THE LITTLE REVIEW
Literature Drama Music Art
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR
MARCH, 1914
A Letter John Galsworthy 3
Five Japanese Prints Arthur Davison Ficke 3
"The Dark Flower" and the "Moralists" Margaret C. Anderson 5
A Remarkable Nietzschean Drama DeWitt C. Wing 8
The Lost Joy Floyd Dell 10
Paderewski and the New Gods The Editor 11
The Major Symphony George Soule 13
The Prophet of a New Culture George Burman Foster 14
How a Little Girl Danced Nicholas Vachel Lindsay 18
The New Note Sherwood Anderson 23
Rahel Varnhagen: Feminist Margery Currey 25
Tagore as a Dynamic George Soule 32
The Meaning of Bergsonism Llewellyn Jones 38
Rupert Brooke's Poetry 29
Ethel Sidgwick's "Succession" 34
Letters of William Vaughn Moody 24
Emerson's Journals 42
The Critics' Critic 20
New York Letter 43
THE LITTLE REVIEW
Fine Arts Building
CHICAGO
Volume 1 Number 1
Copyright, 1914, by Margaret C. Anderson
25 cents a copy $2.50 a year
THE LITTLE REVIEW
MARCH, 1914
Announcement
"The realm of art is prodigious; next to life itself the vastest
realm of man's experience."
Appreciation has its outlet in art; and art (to complete the circle and
the figure) has its source in--owes its whole current--to appreciation.
That is, the tides of art would cease to ebb and flow were it not for
the sun and moon of appreciation.
This function of the sun and moon is known as criticism. But criticism
as an art has not flourished in this country. We live too swiftly to
have time to be appreciative; and criticism, after all, has only one
synonym: appreciation. In a world whose high splendor is our chief
preoccupation the quality of our appreciation is the important thing.
Life is a glorious performance: quite apart from its setting, in spite
of the kind of "part" one gets, everybody is given at least his chance
to act. We may do our simple best with the roles we receive; we may
change our "lines" if we're inventive enough to think of something
better; we may alter our "business" to get our personalities across more
effectively; or we may boldly accost the stage manager, hand back the
part he'd cast us for, and prove our right to be starred. The player who
merely holds madame's cloak may do it with dignity and grace; and he who
changes his role, with a fine freedom and courage, discovers that he's
not acting but living his part! For this reason we feel that we needn't
be accused of an unthinking "all's-right-with-the-world" attitude when
we assert that life is glorious.
And close to Life--so close, from our point of view, that it keeps
treading on Life's heels--is this eager, panting Art who shows us the
wonder of the way as we rush along. We may as well acknowledge right
here that we've never had a friend (except in one or two rare instances)
who hasn't shaken his head at us paternally about this attitude toward
art. "It's purely transitional," he says, tolerantly; "life is so much
more interesting, you see, that you're bound to substitute people for
art, eventually. It really doesn't matter so much that Alice Meynell
wrote 'Renouncement' as that Mrs. Jones next door has left her husband."
Well, he's wrong; at least, he can't speak for us. Wells said to save
the kitten and let the Mona Lisa burn; who would consider anything else?
We think it's rather silly in our paternal friend to argue with us so
heatedly--beside the point! It's not a question as to which is more
important--"Renouncement" or Mrs. Jones. We're merely trying to say that
we're intensely interested in Mrs. Jones, but that Mrs. Meynell has made
our lives more wonderful--permanently.
THE LITTLE REVIEW means to reflect this attitude toward life and art.
Its ambitious aim is to produce criticism of books, music, art, drama,
and life that shall be fresh and constructive, and intelligent from the
artist's point of view. For the instinct of the artist to distrust
criticism is as well founded as the mother's toward the sterile woman.
More so, perhaps; for all women have some sort of instinct for
motherhood, and all critics haven't an instinct for art. Criticism that
is creative--that is our high goal. And criticism is never a merely
interpretative function; it _is_ creation: it gives birth! It's not
necessary to cite the time-worn illustration of Da Vinci and Pater to
prove it.
Books register the ideas of an age; this is perhaps their chief claim to
immortality. But much that passes for criticism ignores this aspect of
the case and deals merely with a question of literary values. To be
really interpretative--let alone creative--criticism must be a blend of
philosophy and poetry. We shall try very hard to achieve this difficult
combination.
Also, we mean to print articles, poems, stories that seem to us
definitely interesting, or--to use a much-abused adjective--vital. Our
point of view shall not be restrictive; we may present the several
judgments of our various enthusiastic contributors on one subject in the
same issue. The net effect we hope will be stimulating and what we like
to call releasing.
Feminism? A clear-thinking magazine can have only one attitude; the
degree of ours is ardent!
Finally, since THE LITTLE REVIEW, which is neither directly nor
indirectly connected in any way with any organization, society, company,
cult or movement, is the personal enterprise of the editor, it shall
enjoy that untrammelled liberty which is the life of Art.
And now that we've made our formal bow we may say confidentially that we
take a certain joyous pride in confessing our youth, our perfectly
inexpressible enthusiasm, and our courage in the face of a serious
undertaking; for those qualities mean freshness, reverence, and victory!
