When wilt thou save the people?O God of mercy! when?Not kings and lords, but nations!Not thrones and crowns, but men!
When wilt thou save the people?O God of mercy! when?Not kings and lords, but nations!Not thrones and crowns, but men!
When wilt thou save the people?O God of mercy! when?Not kings and lords, but nations!Not thrones and crowns, but men!
Dickens himself was entirely instinctive in his class feelings; his mind was a typical middle-class muddle, and his remedy for the ills he pictured was kindness and poor law reform and charity bazaars—hanging paper garlands about the neck of the tiger of capitalism. The British masses needed time in which to find out how to bind and destroy this beast; but the first service was to proclaim the fact that this capitalist world is a world impossible for sensitive and decent human beings to endure—a world in which justice has become the Circumlocution Office, and truth has become Thomas Gradgrind, and Christianity has become Mr. Pecksniff and Uriah Heep.
Emerson, commenting upon the old saying that “No man is a hero to his valet,” put the question: “What hero ever had a valet?” This goes to prove that Emerson was not a reader of popular fiction; for if he had been following the novels of William Makepeace Thackeray in “Fraser’s Magazine,” he would have known that it is impossible for any hero to be without a valet. In Dickens we enter into the lives of the poor, and in Thackeray we enter into the lives of the rich, and it is hard for us to decide which class has the greater claim to our pity.
Thackeray was bom in India, his father being a government official. They tried to educate him at Cambridge, but it didn’t take, because he was incorrigibly desultory, a big, good-natured fellow who loved eating and drinking and gambling and good fellowship—everything, in short, but hard work. He early lost his fortune, trying to publish a paper; then he had to work, and became a contributor to “Punch,” and developed a faculty for burlesque verses and satiric sketches.
In my youth there was general complaint that Thackeray was “a cynic.” Let us settle that question at the outset; he was one of the most sentimental souls that everwalked about the world in trousers. But he had a pair of eyes, and he saw in the fashionable society around him a hundred different varieties of snobs; he collected them into a “Book of Snobs”—each one like a butterfly stuck on a pin. He went on to write a series of novels, full of scoldings varied by ridicule of human vanity and folly.
His first great work remains entirely neglected by the critics. “Barry Lyndon” is a marvelous piece of sustained irony, the story of a capable scoundrel, who makes his way in the great world by being just a little sharper than the people he meets, and a little more honest with himself. You recall how Milton, a devout and orthodox Puritan, could not refrain from making Satan heroic, because Satan was a rebel and Milton was another. We notice the same phenomenon in this case of Barry Lyndon, who does every kind of rascal thing; yet the fact remains, he is living by his wits, he is surviving in a world of privilege and power, and Thackeray is secretly thrilled by him. That doubtless accounts for the unpopularity of the story; for the average novel reader likes to have his villains labeled, and not to mix his blacks and his whites.
The instinctive rebel in Thackeray shows himself still more plainly in “Vanity Fair.” This time the villain is Becky Sharp, an utterly heartless intriguer, selling her sex for money and power. Nevertheless, she is a woman “on her own,” a little tiger-cat backed into a corner, with all the world poking sticks at her; she fights back, and gets the best of her enemies, and Thackeray cannot help making her the most interesting figure in the book.
As a respectable Victorian sentimentalist, he did his best to provide us with a foil for Becky, giving us Amelia Sedley, the perfect, submissive, adoring female. The daughter of a wealthy merchant, Amelia has never had a moment’s discomfort in her life. She is a model of the Victorian virtues; she honors and serves the male members of her family, no matter how selfish and worthless they may be. She has the brains of a medium-sized rabbit, and after we have got to know her, we understand why Victorian gentlemen sought refuge in interesting mistresses.
It has been said that in Thackeray’s novels all the good people are fools and all the evil people are clever. Beatrix Esmond, the one woman who rivals Becky Sharp in interest, is a cold, proud beauty, without even Becky’s excuse of poverty; she schemes to marry a duke, and when he is killed in a duel, she seeks to become the mistress of a prince, and ends ignominously as the wife of a tutor and the widow of a bishop. The Anti-Socialist Union of Great Britain, which exists to fight the “Reds,” should begin its labors by excluding from all libraries these devastating pictures of the manners and morals of the ruling classes.
I do not mean by this that Thackeray was consciously a Socialist; quite the contrary. As a member of the ruling classes, he pleads with them to be worthy of their high and agreeable destiny. How completely he believed in the “gentleman” you can see by the treatment he gives to his hero, Pendennis, a perfectly worthless young idler, and to Major Pendennis, a cynical and depraved old rascal. Thackeray condones the former and loves and pities the latter, and expects us to weep over the closing picture of the old martinet, having lost his fortune, obliged to dwell in a charity home with other indigent parasites. I speak for one reader, who could have borne with entire equanimity to see the major at work on the rock-pile, accompanied by all the other idle clubmen of London.
Thackeray in his writings rebelled against some conventions of his world, but in his every-day life he was as helpless as Amelia Sedley. His wife became insane, so he fell victim of that superstition which condemns the innocent partner in such a marriage to life-long celibacy. Thackeray, enduring this infliction, seemed heroic to his friends, and pitiful to us. He left it to a woman novelist, George Eliot, to set the precedent of defiance to this especially idiotic tribal taboo. George Eliot loved George Henry Lewes, who had an insane wife, and she went and lived with Lewes for twenty-four years, until his death, and told all the world about it. Thus we have one pleasant detail to record concerning Victorian England.
In his early days Thackeray had lived poorly, because he had to; but later he acquired a taste for expensive food, and especially drink, and thereby ruined his health and died at the age of fifty-two. This, of course, was devoutly concealed by his daughters, and explains the fact that no biography was published. Like other conventional gentlemen, he felt bound to provide incomes for these daughters, so he wasted his time trying to get some government sinecure, first in the post office, and then in the diplomatic service—the very kind of thing he exposed in his stories. He took to lecturing, following in the foot-steps of Dickens, but not enjoying the work, because he had nothing of the showman in him, but on the contrary the English gentleman’s intense reserve.
All this is what is called “gossip,” and is supposed to have nothing to do with the works of a great writer. I record my belief, that the character and life experiences of an artist make his works of art, in the same way that a mold makes the image out of the liquid metal. The quickest route to the understanding of any novelist or poet is to know these personal details about him; and above all, his relationship to those who paid him the money which kept him alive from day to day. Whether he conforms, or whether he rebels, these money-forces condition a man’s life.
