absolutism it came most timely as the saving trump. Whether we believe
the press informations about the mad wave of patriotism overflowing
Russia or not, there can be no doubt that in view of the threatening
national catastrophy internal differences will lose their keenness and
will give way to easily drummed-up imperial solidarity, as far as the
average citizens are concerned. The uncompromising revolutionists will
hardly have a considerable following, especially when we consider the
fact that the Czar has been showing surprising tact and foresight of
late by granting concessions to his subjects and lavishly extending
tempting promises to the oppressed nationalities. The constantly
humiliated and insulted citizen; the empoverished overtaxed moujik; the
flogged workingman; the bleeding, robbed, deprived-of-rights Pole, Finn,
Armenian, Caucasian, Jew, Lithuanian, Little-Russian,--all these
elements that make up the abstraction "Russia" would have to possess a
great deal of optimism in order to take seriously the spasmodic
ejaculations of the drowning "Little Father" who has beaten the world's
record as a perjurer. Yet one need not be a specialist in mass
psychology to predict the success of Nicholas's bait. We may further
prophesy that, whatever the outcome of the war, Russia will emerge
purged and electrified, stirred and volcanized. Surely, "such life,"
pre-war life, will be "impossible."
The Silver Ship
SKIPWITH CANNÉLL
A silver ship with silken sail
Fled ghost-like over a silver sea,
Swift to an island leper pale
Where dead hands furled the silken sail.
Then to the island bore they me,
And left me, stricken, there to see
My silver ship with silken sail
Fade out across a silent sea.
The Butterfly
SKIPWITH CANNÉLL
One day in the lean youth of Summer, a butterfly was born upon the
earth. To a brief day of beauty she was born, and to a long night.
Timidly her purple wings unfolded in the kind warmth of the sun. When
they had grown strong, she began to flutter hither and thither, from
flower to flower, a wingéd dream flitting as perfumes called her, from
dream to dream.
At last, when the dark fingers of the night were clutching at the
fields, from the brief stillness of twilight arose a brief summer storm.
Only a few puffs of wind ruffled the grass, only a few growls of thunder
silenced the birds, only a few warm drops of rain pattered among the
trees. Then the storm passed and the sun shone over the wet earth as a
sweetheart shines through her tears with promise of pardon.
But the warm wind had blown the butterfly against a twig, so that her
wings were broken; and the soft summer rain had crushed her to the
earth, so that she died. But there had been one passing, whose dreams
were in music, and he had felt her beauty in his own. And he spun a web
of harmony from the rainbow of his sorrow and the skeins of her beauty,
so that men who had lost their dreams were snared in his net, and women
whose hearts were buried wept for the death of a butterfly....
The Tidings
SKIPWITH CANNÉLL
Once upon a time, in a certain secret city of the East, lived a woman
who was a sorceress. And she awaited tidings of great joy or tidings of
terrible sorrow.
All day long, from her housetop, she had peered across the desert,
seeking the messenger who did not come. At nightfall her servants
returned to her with rumors gathered in the market place. With rumors of
sorrow they returned and stood in a row before her with averted faces.
When she had heard their fears, she thanked them, and going down from
the housetop, she sought a hidden chamber where she could be alone and
silent. When she had pondered for awhile, she piled rare herbs in a
brazier, and wet them with strange liquors, and touched fire to them.
The flames flickered and smoked, singing a soft happy little song all to
themselves. But she could read no answer in the singing, and no meaning
in the coils of smoke; and she was very sad. At last, with a despairing
gesture, she took certain secret things from the chest whereof she alone
had the key, and those things she laid upon the fire and watched until
they were consumed.
As soon as the embers were cold and gray, she took from the carven chest
a vial of jade and a jade cup. From the vial she poured out a pale green
potion, and raising the cup in her hands, she drank it to the end. Then
she lay down upon the marble couch. In a little while she slept.
A sweet, heavy vapor rose from the cup, filling the room with perfume.
The dregs glowed with dull evil light, for the potion had been poison,
and her sleep was death.
In the morning came a messenger, bearing tidings of great joy.
