Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school; and whereas, before, our fathers had no other book but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used; and contrary to the king, his crown and dignity, thou hast erected a paper mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun, and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear.
Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school; and whereas, before, our fathers had no other book but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used; and contrary to the king, his crown and dignity, thou hast erected a paper mill. It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun, and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear.
Such is the wit of our gentleman poet; and what is the comment of our Louisiana scholar? He tells us: “This savors of modern times.... The demagogue has the ignorance of his audience on his side. He has in behalf of his appeals that sullen jealousy of the masses who are conscious of classes, that is, of a caste above them and more accomplished.” To be sure, the Louisiana professor admits that Shakespeare is here handling a great historic scene “flippantly”; but then, you see, the poet had such a good excuse! He was “sorely in need of comedy for the tragic drama of ‘Henry VI’”! But I ask: why could he not have made up some comedy dealing with noble lords and gentlemen?
The answer is: It is a tradition of the leisure-class literature of England that the sufferings of the rich and powerful are dignified tragedy, while the sufferings of the poor are “comic relief.” The only way a poor person of any sort can get Shakespeare to take him seriously is by being a devoted servant of some wealthy and powerful person; for example, Old Adam in “As You Like It,” a part which, according to tradition, was played by Shakespeare himself. But when the common people try to do something for themselves, they are clowns and fools, yokels and tavern roysterers.
Take the comedy scenes in “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” when working people actually attempt to give a play. Shakespeare thinks that no idea could be more absurd. But nowadays working people give many plays in England; there are radical theater groups producing a new dramatic literature, in which it does not always happen that poor people are boobs, while ladies and gentlemen are refined and gracious. More significant yet, the descendants of those Jack Cade rebels, whom Shakespeare represents as objecting to grammar schools, have by a century-long struggle forced the establishment of free schools for the children of the people in every corner of England. They have some three thousand branches of the Workers’ Education Association, in which the people learn about nouns and verbs at their own expense. Was ever a national poet more sternly rebuked by the people of his own nation?
Says Mrs. Ogi: “It is time for Jack Cade to make it felony to read Shakespeare.”
“No,” says Ogi; “we have to follow the example of the Catholic Church, whose priests are allowed to read prohibited books for purposes of controversy. But certainly it is time for us to get clear in our minds that Shakespeare is a poet and propagandist of the enemy; for the present, at any rate, a burden upon the race mind. He is the crown and glory of the system of class supremacy, and a magic word used by every snob and every time-server in the place of straight thinking and the reality of life.”
Says Mrs. Ogi: “From the title of this chapter I judge that we here begin our long-anticipated debate with H. L. Mencken!”
“No,” replies her husband, “we shall hew to the line of John Milton; but of course, if one of the chips happens to hit Mencken in the eye—”
“He will let us know,” says Mrs. Ogi.
“First we have to have some of the despised sociology. We have to mention that human institutions arise, and serve their day, and then degenerate. The shell which at one time protects the crab becomes an encumbrance and has to be split and cast off. The English monarchy once served to break the power of the rebellious nobles, and to give the country unity; but now came Parliament, pushing the kings aside. The people who brought about that change were the Puritans: and for a century they represented such freedom of conscience and freedom of intellect as England had. Incidentally, they settled the North American continent, cleared out the savages, and made a civilization. We owe them more than we owe to any other single group; and if nowadays we identify Puritanism with the Society for the Prevention of Vice, we shall be just as narrow and as bigoted as Anthony Comstock himself.”
Says Mrs. Ogi: “There goes a chip straight for Mencken’s eye!”
The society in which John Milton grew up was very much like the Harding-Coolidge era which we know. There was the same raffish crew in control of government, selling everything in sight, and trampling civil rights. Men were thrown wholesale into prison, they were beaten and tortured for their opinions’ sake. A small handful stood out, and suffered martyrdom; they appealed to the public, and the public seemed dead and indifferent—exactly as it seems today.
John Milton had a fortunate and happy youth. His father was prosperous, and gave his son the best guidance and education. At Christ’s College they called the boy “the lady,” because he was beautiful and refined. He returned to his father’s home to live a life of quiet study, and to write poems of imperishable beauty. If “art for art’s sake” degenerates care to know how poetry can have all the graces and sensuous charms, and still be clean, they are referred to these early poems of the young English Puritan. It is worth while to point out explicitly how little his creed meant narrowness and contempt for art. All that came later, as a result of the civil war. But Milton in his youth acquired all the culture of his time; he was a thorough-going humanist, personally graceful and attractive; he traveled in Italy and met the leading men of his age, including the old blind Galileo, who had been forced under threat of torture to recant his belief that the earth moves around the sun.
The efforts of the most Catholic King Charles I to break the parliament of England brought Milton home from Italy. The parliament resisted, and civil war broke out, and he put aside his poetry and teaching, and plunged into the work of saving free government. Even today we find leisure-class critics bewailing the fact that a great poet should have wasted himself in a political career. But I venture the opinion that John Milton has given us more great poetry than we take time to appreciate; and it was worth while also to give us a life, and demonstrate that a poet can be a man.
For twenty years John Milton was the world voice of the Republican cause. In order to defend it he made himself master of the finest English prose style known up to that time. He defended his cause also in Latin, in French, and in Italian; he defended it so well that it now prevails over most of the world, and so we fail to realize what it seemed in the poet’s day. The parliamentary army met the king in battle, and took him prisoner, held him for three years, and then, because of his infinite and incurable treachery, tried him and cut off his head. To the orthodox respectability of the seventeenth century this was the most horrible thing that had happened since the crucifixion of Christ.
You know how Bolsheviks and Socialists are reputed to practice free love, and worse yet, to preach it. John Milton was that kind of wicked person, also. He married a giddy young Royalist wife, and she left him; whereupon he wrote two pamphlets in favor of divorce.When he could not get permission to print such diabolical documents, he printed them without license; and when he was attacked for this, he published another pamphlet, maintaining the unthinkable theory that men should be free to print what they pleased. I have seen, within a few miles of my own home, bookstores and printing offices raided, and their contents smashed and burned, both by mobs and by officers of the law; I have seen one of my friends fined thirty thousand dollars for publishing a book in favor of the atrocious idea that human beings should not shed one another’s blood; so I believe that I can understand how this Puritan poet was regarded by the cultured world of his time.
He was a grim fighter. It was the fashion in those days to abuse your opponents, and Milton gave as good as he got. People who think that Upton Sinclair is too personal in his controversial writing—
“Won’t think it any the less because he compares himself with Milton!” says Mrs. Ogi. “Go on with your story.”
So her husband confines his statement to the fact that Milton never engaged in a fight except for human liberty. At the crisis of his country’s peril he was told he had abused his eyes, and that if he did not rest them, he would go blind. He wrote another pamphlet in defense of his cause, thus deliberately sacrificing his sight in the effort to save the republican government. The sacrifice was in vain, for Cromwell died, and the government went to pieces, and the raffish rout came back; “bonnie Prince Charlie,” lecherous, treacherous and vile, with all his herd of noble plunderers. John Milton, foreign secretary out of a job, went into hiding, and his books were burned by the public hangman; later he was arrested and fined—they would have liked to have the hangman deal with him also, but did not quite dare.
