When I was a young man, groping my way into Socialism, I discovered that the movement in and about New York had a patroness. Mrs. Prestonia Martin was her name, and she had a beautiful home in the suburbs, and another up in the Adirondacks. An assortment of well-bred radicals would gather, and wait on themselves at table, and do their own laundry, and scratch a bit in the garden, and feel they were on the front door-step of the Co-operative Commonwealth. John Martin had been a member of the Fabian Society in London, so we knew we were under the best possible auspices, doing the exactly correct advanced things.
But time committed its ravages upon the minds of my friends Prestonia and John. They lost their vision of the Co-operative Commonwealth, and when you went to the beautiful “camp” overlooking Keene Valley, you no longer met young radicals, and no longer helped with the laundry; you met sedate philosophers, and listened to Prestonia expounding the mournful conclusion that humanity had never made any advance. The couple took up a new crusade—to avert from womankind the horrors of politics. The last time I met John, just before the war, he was an entirely respectable member of the New York school board and smiled at me a patronizing smile when I ventured to prophesy that inside of ten years women would be voting in New York state. “You will never live to see that!” said the prophet John.
The psalmist expresses the wish that “mine enemy would write a book”; and in this case mine enemy’s wife committed the indiscretion. I have before me a scholarly-looking volume, published in 1910, entitled “Is Mankind Advancing?” by Mrs. John Martin. I cite it as an outstanding example of one variety of culture superstition; it reduces to absurdity the arguments of one group of tradition worshipers. My old friend Prestonia has discovered that the Greeks achieved a higher civilization than has ever since existed on earth, and her demonstration that mankind is not advancing is based on the exaltationof Greek civilization over everything that has since come along.
Mrs. Prestonia does not really know very much about Greek civilization; I can state that, because I had many discussions with her at the time she was writing this book. What she has done is to take a history of Greece and list the leading names, higgledy-piggledy, regardless of their ideas, or of the parts they played, regardless of the fact that they fought and even killed one another, regardless of the fact that their doctrines contradict and cancel one another. They were Greeks, and therefore they were great. Two or three hundred are listed, all men of genius; and what names can you put against them?
I ventured to suggest a number of names to my friend Prestonia; but you see, my men were modern men, vulgar, common fellows who wore trousers, and ate pie, and worked for dollars! Think of comparing Edison with Archimedes—could anything be more absurd? Think of comparing Pasteur with Hippocrates! “But, my dear lady,” I would argue, “Hippocrates believed that disease was caused by ‘humors’; he believed that crises in disease followed numerical systems.” Maybe that was true, said Prestonia, but nevertheless, Hippocrates was the greatest physician that ever lived. And she would have Socrates listed as one of the glories of Athenian civilization—in spite of the fact that Athenian civilization had compelled him to drink the hemlock! In her queer hall of fame the imperialist Pericles, who led his country to ruin, and was convicted of the theft of public money, takes rank as the greatest statesman in all history, outranking Lincoln, who saved the American Union, and freed several million slaves. A dissolute young despot, Alexander, who sighed for new worlds to conquer, outranks George Washington, who founded a nation of free men, and then retired to his plantation.
After running over the list of all the achievements of modern literature and art, politics and philosophy, science and industry, I was able at last to find one thing which my friend Prestonia was unwilling to get along without. She wanted to live in ancient Athens—but to have her modern plumbing! And never once had it occurred to her that plumbing means lead and copper and steel and brass and nickel and porcelain and paint! Also mills in which thesethings are produced, railroads or motor trucks on which they are transported, factories in which the cars and trucks are made! Also telegraph and telephone and electric light, and bookkeeping systems and credit systems, and capital and labor, and the Republican party and the Socialist movement!
All this is preliminary to a study of the literature and art of ancient Greece; to help us clear our minds of cant, and persuade us to face the question: how much do we really admire Greek literature and Greek art, and how much do we just pretend to admire it? How much is the superiority of Greek civilization a reality, and how much is it a superstition maintained by gentlemen who have acquired honorific university degrees, which represent to them a meal ticket for the balance of their sojourns on earth?
“Well,” says Mrs. Ogi, “I see you have got down to the scandal.”
Her husband looks pained. “Do you call that scandal?”
“You accept people’s hospitality, and then come away and ridicule them, and reveal secrets about how they got the family washing done—”
“Secrets!” cries Ogi. “But that was a reform movement, a crusade!” After reflection, he adds: “If I really wanted to tell scandals, I could do it. I might hint that John lost his faith in the radical movement as a result of auto-intoxication.”
“Well, all I can say is that if you tell that, I’ll never speak to you again.”
Ogi answers meekly, “Excuse me.” And then: “What do you think of my thesis?”
“Well,” says Mrs. Ogi, “I see, of course—you are trying to irritate and shock people as much as possible. Are you going to say that Greek art is propaganda?”
“I can’t possibly help saying it.”
