article by J. W. Scott, who accuses Bergson of ethical pessimism on the
grounds of his view of the comic. He points out that the psychology of
comic action, as Bergson works it out, is precisely that of moral
action. For in moral action, too, a man does what is habitual, what is
against his own self-conscious impulse, what is mechanical in that it is
a fixed course of conduct pursued without reference to the favor or
disfavor of the environment. The life impulse must be, he convicts
Bergson of saying, adaptable to its circumstances; it must insert itself
between the determinisms of matter; it must pursue the crooked path
where the straight path is too difficult. It cannot follow its moral
ideal without making itself ridiculous, as indeed in real life moral
people are always doing.
This criticism hangs on the acceptance of a moral ideal, and if we must
have an ideal in the sense of a goal beckoning us from the future, then
the criticism is well founded and Bergson is an ethical pessimist. But
systematic ethics have been denied by other philosophers before Bergson,
and most people of modern temperament are quite willing to let the whole
question of _a priori_ ethics drop. They might not be willing to
exchange it for the very unpoetic utilitarianism which has so often been
offered in its place, but Bergson offers something more than that. If he
be an ethical pessimist, he is not a religious pessimist. Of religion he
has not yet spoken, except incidentally. Obviously so long as he uses
the scientific method in his philosophy, proceeding from facts to their
subordination in a picture whose values are given by intuitions, he
cannot present a systematic philosophy. But in spite of the fact that
pessimism--not only in ethics but in his view of the content of
personality and its relations with the universe--is charged against him,
Bergson means to be decidedly optimistic in his treatment of
personality. In his article in _The Hibbert Journal_ for October, 1911,
occur these remarkable words:
If then, in every province, the triumph of life is expressed by
creation, ought we not to think that the ultimate reason of human
life is a creation which, in distinction from that of the artist
or man of science, can be pursued at every moment and by all men
alike? I mean the creation of self by self, the continual
enrichment of personality by elements which it does not draw from
outside but causes to spring forth from itself.... If we admit
that with man consciousness has finally left the tunnel; that
everywhere else consciousness has remained imprisoned; that every
other species corresponds to the arrest of something which in man
succeeded in overcoming resistance and in expanding almost
freely, thus displaying itself in true personalities capable of
remembering all and willing all and controlling their past and
their future, we shall have no repugnance in admitting that in
man, though perhaps in man alone, consciousness pursues its path
beyond this earthly life.
On the other suppositions of Bergson's philosophy this is by no means so
far-fetched as are most theories of immortality. For the consciousness
which cuts out the patterns of our spatial life here could easily cut
out others in the beyond, like enough to our present ones to carry on
the continuity of our active existence. The idea of survival, or an idea
that may be applied to transmundane survival, is suggested by Laurence
Binyon in a recent volume of poems entitled "Auguries." He writes:
And because in my heart is a flowing no hour can bind
Because through the wrongs of the world looking forth and behind
I find for my thoughts not a close, not an end,
With you will I follow, nor crave the strength of the strong
Nor a fortress of time to enshield me from storms that rend.
This is life, this is home, to be poured as a stream as a song.
This is quoted not only because it represents the poetical realization
of Bergson's message, but because it points to one reason why the charge
of pessimism has been brought against Bergson even in this connection.
If only progress is our home, if there be no stability, how is that
permanence of values to be achieved which Höffding declares to be the
essential axiom of religion? We may love our faithful dog, but according
to Bergson it represents an evolutionary blind alley. We may create as
we will, but we shall survive our creations. Here, after all, is at the
best a tempered optimism. No reunions are promised in the Bergsonian
paradise. Only a perpetual streaming that does not, so far as Bergson
has yet told us (and that is an important point) ever wind safely home
to sea.
Instinct and Intelligence
Clarence Darrow recently echoed that high estimate of instinct at
the expense of intelligence which has been the fashion since
Bergson. Some of these days, when that case has been overstated
often enough, there will be a return swing of that pendulum. The
instinctive wasp who, in order to paralyze it, knows how to sting
a caterpillar "as though she knew its anatomy" may not always
seem in all respects superior to the human surgeon who does
actually know anatomy and can apply that knowledge in a thousand
ways--versus the wasp's one. Some day it will strike some one
that no creature has an instinct against poison comparable in
delicacy, subtlety, and fullness with a chemist's noninstinctive,
intelligent knowledge of poisons--and nonpoisons. So with a
number of things. The pragmatic objection to our present
glorification of instinct is that it tends to become a
glorification of intellectual whim.--George Cram Cook in _The
Chicago Evening Post_.
