experiences, each of them worth while: the intimate life story of a
remarkable woman, the history of her ideals and thoughts as an
anarchist, a portrait of toiling America during the past four decades,
and an account of the years of military communism in the U.S.S.R. I got
what I wanted, although in each case the net gain in light is different
from what I had supposed it would be—different, I feel certain, from
what Emma Goldman herself believes her book has given.
The most enlightening point, for me, in the first volume where the
author describes her girlhood, her marriage, her entrance into the
anarchist ranks after the Chicago executions, her love affairs, her
friendships with Johann Most and Alexander Berkman, is that her
narrative is almost bare of experience and ideas. The pages fly with
gusto, Emma Goldman holds back nothing. But she has, rather amazingly,
almost nothing inward to give! Intimately, for all her good will, she
appears to remember little of her own sensations; and if there was a
period of doubt and inquiry before she accepted Kropotkin and Bakunin,
she takes her own thoughts for granted, giving us the bare conclusion. I
had a sense of Emma Goldman writing these pages of her youth; but it was
a sense of the mature woman the author, not of the young woman the
subject. And this very fact: that Emma Goldman describing her loves, her
factories and sweatshops, her cities, her encounters with magnates and
policemen, gives no direct experience of her feelings and thoughts,
helps to reveal the nature of the woman. One must make one’s own
deductions, as one might if one were actually speaking with the author.
For Emma Goldman is a presence in her book—a deep, hearty presence. She
is never the analyst or integrator of her story.
Her chief traits are goodness and energy. There is something abstract in
her élan vital, since she is unaware of causes. The Freudians would
doubtless call her career a flight from a cruel father (who became
symbolized as authority and the state). More obviously, her life was a
simple escape from the intolerable pain of inhibitions (personal and
social) and a blind rush toward that freedom which the word “anarchism”
convincingly evoked. In a life so purely dynamic, there is no pause for
thought, hence her book’s total lack of ideology; there is no room for
emotional contemplation, hence its author’s want of vivid memory. Emma
Goldman cannot be said to remember her girlhood, and its record,
pictorial or sensory, is absent from her pages. Which is to say, that
her first thirty or forty years were lived not on an intellectual, not
even on an emotional, plane; but were instinctive. Instinctive action
(if I may use this obsolete term) is automatic, and leaves no memory.
But Miss Goldman’s instinctivism must not be confused with that of
others. It is paradoxical, being extremely good and brave. Most women
who live on this level are self-indulgent, cowardly, shallow. Miss
Goldman, although she seems never to have thought, has a nature both
good and profound. At any moment of her youth, it is clear that she was
ready to give herself to her Cause. Even her sex life, one feels, was
the response of a motherly heart rather than of a lusting body. And if
she followed the dictates of her body, the wonder is that even selfish
impulse moved her to constant sacrifice and the acceptance of suffering.
This paradox convinces me that there are really persons in the world
like the “free souls” on whose actual existence Rousseau, Proudhon and
the other romantic anarchists based their theories. No wonder Emma
Goldman was an anarchist—and without having to think about it. Her
innocent nature predicates and incarnates the anarchist creed. Even in
her appetites, she is a woman instinctively good and pure: a woman whose
blithe spirit only the alien contacts of official law could poison.
The pages are, of course, full of references to anarchist comrades.
Directly, she analyzes them no more than herself; but her own vitality
imbues with life her portraits of men like Berkman, Reitman, Brady and
Most. Like the author, these figures belong to the romantic movement.
They are an issue of the same social forces which gave the Atalas,
Renés, Adolphes and Werthers. The key to these characters is a
deliberate return to “self”—a return which is a reaction from a system,
social and intellectual, that was losing its vitality: so that the
romantic return to “self” was literally the escape of “life” from the
old Western order. In the profounder romantics (Rousseau, Blake,
Beethoven, Stendhal, Balzac, Whitman, Nietzsche, etc.), this return to
“self” was sufficiently thorough to reveal the self’s cosmic
implications and therewith the nucleus of a whole new social fabric.
