And my mistress that cannot endure me,
Will love me, and love me again:
Then I’ll fall to loving and drinking again.
ALEXANDER BROME.
The part which money plays in the lives of even the least avaricious people is enormous. The part it plays in literature, and especially poetry, is very small. Moreover, poets seem to feel that money, if mentioned, has to be apologized for. This apology generally takes the form of a deprecatory touch of comedy. There is very little poetry in which economics are given what the Marxian theorists and the Fordian practitioners would certainly regard as their due.
This fact has a double explanation, social and psychological. Pagan philosophers and Christian theologians agreed in looking upon the love of money as evil; while to the aristocracy, economic preoccupations seemed vulgar. The poet who wanted to write about money found himself hemmed in on every side; he might not care much if people thought him wicked; but vulgar—no, he could not run the risk of being considered that.
A Marxian would point out, quite justly, that this moral and aesthetic outlawing of economics was done by men who had an interest in the process. The pagan philosophers were members of a leisured class; the Christian theologians had all their economic needs supplied by a great business organization, the aristocrats were what they were thanks to their wealth; these people had no reason to discuss economics themselves and the very best reasons to prevent other people from asking awkward questions about their privileged position. Hence the taboo on money as a theme for literature. But this explanation, excellent so far as it goes, is not complete. There are internal as well as external reasons for the taboo, psychological as well as social reasons. Money is a peculiarly uninspiring theme. The distresses caused by its lack, though acute, are not of a kind which lend themselves to poetical treatment. Certain agonies are quickening and enlarging, have a natural tendency to break out into expression. Certain others, on the contrary, seem to numb the spirit and contract it. Economic miseries are essentially of the second class. Poets are not often moved to express this particular kind of emotion; and when they try, they find that lyres are not tuned to give an adequate rendering of worry. The comic note is an apology, not only to society, but also to themselves; they are apologizing to the critic within them for their own inability to do the job adequately.
Oft have I sung of Love and of his fire;
But now I find that poet was advised,
Which made full feasts increasers of desire,
And proves weak Love was with the poor despised,
For when the life with food is not sufficed,
What thoughts of love, what motion of delight,
What pleasure can proceed from such a wight.
ROBERT GREENE.
Greene is unromantically right. “For,” in the appalling words of John Pomfret,
. . . that which makes our life delightful prove
Is a genteel sufficiency, and love—
and there can be no love without sufficiency, and none of the refinements of love, unless the sufficiency is at least genteel. A reason, according to certain Marxian theorists for disparaging love. For a thing which can exist only when there is a genteel sufficiency is bourgeois; and what is bourgeois must be bad.
Now, the juxtaposition of, say Epipsychidion and a bald account of the sources of Shelley’s income would probably be rich in some very painful tragi-comic effects. “He for love only, they (the peasantry on Sir Timothy Shelley’s estates) for love in him.” It seems, certainly, rather an inequitable division of labour. But this injustice does nothing to lessen the value of the emotions expressed in Epipsychidion. Flowers are beautiful. But flowers, we discover, grow from dung. Must we therefore deny our immediate intuition and say that, after all, flowers are really ugly? No; if we are reasonable, we shall try to think of means for distributing dung to all potential gardeners, so that more flowers may be produced. Similarly we feel love to be a good; a genteel sufficiency is the condition of love; therefore, let us do our best to guarantee a genteel sufficiency to increasing numbers of human beings.
With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,
Enrichèd from ancestral merchandize,
And for them many a weary hand did swelt
In torchèd mines and noisy factories,
And many once proud-quivered loins did melt
In blood from stinging whip; with hollow eyes
Many all day in dazzling river stood,
To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood.
For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
And went all naked to the hungry shark;
For them his ears gushed blood; for them in death
The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark
Lay full of darts; for them alone did seethe
A thousand men in troubles wide and dark:
Half-ignorant, they turned an easy wheel,
That set sharp racks to work to pinch and peel.
JOHN KEATS.
