In the case of Voltaire we see a man of letters who ranks as one of the great world forces, and purely and simply because of his propaganda. If he had written nothing but heroic tragedies and sublime epics, he would be a forgotten name today; it was only because he took upon himself the task of setting free the mind of his country, and labored at it incessantly for the greater part of his life, that we know of him and honor him as one of the glories of France. Great as were his faults, no one can deny that he stood to all the world for the fundamental idea of freedom of thought.
We have seen that Voltaire was a Tory as to art; his revolution was of the intellect. There was needed a revolutionist of the feelings, and he appeared in the person of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a stormy, embittered, unhappy man, the object of endless controversy, continuing to our own day; a character full of contradictions, difficult to cover within the limits of a chapter.
His father was a watch-maker in Geneva; he ran away from home and became a vagabond, and remained that all his life. He never had any property; as for friends, he had them only for short periods, because he quarreled with everyone. Among the occupations he followed in youth was that of a footman, which ought to have barred him from rising in eighteenth century France. But hewrote ballets, operas, comedies, and won an entrée to the salons of the great.
Here is another “pure” artist; and did you ever hear of him in that “pure” capacity? Did you know that Jean-Jacques had written ballets, operas and comedies? Could you name one of these works? Unless you are a specialist in literary history, you could not; and if Rousseau had followed that easy career, and kept his entrée to the Paris salons, you would never have heard his name. It was only when he became a propagandist that he earned world fame, and it is as a propagandist that we know him.
He was thirty-seven years old when Diderot, editor of the great “Encyclopedia,” the Bible of the new learning in France, was put into prison for writing an atheistical pamphlet. Rousseau went to visit him and, while thus wrought up, he fell to thinking about the depraved state of society, and the causes thereof; he wrote an essay, and so was launched upon his career as maker of intellectual dynamite. He was pursued by the authorities, until he acquired a persecution complex; before he died he became convinced that everyone he knew was in a conspiracy to destroy him.
His first important book was “The Social Contract,” a study of the state and its authority. What is the basis of sovereignty? What right has the state to command my obedience? The answer of Rousseau’s time was that God had appointed a king to rule you, and if you disobeyed this king you were hanged, drawn and quartered, and later on roasted to eternity. Rousseau’s thesis was that the basis of sovereignty is popular consent; the state is made by the general will, and lacking such sanction, no sovereignty exists. The opening words give the keynote of the book: “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” A study of history and anthropology convinces us that the first part of this statement is false; but that did not keep the words from becoming a revolutionary slogan.
The next important book was “The New Heloise,” a love story written in the form of a series of letters. French women were rebelling against being sold in marriage; their natural desire to marry the man of their own choice was reaching a point dangerous to the old convention. To be sure, Heloise obeyed her parents and married according to their command; but her sufferings were so moving that she was more effective as an inspirer of revolt than if she had herself revolted.
Then came another novel, “Emile, or The Sentimental Education”—that is to say, an education according to the dictates of the natural feelings. The physical and moral soundness of the infant Emile were based upon the fact that his mother suckled him, instead of turning him over to a wet nurse, according to the fashion of the great world of France. The child was raised in close contact with nature, and followed the dictates of those natural desires, which Rousseau believed were always wholesome and trustworthy. The youth was taught to work and be useful instead of being a culture parasite; and in due course a pure and beautiful maiden appeared to deserve his love. Today Rousseau’s ideas of education are freely applied in the Ferrer schools; but in 1762 “Emile” was condemned by the Sorbonne, and burned by the common executioner, and its author was forced to flee to Switzerland, and finally to England.
In his later years of desolation Rousseau produced the story of his life, known as the “Confessions.” His other works are not easy for us to read, but the “Confessions” will be read so long as man is interested in his own heart. Here for the first time in the history of our race a man of first-rate genius told the full truth about himself. A great deal of it is painful truth; we read it with dismay, and on the basis of it Rousseau’s enemies have condemned him to infamy.
But never forget, we know these painful things because Rousseau tells them to us; if he had concealed them, or dressed them up to look romantic, then we should have had quite a different Rousseau in our minds. Many authors have done that, and live enthroned in our regard. But this man says to us: much as I care about myself—and I care a great deal—I care still more about enabling my fellowmen to understand reality. And that is the spirit in which we take the “Confessions.” We realize that we are not dealing with one of those feeble natures which first commit offenses, and then find pleasure in talking about them; we are sharing life with a deeply serious man, who seeks in agony a cure for human ills.
I doubt if there has ever been a preacher of doctrine who delivered himself more completely to his enemies than Jean-Jacques. He tells us how, not knowing how to get his bread, he left his newly born children in care of a foundling asylum. This was a custom of the time; but as a rule those who followed the custom did not go away and write a book advising other people how to rear and educate their children! For such inconsistencies his critics ridiculed him unmercifully. And yet, in spite of all they could say, he became the trumpeter of the revolution, political, economic, and cultural, which was on the way in France. He remains in our time a trumpeter of the social revolution which is happening before our eyes.
That does not mean that we are blind to the fallacies and absurdities in his doctrines. We of today study education in the light of a mass of psychological knowledge, we study government in the light of historical and economic knowledge, we study the human soul in the light of biology, sociology, chemistry, psychoanalysis—a host of sciences whose very names were unknown to Rousseau. But how do we come to possess this knowledge? We possess it because Jean-Jacques, with the divination of a prophet and the fervor of a moral genius, proclaimed from the housetops the right of the human spirit to be free, and to face the facts of life, and to choose its path in accordance with its own happiness and health.
With any critic of Rousseau there is one question to be settled at the outset. Why do you quarrel with this man? Is it because you wish to correct his errors, and clear the way to his goal of liberty, equality, and fraternity? Or are you one of those who dread the torrent of new ideas and new feelings which Rousseau let loose upon the world? Is it your purpose to discredit the whole individualistic movement which he fathered, and to take us back to the good old days when children obeyed their parents, and servants obeyed their masters, and women obeyed their husbands, and subjects obeyed their popes and kings, and students in colleges accepted without question what their professors told them?
Says Mrs. Ogi: “I suspect that last phrase is meant for Professor Babbitt.”
“It is wonderful,” says her husband, “that he should have that name. A judgment of Providence, without doubt!”
Let it be explained at the outset that we are setting out to discuss, not a character in a novel, but a living person, Irving Babbitt, professor of French literature in Harvard University; a scholar who has set himself one goal in life, to deliver America from the evil influence of Rousseau and “Rousseauism”—by which he means the whole modern cultural movement. He has published a stately volume, “Rousseau and Romanticism,” three hundred and ninety-three pages, plus twenty-three pages of introduction, with an average of twelve quotations and citations per page, illustrating the follies, absurdities and monstrosities uttered or enacted by every man or woman who has at any time during the past hundred and seventy-five years ever thought a new thought, or tried an original experiment, or embodied an especially intense emotion in art form.
