religion. He gives expression, though not, of course, perfect
expression, to a synthesis of many latent instincts of the modern mind.
He glories in understanding, not only facts and truth, but emotions and
all manifestations of life. He calls us to see vivid beauty wherever it
is found. He acclaims the aid of science in extending man's personality
throughout the universe. He sees the oneness of all life, and bids man
stand erect on account of this eternal and timeless force coursing
through him. He sees the oneness of humanity, and the necessity of
perfecting human relations. He depicts purity without asceticism, vigor
without brutality. He emphasizes joy and action. He does not blink the
fact of death, but robs it of horror by showing it as the natural end of
a victorious life. While he encourages by the idea of an ultimate goal,
he inspires by the conception of a real connection with infinity here
and now. Revering the universal life, he sees that it finds expression
only in individuals, and that the law of our being must be to live as
completely as possible.
Many before Tagore have said these things partially. But it remained for
a poet who combines the intelligence of the Orient with that of the
Occident to say them all, and to say them with such beauty and
simplicity that a large part of the world listens. If he succeeds in
making us conscious of such a religion, he will have quickened life and
made it potent as few artists can.
Ethel Sidgwick's "Succession"
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
_Succession_: A Comedy of the Generations, by Ethel Sidgwick.
(Small, Maynard and Company, Boston.)
Ethel Sidgwick is the world's next great woman novelist. Though I
confess eagerly that I enjoy her novels more than any novels I've ever
read--I mean it literally--it isn't on so personal a basis that I offer
the judgment. But I'm confident that within ten years the critical
perspective will show her on this pinnacle. Since George Eliot and the
Brontës, I can think of no woman who has focused art and life so
intensely into novel writing--though even as I say this _Ethan Frome_
looms up and leaves me a little uncomfortable. But the important thing
is that Ethel Sidgwick is going to count--enormously.
People who aren't yet aware of her (and there seem to be a lot of them)
can be easily explained as that body of the public that neglects a
masterpiece until it has become the fashion to acclaim it. But Ethel
Sidgwick has written a novel that's more important than any number of
our traditional masterpieces. For instance, it's a much more important
story than _Vanity Fair_; just as _Jean Christophe_ is more valuable
than _Ivanhoe_. The novel of manners has its delightful place, and so
has the historical romance; but the novel that chronicles with subtlety
the intellectual or artistic temper of an age is as much more important
than these as Greek drama is than the moving picture show.
I know there are people who'll read _Succession_ and continue to prefer
Thackeray's geniality to Miss Sidgwick's brilliant seriousness and her
humor that's not at all genial--but rapid, sophisticated, impatient of
comedy in the accepted sense. Ethel Sidgwick might write a radiant
tragedy, or a wistful satire, or a sad comedy; I can never imagine her
being anything so obvious as merely comic--or genial! She doesn't laugh;
she _couldn't_ chuckle; she has just the flash of a smile, and then she
hurries on dazzlingly, as though things were too important to be
anything but passionate about. She doesn't "warm the cockles of your
heart"--or whatever that silly phrase is; and she doesn't do crude, raw
things to show you that she "knows life." She goes down into the
darkness rose-crowned, in Rupert Brooke's gorgeous phrase; when she goes
into the sunlight it is always with something of remembered agony.
That's the fine quality of her vitalism. She's too strong to be hard,
too steel-like to be robust. She's like fire and keen air--to borrow
another poet's phrase. She reflects life through the mirror of a vivid
personality--which is one way of being an important artist. She assumes
that you're also vivid, and quick, and subtle, and this gives her
writing the most beautiful quality of nervousness--the kind you mean
when you're not talking about nerves. In short, Ethel Sidgwick is the
most definitely magnetic personality I've ever felt through a book's
pages.
_Succession_, though complete in itself, is really a sequel to
_Promise_, published a year ago. The sub-title presents the idea, and
can be concretely expanded in a sentence: Antoine, child-wonder
violinist, and the youngest of the celebrated Lemaures, revolts against
the musical ideas of his grandfather. Here it is again--the battle of
youth and age, made particularly interesting because it's a purely
intellectual warfare, and particularly charming because its participants
are such delightful people.
