Love's Pilgrimage, by Upton Sinclair.

After a while reading through, the familiarity of the theme is uncanny, although not in details; at some point it suddenly becomes clear that this tale of travails is of every artist of every art, whether musician or someone in performing arts in theatre or films, or painting or sculpture, even architecture at that; one is familiar with lives of Van Gogh and Frank Lloyd Wright, and others who went through much on their quest of art. The unfamiliarity of details of the tale here stems from lives of writers of literature being rarely written in such details of their strife between struggle to survive while not giving in to demands of world for less than their excellence, and their ability to live through the perjury and loneliness that's their lot, until they find success. One somehow thinks of writers as being able to do the writing after a full day of working for survival, giving up the trivial pursuit of relaxation that occupy others during waking hours not spent in needs of earnings.

Within a page or two, a reader familiar with life of author might begin to wonder if this work, at least so far, has roots in early years of the author.

As one reads on, it's clear that it is, in fact, pretty much Upton Sinclair's own story, of the first few years of his beginning, both as an author and as part of a couple, a couple very much in love with one another and with an ideal of art and intellectual life, of growth of selves and soul, but with very different personalities, and diverse needs. Most of the story ďeals with the strife of the author, and travails of his love as seen through his point of view, which eventually turns to a comparatively balanced one between the two, so much so, eventually a reader might end up sympathetic more with her than him, although his scrupulous fairness leaves little scope to blame - except in his determination about not taking a steady well paid work to support his wife and child, and thus put them through hardships, all because his determination that he'd only work at his writing, and that according strictly to his highest lofty views as per his understanding.

The novel format he's employed in telling what's basically his own story, has a further device to veil the names of characters, a simple one. It begins  with the couple reminiscing at the place they met, and ends where they lived for years, as they presumably look back over their togetherness and years of love; but they pick names - Thyrsis and Corydon - out of old, presumably Greek, legends, each one for themselves, and are referred throughout this book only by those names.

So if one has read The Brass Check and The Journalof Arthur Stirling, one has a certainty that this must be an autobiographical novel, but the author holds back from admitting it, and one has no idea if it's all literally factual. If one is familiar with this author, one may safely bet it is, as seen by him.
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"He was full of old-fashioned ideas, which would take the quaintest turns of reactionism; his politics were summed up in the phrase that he "would rather vote for a nigger than a Republican"; but then, in the same breath, he would announce some fine and noble sentiment, out of the traditions of a forgotten past. He was the soul of courtesy to women, and of loyalty to friends. He worshipped General Lee and the old time "Virginia gentleman"; and those with whom he lived, and for whose unclean profits he sold himself, never guessed the depths of his contempt for all they stood for. They had the dollars, they were on top; but some day the nemesis of Good-breeding would smite them—the army of the ghosts of Gentility would rise, and with "Marse Robert" and "Jeb" Stuart at their head, would sweep away the hordes of commercialdom.

"Thyrsis saw a great deal of this forgotten chivalry. His nursery had been haunted by such musty phantoms; and when he first came to the Northern city, he stayed at a hotel which was frequented by people who lived in this past—old ladies who were proud and prim, and old gentlemen who were quixotic and humorous, young ladies who were "belles," and young gentlemen who aspired to be "blades". It was a world that would have made happy the soul of any writer of romances; but to Thyrsis in earliest childhood the fates had given the gift of seeing beneath the shams of things, and to him this dead Aristocracy cried out loudly for burial. There was an incredible amount of drunkenness, and of debauchery scarcely hidden; there was pretense strutting like a peacock, and avarice skulking like a hound; there were jealousy, and base snobbery, and raging spite, and a breath of suspicion and scandal hanging like a poisonous cloud over everything. These people came and went, an endless procession of them; they laughed and danced and gossiped and drank their way through the boy's life, and unconsciously he judged them, and hated them and feared them. It was not by such that his destiny was to be shaped."

"Most of them were poor; not an honest poverty, but a sham and artificial poverty—the inability to dress as others did, and to lose money at "bridge" and "poker", and to pay the costs of their self-indulgences. As for Thyrsis and his parents, they always paid what they owed; but they were not always able to pay it when they owed it, and they suffered all the agonies and humiliations of those who did not pay at all. There was scarcely ever a week when this canker of want did not gnaw at them; their life was one endless and sordid struggle to make last year's clothing look like new, and to find some boarding-house that was cheaper and yet respectable. There was endless wrangling and strife and worry over money; and every year the task was harder, the standards lower, the case more hopeless."

He might be describing White Russians, but there is a difference, and these are  U.S. "Southerners", living forever psychologically in a romanticised past, with contempt for life past civil war.

"There were rich relatives, a world of real luxury up above—the thing that called itself "Society". And Thyrsis was a student and a bright lad, and he was welcome there; he might have spread his wings and flown away from this sordidness. But duty held him, and love and memory held him still tighter. For his father worshipped him, and craved his help; to the last hour of his dreadful battle, he fought to keep his son's regard—he prayed for it, with tears in his eyes and anguish in his voice. And so the boy had to stand by. And that meant that he grew up in a torture-house, he drank a cup of poison to its bitter dregs. To others his father was merely a gross little man, with sordid ideas and low tastes; but to Thyrsis he was a man with the terror of the hunted creatures in his soul, and the furies of madness cracking their whips about his ears.

"There was only one ending possible—it worked itself out with the remorseless precision of a machine. The soul that fought was smothered and stifled, its voice grew fainter and feebler; the agony and the shame grew hotter, the suffering more cruel, the despair more black. Until at last they found him in a delirium, and took him to a private hospital; and thither went Thyrsis, now grown to be a man, and sat in a dingy reception-room, and a dingy doctor came to him and said, "Do you wish to see the body?" And Thyrsis answered, in a low voice, "No.""

And herein one finds the genesis of budding socialist that young Upton Sinclair began to grow towards becoming, with a hatred for capitalism and much more so for the vice business of the city, eventually expressed in the trilogy about N.Y. city - The Metropolis, The Moneychangers, and The Macine -

"Thyrsis could not have told how soon in life this sense had come to him. In his earliest childhood he had known that his father was preyed upon, just as certainly as any wild thing in the forest. At first the enemies had been saloon-keepers, and wicked men who tempted him to drink with them. The names of these men were household words to him, portents of terror; they peopled his imagination as epic figures, such as Black Douglas must have been to the children of the Northern Border.

"But then, with widening intelligence, it became certain social forces, at first dimly apprehended. It was the god of "business"—before which all things fair and noble went down. It was "business" that kept vice triumphant in the city; it was because of "business" that the saloons could not be closed even on Sunday, so that the father might be at home one day in seven. And was it not in search of "business" that he was driven forth to loaf in hotel-lobbies and bar-rooms?

"Who was to blame for this, Thyrsis did not know; but certain men made profit of it—and these, too, were ignoble men. He knew this; for now and then his father's employers would honor the little family with some kind of an invitation, and they would have to swallow their pride and go. So Thyrsis grew up, with the sense of a great evil loose in the world; a wrong, of which the world did not know. And within him grew a passionate longing to cry aloud to others, to open their eyes to this truth!"
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Then there is Corydon, the other youth this story began with, and now returns to:-

"This girl was like a beautiful flower, Thyrsis told himself—like all the flowers that had gone before her, and all those that would come after, from generation to generation. She fitted so perfectly into her environment, she grew so calmly and serenely; she wore pretty dresses, and helped to serve tea, and was graceful and sweet—and with never an idea that there was anything in life beyond these things. So Thyrsis pondered as he went his way, complacent over his own perspicacity; and got not even a whiff of smoke from the volcano of rebellion and misery that was seething deep down in her soul!

"The choosers of the unborn souls had played a strange fantasy here; they had stolen one of the daughters of ancient Greece, and set her down in this metropolis of commercialdom. For Corydon might have been Nausikaa herself; she might have marched in the Panathenaic procession, with one of the sacred vessels in her hands; she might have run in the Attic games, bare-limbed and fearless. Hers was a soul that leaped to the call of joy, that thrilled at the faintest touch of beauty. Above all else, she was born for music—she could have sung so that the world would have remembered it. And she was pent in a dingy boarding-house, with no point of contact with anything about her—with no human soul to whom she could whisper her despair!

"They sent her to a public-school, where the sad-eyed drudges of the traders came to be drilled for their tasks. They harrowed her with arithmetic and grammar, which she abhorred; they taught her patriotic songs, about a country to which she did not belong. And also, they sent her to Sunday-school, which was worse yet. She had the strangest, instinctive hatred of their religion, with all that it stood for. The sight of a clergyman with his vestments and his benedictions would make her fairly bristle with hostility. They talked to her about her sins, and she did not know what they meant; they pried into the state of her soul, and she shrunk from them as if they had been hairy spiders. Here, too, they taught her to sing—droning hymns that were a mockery of all the joys of life."
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And here one sees the genesis of Sylvia's Marriage.

Thyrsis grappled with transition to manhood, having been admitted to college at a much earlier age, by speaking to various young men - one set for a life in church, another of what the author calls scientific but really a cross between materialistic and philosophical bent, yet another a common one and this next one from a fraternity house, scion of a rich family.

"Thyrsis was appalled at the hardness and the utter ruthlessness of this man—he saw him as a young savage turned loose to prey in a civilized community. He had the most supreme contempt for his victims—that was what they were made for, and he paid them their price. Nor was this just because they were women, it was a matter of class; the young man had a mother and sisters, to whom he applied quite other standards. But Thyrsis found himself wondering how long, with this contagion raging among the fathers and the sons, it would be possible to keep the mothers and the daughters sterilized.
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And perhaps here is a key to his quests in regions he nevertheless dares not trust himself:-

"He took to keeping diaries and writing exhortations to himself. Because he could no longer use the theological prayers he had been taught, he fashioned new invocations for himself: prayers to the unknown sources of his vision, to the new powers of his own soul—"the undiscovered gods," as he called them. Above all he prayed to his vision of the maiden who waited the issue of this battle, and held the crown of victory in her keeping—"

For, as anyone familiar with the author's World's End series knows, Upton Sinclair goes on about visions, psychic experiences, and more, all the while seeking to explain it all in a terminology that would keep him kosher with intellectuals and West even if not quite approved by church officially.
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Pity he didn't go on with poetry -

""The quest of the spirit's gain—
"Lured by the graces of pleasure,
"And lashed by the furies of pain.
"Thy weakness shall sigh for an Eden,
"But the sword shall flame at the gate;
"For far is the home of thy vision
"And strong is the hand of thy fate!""