It makes a formidable catalogue. Because, you see, humanity proceeds by the method of trial and error; there is no other way to proceed. The pendulum of life swings to one extreme, and then it swings to the other. Every movement has its lunatic fringe, people who show us where to stop; and what our Harvard professor has done is to make a whole book of these extravagances and insanities. He takes the fringe for the movement; and so, of course, it is easy for him to prove that the human spirit ought never to have been set free; it was a violation of “decorum.” That is his favorite word, to which he comes back in every chapter. The rest of America has another name for it; we call it “the Harvard manner.”
“Of course,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you have to do up a Harvard Tory—that is fore-ordained. But I recall the lunatics I have met in the radical movement—not merely the harmless cranks, but the dangerous and hateful beasts! What Rousseau means to me is that I used to hear his praises sung by a man who has lived for twentyyears by seducing young girls and getting their money.”
Says Ogi: “If you are going to judge a wave by its scum, I shall have to make a study of the criminals of classicism: the horrors perpetrated by perfect gentlemen who respected the three unities, and wrote triolets, and wore exactly the right clothes. There will be a section in this volume devoted to Harvard University—see ‘The Goose-Step,’ pages 62 to 91.”
Says Mrs. Ogi: “Come back to Rousseau, and explain to us why a college professor should take so much trouble to kill a man who died a hundred and fifty years ago.”
“The professor does not know why Rousseau is still alive, but I can tell him—because Rousseau’s revolution is only half completed. The political part happened, and gave us—world capitalism! We aren’t satisfied, and we are gathering our muscles for another leap, and all the world’s Tories are hanging to our coat-tails, trying to hold us back. They dig out all the old mummies from their coffins, and dress them up and paint them to look like life, and set them up to cry warnings to us. Even Voltaire’s ‘l’Infame’! There is a clerical party in every country in Europe, and Catholic trade unions, called ‘Christian Socialist,’ to cheat the workers. In the United States there are the Knights of Columbus, and Tammany Hall, and parades of priests and cardinals up Fifth Avenue, generously financed by Wall Street. And naturally, in such a crisis the three unities and the rest of the classical tradition are not overlooked; so here comes our learned professor with his stately volume, to prove to us that Rousseau did not have the Harvard manner. The very same conspiracy, you see, that Rousseau faced during his life.”
“The persecution complex?” asks Mrs. Ogi.
“Don’t fool yourself; Rousseau actually was persecuted! And see what evidence he would have, if he were alive today, and could investigate this Babbitt case! The House of Morgan, on the corner of Broad and Wall streets, just across the way from the United States Treasury building; and the billion dollars which this House of Morgan made buying war supplies for the Allies; and the thirty billion dollars which the United States Treasury paid out to save the House of Morgan’s French and British loans; and the Boston connections of the House of Morgan, Lee, Higginson & Company, with their network of banks and trust companies; and the Lee-Higginson and Morgan control of the governing bodies of Harvard University; and Harvard’s answer to ‘The Goose-Step,’ the election of its distinguished graduate, Mr. J. P. Morgan, to its sacred band of overseers; and the Boston ‘Transcript,’ and the Harvard ‘Lampoon,’ and the Laski case, and the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and the Boston police strike, and Cal Coolidge, the queer prank that fate played on Boston’s aristocracy. Picture the situation in the year 1919, the days of Attorney-General Palmer; the Harvard mob smashing that police strike, and the hundred per cent patriotic plutocrats of Boston raiding the offices of the ‘Reds,’ and cracking the skulls of everybody they found there—”
“The Harvard manner?” says Mrs. Ogi.
“Throwing them into jail, or packing them by hundreds into rooms in office buildings without toilets, and shipping them back to Europe where they came from. And right in the midst of that campaign, in that same anno mirabile of 1919, comes our Babbitt professor—I mean our Professor Babbitt—with a schoolmaster’s ferule in one hand and a slung-shot in the other, scolding and at the same time committing mayhem upon every artist who in the past hundred and seventy-five years of history has ever had a human feeling. It is supposed to be a work of scholarship, of literary criticism; it is written to teach ‘decorum’—by such examples as this: ‘The humanitarian, all adrip with brotherhood, and profoundly convinced of the loveliness of his own soul.’ And again: ‘Both Rousseau and his disciple Robespierre were reformers in the modern sense—that is they are concerned not with reforming themselves, but other men.’ What is one going to do with a man like that?”
“What did they do with them in the French revolution?” asks Mrs. Ogi.
“Les aristocrats à la lanterne!” says her husband.
“I’ve forgotten all my French,” says Mrs. Ogi, “and so will most of your readers. But I’ll tell you this—the professor sounds exactly like you, except that he’s on the other side!”
While France has been moving toward its revolution, England has been moving away from hers, and we now return to the foggy island to watch the course of events through this eighteenth century. The crown has submitted, and parliament has the last word in public affairs. A parliament of the land-owning gentry, elected by corruption, we shall see it in the course of two centuries being gradually changed into a parliament of merchants and ship-owners, of steel and coal and diamond and gold magnates, of brewers and publishers of capitalist propaganda.
It was the task of eighteenth century England to create the bourgeois soul. Machinery and standardized production, which were to make over the world, had not yet appeared, but when they came, they found their psychology and culture all prepared for them by this “nation of shop-keepers.” It is a world of money, all other powers deposed, all other standards a shell without life inside; honor, favor, virtue are represented by money. Religion has become an affair of “livings” and of “benefices.” Politics has become an affair of party rancor, a squabble over the spoils of office. The difference between the two parties is that one is in and the other is out; the purpose of the outs being to prove rascality against the ins, and thus get a chance to do what the ins are doing.
In this bourgeois world the artist may be feeble of mind, not knowing the reality of his time, believing sincerely in its shams. Or he may be a cynic, jeering at his time, but taking what he can get. Or he may be a rebel, speaking the truth—in which case he will starve in a garret, or go insane, or be thrown into prison, or driven into exile.
The first to greet this new century with his writings was a man who went insane. One of the great masters of English prose, his fate in life was to be brought up as a “poor relation,” and to eat the bitter bread of dependence. He became a kind of educated servant to the wealthy, and finally got a small job in the church. Illmost of his life, proud, imperious, burning up with thwarted genius, Jonathan Swift was made into a master ironist.
His first great book was “The Tale of a Tub,” in which he ridiculed the squabbles of the various church parties. Having thus shocked the church, he applied to be a dean, but did not get the job, because somebody else paid a thousand pound bribe to the official having the appointment. Swift was told that he could have another deanery at the same price, but he did not have the sum handy.
