Mammonart: An essay in economic interpretation

One evening in the year minus ninety-eight thousand and seventy-six--that is, one hundred thousand years ago--Ogi, the son of Og, sat in front of a blazing fire in the cave, lic...

Many and various are the art-forms which the sons and grandsons of Ogi have invented; but of all these forms, the one which bores us most quickly is the parable--a little story...

We have promised to prove our thesis psychologically, by watching the art process at work, and historically, by studying the art works of the ages. We begin with the former task.

Little by little we now begin to note the outlines of Ogi’s art code. Two negative propositions we may consider as clear: Ogi does not paint the thing as it really is; and he do...

Who pays for art? The answer is that at every stage of social development there are certain groups able to pay for certain kinds of art. These groups may be large or small, but...

The reader who shares the art beliefs now prevalent in the world will be quite certain that the ideas here being expounded are fantastic and absurd. Among those who thus differ...

If this be true, the next step to the understanding of art, and the history of art periods past and present, is to understand the economic forces controlling mankind; the evolut...

Twenty-five years ago an American, himself a victim of the commercial system and dying of consumption, wrote a novel which contained a description of a horse-trade. The novel wa...

In the stage of economic evolution where the savage exchanges a fish for a cocoanut, the balance of advantage in the trade may be equal. The fisherman may need the cocoanut as b...

Now this is a sore subject in the cave. Each of the residents is absolutely certain that it is always the other who has his or her way; and each is able to cite chapter and vers...

Topeka, Kan., July 3. (Special to the “Sun.”) The open season for devil-hunting is on in Topeka today. From Nemaha County on the North to Comanche on the South, from Cherokee Co...

How did it happen that political agitators, living in the Mississippi Valley at the end of the nineteenth century, were identical in spirit with religious prophets in Asia Minor...

There come to the desk of a literary editor many volumes which could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered as literature. But they are printed and bound, and those...

We have before us another literary criticism, clipped from the “Roman Times Weekly Review of Books” during the year 300, under the Emperor Diocletian. It is word for word the sa...

When I was a young man, groping my way into Socialism, I discovered that the movement in and about New York had a patroness. Mrs. Prestonia Martin was her name, and she had a be...

“Secrets!” cries Ogi. “But that was a reform movement, a crusade!” After reflection, he adds: “If I really wanted to tell scandals, I could do it. I might hint that John lost hi...

The career of William Randolph Alcibiades, publisher, soldier and politician, coincided with the era of the Great Wars. He was born to a position of power and luxury, being a ne...

Greek civilization was made by a large number of different tribes, inhabiting islands, or fertile valleys and plains separated by mountain ranges. Among these tribes there was i...

Once in their history fate provided the Greeks with a great cause; that was in the fifth century, when the gigantic Juggernaut of Persia came rolling down upon them. King Xerxes...

Needless to say, the Bolshevik sentiments of Euripides were not proclaimed before the altar of Dionysus without protest on the part of the orthodox. There rose up another dramat...

There has been peace in the cave for a while, because Mrs. Ogi has been interested in learning about the Greeks. “I perceive,” she says, “that there are superstitions in the art...

Rome, like all other nations, was founded by stern, determined men, who believed in themselves and in their tribal gods. They conquered the peninsula of Italy, and built mighty...

In the beginning the Romans didn’t bother very much with art. In their public buildings they were content to take over the Greek styles--but making them heavy and solid, so as t...

A few years after Virgil came another Roman poet, whom I learned to read as a lad. He also was taken up by the Emperor Augustus, and wrote fulsome odes in praise of this emperor...

“You had your fun out of that,” says Mrs. Ogi. “But of course I can’t judge; somebody who knows about Rome may come along and show that it’s all nonsense.”

It took several centuries for the peoples of Europe to lift themselves out of barbarism and chaos. Then we find a new art developing, an altogether different art, built upon Bab...

The Art of Beauty is produced by ruling classes when they are established and safe, and wish to be entertained, and to have their homes and surroundings set apart from the commo...