“You know that this art is always cited as the perfect type of pure art, the expression of joy and love of beauty.”
“The Greeks were a beauty-loving race and a joy-seeking race, and they embodied their ideals in the figures of gods and goddesses—extremely lovely figures. No one can do better with the human body than they did; but if you take those divinities on their good looks, you’ll simply be repeating the bitter mistake of the Greeks—and without their excuse of inexperience.”
Says Mrs. Ogi: “We’re to have a Christian sermon on naked marble idols?”
“We are going to understand the total art product of the Greeks, to draw out of it what they put into it. These people constituted themselves an experiment station to try out beauty-loving—that is, trust in Nature—as a basis of civilization; and they found it didn’t work. It led them into pain and failure and despair, and the record is written all over their art. There is a book, Mackail’s ‘Greek Anthology,’ a collection of various kinds of inscriptions, brief verses and sentiments from all sources; and you search the pages and hardly find one happy word. You discover that their art was to put sadness into beautiful and melodious language. ‘Of all things,’ says Theognis, ‘it is best for men not to be born.’ And Anacreon, poet of the joy-lovers, compares life to a chariot wheel that ‘runs fast away.’”
“Well, but so it does!”
“Something endures, and we have to find out what. We have to take hold of life, and learn to direct it; we cannot just play in a garden, like happy children. The Greeks played, and their garden turned into a charnel-house, a place of horror. I call it an amazing blunder of criticism—the notion that Greek art is one of joy and freedom. The culmination of their art impulse was the tragedies which the whole community helped to create and maintain. These performances were religious ritual, their supreme civic events; and what do they tell us? There is one theme, immutably fixed, the helplessness of the human spirit in the grip of fate. A black shadow hangs over the life of men, they grope blindly in the darkness. Whole families, mighty dynasties of kings and rulers are condemned to destruction. They are pursued by bitter and fierce and relentless Nemesis. Somber prophecies are spoken before men are born, and then we see these men, striving with all their wit to evade theirdestiny—in vain. Our pleasure as spectators is to watch this process, and be convinced of the helplessness of our kind. We are lifted up to the heaven of the gods, we are endowed with omniscience and omnipotence—in order to drive a dagger into our own bosoms, to cohabit with our own mothers and sisters, to stab our own fathers and brothers, to tear out our own eyeballs. Enacting such things with majesty and solemnity, reciting them in melodious language to the rhythm of beautiful music and the graceful motions of a chorus—that is the final achievement of these lovers of beauty and joy!”
“You are becoming eloquent,” says Mrs. Ogi, who distrusts eloquence in her cave. “What conclusion do you draw about this art?”
“We are physicians, called to a case after the patient is dead. We want to know what killed this man, so that we can advise living patients. From this post-mortem we learn that sensuous charm does not suffice to secure life; it is not enough for people to carve beautiful figures of the nude human body, and build marble temples to joy and love, while their civic affairs are full of jealousy and greed and corruption.”
“Was there corruption in Greek public life?”
“So much that we in modern times cannot conceive it. Yes, I know about the Teapot Dome and the black satchel with a hundred thousand dollars worth of bills. Nevertheless, if anyone were to tell us about corruption such as the Greeks took for granted, not even a movie audience would swallow it.”
“Now that sounds interesting,” says Mrs. Ogi. “Tell us scandals about these reverend ancients!”
“First I want to explain the class struggle in Greek society, and the economic basis of their state—”
“You take my advice,” says Mrs. Ogi; “leave that lecture until the end, and then forget it. Take your muck-rake and poke it into the Parthenon!”
“What I want to do,” says Ogi, “is to take a character out of ancient Greece, and set him down in our world and see how he’d sound to us. Something like this—”
From “The American Plutarch: Our Leading Statesmen Portrayed for the Young; with Moral Inferences.” New York: A. D. 2124.
The career of William Randolph Alcibiades, publisher, soldier and politician, coincided with the era of the Great Wars. He was born to a position of power and luxury, being a nephew of the greatest statesman of his time, and having as his private tutor the leading philosopher of his time. He had rare gifts of personal beauty and charm; but his youth was wild and dissipated, and he spurned the conventional career which lay open to him, and set himself up as a leader of the Democratic party. His enemies called him a demagogue, and denied him any sincerity in his popular appeals.
In the first World War the young statesman was chosen commander-in-chief of the American forces in France. Returning home, he organized and led the expedition for the conquest of South America, and laid siege to the city of Buenos Ayres. He was recalled, because his enemies charged that on the night before the expedition sailed, he had committed an act of sacrilege by chopping off the nose of the statue of George Washington in front of the Treasury Building, New York. History will never know who committed this vandalism; a young man confessed, and some of those whom he charged with guilt were executed, but the enemies of William Randolph maintained that he had purchased this confession, in order to get rid of certain persons who stood in his way.