The “ins” of those days were called Tories, and the “outs” were called Whigs; they fought furiously, and literary rats, hiding in garrets and cellars, wrote pamphlets of personal abuse, which were published anonymously and circulated in the face of jail penalties. Like the laureate Dryden, our would-be dean did this vile writing; he did it for the Whigs, and when he got no preferment there, he joined the Tories, and was made dean of the cathedral in Dublin. There he wrote his “Modest Proposal” for eating the children of Ireland, one of the most terrific pieces of irony in all literature. “Look,” says the ‘gloomy dean,’ “we are letting a population starve to death, and, what a waste of national resources, what a violation of our fundamental principles of business economy. Let us feed these Irish babies, and when they are nice and fat, serve them on our tables; they will be happy during their brief span of life, and we shall no longer have to import food from foreign parts.”
Then came “Gulliver’s Travels,” which took its place along with “Pilgrim’s Progress” as required reading for children and adults. It is an even more perfect allegory; you can read it as a story pure and simple, without any idea of an ulterior meaning. The author helps you by the perfect gravity with which he describes every detail of these singular adventures. First we visit the land in which the people are only six inches tall, and so we laugh at the pettiness of human affairs. Then we visit the land where they are correspondingly big, and we learn how brutal and gross and stupid we really are. So on, until we come to the land of noble and beautiful horses, in which human beings are lewd and filthy apes. So we learn the worst possible about a world which appointed a man of genius to be dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin, when he wanted to be dean of St. Paul’s in London. So we are ready to go insane, and to die, as the dean himself phrased it, “like a poisoned rat in a hole.”
Prose fiction up to this time had dealt for the most part with men; its most popular variety was the “picaresque,” telling the adventures of vagabonds and rascals. But now in this bourgeois England the fiction writer settles down, and becomes respectable, and discovers the theme which is to occupy him for the next two hundred years—the feminine heart, and what goes on in it during the mating season.
Watch the gentleman-turkey, stirred by erotic excitement; he struts up and down, swells out his comb, spreads his feathers, scrapes the ground with his stiff wings. And there stands the humble and retiring lady-turkey, observing him with modest but attentive eye; she takes a step or two away, but does not run far. What is going on in her mind? What does she think of the blood-flushed comb and the spread feathers, the heroic pose and the awe-inspiring gobble? We are not permitted to enter into the psychology of a lady-turkey; but through the magic of fiction we are permitted to watch the mind of the lady-human, and note every detail of the process whereby she gets her mate. We share her emotions, we analyze the devices she employs—and thus, if we belong to her sex, we perfect our technique, or, if we belong to the male sex, we learn how to write novels.
In this bourgeois world, the emotions of mating are dominated by those of money. Society has become settled, property relations are fixed, and you live a routine life, without great change or adventure—except once, which is at this mating period. Here is your great chance to rise above your own class in a world of money classification. A beautiful and charming maiden may catch the eye of some wealthy man; a handsome, dashing youth may stumble upon an heiress. Such is the significance of the heavenly smiles and the coy glances ofbourgeois romance. Cupid travels about, armed with a golden arrow, and in the love-glints from the eyes of youth and beauty we see fortunes flying to and fro—diamonds and rubies, manor-houses, estates, orders and offices, titles to nobility. And always in the background sit the chaperons, keeping watch—old women, whose function it is to know the grim facts of greed, and to pass on such “worldly wisdom” to the young.
The first old woman to take up this task in English fiction was Samuel Richardson. He himself was a hero for any bourgeois novel—a printer who had married his master’s daughter, and become publisher to the king. He knew what money costs, and believed in it with all his heart and soul; in his mature years he set out to warn young women of the value of their virtue, and point out to them the importance of a life contract in love. He wrote a novel called “Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded,” telling the story of an innocent fifteen-year-old servant girl in the household of a great gentleman who makes love to her. In a series of letters to her parents she exposes to us the details of this love-making, and all her bewilderments, agonies and fears.
Pamela Andrews is the very soul of humility; but young as she is, she knows the business facts concerning the life contract—“with all my worldly goods I thee endow.” She knows that her master is a rake and scoundrel—he gives her in the course of the story all possible evidence of that; nevertheless, she stands firm, and in the end her virtue is rewarded—by marriage with this rake and scoundrel. If that seems to you a strange reward of virtue, it will be only because you do not understand this eighteenth century world. What a man is personally counts for little compared with the class he belongs to. He is a gentleman, he owns houses and lands, and Pamela’s children will be ladies and gentlemen, and will own houses and lands. This novel became the sensation of the day, not merely in England, but all over Europe. There were two large volumes, and a sequel with two more, but no one was bored; great ladies sat up half the night, weeping their eyes red over Pamela’s trials, and welcoming her—in imagination—into the class of ladies. The writers learned how to make money, and a new profession, that of the love-describers, came into being.
You will note in this bourgeois world two attitudes toward money; one might be described as the attitude of the first generation, and the other of the third. The first generation has had to make the money, and knows what money costs. The third generation wants the money just as much, but its knowledge is confined to what money will buy. There is war between these two generations, and you find it reflected in the arts; the young and saucy artists make propaganda for one side, while the mature and sober artists make it for the other.
There was in England at this time a gentleman whose ancestors had had money for a long time, and who took toward it the attitude of jolly good heartedness. He read this story of “Pamela,” and it filled him with fury; what a loathsome world, in which, men and women spent their time poring over cash-books and calling it virtue! What would be left in life if a fashionable young gentleman could not have fun with a lower class girl without tying himself to her for life! So Henry Fielding, gentleman, barrister, and man of pleasure in London, sat himself down to turn “Pamela” into screaming farce. He took Pamela’s brother, a young footman, and pictured him in the household of a great lady who endeavored to lure him from the path of virtue. The agonies of temptation of Joseph Andrews reproduced those of his sister; but as young men were not supposed to have any virtue, the tragedy was turned upside down.
This story is usually cited by the critics as an illustration of how a man of genius began a piece of propaganda, and then got interested in his story, and turned it into a real work of art. I should alter the formula by saying that he changed from a negative to a positive kind of propaganda. Joseph Andrews runs away from his wicked mistress, taking a girl he truly loves, and the narrative turns from a satire on Richardson’s pseudo-virtues into a portrayal of what Fielding considers real virtue. Joseph and his girl fall into trouble, and their creator, in pleading their cause, defends the poor and friendless all over England, who do not get justice in the courts. Fielding knew,because he had ridden the circuits; being a warm-hearted man, he created a model English magistrate by the name of Squire Allworthy—an obvious enough name—to show how the law ought to be administered.
Fielding next took to writing plays. But he ventured to make satiric allusions to “persons of quality”; therefore he ran afoul of the Lord Chamberlain, and one of his plays was banned. He was disgusted, and rather than conform, he gave up play-writing. There was no government big-wig overseeing fiction; and so this new art form was destined to become the vehicle of social criticism.
