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at the ensuing sessions at Chester, but have since applied to the masters (the prosecutors) to be forgiven, and to be permitted to return to their employment like the rest of the workmen, without any alteration in wages or restrictions demanded, which the masters have consented to comply with, upon condition of their signing a submission, to be published at their expense, in the Chester, Manchester, and Derby papers: We, the undersigned [strike leaders], do, therefore, most humbly acknowledge the impropriety of our proceedings, and return our thanks for the lenity we have experienced in the very serious prosecution that pended over us being withdrawn.

Realize the pugnacity of the Englishman, his dour tenacity, especially when hailing from Palatine, Durham, or Cleveland, and his desperate obscurantism when he is asked to subscribe to the event of his own defeat, and then imagine the black bitterness of a signature to a document of this nature to such leaders as George Wilson, John Barton, John Crossthwaite, Alton Locke, Nicholas Higgins, "The Bishop' in Sybil, and the 'Old Saw' in Put Yourself in His Place! The strike is no longer a maleficent symptom to be scotched at once by a superior order of intelligence. Art, the sycophant, has come to treat the strike no longer as a disease of crass ignorance but as a pathetic symptom of discord in the body politic, which needs psychic treatment. In a nation of sedulous ants rather than artistic innovators in letters, it is remarkable that a German should have been first to treat the strike with original insight and philosophic pathos. These qualities, long before the appearance of The Dynasts, must be claimed for The Weavers, a play of Silesian strikers in the forties, by Hauptmann.

But in this new century strike, as much as in that in Mary Barton, the counters in conflict are always remarkably constant. The men are confident of getting their hand on the master's

VOL. 16-NO. 815

throat. Big orders are in hand which a strike will preclude the firm from executing. There is an iron hand like 'Old Carson' or 'Old Anthony' of the Trenartha Tin Plate Works in Galsworthy's Strife, who represents the philosophy of the Diehards.

It has been said that masters and men are equal. Cant! There can only be one master in a house! Where two men meet the better man will rule. It has been said that capital and labor have the same interests. Cant! Their interests are as wide asunder as the poles. It has been said that the board is only part of a machine. Cant! We are the machine; its brains and sinews; it is for us to lead and to determine what is to be done, and to do it without fear or favor. There is only one way of treating 'men'— with the iron hand. This half-and-half business, the half-and-half manners of this generation, has brought all this upon us. Sentiment and softness, and what this young man, no doubt, would call his social policy. You can't eat cake and have it! This middle-class sentiment, or socialism, or whatever it may be, is rotten. Masters are masters, men are men! Yield one demand and they will make it six. If I were in their place I should be the same. But I am not in their place. Mark my words: one fine morning, when you have given way here, and given way there you will find you have parted with the ground beneath your feet, and are deep in floundering in that bog, will be the very the bog of bankruptcy; and with you,

men you have given way to.

Then there is the man like Wilder who says, 'I can't have my reputation as a business man destroyed for the satisfaction of starving the men out.. How can we meet the shareholders with things in the state they are? . . . We're trustees. Reason tells us we shall never get back in the saving of wages what we shall lose if we continue this struggle.' There is the humanitarian who says, "We cannot go on starving women and children. Starving women,' at which the flurried Scantlebury of all ages puts his fingers in his ears and exclaims, 'For

God's sake, sir, don't use that word at a-at a Board meeting; it's-it's monstrous.'

And the end is almost inevitably the same, as Galsworthy beautifully adumbrates. The best and the strongest and also the weakest on either side have cruelly suffered. Both have utterly miscalculated the other's force of reason and endurance. Those who have most solemnly sworn that they will not profit at the expense of the suffering community find themselves profiteers without in the least recognizing the fact. They are almost invariably drawn from the least principled of the contestants. In Italy, where they use cartoons as bludgeons, not as ticklers, there was a ferocious drawing of a bloated middleman ejaculating with much complacency to the toilworn army of workers: 'Forza, ragazzi! Sono cavaliere del lavoro.' The 'old Anthonys' of all ages often find their stanchest supporters in the workingman who has risen from the ranks, and despise their fellows for their mildness and lack of ambition. 'Curs-no grit in 'em.' 'What they want,' says Mr Bounderby, 'is gold spoons and a coach and six.'

