MAMMONART

An Essay in Economic Interpretation
BY
UPTON SINCLAIR
Published by the Author Pasadena, California
Copyright, 1924, 1925 BY
UPTON SINCLAIR
First edition, February, 1925, 4,000 copies, clothbound,
4,000 copies, paperbound.

CONTENTS

MAMMONART

CHAPTER I
OGI, THE SON OF OG

One evening in the year minus ninety-eight thousand and seventy-six—that is, one hundred thousand years ago—Ogi, the son of Og, sat in front of a blazing fire in the cave, licking his greasy lips and wiping his greasy fingers upon the thick brown hair of his chest. The grease on Ogi’s lips and fingers had come from a chunk out of an aurochs, which Ogi had roasted on a sharpened stick before the fire. The tribe had been hunting that day, and Ogi himself had driven the spear through the eye of the great creature. Being young, he was a hero; and now he had a hero’s share of meat in him, and sat before the fire, sleepy-eyed, retracing in dull, slow revery the incidents of the hunt.

In his hand was the toasting-stick, and he toyed with it, making marks upon the ground. Presently, half involuntarily, there came a pattern into these marks: a long mark—that was how the body of the aurochs went; two marks in front, the forelegs of the aurochs; two marks in back, the hind legs; a big scratch in front, the head. And suddenly Ogi found a thrill running over him. There was the great beast before him, brought magically back to life by markings in the dirt. Ogi had made the first picture!

But then terror seized him. He lived in a world of terror, and always had to act before he dared to think. Hastily he scratched over the dirt, until every trace of the magic beast was gone. He gazed behind him, expecting to see the spirit of the aurochs, summoned into the cave by this fearful new magic. He glanced at the other members of his tribe, crouching sleepily about the fire, to see if they had noticed his daring venture.

But nothing evil happened; the meat in Ogi’s stomach did not develop bad spirits that summer night, neither did the lightning poke him with its dagger, nor a tree-limb crash upon his head. Therefore, next evening a temptation came upon him; he remembered his marks, and ventured to bring back his magic aurochs, and sit before the fire and watch him toss his head and snort at his enemies. As time passed Ogi did a thing yet bolder; he made a straight up-and-down mark, with two prongs underneath, and a round circle on top; Ogi himself, a double Ogi, with his long spear stopping the monster’s charge!

Even that did not prove bad magic; Ogi did not sicken, no lightning-daggers or tree-branches struck him. With practice, another idea came; he indicated the body of the aurochs by two marks, one above and one below, where the creature vanished into space. Between these were other scratches indicating a shaggy coat; and in the head a round spot, with a black hole punched deep by the toasting-stick—the eye of the monster, glaring balefully at Ogi, and filling him with such thrills as had never before passed along the nerves of a living organism.

Of course such big magic could not long remain a secret. Ogi was irresistibly driven to show his homemade aurochs to the tribe, and there was a tremendous commotion. It was a miracle, all made clear by their gruntings; they knew the monster instantly—an aurochs, and nothing else! They cried out with delight at the cleverness of the representation.

(And ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and sixty-six years later, when the writer was a little boy, he used to see in a certain home of wealth which he visited, three pictures hanging in the dining-room, and appealing to gastronomic emotions. One picture represented several peaches on a platter, another represented half a dozen fish on a string, the third showed two partridges hanging by their necks. The members of the tribe of Ogi, now called the Merchants and Manufacturers Association of Baltimore, would gather at supper parties and marvel at this big magic. Here were works of art, and all knew they were works of art, and knew exactly why; they would say of the fish: “You can see the very shine of the scales!” Of the peaches: “You can rub the fuzz off them!” Of the birds: “You can bury your hands in the feathers!”)

But when the first thrills had passed, the dwellers in the cave with Ogi fell victims to panic. An aurochs was a fearful and destructive beast; it was hard enough to have to kill him for food—but now to bring back his angry spirit was tempting fate. In the Holy Mountain fronting the cave dwelt the Great Hunter, who made all aurochs, and would be jealous of usurpers. The Witch Doctor of the tribe, who visited the Great Hunter and made spells for good luck—he was the proper person to make magic, and not an up-start boy. So the Witch Doctor trampled out the drawing of Ogi, and the Old Man of the tribe, who made the laws, drove him out from the cave, and into the night where the sabre-toothed tiger roamed.

(And last winter the writer stood one night at 43rd Street and Broadway, a busy corner of New York, and across the front of a building a whole block long he beheld great letters of violet fire, spelling three words: THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. He entered the building, and there upon a silver screen he saw a flash of lightning, followed by a burst of clouds and a terrifying clatter of stage thunder, and out of the lightning and clouds and thunder was unrolled before his eyes the Second Commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.)

Ogi found a cave of his own, and escaped the sabre-tooth tiger. And not all the furies of the Witch Doctor, nor even the Ten Commandments of the Great Hunter, could take from his mind the memory of those delicious thrills which had stolen over him when he made the magic aurochs in the dirt. Being now alone, he had time for magic, and he got red stones and covered the walls of his cave with pictured beasts of many sorts. And presently came young men from the tribe, and beholding what he had done, they took to visiting him in secret to share the forbidden thrills.

(And on Main Street in our Great City, I can take you to a cave with letters of fire over the top, called an “arcade,” and you may go in, and find the magic of Ogi hidden in little boxes, into which you drop a token made of copper, and see what is to be seen. One part of this cave is labeled, For Men Only. I have never been into this part, and therefore do not know what magic the descendants of Ogi have there hidden; but it is interesting to know that a nerve channel, once established in a living organism, can be handed down through generations to the number of three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three.)

Now in the course of time it happened that there was war in the tribe between the Old Man and the Next Oldest Man; and also between the Old Witch Doctor and the Next Doctor. The rebels, having learned about the magic of Ogi, desired to make use of it. There was a secret meeting, at which the rebel Witch Doctor declared that he had had an interview with the Great Hunter on the Holy Mountain, and the Great Hunter Himself had given Ogi power to make the magic aurochs, and to kill them in magic hunts. In other words, said the Witch Doctor, Ogi was an Inspired Artist; and if he and his friends would help the new party into power, Ogi would become Court Painter, and his scratches would be raised to the status of Ritual. Needless to say, Ogi was delighted at that, and likewise his friends, some of whom had learned to make scratches almost as good as Ogi’s, and who desired now to become Inspired Artists, and to decorate the cave walls and weapons of the tribe.

But one provision must be made clear, said the rebel Witch Doctor; Ogi and his friends must understand that they were to glorify the magic of this particular Witch Doctor. When they portrayed hunting, they must make it plain that it was the new Old Man who was head of the hunt; they must make him wonderful and fearful to the tribe. Ogi and his pupils answered that so long as they were permitted to make drawings of aurochs and of hunters, it made not the slightest difference what aurochs and what hunters they portrayed. Art was a thing entirely aloof from politics and propaganda. And so the bargain was settled; the banner of insurrection was raised, and the new Old Man became head of the tribe, and the new Witch Doctor set up his magic behind the aurochs-skin curtains in the far end of the cave; and Ogi made many pictures of both of them.

(And I have walked through the palaces of kings, and through temples and cathedrals in many lands, and have seen long rows of portraits of the Old Men of many tribes, clad in robes of gorgeous colors, and wearing upon their heads crowns of gold and flashing jewels; they were called kings and emperors and dukes and earls and princes and captains of industry and presidents of chambers of commerce. I have seen also the portraits and statues of Witch Doctors of many varieties of magic; they were called popes and priests and cardinals and abbots and college presidents and doctors of divinity. And always the paintings were called Old Masters.)

So Ogi became Court Painter and painted the exploits of his tribe. And when the tribe went out to battle with other tribes, Ogi made pictures to show the transcendent beauty of his tribe, and the unloveliness of the tribe they were to destroy.

(And when my tribe went out to battle, its highly paid magazine illustrators made pictures of noble-faced maidens shouting war-cries, and it was called a Liberty Bond Campaign. And the story-tellers of my tribe became martial, and called themselves Vigilantes.)

Now Ogi throve greatly, developing his technique, so that he could show all kinds of beasts and men. The fame of his magic spread, and other tribes came to visit the caves and to marvel at his skill, and to gaze reverently upon the Inspired Artist.

(And in a certain hotel restaurant in New York I was admitted behind the magic red cord which separates the great from the unheard of, and sitting at a table my companion enlightened me with discreet nods and whispers, saying: “That is Heywood Broun; and next to him is Rita Weiman; and that’s Mencken just coming in; and that round little man in the brown suit and the big spectacles is Hergesheimer.”)

The fame of Ogi, and the magic of which he was master, brought thrills to the young women of the tribe, and they cast themselves at his feet, and so his talent was not lost to future generations.

(And in the galleries of Europe I gazed upon miles of madonnas—madonnas mournful and madonnas smiling, madonnas with wavy golden hair and madonnas with straight black hair—but never a madonna that was not plump, manicured and polished and robed in silks and satins, as became the mistresses of court painters, and of popes and cardinals and abbots able to pay for publicity.)

The sons and grandsons of Ogi cultivated his magic, and found new ways to intensify the thrills of art. They learned to make clay figures, and to carve the Old Men of the tribe and the Witch Doctors out of wood and stone.

(And just before the war, being in Berlin, I was taken by a friend for a drive down the Sieges Allée, between rows of white marble monsters in halberd and helm and cowl and royal robes, brandishing sceptres and mitres, battle-axes and two-bladed swords. Being myself a barbarian, I ventured to titter at this spectacle; whereupon my friend turned pale, and put his fingers upon my lips, indicating the driver of the hack, and whispering how more than once it had happened that presumptuous barbarians who tittered at the Old Men of the Hohenzollern tribe had been driven by a loyal hackman straight to the police station and to jail.)

Likewise the sons of Ogi learned to make noises in imitation of the songs of birds, and so they were able to bring back the thrills of first love. They learned to imitate the rolling of thunder, and the clash of clubs and spears in battle fury, and so they were able to renew the glory of the hunt and the slaughter.

(And in the year 1870 the Khedive of Egypt offered a prize of ten thousand pounds to that descendant of Ogi who should make the most powerful magic out of his ancestral slaughterings; and now, throughout all civilization, the masters of the machines of slaughter put on their honorific raiment, and escort their pudgy wives, bedecked with jewels, to performances of their favorite grand opera, “Aida.”)

Likewise the descendants of Ogi learned to enact their adventures in imitation hunts. Inspired by music, they would dance about the camp-fire, thrusting their weapons into a magic aurochs, shouting when they saw him fall, and licking their chops at the taste of imaginary flesh.

(And in thirty thousand “movie” houses throughout the United States the tribes now gather to woo and win magic darlings of luxury, and lick their chops over the acquirement of imaginary millions; also to shudder at wicked Russian Bolsheviks with bristling beards, at villainous “Red” agitators with twisted faces, and at such other spectacles as the Old Men and the Witch Doctors prepare for them, according to instructions from the Great Hunter on the Holy Mountain.)

Three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three generations have passed, and in every generation the descendants of Ogi have had to face the problem of their relationship to the Old Men and the Witch Doctors. Ogi himself was a hunter, who slew his aurochs with his own hand, and butchered and cooked his meat before he ate it. But now it has been long since any descendant of Ogi has driven a spear through the eye of a charging aurochs. They have become specialists in the imaginary; their hands adjusted, not to spears and stone hatchets, but to brushes and pencils, fountain-pens and typewriter keys. So, when they are cast out from the tribe they can no longer face the sabre-toothed tiger and find meat for themselves and their beautiful women; so, more than ever, the grip of the Old Men and the Witch Doctors grows tight upon them. More than ever it is required that their pictures and stories shall deal with things of which the Old Men and the Witch Doctors approve; more than ever they are called upon to honor and praise the customs of their tribe, as against the customs of all other tribes of men or angels.

CHAPTER II
WHO OWNS THE ARTISTS?

Many and various are the art-forms which the sons and grandsons of Ogi have invented; but of all these forms, the one which bores us most quickly is the parable—a little story made up for the purpose of illustrating a special lesson. Therefore, I hasten to drop Ogi and his sons and grandsons, and to say in plain English that this book is a study of the artist in his relation to the propertied classes. Its thesis is that from the dawn of human history, the path to honor and success in the arts has been through the service and glorification of the ruling classes; entertaining them, making them pleasant to themselves, and teaching their subjects and slaves to stand in awe of them.