William Randolph, while being conducted back to his country under arrest, made his escape to England. In order to punish his enemies at home, he made fervent appeals to the British government to enter the war on the side of South America, and against his own country. His eloquence prevailed, and both England and France sent ships to the relief of Buenos Ayres. But William Randolph had to flee from England to France, because the English king made the discovery that the young American had seduced his wife.
William Randolph now lived in retirement until thesecond World War broke out—between the United States on the one hand, and Japan and China, aided by England and France, on the other. William Randolph had always been ardent in promoting hostility against Japan, but he now fled to the court of the Japanese emperor, and with money furnished by this wealthy monarch he sent emissaries to foment a conspiracy in the United States. The conflict between the Republican and Democratic parties had reached a stage of such bitterness that the wealthy classes were ready to listen to any scheme which promised them power. William Randolph having deserted the Democrats and gone over to the Republicans, his agents approached the naval officers of the fleet, and these, combined with Judge Gary and J. P. Morgan and other gentlemen of wealth, overthrew the established government, and set up a new constitution, which confined the voting power to five thousand of the richest citizens.
The new government made an alliance with Japan and China against England and France; and William Randolph returned to the United States and became a general in command of the American army. But his failure to win victories caused his popularity to wane, and he fled to a castle he had built for himself in Mexico. The British government, enraged by what he had done to turn the Japanese emperor against them, sent emissaries to set fire to his castle, and William Randolph Alcibiades was shot while trying to make his escape from the flames.
From this career we learn that it is not enough for a statesman to be beautiful in person and charming in manner: it is also necessary that he be taught to attend Sunday school in his youth.
Greek civilization was made by a large number of different tribes, inhabiting islands, or fertile valleys and plains separated by mountain ranges. Among these tribes there was incessant rivalry and bitter jealousy. They were never able to form a national or racial union, and their history is a succession of inter-tribal intrigues and wars. In addition to this came the class struggle. The aristocratic classes, based on landlordism, held the government, while the proletariat, crowding into the towns, clamored for power; popular leaders arose, and there were conspiracies and civic tumults. Invariably the leaders of the dispossessed party would form alliances with outside states for war upon their own state. More significant yet, some would take the money and serve the cause of the Persian kings, who represented barbarian despotism.
In the beginning of their written record we find the Greeks just emerging from the family stage. The old men ruled; they were the wise and the rich, and no one disputed their authority. They formed alliances and led expeditions for the plundering of other states; then, returning to their ancestral halls, they hired musicians to entertain them by chanting the story of their exploits. So we have the Homeric poems, ruling-class propaganda, written to glorify the ancestors of powerful chieftains and fighting men, and to inculcate the spirit of obedience and martial pride in the new generations.
Every device of the poet’s art is employed to lend prominence and splendor to the Homeric heroes. They are frequently demigods, the result of some mood of dalliance on the part of one of the high gods of Olympus, who came down to earth and encountered a lovely Greek maiden wandering in a meadow. This divine illegitimacy entitles the heroes to the center of the stage, and they take it. They are a set of extremely greedy, jealous, vain and capricious school-boys; and, what is still more significant, their gods, the highest ideal they could conceive, are exactly as greedy, jealous, vain and capricious. The only beautiful emotion in the poems is when some of the mothers and fathers, the wives and children of those heroes express for them an affection of which they are unworthy.
We are accustomed to use the words “Homeric” and “epic” to signify something vast, elemental, portentous. How is it that Homer secures to his characters this “heroic” effect? By causing all the rest of the world to bow to their pretensions, by interesting the gods in their fate—and, above all else, by portraying them as unrestrained in their emotions and limitless in their desires. These are the familiar devices whereby aristocracy signifies itself.
And that explains why such men as Matthew Arnoldand Gladstone write volumes of rhapsody over Homer. There is in England a class which has invented ways of setting forth to the world the fact that it does not have to work for a living. There are things this class can do which the vulgar herd cannot do; and one of these things is to read and appreciate Latin and Greek literature. Homer is to the British world of culture what the top-hat is to the British world sartorial.
Homer serves these purposes, because he has the aristocratic point of view, and gives the aristocratic mind what it craves. Just as we cherish genealogy volumes to prove that our ancestors came over in theMayflower, so the Homeric minstrel chanted a catalogue of the ships which had taken part in the Trojan war. And just as our members of good society preach “law and order” to the lower classes, so in the Homeric poems it is made clear that the common soldier exists to shed his blood for the glory of his chief. Only once does a common man lift his voice in the “Iliad”—the famous scene in the council where Thersites dares to rise up. He is represented as a hunchbacked and offensive brawler; he is overwhelmed with ridicule, and finally receives a sound thrashing from Ulysses, called “the wily,” the Greek ideal of the shrewd and sensible man of the world. “The sovereignty of the many is not good,” declares this “wily” one; “let there be one sovereign, one king.”
