One came to the culmination of the process in modern capitalist society.
Here was a cla.s.s entrenched in power, owning the sources of wealth, the huge machines whereby it was produced, and the railroads whereby it was distributed, and above all, the financial resources upon which the other processes depended. One saw this cla.s.s holding itself in power by means of the policeman"s club and the militiaman"s rifle, by machine-gun and battle-ship; one saw that, whether by bribery or by outright force, it had seized all the powers of government, of legislatures and executives and courts. One saw that in the same way it had seized upon the sources of ideas; it controlled the newspapers and the churches and the colleges, that it might shape the thoughts of men and keep them content.
It set up in places of authority men whose views were agreeable to it--who believed in the beneficence of its rule and the permanence of its system; who would pour out ridicule and contempt upon those who suggested that any other system might be conceivable. And so the cla.s.s-war was waged, not merely in the world of industry and politics, but also, in the intellectual world.
And step by step, as the processes of capitalism culminated, this war increased in bitterness and intensity. For, of course, as capital heaped up and its control became concentrated, the ratio of exploitation increased. The great ma.s.s of labor was unorganized and helpless; whereas the masters had combined and fixed their prices; and so day by day the cost of living increased, and misery and discontent increased with it.
As capital expanded, and new machines of production were added, there were more and more goods to sell, and more and more difficulty in finding markets; and so came overproduction and unemployment, panics and crises; so came wars for foreign markets--with new opportunities of plunder for the exploiters and new hardships and new taxes for the producers. And so was fulfilled the prophecy of Marx and Engels; under the pressure of bitter necessity the proletariat was organizing and disciplining itself, training its own leaders and thinkers forming itself into a world-wide political party, whose destiny it was to conquer the powers of government in every land, and use them to turn out the exploiters, and to put an end to the rule of privilege.
This change was what the Socialists meant by the "revolution"--the transfer of the ownership of the means of production; and it was about that issue that the cla.s.s-war was waged. Nothing else but that counted; without that all reform was futility, and all benevolence was mockery, and all knowledge was ignorance. So long as the means of producing necessities were owned by a few, and used for the advantage of a few, just so long must there be want in the midst of plenty, and darkness over all the earth. Whatever evil one went out into the world to combat, he came to realize that he could do nothing against it, because it was bound up with the capitalist system, was in fact itself that system.
If little children were shut up in sweat-shops, if women were sold into brothels, it was not for any fault of theirs, it was not the work of any devil--it was simply because of the "surplus value". they represented.
If weaker nations were conquered and "civilized", that, too, was for "surplus value". And these epidemics of "graft" that broke out upon the body politic--they were not accidental or sporadic things, and they were not to be remedied by putting any number of men in jail; they were to be understood as the system whereby an industrial oligarchy had rendered impotent a political democracy, and had fenced it out from the fields of privilege.
And so also was it with the dullness and sterility that prevailed in the intellectual world. The master-cla.s.s did not want ideas--it only wanted to be let alone; and so it put in the seats of authority men who were blind to the blazing beacon-fires of the future. It would be no exaggeration to say that the intellectual and cultural system of the civilized world was conducted, whether deliberately or instinctively, for the purpose of keeping the truth about exploitation from becoming clear to the people.
The master-cla.s.s owned the newspapers and ran them. It had built and endowed the churches, and taught the clergy to feed out of its hand. In the same way it had founded the colleges, and named the trustees, who in turn named the presidents and professors. The ordinary mortal took it for granted that because venerable bishops and dignified editors and learned college-professors were all in agreement as to a certain truth, there must be some inherent probability in that truth; and never once perceived how the cards were stacked and the dice loaded--how those clergymen and editors and professors had all been selected because they believed that truth to be true, and believed the contrary falsehood to be false!
And how smoothly and automatically the system worked! How these dignitaries stood together, and held up each other"s hands, maintaining the august tradition, the atmosphere of authority and power! The bishops praising the editors, and the editors praising the professors, and the professors praising the bishops! And when the circle was completed, what _lese_ _majeste_ it seemed for an ordinary mortal to oppose their conclusions!
