emigrated from his native Italy at the age of seventeen, and was
precipitated into our whirl of economic struggle. He worked in
Pennsylvania in the coal mines and, later, assumed the position which he
still holds: that of editor of the Italian revolutionary weekly, _Il
Proletario_. In the now famous Lawrence strike he was one of those who
were most valuable in stimulating the sense of solidarity among the
workers and in maintaining their enthusiasm. Together with Joseph J.
Ettor and Caruso, he spent several months in jail, awaiting his trial on
a faked-up murder charge. They were acquitted, not so much because of
the legal justice of their cause but because of the fact that their
condemnation would have resulted in the paralysis of the textile
industry. With their threat of general strike the workers forced the
courts of their masters to deliver up to them their captive spokesmen.
The excitement and publicity resultant from the Lawrence Strike brought
into prominence the ideas of Giovannitti and others who were espousers
of the Syndicalist idea, which in this country is expressed through the
organization known as the Industrial Workers of the World.
It is necessary to have some idea of these matters in order to
appreciate the _leit motif_ of this book. All through it flares that
spirit of impatient revolt, that spurning of most of the scaffolding of
our decrepit civilization which is usually held up for admiration to the
budding youth of this country. Courts of law, churches, and parliaments
all fall under the blinding fire of the bitter contempt of this workman
in revolt.
Despite occasional faults in form or stress--and we must remember that
Giovannitti is writing in an alien tongue--the poems are vibrant with
life and some of them express with truest art things which are not
always considered by our academic friends to be at all within the
province of poetry.
Sometimes the formal verse forms are used and, at other times, the poet
has recourse to the free rhythmic mode of Whitman. Personally, I think
that the best work is in the free verse. _The Walker_, a jail experience
of Giovannitti's, is a wonderful piece of work and should be bracketed
with _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_. The finest thing in the book is _The
Cage_, a poem which appeared originally in _The Atlantic Monthly_, and
which is one of the few things which have preserved that journal from
irredeemable mediocrity.
_The Cage_ expresses the thoughts and emotions of the writer when he
stood with his two comrades in the dock of Salem courthouse. The
contrast is drawn between the outworn formalities and rites of the law
and the lusty life of labor,--between the dead lives of the dismal
practitioners of a stilted and tyrannical formula and the life of
vigorous conflict of the awakening working-class.
This is the inside of the court-room:
In the middle of the great greenish room stood the green iron
cage.
All was old, and cold and mournful, ancient with the double antiquity
of heart and brain in the great greenish room,
Old and hoary was the man who sat upon the faldstool, upon the
fireless and godless altar,
Old were the tomes that mouldered behind him on the dusty shelves.
Old was the man upon his left who awoke with his cracked voice the
dead echoes of dead centuries, old the man upon his right
who wielded a wand; and old all those who spoke to him and
listened to him before and around the green iron cage.
Old were the words they spoke, and their faces were drawn and white
and lifeless, without expression or solemnity; like the
ikons of old cathedrals.
For of naught they knew, but of what was written in the old, yellow
books. And all the joys and the pains and the loves and
hatreds and furies and labors and strifes of man, all the
fierce and divine passions that battle and rage in the
heart of man, never entered into the great greenish room
but to sit in the green iron cage.
Senility, dullness and dissolution were all around the green iron
cage, and nothing was new and young and alive in the great
room, except the three men who were in the cage.
And, then, when the prosecutor speaks, we have an insight into the
fervor with which Giovannitti greets the overthrow of the old and the
budding of the new:
... he said (and dreary as a wind that moans thru the crosses
of an old graveyard was his voice):
"I will prove to you that these three men in the cage are criminals
and murderers and that they ought to be put to death."
Love, it was then that I heard for the first time the creak of the
moth that was eating the old painting and the old books,
and the worm that was gnawing the old bench, and it was
then that I saw that all the old men around the great
greenish room were dead.
They were dead like the old man in the painting, save that they could
still read the old books he could read no more, and still
spoke and heard the old words he could speak and hear no
more, and still passed the judgment of the dead, which he
could no more pass, upon the mighty life of the world
outside that throbbed and thundered and clamored and roared
the wonderful anthem of human labor to the fatherly justice
of the Sun.