At least we have got to the age when we realize that all beautiful
things make a place for themselves sooner or later in the world. And we
_hope_ to be very beautiful!
If you've ever read poetry with a feeling that it was your religion,
your very life; if you've ever come suddenly upon the whiteness of a
Venus in a dim, deep room; if you've ever felt music replacing your
shabby soul with a new one of shining gold; if, in the early morning,
you've watched a bird with great white wings fly from the edge of the
sea straight up into the rose-colored sun--if these things have happened
to you and continue to happen till you're left quite speechless with the
wonder of it all, then you'll understand our hope to bring them nearer
to the common experience of the people who read us.
The more I see of academicism, the more I distrust it. If I had
approached painting as I have approached book-writing and music,
that is to say, by beginning at once to do what I wanted ... I
should have been all right.--_The Note-Books of Samuel Butler._
Poetry is in Nature just as much as carbon is.--Emerson's
_Journals_ (1856-1863).
Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling and
instinct, not by rule.--_The Note-Books of Samuel Butler._
A Letter from Galsworthy
Written from Taormina, February 23, 1914.
MY DEAR MADAM:
You ask me to bid your magazine good speed; and so far as I have any
right, I do indeed. It seems you are setting out to watch the street of
Life from a high balcony, where at all events the air should be fresh
and sunrise sometimes visible. I hope you will decide to sleep out there
under the stars, for what kills most literary effort is the hothouse air
of temples, clubs, and coteries, that, never changed, breeds in us by
turn febrility and torpor. Enthusiasms are more convincing from those
who have not told their loves too often. And criticism more poignant
from one who has been up at dawn, seen for himself and put down his
impression before he goes on 'Change. There is a saying of de Maupassant
about a writer sitting down before an object until he has seen it in the
way that he alone can see it, seen it with the part of him which makes
him This man and not That. For the creative artist and the creative
critic there is no rule, I think, so golden. And I did seem to notice in
America that there was a good deal of space and not much time; and that
without too much danger of becoming "Yogis" people might perhaps sit
down a little longer in front of things than they seemed to do. But I
noticed too a great energy and hope. These will be your servants to
carry through what will not, surely, be just an exploit or adventure,
but a true and long comradeship with effort that is worth befriending.
So all good fortune!
Very faithfully yours,
JOHN GALSWORTHY.
Five Japanese Prints
ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE
I KIYONOBU SPEAKS
The actor on his little stage
Struts with a mimic rage.--
Across my page
My passion in his form shall tower from age to age.
What he so crudely dreams
In vague and fitful gleams,
The crowd esteems.--
Well! let the future judge, if his or mine this seems--
This calm Titanic mould
Stalking in colours bold
Fold upon fold--
This lord of dark, this dream I dreamed of old!
II FIGURE BY OKUMURA MASANOBU
Garbed in flowing folds of light,
Azure, emerald, rose, and white,
Watchest thou across the night.
Crowned with splendor is thine head:
All the princes great and dead
Round thy limbs their state have shed--
Calm, immutable to stand--
Gracious head and poisèd hand--
O'er the years that flow like sand.
III PILLAR-PRINT BY KIYOMITSU
A place for giant heads to take their rest
Seems her pale breast.
Her sweeping robe trails like the cloud and wind
Storms leave behind.
The ice of the year, and its Aprilian part,
Sleep in her heart.
Wherefore, small marvel that her footsteps be
Like strides of Destiny!
IV PILLAR-PRINT BY TOYONOBU
O lady of the long robes, the slow folds flowing--
Lady of the white breast, the dark and lofty head--
Dwells there any wonder, the way that thou art going--
Or goest thou toward the dead?
So calm thy solemn steps, so slow the long lines sweeping
Of garments pale and ghostly, of limbs as grave as sleep--
I know not if thou, spectre, hast love or death in keeping,
Or goest toward which deep.
Thou layest thy robes aside with gesture large and flowing--
Is it for love or sleep--is it for life or death?
I would my feet might follow the path that thou art going,
And thy breath be my breath.
V PILLAR-PRINT BY HARUNOBU
From an infinite distance, the ghostly music!
Few and slender the tones, of delicate silver,
As stars are broidered on the veil of evening....
He passes by, the flute and the dreaming player--
Slow are his steps, his eyes are gravely downcast;
His pale robes sway in long folds with his passing.
Out of the infinite distance, a ghostly music
Returns--in slender tones of delicate silver,
As stars are broidered on the veil of evening.
"The Dark Flower" and the "Moralists"
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
_The Dark Flower_, by John Galsworthy. (Charles Scribner's Sons, New
York.)
A book that has beauty as it's given to few books to achieve it has been
the innocent cause of more ignorant, naïve, and stupid condemnation than
anything published for a long time. Even the English critics--who
usually avoid these shallows--in several cases hit the rocks with awful
force. And all because a man with the soul of the old gods chose to
tell, quite simply and with inexpressible beauty, the truth about an
artist. _The Dark Flower_ was everybody's opportunity to deepen his
vision, but nearly everybody decided to look upon it as an emotional
redundancy. Perhaps this doesn't do some of them justice: I believe a
good many of them considered it positively dangerous!
