4. UPTON SINCLAIR
The social and industrial order which has blacklisted Upton Sinclair has, while increasing his rage, also increased his art. In his youth he was primarily a lyric boy storming the ears of a world which failed to detect in his romances the promise of which he himself was outspokenly confident. His first character—the hero of Springtime and Harvest and of The Journal of Arthur Stirling—belonged to the lamenting race of the minor poets, shaped his beauty in deep seclusion, and died because it went unrecognized. Mr. Sinclair, though he had created Stirling in his own image, did not die. Instead he began to study the causes of public deafness and found the injustices which ever since he has devoted his enormous energy to exposing. If that original motive seems inadequate and if traces of it have been partially responsible for his reputation as a seeker of personal notoriety, still it has lent ardor to his crusade. And if he had not discovered so much injustice to chronicle—if there had not been so much for him to discover—he must have lacked the ammunition with which he has fought.
As the evidences have accumulated he has been spared the need of complaining merely because another minor poet was neglected and has been able to widen his accusations until they include the whole multitude of oppressions which free spirits have to contend against when they face machines and privilege and mortmain. The industrial system which true prophets have unanimously condemned for a century and a half helped to pack Mr. Sinclair's records from the first; the war, with its vast hysteria and blind panic, made it superfluous for him to add much commentary in Jimmie Higgins and 100% to the veritable episodes which he there recounted. On some occasions fact itself has the impetus of propaganda. The times have furnished Mr. Sinclair the keen, cool, dangerous art of Thomas Paine.
To mention Paine is to rank Mr. Sinclair with the ragged philosophers among whom he properly belongs, rather than with learned misanthropes like Swift or intellectual ironists like Bernard Shaw. An expansive passion for humanity at large colors all this proletarian radical has written. By disposition very obviously a poet, working with no subtle or complex processes and without any of the lighter aspects of humor, Mr. Sinclair simply refuses to accept existence as it stands and goes on questioning it forever. Samuel the Seeker seems a kind of allegory of its author's own career. He, too, in the fashion of Samuel Prescott, inquires of all he meets why they tolerate injustice and demands that something or other be done at once. These are the methods of the ragged philosophers, whereas the learned understand that justice comes slowly and so rest now and then from effort; and the ironists understand that justice may never come and so now and then sit down, detached and cynical.
Naïve inquirers like Upton Sinclair take and give fewer opportunities for comfort. How can any one talk of the long ages of human progress when a child may starve to death in a few days? How can any one take refuge in irony when agony is always abroad, biting and rending? How can any one leave to others the obligation to assail injustice when the responsibility for it lies equally upon all, whether victims or victors, who permit it to continue? A questioner so relentless can very soon bore the questioned, especially if they are less strenuous or less inflamed than he and can keep up his pitch neither of activity nor of anger; but this is no proof that such an inquiry is impertinent or that answers are impossible. Indeed, the chances are that the proportions of this boredom and the animosity resulting from it will depend upon the extent to which grievances do exist about which it is painful to think for the reason that they so plainly should not exist. A complacent reader of any of Mr. Sinclair's better books can stay complacent only by shutting up the book and his mind again.
Without doubt the various abuses which these books set forth have their case seriously weakened by the violent quickness with which Mr. Sinclair scents conspiracy among the enemies of justice. It is perhaps not to be wondered at that he should so often fly to this conclusion; he has himself, as his personal history in The Brass Check makes clear enough, been practically conspired against. But some instinct for melodrama in his constitution has led him to invent a larger number of conspirators than has been necessary to illustrate his contention.
In Love's Pilgrimage, for instance, Thyrsis suffers tortures from the fact that it takes time for a poet, however gifted, to make himself heard. In reality, of course, the blame for this lies in about the same quarter of the universe as that which establishes a period of years between youth and maturity; to complain too bitterly about either ruling is to waste on an inscrutable problem the strength which might better be devoted to an annoying task. Mr. Sinclair, however, cools himself in no such philosophy. He dramatizes Thyrsis's hungry longings and cruel disappointments on Thyrsis's own terms, making the boy out a martyr with powerful forces arrayed against him in a conspiracy to keep ascendant genius down. Consequently the narrative has about it something shrill and febrile; it is keyed too high to carry full conviction to any but those who are straining at a similar leash. So also in The Profits of Religion—which is to the present age what The Age of Reason was to an earlier revolutionary generation—Mr. Sinclair excessively simplifies religious history by reducing almost the whole process to a conspiracy on the part of priestcraft to hoodwink the people and so to fatten its own greedy purse. He must know that the process has not been quite so simple; but, leaving to others to say the things that all will say, he studies "supernaturalism as a source of income and a shield to privilege." Here again his instincts and methods as a melodramatist assert themselves: he warms to the struggle and plays his lash upon his conspiring priests in a mood of mingled duty and delight.
The Profits of Religion and The Brass Check belong to a series of treatises on the economic interpretation of culture which will later examine education and literature as these two have examined the church and journalism and which collectively will bear the title The Dead Hand. Against the malign domination of the present by the past Mr. Sinclair directs his principal assault. In the arts he sees the dead hand holding the classics on their thrones and thrusting back new masterpieces as they appear; in religion he sees it clothing the visions of ancient poets in steel creeds and rituals and denying that such visions can ever come to later spirits; in human society he sees it welding the manacles of caste and hardening this or that temporary pattern of life to a perpetual order. As he repeatedly suspects conspiracy where none exists, so he repeatedly suspects deliberate malice where he should perceive stupidity.