The bishops, one perceived, were "orthodox"--that is to say they were concerned with barren formulas; and they were "spiritual"--they were concerned with imaginary future states of bliss. The editors were "safe"
and "conservative"--that is to say, their souls were dead and their eyes were sealed and their G.o.d was property. And when it came to the selecting of the college professors, of the men who were to guide and instruct the forthcoming generations--what precautions would be taken then! What consultations and investigations, what testimonials and interviews and examinations! For after all, in these new days, it could be no easy matter to find men whose minds were sterilized, who could face without blenching all the horrors of the capitalist regime! Who could see courts and congresses bought and sold; who could see children ground up in mills and factories, and women driven by the lash of want to sell their bodies; who could see the surplus of the world"s wealth squandered in riot and debauchery, and the nations armed and drilled and sent out to slaughter each other in the quest for more. Who could know that all these things existed, and yet remain in their cloistered halls and pursue the placid ways of scholarship; who could teach history which regarded them as inevitable; who could care for literature that had been made for the amus.e.m.e.nt of slave-drivers, and art which existed for the sake of art, and not for the sake of humanity; who could know everything that was useless, and teach everything that was uninteresting, and could be dead at once to the warnings of the past, and to all that was vital and important in the present.
Section 11. Not since he had discovered the master-key of Evolution had Thyrsis come upon any set of ideas that meant so much to him. It was not that these were new to him--they were the stuff out of which his whole life had been made; but here they were ordered and systematized--he had a handle by which to take hold of them. The name of this handle was "the economic interpretation of history". And its import was that ideas did not come by hazard, or out of the air, but were products of social conditions; and that when one knew by what method the wealth of any community was produced, and by what cla.s.s its "surplus value" was appropriated--then and then only could one understand the arts and customs, the sciences and religions, which that community would evolve.
In the light of this great principle Thyrsis had to revise all his previous knowledge; he had to cast out tons of rubbish from the chambers of his mind, and start his thinking life all over again. Just as, in early days, he had exchanged miracles and folk-tales for facts of natural science; so now he saw political inst.i.tutions and social codes, literary and artistic canons, and ethical and philosophical systems, no longer as things valid and excellent, having relationship to truth--but simply as intrenchments and fortifications in the cla.s.s-war, as devices which some men had used to deceive and plunder some other men. What a light it threw upon philosophy, for instance, to perceive it, not as a search for truth, but as a search for justification upon the part of ruling cla.s.ses, and for a basis of attack upon the part of subject-cla.s.ses!
So, for instance, on the one side one found Rousseau, and on the other Herbert Spencer. Thyrsis had read Spencer, and had cordially disliked him for his dogmatism and his callousness; but now he read Kropotkin"s "Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution", and came to a realization of how the whole science of biology had been distorted to suit the convenience of the British ruling-cla.s.ses. _Laissez-faire_ and the Manchester school had taught him that "each for himself and the devil take the hindmost"
was the universal law of life; and he had accepted it, because there seemed nothing else that he could do. But now, in a sudden flash, he came to see that the law of life was exactly the opposite; everywhere throughout nature that which survived was not ruthless egotism, but co-operative intelligence. The solitary and predatory animals were now almost entirely extinct; and even before the advent of man with his social brain, it had been the herbivorous and gregarious animals which had become most numerous. When it came to man, was it not perfectly obvious that the races which had made civilization were those which had developed the n.o.bler virtues, such as honor and loyalty and patriotism?
And now it was proposed to trample them into the mire of "business"; to abandon the race to a glorified debauch of greed! And this travesty of science was taught in ten thousand schools and colleges throughout America--and all because certain British gentlemen had wished to work their cotton-operatives fourteen hours a day, and certain others had wished to keep land which their ancestors had seized in the days of William the Conqueror! Shortly after this Thyrsis came upon Edmond Kelly"s great work, "Government, or Human Evolution"; and so he realized that Herbert Spencer"s social philosophy had at last been cleared out of the pathway of humanity. And this was a great relief to him--it was one more back-breaking task that he did not have to contemplate!
