THE LITTLE REVIEW
Literature Drama Music Art
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR
DECEMBER, 1915
Hellenica Edward J. O’Brien
Sister Sherwood Anderson
Toward Revolution The Editor
Images of Life and Death Maxwell Bodenheim
Preparedness: Universal Slaughter Emma Goldman
Ellie Mary Aldis
The Ecstasy of Pain: Alexander S. Kaun
Fragmentary Reflections on the Art of Przybyszewski
“Homo Sapiens” Discussed by Readers
The Spring Recital Theodore Dreiser
Editorials:
John Cowper Powys at the Hebrew Institute
The Foreigner in America
The Russian Literature Class
The Illusions of “The Art Student”
The Theatre:
“Grotesques,” by Cloyd Head
Book Discussion:
“Plays for Small Stages,” by Robert M. Lovett
“The State Forbids”
The Reader Critic
Published Monthly
15 cents a copy
MARGARET C. ANDERSON, Publisher
Fine Arts Building
CHICAGO
$1.50 a year
Entered as second-class matter at Postoffice, Chicago
THE LITTLE REVIEW
Vol. II
DECEMBER, 1915
No. 9
Copyright, 1915, by Margaret C. Anderson
Hellenica
EDWARD J. O’BRIEN
I.
The scent of mint on the sandy grave of Nicias
Crieth unto the wanderer
For remembrance.
II.
Here in the arms of the harvest
Lieth the gleaner, Bion,
Whose sickle shineth above him in the evening.
III.
Far from tides and sand
On the slope of Cithaeron
Resteth Eumenes
In the purple distance.
His fellow tunny-fishers erect this stone.
IV.
Chaste Clearista flowereth in the heavens,
For dearer than Helen’s beauty in April sunlight
The gods love the spotless dreams of a maiden.
V.
Fairer than iris blossoms slenderly swaying
Under the sighing zephyrs of sandy Argos,
The harvest breezes stole the heart of Erinna.
Now she dreameth under the meadow grasses.
VI.
The swan afloat on the rippling azure waters
Remembereth thy fairness, Rhododaphne,
And dreameth on time’s surface of thy passing.
VII.
Nerissa played with the swallows till the twilight.
Now they soar above her,
And they wonder.
VIII.
Barefoot, a little lad hath wandered far,
And we have sought in vain,
For he hath found
The amaranthine meadows.
IX.
Far from Cos where the sailors hail in passing,
Cleonicus lieth unmarked on the ocean strand.
The crying gulls bring tidings of ancient summer,
But not to me the sound of his glad coming.
X.
Now that the flower is blown
And the rosy petals
Render earth more fragrant
With their body,
Myrrhis dreameth of spring in the flaming ground.
XI.
Lightly I walked the hills of my native Hellas.
Lightly I rest in the heart of her rushing forest,
Hermas, the hunter,
At peace,
With the moon above me.
XII.
Thyrsis, who loved the rain in the dreaming hollows,
Wandereth now soft-sandalled in misty ways,
Where the scent of flag
Recalleth not
Hylas, lonely.
Sister
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
The young artist is a woman, and at evening she comes to talk to me in
my room. She is my sister, but long ago she has forgotten that and I
have forgotten.
Neither my sister nor I live in our father’s house, and among all my
brothers and sisters I am conscious only of her. The others have
positions in the city and in the evening go home to the house where my
sister and I once lived. My father is old and his hands tremble. He is
not concerned about me, but my sister who lives alone in a room in a
house on North Dearborn Street has caused him much unhappiness.
Into my room in the evening comes my sister and sits upon a low couch by
the door. She sits cross-legged and smokes cigarettes. When she comes it
is always the same—she is embarrassed and I am embarrassed.
Since she has been a small girl my sister has always been very strange.
When she was quite young she was awkward and boyish and tore her clothes
climbing trees. It was after that her strangeness began to be noticed.
Day after day she would slip away from the house and go to walk in the
streets. She became a devout student and made such rapid strides in her
classes that my mother—who to tell the truth is fat and
uninteresting—spent the days worrying. My sister, she declared, would
end by having brain fever.
