This, this is he—long promised, oft foretold—Augustus Cæsar. He the age of gold,God-born himself, in Latium shall restoreAnd rule the land that Saturn ruled before.
This, this is he—long promised, oft foretold—Augustus Cæsar. He the age of gold,God-born himself, in Latium shall restoreAnd rule the land that Saturn ruled before.
This, this is he—long promised, oft foretold—Augustus Cæsar. He the age of gold,God-born himself, in Latium shall restoreAnd rule the land that Saturn ruled before.
That is a more direct and personal kind of propaganda, the propaganda of a hungry poet in search of his dinner. We shall find a great deal of it through the history of art, and it is, I am told, not entirely unknown in art circles today.
“I have here,” says Mrs. Ogi, “a letter from a Professor who has been reading this manuscript. He protests, ‘not in a professorial fashion’—”
“Naturally not,” says Ogi.
“That you cannot possibly know the old authors as well as he does, who has given the greater part of his life to studying them. ‘To say that Virgil was a sycophant of a Roman emperor is a very superficial estimate, which overlooks the really deep matter in his writings. To say that somehow there has constantly been a conscious trick played on humanity, in defending and glorifying the ruling classes, is merely silly. There was no knowledge of a social question then, any more than there was electric machinery.’”
“That is important,” answers Ogi, “and I want to get it straight. I should like to put an arrow on the cover of this book, directing the attention of all professors to the fact that I do not state or imply that the great leisure-class artists were playing a ‘conscious trick.’ Sometimes they knew what they were doing; but most of the time they just wrote that way, because they were that kind of men. I have tried to make this plain; but evidently the Professor missed it, so let me give an illustration:
“Here is a hive of bees; each of these bees all day long diligently labors to collect the juices of flowers and make it into honey; or to collect wax, and build exact hexagonal architectural structures in which to storethe honey. Now comes an entomologist, and studies the life cycle of the bee, and says that the purpose of the hexagonal structures is to hold the honey in the most economical fashion; the purpose of the honey is to nourish the infant bees which will be hatched in the hexagonal cells. Now shall a critic say that this entomologist is ‘silly,’ because no bee can have understood the principles of economy involved in the hexagonal structure, nor can it have performed chemical tests necessary to determine the nutritive qualities of carbohydrates?
“The class feelings of human beings are instinctive and automatic reactions to economic pressure. The reactions of the artist, who seeks fame and success by voicing these class feelings, may be just as instinctive. But now mankind is emerging into consciousness, and social life is becoming rational and deliberate. I say that one of the steps in this process is to go back and study the life cycle of the artist, and find out where he collected his honey, and how he stored it, and what use was made of it by the hive.”
At this point Mrs. Ogi, who has been reading in her Bible—known to the rest of the world as the Works of G. B. S.—produces a text from “The Quintessence of Ibsenism,” reading as follows: “The existence of a discoverable and perfectly definite thesis in a poet’s work by no means depends on the completeness of his own intellectual consciousness of it.”
A few years after Virgil came another Roman poet, whom I learned to read as a lad. He also was taken up by the Emperor Augustus, and wrote fulsome odes in praise of this emperor. Also he found a patron, a wealthy gentleman by the name of Mæcenas, who was really fond of the arts, and gave the poet a Sabine farm to live on. This poet was, I believe, the first author who invited the public into his home, and told them his private affairs, pleasant or otherwise. Being that kind of a tactless author myself, I early conceived a feeling of affection for Mr. Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known to us as Horace.
For one thing, this worldly wise poet knows how to tip us a wink, even while handing out flattery to his patron. For another thing, his Mæcenas seems to have been a really worthy soul. I know how easy it is to love a rich man; but in Rome it must have been hard to find a rich man who could be loved at any price. Horace was a man of humble tastes; all he wanted was to live in his books, and to escape the brawl and fury of politics. We might have expected him to fall down on his knees and kiss the hand of a man who gave him a quiet home, with fruit-trees around him, and snow-capped mountains in the distance, and a crackling log fire in winter-time.
But, as a matter of fact, the poet was quite decent about it. He asserted the right of a man of letters to live an independent life—quite a “modern” idea, and hard for brutal rich Romans to understand. Every now and then Horace would have to visit his patron and friend, and meet some of these haughty conquerors of the world, and be put in his place by them. The father of Horace was what the Romans called a “freedman”; that is, he had formerly been a slave, and the great world sneered at the poet on that account. But instead of being ashamed of his ancestry, and trying to hide it, Horace put his old father into his books, for all Rome to meet. Yes, said the poet, that fond old freedman father brought his little boy to Rome to get an education, and walked every day to school with him, carrying his books and slate.