In his next book this gentleman-novelist went on to write a deadly piece of satire. Looking out over Europe, he saw Frederick, king of Prussia, called “the great,” making a raid upon Silesia and seizing it; he saw other royal and imperial conquerors tormenting mankind with war. He took a notorious criminal, who had recently been hanged in London, and made him the hero of a novel, which parodied in detail the glory-career of a king. “Jonathan Wild the Great,” like all works of revolutionary tendency, has received from the critics small part of its due praise. There are few scenes more grim than the conclusion of the book, the satire upon the “consolations of religion” when the arch-criminal dies.
Then came “Tom Jones,” one of the greatest of English novels. Fielding’s purpose in this story, as he declared it, was “to recommend Goodness and Innocence.” In his hero he set out to show the truth about a man; not a snuffling saint for a church-window, but a real, hearty good fellow, according to Fielding’s notion. What may such a young fellow do, and what may he not do? May he drink? Of course. May he spend money freely? Fielding knew about that, having married a rich wife and run through her fortune. May he take money from his friends? Yes, even ask for it. May he take money from his mistresses? And here suddenly you see the gentleman-author start up in anger. He may not! Here is an iron-clad rule, which English gentlemen enforce without compromise. But then, may he cohabit with girls of classes below his own? Yes, says Fielding, certainly he may, and he will; let’s be honest, and not fool ourselves with shams. Thackeray, who was loud in admiration of“Tom Jones,” lamented that no novelist since then had dared to tell the truth about a man. In our day, for better or worse, the novelists have dared, and reticence as a literary virtue is dead.
In conclusion, we note the fact that Fielding died at the age of forty-three, “of dropsy, jaundice, and asthma.” So it appears that you may take your choice; you may exercise self-restraint, and be accused of hypocrisy, and of spoiling your friends’ pleasure; or you may throw the reins upon the neck of desire, and go through life at a gallop—and have your body give out just when your brain is ready for its best work.
We have read about an English gentleman-novelist who wasted his health and died at the age of forty-three; and we next have to hear the story of a Scotch plowman-poet who treated himself in the same way and died at the age of thirty-seven. Such men present a painful problem to their friends, and also to their critics—since in art circles it is not considered good form to set up moral standards. However, in this case Robert Burns has solved the problem for us; he lacked nothing in clearness of insight or plainness of speech concerning his own follies, and spoke of his “self-contempt bitterer to drink than blood.”
He was one of seven children of a peasant family, and was born on a stormy January day, in a clay cottage of which the roof was blown off a few days later. He followed the plow-tail all his early years, and wrote that his life until sixteen was “the toil of a slave.” The few books they could borrow the children would read at meal times, or snatching a few words in the fields. Such peasant slaves are not supposed to acquire culture, and if they do so, it is at the cost of health of mind and body. Robert Burns was given to fits of melancholy, and to moods of wild excess; he speaks of his “passions raging like demons.” He was a headstrong, impatient youth, disgusted by the falsities and shams of conventional religion.He had to find his own code in life, and the fact that he found it too late to save himself is our loss.
This peasant, toiling on a rocky tenant farm, discovered in himself the gift of exquisite melody. His feelings poured themselves out in verses in the homely Scotch dialect, then considered a barbarous thing, unworthy of literature. He would compose these verses all day long while guiding the plow, and then, coming home at night, he would sit in a garret room and write them out. Not until he was twenty-seven years old did he succeed in having them published. They appeared at a time when the family was ruined, and the poet himself being pursued by officers of the law, at the instance of the father of a girl he loved. The twenty pounds which he got from this first volume saved his life, so he declared.
He leaped into fame all over Scotland, and spent a year in Edinburgh, where he was fêted by the great. But he did not keep their favor, because he persisted in intimacy with his humble friends, and also, alas! with the taverns. He went back to the plow, more set than ever in his bitterness against the world of privilege and rank. It was a time when the great world was in the habit of pensioning its poets, but the Tories controlled in Scotland, and “Bobbie” Burns was a Whig, and turned into a Republican, the same thing as a Bolshevik today. The best that lovers of his poetry could get him was a job as a gauger of liquor barrels, at the princely salary of sixty pounds a years.
Even that he had difficulty in holding; because the French revolution came sweeping over Europe, and frightened the governing class of England into just such a frenzy of reaction as we in America witnessed in 1919. In his capacity as exciseman Burns captured a smuggling ship with four cannon; he purchased the cannon at auction, and sent them to the French Legislative Assembly as a mark of sympathy. Imagine, if you can, an American customs officer in 1919 shipping four machine-guns to the Soviet government of Russia, and you may realize how close the poet came to losing the salary upon which his wife and children had to exist.
We shall see other poets shrinking in horror from the execution of King Louis, and throwing in their lot with reaction. But here is one who stood by the down-troddenof the earth, and voiced their feelings to the end. Not merely is he the national poet of Scotland; he is, in spite of the handicap of dialect, the voice of the peasant and the land-slave throughout the English-speaking world. When he writes “the rank is but the guinea’s stamp,” he is the voice of the labor movement in England and of democracy in America. His work is beloved by humble people; you would be surprised to know how widely it is read—perhaps more widely than any other poetry among the poor.
The people know this voice, they know this heart, with all its loves and hates, its longings and griefs. There is no man who has come from the toiling masses, self-taught and self-made, who has expressed their feelings so completely. And note that he has, not merely beauty and passion, but keen insight and power of brain; he can think for his people, as well as feel with them. He is not a bit afraid to use his art to preach and to scold, to discuss moral problems, to storm at social injustice and to ridicule church dogma.
What though such a man did drink and squander himself; that also is a part of the worker’s tragedy. He paid for it the price which the workers pay, and life spared him no part of the suffering and shame, nor did he spare himself the remorse. He wrote his own epitaph, in which he spoke of himself as “the poor inhabitant below,” and recorded that “thoughtless folly laid him low and stained his name.” Because there is no spiritual value greater than honesty, the judgment of his people has raised him high and crowned his name with immortality.
“Why do you call this a work on art,” says Mrs. Ogi, “when you are dealing entirely with literature?”
“All the arts are one,” says her husband. “They are expressions of the human spirit, and the material they use is comparatively unimportant. We realize this when we see an artist like Michelangelo using blocks of marble and molecules of paint and printed words, and giving us with each medium the record of the same personality. Therehave been others who used the acted drama and the lyric, like Shakespeare; or words and music—”
“Let us see how your thesis works out with music,” says Mrs. Ogi.
Up to the end of the eighteenth century music has been either an adjunct of religious propaganda, or else a leisure-class plaything and decoration. The musicians are commanded to come and entertain their lords and masters, while the latter feast and dance and gossip. The musician as an artist, a lover of beauty for its own sake, exists at his own peril. For example, Mozart; at the age of six he was a child prodigy, exhibited as a curiosity before all the crowned heads of Europe; but he grew up to a life of slow starvation, and a death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five. The sum total of his earnings from seven hundred and sixty-nine compositions was not enough to keep his small family alive.