But then, poetry would have required him to let go of the support of the railings and swim or skate clear across, which he's too afraid to risk; Upton Sinclair would rather hold on to the acceptable as to land, beach, railings at a rink or a pool, and indulge a foot in water or on ice, for a moment.
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Upton Sinclair writes beautifully about music in the World's End series, and here's how he began, much more evoking of his writing about psychic experiences and experiments:-

"But if he could not understand the music, he could read books about it; he read a whole library—criticism of music, analysis of music, histories of music, composers of music; and so gradually he learned the difference between a sarabande and a symphony, and began to get some idea of what he went out for to hear. At first, at the concerts, all he could think of was to crane his neck and recognize the different instruments; he heard whole symphonies, while doing nothing but watching for the "movements," and making sure he hadn't skipped any. One heartless composer ran two movements into one, and so Thyrsis' concert came out one piece short at the end, and he sat gazing about him in consternation when the audience rose to go. Afterwards he read long dissertations about each symphony before he went, and he would note down the important points and watch for them. The critic would expatiate upon "the long-drawn dissonance forte, that marks the close of the working-out portion"; and Thyrsis would watch for that long-drawn dissonance, and be wondering if it was never coming—when suddenly the whole symphony would come to an end! Or he would read about a "quaint capering measure led off by the bassoons," or a "frantic sweep of the violins over a trombone melody," and he would watch for these events with eyes and ears alert, and if he found them—eureka!"

But suddenly, one day, when he went to a concert to hear Beethoven's symphony in C-minor, he could hear music with his spirit.

"He went to the concert, and heard nothing of the rest of the music, but sat like a man in a dream; and when the time came for the symphony, he was trembling with excitement. There was a long silence; and then suddenly came the first theme—those fearful hammer-strokes that cannot be thought without a shudder. They beat upon Thyrsis' very heart-strings, and he sat appalled; and straight out he went upon the tide of that mighty music-passion—without knowing it, without knowing how. He forgot that he was trying to understand a symphony; he forgot where he was, and what he was; he only knew that gigantic phantoms surged within him, that his soul was a hundred times itself. He never guessed that an orchestra was playing a second theme; he only knew that he saw a light gleam out of the storm, that he heard a voice, pitiful, fearful, beautiful beyond utterance, crying out to the furies for mercy; and that then the storm closed over it with a roar. Again and again it rose; Thyrsis did not know that this was the "working-out portion" that had forever been his bane. He only knew that it struggled and fought his fight, that it pleaded and sobbed, and rose higher and higher, and began to rejoice—and that then came the great black phantom-shape sweeping over it; and the iron hammer-strokes of Fate beat down upon it, crushed it and trampled it into annihilation. Again and again this happened, while Thyrsis sat clutching the seat, and shaking with wonder and excitement. Never in his experience had there been anything so vast, so awful; it was more than he could bear, and when the first movement came to an end—when the soul's last hope was dead—he got up and rushed out. People who passed him on the streets must have thought that he was crazy; and afterwards, that day and forever, he lived all his soul's life in music."
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Thyrsis - one may safely infer by now that it's Upton Sinclair writing about his own self - took various classes, and mostly studied languages of Europe and literature thereof, by himself, teaching himself. He considered law and gave up due to the atmosphere he found, and was ready now -

"These things had been going on for a year; and now the book that had been coming to ripeness in his mind was ready to be born."

Genesis of Journal of Arthur Stirling? More than genesis - here's the young writer going off in woods to live in a log cabin to write! One has to wonder, though, about Upton Sinclair's Corydon, so intriguing is the character in the book. One must say, not too many male authors are able to see women or portray them as he can and does, with minds of their own.
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""How I wish we didn't have to get married!" he exclaimed.

""Why?" she asked.

""Because-why should we have to get anybody else's permission to live our lives? I've thought about it a good deal, and it's a slave-custom, and it makes me ashamed of myself.""
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"And so, to Corydon's own amazement, it was not many weeks before she found that she was actually reading music, that they were playing it together. In this way they learned Haydn's and Mozart's sonatas, they even adventured Beethoven's trios, with the second violin left out. Then Thyrsis subscribed to a music-library, and would come home twice a week with an armful of new stuff, good and bad. And whenever in all their struggles with it they were able to achieve anything that really moved them as music, what a rapture it brought them!"

Therein genesis of Hans Robin and Bess Budd.
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"He came, after a long time, to honor this ignorance. People had to bring some real credentials with them to win a place in Corydon's thoughts; it was not enough that they were conspicuous in the papers. And it was the same with facts of all sorts; science existed for Corydon only as it pointed to beauty, and history existed only as it was inspiring. They read Green's "History of the English People" in the evenings; and every now and then Corydon would have to go and plunge her face into cold water to keep her eyes open, The long parliamentary struggle was utter confusion to her—she had no joy to watch how "freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent." But once in a while there would come some story, like that Of Joan of Arc—and there would be the girl, with her hands clenched, and hot tears in her eyes, and the fires of martyrdom blazing in her soul!

"These were the hours which revealed to Thyrsis the treasure he had won—the creature of pure beauty whose heart was in his keeping. He was humbled and afraid before her; but the agony of it was that he could not dwell in those regions of joy with her—he had to know about stupid things and vulgar people, he had to go out among them to scramble for a living. So there had to be a side to his mind that Corydon could not share. And it did not suffice just to tolerate the existence of such things—he had to be actively interested in them, and to take their point of view. How else could he hold his place in the world, how could he win in the struggle for life?

"This, he strove to persuade himself, was the one real difficulty between them, the one thing that marred the perfection of their bliss. But as time went on, he came to suspect that there was something else—something even more vital and important. It seemed to him that he had given up that which was the chief source of his power—his isolation. The center of his consciousness had been shifted outside of himself; and try as he would, he could never get it back. Where now were the hours and hours of silent brooding? Where were the long battles in his own soul? And what was to take he place of them—could conversation do it, conversation no matter how interesting and worth while? Thyrsis had often quoted a saying of Emerson's, that "people descend to meet." And when one was married did not one have to descend all the time?

"He reasoned the matter out to himself. It was not Corydon's fault, he saw clearly; it would have been the same had he married one of the seraphim. He did not want to live the life of any seraph—he wanted to live his own life. And was it not obvious that the mere physical proximity of another person kept one's attention upon external things? Was not one inevitably kept aware of trivialities and accidents? Thyrsis had an ideal, that he should never permit an idle word to pass his lips; and now he saw how inevitably the common-place crept in upon them—how, for instance, their conversation had a way of turning to personality and jesting. Corydon was sensitive to external things, and she kept him aware of the fact that his trousers were frayed and his hair unkempt, and that other people were remarking these things.

"Such was marriage; and it made all the more difference to an author, he reasoned, because an author was always at home. Thyrsis had been accustomed, when he opened his eyes in the morning, to lie still and let images and fancies come trooping through his mind; he would plan his whole day's work in that way, while his fancy was fresh and there was nothing to disturb him. But now he had to get up and dress, thus scattering these visions. In the same way, he had been wont to walk and meditate for hours; but now he never walked alone. That meant incidentally that he no longer got the exercise he needed—because Corydon could never walk at his pace. And if this was the case with such external things, how much more was it the case with the strange impulses of his inmost soul! Thyrsis was now like a hunter, who starts a deer, and instead of putting spurs to his horse and following it, has to wait to summon a companion—and meanwhile, of course, the deer is gone!"
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"He wrote more book-reviews, and peddled them about; sometimes he was forced to exchange them for books he reviewed, and then to sell the books for twenty or thirty cents apiece. He wrote up some ideas for political cartoons, and got three dollars for one of them. He wrote a parody upon a popular poem, and got six dollars for that. He met a college friend, just returned from a trip in the Andes, and he patiently collected the material for a narrative, and sold it to a minor magazine for fifteen dollars.

"And meanwhile he toiled furiously at another pot-boiler, a tale of Hessians and Tories and a red-cheeked and irresistible revolutionary heroine, to fill the insatiable maw of the readers of the "Treasure Chest." On one occasion, when everything went wrong, Corydon took the half-dozen solid silver coffee-spoons and the heavy gold-plated berry-spoon which had constituted her outfit of wedding-presents, and sold them to a nearby jeweler for two dollars and a quarter.

"But through all this bitter struggle they looked forward to a glorious ending. In April the book would be out—and then they would be free! They would go away to the country—perhaps to the little cabin of last summer! Ah, how they dreamed of that cabin, how they hungered for it! They pictured it, covered in snow, with the ice-bound brook in front of it—both the cabin and the brook asleep, and dreaming of the spring-time."
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"His culture and his artistry, his visions and his exaltations—what had they been but a lure for the female? The iris of the burnished dove, the ruff about the grouse's neck, the gold and purple of the butterfly's wing! Even his genius, his miraculous, ineffable genius—that had been the plume of the partridge, the crowning glory before which his mate had capitulated!

"These images came to Thyrsis, until he burst into wild, sardonic laughter. He saw himself in new and grotesque lights; he was the peacock, spreading his gorgeousness before a dazzled and wondering world; he was the young rooster, strutting before his mate, and thrilling with the knowledge of his own importance! He was each of the barnyard creatures by turn, and Corydon was each of the fascinated females. And somewhere, perhaps, stood the farmer, smiling complacently—for should there not be somewhere a farmer in this universal barnyard?

"But then, the laughter died; for he thought of Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee", and shuddered at the fate of the male-creature. He was a mere accident in the scheme of Nature—she wasted all his splendors to accomplish the purpose of an hour. And now it had been accomplished. He had had his moment of ecstasy, his dizzy flight into the empyrean; and now behold him falling, disembowelled and torn, an empty shell!"
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"Then, too, even supposing the best of intentions—there was the cost of living. At present prices it was impossible for a man who had only a salary to support more than one or two children; and with prices increasing as they were, one could not be sure of educating even these. And meanwhile, the Nature of Things had apparently planned it that a woman should bear a child once a year for half her life-time!"