We can honor this honest gentleman, and read his charming verses with pleasure—but without committing the absurdities of the classical tradition, which ranks Horace as a great poet. He was a pioneer man of letters, and in that way made history; but there is nothing he wrote that the world has not learned to write better today. There are a score of young fellows writing verses for the columns of American newspapers who can turn out just as witty and clever and human stuff. “F. P. A.” has written “take-offs” on Horace, which shock the purists, but would have delighted Horace. Louis Untermeyer has published volumes of such mingled wisdom and wit; and there is Austin Dobson, and above all, Heine—a man who writes verse of loveliness to tear your heart-strings, and at the same time had the nerve to hit out at the ruling-class brutes of his age.
“Wasn’t there a single artist in Rome who revolted?” asks Mrs. Ogi.
“Yes, there was one. He also was the son of a freedman, and came nearly a century after Virgil and Horace, in the reign of the infamous Domitian. His name was Juvenal, and he wrote satires in which he flayed the aristocracy of the empire for their vileness and materialism. I once published a novel, ‘The Metropolis,’ in which I did the same thing for the so-called ‘Four Hundred’ of New York; and it is interesting to compare the two pictures—”
“Now don’t you start talking about your own books!” cries Mrs. Ogi.
“I don’t offer ‘The Metropolis’ as literature, but merely as a record of things I saw in New York twenty years ago. Afterwards I’ll show what Juvenal has to say on the same topics. First, ‘The Metropolis,’ page 278, listing the health-cures of ladies in high society:
“One of the consequences of the furious pace was that people’s health broke down very quickly; and there were all sorts of bizarre ways of restoring it. One person would be eating nothing but spinach, and another would be living on grass. One would chew a mouthful of soup thirty-two times; another would eat every two hours, and another only once a week. Some went out in the early morning and walked barefooted in the grass, and others went hopping about the floor on their hands and knees to take off fat. There were ‘rest cures’ and ‘water cures,’ ‘new thought’ and ‘metaphysical healing’ and ‘Christian Science’; there was an automatic horse, which one might ride indoors, with a register showing the distance traveled. Montague met one man who had an electric machine, which cost thirty thousand dollars, and which took hold of his arms and feet and exercised him while he waited. He met a woman who told him she was riding an electric camel!
“But of course they could not really succeed in reducing weight, because they were incapable of self-restraint. Mrs. Billy Alden gave Montague a delightfully malicious account of a certain lordly fat lady of her set, who had got the Turkish-bath habit. Terrible to encounter, most awful in visage, she would enter the baths by night, and all the attendants would rush into instant action. ‘She delights in perspiring with great tumult,’ said Mrs. Billy.‘And when her arms have sunk down, wearied with the heavy dumb-bells, the sly masseur omits to rub down no part of her person. Meantime, perhaps there are a number of guests assembled for dinner at home. They wait, overcome with drowsiness and hunger. At last the lady comes, flushed, and declaring that she is thirsty enough for a whole ‘magnum.’ As soon as she is seated at the table, the footman brings her a bucket of ice, packed about her own special quart of champagne. She drinks half of this before she tastes any food—calling it an appetizer. She drinks so much that it won’t stay down, but returns as a cascade on the floor’—and Montague had to stop Mrs. Billy in her too vivid description of the sights which a certain unhappy banker, the husband of this lady, had to witness at his dinner-parties. Said Mrs. Billy, with her usual vividness of metaphor: ‘It is like a snake that has crawled into a cask of wine; it takes in and gives out again.’”
Mrs. Ogi interrupts. “There is one thing I want to make plain—that you weren’t married to me when you published that disgusting stuff.”
“All right,” says Ogi; “it shall be entered in the record. But you must understand that I am not to blame for Mrs. Billy’s stories.”
“You were to blame for the company you kept,” declares Mrs. Ogi. “I call that sort of writing inexcusable.”
“Well, I’ll try again,” says her husband. “On page 351 of ‘The Metropolis’ you find a glimpse of the underworld of New York:
“So far had the specialization in evil proceeded that there were places of prostitution which did a telephone business exclusively, and would send a woman in a cab to any address; and there were high-class assignation-houses, which furnished exquisite apartments and the services of maids and valets. And in this world of vice the modern doctrine of the equality of the sexes was fully recognized; there were gambling-houses and pool-rooms and opium-joints for women, and drinking-places which catered especially to them. In the ‘orange room’ of one of the big hotels, you might see rich women of every rank and type, fingering the dainty leather-bound and gold-embossed wine cards. In this room alone were sold over ten thousand drinks every day; and the hotel paid a rentalof a million a year to the Devon estate. Not far away the Devons also owned negro-dives, where, in the early hours of the morning, you might see richly gowned white women drinking.
