Francis Turner Palgrave, named by Tennyson as the best judge of poetry of his time, says in the notes to his “Golden Treasury”: “this ‘collect in verse,’ as it has been justly called, is the most mighty Sonnet in any language known to the Editor.” So you see, we are setting a high standard. What modern work shall we compare with it?

In the year 1914 there occurred in Colorado, in the Rocky Mountains cold, the “Ludlow massacre” of the wives and children of miners on strike. It caused a demonstration in front of the office of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., at 26 Broadway, New York, about which you may read in “The Brass Check.” A young poet who happened at that time to be my secretary, and who has since made a success as a novelist, was moved by these events to write a sonnet, which I sent to the Scripps newspapers, getting for the poet the unprecedented sum of twenty-five dollars. I now quote the sonnet, and invite you to study the two, comparing them by all tests of poetry known to you. I give my own opinion: that in their propaganda impulse these two sonnets are identical; that in simplicity, directness, and fervor of feeling they are as nearly identical as two art works can be; and that in technical skill the modern work is superior.

TO A CERTAIN RICH YOUNG RULER

By Clement Wood

Ah, but your bloody fingers clenched in prayer!
Your piety, which all the world has seen!
The godly odor spreading through the air
From your efficient charity machine!
Thus you rehearse for your high rôle up there,
Ruling beside the lowly Nazarene!

CHAPTER XXXVIII
COMRADE’S PROGRESS

There is another artist of English Puritanism we must not overlook. We shall have no trouble in proving this one a propagandist; so obviously was he preaching, that the critics of his own time overlooked him entirely. The elegant men of letters of the Restoration period, gossiping in their coffee houses, dicing in their taverns, and carrying on their fashionable intrigues, would have been moved to witty couplets by the notion that an ignorant tinker, a street-corner tub-thumper locked up in Bedford gaol, was engaged in composing one of the immortal classics of English literature. As soon might you attempt to tell one of the clever “colyumnists” of the New York newspapers, stumping his last cigarette in his coffee saucer at luncheon in the Algonquin, that an immortal classic of American literature was running serially in the “Appeal to Reason” or the “Daily Worker.”

John Bunyan came from the lowest ranks of the people, those same louts and clowns whom Shakespeare delighted to ridicule. And he was quite as ridiculous as Shakespeare could have wished him; he saw visions, and was pursued by devils, and rushed out onto the street to save the souls of people as ignorant and unimportant as himself. Under the laws of England the saving of souls was a privilege reserved to the younger sons of the gentry, who got “livings” out of it; so John Bunyan was persecuted, precisely as ignorant and unimportant I. W. W. are persecuted in my neighborhood today. And he behaved exactly as the I. W. W. behave; that is, he stubbornly declined to change his opinions, or to cease proclaiming them on the streets. Sent to prison, he did what a number of the I. W. W. did in Leavenworth; despite the fact that he had a pregnant wife and four small children, one of them blind, he refused to give a purely formal promise to behave himself. This caused extreme embarrassment to humane magistrates, who didn’t want to be hard on a poor crack-brain, but were sworn to uphold the majesty of the law.

So for twelve years John Bunyan stayed in jail and wrote “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Now my friend, Albert Mordell, includes it among his “waning classics.” He says: “The story that children delight in the book and read it through is mythical; many children try to read it but usually drop it.” Well, it so happened that when I read those words, I had been making a test on a ten-year-old boy, my own. We used to read it aloud, sitting in front of the fireplace on winter evenings; and of all the books we read, none created such excitement. It was difficult to keep on reading, because of the stream of questions: “What does that mean, Papa?” You see, allegories, which bore us adults, are fascinating to the child mind. Such a wonderful idea, when you first think of it—to embody moral qualities in living beings, and give them names, and send them walking out over the earth, to engage in adventures and contend with each other! To see the every-day problems of your own conduct unrolled before you in the form of a story!

My young friends of the radical intelligentsia, who used to live in Greenwich Village, but have now moved to Croton and Provincetown and Stelton to get away from the bally-hoo wagons, have been calling me a Puritan ever since they knew me; and now they will smile a patronizing smile, hearing me endorse this old-fashioned Sunday school story. I can only record my conviction, that one does not escape the need of personal morality by espousing proletarian revolution. Even after the revolution, there will be moral struggles fought out in the hearts of men and women. I realize that morality is destined to become a science, and that by the study of psychology we shall abolish many problems of conduct; nevertheless, life will still require effort—there will remain the question of whether to study or not to study, and why!