When my sister was fifteen years old she announced to the family that
she was about to take a lover. I was away from home at the time, on one
of the wandering trips that have always been a passion with me.
My sister came into the house, where the family were seated at the
table, and, standing by the door, said she had decided to spend the
night with a boy of sixteen who was the son of a neighbor.
The neighbor boy knew nothing of my sister’s intentions. He was at home
from college, a tall, quiet, blue-eyed fellow, with his mind set upon
foot-ball. To my family my sister explained that she would go to the boy
and tell him of her desires. Her eyes flashed and she stamped with her
foot upon the floor.
My father whipped my sister. Taking her by the arm he led her into the
stable at the back of the house. He whipped her with a long black whip
that always stood upright in the whip-socket of the carriage in which,
on Sundays, my mother and father drove about the streets of our suburb.
After the whipping my father was ill.
I am wondering how I know so intimately all the details of the whipping
of my sister. Neither my father nor my sister have told me of it.
Perhaps sometime, as I sat dreaming in a chair, my mother gossiped of
the whipping. It would be like her to do that, and it is a trick of my
mind never to remember her figure in connection with the things she has
told me.
After the whipping in the stable my sister was quite changed. The family
sat tense and quiet at the table and when she came into the house she
laughed and went upstairs to her own room. She was very quiet and
well-behaved for several years and when she was twenty-one inherited
some money and went to live alone in the house on North Dearborn Street.
I have a feeling that the walls of our house told me the story of the
whipping. I could never live in the house afterwards and came away at
once to this room where I am now and where my sister comes to visit me.
And so there is my sister in my room and we are embarrassed. I do not
look at her but turn my back and begin writing furiously. Presently she
is on the arm of my chair with her arm about my neck.
I am the world and my sister is the young artist in the world. I am
afraid the world will destroy her. So furious is my love of her that the
touch of her hand makes me tremble.
My sister would not write as I am now writing. How strange it would seem
to see her engaged in anything of the kind. She would never give the
slightest bit of advice to any one. If you were dying and her advice
would save you she would say nothing.
My sister is the most wonderful artist in the world, but when she is
with me I do not remember that. When she has talked of her adventures,
up from the chair I spring and go ranting about the room. I am half
blind with anger, thinking perhaps that strange, furtive looking youth,
with whom I saw her walking yesterday in the streets, has had her in his
arms. The flesh of my sister is sacred to me. If anything were to happen
to her body I think I should kill myself in sheer madness.
In the evening after my sister is gone I do not try to work any more. I
pull my couch to the opening by the window and lie down. It is then a
little that I begin to understand my sister. She is the artist right to
adventure in the world, to be destroyed in the adventure, if that be
necessary, and I, on my couch, am the worker in the world, blinking up
at the stars that can be seen from my window when my couch is properly
arranged.
Toward Revolution
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
On Thanksgiving Day some five thousand men and women marched in Joe
Hillstrom’s funeral. Why didn’t they march for Joe Hillstrom before he
was shot, everybody is asking.
Yes, naturally. Why not?
Incidentally, why didn’t some one shoot the governor of Utah before he
could shoot Joe Hill? It might have awakened Capital—_and Labor_. Or why
didn’t five hundred of the five thousand get Joe Hill out of jail? It
could have been done. Or why didn’t fifty of the five thousand make a
protest that would set the nation gasping?
There are Schmidt and Caplan. Why doesn’t some one see to it that they
are released? Labor _could_ do it. And there are the Chicago garment
strikers. Why doesn’t some one arrange for the beating-up of the police
squad? That would make a good beginning. Or set fire to some of the
factories, or start a convincing sabotage in the shops?
Why aren’t these things done?
For the same reason that men continue to support institutions they no
longer believe in; that women continue to live with men they no longer
love; that youth continues to submit to age it no longer respects; for
the same reason that you are a slave when you want to be free, or a
nonentity when you would like to have a personality.
It is a matter of Spirit. Spirit can do anything. It is the only thing
in the world that can.