“Montague was told by a certain captain of police a terrible story about the wife of our very greatest railroad magnate, who lived in a colossal marble palace on Fifth Avenue. As soon as she perceived that her husband was asleep, she would put on a yellow wig as a disguise, and wearing an overcoat which she kept for this purpose, she would quit the palace on foot, with only a single attendant. She would enter one of the brothels in the ‘Tenderloin,’ where she had a room set apart for herself. There she took her stand, with naked breasts and gilded nipples, bearing the name of Zaza, and displaying the person of the mother of one of our most magnificent young lords of society and finance. She would receive all comers with caresses, and when the madame dismissed her customers, she would take her leave sadly, lingering, and being the last to close the door of her room. Still unsatisfied in her desires, she would retire with her sullied cheeks, bearing back the odors of the brothel to the pillow of her mighty railroad magnate. And shall I speak of the love-charms—”
“Most emphatically you shall not!” cries Mrs. Ogi, “I think we’ve had enough of ‘The Metropolis’ and I won’t hear of its being reproduced in this new book. It’s your crudest Socialist propaganda—”
“You’re quite sure it’s propaganda?” says Ogi.
“Of course. Who would question that?”
“Well then, I’ve proved one point!” says the other.
“I don’t understand.”
“I have made you the victim of a mean little trick. Each of those passages starts out as ‘The Metropolis’; but then it slides into Juvenal—the sixth satire, dealing with the ladies of ancient Rome. The point of my joke is that you will have to consult the books in order to be sure which is Juvenal and which is me. Of course I’ve had to change names and phrases, replacing Roman things with New York things. And I’ve had to tone Juvenal down, because there are some of his phrases I couldn’t reproduce—”
“There are some you have tried to reproduce, and thatyou’re going to cut out,” says Mrs. Ogi. And as always, she has her way, and so it is a Bowdlerized Juvenal you have been reading!
“You had your fun out of that,” says Mrs. Ogi. “But of course I can’t judge; somebody who knows about Rome may come along and show that it’s all nonsense.”
“Those who know about Rome,” says Ogi, “don’t always know about capitalist America. There has never been such a parallel of two civilizations in all history. I could write, quite literally, a whole book of mystifications—quoting American poets and statesmen and journalists, and mixing in passages from the same kind of people in Rome, and unless you knew the different passages you couldn’t tell which was which.”
“We still have our republic, have we not?”
“In every presidential election for the past fifty years that candidate has won who has had the campaign-funds; and he has had the campaign-funds because he was the candidate of the plutocracy. Right now we are at the critical moment—the age of the Gracchi. We are trying to rouse the people to action; and whether we succeed, or whether we are going to be slaughtered, as our industrial masters desire and intend—”
Mrs. Ogi’s hand tightens upon her husband’s arm. She never has this thought out of mind; and whenever in the midnight hours a cat or dog sets foot upon the porch of her home, she leaps up, expecting to see a company of bankers and merchants, clad in their new uniform of white night-shirts and hoods. Our aristocratic party has what it calls the “Better Roman Federation,” and collects lists of the proscribed, and issues secret bulletins to its mobbing parties. Last week, down at Brundisium, our naval harbor, their subsidized mob raided a meeting of wage slaves, beat some of them insensible with clubs, threw a little girl into a great receptacle of boiling coffee, scalding her almost to death, and dragged six men off into the woods and tarred and feathered them.
“What do you really think is coming?” asks Mrs. Ogi.
“There are two factors in modern civilization that did not exist in Rome. First there is the printing press, a means of spreading information. So far as the master class can control it, it is a machine for debauching the race mind; but in spite of everything the masters can do, the workers get presses of their own, and so get information which was denied the slaves of Rome.”
“And the other factor?”
“The labor movement. In Rome there were some labor unions, but they were weak and the slaves were an unorganized mob; when they revolted, as they did again and again, they were slaughtered wholesale. But the modern labor movement goes on growing; it trains its members, and gives them sound ideas. So, out of the final struggle we may have, not another empire, and another collapse of civilization, but the co-operative commonwealth of our dreams.”
This, of course, is outright preaching; but it happens that Mrs. Ogi has just received a letter about the child who was thrown into the scalding coffee, so her husband gets his way for once. Besides, as he explains, there is nothing more to be said about Roman art, because there is no more Roman art. The plutocracy of the empire had brought themselves to a state where they were incapable of sustained thinking or effort of any sort. The barbarian hordes, which had been besieging the frontiers, broke through and overwhelmed the Roman empire, and so came what history knows as the Dark Ages.
When I was a lad, my Catholic teachers explained to me that these ages were called dark, not because they had no culture, but because we were so unfortunate as not to know about it. I was not able to answer the Catholic gentlemen in those days, but I can answer them now. When groups of human beings kindle the precious light of the intellect, they make it into a torch and pass it on to posterity. That is always their first impulse; and so we may be sure that if an age had no art, it was a dark age.