Throughout this book the word artist is used, not in the narrow sense popular in America, as a man who paints pictures and illustrates magazines; but in its broad sense, as one who represents life imaginatively by any device, whether picture or statue or poem or song or symphony or opera or drama or novel. It is my intention to study these artists from a point of view so far as I know entirely new; to ask how they get their living, and what they do for it; to turn their pockets inside out, and see what is in them and where it came from; to put to them the question already put to priests and preachers, editors and journalists, college presidents and professors, school superintendents and teachers: WHO OWNS YOU, AND WHY?

The book will present an interpretation of the arts from the point of view of the class struggle. It will study art works as instruments of propaganda and repression, employed by the ruling classes of the community; or as weapons of attack, employed by new classes rising into power. It will study the artists who are recognized and honored by critical authority, and ask to what extent they have been servants of ruling class prestige and instruments of ruling class safety. It will consider also the rebel artists, who have failed to serve their masters, and ask what penalties they have paid for their rebellion.

The book purposes to investigate the whole process of art creation, and to place the art function in relation to the sanity, health and progress of mankind. It will attempt to set up new canons in the arts, overturning many of the standards now accepted. A large part of the world’s art treasures will be taken out to the scrap-heap, and a still larger part transferred from the literature shelves to the history shelves of the world’s library.

Since childhood the writer has lived most of his life in the world’s art. For thirty years he has been studying it consciously, and for twenty-five years he has been shaping in his mind the opinions here recorded; testing and revising them by the art-works which he has produced, and by the stream of other men’s work which has flowed through his mind. His decisions are those of a working artist, one who has been willing to experiment and blunder for himself, but who has also made it his business to know and judge the world’s best achievements.

The conclusion to which he has come is that mankind is today under the spell of utterly false conceptions of what art is and should be; of utterly vicious and perverted standards of beauty and dignity. We list six great art lies now prevailing in the world, which this book will discuss:

Lie Number One: the Art for Art’s Sake lie; the notion that the end of art is in the art work, and that the artist’s sole task is perfection of form. It will be demonstrated that this lie is a defensive mechanism of artists run to seed, and that its prevalence means degeneracy, not merely in art, but in the society where such art appears.

Lie Number Two: the lie of Art Snobbery; the notion that art is something esoteric, for the few, outside the grasp of the masses. It will be demonstrated that with few exceptions of a special nature, great art has always been popular art, and great artists have swayed the people.

Lie Number Three: the lie of Art Tradition; the notion that new artists must follow old models, and learn from the classics how to work. It will be demonstrated that vital artists make their own technique; and that present-day technique is far and away superior to the technique of any art period preceding.

Lie Number Four: the lie of Art Dilettantism; the notion that the purpose of art is entertainment and diversion, an escape from reality. It will be demonstrated that this lie is a product of mental inferiority, and that the true purpose of art is to alter reality.

Lie Number Five: the lie of the Art Pervert; the notion that art has nothing to do with moral questions. It will be demonstrated that all art deals with moral questions; since there are no other questions.

Lie Number Six: the lie of Vested Interest; the notion that art excludes propaganda and has nothing to do with freedom and justice. Meeting that issue without equivocation, we assert:

All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.

As commentary on the above, we add, that when artists or art critics make the assertion that art excludes propaganda, what they are saying is that their kind of propaganda is art, and other kinds of propaganda are not art. Orthodoxy is my doxy, and heterodoxy is the other fellow’s doxy.

As further commentary we explain that the word morality is not used in its popular sense, as a set of rules forbidding you to steal your neighbor’s purse or his wife. Morality is the science of conduct; and since all life is conduct it follows that all art—whether it knows it or not—deals with the question of how to be happy, and how to unfold the possibilities of the human spirit. Some artists preach self-restraint, and some preach self-indulgence; and both are preachers. Some artists says that the purpose of art is beauty, and they produce beautiful art works to demonstrate the truth of this doctrine; when such art works are completed, they are beautiful demonstrations of the fact that the purpose of art is to embody the artist’s ideas of truth and desirable behavior.

What is art? We shall give a definition, and take the rest of the book to prove it. We hope to prove it both psychologically, by watching the art process at work, and historically, by analyzing the art works of the ages. We assert:

Art is a representation of life, modified by the personality of the artist, for the purpose of modifying other personalities, inciting them to changes of feeling, belief and action.

We put the further question: What is great art? We answer:

Great art is produced when propaganda of vitality and importance is put across with technical competence in terms of the art selected.

As commentary we add that whether a certain propaganda is really vital and important is a question to be decided by the practical experience of mankind. The artist may be overwhelmingly convinced that his particular propaganda is of supreme importance, whereas the experience of the race may prove that it is of slight importance; therefore, what was supposed to be, and was for centuries taken to be a sublime work of art, turns out to be a piece of trumpery and rubbish. But let the artist in the labor of his spirit and by the stern discipline of hard thinking, find a real path of progress for the race; let him reveal new impulses for men to thrill to, new perils for them to overcome, new sacrifices for them to make, new joys for them to experience; let him make himself master of the technique of any one of the arts, and put that propaganda adequately and vitally before his fellows—and so, and so alone, he may produce real and enduring works of art.

Postscript

Manifestly, all this depends upon the meaning given to the term propaganda. The writer thought that he could trust his critics to look it up in the dictionary; but during the serial publication of the book he discovered that the critics share that false idea of the word which was brought into fashion during the World War—this idea being itself a piece of propaganda. Our own martial fervor was of course not propaganda, it was truth and justice; but there crept in an evil enemy thing, known as “German propaganda”; and so the word bears a stigma, and when this book applies it to some honorable variety of teaching, the critics say that we are “stretching its meaning,” and being absurd.

But all we are doing is to use the word correctly. The Standard Dictionary defines propaganda as: “Effort directed systematically toward the gaining of support for an opinion or course of action.” This, you note, contains no suggestion of reprobation. Propaganda may be either good or bad, according to the nature of the teaching and the motives of the teacher. The Jesuits have been carrying on a propaganda of their faith for three hundred years, and one does not have to share this faith in order to admit their right to advocate it. The present writer has for twenty-one years been carrying on a propaganda for Socialism, and has a sturdy conviction that his time has not been wasted.

We take certain opinions and courses of action for granted; they come to us easily, and when in a poem or other work of art we encounter the advocacy of such things, it does not seem to us propaganda. Take, for example, that favorite theme of poets, the following of our natural impulses; it is pleasant to do this, and the poet who gives such advice awakens no opposition. But it is different in the case of ideas which require concentration of the attention and effort of will; such ideas trouble and repel us, we resent them, and the term “propaganda” is our expression of resentment. For example, the old poet Herrick advises:

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying,
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.

Here is an attitude of relaxation toward life; the poet gives his advice under a beautiful simile and with alluring melody, and therefore it is poetry. If we should call it propaganda, all critics would agree that we were “stretching the word,” and being absurd. But now, take four lines by Matthew Arnold:

Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find your body by the wall.

Here is an utterance of exactly the opposite kind, an utterance of moral conviction and resolution; the poet is bidding us fight for truth and justice. Like Herrick, he has chosen an effective simile, and has put music and fervor into his message; as poetry his lines are exactly as good as Herrick’s; and yet, if we called them propaganda, how many critics would object?

This book will endeavor to demonstrate that exactly the same thing applies to the phenomena of the class struggle, as they appear either in real life or in works of art. It comes easy to human beings to accept society as it is, and to admire the great and strong and wealthy. On the other hand, it gives us a painful wrench to be told that there are moral excellences and heroic splendors in the souls of unwashed and unbeautiful workingmen. We resent such ideas, and likewise the persons who persist in forcing them into our minds; which explains why all orthodox critics agree that Jesus and Tolstoi are propagandists, while Shakespeare and Goethe are pure and unsullied creative artists. Such distinction between “art” and “propaganda” is purely a class distinction and a class weapon; itself a piece of ruling-class propaganda, a means of duping the minds of men, and keeping them enslaved to false standards both of art and of life.

CHAPTER III
ART AND PERSONALITY

We have promised to prove our thesis psychologically, by watching the art process at work, and historically, by studying the art works of the ages. We begin with the former task.

Let us investigate the art process in its elemental forms, as we have seen them in the story of Ogi. Art begins as the effort of man to represent reality; first, for the purpose of bringing it back to his own mind, and second, for the purpose of making it apprehensible to others. Just as Ogi would seek for ways to keep the meat of the aurochs for as long as possible so that he might eat it, so he would keep the memory of the aurochs so that he might contemplate it. And just as he would share the meat of the aurochs in a feast with his fellows, and derive honor and advantage therefrom, so he would use a picture of the aurochs, or a story of the hunt, or a song about it, or a dance reproducing it.

Thus we note two motives, the second of them predominantly social. It is this impulse to communicate ideas and emotions to others, that becomes the dominant motive in art, and is the determining factor in the greatness of art. We share Ogi’s memory of the hunt, his thrills of fear, his furious struggle, his triumph over a chunk of brutal and non-rational force. Try it on your own little Ogis, and you will find they never tire of hearing about the aurochs hunt; and—here is the essential point—while hearing, they are living in the minds of others, they are becoming social beings. So through the ages the race has developed its great civilizing force, the sympathetic imagination, which has brought the tribes together into nations, and ultimately may bring the nations into the human race.

The pleasures which we derive from a picture or representation of reality are many and complicated. There is, first of all, the pleasure of recognition. In its cruder form it is like guessing a puzzle; in more mature reproductions we have the pleasure of following the details. “That is old Smith,” we say—“even to the wart on his nose!” We say: “You can see the shine of the fish’s scales, you can wipe the fuzz off the peach, you can bury your hands in the birds’ feathers!” But is that all there is to art? Manifestly not, for if it were, the sons and grandsons of Ogi would have been put out of business by the photographic camera. You can take a microscope to the product of a camera, and discover endless more details—a bigger magic than any son or grandson of Ogi has achieved.

But even supposing that a micro-photograph were the highest art, still you could not get away from the influence of personality. There would always remain the problem: Upon what shall the camera-lens be focussed?

The first artist I met in my life was a painter, the late J. G. Brown. He used to paint pictures of newsboys and country urchins, and the quaint-looking old fellows who loaf in cross-roads stores. As a boy I watched him at work, and roamed about the country with him when he selected his subjects. At this distance I remember only two things about him, his benevolent gray beard, and the intense repugnance he expressed when I pointed out an old war veteran who had lost an arm. Deformity and mutilation—oh, horrible! Never could an artist tolerate such a subject as that!

But growing older, I observed that some of the world’s greatest artists had made a habit of painting mutilations and deformities. I saw “Old Masters” portraying crucifixions and martyrdoms; I saw the nightmares of Doré, and the war paintings of Verestchagin. So I understand the difference between a man who wishes to probe the deeps of the human spirit, and one who wishes merely to be popular with children and childish-minded adults. The late J. G. Brown was a “realist,” according to the popular use of the term; that is, having selected a subject, he painted him exactly as he was; but by deliberately excluding from his artistic vision everything suggesting pain and failure, he left you as the sum total of his work an utterly false and sentimental view of life.

Most artists go even further in imposing their personality upon their work. Having selected a subject, they do not reproduce it exactly, but modify it, emphasizing this trait or that. This process is known as “idealizing.” The word is generally understood to mean making the thing more pretty, more to the beholder’s taste; but this is a misuse of the word. To idealize a subject means to modify it according to an idea, to make it expressive of that idea, whether pleasing or otherwise. Henry James tells a story about a portrait painter, who takes as his subject a prominent man; divining the fundamental cheapness and falsity of the man’s character, he paints a portrait which brings out these qualities, and so for the first time reveals the man to the world, and causes the man’s wife to leave him. That is one kind of “idealizing”; but manifestly the portrait painter who practiced that method would have a hard time to find sitters.

What generally happens in such cases we saw when Ogi was invited to portray the Witch Doctor and the Old Man of his tribe. The last great hero of the Hohenzollerns, who paid for those white marble monsters at which I tittered in the Sieges Allée, is cursed with a withered left arm, a cause of agonies of humiliation to his strutting soul. In his photographs you will see him carefully posed, so that his left arm is partly turned away. But how about the countless paintings he had made of himself? Do you imagine that the painter ever failed to supply a sound and sturdy left arm? In the same way, in the pictorial labors of all the Ogis of Egypt, you will find the ruler always represented as of abnormal stature. Manifestly, in a settled empire the ruler will be of smaller stature than his fighting men, because he will be coddled in childhood; but the smaller he becomes in reality, the more rigid the art convention that he is big.

