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He died in Rome, and after his death Shelley wrote "Adonais," a eulogy of Keats and an attack on his detractors. Little by little his fame began to spread, and everywhere it was recognized by the Tories as part of the class struggle of the time. Sir Walter Scott had been pained by the personal venom of Lockhart's attack in "Blackwood's"; but not enough to cause him to withdraw his subsidy from the magazine, nor to prevent his accepting Lockhart as his son-in-law and future biographer. A young Englishman of radical sympathies defended Keats, and a friend of Lockhart's intervened in the argument, and forced a duel with Keats' defender, and killed him. That is the way literary questions were settled in those days!

The early poetry of Keats represents that stage of simple, instinctive, unreflecting delight which we call by the name "Greek." He chose Greek themes and Greek imagery, and was never more Greek than when he tried to be medieval. But the most significant thing about his work is the quick maturing of it, even in those scant four years. A shadow of pain darkens his being, the pangs of frustrated love wring cries of anguish from him; and so we come to the second stage of the Greek spirit--the sense of fate, of cruelty hidden at the heart of life, the terror and despair of loveliness that knows it is doomed. Out of this mood came his greatest poems, the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the "Ode to a Nightingale," the "Ode to Melancholy." If anyone denies that this poet is trying to teach us something about life, if anyone thinks there is no message in this infinite mournfulness, he has indeed a feeble apprehension.

But let us, for the sake of argument, assume with the art for art's sakers that Keats was an esthete, and produced "pure beauty," unalloyed by any preaching. Would that mean that we had found some art which is not propaganda? Assuredly not; and those who besiege us with contentious examples--Keats, Gautier, Whistler, Hearn, etc.--simply show that they have not understood what we mean by the thesis that all art is propaganda. It is that, fundamentally, as an inescapable psychological fact; and it does not cease to be that just because the artist preaches enjoyment instead of effort.

Use your common sense upon the proposition. When an artist takes the trouble to embody his emotions in an art form, he does so because he wishes to convey those emotions to other people; and insofar as he succeeds in doing that, he will change the emotions of the other people, and change their attitudes toward life and hence their actions. Is it not just as much "teaching" to proclaim the supremacy of the sensuous delights, as to proclaim the supremacy of reason, or of any system of reasoned thought? When an artist composes a song on the theme, "Let us eat, drink and be merry," is he not setting forth a doctrine of life? If not, why does he not go ahead and eat, drink and be merry? Why does he trouble to give advice to you and me? When Keats writes, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever," it is perfectly plain that he is making propaganda--and false propaganda, since standards of beauty are matters of fashion, varying with every social change. He is making propaganda when he declares that

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Incidentally he is revealing to us that he has done very little thinking about either truth or beauty, but is content to use abstract words without meaning behind them.

I have made clear, I hope, that I consider the art of Keats an exquisitely beautiful art, fine and clean, and a perfectly proper art for any lad to produce between the ages of twenty and twenty-four. There is a stage of na?ve trust in instinct through which youth passes, especially poetical youth. But when this stage is continued into maturity then it becomes something entirely different, neither fine, nor clean, nor beautiful; it becomes stale self-indulgence, empty-minded irresolution, dawdling decadence. All those things manifested themselves in the later periods of Greek art, and they may be observed in our own period of the breakdown of capitalism.

The Tory party came in the end to realize that there was nothing really dangerous in the poetry of this unhappy boy. Wise old Tories like Sir Walter Scott had known it from the beginning, and young Tories like Tennyson and Rossetti proclaimed it. Keats himself was no longer alive to offend them with his Cockney manners, so they took up his writings, and made them a bulwark of leisure-class culture in a stage of arrested mentality, a resource of critics who wish to keep the young from thinking about dangerous modern questions. But I venture the opinion that if this Cockney stable-keeper's son had grown to manhood, he would have taken care of his own destiny, and seen to it that dilettanti idlers and aesthetic decadents should find no comfort in his name and example. His letters give abundant evidence of his capable mind, and assure us that if he had been blessed with health he would have matured into a thinker, even as John Milton, the great companion of his later days.

