Socialism: Positive and Negative Part 5

But for the man of the "educated and professional cla.s.ses" leaving the doll's house is indeed a difficult task. For its performance three things are requisite: a free and open mind, courage, and a vivid imagination. The Russian genius, Peshkoff (Maxim Gorky), did it, and did it with relative ease because he was a workingman _before_ he became an educated man. For the same reason, though in a less degree, Jack London has also done it successfully, though here and there he still lapses into the doll's mode of thought. The s.e.x-interest in the latter part of "The Sea Wolf" is obviously treated from the dolls' point of view; but it should be remembered that Mr. London necessarily expected the majority of the purchasers of "The Sea Wolf" to be dolls. But, in spite of this instance, we may be sure that Jack London brought but little with him when he left the Doll's House; and I am very sure he never sends back to have parcels forwarded to him.

When Mr. Upton Sinclair left the Doll's House, he evidently stuffed his mental pockets with a large a.s.sortment of intellectual _lingerie_ and millinery from the doll wardrobes. In telling us what Life means to him in a recent magazine, he says that during a certain stress and storm period of his life he lived in close intimacy with three friends who "loved" him "very dearly." "Their names are Jesus, Hamlet and Sh.e.l.ley."

Can any one imagine William Morris writing a sentiment so perfectly satisfying to a doll's sense of beauty? When I read these lines there rises before me a picture of the author tastefully robed in an exquisite dress--a doll's dress--of dotted swiss.[34]

Recently he has started a Co-operative Home Colony quite in the spirit of the bourgeois Utopians who founded Brook Farm more than half-a-century ago. Colony-founding, historians tell us, was a favorite amus.e.m.e.nt of the dolls of that era.

In the "Times Magazine" (for December 1906) he tells us that "the home has endured for ages, and through all the ages it has stayed about the same." This belief, I am informed, is almost universal among dolls.

I find myself the prey of a growing suspicion that Mr. Sinclair from time to time receives express parcels from the "Doll's House."

William Morris was a genius; he had a free and open mind; he had courage; and he had a vivid imagination. When he left the Doll's House, he took nothing with him, and he never afterward took anything "from strangers." It was his poet's imagination that enabled him to write "News from Nowhere," the only Utopia in whose communal halls the unwary reader does not stumble over dolls' furniture. Morris is the perfect type of the man of culture turned revolutionist.[35]

Mr. H. G. Wells has recently written a Utopian romance, "In the Days of the Comet," which, although it possesses in the fullest measure Mr.

Wells' well known charm of style, is in substance at best a very feeble echo of "News from Nowhere." One of the modes of thought specially characteristic of eighteenth century French dolls is strongly to the fore in Mr. Wells' treatment of war. In the conversations "after the Change" between Melmount, the famous Cabinet Minister, and the pitiful, cowardly, inefficient hero (?), Leadford, they both appear to be inexpressibly shocked at the _unreasonableness_ of war. It is true it is somewhat difficult to tell just what Melmount did think or feel, for Melmount is in one particular like Boston's distinguished _litterateur_, Mr. Lawson,--he appears to be constantly on the point of uttering some great thought, but never utters it. But so far as light is given us Melmount after the Change seems to have looked on war much as Carlyle did long before. Every one remembers Carlyle's two groups of peasants,[36] living hundreds of miles apart, who never heard of each other, and had not the slightest quarrel, the one with the other, but who none-the-less obeyed the orders of their respective kings, and marched until they met, and at the word of command shot each other into corpses. Most of us will agree with Carlyle and Melmount that, viewed from the peasants' standpoint, this was unreasonable to the point of sheer folly.

But, if I understand Mr. Wells aright, he seems to elevate the reason of the peasant into something very like the "eternal reason" of Diderot and Rousseau. He apparently forgets for the nonce that Engels long ago pointed out that "this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the idealized understanding of the eighteenth century citizen, just then evolving into the bourgeois." The difficulty that Mr. Wells will encounter in trying to bring human society into harmony with "eternal reason" is the impossibility of getting different cla.s.ses of men to agree as to what is reasonable. No one outside of dolls' houses any longer believes in "eternal reason." Every man and every cla.s.s has an ideal of what is reasonable, but these ideals vary. War is unreasonable to the peasant-target; it is also unreasonable to Melmount and Mr. Wells so far as they are representatives of the citizens of the cla.s.sless society of the future, a society based on social solidarity, on world-wide brotherhood. But to the socialist materialist, war, in a world based on private ownership of the means of production used to produce commodities, with its concomitants, the wage-system, compet.i.tion--domestic and international,--and ever-recurring "over-production," is so very far from unreasonable that it is absolutely inevitable.[37]

Mr. Wells evidently brought something with him when he left the Doll's House.

We now begin to realize what a very difficult matter it is to rid the mind completely of the effects of what Professor Veblen calls "the inst.i.tutional furniture handed down from the past." The man, who yields to the lure of Socialism, must sooner or later effect a revolution within his own mind; if he does not, he will sooner or later return to his Doll's House, or make an excursion into some field of "pragmatic romance" where he will build himself a new doll's house.

Granted the truth of historical materialism, how will future generations look on the literature of to-day and yesterday? To a generation wholly untrained in theological, metaphysical and dualistic modes of thought how much meaning will there be in the poetry of Tennyson and Browning? For my part, I never read Browning now without being unpleasantly reminded of the aphorism Nietzsche put into the mouth of Zarathustra: "Alas, it is true I have cast my net in their (poets') seas and tried to catch good fish; but I always drew up the head of some old G.o.d."