However, he lost most of his property; and there he was, old, blind and helpless—his very daughters caught the spirit of the new time, and stole his books and sold them to gratify their own desires. That is what happens to men who consecrate their art to a cause; and somehow they have to rise above such circumstances, maintain the supremacy of the human spirit, “and justify the ways of God to man.”
The psychoanalysts have made us familiar with the word “sublimation.” Without ever hearing the word, John Milton proceeded to sublimate his sufferings and his balked hopes into one of the greatest of the world’s poems. The first point to get clear about this poem is that it was a piece of propaganda, pure and simple, deliberately so made. Beauty and culture and charm—these things John Milton had known, and in his bitter old age he did not forget them; but the task to which he now set himself was the same task as Dante’s to explain the universe and its divine governance.
The epic of English Puritanism has never won its due recognition abroad; the Continental critics have given preference to Byron, who was also a rebel, but a man of the world, a lover, and a lord. Albert Mordell of course includes “Paradise Lost” among his “waning classics”; he has an easy time pointing out the absurdities of its theology, and argues that the interest of the poem is bound up with these. For my part I say about it what I said about Dante; some of its propaganda is out of date, and some of it will be out of date when men cease to consecrate their lives to ends greater than themselves.
It is interesting to note how the spirit of Milton broke the fetters of his theology. According to that theology Satan was the father of evil, and there was no excuse for him; he had rebelled against a heavenly king who was all-wise and all-good. But Milton also had rebelled against a king, and could not forget the feeling; he poured his own revolt into the speeches of Satan, making him the most interesting character in the poem.
If you live in New York or visit there, you may see in the public library a painting of Milton as he sat in his home, dictating “Paradise Lost.” We have a description from the pen of a visitor; it was a poor little house, with only one room to the floor, and the poet sat in a chair, in a rusty black suit, old and blind, pale and tormented with rheumatism. Ten pounds he got for England’s great epic, and thirteen hundred copies of it were sold during his lifetime. Yet his spirit never wavered, and he lived to write “Samson Agonistes,” a drama in the Greek style, neglected by the critics. As a rule there is nothing more futile than imitations of outworn art forms; but once in a while it happens that a man lives the old life, and can write in theold manner. Milton writes a Greek drama about a Jewish strong man—and it turns out to be a picture of the poet’s own soul at bay!
Having praised Milton highly in this chapter, I recall my opening statement as to the superiority of present-day technique. You will expect me to justify this, and an interesting opportunity presents itself here. In 1655 occurred a massacre of Swiss Protestants by Italian Catholics under the Duke of Savoy. Milton, being then in office as foreign secretary, wrote a sonnet voicing his indignation. It is rated by critics as one of the greatest of English sonnets. For your convenience I quote it:
ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONTAvenge, O Lord! thy slaughter’d Saints, whose bonesLie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold;Even them who kept Thy truth so pure of oldWhen all our fathers worshipt stocks and stones.Forget not: In Thy book record their groansWho were Thy sheep, and in their ancient foldSlain by the bloody Piedmontese, that roll’dMother with infant down the rocks. Their moansThe vales redoubled to the hills, and theyTo Heaven. Their martyr’d blood and ashes sowO’er all the Italian field, where still doth swayThe triple Tyrant, that from these may growA hundred-fold, who, having learnt Thy way,Early may fly the Babylonian woe.
ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONTAvenge, O Lord! thy slaughter’d Saints, whose bonesLie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold;Even them who kept Thy truth so pure of oldWhen all our fathers worshipt stocks and stones.Forget not: In Thy book record their groansWho were Thy sheep, and in their ancient foldSlain by the bloody Piedmontese, that roll’dMother with infant down the rocks. Their moansThe vales redoubled to the hills, and theyTo Heaven. Their martyr’d blood and ashes sowO’er all the Italian field, where still doth swayThe triple Tyrant, that from these may growA hundred-fold, who, having learnt Thy way,Early may fly the Babylonian woe.
ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONTAvenge, O Lord! thy slaughter’d Saints, whose bonesLie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold;Even them who kept Thy truth so pure of oldWhen all our fathers worshipt stocks and stones.Forget not: In Thy book record their groansWho were Thy sheep, and in their ancient foldSlain by the bloody Piedmontese, that roll’dMother with infant down the rocks. Their moansThe vales redoubled to the hills, and theyTo Heaven. Their martyr’d blood and ashes sowO’er all the Italian field, where still doth swayThe triple Tyrant, that from these may growA hundred-fold, who, having learnt Thy way,Early may fly the Babylonian woe.
ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONT
Francis Turner Palgrave, named by Tennyson as the best judge of poetry of his time, says in the notes to his “Golden Treasury”: “this ‘collect in verse,’ as it has been justly called, is the most mighty Sonnet in any language known to the Editor.” So you see, we are setting a high standard. What modern work shall we compare with it?
In the year 1914 there occurred in Colorado, in the Rocky Mountains cold, the “Ludlow massacre” of the wives and children of miners on strike. It caused a demonstration in front of the office of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., at 26 Broadway, New York, about which you may read in “The Brass Check.” A young poet who happened at that time to be my secretary, and who has since made a success as a novelist, was moved by these events to write a sonnet, which I sent to the Scripps newspapers, getting for the poet the unprecedented sum of twenty-five dollars. I now quote the sonnet, and invite you to study the two,comparing them by all tests of poetry known to you. I give my own opinion: that in their propaganda impulse these two sonnets are identical; that in simplicity, directness, and fervor of feeling they are as nearly identical as two art works can be; and that in technical skill the modern work is superior.
TO A CERTAIN RICH YOUNG RULERBy Clement WoodWhite-fingered lord of murderous events,Well are you guarding what your father gained;With torch and rifle you have well maintainedThe lot to which a heavenly providenceHas called you; laborers risen in defenseOf liberty and life, lie charred and brainedAbout your mines, whose gutted hills are stainedWith slaughter of these newer innocents.Ah, but your bloody fingers clenched in prayer!Your piety, which all the world has seen!The godly odor spreading through the airFrom your efficient charity machine!Thus you rehearse for your high rôle up there,Ruling beside the lowly Nazarene!
TO A CERTAIN RICH YOUNG RULERBy Clement WoodWhite-fingered lord of murderous events,Well are you guarding what your father gained;With torch and rifle you have well maintainedThe lot to which a heavenly providenceHas called you; laborers risen in defenseOf liberty and life, lie charred and brainedAbout your mines, whose gutted hills are stainedWith slaughter of these newer innocents.Ah, but your bloody fingers clenched in prayer!Your piety, which all the world has seen!The godly odor spreading through the airFrom your efficient charity machine!Thus you rehearse for your high rôle up there,Ruling beside the lowly Nazarene!
TO A CERTAIN RICH YOUNG RULERBy Clement WoodWhite-fingered lord of murderous events,Well are you guarding what your father gained;With torch and rifle you have well maintainedThe lot to which a heavenly providenceHas called you; laborers risen in defenseOf liberty and life, lie charred and brainedAbout your mines, whose gutted hills are stainedWith slaughter of these newer innocents.
TO A CERTAIN RICH YOUNG RULER
By Clement Wood
Ah, but your bloody fingers clenched in prayer!Your piety, which all the world has seen!The godly odor spreading through the airFrom your efficient charity machine!Thus you rehearse for your high rôle up there,Ruling beside the lowly Nazarene!