"Corydon met one young person, the wife of a rising stockbroker, who had presented her husband with twins in the first year of their marriage, and who declared that she was apparently designed to populate all the tenements in the city. This airy and vivacious young lady lay back in her automobile and prattled to Corydon, declaring that she was "always in trouble." She had tried to coax her family physician in vain, and had finally gone elsewhere. She had got quite used to the experience. All that troubled her nowadays was how to make excuses to her friends. one could not have "appendicitis" forever!

"But there was another side to the matter. There was one woman who had had a hemorrhage; and another whose sister had contracted blood-poisoning, and had died in agony. There were even some who pleaded and exhorted like the doctor, and talked about the thing's being murder. All of which arguments and fears Corydon brought to her husband, to be pondered and discussed."

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"He was still hoping for a real review, or for some signs of the book's "catching on". Nor did he finally give up until he chanced to have a talk about it with his friend, Mr. Ardsley; who explained to him that here, too, he had fallen into a trap.

"His "publishers" were not really publishers at all. They did not make their profit by selling books—they made it out of authors. There were many vain and foolish people who wrote books which they were anxious to see in print, so that they might be known as literary lights among their friends. Many of them had money, and would buy a number of copies; and the "publishers" had the expenses guaranteed in advance and so would make a profit upon the sale of even one or two hundred copies. All this being well known, the reviews never paid any attention to the announcements of this concern, nor did "the trade" handle their books. As for Thyrsis' volume, they had printed it very cheaply—it was to be doubted if it had cost them what he had paid them. And they had even published it as a "net price" book—thereby taking three cents more off the royalty to which he was entitled!"
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"Corydon had yielded to her parents and gone to stay with them for a while; and Thyrsis had got his own expenses down to less than five dollars a week—including such items as stationery and postage on his manuscripts. And still, he could not get this five dollars. In his desperation he followed the cheap food idea to extremes, and there were times when an invitation to an honest meal was something he looked forward to for a week. And day after day he wandered about the streets, racking his brains for new ideas, for new plans to try, for new hopes of deliverance.

"In later years he looked back upon it all—knowing then the depth of the pit into which he had fallen, knowing the full power of the forces that were ranged against him—and he marvelled that he had ever had the courage to hold out. But in truth the idea of surrender did not occur to him; the possibility of it did not lie in his character. He had his message to deliver. That was what he was in the world for, and for nothing else; and he must deliver what he could of it.

"He would go alone, and his vision would come to him. It would come to him, radiant, marvellous, overwhelming; there had never been anything like it in the world, there might never be anything like it in the world again. And if only he could get the world to realize it—if only he could force some hint of it into the mind of one living person!

"He looked back over the history of art, and saw the old hideous state of affairs—saw genius perishing of starvation and misery, and men erecting monuments to it when it was dead. He saw empty-headed rich people paying fortunes for the manuscripts of poems which all the world had once rejected; he saw the seven towns contending for Homer dead, through which the living Homer begged his bread. And Thyrsis could not bring himself to believe that a thing so monstrous could continue to exist forever."
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"It was so that he wrote his poem, "Caradrion". It was out of thoughts of Corydon, and of the tears which they shed in each other's presence, that this poem was made. Thyrsis had a fondness for burrowing into strange old books, in which one found the primitive wonder of the soul of man, first awakening to the mystery of life. Such a book was Physiologus, with his tales of strange beasts and magic jewels. "There is a bird called Caradrion", Thyrsis had read…. "And if the sick man can be healed, Caradrion goes to him, and touches him upon the mouth, and takes his sickness from him; and so the man is made well."

"And out of this hint he had fashioned the legend of the two children who had grown up together in "the little cot, fringed round with tender green"; one of them Cedric, and one Eileen—for he had given the names that Corydon preferred."

"They grew "unto the days of love", so the story ran—

""And Cedric bent above her, stooping light,
"To press a kiss upon her tender cheek.
"And said, 'Eileen, I love thee; yea I love,
"And loved thee ever, thou my soul's delight.'
"So time sped on, until there came

""To Cedric once a strange unlovely thought,
"That haunted him and would not let him be.
"'Eileen,' he said, 'there is a thing called death,
"Of which men speak with trembling at the lips;
"And I have thought how it would be with me
"If I should never gaze upon thee more.'"

"So Cedric went to find out about these matters; he sought a witch—

""the haggard woman, held in awe."
""He found her crouching by a caldron fire;
"Far gleams of light fled through the vault away.
"And tongues of darkness flickered on the wall.
"Then Cedric said, 'I seek the fate to know'.

"And the witch laughed, and gazed on him and sang:
"'Fashioned in the shadow-land,
"Out into darkness hurled;
"Trusted to the Storm-wind's hand,"
"By the Passion-tempest whirled!
"Ever straining,
"Never gaining,
"Never keeping,
"Young or old!  Whither going
"Never knowing,
"Wherefore weeping,
"Never told!
"Rising, falling, disappearing,
"Seeking, calling, hating, fearing;
"Blasted by the lightning shock,
"Trampled in the earthquake rock;
"Were I man I would not plead
"In the roll of fate to read!'

""Then Cedric shuddered, but he said again,  'I seek the fate,' and the witch waved her hand;  And straight a peal of thunder shook the ground,

"And clanged and battered on the cavern walls,
"Like some huge boulder leaping down the cliff.
"And blinding light flashed out, and seething fire
"Shattered the seamy crags and heaving floor."

"And so in a vision of terror
"Cedric saw the little vale, and the cot
""fringed round with tender green";
"and upon the lawn he saw Eileen, lying as one dead.
""And Cedric sprang, and cried,
"'My love! Eileen!'
"And on the instant came a thunder-crash
"Like to the sound of old primeval days,
"Of mountain-heaving shock and earthquake roar,
"Of whirling planets shattered in the dark."

"And so, half wild with grief and despair, Cedric wandered forth into the world; and after great suffering, the birds took pity upon him, and gave him advice—that he should seek Caradrion.

""'Caradrion?' cried Cedric, starting up,
"'Speak swiftly, ere too late, where dwelleth he?'  '
"Ah, that I know not,' spake the little voice,
"'Yet keep thy courage, seek thou out the stork,
"The ancient stork that saw from earliest days,
"Sitting in primal contemplation lost,
"Sphinx-like, seraphic, and oracular,
"Watching the strange procession of men's dreams.'""

"But the stork was cruel and would not heed him, and led Cedric a weary chase through the marshes and the brakes. But Cedric pursued, and finally seized the bird by the throat, and forced the secret from him—

""'Fare southward still,
"Fronting the sun's midnoon, all-piercing shaft,
"Unto the land where daylight burns as fire;
"Where the rank earth in choking vapor steams,
"And fierce luxurious vegetation reeks.
"So shalt thou come upon a seamèd rock,
"Towering to meet the sun's fierce-flashing might,
"Baring its granite forehead to the sky.
"There on its summit, in a cavern deep,
"Dwells what thou seekest, half a bird, half man,
"Caradrion, the consecrate to pain.'""

"Then came the long journey and the search for the seamèd rock."

"And Cedric, panting, stretched his shrunken arms:
"'Another's sorrow would I change to joy,
"And mine own joy to sorrow; help thou me.'
"To which the voice, sunk low, replied:
"'Come thou.'
"And Cedric came, unfearing, in the dark,
"And saw in gloomy night a form in pain,
"With wings stretched wide, and beating faint and fast.
"'Art thou Caradrion?' he murmured swift,
"And echo gave reply, 'Caradrion'."

"So Cedric told of his errand, and pleaded for help; he heard the answer of the voice:

""'Yea, I can save her, if thou be a soul
"That can dare pain and face the rage of fate;
"A soul that feareth not to look on death.'
"'Speak on,' said Cedric, shaking, and he spoke:
"'This is my law, that am Caradrion,
"Whose way is sorrow and whose end is death;
"That by my pain some fleeting grace I win,
"Some joy unto another I can give.
"Far through this world of woe I seek, and find
"Some soul crushed utterly, and steeped in pain;
"And when it sleeps, I stoop on silent wing,
"And with a kiss take all its woe away—
"Take it for mine, and then into this cave
"Return alone, the blessing's price to pay.'
"Then up sprang Cedric.
"'Nay,' he,' cried, 'then swift,
"Ere life be gone!'"
"But once more spake the voice:
"'Nay, boy, my race is run, my power is spent;
"This hope alone I give thee, as thou wilt;
"Whoso stands by and sees my heart-throb cease,
"Who tastes its blood, my power and form are his,
"And forth he fares in solitary flight,
"Caradrion, the consecrate to pain.
"And so my word is said; now hide thee far
"In the cave's night, and wrestle there in prayer.'
"But Cedric said, 'My prayer is done; I wait.'
"So in the cave the hours of night sped by,
"And sounds came forth as when a woman fights
"In savage pain a life from hers to free."

"Then in the dawn a dark shadow flew from the cave, and sped across the blue, and came to the little vale, where Eileen lay dying, as he had seen her in the vision in the "haggard woman's" cavern.

""Then Cedric sprang, and cried,

"'My love! Eileen!'
"And Eileen heard him not; nor knew he wept.—
"For mighty sorrow burst from out his heart,
"And flooded all his being, and he sunk,
"And moaned: 'Eileen, I love thee!
"Yea, I love,
"And loved thee ever; and I can not think
"That I shall never gaze upon thee more.
"My life for thine—ah, that were naught to give,
"Meant not the gift to see thee nevermore!
"Never to hear thy voice.
"Nay, nay, Eileen,
"Gaze on me, speak to me, give me but one word,
"And I will go and never more return.'
"But Eileen answered not; he touched her hand,
"And she felt nothing.
"Then he whispered, low,
'Oh, may God keep thee—for it must be done—
"Guard thee, and bless thee, thou my soul's delight!
"And when thou waken'st, wilt thou think of me,
"Of Cedric, him that loved thee, oh so true?
"Nay, for they said thou shouldst no sorrow know,
"And that would be a sorrow, yea, it would.
"And must thou then forget me, thou my love?
"And canst not give me but one single word,
"To tell me that I do not die in vain?
"Gaze at me, Eileen, see, thy love is here,
"Here as of old, above thee stooping light,
"To press a kiss upon thy tender lips.—
"Ah, I can kiss thee—kiss thee, my Eileen,
"Kiss as of yore, with all my passion's woe!'
"And as he spoke he pressed her to his heart,
"Long, long, with yearning, and he felt the leap
"Of molten metal through his throbbing veins;
"His eyes shot fire, and anguish racked his limbs,
"And he fell back, and reeled, and clutched his brow.
"An instant only gazed he on her face,
"And saw new life within her gray cheek leap,
"And her dark eyelids tremble.
"Then with moan,
"And fearful struggle, swift he fled away,
"That she might nothing of his strife perceive.
"And then, reminded of his gift of flight,
"He started from the earth, and beat aloft,
"Each sweep of his great wings a torture-stroke
"Upon his fainting heart.
"And thus away,
"With languid flight he moved, and Eileen, raised
"In new-born joy from off her couch of pain,
"And so Cedric went back to the seamèd rock, and there he heard a voice calling,
""I seek Caradrion!"
"And as before he answered,
""Come not, except to sorrow thou be born!"
"And again, in the cave—
""The hours of night sped by.
"And sounds came forth as when a woman fights
"In savage pain, a life from hers to free.  B
"ut Eileen dwelt within the happy vale,
"Thinking no thought of him that went away."
....................................................................................................


