The Little Review

Poems

Maxwell Bodenheim

After Feeling Deux Arabesques by Debussy

Let Me Not Live Too Long

To the Violinist

(Mr. Bodenheim writes of the violinist described in our last issue.)

Gifts

Hell

(A Part of Heaven Overlooked by Ford Madox Hueffer.)

To a Woman

The greatest war of history flames away all other human concerns. Upon the reaction of humanity to this gigantic thing depends the future.

No one can foresee what will happen to the cultures and the peoples which already crackle in its vortex. It is more profitable to search the heart of America.

A great newspaper has published a cartoon picturing Uncle Sam on a harvesting machine, calmly saying “Giddap” to his horses, while a neglected sheet with the inscription “European war” blows to one side. As long as devastation and horror do not exist on his own piece of land, Uncle Sam doesn’t care—while he can harvest his wheat and sell it at a good high price to starving people. Even the dramatic aspect of the tremendous conflict does not impinge on his provincial consciousness. Can this contemptible attitude represent that of any great number of our people? One cannot escape the feeling that it is the usual reaction of the newspaper to any thing outside of “business,” whether it be social misery, or an interesting idea. But in this case its brutish stupidity is so flagrantly apparent that even the majority must revolt from it.

A more creditable reaction is anger. With such titanic wrath blazing in Europe, any sensitive person must reflect a little of it. Anger at what? We don’t know precisely until we stop to think. The emotion comes before the intellectual objective. Anger perhaps at the terrific human waste. Twenty-odd million men flying at each other’s throats and destroying the bitterly won triumphs of years of peace, without any good reason. We hear phrases like “balance of power,” “dynastic supremacy,” “the life of our country,” “patriotism,” “racial prejudice,” “difference of religion.” Each individual nation is praying to God with profound sincerity for its own success. Priests bless the arms. There is no denying the reality of all this in the consciousness of Europe. Such things do lead men to battle with the fire of conviction.

Well, the brutal fact stands out like a giant against the sky, that if such motives can produce such a result, they are working only for their own destruction. Not a single nation, whether conqueror or victim, can come out of the struggle as strong or as great as it went in. All alike must be swept into destitution of all the things civilization has taught us to value. And this is the result of civilization! It is a spectacle or demoniac laughter.

And shall the United States stand aloof with a feeling of pitying superiority, thinking that, because we happen to have a president instead of a king, and inhabit a different continent, such motives are foreign to us? What folly of conceit! As long as we cultivate the ideal of patriotism, as long as we put economic value above spiritual and human value, as long as in our borders there exist dogmatic religions, as long as we consider desirable the private ownership and exploitation of property for private profit—whether by nations or by individuals—we maintain those elements of civilization which have led Europe to the present crisis.

Do not think that we shall ever escape wrath, hatred, violence. The so-called “primitive emotions” are giving incontrovertible proof of strong present existence. The thing to do is to turn all the emotions, which are eternal, into new forms which shall not be self-destructive, which shall propel instead of oppose the starward march of mankind. Violence? Yes, if it destroys something hateful.

Nineteenth-century civilization has overwhelmingly and dramatically failed. What shall we build now?

(By a spectator)

Sonya Levien

The suffragettes at Lincoln’s Inn are skeptical of foreigners’ sympathy. I pleaded with those in authority to be taken in.

“It is real war with us,” I was told, “and we have reached the stage where, even at the sacrifice of being regarded as insane and fools by the world, we cannot stop to explain all over again.” It was not curiosity, I urged, or lack of understanding. I believed in votes, but I believed in women more; I wanted to feel as well as understand their great Purpose.

My earnestness won their faith, and for two weeks my senses were saturated with every emotion that prevailed in the Englishwomen’s fight against their own country and the rest of the world.

I saw their ammunition stored in back bedrooms of hidden houses—cotton soaked in kerosene, small bags of stone, bottles filled with queer-smelling liquids, and now and then a small bomb filled with powder or metal. All this I considered very formidable then and marvelled at the women’s courage in handling the material.

Scared and horrified, I witnessed the burning of two famous old churches; I helped in the heckling of public speakers, and remonstrated with the police at their outrages upon unoffending women.

The spiritual urge of the fighting women transmitted itself to me and I found myself supporting them with a courage not natural to me. That the character of their protest might be petty, tactless, unwomanly, or even futile, mattered not—for one felt that they were soldiers fighting in a great cause, the slogan of which was: “Give us a chance to develop a better race of men and women.” And the Englishmen looked on ashamed of their womenkind, and the rest of the world snickered.

And then the cataclysm of war descended upon all Europe and civilized man went mad for murder—wholesale terrible murder without reason or purpose. Sickened by the cry for blood, the women’s fight became holy in its significance to me. I saw England change in five minutes when on the streets of London the first cry of war was heard. In a lightning shift Trafalgar Square became a seething mass of gesticulating people—a mob which seemed instantly to drop its sacred inheritance of “good form” and give way to wild and ominous protest and speak eloquently of “an honor” to be upheld; but just what “the honor” was no one seemed to know.

Berlin sang all night to the tune of “Die Wacht Am Rhein,” in celebration of the opportunity given the fittest of the Vaterland to slaughter and be slaughtered by the pick of the neighboring countries. But the reason and purpose for the slaughter they did not know.

Russia, famous for its barbaric cruelty to the Poles and Jews, asks for the sacrifice of the races and thinks itself a generous Christian if in return it promises to give what is left of them the right to their mother-tongue and the privilege to worship God in their own way.

And what of the women? For the first time I felt the real greatness of the women’s fight and the sad futility of it before man’s ignorance. For the first time I felt the real tragedy of the women of Europe whose business it is to bring up sons for the man’s game of war. And to see them now is to see death—a calm bitter death surrounded by panic and catastrophe.

Eunice Tietjens

A very eminent American professor has recently declared that American literary criticism is deficient, that the commercialism of publishers is largely responsible. The first proposition is obvious, the second defensible. The professor further argues for a criticism based on academic standards, which he says are as immutable as the ten commandments; and he couples this with the declaration that criticism finds its justification in the desire of the public to know what it is buying. The immutable standards are to correspond with the government-approved weights and measures of the grocer-shop.

It would be enlightening to give the professor an opportunity to try his plan. Let some millionaire, instead of starting a new college, endow a critical magazine for the professor. In the first number should be announced the fixed standards by which all literature is to be judged. Then would follow calm, irrefutable issues in which the principles of unity, coherence, emphasis and perhaps one or two other measures, should be applied to new literature. The public, eager for standard articles, would, of course, never again read Hall Caine and Harold Bell Wright. The commercialization of literature would be abolished, for would not the professor declare it to be against the decalogue? And there would arise a new generation of writers, carefully observing all academic rules, and scrupulously giving the public full measure of what it wants. A veritable Utopia, an apotheosis of the grocer-shop!

But, however much we may doubt the possibility of such a thing, we cannot oppose the professor, because he has disarmed opposition by predicting it. Of course, he says in effect, there will arise hordes of young, ill-seasoned, and irresponsible persons who will deny my sound position. But don’t let them trouble you; they are of a piece with all the queer people who nowadays are advancing preposterous new ideas. As if anything that is not sanctioned by tradition could possibly be taken seriously!

Very well, we won’t oppose the professor. We are quite willing to let him go ahead pigeon-holing the kind of literature that appeals to him, and anything he may be able to do in turning the public taste from Hall Caine deserves approbation. But in the meantime we shall assiduously forget about him, and try some experiments of our own in the effort to say vital things about literature.

In the first place, we don’t believe in the majority rule for writers. We don’t believe that a writer ever lived who wrote anything really good because he thought the reading public wanted it. Our conviction is based on the testimony of writers themselves. A writer should write what is in him, not what is in the public. He has no excuse for writing unless he is a stronger, more sensitive, and more intelligent man than either his readers or his critics. That is the first distinction between the manufacturer of sausages and the maker of books.

In the second place, we don’t believe in the subjection of writers to critics, or to fixed standards, or to anything except themselves. Whatever excuse there is for standards arises from the fact that writers have furnished the examples on which the standards are founded. The writer must find his authority in his own soul. The one thing he must do is to say what he has to say in the way which seems to him right. The history of art is one long example of the discarding by genius of rules founded on previous work. When was a new technique ever predicted by the academic critic? When has not the new genius been bitterly fought by the academic critic? The natural history of art is this—first the artist, then the intelligent critic, then the appreciative public.

The function of the critic is to be a warrior for the artist. He must understand profoundly, he must be quick to detect and denounce artistic insincerity, he must declare the man who has attained the magic of real aesthetic rightness. The recognition of artistic excellence does not proceed by the scaffolding of academicism; it is instinctive, just as its creation was instinctive, emotional. The critic may, if he likes, oppose the artist, but his first duty is to make him known. He must say to the public, not “you will like this man” but “you must like this man, or at least you must experience him.” No critic is fit to do these things unless he understands the passionate independence of the real artist, his service of no law except inner necessity.

Our spiritual world is tangled up in mechanism. No sooner does a fresh wind make itself known than we try to imprison it in a system, to impale it with a classification. Let us have done with these futilities. The important joy is to feel the mysterious and dynamic glory of the wind. We need in our criticism, as in our literature, more insight, more emotion, more of the power that is produced by virility and the corresponding female quality for which there is as yet no adequate name. The heightening of consciousness, the intensifying of essential values—these shall be our critical aims.

