The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Little Review, September 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 6), by Margaret C. Anderson This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title: The Little Review, September 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 6) Author: Various Editor: Margaret C. Anderson Release Date: December 30, 2020 [eBook #64177] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 Produced by: Jens Sadowski and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. This book was produced from images made available by the Modernist Journal Project, Brown and Tulsa Universities, http://www.modjourn.org. *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE REVIEW, SEPTEMBER 1914 (VOL. 1, NO. 6) *** THE LITTLE REVIEW Literature Drama Music Art MARGARET C. ANDERSON EDITOR SEPTEMBER, 1914 Poems Maxwell Bodenheim Armageddon Women in War Sonya Levien Children of War Eunice Tietjens Grocer Shops and Souls The Democrat With Apologies to Mr. Galsworthy The Constructive Reasoner ” The Crucified Dionysus Alexander S. Kaun Poems Amy Lowell The Poetry of Revolt Charles Ashleigh The Nietzschean Love of Eternity George Burman Foster The Restaurant Violin George Soule Editorials “Baboosya” Obituary of a Poet Floyd Dell Humbugging the Public Henry Blackman Sell New York Letter George Soule Book Discussion: The Gospel According to Moore Chekhov and Andreyev Horace Traubel’s Whitman “Midstream” A Defense of the Grotesque The Reader Critic Published Monthly 15 cents a copy MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher Fine Arts Building CHICAGO $1.50 a year THE LITTLE REVIEW Vol. I SEPTEMBER, 1914 No. 6 Copyright, 1914, by Margaret C. Anderson. Poems Maxwell Bodenheim After Feeling Deux Arabesques by Debussy I stuffed my ears with faded stars From the little universe of music pent in me, For your fiendish ripple must be heard but once: Passing twice through ears, it looses Its thin divine kinkiness.... I felt it undulate my soul— Lavender water, pitted and heaved to huge, uneasy circles. Let Me Not Live Too Long Never will my crumbling tongue hug the drying sides of the basin, Slaying the last, delicate drops. Fire have I tasted; It has flicked me but never burnt— I shall leave it before it breaks into me. One flame will I wrap about my browned skin—a deed accomplished— To speak to me on the way. Then will I go quickly, lest the other fire-beings scorch my slow feet. To the Violinist (Mr. Bodenheim writes of the violinist described in our last issue.) Pits a trillion times blacker than black, Fringed with little black grasses, each holding The jerking, smoldering ghost of a thought. (O deep-aged pupils and lashes!) At the bottom of the pits lay the phosphorescent bones, Of many souls that have cried and died. I think you clutched one of your soul-bones with irreverent hands, And struck your cringing violin. Gifts 1 2 A dwindling gift are you, laughter. Old men have I seen, counterfeiting you on street-corners. Never shall I join them, For not in scorn do I laugh, but in praise. Only with my smiles am I lavish; A different smile for each thought have I. (O thousands of smiles waiting for the labor of birth!) To my death-bed will come the wildest smile: It will be moon-paint on a colorless house. Hell (A Part of Heaven Overlooked by Ford Madox Hueffer.) Heaven and Hell are together. As we walk home on a street in Heaven, in the evening, Those in Hell will stalk past us (For Hell is a condition, not a place) And when we return at dawn will we still see them— Men bearing infants born dead, Kissing the inert purple cheeks; (For the kiss will be the one punishment of Hell); Men and women holding the severed heads of those they once spat on. Before a king kissing the head of his queen will we stop, To give him a kind word; Or before an anarchist clasping the head of the king; Or before a woman carrying the head of the anarchist— Each unaware of the other’s presence. We will see them walking up and down the streets of Heaven For countless years, Till the day when the heads will disappear, And the head-bearers build homes next to our own. To a Woman Lovers married a thousand years in Heaven And in that which lies beyond Heaven (For Heaven is but the first rest of a thirstless journey) Know not each other as we do. Knowledge is born of a second: We had our slim second, And it will live for millions of years. Only when it reaches the suburbs of Eternity, will it die. 3 T Armageddon he 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? 4 T Women in War (By a spectator) Sonya Levien he 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. 