"innocence," as she herself calls it, of her thinking. To her went the
acclaimed wise men of the day for the comfort of her fearlessness and
simplicity of thought upon their questions. She was said to be
brilliant. She was not brilliant in the sense of being learned, or of
being capable of mere intellectual jugglery and fantastic adroitness of
thinking; she was brilliant in the crystal clearness and the sure
rapidity of her thinking. The unexpectedness and strangeness of the
simple truth she spoke bewildered people. For this reason she could say,
"I am as much alone of my kind as the greatest manifestation here on
earth. The greatest artist, philosopher, or poet is not above me."
This passion for truth in her own thinking was the origin of her social
value. Its stimulus to others was immediate, and her recognition through
it of the important things in life made her detect at once those people
and things that were original and valuable in themselves.
"Rahel's most comprehensive significance," writes Ellen Key, "lay in
augmenting the productiveness, humanity and culture of her time by
herself everywhere seeking and teaching others to seek the truth; by
everywhere encouraging them to manifest their own culture; by imparting
to others her profound way of looking at religion, men and women,
literature and art; by judging everything according to its intrinsic
value, not according to its deficiencies; by everywhere understanding,
because she loved, and giving life, because she believed in liberty."
Think always, ceaselessly!--this was Rahel's cry. This, she said, is the
only duty, the only happiness. To a young friend she wrote, begging that
he keep ploughing through things afresh, telling him that he "must
always have the courage to hurt himself with questioning and doubts; to
destroy the most comfortable and beautiful edifice of thought--one that
might have stood for life--if honesty demands it." And so, having
thought out things in the most utter freedom, unhampered by old
preconceptions, and finally unafraid of the starkness of the truths
which she faced, she let nothing prescribed be her unchallenged guide or
stand as a substitute for her own vigor and hardness of thinking. This
is why she said that she was revived by downright brutality, after being
wearied by insincerity.
A virtue, so called, had to give a very good accounting of itself to
Rahel. She demanded that it answer a certain test before it could be
called a piece of goodness. For instance, in many cases she recognized
in "performance of duty" mere acquiescence--a laziness of mind which
does not bestir itself to ask what right this duty has to impose itself.
Patience to her was often lack of courage to seize upon a situation and
change it to suit the imperative demand to express oneself. "The more I
see and meditate upon the strivings of this world," wrote Rahel, "the
more insane it appears to me day by day not to live according to one's
inmost heart. To do so has such a bad name, because simulacra of it are
in circulation." Of these "simulacra" we are familiar in every age--the
amazing antics of certain self-styled "radicals," the unaccountable
manifestations of those who, while professing liberality of view, seem
to have no standards of values in their extravagances of living. Rahel
could understand every nature except the insincere and unnatural.
While we mourn or exult over the eager efforts of women in our day to
evolve completely human personalities, it is interesting to read Rahel's
summing-up of the feminist movement: "Has it been proved by her
organization that a woman cannot think and express her ideas? If such
were the case, it would nevertheless be her duty to renew the attempt
continually." "And how," exclaims Ellen Key, "would Rahel have abhorred
the tyrannical treatment of each other's opinions, the cramping
narrow-mindedness, the envious jostling, the petty importance of
nobodies, which the woman's cause now exhibits everywhere, since, from
being a movement for liberty in great women's souls, like Rahel's own,
it has become a movement of leagues and unions, in which the small souls
take the lead."
Since it is reality and not appearance that alone could stand before
Rahel's devastating scrutiny of human things, and since to her the
highest personal morality consisted in being true, coercive marriage
seemed to her the great social lie. How could one of her simple clarity
of thinking be anything but outraged by the vulgarities of an average
marriage? "Is not an intimacy without charm or transport more indecent
than ecstasy of what kind so ever?" she demands. "Is not a state of
things in which truth, amenity, and innocence are impossible, to be
rejected for these reasons alone?" Of the evils in Europe she cries,
"Slavery, war, marriage--and they go on wondering and patching and
mending!" Rahel believed that in the existing institution of marriage it
was almost impossible to find a union in which full, clear truth and
mutual love prevailed.