The Jewels of a Lapidary
_Emerson's Journals_, Volume IX, 1856-1863. (Houghton Mifflin
Company, Boston.)
At least nine events of permanent historic interest have occurred in
American literature within the past few years: they are represented by
the publication of nine volumes of Emerson's _Journals_. Those who are
trying to achieve a personal religion, which acknowledges God as an
immanence instead of a proposition, hail with a quiet joy every
extraction from the great mine in which Emerson stored the jewels of his
life. If we do not recognize them as lapidarious we must perceive them
as the better metals of ourselves, for this "friend and aider of those
who would live in the spirit" inhumed those spiritual values which all
men at some time or another seek as their own. Emerson buoys us up for
our common struggles and makes us conscious of that aid which is the
awakening of latent power. He composed the bricks which thousands of
builders have used in fashioning beautiful personal temples. "I dot
evermore in my endless journal," he wrote to Carlyle; "... the
arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick-kiln instead of a house."
Speaking of his philosophical work he confesses a "formidable tendency
to the lapidary style," and adds, "I build my house of boulders."
Emerson's published journals are kilns and quarries from which the
foundation materials for the edifice of character have been obtained by
countless builders. If he could not construct a system of philosophy, as
Arnold alleges, he could and did provide the "boulders" and indicate the
pattern which others have used. He is a part of every well-read
American, and, chiefly through Carlyle, still lives in the land of his
forefathers. He was an inspiration to Whitman, one of whose "specimen
days" closed with "a long and blessed evening with Emerson." Such
evenings are as real now as in Whitman's time, and are more commonly
experienced, for Emerson is westward-bound. He has traveled slowly in
this direction: "boulders" are not carried by exploiters and pioneers
who build and live in a world not of "the spirit" but of the senses.
With the establishing of easier communication between centers of thought
and fields of action in America, New England "boulders" were brought
hither, to chink the crude walls of western life; and it is a token of
Emerson's vitality and spiritual universality that his "bricks" and
"boulders" are discoverable in all sorts of shacks which men are trying
to improve. Lumber decays, but "boulders" remain, and some of them
become talismanic.
In reading and re-reading Emerson's _Journals_ one is impressed with
their remarkable quotability, and in this mechanical handiness of his
work we have a partial explanation of the slowness with which it has
been assimilated. "Boulders" are fated to be knocked about before they
are appreciated. We throw them at one another with a sort of physical
dexterity until, burnished and transformed, they are recognized as
adapted to higher uses. We do not flippantly quote or mention the
authors who have become personal to us; I quote Emerson's _Journal_ as a
blessed soliloquy.
D. C. W.
New York Letter
GEORGE SOULE
The most interesting hours of the last week I have spent in listening to
discussions of the futurists. Someone told of a superb incident recently
reported of a speech by Marinetti, the enunciator of the futurist
philosophy. Marinetti, after denouncing the past in his usual method,
proceeded to eliminate women from his world. "But," said someone, "how
will you continue the human race?" "We will _not_ continue the human
race," rejoined Marinetti, with superb _éclat_. Daring and magnificent
utterance! But, after all, perhaps he is the only sane one, and the norm
of human intelligence quite insane. That fits in well with the recently
reported discovery of a Paris scientist, that all variations in the
course of evolution are the result of disease, and that there would have
been no man had not some ape had a parasite in his thyroid gland. All of
which goes to show that I was right in my statement (which Chesterton
probably has said before me) that all logical extremes are illogical,
since the world is based on an eternal paradox.
Really it is quite simple to follow the futurist line of thought once
you get the hang of it. For instance--two developments of painting
predicted at the Troubetzkoys. In the first, each plane in the cubist
picture, instead of being colored, is to be numbered, and the numbers
printed in a catalogue opposite the names of the colors for which they
stand. Thus any approach to the vulgar intrusion of realism would be
avoided, and abstract beauty furthered. What chances for the
imagination! And think of the subtle possibilities in the mathematics of
color! One could surely express by some abstruse quadratic a color quite
beyond the realm of visual possibility, and thus man by one gigantic tug
at his bootstraps would pull his soul out of its finite limitations.