The first glimpse of Antoine is irresistible. After a series of concerts
in England, he is being taken by his uncle to their home in France. M.
Lucien Lemaure has chosen the long route because his nephew has an odd
habit of sleeping better on the water than in any house or hotel on
shore; and while he doesn't understand this nephew, he has vital reasons
for considering him: for upon Antoine's delicate shoulders rests the
musical honor of the family.
"Sleep well, mon petit," he said, in the tiny cabin. "We are
going home."
Antoine, who had no immediate intention of sleeping, was staring
out of the dim porthole of a fascinating space of the unknown.
"That is home to you?" he asked vaguely.
"To be sure. My first youth was passed there, like thine."
After an interval passed spent in a vain effort to imagine his
uncle with no hair on his face, Antoine gave it up and recurred
to the window. "I wish I lived on the sea," he murmured.
In the train, flying toward Paris, Lucien refers to the last London
recital, when Antoine had made both his uncle's and his conductor's
lives a burden by his indifferent rehearsal of his grandfather's latest
composition. Antoine's outburst had outraged Lucien, to whom faith in
his father's character and genius had, all his life, amounted to a
religion.
"What will you tell him then?" said Antoine, turning his dark
eyes without deranging his languid attitude along the seat. "Just
that I said some 'sottises,' the same as always?"
"He is not a child," thought Lucien instantly. "He is clever,
maddening. Of course, my action will have to be explained. I
shall say," he said aloud, with deliberation, "that we differed
about the concerto. That you were difficult and headstrong over
that, which is certainly true. You have admitted since that it
was too much for you, eh?"
"Yes," said the boy. "It is an awful thing, but I played it. I
had to have something real that night."
"You imply my father's composition is not real?"
"Oh, do not," said the boy, under his breath. "I have remembered
he is your father now."
"To be sure," said M. Lucien, with stateliness. "And have you no
duty to him as well?"
"I shall see him soon. I shall remember then." Antoine diverted
his eyes, to his uncle's private relief. "Do you think I do not
want to remember, after that?"
"I should think you would be ashamed," said Lucien, by way of the
last word in argument, and retired to his paper.
"You like me to be ashamed," said Antoine, snatching the last
word from him, though still with a manner of extreme languor.
"Good, then, I have been. It is not"--he watched the trees of
Normandy sleepily--"a very nice feeling."
"I am glad you know what it is like, at least," growled his uncle
into the paper.
"Don't you?" said his nephew. "What it is like, is to make you
feel rather sick--all the time--especially while you are playing
it."
"What?"
"The thing you are ashamed of."
How I wanted to hug him!
"Antoine," said Lucien, rising and discarding the paper, "do not
be absurd. Here, look at me. You suffered that night at the
concert, eh? You excited yourself so much, little imbecile. Are
you tired now?"
"No, thank you--this is France," replied Antoine. "That is a
French cow," he murmured, "not so fat. That is a French tree, not
so thick. The sky is different, and the sun. The concerts will be
easier, I expect."
But the first glimpse of M. Lemaure, the grandfather, is reassuring. In
fact, he's almost as irresistible as Antoine, making you realize
immediately that the battle is going to be a subtle one, and that it may
be difficult to know which side to take, after all.
The old musician asks about the last recital.
"I was not at the last orchestral," Lucien answers. "I left him
in Wurst's charge, and went to the country, ... I should not
easily desert my post, as you know; but the boy made it clear
enough he had no use for me. He clung to that sacré concerto of
Tschedin, which he knows you detest, and which I never thought in
a condition to perform. He mocked himself of my objections,
contradicted me, eluded me, and twisted Wurst round his finger at
rehearsals."
"And Wurst?"
"Wurst found him charming. He has Russian blood himself, and had
known the composer. He has encouraged Antoine's revolutionary
tendencies from the first. The pair of them took the last concert
so completely out of my hands that it seemed fruitless to
remain."
"Bébé forgot himself," pronounced M. Lemaure, still quite at
ease. Indeed the situation so reminded him of Antoine's childhood
that he longed to laugh. "What did he say, and when?"
"We will not revive it," said Lucien. "When he came to his
senses, he apologized sufficiently. Perhaps he was not well ...
when is the first engagement--Sunday?"