Of Rahel's nature, warm, richly exuberant with a healthy sensuousness
and desire for sunlight, Jean Paul's letter to her gives us the essence.
"Wingéd one--in every sense--" he wrote, "you treat life poetically and
consequently life treats you in the same way. You bring the lofty
freedom of poetry into the sphere of reality, and expect to find again
the same beauties here as there."
Biographical facts are negligible here. Even comment on the interpretive
insight of Ellen Key seems not to be essential, though without it this
book could not be. It is the personality of Rahel Varnhagen that
matters, and the influence of that personality on the men of her day.
Rahel is distinctive as a challenger of the worn-out social and ethical
baggage that somehow, in all its shabbiness, has been reverently, with
ritual and with authority, given into our keeping by those who were as
oppressed by it as we in turn are expected to be. With the simplicity of
her questioning the honesty of these conventions, Rahel has made worship
of some of them less inevitable.
Some Contemporary Opinions of Rahel Varnhagen
CORNELIA L. ANDERSON
Heine said: "I should wear a dog collar inscribed: 'I belong to Frau
Varnhagen.'"
Rahel's power over the brilliant minds of her day lay in her own
wonderful personality. She was unique, knew it and gloried in it. She
wrote to Varnhagen, her husband and lover: "You will not soon see my
like again." She understood thoroughly the limitations of her sex. "They
are so surprisingly feeble," she says; "almost imbecile from lack of
coherence. They lie, too, since they are often obliged to, and since the
truth demands intelligence." ... "I know women: what is noble in their
composition keeps together stupidity or madness." ... And she speaks of
their "clumsy, terrible stupidity in lying." But, despite Rahel's
opinion of women, or because of her understanding of their needs, she
was a true feminist and looked toward their liberation through
development and self-expression.
Ellen Key writes: "How Rahel, with her lucidity of thought, would have
exposed the modern superstition that it is in _outward_ departments of
work that woman gives expression to her human 'individuality.' She says
by true economy 'nature keeps woman nearer to the plant'! This 'economy'
is easily understood; it is because the tender life is woman's creation
and because that life requires tranquillity for its genesis and growth;
because a woman taken up by the problems of external life ... no longer
possesses the psychological qualifications which are indispensable in
order that a child's soul may grow in peace and joy; because, in other
words, _children_ need _mothers_, not only for their physical birth but
for their human bringing-up. Rahel hits the very center of the spiritual
task of motherhood when she says that if she had a child she would help
it to learn to listen to its own inmost ego; everything else she would
sacrifice to this.... The progress or ruin of humanity depends, in
Rahel's prophetic view, upon the capacity of the mothers for performing
their task."
How Rahel had listened to her own inmost ego is shown by the following
characterization by Ellen Key. "Rahel probably did not know a single
date in the history of Greece, but she read Homer in Voss's translation;
it made her declare that 'the Odyssey seems to me so beautiful that it
is positively painful,' and she discovered that Homer is always great
when he speaks of water, as Goethe is when he speaks of the stars.
Probably she could not enumerate the rivers of Spain, but she knew _Don
Quixote_. In a word, she was the very opposite of the kind of talent
that passes brilliant examinations and is capable of carrying
'completely undigested sentences in its head.' What Rahel could not
transform into blood of her blood did not concern her at all. There was
such an indestructible 'connection between her abilities,' such an
intimate 'co-operation between her temperament and her intelligence,'
that there was no room in her for all the unoriginal ballast of which
the views and opinions of most other people are made up: she could only
keep and only give what was her own."
What Rahel's power over her contemporaries was we may gather from what
they say of her who was "Rahel and nothing more:"
Heine describes her as "the most inspired woman in the universe." T.
