The New York herald. [volume] (New York, N.Y.) 1920-1924, 1921-09-18
BY CHARLES CALDWELL DOBIE
Author of Broken to the Pillow"
(HaTperS)

J ECAUSE color and light are so
easily seized upon. in the ma
ture of things, the first i'm
pulses toward artistic creation usually
betray a tendency TO escape from the
drab issues of life. But the record of
any authentic or expanding art Is a
continuous and steady withdrawal
from rose flushed horizons to the
sterner fairgrounds of reality. Yet
the real test of an artist in such mat
tiers, 1t seems to me, is the ability to
invest ultimately these pallid fore
grounds with some of the breadth and
glory of far flung distances-to SOW
the gloom of the commonplace with
twinkling stars of romance.
The first lean years of my literary
success came through the interpreta-
ton of certain foreign quarters of San
Francisco. | tried to keep a sense of
reality always near me, but, if the
truth were known, / chose these back
grounds of shifting color, partly, per-
haps, because they appealed to love
OF the picturesque within me. but.
more especially, fancy, because the
life led seemed so devoid of crucial
instances. 1t was only when / left
this soul crushing environment when
/ had drawn away from it apace. that
| had either the courage or the de-
sire to recreate and glorify my bust
ness world companions.
One hears great deal these DAYS
about the dignity of labor. 1t is a
fine, mouth filing phrase, and my only
quarrel with 1t is that it appears to
have become such an exclusive term.
In America, anyway, it seems to mean
only one thing-the man who works
with his hands There is a good deal
of talk also about wage slaves, but
there is growing suspicion that the
wage Garner is moving more and more
swiftly toward freedom. If there is in
existence any slavery worthy of that
name to-day it is the slavery of men
on salary-the slavery Of men char
acterized by Axel Hilmer in Broken
to the Pillow" as robbed of their power
by education of sort, reason
able, rational, considerable beasts, that
can be broken to any harness, chock
fun of loyalty to superiors and systems
and governments just from habit :.
bowling and scraping until they have
a permanent kink In their backs!"
The obvious answer to this is that,
in the final analysis, any class gets
just what it desires or deserves, which
is much the same thing. My impress
sion is that the class of which speak
desires nothing SO much as a square
deal without the nasty alternative of
coming to blows over the issue-or, to
put 1t more graphically, of heaving
bricks to enforce its rights. Personally
/ think there is something sublime as
well as pathetic in this finer yet futile
attitude which ends so often in COM
pletely Stacking these salary slaves.
For the more scratch the surface for
motives the more / am convinced that
lack of initiative is not the real basis
of their economic and spiritual sur
render. The fundamental impulse back
Of their acceptance of conditions is an
abiding, almost naive. faith in hui
man nature. In my seventeen years
of experience as a salary slave /
rarely came across a fellow worker
WHO ulu HOl nave the plolouiiueol
faith in the ultimate justice of his
employer. That this faith was con-
tinually betrayed argues nothing
against the winsomeness of the ideal.
Personally my experiences were most
happy, and herein lies another danger.
If one does not have to put ones
philosophy of life to the test one APP
proaches dangerously near condi-
ton OF ethical fabbiness. Like Fred
Starratt, in Broken to the Plow," one
grows to have faiths which one neither
troubles to prove nor doubt.
Personally detest tracts. / did not
write Broken to the Plow" to point
moral / merely swung back to
life that once had claimed me, stung
trifie, no doubt, by the fact that
more than one reviewer had laid more