The second school was aptly named the auto-symbolists. In this school
Nietzschean individualism attains its sublime extreme. The artist,
instead of expressing his spirit in the vulgar symbols understood by
everybody, arbitrarily chooses a symbol known only to himself. If he
wishes to depict a determined man going up a mountain on a mule's back
he may paint a mouse-trap. To him the mouse-trap perfectly expresses the
particular feeling he has when viewing his own mental image of the
picture he has decided to paint. What matter about anybody else? If you
ask him _cui bono_?--he will reply: why any _bono_ at all? And, of
course, he is perfectly logical. And the satisfying aristocratic
aloofness of his position! If people--as they surely will--study his
mouse-trap and discuss in vain what it portends, if they pay vast sums
for his pictures and start a literature of criticisms to guess his
unguessable riddles, so much the better. He can laugh at them with
diabolical glee. Everybody is a fool but himself, and he can go on
creating in the seventh circle of his own soul undisturbed by the
barnyard cackle of the world.
Has the cubist literature of Gertrude Stein awakened echoes in Chicago?
I have read it without understanding before this. But one night my
host--a great, strong, humorous, intelligent hulk of a man, himself a
scoffer at cubism--read part of her essay on Matisse so that it was
almost intelligible. His inflection and punctuation did it. Her chief
characteristics seem to be an aversion to personal pronouns and a strict
adherence to simple declarative statements, untroubled by subordinate
clauses or phrases of any kind. Her thought, therefore, resolves itself
awkwardly in a four-square way. The multiplicity of her planes becomes
confusing after a page, but each plane stands alone. Thus--(I quote
inaccurately)--"Some ones knew this one to be expressing something being
struggling. Some ones knew this one not to be expressing something being
struggling. This one expressed something being struggling. This one did
not express something being struggling." Which, of course, is the cubist
way of saying that "Some thought he was trying to express struggle in an
object, others thought the contrary. As a matter of fact, he sometimes
did express struggle; sometimes he did not."
But it seems her early work is now getting too obvious, so she is in the
throes of a later phase. In her "Portrait of Miss Dodge" she has
eliminated verbs and sentence structure entirely, flinging a succession
of image-nouns at the reader. One can surely not accuse her of
"prettiness."
The craze for colored wigs is, of course, an outgrowth of futurism. Why
should a man be any color except that which his will dictates? This has
long (a few months) been the cry of the painter, and the smart set has
echoed: Why should he? Women in green and blue wigs have been seen in
New York already. But, of course, it would be senseless to stop there;
if one has an orange toupé he should surely have a mauve face. Yellow
complexions are worn with indigo hair. We have long been accustomed to
blue powdered noses on Fifth Avenue, and the setting of diamonds in the
teeth is an old story. The only trouble with this epoch-making idea is
that it is old. Phoenician women did it! And wasn't it Edward Lear who
wrote of _The Jumblies_:
"Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve"?
Of course, if one doesn't believe in this new development of art, but is
naturalistic, he should be brave enough to chase his idea to its lair
and act upon it, like Lady Constance Stewart Richardson, who is now
tripping about the homes of the rich in New York with nothing at all
on--or worse than nothing.
Forgive my preposterosities! But the ridiculous seriousness with which
everything unfamiliar is taken by a sensation-sated _haute monde_ is
such a brilliant target for satire. I think with immense relief of a
wonderful bit of sky, and a long stretch of beach, and of all things
tangible and--yes, though it may be bourgeois--_healthy_.
To a Lost Friend
EUNICE TIETJENS
Across the tide of years you come to me,
You whom I knew so long ago.
A poignant letter kept half carelessly,
A faded likeness, dull and gray to see....
And now I know.
. . . . . .
Strange that I knew not then,--that when you stood
In warm, sweet flesh beneath my hand,
Your soul tumultuous as a spring-time flood
And life's new wonder pulsing in your blood,
I could not understand.
I could not see your soul like thin red fire
Flash downward to my gaze,
Nor guess the strange, half-understood desire,
The tumult and the question and the ire
Of those far days.
I saw your soul stretch longing arms to love
In adolescent shyness bound,
And passionately storm the gods above.
Yet, since my own young heart knew naught thereof,
You never found.
It is too late now. You have dropped away
In formless silence from my ken,
And youth's high hopes turn backward to decay.
Yet, oh, my heart were very fain to-day
To love you then!
