The "Beau Monde" might have been described as a magazine for the standardizing of the newly-rich. A group of these existed in every town in the country, and had their "society" in every little city. They would come to New York and put up at expensive hotels, and get their education in theatres and opera-houses and "lobster-palaces"; in addition they had this weekly messenger of good form. In its advertising-columns one read of the latest things in cigarettes and highb.a.l.l.s and haberdashery and candies and autos; and in its reading-matter one found the leisure-cla.s.s world, and the leisure-cla.s.s idea of all other worlds. Young Blanchard himself was in the most "exclusive" society; and if one stayed close to him, one might worm his way past the warders. Among the regular contributors to the "Beau Monde" and to "Macintyre"s", there were a dozen men who had risen by this method; and some of them had been real writers at the outset--had started with a fund of vigor, at least. But now they spent their evenings at dinner-parties, and their days lounging about in two or three expensive cafes, reading the afternoon papers, exchanging gossip, and acquiring the necessary stock of cynicism for their next picture of leisure-cla.s.s life.
It was what might have been described as the "court method" of literary achievement. The centre of it was the young prince who held the purse-strings; and the court was a coterie of bookish men of fashion and rich women whose husbands were occupied in the stock-market. They set the tone and dispensed the favors; one who stood in their good graces would be practically immune to criticism, no matter how seedy his work might come to be. n.o.body liked to "roast" a man with whom he had played golf at a week-end party; and who could be so impolite as to slight the work of a lady-poetess whom he had taken in to dinner?
Section 15. Thyrsis studied these people, and measured himself against them. He was not blinded by any vanity; he knew that it would not have taken him a week to turn out a short story which would have had the requisite qualities for Macintyre"s--which would have been clever and entertaining, would have had genuine sentiment, and as large a proportion of sincerity as the magazine admitted. He could have suggested that he thought it was worth five hundred dollars, and "Billy"
Macintyre would have nodded and sent him a check. And then he could have moved up to town, and got a frock-coat, and paid another call upon Mrs.
"Parmy" Patton. Then his friend Comings would have put him up for the "Thistle", he would have got to know the men who made literary opinion, and so his career would have been secure.
Nor need he have made any apparent break with his convictions. In "society" one met all sorts of eccentrics--"babus" and "yogis", Christian Scientists, spiritualists and theosophists, Fletcherites, vegetarians and "raw-fooders". And there would be ample room for his fad--it was quite "English" to be touched with Socialism. All that one had to do was to be entertaining in one"s presentation of it, and to confine one"s self to its literary aspects--not setting forth plans for the expropriation of the house of Macintyre!
Thyrsis had one grievous handicap, of course. He would have had to keep his wife and child in the background; for Corydon, alas, would not have scored as a giver of dinner-parties. From a woman like Mrs. Jesse Dyckman, skilled in intellectual fence, and merciless to her inferiors, Corydon would have turned tail and fled. Thyrsis was able to sit by and let Mrs. Dyckman wave the plumes of her wit and spread the tail-feathers of her culture before his astonished eyes, and at the same time occupy his mind with studying her, and working out her "economic interpretation". But Corydon took life too intensely, and people too personally for that.
But she would have let him go, if he had told her that it was best.
So why should he not do it--why should he turn his back upon this opportunity, and return to the "soap-box in a marsh" to wrestle with loneliness and want? The fact of the matter was that the thing which seemed so easy to his intellect, was impossible to his character.
Thyrsis could not have anything to do with these people without hypocrisy; merely to sit and talk pleasantly with them was to lie. They were to him the enemy, the thing he was in life to fight. And he hated all that they stood for in the world--he hated their ideas and their inst.i.tutions, their virtues as well as their vices.
He had been down into the bottom-most pit of h.e.l.l, and the sights that he had seen there had withered him up. How could he derive enjoyment from silks and jewels, from rich foods and fine wines, when he heard in his ears the cries of agony of the millions he had left behind him in that seething abyss? And should he trample upon their faces, as so many others had trampled? Should he make a ladder of their murdered hopes, to climb out to fame and fortune? Not he!
It seemed to him sometimes, as he thought about it, that he alone, of all men living, had power to voice the despair of these tortured souls.
Others had been down into that pit, and had come out alive; but who was there among them that was an _artist;_ that could forge his hatred into a weapon, sharp enough and stout enough to be driven through the tough hide of the world of culture? To be an artist meant to have spent years and decades in toil and study, in disciplining and drilling one"s powers; and who was there that had descended into the social inferno, and had come back with strength enough to accomplish that labor?