A sense of the obviousness of what we have said prevents us from amplifying it. Our excuse for saying it is that there are still many professors in the world!

(With apologies to Mr. Galsworthy)

He knew himself for a democrat. He might be with a crowd of what he called “real people” and if he happened to pass a waiter who had served him or a barber who had shaved him he would speak to them. He would do it without the least embarrassment or condescension; anything else he would have considered low. His friends knew him to be essentially democratic; they would assure you of this quality in him as something that only the morally courageous possess.

To have explained that his attitude was a matter of common sense rather than democracy would have left him bewildered. Surely every one recognized that there were certain barriers that had to be maintained; it was not a question of snobbishness, but simply of natural law. The man who had pushed ahead and made something of himself was more entitled to the respect of his fellows than the waiter who was content to spend his life serving other people. Take himself, for example. He might have been a bricklayer if he had not worked hard enough to be a power on the Board of Trade. He had done it all himself and he knew the difficulties of the struggle. He could remember the time when he would hire a taxi and dash all over town to find the special brand of cigarettes he liked. Of course he realized now that that was an extravagant and foolish thing to do; but after all a boy must have his taste of “sporting.” And then, of course, there was nothing harmful in chasing around town for cigarettes in a taxi. He might have been doing something really wrong instead—such as marrying a chorus girl or becoming one of those revolutionists who worries his friends to death by fighting for the proletariat and getting into jail as a consequence. No, thank heaven, he had had his little flings, but he had always kept his head. He had never really done anything to disgrace himself or his friends. But it was a hard struggle, and he respected anyone who had come through it successfully. That was the reason of his insistence on natural barriers. That was the reason he felt it an honor to shake the hand of a great man—the man who had made a million by his skilful corner of the wheat market, for instance. He had a real respect for brains, for power, for achievement, for all the things that keep a man from being a weakling.

Not that he worshipped power or made a god of success. On the contrary, he was something of an idealist himself—though not the sort literary people talk about. He always made it a point to state that he had no use for literary “ideas.” Those people didn’t really know what they were talking about. They were so impractical; they wanted to change the face of the earth and they seemed to think that ideas would do it. But even for that sort of thing he had a certain tolerance: he remembered how he had planned long ago to be a missionary—to go to the ends of the world and help people. He did not remember just what he wanted to help them to, but it was a sort of plan to ease his conscience when he felt he wasn’t doing any good in the world. However, he had got over that in the same way he had given up his vision of the brown-stone mansion with which he had planned at eighteen to delight the woman he married.

He was very human, too; but he did demand certain standards of conduct. There was nothing he hated like snobbishness—he would always speak to anybody, no matter what he had done; but beyond that he respected himself and his friends too much to venture. When the men at his club pointed out, with their knowing winks, that a certain woman was “outside”—well, that was enough for him. He would never do anything to push her further down, but he could at least warn his friends. And he had an infinite disgust, a pitying contempt for those who suggested that circumstances may have had something to do with it. As though it were not the prime business of every human being to fight circumstances; as though he himself might not have been a regular Mark Lennan if he had let himself go. Every man had these things in him. That was the trouble with such writers as Galsworthy:—they helped people to tolerate weakness, even to see a certain beauty in it. It had got to be the fashion, especially among “literary” circles, to break away from standardizations. The persons who did so were given credit for living a fuller Life. How he hated their talk—what rot it was to suppose that any life could be full or rich unless it were a good life. And if there was anything in the world, in these hysterical times, to which a man could anchor, it was the fact that good was good and bad was bad, and even a child knew which was which. There was no arguing about it.

But people seldom argued with him because he disarmed them beforehand by declaring that it didn’t matter what any one thought: all these things had been settled for us long ago; they were the very bulwark of our progress, our prosperity, our whole civilization. It was strange that the people who most enjoyed the benefits of that civilization should be the ones to abuse it. If one must know outcasts (and one might of course be able to help them) let him confine the acquaintanceship to his office or some place where he would not run the risk of influencing other people. He remembered with horror a woman he had once known who could never understand these distinctions. He had not tried to dissuade her from knowing any one in the world she wanted to know; but he had begged her to be discreet about it, at least—to remember her responsibilities in the matter on account of her friends, and to be sure that “those people” were made to feel the inevitable barrier between. “Good God!” he had said, “I’m democratic and all that; but you can’t let people of that sort feel they’re your equals!” Eventually he stopped worrying about the woman—after she told him that she would be proud to be as big and fine as those friends of hers. What was the use? She must have been a little insane all the time; because he knew that she was a good woman, and those “friends” of hers were the sort who believed in free love and that kind of thing—some of them had even been in jail for preaching anarchism.

He had solved such problems in his own case much in the same way he had solved the question of his family relationships. He had been brought up in a home where card-playing, smoking, theatre-going, etc., were forbidden. His life as a man had of course included all these evils. But whenever he visited the old home he reverted to the old order. He would no more think of smoking a cigarette in his mother’s presence than he would think of telling her how vital a part of his life the theatre had become. He had too much respect for her. He knew it would hurt her, and his love and reverence for her were too deep to allow of that.

Something of the same simplicity and clarity colored his ideas of property. Let each man work for his little plot of ground, own it, and live on it. That would do away with all this fuss and competition. He knew there were people who talked vaguely about property being robbery; but what was there to keep the ambition in a man, make a good citizen of him, if it were not his struggle for possession of something he might call his own? If he had not had his little plot to look forward to, and the thought of the woman who was to share it with him, he would long ago have stopped working and started off to the South Sea Islands, wandering about the earth aimlessly without any incentive. Incidentally, his idea of the woman who was to share the plot was very interesting. He was not one to talk bromidioms about woman’s place being in the home, or to discredit the achievements of the new woman. But the fact remained that the new woman knew too much to be a comfortable companion. He refused to be tyrannized; he would marry one of those sweet feminine women who didn’t know anything and live in peace and freedom.

Sometimes he got rather sick of life and found himself in that “what’s the use?” mood. It worried him a little. In the same manner that he had driven around in a taxi for cigarettes he now lounged about in hotel corridors or at his club, watching the people, speculating about life. It seemed a waste of time, rather; yet it harmed no one and it kept him from a good many worse things. His conscience was clear—which was more than most men could say. He knew men. The only thing that really weighed upon him seriously was the fact that he was getting a little too fat. He would have to try to eat less.

True to his creed, his faith was in the people—the great mass of people whose instincts always led them to the right thing. It was a safe rule to go by—that of mistrusting the personality who did not measure up to the decent average. It was the way to keep sane and healthful. Socialists and anarchists and syndicalists and radicals in general—what were they but abnormalities? He would never be guilty of the narrow attitude that they ought to be hanged; they would quite naturally fritter themselves out; for what they were all trying to achieve was individualism pure and simple—and that would never buy bread for the working-man or lift him to happiness. He might not be right about these things, of course; but he had thought them out. Yes, he believed in the people; he believed in their rights; and he believed in being kind to them. There was no telling how much good a cheery smile might do, and so he smiled constantly. A great man had once told him that he made it a point to cultivate friendships only among those people who could help him; and this seemed very sensible to the democrat. He practiced it assiduously, with the result that he never lost that satisfying glow which comes in with shaking a hand that belongs with a full dress shirt.

M. C. A.

(A Non-Mythical Allegory)

George Soule

He was born in the glacial age. They originally called him something else, but as soon as he was old enough to talk he lisped the tertiary dialect for “constructive reasoner”—when they paid any attention to him. Later he was recognized by his characteristic expression, “Yes, but—”. When he was ten years old he watched his father, with much skill and heroism, slaying a musk ox. “Why did you kill him?” he asked. “To eat,” was the reply. “Yes,” replied the prodigy, “but what will you put in his place?” The misguided parent glared at his son without replying, and passed him a second joint, which was consumed with relish.

The tragedy of his early life was to watch the glaciers slowly leveling mountains and laying up vast wastes of terminal moraine without conscious purpose. All this destruction weighed on his soul.

He was ever an observer. As time went on, his intellect grew more ponderous. He saw mankind slay the dinosaurs, rob the earth of its minerals, hew down vast trees, and agitate the earth with rude plows. Agitators were particularly distasteful to him. He stood aloof from these movements, because he did not believe in destruction. And when men finally set sail on the seas, he was moved to poetic rancor. “You are destroying the mystery of the ocean” he cried. But he built himself a fine house from the products of their commerce.

He was in Rome when the Goths swept down over Italy and sacked it. “What will you give us instead?” he asked their leader. The Northerner frankly did not know. “You have no right to sweep away something that has been established so long unless you can put in its place something better,” he complained. The great Goth laughed and grabbed another handful of jewels.

Religions seemed to him peculiarly sacred. With great satisfaction he watched the burning of the early Christian agitators, who were attempting to tear in pieces the comfortable old hierarchy of Jove. “What is this utopian theory of theirs?” he asked, derisively. “It won’t work. You can’t change human nature in a day. When they give us a program I can’t pick flaws in, I will listen to them.” Later he was particularly incensed at Martin Luther and remonstrated with him for undermining so many persons’ simple faith without giving them something that would exactly fill its place.