Intellectually weaker romantics did not go so far. They discovered their
own yearning ego, and loved it, and regarded the world as a mere bar to
its divine trajectory. Their ideas of social justice were
rationalizations of their lyric need of freedom. They were the
anarchists. They knew nothing of the objective world, save that it got
in their way. They knew nothing even of each other, since in the last
analysis they knew nothing of themselves. They were “pure being,” and
since “pure being” is a rationalized fantasy, their own lives have an
abstract air, a lack of body and of reason.
This _unreality_ of the anarchists is perfectly revealed by Emma
Goldman. It is epitomized in the _attentat_ on Frick by her lifelong
comrade Berkman. Young Berkman (a very different man from the mature
Berkman of later years) is as good as his girl friend. He _knows_
nothing, either: not how to make a bomb, not how to speak English, not
the crucial differences between an American magnate and the lords of
Tsarist Russia; not (at the end) how to aim a pistol. His act is a “pure
act” in a cruel, complex world that has thrown him off, so that he wills
to destroy it. The anarchist is a tangential force from the social
center, but in his naïve egoism he conceives himself as the center.
Thus, by immediate logic, the legalized social world becomes the
centrifugal tangent—and he erects a philosophy or builds a bomb, to wipe
it out.
Volume One of Emma Goldman’s story might, then, be called the premise of
anarchism: there are really born in the world persons instinctively
good, whom the complex tissue of laws tortures and maims. Volume Two is
the conclusion of anarchism: the fate of such persons in the real world
that persists. In her record of the past ten or fifteen years, the
author is closer to the subject. We no longer have a woman of sixty
trying to re-create a girl. We know what the young Miss Goldman was, by
what she failed to record: we have the contemporary in a more positive
record. For this other woman has been forced, by her frustrations, from
the instinctive rush of her élan vital to the emotional plane. The
natural mother blindly fighting for her children becomes the
contemplative mother who can no longer wield arms, who can only suffer.
The bud of the young woman’s goodness blooms into a dark flower of pain.
Now Emma Goldman has memory. Her last pages, in which she gives us a War
America and a Russia of her own, are suffused with tragic light.
b.
I do not wish to appear to minimize the intellectual contribution of the
great anarchist writers. They established a theory of the state which
Marx accepted. Indeed, the bitter war between anarchism and communism is
one of methods toward a common goal—the classless and stateless society.
As anarchism evolved, however, it became an unrealistic fixation on the
end, whereas the Marxists assumed the task of establishing the
ideological and technical means that might bring the end into existence.
The anarchists (in the contemporary jargon) became a dissociation from
the context of life: they represented that extreme of social suffering
which touches madness in so far as madness is a dislocation from the
whole. And against them, Marx brought his organic rationale to the cause
of revolution. He counteracted the instinctive anarchist flight from an
unjust world by making reasonable the relation between the rebellious
impulse and the capitalist system, and by integrating social revolution
as an organic (dialectic) issue of our social order. In this effort, it
is natural that all the leading Marxists—Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin,
etc.—should have made conscious war against the anarchists. But it is a
beautiful stroke of fortune which led a leading anarchist, like Emma
Goldman, into articulate contact with the first Marxist nation.
Her bitter rejection of bolshevism is well known. She went to Russia in
1920, ready to defend and to collaborate. A year and a half later, she
and Berkman left, heartbroken by what she names the betrayal of the
Cause for which she has given her life. Her record is full, and is—for
reasons unknown to herself—the most significant part of her book. It is
the final revelation of the utter unreality of her own kind of
revolution. Emma Goldman found in Russia a ruthless state employing
repression of all kinds—censorship, imprisonment, execution—in the
effort to survive both the inherited chaos of the Tsarist regime and the
seventeen White armies that were attacking it. This was enough for Miss
Goldman: the old hated state at its old methods. She had never stopped,
in her assaults on bourgeois society, to understand it; why, now, should
she stop to understand the real problems of the proletarian dictatorship
in Russia? Contexts are beyond Emma Goldman, whether they be White or
Red. The whole activity of relations is beyond her.