So it seemed to him that he was the bearer of a gospel, that he had to teach the world something it could otherwise not know. He had tried out upon his own person, and upon the persons of his loved ones, the effects of poverty and dest.i.tution, of cold and hunger, of solitude and sickness and despair. And so he knew, of his own knowledge, the meaning of the degradation that he saw in modern society--of suicide and insanity, of drunkenness and vice and crime, of physical and mental and moral decay.
He knew, and none could dispute him! Therefore he must nerve himself for the struggle; he must deliver that message, and pound home that truth.
He must keep on and on--in defiance of authority, in the face of all the obloquy and ridicule that the prost.i.tute powers of civilization could heap upon him. He must live for that work, and die for it--to make real to the thinking world the infamies and the horrors of the capitalist _regime_.
BOOK XV
THE CAPTIVE FAINTS
_"Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?
Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on."
"Do you remember how you used to tell me that?" she whispered.
"Hoping--always hoping!"
"And always young!" he added.
"How did I keep so?" she said, with wonder in her voice; and he read--
"Thou nearest the immortal chants--of old!-- Putting his sickle to the perilous grain In the hot corn-field of the Phrygian king, For thee the Lityerses-song again Young Daphnis with his silver voice doth sing!"
Then a smile of mischief crossed her face, and she asked, "Which Daphnis?"_
Section 1. Thyrsis came back to his home in the country, divided between satisfaction over the four hundred dollars worth of booty he had captured, and a great uneasiness concerning his novel. It had had with the critics all the success that he could have asked, but unfortunately it did not seem to be selling. Already it had been out three weeks, and the sales had been only a thousand copies. The publisher confessed himself disappointed, but said that it was too early to be certain; they must allow time for the book to make its way, for the opinions of the reviews to take effect.
And so, for week after week, Thyrsis watched and hoped against hope--the old, heart-sickening experience. In the end he came to realize that he had achieved that most cruel of all literary ironies, the _succes_ _d"estime_. The critics agreed that he had written a most unusual book; but then, the critics did not really count--they had no way of making their verdict effective. What determined success or failure was the department-store public. It would take a whim for a certain novel; and when a novel had once begun to sell, it would be advertised and pushed to the front, and everything else would give way before it, quite regardless of what the critic"s had said. A book-review appeared only once, but an advertis.e.m.e.nt might appear a score of times, and be read all over the country. So the public would have pounded into its consciousness the statement that "Hearts Aflame", by Dorothy Dimple, was a masterpiece of character-drawing, full of thrilling incident and alive with pulsing pa.s.sion. The department-store public, which was not intelligent enough to distinguish between a criticism and an advertis.e.m.e.nt, would accept all these opinions at their face-value. And that was success; even the critics bowed to it in the end--as you might note by the change in their tone when they came to review the next work by this "popular" novelist.
So Thyrsis faced the ghastly truth that another year and a half of toiling and waiting had gone for nothing--the heights of opportunity were almost as far away as ever. He had to summon up his courage and nerve himself for yet another climb; and Corydon would have to face the prospect of another winter in the "soap-box in a marsh".
It was now November, and Thyrsis had written nothing but Socialist manifestoes for six months. He was restless and chafing again; but living in distress as they were, he could not get his thoughts together at all. He must have been a trying person to live in the house with at such a time. "You ask me to take love for granted," said Corydon to him once; "but how can I, when your every expression is contradictory to love?"
How could he explain to her his trouble? Here again was the pressure of that dreadful "economic screw", that was crushing their love, and all beauty and joy and hope in their hearts. They might fight against it with all the power of their beings; they might fall down upon their knees together, and pledge themselves with anguish in their voices and tears in their eyes; but still the remorseless pressure would go on, day and night, week after week, without a moment"s respite.
There was this little house, for instance. It was all that Thyrsis wanted, and all that he would ever have wanted; and yet he could not be happy in it, because Corydon was not happy in it. He must be plotting and planning and worrying, straining every nerve to get to another house; he might not even think of any other possibility--that would be treason to her. So always it seemed--he had to turn his face a way that he did not wish to travel, he had to go on against every instinct of his own nature. His love for Corydon was such that he would be ashamed whenever his own instincts showed themselves. But then he would go alone, and try to do his work, and then discover the havoc this had wrought in his own being.
Just now the tension had reached the breaking point; the craving for solitude and peace was eating him up.
"What is it that you want?" asked Corydon, one day.
"I want to be where I don"t have to see anybody," he cried. "I want to rough it in a tent, as I did once before."