"Let him be for a time. There is no harm."
Lucien grunted. "I shall not disturb him while he is seasick, if
that is what you mean. It would do him no harm to play scales all
the week."
"Scales--as you will, but not persons. Not Dmitri Tschedin, I
mean, nor even me. It is intrusive personality, always, that
disturbs the current of Antoine's philosophy."
"Father! How absurd."
"But I have long remarked it. His own individuality fights the
alien matter, and it is not till he has either rejected it or
absorbed that he is steady again. Wurst and his Russians have
excited him--nothing more natural. For me," said M. Lemaure,
plunging into memory, as he stood by his son's side at the
window, "at his age, the realm of music did not hold such
petulant passions, any more than it held flat heresy, like that
of Sorbier and Duchâtel."
"Antoine adores Duchâtel," remarked Lucien. "There is no fighting
there."
"Bon!" The old man laughed. "Heresy on the hearth then, if it
must be so. So long as he does not play the stuff in my hearing."
There are over six hundred pages in the story, and they cover just a
year and a half of Antoine's life. This appears to be an impossible
literary feat; any orthodox novelist will tell you that you can't hold a
reader through six hundred pages with the story of a fourteen-year-old
boy. But Miss Sidgwick's holding power is--well, I read _Succession_
during a brief trip to Boston, and much as I longed to absorb Concord
and all its charms, I found I only had half my capacity with me; the
rest was with Antoine, and it stayed there till in desperation I shut
myself up in a hotel room and saw him safely off to America with his
nice, wholesome, inartistic father. Then came the awful realization that
I'd have to wait a whole year for the next volume--for surely Miss
Sidgwick intends to make a trilogy.
The explanation of this absorption is simply that Antoine is so
interesting. His professional life is dramatic; but even in the
commonest experiences of every day his world is as vivid as it can only
be to a dramatic nature. For instance, in this little scene with his
brother:
"There was a little thing on legs," he announced, "that went
under the carpet just now. It was rather horrible, and I have not
looked for it."
"A blackbeetle, I presume," said Philip.
"It was not black," said Antoine. "It was pink--a not-clean pink,
you understand. I found it"--a pause--"disagreeable."
"How could you find it when you had not looked for it?" said
Philip. Another pause, Antoine considering the point, which was
an old one.
"You will catch it," he suggested, shooting a soft glance at his
brother.
"Why should I?" said Philip. "They're perfectly harmless."
"I shall dream of it," said Antoine, shutting his eyes. "It was
too long, do you see, and pink as well." His brow contracted, and
he finished with gentle conviction. "If it comes upon my bed in
the night, I shall be sick."
Of course, most interesting of all is his musical development, in which
are involved several personalities of striking character: Duchâtel, the
revolutionary, more a son, after the French fashion, than a man or a
musician; Savigny, the celebrated alienist, who treats the child
hypnotically in his severe illnesses; Lemonski, a rival child wonder,
who is like a pig, and vulgar--which it is silly to say, because he is a
beautiful artist, according to Antoine; Reuss, the great German
conductor, and the boy's staunch friend, who hates "the cursed French
training" of making life weigh so heavily on its youth; Jacques
Charretteur, the vagabond violinist, "a man to play French music in
France"; Cécile, the aunt, who has the perception to understand the
little genius with the dark eyes, whose "expression was so beautiful
that she could hardly bear it"; and Ribiera, the famous Spanish pianist,
who "warms" the piano, in Antoine's words, and calls the boy an
intelligent ape, by way of expressing his admiration. All these people
are drawn with consummate skill.
I think one of the most poignant passages in the book, to me, is
Antoine's description of how he had _raté_ the solo at a London concert.
It was at the end of the season, and he had been harassed by a thousand
needless frictions:
"The first part had gone pretty well, though I did not like how
the Duchâtel sounded. I thought that was the violin, perhaps--and
a new room. It was a bad room, pretty, but stupid for the sound.
I heard much too much, so I was sure _they_ were not hearing
properly. _They_ were extremely still, and made a little clapping
at the end. I did not find it a good concert, but Wurst in the
interval said it was very well, and I should not excite myself.