Longing
GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER
It was indeed a world-historical movement, that old reformation of the
Sixteenth century, snapping as it did the fetters of a Church that
arrogated to itself all power in heaven and on earth, and defiantly
asserting supremacy over the papacy. But the reformation of our day is
much more radical and universal. Ours ends what that began, destroys
what that established. The critical spirit of our time, this nothing can
withstand unless it is in a position to justify and verify itself to the
moral and rational judgment of mankind. In our time of day, what is
church, what is state, what are society and law and sanctified
custom--things that the old reformation partly inherited, partly
organized, and wholly bequeathed to us? At best, tones for the
musician's use, clay in the hands of the potter, or stuff for the
sculptor's shaping, materials all, ductile or refractory, to be kneaded
into forms for the habitation of man's free spirit, man's soul, man's
life. This critical spirit of an all-inclusive reform of life, to which
everything belonging to life is subject, for which science works and art
as well, living and active in the heart of modern humanity in countless
problems, like the woman problem, the labor problem, like national and
international social problems, with all their subdivisions,--this
critical spirit gives our time a prophetic character. It summons all
progressive spirits to the great struggle against a common foe, against
all those forces which have banded together for a standstill of life and
have made a lucrative and social-climbing business out of retrogression.
Can there be any doubt as to the stand we ought to take with reference
to these great movements? May we not greet them as a new spring-time of
humanity whose light and warmth shall vanquish winter, and bring life,
joy and peace into the land? "When the Day of Passover was fully
Come"--may we not see this day in these movements, when a spirit of
truth and soul and freedom shall brood over men, and lead them to higher
goals and greater tasks of human being?
To be sure, our era is not arbitrarily made, not excogitated and
invented by man. To be sure, great elementary forces of life will come,
must come, to their unfolding in these movements. To be sure, the matter
of real concern is a new structure of humanity, new cultural and social
forms, new world-views, new life-views. No doubt these forces of life
will carry the individual along with them, will come upon him and coerce
him when he does not so will, will not at all even ask him what he
wills, what he has to say to them, or how he regards them. But on this
very account, in surveying the great whole of our life development we
easily lose sense for what is individual and special. Where classes and
masses of men encounter each other, where world-moving thought jolt and
undermine thousand-year-old traditions and customs, removing their very
foundations, there the individual human soul suffers abridgement, there
we forget that even the largest number consists of units, and that the
greatest numerical worth is judged according to the worth of these
units.
Therefore a great social thinker must reflect ever anew that _man_ is
the significant thing in every new social culture--is beginning and
goal. To understand how to trumpet a word respecting _man and his
personality_ into this social movement and seething, this is to do an
essential service to the modern way of viewing life, this is to warn us
that we are not entirely impersonal in the presence of pure objectivity.
No one has done such service to our age in so signal a manner, as
_Friedrich Nietzsche_. He is not the preacher of _social_, but of
_personal_, man. However, fundamental hater of socialism that he was, he
yet became a mighty moving and impelling force for socialism. He, too,
wills a new culture, _but he wills it through a new man_. Therefore, he
shows us the way to this new culture in that which is most _personal_ to
man, in man's _Longing_, or yearning, or craving,--in man's
_Sehnsucht_,--a word of profound import to which none of these English
words does justice.
To many ears that program does not sound provocative, promising,
alluring. _Sehnsucht_ is not a feeling that makes one happy and
blissful--not a feeling to which one would like to accord a constant and
abiding possession of one's heart. "Only he who knows _Sehnsucht_ knows
what I _suffer_"--so sighed Goethe's Mignon, one of the most impressive
and marvelous characters the poet-genius ever created, an Incarnate
Yearning, self-consumed in unquieted longing of soul, in _Heimweh_ for a
dreamily visioned distance, to walk in whose sunny beauty her feet were
never destined. To preach _Sehnsucht_ is to preach hunger. To hunger is
to ache. The gnawing of a hungry stomach--but what is that compared with
the gnawing of a hungry heart, when everything that seems good and great
and worth striving after becomes elusive, unattainable, unintelligible,
to passionate longing? _Sehnsucht_ is not anxiety, it is worse than
anxiety. Anxiety is petty; _Sehnsucht_ is great and deep. In anxiety,
life is dark, and darkness terrifies and distresses man. In _Sehnsucht_,
life is luminous, but the light blinds the soul. _Sehnsucht_ sees all
light in a magical radiance, yet cannot clasp it; feels its overpowering
attraction, yet cannot satisfy the eye with it. Prometheus chained to a
rock, after he had filched the celestial spark from the gods! Tantalus,
the luscious fruit just over his head, but wafted away as soon as he
longs to grasp it with greedy hands! Yes, all the human heart's deepest
pain, this is _Sehnsucht_. Whoever names a pain that is not _Sehnsucht_
has not peered to the bottom of pain's chalice.
"Woe to that man through whom _Sehnsucht_ comes!" we might almost cry.
If you love me, do not stir up this yearning for the impossible that is
in me, this hot, fervent craving, which can never find satisfaction,
which can never enjoy the pleasures of life, or its own self. If you
love men, save them from their very youth up in the presence of that
tempestuous storm and stress into the Afar, where all solid shores
vanish, all safe harbors are closed--save men, trembling, untranquil,
from the everlasting question: Knowest thou the land? Knowest it well?
Leave men their peace of mind, add no fuel to the flame of their
discontent. Do not wrong them by letting them eat of the tree of
knowledge. Do not show them the infinite expanse unrolling behind and
beyond the narrow confines of their petty lives, thus spoiling the
pleasure of their contentment, the joy they have in their limited and
longingless life. Paradise is better than Wilderness. The familiar
murmur of the brook in the meadow by the old home is more restful than
the roar of the cataract or than the eternal haunting mystery and melody
of the great sea. Such is the common cry of the lackadaisical, the
longingless, the _laissez-faire_ people to all of us who "turn the world
upside down."
Yes, we make all men sufferers--we who pilot their minds to what is not
yet there, and to what they not yet are--we who show them a land lying
undiscovered in mist or azure ahead of them. We make man seekers, we
become disturbers of the peace--this is what they call our crime and
blasphemy. Therefore, men give us a wide berth, warn others against our
society, afraid of the yearning and hot hunger of soul which would come
over them, were they once to hanker after a different fare from what
they light upon in their troughs every morning, gorging themselves to an
easy satiety--a different fare that would make them hunger ever anew,
and arouse them to new longings. No, comfort men; free them from their
painful Sehnsucht; teach them the foolishness of hitching their wagons
to stars; tell them that all is well with them and make them content
with any lot in life that may by chance be theirs! Then you will be
their true benefactors; then you will heal the wounds from which the
heart would otherwise so easily bleed!
Really? That is a good thing to do for men? The wise thing to say to the
heart is: Break your wings in two, so you will not be tempted to brave
the blue, to keep company with "the distant sea," to explore the Afar?
The comforting thing to do for the slave is to gild his chains, so that
he may have joy in their glittering splendor and show them off as worth
their weight in gold? How easy it would be then for the Czar of all the
Russias "to go to Berlin if it costs me my last peasant!" How easy for
the Vatican to silence the modernist! Throne and altar, an _entente
cordiale_ indeed, could then enjoy by "divine right" an unmolested and
unworried repose upon a world of dumb, blind, brute peasants. But--
If I'm designed yon lordling's slave--
By nature's law design'd--
Why was an independent wish
E'er planted in my mind?
Why did God implant _Sehnsucht_ in the heart of man? "Thou hast made us
for Thyself and the heart is restless until it rests in Thee," said
Augustine long ago. Indeed, God is but another human name for Eternal
Yearning.
All yearning is love--love that silently and secretly celebrates its
triumphal entry into the soul. If you stood at the grave of a joy and
felt pain over that which was lost, would not the pain of yearning be
the measure, the consciousness, of your newly-awakened, ever-waking
love? Would you like to calculate this yearning and exchange therefor
coldness and indifference of heart? And if you felt a love so full and
deep that moments had eternities concealed in them, even so, on the
basis of this love yearning would live more than ever, it would open up
to the soul new vistas, new goals, it would give love her life; and a
love without yearning, which did not see beyond itself, did not love
above itself, finished in that which it was, or it called its own--would
quickly cease to be love. Yes, yearning redoubles all genuine love to
man; it involves something becoming, something greater, purer, for which
love lays the foundation and gives the impulse. Only he who knows
yearning, knows what I _love_, so Mignon might have also said. There is
something unslaked, unslakable, in every love, an insatiable hunger for
more love, for better and purer love.
It is this yearning that saves love from being blind; it gives love the
strength and courage of veraciousness; it plunges the heart into a
struggle of desperation when a man of our love does not keep his
promise, when he becomes pettier and baser than we had believed of him;
and yet in this struggle it achieves the victory of faith which mounts
above all the pettiness and baseness of the man, to the certainty of its
strength, that love faileth never. In every love we love something
higher than itself, something for which the heart is destined and
endowed. This is the yearning in our love, _a will_, which stirs in all
deep feeling of the heart, and guards against the death which every
moment, sufficient only for itself, harbors. Every love, therefore, is
itself a yearning: love for truth is the power to grow beyond _a_ truth;
love for righteousness is hunger and thirst after righteousness. In all
the beauty that greets the eye and awakens exultation and joy in the
heart, the soul ripens new sensitivity for new visions of the wonders of
life, the heart widens so that it absorbs strength for new beauty and
sees new beauty even in the darkness and dust of earth. A man without
yearning is a man without love. And if one would guarantee man that
satisfaction which one prizes as the most beautiful and most blissful
lot on earth, then one must first stifle his heart or tear it from his
breast; for as long as this heart still beats, and announces in every
beat its insatiable hunger for love, so long will the man harbor and
feel his yearning, which will not let the beating heart be satisfied.
But yearning is therefore not simply suffering, not simply love--of
these we have been thinking--it is also life, the true life of man. The
man who lives only for himself, and for the passing moment, does not
live at all. And this is what Nietzsche says of man--man a transition
and an end--yearning always interring an Old, always swinging a bridge
across to a New--love loving the most distant and most future--vision
sweeping up the ages to higher man. This, then, is man's hour of great
self-contempt. All his happiness, his wealth, his knowledge, his virtue,
seems too little to fill his soul. There is insufficiency, nausea, as to
all that he esteems, a cry of wrath from the deep of his being, a cry
that sounds like madness to all who call themselves good and righteous,
to all who call their execrable smugness a delight.
But this is the great tumultuous yearning, the thunder of whose soaring
wings is forever in modern ears. It proffers man a new table of values;
forward, not backward, shall he look; love _Kinderland_, the
undiscovered land in distant oceans, that he may make amends to the
children for their being the children of their fathers!
In this song of jubilee of yearning, who does not hear the old ring,
which was once preached as glad tidings, as gospel of humanity! There,
too, it was the seeking that were saved, the hungering and not the
sated, the starving and not the full. And they, too, had their Higher
Man--the Christ they called Him, their Yearning, their Love, their Life.
They sang: For me to live is Christ; I live, yet not I; Christ lives in
me. And as long as this Yearning lived in them, they were creative
spirits. They put a new face upon the world. They transformed the world
after the image of their Higher Man. A living, a socially organized
Yearning, this is what the whole Middle Age was, with its Below and its
Above, where each lower man had in each higher man a rung of the
heavenly ladder on which he should climb to a higher existence. A
yearning hewn in stone, that was their dome; yearning they sang in their
most impressive hymns and masses; and yearning breathed all those
celestial figures as they lifted their glorified eyes to the Higher Man
of Heaven, the Man Thorn-crowned, Crucified and Risen.
Then the glow of this yearning was cooled by the cold north wind of
reality. Yearning petrified. There was no inclination to keep it from
dying. They were swift to deal it a deadly blow. They thought they had
accomplished marvels to have torn themselves loose from it. "No more
_Sehnsucht_ now," they said, "for we have found happiness!" They smirked
and they blinked. Their Higher Man died along with their yearning. The
scholars indeed had discovered that this Higher Man was only "man," a
Jewish rabbi whom the people of his day mistakenly held to be a Higher
Man, a Messiah, but who now to them themselves and to all moderns
belongs to Lower Man, to Past Man. To be sure, it goes against the grain
of all of them for their Higher Man to vanish from life, from the
yearning of man. Therefore, they seek painfully and anxiously for a
"Dignity" which they may still claim for their _human_ Jesus. Above all,
they thus forget that the Higher Man can never lie behind us, but only
before us, not beside us, on a level with us, but only above us.
Therefore, all their scholarship cannot rescue the Higher Man for us,
and cannot give us back the Great Yearning. Only the living heart can do
this, the heart that creates out of its own mystery a yearning. That
heart with this yearning will overcome and retire the man of today--all
who play the game as lords of today. The modern man of yearning looks
beyond himself, works beyond himself, for a Man as high above
present-day man as once the _Christusbild_ was above the men of the
long-lost past--a Man who will bear all the deeps of the world and all
the deeps of its woes in his heart, while at the same time thirsting in
its deepest depths for the eternities. This great yearning, this
suffering and loving yearning, this is more than all the wisdom of the
scribes, all the subtleties and hairsplittings of the theologians, this
is the sacred womb from which a Christ life is born ever and ever again.
"Only he who knows yearning, knows what I _live_!"--so might Mignon's
dear words be changed yet again. To save the Sehnsucht is to save the
soul. _Also sprach Goethe--Nietzsche!_
The Wicked to the Wise
ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE
"A brilliant mind, gone wrong!" ...
O tell me, ye who throng
The beehives of the world, grow ye not ever weary of this song?
"The way our fathers went." ...
Yes, if our days were spent
Sod-deep, beside our fathers' bones, wise, needless were your argument.
"The wisdom of the mass." ...
Thank God, it too shall pass
Like the breathed film hiding the face grayly within the silvered glass.
"All's surely for the best!" ...
Aye, so shall be confessed
By your sons' sons, marking where down we smote you as we onward
pressed.
The Viennese Dramatists
ERNA MCARTHUR
One does not know quite how the modern literary movement in Vienna
arose. Suddenly, some twenty years ago, there were some active young
writers called "Young Vienna," in a collective way, who were supposed to
be revolutionary and bent on originality. In reality these young people
had no definite literary program such as had been issued in Berlin by
the leaders of the new naturalist movement. They were a circle of
friends, who had heard of the new and wonderful things that had been
done. They came to know Ibsen and the great Russian and French
novelists; they were of the generation which was to be moved to the
utmost by the philosophy of Nietzsche. Of course these influences had
been working in the whole German-speaking world. Art was being taken
seriously again and the young people were yearning to produce something
new and original of their own.
Hauptmann had started a kind of revolution in Germany by his first play,
_Before Sunrise_, and the Viennese, who lived a little isolated in their
town, grew excited and enthusiastic over these doings.
A young writer, Hermann Bahr, was a kind of apostle for the new art in
Vienna. He was a man of agility, capable of unbounded enthusiasm, who
could go into ecstasy for all kinds of movements--for realism as well as
neo-romanticism, for Ibsen and Zola, for Maeterlinck and d'Annunzio. He
had been traveling about in Europe, had come in touch with all the
leading personalities, and had brought the news home to his Viennese
friends; he wanted to make a new Vienna in every way. A few years later
he was active in organizing the young painters, sculptors, and
architects, who evolved a very original and striking art.
So it came to pass that Hermann Bahr was considered the leader of
everything modern--which meant "crazy" to the good citizen of the day.
It was this same milieu of the citizen, the bourgeois, that produced all
the young writers. In consequence, they were absolutely anti-bourgeois
in their way of looking at things, in the very natural contrast of
fathers and sons. Hence, too, they had a certain culture, good manners,
and a predominant interest in æsthetic questions, as there had been no
occasion for them to know the primitive cares of life. But they were
tired of the narrowness and tastelessness of their milieu; they wanted
to do things differently--to live and love differently; to put art into
their surroundings, their dwellings, their dress; good taste--this had
been a tradition of the old Vienna, lost in the transition-state when
the middle-class element obtained its precedence over the old
aristocracy--was now to take its place again.