There is another artist of English Puritanism we must not overlook. We shall have no trouble in proving this one a propagandist; so obviously was he preaching, that the critics of his own time overlooked him entirely. The elegant men of letters of the Restoration period, gossiping in their coffee houses, dicing in their taverns, and carrying on their fashionable intrigues, would have been moved to witty couplets by the notion that an ignorant tinker, a street-corner tub-thumper locked up in Bedford gaol, was engaged in composing one of the immortal classics of English literature. As soon might you attempt to tell one of the clever “colyumnists” of the New York newspapers, stumping his last cigarette in his coffee saucer at luncheon in the Algonquin, that an immortal classic of American literature was running serially in the “Appeal to Reason” or the “Daily Worker.”
John Bunyan came from the lowest ranks of the people, those same louts and clowns whom Shakespeare delighted to ridicule. And he was quite as ridiculous as Shakespeare could have wished him; he saw visions, and was pursued by devils, and rushed out onto the street to save the souls of people as ignorant and unimportant as himself. Under the laws of England the saving of souls was a privilege reserved to the younger sons of the gentry, who got “livings” out of it; so John Bunyan was persecuted, precisely as ignorant and unimportant I. W. W. are persecuted in my neighborhood today. And he behaved exactly as the I. W. W. behave; that is, he stubbornly declined to change his opinions, or to cease proclaiming them on the streets. Sent to prison, he did what a number of the I. W. W. did in Leavenworth; despite the fact that he had a pregnant wife and four small children, one of them blind, he refused to give a purely formal promise to behave himself. This caused extreme embarrassment to humane magistrates, who didn’t want to be hard on a poor crack-brain, but were sworn to uphold the majesty of the law.
So for twelve years John Bunyan stayed in jail and wrote “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Now my friend, Albert Mordell, includes it among his “waning classics.” He says: “The story that children delight in the book and read it through is mythical; many children try to read it but usually drop it.” Well, it so happened that when I read those words, I had been making a test on a ten-year-old boy, my own. We used to read it aloud, sitting in front of the fireplace on winter evenings; and of all the books we read, none created such excitement. It was difficult to keep on reading, because of the stream of questions: “What does that mean, Papa?” You see, allegories, which bore us adults, are fascinating to the child mind. Such a wonderful idea, when you first think of it—to embody moral qualities in living beings, and give them names, and send them walking out over the earth, to engage in adventures and contend with each other! To see the every-day problems of your own conduct unrolled before you in the form of a story!
My young friends of the radical intelligentsia, who used to live in Greenwich Village, but have now moved to Croton and Provincetown and Stelton to get away from the bally-hoo wagons, have been calling me a Puritan eversince they knew me; and now they will smile a patronizing smile, hearing me endorse this old-fashioned Sunday school story. I can only record my conviction, that one does not escape the need of personal morality by espousing proletarian revolution. Even after the revolution, there will be moral struggles fought out in the hearts of men and women. I realize that morality is destined to become a science, and that by the study of psychology we shall abolish many problems of conduct; nevertheless, life will still require effort—there will remain the question of whether to study or not to study, and why!
I suggest to my young radical friends that they amuse an idle hour by applying “Pilgrim’s Progress” to the great movement of our day. Instead of Christian, read Comrade; instead of Christian’s burden, read a soap-box. You can always find some youngster to serve as traveling companion under the name of Hopeful. And very soon in your journey you will enter the Valley of Humiliation; very soon you will begin to meet Mr. Money-Love and Mr. Pliable; also Mr. Talkative will come in swarms to your studio parties. And By-Ends—he works beside you in every office; the fellow who takes care of himself and does not believe in going to extremes. And Mr. Worldly-Wiseman—perhaps you have a rich uncle who will serve; you can see him sitting in the padded leather chairs of any club. And when Comrade’s Pilgrimage brings him to New York, he will see Vanity Fair, flaunting its glories up and down the avenue, protected by plate glass. And the fiend Appolyon—we have had two attorney-generals exactly cut for the rôle. If you think that a joke, it means that you have been playing the part of Mr. Facing Both-ways during the past ten years, and do not know about the realities of government by gunmen.
The forms of things change, but the inner essence remains the same, and you must learn to recognize it. The Slough of Despond, for example, is discovered in the bottom of the coffee-cups in which Greenwich Village now gets its bootleg gin. As for the Giant Despair—a singular transformation!—he is a pale-colored microscopic organism of cork-screw shape, lurking in the delicious intrigues of our gay and saucy young folks. As for the Interpreter’s House, it is out of repair just now, having been hit by H-E shells in 1917. As for the Celestial City, whichwe old fogies used to vision under the name of the Co-operative Commonwealth—the young people won’t let us mention it any more; they tell us that propaganda is out of style, in these days of petting-parties and hip-pocket flasks.
We have been keeping low company for so long that the reader may be wondering: Were there no writers for ladies and gentlemen in the time of Milton and Bunyan? The answer is, yes; and we should pay a brief visit to that Vanity Fair which Bunyan saw through the bars of his prison.
There was a poet laureate, who did not go to prison but became the idol of his age, and the most prosperous writer up to that time. John Dryden was his name, and like Milton, he was born of a well-to-do Puritan family, and received the best education going. He was twenty-seven years old when Cromwell died, and he wrote heroic stanzas on the Lord Protector. He attached himself to his cousin, an official of the Puritan republic, expecting advancement; but he did not get it, so two years later, when the “bonnie Prince Charlie” came back to be crowned, the young poet welcomed him with a panegyric ode, several pages of ecstatic compliment—
How shall I speak of that triumphant dayWhen you renewed the expiring pomp of May?A month that owns an interest in your name,You and the flowers are its peculiar claim.
How shall I speak of that triumphant dayWhen you renewed the expiring pomp of May?A month that owns an interest in your name,You and the flowers are its peculiar claim.
How shall I speak of that triumphant dayWhen you renewed the expiring pomp of May?A month that owns an interest in your name,You and the flowers are its peculiar claim.
I am following the life of Dryden by Professor Saintsbury, an eminent scholar of the Tory way of thought, who has just immortalized himself by publishing a whole volume devoted to the literature of alcoholic liquor. This professor says everything that can be said in defense of Dryden, but the best he can say about this “Astræa Redux” is that in order to appreciate its beauties, you must forget the facts about the “bonnie Prince Charlie” and his reign. The professor lists a few of the facts you must forget: “the treaty of Dover and the closed exchequer,Madam Carwell’s twelve thousand a year and Lord Russell’s scaffold.” That is the way to read literature under the guidance of a leisure-class critic! As we used to say when we were children: “Open your mouth and shut your eyes, and I’ll give you something to make you wise!”
The elegant literature of that time was described by the term “metaphysical,” which meant that the poet exhausted his imagination in inventing quaint and startling conceits. For example, one of Dryden’s noble patrons contracted smallpox, and the poet, describing his appearance, records that
Each little dimple had a tear in it,To wail the fault its rising did commit.
Each little dimple had a tear in it,To wail the fault its rising did commit.
Each little dimple had a tear in it,To wail the fault its rising did commit.
By such personal attention to the rich and powerful John Dryden became the greatest poet of his century, and married the daughter of an earl. He took to writing heroic plays in the style of his time, such preposterous bombast that if I were to tell you about them you would think I was making them up. Then he wrote society comedies, also in the style of his time, which was such high-toned sex nastiness that if I were to write it today I should be taken up by the Shuberts and the Laskys, and paid as much as Cecil de Mille and Robert W. Chambers and Elinor Glyn rolled into one.