In the modern world he found a very comfortable niche. A city of tradesmen offered him the post of chief prophet. Not that they bothered much about his great principle, but he always did his best to stave off the destructive elements of society, who interfered with business. He advised people to be comfortable and quiet. He deplored violence of any kind. Sane progress was all very well, but he always demanded progress of visionaries and theorists, and he always pointed out tremendous flaws in their programs. He opposed bitterly anything in the nature of tariff reform or anti-trust laws. Such things destroyed business confidence, and were not the business men the great constructive element in society? To women who wanted the vote, he said “Woman’s place is in the home. If you had your way, you would destroy the family.” He supported practical men for office.

One day he came upon a workman wrecking an old building. The sight filled him with pain. He went up to the man and asked him if he were sure that the new building would be better than the old, if in fact it would stand at all? To his great surprise the workman paid no attention to him. Again the constructive reasoner put the question; he even touched the workman on the shoulder. But it was as if the questioner did not exist. He was angry and chagrined. Then it dawned on him that he was dead. Unconsciously he had become a ghost.

Jehovah appointed a private judgment day for him. The dead hero came before the throne. “Who are you?” asked the ruler of the universe. “I am the constructive reasoner,” he replied proudly. “What have you constructed?” was the next question. For the first time since his birth, the mortal was at a loss.

“Never mind,” said Jehovah, “you have earned Heaven, for there all is peace and perfection; there no one tears down or builds up.” And so Jehovah put him into a place which was labeled “Heaven,” and locked the gate on the outside.

For a while the saved soul sat on a golden throne and was contented. But soon he began to be a little bored. He went to an older inhabitant and asked him what one does in Heaven. “Nothing,” was the answer. “The place is populated with souls who have done nothing but try to get here, and now they must rest from their labors. What can there be to do, in a place that is perfect?”

For a moment the new arrival suspected for the first time that all these years he had been mistaken. Would it not be better to be building something, even if one had to destroy something else as a preliminary? But he layed the suspicion aside as unworthy of him. “Before I can logically object to Heaven,” he thought, “I must propose something better. And of course, that is impossible.” So he sat down again, to await Eternity.

G. S.

Alexander S. Kaun

Achad Ha’am, in his admirable essay, Priest and Prophet, differentiates between the two ways of serving an Idea. The Prophet is essentially one-sided; a certain idea fills his whole being, masters his every feeling and sensation, engrosses his whole attention. His gaze is fixed always on what ought to be in accordance with his own convictions; never on what can be consistently with the general condition of things outside himself. He is a primal force. The Priest also fosters the Idea, and desires to perpetuate it; but he is not of the race of giants. Instead of clinging to the narrowness of the Prophet, and demanding of reality what it cannot give, he broadens his outlook, and takes a wider view of the relation between his Idea and the facts of life. Not what ought to be, but what can be, is what he seeks. The Idea of the Priest is not a primal force; it is an accidental complex of various forces, among which there is no essential connection. Their temporary union is due simply to the fact that they have happened to come into conflict in actual life, and have been compelled to compromise and join hands. The Priest sooner or later becomes a dominant force, an interpreter, a teacher; the Prophet remains all his life “a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth,” and is cried after, “The Prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is mad.” Throughout the ages we have seen the repetition of this phenomenon: from Jeremiah to Nietzsche, from Paul to Brandes. The narrow-minded, hapless giants have been sowing seed for future generations; the broad-minded interpreters have been cultivating the soil for their contemporaries.

Friedrich Nietzsche, by George Brandes, recently published by the Macmillan company, adds little new to the vast interpretative literature on the creator of Zarathustra. The book contains a moderate essay on Aristocratic Radicalism, written in 1889, a necrolog, a brief note on Ecce Homo, and a few letters interchanged between the philosopher and the critic. In the last twenty-five years life and literature (perhaps I ought to say art in general) have been so profoundly influenced by Nietzschean views that the source of those views has ceased to be discernable. From Gorky’s Bosyaki and the types of D’Annunzio down to the Manifestoes of the Futurists, the aphorisms and paradoxes of Nietzsche have been sounded and resounded on various scales, and the slogan of Transvaluation of Values has been echoed and re-echoed from the college platform, from the pulpit, from the soap-box, from the stage, even from the cabaret and music-halls (the Ueberbrettl’ movement in central Europe). Perhaps the American public has been too “busy” to be touched by that hurricane, so that it was left to Dr. Foster to appear in our day and proclaim with prophetic fervor and pathos the “new” Decalogue; but then our neophytes will hardly find adequate Dr. Brandes’ Essay written in 1889, when Nietzsche was practically unknown.

Yet this belated book in its somewhat belated English translation contains an invaluable feature—the correspondence between Nietzsche and Brandes. “The letters he sent me in that last year of his conscious life” says the famous critic, “appear to me to be of no little psychological and biographical interest.” Indeed so, and what is more, they reveal a bit of the reserved personality of Brandes and provoke the reader to venture a comparison between the correspondents.

From the very first we mark the distinct characteristics of the Priest and the Prophet. The careful, correct, and clear interpreter, and the bewildering, cascading revaluator of life, or, to use Ben-Zakkay’s metaphor, the plastered well that does not lose a drop, and the powerful spring ever shooting forth new streams; the earnest professor offering practical suggestions, telling of the book-binder, of the copyright business, and of the big audiences at his lectures, and the seething, “three parts blind” sufferer who swings his imagination on revolutionizing Europe, bringing “the whole world into convulsions.” The difference in the style of writing is also characteristic. As against Brandes’ “free and graceful French way in which he handles the language,” Nietzsche thus explains his “difficult position.”

To which Brandes comments with his usual clarity.

The earnest tone of Brandes’ letters is at times counteracted by a humorous frolic on the part of his correspondent. I even suspect an ironical smile curving around the Polish mustache, when, for instance, Nietzsche confesses his “admiration for the tolerance of your judgment, as much as for the moderation of your sentences.” Or as when Brandes confesses:

Nietzsche mischievously retorts:

Only once irony passes into impatient sarcasm. Nietzsche expresses his regret at not knowing either Swedish or Danish. Yet Brandes continuously tantalizes him with such exclamations as, “What a pity that so learned a philologist as you should not understand Danish.” Back comes a flash: “Ah, how industrious you are! And idiot that I am, not to understand Danish!”

I am tempted to bring another illustration of the profound earnestness of the Priest as against the plausible light-mindedness of the Prophet.

Brandes writes:

And this is what Nietzsche thinks about it:

Think of the Lebensfreude that sparkles from these lines written by a man who a few months later had to be shut out from the world, who had suffered extremely painful and persistent headaches,—“hundred days of torment in the year”! It was his keen sense that “a sick man had no right to pessimism,” it was his extravagant love of life that led him to set for chorus and orchestra the Hymn to Life written by Lou von Salomé, from which we read an extract in the book of Brandes:

And in conclusion:

George Brandes “discovered” Nietzsche in the last year of his conscious life, after he had written his greatest works, unrecognized, repulsed by his few former friends, suffering in solitude, yet with superhuman enthusiasm casting new worlds, slaughtering old gods, fighting mediocrity. His letters of that year reveal the final act of the greatest of world-tragedies—the Nietzsche-Tragedy; they grant us a glimpse into the torn soul of the joyous martyr.

How he created his greatest work, Zarathustra:

In his first letter to Brandes, Nietzsche wrote:

And the path led him to the inevitable end. His mind reached the summit of the heights and burst into bleeding fragments over the yet not comprehending world. In the last letter but one we see “signs of powerful exaltation,” as Brandes chooses to name the obvious symptoms of megalomania. January 4, 1889, is the date of an unstamped, unaddressed letter written on a piece of paper ruled in pencil:

In reading the letters of Nietzsche we follow the doomed one with profound pain and awe unto his Golgotha; we witness the dire trials of his spirit and body, we see the last flashes of Zarathustra’s sun, then—darkness. Götter-dämmerung. Self-crucified Dionysus.

Nietzsche was by no means a child of his age. As a prophet, he hurled his seeds far into the future, over the heads of many generations. Mankind is still vegetating on the bottom of the Valley unable to reach the Heights where Zarathustra is alone with himself, bathing in an abyss of light. They who have exchanged the Prophet’s pearls on up-to-date glittering coins, are counterfeiters; they who presumptuously wrap themselves in the crimson mantle of the Crucified Dionysus, as his faithful followers, are impostors: the time for the Superman has not come yet. Let us bear in mind these burning words from the farewell message, Ecce Homo:

Amy Lowell

Clear, With Light Variable Winds

Fool’s Moneybags

Charles Ashleigh

Arrows in the Gale, by Arturo Giovannitti. [Hillacre Bookhouse, Riverside, Connecticut.]

There are many ways in which we can approach this curious and portentous volume. We may confine ourselves solely to the technique of the writing, but, in so doing, we should ignore the most important and compelling part of the book: its spirit. There is something which flames through these poems that abashes one who would content himself with a sterile commentary on the versification; only those who are afraid of life would take refuge in such pedantic air-beating.