It was for offenses such as this that Plato drove the artists out of his Republic. They were liars and pretenders, the whole tribe, and destroyed men’s respect for truth. But as a matter of fact, this kind of idealizing of rulers and fighting men may be entirely sincere. The artist is more sensitive than his fellowmen—that is what makes him an artist; he shrinks from pain and violence, and feels a real awe for authority. He thinks his sovereign is bigger in spirit; and so, in making him bigger in body, the artist is acting as a seer and philosopher, bringing out an inner truth. Such is the clue to the greater part of our present-day art standards; snobbery and subservience, timidity and worship of tradition, also bragging and strutting and beating of tom-toms. Every little tea-party poet and semi-invalid cherishes a strong and cruel dream—Nietzsche with his Blond Beast, and Carlyle with his Hero-worship, and Henley with his Song of the Sword, and Kipling with his God of our Fathers, known of old, Lord of our far-flung battle-line.

CHAPTER IV
THE LABORER AND HIS HIRE

Little by little we now begin to note the outlines of Ogi’s art code. Two negative propositions we may consider as clear: Ogi does not paint the thing as it really is; and he does not paint the thing as he sees it. The former he could not do, for he does not know what the thing really is; and the second he would consider bad manners, bad morals and bad taste. Ogi paints the thing as he thinks it ought to be; or, more commonly, he paints the thing as he thinks other people ought to think it to be.

And now comes the question: Why, having chosen his subject, does Ogi idealize it according to one idea, and not according to another? Are such decisions matters of accident or whim? Assuredly not; for human psychology has its laws, which we can learn to understand. We ask: What are the laws of Ogi, his hand and his eye and his brain? What forces determine that he shall present his “reality” in this way and not in that?

The first thing to say is: Don’t ask Ogi about it, for he cannot tell you. Ogi is not at all what he thinks he is, and does not produce his works of art from the motives he publishes to the world. We shall find that the fellow has been almost too shrewd—he has contrived a set of pretenses so clever that he has fooled, not merely his public, but himself. He who would produce a great work of art, said Milton, must first make a work of art of his own life. Ogi has taken this maxim literally, and got out a fancy line of trade-lies.

It is perfectly plain that the artist is a social product, a member of a tribe and swayed by tribal impulses. But you find him denying this with passion, and picturing himself as a solitary soul dwelling in an ivory tower, galloping through the sky on a winged horse, visited and directed by heaven-sent messengers, and wooed by mysterious lovely ladies called Muses. At the same time, however, he wants at least one lady love who is real; and this lady love does not often share his interest in the imaginary lady loves. On the contrary, she is accustomed to point out the brutal fact that Ogi wants three good chunks of aurochs meat every twenty-four hours; also, the lady herself wants a little meat—and more important yet, she wants it served according to the best tribal conventions, those to which she was accustomed before she ran away and married an artist. The tribal law decrees that the glass on her table must be cut by hand, even though it is cut crooked; the linen on her table must be embroidered by hand, because, if it is done wholesale, by machinery, it is not “art.”

Theoretically, it is possible for an artist to produce his art-works for the approval of the imaginary Muses; but as a matter of fact you find that the most solitary old Ogi has somebody, a faithful friend, or an old housekeeper, or even a child, whose approval he craves. Even an artist on a desert island will be thinking that some day a ship will land there; while young and rebellious artists produce for a dream public in the future. I myself did all my early work from that motive; and in Voltaire I came upon what seemed to me the cruelest sentence ever penned: “Letters to posterity seldom reach their destination!”

Ogi must have an audience. So, in his selecting, his idealizing, and his other varieties of feigning, he has always before him the problem: Will this please my public? And to what extent? And for how long? There is no birth control movement in Ogi’s brain; vast numbers of dream children are born there, and he must select a few of them to be nourished and raised up to reality, while he sentences the others to be starved and buried.

Having become a professional, living by his work, Ogi is under the necessity of finding an audience that will feed him. And remember, it is not merely the three chunks of aurochs meat per day, and three more for Mrs. Ogi; it is the means of serving Mrs. Ogi’s meat in the fashion her social position requires. Surely I do not have to prove the proposition that Ogi cannot produce beautiful and inspiring works of art while Mrs. Ogi is raising ructions in the cave!

So comes the great struggle in the artist’s soul, a struggle which has gone on for three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three generations, and may continue for as many more. Among the children of Ogi’s brain are some he dearly loves, but who will not “sell.” There are others whom he despises, but whom he knows the public will acclaim and pay for. “Which shall it be?”

The answers have been as various as the souls of artists. We shall see how through the ages there have been hero artists and martyr artists, men who have produced what they believed to be the best, in the face of obloquy, ridicule, starvation, even the dungeon and the stake. But, manifestly, these conditions are not the most favorable for the birth of masterpieces. To develop an art technique requires decades of practice and study. To feel other persons’ emotions intensely and reproduce them according to some coherent plan; to devise new forms, and arrange millions of musical notes or words or molecules of paint in a complex design—all this requires intense and persistent concentration. Men cannot do such work without leisure; neither can they do it while they are despising themselves for doing it. So we may set down the following as one of the fundamental art laws:

The bulk of the successful artists of any time are men in harmony with the spirit of that time, and identified with the powers prevailing.

CHAPTER V
THE LORD’S ANOINTED

Who pays for art? The answer is that at every stage of social development there are certain groups able to pay for certain kinds of art. These groups may be large or small, but they constitute the public for that kind of art, and determine its quality and character; he who pays the piper calls the tune. It should need no stating that Rolls-Royce automobiles are not made according to the tastes of rag-pickers and ditch-diggers, nor yet of poets and saints; they are made according to the tastes of people who can afford to pay for Rolls-Royce automobiles. If our thinking about the arts were not so completely twisted by false propaganda, it would seem an axiom to say that the first essential to understanding any art product is to understand the public which ordered and paid for that art product.

Some arts, of course, are cheaper than others. Ballads cost nothing; you can make one up and sing it on any street corner. Hence we find the ballad close to the people, simple and human, frequently rebellious. The same thing applies to folk tales and love songs—until men take to printing them in books, after which they develop fancy forms, understandable only to people who have nothing to do with their time except to play with fancy things.

Beginning with the primitive art forms, it would be possible to arrange the arts in an ascending scale of expensiveness, and to show that exactly in proportion to the cost of an art product is its aristocratic spirit, its subservience to ruling class ideals. Of all the art forms thus far devised, the most expensive per capita is the so-called “grand opera”; this grandeur has to be subscribed for in advance by the “diamond horseshoe,” and consequently there has never been such a thing as a proletarian grand opera—if you except the “Niebelung Ring,” which was so effectively disguised as a fairy story that nobody but Bernard Shaw has been able to decipher its incendiary message.

Many years ago I was talking with a captain of industry, prominent in New York political life. I spoke of the corruption of the judges, and he contradicted me with a smile. “Our judges are not bought; they are selected.” And exactly so it has been with our recognized and successful artists; they have been men who looked up to the ruling classes by instinct, and served their masters gladly and freely. If they did not do so, they paid the penalty by a life of conflict and exile; if they happened to be poor and friendless, they do not even receive the gratitude of posterity, because their dream-children died unborn, and were buried, along with their parents, in graves unknown. “Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest.”

It will be our task to study the great art periods one after another, taking the leading artists and showing what they were, what they believed, how they got their livings, and what they did for those who paid them. We shall find that everywhere they were members of their group, sharing the interests and the prejudices, the hates and fears, the jealousies and loves and admirations of that group. We shall find them subject to all the social stresses and strains of the time, and fighting ardently the battles of their class. For life is never a static thing, it is always changing, always subjecting its victims to new dangers, forcing them to new efforts. Either the ruling class is threatened by the attacks of outside enemies, or else there is a new class arising inside the community. In times of internal order and prosperity, there come luxury and idleness, the degeneration of the tribe; there come all sorts of novelties startling the elders—modernists sapping the old time creeds, and flappers adopting the vices of men.

Such evils must be corrected; such enemies of the tribe must be put down; and in the course of these labors, what chance is there that the ruling classes will fail to make use of their most powerful weapon, that of art? There is simply no chance whatever. Ogi will be called on by his masters; or else he will act of his own impulse—he will lead the crusade, singing the praises of the old time ways, “idealizing” the ancestral heroes, the holy saints and the founding fathers, and pouring ridicule upon the bobbed heads of the flappers. The critics will leap to Ogi’s support, hailing him as the Lord’s own anointed, a creator of masterpieces, dignified, serene, secure in immortality. This is art, the critics will aver, this is real, genuine, authentic art; while out there in the wilderness somewhere howls a lone gray rebellious wolf, attacking and seeking to devour everything that is beautiful and sacred in life—and the howling of this wolf is not art, it is vile and cheap propaganda.

The critics are certain that the decision is purely a question of aesthetics; and we answer that it is purely a question of class prestige. They are certain that art standards are eternal; and we answer that they are blown about by the winds of politics. Social classes struggle; some lose, and their glory fades, their arts decay; others win, and set new standards, according to their interests. The only permanent factors are the permanent needs of humanity, for justice, brotherhood, wisdom; and the arts stand a chance of immortality, to the extent that they serve such ideals.

CHAPTER VI
ARTIFICIAL CHILDHOOD

The reader who shares the art beliefs now prevalent in the world will be quite certain that the ideas here being expounded are fantastic and absurd. Among those who thus differ is a friend of mine, a very great poet who is patiently reading the manuscript and suffering, both for himself, and for all poets who will follow him. He writes: “There is and should be such a thing as the enjoyment of what we are pleased to term ‘pure’ beauty.” And again: “You must believe either that we have a right to play, in which case the poet-who-doesn’t-preach is justified, or believe the contrary, with its corollary of a coming race of solemn scientific monsters.”

I do not want to gain an argument by the easy device of omitting everything that does not help me; therefore I take up this friend’s contentions. Manifestly an element of play is essential to all art; it is what distinguishes art from other forms of expression, essays, sermons, speeches, mathematical demonstrations. If we do not emphasize this play element, it is not from failure to realize the difference between a work of art and an essay, a sermon, a speech or a mathematical demonstration; it is merely because the play element in art is recognized by everyone, to the exclusion of the element of rational thought and purpose, which is no less essential.

Let us ask: what is play? The answer is: play is nature’s device whereby the young train themselves for reality. Two puppies pretending to bite each other’s throats, learn to fight without having their throats torn in the process. So all young creatures develop their faculties; and this function is carried right up into modern art products. From many new novels I may learn, without risking the fatal experiment, what will happen to me if I permit the wild beast of lust to get me by the throat.

Let us have another principle, to guide us in our analysis:

Art is play, having for its purpose the development of human faculties, and experiment with the possibilities of life.

But notice this distinction. Two puppies, leaping at each other’s throats and dodging away, do not reason about what they are doing; they are guided by instinct. But a modern novelist knows what he is doing; he is thinking ordered thoughts about life, and making a deliberate record thereof. So we have a second principle:

Art is play, to the extent that it is instinctive; it is propaganda when it becomes mature and conscious.

Manifestly, art can never be entirely play, because no human being is entirely instinctive; nor can it be entirely propaganda—if it is to remain art, it must keep the play form. Moreover, the play element must be real, not simply a sham; the work must be a representation of life so skillful that we can pretend to take it for actuality. Wilkie Collins gave his formula for success as a fiction writer: “Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait.” In other words, make ’em do just what they would have to do, if they were taking part in actual life. This is the one indispensable element: the artist, by whatever trick, must persuade us that this is no trick, but reality.

The function of play in adults has been ably studied in Dr. Patrick’s book, “The Psychology of Relaxation.” We humans have only recently developed the upper lobes of the brain, and cannot stand using them all the time; it is necessary occasionally to let them rest, and to live in the lower centers; in other words, to go back into childhood and play. To my friend the Poet, who asks if I believe in play, I answer by pointing to my tennis racquet. But what shall we say about adults who play all the time? Modern science has a name for such people; it calls them morons.

If you are a moron artist, producing for a moron public, it will not avail to argue with you. But we have to inquire: how comes it that the art of morons is glorified and defended as “true” and “pure” art? How comes it that the quality of enjoyment without thought, which is characteristic of puppies and infants, comes to be considered a great quality in adults? In the fields of industry and education, we know that pitiful thing, the mind of a child in the body of a grown man. How comes it that such defective mentality is glorified in the field of art?

The answer is what you will expect from me. There is a class which owns and runs the world, and wishes everything to stay as it is. As one of the functions of ownership, this class controls culture and determines taste. It glorifies the scholar, the man who walks backward through life; and likewise it glorifies the art-moron, the man who has emotions without brains.