The “Restoration comedies” were much the same thing as our “bedroom farces,” except that they were long drawn out; the seventeenth century audience was satisfied to listen to smart people gossiping about their vices, while our audience wants to see the smart people climbing through the transom in their pajamas. Also, the old comedies are difficult for us to understand, because the language of polite obscenity changes from age to age, and we don’t always know what Dryden and Congreve and Wycherley are talking about. But we need not rack our brains; we may be sure that all their witticisms have reference to fornication and adultery. There was no other occupation for these “restored” ladies and gentlemen—except gambling and eating and drinking, and cheating and lying in order to get the money to pay for their elegant pleasures.
Dryden gained by this writing an income of a couple of thousand pounds a year, which was the top-notch for aliterary fellow in England. Also he became poet laureate, and an intimate of the king; in short, he reached the heights. But alas, greatness has its penalties, as the poet soon discovered, caught in the poisonous intrigues of a vile court. He was accused of having written a slanderous poem, and one of his noble enemies hired some bullies to beat him up one night. Also, a muck-raking parson by the name of Jeremy Collier came along and lashed him in a book entitled “A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage.” To all his other literary and political enemies the poet showed himself a voluble antagonist; but to the Reverend Jeremy he had nothing to answer.
He began, apparently, to realize the seriousness of life, and took to writing propaganda for his gang. He produced a series of political tracts, satirical and didactic verses upon which he expended great technical skill. Professor Saintsbury points out these literary beauties; but again he specifies: in appreciating them, the reader has to bear in mind that what Dryden proved today he may have disproved yesterday, and he may prove something different tomorrow. Lacking this acrobatic ability, I can only record my opinion, that these most famous verses are snarling and odious quarrels, of exactly as much importance to mankind as the yelps in a dog-fight.
One of them was a poem full of enraptured praise for the Anglican church. The poet at this time was listed for a salary of a hundred pounds a year as poet laureate; but the salary was badly in arrears, and somebody must have pointed out to him that his new sovereign, King James II, was an ardent Catholic. So the poet became converted to Catholicism, and wrote an equally enraptured poem in praise of that. But, alas! it was a bad guess; shortly afterwards His Most Catholic Majesty was kicked out of England, and William of Orange was brought over, and the country was Protestant again. This was the period when the Vicar of Bray had such a hard time holding his job; and our court poet also suffered, losing most of his perquisites, and having to go to work again.
He was an old man now, and decided to play safe; he made a verse translation of Virgil, for which nobody could scold him. Nobody did, and he died full of honors, and had a “sufficiently splendid funeral” in Westminster Abbey, “with a great procession, preceded at the College by a Latin oration, and by the singing of Exegi Monumentum to music.”
And so, if you like that sort of thing, there you have what you like; and if you have Dryden’s talents, and are willing to sell them to the ruling classes, I can drive you over to Hollywood any day, and introduce you to the fellows who will start you off at twenty thousand a year, and raise you to two hundred thousand as soon as you have begun to deliver the goods.
In order to make a consecutive story we have followed the development of English art for a century and a half. We now go back to cover the same period on the Continent, where a new ruling class has acquired wealth and power and has ordered a supply of new artists.
The difference between France and England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may be summed up briefly. The English revolt against the Catholic machine was successful, therefore the spirit of the English race expanded, and new art forms were created. In France, on the other hand, the Catholic machine succeeded in crushing the Protestants; something over fifty thousand were slaughtered on St. Bartholomew’s Eve; and therefore the art of France was held within the mold of the classical tradition. The Elizabethan drama grew out of the old miracle and mystery plays, a native product, crude, but popular and democratic. There existed such a native drama also in France; but it was scorned and repressed by authority, and cultured art followed the tragedies of Seneca, a Roman millionaire of the time of Nero, who had of course derived from the Greeks.
It may seem strange that Catholic absolutism should have made Greek and Latin art forms a part of its sacred dogma; but so it was. The doctors of the church in the Middle Ages had put together a theology, in part from the early Christian fathers, and in part from Athenian and Alexandrian philosophers. It was for denying Ptolemy’s doctrine that the sun moved round the earth thatGalileo was forced to recant under threat of torture by the pope; and it was for denying the sacred “three unities,” derived from Aristotle’s “Poetics,” that playwrights were critically tortured by the priests of orthodox culture.
These three dogmas of play-writing were unity of theme, unity of time, and unity of place. The first is, within reasonable limits, a natural requirement of any work of art; but unity of time, meaning that the play must happen within twenty-four hours, and unity of place, meaning that it must happen on one physical spot, are absurdities. It is hard for us to realize that such rules were compulsory upon any dramatist who wished to see his work upon the stage; it is harder yet for us to realize that such rules were used as weapons in the class struggle, along with the infallibility of the pope and the divine right of kings.
There arose in France a prelate of the grim and bloody kind, who became the king’s minister, and directed the slaughtering of the Huguenots, and chopped off the heads of the rebellious nobles; he even forced the church to submit itself, and made his king the absolute ruler of France, so that a year after Richelieu’s death it was possible for the king’s son to ascend the throne, and to say, “I am the State,” and have no one dispute him through his reign of seventy-two years. One of the engines of repression that Richelieu devised was the French Academy, to take charge of the language and art of the monarchy, and impose law and order by chopping off the literary heads of all rebels. This Academy became the ruling authority in cultured France, and has filled that rôle for three hundred years. Not merely has it served the ruling classes by maintaining tradition and discrediting every innovation in French letters; it has issued formal pronouncements against unorthodox social and political books—for example, Rousseau’s “Social Contract.” A list of the French men of letters who have been excluded from the “immortals” includes Descartes, Pascal, Molière, Saint-Simon, LeSage, Rousseau, Beaumarchais, Diderot, Compte, Proudhon, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Goncourt, Maupassant, Jaurès, Barbusse, Rolland.
The polite literature which reigned in Richelieu’s time was known as “précieuse,” and occupied itself in the making up of elaborate long similes, extending sometimesthrough several pages. It was foppish and fantastic to the point of imbecility; and the makers of it were the darlings of Richelieu’s Academy. There came up from the provinces a young lawyer by the name of Pierre Corneille, who began to write successful comedies, and received the high honor of being picked by Richelieu as one of five men to write dramas under his august direction. But Corneille, a man of genius, could not long submit himself to the head-chopping cardinal. He went his own way, and incurred the raging enmity of both Richelieu and his Academy.
He wrote a tragedy in Alexandrine verse called “The Cid,” which was an enormous popular success. This Cid was a legendary hero of Spain, a “free captain”—that is, the head of an army of hired mercenaries, who went about fighting for anybody who would pay him. We are used to this system of “free captains” in the United States, where they are called private detective bureaus and strike-breaking agencies. They have armies of tens of thousands of fighting men, horse, foot and artillery, whom they move about from place to place for the crushing of union labor. So before long we shall see on Broadway or in Hollywood some young writer making a tremendous ruling-class drama out of the legendary career of Alan Pinkerton or William J. Burns. The great detective will be shown in love with the beautiful daughter of some labor leader, the tragedy coming when in the course of his duty the great detective has to kill the labor leader. That is the story which Corneille developed—except that of course, it was a rival prince whom the Cid was fighting. Needless to say, in order not to have his head chopped off by Richelieu, the playwright put his hero in the position of defending legitimacy.