It took several centuries for the peoples of Europe to lift themselves out of barbarism and chaos. Then we find a new art developing, an altogether different art, built upon Babylonian and Hebrew foundations, instead of Greek and Roman. It meant an overthrowing of standards, and a setting-up of new values—a precedent of enormous importance to social revolutionists.
What exactly was the difference between Pagan and Christian art? The Greeks said: The human body is the most beautiful thing in the world. To which the Christians replied: All flesh is grass. The Greeks said: Because the body is beautiful, we immortalize it in statues. The Christians replied: We are iconoclasts—that is to say, breakers of marble idols. The Romans said: Material wealth is the basis of individual and national safety. The Christians replied: What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?
These Christian sayings meant that mankind had discovered new satisfactions, replacing, for a time at any rate, the customary ones of physical pleasure and domination over others. These new joys came from inside the self, and required a new word, spiritual. To the artist was set the task of making these inner qualities apprehensible, and for this he had to have a new technique. Where the Greeks had carved the body graceful, the Christians carved it with that ugliness which results from the ascetic life. Where the Romans had represented their great men muscular and mighty, the Christians represented them frail and sickly. The Christians reveled in wounds, disease and deformity, taking a perverse pleasure in defying old standards—a process known to the psychologist as “over-correction.” The two favorite themes of Christian art became a man-god who accepted all suffering and humiliation, and a woman-god who allowed the erring soul an unlimited number of new opportunities.
Because this new art was trying so often to express the inexpressible, it was driven to symbolism. The painters and sculptors invented outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual graces: the cross, the crown ofthorns, the sacrificial lamb. The Virgin Mary would have a heart of radiant fire, with perhaps a white dove perched on top of it. The saints and martyrs wore halos of light about their heads, so as not to be mistaken for ordinary beggars, or for patients in the last stages of tuberculosis. One should hardly need to state that all this art was propaganda; it was permitted on that basis alone.
The significance of all this to social revolutionists lies in the fact that they also plan an art revolution. What the Christians did to Pagan art, the Socialists now seek to do to bourgeois art; metaphorically speaking, to smash the idols and burn the temples dedicated to the worship of individual and class aggrandizement, and to set up new art standards, based on the abolition of classes, and the assertion of brotherhood and solidarity. Just as the stone which was rejected of the Pagan builders became the cornerstone of the Christian temple, so those things which are despised and rejected of plutocratic snobbery will become the glory of revolutionary art; the very phrases of contempt will become battle-cries—the great unwashed, the vulgar herd, the common man. The revolutionary artist, clasping the toiling masses to his bosom—
“Over-correction?” suggests Mrs. Ogi.
“Partly that; but also the longing for solidarity, the enlargement of the personality through mass feeling.”
“But beauty came back into art,” says Mrs. Ogi.
“Yes, and that is an interesting story; a drama of the conflict between God and Mammon, and the triumph of what I am calling Mammonart. I have pondered a title for the drama—something like this: Christianity as a Social Success; or the admission of the Martyr to the Four Hundred!”
There are two types of human temperament and attitude which manifest themselves in the world’s art product: the Art of Beauty and the Art of Power.
The Art of Beauty is produced by ruling classes when they are established and safe, and wish to be entertained, and to have their homes and surroundings set apart fromthe common mass. I do not mean that simple and primitive people do not produce beauty of a naïve sort; but for such art to develop and mature, it must be taken up by the privileged classes, patronizing and encouraging the artist, and making his work a form of class distinction. The fact that the men who produce this art have come from the people is a fact of no significance; for the ruling classes take what they want where they find it, and shape it to their own class ends. The characteristics of the Art of Beauty, whether in painting, or sculpture, or music, or words, or actions, are those of rest and serenity, pleasure in things as they actually exist; also clarity of form—because the leisure-class artist has time to study technique, and knows what he wants to do.
In every human society there is one group which controls, and another which struggles for control; the “ins” versus the “outs,” the “haves” versus the “have-nots.” In every well-developed civilization this latter class will be strong enough to have its art, which is apt to be crude and instinctive, full of surging, half-expressed and half-realized emotion. Such art lays stress upon substance, rather than form; it aims, or at any rate tends, to arouse to action; and so we call it the Art of Power.