The so-called “purity” of art is thus a form of artificial childhood. Just as the Chinese bind the feet of their women in order to keep them helpless and acquiescent, so ruling-class culture binds the imagination of the race so that it may not stride into the future. And if you think that those who run the world’s thinking for the ruling class are not intelligent enough to formulate such a purpose as this—my reply is that you are as unintelligent as they would wish you to be, and you justify all the contempt they feel for you.

CHAPTER VII
MRS. OGI EMERGES

We now assume as demonstrated the following propositions. First:

The artist is a social product, his psychology and that of his art works being determined by the economic forces prevailing in his time.

And second:

The established artist of any period is a man in sympathy with the ruling classes of that period, and voicing their interests and ideals.

If this be true, the next step to the understanding of art, and the history of art periods past and present, is to understand the economic forces controlling mankind; the evolution and struggle of classes.

We get that far, when the argument is broken in upon by the particular Mrs. Ogi who inhabits the cave where this manuscript is produced. Says Mrs. Ogi: “In other words, you are going to give them your Socialist lecture.”

Says Mrs. Ogi’s husband: “But—”

Says Mrs. Ogi, who finishes her husband’s sentences, as well as his manuscripts: “You promised me to write one book without propaganda!”

“But—” once more—“this is a book to prove that all books are propaganda! And can I conduct a propaganda for propaganda that isn’t propaganda?”

“That depends,” says Mrs. Ogi, “upon how stupid you are.”

She goes on to maintain that the purpose of all propaganda is to put itself across; the essence of it being a new camouflage, which keeps the reader from knowing what he is getting. “If you imagine that people who take up a discussion of art standards are going to read a discourse on the history of social revolutions, I call you silly, and you aren’t going to alter my opinion by calling me Mrs. Ogi.”

“My dear,” says the husband, in haste, “all that is not to be taken literally. Mrs. Ogi is the wife of the artist in general; she is the human tie that binds him to the group, and forces him to conform to group conventions.”

“I know—like all men, you want to have it both ways. Everybody will assume—”

“I won’t let them assume! It shall be explicitly stated that you are not Mrs. Ogi.”

“Let it be explicitly stated that there has never been any hand-embroidered table-linen in this cave—never any sort of table-linen but paper napkins since I’ve been in it!”

“My dear,” says Ogi, patiently, “you were the one who first pointed out to me the significance of hand-embroidered table-linen in the history of art. You remember that time when we went to the dinner-party at Mrs. Heavy Seller’s—”

“Yes, I remember; and what you ought to do is to put that dinner-party into your book. Entitle your next chapter ‘The Influence of Lingerie on Literature,’ or, ‘The Soul of Man Under Silk Hosiery.’”

“That’s not bad,” says Ogi, “I’ll use it later. Meantime, I’ll do my best to liven up the argument as you request.” And so he retires and cudgels his brain, and comes back with a new chapter—bearing, not the dignified title of “The Evolution of Social Classes,” as he had planned, but instead, a device to catch the fancy of the idle and frivolous—

CHAPTER VIII
THE HORSE-TRADE

Twenty-five years ago an American, himself a victim of the commercial system and dying of consumption, wrote a novel which contained a description of a horse-trade. The novel was rejected by many publishers, but came finally to one reader who recognized this horse-trading scene as the epitome of American civilization. He persuaded the author to rewrite the book, putting the horse-trade first, and making everything else in the novel subsidiary; this was done, and the result was the most sensational success in the history of American fiction. Young and old, rich and poor, high and low, all Americans recognized in the opening scene of “David Harum” the creed they believed in, the code they followed, the success they sought: they bought six hundred thousand copies of the book. I was young at the time, but I recall how all the people I knew were shaking their sides with laughter, discussing the story with one another, delighting in every step of the process whereby David got the better of the deacon.

Let us analyze this horse-trade, taking our data from the book. First, there is the lie of the seller, describing a horse which he believes to be useless. “He’s wuth two hundred jest as he stands. He ain’t had no trainin’, an’ he c’n draw two men in a road wagin better’n fifty.” And second, there is the lie of the purchaser, as the purchaser himself boasts about it afterwards: “Wa’al, the more I looked at him, the better I liked him, but I only says, ‘Jes so, jes so, he may be wuth the money, but jes as I’m fixed now he ain’t wuth it to me, an’ I hain’t got that much money with me if he was,’ I says.”

So we see that in a horse-trade both the traders lie; and further we see that each pretends to be telling the truth, and makes an effort to persuade the other that he is telling the truth. Watching the ignoble process, we perceive that neither of the traders is ever sure how far his own lies are being accepted; nor is he sure what modicum of truth there may be in the other’s lies. So each is in a state of uncertainty and fear. When the process has been completed, one trader has a sense of triumph, mingled with contempt for the victim; the other trader has a sense of hatred, mingled with resolve to “get square.”

It is further to be pointed out that this conflict of wits, this modern form of the duello, while it seems ruthless and cruel, yet has its own strict ethical code. David would lie to the deacon, but he would not pick the deacon’s pocket, nor would he stab the deacon in the back, no matter how badly the deacon might have defeated him in commercial war. We observe also that the author feels under the necessity of persuading us that David would not have cheated the deacon unless he had first been cheated by the deacon; this being the conventional lie of the horse-trader turned novelist. We may also observe that next to the impulse to acquisitiveness, the supreme quality of this Yankee farmer, comes the impulse to sociability; having consummated his bargain, he tells his sister about it, and the humanness of the story lies not merely in the triumph of David, but in his pleasure in telling his sister. And observe that David tells her the truth without reservation. There might be other matters about which he would lie to his sister, but so far as concerns this horse-trade, he knows that she will not betray him to the deacon.

When the first savage offered a fish in exchange for a cocoanut, and made statements as to the freshness of the fish, and the difficulties and perils of fishing, the trade-lie was a comparatively simple thing. But in the process of industrial evolution, there have been developed so many variations and complexities that an encyclopedia of occupational deceptions would be required. Suffice it to say that the principle is understood in every nation and clime, being embodied in innumerable maxims and witticisms: caveat emptor: business is business; dog eat dog; the devil take the hindmost; look out for Number One; do others or they will do you; self-preservation is the first law of Nature. In a civilization based upon commercial competition, laissez faire and freedom of contract, the lie of the horse-trader becomes the basis of all the really significant actions of men and women.

So obvious is this, so clearly is it set forth in the wisdom of the race, that at first thought it seems surprising that anyone could be led into believing a trade-lie. But it is obvious that the test of a competent liar is that he gets himself believed; like the endless struggle between the gun-maker and the armor-plate maker, is the struggle between the trader and his victim. The trader is aided by the fact that an impulse towards constructiveness has been planted in the human heart, which breeds a repugnance to dishonesty. So there are ideals and aspirations, religions, loyalties and patriotisms; there are the Christs and Galileos of history, the Parsivals and Don Quixotes of legend. As the trader himself puts it, there is a sucker born every minute. The trader kills a silly sheep, and puts the skin over his wolf’s hide; so we have religious institutions and ethical systems, philanthropic endowments, professional codes, political platforms; we have honors, offices and titles, proprieties and respectabilities, graces, refinements, etiquettes and standards of good taste. Many of these things begin naively and in good faith; but in a society given up to commercial competition, and dominated by systems of greed, they all become trade-lies, and are used as weapons in the war of the classes.

CHAPTER IX
THE CLASS LIE

In the stage of economic evolution where the savage exchanges a fish for a cocoanut, the balance of advantage in the trade may be equal. The fisherman may need the cocoanut as badly as the cocoanut-gatherer needs the fish. But as soon as we come to the stage where tokens are accepted, there begins a shifting of the balance of advantage; for the reason that the seller comes to specialize in the selling of one thing, whereas the more complex the society, the more different things the buyer must buy, and so he remains an amateur as to each. Moreover, the sellers learn to combine; they form partnerships, firms, corporations, alliances, leagues, associations, parties, classes; the buyer, on the other hand, remains unorganized and helpless. He is the consumer, who takes what he can get; he is the proletarian, who has only his chains to lose; he is that plaything of the competitive process, that jest of the trader through the ages, the general public. “The public be damned,” said a great seller of railway transportation, and his phrase has become the corner-stone of capitalist civilization.

Nineteen hundred years ago a revolutionary economist remarked, “To him that hath shall be given; while from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” And this economic process is one which tends continually to accelerate, multiplying itself by geometrical progression. In present-day society, the sellers are nearly all organized, while labor is only ten per cent organized, and the ultimate consumer is not organized at all. We have thus the combination of a monopoly price with a competitive wage, and the surplus wealth of the world is drawn by automatic process into the hands of a small class. The world’s selling power is now vested in combinations of capital, called “trusts,” which present themselves in the aspect of enormous fortresses of lies.

Merely to give a catalogue of the various trade-lies embodied in the daily operations of such a “trust” would require a volume. There are so many kinds of lies that no one man can know them all. There are lies carried in the heads and embodied in the practice of petty chiefs of departments. There are lies so generally accepted and conventionalized that the very liars do not know them as such, and are amazed and wounded in the feelings when their attention is called to the truth. There are lies so complicated that highly trained lawyers have been paid millions of dollars to contrive them. There are lies so cleverly hidden that it would take the restoring of tons of burned account-books to prove them. There are lies so blazoned forth on billboards and in newspapers that they have become part of the daily thought of the people, and have given new words and phrases to the language.

So comes the next stage in the evolution of the trade-lie. The owners of trusts and combinations unite into parties, classes and governments for the defense of their gains. They combine and endow and perpetuate their trade-lies, making them into systems and institutions; and so we have the Lie Wholesale, the Lie Sublimated, the Lie Traditional, the Lie Classical; we have the Lie become Religion, Philosophy, History, Literature, and Art.

Turn back to Chapter II, and read the list of the six great art lies; you may now understand who made them and why. Lie Number One, the Art for Art’s Sake lie, the notion that the end of art is in the art work, is a trade lie of the art specialist, the effort of a sacred caste to maintain its prestige and selling price. Lie Number Two, the lie of Art Snobbery, the notion that art is for the chosen few, and outside the grasp of the masses, is the same. Lie Number Three, the lie of Art Tradition, the notion that new artists must follow old models, is a self-protective device of those in power. Lie Number Four, the lie of Art Dilettantism, the notion that the purpose of art is entertainment and diversion, is a device of the culturally powerful to weaken and degrade those upon whom they prey; just as the creatures of the underworld get their victims drunk before they rob them. Lie Number Five, the lie of the Art Pervert, the notion that art has nothing to do with moral questions, is the same. Lie Number Six, the lie of Vested Interest, is the sum of all the other lies, of all the infinite cruelties of predatory, class-controlled culture.

The sarcastic critic will say that I make the artist an extremely knavish and dangerous person. My answer is that he may be, and frequently is, an amiable and guileless child. His knaveries are class knaveries, collective cruelties, conventions and attitudes to life which have been produced as automatic reactions to economic forces; the individual acquires them with no more conscious thought than is involved in the assimilation of his food. Ogi lies and pretends, he cheats, robs and murders, imaginatively speaking, by the same instincts that cause him to blink his eyes in a bright light.

CHAPTER X
MRS. OGI ORDERS JAZZ

Says Mrs. Ogi: “Well, I see you are having your way.”

Now this is a sore subject in the cave. Each of the residents is absolutely certain that it is always the other who has his or her way; and each is able to cite chapter and verse, and frequently does so. However, at present Ogi has a guilty conscience, so he speaks softly. “I am almost through with my explanation of industrial evolution.”

“Almost!” sniffs Mrs. Ogi. “How much more?”

“Well, I have to show how successive classes emerge and acquire power—”

“Until at last we see the inevitable triumph of the proletariat and the establishment of the Co-operative Commonwealth! That will be so new to your readers, and so delightfully exciting! And meantime they sit and wonder when the scandals begin.”

“Scandals?” says Ogi. “Have I said anything about scandals?”

“You tell your readers you’re going to turn the artists’ pockets inside out and show what is in them! If you don’t do it, they’ll say, ‘This show is a frost!’”

I mention that Mrs. Ogi was brought up in exclusive social circles, where never a breath of slang could pass her lips without some female relative raising a finger and whispering: “Hush!” But times are changing, and marriage becomes more and more a lottery.

Says Mrs. Ogi’s husband: “Of course I intend to muck-rake individual artists—”

“Which artists?”

“Well, I have to begin at the beginning—”

“But you’ve already begun with the beginning of the world!”