How much the lip-servers of Keats really understand him, was proven by a peculiar incident which befell me in my own youth. Twenty-two years ago I published "The Journal of Arthur Stirling," a passionate defense of the right of young poets to survive; and of course I sang enraptured praise of Keats, and made him a text for excited tirades. At that time there was a newspaper in New York called the "Evening Telegram," owned by James Gordon Bennett, a dissipated rowdy who might have been a blood brother to the Tory crowd which conducted "Blackwood's" and the "Quarterly" a hundred years ago. This "Evening Telegram" published a page of book reviews every Saturday, boasting it the most widely circulated book page in the United States. Its opinion, therefore, was of importance to a young writer hoping to live by his pen. It reviewed "The Journal of Arthur Stirling," saying that we might have sympathized with the struggles of an unfortunate poet, had he not committed the indiscretion of giving us samples of his writings, which enabled us to be certain that he had no idea whatever of poetry. For example, said the editor, here was one of Arthur Stirling's effusions. Read it:

Sit thee by the ingle, when The sear faggot blazes bright, Spirit of a winter's night!-- Sit thee there, and send abroad With a mind self-overaw'd Fancy, high-commission'd;--send her! She has vassals to attend her; She will bring, in spite of frost, Beauties that the earth hath lost; She will bring thee, all together, All delights of summer weather; All the buds and bells of May From dewy sward or thorny spray; All the heap?d Autumn's wealth, With a still, mysterious stealth; She will mix these pleasures up, Like three fit wines in a cup, And thou shalt quaff it!--

Poor Arthur Stirling was supposed to be dead, so I asked a friend to write to the editor of the "Evening Telegram" and point out to him that he had misunderstood the book; the lines quoted were not submitted as the work of Arthur Stirling, they happened to be the work of John Keats! The editor published this reply with an easygoing comment; it made a good joke, he said, but as a matter of fact he was justified in his criticism, because the lines belonged to the very early work of Keats, which was practically without poetic merit. My friend wrote again, expressing surprise that the editor should make such a statement; for this poem, entitled "Fancy," belonged to the last two years of Keats' life, the wonderful years which produced all his greatest writings. Palgrave, whose authority none would dispute, had included it in the "Golden Treasury," which contained only thirteen poems by Keats. The editor of the "Evening Telegram" was unable to find space for that letter!

THE PREDATORY ARTIST

Says Mrs. Ogi: "Here is Haldeman-Julius, discussing the thesis of your book. He says: 'You may say that because Balzac drew his characters largely from the bourgeoisie he was conducting a subtle propaganda in behalf of a class; or, in general, that he was a bourgeois author. But such a view would be a travesty of literary criticism.'"

Says Ogi: "That is what a great many people are going to call this book. But let us see what we can make of Balzac."

At this point the mail arrives, and in it a letter to Mrs. Ogi, telling some bad news about a friend. A look of deep distress comes upon her face, and Ogi, watching her, is suddenly inspired. "Hold that expression!" he cries.

"What do you mean?" falters Mrs. Ogi.

"It's what I need for a story! I want to get all the details of it--the trembling of your lips, the look in your eyes. Hold it now! It is copy!"

"I think you are out of your mind," says Mrs. Ogi; and her face assumes a quite different expression.

Says her husband: "I am the artist, and I feed on life. My fellow humans suffer, and a voice within me cries: 'Magnificent!' Anguish writes itself upon their features, and I whisper: 'There is a great moment!' They are utterly abased, and I think: 'Here is my chance of immortality!'"

Says Mrs. Ogi: "You are a monster! I have always known it."

"I am one among thousands of monsters, ranging the earth, competing furiously for their prey. I explore the whole field of human experience; I climb the mountain peaks, I ransack the starry spaces, I rummage the dust-bins of history, collecting great significant moments, climaxes of emotion, drama, suspense, thrill; when I find it, I slap my knee, like Thackeray writing the scene of Becky Sharp caught in adultery, and exclaiming: 'There is a stroke of genius!' I see tears falling, and I think: 'That will sell!' Out of that cry of despair I shall make a feast! From this tale of tragedy I shall build a new house! Upon this heap of anguish I shall leap to fame! I shall enlarge my ego, expand in the admiration of my fellow-men, enjoying dominion over their emotions and their thoughts. Also, of course, I shall not forget my fellow-women, their thrills and ecstasies; I shall have gorgeous apartments, furnished with barbaric splendor, to which will come brilliant and fascinating admirers--"

Says Mrs. Ogi: "Is this a dream you want me to psychoanalyze?"

