While I do not profess to be certain, I imagine that an author who wanted his book published by the Government would have to pay the expenses of the publication. This would not be any hardship, for wages in the Industrial Republic could not be less than ten dollars for a day of six hours’ work. With the rapid improvement in machinery and methods that would follow, they would probably soon be double that—and of course it would rest with the people who were doing the work to see that it was done in an attractive place, with plenty of fresh air and due safeguards against accidents. Under these conditions a man of refinement could go to a factory to work for pleasure and exercise, instead of pulling at ropes in a gymnasium, as he commonly does nowadays. And when a young author had earned the cost of making his book, he would have done all that he had to do. He would not have to enter into a race in vulgar advertising with exploiting private concerns; nor would the public form its ideas of his work from criticisms in reviews which were run to secure advertisements, and which gave their space to the books that were advertised the most. Neither would his critics be employed by a class, to maintain the interests of a class, and to keep down the aspirations of some other class. Also, the book-reading public would no longer consist—as our present society so largely consists—of idle and unfeeling rich, and ignorant, debased and hunger-driven poor.
And then, as I said, there is a second method—the method of the churches and clubs. Out in Chicago there was, four years ago, a man who thought there ought to be more Socialist books published than there were. He had no money; but he drew up a programme for a coöperative publishing house, to furnish Socialist literature at cost to those who wanted it. He got some ten thousand dollars in ten-dollar shares, and since then he has been turning out half a million pieces of Socialist literature every year. That seems to me a perfect illustration of what would happen in the new society, the second way in which books would be published. Such concerns—free associations, as they are termed in the Socialist vocabulary—would spring up literally by the thousands. They would cover every field that the liberated soul of man might be interested in, they would care for every type of thinker and artist, no matter how eccentric; they would offer encouragement to every man who showed the slightest sign of power in any field. The only reason we do not have many times as many of these associations as we have now, is simply that those people who really care about the higher things of life are almost invariably poor and helpless.
One of the curious things which I have observed about those who pick flaws in the suggestions of the Socialist, is how seldom it ever occurs to them to apply their own tests to the present system of things. How is it with art and literature production now—are all the conditions quite free from objection? Is the man of genius always encouraged and protected, and set free to develop his powers?
In the North American Review a couple of years ago there appeared an article by Mrs. Gertrude Atherton, in which she set forth her opinion that “American literature to-day is the most timid, the most anæmic, the most lacking in individualities, the most bourgeois, that any country has ever known.” This seemed to perplex Mrs. Atherton very much—she could not comprehend why such a very great country should have a “bourgeois” literature. I replied to her in a paper which was published in Collier’s Weekly, in which I maintained that “American literature is the most bourgeois that any country has ever known, simply because American life is the most bourgeois that any country has ever known.” I shall quote a few paragraphs from the essay, which began with an attempt to define the word “bourgeois”:
It signifies, in a sentence, that type of civilisation, of law and convention, which was made necessary by the economic struggle, and which is now maintained by the economic victors for their own comfort and the perpetuation of their power. The bourgeoisie, or middle class, is that class which, all over the world, takes the sceptre of power as it falls from the hands of the political aristocracy; which has the skill and cunning to survive in the free-for-all combat which follows upon the political revolution. Its dominion is based upon wealth; and hence the determining characteristic of the bourgeois society is its regard for wealth. To it, wealth is power, it is the end and goal of things. The aristocrat knew nothing of the possibility of revolution, and so he was bold and gay. The bourgeois does know about the possibility of revolution, and so it is that Mrs. Atherton finds that our literature is “timid.” She finds it “anæmic,” simply because the bourgeois ideal knows nothing of the spirit, and tolerates intellectual activity only for the ends of commerce and material welfare. She finds also that it “bows before the fetich of the body,” and she is much perplexed by the discovery. She does not seem to understand that the bourgeois represents an achievement of the body, and that all that he knows in the world is body. He is well fed himself, his wife is stout, and his children are fine and vigorous. He lives in a big house, and wears the latest thing in clothes; his civilisation furnishes these to every one—at least to every one who amounts to anything; and beyond that he understands nothing—save only the desire to be entertained. It is for entertainment that he buys books, and as entertainment that he regards them; and hence another characteristic of the bourgeois literature is its lack of seriousness. The bourgeois writer has a certain kind of seriousness, of course—the seriousness of a hungry man seeking his dinner; but the seriousness of the artist he does not know. He will roar you as gently as any sucking dove, he will also wring tears from your eyes or thrill you with terror, according as the fashion of the hour suggests; but he knows exactly why he does these things, and he can do them between chats at his club. If you expected him to act like his heroes, he would think that you were mad.
