Upton Sinclair

“ I cried, “what is it that you do believe in? Blind creatures that you are, this raging faith of mine—this fervent ardor—you do not believe in that! You do not believe in enthusiasm, you do not believe in ecstasy, you do not believe in genius! You think that I am mad, poor raving poet! You see me sick, haggard, dragging myself about.
“But I am caged, I tell you,—I am caged! You are killing me as you would kill some animal; and I am never to sing that song—I am never to sing that song!” ”

“ Twenty centuries ago the Jewish world was a little plain, and God a loving Father. He held you in his arms, he spoke to you in every dream, in every fantasy, in every accident. Life was very short—but a little trial—you had only to be patient, and nothing mattered. Society did not exist—only your neighbor existed. Knowledge did not exist, nor was it needed—the world was to end—perhaps to-night—and what difference made all the rest? You took no heed for the morrow—for would not your Father send you bread? You resisted not evil—for if you died, was not that all that you could ask? ”

“ Ah, let me not forget what Shelley was to me in my young struggling days! Let me not forget while I am wrestling with a dull world—let me not forget what a poet is to young men hungering for beauty! Let me not forget!
Yes, it is to such that my appeal is, it is by such that I will be judged! It is for such that I toil! For hearts upon whom the cold world has not laid its hand! For the poets and the seekers of all ages! Oh come to me, poets and seekers of all ages—dwell in my memory and strengthen my soul! That I go not down altogether—that I be not overcome by the dull things about me! ”

“ Is my inspiration of no value at all, my ardor, my tenderness, my faith,—all nothing? You treat me as if I were an ox!
It is like being chained in the galleys! The dust and the heat, the jostling crowds, the banging and rattling, the bare, hideous streets—and above it all the wild, rampant vulgarity—the sordidness, the cheapness, the chaffering! My eyes stare at advertisements and signs until they burn me in my head.
Oh, the hell of egotism and vulgarity that is a city!
—“Why so much trouble? Other men bear dust and heat, and do their work without complaining!” ”

“ And the poet! Again the poet! Is he not vital to your society? Is he not, in the last analysis, the lawmaker, the law-enforcer—this seeker, this inspirer, this man with the new vision of right? I look at this society—body enough I see, bone and muscle, and a good, large, capable stomach. Brain enough I see, too, or nearly enough; but Soul? Soul? Who will dare to tell me that there is Soul enough? And your poet—why, he is your Soul! He is the man who fills the millions with the breath of life, who makes the whole vast machine a living, rejoicing, beautiful thing. ”

“ When you wait your life is outside of yourself; you hope,—you are at the mercy of others—at the mercy of indifference and accident and God knows what.
But again I cry, “What can I do? If there is anything I have not done—tell me! Tell me!”
Here I sit, and I have but seven dollars left to my name, including what I made by the shoveling. And I sit and watch the day creep on me like a wild beast on its prey—the day when I must go back into the world and toil again! Oh, it will kill me—it will kill me!
I sit and wait and hang upon the faint chance of one publisher more. ”

“ And you have beaten me and kicked me as if I were a filthy cur!
Those thoughts turn my whole soul into one wild curse! Have done with laying bare your heart to men, have done with telling your life to men! Why should you go on trying to be a poet, go on putting your secret soul into books, to be spurned at by the rabble? Your soul is your own—it is your God's—and what have the rabble to do with it! And all its tenderness! all its shrinking ecstasy! all its holiest consecration!—You will take them out to sell them to the rabble!
When will you get back into yourself, you fool? ”

“ There looms up before you—like a bare mountain in its majesty—the great elemental world-fact, the death-grapple of the will with circumstance. You may build yourself any philosophy or any creed you please, but you will never get away from the world-fact—the death-grapple of the soul with circumstance. Æschylus has one creed, and Milton has another, and Shelley has a third; but always it is the death-grapple. Chaos, evil—circumstance—lies about you, binds you; and you grip it—you close with it—all your days you toil with it, you shape it into systems, you make it live and laugh and sing. ”

“ Here is the inspiration of a sainted poet, here is ecstasy unthinkable, flung wide and glorious as the dawn; and here is all the sodden and brutal vulgarity of wealth, deaf, blind, and strutting in its insolent pomposity.
—I am very ill to-day—I have a splitting headache and I am weak. It is from trying to save too much money for the dumb-bell, I fear. But I laugh—what care I? My body is going to wreck—but what care I? Ah, it is a fine thing to be death-devoted, and freed from all the ills that flesh is heir to! ”

