CHAPTER XLVIII

THE GOOD FELLOW'S CODE

You will note in this bourgeois world two attitudes toward money; one might be described as the attitude of the first generation, and the other of the third. The first generation has had to make the money, and knows what money costs. The third generation wants the money just as much, but its knowledge is confined to what money will buy. There is war between these two generations, and you find it reflected in the arts; the young and saucy artists make propaganda for one side, while the mature and sober artists make it for the other.

There was in England at this time a gentleman whose ancestors had had money for a long time, and who took toward it the attitude of jolly good heartedness. He read this story of "Pamela," and it filled him with fury; what a loathsome world, in which men and women spent their time poring over cash-books and calling it virtue! What would be left in life if a fashionable young gentleman could not have fun with a lower class girl without tying himself to her for life! So Henry Fielding, gentleman, barrister, and man of pleasure in London, sat himself down to turn "Pamela" into screaming farce. He took Pamela's brother, a young footman, and pictured him in the household of a great lady who endeavored to lure him from the path of virtue. The agonies of temptation of Joseph Andrews reproduced those of his sister; but as young men were not supposed to have any virtue, the tragedy was turned upside down.

This story is usually cited by the critics as an illustration of how a man of genius began a piece of propaganda, and then got interested in his story, and turned it into a real work of art. I should alter the formula by saying that he changed from a negative to a positive kind of propaganda. Joseph Andrews runs away from his wicked mistress, taking a girl he truly loves, and the narrative turns from a satire on Richardson's pseudo-virtues into a portrayal of what Fielding considers real virtue. Joseph and his girl fall into trouble, and their creator, in pleading their cause, defends the poor and friendless all over England, who do not get justice in the courts. Fielding knew,

because he had ridden the circuits; being a warm-hearted man, he created a model English magistrate by the name of Squire Allworthy-an obvious enough name-to show how the law ought to be administered.

Fielding next took to writing plays. But he ventured to make satiric allusions to "persons of quality"; therefore he ran afoul of the Lord Chamberlain, and one of his plays was banned. He was disgusted, and rather than conform, he gave up play-writing. There was no government big-wig overseeing fiction; and so this new art form was destined to become the vehicie of social criticism.

In his next book this gentleman-novelist went on to write a deadly piece of satire. Looking out over Europe, he saw Frederick, king of Prussia, called "the great," making a raid upon Silesia and seizing it; he saw other royal and imperial conquerors tormenting mankind with war. He took a notorious criminal, who had recently been hanged in London, and made him the hero of a novel, which parodied in detail the glory-career of a king. "Jonathan Wild the Great," like all works of revolutionary tendency, has received from the critics small part of its due praise. There are few scenes more grim than the conclusion of the book, the satire upon the "consolations of religion" when the arch-criminal dies.

Then came "Tom Jones," one of the greatest of English novels. Fielding's purpose in this story, as he declared it, was "to recommend Goodness and Innocence." In his hero he set out to show the truth about a man; not a snuffling saint for a church-window, but a real, hearty good fellow, according to Fielding's notion. What may such a young fellow do, and what may he not do? May he drink? Of course. May he spend money freely? Fielding knew about that, having married a rich wife and run through her fortune. May he take money from his friends? Yes, even ask for it. May he take money from his mistresses? And here suddenly you see the gentleman-author start up in anger. He may not! Here is an iron-clad rule, which English gentlemen enforce without compromise. But then, may he cohabit with girls of classes below his own? Yes, says Fielding, certainly he may, and he will; let's be honest, and not fool ourselves with shams. Thackeray, who was loud in admiration of

"Tom Jones," lamented that no novelist since then had dared to tell the truth about a man. In our day, for better or worse, the novelists have dared, and reticence as a literary virtue is dead.

In conclusion, we note the fact that Fielding died at the age of forty-three, "of dropsy, jaundice, and asthma.” So it appears that you may take your choice; you may exercise self-restraint, and be accused of hypocrisy, and of spoiling your friends' pleasure; or you may throw the reins upon the neck of desire, and go through life at a gallop and have your body give out just when your brain is ready for its best work.