It was in Italy first that the language of the people became the language of culture, replacing Latin; and the two greatest writers of this age afford us an interesting contrast...

Now by way of contrast we take the Italian poet of revolt and moral indignation. We have only to look at the pictures of this man to see that he is a crusader; a lean, hawk-like...

The Italian princes were no more influenced by the moral austerity of Dante than the Roman ruling class had been by Virgil. Medieval Italy traveled the same road as imperial Rom...

Among its numerous artists of beauty Renaissance Italy produced one man who did not find life a garden of pleasure; one man who, when he sinned, did not do it with easy grace an...

When civilization emerged from the Dark Ages, the fighting man went about with a hard-shell covering, like a crab, and was called a knight. Both he and his horse underwent a lon...

Says Mrs. Ogi: “This is getting to be quite a respectable literary book: the very thing for club ladies here in Southern California, who hire somebody to read books for them, an...

A few months ago I had the pleasure of spending twenty-four hours with a Chicago millionaire who specializes in knowing all there is to know on the subject of ciphers. During th...

When I was young the orthodox critics of Shakespeare taught, and everybody accepted the idea, that there was no poet who had been more aloof from his own work, and that it was i...

Shakespeare’s historical plays cover a period of three hundred years; the breakdown of the feudal system, and its replacement by a monarchy more or less controlled by a parliame...

“First we have to have some of the despised sociology. We have to mention that human institutions arise, and serve their day, and then degenerate. The shell which at one time pr...

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...

We have been keeping low company for so long that the reader may be wondering: Were there no writers for ladies and gentlemen in the time of Milton and Bunyan? The answer is, ye...

In order to make a consecutive story we have followed the development of English art for a century and a half. We now go back to cover the same period on the Continent, where a...

Louis XIV, the “grand monarch,” ascended the throne of France in the year 1643, while Cromwell’s “Ironsides” were fighting their king, and only six years before they cut off his...

In vain do kings and emperors set up the doctrine that art exists for courts; that only the great ones of the earth are the proper theme for art works, and courtiers and court c...

In his later years the “grand monarch” fell under the spell of a priest-ridden woman, made her his queen, and turned over his court to Jesuit intrigue. The law tolerating Protes...

We have seen that Voltaire was a Tory as to art; his revolution was of the intellect. There was needed a revolutionist of the feelings, and he appeared in the person of Jean-Jac...

Let it be explained at the outset that we are setting out to discuss, not a character in a novel, but a living person, Irving Babbitt, professor of French literature in Harvard...

While France has been moving toward its revolution, England has been moving away from hers, and we now return to the foggy island to watch the course of events through this eigh...

Prose fiction up to this time had dealt for the most part with men; its most popular variety was the “picaresque,” telling the adventures of vagabonds and rascals. But now in th...

You will note in this bourgeois world two attitudes toward money; one might be described as the attitude of the first generation, and the other of the third. The first generatio...

We have read about an English gentleman-novelist who wasted his health and died at the age of forty-three; and we next have to hear the story of a Scotch plowman-poet who treate...

“All the arts are one,” says her husband. “They are expressions of the human spirit, and the material they use is comparatively unimportant. We realize this when we see an artis...

We come now to one of the great intellects of modern times, a genius who made the culture of Germany known to the rest of the world. He is cited, along with Shakespeare, as an i...

Spreading the magic carpet of the imagination, we take flight from the free and easy court of Weimar to the home of an English rector, where impropriety is scarcely whispered, a...

Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh in 1771, the son of a prosperous lawyer who held the high office of sheriff. The father made a specialty of his country’s antiquities, and the...

The effect of the French revolution upon poets is a subject of especial interest to us, because the period is so nearly identical with our own. There were several English poets...

He was born in 1774, the son of a linen draper. At the age of nineteen he was full of Rousseau, Goethe, and the “infidelity” of Gibbon. He was so keen for France that he wrote a...

William Wordsworth was born in 1770, his father being lawyer to a noble earl who robbed him of five thousand pounds. That may possibly have accounted for some of the early rebel...