Thyrsis, or the author in the alter ego the protagonist, here transforms the profound comprehension he came upon in witnessing childbirth, of agonies in process of giving life, and brings forth a poem of mythical quality about a lover seeking to never part from his love, and becoming a legendary bird Caradrion that takes away pain with a kiss and vanishes on a long flight to a towering equatorial rock's cave.
....................................................................................................

The descriptions of the rich of the city have worked themselves into the Metropolis trilogy, while the meeting with rich relatives - probably autobiographical  - has gone into the World's End series. The musical performance description has gone into The Metropolis.

Thyrsis is invited after theatre to dinner by the relatives, and accepts due to necessity; they are joined by the rector of the church that the relatives attend back home.

"There came another guest to the meal—the rector of the fashionable church which the family attended at home. He was a young man, renowned for the charm of his oratory; smooth-shaven, pink-and-white-cheeked, exquisite in his manners, gracious and insinuating. His ideas and his language and his morals were all as perfectly polished as his finger-nails; and never before in his life had Thyrsis had such a red rag waved in his face. But he had come there for the dinner, and he attended to that, and let Dr. Holland provide the flow of soul; until at the very end, when the doctor was sipping his demi-tasse.

"The conversation had come, by some devious route, to Vegetarianism; and the clergyman was disapproving of it. That made no difference to Thyrsis, who was not a vegetarian, and knew nothing about it; but how he hated the arguments the man advanced! For that which made the doctor an anti-vegetarian was an attitude to life, which had also made him a Republican and an Imperialist, a graduate of Harvard and a beneficiary of the Apostolic Succession. Because life was a survival of the fittest, and because God had intended the less fit to take the doctor's word as their sentence of extermination.

"The duty of animals, as the clergyman set it forth to them, was to convert plant-tissue into a more concentrated and perfect form of nutriment. "The protein of animal flesh," he was saying, "is more nearly allied to human tissue; and so it is clearly more fitted for our food."

"Here Thyrsis entered the conversation. "Doctor Holland," he said, mildly, "I should think it would occur to you to follow your argument to its conclusion."

"The other turned to look at him. "What conclusion?" he asked.

""I should think you would become a cannibal," Thyrsis replied.

"And then there was silence at the table. When Dr. Holland spoke again it was to hurry the conversation elsewhere; and from time to time thereafter he would steal a puzzled glance at Thyrsis."

Thyrsis took his leave after dinner, not noticing Holland, and went to walk furiously in park, working out the new book about The Higher Cannibalism.
....................................................................................................


Thyrsis writes another book, "Genius", a play about a violinist.

"Helena asks, "Who wrote that music?" He tells her a ghastly story of a titan soul who starved in a garret and shot himself, crushed by the mockery of the world.

""I might have saved him!" the boy exclaims. "I was so busy with the music I forgot the man!"

"They talk about this epoch-making concerto, and how Lloyd means to force it upon the public. "And you shall play it with me!" he exclaims. "You are the first that has ever understood it!"

""I cannot play it!" she protests; to which he answers, "It was like his voice come back from the grave!" And so we see these two souls cast into the crucible together.

"The second act showed the aftermath of the great concert, and took place in the drawing-room of the Hartman family's apartment, at four o'clock in the morning. We see Moses and the two professors, who have not been able to tear themselves away; dishevelled, distrait , wild with vexation, they pace about and lament. Failure, utter ruin confronts them—the structure of their hopes lies in the dust! They blame it all on "that woman"—and members of the family concur in this. It was she who kept Lloyd to his resolve to play that mad concerto; and then, to cast aside all the master had taught them, all the results of weeks of drilling—and to play it in that frantic, demonic fashion. Now the men await the morning papers, which will bring them the verdict of "the world"; and they shudder with the foreknowledge of what that verdict will be.

"Lloyd and Helena enter.

"She answers to this, "I cannot see how my love will hinder you."

"He replies, "If you love me, who will love my art?""
....................................................................................................


"Thyrsis could only reply with vague hopes—and then go away for a tramp in the forest, and call to his soul for new courage. He had still troubles enough of his own. For one thing, the fiend in his stomach was not to be exorcised by any spell he knew. It was all very picturesque to portray one's hero as dying of disease; but in reality it was not at all satisfactory. Thyrsis did not die, he merely ate a bowl of bread and milk, and then went about for several hours, feeling as if there were a football blown up inside of him."
....................................................................................................


""To-night I was trying to put my baby to sleep and he wouldn't go, but just lay in my lap and kicked and grinned. I tried to coax him to go to sleep, but if I was the least bit impatient he'd begin to cry. And then he'd grin at me so roguishly, as if to say, 'Let's play before I go to sleep!' Finally I looked right at him and said, 'Now, you have played long enough, and I wish you to be a good boy and go to sleep!' And then he laughed, and I put him on his side and he went to sleep! Wasn't that bright for a baby just seven months old?"
....................................................................................................


"There were huckleberries in profusion upon the hills, and in the lakes were fish, and in the forests squirrels and rabbits, partridges and deer. There were the game-laws, to be sure; but there was also a "higher law", as eminent authorities had declared. As one of the wits at the lumber-camp put it, "If any wild rabbit comes rushing out to bite you, don't you hesitate to defend yourself!"

"So, with the sum of one dollar and twenty-three cents in his pocket-book, Thyrsis began the happiest experience of his life. He watched the sun rise and set behind the mountains; and sometimes he climbed to the summits to see it further upon its way. He watched the progress of the tempests across the lake, and swam in the water while the rain splashed his face and the lightning splintered the pines in the forest. He crouched in the bushes and saw the wild ducks feeding, and the deer that came at sunset to drink. He watched the loons diving, and spying him out with their wild eyes—sometimes, as they rose in flight, beating the surface of the water with a sound like thunder. At night he heard their loud laughter, and the creaking cries of the herons flying past. Sometimes far up in the hills a she-fox would bark, or some too-aged tree of the forest would come down with a booming crash. Thyrsis would lie in his open camp and watch the moonlight through the pines, and prayers of thankfulness would well up within him—"Peace of the forest, rich, profound,  Gather me closely, fold me round!""
....................................................................................................

"Upon the receipt of this letter the philanthropist wrote again, suggesting that the poet come to see him and talk things over. He sent the price of a railroad ticket to Boston; and so Thyrsis made the acquaintance of a new world—one might almost say of a whole new system of worlds.

"For here was the Athens of America, the hub of the universe. In Boston they worshipped culture, they lived in literature and art and the transcendental excellences; and by the way of showing that there was no snobbery in them, they opened the gates of their most august mansions to this soul-sick poet, and invited him to tea.

"Thyrsis got a strange impression among these people, who were living upon their knees before the shrine of their own literary history. One was treading here upon holy ground; in these very houses had dwelt immortal writers—their earthly forms had rested in these chairs, and their auras yet haunted the dim religious light of these drawing-rooms. There were old people who had known them in the flesh, and could tell anecdotes about them—to which one listened in reverent awe; at every gathering one met people who were writing biographies and memoirs of them, or editing their letters and journals, or writing essays and appreciations, criticisms and commentaries and catalogs and bibliographies. And to be worthy of the visitations of such hallowed influences, one must guard one's mind as a temple, a place of silences and serenities, to which no vulgar things could penetrate; one excluded all the uproar of these days of undisciplined egotism—above all things else one preserved an attitude of aloofness from that which presumed to call itself "literature" in such degenerate times.

"To have become acquainted with these high standards was perhaps worth the rent of a room and the cost of some food and clean collars. So Thyrsis reflected when, after his week of waiting, he had his interview with the benevolent philanthropist, who explained to him, at great length, how charity had the effect of weakening the springs of character, and destroying those qualities of self-reliance and independence which were the most precious things in a man."
....................................................................................................


"Thyrsis spoke of a novel he had been reading, which set out to solve the problem of "capital and labor". Its solution seemed to be for the handsome young leader of the union to marry the daughter of the capitalist; and Paret remarked, with his dry smile, "No doubt if the capitalists and their daughters are willing, the union-leaders will come to the scratch.""

"There came also a poetess, whose work he had seen in the magazines, and with her a Russian youth who had come to study the thought of America, and was now going home, because America had no thought. Thyrsis had a good deal of patriotism left in him, and might have been angered by this stripling's contempt; but the stripling spoke with such quiet assurance, and his contempt was so boundless as to frighten one. "These people," he said—"they simply do not know what the intellectual life means!""
....................................................................................................


Upton Sinclair mentions George D. Herron in both World's End series and The Brass Check, and unless Darrell is yet another person whose life's story is eerily similar, here it's George D. Herron under that name.

"Meantime Thyrsis was reading Darrell's books and pamphlets, and coming to realize what a mind was here being destroyed. For this man, it seemed to him, was master of the noblest prose utterance that had been heard in America since Emerson died. He went again to hear him speak, in another ill-lighted and stuffy hall before less than a hundred people; and the pain of this was more than he could bear. He went home that night with his friend, and labored with him with all the force of his being. "You stay here," he declared, "and put yourself at the mercy of your enemies! You waste your faculties contending with them—even knowing about them is enough to destroy you. And all the while you might escape from them altogether—might do your real work, that the world knows nothing of. No one can hinder you. And when you have written the book of your soul, then your tormentors will be—they will be like the tormentors of Dante! Go away! Go away to Europe, where you can be free!"