So when I did not, then I was tired, and it seemed stupider than
before. And at last that thing came, the Mirski 'Caprice,' which
you know how detestable. The passages are hard in that thing, but
I know them. Every morning I played them to Moricz, so now I do
not trouble.... And then, in the middle of it, I heard Peter Axel
playing wrong.... And I was frightened horribly.... And I made
him an awful frown for forgetting it, and Peter was looking at
me. His face was not happy like it generally is. It was like one
of those worst dreams. And, of course, I stopped playing, because
it cannot be like that. And Peter said 'Go back,' very quietly,
making a lot of little passages and returning for me to find, do
you see?"
"He gave you a chance to pick up, eh?" said Philip. "And you
couldn't."
"Couldn't! I _would_ not. I was furious--awful.... I said a rude
thing to Axel in passing, and went off the estrade. And _they_
all clapped together down there, bah!--though they knew it was
not finished. They were sorry I had stopped--because they were
people who like a difficult Caprice, to be amused by it. But I
was not amused. Nor Peter, very much." He laughed sharply.
"Don't, I say," said Philip. "It's all over now. It doesn't
matter, really. Everybody forgets, now and then" ...
"I do not," said Antoine. "I do not know how it is to forget. I
know that thing--I know all the little notes, long ago, before
Moricz--since years. It is not possible to _forget_ a little
concert piece that you _know_...."
"Did you go on again?"
"Yes. After Wurst had finished talking, I had to. I should not
have for my uncle, but I had to for him. He was violent, Wurst.
He said it was indigne and lôche if I stopped, and a lot of other
words. He was like a little dog barking. A man like Wurst does
not 'rater.' He does not know how that is done. His head has all
the big scores inside.... He did not see how it was for me to
stand up on the estrade again, with quantities of beautiful
people looking kind. It would have been so better if they had
siffli, like here in Paris."
The book closes on an unexpected and suggestive note. Antoine, who had
always realized that his grandfather couldn't bear his being "different"
in music, had taken quietly to composing the kind of things he loved. He
"made" a quintet in which Ribiera was given a brilliant piano part, and
which he thought beautiful--extremely. But when they played it for him,
though he was moved to cry, he found its "ideas" not so good as he had
thought. Whereupon he plans to produce better ones in his new overture.
_Succession_ is a masterpiece of art, and Antoine is the most lovable
and interesting character in new fiction.
The Meaning of Bergsonism
LLEWELLYN JONES
Bergson's philosophy is the antithesis of the natural-science view of
the universe as mechanism. In that view the laws of nature are fixed
sequences controlling matter, or energy, and the more complicated and
faultless the mechanism the higher the life. Just how this mechanism
became conscious of the fact that it was a mechanism--caught itself at
itself, so to speak, and announced the laws of its own being--is a
question as puzzling as the old theological one of the aseity of
God--which is simply a Latinized way of asking how the deity could,
being infinite, turn himself inside out in such a manner as to become
aware of his own existence and attributes. In fact, the two questions
are one and the same. According to Bergson, mechanism not only cannot
explain consciousness, but it is the very antithesis of conscious life.
Behind mechanism he places an inextinguishable but not uncheckable vital
urge with endless potentialities and with no fixed goal. The progress of
this "elan vital" is through resistance to matter, which is simply the
reversal of its own movement. The onward urge is what Bergson calls
"pure duration" or motion, and its collision with its own reverse
movement is what appears to us as space. The actual situation of life at
any given time is simply a _modus vivendi_ between this spiritual
activity striving to be free, and the reverse movement.
We know, of course, that the physical universe is simply energy running
down. Just as a glass of water cools off, so the sun dissipates its
heat, and so, we are learning, the elements break up into simpler forms,
giving off their contained energy in the forms of heat and electricity
as they do so. But on the other hand the plant takes unto itself that
energy of the sun, and with it builds up again the inorganic salts from
its soil into higher forms with a greater content of stored energy. What
the plant does, says Bergson, is typical and symbolical of what all life
does at all times: sets up a reverse current to the running-down
tendency of the universe of matter.
Life cannot do this easily, but has to adapt itself to the resistance of
the downward flow. It does this through its motor reactions, its sense
organs, and above all through its intelligence when that is evolved. The
evolution of these things gives us our ideas of space. The insect cuts
up its environment into spatial forms easy for it to deal with. Man with
different sense organs probably lives in a different space world. As "a
thing is where it acts," it is obvious that the boundaries of things in
the material realm would be quite different if we had, for example, some
sort of sense organ adapted to identify things by their electrical
properties. But this identifying of things by spatial and material
concepts--the mathematical order--is instrumental to the ends of action,
and the original consciousness of life, while it included the
potentialities of intellectual knowledge, was instinctive. Instinct,
according to Bergson, is first-hand knowledge, but knowledge incapable
of conceptual extension. It is therefore no use in the practical affairs
of life, but certain and immediate in its apprehension of the actual
flow of life itself. In its broadened form of intuition it is
responsible for all the valid and original insights of the philosophers
and poets. The structural and dialectic forms in which philosophies have
been given to the world are simply the intellectualizing process which
philosophers have used to buttress--and which they have often thought
produced--the insight which was prior to and independent of the system.
Bergson's doctrine has been seized upon by apologists for every creed
and for every iconoclasm. Bergson has been accused of every intellectual
crime, from being the intellectual father of syndicalism to being the
last rich relative of struggling obscurantism. The protestant
theologians talk glibly of Bergson's idea of God, and use him as a stick
with which to beat the hated materialist. Bergson himself would never
apply his philosophy to the uses of the syndicalists. The argument of
the syndicalists themselves is simply an ingenious parody of the
Bergsonian philosophy, as it is so far developed. As mechanism and the
mathematical order, they say, do not represent life, we cannot by the
means of natural and sociological sciences predict in advance what life
will do, and what forms it will take. We cannot base revolutionary
action, for instance, along Marxian lines, because the whole Marxist
philosophy rests upon the assumption that life is the slave of material
forces--chemical firstly, and economical in the human drama--and that it
will therefore follow along predetermined lines. If life is an "elan
vital," breaking its path as it goes, and only able to think in terms of
the past, then revolutionary activity must cut loose from the
reactionary intellect, and trust itself to its instincts; fight its way
to that freedom which is impossible in the mathematically determined
intellectual realm, and which is equally impossible of achievement by
mere intellectual foresight. So the syndicalist in the name of Bergson
cuts loose from all theories of the future he wishes to bring in,
preaches the "general strike" for its stimulating effect on the emotions
of the proletarian constituents of his social "elan vital"--quite
careless of whether it would ever be a practical success or not--and
deliberately cuts loose from all forms of "bourgeoise culture."
But the anti-revolutionists point out that Bergson does believe in the
intellect as a guide to the practical affairs of life; and industry and
production--the field of the syndicalist--are far more mechanical than
they are vital. In man's industrial relations he has to approximate
himself as much to the machine as possible, and for Bergson's
anti-intellectualism to be applied to this particular realm of life is
as great a calamity as could happen to the doctrine. And then these
conservatives proceed, less justifiably perhaps, to train the captured
gun of intuition upon the syndicalists. The racial intuitions, they say,
are older than the race's newly-found intellectual conceptions. For
generations the race has lived by certain instinctive rules of conduct.
Religion, custom, and patriotism, these are all sacred because they are
extra-intellectual, and they dare us to disturb these sacred things. It
is a strange sight--this most revolutionary philosophical doctrine being
used to support all the prejudices that the ages have handed down--but
we cannot deny that it is a plausible use of intuitionism, and a more
legitimate use than that to which Sorel and his followers have put the
teachings emanating from the College of France.
Perhaps the most detailed application that Bergson has yet made of his
philosophy to the affairs of life is his application of its principles
to the puzzling æsthetic problem of laughter and the comic. His theory
is that laughter is a social corrective directed against the man who
allows the dogging steps of mechanism to overtake him and imprison his
spirit in a web of meaningless action. The man who is walking along the
street should be going in a determinate direction with a determinate end
in view, and with the ability to get there in spite of reasonable
obstacles. So says society. When he becomes abstracted, walks
mechanically, and in consequence falls over a brick, we laugh at him. He
has permitted himself to become a machine for the nonce instead of a
self-conscious spirit, and society cannot afford to have its interests
jeopardized in that way.