Capitalist industrialism may be indicted on economic grounds because it is wasteful, and on moral grounds because it is dishonest; also it may be indicted upon esthetic grounds because it is ugly. The artistic temperament objects to it for this last reason, and there were some among the artists who set out to make war upon it.
John Ruskin was the son of a wealthy English wine merchant; he devoted himself to the study of art, and sought to carry it back to the simple standards of the Christian primitives. He became a lecturer and teacher, and founded a college for the sons of workingmen at Oxford. We find him leading groups of British university students out to do manual labor upon the roads—a pathetic effort to be useful and honest in a world of cheating and exploiting. In the end Ruskin went out of his mind, as a result of brooding over the ugliness and cruelty of his country’s industrial system.
Among his disciples was one who is entitled to a place in these pages, because he was a working artist who strove to create beauty upon a sound social basis; also becausehe was a Socialist who tried to teach the principles of brotherhood and solidarity to a world of individualist and capitalist art.
William Morris was born in 1834; his parents were wealthy and he inherited a comfortable income. His mother designed him for a bishop, but he soon outgrew that career. He parted with his Christian faith on the intellectual side, but he still kept its emotions; he was a passionate lover of the Middle Ages, and of the Gothic spirit in art. He managed to persuade himself that the Middle Ages had been happy, and that the craftsmen in those days had been free to make what they loved without reference to the profit motive. So all his life he yearned back to those good old days, and made them a standard by which to judge everything bad in his own time.
He was a simple, whole-souled fellow, who loved to do things with his hands, and possessed extraordinary aptitude for all the arts; he learned to paint and to carve and to decorate, and to do every kind of hand labor that contained any slightest element of artistry. He looked out upon modern industrialism and saw wholesale, cheap production of ugly and commonplace and unsubstantial goods. He hated it with his whole soul, and attributed all the moral evils of the time to the fact that the workers had lost their love for their job and their pride in craftsmanship. He wanted a home to live in, and because no architect knew how to design a beautiful home, Morris became his own architect; because he could not buy any beautiful furniture, he designed his own furniture and had a carpenter make it. Out of this came the establishment of a firm to do such labor, and so grew the Arts and Crafts movement.
That brought Morris into touch with workingmen, a very dangerous thing; because under our present social system it is better for a gentleman to stay in his own class, and not find out what is happening to the workers. Morris was drawn into politics—beginning, curiously enough, with an effort to save old churches and other buildings from being “restored” according to modern taste. Before long we find him evolved into one of the leading Victorian rebels, a founder of the Social-Democratic Federation, speaking afternoons and evenings atsoap-box meetings. The critics lamented this, just as they lamented the political career of John Milton: it seemed such a waste of time for a great poet and artist. But it was all a part of William Morris’s life; if he had not been the kind of man he was, he could not have produced the kind of art he did.
In between all his other labors he wrote poetry; it flowed out of him freely, wonder tales of all sorts, having to do with those old times which he loved, and the beautiful things which he imagined happening there. It is very good narrative verse, and all young people ought to read “The Earthly Paradise”; also they ought to read “The Dream of John Ball,” and learn what happened to the social rebels in the old days.
Morris’s most popular piece of prose writing is “News from Nowhere.” He had read Bellamy’s Utopia, “Looking Backward,” and he did not like it, because Bellamy was an American, and had organized and systematized the world. Nobody was going to organize and systematize William Morris; he set about to make his own Utopia, in which everything is placid and commonplace, healthy as the animals are healthy—but also abominably dull.
Says Mrs. Ogi: “You are discussing one of the classics of your movement, and you know what the critics all say: the Socialists ought to begin by agreeing on what they want.”
“I know,” says Ogi, “and I’m sorry to disappoint them. But there are many different kinds of people in the world, and some of each kind in our movement. I am a Socialist who believes in machinery, and has no interest in any world that does not develop machine power to the greatest possible extent. We are like people traveling through a tunnel; it is dark and smoky, and some want to turn back, but I want to go through to the other end.”
“Morris and Ruskin said the other end was in hell.”
“Yes, but I think their eyes were blinded by the smoke. What is wrong is not with machinery, but with the private ownership of machinery. There is no reason why machines should not make beautiful and substantial things, instead of making ugly and dishonest things—except the fact that machines are owned by peoplewho have no interest except to make a profit out of the product. A thing is not less beautiful because there are millions of other things exactly like it in the world. That is just a snobbish notion, and Morris should have learned the lesson from any field of daisies.”
Here is Sherwood Anderson telling the story of his life. He is one American who does not like machinery, and he has good reason; he has worked in factories, and he knows. He agrees with Morris that the monotony of the machine destroys the initiative and therefore the morals of the workers; they cannot create, and so they tell smutty stories. But you note that Anderson is not a Socialist, and has not the vision of what a factory might be if it were democratically owned and managed by the workers. The workers will then be very proud of their beautiful machines, they will learn to understand and tend them all, and administer the politics of the great industry of which the machines are a part. The individual worker will travel from the factories to the harvest fields and back, as many varieties of labor as he fancies. And anyhow he won’t have to work but three or four hours a day, and the rest of the time he can develop his faculties by making verses, or playing music, or staging dramas, or baseball games, or whatever he pleases. And every year the machines will become more automatic, until some day the only labor of man will consist of pressing a few buttons every morning. Whether you like that or not depends entirely upon whether or not you have developed your brains, and want to develop them still further.
The spirit of John Milton and John Bunyan crossed the Atlantic Ocean and settled in Massachusetts, and the spirit of their enemies crossed the Atlantic Ocean and settled in Virginia. They made two civilizations, and these civilizations fought a civil war in the new world, just as they had done in the old.
For the first two hundred years the colonists were busy killing Indians and clearing the wilderness, so they had little time for art. They had to break their ties withthe old country; and just as we saw Voltaire finding it easier to rebel in religion and politics than in the field of culture, so in America we shall find that the Declaration of Independence was signed a long time before any artist was bold enough to revolt from British standards of taste. The first American writers were concerned to handle American themes as they imagined Addison and Steele and Burke and Dryden would have done.
The first writer to escape this British tradition did so, not by making an American tradition, but by ascending into the universal and transcendental. Ralph Waldo Emerson read Goethe and Swedenborg and Plato and the Hindus, and became a Yankee mystic and democratic saint.
He was the son of a Unitarian clergyman, and followed in his father’s footsteps. But early in life he realized that he no longer believed the special doctrines which gave meaning to the communion service, so he stood up in his church, and very quietly and simply told about his new convictions, and went out into the world to earn his living as an independent lecturer.