Section 12. Then one of his Socialist friends sent him Thorstein Veblen"s "Theory of the Leisure Cla.s.s"; a book which he read in a continuous ebullition of glee. Truly it was a delicious thing to find a man who could employ the lingo of the ultra-sophisticated sociologist, and use it in a demonstration of the most revolutionary propositions.
The drollery of this was all the more enjoyable because Thyrsis could never be sure that the author himself intended it--whether his sesquipedalian irony might not be a pure product of nature, untouched by any human art.
Veblen"s book might have been called a study of the ultimate destiny of "surplus value"; an economic interpretation of the social arts and graces, of "fashions" and "fads". Where men competed for the fruit of each other"s labor, the possession of wealth was the sign of excellence.
This excellence men wished to demonstrate to others; and step by step, as the methods of production and exploitation changed, one might trace the change in the methods of this demonstration. The savage chief began with nose-rings and anklets, and the trophies of his fights; then, as he grew richer, he would employ courtiers and concubines, and shine by vicarious splendor. He would give banquets and build palaces--the end being always "the conspicuous consumption of goods".
Later on came those stages when he no longer had to gain his wealth by physical prowess; when cunning took the place of force, and he ruled by laws and religions and moral codes, and handed down his power through long lines of descendants. Then ostentation became a highly specialized and conventionalized thing--its criterion changing gradually to "conspicuous waste of time". Those characteristics were cultivated which served to advertise to the world that their possessor had never had to earn wealth, nor to do anything for himself; the aristocrat became a special type of being, with small feet and hands and a feeble body, with special ways of walking and talking, of dressing and eating and playing. He developed a separate religion, a separate language, separate literatures and arts, separate vices and virtues. And fantastic and preposterous as some of these might seem, they were real things, they were the means whereby the leisure-cla.s.s individual took part in the compet.i.tion of his own world, and secured his own prestige and the survival of his line. Some philosopher had said that virtue is a product like vinegar; and it was a pleasant thing to discover that French heels and "picture-hats" and course-dinners were products also.
Thyrsis would read pa.s.sages of this book aloud to Corydon, and they would chuckle over it together; but the reading of it did not bring Corydon the same unalloyed delight. In the leisure-cla.s.s _regime_, the woman is a cherished possession--for it is through her that the ability to waste both time and goods can best be shown. So came Veblen"s grim and ironic exposition of the leisure-cla.s.s woman, an exposition which Corydon found almost too painful to be read. For Corydon"s ancestors, as far back as doc.u.ments could trace, had been members of that cla.s.s. They had left her the frail and beautiful body, conspicuously useless and dependent; they had left her all the leisure-cla.s.s impulses and cravings, all the leisure-cla.s.s impotences and futilities to contend with. They had taught her nothing about cooking, nothing about sewing, nothing about babies, nothing about money; they had taught her only the leisure-cla.s.s dream of "love in a cottage"--and she had run away with a poor poet to try it out!
The depth of these instincts in Corydon was amusingly ill.u.s.trated by the fact that she always woke up dull and discouraged, and was seldom really herself until afternoon; and that along about ten o"clock at night, when for the sake of her health she should have been going to bed, she would be laughing, talking, singing, ablaze with interest and excitement.
Thyrsis would point this out to her, and please himself by picturing the role which she should have been filling--wearing an empire gown and a rope or two of rubies, and presiding in an opera-box or a _salon_.
Corydon would repudiate all this with indignation; but all the same she never escaped from the phrases of Veblen--she remained his "leisure-cla.s.s wife" from that day forth. Not so very long afterwards they came upon Ibsen"s "Hedda Gabler"; and Thyrsis shuddered to observe that of all the heroines in the world"s literature, that was the one which most appealed to her. Nor did he fail to observe the working of the thing in himself; the subtle and deeply-buried instinct which made him prefer to be wretched with a "leisure-cla.s.s wife" rather than to be contented with a plebeian one!