"And so before long, he stood upon a steamer-pier and waved Henry Darrell and his wife farewell. And every now and then would come letters, telling of long, long agonies; for Darrell had to fight for those few rare days when ill health would permit him to think. So year by year he labored at what Thyrsis knew, if it was ever finished, would be America's first world-poem; and in the meantime eminent statesmen and moralists who were alarmed at the progress of "Socialist agitation", would continue to conjure up before the public mind the night-mare spectre of the once-respected clergyman, who had deserted his weeping wife and children, and run away with a rich woman to found a "free-love colony"!"
....................................................................................................


"On account of the new book, he would have to be near a library, and so he had selected a college-town not far from New York. He went there now, and put up for a week at a students' boarding-house, while prosecuting his search.

"Upon his excursions into the country some of these young men would tramp with him—threshing out, student-fashion, the problems of the universe; and how staggering it was to meet a man who was about to receive a master's degree in literature—and who regarded Arthur Hugh Clough as a "dangerous" poet, and Tennyson's "Two Voices" as containing vital thought, and T. H. Green as the world's leading philosopher! And this was the "education" that was dispensed at America's most aristocratic university—for this many millions of dollars had been contributed, and scores of magnificent buildings erected!

"Thyrsis saw that a partial explanation lay in the fact that in connection with the university there existed a great theological seminary. Some of these future ministers came also to the boarding-house, and Thyrsis listened to their shop-talk—about the difference between "transubstantiation" and "consubstantiation", and the status of the controversy over the St. John Gospel. He heard one man cite arguments from Paley's "Moral Philosophy"; and another making bold to state that he was uncertain about the verbal inspiration of the Pentateuch!

"To Thyrsis, as he listened to these discussions, it was as if he felt a black shadow stealing across his soul. He wondered why he should hate these men with a personal hatred; he tried to argue with himself that they must be well-meaning and earnest. The truth was that they seemed to him just like the law-students, men moved by sordid and low ideals; the only difference was that their minds were not so keen as the lawyers'. Thyrsis was coming little by little to understand the economic causes of things, and he perceived that this theological world represented a stagnant place in the stream of national culture; it being a subsidized world, maintained half by charity, vital men turned from it; it drew to itself the feebler minds, or such as wished to live at ease, and not inquire too closely into the difference between truth and falsehood."
....................................................................................................


"It was amazing what loads of provisions a family of three could consume in the course of a week—especially when one of them was following the "stuffing regime". There had to be a lot of figuring done to get it for the sum of thirty dollars a month; and this put another grievous burden upon Thyrsis. Corydon, alas, had no talents for figuring, and was cursed with a weakness for such superfluities as clean laundry and coffee with cream. This was one more aspect of the difference between the Hebrew and the Greek temperament; and sometimes the Hebrew temperament would lose its temper, and the Greek temperament would take to tears. The situation was all the more complicated because of their pitiful ignorance. They really did not know what was necessity and what was luxury. For instance, Thyrsis had read somewhere that people could live without meat; but Corydon had never heard of such an idea, and insisted with vehemence that it was an absurdity."
....................................................................................................


They built a small house in a corner of a farmer's land, and lived together with the baby, while Thyrsis was in process of writing a book about the civil war. So while he fought the creative battle, there was the continuous war within, the writer verses the husband and father, and circumstances of bordering penury were no help, since Corydon needed him. Upton Sinclair describes beautifully the process Thyrsis goes through in his relationships, even as his book takes shape, with his awareness of the then current Russian revolution and his need of reading the newspapers even as money is scarce.
....................................................................................................


" ... Bull Run and then again Bull Run, and there was the long Peninsula Campaign—an entire year of futility and failure; and there was the ghastly slaughter of Fredericksburg, and the blind confusion of Chancellorsville, and the bitter, disappointment of Antietam."

Here Upton Sinclair is describing his own process of writing Manassas.

"Thyrsis wished to portray all this from the point of view of the humble private, who got none of the glory, and expected none, but only suffering and toil; whose lot it was to march and countermarch, to delve and sweat in the trenches, to be stifled by the heat and drenched by the rain and frozen by the cold; to wade through seas of blood and anguish, to be wounded and captured and imprisoned, to be lured by victory and blasted by defeat. And into it all he was pouring the distillation of his own experiences."

Very much in the then very new, comparatively revolutionary tradition of War And Peace!
....................................................................................................


"Little by little, as he studied this War, Thyrsis had come upon a strange and sinister fact about it. Roughly speaking, the population of the country might have been divided into two classes. There were those to whom the Union was precious, and who gave their labor and their lives for it; they starved and fought and agonized for it, and came home, worn, often crippled, and always poor. On the other hand there were some who had cared nothing for the Union, but were finding their chance to grow rich and to establish themselves in the places of power. They were selling shoddy blankets and paper shoes to the government; they were speculating in cotton and gold and food. There were a few exceptions to this, of course; but for the most part, when one came to study the gigantic fortunes which were corrupting the nation, he discovered that it was just here they had begun.

"So this was the curious and ironic fact; the nation had been saved—but only to be handed over to the money-changers! And these now possessed it and dominated it; and a new generation had come forward, which knew not how these things had come to be—which knew only the money-changers and their power. And who was there to tell them of the War, and all that the War had meant? Who was there to make that titan agony real to them, to point them to the high destinies of the Republic?"

And the following must be referring to WWI.

"So here again was War! Here again were pain and sickness, hunger and cold, solitude and despair, to be endured and defied; death itself to be faced—madness even, and soul-decay! Armies of men had gone out, had laid themselves down and filled up the ditches with their bodies, to make a bridge for Freedom to pass on. And the ditches were not yet full—another life was needed!"
....................................................................................................


Corydon was ill, he nursed her. But she was better only when she saw he needed her.

"There seemed to be no limit to the powers of this subliminal woman within Corydon. Her cheeks would kindle, her eyes would blaze, and eloquence would pour from her—the language of great poetry, fervid and passionate, with swift flashes of insight and illumination, tumultuous invocations and bursts of prophecy. Thyrsis would listen and marvel. What a mind she had—sharp, like a rapier, swift as the lightning-flash! The powers of penetration and understanding, and above all the sheer splendors of language—the blazes of metaphor, the explosions of coruscating wit! What a tragic actress she might have made—how she would have shaken men's souls, and set them to shuddering with terror! What an opera-singer she could have been, with that rich vibrant voice, and the mien of a disinherited goddess!

"It was out of such hours that the faith of their lives was made; and it was out of them also that Thyrsis formed his idea of woman. To him woman was an equal; and this he not only said with his lips, he lived it in his feelings. The time came when he went out into the world, and learned to understand the world's idea, that woman meant vanity and pettiness and frivolity; but Thyrsis let all this pass, knowing the woman-soul. Somewhere underneath, not yet understood and mastered, was pent this mighty force that in the end would revolutionize all human ideas and institutions. Here was faith, here was vision, here was the power of all powers; and how was it to be delivered and made conscious, and brought into the service of life?

"Most women liked Thyrsis, because they divined in some vague way this attitude; and some men hated him for the same reason. These men, Thyrsis observed, were the slave-drivers; they held that woman was the weaker vessel, and for this they had their own motives. There were women, too, who liked to be ruled; but Thyrsis never argued with them—it was enough, he judged, to treat any slave as a free man, or any servant as a gentleman, and sooner or later they would divine what he meant, and the spirit of revolt would begin to flicker."
....................................................................................................


Thyrsis's play, The Genius, had success and good reviews in Germany, so he got noticed, and his new work about the civil war got a good contract, and an advance. They expanded the house with a lean-to addition, tried having a servant, and went back to doing housework themselves for sake of privacy. Having finished and sent off the book, Thyrsis read about socialism seriously, and saw he was naive in assuming evolution will happen, and realised the reality of class war.

"And so also was it with the dullness and sterility that prevailed in the intellectual world. The master-class did not want ideas—it only wanted to be let alone; and so it put in the seats of authority men who were blind to the blazing beacon-fires of the future. It would be no exaggeration to say that the intellectual and cultural system of the civilized world was conducted, whether deliberately or instinctively, for the purpose of keeping the truth about exploitation from becoming clear to the people.

"The master-class owned the newspapers and ran them. It had built and endowed the churches, and taught the clergy to feed out of its hand. In the same way it had founded the colleges, and named the trustees, who in turn named the presidents and professors. The ordinary mortal took it for granted that because venerable bishops and dignified editors and learned college-professors were all in agreement as to a certain truth, there must be some inherent probability in that truth; and never once perceived how the cards were stacked and the dice loaded—how those clergymen and editors and professors had all been selected because they believed that truth to be true, and believed the contrary falsehood to be false!

"And how smoothly and automatically the system worked! How these dignitaries stood together, and held up each other's hands, maintaining the august tradition, the atmosphere of authority and power! The bishops praising the editors, and the editors praising the professors, and the professors praising the bishops! And when the circle was completed, what lése majesté it seemed for an ordinary mortal to oppose their conclusions!

"And when it came to the selecting of the college professors, of the men who were to guide and instruct the forthcoming generations—what precautions would be taken then! What consultations and investigations, what testimonials and interviews and examinations! For after all, in these new days, it could be no easy matter to find men whose minds were sterilized, who could face without blenching all the horrors of the capitalist regime! Who could see courts and congresses bought and sold; who could see children ground up in mills and factories, and women driven by the lash of want to sell their bodies; who could see the surplus of the world's wealth squandered in riot and debauchery, and the nations armed and drilled and sent out to slaughter each other in the quest for more. Who could know that all these things existed, and yet remain in their cloistered halls and pursue the placid ways of scholarship; who could teach history which regarded them as inevitable; who could care for literature that had been made for the amusement of slave-drivers, and art which existed for the sake of art, and not for the sake of humanity; who could know everything that was useless, and teach everything that was uninteresting, and could be dead at once to the warnings of the past, and to all that was vital and important in the present."

Funny, this is the first time there is a vague oblique indication of the war then raging in Europe for years, although he does mention the Russian revolution; so neither Thyrsis nor Upton Sinclair cared enough to join the war, but only enough to point a finger of blame at professors?
....................................................................................................


