Chapter IX: Manassas

I.

_The Journal of Arthur Stirling_ had been the death-cry of his boyhood’s ideals; and it was heard by a Socialist editor and lecturer named George D. Herron--a gentle ex-clergyman, a man much lied about at the time in the newspapers, which chose to represent a divorce and re-marriage of his as a “free-love” arrangement, so that he was a notorious figure and in public esteem a monster of iniquity. It was he who subsidized the young author during the period of his hardest struggles, and it was his influence which led him to read Socialist books and listen to Socialist arguments. There ensued a swift conversion; for the young man badly needed a new ideal to live by, in the place of the one which life had so rudely shattered; and the Socialist philosophy was peculiarly suited to his needs. His scientific interests, his acceptance of the Darwinian ideas of evolution, his repudiation of the church and of mysticism, his interest in history and belief in the democratic ideal, his sense of justice and abhorrence of a class society, his Utopian tendencies, his conception of himself as a rebel and revolutionist, had half prepared him for the new philosophy of Socialism; nothing, indeed, had stood in its way except the doctrine, centering about his own personal ambitions, of literature as the determining influence in human progress: and once he had given up his poetic ambitions, it would not prove difficult for him to dethrone literature from the supreme place he had assigned it, in favor of humbler material factors, as required by the Marxian theory. It was not, he now perceived, literature that made life, but life that made literature; it was, on the whole, the way men made their living that determined their thought, including their sense of right and wrong. What, then, he had found wrong with the world was due fundamentally to its economic arrangements; and these economic arrangements were in their very nature, according to the Marxian reading of history, temporary; this present period of capitalism was a passing phase in mankind’s conquest of its environment. It would be destroyed by its own machinery; for the machine method of production brought into existence a larger and larger class of wage-workers, whose interests were necessarily inimical to those of the class which lived on profits and dividends; and when these workers had learned the lesson that they had nothing to lose but their chains and a world to gain, in the words of the _Communist Manifesto_, they would unite for revolutionary purposes, destroy capitalism, and create a workers’ commonwealth all over the world. He conceived this, in accordance with the somewhat mild Socialist ideas of that period, as an essentially peaceful process, to be brought about by voting the Socialist ticket; the votes being influenced by “agitation”, in which a writer who had the good of the world at heart could find an honorable and useful and sufficiently important field for the exercise of his talents.... But, truly more important than all this, so far as his development as a writer is concerned, was that aspect of the Socialist philosophy which gave, to one who had always feared and hated the world, some realistic means of discriminating among its values, so that he could more freely and fearlessly enter into an imaginative intimacy with it in all its crude detail. His old ethico-artistic theory of life, which had held him in imagination at as great a distance as possible from raw life, and had permitted him imaginatively to entertain life’s welter only in the highly sublimated form of precept and principle, had thereby played him false both in love and in art, had fooled and cheated him on every hand. This new theory of life, finding order in the very midst of what had been an unintelligible chaos, made him braver and bolder in his imaginative approach to human experience; it enabled him to see beauty where before there had been only ugliness, and it is ultimately to the bracing influences of this new philosophy that we owe his development into a great realistic novelist.

His nearness to the Socialist philosophy is apparent in _Prince Hagen_, written in 1901--a spirited and amusing though too obviously didactic satirical fable, in which a Nibelung out of Wagnerian opera comes to New York and pursues an instructive career in Democratic and Republican politics, high society, and finance, and then proposes to take back to the Nibelungs the benefits, already set forth in somewhat Shavian terms, of Christianity and capitalism. It was published in 1903, and dedicated to his Socialist friend, Dr. Herron. But its criticism of the world was his own--not Marx’s.

II.

He had planned a novel of the Civil War--a trilogy, in fact--to be called _The American_. It was announced under that title in the _Independent_ article, where he spoke of the Civil War as “to me the greatest art-theme now unpre-empted”, “one of the most tremendous efforts of the human spirit in all history”, and declared that he hoped to give “the next four or five years” to the task. This projected work had also been described in _The Journal of Arthur Stirling_:

The world is filled with historical fiction; it is the cant and
sham of the hour.--Bah!

--This is what I long to do; to take the agony of that struggle and
live it and forge it into an artwork; to put upon a canvas the soul
of it....

I saw some of it to-day, and it made my blood go!