Her book, in its finality, becomes the tragedy of good will and a good
heart unguided by a sense of the Whole. The impulse that had made her a
rebel was generous; her methods of rebellion were brave and pure. But
rebellion became the automatic habit of her life; her one positive
response to the objective world of men and of values. If she had
_understood_ the evils of bourgeois society, she would have understood
the inevitability of their survival in the transition period which she
witnessed in Russia. Her descriptions of what she saw are factual
enough: Emma Goldman is incapable of deliberate falsehood. But she is
also incapable of truth, which is the placing of facts in their vital
context.
Her failure to understand Russia is the anarchist failure to understand
and hence to work upon the world. Her story of a great anarchist (there
is something about this woman that is great) becomes the most eloquent
defense of communism. If the revolutionary impulse can go so far astray
through blind emotion, become so hysterical, so impotent, so unjust, and
finally so destructive, the Marxian method is imperative.
But if the lesson of this book went no further, it would scarcely
deserve the space that I have given it. Anarchism as a system and method
of revolution is dead: communism has killed it. What remains in the
revolutionary world is the menace of a fixation, different but as deadly
as that which in a hundred years turned the fertile beginnings of Godwin
and Proudhon into so pitiful an end. Anarchism has died of intellectual
dry rot induced by its eccentric emotionalism. There are signs that
orthodox communism is threatened by a dogmatic rationalistic creed (by
no means discoverable in Marx) whose inadequate depth and breadth would
ultimately exclude the creative energies of mankind.
The intelligent communist will not gloat over the tragic story of Emma
Goldman. He will bear in mind that a revolutionary cause must be
constantly Creative, and that to this end it must be vigilant against
mental or emotional habits that exclude the right of fresh discoveries.
To bring a new mankind into the world is a long act of birth menaced at
every instant by the nearness of death.
_1931_
6. THE BOOK OF LEO STEIN
The man whose conversations about art have gone into the nurture of most
of the important artists of our day in Paris has written a book. For one
who knows the author, it will be hard to dissociate these printed pages
from the voice of the man who wrote them. To have had acquaintance with
this tireless seeker, watched the beautiful curves of his mind moving
for hours of uninterrupted discourse upon a mental action, and to have
relished his piquant admixture of spiritual humbleness, intellectual
passion and ascetic distrust of all passions, is not the sort of
experience to be overlooked, just because one of the best talkers of our
day has turned to writing. Mr. Stein’s work is, moreover, in the best
sense, conversation. From beginning to end, his curt and quiet tone is a
manner of speaking. The color of the man stands in his most abstracted
thought. He has written a volume in which all thinking and all topics
are so securely focused to a personal rhythm, that—whatever else—his
essay is a work of art.
Mr. Stein has a poor opinion of philosophy, and of what esthetics, at
its hand, has suffered. Mr. Stein, moreover, has loved art. He has, in
consequence, attempted what might be called a “rescue.” The sentimental
mists of philosophic thought must be cut away from his beloved; the
basis of the esthetic act must be presented in simple, matter-of-fact,
assumptionless terms. This is the program. Actually, what Mr. Stein has
achieved is a statement as subjective as Amiel’s journal: a
self-portrayal which is both beautiful and significant, since its hero
is so archetypical of his time.
With the purely technical part of his examination of esthetics, there
can be no quarrel. It is superb. Mr. Stein has studied the _picture_
with a combined sensitivity and intelligence of which I, at least, can
name no even approximate equal. To read his discussion of focus,
interval, the physiology and analogies of rhythm, distortion, tension,
composition, is to be aware of mastery and to know what sentimental
perfume most literary art appreciation—from Goethe to Elie
Faure—consists of. Mr. Stein’s technique for the practical taste of art
seems to me to be perfect. His chapter, for example, on “Pictorial
Seeing,” in which he makes clear how the eyes can turn a dish into a
picture, how this ideal act is the basis of esthetics and must
inevitably determine the distorting, flattening and focalizing, is a
masterpiece; and the man who understands it is ready to see pictures.
Moreover, the book is filled with apophthegmatic observations on life,
the ego, civilization (which, to Mr. Stein, is yet far from dawning),
that should make his volume precious to all lovers of delicious talk.
Indeed, the work is so complete in its foreground—the physiology of the
esthetic object—that its utter lack of background—the matrix, causality
and dynamics of art—becomes the clearer. Mr. Stein makes plain how in a
picture it is upon the depth dimension that esthetic success hinges:
how, indeed, much European art has failed because of the failure to
throw the focus organically back and to make alive the planes which
support and enact the forward action. And in this criticism he has given
the measure of himself.
If, having so amply learned from Leo Stein how to transform the dish
before our eyes into a picture, one were to ask him: (a) why one should
do this; (b) why anyone has ever done this; (c) why and how this act is
universally linked with the entire history of man’s spirit; (d) why
feeling and value accrue from this act, and (e) what is the nature of
this process whereby the self is enhanced, one would receive no answer.
As I have said, Mr. Stein is “against” all philosophy and metaphysics.
He takes furious pride in telling us that he has never been able to
understand the writers on these subjects: and he makes clear that, if
you think you have understood them, you are suffering from a delusion.
“Philosophy,” he tells us, “is a pseudo-knowledge which attempts to add
a dimension to human capacity.” “Mysticism,” he adds, “is sentimentality
taken seriously.” The entire effort to establish truth from facts, or
the real from our complex of thought and sense and act, being
“philosophical” or “mystic,” is inadequate and acrimoniously barred from
his discussion of esthetics. “Esthetics gives us fact, not truth,” he
tells us. The work of art is a cognitive object, an object by means of
which men may know but which they must “stay outside of.”
Mr. Stein sticks about as heroically to his backgroundless thesis as he
could, without becoming inarticulate altogether. What value exists in
that rhythmic synthesis of ingredients intercepted by self, and called
art, unless the unity achieved conveys an experience beyond the matters
abstracted? Why should we care to know a Cezanne landscape, if this
especial focusing of hills and houses is a mere unification of
themselves? Mr. Stein, in refusing to ask such questions or to place his
facts in a context that inherently transcends them, dislocates every
fact, every question he discusses; as assuredly as he would dislocate a
dish (in a picture) if he essayed to represent its planes without the
planes that intersect them.
To render art intelligible by isolating it from those causes and
associations which invade the philosophic realm is just about as wise as
it would be to employ a language after abstracting the meaning of the
words. (This, by the way, is not far from the method of Mr. Stein’s
illustrious and ridiculous sister, Gertrude.) In his fear of unproved
assumptions, Leo Stein has made a two-dimensional picture of esthetics.
For the expert, his study of the traits of art in analytical cross
section is instructive. But for the reader who is really seeking an
alphabet of esthetics, the result is arid.
Leo Stein represents, in his attitude, the philosophical defeatism of
our day. Because so many little boys have burned their fingers, he will
eschew fire and live cold. There is something positively heroic in this
spectacle of a man aborting the creative process of his mind, because so
many births in the past (as he sees it) have been abortions. Even worse,
Leo Stein, having no sympathy with the birth pangs of the world, decides
there shall be no more birth at all. To this end, the work of art is
reduced to a mere rationally cognitive object, with self as a static
co-ordinate of the cognition; and that entire process of dynamic osmosis
between self and not-self, _which is the history of culture_, is put
away as sentimental nonsense.
His subject has its revenge upon him. You cannot trace more than a
diagram of the means of esthetics, unless you know that the
configuration of facts in any work of art establishes for both artist
and observer an experienced entity called truth, which as radically
differs from these facts as water does from H_{2} and O, or as a human
body differs from the sum of inorganic chemicals within it.
And—unfortunately for Mr. Stein—you cannot talk about anything with
perseverance, without having to choose between a philosophy of your own
(which is at least alive and yours) and a philosophy that is unconscious
and not yours and uncontrolled.
This is the fate of the antiphilosophic Leo Stein. He says, for
instance: “Some believe there are quite a lot of emotions. Some believe
there are only three. I doubt very much that there is more than one,
which is just emotion.” This sounds like a brave refusal to “assume.” It
is really an assumption based on an atomistic philosophy whose tenet was
that you must split up psychic states just as physicists split up matter
into atoms. I might respond that there are no emotions—only organic
contexts from which the mind may abstract analytic elements which
partake solely of the mind process and which it has called emotions. I
don’t say my organic philosophy would be truer. The point is that Mr.
Stein, in disagreeing with me, is as philosophical as I am.
Throughout his book, such unconscious philosophical assumptions are
present: and they are inadmissible because _he_ does not admit them. He
says, for instance:
Esthetics gives us fact, not truth. But fact to be interesting to
adults in the long run must be true. Only science and practice can
judge validity beyond the mere aspect. The world as it is
scientifically known is not a whole world, but the nature of that
world is such that it can find in science a partial reflection that is
true enough to work. Our esthetic perception of the world must not
contradict this knowledge.
If this is not philosophy—philosophy of a very classic mold—then
Aristotle was a landscape painter.
I have here no space to isolate the assumptions which color the esthetic
of Leo Stein; nor to work out the inadequacy of his definition of art as
a cognitive object. The task would be the more difficult, in that he
forbears from the method of statement of his first principles—a method
which makes it so easy to attack the systematic thinkers. I detect,
under Mr. Stein’s abnegation of first principles about the “real” and
the “true” and the “good,” the cowardice of our epoch. Every man who
lives should know that his _life_ is an assumed, rationally unproved
first principle. The real and the true are categories of our existence
and enter as functions into all our acts. Our sole choice is between a
creative and a passive attitude toward the first principles thus
_given_. So far as I know, the one honest, if vain, effort to reject
first principles is suicide. Much of the brilliant intellectual activity
of our day is a comfortable surrogate for self-destruction.
_1927_
7. REFLECTIONS ON SPENGLER
Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West,” from 1918 to 1926, sold in
Germany almost a hundred thousand copies. It would be inspiriting to
believe that a profound historical and philosophical work could have so
large a sale in any modern land. But the originality of Spengler does
not reside in his erudition; it is poetic. The book’s metaphysics is
eclectic rather than sound; its historical research is vast rather than
uniformly deep. “Der Untergang des Abendlandes” is an epos, a myth. So,
if Germany has not bought a hundred thousand copies of a great
philosophic work, it has at least welcomed a personal mythos of deep
interest: one whose elements are philosophy, history, esthetics: one
whose comprehension requires of the reader a great familiarity with
comparative history and comparative religion.
I think at once of “The Outline of History” of H. G. Wells, which had an
analogous popular appeal in America and England. Wells, like Spengler,
under the guise of writing history, offered a thesis and a myth. Here
the analogy stops. The story in Wells is a vulgar, obvious narrative of
“events”: his thesis is the most illiterate notion of “human progress”
and his myth is a mere flatulent, optimistic dream. Spengler’s work is
formally beautiful. He builds, not by storytelling, but by the
presentation and analysis of analogies. And he concludes on a note as
darkly glamorous as it is pessimistic. The Winter is upon us, he
declares in doom words that are closer to the note of the prophets than
he would care to admit. Our salvation is to perform, nobly and
perfectly, the work of Winter: to understand ourselves, to set down as
the Seal of our glorious dying life a ruthless scrutiny of what we were.
I shall criticize Spengler harshly enough. Let it be, however, always
clear that Spengler has written a work of heroic poetic power. The land
that dared to welcome such a volume still possesses culture.
The book’s main thesis seems to be disguised in the title. “The Decline
of the West”—is it not a misnomer? Has not Spengler really written a
history and a morphology of Cultures? But no. Though the title may
mislead—may, indeed, have misled its author and its readers, it is a
true self-confession of the poet’s veritable purpose. Spengler has
composed this erudite, overpoweringly brilliant thesis on the anatomy
and physiology of cultures, in order to prove that _his_ Culture (the
Culture of the West) is dying. This is where his heart lies. He has
written a swan song. And since he is a citizen of the world whose most
valid mythic material is no longer the personal legend, the hero, the
war, the romance; is, on the other hand, metaphysics, history,
epistemology and science, Spengler has employed these elements to make
his tragic tale.