"But it"s too late to go to the Adirondacks, Thyrsis!"
"I know that," he said. "But there are other places."
He had heard of one in Virginia--in that very Wilderness of which he had written so eloquently, but had never seen. "Isn"t there some one who could come and stay with you?" he pleaded.
"I don"t know," replied Corydon. But the next day, as fate would have it, there came a letter from Delia Gordon, saying that she had finished a certain stage of her study-course, and was tired out and in fear of break-down. So an invitation was sent and accepted, and Thyrsis secured the respite which he craved.
And so behold him as a hermit once more, settled in a deserted cabin not far from the battle-field of Spotsylvania. He had got rid of the vermin in the cabin by burning sulphur, and had stocked his establishment with a canvas-cot and a camp-stool and a lamp and an oil-can, and the usual supply of beans and bacon and rice and corn-meal and prunes. Also he had built himself a rustic table, and unpacked a trunkful of blankets and dishes and writing-pads and books. So once more his life was his own, and a thing of delight to him.
He had promised himself to live off the country, as he had before; but the princ.i.p.al game here was the wild turkey, and the wild turkey proved itself a shy and elusive bird. It was not occupied with meditations concerning literary masterpieces; and so it had a great advantage over Thyrsis, who would forget that he had a gun with him after the first half-hour of a "hunt".
Section 2. It had now become clear to Thyrsis that he had nothing more to expect from his novel; it had sold less than two thousand copies, which meant that it had not earned the money which had already been advanced to him. But all that was now ancient history--the entrenchments and graveyards of the Wilderness battlefield were not more forgotten and overgrown with new life than was the war-book in Thyrsis" mind. He had had enough of being a national chronicler which the nation did not want; he had come down to the realities of the hour, to the blazing protest of the new Revolution.
For ten years now Thyrsis had been playing at the game of professional authorship; he had studied the literary world both high and low, and had seen enough to convince him that it was an impossible thing to produce art in such a society. The modern world did not know what art was, it was incapable of forming such a concept. That which it called "art" was fraud and parasitism--its very heart was diseased.
For the essence of art was unselfishness; it was an emotion which overflowed, and which sought to communicate itself to others from an impulse of pure joy. It was of necessity a social thing; the supreme art-products of the race had been, like the Greek tragedy and the Gothic cathedral, a result of the labor of a whole community. And what could the modern man, a solitary and predatory wolf in the wilderness of _laissez_ _faire_--what could he conceive of such a state of soul? What would happen to a man who gave himself up to such a state of soul, in a community where the wolf-law and the wolf-customs prevailed?
A grim purpose had been forming itself in Thyrsis" mind. He would suppress the artist in himself for the present--he would do it, cost whatever agony it might. He would turn propagandist for a while; instead of scattering his precious seed in barren soil, he would set to work to make the soil ready. There was seething in his mind a work of revolutionary criticism, which would sweep into the rubbish-heap the idols of the leisure-cla.s.s world.
It was his idea to go back to first principles; to study the bases of modern society, and show how its customs and inst.i.tutions came to be, and interpret its art as a product of these. He would show what the modern artist was, and how he got his living, and how this moulded his work. He would take the previous art-periods of history and study them, showing by what stages the artist had evolved, and so gaining a stand-point from which to prophesy what he would come to be in the future. Only once had an attempt ever been made to apply to questions of art the methods of science--in Nordau"s "Degeneration". But then Nordau"s had been pseudo-science--three-quarters impertinence and conceit. The world still waited to understand its art-products in the light of scientific Socialism.
Such was the task which Thyrsis was planning. It would mean years of study, and how he was to get the means to do it, he could not guess.
But he had his mind made up to do it, though it might be the last of his labors, though everything else in his life might end in shipwreck. He went about all day, possessed with the idea; it would be a colossal work, an epoch-making work--it would be the culmination of his efforts and the vindication of his claims. It would save the men who came after him; and to save the men who came after him had now become the formula of his life.
Section 3. Thyrsis would come back from a sojourn such as this with all his impulses of affection and sympathy renewed; he would have had time to miss Corydon, and to realize how closely he was bound to her. He would be eager to tell her all his adventures, and the wonderful plans which he had formed.
But this time it was Corydon who had adventures to narrate. He realized as soon as he saw her that she had something upon her mind; and at the first occasion she led him off to his own study, and shut the door. He got a fire going, and she sat opposite him and gazed at him.
"Thyrsis," she said, "I hardly know how to begin."