My quite spontaneous tribute to Galsworthy's Mark Lennan--before I'd
heard anyone discuss him--was that here was a man a woman would be glad
to trust her soul to. And, in view of how silly it is for a woman to
trust her soul to anyone but herself, I still insisted that one could do
it with Mark Lennan: because he'd not take charge of anyone's soul!--his
wife's least of all. Of course, to love a man of his sort would mean
unhappiness; but women who face life with any show of bravery face
unhappiness as part of the day's work. It remains to decide whether one
will reach high and break a bone or two over something worth having, or
play safe and take a pale joy in one's unscarred condition. With Mark
Lennan a woman would have had--à la Browning--her perfect moment; and
such things are rare enough to pay well for, if necessary.
All of which is making a very personal issue of _The Dark Flower_; but
it's the kind of book you've got to be personal about; you revise your
list of friends on a basis of their attitude toward Galsworthy.
After I'd finished _The Dark Flower_--and it had never occurred to my
naïve mind that anyone would disagree with me about it--various persons
began to tell me how wrong I was. Mark Lennan was a cad and a
weakling--decidedly the kind of person to be kept out of a good novel.
The very beauty of the book made it insidious, someone said; such art
expended in defense of immorality would soon tend to confuse our
standards. Someone else remarked patronizingly: "Oh, _The Dark Flower_
may be well done and all that, but personally I've always had a passion
for the normal!" But, most maddening of all, I think, were those readers
of thrillers, of sweet, sentimental stories--those persons who patronize
comic opera exclusively because they "see enough tragedy in life to
avoid it in the theater"--who asked earnestly: "But, after all, what's
the use of such books? What possible _good do they do_?"
On another page of this review such questions are answered with a
poignancy I dare not compete with. I want to try, instead, to tell why
_The Dark Flower_ seems to me an altogether extraordinary piece of work.
In the first place, constructively. The story covers three episodes of a
man's love life: Spring, with its awakening; Summer, with its deep
passion; and Autumn, with its desperate longing for another Spring. But
the handling of the episodes is so unepisodic that you feel you've been
given the man's whole life, day by day, from Oxford to that final going
down the years--_sans_ youth, _sans_ spring, _sans_ beauty, _sans_
passion; _sans_ everything save that "faint, glimmering light--far out
there beyond...." This effect of completeness is achieved, I think, by
the remarkable intensity of the writing, by the clever (and by no means
easy) method of sometimes allowing the characters the author's
prerogative of addressing the audience directly. Highly subjective in
everything that he does, Galsworthy has reached a climax of subjectivity
here: _The Dark Flower_ is as personal in its medium as music.
In the second place--the great matter of style. Every page shows the
very poetry of prose writing; there's an inevitability about its choice
of beautiful and simple words that makes them seem a part of the nature
they describe. For instance, to choose at random from a multitude of
exquisite things: "... under the stars of this warm Southern night,
burning its incense of trees and flowers"; or, "And he sat for a long
time that evening under a large lime-tree on a knoll above the
Serpentine. There was very little breeze, just enough to keep alive a
kind of whispering. What if men and women, when they had lived their
gusty lives, became trees! What if someone who had burned and ached were
now spreading over him this leafy peace--this blue-black shadow against
the stars? Or were the stars, perhaps, the souls of men and women
escaped for ever from love and longing? ... If only for a moment he
could desert his own heart, and rest with the trees and stars!" With a
single clause like "for ever part of the stillness and the passion of a
summer night" Galsworthy gets effects that some poets need three or four
verses for. In one place he defines for all time a Chopin mazurka as "a
little dancing dirge of summer"; in another gives you with one stroke an
impression of his hero that it's impossible to forget: "He looks as if
he were seeing sands and lions."
In the third place, Galsworthy's psychology is profound--impregnable.
One simple characterization will serve to illustrate: he describes a
man's face as having the candour of one at heart a child--"that simple
candour of those who have never known how to seek adventures of the
mind, and have always sought adventures of the body."
As to the lesson of _The Dark Flower_--its philosophy, its "moral"--I
can only say that it hasn't any such thing; that is, while it's full to
the brim of philosophy, it doesn't attempt to force a philosophy upon
you. It offers you the truth about a human being and lets it go at
that--which seems to be the manner of not a few who have written
greatly. For the other sort of thing, go to any second-rate novelist you
happen to admire; he'll give you characters who have a hard time of it
and tell you just where they're right and where they're wrong. I can see
how you feel you're getting more for your money.
I can't help feeling that everything Galsworthy has done has had its
special function in making _The Dark Flower_ possible. The sociology of
_Fraternity_, the passionate pleading of _Justice_ and _Strife_, the
incomparable emotional experiments of _A Commentary_, the
intellectuality of _The Patrician_--all these have contributed to the
noble simplicities and the noble beauty of _The Dark Flower_.
The Garden
My heart shall be thy garden. Come, my own,
Into thy garden; thine be happy hours
Among my fairest thoughts, my tallest flowers,
From root to crowning petal thine alone.