George Gordon, Lord Byron, was born in 1788. His father was a rake and blackguard. “Your mother is a fool,” said a schoolmate; and Byron answered, “I know it.” This, you must ad...

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792, which made him four years younger than Byron. His father was the richest baronet in the county of Sussex, a great landlord and a ferocious...

“Yes,” says her husband; “an amusing illustration of the extent to which leisure-class criticism is able to take the guts out of art. Here is a man whose life and personality co...

Says Mrs. Ogi: “Here is Haldeman-Julius, discussing the thesis of your book. He says: ‘You may say that because Balzac drew his characters largely from the bourgeoisie he was co...

Victor Hugo was born in 1802, three years later than Balzac. He grew up in the same world, but was not satisfied to contemplate its diseases; he sought remedies, and became a co...

What would Victor Hugo have been if he had had no social conscience? What would the romantic movement have amounted to if it had confined itself to the field of art? These quest...

The middle of the nineteenth century was a hard time for generous-minded and idealistic poets in France. The great revolution had failed, it failed again in 1830 and in 1848, an...

The problem of the relationship of art to morality is most interestingly illustrated by the case of George Sand. This woman-writer was promiscuous, and she was predatory, in the...

“Eighteen years ago,” says Ogi, “a lanky, red-headed youth from Minnesota ran away from Yale University and showed up at Helicon Hall to stoke our furnace. We were never entirel...

We have paid a long visit to France, and must now cross the Rhine and see what is happening in Germany. It is interesting to note that the two artists whom we are about to study...

In my interpretation of artists so far I have had to rely, for better or for worse, upon myself; no one else, so far as I know, has analyzed art works from the point of view of...

Ogi has been wandering about the cave with a discontented expression on his face, showing a disposition to growl at whatever gets in his way. Mrs. Ogi, whose job is to notice do...

delightful book ever penned! But I went on, and got an overdose of Carlyle. I read almost all that Gospel of Silence in forty volumes; and now I sit and ask: what did I learn fr...

The story of my own soul is the story of Alfred Tennyson’s reputation for the last thirty or forty years; so that is the easiest way for me to tell about it.

There was another poet who grew up in this unpromising Victorian England. His father and grandfather were bank officials, and he had a comfortable income. In his youth he was a...

In this writer’s youth, when he was struggling to earn a living in New York, there was one magazine which was open to new ideas, the “Independent.” Its literary editor was Paul...

In the first half of this nineteenth century the British factory system came to maturity; the capitalist class took charge of society, and forced the working class into a condit...

Emerson, commenting upon the old saying that “No man is a hero to his valet,” put the question: “What hero ever had a valet?” This goes to prove that Emerson was not a reader of...

Capitalist industrialism may be indicted on economic grounds because it is wasteful, and on moral grounds because it is dishonest; also it may be indicted upon esthetic grounds...

The spirit of John Milton and John Bunyan crossed the Atlantic Ocean and settled in Massachusetts, and the spirit of their enemies crossed the Atlantic Ocean and settled in Virg...

America at this time was an overgrown youthful body, ill-supplied with mind; and a few ardent believers in culture set out to fill this need. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a st...

The Puritans, having been driven from England by religious persecution, set to work in their New England to persecute others. Among their victims was a Massachusetts Quaker by t...

The Puritans of Massachusetts, having killed the Indians and fenced the farms and built the towns, settled into the routine of getting one another’s money. The more enterprising...

The Puritans who settled Massachusetts believed that happiness was to be found in the repressing of the “carnal nature.” The Cavaliers who settled Maryland and Virginia believed...

Edgar Allan Poe lived and wrote to prove that art excludes morality. We come now to another poet, who lived and wrote to prove that art excludes everything else. He had a messag...

We have been following the fortunes of a pioneer people breaking into the field of world culture. Let us now travel part way round the earth in either direction, and watch anoth...

The poet who taught the Russian people the possibilities of their language was Pushkin; one of those beautiful leisure-class youths who live fast and die young. He was born of a...