Puritanism was now two hundred years ancient, but the temper of it still survived in New England; that is, people were painfully anxious to do right, and looked up to teachers who had studied such problems. They were willing to gather in meeting places, and be advised what they should do, and to pay a modest stipend to the adviser. So this young rebel was able to earn the simple living which sufficed everyone in Concord in those days. He studied the world’s best literature in several languages, he thought earnestly and wrote honestly, and was a model of dignity, kindness, and wisdom.
His most popular lectures are known to us as “Emerson’s Essays.” I read them in youth, and owe to them a tribute of gratitude. First of all, they teach self-reliance, the most fundamental of the pioneer virtues. It was by self-reliant men that New England was made; and in this atmosphere of extreme individualism, it was impossible for a philosopher to value the equally fundamental virtue of solidarity. Emerson has no conception of a co-operative world, and believes that he has done his duty to his fellows by courtesy and the speaking of the truth.
The essays are formless, consisting of scattered paragraphs and random reflections. They are not always easy to interpret, because they soar into regions of the absolute, where every statement is equally as untrue as it is true. The bearings depend upon the application; so that we have to know Emerson’s whole thought, and his life. Applying the highest tests, we find his doctrine a little thin and his example a little tame. He lived through stern times, and while his voice was always on the right side, we feel that he might have been more prompt and more vigorous. His optimism is beautiful, but a trifle lacking in content. We want a man to put more reality into his writings, to show us how to deal with the grim and hateful facts of life. Emerson makes a cryptic statement—
I am owner of the sphere,Of the seven stars and the solar year,Of Caesar’s hand, and Plato’s brain,Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakespeare’s strain.
I am owner of the sphere,Of the seven stars and the solar year,Of Caesar’s hand, and Plato’s brain,Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakespeare’s strain.
I am owner of the sphere,Of the seven stars and the solar year,Of Caesar’s hand, and Plato’s brain,Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakespeare’s strain.
We say: yes, perhaps; but most of us find it difficult to get the Shakespeare strain to come out of us. Likewise, we do not know quite how to reconcile Lord Christ with Caesar; nor can we always get Lord Christ to agree with Shakespeare—watch the scoffing this book will cause among the critics! You see how these mystic utterances are liable to be misunderstood; and how it was possible for the transcendentalist movement, which produced Emerson, to produce also the horrors of “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.”
On the other hand, when Emerson deals with justice and liberty in New England he can deliver as heavy a punch as Byron: for example, his “Boston Hymn,” discussing the question of compensation for the enfranchised slaves—
Pay ransom to the owner,And fill the bag to the brim.Who is the owner? The slave is owner,And ever was. Pay him.
Pay ransom to the owner,And fill the bag to the brim.Who is the owner? The slave is owner,And ever was. Pay him.
Pay ransom to the owner,And fill the bag to the brim.Who is the owner? The slave is owner,And ever was. Pay him.
I have discussed these lines in “The Book of Life,” and suggested how much cheaper it would have been to pay the owners than to fight the Civil War. I overlooked the fact that this “Boston Hymn” was written after the Civil War was on. Emerson, combining Yankee economywith wise humanity, had all along been advocating the sensible course of freeing the slaves by purchase.
We think of this Concord sage as a philosopher, and less often as a poet. But he was a great poet; at his best he is among the immortals. Not only is there wisdom and moral beauty in his verse; there is love of nature, and there is passion. People sometimes died young in Concord, just as they did in old England and in Greece, and poets poured their sorrow into song. Emerson’s “Threnody,” written upon the death of his five-year-old son, is lacking in all the classical paraphernalia of Milton’s “Lycidas,” but it is full of such beauty and fervor as are native to our country, and I see no reason why we Americans should devote all our time to the worship of foreign gods. If our colleges must teach the classics, to the exclusion of modern work, let them at least teach our native classics, which are easier for us to understand.
I propose a motto for our youth: See Emerson first!
America at this time was an overgrown youthful body, ill-supplied with mind; and a few ardent believers in culture set out to fill this need. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a student at Bowdoin College, and the faculty decided that Cervantes and Dante and Goethe and Moliere and Hugo ought to be more than names to the American people; somebody ought to study these languages and literatures, and pass them on. They gave Longfellow a traveling scholarship for three years, and he went abroad and collected things romantic and beautiful and innocent in Spain and Italy and Germany and France, and came home and spent the next twenty or thirty years in teaching them, first at Bowdoin and then at Harvard. He translated poetry, and also wrote poetry of his own, very much resembling the translations. At the age of forty-seven he became a poet exclusively, and lived to be a seventy-five-year-old boy, just as romantic and beautiful and innocent as when he had first gone out to gather nourishment for the hungry young soul of America.
Longfellow was a moralist, and it was his purpose todraw useful conclusions in his poetry. He would start by looking at the planet Mars, and end by proving that human beings must be brave and self-reliant: not that there is anything remotely suggesting such qualities in a “red planet,” but because this planet happens to be named after the God of war. He would look at a ship on the stocks, and draw conclusions about the government of his country. He would look at the village blacksmith, and thank him for a lesson in diligence and sobriety.
That kind of poetry has now gone out of fashion. The young intellectuals of America are no longer romantic and beautiful and innocent, and they say that Longfellow is propaganda. But you know my thesis by now—theirs is just as much propaganda, only it is on the other side. What Longfellow called art is incitement towards diligence and sobriety, while what our young sophisticates call art is incitement toward going to hell in a hurry. Anything that pictures the delights of the senses and the breakdown of the will is art; but poor Longfellow, in an unguarded moment, had the misfortune to exclaim that
Life is real! Life is earnest!And the grave is not its goal.
Life is real! Life is earnest!And the grave is not its goal.
Life is real! Life is earnest!And the grave is not its goal.
These two lines have been enough to damn him in the eyes of a whole generation of coterie-litterateurs.
Turning the pages of the art which Longfellow brought back from Europe, there flashes to mind a memory of the days when I also traveled in Europe, collecting culture. It was in Naples, a soft moonlit evening in early spring, and I stood before a great statue, noting its dim outlines. A figure slipped up beside me, and a soft voice began to whisper, offering to take me to a place where there were beautiful boys: “beautiful, sweet Neapolitan boys,” I remember the phrase. I wonder what the traveling idealist from Bowdoin College would have made of such a whisper in the moonlight!
