Bars and Shadows | Page 4

soothing, cajoling, flattering. By these means the rulers succeed in bringing under their control the strong thinkers, the capable executives, the sensitive, the talented--all in fact who are worth buying, and who can be bought for income and for social preferment, even though they may have been born into the families of the humblest and most oppressed of the workers.
Most men and women go where income promises and social preferment beckons. But not all! There are some whose love of justice, truth and beauty; whose yearning for betterment and increased social?opportunity, outweighs the tempting bait of ease and respectability. Them the established order smites.
The strength of the old order is measured superficially by the extent of its control over the means of common livelihood and by the generalness of the satisfaction or discontent with which the masses receive its administration. Fundamentally its strength is determined by the direction in which its life is tending. The structure of the Roman Empire was apparently sound before it buckled and disintegrated. The French aristocracy was never surer of itself than in the gala days that preceded 1789. The old order may undergo a process of gradual transformation. In that case the change is slow, as it was when Feudalism gave place to Capitalism in England. Again, the old order may be exterminated as it was when Feudalism gave place to Capitalism in France. In one case the masters of life loosens the reins of power to ease the straining team; in the other case the masters hold the reins taut till they are jerked from their hands, as masters and team go together over the precipice.
The strength of the new order, at any stage in its development may be gauged by the solidarity of its organization, the efficacy of its propaganda, and the tone of its art. These forms of expression are necessary to the maintenance of any phase of culture, old or new, and by the last of the three, the esthetic expression of the culture, its morale may best be judged. It is for this reason that artists, musicians, dramatists and poets are so important a part of any order of society. They voice its deepest sentiments and express its most sacred faiths and longings. When the time arrives that a new social order can boast its permanent art and music and literature, it is already far advanced on the path that leads to stability and power.
VI.
The poems which appear in this volume are a contribution to the propaganda and the art of the new culture. "Above all things," writes Chaplin, "I don't want anyone to try to make me out a 'poet'--because I'm not. I don't think much of these esthetic creatures who condescend to stoop to our level that we may have the blessings of culture. We'll manage to make our own--do it in our own way, and stagger through somehow. . . . These are tremendous times, and sooner or later someone will come along big enough to sound the right note, and it will be a rebel note." It is that note which Chaplin has sought to strike, and that he has succeeded will be the verdict of anyone who has read over the poems.
Chaplin's work speaks for itself. Some of the poems were written in Leavenworth Prison and published in the prison paper. Others were written during the tedious months of the Chicago trial, when the men were kept in the Cook County jail. Chaplin has had ample time to work them out. Christmas, 1921, was the fifth consecutive Christmas that he has spent in prison. The poems bear the impress of the bars, but they ring with the glad vigor of a free spirit that bars cannot contain.
The reader of Chaplin's prison poems unavoidably makes three mental comments:
1. When poems so reserved, so vigorous; so penetrating, so melodious, so beautiful, come from behind jail bars, it is high time that thinking men and women awoke to the fate that awaits bold dreamers and singers under the present order in the United States.
2. Men are not silenced when steel doors clang behind them. Free spirits are as free behind the bars as they are under the open sky. The jail, as a gag, is impotent. While it may master the body, it cannot contain the soul.
3. The new order in America is already finding its voice. Although it is so young, and so immature, it is speaking with an accent of gifted authority.
Chaplin is not a dangerous man--except as his ideas are dangerous to the existing order of society. His presence in the penitentiary, under a twenty year sentence, indicates how dangerous those ideas are considered by the masters of American public life. Rich those masters are--fabulously rich; and strong they may be, yet so insecure do they feel