Keats does for Isabella and her brothers the very thing which, as I suggested in an earlier paragraph, a Marxian critic of romantic values might do for the protagonists of Epipsychidion—he gives a description of their sumptuous and, in Isabella’s case, emotionally refined existence, and follows it up with another (printed here) of the sources of that more than genteel sufficiency which made the luxury and refinement possible. The effect is good, but might have been very much better if Keats’s artistic principles had allowed him for one moment to be “unpoetical.” But, alas, they did not. Bare and brutal veracity is against his rules. He writes of sweated factory workers and the horrors of slavery in the same rather unreal, Wardour-Street language as he uses to describe mediaeval lords and ladies and the shepherds of Greek fable. The edge of his effect is thus blunted, the violence of what should have been the most startling of contrasts so muted and muffled that we hardly notice it, but read on, line after all-too-poetic line, soothed into a kind of hypnotic doze.
On Keats’s, as on most of even the best nineteenth-century poetry, the curse of literariness lies heavy. How much better, on this economic theme, is Shelley, whose Mask of Anarchy contains perhaps the finest poetical account of economic slavery in the language. The best Marxian commentary on Epipsychidion has been written by the author of the poem himself.
What is Freedom?—ye can tell
That which slavery is, too well—
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.
’Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In your limbs, as in a cell
For the tyrant’s use to dwell.
So that ye for them are made
Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade,
With or without your own will bent
To their defence and nourishment.
’Tis to see your children weak
With their mothers pine and peak,
When the winter winds are bleak—
They are dying, whilst I speak.
’Tis to hunger for such diet
As the rich man in his riot
Casts to the fat dogs that lie
Surfeiting beneath his eye.
’Tis to be a slave in soul
And to hold no strong control
Over your own wills, but be
All that others make of ye.
And at length, when ye complain
With a murmur weak and vain,
’Tis to see the Tyrant’s crew
Ride over your wives and you—
Blood is on the grass like dew.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH.
Hypocrisy
(From the epilogue to “Tartufe.” Spoken by Tartufe.)
Zeal stands but sentry at the gate of sin,
Whilst all that have the word pass freely in:
Silent and in the dark, for fear of spies,
We march, and take Damnation by surprise;
There’s not a roaring blade in all this town
Can go so far towards Hell for half-a-crown
As I for sixpence, for I know the way.
CHARLES SACKVILLE, EARL OF DORSET.
Le Châtiment de Tartufe
Tisonnant, tisonnant son cœur amoureux sous
Sa chaste robe noire, heureux, la main gantée,
Un jour qu’il s’en allait effroyablement doux,
Jaune, bavant la foi de sa bouche édentée,
Un jour qu’il s’en allait—“Oremus”—un méchant
Le prit rudement par son oreille benoîte
Et lui jeta des mots affreux, en arrachant
Sa chaste robe noire autour de sa peau moite.
Châtiment! Ses habits étaient déboutonnés,
Et, le long chapelet des péchés pardonnés
S’égrenant dans son cœur, saint Tartufe était pâle.
Donc, il se confessait, priait, avec un râle.
L’homme se contenta d’emporter ses rabats.
—Peuh! Tartufe était nu du haut jusques en bas.
ARTHUR RIMBAUD.
Sin, like art, is subject to the vagaries of fashion and the fluctuations of taste. Moralists lay the emphasis now here, now there. Thus, in the ages of scarcity, gluttony ranked as a much deadlier sin than it does to-day, when we all ought to eat two or three times as much as we do, in order to keep down the surplus stocks of foodstuffs. Avarice, according to that Business Ethic, by which, for a hundred years past, most of the western world has been forced to live, avarice is no longer a sin, but actually a virtue. Under the influence of socialist propaganda, it is now beginning to seem less creditable than it did a few years ago. Lechery, on the contrary, is going up in the ethical scale. The psychologists are busily engaged in making it individually respectable; and at the same time the birth-controllers have robbed it of its unpleasant social consequences. The only sin which seems to us more sinful than it did to our fathers is cruelty. We feel for cruelty an abhorrence which would have seemed incomprehensible in the days of torture and public executions.
Next to acts of cruelty, lying is the offence that now appears to us most sinful—especially the long-drawn, elaborate lying which is hypocrisy. Tartufe is always with us, and we hate him at least as much as Molière hated him.
The Worst Side
Go, soul, the body’s guest
Upon a thankless arrant;
Fear not to touch the best,
The truth shall be thy warrant:
Go,