The basis of a bourgeois society is cash payment; it recognises only the accomplished fact. To be a Milton with a “Paradise Lost” in your pocket is to be a tramp: to be a great author in the bourgeois literary world is to have sold a hundred thousand copies, and to have sold them within memory—that is, a year or two. With the bourgeois, success is success, and there is no going behind the returns; to discriminate between different kinds of success would be to introduce new and dangerous distinctions. As Mr. John L. Sullivan once phrased it: “A big man is a big man, it don’t matter if he’s a prize-fighter or a president.” Mr. John L. Sullivan is a big man himself; so is Mr. Frank Munsey, and so was Mr. Henry Romeike, and so was Senator Hanna. So are they all, all honourable men, and when you look up in “Who’s Who,” you find that they are there.
The bourgeois ideal is a perfectly definite and concrete one: it has mostly all been attained—there are only a few small details left to be attended to, such as the cleaning of the streets and the suppressing of the labour unions. Thus there is no call for perplexity, and no use for anything hard to understand. Originality is superfluous, and eccentricity is anathema. The world is as it always has been, and human nature will always be as it is; the thing to do is to find out what the public likes. The public likes pathos and the homely virtues; and so we give it “Eben Holden” and “David Harum.” The public likes high life, and so we give it Richard Harding Davis and Marie Corelli. The public does not like passion; it likes sentiment, however—it even likes heroics, provided they are conventionalised, and so to amuse it we turn all history into a sugar-coated romance. The public’s strong point is love, and we lay much stress upon the love-element—though with limitations, needless to say. The idea of love as a serious problem among men and women is dismissed, because the social organisation enables us to satisfy our passions with the daughters of the poor. Our own daughters know nothing about passion, and we ourselves know it only as an item in our bank accounts. To the bourgeois young lady—the Gibson girl, as she is otherwise known—literary love is a sentiment, ranking with a box of bonbons, and actual love is a class marriage with an artificially restricted progeny.
These which have been described are the positive and more genial aspects of the bourgeois civilisation; the savage and terrible remain to be mentioned. For it must be understood that this civilisation of comfort and respectability furnishes its good things only to a class, and to an exceedingly small class. The majority of mankind it pens up in filthy hovels and tenements, to feed upon husks and rot in misery. This was once easy, but now it is growing harder—and thus little by little the bourgeoisie is losing its temper. Just now it is like a fat poodle by a stove—you think it is asleep and venture to touch it, when quick as a flash it has put its fangs in you to the bone.
The bourgeois civilisation is, in one word, an organised system of repression. In the physical world it has the police and the militia, the bludgeon, the bullet, and the jail; in the world of ideas it has the political platform, the school, the college, the press, the church—and literature. The bourgeois controls these things precisely as he controls the labour of society, by his control of the purse-strings. Unless proper candidates are named by political parties, there are no campaign funds; unless proper teachers and college presidents are chosen, there are no endowments. Thus it happens that our students are taught a political economy carefully divorced, not merely from humanity, but also from science, history, and sense; any other kind of political economy the student sometimes despises—more commonly he does not even know that it exists. And it is just the same with the churches and with theology. We have at present established in this land a religion which exists in the name of the world’s greatest revolutionist, the founder of the Socialist movement; this man denounced the bourgeois and the bourgeois ideal more vehemently than ever it has since been denounced—declaring in plain words that no bourgeois could get into Heaven; and yet his church is to-day, in all its forms, and in every civilised land, the main pillar of bourgeois society!
With the press the bourgeois has a still more direct method than endowment; the press he owns. All the daily newspapers in New York, for instance, are the property of millionaires, and are run by them in their own interests, exactly the same as their stables or their cuisine. That does not mean, of course, that many of their journalistic menials are not sincere—it does not mean that the college presidents and clergymen may not be sincere. One of the quaintest things about the bourgeois editor, the bourgeois college president, the bourgeois clergyman, is the whole-souled naïveté with which he takes it for granted that just as all civilisation exists for the comfort of the bourgeois, so also all truth must necessarily be such as the bourgeois would desire it to be.