To me such stuff as this means a hundred times more than a thousand
sonnets to a mistress' eye-lash, or than the weak maudlinities of an
absinthe-soaked eroto-dabbler, wailing puling repentance to a pale
Christ. It is compact of life--life as it is today, made, not for the
tittillation of dilletantes, but for the enjoyment and inspiration of
men who can appreciate the meat of life redolent of sweat and blood and
tears.
This is Giovannitti's picture of the Republic, after it had been gained
with blood and sacrifice:
When night with velvet-sandaled feet
Stole in her chamber's solitude,
Behold! she lay there naked, lewd,
A drunken harlot of the street,
With withered breasts and shaggy hair
Soiled by each wanton, frothy kiss,
Between a sergeant of police
And a decrepit millionaire.
Love poems also figure in the book, but the dominant note is that of
conflict. Giovannitti has realized the pregnant fact that in struggle is
the greatest joy, that the ecstasy of growth and striving is worth more
that the bovine placidity of "happiness." At the end of his love-song,
_The Praise of Spring_, he says:
But shall I sing of love now, I who could only sing to the
tune of the clarions of war?
And shall I forget for a woman my black frothing horse that neighs
after the twanging arrows in the wind?
And shall I not lose my strength when her arms shall encircle me
where thou hast girt me with the sword, O Gea, my mother
immortal?
Giovannitti makes no claim for inclusion in Parnassian galleries. He
believes that deeds count for more than words, and he essays but to make
a handful of war-songs for the pleasure of his comrades.
Still may my song, before the sun's
Reveille, speed the hours that tire,
While they are cleaning up their guns
Around the cheery bivouac fire.
And so, these are the rough-hewn songs of a man; of one who goes his way
with his love upholding him and the Vision burning within him and the
sound of battle forever in his ears and the whole-hearted hate of his
enemy to spur him, and the stalwart comradeship of his fellows to make
dear the thorny way.
The Nietzschean Love of Eternity
GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER
After all, there have been great wars before this pan-European
cataclysm; and, naturally enough, according to the psychological law of
the expansion of the emotions, men have transferred their experiences of
time to the content of eternity. Thus, amid the abomination of
desolation which the Thirty Years' War brought upon the German
Fatherland, one Johannes Rist, a clergyman residing in the neighborhood
of Hamburg, sang his symptomatic song:
"O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort!
Du Schwert, das durch die Seele bohrt!
O Anfang sonder Ende!
O Ewigkeit, Zeit ohne Zeit,
Ich weiss vor lauter Traurigkeit,
Nicht, wo ich mich hinwende!"
The thunder and blood of war are in it. The horrors of the war long have
passed, but not those of the song. Today you may hear the old hymn sung
from new hymn-books in German churches. Today still, school children
commit it to memory in their schools--with what profound and terrible
impression, who can say? All the pains which little children feel so
quiveringly with their defenseless and susceptible natures, all these
will continue unbrokenly in eternity. On this bank and shoal of time,
children easily and happily forget the tribulations of a bygone hour--in
eternity, never, never again! But might there not be also an eternity of
childish play and joy? Even so, that could not tip the scale in view of
the possibility of a comfortless and cruel eternity; especially since
the possibility becomes a probability, and the probability a certainty,
owing to the fact that the children are taught to consider themselves as
lost and damned sinners--in Adam's fall they sinned all! Consequently
the remote hope of bliss in "Jerusalem the golden with milk and honey
blest" could not assuage the grief nor silence the terror and torture
that filled the child mind. "Would that there were no eternity!"--often
this must have been the secret thought of German children, and not of
these alone.
This is the eternity of fear.
From the nursery and school to the world of thought! From gruesome
pictures and poetry of the enigma of eternity to the solution in systems
of the philosophers and theologians. From Rist of the Thirty Years' War
to Spinoza with imperturbable philosophic calm--such was the great
change through which many a German child passed--Spinoza who won his
deepest insight into life by viewing all things _sub specie
aeternitatis_. Or from Rist to Schleiermacher, who unveiled the august
mystery of humanness as eternity in the heart--as eternity internal,
dynamic, living, present, not external, mechanical, fixed, and future.
It was the great transition from orthodoxy to romanticism.
Or else from all these men to _Friedrich Nietzsche_, him that was the
godless one, who, in the end of the ages, also sang a song, a new song,
of eternity. He both celebrated eternity in song and made no problem of
it. He lived it and loved it as his first and truest love--plighted his
soul's troth in unwavering loyalty: "Denn ich liebe dich, o Ewigkeit!"
From dull and gloomy dreams and anxious fears did this eternity awaken
him, from mortal ills did it redeem his life. Nietzsche had wistfully
peered into the world's enigmatic darkness, his seeking and skeptical
soul had chafed over the riddles and contradictions of life--no meaning,
he cried, in this senseless play of life and death, truth and error; and
only illusion and folly in all that men called joy and sorrow. There
came to him, then, revelation of a new, of an eternal life. The present,
with all the kaleidoscopic changes of life's little day, makes ready its
own recurrence, each part of time being but a ring linked with the next,
the whole becoming the ring of eternity, the true marriage ring of
humanity--the seal and stay of an eternal bond between man and
Ever-creative, Ever-reincarnating Life!
Ich liebe dich, o Ewigkeit. Perfect love casts out fear. This is the
eternity of love. The godless one would lead the German heart, and all
hearts, from "_Donnerworte_" and "_Schwerte_," from the _fear_ of
eternity to the _love_ of eternity.
That is what Nietzsche would do. But is such an undertaking worth while
in a day like ours? What does man care about eternity--his life so swift
and short that he does not know on one day what he did or thought or
wanted the day before? His treasures in time, will not his heart be
there also, seeking its right and content there? Money ruling the world,
time ruling money, why talk of eternity at all? A jolly hour, a sprig of
mirth plucked by the way, is not that what the man of modern culture
longs for, is it not enough to satisfy such longing as his? The earth
overpopulated as it is with _Augenblicksmenschen_, as Nietzsche would
say, and not with _Ewigkeitsmenschen_, why recall the love and hope of a
long lost past?
Such queries may give us pause, but they may not stampede us. We may not
forget that Professor Münsterberg, of Harvard, has written a great book
bearing the impressive title, _The Eternal Values_. Nor may we be blind
to the evidence that the thought so clearly and singularly espoused by
the bearers of the better ideals of our new time is that of _the
imminent and constant eternity in the human heart_, as unfolded by
Spinoza and Schleiermacher and Nietzsche. Indeed, the question as to
_what values are eternal values_, this eternity question, is central in
our modern culture. Very superficial indeed would be our evaluation of
modern life, most un-understood indeed would be the riddle of the soul
of this life, did we ignore the ever clearer, ever mightier longing for
eternity in this soul's abyss, and the unification of all deeper spirits
upon the high task of giving an eternal content to our culture.
By taking some illustrations, one can see the need to supply the latter
profound view to the former superficial judgment, if one is to do
justice to the new movements of life in the modern world.
There is your modern poet. At first sight he seems to lack the
illumination of that eternal light which never was on land or sea. You
see the scorching sun beating upon the lone pilgrim as he plods through
the burning sand to a goalless goal. You see faded, pale shadows. You do
not meet with an idea that makes you feel that the poet yearns to
interpret some eternal thought to this life of ours. Instead, life
speaks only of itself and from itself. This is an abomination in the
eyes of those who call themselves _Ewigkeitsmenschen_. They call it
naturalistic, materialistic art. They upbraid an era in which a poet may
dare to dissociate his poetry from the eternal ideal. Then you look
again, you read more carefully, and you see the whole matter
differently. The eternity that men claimed for their _thought_ is indeed
gone. But eternity itself, the eternity of life, that is not gone, that
abides. This realistic man of modern poetry, the more really he is
apprehended, stands before us as the embodiment of a _necessity_, a
necessity that transcends the individual, yet lives and weaves in him, a
necessity that enunciates the law of life in the destiny of the
individual--power of darkness or dawn of a new day! But necessity, law
of life, this is but another name for eternity.
And there again is your modern painter. He, too, presents us with a bit,
often a tiny bit, of reality, of nature. A rotten trunk of some old
tree; a dilapidated hut on a ledge; some God-forsaken nook of earth,
lost and forgotten of man; a bent and broken man with his hoe; some poor
wretch with pistol against his skull; some traveller bleeding unbandaged
by the roadside--there they all are in the galleries of our modern
realism. But look again, and you will see that the keen observant eye of
your artist serves an artist's heart, seeks and finds eternity, and
directs our slower vision to the eternal mystery he has found, the most
inspiring of all mysteries--viz., greatness in the least and lowest,
glory and beauty in the offensive and repellant, invaluable human worth
and nobility in the depraved and downtrodden!
There also is your man of science as he moves out along new paths.
Storming the sky, unlocking all the eternities so long sought for behind
the world, what does the scientist's supreme power and consecration
consist in but his steadfast and strenuous search for eternity? He not
only seeks, he finds. He finds eternal life and eternal love in the
daintiest fern, in the tiniest lichen. In the very dust beneath our feet
he descries what was there before men were at all. He points us to men
as they emerge from the unplumbed æonian abyss, bearing in their bodies
still visible and tangible traces of an eternal life. He reveals an
eternal content of being in all that lives and weaves and moves.
Truly, if there is no sign of an eternity in which we live, there is no
sign of an eternity at all. But if you were to bring to its simplest and
truest expression all that is great and overmastering in the life of the
human spirit today, you would then have once again the exultant
Zarathustra song: "Ich liebe dich, o Ewigkeit!" All that lends true
worth to the life that now is and is to be, is contained in this song. A
_present_ eternity we seek as the one thing needful. What we love must
be near us, we must feel it and grasp it. Be it never so remote, it is
the magic of love to bring the remote nigh our hearts, or, better still,
to conquer space and time, so that there is no near and no far, only a
life and love that is eternal!
To create such Ewigkeitsmenschen is the great goal of the new life, the
prophecy of a new culture. For this new culture we need men who feel
something in their own being that uplifts them above all the experience
of the present, much as they may seem imprisoned therein, men who
dominate life in a royal fashion, men who in confident freedom do not
mind the storms which would hurl them from their path. We need men who
survey the great connections of the world from peak to peak and
overbridge them with their own souls, men who release destiny from its
isolation and articulate it in the eternal cycle of human life, men
whose own being contains all life according to its eternal substance,
uttering their "yea and amen" to all that is called life as they
blissfully surrender to the beauty of existence. This is the great
apocalypse, life's cryptic mystery-manual, whose seven seals the
poet-prophet of this new culture, Friedrich Nietzsche, has broken.
What is yet to be? What will a day, a year, bring forth? If the eye is
far-seeing and far-seeking, what will the next century bring forth? The
darkness tenting like thick clouds upon the mountains of the future
mystifies, and the days, the times, the years, the centuries, coerce man
under the burden of all their darknesses until he is a-weary even before
he has taken up his pilgrimage into the untrodden. Then there flashes
from the love of eternity a clear light which kindles the light of the
future: _we ourselves are this light!_ Our existence is the cloud
hanging heavily over the hills, cloud with prophetic and positive light,
from which redeeming beams shall break.
Behind us lies the whole long grim past, a huge grave, with countless
gravestones--the silent city of the dead which holds all that has been
ever dear to the heart, all youth with their glad faces and forms, all
glances of love, all divine moments. And all the dead compel all the
living to conflict that the living may be controlled by life and not by
death. From their graves the dead direct their deadliest shafts at the
heart, at the living, to drag them down into the embrace of death. But
something stirs in man that cannot be wounded, cannot be buried--_man's
will_. The will bursts all tombs hewn from rocks, demolishes all graves,
creates resurrections out of them, smashes churches and abbeys that
heaven's pure eye may gaze through their rent roofs--the will building
and bearing eternities! And who, through love of eternity, controls
future and past, finds the earth quivering with new creative words, is
himself such a word, even binds good and evil together, making the
evilest worthy of being the sauce of life.
Ewigkeitsmensch!--the wind from the unexplored swells his sail,
seafarer's gale roaring in from the boundless. When time and space
vanish from sight, vanish coasts also, the last fetters drop away: the
body feels its weight and burden is past! How shall we go about rescuing
ourselves from this torture and casting off this oppression?
In a strange fanatical vision, Nietzsche shows how he became an
eternity-preacher, an eternity-sculptor. The vision is more novel than
that of the Ascension which biblical legends narrate. The disciples of
Jesus gaze upon their Master mounting heavenward into the clouds, and
they hear strange words of the Christ coming down from heaven again to
abide with them all the days till the end of the world. Nietzsche does
not speak of the second advent of the Christ, of a recurrence of a
single item of being, but of an eternal recurrence of all things, of all
men, all moments and happenings of all life! Eternal return--to live
life so that we would live each and all of it over again--to live it all
so that it would be worth being not once but once again forever and
forever--to be joint creator of a cosmos in which what is shall be
fit--to be once yet again everlastingly--that is our, and Being's, final
flawless test, passing which, no Great White Throne may fill us with
dismay! There is the heart's harrowing cry: Could I but begin and live
it--all over again, how different I would do! Would we like to do all
that we have done over again? do them again eternally? Would we like to
say and hear all the senseless prattle over again forever? Horrible
thought! It were well to live and speak so that our existence can stand
the fiery test of a Nietzschean eternity--live now in a way that it
would be worth while to live again. It were indeed well to fill each
fleeting moment of time with what is worthy to be the content of
eternity. Eternity the criterion of time--that is really a great
thought. To be sure, there is no eternal recurrence, and it is not clear
that Nietzsche meant to say that there was. Faith in the eternal
recurrence of all things, Nietzsche means this,--so at all events it
seems to me,--to be a mirror in which we may recognize the true full
worth of our life, a life in which there is nothing to be forgotten,
nothing to be regretted, nothing done to be undone, because all is freed
from the limitations of space and time and from external contingencies,
and stands there in its great eternal necessity, because eternal, good,
and godly even, in this necessity itself. Then we would not only live
our life over again precisely as we lived it, we would live it in the
light of the eternity again, ever again. No error, and folly would we
then wish out of our life, because in this love of eternity it is
precisely from error and folly that the truth grows which lights our
faith. No weakness, no stumbling and falling, would we wish out of our
life, because in the eternal illumination, power grows from all these
experiences which enables us to mount above them, and gives us the
victory in every bitter battle of life. No, our life is not lived from
the right point of view, until we can sing it out in the song whose name
is--Recurrence! We do not know the worth of the honor until we can
dedicate to it that song whose meaning is: "_In alle Ewigkeit!_"
Ye say that a good cause will even sanctify war! I tell you, it
is the good war that sanctifies every cause!--_Nietzsche._
The Restaurant Violin
GEORGE SOULE
(_Another picture of our violinist_)
A brook
Which murmured me to high afternoon fields,
Where came a shower,
And after that, the long, straight call of the low sun
To the green-gold and winking purple of every leaf
And the long shadows between the hills.
And every leaf was glad
And the earth was comforted,
Breathing up freshly,
And the hills were full of joy,
And the clouds remained in the west
In ecstasy of color because of the sun.
Out of hidden trees
A wood-thrush sang.
And then I heard the restaurant--
Crashing of spoons on trays,
The dip, dip, dip, of the big rotary fans,
The chink of the cash-register, the clatter of money into the tray,
And people talking loudly, with mirthless laughter,
And munching, munching, munching.
Over it mocked the violin--
The rain fell and the sun called,
And there returned unto the violin,
And entered with glory into the violin
Final loneliness.
Then the pianist selected something from a musical comedy.
Editorials
_Our Third New Poet_
Maxwell Bodenheim was born in Natchez, Mississippi, twenty-two years
ago, was educated in the Memphis, Tennessee, schools, served three years
in the U. S. regular army, and is at present studying law and art in
Chicago. He has written poetry for six years without having had a single
poem accepted--in fact, he has had exactly three hundred and seventeen
rejection slips from the astute editors of American magazines. He
addresses to them the following poem:
_The Poet Speaks To Those Who Scorn Him_