The constancy of the elements in the great basic things which make up the ground-swell of humanity must always appeal to the observer, and, in the form of struggle that culminates in the strike, it is very apparent. The chorus, represented by Old Baumert in the epoch-making drama of The Weavers (which deserves in a sense to be numbered as one of Verhaeren's Les Aubes), surveys the world of suffering manalways the same in his hunger strikes, in the cruel story of what man has made of man ever in process of repetition, the under-dog continually born to suffer, his redress, under whatever

The Times

laws happen to prevail, perpetually illusory. The strike is the periodic revolt of the teeming workers against this chronic aspect upon a large survey of the right-to-live question: the revolt against our fatal but unending repudiation of the first economic axiom of "The Fable of the Bees.' 'The great art of making a nation happy, and what we call flourishing, consists in giving everybody an opportunity of being employed' at a subsistence wage at the very least. The inoffensive, as in The Weavers, almost invariably suffer most by these upheavals, and who gain in the upshot it would probably be impossible to decide. The same fallacies constantly prevail - belief in the efficacy of the lightning strike, the same old tendency to overrate the solidarity of the protestants against the existing order, the same old tendency to underrate the pride, constancy, tenacity, fighting spirit, and resolve of the opposing party, the same sanguine impulse to anticipate anything like a successful decision-the uplift of Liége without the grim reality of Namur. The result, so unaccountably overlooked, yet almost inseparable from every protracted strikehunger, violence, bankruptcy of ideals, the futility of verbal scores and polemical victories in comparison with the invariable residuum of rankling bitterness and the sense of injustice. Those who have faithfully depicted the strike moral in fiction have done their bit of national service in throwing into relief some of these constant features of an ancestral curse under a new illusive spell. They help to show the necessity for the increased spontaneity and momentum of that good will, unprocurable by laws and governments, which alone can sterilize that sour soil in which strikes are fomented.

LETTERS FROM AMERICA: WRITTEN BY JOHN

BUTLER YEATS TO W. B. YEATS

NEW YORK, November 16, 1916.

death is regarded as the tranquil end

WOULD you like - pour changering of life coming at the right moment

to know my idea of America? There
everything is in the melting pot, hus-
bands, wives, children, and the family,
and religion, and politics. No fixity
anywhere. It is not a hot melting pot,
it does not come to the boil, just sim-
mers gently on the hob, so that every-
body is good-natured and tolerant and
almost indifferent-not much con-
cerned for the truth but just to amuse
the passing moments. In the election,
as at a game of baseball or on an Eng-
lish race-course, the only interest that
matters is the betting. I wonder is it
so always in a democracy? For in-
stance, in the old days at Athens. Ah,
no! There is a vast difference. In
Athens the supreme interest-for
some not mysterious reason
and poetry.

was art

Apart from the betting, they also in America have another more serious interest: it is that their ninety millions should be materially comfortable, for the Americans are a humane people, they wish everybody to be comfortable

-that is, in a bodily sense comfortable -whereas, the Athenians thought all the time of mental comfort. No, no! more than mental comfort, for to a people living as they did, with wars constantly threatening, such constant sorrows about death and disease, the lot then of every nation on the globe, mental comfort was not to be thought of; they thought all the time about spiritual ecstasy, and strove for it through the methods and channels of artistic creation.

when the failing powers long for rest. Mental comfort being thus within easy reach, there remains only bodily comfort, and that America is resolved to bestow on its people. Who nowadays cares for mental ecstasy?

I see every democracy, even that of Athens, as a crowd gathered to hear their orators, very eager to be excited, for excitement is the breath of their nostrils, and a great orator who is himself a great man means a great democracy. But great men are not things of chance and appear only when there has been necessary training. There are no great men in America because their training is lacking.

There is one dark menace running through all classes, like a black thread in a cloth of gold — the labor cause. Its supporters are numerous as the sands of the sea, but brainless. Their hearts beat for but one feeling which is hatred, the ignorant love activity and to see things doing, and hatred prompts to action, therefore, the ignorant love to hate. Isaac Butt was a constructive statesman, his heart and mind luminous with love for his enemies, but the Irish are an ignorant people and so Parnell seduced them with his gospel of hatred, which Butt, in his gentle and courteous fashion, called the policy of exasperation.

February 20, 1916.

The ethical doctrine most popular in America is expressed by the word service. Every man, woman, and child Latterly mental comfort comes is brought up with the idea of service, easily, disease is manageable, and and it is fatal to sincerity. In America

477

there is no such thing as sinceritythe effect of democracy is that each eitizen regards himself as holding, by virtue of his citizenship and his vote, a kind of public position. Socrates, in his Apologia, says that he soon discovered that in democratic Athens, he could not serve truth if he occupied a public position; for which reason he forsook all opportunities of public service and devoted himself to a private life in which he sought for truth pure and simple. The head of a great railway or other big commercial concern must, if he is to do his duty by his clients, throw overboard nice ideas of honor and honesty, and employ the accustomed methods of graft and bribery. The editor of a paper, enlisted in some propaganda of socialism or philosophical anarchism, finds that he must look askance at truth as these men do at honesty - overstating and understating matters in a way that must ultimately blunt all those susceptibilities which are of the very essence of fine character, and which also are at the root of that enthusiasm which is the soul of poetry. If a poet preserves his susceptibility to truth, poetic enthusiasm remains to comfort and inspire him, even though he had parted with every other honorable quality.