"So, for instance, on the one side one found Rousseau, and on the other Herbert Spencer. Thyrsis had read Spencer, and had cordially disliked him for his dogmatism and his callousness; but now he read Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution", and came to a realization of how the whole science of biology had been distorted to suit the convenience of the British ruling-classes. Laissez-faire and the Manchester school had taught him that "each for himself and the devil take the hindmost" was the universal law of life; and he had accepted it, because there seemed nothing else that he could do. But now, in a sudden flash, he came to see that the law of life was exactly the opposite; everywhere throughout nature that which survived was not ruthless egotism, but co-operative intelligence. ... When it came to man, was it not perfectly obvious that the races which had made civilization were those which had developed the nobler virtues, such as honor and loyalty and patriotism? And now it was proposed to trample them into the mire of "business"; to abandon the race to a glorified debauch of greed! And this travesty of science was taught in ten thousand schools and colleges throughout America—and all because certain British gentlemen had wished to work their cotton-operatives fourteen hours a day, and certain others had wished to keep land which their ancestors had seized in the days of William the Conqueror! Shortly after this Thyrsis came upon Edmond Kelly's great work, "Government, or Human Evolution"; and so he realized that Herbert Spencer's social philosophy had at last been cleared out of the pathway of humanity. And this was a great relief to him—it was one more back-breaking task that he did not have to contemplate!"
....................................................................................................


So far so good, but when it comes to Thyrsis reading Veblen,

"Later on came those stages when he no longer had to gain his wealth by physical prowess; when cunning took the place of force, and he ruled by laws and religions and moral codes, and handed down his power through long lines of descendants. Then ostentation became a highly specialized and conventionalized thing—its criterion changing gradually to "conspicuous waste of time". Those characteristics were cultivated which served to advertise to the world that their possessor had never had to earn wealth, nor to do anything for himself; the aristocrat became a special type of being, with small feet and hands and a feeble body, with special ways of walking and talking, of dressing and eating and playing. He developed a separate religion, a separate language, separate literatures and arts, separate vices and virtues. And fantastic and preposterous as some of these might seem, they were real things, they were the means whereby the leisure-class individual took part in the competition of his own world, and secured his own prestige and the survival of his line."

- not quite true! Especially so with the physical aspects.
....................................................................................................


"Corydon's ancestors, as far back as documents could trace, had been members of that class. They had left her the frail and beautiful body, conspicuously useless and dependent; they had left her all the leisure-class impulses and cravings, all the leisure-class impotences and futilities to contend with. They had taught her nothing about cooking, nothing about sewing, nothing about babies, nothing about money; they had taught her only the leisure-class dream of "love in a cottage"—and she had run away with a poor poet to try it out!

"The depth of these instincts in Corydon was amusingly illustrated by the fact that she always woke up dull and discouraged, and was seldom really herself until afternoon; and that along about ten o'clock at night, when for the sake of her health she should have been going to bed, she would be laughing, talking, singing, ablaze with interest and excitement. Thyrsis would point this out to her, and please himself by picturing the role which she should have been filling—wearing an empire gown and a rope or two of rubies, and presiding in an opera-box or a salon. Corydon would repudiate all this with indignation; but all the same she never escaped from the phrases of Veblen—she remained his "leisure-class wife" from that day forth. Not so very long afterwards they came upon Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler"; and Thyrsis shuddered to observe that of all the heroines in the world's literature, that was the one which most appealed to her. Nor did he fail to observe the working of the thing in himself; the subtle and deeply-buried instinct which made him prefer to be wretched with a "leisure-class wife" rather than to be contented with a plebeian one!"
....................................................................................................


"Whenever Thyrsis met a stranger, it was necessary for him to go through elaborate intellectual processes, to find the person out by an exchange of ideas. And if by any chance the person was insincere, and used ideas as a blind and a cover, then Thyrsis might never find him out at all. In other words, he took people at the face-value of their cultural equipment; and only after long and tragic blunderings could he by any chance get deeper. But with his wife it happened quite otherwise; this case was the first which he witnessed, but the same thing happened many times afterwards. With her there would be a strange flash of recognition; it was a sort of intuition, perhaps a psychic thing—who could tell? By some unknown process in soul-chemistry, she would divine things about a person that he might have been a life-time in finding out."

A visitor had come, and Corydon had loved Delia Gordon, who was visiting the neighbourhood preacher Rev. Harding, despite their differences. Delia made Corydon blossom, and Thyrsis thought they'd be better if she lived with them, although she was to go to Africa.

"Thyrsis found to his pain that it was impossible to make these considerations of any real import to Delia. She understood them, she assented to them; but that did not make them count. Her impulses came from another part of her being. Her savages were naked and hungry and ignorant and miserable; and they needed to be fed and clothed, and more important yet, to be baptized and saved. She was all the more impelled to her task by the fact that all the forces of civilization were arrayed against her. The fires of martyrdom were blazing in her soul. She meant to throw herself over a precipice—and the higher the precipice, and the more jagged the rocks beneath, the greater was the thrill which the prospect brought her."

"The truth of the matter was that Thyrsis loved the religious people; it was among them that he had been brought up, and their ways were his ways. This was a fact that came to him rarely now, for he was hard-driven and bitter; but it was true that when he sneered at the church and taunted it, he was like a parent who whips a child he loves. Perhaps Paret had spoken truly in one of his cruel jests—that when a man has been brought up religious, he can never really get over it, he can never really be free."

"Truly, was it not the supreme act of infidelity, to make the spirit of religion, which was one with the impulse of all life—the force that made the flower bloom and oak-tree tower and the infant cry for its food—to make it dependent upon Hebrew texts and Assyrian folk-tales!"

""Your whole attitude is an outrage to it! You never speak of 'science' except as an evil thing. You told Corydon that 'evolution' was wicked!"

""I don't see how evolution can help my faith"—began the other.

""That's just it!" cried Thyrsis again. "That is exactly what I mean! You do not pay homage to truth, you do not seek it for its own sake! You require that it should fit into certain formulas that you have set up—in other words that it should not interfere with your texts and your legends! And what is the result of that—you have paralyzed all your activities, you have condemned your intellectual life to sterility! For we live in an age of science, we cannot solve our problems except by means of it; the forces of evil are using it, and you are not using it, and so you are like a child in their hands!"

"All this, of course, was effort utterly wasted. Thyrsis poured out his pleadings and exhortations, his longing and his pain; and when he had finished, the girl was exactly where she had been before—just as distrustful of "science", and just as blindly bent upon getting away to her savages and binding up their wounds and baptizing them. And so at last he gave up in despair, and left Delia to go to bed, and went out and sat alone in the moonlight."

Thyrsis gave up, and later Corydon joined him on the pizza. She'd seen.

""She doesn't care about facts at all, Corydon. And notice this also—she doesn't care about succeeding. That's the thing you must get straight—her religion is a religion of failure! It comes back to that criticism of Nietzsche's—it's a slave-morality. The world belongs to the devil; and the idea of taking it away from the devil seems to be presumptuous. Even if it could be done, the attempt would be "unspiritual'; for the 'world' is something corrupt—something that ought not to be saved. So you see, she's perfectly willing for the Belgians to have the rubber."

""'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's'!" quoted Corydon.

""Yes, and let Caesar spend them on Cleo de Merode. What she wants is to save the souls of her savages—to baptize them, and to perish gloriously at the work, and then be transported to some future life that is worth while. So you see what the immortality-mongers do with our morality!""

Corydon said it needn't be so, and insisted he must spread the message.

"She caught hold of him and clung to him; he could feel, like an electric shock, the thrill of her excitement. He marvelled at the effect his words had produced upon her—realizing all the more keenly, in contrast with Delia, what a power of mind he had here to deal with. "Dearest," he said, "I must put these things into my books. You must stand by me and help me to put them into my books!""

"There was a great strike that summer, and they followed the progress of it, reading accounts of the distress of the people. Every now and then the pain of these things would prove more than Thyrsis could bear, and he would blaze out in some fiery protest, which, of course, the Socialist papers published gladly. So little by little Thyrsis was coming to be known in "the movement". Some of his friends among the editors and publishers made strenuous protests against this course, but little dreaming how deeply the new faith had impressed him.

"In truth it was all that Thyrsis could do to hold himself in; it seemed to him that he no longer cared about anything save this fight of the working-class for justice. He was frightened by the prospect, when he stopped to realize it; for he could not write anything but what he believed, and one could not live by writing about Socialism. He thought of his war-book, for instance. It was but two or three months since he had finished it, and it was his one hope for success and freedom; and yet already he had outgrown it utterly. He realized that if he had had to go back and do it over, he could not; he could never believe in any war again, never be interested in any war again. Wars were struggles among ruling-classes, and whoever won them, the people always lost. Thyrsis was now girding up his loins for a war upon war."

"But a college-town was a poor place for Socialist propaganda, as he realized with sinking heart; its population was made up of masters and servants, and there was even more snobbery among the servants than among the masters. The main architectural features of the place were fraternity-houses and "eating-clubs", where the sons of the idle rich disported themselves; once or twice Thyrsis passed through the town after midnight, and saw these young fellows reeling home, singing and screaming in various stages of intoxication. Then he would think of little children shut up in cotton-mills and coal-mines, of women dying in pottery-works and lead-factories; and on his way home he would compose a screed for the "Appeal to Reason"."

Rev. Harding visited, and Corydon kept on haranguing him, telling Thyrsis he was changing.

"It must have been a novel experience for the clergyman; it seemed to fascinate him, for he came again and again, and soon quite a friendship sprang up between the two."

"Through Mr. Harding they made other acquaintances in Bellevue. There was a Mrs. Jennings, the wife of the young principal of the High School; they were simple and kindly people, who became fond of Corydon, and would beg her to visit them. The girl was craving for companionship, and she would plead with Thyrsis to accompany her, and subject himself to the agonies of "ping-pong" and croquet; and once or twice he submitted—and so one might have beheld them, at a lawn-party, hotly pressed by half a dozen disputants, in a debate concerning the nature of American institutions, and the future of religion and the home!"
....................................................................................................


"Corydon's excitement over these questions was all the greater because she was just then making the discovery of the relationship of Socialism to the problems of her own sex. Some one sent her a copy of Charlotte Gilman's "Women and Economics"; she read it at a sitting, and brought it to Thyrsis, who thus came to understand the scientific basis of yet another article of his faith. He went on to other books—to Lester Ward's "Sociology", and to Bebel's "Woman", and to the works of Havelock Ellis. So he realized that women had not always been clinging vines and frail flowers and other uncomfortable things; and the hope that they might some day be interested in other matters than fashion and sentiment and the pursuit of the male, was not a vain fantasy and a Utopian dream, but was rooted in the vital facts of life.

"Throughout nature, it appeared, the female was often the equal of the male; and even in human history there had been periods when woman had held her own with man—when the bearing of children had not been a cause of degradation. Such had been the case with our racial ancestors, the Germans; as one found them in Tacitus, their women were strong and free, speaking with the men in the council-halls, and even going into battle if the need was great. It was only when they came under the Roman influence, and met slavery and its consequent luxury, that the Teutonic woman had started upon the downward path. Christianity also had had a great deal to do with it; or rather the dogmas which a Roman fanatic had imposed upon the message of Jesus.

"It was interesting to note how one might trace the enslavement of woman, step by step with the enslavement of labor; the two things went hand in hand, and stood or fell together. So long as life was primitive, woman filled an economic function, and held her own with her mate. But with slavery and exploitation, the heaping up of wealth and the advent of the leisure-class régime, one saw the woman becoming definitely the appendage of the man, a household ornament and a piece of property; securing her survival, not by useful labor, but by sexual charm, and so becoming specialized as a sex-creature. For generations and ages the male had selected and bred in her those qualities which were most stimulating to his own desires, which increased in him the sense of his own dominance; and for generations and ages he taught the doctrine that the proper sphere of woman was the home. If he happened to be a German emperor, he summed it up in the sneer of "Kuche, Kinder, Kirche". So the woman became frail and impotent physically, and won her success by the only method that was open to her—by finding some male whom she could ensnare."
....................................................................................................


Again, so far so good, but the next part, not so much:-

"Such had been the conditions. But now, in the present century, had come machinery, and the development of woman's labor; and also had come intelligence, and woman's discovery of her chains. So there was the suffrage movement and the Socialist movement. After the overthrow of the competitive wage-system and of the leisure-class tradition, woman would no longer sell her sex-functions, whether in marriage or prostitution; and so the sex might cease to survive by its vices, and to infect the whole race with its intellectual and moral impotence. So would be set free the enormous force that was locked up in the soul of woman; and human life would be transformed by the impulse of emotions that were fundamental and primal. So Thyrsis perceived the two great causes in which the progress of humanity was bound up—the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of woman; to educate and agitate and organize for which became the one service that was worth while in life."

Quite on the contrary - whatever was wrong with the land-owning and serf-peasant tilling was only made worse by development of industrial era with banking involving less physical currency than numbers in a ledger or words on paper. For this made women's role in managements of households and farms less and less important.

As long as it's about independent lanholding on a family scale, wealth is directly related to produce, of dairy and agriculture; cattle is wealth, and management thereof is shared, as is farm work. Manpower is necessary for the work, hence importance of sons, and consequently of the mother of children, since there are no sons without her.

But change to work in industry and payment in the name of the man, directly in his hands or in his accounts, and the vows at marriage about endorsing the bride with his wealth are now circumvented. She now is a sex toy and household servant without pay, an encumbrance casted off as soon as new toy can replace the one not quite old, and she is thrown inyo penury with her children, all the more so if they aren't sons and often enough even then; this did happen on a large scale in U.S. post the domestic fifties after WWII. Women's movements came not from awakening due to machines easing housework but due to their being thrown out of their marital homes with pittance for alimonies and child support, often not paid, while the male still exercised his authority over her and children, unless replaced legally by another male. Next generation knew better than to trust love and marriage, and fact of needing one's own job to support oneself through fickle and privileged male that wasn't dependable.
....................................................................................................


They decided to buy a farm, and looked about. Meanwhile his book was coming out, mainstream reviews were good, and he wrote an article that was accepted in a mainstream magazine, McIntyre's Weekly, with offer for another, at rate of five cents a word, two hundred dollars for an article! Billy McIntyre, the editor of the magazine, invited him for dinner, where McIntyre the father, and owner of McIntyre's,  informed him that the article wouldn't be published in the magazine but he'd be paid, and suggested he should put it in a book.

"They went in to dinner, which was served upon silver-plate, by the light of softly-shaded candles; and while the velvet-footed waiters caused their food to appear and disappear by magic, Thyrsis fulfilled his mission and "threw Socialism" at the company.

"The company had its guns loaded, and they went at it hot and heavy. The editors wanted to know about "the home" under Socialism; to which Thyrsis made retort by picturing "the home" under capitalism. They wanted to know about liberty and individuality under Socialism; and so Thyrsis discussed the liberty and individuality of the hundred thousand wage-slaves of the Steel Trust. They sought to tangle him in discussions as to the desirability of competition, and the impossibility of escaping it; but Thyrsis would bring them back again and again to the central fact of exploitation, which was the one fact that counted. They insisted upon knowing how this, that, and the other thing would be done in the Cooperative Commonwealth; to which Thyrsis answered, "Do you ask for a map of heaven before you join the Church?""

Thyrsis was invited to lunch by another editor and taken to an afternoon gathering at Mrs Parmley Patton's, and he found Mrs Patton unexpectedly intelligent; he was becoming a celebrity.

"Thyrsis got new light upon the making of reputations, when he looked into the next issue of "Knickerbocker's Weekly". There he found that Murray Symington had devoted no less than three paragraphs to his personality and his book. It was all "sprightly"—that was Murray's tone—but also it was cordial; and it referred to Thyrsis' earlier novel, "The Hearer of Truth", as "that brilliant piece of work". Thyrsis read this with consternation—recalling that when the book had come out, not two years ago, "Knickerbocker's Weekly" had referred to it as a "preposterous concoction". Could it be true that an author's work was "preposterous" while he was starving in a garret, and became "brilliant" when he was found in the drawing- room of Mrs. "Parmy" Patton?"
....................................................................................................


They bought a farm with help from the priest who had married them, and engaged a couple for help in the house and on the farm.

""Henery" was slow at pitching hay and loading stone, but when the season came, he developed a genius for peddling fruit; he was always hungry for any sort of chance to bargain, and was forever coming upon things which Thyrsis ought to buy. Very quickly the neighborhood discovered this propensity of his, and there was a constant stream of farmers who came to offer second-hand buggies, and wind-broken horses, and dried-up cows, and patent hay-rakes and churns and corn-shellers at reduced values; all of which rather tended to reveal to Thyrsis the unlovely aspects of his neighbors, and to weaken his faith in the perfectibility of the race.

"There were many such drawbacks to be balanced against the joys of "life on a farm". Thyrsis reflected with a bitter smile that his experiences and Corydon's had been calculated to destroy their illusions as to several kinds of romance. They had tried "Grub Street", and the poet's garret, and the cultivating of literature upon a little oatmeal; they had not found that a joyful adventure. They had tried the gypsy style of existence; they had gone back "to the bosom of nature"—and had found it a cold and stony bosom. They had tried out "love in a cottage", and the story-writer's dream of domestic raptures. And now they were chasing another will o' the wisp—that of "amateur farming"! When Thyrsis had purchased half the old junk in the township, and had seen the mules go lame, and the cows break into the pear-orchard and "founder" themselves; when he had expended two hundred dollars' worth of money and two thousand dollars' worth of energy to raise one hundred dollars' worth of vegetables and fruit, he framed for himself the conclusion that a farm is an excellent place for a literary man, provided that he can be kept from farming it."
....................................................................................................


Corydon was sick, and finally consulted a surgeon in town related to Mr Harding, and was diagnosed with abdominal tumour, and operated. Harding visited her every day, and she discovered they were in love. After another operation, when she was finally well enough to return home, she talked to Thyrsis. He wrestled within, and wrote to Harding to say he did not intend to claim outrage or to stand in the way, but as a result Harding resigned and left without seeing either of them.

"For a minute or two they sat staring before them as if in a trance; and then suddenly from Thyrsis' lips there burst a peal of wild laughter. "By the Lord God, he ran away from it!" he cried; and he seized Corydon by the arm and cried again, "He ran away from it!"

""He's fled like Joseph," said Thyrsis—"leaving his cloak in the hands of the temptress!"

""But Thyrsis!" she protested. "Think what we've done to him! The man's life is wrecked!"

""Nonsense!" said he. "It's the best thing that could have happened to him. He might have gone on preaching sermons all his life—but now he's got some ideas to work out. He'll have time to read books, and to think."

""But he must be suffering so!" exclaimed Corydon, who could not forget her love, even in the presence of his ribaldry.

""He needs to suffer," Thyrsis replied. "He may meet some of the radicals over there, and come back with a new point of view.""

""Corydon," said he, "I don't believe you really loved him as much as you thought. Did you?"

"She stared before her without answering.

""Would you have loved him for long?" he persisted.

"She pondered over this. "I don't think one could love a man always," she answered, "unless he had a mind."

""Thyrsis," she said, "you must promise me that you will never do anything dreadful like that again. You must understand me; I might think that I was in love, but it would never be real—truly it wouldn't. No man could ever mean to me what you mean—I know that! And I couldn't give you up—you must never let yourself think of such a thing! I couldn't give you up!"

"So there came to Thyrsis one of those bursts of tenderness that she knew so well. He put his arms about her and kissed her with fervor; but even while he spoke with her, and gave her the love she desired, there was something in him that sank back and moaned with despair. So the captive sinks and moans when he finds that his break for freedom has led only to the tightening of his chains."

So while Thyrsis has written his civil war book in Tolstoy fashion, his personal life has a Shavian turn to his noble resolution of love.
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"_They stood for the last time before the cabin, bidding farewell to the little glen and all its memories.

""There are lines in the poem for everything," she said. "Even for that!" And she quoted— "He hearkens not! light comer, he is flown!"

"He laughed. "I can do better yet," he said— "Alack, for Corydon no rival now!"

"There was a pause. "That was five years," she mused.

""And there were five more!"

""It will mean another book," he said. "To tell about the new work; and how Thyrsis became a social lion; and how, like Icarus, he flew too high and melted his wings. And then, 'The Exploiters,' the book of his vengeance! And then Corydon—"

""Yes, do not forget Corydon," she said. "How he watched her dying before his eyes, and how he prayed for months for courage to kill her, and could not, but ran away. And then—-"

""It will make a long story."

""Yes—a long story. 'Love's Deliverance,' let us call it."

""They will smile at that. It sounds like Reno, Nevada."

""'Love's Deliverance,' even so," he said.

""To tell how Thyrsis went out into the wilderness and found himself; and of the new love that came to Corydon."

""It will be a Bible for lovers," said she.

""Yes," he replied, and smiled-"with a book of Chronicles, and a book of Proverbs, and a book of Psalms, and a book of Revelations—"

""And several books of Epistles," she interposed.

""The tablets in the temple are cracked," he said, "and the fortresses of privilege are crumbling. When the Revolution is here—when there are no longer priests nor judges nor class-taboos—then out of the hunger of our own hearts we shall have to shape our sex-ideals, and organize our new aristocracies."

""They will call it a book of 'free love'," said she.

"To which he answered, gravely: "Let us redeem our great words from base uses. Let that no longer call itself Love, which knows that it is not free!""
....................................................................................................
....................................................................................................

The Machine, by Upton Sinclair.

Having read The Metropolis by the author, the characters - Allan Montague, Laura Hegan and her father Jim Hegan, and Robert Grimes - are familiar by name, some more than by name. This work, unlike his usual novel format, is in format of a play. It follows The Metropolis in timeline, in fact The Metropolis is summed up is a dialogue of Allan Montague, but in a puzzling avoidance of a detail amounting to Laura Hegan having cut him - here she says he distanced himself - and it's unclear if it predates the other one, The Moneychangers.
....................................................................................................


The play is short, and jumps right in.


"JACK : Built for the proletariat, and inhabited by cranks.

"LAURA : Is that the truth?

"JULIA : It's certainly the truth about this one. Below me are two painters and a settlement worker, and next door is a blind Anarchist and a Yiddish poet.

"LAURA : What's the reason for it?

"JULIA : [Going to room off left with LAURA's things.] The places are clean and cheap; and whenever the poor can't pay their rent, we take their homes."

They tell her they are expecting Allan Montague.

"JACK : It was last election day, in a polling place on the Bowery. I was a watcher for the Socialists, and this Montague was one of the watchers for the reform crowd. The other one was drunk, and so he had the work all to himself. It was in the heart of Leary's district, and the crowd there was a tough one, I can tell you. It was a close election.

"LAURA : Yes; I know.

"JACK : There'd been all kinds of monkey-work going on, and the box was full of marked and defective ballots, and Montague set to work to make them throw them out. I didn't pay much attention at first. I was only there to see that our own ballots were counted; but pretty soon I began to take interest. He had everyone in the place against him. There was a Tammany inspector of elections and four tally clerks... all in with Tammany, of course. There were three or four Tammany policemen, and, outside of the railing, the worst crowd of toughs that ever you laid eyes on. To make matters worse, there were several men inside who had no business to be there... one of them a Judge of the City Court, and another a State's attorney... and all of them storming at Montague.

"JULIA : What did he do?

"JACK : He just made them throw out the marked ballots. They were willing enough to put them to one side, but wanted to count them in on the tally sheets. And, of course, Montague knew perfectly well that if they ever counted them in they'd close up at the end, and that would be all there was to it. He had the law with him, of course. He's a lawyer himself, and he seemed to know it all by heart; and he'd quote it to them, paragraph by paragraph, and they'd look it up and find that he was right, and, of course, that only made them madder. The old Judge would start up in his seat. “Officer!” he'd shout (he was a red-faced, ignorant fellow... a typical barroom politician), “I demand that you put that man out of here.” And the cop actually laid his hand on Montague's shoulder; if he'd ever been landed on the other side of that railing the crowd would have torn him to pieces. But the man stayed as cool as a cucumber. “Officer,” he said, “you are aware that I am an election official, here under the protection of the law; and if you refuse me that protection you are liable to a sentence in State's prison.” Then he'd quote another paragraph."

Allan Montague arrives, and he is startled to see Laura. They talk about the Tammany Hall, Laura lauding the heroic act.

"MONTAGUE : Make him tell you about some of his own adventures.

"JULIA : Would you ever think, to look at his innocent countenance, that he had helped to hold a building for six hours against Russian artillery?

"LAURA : Good heavens! Where was this?

"JULIA : During the St. Petersburg uprising.

"LAURA : And weren't you frightened to death?

"JACK : [Laughing.] No; we were too busy taking pot-shots at the Cossacks. It was like the hunting season in the Adirondacks.

"LAURA : And how did it turn out?

"JACK : Oh, they were too much for us in the end. I got away, across the ice of the Neva... I had the heel of one shoe shot off. And yet people tell us romance is dead! Anybody who is looking for romance, and knows what it is, can find all he wants in Russia."
....................................................................................................


Jim Hegan arrives, and there is a disturbance from Annie Rogers next door. Jim asks about it.

"JACK : [Quietly, but with suppressed passion.] Tens of thousands of girl slaves are needed for the markets of our great cities... for the lumber camps of the North, the mining camps of the West, the ditches of Panama. And every four or five years the supply must be renewed, and so the business of gathering these girl-slaves from our slums is one of the great industries of the city. This girl, Annie Rogers, a decent girl from the North of Ireland, was lured into a dance hall and drugged, and then taken to a brothel and locked in a third-story room. They took her clothing away from her, but she broke down her door at night and fled to the street in her wrapper and flung herself into Miss Patterson's arms. Two men were pursuing her... they tried to carry her off. Miss Patterson called a policeman... but he said the girl was insane. Only by making a disturbance and drawing a crowd was my friend able to save her. And now, we have been the rounds... from the sergeant at the station, and the police captain, to the Chief of Police and the Mayor himself; we have been to the Tammany leader of the district... the real boss of the neighborhood... and there is no justice to be had anywhere for Annie Rogers!

"HEGAN : Impossible!

"JACK : You have my word for it, sir. And the reason for it is that this hideous traffic is one of the main cogs in our political machine. The pimps and the panders, the cadets and maquereaux... they vote the ticket of the organization; they contribute to the campaign funds; they serve as colonizers and repeaters at the polls. The tribute that they pay amounts to millions; and it is shared from the lowest to the highest in the organization... from the ward man on the street and the police captain, up to the inner circle of the chiefs of Tammany Hall... yes, even to your friend, Mr. Robert Grimes, himself! A thousand times, sir, has the truth about this monstrous infamy been put before the people of your city; and that they have not long ago risen in their wrath and driven its agents from their midst is due to but one single fact... that this infamous organization of crime and graft is backed at each election time by the millions of the great public service corporations. It is they...

"MONTAGUE : [Interfering.] Bullen!

"JACK : Let me go on! It is they, sir, who finance the thugs and repeaters who desecrate our polls. It is they who suborn our press and blind the eyes of our people. It is they who are responsible for this traffic in the flesh of our women. It is they who have to answer for the tottering reason of that poor peasant girl in the next room!"
....................................................................................................


Allan Montague visits Laura at her invitation, and they talk over the interim period.

"LAURA : You were concerned in some important deal with my father, were you not?

"MONTAGUE : I was.

"LAURA : Then you withdrew. Was that because there was something wrong in it?

"MONTAGUE : It was, Miss Hegan.

"LAURA : There were corrupt things done? MONTAGUE : There were many kinds of corrupt things done.

"LAURA : And was my father responsible for them?

"MONTAGUE : Yes.

"LAURA : Directly?

"MONTAGUE : Yes; directly.

"LAURA : Then my father is a bad man?

"MONTAGUE. [After a pause.] Your father finds himself in the midst of an evil system. He is the victim of conditions which he did not create."

Which makes one think this play follows The Moneychangers in timeline.

....................................................................................................

"MONTAGUE : The vice graft serves for the police and the district leaders and the little men; what really pays nowadays is what has come to be called “honest graft.” 

"LAURA : What is that? 

"MONTAGUE : The business deals that are trade with the public service corporations. 

"LAURA : Ah! That is what I wish to know about! MONTAGUE : For instance, I am running a street railway... 

"LAURA : [Quickly.] My father is running them all! 

"MONTAGUE : Very well. Your father is in alliance with the organization; he is given franchises and public privileges for practically nothing; and in return he gives the contracts for constructing the subways and street-car lines to companies organized by the politicians. These companies are simply paper companies... they farm out the contracts to the real builders, skimming off a profit of twenty or thirty per cent. One of these companies received contracts last year to the value of thirty million dollars. 

"LAURA : And so that is how Grimes gets his money? MONTAGUE : Grimes' brother is the president of the company I have reference to. LAURA : I see; it is a regular system. 

"MONTAGUE : It is a business, and there is no way to punish it... it does not violate any law... 

"LAURA : And yet it is quite as bad! 

"MONTAGUE : It is far worse, because of its vast scope. It carries every form of corruption in its train. It means the prostitution of our whole system of government... the subsidizing of our newspapers, and of the great political parties. It means that judges are chosen who will decide in favor of the corporations; that legislators are nominated who will protect them against attack. It means everywhere the enthronement of ignorance and incompetence, of injustice and fraud. 

"LAURA : And in the end the public pays for it? 

"MONTAGUE : In the end the public pays for everything. The stolen franchises are unloaded on the market for ten times what they cost, and the people pay their nickels for a wretched, broken-down service. They pay for it in the form of rent and taxes for a dishonest administration. Every struggling unfortunate in the city pays for it, when he comes into contact with the system... when he seeks for help, or even for justice. It was that side of it that shocked me most of all... I being a lawyer, you see. The corrupting of our courts... 

"LAURA : The judges are bought, Mr. Montague? 

"MONTAGUE : The judges are selected, Miss Hegan. 

"LAURA : Selected! I see. 

"MONTAGUE : And that system prevails from the Supreme Court of the State down to the petty Police Magistrates, before whom the poor come to plead."

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Montague informs Laura about Annie Rogers, who killed herself; Laura confronts her father. She attempts to make him change, and informs him that she'll leave him and his money if he doesn't instantly drop the next step in his course of action, which he cannot; Allan Montague comes to know of it, and is finally able to declare his suit for her, which she is deliriously happy to accept. 

Funny, Upton Sinclair seems to have forgotten Lucy Dupree! She isn't mentioned as the victim, even, much less an old friend. 

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