We shall find that the bards of aristocracy seldom neglect to flatter their masters by showing some rebel thus being taught his place. We shall find Shakespeare treating Jack Cade precisely as Homer treats Thersites; neither stopping for a moment to inquire whether the grumbler had any just cause to grumble. We shall find also that leisure-class critics always accept these scenes as pure and undefiled “art,” and are shocked by the suggestion of their mighty minstrels stooping to propaganda in the interest of those who pay them. In those early days the pay was poor; if legend is to be trusted, Homer wandered blind and friendless among the Greek towns, which afterwards claimed the honor of being his birthplace. Says the epigram:
Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead,Through which the living Homer begged his bread.
Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead,Through which the living Homer begged his bread.
Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead,Through which the living Homer begged his bread.
Taking the “Iliad” on the basis of literature, we say it contains fine poetry, and vivid pictures of old-time manners, fascinating to read about—if you come on them while you are young. There is a stage of life when we are naïve and uncritical in our acceptance of “heroism.” We adopt a certain shining person, we share his glories, we go out to battle with him, we thrill to every stroke of his broad sword, we shout when he wins the victory—and never reflect that we might exactly as well be interested in the other fellow, who has exactly as much right to survive. The average person reaches that age of hero-worship at twelve years, and passes it at sixteen, if he passes it at all. Let children read the “Odyssey” in a good translation; they will enjoy these perils and later on they will discover that the universe has not yet been entirely explored—there are perils in the starry spaces, and in the deeps of our minds.
Once in their history fate provided the Greeks with a great cause; that was in the fifth century, when the gigantic Juggernaut of Persia came rolling down upon them. King Xerxes assembled his barbarian hordes, his tribes of wild horsemen and his phalanxes of slaves, his war elephants and his chariots. Compared with these invaders, the Greeks were modern civilized men; free men, holding in their minds all the treasures of the future. They forgot their state jealousies and civic factions, and rallied and saved their culture. From that national impulse came practically everything that is worth while in the “classics.” It was here that the Greek spirit achieved self-consciousness; it was here that Greek patriotism and Greek religion found their justification, their validity as propaganda for great art.
Among the Athenian captains who fought at Marathon was one by the name of Æschylus. He returned, full of the pride of his race, and wrote a tragedy, “The Persians,” around the story of the king whom he had helped to defeat; the climax of the drama being the battle in which the poet had been a leader. It was Greek patriotic and religious propaganda without any thought of disguise; its purpose being to portray the downfall of despotism. The play was a popular success, and made Æschylus the national poet, not merely of Athens, but of all the Greeks.
He wrote other plays of the same religious and patriotic sort, and he never feared to put in whatever moral teachings he thought his audience needed. “Obedience is the mother of success, bringing safety,” summed up his political creed; so, needless to say, he belonged to the conservative party. So little was he afraid of “propaganda” that in “The Seven Against Thebes” he praised by name the statesman Aristides, who was present in the audience. This kind of topical illusion “brought down the house” in ancient Athens, precisely as it would in New York today.
The sculptors and architects and other artists of Greece felt the same patriotic and religious thrill, the same consciousness of a sublime destiny; they labored with burning faith to glorify the gods and demigods, the ancestors and rulers who had made them masters of the land. As a memorial to the victory of Marathon the Greeks instituted national games, which took place every four years, and were a means of uniting the various tribes in worship of their gods. There was the keenest rivalry, and the ambition of Greek gentlemen was to win the crowns and laurel wreaths. When they had won, they wanted the fact to be known; so they paid poets who could sing their achievements in glorious verses. The poet Pindar became a high-class publicity man for these aristocratic sportsmen; also he sang the praises of whatever tyrants held power in the Greek cities, making them splendid and heroic, regardless of how unprincipled and cruel they might be.
The production of the dramas was also a kind of game. Each playwright found a wealthy patron to pay the expenses of drilling and equipping the chorus for his play; then, if the play carried off the prize, the wealthy gentleman built a monument to his own generosity; and so we saw, lining the streets of Athens, the choregic monuments of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller and Otto H. Kahn. Each poet seeking the prize would take the demigods and ancestral rulers, and portray themaccording to his own interpretation; incidentally he would use the chorus to discuss the current events of politics, and to express his own convictions. Thus Æschylus wrote his “Eumenides” to oppose the abolishing of the Areopagiticus, an ancient court which met on the Sacred Hill: just as if today a poet should produce a drama to combat the radical attacks on the United States Supreme Court.
Another dramatist arose, the son of a noble family, Sophocles by name. He wrote some thirty plays, and carried off the prize nineteen times, and his rivals and enemies took pleasure in charging that he was greedy for money, a regular old miser, besides being exceptionally fond of the ladies, and raising a large illegitimate family. Sophocles produced serene and beautiful works, because he believed in the patriotic and pious traditions he served, accepting the hideous stories of the old-time Greek heroes and demi-gods as the natural fate of mortals. He is the perfect type of the ruling-class artist who achieves perfection without strife, because he is completely at one with his environment, identifying the interests of his class with the will of the gods. We shall encounter a line of such poets—Virgil, Spenser, Shakespeare, Racine, Goethe, Tennyson. They feel love and pity for the unhappy children of their brains, and they move us to grief and awe, but never do they move us to revolt.