Now stupidity, though certainly the cause of more evils than malice can devise, is less employable as a villain: it is not anthropomorphic enough for melodrama. Mr. Sinclair is moral first and then intellectual. Touching upon such a theme as the horrors of venereal disease he feels more than a rational man's contempt for the imbecility of parents who will not instruct their daughters in anything but the sentimental elements of sex; he feels the fury toward them that audiences feel toward villains. It is much the same with his rather absurd novels written to display the follies of fashionable life, The Metropolis and The Moneychangers: he finds more crime than folly in the extravagant pursuit of pleasure on the part of the few while the many endure hunger and cold, homelessness and joblessness, ignorance and rebellion and premature decay. Though the satirists may smile at the silly few, the ragged philosophers must weep for the miserable many.
Class-consciousness is a great advantage to the writer of exciting fiction, as numerous American novelists have shown—standing ordinarily, however, on the side of the privileged orders. Mr. Sinclair in The Jungle, his great success, taking his stand with the unprivileged, with the wretched aliens in the Chicago stockyards, had the advantage that he could represent his characters as actually contending against the conspiracy which always exists when the exploiters of men see the exploited growing restless. What outraged the public was the news, later confirmed by official investigation, that the meat of a large part of the world was being prepared, at great profit to the packers, under conditions abominably unhygienic; what outraged Mr. Sinclair was the spectacle of the lives which the workers in the yards were compelled to lead if they got work—which meant life to them—at all. Thanks to the conspiracy among their masters they could not help themselves; thanks to the weight of the dead hand they could get no help from popular opinion, which saw their plight as something essential to the very structure of society, as Aristotle saw slavery. Mr. Sinclair proclaimed with a ringing voice that their plight was not essential; and he prophesied the revolution with an eloquence which, though the revolution has not come, still warms and lifts the raw material with which he had to deal.
Nothing about him has done more to make him an arresting novelist than his conviction that mankind has not yet reached its peak, as the pessimists think; and that the current stage of civilization, with all that is unendurable about it, need last no longer than till the moment when mankind determines that it need no longer endure. He speaks as a socialist who has dug up a multitude of economic facts and can present them with appalling force; he speaks as a poet sustained by visions and generous hopes.
How hope has worked in Mr. Sinclair appears with significant emphasis in the contrast between Manassas and 100%; the two books illustrate the range of American naturalism and the progressive disillusion of a generation. Manassas is the work of a man filled with epic memories and epic expectations who saw in the Civil War a clash of titanic principles, saw a nation being beaten out on a fearful anvil, saw splendor and heroism rising up from the pits of slaughter. And in spite of his fifteen years spent in discovering the other side of the American picture Mr. Sinclair in Jimmie Higgins, the story of a socialist who went to war against the Kaiser, showed traces still of a romantic pulse, settling down, however, toward the end, to a colder beat. It is the colder beat which throbs in 100%, with a temperature that suggests both ice and fire. Rarely has such irony been maintained in an entire volume as that which traces the evolution of Peter Gudge from sharper to patriot through the foul career of spying and incitement and persecution opened to his kind of talents by the frenzy of noncombatants during the war. To this has that patriotism come which on the red fields of Virginia poured itself out in unstinting sacrifice; and, though the sacrifice went on in France and Flanders, was it worth while, Mr. Sinclair implicitly inquires, when the conflict, at no matter how great a distance, could breed such vermin as Peter Gudge? Explicitly he does not answer his question: his art has gone, at least for the moment, beyond avowed argument, merely marshaling the evidence with ironic skill and dispensing with the chorus. 100% is a document which honest Americans must remember and point out when orators exclaim, in the accents of official idealism, over the great days and deeds of the great war.
The road for Mr. Sinclair to travel is the road of irony and documentation, both of which will hold him back from ineffectual rages and thereby serve to enlarge his influence. Such genius for controversy as his may be neither expected nor advised to look for quieter paths; it feels, with Bernard Shaw, that "if people are rotting and starving in all directions, and nobody else has the heart or brains to make a disturbance about it, the great writers must." It is fair to say, however, that certain readers heartily sympathetic toward Mr. Sinclair observe in him a painful tendency to enjoy scandal for its own sake and to generalize from it to an extent which hurts his cause; observe in him a quite superfluous gusto when it comes to reporting bloody incidents not always contributory to any general design; observe in him a frequent over-use of the shout and the scream. He has himself given an example—100%—on which such critical strictures are based; in that best of his novels as well as best of his arguments he has avoided most of his own defects.
A revolutionary novelist naturally finds it difficult to represent his world with the quiet grasp with which it can be represented by one who, accepting the present frame of life, has studied it curiously, affectionately, until it has left a firm, substantial image in the mind. The revolutionist must see life as constantly whirling and melting under his gaze; he must bring to light many facts which the majority overlook but which it will seem to him like connivance with injustice to leave in hiding; he must go constantly beyond what is to what ought to be. All the more reason, then, why he should be as watchful as the most watchful artist in his choice and use of the modes of his particular art. It requires at least as much art to convert as to give pleasure.