In this book there is a combination of two of the most significant personalities of our time. The preface is written by that miracle incarnate: Helen Keller. In it she gives us the background of the poems—a background of tumultuous class-conflict. The awakening of the working-class, and its surprising growth of self-reliance and militancy, is the inspiration of the book, and Helen Keller announces herself for it and with it.

Giovannitti himself is a remarkable man of remarkable antecedents. He emigrated from his native Italy at the age of seventeen, and was precipitated into our whirl of economic struggle. He worked in Pennsylvania in the coal mines and, later, assumed the position which he still holds: that of editor of the Italian revolutionary weekly, Il Proletario. In the now famous Lawrence strike he was one of those who were most valuable in stimulating the sense of solidarity among the workers and in maintaining their enthusiasm. Together with Joseph J. Ettor and Caruso, he spent several months in jail, awaiting his trial on a faked-up murder charge. They were acquitted, not so much because of the legal justice of their cause but because of the fact that their condemnation would have resulted in the paralysis of the textile industry. With their threat of general strike the workers forced the courts of their masters to deliver up to them their captive spokesmen. The excitement and publicity resultant from the Lawrence Strike brought into prominence the ideas of Giovannitti and others who were espousers of the Syndicalist idea, which in this country is expressed through the organization known as the Industrial Workers of the World.

It is necessary to have some idea of these matters in order to appreciate the leit motif of this book. All through it flares that spirit of impatient revolt, that spurning of most of the scaffolding of our decrepit civilization which is usually held up for admiration to the budding youth of this country. Courts of law, churches, and parliaments all fall under the blinding fire of the bitter contempt of this workman in revolt.

Despite occasional faults in form or stress—and we must remember that Giovannitti is writing in an alien tongue—the poems are vibrant with life and some of them express with truest art things which are not always considered by our academic friends to be at all within the province of poetry.

Sometimes the formal verse forms are used and, at other times, the poet has recourse to the free rhythmic mode of Whitman. Personally, I think that the best work is in the free verse. The Walker, a jail experience of Giovannitti’s, is a wonderful piece of work and should be bracketed with The Ballad of Reading Gaol. The finest thing in the book is The Cage, a poem which appeared originally in The Atlantic Monthly, and which is one of the few things which have preserved that journal from irredeemable mediocrity.

The Cage expresses the thoughts and emotions of the writer when he stood with his two comrades in the dock of Salem courthouse. The contrast is drawn between the outworn formalities and rites of the law and the lusty life of labor,—between the dead lives of the dismal practitioners of a stilted and tyrannical formula and the life of vigorous conflict of the awakening working-class.

This is the inside of the court-room:

And, then, when the prosecutor speaks, we have an insight into the fervor with which Giovannitti greets the overthrow of the old and the budding of the new:

To me such stuff as this means a hundred times more than a thousand sonnets to a mistress’ eye-lash, or than the weak maudlinities of an absinthe-soaked eroto-dabbler, wailing puling repentance to a pale Christ. It is compact of life—life as it is today, made, not for the tittillation of dilletantes, but for the enjoyment and inspiration of men who can appreciate the meat of life redolent of sweat and blood and tears.

This is Giovannitti’s picture of the Republic, after it had been gained with blood and sacrifice:

Love poems also figure in the book, but the dominant note is that of conflict. Giovannitti has realized the pregnant fact that in struggle is the greatest joy, that the ecstasy of growth and striving is worth more that the bovine placidity of “happiness.” At the end of his love-song, The Praise of Spring, he says:

Giovannitti makes no claim for inclusion in Parnassian galleries. He believes that deeds count for more than words, and he essays but to make a handful of war-songs for the pleasure of his comrades.

And so, these are the rough-hewn songs of a man; of one who goes his way with his love upholding him and the Vision burning within him and the sound of battle forever in his ears and the whole-hearted hate of his enemy to spur him, and the stalwart comradeship of his fellows to make dear the thorny way.

George Burman Foster

After all, there have been great wars before this pan-European cataclysm; and, naturally enough, according to the psychological law of the expansion of the emotions, men have transferred their experiences of time to the content of eternity. Thus, amid the abomination of desolation which the Thirty Years’ War brought upon the German Fatherland, one Johannes Rist, a clergyman residing in the neighborhood of Hamburg, sang his symptomatic song:

The thunder and blood of war are in it. The horrors of the war long have passed, but not those of the song. Today you may hear the old hymn sung from new hymn-books in German churches. Today still, school children commit it to memory in their schools—with what profound and terrible impression, who can say? All the pains which little children feel so quiveringly with their defenseless and susceptible natures, all these will continue unbrokenly in eternity. On this bank and shoal of time, children easily and happily forget the tribulations of a bygone hour—in eternity, never, never again! But might there not be also an eternity of childish play and joy? Even so, that could not tip the scale in view of the possibility of a comfortless and cruel eternity; especially since the possibility becomes a probability, and the probability a certainty, owing to the fact that the children are taught to consider themselves as lost and damned sinners—in Adam’s fall they sinned all! Consequently the remote hope of bliss in “Jerusalem the golden with milk and honey blest” could not assuage the grief nor silence the terror and torture that filled the child mind. “Would that there were no eternity!”—often this must have been the secret thought of German children, and not of these alone.

This is the eternity of fear.

From the nursery and school to the world of thought! From gruesome pictures and poetry of the enigma of eternity to the solution in systems of the philosophers and theologians. From Rist of the Thirty Years’ War to Spinoza with imperturbable philosophic calm—such was the great change through which many a German child passed—Spinoza who won his deepest insight into life by viewing all things sub specie aeternitatis. Or from Rist to Schleiermacher, who unveiled the august mystery of humanness as eternity in the heart—as eternity internal, dynamic, living, present, not external, mechanical, fixed, and future. It was the great transition from orthodoxy to romanticism.

Or else from all these men to Friedrich Nietzsche, him that was the godless one, who, in the end of the ages, also sang a song, a new song, of eternity. He both celebrated eternity in song and made no problem of it. He lived it and loved it as his first and truest love—plighted his soul’s troth in unwavering loyalty: “Denn ich liebe dich, o Ewigkeit!” From dull and gloomy dreams and anxious fears did this eternity awaken him, from mortal ills did it redeem his life. Nietzsche had wistfully peered into the world’s enigmatic darkness, his seeking and skeptical soul had chafed over the riddles and contradictions of life—no meaning, he cried, in this senseless play of life and death, truth and error; and only illusion and folly in all that men called joy and sorrow. There came to him, then, revelation of a new, of an eternal life. The present, with all the kaleidoscopic changes of life’s little day, makes ready its own recurrence, each part of time being but a ring linked with the next, the whole becoming the ring of eternity, the true marriage ring of humanity—the seal and stay of an eternal bond between man and Ever-creative, Ever-reincarnating Life!

Ich liebe dich, o Ewigkeit. Perfect love casts out fear. This is the eternity of love. The godless one would lead the German heart, and all hearts, from “Donnerworte” and “Schwerte,” from the fear of eternity to the love of eternity.

That is what Nietzsche would do. But is such an undertaking worth while in a day like ours? What does man care about eternity—his life so swift and short that he does not know on one day what he did or thought or wanted the day before? His treasures in time, will not his heart be there also, seeking its right and content there? Money ruling the world, time ruling money, why talk of eternity at all? A jolly hour, a sprig of mirth plucked by the way, is not that what the man of modern culture longs for, is it not enough to satisfy such longing as his? The earth overpopulated as it is with Augenblicksmenschen, as Nietzsche would say, and not with Ewigkeitsmenschen, why recall the love and hope of a long lost past?

Such queries may give us pause, but they may not stampede us. We may not forget that Professor Münsterberg, of Harvard, has written a great book bearing the impressive title, The Eternal Values. Nor may we be blind to the evidence that the thought so clearly and singularly espoused by the bearers of the better ideals of our new time is that of the imminent and constant eternity in the human heart, as unfolded by Spinoza and Schleiermacher and Nietzsche. Indeed, the question as to what values are eternal values, this eternity question, is central in our modern culture. Very superficial indeed would be our evaluation of modern life, most un-understood indeed would be the riddle of the soul of this life, did we ignore the ever clearer, ever mightier longing for eternity in this soul’s abyss, and the unification of all deeper spirits upon the high task of giving an eternal content to our culture.

By taking some illustrations, one can see the need to supply the latter profound view to the former superficial judgment, if one is to do justice to the new movements of life in the modern world.

There is your modern poet. At first sight he seems to lack the illumination of that eternal light which never was on land or sea. You see the scorching sun beating upon the lone pilgrim as he plods through the burning sand to a goalless goal. You see faded, pale shadows. You do not meet with an idea that makes you feel that the poet yearns to interpret some eternal thought to this life of ours. Instead, life speaks only of itself and from itself. This is an abomination in the eyes of those who call themselves Ewigkeitsmenschen. They call it naturalistic, materialistic art. They upbraid an era in which a poet may dare to dissociate his poetry from the eternal ideal. Then you look again, you read more carefully, and you see the whole matter differently. The eternity that men claimed for their thought is indeed gone. But eternity itself, the eternity of life, that is not gone, that abides. This realistic man of modern poetry, the more really he is apprehended, stands before us as the embodiment of a necessity, a necessity that transcends the individual, yet lives and weaves in him, a necessity that enunciates the law of life in the destiny of the individual—power of darkness or dawn of a new day! But necessity, law of life, this is but another name for eternity.