I saw a poet, young, sensitive, throbbing at the old, old wrong,
at the black shame of our history; I saw him drawn into that
fearful whirlpool of blood and passion, driven mad with the pain
and the horror of it; and I saw him drilled and hammered to a grim
savageness, saw him fighting, day by day, with his spirit, forging
it into an iron sword of war. He was haggard and hollow-eyed,
hard, ruthless, desperate.... I saw a man, wild and war-frenzied,
riding a war-frenzied horse; he rode at the head of a squadron,
bare-headed, sword in hand, demon-like--thundering down-hill upon
a mass of men, stabbing, slashing, trampling, scattering! Above
the roar of it all I heard his cry: “Finish it! Finish it!”

And afterward he staggered from his horse and knelt by the men he
had killed, and wept.

--I saw him again. It was when the man of the hour had come at
last; when the monster had met his master; when, day by day, they
hammered it ...; when they closed with it in death-grapple in a
tangled wilderness, where armies fought like demons in the dark,
and the wounded were burned by the thousands. I saw companies of
fainting, starving, agonized men retreating, still battling, day
by day; and I saw the wild horseman galloping on their track,
slashing, trampling--and still with the battle-yell: “Finish it!
Finish it!”

I saw him yet a third time. It was done, it was finished; and he
lay wounded in a dark room, listening. Outside in the streets of
Washington a great endless army marched by, the army of victory,
of salvation; and the old war-flags waved, and the old war-songs
echoed, and he heard the trampling of ten thousand feet....

The first volume of this projected trilogy appeared in 1904, under the title _Manassas: A Novel of the War_. As written, under the sobering influence of the new philosophy that had intervened in the meantime, it is by no means so rhetorical a work as might have been expected from these announcements. It is, in fact, his first realistic novel. It is at the same time beautiful. Its many-cadenced and never negligent prose bends tenderly or humorously over the most minute details of everyday life, and rises with a mature magnificence to the height of the most chaotic battle-scenes, never once losing its grip on reality. It impresses one, re-reading it after many years, as a great war-novel. It has its special limitation, sufficiently characteristic of the author in this transition phase: sex does not exist for its hero; but that limitation, ridiculous enough in afterthought, does not count against it as much as might be supposed. Politics fill that foreground of emotional interest usually occupied in fiction by women, and so profoundly passionate are these political emotions that one scarcely notices, and does not resent, the substitution. The hero is a Southern youth who goes to visit relatives up North, becomes interested in the Abolition agitation, becomes gradually a convert and an enthusiast, and, when the war begins, enlists in a Boston regiment that is mobbed in passing through Baltimore on its way to Washington, and takes part in the great defeat of Northern arms at Manassas, where the book ends. Its historical background is marvelously sketched in; and, though it may be a heretical taste, it is possible to prefer its battle-scenes to those of _The Red Badge of Courage_, or, indeed, to anything short of Byron’s in _Don Juan_ and Tolstoy’s in _War and Peace_. Jack London, it may be remarked, called it “the best Civil War book I’ve read”.

But it is interesting not only as a novel, but as a memorial of a private struggle of his own. It is not for merely literary reasons that a child of the South goes over to the traditional enemy. The aristocratic South, the old South, was still alive in him; it was the South in him that, in spite of all his efforts to be modern and scientific and democratic, still gave him that unconsciously lordly attitude toward life. He had only changed its terminology and not its essence when, as a Prince of the Kingdom of the Spirit, as a poet-aristocrat, he had demanded of the world his rightful place in the seats of spiritual rulership of mankind. When he hated the South, as he had done since boyhood, it was something in himself that he hated. And now, when he had cast off these lordly pretensions that had only gained him mockeries and injuries, and sunk his own aspirations toward freedom and happiness in those of the masses of workingmen, now more than ever he needed to free himself from his Southern heritage. It was for that reason that he fought the Civil War over again in his imagination. In the person of his hero he had to make war on the South; the slavery of black men was his pretext--it was himself that must be set free, before he could go on to write the new books that called to him....

The rest of the trilogy was never written. In the fall of 1904, he went to Chicago to get material for a book about Packingtown. He worked there seven weeks, came back with his imagination aflame, and--pausing in 1905 to found the Intercollegiate Socialist Society[11]--wrote a book that changed his whole literary career.