"No," says her husband, "it is simply the soul of Balzac which I am putting before you: the most perfect type of the predatory artist that has existed in human history; the art for art's sake ideal incarnate; genius divorced from conscience, save only as applied to the art work itself--the inexorable duty of portraying the utmost conceivable energy, fury, splendor, terror, sublimity, melodrama, pity, elegance, greed, horror, cruelty, anguish, beauty, passion, worship, longing, wickedness, glory, frenzy, majesty and delight."

This predatory artist, living in a predatory world, and portraying predatory emotions, does not seem to us a propagandist, simply because of the complete identity which exists between him and the thing he portrays. It is the world which came into existence after the French revolution, and has prevailed ever since. The masses made the revolution, hoping to profit from it; but the merchants and bankers and lawyers took over the power. Alone, this class in France could not have succeeded; but they had the help of England--it is the triumph of British gold, taking charge of the continent and making it over in the image of the "shop-keeper": the bourgeois world, a society in which everybody seeks money, and having obtained it, spends it upon the getting of more money, or upon the expansion of his personality through the power of money to dominate and impress other men. Those who succeed enjoy, while those who fail are trampled; such is the "Com?die Humaine," as Balzac exhibits it in a total of eighty-five works of prose fiction, not counting dramas, essays and reviews.

He was born of a bourgeois family and educated for a lawyer. But he wanted to write, and because his family would not support him, he went away and starved most hideously in a garret. The hunger which he there acquired was not merely of the stomach and the senses, but of the intellect and soul. He became a ferocious, almost an insane worker. He was greedy for facts, and never forgot anything; he acquired a whole universe of detail, names, places, technical terms, the appearances of persons and things, human characteristics, anecdotes, conversations. He wove these into his stories, he constructed vast panoramas of French society, colossal processions marching past without end. The bulk of his work is so enormous that you may spend your lifetime reading Balzac, exploring the lives of his two or three thousand characters.

What will you know when you get through? You will know French bourgeois civilization, high and low, rich and poor, good and evil. You will observe the rich growing richer and the poor growing poorer; you will discover the greedy devouring the good and patient and honest--and then coming to ruin through their own insensate desires. It is brilliant, vivid, as real as genius can make it, and at first you are enthralled. How marvelous, to learn about the world without the trouble of going into it! But after you have read for a month or two, another feeling steals over you, a feeling of familiarity: you know all this, why read any more? Life is odious and cruel, it makes you ill; your one thought becomes, can anything be done about it? Is there any remedy? And from that moment you are done with Balzac.

For, so far as this "Com?die Humaine" is concerned, there is no remedy. Balzac was so much a part of his own corrupt age that he could not have conceived of a co-operative world. He saw the class struggle, of course--and took his stand on the side of his money. A passionate Tory, he referred to "the two eternal truths, the monarchy and the Catholic church." His attitude to politics was summed up in the formula that the people must be kept "under the most powerful yoke possible." You find in his novels tremendous loads of philosophic and scientific learning, practically all of it utter trash. Henry James disposes of him in the sentence: "He was incapable of a lucid reflexion." The nearest approach to a definite proposition to be got out of his writings is the notion that desire, imagination and intellect are the destroyers of life. Of course, if that be true, civilization is doomed, and it is a waste of time to seek moral codes or understanding, or even to produce art.

Such a view was, of course, simply the reflex of the predatory artist's own greed for money, luxury, fame and power. He lived alternately for art and Mammon. He would shut himself up alone in a secret place and write for weeks, even months, without seeing anyone. He would start work at midnight, clad in a white Benedictine robe, with a black skull-cap, by the light of a dozen candles, and under the stimulus of many pots of coffee. Having thus completed a masterpiece, he would emerge to receive the applause of Paris, carrying a cane with an enormous jeweled head. Having made another fortune and paid a small part of what he called his "floating debt," he would plunge into the wholesale purchasing of silks and satins and velvets, furniture and carpets and tapestries and jewels and "objects of art," vast store-rooms full of that junk whereby the bourgeois world sets forth the emptiness of its mind and the futility of its aims. Lacking money enough, his maniac imagination would evolve new schemes--book publishing, paper manufacturing, a journal, a secret society, silver mines in Sardinia, the buried treasure of Toussaint l'Ouverture, each of which he was sure was going to turn him into a millionaire overnight.