BOOK XIV
THE PRICE OF RANSOM
_The faint grey of dawn was stealing across the lake; and still the spell was upon them.
"There thou art gone, and me thou leavest here Sole in these fields! yet will I not despair."
So she whispered; and he answered her--
"He loved his mates; but yet he could not keep, Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep.
Some life of men unblest He knew, which made him droop, and filled his head.
He went; his piping took a troubled sound Of storms that rage outside our happy ground._"
Section 1. In the course of that summer there befell Corydon an adventure; Thyrsis had gone off one day for a walk, and when he came back she told him about it--how a young lady had stopped at the house to ask for a drink of water, and had sat upon the piazza to rest, and had talked with her. Now Corydon was in a state of excitement over a discovery.
Whenever Thyrsis met a stranger, it was necessary for him to go through elaborate intellectual processes, to find the person out by an exchange of ideas. And if by any chance the person was insincere, and used ideas as a blind and a cover, then Thyrsis might never find him out at all.
In other words, he took people at the face-value of their cultural equipment; and only after long and tragic blunderings could he by any chance get deeper. But with his wife it happened quite otherwise; this case was the first which he witnessed, but the same thing happened many times afterwards. With her there would be a strange flash of recognition; it was a sort of intuition, perhaps a psychic thing--who could tell? By some unknown process in soul-chemistry, she would divine things about a person that he might have been a life-time in finding out.
It might be a burst of pa.s.sionate interest, or on the other hand, of repugnance and fear. And long years of practice taught Thyrsis that this instinct of hers was never to be disregarded. Not once in all her life did he know her to give her affection to a base person; and if ever he disregarded her antipathies, he did it to his cost. Once they were sitting in a restaurant, and a man was brought up to be introduced by a friend; he was a person of not unpleasant aspect, courteous and apparently a gentleman, and yet Corydon flushed, and could scarcely keep her seat at the table, and would not give the man her hand. Years after Thyrsis came upon the discovery about this man, that he made a practice of unnatural vices.
He came home now to find Corydon flushed with excitement. "She has such a beautiful soul!" she exclaimed. "I never met anyone like her. And we just took to each other; she told me all about herself, and we are going to be friends."
"Who is she?" asked Thyrsis.
"She"s visiting Mr. Harding, the clergyman at Bellevue," was the answer.
Bellevue was a town in the valley, on the other side from the university; it had a Presbyterian church, whose young pastor Thyrsis had met once or twice in his tramps about the country. This Miss Gordon, it seemed, was the niece of an elderly relative, his housekeeper; she was studying trained nursing, and afterwards intended to go out as a missionary to Africa.
"She"s so anxious to meet you," Corydon went on. "She"s coming up to see me to-morrow, and she"s going to bring Mr. Harding. You won"t mind, will you, Thyrsis?"
"I guess I can stand it if he can," said Thyrsis, grimly.
"You mustn"t say anything to hurt their feelings," said Corydon, quickly. "She"s terribly orthodox, you know; and she takes it so seriously. I was surprised--I had never thought that I could stand anybody like that."
Thyrsis merely grunted.
"I guess ideas don"t matter so much after all," said Corydon. "It"s a deep nature that I care about. But just fancy--she was pained because the baby hadn"t been baptized!"
"You ought to have hid the dreadful truth," said he.
"I couldn"t hide things from her," laughed Corydon, "But she says I can make a Socialist out of her, and she"ll make a Christian out of me!"
His reply was, "Wait until she discovers the sensuous temperament!"
But Corydon answered that Delia Gordon had a sensuous temperament also.
"She seemed to me like a Joan of Arc. Just think of her going away from all her family, to a station on the Congo River! She told me all about it--how wretched the people are, and what the women suffer. She woke up in the middle of the night, and a voice told her to go--told her the name of the place. And she"d never heard it before, and hadn"t had the least idea of going away!"