But now came another dramatist, in a different mood. This man looked at the Greek legends and decided that they were not true. He looked at Greek institutions, private property, and state patriotism, and the sovereignty of old men in family and tribe, and he decided that these were not necessarily wise and permanent arrangements. He set himself up as a propagandist of things that we call “modern,” and that the Greeks called blasphemy and infidelity. His name was Euripides, and he took the heroes and heroines of the old legends and turned them into plain human beings, suffering the cruelties of fate, but fighting back, voicing protests and doubts. So came a string of plays, jeering at militarism and false patriotism, denouncing slavery and the subjection of women in the home, rebuking religious bigotry, undermining the noble and wealthy classes. A play in which the women get together to rebel against war! A play in which a devotedwife gives her life to an angry god in order to save her husband’s life—but the husband is shown as an egotistical cad, not worthy of this dutiful and pious Greek sacrifice! Read a passage of the dramatic propaganda of Euripides, and realize how this must have sounded to hundred per cent Athenian patriots—and right in the midst of a war to the death with Sparta:
Doth some one say that there be gods above?There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool,Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you.Look at the facts themselves, yielding my wordsNo undue credence; for I say that kingsKill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud,And doing thus are happier than thoseWho live calm pious lives day after day.How many little states that serve the godsAre subject to the godless but more strong,Made slaves by might of a superior army!
Doth some one say that there be gods above?There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool,Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you.Look at the facts themselves, yielding my wordsNo undue credence; for I say that kingsKill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud,And doing thus are happier than thoseWho live calm pious lives day after day.How many little states that serve the godsAre subject to the godless but more strong,Made slaves by might of a superior army!
Doth some one say that there be gods above?There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool,Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you.Look at the facts themselves, yielding my wordsNo undue credence; for I say that kingsKill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud,And doing thus are happier than thoseWho live calm pious lives day after day.How many little states that serve the godsAre subject to the godless but more strong,Made slaves by might of a superior army!
Needless to say, the Bolshevik sentiments of Euripides were not proclaimed before the altar of Dionysus without protest on the part of the orthodox. There rose up another dramatist, this time a comedian, to champion the ancient and honorable traditions of Athens. Aristophanes was his name, and he was one of the world’s great masters of the comic line. He had infinite verve and wit and imagination; you can read him today and laugh out loud—even while his reactionary ideas make you cross.
The point to be got clear is that right or wrong, this poet is altogether a propagandist; a political campaigner, full of the most bitter fury against his enemies, attacking them by name, lampooning them, ridiculing them, not scrupling even to tell vicious falsehoods about them. He wrote his plays to advocate this thesis or that thesis; he arranged his incidents to exhibit this or that aspect of the thesis; he chose his characters, either to voice his own convictions, or to make the opposite convictions absurd. Not merely do his characters make long speeches in which they set forth the poet’s ideas; at any time in the courseof the action the poet will wave these characters one side, and step out in the form of the chorus and say what he thinks, arguing and pleading with the audience, scolding at them, denouncing his enemies, explaining his previous actions, discussing his present play—even going so far as to explain to the audience why they should award the prize to Aristophanes and not to somebody else! I doubt if there has ever been a bolder propagandist using the stage; I doubt if the propertied classes and the partisans of tradition ever had a more vigorous defender; and this, don’t fail to note, in a world dramatist, a “classic” of history’s greatest “art for art’s sake” period!
The amazing modernness of Aristophanes is what strikes us most. There is hardly a single one of our present-day contentious questions he does not discuss at length. He has the malicious wit of the New York “Sun” in the days of Dana; he has the fun of Stephen Leacock, whose comical tales ridicule every new and sensible idea the human mind can conceive. Again, one thinks of the verses of Wallace Irwin—except that Aristophanes sincerely held his convictions, whereas Mr. Irwin’s wit appears to be directed by his newest publisher.
Aristophanes was a gentleman, in the English sense of the word, and wrote for other gentlemen. Just as in England during the late war we observed the manufacturers of beer and munitions rising to power and turning the aristocracy out of their castles, so during the Peloponnesian war Aristophanes saw his cultured class dispossessed by newly rich traders. There is a scene in the “Knights” in which he denounces them; they are “mongers,” a whole succession of “mongers”—topical allusions which the audience received with roars of laughter. First came a rope-monger to govern the state, and then a mutton-monger; now there was a leather-monger—Cleon, ruler of the city, who sat in the audience and heard himself abused. Athens could go only one stage lower, said Aristophanes, and he produced an offal-monger, and recited to this person a list of his vices, which proved him fit to take charge of public affairs.