This is the art which is generally described as “propaganda” by established criticism; the distinction being, as we have previously explained, itself a piece of propaganda. The Art of Beauty is equally propaganda; it is the gas-barrage of the “haves,” and the essence of its deadliness lies in the fact that it looks so little like a weapon. But to me it seems clear enough that when a leisure-class artist portrays the graces and refinements of the civilization which maintains him, when he paints the noble features, and quotes the imaginary golden words of ruling-class ladies and gentlemen, he is doing the best he knows how to protect those who give him a living. Nor is he, as a rule, without some awareness of the harsh and rough and dangerous forces which surround him, besieging the ivory tower, or the temple, or the sacred grove, or wherever it is that he keeps his working tools. But even where the artist is instinctive and naïve, the class which employs him knows what he is doing; it knows what is “safe and sane,” and “of sound tendency”; it approves of such art, and pays its money to maintain such art.
Unless the society is stagnant, like China, its social life is marked by changes of power. The revolutionary classes succeed, and replace the old rulers; whereupon we note at once a change in their art. Those who were dissatisfied now find peace; those whose emotions overwhelmed them now find themselves able to order their thoughts; those who were interested in what they had to say now achieve triumphs of technique; in short, those who were producing an Art of Power now begin to produce an Art of Beauty. And so we are in position to understand what happened to Christian art, when the martyrs and the saints broke into “good society.”
The Roman Empire fell about five hundred years after Christ, and for another five hundred years the Italian peninsula was a battle-ground of invading barbarian hordes. When finally things settled down, the land was held by a great number of feudal princes and plundering groups, having their lairs in castles and walled cities. Christianity was the official religion, and abbots and bishops and popes were robber chiefs commanding armies. In between their military campaigns they took their pleasures like other princes; and among their pleasures were those of art.
The inner emotions which Christianity cultivated were free to those who sought them in monks’ cells and hermits’ caves, but they could not be purchased nor rented out, and they wilted in the atmosphere of palaces and courts. So gradually we find Italian religious art undergoing a change. The saints become gentlemen of refinement wearing scholars’ robes; Jesus becomes a heavenly prince, in spotless linen garments and a golden crown, casting benevolent looks upon the clergy; the Virgin Mary becomes the favorite mistress of a duke or abbot or pope—or perhaps the painter’s own mistress. This latter arrangement is common, for business reasons easy to understand. The lady is at hand, and has nothing to do while the painter is painting; he gets the service of a model free, he flatters his lady love’s vanity, and at the same time he keeps her safe from other painters. So the poison of luxury creeps into what is supposed to be religious art; and we see the symbols of martyrdom and holy sacrifice employed to glorify the vanities and cloak the vices of the predatory classes.
But the soul of man never dies; it goes on struggling for justice and brotherhood, in spite of all betrayal and persecution. So inside the church and outside comes a long line of heroic souls, fighting to restore the primitive simplicity and honesty of the faith. The struggle between the “ins” and the “outs,” the “haves” and the “have-nots,” takes the form of heresy and schism, of mendicant and preaching orders and Protestant sects. Young and obscure servants of God arise, denouncing the corruption of the church machine. Some retire to monasteries, spurning the wicked world; others take literally the words of Jesus, and go out upon the road without scrip or cloak, preaching to whoever will hear them, and living on charity. They are denounced and excommunicated, their followers are slaughtered by the tens and hundreds of thousands; but the movement persists, and when the leaders die they are canonized, and become in their turn themes for artists—to be “idealized,” and dressed in spotless raiment, and made fit for stained glass windows and the art galleries of prelates and princes. St. Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century, putting on beggar’s clothing and being publicly disinherited by his father; Savonarola in the fifteenth century, persuading the rich to throw their jewels into the flames, and being publicly hanged in Florence; Martin Luther in the sixteenth century, preaching against the sale of indulgences and nailing his theses to the church door; George Fox in the eighteenth century, crying out against priestly corruption in the streets, and jailed time after time; Bishop Brown in the twentieth century, kicked out of the Episcopal church for repudiating dogma and defending Communism—such are the figures which have kept the Christian religion alive, and such are the themes of vital religious art.
It was in Italy first that the language of the people became the language of culture, replacing Latin; and the two greatest writers of this age afford us an interesting contrast between the Art of Beauty and the Art of Power.
The favorite ruling-class poet and novelist ofmedieval Italy was the illegitimate son of a merchant, who was recognized by his father and given the best education of his time. He chose as his mistress the natural daughter of a king; with this married lady he carried on an intrigue for many years, and wrote to her long epic poems about Greek heroes, weaving into the poems elaborate acrostics and secret codes. The first letters of the lints, taken according to certain numerical systems, made three other separate poems; other letters, chosen according to other systems, spelled the names of other lady loves. In such ways the skillful artists of the Italian courts were accustomed to beguile their leisure, wrung from the toil of a wretched enslaved peasantry.