* * * * *
For God’s sake, why doesn’t some one start the Revolution?
Images of Life and Death
MAXWELL BODENHEIM
Life
I.
The sky is the thin, strong expanse of a God,
And the trees are lines of black Hindus
Praying in black shrivelled attitudes.
II.
The grass is a priest in dream-gold cloth,
Lying on his back, hard with years of thought-spinning.
The lateral-gray, snarled clouds over him
Are the thoughts he has solemnly woven.
III.
The slender lagoon holds the laughter of a child
With his lips to a huge, full cup.
Death
I.
A fan of smoke, in the long, green-white reverie of the horizon,
Slowly curls apart.
So shall I rise and widen out in the silence of air.
II.
An old man runs down a little yellow road
To an out-flung, white thicket uncovered by morning.
So shall I swing to the white sharpness of death.
Preparedness.
The Road to Universal Slaughter
EMMA GOLDMAN
Ever since the beginning of the European conflagration the people of
Europe have thrown themselves into the flames of war like panic-stricken
cattle. And now America, pushed to the very brink by unscrupulous
politicians, by ranting demagogues, and by military sharks, is preparing
for the same terrible feat.
In the face of this approaching disaster it behooves men and women not
yet overcome by the war madness to raise their protest, to call the
attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be
perpetrated upon them.
America is essentially the melting pot. No national unit composing it is
in a position to boast of superior race purity, particular historic
mission, or higher culture. Yet the jingoes and war speculators are
filling the air with the sentimental slogan of hypocritical nationalism,
“America for Americans,” “America first, last, and all the time.” This
cry has caught the popular fancy from one end of the country to the
other. In order to maintain America military preparedness must be
engaged in at once. A billion dollars of the people’s sweat and blood is
to be expended for dreadnaughts and submarines for the army and the
navy, all to protect this precious America.
The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a
huge military force is not the America of the people, but the America of
the privileged class; the class which robs and exploits the masses, and
controls their lives. And it is no less pathetic that so few people
realize that preparedness never leads to peace, but is indeed the road
to universal slaughter.
The American military ring with its Roosevelts, its Garrisons, its
Daniels, and lastly its Wilsons, is moving the very heavens to place the
militaristic heel upon the necks of the American people—using the same
methods of the German diplomats to saddle the masses with Prussian
militarism. If it is successful America will be hurled into the storm of
blood and tears now devastating the countries of Europe.
Forty years ago Germany proclaimed the slogan: “Germany above
everything. Germany for the Germans, first, last and always. We want
peace; therefore we must prepare for war. Only a well-armed and
thoroughly-prepared nation can maintain peace, can command respect, can
be sure of its national integrity.” And Germany continued to prepare,
thereby forcing the other nations to do the same. The European war is
the fruition of the gospel of military preparedness.
Since the war began, miles of paper and oceans of ink have been used to
prove the barbarity, the cruelty, the oppression of Prussian militarism.
Conservatives and radicals alike are giving their support to the Allies
for no other reason than to help crush that militarism, in the presence
of which, they say, there can be no peace or progress in Europe. But
though America grows fat on the manufacture of munition and war loans to
the Allies to help crush Prussianism, the same cry is now being raised
in America which, if carried into national action, will build up an
American militarism far more terrible than German or Prussian militarism
could ever be; because nowhere in the world has capitalism become so
brazen in its greed as in America, and nowhere is the state so ready to
kneel at the feet of capital.
Like a plague the mad spirit of militarism is sweeping the country,
infesting the clearest heads and staunchest hearts. National security
leagues, with cannon as their emblem of protection, naval leagues with
women in their lead, have sprung up all through the United States.
Americanization societies with well-known liberals as members, they who
but yesterday decried the patriotic clap-trap of today, are now lending
themselves to the befogging of the minds of the people, to the
building-up of the same destructive institutions in America which they
are directly and indirectly helping to pull down in Germany—militarism,
the destroyer of youth, the raper of woman, the annihilator of the best
in the race, the very mower of life.