The modern world was there, and it kept calling to the youth of Russia. There came a skillful novelist, whose task it was to interpret his country to the outside world, and at t...

A dozen years ago in Holland, talking about Dostoievski with my friend Frederik van Eeden, I remarked that I had made several attempts, but had never been able to read one of hi...

Just what has a professor at Yale University to do with “the Christian religion”? What do “the teachings of the New Testament” really mean to him? How competent is he to judge a...

We come now to the great giant of the North, the most dynamic artist that Russia has produced. Leo Tolstoi, when he died, was not only the greatest literary man in the world; he...

We left the French novel in the hands of Flaubert. We return now to consider the influence of two French writers, who founded the school known as “naturalism.” They were contemp...

Emile Zola was left an orphan in childhood, and experienced bitter poverty. He began work as a bundle-clerk in a publishing house, and trained himself to be a writer at night. H...

What would Zola and his naturalism have been without social vision and revolutionary hope? This question was answered for us by a disciple and friend of Zola, ten years his juni...

Up in the gloomy, ice-bound North, where men dream about God and drink strong liquor, another teacher was engaged in undermining bourgeois morality, and raising a storm of contr...

Sweden also had a great dramatist and poet in this nineteenth century. He came some twenty years later than Ibsen, a tormented and highly emotional man of genius, who just about...

Another great writer of this time was troubled about the problem of the ladies. August Strindberg married three, and experienced three tragedies. Friedrich Nietzsche sought to m...

Modern civilization is a stepmother to poets; it is crowded, noisy and ugly, and they run away and seek refuge in gardens, or monasteries, or dreams of a happier past. But moder...

I remember the first poet I ever met in my youth; one of the “pure” poets, a dreamy soul, who lived in the ugly city of New York, and wrote about beauty in distant Nineveh and T...

Eight years ago Frank Harris published his two volumes entitled “Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions.” I wrote him that it was one of the half dozen greatest biographies in th...

“In modern times each of the arts has developed a complicated technique; and in order to analyze them all and show what they mean, one would have to know much more than I know....

Some years ago a story was told me concerning a certain eminent man in England. This man came from the common people; he possesses one of the finest minds in England, and he is...

We are getting down to modern times, and have come to the first great artist of whom I can say that with my own eyes I saw him. Shortly before the war, coming out of the dining-...

We have studied two great novelists of the later Victorian age who failed of wide popularity. We shall not understand that age completely unless we study one who was crowned, no...

The dominating factor in this period was the Civil War, a conflict in which the physical and moral energy of the country was exhausted. There followed the inevitable reaction: A...

His name was William Dean Howells, and he was born in 1837 in an Ohio town. He began life as a typesetter in a newspaper office, then he became a reporter, and was made United S...

Through the latter part of the nineteenth century there existed in the United States a peculiar literary phenomenon, the underground reputation of Ambrose Bierce. The fiction re...

Richard Harding Davis was born in Philadelphia in 1864. His father was a famous editor, and he was raised among cultured people, with every advantage of prestige and social posi...

We come now to another one of those unhappy tales of young rebellious geniuses who cannot or will not fit themselves into the bourgeois world. This time it is Stephen Crane, who...

The mind of America at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century was controlled by elderly maiden aunts and hired men of privilege; and it seemed that...

David Graham Phillips affords an interesting illustration of the power of bourgeois criticism to suppress and abolish those writers who threaten its ideology. He was by all odds...

The short story writer who signed the pen name O. Henry burst like a meteor upon the magazine world of New York. His first stories appeared in 1902, when he had only eight years...

We come now to the first of the writers of our time who was born of the working class, and carried his working-class consciousness into his literary career. He was the true king...

The first of them is Joseph Conrad. Away back in my early days someone sent me from England a copy of his first novel, “Almayer’s Folly,” and after that I kept watch, and manage...

Henry James remarks somewhere that an American has to study for fifty years of his life in order to attain, culturally speaking, the point from which a European starts at birth....

“It’s this way,” says her husband. “I found I had so much material that I’d have to make two volumes, one dealing with the artists of the past, and the other with living artists.”