Mundt calls her "the sympathetic nerve of the time." The Austrian
dramatist, Grillparzer, relates: "Varnhagen went home with me. As we
passed his house, it occurred to him to introduce me to his wife, the
afterwards so celebrated Rahel, of whom I then knew nothing. I had been
strolling about all day and felt tired to death, and was, therefore,
heartily glad when we were told that Frau Varnhagen was not at home. But
as we came down the stairs, she met us and I submitted to my fate. But
now the lady,--elderly, perhaps never handsomer, shriveled by illness,
reminding me rather of a fairy, not to say a witch,--began to talk, and
I was altogether enchanted. My weariness disappeared, or perhaps,
rather, gave way to intoxication. She talked and talked till nearly
midnight, and I don't know whether they turned me out or whether I went
away of my own accord. Never in my life have I heard anyone talk more
interestingly. Unfortunately it was near the end of my stay, and I could
not repeat the visit."
The Poetry of Rupert Brooke
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
_Poems_, by Rupert Brooke. (Sidgwick and Jackson, London.)
The unusual thing about Rupert Brooke--the young Oxford don whose poetry
is just finding its way in this country--is that he has graduated from
the French school without having taken a course in decadence. The result
is a type of English poetry minus those qualities we think of as typical
of "the British mind" and plus those that stand as the highest
expression of the French spirit. There is nothing of self-conscious
reserve about Mr. Brooke; and yet it is not so obvious a quality as his
frank, unashamed revealment that places him definitely with the French
type. It is rather a matter of form--that quality of saying a thing in
the most economic way it can be said, of finding the simple and the
inevitable word. Mr. Brooke stands very happily between a poet like
Alfred Noyes, in whom one rarely finds that careful selection, and the
esthetes whose agony in that direction becomes monotonous. For example,
in the first sonnet of this collection:
Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire
Of watching you; and swing me suddenly
Into the shade and loneliness and mire
Of the last land! There, waiting patiently,
One day, I think, I'll feel a cool wind blowing,
See a slow light across the Stygian tide,
And hear the Dead about me stir, unknowing,
And tremble. And I shall know that you have died,
And watch you, a broad-browed and smiling dream,
Pass, light as ever, through the lightless host,
Quietly ponder, start, and sway, and gleam--
Most individual and bewildering ghost!--
And turn, and toss your brown delightful head
Amusedly, among the ancient Dead.
There are about eighteen words in this one sonnet chosen with infinite
pains; and yet the effect of the whole is quite unlabored--an effect of
spontaneity reduced to its simplest terms.
Perhaps the point can be made more emphatically by a miscellaneous
quotation of single lines, because the poignancy of Rupert Brooke's
phrasing leaves me in a torment of inexpressiveness, forced to quote him
rather than talk about him. Here are a few: "Like hills at noon or
sunlight on a tree"; "And dumb and mad and eyeless like the sky"; "The
soft moan of any grey-eyed lute-player"; "Some gaunt eventual limit of
our light"; "Red darkness of the heart of roses"; "And long noon in the
hot calm places"; "My wild sick blasphemous prayer"; "Further than
laughter goes, or tears, further than dreaming"; "Against the black and
muttering trees"; "And quietness crept up the hill"; "When your swift
hair is quiet in death"; "Savage forgotten drowsy hymns"; "And dance as
dust before the sun"; "The swift whir of terrible wings"; "Like flies on
the cold flesh"; "Clear against the unheeding sky"; "So high a beauty in
the air"; "Amazed with sorrow"; "Haggard with virtue"; "Frozen smoke";
"Mist-garlanded," and a thousand other things that somehow have a
fashion of striking twelve. There's a long poem about a fish, beginning
In a cool curving world he lies
And ripples with dark ecstasies.
that flashes through every tone of the stream's "drowned colour" from
"blue brilliant from dead starless skies" to "the myriad hues that lie
between darkness and darkness." And there's one about Menelaus and Helen
containing this description:
High sat white Helen, lonely and serene.
