Schweidnitzer prison for my sins in exercising too much freedom of the
press, I was overjoyed one morning by the news that Hauptmann had sent
me a box of books. Through his kindness, Gottfried Keller, Konrad
Ferdinand Meyer and other authors have illumined many dreary days of my
cell life.
All the books reached me safely but the "Weavers," which had just been
published at that time, and that I could not get hold of, in spite of
every effort. The inspector had strict orders to consider that book as
contraband.
Every time I went into the office to change one book for another, I saw
the "Weavers" on the table. The temptation to shove the book under my
jacket at an opportune moment was very great and trying, but
unfortunately the State Attorney had instilled the idea into the head of
the inspector that it was a very dangerous work; he never took his eyes
from it.
Gerhart Hauptmann remained to the Schweidnitzer prison administration
the most dangerous, prohibited author.
[Illustration]
DISAPPOINTED ECONOMISTS.
Teachers and economists represent the bees as models of diligence.
Behold how these little hard workers gather the honey together! Not a
sign of obstinacy. They never insist on a certain number of hours for
their workday, nor do they crave time for leisure, meditation or rest.
Indeed, they employ all their energies, so that the owner of the beehive
shall gain high profits.
No matter if they gather a thousandfold as much honey as they can
consume, they never seek iniquity. Man takes all their wealth from them,
and in the spring, in the beautiful month of May, when the flower cups
begin to fill, the little hustlers resume their work again without
complaint and without murmur.
Probably some economists regret that workmen are not endowed by nature
with such an instinct for work as would let them feel nothing else but
the desire to accumulate wealth for others.
It is too bad, indeed, that house builders, railroad workers, miners,
garment workers and farmers are creatures with thinking faculties. That
they should be able to analyze, to compare, to draw conclusions is
really very unfortunate for the "Captains of Industry."
Next to the bee, the Asiatic coolie is the favorite ideal of the
every-day economist. In one respect he surpasses the bee--he does not
destroy drones.
How smoothly everything might run along in this world of material
supremacy, if only the workers were made up of such a desirable mixture
as the bees and coolies.
Fortunately, Fate hath not willed it so.
[Illustration]
VITAL ART.
ANNY MALI HICKS.
IN order to estimate the value of any movement, whether social,
economic, ethical or esthetic, it must be studied in its relation and
attitude to general progress. Its effectiveness should be judged by what
it contributes to the growth of the universal conscience. That "no man
liveth unto himself alone" is never so true as now, because now it is
more generally realized. Therefore, any expression which concerns itself
solely with its own special field of action finds itself soon set aside,
and presently becoming divorced from reality, ends as a sporadic type.
Any expression, however, which responds to the larger life gains a
vitality which insures its continuance.
Thus, the effort to apply certain truths not new in themselves, is a
tendency to work in harmony with progress. The effort to apply
principle, however imperfectly expressed, is important, not because of
its results, but because of the desire to relate theory and action in a
conduct of life. Almost every type of expression is undergoing its phase
of application. Esthetics have somewhat aligned themselves to the
others, but at last there is a movement, known as the arts and crafts
movement, more properly called applied esthetics, which is the effort to
relate art to life. The old banality, "Art for Art's sake," is obsolete,
and the vital meaning of art is in a more rational and beautiful
expression of life, as it were, the continent art of living well.