“I have to begin now with the first significant art.”

Mrs. Ogi’s snort reminds her husband of the old days of the aurochs hunt. “What the American people want to know is how many thousand dollars a week Gloria Swanson is really getting, and what was Rupert Hughes’ total income from ‘The Sins of Hollywood.’ Is all that to be put off to the end of your book?”

“But how can I deal with present-day art ahead of ancient art?”

“You make me think of those interminable English novels, which begin with the infancy of the hero, and get through public school at page three hundred and something!”

“But, my dear, there is some old literature that people are really interested in. The Bible for example—”

“The Hundred Best Books! Number two, Homer; number three, Shakespeare; Number four, Paradise Lost—”

“But you overlook the fact—the Bible is a best-seller!”

“The people who buy it are not people who read about art, or would ever hear of a book on art theories. They are people like Mamma! Once upon a time a book-agent offered her a set of the World’s Great Orations, and she decided the dark red leather binding would go well with the draperies in the drawing-room. Then a couple of weeks later came another man, selling a set of books in dark green cloth. She decided these would match the decorations in the billiard-room, so she bought them also, and it wasn’t until afterwards that somebody noticed the family had two sets of the same World’s Great Orations!”

“But, my dear, there really is literature in the Bible.”

“People have been told about literature in the Bible since they were children in Sunday school, and there’s no idea in the whole world that bores them quite so much.”

“But that’s exactly the point! That’s what this book is for—to show how real literature was alive in its own day, and is just as much alive in the present day. Don’t you see what a fascinating theme: they had in Judea the very same class struggle—”

There has come that fanatical light into his eyes which Mrs. Ogi knows so well; he means to make her sit and listen to a whole chapter—and when she has the laundry to count, and the apples to boil for his supper! “Go ahead and write it,” she says, in a weary voice. “But take my advice and jazz it up!”

So Ogi goes away and postpones his exposition of the successive emergence of social classes; and instead of an impressive title such as “Agrarian Revolt in Ancient Judea,” he begins—

CHAPTER XI
THE POPULIST CONVENTION

From the New York “Sun,” July 4, the early 1890s:

Kansas Kicking

Cranks’ Convention in Tumult at Topeka

Wild Asses of Prairie Bray

Millennium by Majority Vote Scheduled for Next November

Topeka, Kan., July 3. (Special to the “Sun.”) The open season for devil-hunting is on in Topeka today. From Nemaha County on the North to Comanche on the South, from Cherokee County on the East to Cheyenne on the West, the hunters are pouring into their state capital; money-devil hunters and speculator-devil hunters, railroad-devil hunters and rum-devil hunters. The streets of the city swarm with them, the lobbies of the hotels are packed with them, spell-binders and oratorical wizards, political quack-doctors and prohibitionist cranks, long-haired men and short-haired women, partisans of free money, free land and free love. For months they have been looking forward to this convention, which is to wrest the powers of government from the hands of a predatory plutocracy; today, if there is a lunatic in Kansas who is not in Topeka, it is only because the Wall Street devil has got him behind bars in one of the asylums.

The lobby of the American House this evening is more like the menagerie tent of a circus than like anything else ever seen in the effete East. The convention opens at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, and tonight every orator has a last chance to save the nation before the platform is made up. Audiences are not necessary, everybody talks at once, and there are a dozen men delivering exhortations, standing on the leather seats of hotel-lobby chairs. Here is “Sockless” Jeremiah Simpson, expecting to be nominated for Congress tomorrow. Coatless and tieless, his collar wilted flat, he shouts to the corn-field cohorts his denunciations of the blood-sucking leeches which have picked the bones of the farmers of Kansas. Here is Isaiah Woe, weird figure having whiskers almost to his belt and pants almost to his shoe-tops, waving his skinny arms and justifying his surname—“Woe, woe, woe—woe unto this and woe unto that—woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the rights from the poor of my people, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless!”

Isaiah is known as a “prophet” among this prairie population; he roars the grievances of the dear peepul of the prairie-country, and shakes the hayseeds and corn-dust out of his white whiskers until his audience really believes it sees a halo about his head. He does not hesitate to claim divine inspiration, declaring to the mob: “The Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives.”

Isaiah has no rival in lung-power, unless it be Micah, the Pottawatomie Prophet—“Mournful Mike,” as he is known in the state capital. This aged replica of Uncle Sam is out on a cracker-box in front of the Elks’ Club, and your reporter took down some of his sentences verbatim: “They build up Washington with blood, and New York with iniquity. The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money.... Therefore shall Washington for your sake be plowed as a field, and New York shall become heaps, and the buildings of Wall Street as the high places of a forest.”

There is a regiment of such calamity howlers and kickers, thirsting for the blood of the money-devil. There is Elijah, known as the “boy orator” from Kiowa County, and Angry Amos, the “Wild Man of Neosho.” There is one John, who calls himself the Baptist, and has adopted the singular habit of dipping his followers into water—though it must be stated that few of them show the effects after a blistering hot day in Topeka. It is reported and generally believed that the water-dipping prophet lives upon the locusts which infest the Kansas corn-fields, together with wild honey furnished by friendly bees in the cottonwoods along the creek bottoms. Apparently, however, the prophet has not brought along a supply of his customary provender, for your correspondent observed him this afternoon partaking of sinkers and coffee in the railroad restaurant, with a bunch of other wild asses from the prairie.

Kansas is scheduled to have a new political party tomorrow; a party of the peepul, to be run by prophets, none of whom will take their salaries when they get elected to office. And what is to be the platform of this party? Well, the government is to fix the price of wheat, and freight-rates are to be reduced to a point which will compel holders of railway securities to live on locusts and wild honey. All interest on money is to be abolished; the prophets of the Lord call it “usury,” and the plank in their platform on the subject reads as follows:

“If thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee, then thou shalt relieve him, yea, though he be a stranger or a sojourner, that he may live with thee: Take thou no interest of him, or increase; but fear thy God that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him any money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase.”

And if that be not enough, bond slavery is to be forbidden by law, and beginning with the year 1900, and every fifty years thereafter, all debts are to be forgiven, and everybody is to have a fresh start. Well may Jabez Smith, chairman of the State Committee of the Republican party, watching this outfit of wild men and listening to their conglomeration of lunacy, lift up his hands and cry out: “Was ist los mit Kansas?”...

Such was news according to the New York “Sun” of Charles A. Dana’s time; the sort of news from which I got all my political ideas during boyhood. Seven times every week I would read articles and editorials in that tone, and laugh with glee over them; and then, every Sunday morning and evening I would go to church, and listen while the preacher read the words of Jeremiah and Isaiah and Micah and Elijah and Amos and John the Baptist, and I would accept them all as the divinely inspired words of God. How was I, poor lad, to know that the very same prophets were back on earth, living the very same lives and making the very same speeches—trying to save America, as of old they had tried to save Judea, from the hands of the defilers and the despoilers?

CHAPTER XII
KANSAS AND JUDEA

How did it happen that political agitators, living in the Mississippi Valley at the end of the nineteenth century, were identical in spirit with religious prophets in Asia Minor five hundred years before Christ? The answer is that civilizations rise and fall, and history repeats itself. Let me describe one historic process, and you watch my statement phrase by phrase, and see if you can tell whether I am referring to ancient Judea or to modern Kansas.

A people traveled for a long distance, fleeing from despotism and seeking religious liberty. They were a primitive, hardy people, having a stern faith in one God who personally directed their lives. They came to a rich land, and conquered it by hard fighting, under this personal direction of their God. They built homes, they gathered flocks and herds, they accumulated wealth; and they saw this wealth pouring into cities, to be absorbed by governing and trading classes. Their agricultural democracy evolved into a plutocratic imperialism. The landlords and the tax collectors left them nothing but a bare living; the fruits of their labor paid for palaces and temples with golden roofs, and for golden calves and monkey dinners, and rulers with a thousand chorus girls.

So there was revolt in the country districts, and one after another came prophets of discontent. Always these prophets were radical in the economic sense, voicing the wrongs of the poor and helpless, the widows and the orphans. Always they were conservative in the social and religious sense, calling the people back to simplicity and honesty of life, to faith in the one true God. Always they used the symbols of the old tribal creed; repudiating new-fangled divinities such as Baal and Darwin, and gathering at Armageddon to battle for the Lord. Throughout their lives they were stoned and persecuted and covered with ridicule; when they died they became their country’s glory, and their words were cherished and embodied in sacred records which school children were made to study.

Now, how much of that is Judea, and how much is Kansas?

Let us make clear the point, essential to our present argument, that from cover to cover the “Old Testament” is propaganda. Those who created it created it as propaganda, having no remotest idea of anything else. Nowadays our docile population reads it and accepts it as the literal inspired Word—not realizing that the book is divided between two kinds of propaganda, which exactly cancel each other: the propaganda of a ruling class, teaching reverence for kings and priests, and the propaganda of rebels, clamoring for the overthrow of these same kings and priests!

This Old Testament is also offered to us in the literature classes, so it will be worth our while to consider it from that point of view. Manifestly there is much of it which never pretended to be literature. There are weary chronicles of the doings of kings, and lists of their sons and grandsons. You may find acres of this in our big libraries, but it is classified as genealogy, not literature. Likewise there are the laws of the Hebrews, which belong in the legal department. There are architectural specifications for the temple, and rules of hygiene—all important to a historian, but rubbish to anybody else. There are a great number of legends which are eternally delightful to children, stories of the creation and the fall of man, and of gods and devils and miracles, precisely as important as similar stories among the ancient Anglo-Saxons, or the ancient Greeks, or the ancient Egyptians, or the ancient Hopis.

Among these stories are a few which display fine feeling and narrative skill, and so for the first time we have literature. There is one attempt at a drama; it is crude and confused—any sophomore, having taken a course in dramatic construction at a state university, could show the author of the Book of Job how to clarify his theme and cut out the repetitions. But in the midst of such crudities is magnificent poetry, which our university courses have not yet taught us to equal. Likewise there is some shrewd philosophy—and it is amusing to note that our verbal inspirationalists accept the worldly-wise common sense of the Proverbs and the bleak cynicism of Ecclesiastes as equally divine with the fervor of Isaiah and the fanatical rage of Jeremiah.

Finally, there is some lyric poetry of a spiritual nature, this also full of repetition. If you are judging it as ritual, that is all right, because ritual is intended to affect the subconscious, and repetition is the essence of the process. The difference between ritual and literature is that the latter makes its appeal to the conscious mind, where a little repetition goes a long way.

Dr. Johnson was asked his opinion of the feminist movement in religion, and he said that “a woman preaching is like a dog walking on two legs; it is not well done, but we are surprised that it is done at all.” I think that if we examine our judgments carefully, we shall find that our high opinion of ancient writings is on this basis. We do not really judge them by modern standards, any more than we judge a child by adult standards when he tries to wield a pen, or a hoe, or an oar. Our pleasure in reading ancient writings is to note the beginnings of real thinking, of mature attitudes toward life. We say: “By George, those old fellows had a lot of sense after all!” But judging the Old Testament strictly, as literature, not as antiquity, I say that everything which is of serious value to a modern adult person could be gathered into an extremely small volume, certainly not over thirty thousand words, or four per cent of the total.

CHAPTER XIII
THE COMMUNIST ALMANAC

From the “American Times” Sunday Review of Books, A. D. 1944

Satan Sanctified

A New Religion Enters the Lists

There come to the desk of a literary editor many volumes which could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered as literature. But they are printed and bound, and those who write them believe them of importance, and others may be of the same opinion. So it becomes the task of a reviewer to give an account of these volumes.

The book now before us came through the mails, bearing no indication as to the sender; and examination of the contents quickly reveals the reason. Those who print and circulate the volume know that in so doing they render themselves liable to the lethal gas chamber. Nevertheless, they are impelled by fanaticism to incur the risk, so here is the result on our desk. Technically, we believe the editor incurs penalties by keeping the volume, instead of turning it over to the police authorities. But it seems to us a matter of importance that the public should know what sort of material is now being circulated among the populace, and for that reason we give an account of the contents of the “Communist Almanac for 1944.”

It is perhaps a natural tendency of the human mind, an inevitable process of history, that holders of proscribed opinions should see themselves as martyrs, and endeavor to capitalize their sufferings for political advantage. So, ever since the extermination of the Soviet government by the armed forces of the civilized world, the surviving Communists, hiding in forests and holes in the ground, have been seeing themselves as founders of a new religion. In this document which they now put before us, we find the creed and ritual of this monstrous perversion of the so-called proletarian mind, together with the biographies of its founder and the acts of its leading martyrs.