He had not remembered that she was so fair,
And that her neck curved down in such a way;
The simplicity of that last line--but what a picture it is!
The important things about Mr. Brooke, however--and of course this
should have been said in the first paragraph--are his sense of life and
his feeling for nature. Of the first it might be said that he is strong
and radiant and sure--and at the same time reverently impotent. _The
Hill_, which I like better than anything in this collection, will
illustrate:
Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.
You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old...." "And when we die
All's over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips," said I,
--"Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!"
"We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said;
"We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness!" ... Proud we were,
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
--And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.
Everything in it--with the exception of "kissed the lovely grass," which
might easily be spared--is fine; "with unreluctant tread Rose-crowned
into the darkness!" is vivid with beauty; and when the simple dignity of
"such brave true things to say" has swung you to its great height, the
drop in that sudden last line comes with the most moving wistfulness.
There are several poems, too long to quote here, which show Mr. Brooke's
affinity with the outdoors; but perhaps even five lines from one of them
will suggest it:
Then from the sad west turning wearily,
I saw the pines against the white north sky,
Very beautiful, and still, and bending over
Their sharp black heads against a quiet sky
And there was peace in them....
Not long ago I asked a poet in whose judgment I have a profound belief,
to read these poems of Rupert Brooke's and give me his opinion. After
looking at two or three he said he was afraid he wasn't going to like
them, but the next day he reported that he wished to retract, making the
magnificent concession that "_some_ of Brooke's moods are healthy!" Of
course there are a number of things in this volume that can easily be
interpreted as unhealthy or repulsive, like the _Wagner_:
Creeps in half wanton, half asleep,
One with a fat wide hairless face.
He likes love music that is cheap;
Likes women in a crowded place;
And wants to hear the noise they're making.
His heavy eyelids droop half-over,
Great pouches swing beneath his eyes.
He listens, thinks himself the lover,
Heaves from his stomach wheezy sighs;
He likes to feel his heart's a-breaking.
The music swells. His gross legs quiver.
His little lips are bright with slime.
The music swells. The women shiver,
And all the while, in perfect time
His pendulous stomach hangs a-shaking.
But it seems something more than that to me. As an attack on German
emotionalism--however unjustly, from my point of view, through
Wagner--the poem struck me as an exercise of extraordinary cleverness. I
don't know that anyone has ever said so effectively the things that
ought be said about that type of emotion which feeds not upon life but,
inversely, upon emotion.
Mr. Brooke's pictures have much of the quality of Böcklin's. That first
sonnet can be imagined in the same tone values as Böcklin's wonderful
_Isle of the Dead_, and the closing lines of _Victory_ need the same
medium:
Down the supernal roads,
With plumes a-tossing, purple flags far flung,
Rank upon rank, unbridled, unforgiving,
Thundered the black battalions of the Gods.
_Seaside_ needs an artist like Leon Dabo:
Swiftly out from the friendly lilt of the band,
The crowd's good laughter, the loved eyes of men,
I am drawn nightward; I must turn again
Where, down beyond the low untrodden strand,
There curves and glimmers outward to the unknown
The old unquiet ocean. All the shade
Is rife with magic and movement. I stray alone
Here on the edge of silence, half afraid,
Waiting a sign. In the deep heart of me
The sullen waters swell towards the moon,
And all my tides set seaward.
From inland
Leaps a gay fragment of some mocking tune,
That tinkles and laughs and fades along the sand,
And dies between the seawall and the sea.
How perfect those last three lines are! How skilful, in painting the
sea, to concentrate upon something from inland, making the ocean twice
as old and vast and unquiet because of that little tinkling tune.
One will find in Rupert Brooke various kinds of things, but never
attitudinizing and never insincerity. He is one of the most important of
those young Englishmen who are doing so much for modern poetry. He is
essentially a poet's poet, and yet his feet are deep in the common soil.
Swinburne would have liked him, but the significant thing is that
Whitman would, too. There are several poems I have not mentioned that
Whitman would have loved.
