“In every country in Europe, as soon as the social revolution comes. The workers, taking power, bring a new psychology and a new ethics; naturally they have to have a new art, and new art standards.”
“They may want to write their own text-books,” suggests Mrs. Ogi.
“No doubt they will—and better than mine. But so far no one has done it—and they will have to use such weapons as they find ready.”
Mrs. Ogi is one of those who observe the phenomena of religion with a mingling of fear and longing. It would be wonderful to believe like that! “Of course,” she says, “if your side has its way—”
“That is how history is made,” says Ogi. “Once upon a time a wealthy Virginia planter, with other wealthy gentlemen from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, rose up and declared rebellion against his king. A war was fought, and the rebel planter won; therefore he is known as the Father of His Country, and all little boys in school learn how he could not tell a lie. If he had lost his war against his king, he would have been a vile and traitorous varlet, and every little boy in school would have learned by heart a long list of the lies he had told. And just so it is with writers who take up the cause of the dispossessed and disinherited. If the proletariat wins in its war against capitalism, these outcast writers will become leading men of letters. On the other hand, if the proletariat loses, they will remain ‘propagandists,’ and ‘tub-thumpers,’ and ‘buzzards,’ and ‘muckrakers’—you recognize those terms.”
Yes, Mrs. Ogi admits that she recognizes them; and he continues:
“I have given the workers an honest book, a sound book, from the point of view of their hopes and needs. I say to them: Why should you read the books of your enemies, those who make their glory and their greatness out of your misery and humiliation? Why should you walk into the traps that are set for you? Life is very cruel, but assuredly this is the most cruel thing in your fate—that you should admire those actions which crush you, those tastes which spurn you, those standards which have as their beginning and end your enslavement and degradation.”
“None but workers are to see this book?” asks Mrs. Ogi.
“I use the word in its revolutionary sense, the strict scientific sense of those who do the useful and necessary labor, whether of hand or brain. I am pleading especially with the young brain-workers, the intellectuals. For the hand-worker is a slave by compulsion, but the young thinker, the student, has the ancient choice of Hercules, between virtue and vice. He may sell himself to the exploiters, he may take the dress-suit bribe, the motor-cars and the ‘hooch’ parties, and the beautiful, soft-skinned, hard-souled women; or he may heed my plea, and steel his soul, and go back to the garret which is the cradle of the arts, back to the ancient and honorable occupation of cultivating literature upon a little oatmeal.
“To this young intellectual, hesitating at the parting of ways, I say: Comrade, this world of organized gambling and predation in which we live seems powerful and permanent, but it is an evil dream of but a few more years; the seeds of its own destruction are sprouting in its heart. I am not referring to its moral failure, the fact that it thwarts the most fundamental of human cravings, for justice and for freedom; I mean in the bare material sense—it fails to employ its own workers, it makes misery out of its own plenty, and war and destruction of its abounding prosperity. It is as certain to fall as a pyramid standing on its tip; and when it falls, what is left but the workers? What other force is there, having solidarity, the sense of brotherhood, the ideal of service, of useful labor, as against the buying and selling and exploiting, the robbing, killing and enslaving which is capitalism?