Thine is the place from where the seeds are sown
Up to the sky enclosed, with all its showers.
But ah, the birds, the birds! Who shall build bowers
To keep these thine? O friend, the birds have flown.
For as these come and go, and quit our pine
To follow the sweet season, or, new-comers,
Sing one song only from our alder-trees,
My heart has thoughts, which, though thine eyes hold mine,
Flit to the silent world and other summers,
With wings that dip beyond the silver seas.
--_Alice Meynell's Poems._ (Charles Scribner's Sons.)
A Remarkable Nietzschean Drama
DEWITT C. WING
_Mr. Faust_, by Arthur Davison Ficke. (Mitchell Kennerley, New
York.)
Have you thought there could be but a single Supreme? There can
be any number of Supremes.--Whitman.
Mr. Faust is the embodiment of the Nietzschean attitude toward the
universe. This characterization consciously ignores the legendary Faust
of Goethe as having no vital kinship with his namesake. There is of
course a skeletal likeness one to the other, but the hero in Mr. Ficke's
drama is incarnated with modern flesh and endued with a supreme will.
His unconquerable spirit is not that of Goethe's _Faust_ but of
Friedrich Nietzsche. Incidentally and singularly it is the spirit of
Whitman. And these two men, more than any other two or twenty in the
realm of literature, represent the undying god Pan, or the spirit of
Youth. Nietzsche and Whitman are the understanding comrades of the
young-hearted and open-minded.
_Mr. Faust's_ creator may have no conscious knowledge of Whitman's
poetry, which is a matter of no moment, but he has read Nietzsche, and
that is momentous--indispensable--in relation to this splendid result of
white-heat intellection. I say intellection because _Mr. Faust_ is not
so much a work of art as a remarkable example of reproduction. I know
that, although the thought and feeling of the work rise in places to the
power of an inspiration wholly personal to the author, never "Thus Spake
Zarathustra." For that is an original, authentic voice which, like
everything else in nature, has no substitute or duplicate.
I can fancy a strong, healthy, organically cultured young man, just
beginning to feel his way into the realities that lie outside the
American cornbelt, by chance taking a peep into one of Nietzsche's great
books, and, fascinated and quickened by that marvelously contagious god,
leaping to new heights of his own manhood. I should guess that in this
instance the young man, who happens to be a lawyer, thirty-one years
old, living at Davenport, Ia., was temporarily Christianized by bad
luck, illness or something of the sort, and in this extremity, kicked by
Nietzsche, experienced the feeling of personal adequacy to which Mr.
Faust gives utterance. Recovering himself, he avowed his own godhood,
even to the last ditch! And that is the triumphant Youth--the
Nietzsche--of the thing.
A day or two subsequent to the appearance of Mr. Ficke's book upon the
market I had the pleasure of hearing it read, with well-nigh perfect
sympathy and appreciation, by the foremost Nietzschean expositor in this
country. Like other listeners I was amazed, charmed and aroused. Were
these results referable to the play alone or in part to the reader, or
to both? To what extent, I was compelled to ask, was the effect illusory
or hypnotic? I had read some of Ficke's verse, which had given no
intimation of anything in its author so heroically Nietzschean as _Mr.
Faust_. I had consequently tabbed Ficke as probably a poetic
possibility, provided he lived a dozen years in an involuntary hell,
undergoing a new birth. Entertaining the doubts indicated by my
questions, I read _Mr. Faust_ to myself, trying it in my fashion by the
trees, the stars and the lake. Subjected to this test the play did not
have the ring and lift which I had heard and felt when it was
read--perhaps I should say given an added vitality--by a Nietzschean
philosopher. It now impressed me as an extraordinary _tour de force_,
reaching in some of its passages a species of accidental
trans-Nietzscheanism.
Written in blank verse, the superior quality of which is admirably
sustained, the style of the drama is undeniably poetical, as Edwin
Björkman, the editor of Mr. Kennerley's Modern Drama Series, states in
an interesting biographical sketch; but where there is so much
consciousness of workmanship--so much preoccupation with an imported
idea instead of sweeping control by an inner, personal urge like that,
for example, which produced _Thus Spake Zarathustra_--poetry is not to
be expected. What surprises me is that, despite this restriction, Mr.
Ficke strides upward in many lines to the borderland of the gods. In the
first three acts he writes as one possessed--as an intellectualist
furiously interested in Americanizing, if you please, the racial
implications of the philosophy of a superhumanity which will always be
associated with the name of his temporary master, Nietzsche. In these
acts there is a deal of amazing revealment of insight; of aspiration for
transcendent goals; of the spiritual insatiability of man. And there is
a cold humor. Underneath the whole thing lies its own by-product: social
dynamite!
I think that Mr. Ficke finished his play in three acts, but he added two
more--to make it five, I was about to say, but in the fifth he achieves
a measurable justification, for the last sentence, "Touch me across the
dusk," is poetry--the wonderful words of the dying Faust, addressed to
Midge, the only person who understood him.
Near the middle of the opening act, Faust, roused by an inquiring mind
to an analytical protest against things as they are, says,
... I would go
Out to some golden sun-lighted land
Of silence.