Even Woodrow Wilson, who not so long ago talked of “a nation too proud
to fight,” who in the beginning of the war ordered prayers for peace,
who in his proclamations spoke of the necessity of watchful waiting—even
he has been whipped into line. He has now joined his worthy colleagues
in the jingo movement, echoing their clamor for preparedness and their
howl of “America for Americans.” The difference between Wilson and
Roosevelt is this: Roosevelt, the bully, uses the club; Wilson, the
historian, the college professor, wears the smooth polished university
mask, but underneath it he, like Roosevelt, has but one aim: to serve
the big interests, to add to those who are growing phenomenally rich by
the manufacture of military preparedness.
Woodrow Wilson, in his address before the Daughters of the American
Revolution, gave his case away when he said: “I would rather be beaten
than ostracized.” To stand out against the Bethlehem, Du Pont, Baldwin,
Remington, Winchester metallic cartridges and the rest of the armament
ring means political ostracism and death. Wilson knows that; therefore
he betrays his original position, goes back on the bombast of “too proud
to fight,” and howls as loudly as any other cheap politician for
preparedness and national glory, for the silly pledge the Navy League
women intend to impose upon every school child: “I pledge myself to do
all in my power to further the interests of my country, to uphold its
institutions and to maintain the honor of its name and its flag. As I
owe everything in life to my country, I consecrate my heart, mind, and
body to its service and promise to work for its advancement and security
in times of peace and to shrink from no sacrifice or privation in its
cause should I be called upon to act in its defense for the freedom,
peace, and happiness of our people.”
To uphold the institutions of our country—that is it; the institutions
which protect and sustain a handful of people in the robbery and plunder
of the masses, the institutions which drain the blood of the native as
well as of the foreigner and turn it into wealth and power; the
institutions which rob the alien of whatever originality he brings with
him and in return give him cheap Americanism, whose glory consists in
mediocrity and arrogance.
The very proclaimers of “America first” have long before this betrayed
the fundamental principles of real Americanism, of the kind of
Americanism Jefferson had in mind when he said that the best government
is that which governs least; the kind of an America David Thoreau worked
for when he proclaimed that the best government is the one that doesn’t
govern at all; or the other truly great Americans who aimed to make of
this country a haven of refuge, who hoped that all the disinherited and
oppressed coming to these shores would give character, quality and
meaning to the country. That is not the America of the politicians and
the munition speculators. Their America has been powerfully portrayed by
a young New York sculptor I know; he has made a hard cruel hand with
long lean merciless fingers, crushing in over the heart of the
foreigner, squeezing out its blood in order to coin dollars.
No doubt Woodrow Wilson has reason to defend these institutions. But
what an ideal to hold out to the young generation! And how is a
military-drilled and trained people to defend freedom, peace, and
happiness? This is what Major General O’Ryan has to say of an
efficiently trained generation: “The soldier must be so trained that he
becomes a mere automation; he must be so trained that it will destroy
his initiative; he must be so trained that he is turned into a machine.
The soldier must be forced into the military noose; he must be jacked
up; he must be ruled by his superiors with pistol in hand.”
This was not said by a Prussian Junker; not by a German barbarian; not
by Treitska or Bernhardi, but by an American major general. And he is
right. You cannot conduct war with equals; you cannot have militarism
with free born man; you must have slaves, automatons, machines, obedient
disciplined creatures, who will move, act, shoot, and kill at the
command of their superiors. That is preparedness, and nothing else.
It has been reported that among the speakers before the Navy League was
Samuel Gompers. I have long ceased to believe what is reported in the
press. But if that is true, it signalizes the greatest outrage upon
labor at the hands of its own leaders. Preparedness is directed not only
against the external enemy; it aims much more at the internal enemy. It
is directed against that element of labor which has learned not to hope
for anything from our institutions, that awakened part of the working
people who have realized that the war of the classes underlies all wars
among nations, and that if war is justified at all it is the war against
economic dependence and political slavery, the two dominant issues
involved in the struggle of the classes.