This poet rose to fame, and became the darling of the ruling classes. He was sent as an ambassador on various important missions to popes and princes; he became the favorite of a queen, and did not reject her favor even when she turned into a murderess. He learned to write beautiful Italian prose, a great service to his country. He used his skill to compose a collection of short stories dealing with the sojourn in a country villa of a number of Italian ladies and gentlemen of wealth and charm, the occasion being an outbreak of the plague in Florence. These ladies and gentlemen did not feel impelled by their religion to nurse the suffering; they were of too great importance to be risked in such crude fashion, so they retired, and passed their time listening to charmingly narrated tales of sexual promiscuity.
I do not mean to imply that there is nothing but smut in the “Decameron” of Boccaccio. We shall find it a rule throughout history that leisure-class ladies and gentlemen do not spend their entire time in trying new sexual combinations. They have to eat, and so their artists give us delightful, appetizing accounts of banquets. They have to drink, and so their artists give us an entire lore of intoxicating liquors. They have to cover their nakedness, so we have a complicated art of dress, a mass of subtlety constantly changing, and affording traps to catch the feet of the unwary, so that the sacred inner circles may be protected from those individuals who have disgraced themselves by doing useful work, or by having parents or grandparents who did useful work.
Also, the ladies and gentlemen have palaces to live in,and country estates to which they may flee from pestilence, famine and war; so we have the art of architecture. Because these homes have walls which must be decorated, we have the art of painting; and so on through a long list of cultural accomplishments. Moreover, not all ladies and gentlemen have been able to exclude the natural human emotions from their hearts; so in leisure-class art we have sentiments and sentimentalities. We like to be sorry for the poor, provided they are “worthy”; so we have “idylls” and other sad, sweet tales. When we are sick with ennui, we like to imagine going back to the country; so we have a long line of “return to nature” arts—eclogues and bucolics and pastorals, with beautiful shepherds and shepherdesses dancing on the green, and country lads and lasses giving touchingly quaint imitations of the manners of their betters.
Also we have in this leisure-class world vestigial traces of the sense of duty. We take this sense and refine it or exaggerate it, making it into something fantastic, stimulating to jaded tastes. So we find in Boccaccio the famous story of the “patient Griselda,” a leisure-class model of wifely fidelity and humility. She is married to a monster, who subjects her to every indignity the perverted imagination can conceive; but she endures all things, and continues to be his patient and devoted slave, and in the end she conquers her tormentor, and brings about the necessary happy ending. The legend of this most convenient lady represents a popular form of masculine wish-fulfillment.
Giovanni Boccaccio died in ripe old age, and the Catholic Church took cognizance of his popularity among the Italian people by preparing an expurgated and authorized edition of his “Decameron.” From this edition they omitted no word of the obscenities, but they changed each of the stories so that wherever Boccaccio described indecencies committed by priests and monks and holy popes, the said indecencies were transferred to laymen! The tales of this darling of the Italian leisure class remain today one of the most popular of books, which every dirty old boy keeps hidden in his trunk, and every dirty young boy reads under his desk while the professor of moral philosophy is lecturing on the social responsibilities of great wealth.
Now by way of contrast we take the Italian poet of revolt and moral indignation. We have only to look at the pictures of this man to see that he is a crusader; a lean, hawk-like face, stern, bitter, lined with suffering; “the mournfulest face,” says Carlyle, “that ever was painted from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face.” There has never been a world poet so deliberately ethical, preoccupied with moral problems, and using his art as a means of teaching mankind what he believed to be sound ideas about conduct.
Dante Alighieri was born to comfortable circumstances in Florence; he had the education of a scholar, and might have lived a life of literary ease. Instead, he chose to take part in the tumultuous and dangerous politics of his city, becoming one of the leaders of the republican party. When the forces of the pope conquered Italy, he fled for his life, and a sentence of exile was pronounced upon him. This exile was a cruel hardship; he describes himself as “a pilgrim, almost a beggar, displaying against my will the wounds of fortune.... Truly have I been a vessel without sail and without rudder, borne to divers ports and shores and havens by the dry wind that blows from dolorous poverty.” Yet he never wavered in his convictions; on the contrary, by his writings he brought upon himself a confirmation of the decree of exile, and an exile he died.
We shall not go into the details of medieval politics, the complicated wranglings among various cities and principalities, the warring factions in each, plus the partisans of papal dominion and those of the Holy Roman Empire. Suffice it here to point out that one of the greatest world poets was from the beginning to the end of his life a politician, and took a vigorous part in the practical affairs of his time, fighting his enemies hard, hating them implacably, and not hesitating to use his literary art to punish them in a future world. When Dante goes down into hell he encounters in the lowest pits of torment various Florentine politicians, who have betrayed and debauched his city. How he regards them may be judged by thecase of Bocca degli Abbati, a gentleman who is found locked helpless up to his neck in ice; the poet grabs his hair and tears it out by the handful!