As to Cleon, the poet objected that his political manners were rude; and in order to set him a good example,described him as “a whale that keeps a public house and has a voice like a pig on fire!” This was in war-time—and imagine what would have happened to a playwright who produced a play in Washington, D. C., in the year 1918, describing the President of the United States in similar language!
Again, Aristophanes produced a play denouncing his city for its shabby treatment of its tributary states. He produced this play while ambassadors from those states were in the audience, attending a council of the empire. For this Cleon had the poet prosecuted and fined; so in his next production Aristophanes comes back, proposing that the people shall kick out a number of rascals, including
All statesmen retrenching the fees and the salariesOf theatrical bards, in revenge for the railleries,And jests, and lampoons, of this holy solemnity,Profanely pursuing their personal enmity,For having been flouted, and scoff’d, and scorn’d—All such are admonish’d and heartily warn’d!
All statesmen retrenching the fees and the salariesOf theatrical bards, in revenge for the railleries,And jests, and lampoons, of this holy solemnity,Profanely pursuing their personal enmity,For having been flouted, and scoff’d, and scorn’d—All such are admonish’d and heartily warn’d!
All statesmen retrenching the fees and the salariesOf theatrical bards, in revenge for the railleries,And jests, and lampoons, of this holy solemnity,Profanely pursuing their personal enmity,For having been flouted, and scoff’d, and scorn’d—All such are admonish’d and heartily warn’d!
Aristophanes loathed Euripides for having turned the ancestral heroes into weak mortals, with sentiments and whinings about their rights and wrongs. He dragged the poet down into hell, and there beat him with all the weapons he could lay hold of. He took the poet’s play of feminism, the “Lysistrata,” and turned it to farce by that most modern of devices, a strike of mothers! A play in which the women of Athens refuse to co-habit with their husbands until the husbands have ended the war with Sparta!
Also Aristophanes loathed Socrates, because that philosopher taught the youths of Athens to think for themselves. To this the poet attributed the corruption of Alcibiades, the young aristocrat who had been a pupil of Socrates, and had sold out his country to the Persian king. He wrote a play called “The Clouds,” in which he represented Socrates as a cunning trickster, teaching men how to advocate any cause for money. He portrayed the philosopher sitting in a hanging basket in front of his house, performing absurdities with his pupils. It is exactly the tone of a “Saturday Evening Post” editorial, jeering at “parlor pinks,” and college professors who teach their pupils “mugwumpery.” Thetime came when the mob voted death to Socrates; and this was the great triumph of the funny man of reaction.
But alas, the death of one free-thinker did not suffice to bring the citizens of Athens back to the simple life of their ancestors. They continued to make money and enjoy themselves, and to hire soldiers to do their fighting. Their dramatists developed the so-called “social comedy”—that is, pictures of the fashions and follies of the leisure class, without any propaganda. It is an invariable rule that the absence of propaganda in the art of a people means that this people is in process of intellectual and moral decay. So now a strong man came down out of the north and took charge of Greece, and Greek literature moved into the Alexandrine period.
The center of this new culture was the city of Alexandria, in Egypt. The poets now took pride in their technical skill, and wrote delicate and charming portrayals of the delights of love. A horde of learned scholars busied themselves with criticism and interpretation of the works of the past, and composed long epic poems dealing with grammar and rhetoric and similar subjects. This too was “propaganda”; but you note that it was propaganda of a secondary and imitative sort, it was not produced by men who were doing great deeds, and creating new forms of life. Alexandria was a cosmopolitan center, ruled by a despot, the home of some wealthy and cultured gentlemen, who supported painters and sculptors and poets and musicians and actors to while away their boredom, and to serve as their press-agents and trumpeters. But the art of classical Greece was the work of free men, citizens of a state ruled by a larger proportion of its inhabitants than had ever before held authority in civilized times. That meant throughout the community the joy and thrill of intellectual adventure, it meant a great leap of achievement for the whole group. Such invariably is the origin of art which we now regard as “classical”—and which we use to hold the minds of new generations in chain to tradition and conformity!
There has been peace in the cave for a while, because Mrs. Ogi has been interested in learning about the Greeks. “I perceive,” she says, “that there are superstitions in the arts, just as in religion.”
“Exactly,” says Ogi; “and they serve the same purpose. They begin as honest ignorance, and are then taken up and used as a source of income and a shield to privilege.”
Says Mrs. Ogi, “It strikes me the Greeks lived in a country very much like Southern California.”
“Quite so. The climate is the same; and the rocky hills and fertile valleys, and people living the outdoor life, and giving their time to sports. The one-piece bathing-suits that have come into fashion in our ‘beauty parades’ are about the same thing as the Greek maidens running naked in the games. And if you want to parallel the darker side of Greek sensuousness—”
“There is Hollywood,” says Mrs. Ogi.
“There is all smart society, as much luxury and wantonness as your thesis requires.”
“But then, why has Los Angeles never had any art? I know what you are going to say—our mental energy goes into real estate advertisements. But joking aside, why?”