But the poet had failed to respect the “three unities” in his tragedy; so, although acclaimed by audiences, he was viciously attacked by the academicians—one of them even challenged him to a duel! The Academy as a body was afraid to attack the play, but Richelieu forced it to take action. Corneille was not strong enough to withstand opposition such as this; in his future work he conformed to the rules, and became a humble pensioner of the cardinal. It is interesting to note that his genius began quickly to decline, and he had the humiliation ofliving to old age and seeing himself scorned and neglected by the new generation. Thus Richelieu’s Academy fulfilled at the outset its function, destroying the greatest tragic dramatist that France had produced, and suppressing for two hundred years the romantic movement in the French theater.
It is important to get clear the difference between the real classical art of the Greeks, and this imitation classical art of French absolutism. The Greek stage rules had been made to fit the facts of the Greek stage. Their tragedies had been enacted in a large open-air theater, and to keep the actors from looking too small they had worn high shoes, almost stilts, and had shouted to the audience through a megaphone disguised as a mask. Needless to say, they could not move quickly, and could not do anything but talk. Their tendency was to talk at great length—like mighty ships, which, having got under way, were not easily to be stopped.
But in the time of Corneille and his successors all that was gone; plays were acted in small, indoor theaters, and the characters might have been human and real. But the critical authorities ordained that the Greek conventions were sacred; so the characters of Corneille are stiff and stately, and stalk about hurling long, impassioned tirades at one another.
Nevertheless, two thousand years have not failed to make an impression upon the minds of men. The dark, overshadowing fate of the Greeks is gone, its place as director of events being taken by human ambition. Corneille’s characters are embodiments of this or that passion. They are, of course, always aristocrats, the mighty and powerful of the earth; they are intended to be morally sublime, but to us they seem monsters of egotism. They want what they want when they want it, they smite their breasts and exclaim: “Moi! Moi! Moi!” There is war, splendid war, in which they gain the admiration and attention known as “glory.” The tragedy comes because they cannot get all they want; they have weaknesses, especially love, which get in the way, and paralyze the will of mighty princes engaged in prevailing over each other.
At this time the Thirty Years’ War was devastating Europe. It had begun as a religious war, an effort of Catholic Austria to crush German Protestantism; but ithad now degenerated into a clash of rival dynasties, with Richelieu, master intriguer, using the Protestants to put down the enemies of the French monarchy. The mother of the French king had been an Austrian princess, Catherine de’ Medici, and she was intriguing against her son’s country. She had been driven into exile by Richelieu, and was raising up armies against him; so, all over Europe, the people were being led out to slaughter at the whim of this vicious old woman. They were led out for one greedy prince or another; they were led out because the mistress of some king had been snubbed by the wife of some emperor; they were led out for an endless tangle of royal jealousies and noble spites.
And the function of the dramas of Corneille is to take us into the souls of these lawless aristocrats; all the powers of genius, all the resources of the stage are expended in order that we may share their furies, may strut the stage with them and deliver tumultuous tirades. For a time or two the experience is interesting; but then the novelty wears off, and we ask ourselves: Do I really care anything about these heroes? Do I want to share their feelings—or do I want to change the world, so that there may be no corner where such dangerous and destructive creatures can lurk? And so ends the glory propaganda of Corneille.
Louis XIV, the “grand monarch,” ascended the throne of France in the year 1643, while Cromwell’s “Ironsides” were fighting their king, and only six years before they cut off his head. A greater difference between two kingdoms could scarcely be imagined; and this difference is completely reflected in French and English art.
All the life of France was centered at the court. The monarch who was “the State” withdrew himself from Paris, and built a magnificent play-ground at Versailles; aqueducts were constructed, a barren waste was turned into a pleasure-park, whole forests of trees being moved and replanted. Great palaces arose; the architects and landscape gardeners, the sculptors and painters pouredout their treasures, to make this most wonderful garden of delight.
All over the land was a ruined peasantry; misery, starvation and ignorance, freedom crushed, justice flaunted, superstition and despotism enthroned. A nation was taxed bare to make the beauty and glory and luxury of this court. You might see the “grand monarch,” with a huge powdered periwig on top of his head, in a costume of crimson and white brocaded with gold, advancing with solemn steps upon red-heeled shoes, and wielding a golden snuff-box covered with jewels. About him flock the courtiers, great nobles and ecclesiastics, now deprived both of their powers and their duties, and with nothing to do but dance attendance at court. Here also are the swarms of fine ladies, trained in the arts of seduction. In the morning the court rides forth in enormous hunting parties, pursuing stags imported from all over Europe. They spend the afternoons and evenings in feasting, gaming, gossiping, intriguing.
And here, of course, come the artists; poets and painters, dramatists and musicians, dancing masters and jugglers and makers of ballets and masques. The king who said, “I am the State,” might equally have said, “I am Art.” He and his court constituted audience and critics; either you pleased them, or as an artist you were dead.
It is interesting to note that the famous artists of that time all came from the middle classes. The great gentlemen scorned to work at art, as at anything else; they paid others to work for them. They were exacting paymasters, having high standards of perfection in technique, and the middle-class Ogis slaved diligently to polish and refine and beautify their productions.
War was far off from this splendid court, an echo of trouble in another world; so the sternness and sublimity of Corneille went out of fashion. Love was no longer a temptation and a weakness, but the delight and glory of the “great world.” The source of human impulse was located in what the poets of those days called “the heart”—though we, by surgical investigations, have ascertained that it is located below the diaphragm.
There came a new dramatist to thrill this amorous company. His name was Jean Racine, and he also came from the middle classes. His genius brought him instantsuccess; he wrote an ode to the king, was awarded a pension of six hundred livres, and became an assiduous and successful courtier. He is, like Raphael, the perfect type of the ruling-class artist; fitting exactly to his age, with no ideals below it and none above it. His works represent perfection of technique, the ideal harmony of content and form, the Art of Beauty as it had not been seen upon the stage since the time of Sophocles.
Until late in Racine’s life religion is purely formal in his work; his plays deal with the princely world. Society is fixed, and its forms ordained; nobody is rising and displacing anybody else, hence there can be no social drama. You play your part “in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call you”; and tragedy happens when somebody takes away from you the sexual gratification you crave. Everything has become personal; we are concerned with the jealousies, the fears, the loves and hates of aristocratic individuals. The heroes and heroines abandon themselves to their passions, they pour out floods of exquisite emotion. The scene is laid in “an apartment in a palace,” and murder, suicide, insanity and despair lurk just outside the door.
They do not come upon the stage, because the classical tradition ordains that violent actions happen off the stage, and people rush on and tell us about them. We get the echoes of horror in the eyes and the voices of these people. It is curious to compare Racine’s tragedies with those of Shakespeare, which jump you about among a score or two of places all over the earth, and bring on swarms of characters from every social class. In Racine, not merely are the lower classes excluded from the stage, the lower classes are excluded from existence. Three or four noble ladies and gentlemen stand in a room, and come and go, and make speeches to one another in marvelously polished rhymed couplets. They address long soliloquies to the air, they address imaginary beings, the heavenly powers of Christian mythology and Roman and Greek and Turkish and Celtic mythology; they call earth and sea and sky to witness the infinite wickedness and cruelty of their not being able to have what they want.
This is the height and perfection of art, according to the most fastidious and exacting of French standards. And is it propaganda? I do not see how anyone capableof putting two thoughts together can question the fact. Here are the gods of a new hierarchy, princes and potentates, absorbing to themselves by divine right all the treasures of civilization. Here they are exhibited in all their splendor, one of the world’s greatest poets devoting his technical skill to glorifying and exalting them. Storms of thrilling emotion are poured forth, and the crowds go mad with excitement. So ideals are created and standards set, which govern, not merely the art life, but the social and political and business life of the whole of society.
The poet himself lived this life of elegant egotistical passion; he was jealous and quarrelsome, and he followed the custom of the painters in using his mistresses as models for his female types. One of his tragedies became the cause of a ferocious court quarrel; a duchess hired another playwright and produced a rival play on the same theme, and hired a claque to applaud his play, and to hiss Racine’s. This apparently frightened the poet; he lost his joy in the courtier life, became sick, and in orthodox Catholic fashion retired into mysticism, and wrote a play of religion, as unwholesome and remote from reality as his worldly plays.
The most famous of his tragedies is “Phedre,” which tells about the wife of an Athenian king, who conceives an adulterous passion for her step-son, and when the youth repels her advances, accuses him falsely to his father, and brings about his death; after which, in a transport of shame, she poisons herself. For two centuries and a half this portrayal of unbridled desire has been the test of genius upon the French stage; eight generations of actresses have exhausted their skill in portraying it to eight generations of elegant ladies and gentlemen, living lives of the same unbridled desire.
In our time the great Phedre was Sarah Bernhardt, the “divine Sarah,” as she was known to the leisure-class critics of my boyhood. Upon the stage she exhibited the unbridled desires of an ancient Greek queen, and in real life she exhibited the unbridled desires of a modern stage queen; a woman who never felt a social emotion, but squandered the treasure of various royal and plutocratic and literary lovers, who likewise had never felt a social emotion. We are privileged now to read the extremely stupid love-letters which King Edward of England wroteto her, and learn what sums of money be paid to her, and what dignified court gentlemen he sent to make his assignations with her. We read also about her passion for Sardou, leisure-class playwright of her time, who created a host of splendid prostitutes and lustful queens, to enable this leisure-class divinity to sweep her audiences into ecstasy.
We today, possessing means of exploring the subconscious mind, understand these unbridled desires as symptoms of infantilism. Here are babies, still reaching out for the moon, and shrieking because they cannot have it; here are spoiled children, flattered by servants and fawned upon by slaves, indulged and petted, never adjusting themselves to the realities of life, but growing up to make heroes and heroines of tragedy. We no longer consider these creations sublime; we call them psychopaths, and the art which portrays them we call a bore.
As economists we have explored the social causes of such raging egotisms, and also the social consequences. The plutocracy is not the only class which has unbridled desires; the proletariat has its share, and if one class is permitted to gratify them, and to flaunt them before the world, the only possible consequence is a revolution of blind and bloody revenge. Queen Phedre, frenzied and horror-smitten, saw hell looming hideous before her staring eyes; but she saw no hell compared with what Racine’s audience might have seen, had they been able to look forward a hundred years in French history, and to watch the starved and brutalized mob of Paris dancing the “Carmagnole” in the streets, while the guillotine rolled into its bloody basket the heads of the great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of those splendid, unbridled ladies and gentlemen who made up the “grand monarch’s” splendid, unbridled court.
In vain do kings and emperors set up the doctrine that art exists for courts; that only the great ones of the earth are the proper theme for art works, and courtiers and court critics the true judges of taste. Deeply planted inthe human heart is an instinct, declaring that all human beings are of consequence; and men of genius arise who follow that instinct, and write about ordinary people, and appeal to wider and wider groups of the community. We shall now see this happening to the exclusive and haughty court of the “grand monarch.” A world genius appears, who breaks the established barriers, sets all France to arguing over his ideas, and helps to make the drama of Europe the social force which it is today.
He was the son of the royal upholsterer in Paris; that is to say, of a tradesman who had the job of repairing the soft and expensive cushions upon which this court reclined. But Molière, a volcano of energy and enterprise, did not take long to discover that he was not interested in cushioning a court. At the age of twenty-one he sold his claims to the family job, and started a theater on a tennis-court in Paris. It was a failure, and the young Molière was three times imprisoned for debt. But he would not give up; he organized a company to tour the provinces, and for thirteen years he lived a life of “one-night stands.” It is a dog’s life today, and must have been worse three hundred years ago, when actors were outcasts and almost outlaws. Catholic bigotry in France was as bitter against them as Puritan bigotry in England.
It was a hard school, in which Molière made no money and lost his health. But it was a way to make a tragi-comic dramatist, for it brought him into contact with every kind of human being. When he came to Versailles to become the king’s favorite dramatist, he brought with him knowledge of something more than courtly intrigue; he brought the fighting spirit of a man who had been roughly handled, who had been poor and in jail, and who knew France as it was to the plain people.
Molière got a chance to produce plays before the king, including a couple of his own little farces. The king was then twenty-one years of age, curious about life, and not entirely in the hands of women and priests as he later became. Molière was thirty-seven when he produced his first significant work, “Les Précieuses Ridicules,” a satire on the literary fashions of the time, according to which a mirror was called “the counsellor of the graces,” and a chair “the commodity of conversation.” Great ladies were accustomed to assemble to display their wit to one another,and it was exactly like the literary tea-parties we have nowadays. I have pictured them in a chapter in “The Metropolis”—
“Go ahead with Molière!” says Mrs. Ogi.
“I just want to quote a dozen lines,” pleads her husband. “This shows you what happens to literature, when it becomes ‘the rage’ among fine ladies: ‘We learn thereby, every day, the latest gallantries, and the prettiest novelties in prose and verse; we are told just in the nick of time, that such a one has composed the prettiest piece in the world on such a subject; that some one else has written words to such an air; that this person has made a madrigal upon an enjoyment, and that his friend has composed some stanzas upon an infidelity; that Mr. So-and-so sent half a dozen verses yesterday evening to Miss Such-and-such, and that she sent back an answer at eight o’clock this morning; that one celebrated author has just sketched a plan for a new book, that another has got to the third part of his romance, and that a third is passing his works through the press.’”
“Is that in ‘The Metropolis’?” asks Mrs. Ogi, suspiciously.
Whereat, her husband grins with malice. “Look for it; and if you don’t find it, try the tenth scene of ‘Les Précieuses Ridicules.’”
It was insolence for a mere tradesman’s son to make fun of high-born ladies, and the ladies were furious, and succeeded in keeping the play off the stage for five days. That was the beginning of a fight, which lasted the rest of Molière’s life. At any time he chose to write a silly farce or a ballet he could have it produced safely and with applause; but whenever he wrote a play with a serious purpose he raised up a swarm of enemies, who kept his play off the boards anywhere from five days to five years. And here is where the man showed his spirit; he was sick, he was always struggling with debt, he had his theatrical company to look out for—people whom he loved and whose burdens he carried. Nevertheless, truth blazed in him like a white-hot flame, and he could not let his enemies alone. He would quit the fight for a year or two, then come back to it with a piece of ridicule yet more stinging, or a picture of cruelty and falsehood so grim that it was hard to pass off for a comedy.
Molière hated hypocrisy with a deadly hatred; he hated the church of his time, because it was an organized system of hypocrisy for cash. He hated vain fops, and empty-headed, pretentious women, and the snobbish and self-seeking great ones of the earth. Also he hated the enslaving and imprisoning of love. In his time the French girl was raised in a convent, and when she was somewhere between thirteen and eighteen her parents, with the aid of the family lawyer, sold her in marriage to some mature man of the world, who possessed rank and fortune, and was apt to possess vices and diseases. In no less than nine of Molière’s plays there is such a situation; also there is an amiable young man in love with the girl, and the couple find a way to thwart the schemes of their elders. The plays thus become a plea for common sense and human feeling, as opposed to avarice and worldly pride. This has become a familiar theme of comedy; the poet’s first instinctive revolt against the money-power.
It is Molière’s custom to take some propaganda theme, and to construct upon it a sermon in picture form. He chooses very simple characters to illustrate the theme, and in the conversations he pounds upon it like a man driving in a spike with a sledge. Every bit of knowledge and skill he possesses goes into those hard strokes; all his wit and verve, his insight into human character, his amazing vividness, his palpitating sense of life.
The greatest evil of the time was unquestionably the church, which controlled the mind and conscience of the nation and repressed all independent thinking. The life of France was beset by a horde of spies, the secret agents of a predatory power, the Jesuits; nothing could be hid from them, because they controlled the salvation of souls, and through the instrument of the confessional were able to dominate political and social life. They worked, as always, upon the ignorance and emotionalism of women; they beset the mind of the king, and in the end they got him, forcing the revocation of the law tolerating Protestants, and beginning another monstrous persecution. Molière saw all that going on around him, and he wrote about it one of the most terrible plays in the world. It is called “Tartuffe, or The Hypocrite,” and shows a religious intriguer, worming his way into a middle-class family and seducing the wife of his benefactor. The dramais an utterance of blazing anger, a veritable harpooning of hypocrisy. As a weapon of propaganda it is exactly as powerful today as it was three hundred years ago.
Of course it raised a storm in the little world of Paris and Versailles. The clerical party besieged the king, and the play was barred from public performance, though it was shown privately to some of the great nobles. The archbishop threatened to excommunicate those who even read the play, and Bossuet, the ruling-class literary pope of the time, took Molière’s untimely death from tuberculosis as a divine judgment upon him for the writing of this infamous work. Two years later the king again permitted the play to be shown; but when the performance came on he was away at one of his wars, and an official closed the theater, and Molière’s appeals to the king were in vain. For five years the fight over this play went on, before at last it could be freely shown.
They were years of incessant struggle for Molière. He produced “Don Juan,” and the clerical critics objected to that also, because it portrayed an intellectual and free thinker. To be sure, it portrayed him as a very immoral man; but that did not satisfy the clerical party, for few of them could meet that test. It was the irony of fate that the archbishop, who forbade to Molière’s body a church service, was himself a man of notoriously vile habits.
Then came a play called “The Misanthrope,” a name doubtless given as a sop to Molière’s critics. There is really nothing misanthropic about the hero; he is simply a man of fine ideals, who is stunned by his discovery of the powers of evil in the world about him, and their ability to destroy human life. He is married to a woman whom he loves, but who will not give up this evil world, and gives up her husband instead. Molière himself had made a bitterly unhappy marriage with a young actress who preferred the world to her husband, and the hero of this play is generally taken as Molière’s own voice, just as Hamlet is taken as Shakespeare’s voice.
This greatest comic dramatist of France had to waste much of his time producing farces and ballets for his exacting king. He now wrote a farce comedy, which I suppose is produced a thousand times every year in American high schools, “The Bourgeois Gentleman.” The play makes merry with a crude, newly-rich merchant who triesto acquire a little culture in his prosperous years. Molière was thus catering to high-born snobbery, and also voicing the dislike which all artists feel for those who buy and sell. You will recall the scorn of Aristophanes for “mongers” of all sorts—“mutton-mongers” and “rope-mongers” and “leather-mongers” and “offal-mongers.”
In another play, “The Learned Ladies,” Molière joins Aristophanes in poking fun at the idea that women should or could be educated. It is true that the vanities of women are especially absurd when applied to scientific matters, in which personality is so entirely out of place; but the same absurdities result from the first efforts of any disinherited group or class or race to lift itself. We have seen Shakespeare making fun of workingmen trying to produce a play; similarly, we shall find Kipling ridiculing the notion that Hindoos can master the English language, and become fit to hold government positions in their own country.
Molière’s last whack was at the doctors, whom he especially disliked. We can understand that a man afflicted with a chronic disease, concerning which the doctors of his time understood nothing, must have had unsatisfactory results from their visits, must have submitted to their purgings and their bleedings to no purpose, and paid them money which he felt they did not earn. Anyhow, he goes after them again and again, and in his “Imaginary Invalid” he portrays a man who thinks he is sick, and all the various quacks who swarm around him. Three times the play was given with great success, with Molière acting the leading part. A fourth performance was due, and the poor playwright was ill; he thought of his company and what would happen to them if he were to shut down, so he went through the performance, and collapsed and died a few hours later.
But his vivid and courageous propaganda did not die. It lives, even to our time, as the greatest glory of the French drama; proving over and over again our thesis that really great art has never been produced except by men who wished to improve their fellow-men and to abolish cruelty and greed and falsehood from the earth.
In his later years the “grand monarch” fell under the spell of a priest-ridden woman, made her his queen, and turned over his court to Jesuit intrigue. The law tolerating Protestants was repealed, the best schools in France were closed, and half a million of the most intelligent people were driven from the country. At the same time wars of conquest were undertaken, and a series of military disasters befell. The king’s reign closed in darkness and despair, and the crowds of Paris mocked his funeral pageant. But the people’s wrath had to fester for seventy years longer before it broke the tyranny of this “ancient regime.”
Two years after the “grand monarch’s” death, the regent sent to the Bastille a young French poet and man of fashion, the son of a wealthy lawyer of Paris. This youth, known to us as Voltaire, was accused of having written a pamphlet ridiculing absolutist ideas; the charge happened to be false, but needless to say, a year spent in prison without redress did not increase the young man’s love for absolutism. He was one of the wittiest mortals ever born on earth, and blessed, or cursed, with an incessantly active mind. His jailers were comparatively civilized—I mean, compared with jailers of capitalist absolutism in America; they permitted the young man to write poetry and dramas, and when he came out he continued the gay and dissolute life of a literary fop of that period. He was welcomed in the salons of the great, and his long epic poems and his rhymed verse tragedies were produced with great success.
But in his pride as a man of letters Voltaire forgot his place in the great world of France; he presumed to resent an insult from a noble gentleman, whereupon this gentleman brought his lackeys, armed with sticks, and had the poet cruelly beaten, while the noble gentleman sat in his sedan-chair, jeering and directing the punishment. To the amazement of the French aristocracy, the victim failed to accept this as a proper form of discipline; he, a mere lawyer’s son, proceeded to train himself to fight a duel with the nobleman—whereupon his great friends turnedtheir backs on him, and he was again thrown into the Bastille, and got out only upon promise to leave France.
He went to England, where he lived for three years. It was a new England, based upon the revolution which had driven out the Stuarts; a Protestant England, prosperous, busy, and from the point of view of a French refugee, amazingly free; an England in which Pope was preaching common sense, and Swift was lashing hypocrisy, and Newton was discovering the laws of the universe. When Voltaire returned to France, it was no longer to be a society fop and darling of the aristocracy; it was to be an intellectual pioneer, undermining the wall which French absolutism had built about the country.