That was a dozen years ago, and we in America have learned something about Europe since then. I am the last person in the world who would desire a return to the age of innocence, or advocate, even for the young, the blinking of grim and hideous facts. But this I do believe: a time will come, and not so far in the future, when American youth will react from the hip-pocket flask and petting-party stage of culture. With full knowledge of vice and disease, it will choose virtue and health, because these are the truly interesting and worth while things, and the truly great themes of art.
Pending the arrival of such a time, I record my notion, that poetry does not cease to be great because it is declaimed by a million schoolboys. “To be or not to be,” and “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” are great poetry, even though we personally are tired of them. If it be permitted to tell a story in verse, then assuredly “The Wreck of the Hesperus” is a tragic story told in vivid and stirring language. I say that anyone who does not know this for a great ballad simply does not know what a ballad is. You may spend your time digging in Percy’s “Reliques” and other old volumes, and find things less easy to read, but nothing more worth reading. I go farther and admit that when I was young I found delight in “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “Hiawatha” and “Evangeline,” and I don’t believe that kind of young person is yet entirely extinct in America.
The Puritans, having been driven from England by religious persecution, set to work in their New England to persecute others. Among their victims was a Massachusetts Quaker by the name of Whittier, who was deprived of the franchise for daring to petition the town council for liberty to preach. Undaunted by the punishment, this pioneer raised a family of ten stalwart children in the Quaker faith, and became the great-great-grandfather of a Quaker poet, who has received but scant appreciation from the literary critics of his country.
John Greenleaf Whittier was born in 1807, one of a large family, and grew up to toil upon a rocky farm. He got his education in a country school, and his first glimpse of poetry from a wandering Scotchman who spent a night at the farm-house, and who sang the songs of Robert Burns. The frail and sensitive lad who sat and listened enraptured was to grow up to be the Burns of New England; a saintly Burns, having the Scotch poet’s energy and rebellious ardor, but not his destroying vices.
Independence, hard work, and religion were the three factors in Whittier’s environment. He wanted to go to an academy to continue his education, but there was no money, so he earned it by work as a cobbler. You remember the sneer of the Tory critic—“Back to your gallipots, Mr. Keats”; and here we find a critic satirizing our Quaker poet: “the wax still sticking to his fingers’ ends.” You remember how Keats fell in love with an elegant young lady; Whittier became a country editor and presumed to aspire to the daughter of a local judge, and was spurned, and went back home, ill, poverty-stricken and humiliated.
But he continued to study and write verses, and found another job as editor, and a prospect of success in politics. Then came the crisis in his life; the anti-slavery movement was making its first feeble beginnings in New England, and Whittier became the friend of William Lloyd Garrison, and spent sleepless nights wrestling with the angel of duty. At the age of twenty-seven he made the choice; he threw away his career, and spent his hard-won savings to print and send out five hundred copies of an address in opposition to chattel slavery. We who in these days are daring to challenge wage slavery, and are witnessing mobbings and jailings and torturing for the cause, must not forget that back in the 1830’s this gentle Quaker poet was stoned and nearly lynched in Massachusetts, and mobbed again and had his office burned about his head in Philadelphia.
He suffered from ill health all his life, yet he never gave up the cause. He suffered from poverty; having a mother and sisters dependent upon him, he was too poor ever to marry. He continued to edit papers, he wrote and spoke against slavery, and composed verses which were taken up and recopied by constantly increasing numbers of newspapers. Many of these verses are now found in his collected works, and one who reads them is surprised by their uniformly high quality, not merely the fervor and energy, but the beauty of expression and the treasures of imagination which this self-taught country boy poured into his propaganda. You recall Browning’s rebuke to the old poet Wordsworth, “The Lost Leader.” Here is Whittier’s “Ichabod,” rebuking Daniel Webster for his apostasy to the cause of freedom—
All else is gone, from those great eyesThe soul has fled:When faith is lost, when honor dies,The man is dead!
All else is gone, from those great eyesThe soul has fled:When faith is lost, when honor dies,The man is dead!
All else is gone, from those great eyesThe soul has fled:When faith is lost, when honor dies,The man is dead!
Whittier was not among the fanatics of the movement; on the contrary, he was a shrewd politician, interested in moving the minds of his fellows and in getting something done. He helped in the forming of the Abolition party, which later became the Free Soil party, and then the Republican party of Lincoln. As a Quaker he could not support the war, yet he managed to write verses about it—for example, when Stonewall Jackson was unwilling to kill old Barbara Frietchie for hanging out the Stars and Stripes in Frederick. It is probable that this incident never happened, but it made a very popular poem.
Whittier never went to college, he never traveled in Europe to acquire a foreign tone; he remained an American peasant. He voiced their thoughts in their own language, and they have cherished him, and will some day force the critics to give him his due place. If you are looking for ballads made out of native material, read the story of old Skipper Ireson, who roused the fury of his villagers by sailing away from a ship in distress:
Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heartTarred and feathered and carried in a cartBy the women of Marblehead.
Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heartTarred and feathered and carried in a cartBy the women of Marblehead.
Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heartTarred and feathered and carried in a cartBy the women of Marblehead.
If you are looking for American sentiment, for simple, untouched democracy, read “Maud Muller.” Above all, if you want the inner essence of New England farm life, the mingled harshness and beauty of its body, and the mingled sternness and charm of its spirit, read “Snow-Bound”
The Puritans of Massachusetts, having killed the Indians and fenced the farms and built the towns, settled into the routine of getting one another’s money. The more enterprising ones moved West, where there was moremoney; the others sunk into slow decay. Puritanism came to mean, not aggressive virtue, but negative avoidance. Before it passed away entirely, it produced a man of genius who was of it enough to know it thoroughly, yet sufficiently out of it to be able to embody it in art.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, a port which had once been prosperous, but had lost in competition with the great cities. It was a mournful place, living in the memory of its past, which included the drowning and hanging of witches, a frenzy of religious terror in which an ancestor of Hawthorne had been a persecuting judge. One of this judge’s victims had put a curse upon him, and the novelist pictures himself, playfully, as the last sad relic of this curse. He was a solitary man, born to poverty, shy, aloof and obscure. Recognition did not come until the middle forties, and meantime he lived in ancient, lonely houses, staying indoors by day and wandering the streets by night. He had no political sense, no social sense; events in the world outside meant little—he lived in the past.