Culture has one great passion--the passion for sweetness and
light. It has one even yet greater!--the passion for making them
_prevail_.--Matthew Arnold in _Culture and Anarchy_.
The Irish Players: An Impression
A small, low room with walls of cool green-grey; in the center an
old brown fire-place with a great black chimney; on the hearth a
light like a deep raspberry; at each end a chair of smudgy brown;
near the front a table toned with the walls; on it two black mugs
and a stein; in one corner at the back, piled against the
green-grey, flour sacks the color of dirty straw; and standing in
the foreground, balanced as Whistler would have done it, a miller
in a suit of brown, a thin widow in rusty black, a fat widow with
bustles in rusty black and dirty white.--Somehow one planned
beauty in that place.
The Novel of Manners
... And yet, even into Mrs. Wharton's work is creeping slowly a
part of the tremendous socializing spirit of today--the
realization that group backgrounds, unlighted by a sense of their
relativity to other groups, and to life, do not amount to much
more than painted scenery. Over in England, Wells, with all his
tremendous burden of national background and customs, manages,
often with a desperate wrenching of impedimenta, but always with
a great resolve that commands admiration, to inject into his
massive English settings a humanized world atmosphere as well.
Wells writes not of Englishmen and England, but of Englishmen and
the world. And Galsworthy, his soul permeated by this new social
sense, writes down, in his English men and women, all humanity,
with all the tragedy and plaintive joys of human life, with the
desires and hampered fruition of the desires of all living
things, as his background. Not the world alone, but life, is the
stage.--Edna Kenton in _The Bookman_.
A man should always obey the law with his body and always disobey
it with his mind.--James Stephens in _The Crock of Gold_.
There are two great rules of life, the one general and the other
particular. The first is that everyone can, in the end, get what
he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. The
particular rule is that every individual is, more or less, an
exception to the general rule.--_The Note-Books of Samuel
Butler._
Forbes-Robertson's Hamlet
All my life I seem to have been asking my friends, those I loved
best, those who valued the dearest, the kindest, the greatest,
and the strongest, in our strange human life, to come with me and
see Forbes-Robertson die in _Hamlet_. I asked them because, as
that strange young dead king sat upon his throne, there was
something, whatever it meant--death, life, immortality, what you
will--of a surpassing loneliness, something transfiguring the
poor passing moment of trivial, brutal murder into a beauty to
which it was quite natural that that stern Northern warrior, with
his winged helmet, should bend the knee. I would not exchange
anything I have ever read or seen for Forbes-Robertson as he sits
there so still and starlit upon the throne of Denmark.--Richard
Le Gallienne in _The Century_.
To feel, to do, to stride forward in elation, chanting a poem of
triumphant life!--James Stephens in _The Crock of Gold_.
Why is it that in some places there is such a feeling of life
being all one; not merely a long picture-show for human eyes, but
a single breathing, glowing, growing thing, of which we are no
more important a part than the swallows and magpies, the foals
and sheep in the meadows, the sycamores and ash trees and flowers
in the fields, the rocks and little bright streams, or even than
the long fleecy clouds and their soft-shouting drivers, the
winds?--John Galsworthy in _The Atlantic Monthly_.
The Dying Pantheist to the Priest
Henry A. Beers, the author of this dynamic poem from which we
quote only a part, is a professor of literature at Yale--a man
supposedly conventional and soft spoken!
Take your ivory Christ away:
No dying god shall have my knee,
While live gods breathe in this wild wind
And shout from yonder dashing sea.
O no, the old gods are not dead:
I think that they will never die;
But I, who lie upon this bed
In mortal anguish--what am I?
A wave that rises with a breath
Above the infinite watery plain,
To foam and sparkle in the sun
A moment ere it sink again.
The eternal undulation runs:
A man, I die; perchance to be,
Next life, a white-throat on the wind,
A daffodil on Tempe's lea.
They lied who said that Pan was dead:
Life was, life is, and life shall be.
So take away your crucifix--
The ever-living gods for me!
--_The Yale Review._
Interesting New or Forthcoming Books
[Classification in this list implies a review in an early issue.]
_Notes of a Son and Brother_, by Henry James.
_Collected Essays of Rudolph Eucken._
_The Fugitive_, by John Galsworthy.
_Plays_, by Tchekoff and Andreyeff.
