Upton Sinclair

“ Modern civilization is a stepmother to poets; it is crowded, noisy and ugly, and they run away and seek refuge in gardens, or monasteries, or dreams of a happier past. But modern civilization is alive; it is the life of hundreds of millions of human beings, forging a new future. And there comes a new kind of poet, able to penetrate to the inner spirit of that future. ”

“ If only he had been willing to learn from Mark Twain and William Dean Howells how to dodge the shadow of a scandal!
The life of this wayward child of genius is one more illustration of that disagreeable alternative which life so often presents us. You may have self-restraint, plus more or less hypocrisy, and live long and successfully; or you may have do-as-you-please, plus absolute honesty, and undermine your constitution and die at the age of twenty-nine. The mind of Stephen Crane was like an acid which dissolved the shams and pretenses of civilization. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was fitting that such a poet should be a Belgian; for Belgium is the center of the new industrialism in Europe. Here are great iron and steel plants, and vast cobwebs of railroads, and harbors to which the commerce of the world pours in. The past and the future meet here, for Belgium has an old history and art; it is a battle-ground of Catholicism and Protestantism, of modern science and ancient mysticism, of French revolution and German autocracy. It is wealthy, with all the class contrasts and antagonisms which modern capitalism brings. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Living in the nineteenth century, at a time of universal suffrage, and democracy, and liberalism, we asked ourselves whether what are called “the lower orders” had no claim upon the Novel; whether the people—this world beneath a world—were to remain under the literary ban and disdain of authors who have hitherto maintained silence regarding any soul and heart that they might possess. We asked ourselves whether, in these days of equality, there are still for writer and reader unworthy classes, misfortunes that are too low, dramas too foul-mouthed, catastrophes too base in their terror. ”

“ Get it clear in your mind that external beauty is entirely compatible with deadly cruelty of intellect and spirit. A tiger is a marvelous product, from the esthetic point of view, and offers a superb theme to poets, as William Blake has shown us. “Tyger, tyger, burning bright”—but who wants this gold-striped glory in his garden? In exactly the same way, there is a mass of what is called literature, possessing the graces of form—music and glamor, elegance, passion, energy—and using all these virtues, precisely as the tiger uses his teeth and claws, to rend and destroy human life. ”

“ Young poets are free to write as eloquent verses as they know how; and they may put into those verses a celebration of all things beautiful and just and noble in the world. On the other hand, they may put in a celebration of debauchery; and they may try it out for themselves, and fall slaves to alcohol and drugs, and end in the mad-house or a suicide’s or drunkard’s grave—like Baudelaire and Verlaine and Musset and Poe and Dowson, and that brilliant, unhappy genius whose story we have next to read. ”

“ But the literary world also resembles a crab, in that it walks backward, with its eyes on the past. Invariably you find that what is called scholarship and culture is several generations behind the practical life of men; and so the poets went on composing elaborate and fantastic romances of chivalry. The test of excellence in literature was the refinement and elegance and remoteness from life of this perverted leisure-class art: until Cervantes came along and laughed it to death. ”

“ You see, it is hard for Turgenev to portray anyone who believes, because he is an artist in the leisure-class tradition of fatalism and urbane incredulity. Life is a malady; it is a malady in cruel and barbarous Russia, and no less so in free but cynical and licentious Paris. Turgenev, living safely abroad, describes heroes who also live abroad; he has not the moral courage to face Russia and the Russian problem, even in his thoughts. His people are the exiles and intellectuals, the travelers and parasites, amusing themselves in the capitals of Europe. ”

“ Beethoven went to Vienna to earn his living as entertainer to the dilettante aristocracy of that pleasure-loving city. He was eccentric, self-absorbed, possessed by his visions, never happy except when he was composing, or out in the country where he could give free rein to his delight in nature. It was his fate to teach music to the children of the rich, and to play for grown-up rich children in their salons. They were accustomed to chatter while men of genius attempted to entertain them ”

“ 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! ”

“ It was the task of eighteenth century England to create the bourgeois soul. Machinery and standardized production, which were to make over the world, had not yet appeared, but when they came, they found their psychology and culture all prepared for them by this “nation of shop-keepers.” It is a world of money, all other powers deposed, all other standards a shell without life inside; honor, favor, virtue are represented by money. Religion has become an affair of “livings” and of “benefices.” Politics has become an affair of party rancor, a squabble over the spoils of office. ”

“ And so once more, as in the case of Mark Twain, we see the spirit of bourgeois America, embodied in the personality of a woman, engaged in remodeling the soul of a genius. Here was a mass of material, palpitating with life, and ready to be shaped into one of the great tragic records of the ages. And here was a loving and tender-hearted, humorous and blundering Southern gentleman, with no grasp of social forces and no understanding of what had happened to him, engaged in sentimentalizing and feminizing that mass of material. ”

“ Here are the gods of a new hierarchy, princes and potentates, absorbing to themselves by divine right all the treasures of civilization. Here they are exhibited in all their splendor, one of the world’s greatest poets devoting his technical skill to glorifying and exalting them. Storms of thrilling emotion are poured forth, and the crowds go mad with excitement. So ideals are created and standards set, which govern, not merely the art life, but the social and political and business life of the whole of society.
The poet himself lived this life of elegant egotistical passion ”

“ Strindberg’s tragedy was the same, but he never recognized it; he clung to his generalization, not merely through this marriage, but through two others, which failed in the same way, and for the same reason.
It is true that some women are predatory; it is true that a great many women abuse the power they get. That may be expected of every enslaved race or class or sex. But the only way to become fit for power is to exercise it, and the only way to get it is to take it. The women who broke Strindberg’s three marriages were like the suffragettes with hammers ”