And there again is your modern painter. He, too, presents us with a bit, often a tiny bit, of reality, of nature. A rotten trunk of some old tree; a dilapidated hut on a ledge; some God-forsaken nook of earth, lost and forgotten of man; a bent and broken man with his hoe; some poor wretch with pistol against his skull; some traveller bleeding unbandaged by the roadside—there they all are in the galleries of our modern realism. But look again, and you will see that the keen observant eye of your artist serves an artist’s heart, seeks and finds eternity, and directs our slower vision to the eternal mystery he has found, the most inspiring of all mysteries—viz., greatness in the least and lowest, glory and beauty in the offensive and repellant, invaluable human worth and nobility in the depraved and downtrodden!

There also is your man of science as he moves out along new paths. Storming the sky, unlocking all the eternities so long sought for behind the world, what does the scientist’s supreme power and consecration consist in but his steadfast and strenuous search for eternity? He not only seeks, he finds. He finds eternal life and eternal love in the daintiest fern, in the tiniest lichen. In the very dust beneath our feet he descries what was there before men were at all. He points us to men as they emerge from the unplumbed æonian abyss, bearing in their bodies still visible and tangible traces of an eternal life. He reveals an eternal content of being in all that lives and weaves and moves.

Truly, if there is no sign of an eternity in which we live, there is no sign of an eternity at all. But if you were to bring to its simplest and truest expression all that is great and overmastering in the life of the human spirit today, you would then have once again the exultant Zarathustra song: “Ich liebe dich, o Ewigkeit!” All that lends true worth to the life that now is and is to be, is contained in this song. A present eternity we seek as the one thing needful. What we love must be near us, we must feel it and grasp it. Be it never so remote, it is the magic of love to bring the remote nigh our hearts, or, better still, to conquer space and time, so that there is no near and no far, only a life and love that is eternal!

To create such Ewigkeitsmenschen is the great goal of the new life, the prophecy of a new culture. For this new culture we need men who feel something in their own being that uplifts them above all the experience of the present, much as they may seem imprisoned therein, men who dominate life in a royal fashion, men who in confident freedom do not mind the storms which would hurl them from their path. We need men who survey the great connections of the world from peak to peak and overbridge them with their own souls, men who release destiny from its isolation and articulate it in the eternal cycle of human life, men whose own being contains all life according to its eternal substance, uttering their “yea and amen” to all that is called life as they blissfully surrender to the beauty of existence. This is the great apocalypse, life’s cryptic mystery-manual, whose seven seals the poet-prophet of this new culture, Friedrich Nietzsche, has broken.

What is yet to be? What will a day, a year, bring forth? If the eye is far-seeing and far-seeking, what will the next century bring forth? The darkness tenting like thick clouds upon the mountains of the future mystifies, and the days, the times, the years, the centuries, coerce man under the burden of all their darknesses until he is a-weary even before he has taken up his pilgrimage into the untrodden. Then there flashes from the love of eternity a clear light which kindles the light of the future: we ourselves are this light! Our existence is the cloud hanging heavily over the hills, cloud with prophetic and positive light, from which redeeming beams shall break.

Behind us lies the whole long grim past, a huge grave, with countless gravestones—the silent city of the dead which holds all that has been ever dear to the heart, all youth with their glad faces and forms, all glances of love, all divine moments. And all the dead compel all the living to conflict that the living may be controlled by life and not by death. From their graves the dead direct their deadliest shafts at the heart, at the living, to drag them down into the embrace of death. But something stirs in man that cannot be wounded, cannot be buried—man’s will. The will bursts all tombs hewn from rocks, demolishes all graves, creates resurrections out of them, smashes churches and abbeys that heaven’s pure eye may gaze through their rent roofs—the will building and bearing eternities! And who, through love of eternity, controls future and past, finds the earth quivering with new creative words, is himself such a word, even binds good and evil together, making the evilest worthy of being the sauce of life.

Ewigkeitsmensch!—the wind from the unexplored swells his sail, seafarer’s gale roaring in from the boundless. When time and space vanish from sight, vanish coasts also, the last fetters drop away: the body feels its weight and burden is past! How shall we go about rescuing ourselves from this torture and casting off this oppression?

In a strange fanatical vision, Nietzsche shows how he became an eternity-preacher, an eternity-sculptor. The vision is more novel than that of the Ascension which biblical legends narrate. The disciples of Jesus gaze upon their Master mounting heavenward into the clouds, and they hear strange words of the Christ coming down from heaven again to abide with them all the days till the end of the world. Nietzsche does not speak of the second advent of the Christ, of a recurrence of a single item of being, but of an eternal recurrence of all things, of all men, all moments and happenings of all life! Eternal return—to live life so that we would live each and all of it over again—to live it all so that it would be worth being not once but once again forever and forever—to be joint creator of a cosmos in which what is shall be fit—to be once yet again everlastingly—that is our, and Being’s, final flawless test, passing which, no Great White Throne may fill us with dismay! There is the heart’s harrowing cry: Could I but begin and live it—all over again, how different I would do! Would we like to do all that we have done over again? do them again eternally? Would we like to say and hear all the senseless prattle over again forever? Horrible thought! It were well to live and speak so that our existence can stand the fiery test of a Nietzschean eternity—live now in a way that it would be worth while to live again. It were indeed well to fill each fleeting moment of time with what is worthy to be the content of eternity. Eternity the criterion of time—that is really a great thought. To be sure, there is no eternal recurrence, and it is not clear that Nietzsche meant to say that there was. Faith in the eternal recurrence of all things, Nietzsche means this,—so at all events it seems to me,—to be a mirror in which we may recognize the true full worth of our life, a life in which there is nothing to be forgotten, nothing to be regretted, nothing done to be undone, because all is freed from the limitations of space and time and from external contingencies, and stands there in its great eternal necessity, because eternal, good, and godly even, in this necessity itself. Then we would not only live our life over again precisely as we lived it, we would live it in the light of the eternity again, ever again. No error, and folly would we then wish out of our life, because in this love of eternity it is precisely from error and folly that the truth grows which lights our faith. No weakness, no stumbling and falling, would we wish out of our life, because in the eternal illumination, power grows from all these experiences which enables us to mount above them, and gives us the victory in every bitter battle of life. No, our life is not lived from the right point of view, until we can sing it out in the song whose name is—Recurrence! We do not know the worth of the honor until we can dedicate to it that song whose meaning is: “In alle Ewigkeit!”

George Soule

(Another picture of our violinist)

Catherine Breshkovskaya is a legendary woman even for Russia. She is now seventy-three years old; about half of her life has been spent in prison and exile; in 1910 she was once more arrested on the ground of her revolutionary activity, but thanks to the intercession of prominent European and American liberals, the verdict was mild:—Siberia, but without hard labor. Last year the ever-young Babooshka (“little grandmother,” her pet name among the revolutionists) attempted to escape, failed, and was subsequently transferred to the terrible Yakutsk region, where she is now slowly dwindling away. The Russkoye Bogatstwo prints two letters—two human documents—miraculously smuggled through the rigid net of the Siberian police system. One is a letter written by Breshkovskaya to a friend; it reveals a great woman—great even in little things. She speaks at length on the miserable life of the exiles; on her plans to mitigate their sufferings by planting vegetables to be used for food and also to be sold on the market; and on other apparently little matters—little when we consider the grandiose activity of the gray revolutionist in the recent past. Her letter is full of love and anxiety for her comrades, but she refers very little to herself. The only plaintive note is heard in these lines:

This is all she says about her own existence in the dead land, but we hear more about it from the second letter, written by a young exile:

What a simple tale, friends.

I recall a few lines from a clumsy poem written by an American woman after the trial of Breshkovskaya. Upton Sinclair considered it one of the twenty-five greatest!

Floyd Dell

Adonais is dead—dead in the flush of youth, with all of life before him.

Yes, but perhaps that is not such a bad thing.

“He had so much of promise!” That’s the trouble. When the promise petered out—as it usually does—what then?

As it is, he will never have to see his great hopes dwindle. He will never have to bolster himself against disillusion.

Adonais has known the sweet of life—he has known the glory of youth, and the gay companionship of men, and the taste of good liquor in the mouth. He has known the joy of hard work, and the joy of roaming the streets, idle and curious, feeling the beauty of the world; he has known the joy of love.

Fortunate Adonais!

He did not know that it was possible for the love of women to become to him a cheap article, to be appraised with practiced eye and perhaps tossed carelessly aside; he was a lover—

And now he will never be cruel or careless about love, an exploiter and parasite of women. He will never have to emerge, with false hope and courage, from the humiliation of the Keeley cure. He will never parade the streets with a dyed moustache—a broken-down boulevardier.

He will never read with secret malignant envy the enthusiastic words of reviewers about the writings of younger men. He will never foregather with other has-beens in the charitable precincts of a club, to exchange compliments and listen hungrily to the accents of praise. He will never be a perambulating tombstone to a forgotten poet.