Yet, strangely enough, he did not accept the ideas of this past. He had nothing of the robust Tory fervor of Sir Walter Scott; he was a modern man, and a quiet, skeptical humor shines through his pages. What had happened was that his faith had dried up, and nothing else had come to take its place; so there he was, not knowing why, or how, or to what end. He wrote elaborate diaries, full of minute details about the things which happened hour by hour; things which only a child would consider worth recording. He would produce and publish a sketch in which, with really beautiful art, he would describe the sensations of walking about the streets of Salem on a rainy night, and how the lights shone in the puddles—yellow lights of the street-lamps and blue and green lights from the drug-stores.
He gathered strange legends of old-time people, living terror-haunted lives, driven to sin by the very desperation of their efforts to avoid it. The pangs of conscience are Hawthorne’s “local color” and artistic tradition; he knows them in every detail, but he himself is not under their spell—they are like bric-à-brac and objects of art which he collects. “Twice-Told Tales” was the title of his first volume, and this, you see, prepares us for conscious literary artifice. Then we have “Mosses from an Old Manse” which promises mournfulness and moldiness, desolation and decay. Then “The House of the Seven Gables,” the hiding place of an old and dying family haunted by a curse.
“The Scarlet Letter” brought its author instant recognition, and is considered by many critics America’s most authentic masterpiece of fiction. A young married woman in the old-time witch-hunting Salem has yielded to adulterous love for a young clergyman. A child is born, and the mother is publicly accused, and exhibited upon the scaffold, with the letter “A” embroidered in scarlet cloth upon her dress. She will not reveal the name of her lover, and so the young clergyman escapes obloquy, but is haunted by that sense of guilt which is the principal product of Puritanism in decay.
The “eternal triangle,” you see; but it differs from other triangles in that it is not a story of passion, but of punishment. We do not see the guilty love in the days of its happiness, but only in the days of its remorse. As in all Hawthorne’s stories, we meet, not people who are acting, but people who are looking back upon actions long since committed. This is one kind of art, and I admit the greatness of “The Scarlet Letter” as a piece of technique. But we are here discussing art works as human and social products; and I point out, as in the case of so many other tragedies, how temporary and unsubstantial is the ground upon which it rests.
The ethical basis of “The Scarlet Letter” is the conviction that marriage is indissoluble, and that a young woman who has been given in marriage to an elderly man, and finds herself unhappy, is bound by the laws of God to remain in the bonds of that unhappy marriage. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that the ideas of mankind should undergo a change; suppose we should come to the conviction that a young woman who finds herself married to an elderly man whom she does not love, and who conceives an intense and enduring passion for a younger man, and desires to have children by that younger man—suppose we should decide that this woman, in remaining with the older and unloved man, and denying life to children by the younger man, is committing a crime against posterity, violating a fundamental law upon whichrace progress depends? You can see that in that case “The Scarlet Letter” would become entirely archaic, an object of curiosity mingled with repugnance.
The American government honored this eminently respectable novelist by making him, first a gauger of customs, and then its consul to Liverpool. He was a prematurely old man then, and fled from the cold fogs of England to Rome—which he liked no better. But he patiently collected information concerning Roman antiquities, and composed a novel called “The Marble Faun,” which is dutifully read as a guide book by all school-marms visiting the Eternal City. How well adapted this Puritan genius was to interpret the Latin world, you may judge from the fact that he was shocked by nude statues, and could not see why sculptors continued to overlook the necessity for marble clothing. That skin was made before clothing, and may continue to be worn after clothing is forgotten, is a fact which did not occur to this traveler from Salem.
He came back to pass his last days in an America torn by the agonies of the Civil War. He was a Democrat by force of inertia, and had written a campaign biography of the genial and bibulous President Pierce. He had no understanding of the war, nor of the new America which was to be born from it. In these last pathetic days he reminds us of the poor old Tory, Sir Walter Scott, facing the Reform Bill and the Chartist riots and “the country mined below our feet.” I plead with artists to step ahead of the procession in their youth, so that in their old age. they may not be left so pitifully far behind.
The Puritans who settled Massachusetts believed that happiness was to be found in the repressing of the “carnal nature.” The Cavaliers who settled Maryland and Virginia believed in enjoyment, and rode their passions at a gallop. It was appropriate that these Cavaliers should give to America an artist who taught that sensuous beauty is a mystic revelation of God, and that poetry must be music, to the exclusion of intellect and moral sense.
A Maryland general’s son ran away and married a young actress, and these two lived a wretched, hand-to-mouth existence, and died in a garret, leaving three infants. One of the three was named Edgar Poe, and our first glimpse of him shows a nurse feeding him upon a “sugar-tit” soaked in gin. A little later we find him adopted by a sentimental lady named Allan, and made into a kind of drawing-room pet, taught to pledge toasts in drink. He was an exquisite little fellow, proud, sensitive and self-willed; and in his early training we note the seeds of all his later misery.
He began writing poetry in childhood, and we still read verses which he composed in his ’teens. He was sent to the University of Virginia, where along with rich men’s sons he gambled and drank. He deserted the University, quarreled with his benefactors, and enlisted in the army. They got him out and sent him to West Point, which is famous for having graduated a number of soldiers, and for having failed to graduate two artists, Edgar Allan Poe and James McNeill Whistler. Poe wrote verses and drank brandy with his room-mates, and finally set about to get himself expelled from a life which he hated.
So here he was at the age of twenty-two, a poet, a rebel and a drunkard. He had eighteen years more to live, and during that time his life was one long agony of struggle. He had brilliant gifts, his work found recognition, and he got many editorial positions, but could not keep them. He wandered from city to city, quarreled with both enemies and friends, and exhibited all those forms of evasion and dishonesty for which alcohol and opium are responsible....
“How much shall I say about the great curse of the South?” asks Ogi.
“Say it all,” says his wife.
“I recall those old Maryland and Virginia homesteads, dark and dusty, falling to decay; a few sticks of furniture, moth-eaten hangings, and silent, pale, in-door men and women—the former drinking, the latter taking drugs and patent medicines. I remember also the well-to-do families in the towns, the wild young cursing blades, and the old topers with trembling hands. I remember the uncle who shot off his head in the park, and that other uncle, with a distinguished naval record, who lived into old agewithout ever being sober. I remember my own father, and my childhood and youth of struggle to save him. All these men were kind and gentle, idealistic, charming in manners—”
“I, too, had an uncle,” says Mrs. Ogi; “the tenderest heart you ever knew. He drank because he could not stand the life he saw about him, the unsolvable race problem, the mass of ignorance and brutality. I would get his bottle away from him and hide it, and then in his torment he would go so far as a ‘damn’; but I never saw him so drunk that he failed to apologize for such a word.”
