made for himself a philosophy of stern resignation, and an art of beautiful but mournful despair. The scholars and lovers of old things have identified themselves and their reputations with these ancient dignities and renunciations, these tender and touching griefs; and how shall they express their irritation when bumptious youth arises, and proceeds to take charge of life, to abolish pestilence and famine, poverty, war, crime—and perhaps, in the end, even old age and death?

All this is preliminary to the introduction of another Victorian poet; one who moved me deeply in my youth, and still holds my undimmed affection. I would choose Matthew Arnold as the perfect exemplar of the “classical” attitude toward life; that is, resignation, at once pathetic and heroic, to the pitiful fate of mankind on earth. Listen to him at his best:

Ah, love, let us be trueTo one another! for the world, which seemsTo lie before us like a land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;And we are here as on a darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The author of these lines was the son of a great teacher, and therefore had no money. He spent thirty years of his life as an inspector of schools; a most pitiful destiny for a poet—traveling all over England to hear little children recite the list of the kings and the counties, and tell the number of legs on a spider. The fountain of his poetry dried up, and he became a critic, not merely of English letters but of English life; in many ways the most radical and most intelligent critic that Victorian England had. He preached the gospel of sweetness and light; also, alas, he went on the war-path against an infamous bill which was being agitated in Parliament, to permit a man to violate the old Mosaic code by marrying the sister of his deceased wife!

Matthew Arnold insisted that it wasn’t on account of Moses, but on account of a thing he called “delicacy.” You cannot travel in Victorian England without encountering phenomena like this. You will be introduced to what appears to you a perfectly sane and self-contained and cultivated gentleman, wearing exactly the correct frock-coat and tie; but then, you will happen to touch one of his tribal taboos, and suddenly he will shriek, and tear off his shirt, and pull out a sharp knife, and begin to slash himself, and dance and whirl in a holy frenzy.

—Ogi, wishing to make sure about this point, goes to the source of all information on the subject of refinement in sex matters. “Tell me,” he says, “if you were to die,would it be indelicate of me to marry one of your younger sisters?”

Mrs. Ogi, who has never read the Mosaic code, and is not learned in the Victorian lunacies, looks at her husband with a puzzled expression. “I helped to raise my sisters,” she says. “Surely any wife would want to leave her husband in safe hands!”

In the first half of this nineteenth century the British factory system came to maturity; the capitalist class took charge of society, and forced the working class into a condition of degradation hitherto unknown upon this planet. The class struggle took definite shape—Chartist agitations and suffrage reform bills and Corn Law riots—and there arose in England a man of genius to tell about the wrongs of the people from his own first-hand experience.

His father was a wretchedly paid government clerk, who had no acquaintance with the birth control movement. Charles Dickens was one of eight half-starved children, and went to work at the age of ten in a filthy, ramshackle blacking factory. The cruelties he there experienced stamped his soul for life, and helped to make the radical movement of the English-speaking world.

Later on he got a chance to go to school, and became a court stenographer and newspaper reporter, and saw the insides of ruling-class rascality. He began writing humorous sketches which turned into the “Pickwick Papers,” and so at the age of twenty-four he was carried up into a golden cloud of glory. World fame and success were his for the balance of his life; but he never entirely forgot the meaning of his early days, and remained to some extent an apostle of the poor and oppressed.

When I say that Dickens is radical propaganda, I do not mean merely that he wrote novel after novel exposing the abuses of his time, the cruelties of the poor laws, the horrors of the debtors’ prisons, the delays and corruptions of the courts, the knaveries and imbecilities of politics. I do not mean merely that he hated by instinct and ridiculed all through his life, lawyers and judges and newspaper editors and preachers and priests of capitalist prosperity. I mean something more deep and more fundamental than that: I mean that the very selection of his themes and of his characters, the whole environment and atmosphere of his novels, is a piece of propaganda. For Dickens proceeds to force into the aristocratic and exclusive realms of art the revolutionary notion that the poor and degraded are equally as interesting as the rich and respectable. We are invited, not merely to laugh at the antics of illiterate and unrefined people, as in Shakespeare; we are invited to enter into their hearts and minds, to put ourselves in their place and actually live their experiences. As reward for so doing, we are offered treasures of laughter and tears and thrills.

I don’t know how it is nowadays, but in my boyhood, which was some twenty years after Dickens’ death, everybody read him—my rich relatives, who read nothing else, and my poor relatives, broken-down Southern aristocrats, who read nothing else except the life of Robert E. Lee. And then in New York, the people I met in boarding-houses and third-rate lodgings—all shuddered over Bill Sykes and wept over Paul Dombey and laughed over Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller.

Dickens was, and remained to the end, from the point of view of leisure-class culture, a quite vulgar person. He took a naive delight in his worldly triumphs, and counted the success of his books by sales and money. He was a born actor, and loved to shine before the public; devising dramatic readings of his works, and taking endless tours, both in England and America, gathering great sums of money—though of course not to be compared with the moving picture fortunes of our day. It was a time when audiences liked to shed tears out loud, and Dickens liked to join them; he has all the tremolo stops in his organ, and piles on sentiment until we shudder. Fastidious and literary persons have now made it fashionable to declare that Dickens is unreadable; but the people have read him, and his sentiment as well as his humor are a part of our racial heritage, and one of the fountain-heads of the Socialist movement. His books are a five million word reiteration of the old Chartist hymn—

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