_Stories of Russian Life_, by Tchekoff.
_Selected Essays of Alice Meynell._
_Second Nights_, by Arthur Ruhl.
--Scribner.
_Stories of Red Hanrahan_, by William Butler Yeats.
_The Tragedy of Pompey_, by John Masefield.
_Chitra_, by Rabindranath Tagore.
_The Possessed_, by Dostoevsky.
_The Flight and Other Poems_, by George E. Woodberry.
--Macmillan.
_When Ghost Meets Ghost_, by William De Morgan.
_Nowadays_, by George Middleton.
_Angel Island_, by Inez Haynes Gillmore.
_Euripides and His Age_, by Gilbert Murray.
_Social Insurance_, by I. M. Rubinow.
--Holt.
_The World Set Free_, by H. G. Wells.
_The Way of All Flesh_, by Samuel Butler (new edition).
_Wagner as Man and Artist_, by Ernest Newman.
_The Philosophy of Ruskin_, by Andre Chevrillon.
--Dutton.
_Little Essays in Literature and Life_, by Richard Burton.
_Beaumont, the Dramatist_, by Charles M. Gayley.
_Arthur Rackham's Book of Pictures._
_Prostitution in Europe_, by Abraham Flexner.
--Century.
_The Poems of Francois Villon._
_Knave of Hearts_, by Arthur Symons.
_Essays of Francis Grierson_ (new editions).
_The Fortunate Youth_, by William J. Locke.
--Lane.
_The Making of an Englishman_, by W. L. George.
_The Truth About Women_, by C. Gasquoine Hartley.
--Dodd, Mead.
_Our Friend, John Burroughs_, by Clara Barrus.
_Paul Verlaine_, by Wilfred Thorley.
_The Japanese Empire_, by T. Philip Terry.
--Houghton Mifflin.
_Knowledge and Life_, by Rudolf Eucken.
_The Science of Happiness_, by Jean Finot.
--Putnam.
_Florian Mayr_, by Baron von Wolzogen.
_Socialism and Motherhood_, by John Spargo.
--Huebsch.
_Richard Wagner_, by Oliver Huckel.
_The Education of Karl Witte_, translated by Leo Wiener.
--Crowell.
_Crowds, Jr._, by Gerald Stanley Lee.
_A Thousand Years Ago_, by Percy MacKaye.
--Doubleday.
_The Masque of Saint Louis_, by Percy MacKaye.
--Stokes.
_Old Mole_, by Gilbert Cannan.
--Appleton.
_Poems_, by Brian Hooker.
--Yale University.
_The Clean Heart_, by M. A. Hutchinson.
--Little, Brown.
Some Scribner Spring Books
Notes of a Son and Brother
By HENRY JAMES
_Illustrated, $2.50 net; postage extra_
This is the continuation of the account, in "A Small Boy and
Others," of the early years of William and Henry James and their
brothers, with much about their father and their friends. The
story of the life in Switzerland and Geneva, and later on in
Newport and Cambridge, tells not only their own experiences but a
great deal about such men as John LaFarge, Hunt, Professor
Norton, Professor Childs, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a
close friend of Henry James, Senior. The description of the Civil
War time and of Wilkinson James's experiences with Colonel Shaw's
colored regiment are particularly interesting. The illustrations
are from drawings made by William James in the early part of his
career when he was studying to be a painter.
Shallow Soil
By KNUT HAMSUN
_Translated from the Norwegian by Carl Chr. Hyllested.
$1.35 net; postage extra_
Introduces to the English-speaking world a writer already a
classic not only in his own country but throughout continental
Europe.
The publication of "Shallow Soil" is accordingly a literary event
of the first magnitude in the sphere of fiction. Hamsun is the
greatest living Scandinavian novelist and this work alone
justifies his fame. It is a social picture of Christiania, and
indeed of generally modern life.
A Village Romeo and Juliet
By GOTTFRIED KELLER
_With a Biographical and Critical Introduction by Edith
Wharton. Translated by A. C. Bahlmann, $1.00 net;
postage extra_
This love story of Swiss peasant life--whose title conveys the
character of its plot--is generally regarded as the finest and
most representative production of the great Swiss novelist. But
it has a still further element of interest beyond that which
necessarily attaches to so fine a piece of writing--the
singularly modern spirit which actuates the characters and
inspires the writer.
Plays by Björnstjerne Björnson