We must take Poe as one of the pitiful victims of these customs; we must understand that his virtues were his own, while his vices were fed to him in a “sugar-tit.” Of all American poets up to this time his was the greatest genius; his was the true fire, the energy, the vision—and for the most part it was wasted and lost. It was wasted, not merely because he got drunk, because he was always on the verge of starvation, because he was chained to slavery, and had to write pot-boilers under the orders of men with routine or mercenary minds; it was wasted also because he was a victim of perverse theories about art and life. He began, as a child, with imitations of Byron, and then came under the spell of Coleridge’s disorderly genius. We might take a great part of Poe’s work, just as we took “Kubla Khan,” and show how his talent goes into the portrayal of every imaginable kind of ruin, terror and despair.
We cannot say to what extent Poe’s art theories were the product of his vices, and to what extent the vices were the product of the theories. After he left West Point, and was starving in Baltimore, he met his cousin, a frail, sensitive child, as poor as himself. He married her when she was less than fourteen years old; he adored her, but their life was a long crucifixion, because of her failing health. Several times she broke a blood vessel, and in the end she faded away from tuberculosis. The shadow of that tragedy hung over Poe’s whole mature life, and you will note that his loveliest poetry deals with beautiful women who are dying or dead.
In this tormented body there lived and wrought not merely a great genius, but also a great mind. Poe was a critic, of a kind entirely new to America. He did notdistribute indiscriminate praise from motives of patriotism and puffery; he had critical standards, right or wrong, and was merciless to the swarms of art pretenders. Naturally, therefore, he was hated and furiously attacked; and because of his weaknesses, he was an easy mark for all.
His art theories were those which we are here seeking to overthrow; how false and dangerous they were, his life attests. It is interesting to note that in one of his youthful poems, the first real utterance of his genius, he took a quite different view. Quoting an imaginary passage from the Koran about the angel Israfel, “whose heart-strings are a lute,” he wrote:
Therefore thou art not wrong,Israfeli, who despisestAn unimpassioned song;To thee the laurels belong,Best bard, because the wisest.
Therefore thou art not wrong,Israfeli, who despisestAn unimpassioned song;To thee the laurels belong,Best bard, because the wisest.
Therefore thou art not wrong,Israfeli, who despisestAn unimpassioned song;To thee the laurels belong,Best bard, because the wisest.
Well might this tormented Baltimore poet long for the wisdom of the Mohammedan angel! He spent his great analytical powers in concocting a “moon hoax,” and in solving all the cryptograms which empty-headed people sent him. It was as if a man should build a mighty engine, and then set it to fanning the air. In his last pitiful years he composed an elaborate work on metaphysics, which he called “Eureka,” meaning that he had solved the secret of the ages, the nature of existence and the absolute. It is like all other metaphysics—a cobweb spun out of words; the mighty engine has here been set to fanning a vacuum.
Poe was a fighting man and an ardent propagandist. He fought for art, for the freedom and the glory and the joy of art, as a thing apart from humanity, and from the sense of brotherhood and human solidarity. Life wreaked its vengeance upon him, his punishment was heavy enough, and we should be content with voicing our pity—but for the fact that his art theories are still alive in the world, wrecking other young artists. This is what makes necessary the painful task of drawing moral lessons over the graves of “mighty poets in their misery dead.”
Edgar Allan Poe lived and wrote to prove that art excludes morality. We come now to another poet, who lived and wrote to prove that art excludes everything else. He had a message and a faith, which was the dominating motive in everything he wrote; in short, he was one of the major prophets—like Dante, Milton, Tolstoi, Nietzsche, who used art as a means of swaying the souls of men.
Referring thus to Walt Whitman, we now have upon our side the weight of critical authority; learned and entirely respectable college professors write in this fashion about his books, and do not lose their positions for so doing. But realize how different it was in Whitman’s lifetime; in the early years respectable opinion looked upon him as a kind of obscene maniac. His first edition of “Leaves of Grass,” a thousand copies printed by himself, was left on his hands, except for those which he sent out free—and even some of these were returned, one by the poet Whittier! A critic wrote that Whitman was “as unacquainted with art as a hog with mathematics.” Another wrote that he “deserved the whip of the public executioner.” He was thrown out of a government position in Washington for having a copy of his book locked up in his own desk, and again and again his publishers were forced by threat of public prosecution to withdraw the book from circulation. Alone among Whitman’s contemporaries to recognize his genius was Emerson, and when Whitman published Emerson’s letter in the second edition of “Leaves of Grass,” Emerson was embarrassed—for in the meantime his horrified friends had persuaded him to hesitate in his opinion. From all this we may learn how difficult it is to judge one’s contemporaries.
Walt Whitman was born of farmer folk in an isolated part of Long Island. His father became a carpenter and moved to Brooklyn, then a small town. Walt became an office boy at the age of twelve; he got hold of some good reading, learned printing, and became a teacher, and something of an orator. He was an abolitionist, a teetotaler and other kinds of “crank”; a slow-moving, ratherstubborn youth, who wandered about from place to place, meeting all kinds of people, watching life with interest, but caring nothing for success. He had a good job as a newspaper editor, but gave it up because of his views on slavery. He set a new fashion in life—a type of man now common in the radical movement, who does enough manual labor to keep alive, and spends the rest of his time studying literature and life. Walt’s people loved him, but could not make him out; they thought he was lazy when he loafed and invited his soul.
He was finding his own way, guided by the unfolding genius within. He wanted to know people, every kind that lived; he wanted to talk with them, to feel himself one with them. He worked with laborers on the job, he rode in ferry-boats, he made friends with the drivers of busses. He wanted to see America, so he wandered by slow stages to New Orleans and back. He wanted to know literature, so he read, but according to his own taste, taking no one’s opinions. When he was ready to express himself, it was a self hitherto unknown in literature, and the most startling voice yet lifted in America.
It often happens that the student learns about new and vital movements through the writings of their opponents. Thus the present writer was made into a rationalist by the reading of Christian apologetics. In the same way I learned about Whitman from an essay by Sidney Lanier, a respectable gentleman-poet from the South, who demonstrated that Whitman’s claim to be the voice of democracy was nonsense; the masses of the people had no interest whatever in this eccentric poetry, and could not understand what the poet was driving at.
