Upton Sinclair by Floyd Dell

I.

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