The founder is Nikolai Lenin, and, incredible as it may seem, this person has been selected for sanctification! A couple of years before his death, an almost successful attempt was made to assassinate him, and the bullets then shot into his body are said to have been the final cause of his death. That is sufficient to constitute martyrdom in the Soviet formula, and to entitle Vladimir Ulianov to become a legend. For a year after his death the Soviet government attempted to preserve his body in mummy form; but this kind of immortality being unattainable, the body was buried, and soon afterwards rumors began to spring up all over Russia to the effect that Lenin had come back to life, and was reappearing to his followers, giving them advice about the management of his Bolshevik dictatorship. That was a miracle; so now Lenin is a divine personage, and those who died in the faith of the “proletarian” revolution are martyrs and saints. At least, that is the thesis of the “Communist Almanac for 1944.”

The volume opens with no less than four biographies of the founder, alleged to have been composed by different followers who knew him intimately, Mattiu Shipinsky, Marco Sugarmann, Luka Herzkovitz, and Ivan Petchnikoff. The last, it appears, is a kind of philosopher, and provides for the Bolshevik cult the mantle of a mystical and metaphysical system. It is amusing to note that the four biographies go into minute detail—and differ as to many of these details! They purport to quote their founder verbatim—and his words on the same occasions are seldom the same words! Most absurd yet, they cannot even agree about his ancestry! In fact, they cannot agree about anything, except that he was the most remarkable person who has ever lived on earth, the bearer of a new revelation to mankind.

Following the biographies, the “Almanac” proceeds to a long recital of the doings of various propagandists of the cult, their travels over the world in the interest of the “class struggle,” and the persecutions to which they were subjected in various countries. It is a melancholy duty to record that among these emissaries of disaster were several of American birth and ancestry. One of the easy ways of achieving sanctification under the Bolshevik system is to be bitten by a body-louse, and to die of typhus. So among the Soviet apostles we find the figure of John Reed, graduate of Harvard University, and traitor to his country and his race.

Next we have various communications from these agents of social chaos, addressed to their deluded followers. This part of the volume is almost comical, in the solemnity with which these precious words are recorded and preserved for the benefit of posterity. Needless to say, the communications contain exhortations to the party members to remain steadfast in the faith, and to carry the message to their fellow “wage-slaves.” This portion of the volume is known as the “Epistles”—the word “epistle” being Russian for letter.

Finally, there is a collection of miscellaneous prophesyings, attributed to a former commissar under the Russian Bolshevik government. All we can say concerning this part of the volume is that we have been unable to find out what it means, and it seems destined to serve as an inspiration to all the lunatics and would-be prophets of the next two thousand years. It is called “Revelations,” and closes the amazing volume.

We think the time has come when public sentiment should make plain that the present laxity of the Department of Justice toward Communist agitators, and the whole tribe of “parlor Bolsheviks” and “pinks,” will no longer be tolerated. We should be sorry to see this country return to the old days of the Democratic and Republican parties, and the oil scandals of the Harding-Coolidge era. But when we read a collection of perversities such as this “Communist Almanac,” we cannot but sigh for the return of Palmer and Daugherty, when red-blooded hundred per cent Americans set to work with vigor to preserve their country from the fanatical propagandists of class greed.

CHAPTER XIV
GOD’S PROPAGANDA

We have before us another literary criticism, clipped from the “Roman Times Weekly Review of Books” during the year 300, under the Emperor Diocletian. It is word for word the same as that from the “American Times” of 1944—the only difference being that one deals with an outlaw party known as Bolsheviks, while the other deals with an outlaw sect known as Christians. The Founder of this latter sect is described by the “Roman Times” as a proletarian criminal, who was crucified for disturbing the public peace under the Emperor Augustus Cæsar. His followers have been hiding in catacombs and tombs, carrying on incessant propaganda in defiance of the Roman law. In place of John Reed, the “Roman Times” refers to a certain Paul, a renegade Roman gentleman and former official of the empire. The good old days to which the “Roman Times” looks back with longing, are the days of Nero, when these incendiary fanatics were boiled in oil or fed to the lions. Under the prodding of this most respectable “Times,” the Emperor Diocletian undertook a new and ferocious persecution of the sect; but twenty-four years afterwards the successor of Diocletian became converted to Christianity, and adopted it as the official religion of the state, entitled to persecute other religions.

The reader who is a Christian will remind me that Jesus was a pacifist, he was meek and gentle. To this I answer, the early social revolutionists were likewise Utopians, appealing to love and brotherhood. At the time the New Testament became fixed in its present form, the Christians had never held power in any part of the world. When they took power under the Emperor Constantine, they behaved like every government in history—that is, they kept their power, using as much force as necessary for the purpose. If the reader is shocked by the fact that the Soviet government of Russia fought for two years a defensive war on twenty-six fronts against its enemies, I invite him to consider the Christian crusades, two centuries of offensive propaganda warfare. If he is shocked by stories he has read about the Tcheka and its torturing of prisoners, I invite him to consult Lea’s “History of the Spanish Inquisition.” Considering the series of religious wars which made of Europe a shambles for more than a thousand years, it is safe to assert that for every human life sacrificed by the Soviet revolution in Russia, a hundred thousand lives have been taken in the name of the gentle and lowly Jesus.

But these are questions which will not be settled in a generation, nor in a century; therefore we pass on, and take up the question of the New Testament as literature. It has been generally so recognized, and we may doubt if any writing ever collected in one volume has exercised as great an influence upon the human race. And let it be noted that this literature is propaganda, pure and simple; we may defy anyone to find a single line in the Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, or the Book of Revelations which was not produced as conscious and deliberate propaganda.

A critic highly regarded by the academic authorities when I was a student in college was George Henry Lewes. I read his “Life of Goethe,” and made note of his argument on behalf of “realist” as opposed to “idealist” art. Goethe and Shakespeare are his examples of the former type; and how obvious is their superiority to those “subjective” artists, who “seek in realities only visible illustrations of a deeper existence!” The critic takes as his test the production of “the grandest generalizations and the most elevated types”; but it was evident to me, even in my student days, that he reached his conclusion by the simple device of overlooking the evidence on the other side. I introduce to you four “idealist” artists who bear the names—perhaps pen-names—of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Will anyone maintain that the works of Shakespeare and Goethe contain “grander generalizations” or “more elevated types” than the Four Gospels? We set Jesus against Shakespeare, and Buddha against Goethe, and leave it for the common sense of mankind to decide.

CHAPTER XV
MRS. PRESTONIA ORDERS PLUMBING

When I was a young man, groping my way into Socialism, I discovered that the movement in and about New York had a patroness. Mrs. Prestonia Martin was her name, and she had a beautiful home in the suburbs, and another up in the Adirondacks. An assortment of well-bred radicals would gather, and wait on themselves at table, and do their own laundry, and scratch a bit in the garden, and feel they were on the front door-step of the Co-operative Commonwealth. John Martin had been a member of the Fabian Society in London, so we knew we were under the best possible auspices, doing the exactly correct advanced things.

But time committed its ravages upon the minds of my friends Prestonia and John. They lost their vision of the Co-operative Commonwealth, and when you went to the beautiful “camp” overlooking Keene Valley, you no longer met young radicals, and no longer helped with the laundry; you met sedate philosophers, and listened to Prestonia expounding the mournful conclusion that humanity had never made any advance. The couple took up a new crusade—to avert from womankind the horrors of politics. The last time I met John, just before the war, he was an entirely respectable member of the New York school board and smiled at me a patronizing smile when I ventured to prophesy that inside of ten years women would be voting in New York state. “You will never live to see that!” said the prophet John.

The psalmist expresses the wish that “mine enemy would write a book”; and in this case mine enemy’s wife committed the indiscretion. I have before me a scholarly-looking volume, published in 1910, entitled “Is Mankind Advancing?” by Mrs. John Martin. I cite it as an outstanding example of one variety of culture superstition; it reduces to absurdity the arguments of one group of tradition worshipers. My old friend Prestonia has discovered that the Greeks achieved a higher civilization than has ever since existed on earth, and her demonstration that mankind is not advancing is based on the exaltation of Greek civilization over everything that has since come along.

Mrs. Prestonia does not really know very much about Greek civilization; I can state that, because I had many discussions with her at the time she was writing this book. What she has done is to take a history of Greece and list the leading names, higgledy-piggledy, regardless of their ideas, or of the parts they played, regardless of the fact that they fought and even killed one another, regardless of the fact that their doctrines contradict and cancel one another. They were Greeks, and therefore they were great. Two or three hundred are listed, all men of genius; and what names can you put against them?

I ventured to suggest a number of names to my friend Prestonia; but you see, my men were modern men, vulgar, common fellows who wore trousers, and ate pie, and worked for dollars! Think of comparing Edison with Archimedes—could anything be more absurd? Think of comparing Pasteur with Hippocrates! “But, my dear lady,” I would argue, “Hippocrates believed that disease was caused by ‘humors’; he believed that crises in disease followed numerical systems.” Maybe that was true, said Prestonia, but nevertheless, Hippocrates was the greatest physician that ever lived. And she would have Socrates listed as one of the glories of Athenian civilization—in spite of the fact that Athenian civilization had compelled him to drink the hemlock! In her queer hall of fame the imperialist Pericles, who led his country to ruin, and was convicted of the theft of public money, takes rank as the greatest statesman in all history, outranking Lincoln, who saved the American Union, and freed several million slaves. A dissolute young despot, Alexander, who sighed for new worlds to conquer, outranks George Washington, who founded a nation of free men, and then retired to his plantation.

After running over the list of all the achievements of modern literature and art, politics and philosophy, science and industry, I was able at last to find one thing which my friend Prestonia was unwilling to get along without. She wanted to live in ancient Athens—but to have her modern plumbing! And never once had it occurred to her that plumbing means lead and copper and steel and brass and nickel and porcelain and paint! Also mills in which these things are produced, railroads or motor trucks on which they are transported, factories in which the cars and trucks are made! Also telegraph and telephone and electric light, and bookkeeping systems and credit systems, and capital and labor, and the Republican party and the Socialist movement!

All this is preliminary to a study of the literature and art of ancient Greece; to help us clear our minds of cant, and persuade us to face the question: how much do we really admire Greek literature and Greek art, and how much do we just pretend to admire it? How much is the superiority of Greek civilization a reality, and how much is it a superstition maintained by gentlemen who have acquired honorific university degrees, which represent to them a meal ticket for the balance of their sojourns on earth?

CHAPTER XVI
MRS. OGI ORDERS ETIQUETTE

“Well,” says Mrs. Ogi, “I see you have got down to the scandal.”

Her husband looks pained. “Do you call that scandal?”

“You accept people’s hospitality, and then come away and ridicule them, and reveal secrets about how they got the family washing done—”

“Secrets!” cries Ogi. “But that was a reform movement, a crusade!” After reflection, he adds: “If I really wanted to tell scandals, I could do it. I might hint that John lost his faith in the radical movement as a result of auto-intoxication.”

“Well, all I can say is that if you tell that, I’ll never speak to you again.”

Ogi answers meekly, “Excuse me.” And then: “What do you think of my thesis?”

“Well,” says Mrs. Ogi, “I see, of course—you are trying to irritate and shock people as much as possible. Are you going to say that Greek art is propaganda?”

“I can’t possibly help saying it.”

“You know that this art is always cited as the perfect type of pure art, the expression of joy and love of beauty.”

“The Greeks were a beauty-loving race and a joy-seeking race, and they embodied their ideals in the figures of gods and goddesses—extremely lovely figures. No one can do better with the human body than they did; but if you take those divinities on their good looks, you’ll simply be repeating the bitter mistake of the Greeks—and without their excuse of inexperience.”

Says Mrs. Ogi: “We’re to have a Christian sermon on naked marble idols?”

“We are going to understand the total art product of the Greeks, to draw out of it what they put into it. These people constituted themselves an experiment station to try out beauty-loving—that is, trust in Nature—as a basis of civilization; and they found it didn’t work. It led them into pain and failure and despair, and the record is written all over their art. There is a book, Mackail’s ‘Greek Anthology,’ a collection of various kinds of inscriptions, brief verses and sentiments from all sources; and you search the pages and hardly find one happy word. You discover that their art was to put sadness into beautiful and melodious language. ‘Of all things,’ says Theognis, ‘it is best for men not to be born.’ And Anacreon, poet of the joy-lovers, compares life to a chariot wheel that ‘runs fast away.’”

“Well, but so it does!”