This is the ideal and educational aspect of applied esthetics. Within
the limits of its exclusive circle and within the radius of its special
activities there is a trend to contentment with the production of
objects of "worth and virtue." The object of luxury, which in fact has
no vital meaning to either the producer or consumer. Were the production
of such things to be its only aim, it would soon defeat its own end. But
this movement has in reality wider and more democratic ideals. Because
of its power to stimulate self-expression and the creative impulses, its
greatest and most vital influence is more social than artistic. It
principally concerns itself with the desire of the worker to express in
his work whatever impulse for beauty may be his. There is no surer way
of feeling the pressure of present economic conditions. The value of
applied esthetics is as a medicine to stir up social unrest and
discontent. Its keynote is self-expression, and it is when men and women
begin to think and act for themselves that they most keenly feel social
and economic restrictions, and are made to suffer under them. But if
suffering is necessary to growth, let us have it and have it over with
by all means. No sane being will stand much of it without making an
effort to get at its cause. It has been said that the most important
part of progress is to make people think; it is vastly more important
that they should feel. The average individual is not discontented with
his surroundings, else he would go to work to change them. As a product
of them he is benumbed by their mechanical influence, and consequently
expresses himself within their limits. He is the mouthpiece of existing
conditions, and, accordingly, acts in law-abiding fashion.
The larger emotional life, or inner social impulse emanates from those
pioneers who, living beyond existing conditions, are the dynamics of
society. Through them life pushes onward. The inner impulse becomes
public opinion, public opinion becomes custom, custom crystallizes into
law. Now the fresh impulse is needed for new growth; where shall it be
sought if not in the expression of the emotional life? What form shall
the expression take unless it be the purest and most spontaneous form of
art, which is without purpose other than the expression of an impulse?
This alone fosters the growth of the emotions.
Art, like justice, has many crimes committed in its name, and much
called so that is merely a methodical and imitative performance. It is
in no wise that spontaneous expression of life which, coming simply and
directly as an impulse, takes a decorative or applied form. All the
beginnings of art grew up in this way. In primitive peoples it is the
first expression of emotional life, which comes after the material need
is satisfied. The savage makes his spade or fish spear from the
necessity of physical preservation. Thus from the joy of living he
applies to it his feeling for beauty.
The earliest forms of art were all applied. Stone carving was applied to
architecture, thus colored stones, called mosaics, as wall decorations;
from these to the fresco; from the fresco to the pictorial form of
painting. To-day the final degeneration of art is in the easel picture,
which as an object detached and disassociated from its surroundings,
takes refuge in the story-telling phase to justify its _raison d'être_.
But, alas for the easel picture! alas, also, for the usual illustration,
without which most literature would be so difficult to understand. In
each case the one is there to help out the other's deficiency. Two
important expressions of art, in a state of insubordination. It is the
opera over again, where music and drama keep up an undignified race for
prominence. Supposing an illustration were decorative in character
echoing in a minor manner the suggested theme, would that not be a
fitting background for the story-telling art? The Greeks knew very well
what they were about when they introduced the relatively subordinate but
decoratively important chorus into their dramas. This as well expresses
their sense of relative proportion as does their sculpture and
architecture.
What is decorative art, if not a sense of beauty applied to objects of
use? That these need the emotional element as well as their element of
service is as essential as the life breath in the body. It is the spark
of divine fire which relates the actual to the ideal, resulting in the
reality. It removes from our surroundings any influence which is solely
mechanical. Applied art is alike because of its association with that
which is necessary to life.
The test is necessity, not alone the physical, but likewise the
emotional necessity, for all sides of our nature must be developed if
life is to have full meaning and come to its maturity. The influence of
applied esthetics is more vital because it is unconsciously absorbed
through constant association. Imagine surroundings where everything
which did not have a distinct use were eliminated and where everything
else was distinctly fitted to its use. If this were put into practice in
the usual household, a certain simplicity would be the result, to say
the least. Most things with which we surround ourselves are neither
useful nor beautiful. They are either so absurdly over-ornamented as to
have their usefulness completely impaired, or else they are the usual
mechanical device equally complicated and hideous. Ornament is usually
an anomaly, added to cover structural defect. If the relation of the
parts to the whole is perfect, beauty is there. But being accustomed to
the over-ornamented and wholly mechanical, we do not resent their
presence. For what, indeed, is habit not responsible? Even such innocent
objects as pictures hang on our walls until they are scarcely noticed by
us. Why not change them to suit our moods? Why not, indeed? There are so
many of them, in the first place--and one remembers the time and
trouble, even the family dissension which it took to hang them. But no
one cares much, no one is alive enough to care much--the economic
struggle which deadens our other senses is responsible for this also.
No unit of the social body can disentangle itself from existing
conditions. Each is affected by all its influences. Some are more, some
less, some are so much a part that they are not conscious. These last
also suffer, but without knowing why. Vital education would show them.
But the factory system pervades the school and art school as well as the
factory.
What if the underlying force of education were spontaneous expression,
instead of the limited method or system? The cry of the teacher is
always, "It is very well to be spontaneous, but we must deal with the
child _en masse_." The remedy for that is simple, because there is no
real necessity to deal with children _en masse_. It is so much easier to
apply the same system to each varied unit of a mass than to discover and
help the individual expression of each. The basis of vital art, of vital
education, is self-expression; from it and through it comes
self-control. Self-repression is as socially uneconomic as jails and
standing armies. If, instead of building prisons where human life is
entombed, libraries where literature moulds, museums where art becomes
archaic, why not establish centers of education, where spontaneous
expression is encouraged, and where the soul, mind, and hand are
simultaneously developed.
Think of a state where each individual working out from its own
standpoint, truly without hypocrisy, would contribute his quota of
individual life to the life of the whole. Pleasing himself in his work
without fear. Then would come the true democracy, possible only under
just economic conditions, where each has equal opportunity for
self-expression. Then can the higher emotional life develop necessary to
all human growth.
[Illustration]
KRISTOFER HANSTEEN.
By VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE.
"OF the earth, unearthly--"
The sentence remained unfinished as I had written it two years and a
half ago when Disease laid its hand on me, and all my MSS. ended in a
dash. It was a description of Kristofer Hansteen, an explanation of his
work in Norway. And now that I am ready to pick up the thread of life
again, I read that he is dead--of the earth no more, he who hardly ever
belonged to it. At this moment the most insistent memory I have of that
delicate, half-aërial personality are the words: "When the doctors told
me that I might perhaps not live longer than spring, I thought: 'If I
die, what will become of Anarchism in Norway?'" He had no other idea of
his meaning in life than this.
Somewhere fluctuant in my memory runs broken music--you have heard
it?--"an ineffectual angel, beating his luminous wings within the
void,"--something like that,--words descriptive of Shelley--they haunt
me whenever I would recall Kristofer Hansteen. Perhaps to those who had
known him in his youth, before his body was consumed like a half-spent
taper, he might have seemed less spirit-like; but when I met him, three
years ago this coming August, his eyes were already burning with
ethereal fires, the pallor of waste was on the high, fine forehead, the
cough racked him constantly, and there was upon the whole being the
unnameable evanescence of the autumn leaf; only--his autumn came in
summer.
The utter incapacity of the man before the common, practical
requirements of life would have been irritating to ordinary individuals.
The getting of a meal or the clothing of the body with reference to the
weather, were things that he thought of vaguely, uncomfortably, only
with forced attention. What he saw clearly, entranced by the vision, was
the future--the free future. He had been touched by the wan wizard of
Olive Schreiner's Dream of Wild Bees, and "the ideal was real to him."
The things about him, other people's realities, were shadows--oppressive
shadows, indeed, but they did not concern him deeply. It was the great
currents of life he saw as real things, and among all the confusion of
world-movements he could trace the shining stream that ran towards
liberty; and with his hectic face and burning eyes he followed it, torn
by the cough and parched by the fever.
The Hansteens are a well-known family in Norway, clever and often
eccentric, Kristofer's aunt, Aosta Hansteen, at the time of my visit an
old lady over eighty, having fought many a battle for the equality of
woman both in Norway and America. Artist, linguist, and literary woman
of marked ability, but, after the manner of her cotemporaries, rather
outlandish and even outrageous in her attacks on masculine prerogative,
she is a target for satirists and wits, few of whom, however, approach
her virility of intellect. Her father, Kristofer's grandfather, was an
astronomer and mathematician. In his youth Kristofer had gone afoot
through the "dals" of Norway, and when he took me through the art
galleries of Kristiania he was a most interesting guide, through his
actual acquaintance with the scenes and the characters of the dalesmen
depicted. He knew the lights upon the snow and rocks, just what time of
the year shone on the leaves, where the wood-paths wound, the dim
glories of the mist upon the fjords, the mountain stairways in their
craggy walls, and the veiled colors of the summer midnight. And he knew
the development of Norwegian art life and literary life, as one who
wanders always in those paths, mysteriously lit.