Does a poet necessarily have to be appreciated by those of whom he writes? Or is it possible to tell something about people which they themselves do not yet know? If a man is picking apples, he is obeying the laws of gravitation, and the apples likewise are obeying it. Sir Isaac Newton comes along, and interprets the behavior of the man and of the apples. Does the truth of Newton’s law depend upon the assent of the apple-picker?
Walt Whitman did really know the American people, the masses, as distinguished from the cultured few; he knew them as no man of letters up to that time had known them. He believed there were tremendous, instinctiveforces working within them, and that he, as poet and seer, could enter into that unconscious mass-being and understand it and guide it. He believed that he was laying out the path which democracy would follow, he was voicing the desires it would feel, the love and fellowship and solidarity it would embody in institutions and arts. Whether he was right in these intuitions and mystical prophesyings was for the future to decide. Certainly there were two kinds of persons in Whitman’s own day who could not decide; one was the average wage-slave, ignorant and groping; and the other was a gentleman from Georgia, who made excellent but customary rhymes about birds and brooks and flowers.
Walt Whitman was one of those mystics to whom the inner essence of all things is the same; all life is sacred, and all men are brothers in a common Fatherhood. Jesus taught that, and in the nineteen hundred years which have since passed new prophets have arisen every now and then to revive it—but the Christians are just as much scandalized every time. Whitman’s title, “Leaves of Grass,” under which he included all his poems, means that he chose the most common and least distinguished product of nature for his symbol of the human soul. The poet himself was one of these “Leaves of Grass,” and celebrated himself as the representative and voice of the rest. He sang the song of himself, and his contemporaries thought this was crude and barbarous egotism. This big bearded fellow who printed his own poems, with a preface to tell how great they were, and his picture in a workingman’s dress without a necktie—he was nothing but a hoodlum, and the critics called for the police.
The worst stumbling block was the portion of the book called “Children of Adam,” dealing with sex. The Anglo-Saxon race was used to horrified silence about sex, and also to sly leering about sex; the one thing it had never encountered was simple frankness. What Whitman did was to take sex exactly as it is, a part of life, and write about it as he wrote about everything else. When I, as a student, first looked up “Leaves of Grass” in the Columbia University library, I found this portion of the book so thumbed and worn as to make plain that the young readers had not been taught to understand Whitman. For he gave to this part of his message its due proportion andno more. He was a clean man, living an abstemious and even ascetic life, developing his mind as well as his body.
The Civil War came, and the moral greatness of Whitman was made apparent. He went to Washington as a sort of amateur nurse; living on almost nothing, he devoted his entire time to visiting in the hospitals, bringing comfort and affection to tens of thousands of suffering and neglected soldiers. His genius was for friendship, and everyone loved him; there are many stories of men whose lives were saved by his presence and his love. He was a big man, with ruddy cheeks and a full beard, turned gray under the strain of these years. It is interesting to note that Lincoln, meeting him, said the same words that Napoleon said to Goethe: “This is a man!”
“The good grey poet,” as one of his friends called him, wrecked his health amid these frightful scenes, and was never the same again. He published more poems, “Drum-Taps,” dealing with the war. All that which was called egotism is now burned away, and we have a revelation of a people uplifted by struggle. In 1871 came a prose work, “Democratic Vistas,” in which his message is proclaimed even more clearly than in his verse. It is a call for a new art, based upon brotherhood and equality. Our New World democracy, declared Whitman, is “so far an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary and aesthetic results.”
Whitman suffered a stroke of paralysis, recovered partially, and then suffered another stroke. He was more or less crippled through his last twenty years, and lived in extreme poverty; but gradually his fame spread and friends gathered about him. The labor movement was now emerging—and its leaders were discovering that this old poet had indeed forseen how they would feel. “My call is the call of battle—I nourish active rebellion.” And each new generation of the young nourishers of rebellion feeds its soul upon Whitman’s inspiration.
Is it poetry? That is a question over which battles are fought. It seems to me that words matter little; it is a kind of inspired chant, which moves you if you are susceptible to its ideas. For two years I steeped myself in the literature of the Civil War, while writing “Manassas”; and to me at that time “Drum-Taps” seemed to contain all the fervor and anguish of the conflict. But the everyday person, who does not rise to those heights, prefers “O Captain, My Captain,” which has the easier beauties of rhyme and fixed rhythm.
The critics have by now got used to Whitman’s honesty about sex; the only stumbling block is his long catalogues of things. He will sing the human body, and give you a list of the parts thereof: and can that be poetry? But you must bear in mind that Whitman is more a seer than a poet. “Sermons in stones,” said Shakespeare; and if the stones had names, Whitman would call the roll of them, and each would be a mystic symbol, and the total effect would be a hypnotic spell. It is an old trick of those who appeal to the subconscious mind; in the English Prayer-Book, for example, there is a chant: “O, all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him forever.” The hymn goes on to name all the various aspects of nature: “O, all ye Showers and Dew ... O, all ye Fire and Heat ... Ye Lightnings and Clouds ... Ye Mountains and Hills ... Ye Seas and Floods ... Ye Fowls of the Air ... Ye Beasts and Cattle.” ... and so on through the many Works of the Lord which are invited to praise Him and magnify Him forever. So, if you are a mystic, you may contemplate with awe each separate miraculous product of that mysterious organizing force which has created a living human body.
The mystical life has its dangers, and also, alas! its boredoms. I have stated in the chapter on Emerson that there is no absolute which is not equally as false as it is true. Whitman has raised up a host of imitators, and I have read their alleged “free verse,” and record the fact that it was surely a waste of my time, and apparently a waste of theirs. Also, I have known many followers of Walt Whitman, the greater number of whom have chosen to follow the poet’s eccentricities, rather than his virtues. You see, it is so much easier to leave off a necktie and “loaf,” than it is to have genius and create a new art form! Whitman is not alone in suffering through his disciples; Jesus had that tragic fate, and Nietzsche, and Tolstoi, and many another major prophet!
We have been following the fortunes of a pioneer people breaking into the field of world culture. Let us now travel part way round the earth in either direction, and watch another pioneer people doing the same thing.
The differences between America and Russia are many and striking, and before we enter upon a study of Russian literature we must understand Russian life. Voltaire tells us that virtue and vice are products like vinegar, and we shall find this applies also to the Russian soul with its mysticism and melancholy. When the sun almost disappears for six months at a time, and icy blizzards rage, human beings have a tendency to stay by the fire and develop their inner natures; also they develop congested livers, and brood upon the futility of life.