5 Children of War Eunice Tietjens Out of the womb of war we cry to you, We who have yet to be, We who lie waiting in the strong loins of time, unformed and hesitant, We who shall be your sons and your slim daughters. In the womb of war shall you beget us, and with the seal of the war-god shall we be sealed; In ditches shall we be begotten, of lust-crazed soldiers on the screaming women of the enemy. Of camp followers and scavengers shall we be conceived, of the weakling and the sick. We shall be begotten in secret, stolen meeting of man and wife, drunk with weariness the man, and blind with terror the woman. In bitterness of soul shall we be borne, and deeply shall we suck the pap of hatred. Revenge shall be our daily bread, and with blood-lust shall we be nourished. Yea, in our bodies shall we bear the seal of the war-beast. Our hearts shall be thin and naked as your sword-blades, and our souls ruthless as your cannon. And we shall pay—year by year, in our frail bodies and our twisted souls shall we pay For your glorious patriotism. Out of the womb of war we cry to you, We who have yet to be! 6 A Grocer Shops and Souls 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! There is nothing sane about the worship of beauty. It is something entirely too splendid to be sane.—Oscar Wilde. 7 8 H The Democrat (With apologies to Mr. Galsworthy) e 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 9 10 11 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. 12 H The Constructive Reasoner (A Non-Mythical Allegory) George Soule e 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. Patriotism, sir, is the last resort of scoundrels.—Dr. Johnson. 13 14 A The Crucified Dionysus Alexander S. Kaun chad 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.” On the scale of my experiences and circumstances, the predominance is given to the rarer, remoter, more attenuated tones as against the normal, medial ones. Besides (as an old musician, which is what I really am), I have an ear for quarter-tones. Finally—and this probably does more to make my books obscure—there is in me a distrust of dialectics, even of reasons. What a person already holds “true,” or has not yet acknowledged as true, seems to me to depend mainly on his courage, on the relative strength of his courage (I seldom have the courage for what I really know). To which Brandes comments with his usual clarity. ... You write more for yourself, think more of yourself in writing, than for the general public; whereas most non-German writers have been obliged to force themselves into a certain discipline of style, which no doubt makes the latter clearer and more plastic, but necessarily deprives it of all profundity and compels the writer to keep to himself his most intimate and best individuality, the anonymous in him. I have thus been horrified at times to see how little of my inmost self is more than hinted at in my writings. 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: At the risk of exciting your wrath ... Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde made an indelible impression on me. I once heard 15 16 17 this opera in Berlin, in a despondent, altogether shattered state of mind, and I felt every note. I do not know whether the impression was so deep because I was so ill. Nietzsche mischievously retorts: As to the effect of Tristan, I, too, could tell strange tales. A regular dose of mental anguish seems to me a splendid tonic before a Wagnerian repast. The Reichsgerichtsrath, Dr. Wiener, of Leipzig, gave me to understand that a Carlsbad cure was also a good thing.... 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: I am delighted with the aphorism on the hazard of marriage. But why do you not dig deeper here? You speak somewhere with a certain reverence of marriage, which by implying an emotional ideal has idealized emotion—here, however, you are more blunt and forcible. Why not for once say the full truth about it? I am of opinion that the institution of marriage, which may have been very useful in taming brutes, causes more misery to mankind than even the church has done. Church, monarchy, marriage, property, these are to my mind four old venerable institutions which mankind will have to reform from the foundations in order to be able to breathe freely. And of these marriage alone kills the individuality, paralyzes liberty and is the embodiment of a paradox. But the shocking thing about it is that humanity is still too coarse to be able to shake it off. The most emancipated writers, so called, still speak of marriage with a devout and virtuous air which maddens me. And they gain their point, since it is impossible to say what one could put in its place for the mob. There is nothing else to be done but slowly to transform opinion. What do you think about it? And this is what Nietzsche thinks about it: I feel for you in the North, now so wintry and gloomy; how does one manage to keep one’s soul erect there? I admire almost every man who does not lose faith in himself under a cloudy sky, to say nothing of his faith in “humanity,” in “marriage,” in “property,” in the “State”.... In Petersburg I should be a nihilist: here I believe, as a plant believes, in the sun. The sun of Nice—you cannot call that a prejudice. We have had it at the expense of all the rest of Europe. God, with the cynicism peculiar to Him, lets it shine upon us idlers, “philosophers,” and sharpers more brightly than upon the far worthier military heroes of the “Fatherland.” 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: So truly loves a friend his friend As I love thee, O Life in mystery hidden! If joy or grief to me thou send; If loud I laugh or else to weep am bidden, Yet love I thee with all thy changeful faces; And shouldst thou doom me to depart, So would I tear myself from thy embraces, As comrade from a comrade’s heart. And in conclusion: And if thou hast now left no bliss to crown me, Lead on! thou hast thy sorrow still! 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. I lived for years in extreme proximity of death. This was my great good fortune. I fought myself, I outlived myself.... ... After all, my illness has been of the greatest use to me: it has released me, it has restored to me the courage to be myself.... And, indeed, in virtue of my instincts, I am a brave animal, a military one even.... Am I a philosopher, do you ask?—But what does that matter!... How he created his greatest work, Zarathustra: Each part in about ten days. Perfect state of “inspiration.” All conceived in the course of rapid walks: absolute certainty, as though each sentence were shouted to one. While writing the book, the greatest physical elasticity and sense of power. In his first letter to Brandes, Nietzsche wrote: 17 18 How far this mode of thought has carried me already, how far it will carry me yet—I am almost afraid to imagine. But there are certain paths which do not allow one to go backward and so I go forward, because I must. 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: To the friend Georg—When once you had discovered me, it was easy enough to find me: the difficulty now is to get rid of me.... —The Crucified. 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: Nun heiße ich euch, mich verlieren und euch finden; und erst, wenn ihr mich Alle verleugnet habt, will ich euch wiederkehren. Soon, I believe, we shall once more receive a lively impression that art cannot rest content with ideas and ideals for the average mediocrity, any more than with remnants of the old catechisms; but that great art demands intellects that stand on a level with the most individual personalities of contemporary thought, in exceptionality, in independence, in defiance, and in artistic self-supremacy.—George Brandes. 19 Poems Amy Lowell Clear, With Light Variable Winds The fountain bent and straightened itself In the night wind, Blowing like a flower. It gleamed and glittered, A tall white lily, Under the eye of the golden moon. From a stone seat, Beneath a blossoming lime, The man watched it. And the spray pattered On the dim grass at his feet. The fountain tossed its water, Up and up, like silver marbles. Is that an arm he sees? And for one moment Does he catch the moving curve Of a thigh? The fountain gurgled and splashed, And the man’s face was wet. Is it singing that he hears? A song of playing at ball? The moonlight shines on the straight column of water, And through it he sees a woman, Tossing the water-balls. Her breasts point outwards, And the nipples are like buds of peonies. Her flanks ripple as she plays, And the water is not more undulating Than the lines of her body. “Come,” she sings, “Poet! Am I not worth more than your day ladies, Covered with awkward stuffs, Unreal, unbeautiful? What do you fear in taking me? Is not the night for poets? I am your dream, Recurrent as water, Gemmed with the moon!” She steps to the edge of the pool And the water runs, rustling, down her sides. She stretches out her arms, And the fountain streams behind her Like an opened vail. In the morning the gardeners came to their work. “There is something in the fountain”, said one. They shuddered as they laid their dead master On the grass. “I will close his eyes”, said the head gardener, “It is uncanny to see a dead man staring at the sun.” 20 21