That is poetical; it is cosmic in its feeling. Looking at a bust of
Washington, he enviously--no, compassionately--remarks,
... Not a star
In all the vaults of heaven could trouble you
With whisperings of more transcendent goals.
At this juncture Satan appears, gains recognition by recalling an
incident involving Faust with a blackmailing woman in a college during
his youth, and thereafter tempts him into empty, unsatisfying paradises.
In his wandering and winding pilgrimage through the world Faust makes
the footprints that we recognize as those of our own humanity, seeking
its way--somewhither. He is offered but rejects peace, happiness,
salvation and all the rest of their related consolations, knowing that
none of them could satisfy his restless heart. To his uncomprehending
friends he is lost, and Satan himself, to whom in such circumstances he
is obviously resigned by society, fails to claim him. But Midge, the
heroine, knew him; she could touch him across the dusk, which was his
kind of immortality. And so Faust, with a vague consciousness of his own
godhood, a sense of his own supremacy, an unshakable faith in one
thing--himself--passed from the earthly freedom of his will into the
great release.
It is altogether too early in the morning of humanity to expect to see
this play or one like it on the stage. That it should be written by a
young American and published by a young Englishman is enough to satisfy
those who would enjoy its presentation, and those to whom it would be
Greek or "unpleasant," whether they saw it or read it, must wait for its
truth through their children--across the dusk!
The Lost Joy
FLOYD DELL
There was once a lady (I forget her name) who said that love was for
women one of the most important things in the world. She made the remark
and let it go at that. She did not write a book about it. If she had
considered it necessary she would doubtless have written such a book.
Consider the possibility--a book entitled _Woman and Love_, a book
proving with logic and eloquence that woman ought to love, and that,
unless she loved, the highest self-development was impossible to her and
to the race!
It is not entirely absurd. Such a book might have been necessary. If
half of all womankind, through some change in our social and ethical
arrangements, refrained from love as something at once disagreeable and
ungenteel, and if the other half loved under conditions disastrous to
health and spirit, then there might have been need for a book preaching
to women the gospel of love. It would have been time to urge that,
hateful as the conditions might be, love was for women, nevertheless, a
good thing, a fine thing, a wonderful and necessary thing. It would have
been time to break down the prejudice which made one-half of womankind
lead incomplete and futile lives, and to raise love itself to its proper
dignity.
Well, we are in a condition like that today, only it is not love, it is
work that has lost its dignity in the lives of women. It is not love, it
is work from which one-half of womankind refrains as from something at
once disagreeable and ungenteel, while the other half of womankind
performs it under conditions disastrous to health and spirit.
There is need today for a book preaching to women the gospel of work. It
is time to break down the prejudice which makes one-half of womankind
lead incomplete and futile, because idle, lives. We need a book to show
women what work should mean to them.
And, curiously enough, the book exists. It is Olive Schreiner's _Woman
and Labor_. It is a wise book and a beautiful book. There are statistics
in it, but there is eloquence flaming on every page. It is a book of the
joy and the significance of work for women.
When Olive Schreiner says "work," she means it. She does not refer to
the makeshifts which masquerade under the term of "social usefulness."
She means work done with the hands and the brain, work done for money,
work that sets the individual free from dependence on any other
individual. It is a theme worth all her eloquence. For work and love,
and not either of them alone, are the most important things in the
world--the supremest expressions of individual life.
H. G. Wells on America
I came to America balancing between hope and skepticism. The
European world is full of the criticism of America; and, for the
matter of that, America, too, is full of it; hostility and
depreciation prevail--overmuch; for, in spite of rawness and
vehemence and a scum of blatant, oh! quite asinine, folly, the
United States of America remains the greatest country in the
world and the living hope of mankind. It is the supreme break
with the old tradition; it is the freshest and most valiant
beginning that has ever been made in human life.--_The Passionate
Friends._
Paderewski and the New Gods
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
I shall keep always, as my most unforgettable memory, the thought of a
certain afternoon during Paderewski's tour this year when he walked
quietly back across the stage, in response to an encore, and played
Schumann's _Warum_. It was somehow heart-breaking. It was a more
poignant questioning to me, than Arnold's
"unquenched, deep-sunken, old-world pain--
Say, will it never heal?"
Nothing that I have ever heard or seen has given me so vivid a sense of
being in the presence of an art that is immortal.
It seems to have become hideously "popular" to love Paderewski. The
critics will tell you that it's only done in America; that Europeans
have any number of idols they put before him; and that we who persist in
calling him "the greatest" are simply under the spell of an old
hypnotism. There was a time, they'll concede, when he came like a
conqueror, royally deserving the flowers we strewed. But now--there's
Bauer, there's Godowsky, and Hofman, and Gans, and Busoni! One local
critic has even gone to the length of saying that since the American
public has sat at the feet of these men and learned sanity in piano
playing it has no enthusiasm for Paderewski's "neurotic, disordered,
incoherent" music--"his woeful exaggerations of sentiment and hysterical
rhapsody." I should say some unpublishable things to that critic if we
should ever discuss the subject.