“ And so far it has not made one great poem, one great drama, one great novel!
It was the furnace-fire in which this land was forged—this land which holds in its womb the future of the world—this land that is to give laws to the nations and teach mankind its destiny. I search the ages, and I find no struggle so fraught with meaning, with the woe and the terror and the agony of a desperate hope.
It must be all put into an art-work, I say! There is no theme that could thrill the men of this country more, that could lift them more, that could do more to make their hearts throb with pride. ”

“ Here I was, a miserable, pining, starving wretch—and for no reason in the world but that I was a coward, but that I was a coward—a blind fool! Because I had not let the empty-headed and sodden, the placid and smug, the fat and greasy citizens of our great metropolis, tell me—the servant of the muses—how I ought to look, how I ought to act, what I ought to be! The very breath of my body is prayer—is effort—is vision; to dwell in my own light, to behold my own soul, to know my own truth—that is my one business in this world! ”

“ I am being tamed, subdued, overpowered; the thing is like a great cold hand that is laid upon me, pressing me down, smothering me! I know it—and I cry out and struggle as if in a nightmare; but it only presses the harder. Why, I was like a lion—restless—savage—all-devouring! Never-ceasing, eager, untamable—hungry for life, for experience, for power! I rushed through in days what others took months at—I watched every instant—I crowded hours into it.
—And now look at me! I crouch and whine—there is an endless moan in my soul. Can you break a man's spirit so that he never rises again? ”

“ The hours that I have hungered with thee, the hours that I have wept with thee, oh thou my poet, oh thou my Keats! Oh thou most wretched, most miserable of poets, oh thou most beautiful, most exquisite, most unthinkable of poets! Most inspired poet of England, since Milton died!—It was given to others to be beautiful, it was given to thee alone to be perfect! It was given to thee to be ecstasy incarnate, to be melody too sweet to hear! It was given to thee, alone of all poets, to achieve by mere language a rapture that thrills the soul like the sound of an organ. ”

“ The poet—tenderest and most sensitive of all men! The poet—the master of the arts of suffering! Exposed on every side, nervous, haunted, unused to the world, knowing how to feel and knowing that alone! Is not his life an agony under any conditions,—is he not tortured for you—the world? And you leave him helpless, despairing!
What is the matter with you?—How can you be so blind? There are some of you who really love books—look and see the story of genius—if it be not a thing to make you shudder and turn sick. ”

“ For seven years I have borne poverty and meanness, sickness, heat, cold, toil—that I might make myself an artist. The indignities, the degradations—I could not tell them, if I spent all the time I have in writing a journal. I have lived in garrets—among dirty people—vulgar people—vile people; I have worn rags and unclean things; I have lived upon bread and water and things that I have cooked myself; I have seen my time and my strength wasted by a thousand hateful impertinences—I have been driven half mad with pain and rage; I have gone without friends—I have been hated by every one ”

“ Am I to believe that mankind will always submit to toil and pant to make lace at a thousand dollars a meter to cover the pride-swollen carcase of a society dame?
How is it to be managed? I do not know. I am not a political economist—I am a seeker after righteousness. But as a poet, and as a clear-eyed soul, I stand upon the heights and I cry out for it, I demand it. I demand that society shall come to its own, I demand that there shall be intelligence in the world! I demand that the toil of the millions shall not be for the pride of the few! ”

“ What is that to Zarathustra! Clear shall your eye tell me: free to what?
“Canst thou give to thyself thy good and thine evil, and hang thy will above thee as thy law? Canst thou be thine own judge, and avenger of thy law?
“Fearful it is to be alone with the judge and the avenger of thy law. So is a stone flung out into empty space and into the icy breath of isolation.—
“Dost thou know truly, my brother, the word scorn? And the pain of thy righteousness, to be just that which thou dost scorn?...” ”

“ I come home every night weak and worn and filled with despair, or else with a choking in my throat, and helpless, cruel rage in my soul. Never mind that I am going to be free—the wrong is that it should ever have been—it will stay with me all my days and turn all my life to gall! It will wreck all my visions, all my aspirations, my faith, my eagerness; the memory of it will sound like a mocking voice in my ears, a sneer!
Day by day I strive and struggle and tear my-self to pieces, and sink back worn out ”