Balzac gives prominence to that type of men whom the French call "careerists"; that is to say, men who set out to make their fortune, at any cost of honor, decency and fair play. Balzac admired such men--for the simple reason that he himself was that kind. In his later years he met a wealthy Polish lady, Madame Hanska, who became his mistress; writing to his sister about it, he set forth what this meant to him, and his language was such as a "confidence man" would use, writing to a woman confederate. The alliance, he wrote, would give him access to the great world, and "opportunity for domination."

Is the work of such a man propaganda? If you accept the common dogma that blind egotistical instinct, and the portrayal and glorification thereof, constitute art, while the effort to understand life, and to reconstruct it into a thing of order and sense and dignity, is propaganda--why then undoubtedly the "Com?die Humaine" of Honor? de Balzac is pure and unadulterated art. If, on the other hand, you admit my contention that a man who is born into a money-ravenous world, and who absorbs its poisoned atmosphere, and sets himself to the task of portraying it, not merely as real and inevitable, but as glorious, magnificent, fascinating, sublime--if you admit with me that such a man is a propagandist, why then you must reconcile yourself to enduring the opposition of all orthodox literary critics.

THE OLD COMMUNARD

Victor Hugo was born in 1802, three years later than Balzac. He grew up in the same world, but was not satisfied to contemplate its diseases; he sought remedies, and became a convert to revolutionary ideals, and so all critics agree that his work is marred by propaganda. He lived to be eighty-three years old, and went on writing and working to the very end, so that the story of his life carries us through practically the whole of the nineteenth century. We shall follow it, and then come back and retrace parts of the same story in the lives of other artists, French, German, British and American.

Hugo's father was a revolutionary soldier who rose to be a general in Napoleon's army. As a little boy the poet followed the armies from place to place in Switzerland, Italy and Spain. His mother was a Royalist, and the boy had an old Catholic priest for a tutor, and was taught the old dogmas, literary as well as religious and political. His conversion into a revolutionist was not completed until the age of forty-six. Having been brought about by contact with daily events, this conversion was of tremendous influence upon the thought of Europe.

All this time, you understand, French art is still under the sway of the so-called "classical" ideals of Voltaire and Racine; tragic dramatists have to obey the "three unities," or they cannot get produced. But by 1830 the French people are sick of reaction, and ready to make their revolution again. As part of the change comes a surge of "romanticism" in the arts. Shakespeare is played in Paris for the first time; and Victor Hugo publishes a drama on the theme of Cromwell, with a preface in which he commits the blasphemy of declaring that Racine is "not a dramatist"! In the midst of the new revolution he produces a romantic play, "Hernani," dealing with a revolutionary Spaniard of the Byronic type, who declaims all over the stage and dies sublimely.

The production of this play resulted in one continuous riot for forty-five nights. The leading lady protested, the hired claque revolted; so Victor Hugo called for help to the young artists of the studios, and they poured out of Montmartre and took possession of the theater. In those days the first purpose of romantic youth was to "shock the bourgeois" by strange costumes. Here was Th?ophile Gautier, nineteen years old, with long locks hanging over his shoulders, a scarlet satin waistcoat, pale sea-green trousers seamed with black, and a gray overcoat lined with green satin. Night after night the rival factions shouted and raged as long as the play lasted. All this in order to gain for dramatists the right to show more than one scene in a play, and more than twenty-four hours of their hero's life!

Victor Hugo also wrote fiction and prose, and in every field he became the new sun of France. But he was not content with literary laurels; he went on seeking a remedy for the bourgeois disease. He espoused the cause of a poor workingman, who, having been tortured in prison, had killed the governor of the prison. The young poet came upon a novel remedy--to sow the Bible all over France. "Let there be a Bible in every peasant's hut." Here in America the Gideonites have tried out the idea, sowing a Bible in every hotel room--but for some reason there are more crimes of violence in the United States than ever before in any civilized country!