The three most interesting human faces I know are Forbes-Robertson's,
Kreisler's, and Paderewski's. In the English actor's there is a meeting
of strength and spirituality (not the anæmic "spirituality" of certain
new cults, but a quality of soul that makes him "a prince, a
philosopher, a lover, a soldier, a sad humorist," all in the limits of
one personality) that means utter nobility. It can be as cold as a
graven image, or as hot with feeling as a poet's. Depth upon depth of
subtlety plays across it--not the hypnotic subtlety of the Orientalist,
but the austere subtlety of an English scholar and a great gentleman. In
Kreisler's there is a meeting of strength and sensuousness that means
utter fascination to the artist who would paint him--utter revealment to
the musician who would analyze his art. For the secret of Kreisler's
personality and his music lies in that finely balanced combination of
qualities: a sensuousness that would be a little overpowering, a little
drugging, without the gigantic strength that seems to hold it in leash.
That balance makes possible his little air of military jauntiness, of
sad Vienna gayety; it gives him that huge effect of power that always
makes me feel I'm watching the king of the forest stride through his
kingdom. You need never expect emotionalism from this musician; he's too
strong to give you anything but passion. In Paderewski's face there is a
meeting of strength and two other predominant qualities: sentience, I
think, and suffering. It's difficult to express his great, interesting
head in a series of nouns; but there are some that come near to it:
mystery, melancholy, weariness, a sort of shattering sorrow; always the
sense of struggle and pain, and always the final releasement--in music.
For while you can conceive a Forbes-Robertson away from the stage, and a
Kreisler apart from his violin, you can never for a moment think of
Paderewski without his piano. Not that he's less of a man, but that he's
the most sensitized human instrument that ever dedicated itself to an
art.
To resort to the most overworked phrase in the language, Paderewski has
a temperament. Somebody has said that no fat person ever possessed one;
and after you've speculated about this till you begin to wonder what
temperament really is, you can come back to Paderewski as the most
adequate illustration. Ysaye is the best example I know of the opposite.
When strength turns to fat ... well, we'll not go into that; but to make
my point--and there's certainly nothing of personal maliciousness in
it--it's necessary to reflect that obesity has some insidious influence
upon artistic utterance. (Schumann-Heink is an artist in the best
meaning of the word; but no one ever talked of her and temperament in
the same breath, so she doesn't negate the issue.) But Ysaye's tepid,
wingless, uninspired music--his utterly sweet but _fat_ music--that
appears to attract thousands of people, is as lazily inadequate as its
creator would be in a marathon. It's as though his vision had dropped
slowly away with every added pound of avoirdupois. Or perhaps it's
because vision has a fashion of dropping away with age....
Ah!--but Paderewski has the years, too, now, and his playing is
as virile, as flaming, as it ever was. An artist--with a
temperament--doesn't get old, any more than Peter Pan does. Paderewski's
furrowed face shows the artist's eternal striving; his music shows his
eternal youth, his faithfulness to the vision that furnishes his answer
to the eternal "Warum?"
This is the secret of Paderewski's white magic. He's still the supreme
god! Bauer plays perfectly within the rules--exquisitely and
powerfully--and misses the top height by the mere fraction of a mood,
the simple lack of a temperament; or, as O. Henry might have explained
it, by the unfortunate encumbrance of a forty-two-inch belt. Hofman has
an impatience with his medium, apparently, that leaves his hearer
unsatisfied with the piano; while Paderewski, though he transcends the
instrument, does so because of his love for the piano as a medium, and
forces his hearer to agree with him that it's the supreme one. Godowsky
forces things into the piano--pushes them in and makes them stay there;
Paderewski draws things out, always, and fills the world with them.
I can think of no comparison from which he doesn't emerge unscathed. If
I were a musical reactionary, this judgment would have no value here;
but I'm not. Classical perfection is no longer interesting; Beethoven
seems no longer to comprehend all music--in fact, the people who have no
rebellions about the sterility of the old symphonies are quite beyond my
range of understanding. But Paderewski plays the old music in a new way,
gives it such vitality of meaning that you feel it's just been born--or,
better, perhaps, that its composers have been triumphantly revalued,
rejustified in their claim for eternal life. His Beethoven is as full of
color as his Chopin; and who, by the way, ever started the popular
nonsense about De Pachmann or anyone else being the supreme Chopin
exponent? No one has ever played Chopin like Paderewski; no one has ever
made such simple, haunting melodies of the nocturnes; no one has ever
struck such ringing Polish music out of the polonaises, or such
wind-swept cadences from the Berceuse; no one has ever played the
Funeral March so like a cosmic procession--the mighty moving of humanity
from birth to death and new life; no one has ever so visualized those
"orchestras of butterflies that played to Chopin in the sun."
I have still one great wish in the world: that some time I may hear
Paderewski play on a Mason and Hamlin--that piano of unutterable depth
and richness. The fact that he's never used it is the one flaw in his
performances, for no other instrument that I've heard gives you the same
sense of drowning in great waves of warm sound. The combination would
convince even the followers of the new gods. But, old or new, and even
on his cold Steinway, no one has ever drawn from the piano the same
quality of golden tone or dared such simplicity of singing as
Paderewski. To put his genius into a sentence: no one has ever built so
strong a bridge across the gulf that yawns between vision and
accomplishment.