“Because the people here have never had a struggle. They came into a country already prepared for them, inhabited by tame Indians living on piñon nuts. All the settlers had to do was to subdivide the land, and raise the price once every year. They are too polite to have an art; if anybody makes a crude effort, it is a masterpiece, and we all get together and boost. You can write one feeble book, and live a life-time on your reputation. Los Angeles is a fruit that was rotten before it was ripe.”
“What are we going to do?” asks Mrs. Ogi.
“We are going to take our choice between a social revolution and a slave empire.”
Mrs. Ogi is not certain about her choice; she sits, watching the entrance of the cave out of the corner of her eye—the ancestral habit of expecting some hostile intruder. After a while she remarks, “I notice you didn’t say anything about slavery in Greece.”
“It will be better to deal with slavery in the case of the Romans, where its effects show so plainly. The Greeks had slavery, but the force which destroyed their civilization was faction. They had their ‘world war,’ and Sir Gilbert Murray, who knows them by heart, has drawn a parallel between that war and ours; it is so exact that it makes you laugh—or weep, according to your temperament. The Greek struggle was between the Athenian empire, a democratic sea power, and the Spartans, an aristocratic, military people with no nonsense about them. The war lasted for two generations, off and on; they hadn’t developed the technique of extermination as we have. But they had all the social and psychic factors of our ‘war for democracy’—‘defeatists’ and ‘bitter-enders,’ poets and propagandists of hate, statesmen promising utopias after victory, spies and informers and provocateurs, refugees crowding into the cities, landlords raising rents, food famines, rationing of supplies, and profiteers coining fortunes out of the general misery. And of course the demagogues and haters had their way; Athens was ruined and Sparta was bled white, and the Greeks became subjects, first of Macedonia, then of the Romans, then of the Turks.”
“Thus endeth the first lesson,” says Mrs. Ogi. “And now for the Romans.”
“Well, the Romans didn’t bleed themselves to death; they were practical fellows, with a business man’s point of view. They turned their deadly short swords against other races; and when they had conquered somebody, they put him to work for the glory of the Grand Old Party. They were ‘hard-boiled,’ as we say; our big business men of the rougher type—old P. D. Armour, and Pullman, and ‘Jesse James’ Hill, and Harriman, and the elder Morgan, and Judge Gary. This banker in Chicago that the Republican party has just put over on us as vice-president, General ‘Helen Maria’ Dawes—he commanded an army against the Germans, and having conquered them, he goes back to put them under bond, to set them at work for long hours, and drain the milk out of the mothers’ breasts, and feed it to the international bankers, instead of to the German infants. That was a perfect Roman job,and General Helen Maria would have been the boy after the Romans’ own heart; they would have made him a prefect over the whole of Asia Minor, or Northern Africa, or Spain, and he would have come home a millionaire—but never so rich as the head of one of the Morgan banks in Chicago!”
“I shouldn’t think you’d get much art out of people like that,” says Mrs. Ogi. “But go ahead and tell us the story.”
Rome, like all other nations, was founded by stern, determined men, who believed in themselves and in their tribal gods. They conquered the peninsula of Italy, and built mighty cities, and a net-work of military roads, and aqueducts which endure even today. All that time their state was a republic; in fact, they made the word for us—res publicæ mean public affairs, and all Roman citizens took part in them, discussed and voted, passed laws and enforced the laws. They raised armies, and built fleets of ships, and conquered Carthage, and ultimately the whole Mediterranean world. But, according to the custom of the time, they enslaved their prisoners in war; and so, in the course of six or eight centuries, Rome provided the classic demonstration of what slavery does to civilization.
Emerson has said that wherever you find a chain fastened to the wrist of a slave, you find the other end fastened to the wrist of a master. It is possible for a slave-holder to be a virtuous man, but it is impossible for him to raise virtuous children. Slaves are tricky and dishonest, full of suppressions and secret vices; even where they mean well, they debauch the young by waiting upon them and depriving them of initiative. Why should a young aristocrat work, when he knows he will grow up to inherit papa’s money? In a few generations he is too effeminate even to fight. Why should he risk his precious life, when he can hire common soldiers?
Not only that, but slavery undermines free labor, and breaks down the farming class. Cheap food poured intoRome, and the farmers were ruined, and their sons drifted into the cities. The lands of Italy were mortgaged, and the money-lenders got them. Wealthy merchants and officials returning from the provinces became owners of vast estates, while the cities were crowded with a hungry mob, idle, dissolute—and victimized by the owners of slum tenements. You may see every bit of that reproduced in the United States today, for chattel slavery and wage slavery are in their economic effects the same. The only difference is that a process which took six or eight centuries in Rome is taking one century under the stimulus of machinery.