Our hours of fraternization were few but memorable. He was a frequent
visitor at the house of Olav Kringen, the editor of the daily Social
Democrat, a big, kindly Norseman, who had remembered me from America,
and who had defended me in his paper against the ridiculous charge in
the ordinary press that I had come there to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm.
Through the efforts of Hansteen and the kindliness and largemindedness
of Kringen and his Socialistic comrades, I spoke before the Socialistic
League of Youth in their hall in Kristiania. The hall was crowded, over
eight hundred being present, and there was some little money in excess
of expenses, which was given to me. I shared it with Hansteen, and he
looked up with a bright flash in his dark eyes: "Now," said he, "'Til
Frihet' will come out one month sooner." "Til Frihet" (Towards Freedom)
was his paper; and would you know how it came out? He set it up in his
free moments, he did the mechanical work; and then, being too poor to
pay for its delivery through the post, except the few copies that were
sent abroad, he took it from house to house himself, over the hills of
Kristiania!--he, a consumptive, the cough rending him!
There was a driving rain the night I left the city; he wore no rubbers
or gum-coat. I was in hopes that he might think the propaganda deserved
that its one active worker should get a pair of rubbers, since he must
carry papers through the rain. I reminded him that he should keep his
feet dry; he only glanced at them as if they were no concern of his,
and--"'Til Frihet' will come out one month sooner."
It was in "Til Frihet" that he had been guilty of high treason. It
happened once that King Oscar, in temporary retirement from public
king-business, had left over to the Crown Prince the execution of
certain matters, which according to the "Ground Law" of Norway could not
be so left; whereupon Comrade Hansteen printed an editorial saying,
"Oscar has broken the ground-law, and there is no more a King in
Norway." For this he was charged with high treason, and to escape
imprisonment he went to England, where he remained about a year among
the London comrades. On his return, there was some threat of carrying
out the prosecution, but, probably to avoid wider publication of the
king's "treason," the matter was dropped. Previous to that Comrade
Hansteen had had experience of prison life. In a May-day procession,
ostensibly to include all labor reform or revolutionary parties, he,
declaring that Anarchists should be given place too, marched, carrying a
red flag. The chief of police directed a subordinate to take the flag
away from him. Easily enough done, but not, as an evidence of unwilling
submission, before he had struck the official in the face with his hand.
That little hand, weak and delicate as a woman's! An ordinary man would
have pushed it aside like a feather and thought no more of it; but the
official paid tribute to the big will behind the puny flesh by
sentencing him to seven months in prison.
My ignorance of Norwegian prevents my giving any adequate idea of his
work. I know he was the author of a little pamphlet, "Det frie samfund"
(Free Society), and that he had translated and published one of
Krapotkin's works (whether "The State" or "The Conquest of Bread," I do
not now remember), which he had issued in a series of instalments,
intended ultimately to be bound together. As I recall the deep
earnestness of his face in speaking of the difficulties he had had in
getting it out, and the unsolved difficulties still facing its
completion, I find myself wanting to pray that he saw that precious
labor finished. It was so much to him. And I prophecy that the time will
come when young Norwegians will treasure up those sacrificial fragments
as dearer than any richer and fuller literature. They are the heart's
blood of a dying man--the harbinger of the anarchistic movement in
Norway.