CHAPTER XLIX

THE GAUGER OF GENIUS

We have read about an English gentleman-novelist who wasted his health and died at the age of forty-three; and we next have to hear the story of a Scotch plowmanpoet who treated himself in the same way and died at the age of thirty-seven. Such men present a painful problem to their friends, and also to their critics-since in art circles it is not considered good form to set up moral standards. However, in this case Robert Burns has solved the problem for us; he lacked nothing in clearness of insight or plainness of speech concerning his own follies, and spoke of his "self-contempt bitterer to drink than blood."

He was one of seven children of a peasant family, and was born on a stormy January day, in a clay cottage of which the roof was blown off a few days later. He followed the plow-tail all his early years, and wrote that his life until sixteen was "the toil of a slave." The few books they could borrow the children would read at meal times, or snatching a few words in the fields. Such peasant slaves are not supposed to acquire culture, and if they do so, it is at the cost of health of mind and body. Robert Burns was given to fits of melancholy, and to moods of wild excess; he speaks of his "passions raging like demons." He was a headstrong, impatient youth, disgusted by the falsities and shams of conventional religion.

He had to find his own code in life, and the fact that he found it too late to save himself is our loss.

This peasant, toiling on a rocky tenant farm, discovered in himself the gift of exquisite melody. His feelings poured themselves out in verses in the homely Scotch dialect, then considered a barbarous thing, unworthy of literature. He would compose these verses all day long while guiding the plow, and then, coming home at night, he would sit in a garret room and write them out. Not until he was twenty-seven years old did he succeed in having them published. They appeared at a time when the family was ruined, and the poet himself being pursued by officers of the law, at the instance of the father of a girl he loved. The twenty pounds which he got from this first volume saved his life, so he declared.

He leaped into fame all over Scotland, and spent a year in Edinburgh, where he was fêted by the great. But he did not keep their favor, because he persisted in intimacy with his humble friends, and also, alas! with the taverns. He went back to the plow, more set than ever in his bitterness against the world of privilege and rank. It was a time when the great world was in the habit of pensioning its poets, but the Tories controlled in Scotland, and "Bobbie" Burns was a Whig, and turned into a Republican, the same thing as a Bolshevik today. The best that lovers of his poetry could get him was a job as a gauger of liquor barrels, at the princely salary of sixty pounds a years.

Even that he had difficulty in holding; because the French revolution came sweeping over Europe, and frightened the governing class of England into just such a frenzy of reaction as we in America witnessed in 1919. In his capacity as exciseman Burns captured a smuggling ship with four cannon; he purchased the cannon at auction, and sent them to the French Legislative Assembly as a mark of sympathy. Imagine, if you can, an American customs officer in 1919 shipping four machine-guns to the Soviet government of Russia, and you may realize how close the poet came to losing the salary upon which his wife and children had to exist.

We shall see other poets shrinking in horror from the execution of King Louis, and throwing in their lot with reaction. But here is one who stood by the down-trodden

of the earth, and voiced their feelings to the end. Not merely is he the national poet of Scotland; he is, in spite of the handicap of dialect, the voice of the peasant and the land-slave throughout the English-speaking world. When he writes "the rank is but the guinea's stamp," he is the voice of the labor movement in England and of democracy in America. His work is beloved by humble people; you would be surprised to know how widely it is read-perhaps more widely than any other poetry among the poor.

The people know this voice, they know this heart, with all its loves and hates, its longings and griefs. There is no man who has come from the toiling masses, self-taught and self-made, who has expressed their feelings so completely. And note that he has, not merely beauty and passion, but keen insight and power of brain; he can think for his people, as well as feel with them. He is not a bit afraid to use his art to preach and to scold, to discuss moral problems, to storm at social injustice and to ridicule church dogma.

What though such a man did drink and squander himself; that also is a part of the worker's tragedy. He paid for it the price which the workers pay, and life spared him no part of the suffering and shame, nor did he spare himself the remorse. He wrote his own epitaph, in which he spoke of himself as "the poor inhabitant below," and recorded that "thoughtless folly laid him low and stained his name.' Because there is no spiritual value greater than honesty, the judgment of his people has raised him high and crowned his name with immortality.

CHAPTER L

THE BRAIN PROPRIETOR

"Why do you call this a work on art," says Mrs. Ogi, "when you are dealing entirely with literature?"

"All the arts are one," says her husband. "They are expressions of the human spirit, and the material they use is comparatively unimportant. We realize this when we see an artist like Michelangelo using blocks of marble and molecules of paint and printed words, and giving us with each medium the record of the same personality. There