The revolution of 1830 brought in a new king, Louis-Philippe, the ideal bourgeois monarch, an amiable gentleman who stayed at home with his wife and let the bankers and business men run the country. This king made Victor Hugo into a peer of France. But there was a new revolutionary outburst preparing, and in 1848 the bourgeois king was dethroned, and Victor Hugo was elected deputy to the new parliament, styling himself a "moderate Republican." The French people at this time were in the same position as the American people at present; that is, they believed what they were told, and were ready to accept any tinseled circus-performer as a statesman. They chose for their president a wretched creature who happened to be a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, and promised a return of all the old glories of France.

It took only a year of his government for Victor Hugo to realize that the one hope for progress lay in the program of the radicals. His two grown sons were thrown into jail for editing a paper attacking the policies of Louis Napoleon; and the father espoused the ideas of the old revolution, "the rights of man." Egged on by the terrified financiers, Louis Napoleon overthrew the parliament and had himself made emperor. Victor Hugo sought to rouse the people, barricades were raised in the streets, and hundreds were shot down with cannon. The poet with great difficulty made his escape to Brussels, from which city he denounced the usurper--"Napoleon the Little" as he called him--with the result that the Catholic government of Belgium passed a law expelling him.

He fled to the channel island of Jersey, where he wrote a book of poems called "The Chastisements," one of the most terrific pieces of denunciation in all the world's literature. Shortly after this the bourgeois government of England combined with the bourgeois government of France to drive Russia out of the Crimea; there was a great war, and the people of Jersey objected to the poet's attacks on the French emperor; they mobbed his home, and he had to flee to the neighboring island of Guernsey, where he settled down to the true task of a great artist, to reform the world by changing the ideals of the coming generations. For nineteen years he stayed in exile, until "Napoleon the Little" brought himself to ruin, and his country along with him. In the meantime Victor Hugo had published several volumes of marvelous poetry, and finally, after ten years' labor, his masterpiece of fiction, "Les Mis?rables," which appeared simultaneously in eight capitals of the world, and brought its author the sum of four hundred thousand francs.

Into this novel Hugo poured all his passionate devotion to liberty, equality and fraternity; likewise his blazing hatred of cruelty and tyranny. He tells the story of an escaped convict who reforms and makes a success of his life, but is pursued by the police and dragged back to prison. Incidentally the poet gives us a vast picture of the France of his own time, and the lives and struggles of the proletariat. The figure of Jean Valjean is one of the great achievements of the human imagination, and his story is a treasure of the revolutionary movement in every modern land.

After the peace with Germany, France was left a republic, and her great poet returned to live with his grandchildren, to labor for the working classes, and to pour out floods of eloquence in behalf of his social ideals. New movements arose, and the old man heard that he was theatrical, bombastic, unreal. All that is true to a considerable extent; for Hugo is like Shelley, having the defects of his great qualities. When the inspiration does not come to him, he learns to imitate it; he acquires mannerisms, he adopts poses. Following Milton's suggestion of making an art work of his life, he sets his personality up as an embodiment of revolutionary idealism, he makes himself into a legend, a living monument, a literary shrine, one might say a literary cathedral. It is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, and we often take that step with Victor Hugo. But the masses of the people knew that the core of his being was a passionate devotion to liberty and justice; therefore they took him to their hearts, and his life is so blended with theirs that Victor Hugo and revolutionary France are two phrases with one meaning.

TYGER, TYGER!

What would Victor Hugo have been if he had had no social conscience? What would the romantic movement have amounted to if it had confined itself to the field of art? These questions are answered for us by Th?ophile Gautier.

We have seen him at the age of nineteen taking part in the battle of "Hernani" in his scarlet satin waistcoat; we see him at the same age leading the art students in mocking dances about a bust of Racine in a public square of Paris. After that we see him for forty-two years diligently following the art for art's sake formula. He declares that he has no religion, no politics; he has no concern with any moral or intellectual question, he is purely and simply an artist, devoting himself with passionate fervor to the production of works of pure beauty. His fastidiousness is shown by the law he lays down, that a young artist should write not less than fifty thousand verses for practice before he writes one verse to be published.

And what is the content of this art? Gautier believes in one thing, the human body. He believes in it, not as an instrument of the mind, a house of the spirit, but as a thing in itself, to be fed and pampered and perfumed, and clad in silks and satins, and taken out to engage in sexual adventures. The pretensions of art for art's sake turn out to be buncombe; the reality of the matter is art for orgy's sake.