The quality which Dante especially loathed was greed, “cupiditia.” He raged at the church of his time, because it had accepted the “fatal gift” from the Emperor Constantine—the temporal possessions which made the popes into worldly potentates, intriguers and heads of armies. The two popes of his own time Dante flung into hell, and portrayed heaven itself as reddening with anger at their deeds. St. Peter declares that each of them “has of my cemetery made a sewer of blood and filth.” This is plain muck-raking; and how undignified and unliterary it must have seemed to the cultured prelates of the fourteenth century!
It seems that way to modern critics also. Albert Mordell has published a book entitled “Dante and Other Waning Classics,” in which he argues that the “Divine Comedy” is ugly, as well as out of date, with its elaborate symbolism derived from church legend, and from Greek and Latin mythology, combined and complicated by scholastic subtlety. Mr. Mordell is one of those who think that art ought not to preach; and certainly Dante does not shirk this issue—he tells us in plain words: “The kind of philosophy under which we proceed in the whole and in the part is moral philosophy or ethics; because the whole was undertaken not for speculation but for use.”
What are the moral problems which occupied the soul of Dante, and have these problems any interest for us? There are two which I believe will always concern mankind. First, the problem of divine justice. How does it happen that the wicked flourish? How shall we explain their power to oppress the innocent? If God has power to prevent it, why does He not use that power? Dante traveled to the depths of hell and ascended through purgatory to heaven, seeking answers to these questions. Our only advantage over him is that we do not even think we can answer.
The second great problem is that of love. The Christian revolution had brought with it a new attitude toward womanhood. Mankind made the discovery of what the psycho-analysts call the sublimation of sex, that gratification withheld acts as a stimulus to all the psychic being. Sothe simple naturalism of the Greeks was replaced by the romanticism of the Middle Ages; and Dante’s whole being, his total art product, was illuminated by the vision of a great and wonderful love, which began by a chance meeting with a nine-year-old girl, and continued without physical expression through the poet’s whole life. No student of the science of sex today would accept Dante’s attitude as sound or sensible; nevertheless, we are stirred by his exaltation of the ideal woman, and the Beatific Vision which she brings to his soul.
In Dante’s pilgrimage through hell he accepted the leadership of Virgil. This was because he honored in the Roman poet those factors we have stressed—the moral earnestness, the effort of a lofty soul to rescue a civilization. In Dante’s time the cultured world was just making the discovery of Greek and Roman art, and was all a-thrill with the wonder of a past age, rescued after a thousand years: the Renaissance, or re-birth, we call it.
We may understand how it was by recalling our own excitement over the tomb of King Tutankhamen. Let us suppose that in that tomb had been found Egyptian literary masterpieces, which revealed the existence of a Socialist civilization in ancient Egypt. There was a mighty king who had been just to the poor, who had abolished exploitation by the landlords, and had kept the peace with other nations. A Socialist poet of our day, wishing to satirize the “war for democracy” by locating its leaders in hell, would take this ancient Egyptian king for a guide, and would exchange fraternal greetings with his royal comrade, and discuss with him political conditions both in ancient Egypt and in modern America.
And in the nethermost pits the poet would meet Lloyd George and Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson, together with the rowdies and bullies whom these statesmen turned loose upon mankind. Attorney-General Palmer, for example, would be represented as a devil with a long barbed tail; the poet would seize this tail and twist it, and the attorney-general would howl and shriek, and a radical audience would be delighted. But respectable critics would turn up their noses, saying that of course no one would take such a thing for art; it was the most obvious soap-box propaganda.
So the cultured Renaissance critics looked uponDante as a crude and “popular” person; the highly cultured Bishop della Casa spoke patronizingly concerning “the rustic homeliness of his language and style, his lack of decorum and grace.” If space permitted I could show you that every truly vital artist who has ever lived has been thus dealt with by the academic critics of his own time.
The Italian princes were no more influenced by the moral austerity of Dante than the Roman ruling class had been by Virgil. Medieval Italy traveled the same road as imperial Rome, and two centuries after Dante we find the vicars of God on earth reproducing the worst crimes of the Neros and Caligulas. Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, purchased his high office, and then set to work to plunder the cities of Italy and harry the whole peninsula with war. Among his children by his numerous mistresses was Cesare Borgia, who became the commander of the papal armies, and slaughtered and poisoned all who stood in his way, including his own brother. Returning from his wars, he would amuse himself by using his prisoners of war as targets for archery practice in the courtyard of the Vatican. In the end Cesare died of wounds, Alexander died by poison, and his daughter Lucrezia poisoned her own son and then herself.
