CHAPTER IX

SOCIALISM IN ART AND LITERATURE

ALTHOUGH, as we have seen, modern socialism is of very recent growth, one can already clearly discern two distinct periods in what may be called the literature of socialism. The first period was a heroic one, corresponding nicely with the unorganized and not always intelligent revolt of the working-classes previous to the eighties. Nearly all the great minds in art and literature, consciously or unconsciously, translated into their work the spirit of unrest and blind revolt characteristic of the time. Wagner in music; Millet in painting; Turguéneff, Grigoróvitch, Nekrassoff, Tolstoy, Hugo, Zola, Herwegh, Freiligrath, Whitman, Carlyle, and Ruskin in literature, to mention only a few, were all expressing in varied form the widespread discontent with the existing social order. Matthew Arnold, similarly engaged in his keenly intellectual and passionless essays, summed up his complaint in the powerful sentence, "Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class." Ruskin came to the conclusion that "all social evils and religious errors arise out of the pillage of the laborers by the idlers." And in 1871 he began to write "Fors" letters to the workmen of Great Britain by declaring: "For my own part, I will put up with this state of things, passively, not an hour

longer. I am not an unselfish person, nor an evangelical one; I have no particular pleasure in doing good; neither do I dislike doing it so much as to expect to be rewarded for it in another world. But I simply cannot paint, nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do anything else that I like, and the very light of the morning sky, when there is any which is seldom, nowadays, near London has become hateful to me, because of the misery that I know of, and see signs of, where I know it not, which no imagination can interpret too bitterly."

Carlyle could not think of modern society without bursting into rage. The disorganization of labor; the spectacle of society covering the fair face of England with filthy furnaces and boundless slums; the silly commonplaces of political economy, which he called "the dismal science"; the anarchy in industry and commerce, led him to write his bitter political satires that seethe with brimstone and fire. Hugo, in France, was writing his immense drama of modern society, picturing the life of that outcast saint whom the modern. world could not understand, and perforce must crucify. Whitman, in America, was singing his great songs of Democracy. Tolstoy was writing two novels: one picturing the horrors of war, the other the foibles and vanities of Russian society. Turguéneff was watching the rising revolt among the masses, and becoming almost a guiding force in its progress by his pitiless analysis of the character of its leaders. It would be difficult to find in any other period of recent history men equal in power to these master minds, all of them struggling to voice the rising revolt, and yet incapable of discerning or of adequately expressing the new idealism coming to birth.

Amidst the storms then raging over Europe there was something magnificent in the Titanic labors of these men. Analyzing the warring elements, describing the discord, lamenting the carnage, they sought for some guiding principle, but in vain; they could only voice the spirit of their restless, questioning, dissatisfied age. They were the prophets, rather than the teachers, of the new time of which they saw but the dawn. “I know not if I deserve," said Heine, "that a laurel-wreath should one day be laid on my coffin. Poetry, dearly as I have loved it, has always been to me but a divine plaything. I have never attached any great value to poetical fame; and I trouble myself very little whether people praise my verses or blame them. But lay on my coffin a sword; for I was a brave soldier in the Liberation War of humanity." The same wish might have been expressed by all these men, for without exception they placed higher than their art their work in the service of humanity.

It is not a mere coincidence that during the same period another group of great minds was trying to form an International Working Men's Association. Marx, Engels, Bakounine, de Paepe, Mazzini, Professor Beesley, were all minds of a high order, and all were connected with the International at some time in its history. It represented in active life what the other group represented in art and literature. Both groups felt instinctively the modern revolt; both saw the evils of our economic system; both recoiled from the anarchy in society, the bitter poverty of the many, the arrogant dominance of the few. But the Internationalists, like the artists and writers, could arrive at no common program; and, after a few years of troubled

existence, their organization broke into dissension and discord, which was also characteristic of the time. With the exception of Marx and Engels, much of the spirit of the International was destructive and nihilist rather than constructive and creative, with the result that it merely incited the masses to blind and futile revolt instead of organized and constructive action. The fact is, all these men were living in the eventide of a great historical epoch. It was Carlyle who voiced the vague, despondent spirit of these forerunners of modern socialism when he said, "There must be a new world if there is to be any at all."

The eighties mark a new period in the literature as well as in the politics of socialism. There began to appear at that time in all the countries of Europe a new force. There was the same revolt against the anarchy of society, against poverty and riches, but with it there came a master passion which differed fundamentally from the vague democratic yearnings of the older men. Carlyle, as well as the others, had noticed the growing proletariat, but he no more than they understood the historic rôle they were destined to play. Arnold said: “Our present social organization has been an appointed stage in our growth; it has been of good use, and has enabled us to do great things. But the use is at an end, and the stage is over." Nearly all the older men were of a similar view. They felt that society was on the eve of new developments, but of these their thought was vague and uncertain. In general their attitude was destructive and negative; more in accord with Bakounine than with Marx, who was coming to be the dominant spirit in the rising movement.

Socialism was beginning to manifest itself in definite