At the age of twenty-four Gautier published a novel, "Mademoiselle de Maupin," which might be described as Shakespeare's "As You Like It" rewritten by the devil. A young lady of beauty and fashion goes wandering in the costume of a man, and this affords endless possibilities of sexual titillation; women fall in love with her, thinking she is a man, and men fall in love with her by instinct, as it were; the orgies thus postponed are especially thrilling when they finally occur.

It should hardly need to be said that the art of Th?ophile Gautier is a leisure-class art. These orgies are possible only in a slave civilization; they presuppose the fact that the masses shall toil to heap up wealth for a privileged few to destroy in a night of riot. At the very opening of "Mademoiselle de Maupin" the author portrays his hero, living at ease with a valet to serve him, and nothing to do but be discontented. "My idle passions growl dully in my heart, and prey upon themselves for lack of other food." He is consumed with imaginings--all, needless to say, having to do with pleasures which he does not mean to earn. "I wait for the heavens to open, and an angel to descend with a revelation to me, for a revolution to break out and a throne to be given me, for one of Raphael's virgins to leave the canvas and come to embrace me, for relations, whom I do not possess, to die and leave me what will enable me to sail my fancy on a river of gold," etc.

His dream finally takes the form of a woman, and he spends many pages in detailing her qualities. Needless to say, she belongs to the rioting classes. "I consider beauty a diamond which should be mounted and set in gold. I cannot imagine a beautiful woman without a carriage, horses, serving-men, and all that belongs to an income of a hundred thousand a year; there is harmony between beauty and wealth." Of course this dream-woman must be entirely subject to the sensual desires of man. "I consider woman, after the manner of the ancients, as a beautiful slave designed for our pleasure."

Victor Hugo was exiled by Louis Napoleon; while Gautier, having "no political opinions," remained in Paris and accepted financial favors from the tyrant. What he considered his master work was published at the age of forty-five, a volume of verse whose title explains its character, "Enamels and Cameos." The art of poetry has become identical with that of the goldsmith; words are tiny jewels, fitted together with precise and meticulous care. Words have beauty, quite apart from their meaning, and the proper study for mankind is the dictionary. Poetry should have neither feeling nor ideas; while as for the subject, the more unlikely and unsuitable it is, the greater the triumph of the poet. This is not an effort to caricature Gautier's doctrine, it is his own statement, the theme of one of his poems. But on no account are you to take this poem for propaganda!

You see how the proposition demonstrates its own absurdity. Th?ophile Gautier was during his entire lifetime a fanatical preacher, a propagandist of sensuality and materialism, a glorified barber and tailor, a publicity man for the Association of Merchants of Tapestries, Furniture and Jewelry. When he writes a poem on the subject of a rose-colored dress, he asks you to believe that he is really interested in the rose-colored dress, but you may be sure that he is no such fool; he writes about the rose-colored dress as an act of social defiance. He says: There are imbeciles in the world who believe in religion, in moral sense, in virtue, self-restraint and idealism, subjects which bore me to extinction; in order to show my contempt for such imbeciles, I proceed to prove that the greatest poem in the world can be written on a rose-colored dress or on a roof, or on my watch, or on smoke, or on whatever unlikely subject crosses my mind; I consecrate myself to this task, I become a moral anti-moralist, a propagandist of no-propaganda.

What are the products of nature bearing most resemblance to enamels and cameos? They are certain kinds of insects, beautiful, hard, shiny, brilliantly colored, repulsive, cruel, and poisonous. Such is the art of Th?ophile Gautier and his successors, who have made French literature a curse for a hundred years. This literature possesses prestige because of its perfection of form; therefore it is important to get clear in our minds the fact that the ability to fit words together in intricate patterns is a thing ranking very low in the scale of human faculties. The feats of the art-for-art-sakers are precisely as important as those of the man on the stage who balances three billiard-balls on the end of his nose. The piano-gymnast who leaped to world fame by his ability to wiggle his fingers more rapidly than any other living man has been definitely put out of date by the mechanical piano-player; and some day mankind will adopt a universal language, and forget all the enamels and cameos in the old useless tongues.

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