November 21, 1916.

The doctrines of 'uplift' and social service are shouting over all the hills and valleys and into the secret glens. The natural man loves his wife, his children, himself, and the little patch of the earth's surface where he lives and was born, and though he says his solitude is for him an arching sky glittering with stars, it is vain. Civilization says he must be reasonable and he must not be selfish. The shy muses who come to us in secret are scared away by the noise and the company.

In their place come the pompous rhetoricians pretending that they are. commissioned by the muses and what they preach is that a man does not belong to himself but to his neighbors. Every age has its particular heresy.

The doctrine of social service is the heresy of modern civilization. And so, poor man the solitary, becomes man the social, the gregarious; his natural feelings all watered down to the right temperature so that he can cease to be himself and become the servant of the social machine. Meantime my only comfort is to know that the muses by fiat of the gods are immortal. And where are they domiciled? In Russia perhaps, or in Roumania, or in India -savage lands not yet reached by the heresy. In Russia, certainly, there are some poets and there is still a 'palate.' These benighted Americans have no palate either for Jameson's whiskey or in poetry for the true vintage. So it is a sad and noisy world. I think that in Europe, when this terrible war is over and gone (if there does not start another war of labor and social struggle), the individual man will rediscover himself and become so vital and, as it were, importunate in his demands for a true existence (which I need not say is not the material things the proletariat- inevitably so-are in pursuit of) that he will return to solitude and once more be visited, by the kind-hearted and now more relenting muses.

True patriotism is not social service in its essence whatever it be in its effect. The ecstasy of the Athenian was patriotism, but why? Because it was spontaneous, genuine, and springing as naturally in the bosoms and hearts of Athenians as the multitudinous duties on the hillside. Another ecstasy was their sense of life as it distributed fate and fortune and death in its awful way, and with its

capricious impartiality-an ecstasy made it a practice to attend his

as

made of fear and wonder and austere beauty. Patriotism is only possible to a small country and a small city. However intense our feelings are, the heart of man cannot embrace a large surface. When he thinks imperially,' and my unionist friends would invite me to do, he does so with his vanity and vulgarity or because of some self-interest. His heart is cold as ice. Athens was a mother to her children— the best of mothers, and as visibly so in their eyes as their natural mother-elegant, gracious, stately besides, and lovely in conversation to the last. I mean her public plays and the speeches of her orators. We have Pericles's word for it and we have, still to be seen, her beautiful architecture.

She also was like a mother, the good providence of the home. The Athenian loved Athens because he loved himself. She is mine, he said, with every nerve in his soul and body resonant with the words.. At the rising of the sun and the going down, therefore, it was his constant thought, his religion, by which he saved his soul and his body. Afterward he went the downward course and sank to thinking imperially and so degenerated till his feelings became tepid like those of any modern. I suppose that in the long life of a nation the moments of intensity are few and far between.

February 22, 1916.

Poetry, which almost everyone in America is now writing, fails because of two reasons. In the first place there is this doctrine of service everyone must serve, it is a woman's doctrine, and America is a woman's country. Some time ago I met a most refined and charming woman and she praised Brother Sunday, and said that she

services. In the name of common sense, why?' I asked. 'Oh,' she replied, 'he is doing so much good.' There you have the doctrine of service in its crudest form proclaimed from those pretty lips. The second reason is that there is no leisure and this because of the newspapers and the habit of the newspapers. There is not a nook in all America, however shady and sequestered, not hurried by them.

The doctrine of service is bad because it enfeebles the sense of truth, for I am sure that you will agree with me that every poet hates that kind of crudity, so popular in journalism, which is unsifted truth. Anything, false or true, will do for the people who serve. Like the Catholic Church, they are persuaded that they are out for something more important than the merely true. The poet, because of that inner sincerity which is the very root of his being, and which is his intensity— like that of a grieving mother who will not be put off with half-answers from the doctor - seeks and seeks always for the truth which has been many times sifted. times sifted. In his methods of reproduction of finite things he may employ every artifice of metaphor and bold figure, but the inner feeling must not be falsified in expression in one single tittle, neither may it be tempted by any kind of self-indulgence or selfglory into falseness toward the facts by which it is excited. The vice of Byron's poetry is that he had not this 'caution' toward truth. He wrote out of the heart of a fictitious Byron when he rushed into what Keats calls his 'magnanimity.' Shelley was always the 'cautious' thinker and had the poet's virgin heart. Had he lived, he would have cast off his 'magnanimity' which all came from the large head

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