Upton Sinclair's Ruling-Class Artists and Hero Artists

In Mammonart Upton Sinclair acknowledges the hard fact that for the artist "the path to honor and success in the arts has been through the service and glorification of the ruling classes." They desire that their persons and deeds should be flattered, their prejudices and lifeways affirmed, their sense of self-importance and their fantasies indulged--and "their subjects and slaves" taught "to stand in awe of them." Those who did so most satisfactorily could be very well-rewarded indeed, not only in life, but in death, and for the ages, it no accident that a Homer, a Shakespeare, a Racine--ruling-class artists all in Sinclair's view--were acclaimed the greatest of their era and nation, and continue to enjoy that status today.

I suppose this is in part because of the conservatism of literary critics, who tend to act as the priests of literature, uncritically accepting the judgments of the past to such a degree that they can at times seem to not even bother to have real opinions of their own, though they also would not seem to find acceptance of those judgments handed down to them a stretch given that the tastes of the comfortable have not changed so very much over the millennia--the upper-class Briton of Victorian times still able to thrill to Homer as the poet's own listeners once had. (Thus did ancient Greek robber-barons have poems composed "to glorify the ancestors of powerful chieftains and fighting men, and inculcate the spirit of obedience and martial pride in the new generations," and a William Gladstone still be moved.)

Equally those who walked a different path suffered for it--often in death as in life--with Sinclair making a pointed contrast between the treatment of a Shakespeare and a Shelley, a Racine and a Molière.

In handling the conceptions of the "ruling-class artist" and "hero artist" Sinclair displays some nuance--reflecting the reality that over a long career many a writer has been a mix of the two, and that many who began as one thing ended up another, with it all too sadly predictable that the more common pattern has been for a hero artist, or someone who might at least have become one, to become a ruling-class artist (as he recounts cases from Wordsworth to Wagner).

Still, if it is those who pandered to the powerful who have commanded respectability thousands of years after their passing, it has also been the case that those who look at them with their own eyes and make their own judgments are often less admiring than they are told they should be. In the aristocratic heroes giving in to "unbridled desires" of the epics and tragedies they are told they ought to speak of only in superlative terms they may, as Sinclair did again and again, see nothing but "spoiled children, flattered by servants and fawned upon by slaves," who were ultimately raised to be "psychopaths," and the art that portrayed them not at all "sublime" but rather "a bore." Those hero artists the powerful treated with such disdain, however, often manage to speak to us across time, space and culture in a way that surprises us.

Of course, it has been a long time since many read Sinclair--and few of those have been in positions of any influence. And so the canons of a century ago endure as the canons of today, as those of us required to read for school, or still read at all of our own volition, read the stories of psychopaths, and very likely find them a bore, but to retain the good opinion of others claim to have found them sublime.