“Something endures, and we have to find out what. We have to take hold of life, and learn to direct it; we cannot just play in a garden, like happy children. The Greeks played, and their garden turned into a charnel-house, a place of horror. I call it an amazing blunder of criticism—the notion that Greek art is one of joy and freedom. The culmination of their art impulse was the tragedies which the whole community helped to create and maintain. These performances were religious ritual, their supreme civic events; and what do they tell us? There is one theme, immutably fixed, the helplessness of the human spirit in the grip of fate. A black shadow hangs over the life of men, they grope blindly in the darkness. Whole families, mighty dynasties of kings and rulers are condemned to destruction. They are pursued by bitter and fierce and relentless Nemesis. Somber prophecies are spoken before men are born, and then we see these men, striving with all their wit to evade their destiny—in vain. Our pleasure as spectators is to watch this process, and be convinced of the helplessness of our kind. We are lifted up to the heaven of the gods, we are endowed with omniscience and omnipotence—in order to drive a dagger into our own bosoms, to cohabit with our own mothers and sisters, to stab our own fathers and brothers, to tear out our own eyeballs. Enacting such things with majesty and solemnity, reciting them in melodious language to the rhythm of beautiful music and the graceful motions of a chorus—that is the final achievement of these lovers of beauty and joy!”

“You are becoming eloquent,” says Mrs. Ogi, who distrusts eloquence in her cave. “What conclusion do you draw about this art?”

“We are physicians, called to a case after the patient is dead. We want to know what killed this man, so that we can advise living patients. From this post-mortem we learn that sensuous charm does not suffice to secure life; it is not enough for people to carve beautiful figures of the nude human body, and build marble temples to joy and love, while their civic affairs are full of jealousy and greed and corruption.”

“Was there corruption in Greek public life?”

“So much that we in modern times cannot conceive it. Yes, I know about the Teapot Dome and the black satchel with a hundred thousand dollars worth of bills. Nevertheless, if anyone were to tell us about corruption such as the Greeks took for granted, not even a movie audience would swallow it.”

“Now that sounds interesting,” says Mrs. Ogi. “Tell us scandals about these reverend ancients!”

“First I want to explain the class struggle in Greek society, and the economic basis of their state—”

“You take my advice,” says Mrs. Ogi; “leave that lecture until the end, and then forget it. Take your muck-rake and poke it into the Parthenon!”

“What I want to do,” says Ogi, “is to take a character out of ancient Greece, and set him down in our world and see how he’d sound to us. Something like this—”

CHAPTER XVII
WILLIAM RANDOLPH ALCIBIADES

From “The American Plutarch: Our Leading Statesmen Portrayed for the Young; with Moral Inferences.” New York: A. D. 2124.

The career of William Randolph Alcibiades, publisher, soldier and politician, coincided with the era of the Great Wars. He was born to a position of power and luxury, being a nephew of the greatest statesman of his time, and having as his private tutor the leading philosopher of his time. He had rare gifts of personal beauty and charm; but his youth was wild and dissipated, and he spurned the conventional career which lay open to him, and set himself up as a leader of the Democratic party. His enemies called him a demagogue, and denied him any sincerity in his popular appeals.

In the first World War the young statesman was chosen commander-in-chief of the American forces in France. Returning home, he organized and led the expedition for the conquest of South America, and laid siege to the city of Buenos Ayres. He was recalled, because his enemies charged that on the night before the expedition sailed, he had committed an act of sacrilege by chopping off the nose of the statue of George Washington in front of the Treasury Building, New York. History will never know who committed this vandalism; a young man confessed, and some of those whom he charged with guilt were executed, but the enemies of William Randolph maintained that he had purchased this confession, in order to get rid of certain persons who stood in his way.

William Randolph, while being conducted back to his country under arrest, made his escape to England. In order to punish his enemies at home, he made fervent appeals to the British government to enter the war on the side of South America, and against his own country. His eloquence prevailed, and both England and France sent ships to the relief of Buenos Ayres. But William Randolph had to flee from England to France, because the English king made the discovery that the young American had seduced his wife.

William Randolph now lived in retirement until the second World War broke out—between the United States on the one hand, and Japan and China, aided by England and France, on the other. William Randolph had always been ardent in promoting hostility against Japan, but he now fled to the court of the Japanese emperor, and with money furnished by this wealthy monarch he sent emissaries to foment a conspiracy in the United States. The conflict between the Republican and Democratic parties had reached a stage of such bitterness that the wealthy classes were ready to listen to any scheme which promised them power. William Randolph having deserted the Democrats and gone over to the Republicans, his agents approached the naval officers of the fleet, and these, combined with Judge Gary and J. P. Morgan and other gentlemen of wealth, overthrew the established government, and set up a new constitution, which confined the voting power to five thousand of the richest citizens.

The new government made an alliance with Japan and China against England and France; and William Randolph returned to the United States and became a general in command of the American army. But his failure to win victories caused his popularity to wane, and he fled to a castle he had built for himself in Mexico. The British government, enraged by what he had done to turn the Japanese emperor against them, sent emissaries to set fire to his castle, and William Randolph Alcibiades was shot while trying to make his escape from the flames.

From this career we learn that it is not enough for a statesman to be beautiful in person and charming in manner: it is also necessary that he be taught to attend Sunday school in his youth.

CHAPTER XVIII
THE AGE OF HERO-WORSHIP

Greek civilization was made by a large number of different tribes, inhabiting islands, or fertile valleys and plains separated by mountain ranges. Among these tribes there was incessant rivalry and bitter jealousy. They were never able to form a national or racial union, and their history is a succession of inter-tribal intrigues and wars. In addition to this came the class struggle. The aristocratic classes, based on landlordism, held the government, while the proletariat, crowding into the towns, clamored for power; popular leaders arose, and there were conspiracies and civic tumults. Invariably the leaders of the dispossessed party would form alliances with outside states for war upon their own state. More significant yet, some would take the money and serve the cause of the Persian kings, who represented barbarian despotism.

In the beginning of their written record we find the Greeks just emerging from the family stage. The old men ruled; they were the wise and the rich, and no one disputed their authority. They formed alliances and led expeditions for the plundering of other states; then, returning to their ancestral halls, they hired musicians to entertain them by chanting the story of their exploits. So we have the Homeric poems, ruling-class propaganda, written to glorify the ancestors of powerful chieftains and fighting men, and to inculcate the spirit of obedience and martial pride in the new generations.

Every device of the poet’s art is employed to lend prominence and splendor to the Homeric heroes. They are frequently demigods, the result of some mood of dalliance on the part of one of the high gods of Olympus, who came down to earth and encountered a lovely Greek maiden wandering in a meadow. This divine illegitimacy entitles the heroes to the center of the stage, and they take it. They are a set of extremely greedy, jealous, vain and capricious school-boys; and, what is still more significant, their gods, the highest ideal they could conceive, are exactly as greedy, jealous, vain and capricious. The only beautiful emotion in the poems is when some of the mothers and fathers, the wives and children of those heroes express for them an affection of which they are unworthy.

We are accustomed to use the words “Homeric” and “epic” to signify something vast, elemental, portentous. How is it that Homer secures to his characters this “heroic” effect? By causing all the rest of the world to bow to their pretensions, by interesting the gods in their fate—and, above all else, by portraying them as unrestrained in their emotions and limitless in their desires. These are the familiar devices whereby aristocracy signifies itself.

And that explains why such men as Matthew Arnold and Gladstone write volumes of rhapsody over Homer. There is in England a class which has invented ways of setting forth to the world the fact that it does not have to work for a living. There are things this class can do which the vulgar herd cannot do; and one of these things is to read and appreciate Latin and Greek literature. Homer is to the British world of culture what the top-hat is to the British world sartorial.

Homer serves these purposes, because he has the aristocratic point of view, and gives the aristocratic mind what it craves. Just as we cherish genealogy volumes to prove that our ancestors came over in the Mayflower, so the Homeric minstrel chanted a catalogue of the ships which had taken part in the Trojan war. And just as our members of good society preach “law and order” to the lower classes, so in the Homeric poems it is made clear that the common soldier exists to shed his blood for the glory of his chief. Only once does a common man lift his voice in the “Iliad”—the famous scene in the council where Thersites dares to rise up. He is represented as a hunchbacked and offensive brawler; he is overwhelmed with ridicule, and finally receives a sound thrashing from Ulysses, called “the wily,” the Greek ideal of the shrewd and sensible man of the world. “The sovereignty of the many is not good,” declares this “wily” one; “let there be one sovereign, one king.”

We shall find that the bards of aristocracy seldom neglect to flatter their masters by showing some rebel thus being taught his place. We shall find Shakespeare treating Jack Cade precisely as Homer treats Thersites; neither stopping for a moment to inquire whether the grumbler had any just cause to grumble. We shall find also that leisure-class critics always accept these scenes as pure and undefiled “art,” and are shocked by the suggestion of their mighty minstrels stooping to propaganda in the interest of those who pay them. In those early days the pay was poor; if legend is to be trusted, Homer wandered blind and friendless among the Greek towns, which afterwards claimed the honor of being his birthplace. Says the epigram:

Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead,
Through which the living Homer begged his bread.

Taking the “Iliad” on the basis of literature, we say it contains fine poetry, and vivid pictures of old-time manners, fascinating to read about—if you come on them while you are young. There is a stage of life when we are naïve and uncritical in our acceptance of “heroism.” We adopt a certain shining person, we share his glories, we go out to battle with him, we thrill to every stroke of his broad sword, we shout when he wins the victory—and never reflect that we might exactly as well be interested in the other fellow, who has exactly as much right to survive. The average person reaches that age of hero-worship at twelve years, and passes it at sixteen, if he passes it at all. Let children read the “Odyssey” in a good translation; they will enjoy these perils and later on they will discover that the universe has not yet been entirely explored—there are perils in the starry spaces, and in the deeps of our minds.

CHAPTER XIX
HUNDRED PER CENT ATHENIAN

Once in their history fate provided the Greeks with a great cause; that was in the fifth century, when the gigantic Juggernaut of Persia came rolling down upon them. King Xerxes assembled his barbarian hordes, his tribes of wild horsemen and his phalanxes of slaves, his war elephants and his chariots. Compared with these invaders, the Greeks were modern civilized men; free men, holding in their minds all the treasures of the future. They forgot their state jealousies and civic factions, and rallied and saved their culture. From that national impulse came practically everything that is worth while in the “classics.” It was here that the Greek spirit achieved self-consciousness; it was here that Greek patriotism and Greek religion found their justification, their validity as propaganda for great art.

Among the Athenian captains who fought at Marathon was one by the name of Æschylus. He returned, full of the pride of his race, and wrote a tragedy, “The Persians,” around the story of the king whom he had helped to defeat; the climax of the drama being the battle in which the poet had been a leader. It was Greek patriotic and religious propaganda without any thought of disguise; its purpose being to portray the downfall of despotism. The play was a popular success, and made Æschylus the national poet, not merely of Athens, but of all the Greeks.

He wrote other plays of the same religious and patriotic sort, and he never feared to put in whatever moral teachings he thought his audience needed. “Obedience is the mother of success, bringing safety,” summed up his political creed; so, needless to say, he belonged to the conservative party. So little was he afraid of “propaganda” that in “The Seven Against Thebes” he praised by name the statesman Aristides, who was present in the audience. This kind of topical illusion “brought down the house” in ancient Athens, precisely as it would in New York today.

The sculptors and architects and other artists of Greece felt the same patriotic and religious thrill, the same consciousness of a sublime destiny; they labored with burning faith to glorify the gods and demigods, the ancestors and rulers who had made them masters of the land. As a memorial to the victory of Marathon the Greeks instituted national games, which took place every four years, and were a means of uniting the various tribes in worship of their gods. There was the keenest rivalry, and the ambition of Greek gentlemen was to win the crowns and laurel wreaths. When they had won, they wanted the fact to be known; so they paid poets who could sing their achievements in glorious verses. The poet Pindar became a high-class publicity man for these aristocratic sportsmen; also he sang the praises of whatever tyrants held power in the Greek cities, making them splendid and heroic, regardless of how unprincipled and cruel they might be.

The production of the dramas was also a kind of game. Each playwright found a wealthy patron to pay the expenses of drilling and equipping the chorus for his play; then, if the play carried off the prize, the wealthy gentleman built a monument to his own generosity; and so we saw, lining the streets of Athens, the choregic monuments of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller and Otto H. Kahn. Each poet seeking the prize would take the demigods and ancestral rulers, and portray them according to his own interpretation; incidentally he would use the chorus to discuss the current events of politics, and to express his own convictions. Thus Æschylus wrote his “Eumenides” to oppose the abolishing of the Areopagiticus, an ancient court which met on the Sacred Hill: just as if today a poet should produce a drama to combat the radical attacks on the United States Supreme Court.