But I am glad to believe that the matchless melody and the chiseled beauty of Tennyson's verse will charm the senses of men to whom his curious mixture of pantheism and Broad Church theology, which the middle cla.s.ses of England and America in the latter decades of the nineteenth century welcomed as the ultimate ma.s.sage of philosophy, will not be ridiculous only because it will be meaningless. But I am unable to think of the men of the future deriving any pleasure from our greatest poet, Browning. On the other hand it is not impossible that the fame of Swinburne will stand higher in the twenty-first century than it does in this opening decade of the twentieth.

The men and women of the future will, I am sure, feel themselves akin to Sh.e.l.ley. They will probably enjoy Byron too, so far as they understand him; but men and women, who have never known any relationship between the s.e.xes but that of independence and equality, will be bored and baffled by that great bulk of Byron's verse which shocked his contemporaries.

When we turn to the drama, it appears probable that the revolution in the relations of the s.e.xes will convert into mere materials for the historian even our greatest plays, such as Ibsen's "The Doll's House,"

Sudermann's "The Joy of Living," Maeterlinck's "Monna Vanna," and Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession."

Are the "educated and professional" socialists prepared to accept gladly such tremendous changes? They are confronted by a momentous question. It was of their cla.s.s William Morris was thinking when he wrote:

"I have looked at this claim by the light of history and my own conscience, and it seems to me so looked at to be a most just claim, and that resistance to it means nothing short of a denial of the hope of civilization.

This, then, is the claim:--

_It is right and necessary that all men should have work to do which shall be worth doing, and be of itself pleasant to do: and which should be done under such conditions as would make it neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious._

Turn that claim about as I may, think of it as long as I can, I cannot find that it is an exorbitant claim; yet again I say if Society would or could admit it, the face of the world would be changed; discontent and strife and dishonesty would be ended. To feel that we were doing work useful to others and pleasant to ourselves, and that such work and its due reward _could_ not fail us! What serious harm could happen to us then? And the price to be paid for so making the world happy is Revolution."[38]

Are they willing to pay the price? Nora paid the price for her freedom and paid it in full.

_She took nothing from strangers._

If they are unwilling to pay the price, what is there left for them save the joyless sensuality and black despair of pessimism?

FOOTNOTES:

[7] "The Theory of Business Enterprise," Veblen, New York, 1904. Pages 351, 352. See also my article on Veblen the Revolutionist, International Socialist Review, June, 1905, vol. V, page 726.

[8] Throughout this article "nihilism" is not used in its strict technical or philosophical sense, but is used simply as a convenient term by which to designate the aggregate of those aspects of Socialism which, viewed from the standpoint of the existing regime, appear as negative and destructive.

[9] "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy." Karl Marx, New York, 1904. Pages 11, 12.

[10] "See Philosophical Essays," Joseph Dietzgen, Chicago, 1906. Pages 174 and 52.

[11] "Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History." Antonio Labriola, Chicago, 1904. Pages 85, 86.

[12] l. c. pages 155-6, 158.

[13] "Philosophical Essays." Dietzgen. Page 86.

[14] "Socialism and Modern Science." Enrico Ferri, New York, 1904. Pages 60, 61.

[15] "Philosophical Essays." Dietzgen. Page 116.

[16] The reader will observe that Ferri reads into the Erfurt p.r.o.nouncement on religion (quoted in full above) a broader spirit of tolerance than its words necessarily imply.

[17] See "The Theory of the Leisure Cla.s.s." Thorstein Veblen, New York, 1905. Pages 287, 288.

[18] Marx in "Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechts Philosophie."

[19] "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State." F.

Engels, Chicago, 1905. Page 99, and "Woman under Socialism," August Bebel, New York, 1904. Page 127.

[20] Engels, "Origin of the Family, &c." Page 100.

[21] (Mrs. Parsons'.) The enlightened public opinion of to-day finds the chief if not the only warrant for universal male suffrage in its being an educational means. In this view women need the suffrage at present even more than men.

[22] (Mrs. Parsons'.) Dr. Alice Drysdale Vickery gave striking expression to one phase of this subject at a recent discussion of the London Sociological Society. She urged that _without economic independence_ the individuality of woman could not exercise that natural selective power in the choice of a mate which was probably a main factor in the spiritual evolution of the race. _The American Journal of Sociology_, Sept., 1905. Page 279.

[23] (LaMonte's.) No wonder such a startling hypothesis aroused the ire of our clerical friends.

[24] (LaMonte's.) It is worthy of note that this suggestion of a serious modification of marriage _under existing economic conditions_ comes characteristically, not from a Socialist, but from the wife of a Republican member of Congress and the daughter of a distinguished financier.

[25] (Mrs. Parsons'.) Through the discovery of certain and innocuous methods of preventing conception. The application of this knowledge would have to be encouraged by public opinion in cases where conception would result in a degenerate offspring. Public opinion would also have to endorse the segregation of persons tainted with communicable s.e.xual disease.

[26] Berlin cablegram in the New York Sun of Dec. 7, 1906.

[27] "Origin of the Family, &c.," Pages 91, 92. See also Bebel, "Woman under Socialism," Page 122, and elsewhere.

[28] "Origin of the Family &c." Pages 208, 209.

[29] On the existence of organized societies without a co-ercive State, see also, "Ancient Society." Lewis H. Morgan, Chicago, 1907.

[30] "Origin of the Family &c." Pages 211, 212.