The Major Symphony
GEORGE SOULE
Round splendor of the harp's entonéd gold
Throbbing beneath the pleading violins--
That hundred-choiring voice that wins and wins
To over-filling song; the bright and bold
Clamor of trumpets; 'cellos that enfold
Richly the flutes; and basses that like djinns
Thunder their clumsy threatening, as begins
The oboe's mystic plaint of sorrows old:--
Are these the symphony? No, it is will
In passion striving to surmount the world,
Growing in sensuous dalliance, sudden whirled
To ecstasies of shivering joy, and still
Marching and mastering, singing mightily,
Consummate when the silence makes it free.
The Prophet of a New Culture
GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER
A profound unrest tortures the heart of the modern man. The world,
slaughtering the innocents, is meaningless; life, bruised and
bewildered, is worthless--such is the melancholy mood of modernity.
Today life is a burden to many to whom it was once a joy. Decadents,
they call themselves, who rediscover the elements of their most personal
life in everything that is weary and ailing. We are all more or less
infected with this weariness and ennui. The blows which the spirit
experiences from opposing sides today are so powerful that no one is in
a position to endure them with equanimity. The forces resident within
the soul no longer suffice to give support and stability to life. Hence
our culture has lost faith in itself. Our civilization is played out.
What the Germans call _Weltschmerz_ has come over us. Philosophers have
fashioned it into systems; singers, into song--the sad but not sweet
music of humanity; sufferers all, into a sharp cry for redemption.
Deniers of the malady must have their eyes opened by physicians,
scurrying around curatively in this humanity.
First of all, there are those who borrow their panacea from religion.
They demand a reform of the ecclesiastical life according to the sense
and spirit of primitive Christianity. They propose to recover the
religion of Jesus, and to find in it healing for all the diseases of the
times. But this remedy is so complicated that it reveals rather than
heals the whole disunity and distraction of our present life. It was
Tolstoi, in garb of desert prophet, who would restore original
Christianity. He preached a radical reversal of our cultural life--a
monastic asceticism, a warfare against all life's impulses, on whose
development our culture is founded. And ecclesiastical liberals would do
virtually the same thing when they try to extract from the religion of
Jesus a food that shall be palatable to modern taste, and then call
their _ragout_, compounded according to their own recipe, "original"
Christianity.
There are other voices, noisier and more numerous. These hold
Christianity in all its forms to be the hereditary evil of humanity, and
see the salvation of the world only in a purification of life from every
Christian memory. Owing to the brisk international interchange of ideas
today, Buddhism has awakened a momentary hope, as if from the religion
of far-off India a purer spiritual atmosphere might be wafted to us, in
which we could convalesce from the Christian malady.
Now, what shall we say of all these strivings to heal the hurt of the
modern mind?
All of them have one adverse thing in common: They would tear up an old
tree by its roots, and put in its place another tree equally as old and
equally as rotten. There is something reactionary in all of them. They
want to cure the present by the past. It is precisely this that cannot
be done. If Christianity was once original, spontaneous, creative, it is
so no more. We cannot lead an age back to Jesus, which has grown out
beyond him. And the Buddha-religion is no more youthful and life-giving
than the Jesus-religion. It is indicative of the depth of the disgust
and the extent of the confusion on the part of the man of today that
such a hoary thing as Buddhism can make so great an impression upon him.
A revived, renascent heathenism, even as compared with Christianity,
would mean a reactionary and outlived form of life. That men of moral
endeavor and scientific vision could hope for a substitute for
Christianity, a conquest over Christianity, in a rebirth of paganism, is
a new riddle of the Sphinx.
One way only remains out of the aberration and dividedness of our
present life: not _backward_, but _forward_! No winning of a religious
view of the world in any other way! No pursuit of the tasks of the moral
life by those who seek a real part and place in the modern world, in any
other way!
Hence, a man is coming to be leader--a man who, as no other, embodies in
himself all the pain and all the pleasure, all the sickness and all the
convalescence, all the age and all the youth, of our tumultuous and
tortured times: _Friedrich Nietzsche_!
I do not know how many of you know the poet of _Zarathustra_. But if you
do not know him, if you have never even heard his name, yet you do know
him, for a part of him is in your own heart and hope. If you have ever
thought seriously about yourself, if you have even tried to think
seriously about yourself, you have taken up into yourself a part of
Nietzsche as you have so thought. Even without your knowledge or
intention, you have passed into the world of thought for which the name
of Nietzsche stands. It has been only now and then, in quite significant
turning points in human history, and only in the case of the rarest of
men, that such an influence has gone forth as from this man. Once in the
horizon of his power, and you are held there as by magic. And yet not in
centuries has a name been so reviled and blasphemed as his.