He is dead in the flush of youth—

Lucky Adonais!

Henry Blackman Sell

In the palmy days of the sideshow P. T. Barnum let fall a pat little phrase which might be called the Great American Excuse: “the public likes to be humbugged.” The showman referred directly to the amusement-seeking public, and applied his half truth to that rural pageant, the circus; but it was an easy phrase, it suited the purpose of men who were anxious to deceive and to mountebank, and it was snapped up. Today, when a man is caught with a shameful misrepresentation he laughs sheepishly and repeats that the public likes to be humbugged.

But does it?

We are The Public, you are The Public, and none of us likes to be humbugged!

Then how is it that this proverbialism has gained such credence in this country?

We are a new people. Our country is a great international whirlpool of ideas. New music, old music, new theories, old theories, new pictures, old pictures, new standards, old standards meet here and are spun about us with hysteria-like speed.

We do not want to appear ignorant of the newest thought or the oldest convention. We strive for an impossible universalism, and we accept many a mountebank at his face value because we are unable to settle his true worth, immediately, and because we feel that we must give a decision immediately.

Our credulity is stretched almost to the breaking point every hour of every day of the year, for wonders seem never to cease and the quality of the genuine has given rise to the quantity of the false.

We are gullible because we as a nation are alive to the possibility of the impossible.

We have gained a reputation for loving to be cheated because we have the almost national virtue of being able to lose, smile, and again strive, BUT we do not love it. And in the end the only one who really loses is the charlatan who sooner or later awakens to a realization of the bare hollowness of his false and petty philosophy, “the public likes to be humbugged.”

George Soule

The future of The Century is the engrossing topic among the writers and publishers in New York. No startling change in editorial policy is contemplated. Possibly the perception of the modern and future world which the magazine has begun to show under the guidance of Mr. Yard will be more apparent. The principal topic for speculation, however, is whether a “high-class” illustrated magazine selling for thirty-five cents can be a financial success, or even self-supporting. It is an open secret that none of them has been making money for some time. With this question readers who are interested in the contents of The Century have no concern except the single rather important one that if present conditions continue long enough the magazine will cease to exist, at least in its present form.

Here, as in every other literary field, the strengthening of the machinery of commerce has enabled the product of transient popularity to interfere seriously with the thing that is done for its own sake. The “lowbrow” rules. An illustrated magazine is made possible by its advertising, and the advertisers want large circulation. Some of them do, it is true, look also for “quality” of circulation, but their standard of quality has nothing to do with taste, literary or otherwise; it measures merely “spending power.” And the aristocracy of intellect has only a shadowy identity with the aristocracy of wealth. There are thousands of “automobile owners” who would never think of wading through even an Atlantic Monthly article.

Are there enough people in the United States who will buy an ably edited “high-class” magazine to attract a profitable number of advertisers? That is the question which remains to be answered. A probable answer is that there may be enough, but that it will be a herculean task to get them all buying the same magazine. The people who will pay thirty-five cents for the privilege of reading literature of real thought and ideals are now pretty well divided into parties, ranging all the way from old-line republicans to anarchists. Twenty years ago we had a much more homogeneous culture:—people who had any consciousness of their minds were allied in their fundamental ideals. If an intelligent magazine prints anything vital now, it is bound to offend a large portion of its public. Quite possibly in ten more years there will be only two kinds of general magazines left—those which are frankly “lowbrow,” and those which do not care for large profits, depend on uncommercial writers, and are manufactured so cheaply that they do not need much advertising in order to exist. Mr. Yard has a strong belief in the success of his attempt to prove the contrary. It will indeed be a glorious victory if without compromise The Century can weld together a large, intelligent public.

The plight of the theatres is strictly analogous to that of the magazines. The moving-pictures have wiped out their galleries and decimated their balconies. A well-filled orchestra is not quite enough to support the usual production. The managers have either capitulated to the films entirely by putting “movies” on their stages, or have attempted to get the deserters back by competing with the films through the use of cheapened drama. Melodramatic farce, with an abundance of action, is the only form of play which is not now a drug on the managerial market. That is, to be sure, a respectable form of amusement, but there are some of us who would like occasionally to see something else. Perhaps the little theatres, like the little reviews, will become our refuge. Some of us believe that the managers who still stick to live actors would be better off if they would stop trying to compete with the moving-picture on its own ground and produce solid work for which the legitimate stage is alone adapted. We can substantiate our theory by the fact that at one time this spring nearly the only successful plays in New York were the revivals of Fitch’s The Truth and Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. But the temper of most managers and playwrights is not encouraging. Not many days ago a group of successful writers were gathered for the week-end at the house of a producer. One of them was reading a new manuscript. Another interrupted him to say quite seriously: “That’s not right, old chap. You ought to get a laugh two-thirds of the way down that page.” Whereupon the reader inserted a “joke” about a Ford car and an automobile.

There is a danger, however, in the little theatre idea. Little theatres may grow to have the same sort of insincere “style” and disgusting appeal to social snobbery which are the characteristics of magazines like Vogue. As in the case of the magazines, the best thing that could happen would be the appearance of a genius of so much life and power that he could drive the crowds before him and produce his plays in the open air of real public appreciation. The coming of the moving-picture has only aggravated a problem which was previously acute. The crisis is here; for that we must be grateful to the films and the cheap magazines. Shall the rule of the people produce nothing better than a race of commercial craftsmen whose only thought is to make money by exploiting the least worthy instincts of the people? Or shall we produce at least a few courageous leaders who, speaking out of their own authority, shall lead the people after them? The faithful can, while they are waiting, keep alive the sacred fires and scan the horizon for the new prophet. His victory can come, not by compromise, but by aggressive power.

There is one growing form of drama which is genuine in its art and may become popular in its appeal; the development of this is being carefully watched by those who are alert. It is but a step from a moving-picture such as D’Annunzio’s Cabiria to a spectacle such as Reinhardt’s The Miracle. The latter is coming to us next winter; Madison Square Garden will be its stage. Sheldon has written an unusual spectacle play which George Tyler will produce. Let these things not be confused with such orgies of stage-setting as The Garden of Allah; it is quite possible to use the visual element as a principal means of “getting over” the dramatic expression without doing so badly. To condemn all such productions because some of them happen to be over-realistic, is to condemn all painting because of Meissonier.

May it not be that a great trouble of our drama has been the failure to recognize the fact that the picture is just as important an element of the stage as the dialogue? Every French actress receives a thorough training in pantomime; in America anyone with a sensitive eye will squirm under the inept and ugly line-compositions presented by our actresses in their gestures. And as for stage-setting, the height of our ambition has seemed to be to get a door that will really slam, or to fill the stage with pink apple-blossoms—the audience will always applaud pink. The resolution of these crude attempts into something that really makes a good appeal to the eye is no new thing; but for a long time we have not been ready for the work of Reinhardt or Gordon Craig on the one side or of the Russian Ballet on the other. Now the moving-pictures are at once educating our eyes to watch drama, and are undermining the support of old-fashioned plays which, through their very excellent mediocrity, prevented the encroachment of new ideas. Let us go to the theatres next fall prepared to trace the beginnings of a new stage art in this country; in the meantime, however, not hoping to escape the flood of cheap and artistically vicious stuff with which the commercial managers and producers will attempt to drown our sensibilities.

The Gospel According to Moore

Ave, by George Moore. [D. Appleton and Company, New York.]

Mr. George Moore has finished his autobiographic triology, Hail and Farewell, and has shaken the dust of Ireland from his feet. The Celtic Renaissance must make its way without his help or hindrance. He came, he pondered, he withdrew. In these astonishing volumes we have the whole story of his adventures and his thoughts, and an unrivalled series of impressionistic portraits of his friends. We see Yeats in his long cloak, looking like a melancholy rook; Lady Gregory, the poet’s devoted disciple; Edward Martyn and his soul; Plunkett and Gill, the Bouvard and Pécuchet of real life; AE “who settles everybody’s difficulties and consoles the afflicted”; Colonel Moore, the author’s brother; and we catch an occasional glimpse of Arthur Symons, Synge, James Stephens, and many others. But the book is very different from the ordinary Sunlights and Shadows of My Short Life. It is a remarkable piece of self-portraiture and an explanation of the author’s attitude toward art and the Christian religion.

It was during the composition of the stories contained in The Untilled Field that Mr. Moore came to realize that the Celt was but a herdsman, and that art had steadily declined in Ireland since the Irish Church was joined to Rome. But what was the reason for this decline? Was it due to the race or to Catholicism? Mr. Moore and his friends discussed this question at length and considered the history of literature in relation to the Roman Catholic Church. Their discoveries astonished him, for the case against Catholicism was even stronger than he had hoped for.