The Roman mob had the vote, and they used it to get something for themselves. There came class struggles, bitter and ferocious. Two young brothers of the aristocracy, Caius and Tiberius Gracchus, became champions of the common people—what we call “parlor Socialists.” They were assassinated, and the partisans of privilege, the “old gang,” proceeded to slaughter everybody in Italy who threatened their power. There followed two generations of civil strife, and then came a strong man, Julius Cæsar, who put an end to political democracy. In history books that are taught to our school children today you will read that Cæsar was a great and virtuous protector of law and order; because the class which is paying for school text-books in capitalist America is waiting hopefully for the arrival of exactly such a man to put an end to the threat of industrial democracy.
So Rome became in form what it was in fact, an empire, the most colossal machine for plundering that had ever been seen on earth. A little inside gang of rich men ran it, and kept the mob satisfied by bread and circuses and gladiatorial shows. The Roman emperors tried every form of debauchery and blood-thirsty cruelty, incest and unnatural vice, and crowned it by having themselves made into gods with their statues set up to be worshiped in the temples. Their heirs took to murdering and poisoning each other, and Rome was governed by palace revolutions. Then the army discovered that it could share the graft, and the troops took to revolting and setting up their leaders as emperors and gods. All the while the tribute continued to roll in—the wealth of the whole world squandered in one mad orgy—
“Look here,” says Mrs. Ogi; “you have got in a solid chapter of preaching—and we are trying to find out about art!”
“I’m all through now,” says her husband, humbly. “But no one could understand Roman art without understanding the economics of slavery.”
In the beginning the Romans didn’t bother very much with art. In their public buildings they were content to take over the Greek styles—but making them heavy and solid, so as to last to the end of time. The attitude of a Roman gentleman toward the fine arts reminds me of a wealthy Southern planter whose son wanted to become a violinist, and the father said, “I can hire all the fiddler-fellows I want.” The Roman gentleman bought people of that sort—musicians, dancers and poets with skill handed down from “the glory that was Greece.”
Until the republic was dead and the Emperor Augustus took the throne. Then came a time of peace, and a Roman scholar, the son of a country proprietor, looked about him, and seeing the perils of internal decay and outside barbarism looming over his world, he recalled the stern sobriety of the good old days, and yearned to bring back the governing class of Rome to reverence for their ancestors. There is a report that the Emperor Augustus himself suggested the task to the poet; anyhow, Mr. Publius Vergilius Maro, known to us as Virgil, set himself with sober deliberation to the making of a piece of Roman national and religious propaganda.
It was to be an epic after the fashion of Homer, written in dactylic hexameter, like Homer. Virgil cast about him for a hero, and selected a legendary Trojan named Æneas, who was said to have fled from the Greeks and to have founded Rome. The characters in Homer carried an adjective before their names, “the wily Ulysses,” “the swift-footed Achilles,” and so on. Therefore this hero must have an adjective, and he becomes “the pious Æneas”—the man who respects the old-timefaith, and preserves the old-time traditions of virtue, sobriety and public service.
So here is an epic poem, wrought with verbal skill and sincerity of feeling, conveying to us the dream of Rome as it ought to be, but was not. We see the wanderings of Æneas and his ship-load of companions. We see him land at Carthage, and carry on a love affair with Queen Dido, and then desert her—not a serious impropriety in Roman days. We see the founding father celebrating the old-time religious rites, consulting the auguries and asking the blessing of those gods, of which every Roman had a little image in his home, just as orthodox Russians and Roman Catholics do today.
The “Æneid” is considered ideal for infliction upon helpless school boys; it being full of that careful propriety and decorous tameness which represent what our children ought to be, but are not. The old professor of Latin who inflicted the poem upon me was an ardent propagandist of the Catholic faith, and it was his hope that if we learned proper respect for the established religion of ancient Rome, we might some day be lured into similar respect for the established religion of modern Rome. We read, or made up, a phrase: “Dum pius Æneas,” meaning: “While the pious Æneas”—. We boys knew we were being propaganded, and we resented it, and this phrase gave us a chance to express our feelings. “The dumb pious Æneas” became our formula. “What’s your next hour?” “Oh, I’ve got the dumb pious Æneas!”
We would sit and solemnly translate a long account of a prize-fight—a religious prize-fight, part of the pious games. The antagonists wore no vulgar boxing-gloves, but a mysterious, romantic thing called a “cestus,” which we did not recognize as plain “brass knucks.” And woe to the student if the dumb pious professor happened to catch him with a morning newspaper under his desk, reading an account of a prize-fight which had happened the night before in Madison Square Garden! Woe likewise to the student who, translating the rage of the deserted Queen Dido—“furens quid femina possit”—happened to be caught reading the story of some queen of the stage or the grand opera who had committed suicide because of a faithless lover!
Does anyone question that the “Æneid” is propaganda? If so, I mention that the poet lost his country estate in one of the civil wars; and on account of his beautiful verses the Emperor Augustus restored the property to him, and made him a court favorite. So in the “Æneid” we find this pious emperor described in the following fashion: