Chapter XXI: Book XV: The Poet (2)

When we succeed in adjusting our social structure in such a way as to enable us to solve social questions as fast as they become really pressing, they will no longer force their way into the theatre. Had Ibsen, for instance, had any reason to believe that the abuses to which he called attention in his prose plays would have been adequately attended to without his interference, he would no doubt have gladly left them alone. The same exigency drove William Morris in England from his tapestries, his epics, and his masterpieces of printing, to try and bring his fellow citizens to their senses by the summary process of shouting at them in the streets and in Trafalgar Square. John Ruskin's writing began with Modern Painters; Carlyle began with literary studies of German culture and the like; both were driven to become revolutionary pamphleteers. If people are rotting and starving in all directions, and nobody else has the heart or brains to make a disturbance about it, the great writers must.

Fleet Street Eclogues

BY JOHN DAVIDSON

(In these dialogues a number of English journalists discuss their views of life. The author, by his tragic death, may be said to have put the seal of sincerity upon his bitter utterances. See page 216)

I too, for light the world explore,
And, trembling, tread where angels trod;
Devout at every shrine adore,
And follow after each new god.
But by the altar everywhere
I find the money-changer's stall;
And littering every temple-stair
The sick and sore like maggots crawl....

And always divers undertones
Within the roaring tempest throb--
The chink of gold, the laborer's groans,
The infant's wail, the woman's sob.

Hoarsely they beg of Fate to give
A little lightening of their woe,
A little time to love, to live,
A little time to think and know.
I see where from the slums may rise
Some unexpected dreadful dawn--
The gleam of steeled and scowling eyes,
A flash of women's faces wan!

To a Bourgeois Litterateur

(_Who referred to a group of agitators as "Professional Hoboes"_)

BY MAX EASTMAN

(See page 408)

How old, my friend, is that fine-pointed pen
Wherewith in smiling quietude you trace
The maiden maxims of your writing-place,
And o'er this gripped and mortal-sweating den
And battle-pit of hunger, now and then
Dip out, with nice and intellectual grace,
The faultless wisdoms of a nurtured race
Of pale-eyed, pink, and perfect gentlemen?

How long have art and wit and poetry,
With all their power, been content, like you,
To gild the smiling fineness of the few,
To filmy-curtain what they dare not see
In multudinous reality--
The rough and bloody soul of what is true?

The Scholar as Revolutionist

(_From "Anatole France"_)

BY GEORG BRANDES

(Danish critic, born 1842)

What gives Anatole France his lasting hold over his hearers is not his cleverness, but himself--the fact that this savant who bears the heavy load of three cultures, nay, who is in himself a whole little culture--this sage, to whom the whole life of the earth is but an ephemeral eruption on its surface, and who consequently regards all human endeavor as finally vain--this thinker, who can see everything from innumerable sides and might have come to the conclusion that, things being bad at the best, the existing state of matters was probably as good as the untried: that this man should proclaim himself a son of the Revolution, side with the workingman, acknowledge his belief in liberty, throw away his load and draw his sword--this is what moves a popular audience, this is what plain people can understand and can prize. It has shown them that behind the author there dwells a man--behind the great author a brave man.

A Warning

BY HEINRICH HEINE

(_Translated by Louis Untermeyer_)

(See pages 97, 222, 744)

You will print such books as these!
Then you're lost, my friend, that's certain.
If you wish for gold and honor,
Write more humbly--bend your knees!

Aye, you must have lost your senses
Thus to speak before the people;
Thus to dare to speak of Preachers
And of Potentates and Princes.

Friend, you're lost--so it appears--
For the Princes have long arms,
And the Preachers have long tongues,
--And the masses have long ears!

Stoning the Prophets

(On page 623 appears a sample of the weapons with which Privilege defends itself upon the political field. It seems worth while to include at this place a sample of what the revolutionary poet has to encounter. The following are comments of newspapers and weekly reviews in London at the time of the first productions of the plays of Henrik Ibsen, in 1891. They are taken partly from an article by William Archer, "Ghosts and Gibberings," _Pall Mall Gazette_, April 8, 1891; and partly from another article by the same writer, "The Mausoleum of Ibsen," _Fortnightly Review_, July, 1893)

London _Truth_, March 19, 1891, discussing a reading of "Ghosts":

An obscure Scandinavian dramatist and poet, a crazy fanatic, and determined Socialist, is to be trumpeted into fame for the sake of the estimable gentleman who can translate his works, and the enterprising tradesmen who publish them.... The unwomanly woman, the unsexed female, and the whole army of unprepossessing cranks in petticoats ... sat open-mouthed and without a blush on their faces, whilst a Socialist orator read aloud "Ghosts," the most loathsome of Ibsen's plays.... If you have seen one play by Ibsen you have seen them all. A disagreeable and nasty woman; an egotistical and preachy man; a philosophical sensualist; dull and undramatic dialogue. The few independent people who have sat out a play by Ibsen ... have said to themselves, Put this stuff before the play-going public, risk it at the evening theatre, remove your claque, exhaust your attendance of the Socialistic and the sexless, and then see where your Ibsen will be. I have never known an audience yet that cared to pay to be bored.

* * * * *

London _Daily Telegraph_, reviewing the first performance of "Ghosts":

Ibsen's positively abominable play.... This disgusting representation.... Reprobation due to such as aim at infecting the modern theatre with poison after desperately inoculating themselves and others.... An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open.... Candid foulness.... Kotzebue turned bestial and cynical.... Offensive cynicism.... Ibsen's melancholy and malodorous world.... Absolutely loathsome and fetid.... Gross, almost putrid indecorum.... Literary carrion.... Crapulous stuff.... Novel and perilous nuisance.

* * * * *

Other London reviews of "Ghosts":

Unutterably offensive.... Prosecution under Lord Campbell's Act.... Abominable piece.... Scandalous.--_Standard._

Naked loathsomeness.... Most dismal and revolting production.--_Daily News._

Revolting, suggestive and blasphemous.... Characters either contradictory in themselves, uninteresting or abhorrent.--_Daily Chronicle._

A repulsive and degrading work.--_Queen._

Morbid, unhealthy, unwholesome, disgusting story.... A piece to bring the stage into disrepute and dishonor with every right-thinking man and woman.--_Lloyds._

Merely dull dirt long drawn out.--_Hawk._

If any repetition of this outrage be attempted, the authorities will doubtless wake from their lethargy.--_Sporting and Dramatic News._

Most loathsome of all Ibsen's plays.... Garbage and offal.--_Truth._

Ibsen's putrid play called "Ghosts." ... So loathsome.--_Academy._

As foul and filthy a concoction as has ever been allowed to disgrace the boards in an English theatre.... Dull and disgusting.... Nastiness and malodorousness laid on thickly as with a trowel.--_Era._

Noisome corruption.--_Stage._

For Hire

BY MORRIS ROSENFELD

(See page 56. Translation by Rose Pastor Stokes)

Work with might and main,
Or with hand or heart,
Work with soul and brain,
Or with holy art,
Thread, or genius' fire--
Make a vest, or verse--
If 'tis done for hire,
It is done the worse.

A Man of Genius

(_From "The New Grub Street"_)

BY GEORGE GISSING

(A novel portraying the lives of the innumerable hack-writers who starve in the garrets of modern London. See page 104)

His name was Harold Biffen, and, to judge from his appearance, he did not belong to the race of common mortals. His excessive meagerness would all but have qualified him to enter an exhibition in the capacity of living skeleton, and the garments which hung upon this framework would perhaps have sold for three and sixpence at an old-clothes dealer's. But the man was superior to these accidents of flesh and raiment. He had a fine face: large, gentle eyes, nose slightly aquiline, small and delicate mouth. Thick black hair fell to his coat-collar; he wore a heavy moustache and a full beard. In his gait there was a singular dignity; only a man of cultivated mind and grateful character could move and stand as he did.

His first act on entering the room was to take from his pocket a pipe, a pouch, a little tobacco-stopper, and a box of matches, all of which he arranged carefully on a corner of the central table. Then he drew forward a chair and seated himself.

"Take your top-coat off," said Reardon.

"Thanks, not this evening."

"Why the deuce not?"

"Not this evening, thanks."

The reason, as soon as Reardon sought for it, was obvious. Biffen had no ordinary coat beneath the other. To have referred to this fact would have been indelicate; the novelist of course understood it, and smiled, but with no mirth.

"Let me have your Sophocles," were the visitor's next words.

Reardon offered him a volume of the Oxford Pocket Classics.

"I prefer the Wunder, please."

"It's gone, my boy."

"Gone?"

"Wanted a little cash."

Biffen uttered a sound in which remonstrance and sympathy were blended.

"I'm sorry to hear that; very sorry. Well, this must do. Now, I want to know how you scan this chorus in the 'Oedipus Rex.'"

Reardon took the volume, considered, and began to read aloud with metric emphasis.

"Choriambics, eh?" cried the other. "Possible, of course; but treat them as Ionics _a minore_ with an anacrusis, and see if they don't go better."

He involved himself in terms of pedantry, and with such delight that his eyes gleamed. Having delivered a technical lecture, he began to read in illustration, producing quite a different effect from that of the rhythm as given by his friend. And the reading was by no means that of a pedant, rather of a poet.

For half an hour the two men talked Greek metres as if they lived in a world where the only hunger known could be satisfied by grand or sweet cadences....

Biffen was always in dire poverty, and lived in the oddest places; he had seen harder trials than even Reardon himself. The teaching by which he partly lived was of a kind quite unknown to the respectable tutorial world. In these days of examinations, numbers of men in a poor position--clerks chiefly--conceive a hope that by "passing" this, that, or the other formal test they may open for themselves a new career. Not a few such persons nourish preposterous ambitions; there are warehouse clerks privately preparing (without any means or prospect of them) for a call to the Bar, drapers' assistants who "go in" for the preliminary examination of the College of Surgeons, and untaught men innumerable, who desire to procure enough show of education to be eligible for a curacy. Candidates of this stamp frequently advertise in the newspapers for cheap tuition, or answer advertisements which are intended to appeal to them; they pay from sixpence to half a crown an hour--rarely as much as the latter sum. Occasionally it happened that Harold Biffen had three or four such pupils in hand, and extraordinary stories he could draw from his large experience in this sphere....

_Biffen Falls in Love_

A fatal day. There was an end of all his peace, all his capacity for labor, his patient endurance of penury. Once, when he was about three and twenty, he had been in love with a girl of gentle nature and fair intelligence; on account of his poverty, he could not even hope that his love might be returned, and he went away to bear the misery as best he might. Since then the life he had led precluded the forming of such attachments; it would never have been possible for him to support a wife of however humble origin. At intervals he felt the full weight of his loneliness, but there were happily long periods during which his Greek studies and his efforts in realistic fiction made him indifferent to the curse laid upon him. But after that hour of intimate speech with Amy, he never again knew rest of mind or heart....

He was not the kind of man that deceives himself as to his own aspect in the eyes of others. Be as kind as she might, Amy could not set him strutting Malvolio-wise; she viewed him as a poor devil who often had to pound his coat--a man of parts who could never get on in the world--a friend to be thought of kindly because her dead husband had valued him. Nothing more than that; he understood perfectly the limits of her feeling. But this could not put restraint upon the emotion with which he received any trifling utterance of kindness from her. He did not think of what was, but of what, under changed circumstances, might be. To encourage such fantasy was the idlest self-torment, but he had gone too far in this form of indulgence. He became the slave of his inflamed imagination....

Companionless, inert, he suffered the tortures which are so ludicrous and contemptible to the happily married. Life was barren to him, and would soon grow hateful; only in sleep could he cast off the unchanging thoughts and desires which made all else meaningless. And rightly meaningless; he revolted against the unnatural constraints forbidding him to complete his manhood. By what fatality was he alone of men withheld from the winning of a woman's love?

He could not bear to walk the streets where the faces of beautiful women would encounter him. When he must needs leave the house, he went about in the poor, narrow ways, where only spectacles of coarseness, and want, and toil would be presented to him. Yet even here he was too often reminded that the poverty-stricken of the class to which poverty is natural were not condemned to endure in solitude. Only he who belonged to no class, who was rejected alike by his fellows in privation and by his equals in intellect, must die without having known the touch of a loving woman's hand.

The summer went by, and he was unconscious of its warmth and light. How his days passed he could not have said....

One evening in early autumn, as he stood before the book-stall at the end of Goodge Street, a familiar voice accosted him. It was Whelpdale's. A month or two ago he had stubbornly refused an invitation to dine with Whelpdale and other acquaintances, and since then the prosperous young man had not crossed his path.

"I've something to tell you," said the assailer, taking hold of his arm. "I'm in a tremendous state of mind, and want someone to share my delight.... You know Dora Milvain; I have asked her to marry me, and, by the Powers! she has given me an encouraging answer! Not an actual yes, but encouraging! She's away in the Channel Islands, and I wrote----"

He talked on for a quarter of an hour. Then, with a sudden movement, the listener freed himself.

"I can't go any farther," he said hoarsely. "Goodbye!"

Whelpdale was disconcerted.

"I have been boring you. That's a confounded fault of mine; I know it."

Biffen had waved his hand, and was gone.

A week or two would see him at the end of his money. He had no lessons now, and could not write; from his novel nothing was to be expected. He might apply again to his brother, but such dependence was unjust and unworthy. And why should he struggle to preserve a life which had no prospect but of misery?...

It was in the hours following his encounter with Whelpdale that he first knew the actual desire of death, the simple longing for extinction. One must go far in suffering before the innate will-to-live is thus truly overcome; weariness of bodily anguish may induce this perversion of the instincts; less often, that despair of suppressed emotion which had fallen upon Harold. Through the night he kept his thoughts fixed on death in its aspect of repose, of eternal oblivion. And herein he found solace.

The next night it was the same. Moving among many common needs and occupations, he knew not a moment's cessation of heartache, but when he lay down in the darkness a hopeful summons whispered to him. Night, which had been the worst season of his pain, had now grown friendly; it came as an anticipation of the sleep that is everlasting.

A few more days, and he was possessed by a calm of spirit such as he had never known. His resolve was taken, not in a moment of supreme conflict, but as the result of a subtle process by which his imagination had become in love with death. Turning from contemplation of life's one rapture, he looked with the same intensity of desire to a state that had neither fear nor hope.

One afternoon he went to the Museum Reading Room, and was busy for a few minutes in consultation of a volume which he took from the shelves of medical literature. On his way homeward he entered two or three chemists' shops. Something of which he had need could be procured only in very small quantities; but repetition of his demand in different places supplied him sufficiently. When he reached his room, he emptied the contents of sundry little bottles into one larger, and put this in his pocket. Then he wrote rather a long letter, addressed to his brother in Liverpool....

* * * * *

"Really," said Jasper, "one can't grieve. There seemed no possibility of his ever earning enough to live decently upon. But why the deuce did he go all the way out there? Consideration for the people in whose house he lived, I dare say; Biffen had a good deal of native delicacy...."

"Was he still so very poor?" asked Amy, compassionately.

"I'm afraid so. His book failed utterly."

"Oh, if I had imagined him still in such distress, surely I might have done something to help him!"--So often the regretful remark of one's friends, when one has been permitted to perish.

Letter to the Earl of Chesterfield

BY SAMUEL JOHNSON

(English man of letters, 1709-1784; maker of a celebrated English dictionary, and the subject of one of the world's most famous biographies. Dr. Johnson might be called the first professional literary man; the first who lived by his trade and was respected for it. So the present letter, addressed to one of the most powerful personages of the time, may be said to mark the end of the age of patronage in the literary world: the system whereby authors dedicated their works to noblemen, and received food and favors in return)

My Lord, I have been lately informed, by the proprietor of the World, that two papers, in which my Dictionary is recommended to the publick, were written by your Lordship. To be so distinguished, is an honour, which, being very little accustomed to favours from the great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge.

When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your Lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by the enchantment of your address, and could not forbear to wish that I might boast myself _Le vainquer du vainqueur de la terre_;--that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world contending; but I found my attendance so little encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once addressed your Lordship in publick, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly scholar can possess. I had done all that I could; and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little.

Seven years, my Lord, have now past, since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a Patron before.

The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.

Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity, not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the Publick should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.

Having carried my work thus far with so little obligation to any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have been long wakened from that dream of hope in which I once boasted myself with so much exultation,

My Lord,
Your Lordship's most humble
Most obedient servant,
SAM. JOHNSON.

Mother Hubbard's Tale

BY EDMUND SPENSER

(See page 493)

Full little knowest thou that hast not tride,
What hell it is in suing long to bide:
To loose good dayes, that might be better spent;
To waste long nights in pensive discontent;
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow;
To feed on hope, to pine with feare and sorrow;
To fret thy soule with crosses and with cares;
To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires;
To fawne, to crowche, to waite, to ride, to ronne,
To spend, to give, to want, to be undonne.
Unhappie wight, borne to desastrous end,
That doth his life in so long tendence spend!

The Journal of Arthur Stirling

BY UPTON SINCLAIR

(A young poet, starving and about to commit suicide, leaves his farewell testament to the world)

The poet! He comes with a heart trembling with gladness; he comes with tears of rapture in his eyes. He comes with bosom heaving and throat choking and heart breaking. He comes with tenderness and with trust, with joy in the beauty that he beholds. He comes a minstrel, with a harp in his hand--and you set your dogs upon him, you drive him torn and bleeding from your gates!

The poet! You make him go out into the market and chaffer for his bread! You subject him to the same law to which you subject your loafers and your louts--that he who will not work cannot eat! Your drones and your drunkards--and your poets! Every man must earn for himself, every man must pay his way! No man must ask favors, no man must be helped, no man shall be different from other men! For shame! For shame!...

I am to die now, therefore let me write it: that I was a man of Genius. And that you have trodden me down in the struggle for existence. I saw things that no other man has ever seen, I would have written things that no other man can ever write. And you have trodden me down in the struggle for existence--you have trodden me down because I could not earn my bread!

This is what I tell you--this is what I cry out to you, that the man of Genius _cannot_ earn his bread; that the work by which he develops his power is something absolutely and utterly different from the work by which he earns his bread; and that every hour which he gives to the one, he lessens his power and his capacity for the other. Every hour that he gives to the earning of his bread, he takes from his soul, he weakens his work, he destroys beauty which never again can he know or dream.

And this again is what I tell you, this again is what I cry out to you: that the power by which a man of Genius does his work, and the power by which he earns his bread, are things so entirely distinct that _they may not occur together at all_! The man may have both, but then again he may only have the former. And in that case he will die like a poisoned rat in a hole.

Last Verses

BY THOMAS CHATTERTON

(This boy, 1752-1770, came to London friendless and unknown, and on account of starvation committed suicide at the age of eighteen. He has become the classic example of the world's mistreatment of its poets. The reference to Bristol is to his native city)

Farewell, Bristolia's dingy piles of brick,
Lovers of mammon, worshippers of trick!
Ye spurned the boy who gave you antique lays,
And paid for learning with your empty praise.
Farewell, ye guzzling aldermanic fools,
By nature fitted for corruption's tools!
I go to where celestial anthems swell;
But you, when you depart, will sink to hell.
Farewell, my mother!--cease, my anguished soul,
Nor let distraction's billows o'er me roll!
Have mercy, Heaven! when here I cease to live,
And this last act of wretchedness forgive.

The "Pinch of Poverty"

BY FRANCIS THOMPSON

(English poet, 1860-1907, who lived neglected and died in misery)

'Tis the convinced belief of mankind that to make a poet sing you must pinch his belly, as if the Almighty had constructed him like a certain rudimentary vocal doll.

Man as God

(_From "A Ballad in Blank Verse"_)

BY JOHN DAVIDSON

(See pages 216, 761)

How vain! he cried. A God? a mole, a worm!
An engine frail, of brittle bones conjoined;
With tissue packed; with nerves, transmitting force;
And driven by water, thick and coloured red:
That may for some few pence a day be hired
In thousands to be shot at! Oh, a God,
That lies and steals and murders! Such a God
Passionate, dissolute, incontinent!
A God that starves in thousands, and ashamed,
Or shameless in the workhouse lurks; that sweats
In mines and foundries! An enchanted God,
Whose nostrils in a palace breathe perfume,
Whose cracking shoulders hold the palace up,
Whose shoeless feet are rotting in the mire!

A Preface to Politics

BY WALTER LIPPMANN

(American writer upon public questions, born 1889)

We have almost no spiritual weapons against classicalism: universities, churches, newspapers are by-products of a commercial success; we have no tradition of intellectual revolt. The American college student has the gravity and mental habits of a Supreme Court judge; his "wild oats" are rarely spiritual; the critical, analytical habit of mind is distrusted. We say that "knocking" is a sign of the "sorehead" and we sublimate criticism by saying that "every knock is a boost." America does not play with ideas; generous speculation is regarded as insincere, and shunned as if it might endanger the optimism which underlies success. All this becomes such an insulation against new ideas that when the Yankee goes abroad he takes his environment with him.

Learning

(_From "Thus Spake Zarathustra"_)

BY FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

(German philosopher, 1844-1900, whose lofty utterance has suffered from materialistic interpreters)

As I lay in sleep a sheep ate up the ivy crown of my head--ate and then said: "Zarathustra is no more a scholar."

Said it and went strutting away, and proud. A child told it to me....

This is the truth. I am gone out of the house of the scholars, and have slammed to the door behind me....

I am too hot, and burning with my own thoughts; oft will it take away my breath. I must into the open and out of all dusty rooms.

But they sit cool in cool shadows; they wish in all things to be but spectators, and guard themselves lest they sit where the sun burn the steps.

Like those who stand upon the street and stare at the people who go by; so they wait also and stare at the thoughts that others have thought.

If one touches them with the hands, they make dust around them like meal-sacks, and involuntarily; but who could guess that their dust comes from corn and the golden rapture of the summer fields?