But now comes a mighty genius, who discovers how to make music an art of power, an expression of the deepest experiences of the human soul. Beethoven was born in 1770, his mother being a cook and his father a broken-down musician drinking himself to death. Beethoven became the child slave of this drunkard; he was driven by beatings to practice the piano at the age of four, and at the age of seven had a job in a theater orchestra. I wonder, when we go to the “movies” and listen to the banging and scraping, may there be among those servants of imbecility some lad who is destined to raise the art of music to a new height, and to die in misery for his pains?
Beethoven went to Vienna to earn his living as entertainer to the dilettante aristocracy of that pleasure-loving city. He was eccentric, self-absorbed, possessed by his visions, never happy except when he was composing, or out in the country where he could give free rein to his delight in nature. It was his fate to teach music to the children of the rich, and to play for grown-up rich children in their salons. They were accustomed to chatter while men of genius attempted to entertain them; but Beethoven thought his playing was of importance, and when they failed to keep silence he struck his fist upon the piano keys, and sprang up, exclaiming: “I will not play for such swine!”
A terrible calamity befell him, the worst that amusician could imagine—he began to grow deaf. At the age of thirty he could no longer hear a musical note. That seemed the ruin of his life; his enemies jeered, saying that he poured out his preposterous compositions because he did not know how horrible they sounded. Also Beethoven suffered from near-sightedness, caused by smallpox in childhood. His health at times gave way entirely, and he contemplated suicide. “My art alone deterred me,” he wrote.
He was, like Milton, a Puritan, though he did not use the word. He had an ideal of love, and did not squander himself in casual intrigues. His profession brought him into intimacy with the ladies of the great world; they would be overwhelmed by his genius, but then they would think it over, and realize what it would mean to marry a social inferior—and a deaf one at that. One brilliant young lady tortured the great man’s heart, and then went off and married a count. So Beethoven withdrew into himself, becoming more eccentric, more irritable, and more passionate and terrifying in his compositions. Said Weber when he heard the Third Symphony: “Beethoven is now quite mad.”
The composer’s life was one long struggle with poverty and debt. There were wealthy noblemen in Vienna who appreciated his genius, and wanted him to stay and play for them; they subscribed an income for him, but then forgot to pay it, and left him to struggle along. To be sure, he was none too easy with his patrons; he went to stay with one, and the good man persisted in taking off his hat every time he laid eyes on Beethoven. The composer, who abhorred ceremony, ran away.
Beethoven was a reader of Plutarch, and held the ideals of the old Roman republic; he believed in universal suffrage, and in liberty, and had no hesitation in voicing his convictions to anyone. He hailed Napoleon as a defender of liberty, and dedicated his “Eroica” symphony to him. Later on, when Napoleon accepted a crown, Beethoven changed this dedication, “To thememoryof a great man.” He dedicated another symphony to a French general, the conqueror of the Bastille; and you can imagine how reactionary Vienna welcomed that.
After the defeat of Napoleon, the monarchs entered into what they called the “Holy Alliance,” to rivet Catholic absolutism upon the continent forever. Vienna became the center of world reaction, and dungeon and torture were the fate of men who raised their voices for human rights. Here was Beethoven, old, deaf, and poverty-stricken; but he never yielded an inch of his principles. “Words are bound in chains,” he said, “but sounds are still free.” He poured his feelings into his wonderful Ninth Symphony, which occasioned such a tornado of applause that the police considered it necessary to interfere.
Here, you see, was no maker of pretty sounds for the entertainment of the rich; here was a great mind, one who read and thought for himself, and understood not merely dancing and mating, but the nature of organized society. In a time of universal subservience and fawning he clenched his hands and behaved like a democrat. When his brother, full of the pride of a newly rich bourgeois, presented him with a card inscribed, “Johann van Beethoven, Land Proprietor,” the composer scrawled under it, “Ludwig van Beethoven, Brain Proprietor.”
There is a story of his meeting with the poet Goethe. As we shall see, Goethe had made his way by conforming to the customs of a court; he was now sixty-three years of age, stiff to the rest of the world, but pliable to the nobility. Beethoven was forty-two, willing to be humble to a poet of genius, but not to rank and arrogance. They met in the open air, in a park where there were many people; and suddenly came word that the duke and the empress were coming. The people formed two lines, and stood, hats in hand, to do homage; and Goethe took his place among them. Beethoven was furious; he remonstrated with the poet in vain, then he jammed his hat down over his head and strode toward the duke and empress, and they were the ones who did homage to him. Goethe never forgot this scene, and he did not care to listen to Beethoven’s music, because he said he found it “disturbing.”
We are told by our “art for art’s sake” dilettanti that art has nothing to do with moral questions. Let them take their answer from the father of modern music, the greatest genius who has used that lofty art. No higher authority could be found; and his words were these: “I recognize no sign of superiority in mankind other thangoodness.” By that principle he lived, and by it he wrote; his art is overwhelmingly ethical, and if we were to tear up every record of his life, every word in the way of title or dedication or inscription upon his compositions, if we had nothing but the musical notes of his sonatas and symphonies, we should get precisely the same impressions; we should know that we were in the presence of a titanic conflict of the human will against the forces of fate, the blind cruelties of nature and the deliberate cruelties of class. We might not know that this man became deaf at the height of his powers; we might have no definite image to attach to the terrible hammer strokes of the Fifth Symphony; but we should know that here is torture, here is defeat and despair crying out, here is loveliness broken to pieces, trampled, crushed out of life; here also is man, clenching his hands and setting his teeth in grim resolve, proclaiming the supremacy of his own spirit, and rising to heights of power, in which he makes his joy out of the very materials of his torment. Some friend in Beethoven’s presence called upon God; and the composer answered with the motto of his life: “O man, help thyself!”
We come now to one of the great intellects of modern times, a genius who made the culture of Germany known to the rest of the world. He is cited, along with Shakespeare, as an illustration of how great art holds itself aloof from propaganda; so it will be worth our while to study him carefully, and see how he lived and voiced the aristocratic ideals of his age.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe was born in Frankfort, his father being a wealthy lawyer. Through his eighty-three years of life he never knew a moment’s inconvenience or waste of time from poverty. He was sent to the university, but was not interested in the study of law, which his father tried to force upon him; he studied the things he cared for, and incidentally gave himself to a life of pleasure, so that he came home at the age of nineteen with a severe hemorrhage.
It was the period of “Storm and Stress” in German literature; Rousseau and his wicked “Romanticism” had crossed the Rhine, and here was all the youth of Germany revolting against writing poetry in French; they insisted upon dealing with German heroes and experiencing unrestrained German emotions. Goethe was reading Shakespeare; and, spurning the classical forms, he wrote a drama about Goetz von Berlichingen, a medieval German knight who was big and bold and turbulent. This made Goethe a hero of the new insurgency. Also he wrote a story entitled “The Sorrows of Werther,” about a young man who yearned agonizingly for the wife of his friend, and finally committed suicide. Goethe himself did not commit suicide, but lived to regret these youthful extravagances.