Voltaire wrote a book dealing with the things he had learned in England, all the ideas of the new science and the new philosophy and the new toleration. Refused permission to publish it, he had it published secretly, whereupon it was solemnly banned by authority, and a copy was burned by the hangman. This made the fortune of the book; it had a big circulation, and all intellectual France fell to arguing about it. And that was to be Voltaire’s life for some forty-five years thereafter; writing forbidden books and pamphlets under an infinity of pen names, having them secretly printed in England, or in Holland, or in Switzerland, having them publicly burned, and no less publicly debated.
The name Voltaire thus means to us a champion of free thought, against religious superstition; but we must get clear the fact that during his life Voltaire was the most eminent poet and dramatist of France. Also it is interesting to note that, revolutionary as he was in the field of philosophy, he was a complete conservative in the field of art; following the models of Corneille and Racine, and respecting the sacred unities, the artificial laws whereby the French stage was fettered. Among the discoveries he had made in England was a playwright by the name of Shakespeare, whom he described as “a drunken savage, without the smallest scrap of good taste, and without the least acquaintance with the rules.” Voltaire was much annoyed when this dictum had the effect of causing some Frenchmen to be curious about Shakespeare! As time passed, he found that he had to give more and more energyto denouncing this “drunken savage,” and rebuking those who professed to find merit in his work.
All of which has a vital lesson for us; it shows us how tight is the grip of culture conventions upon the educated mind. It is possible for men to think for themselves concerning God and immortality, concerning the divine right of emperors and kings, and even of oil magnates and international financiers. But it is extremely difficult for them to think freely on the subject of what constitutes good taste, and whether or not they ought to permit themselves to enjoy a new and strange work of art. I note with interest that our own young intellectuals, who count themselves thorough-going revolters, who boast of unorthodoxy in religion, politics, economics, and morals, are usually of Tory inclination in matters of culture; cherishing the aristocratic superstition that art exists for cultured classes, and that whatever is popular is obviously contemptible.
We in America do not make any fuss about poets, so it is hard for us to understand the power which Voltaire wielded over French society. He was cynical, he was obscene, he was jealous and vain and exasperating; but he was a kind of god, to whom critical authority bowed, even monarchs with their worldly power. He produced a score of dramas, most of them tragedies in the heroic style, and with few exceptions each was a separate ovation, a coronation in the kingdom of letters. It never occurred to anyone in Voltaire’s time that he was not the equal of Racine, as a dramatist; while his epics were put above Homer and Virgil. We today begin one of his plays with determination to go through to the end, but we cannot make it; we desire some Greenwich Village wit to produce it in mock heroic style, so that we can laugh heartily at these pompous aristocrats raging and storming, stabbing and killing each other. We laugh, because it is so apparent that the poet himself has never felt any of this emotion, he has thought only how magnificent it sounds.
But at this time French culture was supreme throughout Europe, and Voltaire, cynic and skeptic, was at once the idol and the terror of the courts. He was a good business man, and invested the money he made from his plays, and become enormously rich. He purchased an estate in Switzerland, just over the French border; an admirablestrategic location, a sort of literary emplacement for a high-caliber gun. He could have his pamphlets printed in Germany and Holland, and secretly shipped into France, and the French police were powerless to touch him. The Swiss Calvinists were glad to have attacks made upon French and Catholic absolutism, so they let the poet alone.
Voltaire was a frail ghost of a man, almost a skeleton, but with quick bright eyes in his bare skull. He was ill most of his life; when he visited King Frederick he described himself as suffering from four mortal diseases, yet he lived to the age of eighty-four, and worked under terrific pressure all the time. He carried on an enormous correspondence—more than ten thousand of his letters have been edited and published. He was capable of almost every kind of meanness and malice, but he was also capable of heroic and unselfish idealism, as the world was now to see.
In the city of Toulouse, in southern France, a young man named Calas committed suicide, as result of religious mania; he was a member of a Protestant family, and the Catholic authorities in Toulouse accused the father of having murdered the boy to keep him from turning Catholic. They had no shred of evidence, but they cruelly tortured the old man, and finally executed him, and confiscated the property of the family. Voltaire took up the case in a frenzy of indignation; he employed investigators and lawyers, he wrote pamphlets and circulated them, he wrote innumerable letters and appeals; for three years he devoted his time to making the case a political and religious issue in France. No man could have displayed nobler public spirit, or more genuine human sympathy; for three years, so he wrote, he never smiled without feeling that he had committed a crime. When at last the verdict of the Toulouse courts was reversed, he fell into the arms of one of the Calas lads, and wept like a child. He said—he, the veteran playwright: “This is the most splendid fifth act I have ever seen on any stage!”
There came one such case after another. Just as in Russia the Black Hundreds spread the rumor that the Jews were accustomed to shed the blood of Christian children, so this Catholic machine made war on the Protestants by accusing them of hideous crimes. Voltaireespoused the “Sirven case” in the same fury of indignation; it had taken the courts two hours to condemn the victims, he said, and nine years to do them justice! Out of his agony of protest came one of his greatest works, the “Treatise on Toleration”—burned by the hangman, like everything else. Also there came his immortal slogan, which he took to putting on all his letters: “Écrasez l’infame”—that is, crush the infamous thing, meaning Catholic absolutism.
Now America also has its “infame,” which is capitalist absolutism; and we await the arrival of some man of letters, capable of the heroic and unselfish idealism of Voltaire. To him there were brought ten or a dozen cases of cruelty and torture in the course of twenty years; but hardly a month passes that my mail does not contain a story of cruelty and torture equally hideous, committed by the powers which are now destroying liberty and enlightenment in America. Consider, for example, the case of the Centralia prisoners, a story of brutality, torture, murder, terrorism, and the subornation of the law by the lumber barons of the Northwest; a story just as pitiful, just as revolting, just as worthy of Voltaire’s immortal slogan.
“If you are not careful,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you will be accused of putting propaganda into this chapter!”
It was as the champion of freedom of thought that Voltaire stood before the French people; he, with his wealth and fame, was able to do what they did not dare to do. From his mountain retreat he sent his ideas all over Europe; and meantime the blind, deluded rulers of France did all they could to plow the soil for his sowing. The great-grandson of the “grand monarch,” who ascended the throne as a child in 1715, ruled for almost sixty years. Beginning with the name of “the well-beloved,” he squandered the revenues of the state upon his mistresses, and led his country to a series of disasters, including the loss of the American colonies and India. He left the nation bankrupt, and died with the famous phrase, “After us the deluge.”
Four years later, the old Voltaire, made bold by all his honors, came down from his mountain fortress and entered Paris. He had a pageant like a conquering hero; his plays were produced to enormous audiences, and eventhe Academy of Richelieu welcomed him—strange irony of history! It was like Tolstoi in Russia; the authorities would have liked to chop off his head, but they could only gnash their teeth in impotence. However, what their hatred could not do, the love of the people accomplished; Voltaire was literally killed by kindness, and died amid the excitements of this holiday. It is interesting to us to note that among those he met in Paris was Benjamin Franklin, fellow skeptic, scientist, and revolutionary propagandist from the new world. This was in 1778, two years after the Declaration of Independence, and less than ten years before the French revolution.