I cannot say good-bye to him forever without a word concerning his
personal existence, as incomprehensible to the practical as his social
dreams perhaps. He had strong love of home and children; and once he
said, the tone touched with melancholy: "It used to pain me to think
that I should die and have no son; but now I am contented that I have no
son." One knew it was the wrenching cough that made him "contented." A
practical man would have rejoiced to be guiltless of transmitting the
inheritance, but one could see the dreamer grieved. His eyes would grow
humid looking at his little daughters; and indeed they were bright,
beautiful children, though not like him. In his early wanderings he had
met and loved a simple peasant woman, unlettered, but with sound and
serviceable common sense, and with the beauty of perfect honesty shining
in her big Norse-blue eyes. It was then and it is now a wonder to me how
in that mystical brain of his, replete with abstractions,
generalizations, idealizations, he placed his love for wife and
children; strong and tender as it was, one could appreciate at once that
he had no sense of the burden of practical life which his wife seemed to
have taken up as naturally hers. The whole world of the imagination
wherein he so constantly moved seemed entirely without her ken, yet this
did not seem to trouble either. Nor did the fact that his unworldliness
doubled her portion of responsibility seem to cause him to reflect that
she was kept too busy, like Martha of old, to "choose that good part"
which he had chosen. Thinking of it now, still with some sense of
puzzlement, I believe his love for human creatures, and especially
within the family relation, were of that deep, still, yearning kind we
feel towards the woods and hills of home; the silent, unobtrusive
presence fills us with rest and certainty, and we are all unease when we
miss it; yet we take it for granted, and seldom dwell upon it in our
active thoughts, or realize the part it plays in us; it belongs to the
dark wells of being.
Dear, falling star of the northland,--so you have gone out, and--it was
not yet morning.
[Illustration]
FIFTY YEARS OF BAD LUCK.
By SADAKICHI HARTMANN.
EVERY occupant of the ramshackle, old-fashioned studio building on
Broadway knew old Melville, the landscape painter, who had roughed life
within its dilapidated walls for more than a score of years. In former
years the studio building had been quite fashionable and respectable;
there is hardly a painter of reputation in New York to-day who has not,
once in his life, occupied a room on the top floor. But in these days of
"modern improvements," of running water and steam heat, of elevators and
electric lights, it has lost its standing and is inhabited by a rather
precarious and suspicious clan of pseudo artists, mountebanks who
vegetate on the outskirts of art; "buckeye painters," who turn out a
dozen 20x30 canvases a day for the export trade to Africa and Australia;
unscrupulous fabricators of Corots and Daubignys, picture drummers who
make such rascality profitable, illustrators of advertising pamphlets,
and so-called frescoe painters, who ornament ceilings with sentimental
clouds, with two or three cupids thrown in according to the price they
extort from ignorant parvenues.
And yet, no matter on what by-roads these soldiers of fortune wandered
to earn their dubious livelihood, they all respected the white-bearded
tenant, in his shabby gray suit, a suit which he wore at all seasons,
and which time seemed to have treated just as unkindly as the bent and
emaciated form of its wearer. Old Melville gave offense to nobody, and
always had a pleasant word for everybody, but, as he was not talkative,
and the other tenants were too busy to bother an old man painting,
nobody knew much about his mode of living, the standard of his art, or
his past history.
Very few had ever entered his studio--he had neither patrons nor
intimate friends--and very likely they would not have enjoyed their
visit. A peculiar gloomy atmosphere pervaded the room, almost sickening
in its frugality, and as its skylight lay north, the sun never touched
it. It had something chilly and uncanny about it even in summer. The
floor was bare, furniture there was none, except an old worn-out kitchen
table and chair, an easel and an old box which served as a bookcase for
a few ragged unbound volumes. The comfort of a bed was an unknown luxury
to him; he slept on the floor, on a mattress which in daytime was hidden
with his scant wardrobe and cooking utensils in a corner, behind a gray
faded curtain. His pictures, simple pieces of canvas with tattered
edges, nailed to the four walls, leaving hardly an inch uncovered, were
the only decoration and furnished a most peculiar wall paper, which
heightened the dreariness of the room.