Anathematized from the pulpit, ridiculed from the stage, demolished by
any champion of blatant and blind _bourgeoisie_, refuted regularly by
pedants, he is still Friedrich Nietzsche, and, unlike most preachers,
his congregation grows from year to year. Newspapers, always sensitive
to the pulse-beat of mediocrity, tell us that "the man is dead"; that he
belongs to the past; that he is already forgotten. But he is more alive,
now that he is dead, than he was when he was living. Dead in the flesh,
he is alive in the spirit, as is so often the case. Superficial
misunderstandings, transient externals, regrettable excrescences--these
were interred with his bones. The real and true Nietzsche lives, and has
the keys of death and of hell. Who has the youth has the future--and
this is why the future belongs to Nietzsche; for no contemporary so
gathers the youth under his shining banner. And it is because the moral
seething of our time, our struggle with questions of the moral life, are
recapitulated and epitomized in Nietzsche, that he stands out, like an
Alpine apocalypse, as the new prophet of our new day. The mysterious
need of a man to find himself in another, another in himself, as deep
calls unto deep or star shines unto star, is met in the resources of the
great personality of Nietzsche.
The new day whose billows bear us afar began with doubt. First, a doubt
of the Church and its divine authority. A violent, devastating storm
swept over popular life. The storm was speedily exorcised. Again--
"The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled."
A new faith emerged from the old doubt, like sweet waters in a bitter
sea, and kept man a living soul.
"The sea is calm tonight;
The tide is full."
But the calm proves to be treacherous. The tide of the new faith now in
the bible, and in the doctrine derived from the bible, went back to sea,
and now I only hear
"Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath
Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world."
The human spirit urged a new, mightier protest against the "It is
written," which was said to put an end to all doubt. The new doubt, as
free inquiry, as protestant science, flung down the gauntlet to the
bible faith. No page of the sacred book remained untouched. Only one
certainty sprang from this new doubt--the certainty that the sacred book
was a human book. Therefore it had no right to rule over man. Man was
its judge; it was not man's judge. It must be measured by man's truth,
man's conscience.
How, now, should the timorous heart of man be quieted in the presence of
this new doubt? At once new props were offered him--truth and the state.
What science recognized as "true," what morals and _bourgeoise_ customs
and civil law sanctioned as "good"--these were now proffered man, that
he might brace up his tottering life thereby. "Trust the light of
science, and you shall indeed have the light of life; do what is 'good,'
and you shall be crowned with the crown of life." This was the
watchword. Then there stirred in the womb of present-day humanity the
last, ultimate, uncanniest doubt. If we doubt the Church, why not doubt
the state, too? If we doubt faith, why not doubt science, too? If we
doubt the bible, why not doubt reason, doubt knowledge, doubt morality?
Even if what we call "true" be really true, can it make us happy? Can
the men who have all the knowledge of our time at their disposal, can
the scholars, can the cultivated, really become fit leaders of humanity
through life's little day? Is not that which is called "good" grievous
impediment in our pilgrimage? Law, morals--are not these perhaps a
blunder of history, an old hereditary woe with which humanity is
weighted down?
This doubt--long and ominously maturing throughout the spiritual
evolution of our new time--finds its most radical, most conscious, and
most eloquent expression in Friedrich Nietzsche. He launches this doubt
not only against all that has been believed and thought and done, but
against all that men believe and think and do today. He shakes every
position which men have held to be unshakable. An irresistible,
diabolical curiosity impels him to transvalue all values with which men
have reckoned, and to inquire whether they are values at all; whether
"good" must not be called evil, "truth" error. As Nietzsche ventures
upon this experiment of his curiosity, as he advances farther and
farther with it, suddenly he laughs with an ironic, uproarious laughter.
The experiment is a success! In the new illumination all the colors of
life change. Light is dark, dark is light. What men had appraised as
food, as medicine, evinced itself to be dangerous poison, miserably
encompassing their doom. And since men believed that all the forces
present, dying, poisoned culture, were resident in their "morals" and
their "Christianity," it was necessary to smash the tables of these old
values. In full consciousness of his calling as destroyer of these old
tables, Nietzsche called himself the immoralist, the anti-Christ. Morals
and Christianity signified to him the most dangerous maladies with which
men were suffering. He considered it to be his high calling as savior to
heal men of these maladies. He sprang into the breach as
anti-Christ. Like Voltaire, he was the apostle and genius of
disrespect--respectability was the only disgrace, popularity the only
perdition.
Nietzsche the Immoralist, Nietzsche the Antichrist! Dare we write his
name and name his writings without calling down upon our much-pelted
heads the wrath of the gods? Does he not blaspheme what is sacred, and
must we not, then, give him a wide berth? There are the familiar words
concerning false prophets in sheep's clothing, but ravening wolves
within. Such wolves there are--smooth, sleek men, paragons of "virtue,"
and "morals," and "faith," but revolting enough in their inner rawness
as soon as you get a glimpse of their true disposition. Conversely,
might there not be men who come to us in wolves' clothing, but whose
hearts are tender and rich and intimate with a pure and noble humanity?
We know such men. Friedrich Nietzsche was one of them. He was a true
prophet. All his transvaluations dealt deadly blows at the old, false,
man-poisoning prophetism. What if more morals matured in this
immoralist, more Christianity in this anti-Christ, more divinity in this
atheist, than in all the pronouncements of all those who today still are
so swift to despise and damn what they do not understand?