About two thousand years ago the Ecclesiastic started out to crush life, and “in three centuries humility, resignation and obedience were accepted as virtues; the shrines of the gods were abandoned; the beautiful limbs of the lover and athlete were forbidden to the sculptor and the meagre thighs of dying saints were offered him instead. Literature died, for literature can but praise life. Music died, for music can but praise life, and the lugubrious Dies Irae was heard in the fanes. What use had a world for art when the creed current among men was that life is a mean and miserable thing? So amid lugubrious chant and solemn procession the dusk thickened until the moment of deepest night was reached in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. In the fifteenth century the dawn began in Italy, and sculptors and painters turned their eyes toward Greece.” Dante was a Catholic, although not a very orthodox one, and Catholicism can make a valid claim to the cathedrals and the choral music of Vittoria and Palestrina. But the painters of the Renaissance were as pagan as Cæsar Borgia and only chose religious subjects as a pretext for drawing and to meet a certain demand. In fact, the whole spirit of the Renaissance was pagan and progressive, and a return to the Middle Ages was averted when “that disagreeable monk, Savonarola,” was burned at the stake. After this new birth came the Reformation, resulting in the Council of Trent, which forbade all speculation on the meaning and value of life and arranged “the Catholic’s journey from the cradle to the grave as carefully as any tour planned by that excellent firm, Messrs. Cook and Sons.” As a result there has been practically no Catholic literature since that time.

“Art is but praise of life, and it is only through the arts that we can praise life. Life is a rose that withers in the iron fist of dogma, and it was France that forced open the deadly fingers of the Ecclesiastic and allowed the rose to bloom again.” Descartes, Rabelais, Montaigne, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, Hugo, Balzac, Gautier, Renan, Taine, Merimee, George Sand, Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant are all agnostics. The most important Christians are Pascal, Racine, and Corneille, who wrote mere imitations of the Greek drama without any criticism of life, and Verlaine, who embraced the Church in an ecstasy more sensuous than religious. In Germany there are Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche—no Catholics and mainly agnostic. In Russia we find the utterly unmoral Turgenev and Tolstoy, who professed to be a Christian, but, as Mr. Moore points out, did not believe in the Resurrection of the Body. In Italy the main figure since the Reformation is an artist of today, the pagan D’Annunzio. In Spain there is one great Catholic work, Don Quixote, but it is completely unethical. Among the Scandinavians, Ibsen, Bjornson, and Strindberg are agnostics. In England the main evidence for the defence is found in Pope, who called himself a Christian, but wrote The Essay on Man, and Cardinal Newman, who, according to Carlyle, had a brain like a half-grown rabbit. In America there are Hawthorne, Emerson, Poe, and Whitman—Protestant and agnostic.

The reason for all this has been explained by Mr. Moore again and again. It lies in the fact that the Church has always preferred the obedient and poor in spirit to the courageous and the wise. Religion is strongest among ignorant and weak-minded people, and as far back as the book of Genesis we read of God’s anger at the man and woman who ate of the forbidden fruit. “The two great enemies of religion are the desire to live and the desire to know,” and the whole tendency of art is to increase and strengthen these desires. Another thing for which the Church is responsible is the present attitude toward love. Mr. Moore writes with pride of “the noble and exalted world that must have existed before Christian doctrine caused men to look upon women with suspicion and bade them to think of angels instead.” He insists with Gautier that earth is as beautiful as heaven.

When he had decided that literature was incompatible with dogma, Mr. Moore found himself in a decidedly unpleasant situation. He had changed the course of his life to take part in the Irish Renaissance, and now he realized that the Irish Renaissance was a mere bubble. The whole history of the world showed that literature could not be produced in a Roman Catholic country. The only thing for him to do was to leave Ireland, but in the meanwhile he felt that he must declare himself a Protestant. Between art and religion there could be but one choice for him; the religion must be changed. It is true that he had never acquiesced in any of the dogmas of the Catholic Church, but he had been baptized in that Church, and he had always been considered a Catholic. Protestantism seemed much preferable, because Protestantism leaves the mind very nearly free. In the Confessions of a Young Man, he had already expressed his prejudice in its favor. “Look at the nations that have clung to Catholicism, starving moonlighters and starving brigands. The Protestant flag floats on every ocean breeze, the Catholic banner hangs limp in the incensed silence of the Vatican.” And so Mr. Moore after several futile interviews with the Anglican priest wrote to The Irish Times announcing his change from the Church of Rome, and began the composition of Hail and Farewell as the best means in his power to liberate his country priestcraft.

P. M. Henry.

Smile and Scream: Chekhov and Andreyev

Stories of Russian Life, by Anton Tchekoff; translated by Marian Fell. [Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.]

Savva and The Life of Man, by Leonid Andreyev; translated from the French (!) by Thomas Seltzer. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]

A French critic characterized Russian literature as Heroic. Tragic would perhaps be a happier definition; what has been Russian life, and hence its literature, but a continuous tragedy? Gogol looked into that life and burst into a homeric laughter which ultimately drove him insane; the “repenting nobleman” Turgenyev was devoured by melancholy over his sad heroes and heroines; the “cruel genius” of Dostoyevsky convulsively writhed in contemplation of the “humiliated and offended”; Chekhov, who had begun his career in the gayest humor, turned eventually gloomy and pronounced his diagnosis: Such life is impossible; even Gorky, the chanter of hymns to the proud Man, was crushed and silenced by grim reality, and his scepter of the idol of young Russia passed into the hands of the most pessimistic writer, Andreyev.

Tutchev found a mysterious beauty in the brightness of autumn evenings:

Such was the smile of Anton Chekhov. Run through his works, look at the sad faces of his heroes, listen to the yearning effusions of his women, observe his Nature, his skies and steppes, and your heart will shrink before that smile of fading autumn. He knew and understood Russian life better than any other writer, and keenly felt its tragicness and ... hopelessness. Therefore he did not protest or advocate, did not denounce or propagate, did not shout or curse, as most of his colleagues did: for what is the use? He only smiled, a sad gripping smile that maddens the sensitive reader—a smile of ennui and helplessness characteristic of the Russian “soilless” intellectual. I believe it was this smile, which masqued an abyss of sorrow and pain, that early extinguished Chekhov’s life; it is so much easier and more healthful to scream and howl than to smile under torture.

The stories translated by Miss Fell are far not of the best (by the way: why not use a correct transliteration? Why that half-German, half-English “Tchekoff”?). I suspect that the translator endeavored to choose the least typically-Russian sketches in the hope that they would be more “understandable” to the foreign reader; such attempts generally fail to convey the real atmosphere. “If you wish to know the Poet, you must go into the Poet’s land,” said Goethe. On the whole, however, the book is imbued with the Chekhovian leit-motif—the longing, struggling, crippled Russian soul.

Leonid Andreyev is of a dual personality: the artist, and the mouthpiece of society. In his early sketches, in his short stories, and in his greatest achievement, The Seven Who Were Hanged, he is the wonderful psychologist, the unveiler of the soul mysteries with an art that approaches that of Maeterlinck. Russian reality, however, is a Moloch clamoring victims; the powerful tragedy of life absorbs and subjugates all individual forces, and it requires great artistic strength to preserve aloofness from the burning problems of the day. Andreyev has witnessed the most appalling epoch in his country’s history: disastrous war, revolution, reaction, famine, national demoralization. He has been tempted to interpret the passing events, a perilous path for an artist whose field of observation must lie either in the crystallized past or in the dim future, never in chronicling the floating present. In his stories and plays of that later period, Andreyev revealed such horrors, such gruesome scenes, that we have felt as if we were in a Gallery of Tortures. Horror shrieks, screams, beats upon our senses, maddens us. But the colors are too loud, the medium of tickling our sensations too vulgar. I recall a passage from Merezhkovsky, a description of one of the museums in Florence. There is a head of Dante; the face is calm, almost indifferent, yet one sees at once that it is a face of one who saw hell. In the same room hangs a wax-image of Plague, with hideous details—rotting cadavers with outpouring bowels in which swarm enormous worms. The Sunday-visitors pass by Dante’s head yawning, but wistfully crowd at the wax Plague. I confess this scene, at times, makes me draw an analogy with Chekhov and Andreyev.

As a playwright Andreyev has utterly failed; he lacks dramatic constraint and proportion. He puts into the mouths of his actors bombastic phrases, to the delight of the gallery; but there is absolutely too much talking in his plays, with very little drama. The two plays published in the book now before me, Savva and Life of Man, have caused more discussion than any of his other plays,—a fact due not to their particular merit, but to their pyrotechnic effects and “understandableness.”

Savva, a young man “with a suggestion of the peasant in his looks,” has a modest intention to annihilate everything.

Well, how is this enfant terrible—the trumpeter of a popularized edition of Schopenhauer, Bakounin, Stirner, Nietzsche, etc., etc.—how is this “bad man” going to carry through his gigantic plans? In a very simple manner: he will destroy the wonder-working ikon of the Saviour, that made the monastery of his native town famous; he will place a bomb behind the ikon, and its explosion will open the eyes of the ignorant believers. A tempest in a cup of water! But hark and tremble:

Monologues, long and pretentious like those quoted, fill up the play to a point of dizziness; yet there are a few oases in that unhappy work, where you find the real Andreyev, the unrivalled painter of sorrow and suffering. Here is, for instance, one of the pilgrims, a man who had killed accidentally his son and has since been wandering from monastery to monastery, fasting, wearing heavy chains, and indulging in all sorts of self-chastisement. The cynical monks give him the cruel nickname of King Herod, which he bears, like his other burdens, with the joy of a martyr. Listen to his unsophisticated talk:

Our hero, Savva, is naturally offended, for his motto is Ignis sanat, and he is determined to cure the world with fire. The pilgrim calmly rejoinds:

In depicting individual sorrow Andreyev approaches Dostoevsky; it is when he raises general, universal questions, that he miserably fails in answering them. The Russian public has “spoiled” him, has crowned him with the title of a genius, when he is only a man of big talent. Unfortunately Andreyev took the flattery of the beast-public seriously; he said to himself: Who knows? Maybe I am, indeed, an Atlas. Let me try and shake the world. And he did try! As a result we have, among his other sore failures, the loudest commonplace—Life of Man.