Says Mrs. Ogi: “Don’t forget that it often gets cold in New England.”
“Yes, and there is both mysticism and melancholy in New England art. But the difference is that the people of New England escaped from the cradle of despotism in Asia many centuries earlier than the Russians. So the brooding of the New England colonist took the form of calling a town meeting to plan for the building of a new road in the spring. But the Russian could not do things for himself; he had to get the permission of officials. If he tried to act for himself, they would strip him and beat him with knouts until he swooned. So the Russian’s brooding turned to despair, and he got drunk, and got into a fight and killed his neighbor, and then tried to make up his mind whether God would forgive him, or damn him to hell fire forever; he fretted over this problem until he went insane or wrote a novel—”
“Or both,” says Mrs. Ogi.
The dominant fact in Russian art of the nineteenth century was despotism. Here was a vast empire of a hundred million people, energetic and aspiring; and the ruling class dreamed that they could introduce modern material civilization, while keeping out the modern mind and soul. Young Russians travelled, and learned to think as the rest of Europe thought; then they came home, tofind that the slightest attempt to teach or to organize was met by imprisonment, torture, exile, hard labor, or the scaffold. Wave after wave of rebellion swept Russia, to be met by wave after wave of repression. Intellectual activity which New England honored was in Russia a secret and criminal conspiracy; the youth of the country was broken in a torture chamber; and so we have the misery and distortion and impotence which we regard as characteristic Slavic qualities.
The Russian was supposed to be incapable of action, incapable of keeping an appointment on time, incapable of doing anything but drinking a hundred cups of tea and shedding tears over the fate of man. But now comes the revolution, and in a flash we discover that all that was buncombe. The Russians begin to act precisely like other men; they cease to get drunk, they learn to keep appointments, they discover a sudden admiration for those qualities we call Yankee—hustle and efficiency, the adjusting of one’s desires to what can be immediately accomplished. The Russian peasant, supposed to be a grown-up and bearded cherub, lifting his eyes in adoration to his Little Father in the Winter Palace and his Big Father in Heaven, is discovered to have precisely the same desires as every other farmer in the world—that is to say, more land, and fewer tax-collectors.
Russian literature is a great literature, because it voices the hopes and resolves of a great people groping their way to freedom and understanding. It is, whether consciously or unconsciously, a literature of revolt. It is full of ideas, because it has to take the place of the prohibited subjects, science, politics, economics, and social psychology. It is desperately serious, because it is produced by people who are suffering. Some twenty years ago I remember meeting in New York the adopted son of Maxim Gorki, who was earning his living as a printer by day and studying our civilization by night. I recall his remark: “Americans do not know what the intellectual life means.” The young man had in mind a country where you adopted ideas with the knowledge that they might cost you your liberty, and even your life. Under such circumstances you think hard before you come to a decision. A lot of Americans have had an opportunity to test their ideas that way during the past ten years, andso they are now taking the intellectual life seriously, and producing literature in many ways resembling the Russian.
Says Mrs. Ogi: “Sherwood Anderson says it is because he was raised on cabbage soup.”
“People will read that,” says Ogi, “and think it a flash of humor; very few will consider seriously the effect of a starvation diet upon the soul of a sensitive boy. Neither will they stop to think about three boys sleeping in one bed as a source of abnormal sexual imaginings, which constitute one of the original elements in Sherwood Anderson’s books. To me this seems a law: that wherever you have widespread and long-continued poverty, maintained by policemen’s clubs, there you will have a literature, extremely painful to its creators, but delightful to high-brow critics, who will hail it as ‘strong,’ and up to the standard of the great Russian masters.”
The poet who taught the Russian people the possibilities of their language was Pushkin; one of those beautiful leisure-class youths who live fast and die young. He was born of an aristocratic family, and when he was twenty he was, like most poets, a hopeful idealist, and wrote an ode to liberty, and was condemned to exile. He lived a wild life among the gypsies, and wasted himself, and finally his family persuaded the tsar to give him another chance. He was brought back to court and made a small functionary, among illiterate, dull, supposed-to-be-great people who had no understanding of his talents. He married a beautiful noble lady, who betrayed him continuously and broke his heart.
Pushkin now wrote folk tales, and a great quantity of love poems in the Byronic manner. His idealism was dead; he was a court man, and went so far as to glorify the rape of Poland. He wrote a long narrative poem, “Eugene Onegin,” which tells about the tragic love troubles of an aristocratic youth, together with all the details of his life, how he got up in the morning, how he sipped his chocolate, how he read his invitations to tea-parties and balls. You might not think there would begreat literature in such a story; but at least Pushkin dealt with Russian themes and with reality; he made it interesting, lending it the glamour of musical verse, and so he killed the old classical tradition in Russia. The Greek nymphs and the French shepherdesses went out of fashion, and the way was clear for Russian writers with something important to say to their people.
Then came Nikolai Gogol. He was a Little Russian; that is, he came from the Ukraine, which is in the South, and like all Southern countries is supposed to be warm-hearted and romantic. Gogol was a poor devil of a clerk, who leaped to fame by writing humorous tales, in which the laughter was mingled with tears. He did not put in any recognized “propaganda,” for the simple reason, that this would have cost him his liberty. In those days when you were discussing politics you announced yourself as a Hegelian Moderate or a Hegelian Leftist, or whatever it might be; in other words, you pretended to be discussing the ideas of a German philosopher, a spinner of metaphysical cobwebs, instead of dealing with the real problems of your country and time.
Gogol wrote a play called “The Inspector-General,” which tells how a government representative is expected to visit a small provincial town, and all the functionaries are in a state of terror for fear their various stealings will be exposed. It is understood that the inspector-general will come in disguise, and so they mistake a youthful traveler for this functionary, and insist on doing him honor, to his great bewilderment. Finally the postmaster of the town, following his custom of secretly reading the mail, opens a letter from the young man to a friend, telling about his adventures and ridiculing the town functionaries. The postmaster reads this aloud in the hearing of the functionaries, to their great dismay.
Somebody read this play to the tsar, and he was so delighted that he ordered it produced. You remember King Louis of France, the “grand monarch,” taking delight in Moliere’s ridicule of his courtiers. The monarch can afford to laugh, or at least thinks he can; it is only the functionaries who realize the destructive power of laughter.
Then Gogol wrote a long novel, “Dead Souls.” He introduces us to a young man who might be a graduateof any one of a thousand schools and colleges and universities of “salesmanship” in the United States. So brilliant are this young man’s talents: