advice on the subject was lacking, is a remarkable document. It is full
of useful information and practical hints to parents and people
interested in the education of children, even in this day of scientific
methods and conflicting authorities. But as we might have expected, the
discipline reminds us a little of the German "Kaserne." The spilling of
a little milk on the tablecloth was punished by enforced abstinence from
all foods except bread and salt. Punishment as a remedy for an offense
is always wrong, because it does not prove the responsibility of the act
to the child.
The spirit in which pastor Witte went about his task is shown in the
following passage:
The firmness in executing my purpose went so far that even our
house dog knew the emphasis of the words: "I must work," and
calmed down the moment we spoke these words softly into his ears.
Almost from the outset this made an enormous impression on Karl.
He soon became accustomed to look upon his work time as something
sacred.
The development of intellectual and moral courage, the most important
qualities any man or woman may possess, were neglected, at least were
not given the attention they deserve. To inculcate in the child a desire
for liberty and social equality, he overlooks entirely.
The father is really the more remarkable of the two. A product of the
method of education prevailing at the time, he stands as a refutation of
his own theories. Pastor Witte conceived and carried out an idea
successfully. He did something, at least theoretically, worth while. The
son died at eighty-three. Now what difference would it have made either
to the boy or to the world if his appointment to the teaching staff of
Berlin had come at a later date? Most methods of education aim at the
training of the senses and the accumulation of facts. While these are
necessary, I think the speed at which this is done is immaterial to the
child.
Some of the finest men and women, who made this a better world to live
in, had no scientific training in their childhood or later. We need not
go back to history to find them. Maxime Gorky, for instance, lost his
parents before he was four years old, and began to read under the
supervision of a cook at sixteen. Jack London is another instance that
suggests itself readily to one's mind.
Of course these are exceptional people, but take the thousands of able
and brainy men and women in labor organizations and idealists in all
walks of life. Usually they had very little attention from their
parents, either because they had no time or did not know enough. These
men and women who had to rub up against the rough edges of our
money-making machinery and to stand squarely on their feet facing this
world and its problems,--willing to lend a hand, yes, even to give their
lives for the betterment of social and economic conditions--these
persons are worthy of the name.
Now I don't want to say anything against the early training of children.
The kindergarten and all the methods of early training in schools have
come into existence because there is a real need for them. Parents, for
many reasons, no longer have the time to train their own children; but
we expect results from education in general that cannot be accomplished.
What good are all the learning and scientific facts that we have
accumulated up to now, if we don't use them to make our life richer and
more beautiful? Knowledge and ability are worthless if there is no moral
and intellectual courage to back them up. Pastor Witte thought the
education of his son finished when he reached the age of sixteen. We
today do things in the same spirit. We get things done. Nothing slow
about us. The result, of course, is very poor; nobody is satisfied. Our
experts, always ready with advice on any and everything, tell us that
what we need is technical training to provide industry with efficient
help. These educators do not see that the difficulty is not with the
child but with industrial conditions. They are going to fit the child to
this misery called modern industry. But remove the possibility of the
unscrupulous taking advantage of the inexperienced and simple-minded,
and many of the so-called educational problems will disappear.
Some Book Reviews
A New-Old Tagore Play
_Chitra: A Play in One Act_, by Rabindranath Tagore. [The
Macmillan Company, New York.]
Nothing is more irritating to a really modern critic than to have to
join in a chorus of universal praise. It is particularly irritating when
the person acclaimed is a Nobel prize winner, for surely those of us who
sit in private judgment in secluded places ought to be able to discern
values subtler than the ones open to the eyes of some mysterious
frock-coated and silk-hatted jury of professors in Stockholm, or
wherever it may be. The very marrow in the bones of criticism curdles at
the thought of agreeing with a popular award.
But a certain native honesty and a distinct desire to spread good news
obliges one, in the case of _Chitra_, to withhold the amiable dissecting
knife. The play is far too beautiful to serve as a cadaver for the
illustration of either the anatomist's skill or the facts of anatomy.
Let it be confessed that this reviewer, who was about to send the book
back with a refusal to review any work of Tagore, found, after reading a
few lines, that he was forced to go on; and that having once gone on, he
preferred to write the review rather than to give up the book.
This play was written twenty-five years ago, and belongs, therefore, to
that earlier strata of Tagore's life which is to the normal mind so much
more alluring than the latter detritus that seems to have accumulated
over him. His later work appears to be old with the old age of Asia and
with the old age of himself. Its fundamental feeling is the only too
familiar impulse to recline on the bosom of a remote God. We who regard
this attitude as a perversion of manhood will turn from it with relief
to the earlier writing, in which the very life-blood of our own hearts
seems quivering with the intimations of a better-than-godlike beauty.
As I have suggested, there is very little that can rationally be said
about this play _Chitra_. To indicate something of the nature of so
perfect a work is the sole office that I can profitably perform.
Chitra, daughter of a King who had no sons, was brought up to live the
life and perform the activities of a man, with a man's hardness of frame
and a man's directness of will. One day while hunting in the forest, she
found sleeping in her path Arjuna, the great warrior of the Kuru Clan.
"Then for the first time in my life I felt myself a woman, and knew that
a man was before me...." Going to the gods of love, Chitra obtained from
them the gift of a perfect and world-vanquishing beauty to last for one
year only; and returning to Arjuna she overcame by this invincible
weapon the monastic vows which he had taken upon himself, and swept him
away into the wild and glorious current of her year of beauty. Thus the
year begins:
_Chitra_
At evening I lay down on a grassy bed strewn with the petals of
spring flowers, and recollected the wonderful praise of my beauty
I had heard from Arjuna;--drinking drop by drop the honey that I
had stored during the long day. The history of my past life, like
that of my former existences, was forgotten. I felt like a
flower, which has but a few fleeting hours to listen to all the
humming of the woodlands and then must lower its eyes from the
sky, bend its head, and at a breath give itself up to the dust
without a cry, thus ending the short story of a perfect moment
that has neither past nor future.
_Vasanta_ (The God of Love)
A limitless life of glory can bloom and spend itself in a
morning.
_Madana_ (The God of the Seasons)
Like an endless meaning in the narrow span of a song.
_Chitra_
The southern breeze caressed me to sleep. From the flowering
_malati_ bower overhead silent kisses dropped over my body. On my
hair, my breast, my feet, each flower chose a bed to die on. I
slept. And suddenly, in the depth of my sleep, I felt as if some
intense eager look, like tapering fingers of flame, touched my
slumbering body. I started up and saw the Hermit standing before
me. The moon had moved to the west, peering through the leaves to
espy this wonder of divine art wrought in a fragile human frame.
The air was heavy with perfume; the silence of the night was
vocal with the chirping of crickets; the reflections of the trees
hung motionless in the lake; and with his staff in his hand he
stood, tall and straight and still, like a forest tree. It seemed
to me that I had, on opening my eyes, died to all realities of
life and undergone a dream birth into a shadow land. Shame
slipped to my feet like loosened clothes. I heard his
call--"Beloved, my most beloved!" And all my forgotten lives
united as one and responded to it. I said, "Take me, take all I
am!" And I stretched out my arms to him. The moon set behind the
trees. Heaven and earth, time and space, pleasure and pain, death
and life merged together in an unbearable ecstasy.... With the
first gleam of light, the first twitter of birds, I rose up and
sat leaning on my left arm. He lay asleep with a vague smile
about his lips like the crescent moon in the morning. The
rosy-red glow of the dawn fell upon his noble forehead. I sighed
and stood up. I drew together the leafy lianas to screen the
streaming sun from his face. I looked about me and saw the same
old earth. I remembered what I used to be, and ran and ran like a
deer afraid of her own shadow, through the forest path strewn
with _shephali_ flowers. I found a lonely nook, and sitting down
covered my face with both hands, and tried to weep and cry. But
no tears came to my eyes.
_Madana_
Alas, thou daughter of mortals! I stole from the divine
storehouse the fragrant wine of heaven, filled with it one
earthly night to the brim, and placed it in thy hand to
drink--yet still I hear this cry of anguish!...
A few words, a half dozen pages of prose modulated to perform an office
as subtle as that of blank verse, give us the exquisite essence of the
year that follows; and toward the end there steal into it notes of the
inadequacy which the great warrior feels in this perfection, and his
desire for the old and harsher round of human life. Thus the year ends:
_Madana_
Tonight is thy last night.
_Vasanta_
The loveliness of your body will return tomorrow to the
inexhaustible stores of the spring. The ruddy tint of thy lips,
freed from the memory of Arjuna's kisses, will bud anew as a pair
of fresh asoka leaves, and the soft, white glow of thy skin will
be born again in a hundred fragrant jasmine flowers.
_Chitra_
O gods, grant me this my prayer! Tonight, in its last hour, let
my beauty flash its brightest, like the final flicker of a dying
flame.
_Madana_
Thou shalt have thy wish.
And as it ends, and as Chitra realizes that there is to fall from her
that radiance which has been, for a year, the sole bond between her and
her lover, and also the sole barrier between the real her and him, she
finds that his profounder longing has changed into a desire for the
companionship of that strong and eager boy-woman that she was before her
transformation.
_Chitra_ (_cloaked_)
My lord, has the cup been drained to the last drop? Is this
indeed the end? No; when all is done something still remains, and
that is my last sacrifice at your feet.
I brought from the garden of heaven flowers of incomparable
beauty with which to worship you, god of my heart. If the rites
are over, if the flowers have faded, let me throw them out of the
temple (_unveiling in her original male attire_). Now, look at
your worshipper with gracious eyes.
I am not beautifully perfect as the flowers with which I
worshipped. I have many flaws and blemishes. I am a traveller in
the great world-path, my garments are dirty, and my feet are
bleeding with thorns. Where should I achieve flower-beauty, the
unsullied loveliness of a moment's life? The gift that I proudly
bring you is the heart of a woman. Here have all pains and joys
gathered, the hopes and fears and shames of a daughter of the
dust; here love springs up struggling toward immortal life.
Herein lies an imperfection which yet is noble and grand. If the
flower-service is finished, my master, accept this as your
servant for the days to come!
I am Chitra, the king's daughter. Perhaps you will remember the
day when a woman came to you in the temple of Shiva, her body
loaded with ornaments and finery. That shameless woman came to
court you as though she were a man. You rejected her; you did
well. My lord, I am that woman. She was my disguise. Then by the
boon of gods I obtained for a year the most radiant form that a
mortal ever wore, and wearied my hero's heart with the burden of
that deceit. Most surely I am not that woman.
I am Chitra. No goddess to be worshipped, nor yet the object of
common pity to be brushed aside like a moth with indifference. If
you deign to keep me by your side in the path of danger and
daring, if you allow me to share the great duties of your life,
then you will know my true self. If your babe, whom I am
nourishing in my womb, be born a son, I shall myself teach him to
be a second Arjuna, and send him to you when the time comes, and
then at last you will truly know me. Today I can only offer you
Chitra, the daughter of a king.
_Arjuna_
Beloved, my life is full.
ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE.
An Unorthodox View of Burroughs
_Our Friend John Burroughs_, by Clara Barrus. [Houghton Mifflin
Company, Boston.]
That title engenders a resentment in me, a sense of unfitness. It is an
epitome of a popular approval which has cheapened the word "friendship."
If Walt Whitman, John Muir, and Francis F. Browne had jointly written of
Burroughs, the words "our friend" in the title of their collaboration
would have been inevitable and nice. The common disregard of so
unimportant a matter as this seems to be in the author's opinion
exhibits the crass liberties which the public is wont to take with
personalities. The result is that a great man may become popular and
useful before he is understood.
Burroughs happily is both read and understood. His popularity therefore
is wholesome. But the mild and consistent protest which his life has
been and is against the necessary artificialities in which most of his
"friends" live has never drawn them into a comprehending, practicing
sympathy with it. He is read, applauded, and envied--but not followed.
His softness and gentle unconcern with affairs are the antitheses of
those dynamic qualities which confer leadership and vitalize men's
impulses and deeds. His urban admirers go to the country to rusticate
and picnic but not to live a life like his. He does too much speculative
thinking to give his attitude toward the world an opportunity to go home
to his readers.
Whitman, with a similar indifference to a following, drives men into the
open road; Thoreau lures them to Walden Ponds to repeat his experiment;
Ik Marvel persuades them to farm; David Grayson charms city folk back to
the land, to anchor and live. Burroughs attracts visitors to Slabsides.
He is on the verge of becoming an institution, a curiosity. His life has
been a personal success. He is young in spirit and surprisingly robust
at nearly eighty years of age--he is seventy-seven this month--and I
daresay that his obvious failure to lead his readers towards country
homes of their own or seriously to interest them in the art of simple
living has never given him the slightest pain. He has assumed no
responsibility for the ways of the world. Nature is capable of working
out her own salvation during a future eternity. A leaf on a tree does
not quarrel with or attempt to reform its personal kin. It functions
alone; the life of which it is a part must take care of horticultural
sociology. Burroughs to me acknowledges himself to be a leaf on the
great tree. That is exceedingly interesting; but endow leaves with
reason, give them an expanding consciousness, and their functions must
change. Burroughs would require to be more than a predestinated leaf if
his fellows were leaves.
By virtue of society's struggle and industry, in which Burroughs is not
interested, he has made of the world, so far as he is concerned, a
quiet, beautiful outdoor cathedral, domed by the sky, its chief priest
being fed and clothed by the slaves of productive industry in your world
and mine. With great respect and admiration I pronounce him a sagacious
man, a clever leaf that has employed its reason with remarkable personal
advantage. In Burroughs' world the tragedies, strife, and noise that we
experience do not exist; his cathedral is a by-product and he is a
modest beneficiary of humanity's work. In relation to the masses of
people it is as unreal as it is unproductive of racial fitness to
persist in the world as most men know it. He loves to dream, think, and
write in his cathedral; what is going on outside does not disturb him.
He revels in the leisure, order, and security which the outsiders have
provided. He assures us that it is pleasant and satisfying, and we honor
and reward him for the information, but I should like to ask him whether
the largest freedom and selfhood that are achievable apart from working,
conflicting, warring men are not themselves fundamentally artificial.
Burroughs does not seem to be sufficiently alive to suspect that he has
missed something greater than personal contentment. A reader of
everything that he has published, I never, until I read the
autobiographical sketches in this work, felt the pity and unsocial
contempt--not for the man but for the type--which I have here tried to
express.
D. C. W.
Another Masefield Tragedy
_The Tragedy of Pompey the Great_, by John Masefield. [The
Macmillan Company, New York.]
Creative artist that he is, Masefield moves forward into amazing
clearness, heightened by flashes of poetic light, the scenes of nearly
two thousand years ago in Rome. The fidelity of this tragedy to the
facts of history, and the remarkable extent to which it reproduces the
overwhelming glory of a great struggle, are new proofs of the author's
special affinity with the sanguinary deeds of heroic men. Masefield's
plays and narrative poems give the element of tragedy something of its
old vividness and nobility in art. Some of his phrases sound like the
fall of a guillotine. He is a master of the magic of objectifying
tremendous unrealities. He hates feeble passions; wanton courage and
oaken physical power in action are the big things that he likes to
ennoble with poetic treatment. And his success is incomparable, so far
as his contemporaries are concerned.
Masefield's great characters, true to the glossed facts of life, in
crises exhibit indwelling cave-men. His frankness and honesty are
themselves tragical. Life _is_ full of and inseparable from tragedy.
Pompey "saw a madman in Egypt. He was eyeless with staring at the sun.
He said that ideas come out of the East, like locusts. They settle on
the nations and give them life; and then pass on, dying, to the wilds,
to end in some scratch on a bone, by a cave-man's fire." The old warrior
lies awake, thinking. "What are we?" he asks Lucceius, and that actor in
a great play replies, "Who knows? Dust with a tragic purpose. Then an
end." Masefield surveys the recorded history of the past, sees into the
heart of the present and exclaims, "Tragedy!" And of course that is in
his own life; otherwise he could not see it apart from himself. In sheer
desperation he endues dust with a "tragic purpose," but he does not
believe so much as he hopes that a "purpose" inheres in that resultant
of life, for in the big poem with which he summarizes the record of
Pompey he says:
And all their passionate hearts are dust,
And dust the great idea that burned
In various flames of love and lust
Till the world's brain was turned.
God, moving darkly in men's brains,
Using their passions as his tool,
Brings freedom with a tyrant's chains
And wisdom with the fool.
Blindly and bloodily we drift,
Our interests clog our hearts with dreams,
God make my brooding soul a rift
Through which a meaning gleams.
_The Tragedy of Pompey the Great_, unlike any Shaw play or even _The
Tragedy of Nan_, is not good reading; its short sentences, tragic with
import, are mere outlines. But they drive incarnate reality into one's
soul.
What was the tragedy of Pompey? Well, it began hundreds of years before
he was born; he was the accidental embodiment of it. He had earned
security and peace. He had aided Caesar in conquering Gaul. "Caesar
would never have been anybody if Pompey hadn't backed him." But that
tyrant's lust for power provoked a civil war, and the end was "a blind,
turbulent heaving towards freedom." Pompey's dream of freedom--his
conviction that power was in too few hands--cost him his life. To him
Rome was inwardly "a great democratic power struggling with obsolete
laws." He declared that "Rome must be settled. The crowd must have more
power." But Pompey's dream was shallow and human, even if great, for,
regarding the "thought of the world" as of transcendent importance, he
asks, "For what else are we fighting but to control the thought of the
world? What else matters?"
History seems to try to repeat itself. Lentulus, fearing that they were
losing Rome, said to Pompey, "You have done nothing." The
reply--"Wait"--has a modern sound. Pompey was preparing to fight Caesar,
but public opinion, voiced by Metellus, excitedly demanded, "but at
once. Give him no time to win recruits by success. Give them no time
here. The rabble don't hesitate. They don't understand a man who
hesitates."
That too might have been said by a modern American newspaper, affecting
to speak for the crowd.
Philip, beloved of the maiden Antistia, is fanatically true to his
master, whom he would follow "To the desert. To the night without stars.
To the wastes of the seas. To the two-forked flame." To him this blind
devotion meant more than Antistia's love. "We shall have to put off our
marriage," he said to her, and she, speaking from the deep heart of the
mother, unachieved, answered:
Why, thus it is. We put off and put off till youth's gone, and
strength's gone, and beauty's gone. Till we two dry sticks mumble
by the fire together, wondering what there was in life, when the
sap ran.... When you kiss the dry old hag, Philip, you'll
remember these arms that lay wide on the bed, waiting, empty.
Years. You'll remember this beauty. All this beauty. That would
have borne you sons but for your master.
Whatever the fate of Pompey, Antistia's was the supreme tragedy.
DEWITT C. WING.
A Net to Snare the Sun
_The World Set Free_, by H. G. Wells. [E. P. Dutton and Company,
New York.]
Do you remember the little verse of Kipling's in the _Just So Stories_
about the small person who kept so many serving men
"One million Hows, two million Wheres,
And seven million Whys?"
There's something very much like that small person in a decidedly larger
person called H. G. Wells. For all the great sweep and astonishing
convincingness of his later novels he still keeps the child-like quality
of asking startling questions about everything in the universe. He still
wants to know: "Why can't I catch the sun, and what would happen if I
did?"
In his last half dozen novels he has been asking about various phases of
our modern society, politics, and the sex question. But in this latest
book, _The World Set Free_, he goes back to a type of question that
interested him some years ago, the type half fanciful and half
sociological that produced _In the Days of the Comet_, _The Time
Machine_, and _When the Sleeper Wakes_. But this book is not entirely
like the earlier ones. For one thing the science is for the first time
so nearly possible that it is almost probable, and for another this book
is the work of an older, quieter soul with less regard for externals and
with more faith in the ultimate high hope for mankind.