“ And all my ardor, my confidence, my trust—has it ever met with anything but jeers?
—Yes, and now you turn away—this revolts you! This is bare, painful egotism—this is whining—this is querulous misery. It offends you like the sight of raw flesh!
—It is my raw soul. My poor little naked, pitiful, beaten soul!—groveling, and begging, too!
—But whose fault is it—merciful Heaven, whose fault is it? It is my nature to live in myself—to live from myself. And this that is unbearable egotism, why, it would have been exulting power! Joy in a vision! Mastery of a life and an art! ”

“ I say that Religion and Art and Progress and Enlightenment—that all these things are made out of Genius; and that Genius is first and last, highest, and best, and fundamental. And I say that when you recognize that fact—when you believe in Genius—when you prepare the way for it and make smooth the paths for it—I say that then and then alone may you tell me that you are civilized.
The thing shrieks against heaven—your cruelty, your stupidity. Since ever the first poet came into this world it has been the same story of agony, indignity, and shame. ”

“ The poet wants nothing in this world but to be let alone to listen to the voices of his soul. He wants nothing from you in all this world but that you give him food while he does it—while he does it, miserable people—not for himself, but for you.
This is the shame upon you—that you expect—that you always have expected—that the poet, besides doing the fearful task his inspiration lays upon him—that he shall go out into the coarse, ruthless world and slave for his bread! That is the shame! That is the indignity, that is the brutality, the stupidity, the infamy! ”

“ You have still a whole scene in your consciousness—as if you were a juggler, tossing a score of golden balls. And all the time, while you work, you learn it—you learn it! It is endless, but you learn it. In the midst of it, perhaps, you come down of sheer exhaustion; and you lie there, panting, shuddering, your hands moist; you dare not think, you wait. And then by and by you begin again—if it will not come, you make it come, you lash yourself like a dumb beast—up, up, to the mountain-tops again. ”

“ He lays broad plans for his life—he gathers all knowledge, he solves all problems; lord of the infinite mind, he ranges all existence, and beholds it as the symbol of himself. Into the deeps and yawning spaces of it he plunges; blind, he sees what men have never seen; deaf, he hears what men have never heard—singer he is, prophet and poet and maker. New worlds leap into being in the infinite fulness of his heart, visions of endless glory that make his senses reel; as a column of incense towering to the sky is the ecstasy of his adoration and his joy. ”

“ Free is my muse, and bold, fearing not the embrace of man, fearing not passion, nor the words of passion,—not the throbbing heart, nor the burning brow, nor the choking voice. But the warmth of her breath and the fire of her eyes, they were kindled at a shrine of which the beast does not know. Let not any man think that he can kiss the lips of my muse while his breath is tainted with the fumes of wine!
An artist is a man with one pleasure—and it is not self-indulgence; an artist is a man with one virtue—and it is not self-restraint. ”

“ That it has been a century in the eyes of the world, and has not yet brought forth one single poet or thinker of the first rank?
The poet! And I sought to be that man, my heart burned to sing that song! And look at me!
Who will dare to say that I might not have sung it? What chance have I had—have I not been handicapped and stunted, beaten and discouraged, punished as if I had been a loafer—by you, the world? Here I am—I am only a boy—and thrilling with unutterable things! And I am going down, down to destruction! ”

“ This is what I tell you—this is what I cry out to you, that the man of Genius can not earn his bread! That the work by which he develops his power is something absolutely and utterly different from the work by which he earns his bread! And that every hour which he gives to the one, he lessens his power and his capacity for the other! Every hour that he gives to the earning of his bread, he takes from his soul, he weakens his work, he destroys beauty which never again can he know or dream! ”

“ Thou wouldst call thyself Artist; thou wouldst have the Eternal Presence to dwell within thee, to fire thy heart with passion and dower thy lips with song; canst thou go into thy closet, and alone with thy Maker, say these words:
“O Thou Unthinkable, source of all light and life, Thou the great unselfish One, the great Sufferer; Thou seest my heart this day, how in it dwells but love of Thy truth and worship of Thy holiness. Thou seest that I seek not wealth that men should serve me, nor fame that they should honor me, for the glory that is Thine. ”