He fell in love more than once in these tumultuous days, his experience being exactly the opposite to that of Beethoven; it was the poet who was aristocratic and prudent, and it was the girl who suffered. Goethe had a fear of marriage, because it would interfere with his genius; but it is worth noting that the course he adopted brought him a great deal of unhappiness and waste of time.
At the age of twenty-six his destiny was decided by a meeting with the young Duke of Weimar. The duke was twenty, and conceived an intense admiration for the poet, and besought him to come and live at his court. To tempt him, and to keep him there, he gave him a beautiful home, together with some acres of land for a garden, and made him a state councilor with a salary, and before long gave him a title, enabling him to put the magic word “von” before his name. Thus Goethe became a court writer and a court man. You may call him the greatest of court writers and the most dignified of court men; nevertheless, there is a whole universe of difference between such a life, and that of an outsider and rebel like Beethoven.
The only trace of his youthful revolt which Goethe kept was in matters having to do with himself. He saved part of his time for his work, he took to traveling to get away from court functions, and in his later years, secure in his fame and power, he withdrew into his own home, and the court had to come to him. Thus he maintained the dignity of the intellectual man; but in his art ideals he became a strong conservative; and as for political andsocial ideals, he solved the problem by having nothing to do with them.
It would be easy to make Goethe less attractive, by mentioning that the court lady who became his mistress for the next ten years had a husband somewhere in the background. But that would not be fair, because it was the custom of the time, and nobody in court saw anything wrong with adultery. But when Goethe, somewhere around the age of forty, fell very much in love with a daughter of the people and made her his mistress, court circles were shocked; they were still more shocked, when, after she had borne him a son, he brought her to his home; they were speechless, when in the end he married her. She justified their worst expectations by turning into a drunkard; and that was hard for a very dignified and reserved man of letters.
Goethe traveled to Italy, and fell in love with the classical ideal of art, and wrote an imitation Greek play. Coming back to Weimar, he took up court duties, including the organizing of a fire brigade and going to war. The French revolution had come, and King Louis of France was a prisoner, together with his beautiful Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette, who had asked why the people did not eat cake if they could not get bread. The sovereigns of Europe hastened to rescue this brilliant wit, and to overthrow the monster of revolution. Goethe’s duke went along, with Goethe in his train. The poet showed his attitude toward the whole matter by writing a musical comedy while at the training camp, and gathering botanical specimens during the fighting.
This attitude he explained by saying that he had to shut his eyes to the events of his time, because otherwise he would have been driven mad. And I admit that it was painful to see the movement for freedom run wild in the Terror, and to see it betrayed by Napoleon, and to see the French people lured into a war of conquest, so that Voltaire’s “l’Infame” was able to pose as a champion of national freedom, and thus to rivet its power upon the peoples once again. But why did these things happen? It was because men of genius and intellect had been indifferent to the misery of the French people, their degradation and enslavement. It was because when the people did rise and throw off their tyrants, there were sofew voices to explain the meaning of this event, and to defend the revolution’s right to be. When Goethe went out with his duke, and lent the sanction of his name to the counter revolution, it was he who was making inevitable the Terror, it was he who was delivering the revolution to Napoleon. Bloodshed and misery overwhelmed Europe for twenty-five years; and Goethe, by withdrawing to his study and occupying himself with poetry and scientific research, encouraged the worst weakness of German philosophy and letters—the tendency to lull itself with high-sounding, abstract words, while the real life of the nation goes to the devil.
Reality broke in harshly enough upon this poet. Sixteen years after his military foray into France, the tables were turned, and Napoleon’s cannon-balls came tumbling through the beautiful gardens at Weimar. Here were French troopers, flushed with the victory of Jena, pillaging the town, robbing the poet of both his wine and his money, and threatening to kill him in his bed. Two years later came the peace negotiations, and the poet lent his presence to balls and fetes, and was summoned to an audience with the master of Europe. He was then fifty-nine years old, a world genius, and Napoleon was thirty-nine years old, a world conqueror; the older man went, and permitted himself to be inspected by the younger. Goethe had a handsome presence, and Napoleon was pleased. “You are a man!” he exclaimed. “How old are you?” he demanded; and then: “You are very well preserved”—as if this were a Grecian scholar being purchased as a slave by a Roman proconsul!
“You have written tragedies?” demanded Napoleon; and a courtier hastened to mention that the poet had written several—also he had translated Voltaire’s tragedy, “Mahomet.” “It is not a good piece,” said Napoleon, and went on to disapprove of dramas in which fate played a part, “What are they talking about with their fate? La politique est la fatalité.” Here was an utterance that Goethe might well have applied through all the rest of his life. I could take it as a motto for this book. “Politics is fate!” Hardly could one pack more wisdom into five words of French or three of English!
But Goethe chose to keep his salary and position in the court, and to overlook the power of organized societyover the individual soul. When the time came for the German people to revolt against Napoleon he had no word of encouragement—quite the contrary, he pronounced it folly. Nor had he any word of protest against the cruelties of the Holy Alliance.
Yet, see the inconsistency! His greatest work is “Faust,” a study of the problem of duty and happiness. Faust tries pleasure, he tries learning for learning’s sake, and it brings him nothing. In the end he accepts useful service as the only ideal, and the draining of swamps and cultivating of land as a moral occupation. But what is the use of such work, if statesmen are permitted to make war, and to destroy in a few hours all that generations have built up? You may believe in aristocratic politics or in democratic politics; but how can you believe in the possibility of human happiness without wisdom in statesmen?
There is a better side to Goethe, which must not be overlooked. He was magnanimous, open-minded, and a friend to all men of genius. He met the poet Schiller, ten years younger than himself, ill in health and struggling with cruel poverty. Schiller was a poet of freedom, and stayed that to the end of his life. His first successful drama was “The Robbers,” a glorification of revolt against medieval tyranny; his last was “William Tell,” whose hero set Switzerland free from the Austrian yoke. The fact that Schiller was of humble origin made no difference to Goethe; he brought the young poet to Weimar, and got him a pension from the duke, and became his intimate friend.
And that was the best thing that happened in Goethe’s life, for Schiller with his fine sincerity and idealism drove the older man to work. We are accustomed to see these two great names coupled together, and the critics point out that Schiller was the enthusiast, the “propagandist,” while Goethe, the serene Olympian temperament, was the greater poet. The critics do not mention that Schiller had to waste most of his life doing wretched hack work, and died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-six. If Goethe, with all his leisure and independence, had died at that age, his greatest work would have been lost.
Can anyone deny that we get a world view from the writings of Goethe; that he has definite conclusions as toevery aspect of human life? Can anyone deny that his dramas and his novels, even his lyric poems, are saturated with philosophy? It so happens that his point of view is that which has been accepted by tradition and critical authority through all the ages; therefore it slides down easily, it does not taste like medicine, and we do not think of it as propaganda.