Another dramatist arose, the son of a noble family, Sophocles by name. He wrote some thirty plays, and carried off the prize nineteen times, and his rivals and enemies took pleasure in charging that he was greedy for money, a regular old miser, besides being exceptionally fond of the ladies, and raising a large illegitimate family. Sophocles produced serene and beautiful works, because he believed in the patriotic and pious traditions he served, accepting the hideous stories of the old-time Greek heroes and demi-gods as the natural fate of mortals. He is the perfect type of the ruling-class artist who achieves perfection without strife, because he is completely at one with his environment, identifying the interests of his class with the will of the gods. We shall encounter a line of such poets—Virgil, Spenser, Shakespeare, Racine, Goethe, Tennyson. They feel love and pity for the unhappy children of their brains, and they move us to grief and awe, but never do they move us to revolt.

But now came another dramatist, in a different mood. This man looked at the Greek legends and decided that they were not true. He looked at Greek institutions, private property, and state patriotism, and the sovereignty of old men in family and tribe, and he decided that these were not necessarily wise and permanent arrangements. He set himself up as a propagandist of things that we call “modern,” and that the Greeks called blasphemy and infidelity. His name was Euripides, and he took the heroes and heroines of the old legends and turned them into plain human beings, suffering the cruelties of fate, but fighting back, voicing protests and doubts. So came a string of plays, jeering at militarism and false patriotism, denouncing slavery and the subjection of women in the home, rebuking religious bigotry, undermining the noble and wealthy classes. A play in which the women get together to rebel against war! A play in which a devoted wife gives her life to an angry god in order to save her husband’s life—but the husband is shown as an egotistical cad, not worthy of this dutiful and pious Greek sacrifice! Read a passage of the dramatic propaganda of Euripides, and realize how this must have sounded to hundred per cent Athenian patriots—and right in the midst of a war to the death with Sparta:

Doth some one say that there be gods above?
There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool,
Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you.
Look at the facts themselves, yielding my words
No undue credence; for I say that kings
Kill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud,
And doing thus are happier than those
Who live calm pious lives day after day.
How many little states that serve the gods
Are subject to the godless but more strong,
Made slaves by might of a superior army!

CHAPTER XX
THE FUNNY MAN OF REACTION

Needless to say, the Bolshevik sentiments of Euripides were not proclaimed before the altar of Dionysus without protest on the part of the orthodox. There rose up another dramatist, this time a comedian, to champion the ancient and honorable traditions of Athens. Aristophanes was his name, and he was one of the world’s great masters of the comic line. He had infinite verve and wit and imagination; you can read him today and laugh out loud—even while his reactionary ideas make you cross.

The point to be got clear is that right or wrong, this poet is altogether a propagandist; a political campaigner, full of the most bitter fury against his enemies, attacking them by name, lampooning them, ridiculing them, not scrupling even to tell vicious falsehoods about them. He wrote his plays to advocate this thesis or that thesis; he arranged his incidents to exhibit this or that aspect of the thesis; he chose his characters, either to voice his own convictions, or to make the opposite convictions absurd. Not merely do his characters make long speeches in which they set forth the poet’s ideas; at any time in the course of the action the poet will wave these characters one side, and step out in the form of the chorus and say what he thinks, arguing and pleading with the audience, scolding at them, denouncing his enemies, explaining his previous actions, discussing his present play—even going so far as to explain to the audience why they should award the prize to Aristophanes and not to somebody else! I doubt if there has ever been a bolder propagandist using the stage; I doubt if the propertied classes and the partisans of tradition ever had a more vigorous defender; and this, don’t fail to note, in a world dramatist, a “classic” of history’s greatest “art for art’s sake” period!

The amazing modernness of Aristophanes is what strikes us most. There is hardly a single one of our present-day contentious questions he does not discuss at length. He has the malicious wit of the New York “Sun” in the days of Dana; he has the fun of Stephen Leacock, whose comical tales ridicule every new and sensible idea the human mind can conceive. Again, one thinks of the verses of Wallace Irwin—except that Aristophanes sincerely held his convictions, whereas Mr. Irwin’s wit appears to be directed by his newest publisher.

Aristophanes was a gentleman, in the English sense of the word, and wrote for other gentlemen. Just as in England during the late war we observed the manufacturers of beer and munitions rising to power and turning the aristocracy out of their castles, so during the Peloponnesian war Aristophanes saw his cultured class dispossessed by newly rich traders. There is a scene in the “Knights” in which he denounces them; they are “mongers,” a whole succession of “mongers”—topical allusions which the audience received with roars of laughter. First came a rope-monger to govern the state, and then a mutton-monger; now there was a leather-monger—Cleon, ruler of the city, who sat in the audience and heard himself abused. Athens could go only one stage lower, said Aristophanes, and he produced an offal-monger, and recited to this person a list of his vices, which proved him fit to take charge of public affairs.

As to Cleon, the poet objected that his political manners were rude; and in order to set him a good example, described him as “a whale that keeps a public house and has a voice like a pig on fire!” This was in war-time—and imagine what would have happened to a playwright who produced a play in Washington, D. C., in the year 1918, describing the President of the United States in similar language!

Again, Aristophanes produced a play denouncing his city for its shabby treatment of its tributary states. He produced this play while ambassadors from those states were in the audience, attending a council of the empire. For this Cleon had the poet prosecuted and fined; so in his next production Aristophanes comes back, proposing that the people shall kick out a number of rascals, including

All statesmen retrenching the fees and the salaries
Of theatrical bards, in revenge for the railleries,
And jests, and lampoons, of this holy solemnity,
Profanely pursuing their personal enmity,
For having been flouted, and scoff’d, and scorn’d—
All such are admonish’d and heartily warn’d!

Aristophanes loathed Euripides for having turned the ancestral heroes into weak mortals, with sentiments and whinings about their rights and wrongs. He dragged the poet down into hell, and there beat him with all the weapons he could lay hold of. He took the poet’s play of feminism, the “Lysistrata,” and turned it to farce by that most modern of devices, a strike of mothers! A play in which the women of Athens refuse to co-habit with their husbands until the husbands have ended the war with Sparta!

Also Aristophanes loathed Socrates, because that philosopher taught the youths of Athens to think for themselves. To this the poet attributed the corruption of Alcibiades, the young aristocrat who had been a pupil of Socrates, and had sold out his country to the Persian king. He wrote a play called “The Clouds,” in which he represented Socrates as a cunning trickster, teaching men how to advocate any cause for money. He portrayed the philosopher sitting in a hanging basket in front of his house, performing absurdities with his pupils. It is exactly the tone of a “Saturday Evening Post” editorial, jeering at “parlor pinks,” and college professors who teach their pupils “mugwumpery.” The time came when the mob voted death to Socrates; and this was the great triumph of the funny man of reaction.

But alas, the death of one free-thinker did not suffice to bring the citizens of Athens back to the simple life of their ancestors. They continued to make money and enjoy themselves, and to hire soldiers to do their fighting. Their dramatists developed the so-called “social comedy”—that is, pictures of the fashions and follies of the leisure class, without any propaganda. It is an invariable rule that the absence of propaganda in the art of a people means that this people is in process of intellectual and moral decay. So now a strong man came down out of the north and took charge of Greece, and Greek literature moved into the Alexandrine period.

The center of this new culture was the city of Alexandria, in Egypt. The poets now took pride in their technical skill, and wrote delicate and charming portrayals of the delights of love. A horde of learned scholars busied themselves with criticism and interpretation of the works of the past, and composed long epic poems dealing with grammar and rhetoric and similar subjects. This too was “propaganda”; but you note that it was propaganda of a secondary and imitative sort, it was not produced by men who were doing great deeds, and creating new forms of life. Alexandria was a cosmopolitan center, ruled by a despot, the home of some wealthy and cultured gentlemen, who supported painters and sculptors and poets and musicians and actors to while away their boredom, and to serve as their press-agents and trumpeters. But the art of classical Greece was the work of free men, citizens of a state ruled by a larger proportion of its inhabitants than had ever before held authority in civilized times. That meant throughout the community the joy and thrill of intellectual adventure, it meant a great leap of achievement for the whole group. Such invariably is the origin of art which we now regard as “classical”—and which we use to hold the minds of new generations in chain to tradition and conformity!

CHAPTER XXI
ATHENS AND LOS ANGELES

There has been peace in the cave for a while, because Mrs. Ogi has been interested in learning about the Greeks. “I perceive,” she says, “that there are superstitions in the arts, just as in religion.”

“Exactly,” says Ogi; “and they serve the same purpose. They begin as honest ignorance, and are then taken up and used as a source of income and a shield to privilege.”

Says Mrs. Ogi, “It strikes me the Greeks lived in a country very much like Southern California.”

“Quite so. The climate is the same; and the rocky hills and fertile valleys, and people living the outdoor life, and giving their time to sports. The one-piece bathing-suits that have come into fashion in our ‘beauty parades’ are about the same thing as the Greek maidens running naked in the games. And if you want to parallel the darker side of Greek sensuousness—”

“There is Hollywood,” says Mrs. Ogi.

“There is all smart society, as much luxury and wantonness as your thesis requires.”

“But then, why has Los Angeles never had any art? I know what you are going to say—our mental energy goes into real estate advertisements. But joking aside, why?”

“Because the people here have never had a struggle. They came into a country already prepared for them, inhabited by tame Indians living on piñon nuts. All the settlers had to do was to subdivide the land, and raise the price once every year. They are too polite to have an art; if anybody makes a crude effort, it is a masterpiece, and we all get together and boost. You can write one feeble book, and live a life-time on your reputation. Los Angeles is a fruit that was rotten before it was ripe.”

“What are we going to do?” asks Mrs. Ogi.

“We are going to take our choice between a social revolution and a slave empire.”

Mrs. Ogi is not certain about her choice; she sits, watching the entrance of the cave out of the corner of her eye—the ancestral habit of expecting some hostile intruder. After a while she remarks, “I notice you didn’t say anything about slavery in Greece.”

“It will be better to deal with slavery in the case of the Romans, where its effects show so plainly. The Greeks had slavery, but the force which destroyed their civilization was faction. They had their ‘world war,’ and Sir Gilbert Murray, who knows them by heart, has drawn a parallel between that war and ours; it is so exact that it makes you laugh—or weep, according to your temperament. The Greek struggle was between the Athenian empire, a democratic sea power, and the Spartans, an aristocratic, military people with no nonsense about them. The war lasted for two generations, off and on; they hadn’t developed the technique of extermination as we have. But they had all the social and psychic factors of our ‘war for democracy’—‘defeatists’ and ‘bitter-enders,’ poets and propagandists of hate, statesmen promising utopias after victory, spies and informers and provocateurs, refugees crowding into the cities, landlords raising rents, food famines, rationing of supplies, and profiteers coining fortunes out of the general misery. And of course the demagogues and haters had their way; Athens was ruined and Sparta was bled white, and the Greeks became subjects, first of Macedonia, then of the Romans, then of the Turks.”

“Thus endeth the first lesson,” says Mrs. Ogi. “And now for the Romans.”

“Well, the Romans didn’t bleed themselves to death; they were practical fellows, with a business man’s point of view. They turned their deadly short swords against other races; and when they had conquered somebody, they put him to work for the glory of the Grand Old Party. They were ‘hard-boiled,’ as we say; our big business men of the rougher type—old P. D. Armour, and Pullman, and ‘Jesse James’ Hill, and Harriman, and the elder Morgan, and Judge Gary. This banker in Chicago that the Republican party has just put over on us as vice-president, General ‘Helen Maria’ Dawes—he commanded an army against the Germans, and having conquered them, he goes back to put them under bond, to set them at work for long hours, and drain the milk out of the mothers’ breasts, and feed it to the international bankers, instead of to the German infants. That was a perfect Roman job, and General Helen Maria would have been the boy after the Romans’ own heart; they would have made him a prefect over the whole of Asia Minor, or Northern Africa, or Spain, and he would have come home a millionaire—but never so rich as the head of one of the Morgan banks in Chicago!”

“I shouldn’t think you’d get much art out of people like that,” says Mrs. Ogi. “But go ahead and tell us the story.”

CHAPTER XXII
THE SLAVE EMPIRE