Here was an ideal environment for the development of leisure-class art. These popes and princes built themselves magnificent palaces, and as a measure of soul-insurance they built cathedrals and churches. They were willing to spend fortunes upon famous artists; and the artists, needless to say, were willing to take the money. Browning has a poem, “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church,” a vivid picture of the attitude of mind of these pious poisoners and artistic assassins. The bishop lies upon his couch dying, and his sons, politely known as “nephews,” gather about him to hear his vision of a tomb which is to preserve his memory and bring peace to his soul. He describes the treasures of beauty which are to go upon the tomb—
One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut,There’s plenty jasper somewhere in the world—And have I not St. Praxed’s ear to prayHorses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?
One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut,There’s plenty jasper somewhere in the world—And have I not St. Praxed’s ear to prayHorses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?
One block, pure green as a pistachio-nut,There’s plenty jasper somewhere in the world—And have I not St. Praxed’s ear to prayHorses for ye, and brown Greek manuscripts,And mistresses with great smooth marbly limbs?
The pious soul goes on to specify his epitaph; it must be “choice Latin, picked phrase,” from Cicero. Having got this—
And then how I shall lie through centuries,And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,And see God made and eaten all day long,And feel the steady candle-flame, and tasteGood strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!
And then how I shall lie through centuries,And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,And see God made and eaten all day long,And feel the steady candle-flame, and tasteGood strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!
And then how I shall lie through centuries,And hear the blessed mutter of the mass,And see God made and eaten all day long,And feel the steady candle-flame, and tasteGood strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!
The true “art for art’s sake” attitude, you perceive; and under the patronage of such esthetic prelates, the poets and musicians, the painters and sculptors flourished in sixteenth century Italy. Among those who were employed by the poisoner pope, Alexander VI, was a youthful painter of extraordinary ability, Raphael Sanzio by name. This pope was succeeded by two others, who conquered many cities for the glory of God, and spent millions of their plunder upon religious art. So this young painter of genius was floated through life upon a flood of gold ducats, and with his magic brushes he turned the blood and sweat and tears of the peasantry of Italy into beautiful images of serenely smiling madonnas, and enraptured saints, and ineffably gracious Jesuses. Raphael is ranked by many as the greatest painter in history; we stand, therefore, within the very holy of holies, before the shrine of “pure” beauty, and it will repay us to dig into the roots of his life, and see from what soil this precious flower grows.
He was the son of a court painter, and his life was one of ease, swift achievement, and applause. He was gifted with all the graces of body, also a genial and winning nature. He studied the work of one painter after another, and acquired all the powers of each. He became so famous that his life was “not that of a painter, but of a prince.” Ambassadors from the wealthy and powerful besieged his doors, and waited for months in hope of an interview. He went about accompanied by a band of more than fifty youths, pupils and adorers of his art.
He had one weakness, which was for the ladies. Thepopes and princes who cherished him sought to put loving restraint upon him, and planned wealthy marriages for him, but he could not bring himself to stoop to matrimony. At this time he was decorating the palace of a Sienese millionaire, Chigi, owner of ships and of salt and alum mines throughout Italy; this gentleman, discovering that Raphael was so wrapped up in his mistress that he was neglecting the palace decorations, solved the problem by a brilliant move—bringing the mistress to live in the palace! In the end this darling of fortune died at the age of thirty-seven, of a fever brought on by self-indulgence. His adoring biographer, Vasari, tells us that when he knew his last hour had come, he sent away his mistress from his home, “as a good Christian should,” and so passed on to decorate the palaces of heaven.
What was the secret of Raphael’s fortune? The answer is, he painted the ruling class of Italy, in their physical beauty and their material luxury and splendor. In order to flatter their vanity, he painted them as all the saints and demigods of the Catholic mythology. Every trace of asceticism is now gone out of church art; the Christian gentlemen and mistresses and virgins and gods and saints of Raphael and his contemporaries are full-throated and full-bosomed and ruddy-cheeked pictures of prosperity; their ecstasies have never been permitted to interfere with their digestions. The angel comes to the Virgin Mary to bring to her the sacred tidings of her divine pregnancy, and finds her seated, not in a carpenter’s hut, but in a palace. Even when Jesus is crucified and borne to the sepulchre, the mourning ladies have not forgotten the proper arrangement of their hair and the proper costumes for the historic occasion. Says Vasari: “Our Lady is seen to be insensible, and the heads of all the weeping figures are exceedingly graceful.”
Needless to say, Raphael painted portraits of all the Old Men and the Witch Doctors of his time, and he made them magnificent and thrilling. Of the portrait of Pope Julius II, valiant war-maker, Vasari writes: “The picture impresses on all beholders a sense of awe, as if it were indeed the living object.” Later on came another pope, Leo X, who in order to get the millions necessary for his family monuments, and for the art glories of St. Peter’s, started a sale of indulgences, which brought about thechurch revolt known to us as the Reformation. His portrait by Raphael shows a Tammany politician of the bar-room type; and Vasari tells us—