What is this point of view? The world is a place of blind and generally aimless strife, and scholars and men of genius are powerless to control it, and can only keep out of its way. “Renounce,” said Goethe; and what is the first of all things you must renounce? Manifestly, the dream that you can manage your own time. Live simply, develop your highest faculties, leave a message and an example to the world; and somehow, at some future date—you do not attempt to say when or how—this message and this example may take effect, and truth and justice and mercy may prevail. Meantime, since you must live, and since the ruling classes own all the means of life, you must be polite to them, you must fit yourself into their ways, you must be a gentleman, a courtier, a man of property.
Thus by your example and daily practice you become a prop to the established order; and by the automatic operation of economic forces you become less and less tolerant of all rebels and disturbers of the peace. Because you know only the wealthy and the noble, you come to deal with them exclusively in your art works, you interpret their feelings, and behold life from their point of view. All critics unite in declaring that this is Reality, this is Nature, this is Art; while to object to this, and voice any other point of view, is Idealism, Preaching, and Propaganda.
Spreading the magic carpet of the imagination, we take flight from the free and easy court of Weimar to the home of an English rector, where impropriety is scarcely whispered, and where a little old maid of genius lives amid tea-parties and the embroidering of linen and the visiting ofthe poor, interrupted at intervals by the major crises of births, marriages and deaths.
Jane Austen was the youngest of seven children, who dwelt together in that amity which the Bible recommends but which frail humanity infrequently realizes. She was a genius without eccentricities, egotisms or rebellions; never did a writer of immortal books live a more conventional life or have less to write about. She had no literary friends, not even at the end of her life. Her best work was done at the age of twenty-two, and was a secret kept from the members of her family. She wrote on little sheets of paper, which could be quickly hidden under a blotter or a piece of “fancy work.” Her books were not published until late in her life, and then they were published anonymously. She died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-two.
The characters in her novels are the people of the world she knew. Her theme is, of course, the theme of all bourgeois fiction, the property marriage. Here we see the golden love-glints flashing from Cupid’s eyes; here we see the fortunes sailing about upon breezes of emotion; here we see Sensibility controlled by Sense.
Not great fortunes, you understand, but modest ones, such as entitle one to be on the visiting list of an English country rector. A fortune sufficient to enable the hero to escape the inconvenience of working, and to live in the country and exhibit to mankind a beautiful and graceful specimen of the human race. A fortune sufficient to enable him to marry a lady of Sense and Sensibility, and to provide her with a beautiful home and a garden, and a few servants, and maintenance for whatever number of children it may please Providence to send. That is the sort of fortune for which Jane Austen’s heroines are competing, and which each of them invariably gets—the bourgeois happy ending.
Do not misunderstand me: her heroines are not mercenary—that is, not with their conscious minds. The mercenary elements in their lives are instinctive and conventional; the laws of the British leisure classes, of “gentlefolk.” These laws Jane Austen never questioned, nor does anyone of her heroines ever question them. Therefore it is possible for these ladies to be mercenary to thepoint of ferocity, yet at the same time to be sentimental and even charming.
If you travel through the Jane Austen country you find the roads lined with hedge-rows, which bear flowers in the springtime, and are full of birds, and afford opportunity for delightful descriptions in novels; also they afford thrilling adventures, because a heroine can stand behind a hedge-row and listen to her best friend discussing her to her lover. Outside these hedge-rows walk common people of all sorts; farm laborers on their way to fourteen hours of animal-like toil; factory workers, pale and stunted; soldiers on the march; able seamen paying a visit to home; tradesmen, tourists—all sorts of persons one does not know. Behind the hedge-rows dwell the “gentlefolk,” carefully guarded by the police magistrates; and the common people never by any chance penetrate the hedge-rows, except in the capacity of servants. So the young ladies of the “gentle” family meet no men save such as have been carefully investigated and approved; so it is possible for these ladies to be full of Sensibility—that is, quivering with excitement at the male approach—and yet entirely innocent of mercenary motives, and entirely safe from the danger of making an unmercenary match.
How perfectly this system works you may note in Jane Austen’s novels. There are eight heroines, and eight fortunes to be married. One of the heroines takes the risk of marrying a clergyman who has no money except his “living.” Two others marry clergymen who, in addition to their “livings,” have good financial prospects. The other five marry non-clerical gentlemen of wealth. Mostly these fortunes come from land; everywhere over the Jane Austen novel there hovers a magic presence known as the “entailed estate.” In only one case is there any hint of vulgar origin for the fortune, in a recent connection with “trade.” Of all the fortunes, only one has actually been gained by the man who possesses it and bestows it upon the heroine; and this man has gained it in a most respectable Christian way—that is to say, not by “trade,” but by killing and robbery. He has been a naval captain, and brings home his share of the prizes taken.
The great crimes and horrors of the world lie outsidethe hedge-rows surrounding the Jane Austen rectory. We can hear the guns and smell the powder smoke, but the deadly missiles never pass the magic barrier. Two of Jane’s brothers are naval officers, and they come and go in imposing uniforms; the Napoleonic wars are on, and they are guarding the channel, and in later life become admirals. An intimate friend of the family is Warren Hastings, who conquered India for the British; when he was placed on trial for wholesale graft, he explained by saying that when he considered his opportunities, he marveled, not that he had taken so much, but that he had not taken more. Nothing of anything like this enters into the novels.
What does enter are the quiverings of Sensibility, the ups and downs of the “tender emotions.” When we were children we used to take a daisy and pull off the petals, and with petal number one we would say: “He loves me,” and with petal number two: “He loves me not,” and so on. With petal number one our heart goes up, and with petal number two it goes down. There is another question, equally thrilling: “Do I love him, or do I not?” Many things get in the way; Pride and Prejudice, for example. It is hard to know our own minds; and sometimes when we hesitate too long, it is necessary for the older members of our family to apply Persuasion. (I am making puns on the titles of the novels.)
I would not be understood to disparage this little English old maid. She did not make her world, in which the father of the family preaches in the name of the Prince of Peace, and the sons go out to kill and loot. She is a most charming and witty old maid, and her queer people are alive in every throb of their quivering hearts. She was a sly little body, and we suspect her of knowing more than she tells. There was a terrible scandal whispered concerning her, which she vehemently denied; we hate to pass it on, but this is a book of plain speaking and we have to do our duty—so let it be recorded that some of the neighbors suspected Jane Austen of watching them at tea-parties and church fairs, with the intention of putting their peculiarities into her books!
Upon our first visit to Scotland we kept low company; but now we return to dwell in a castle, and play the host to our Sovereign Lord the King.
Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh in 1771, the son of a prosperous lawyer who held the high office of sheriff. The father made a specialty of his country’s antiquities, and the boy was brought up, as it were, in the property-room of a moving picture studio. He was lame, which made it impossible for him to repeat the valorous deeds of his ancestors; so he took to dreams, and gave the world a new form of art, the historical romance.
The French revolution occurred in his youth, and he reacted from it as did all his class. It was the job of British Toryism to crush the republican idea; with money derived from the trade of the whole world, it subsidized the kings and emperors of Europe in their attacks upon France. The result was to raise up Napoleon, and before Napoleon was beaten Europe had waded through twenty-five years of blood. Walter Scott’s function was to glorify the ancient loyalties and pieties in whose name that world-crime was committed; and for his services he was made a baronet, and paid a million dollars, equal to five or ten times as much in our money.
Personally he was a generous and kindly gentleman, but he lent his name and influence to the most vicious rowdies of his party. Nor was he content with writing; he turned out and did his part as a smasher of the “Reds.” At the age of forty-one we find him writing to the poet Southey like an earlier incarnation of Attorney-General Palmer. “You are quite right in apprehending aJacquerie; the country is mined below our feet.” He goes on to tell how he discovered a meeting of weavers in a large manufacturing village, and how he did his duty as an officer of the law. “I apprehended the ringleaders and disconcerted the whole project; but in the course of my inquiries, imagine my surprise at discovering a bundle of letters and printed manifestoes, from which it appeared that the Manchester Weavers’ Committee corresponds with every manufacturing town in the South and West of Scotland,and levies a subsidy of 2s. 6d. per man—(an immense sum)—for the ostensible purpose of petitioning Parliament for redress of grievances, but doubtless to sustain them in their revolutionary movements. An energetic administration, which had the confidence of the country, would soon check all this; but it is our misfortune to lose the pilot when the ship is on the breakers. But it is sickening to think of our situation.”
Walter Scott’s literary career began with narrative poems based upon the love-makings and quarrelings of old Scottish chieftains. Then he began writing novels on these same themes, and it was as if he had struck a pick into a pit full of golden nuggets. To his Tory age he came as a heaven-sent magician with exactly the right spells to prop up the tottering old system. The public began to buy the Waverley novels so fast that it was impossible to get them bound in time. England went wild over them, and Europe as well; one million, four hundred thousand volumes were sold in France alone. This was the time of the “Holy Alliance,” and another King Louis had been set upon the French throne.
It was not quite the proper thing for an eminent legal gentleman to write novels, so Scott published the books anonymously, and always denied their authorship; but he did not refuse to take the money. He was a fluent writer, and could turn out a volume in a month or six weeks, and would get a thousand pounds before he had finished it. Never was there such prosperity, since the days of Aladdin and his wonderful lamp.
Our Tory novelist was a big overgrown boy; he could never have written such propaganda otherwise. He began to spend his money as a boy would spend it—to make real the world of chivalry and romance in nineteenth century Scotland, fully launched into the age of capitalist industrialism! He built himself an imitation castle of colossal size, “with a tall tower at either end ... sundry zigzagged gables ... a myriad of indentations and parapets, and machicolated eaves; most fantastic waterspouts; labelled windows, not a few of them painted glass ... stones carved with heraldries innumerable.” And inside, of course, were all the stage properties, “cuirasses, helmets, swords of every order, from the claymore and rapier to some German executioner’sswords.” Here our hero kept open house to all the world of rank and fashion, with gay hunting parties and dances, drinking bouts, and singing of ballads and the sounding of pibrochs. It was his aim, in his own words, “to found a family”; besides becoming a baron, he married his eldest son to an heiress, and the climax of his career came when King George IV came to visit his northern dominion, and to be the novelist’s guest.
It so happened that this king was an odious fat lecher; but that made no difference, he was Sir Walter’s Most Gracious and Sovereign Lord. In an ecstasy of loyalty, the novelist took possession of a glass from which His Majesty had drunk a toast. This was to be preserved as the most sacred of the treasures of Abbotsford; but, alas, the novelist put it in his pocket, and in a moment of absent-mindedness sat down on it, and cut himself severely! It did not occur to his pious soul that this might be an effort of Providence to teach him something about drinking, or about the worship of lecherous kings.
Here in Hollywood we see these magic castles arise on the movie lots; we see the costumes reproduced with minute exactitude, and then surmounting them we see the heads of screen dolls, male and female, lounge lizards and jazz dancers and queens from department stores and manicure parlors. And just so it is in the novels of Sir Walter: the costumes and scenery are those of old-time Scotland, but the characters are the gentlemen and servants and tenants of Scott’s own neighborhood. He had creative energy and a sense of humor, he makes the game very real, and we can enjoy it, provided we know what we are getting. It is not even Scott’s own time, it is merely the Tory propaganda of that time. It is medievalism and absolutism dressed up and glorified, with every trace of blood and filth and horror wiped away; a fictionized sermon upon the text: Vote the Conservative ticket.
But alas for the dreams of stand-pat poets! First came the ruin of his personal hopes. Among the rascals of his gang were two who persuaded him into a publishing business, to reap the millions out of his popularity. They stole everything in sight, and then went bankrupt, and left him at the age of fifty-five with a debt of a hundred and seventeen thousand pounds. He set to work to write pot-boilers and pay it off; an action which has made hima hero to his biographers. And of course, it is an honorable thing for an artist to pay his debts; we all know that most disagreeable of characters, the Bohemian genius who borrows from everybody he meets and repays nothing. But it seems necessary to point out that a novelist owes two debts; one to his business creditors, and the other to those who are to read his books in future time. We are not satisfied with Sir Walter’s pot-boilers, and we deny that a man of genius has a right to drive himself to death and bring on a stroke of paralysis in four years, in order to satisfy a romantic dream of honor.
Equally pitiful was the wreck of Sir Walter’s political ideals. In vain did he glorify the loyalty of the Scotch peasants, their fidelity to their lairds; in vain was all his hounding of the rebellious weavers with the weapons of the law. They continued to organize, and the peasants began to mutter and snarl; they wanted the vote, they clamored for rights both political and economic. A most wicked project known as the Reform Bill came up before Parliament, to give the vote to common working people; and Sir Walter, sixty years old and ill, persisted in taking part in the campaign. He made a speech in which he warned the audience that all these licentious movements came from France. This was forty years after the French revolution, and the Bolshevik bogie had lost its power to terrify; Sir Walter was hissed by his audience. Later on he personally saw to the arrest of a radical rascal on the street, and got himself stoned and mobbed. It was a shock he never got over, and he carried the memory to his grave a year or two later.
Fate is usually kind to aged Tories of this sort; it takes them off the stage of life before the failure of their hopes is too apparent. Imagine the shock to this chivalrous old soul if he could come out of his grave today, and visit the House of Parliament, and hear the “left wing” members, elected from his beloved highlands, shouting for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat! Now indeed would he say: “The country is mined below our feet!”