“ Verhaeren wrote in French, and used a new form of rhymed free verse, more obviously rhythmical than Whitman’s, marvelously responsive to every throb of the poet’s imagination. It is a kind of verse to chant aloud, an utterance of sweeping ecstasy. Verhaeren resembles Whitman in many ways; in his identification of himself with the toiling masses, his sense of the multitude as a new being, a thing with a life of its own. Like Whitman he accepts the universe, he sings the chant of humanity becoming God, conquering nature, and remaking existence in its own image. ”

“ The young intellectuals of America are no longer romantic and beautiful and innocent, and they say that Longfellow is propaganda. But you know my thesis by now—theirs is just as much propaganda, only it is on the other side. What Longfellow called art is incitement towards diligence and sobriety, while what our young sophisticates call art is incitement toward going to hell in a hurry. Anything that pictures the delights of the senses and the breakdown of the will is art; but poor Longfellow, in an unguarded moment, had the misfortune to exclaim that
Life is real! ”

“ A fortune sufficient to enable the hero to escape the inconvenience of working, and to live in the country and exhibit to mankind a beautiful and graceful specimen of the human race. A fortune sufficient to enable him to marry a lady of Sense and Sensibility, and to provide her with a beautiful home and a garden, and a few servants, and maintenance for whatever number of children it may please Providence to send. That is the sort of fortune for which Jane Austen’s heroines are competing, and which each of them invariably gets—the bourgeois happy ending. ”

“ Over the whole picture you feel the brooding pity of a master spirit, to whom these suffering millions are an obsession, haunting his imagination and driving him to his task.
There are no heroes and no heroines in Zola’s works; his hero is the human swarms who breed like flies in our teeming cities, and struggle and suffer and perish, without ever a gleam of understanding of their fate. He takes us into the mining country, and in “Germinal” shows us the slaves of the pits, coal-blackened hordes, starving, oppressed, poisoned by alcohol, surging up in a blind fury of revolt. ”

“ There have to be boxes, as well as sex gratification, in the capitalist world; and thousands of women must hold their box-making jobs. They lose their hair and teeth, sometimes their fingers, and always their beauty; but they acquire class-consciousness; and here and there a genius among them, by incredible heroic labors, gets a bit of knowledge and becomes a leader. So, out of the whole mass-misery results organization, and that labor movement which is the germ of the new society, taking form, according to the wondrous process of nature, inside the shell of the old. ”

“ It never occurred to anyone in Voltaire’s time that he was not the equal of Racine, as a dramatist; while his epics were put above Homer and Virgil. We today begin one of his plays with determination to go through to the end, but we cannot make it; we desire some Greenwich Village wit to produce it in mock heroic style, so that we can laugh heartily at these pompous aristocrats raging and storming, stabbing and killing each other. We laugh, because it is so apparent that the poet himself has never felt any of this emotion, he has thought only how magnificent it sounds. ”

“ What a man is personally counts for little compared with the class he belongs to. He is a gentleman, he owns houses and lands, and Pamela’s children will be ladies and gentlemen, and will own houses and lands. This novel became the sensation of the day, not merely in England, but all over Europe. There were two large volumes, and a sequel with two more, but no one was bored; great ladies sat up half the night, weeping their eyes red over Pamela’s trials, and welcoming her—in imagination—into the class of ladies. ”

“ The Art of Beauty is equally propaganda; it is the gas-barrage of the “haves,” and the essence of its deadliness lies in the fact that it looks so little like a weapon. But to me it seems clear enough that when a leisure-class artist portrays the graces and refinements of the civilization which maintains him, when he paints the noble features, and quotes the imaginary golden words of ruling-class ladies and gentlemen, he is doing the best he knows how to protect those who give him a living. ”

“ The dark, overshadowing fate of the Greeks is gone, its place as director of events being taken by human ambition. Corneille’s characters are embodiments of this or that passion. They are, of course, always aristocrats, the mighty and powerful of the earth; they are intended to be morally sublime, but to us they seem monsters of egotism. They want what they want when they want it, they smite their breasts and exclaim: “Moi! Moi! Moi!” There is war, splendid war, in which they gain the admiration and attention known as “glory.” The tragedy comes because they cannot get all they want ”

“ In this bourgeois world the artist may be feeble of mind, not knowing the reality of his time, believing sincerely in its shams. Or he may be a cynic, jeering at his time, but taking what he can get. Or he may be a rebel, speaking the truth—in which case he will starve in a garret, or go insane, or be thrown into prison, or driven into exile. ”

“ The obscure and exploited masses of New York, the waitresses and hat-pressers and soda-jerkers and bums and taxi drivers and policemen, O. Henry’s Four Million, adopted him as their favorite writer, because he knew their lives, he loved them, and they felt that love under the cover of his laughter. And in truth it is a pleasant thing when you are in trouble to find a heart which feels with you; but it is an even more important thing to find a head which understands the causes of your trouble and can help you to escape it. ”

“ We no longer consider these creations sublime; we call them psychopaths, and the art which portrays them we call a bore.
As economists we have explored the social causes of such raging egotisms, and also the social consequences. The plutocracy is not the only class which has unbridled desires; the proletariat has its share, and if one class is permitted to gratify them, and to flaunt them before the world, the only possible consequence is a revolution of blind and bloody revenge. ”

“ The answer is: love of truth, and loathing of corruption and hypocrisy. He wrote all those things which Mark Twain knew, but suppressed. He was the only one of those who fought through the war to tell the truth about it. And therein lies his power and significance as an artist; he, the art-for-art’s-saker pure and simple, writes tales which make us hate mass-murder.
The formula of these tales is the one with which Maupassant has made us familiar. Men aspire, and fate knocks them down and tramples their faces into the mud. ”