I think it was Maurice Baring, a Russologue and an admirer of the playwright, who defined Life of Man as an algebraic play, with Man standing for x and Fate for y. Not the tragedy of a certain life under certain conditions, but Life in general, under all circumstances, was the object of the drama. It is the world-old problem, the futility of man’s struggles in the face of blind unreasoning fate that may at any moment overthrow his toy-castles. Perhaps a Goethe might attempt to say something new on that subject, or at least to put it in a new way. With Andreyev the task proved to be not “up to his shoulder,” as the Russians say. The annoying pretentiousness of the play appears a hundred times more convex when on the stage. I saw it once in the “symbolized” theatre of Mme. Kommissarzhevskaya in St. Petersburg, and another time in the performance of the Moscow Artistic Theatre. On the first occasion I was bored to death, and pitied the gifted manager, Mr. Meyerhold, in his futile attempt to veil the platitudes of the play in mysticism, to create an atmosphere, a “Stimmung.” The Moscow people succeeded in emphasizing the ridiculous awkwardness of the drama, the shrill incongruities of the situations and styles,—and I shall ever be grateful to them for the minutes of hearty laughter that they caused me then and which I cannot escape even now, as soon as I recall the harmony between the symbolicized Someone in Gray (sh-sh ...—Fate!) and the super-realistic shrieks of the mother giving birth to a child. The actors did their best, but no miracle could have saved the doomed loud nothingness.

As I have mentioned, Andreyev’s “heel of Achilles” demonstrates its vulnerability when he obeys the call of the public and speaks on up-to-date topics. Life of Man was written, evidently, in response to the symbolistic moods that became noticeable among Russian society at the beginning of the twentieth century. For more than ten years the group of Symbolists, under the leadership of Valery Brusov, had been ridiculed and unrecognized. Then came the reaction: All began to talk symbols; the press, the stage, the art galleries, the public lectures, became symbolistic over night. A torrent of parodies and imitations gushed on the market, and the public did not differentiate between the real and false coins. It became bon-ton to quote Brusov, Balmont, Viacheslav Ivanov, Sollogub; schoolboys declaimed about “the ostrich feathers that wave in my brains,” and janitors whined to “the moon, in a white bonnet with embroidery.”

Life of Man reaped broad success, a fact that speaks volumes on the taste of the Public. I am sure that in this country Andreyev’s play would be a more “paying proposition” for the producer than even “Everywoman.” The plaintive philosophy of Job clothed in modern phraseology; Maeterlinckian Fates dancing in a saloon around the drunken Man; symbolization of Destiny and squeals of the new-born Man; quasi-primitiveness turned into wood-cut allegory and melodramatic effects (of course, there occur several deaths: there is not a single play by Andreyev not spiced with two or three natural or unnatural deaths),—is it any wonder that Life of Man vied in popularity with its contemporary, The Merry Widow?

No, messrs. stage-managers and publishers, we reject your popular Andreyev.

Alexander S. Kaun.

Horace Traubel’s Whitman

With Walt Whitman in Camden, by Horace Traubel. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]

The wheat that eager work extricates from huge masses of chaff is worth what it costs. Leaves of Grass does not contain all the solid nutrition that stands for Whitman’s durable contribution to the literary food supply of America: he added to it substantially by talking to his friend, Horace Traubel, during the poet’s residence at Camden, N. J., from 1888 to the end of his life in 1892, and that comrade, who jotted down every word, has scattered the resultant wheat through its own chaff. Three of the eight volumes through which the mixture is to run have been published.

It is inevitable that inconsequential stuff—sheer nonsense in instances—should find its way into this morbidly complete story of the harvest years of Whitman’s life; but it is surprising how much personality and interpretative value lie hidden in some of his most commonplace utterances. A tremendous personality descends to occasional banality because of the inadequacy and commonness of words. It is too much to expect Whitman even to revitalize the vocabulary of a democracy. But great as he was as a cosmic voice, Whitman exhibited and confessed kinship with common clay. In fact, Leaves of Grass could never have grown out of an artificial soil, inoculated with classic cultures; it sprang as the first vegetation upon the surface of a wild, primal clay. Whitman was first of all a big, magnificent animal-man; he was secondarily a powerful poetic instrumentality, giving sound and articulation to the wee sma’ voices exhaled by the earth. That is why the essence of his message was an appeal and a challenge to and an expression of democracy. (Of course, I do not mean the institutionalized democracy of politicians, for no Jeffersonian goes to Whitman for solace when his faith is wobbling; I mean the bio-economic democracy that some of us believe in as a part of natural law.)

As a man and as a poet Whitman was simply, daringly, and resolutely himself. He had achieved a large, strong selfhood before Traubel began to Boswellize him, and to that intimate friend he revealed in the languages of pen, tongue, countenance, and silence all the bigness and littleness that a long and intimate relationship could evoke. It would therefore be unfair to ascribe to Whitman all the sapless hay with which these three volumes are padded; it is largely a product of mutual reactions. But in relation to Traubel more than to any other person, Whitman was consistently, habitually, and subconsciously himself, and the result is that this discursive, unedited “story” of the poet’s life and work will live as the most personal and valuable revealment of his character. It is the last word about him as a man. Whitman the poet effected his supreme expression in the poem beginning with the words, “I celebrate myself.” Other features which give permanent distinction to these volumes are the letters to Whitman from noted men and women in America and Great Britain, and numerous portraits of himself and some of his friends.

Despite the fact that this work is padded with arid minutæ, which I should be the last person to abridge, every page is interesting to readers of Whitman and students of American literature. The first page of the first volume, for example, contains an allusion to Emerson’s senility that is worth reading—in Whitman’s words. Reading at random in the third volume I found this striking quotation:

Turning back a hundred pages I found this:

This is the thought of the natural man who would die like a man. One could quote indefinitely from this extraordinary autobiography of the most outstanding figure in American literature.

DeWitt C. Wing.

Midstream

Midstream, by Will Levington Comfort. [George H. Doran Company, New York.]

A direct, big thing—so simple that almost no one has done it before—this Mr. Comfort has dared. He gives us the story of his own life to the mid-way mark. It is not an autobiography—one of those deferential veilings of truth, a blinding of the spectator by the scattering of fact-dust. After reading it one does not remember clearly the author’s various removals from Detroit to other centers of activity; one remembers the vital events in his consciousness, the shames, triumphs, and searchings of his body and soul. Here is a man’s life laid absolutely bare.

There is no use in explaining the value of such a book to those who do not admit it. People to whom reserve is more important than truth; people who are made uncomfortable by intimate grasp of anything—these will not read Midstream through.

The others will see here a chance to understand. And they will emerge from the book with a sense of the absolute nobility of Mr. Comfort’s frankness. If a thousand writers should give us such books we should understand better the much-befogged basis of all human problems—“human nature.” Every man draws his own conclusions about vital matters from just such introspection as this, whether it be conscious or unconscious. But every man does not have the candor and the hard-won insight of the trained writer.

It would be possible to enter into futile discussions about the “artistic” value of such a book—whether naturalism can give us as fine a work as imagination. Whatever might be the result of such a discussion, Mr. Comfort’s book remains interesting, and interest is the first value of any written work. He is neither a Wilde nor a Turgenev, but he is a true writer.

To recapitulate the adventures of the sensitive and often unwholesome boy, the degradations and victories of the young newspaper reporter, the soldier, the war correspondent, the husband, and the writer, would be to undermine the novel itself. If you want to experience them, let Mr. Comfort be the narrator.

It may not be out of place, however, to quote a few of the conclusions, in order to give a taste of the book’s direction.

This of man:

This of publishers and the public:

This of woman’s status:

And this of the future:

G. S.

A Defense of the Grotesque

Sonnets from the Patagonian, by Donald Evans. [Claire Marie, New York.]

It has become the fashion, even among intelligent people, to fling tawdry sneers at something not understood—especially the intensely grotesque. The indulgent smile has disappeared, and the little peevish joke has taken its place. Perhaps this is obvious, but some obvious things cannot be made too obvious.

Sonnets from the Patagonian is a type of book which will be almost universally laughed at. Yet it is something like a gold nugget: one must use his mind as a pick with which to isolate streaks of poetry from the coarse rock. The rock is simply grotesqueness. The gold is protesqueness mixed with unconscious simplicity.

I took out my pick one night and started the mental manual-labor. At the end I had extracted six of the most startling, clutching, beautiful lines of verse ever written in English. Perhaps the twisted dreariness of their surroundings made them stand out more vividly, gave them a false value to me. I shall let the reader judge.

Six lines almost lost in the mirage the poet speaks off, but well worth finding.

M. B.

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