Tagore As a Dynamic
GEORGE SOULE
[We do not agree that _Tagore_ is a dynamic; we find him a poet
whose music is more important than his thinking. But we are glad
to print this interesting analysis.]
In _The Crescent Moon_, with its ravishing beauty of childhood, in _The
Gardener_, with its passion of love, and especially in _Gitanjali_ and
_Sadhana_ (Macmillan), with their life universal and all-permeating, we
have found the poet Tagore and been grateful. It remains to ask: What
has Tagore done to us? What is he likely to do for the future? What has
been his answer to the promise and the challenge of the world?
Religions have provided one answer. In his zeal of affirmation the
prophet has declared that the individual lives after death; that in some
unseen world completion shall be attained. Yet increasing millions find
this explanation fading into unreality. If one living organism is
perpetuated after its physical dissolution, why not another? We can
account for every particle of life which the blossom loses by its death.
Some has passed to the seed; the rest finds its chemical reaction, which
in turn produces other forms of life--in entirely new individuals. To
assert that the original blossom lives in an unseen form outside the
realm of thought is preposterous. Why should it? Its function has been
accomplished. The sentimentality behind this thinking is a weak prop for
a vigorous mind. And exactly the same reasoning applies to all living
organisms, including man.
The more intelligent part of mankind has also outgrown the conception of
a definite heaven. It is impossible to imagine a satisfactory heaven for
the individual. A place where there is no strife, where everything is
perfection and completion--what joy is to be found there? The essence of
life as we know it is growth and survival; its happiness comes from the
exercise of a function. Growth and survival postulate extinction; in
heaven an individual would evaporate.
Some thinkers have made a substitute "religion of humanity." They find
solace in action tending to make the world a better place; they have
been gratified by an imaginative conception of a future heaven on earth.
As a religion of morality and action this is magnificent. Yet its dogma
does not satisfy. A heaven on earth is no more conceivable than a heaven
anywhere else. If we find our happiness in action, how shall our
descendants find happiness when there are no more evils to conquer?
Though a static condition of blessedness be the goal of humanitarian
endeavor, it is the progress toward it which furnishes the joy.
The Oriental thinker has looked for his answer in a different direction.
Though the individual is partial and unsuccessful, life as a whole is
always triumphant. Cannot the individual by contemplation identify
himself with the world-soul? Can he not tack himself on to this
all-inclusive life by denial and forgetfulness of himself? Brahmin
saints have done so imaginatively. But such an answer is no answer. We
are individuals, after all, and thinking of Nirvana will not rob us of
our separate bodies and minds. Contemplation is not a substitute for
living.
The doctrine of transmigration is equally unsatisfying. If an individual
never succeeds in any single life, innumerable chances will be mere
repetitions of tragedy. The only hope of such a process would be a final
"heaven on earth," which is just as inconceivable as that of the
humanitarians.
We cannot now be satisfied with theological answers. Nor will the world
ever find an answer permanently satisfactory. Is not this as it should
be? A fixed system of thought which answers every spiritual craving must
be a shell around the individual, preventing growth. It finally ceases
to be a dynamic and becomes a wall in the way of the feelers which
mankind is constantly sending into his spiritual environment. It forces
him to rest. It eventually turns all his expansion into the lower planes
of life. It is deadening, suffocating, as soon as he reaches its limits.
Of what nature, then, must be the religion of the modern man and woman?
First of all, it must not be imposed from without; it must grow through
the personality and find its being there. It must not only square with
every known fact of science and thought; it must stimulate to a fervent
desire for new understanding. It must not deny or destroy life; it must
be life's essence. It must ring with a call to the individual to assume
his proper dignity of life. It must harmonize with the laughter of
children and with the bitter beauty of a winter sea. It must flame with
emotion, yet be keen and hard as a sword. And it must be not a
self-constituted standard with which every other thing is arbitrarily
compared, but a principle of growth making necessary in us vision,
strength, freedom, and fearlessness.