Already militarism has been acting its bloody part in every economic
conflict, with the approval and support of the state. Where was the
protest from Washington when “our men, women and children” were killed
in Ludlow? Where was that high-sounding outraged protest contained in
the note to Germany? Or is there any difference in killing “our men,
women and children” in Ludlow or on the high seas? Yes, indeed. The men,
women, and children at Ludlow were working people, belonging to the
disinherited of the earth, foreigners who had to be given a taste of the
glories of Americanism, while the passengers of the Lusitania
represented wealth and station; therein lies the difference.
Preparedness, therefore, will only add to the power of the privileged
few and help them to subdue, to enslave, and crush labor. Surely Gompers
must know that, and if he joins the howl of the military clique he must
stand condemned as a traitor to the cause of labor.
It will be with preparedness as it has been with all the other
institutions in our confused life which were created for the good of the
people and which have accomplished the very reverse. Supposedly, America
is to prepare for peace; but in reality it will prepare for the cause of
war. It has always been so and it will continue to be so until nation
refuses to fight against nation, and until the people of the world stop
preparing for slaughter. Preparedness is like the seed of a poisonous
plant; placed in the soil, it will bear poisonous fruit. The European
mass destruction is the fruit of that poisonous seed. It is imperative
that the American workers realize this before they are driven by the
jingoes into the madness that is forever haunted by the spectre of
danger and invasion; they must know that to prepare for peace means to
invite war, means to unloose the furies of death over land and sea.
You cannot build up a standing army and then throw it back into a box
like tin soldiers. Armies equipped to the teeth with highly-developed
instruments of murder and backed by their military interests have their
own dynamic functions. We have but to examine into the nature of
militarism to realize the truth of this contention.
Militarism consumes the strongest and most productive elements of each
nation. Militarism swallows the largest part of the national revenue.
Even in times of peace almost nothing is spent on education, art,
literature, and science in comparison with the amount devoted to
militarism; while in times of war everything else is set at naught: all
life stagnates, all effort is curtailed, the very sweat and blood of the
masses are used to feed this insatiable monster—militarism. Under such
circumstances it must become more arrogant, more aggressive, more
bloated with its own importance. If for no other reason, it is out of
surplus energy that militarism must act to remain alive; therefore it
will find an enemy or create one artificially. In this civilized purpose
militarism is sustained by the state, protected by the laws of the land,
fostered by the home and the school, and glorified by public opinion. In
other words, the function of militarism is to kill. It cannot live
except through murder.
But the most dominant factor of military preparedness, and the one which
inevitably leads to war, is the creation of group interests which
consciously and deliberately work for the increase of armament whose
purposes are furthered by creating the war hysteria. This group interest
embraces all those engaged in the manufacture and sale of munition and
in military equipment for personal gain and profit. For instance, the
family Krupp, which owns the largest cannon munition plant in the world;
its sinister influence in Germany, and in fact in many other countries,
extends to the press, the school, the church, and to statesmen of
highest rank. Shortly before the war, Karl Liebknecht, the one brave
public man in Germany now, brought to the attention of the Reichstag the
fact that the family Krupp had in its employ officials of the highest
military position, not only in Germany, but in France and in other
countries. Everywhere its emissaries have been at work, systematically
inciting national hatreds and antagonisms. The same investigation
brought to light an international war supply trust which gives a hang
for patriotism, or for love of the people, but which uses both to incite
war and to pocket millions of profits out of the terrible bargain.
It is not at all unlikely that the history of the present war will trace
its origin to this international murder trust. But is it always
necessary for one generation to wade through oceans of blood and heap up
mountains of human sacrifice that the next generation may learn a grain
of truth from it all? Can we of today not profit by the cause which led
to the European war, can we not learn that it was preparedness, thorough
and efficient preparedness on the part of Germany and the other
countries for military aggrandizement and material gain; above all can
we not realize that preparedness in America must and will lead to the
same result, the same barbarity, the same senseless sacrifice of life?
Is America to follow suit, is it to be turned over to the American
Krupps, the American military cliques? It almost seems so when one hears
the jingo howls of the press, the blood and thunder tirades of bully
Roosevelt, the sentimental twaddle of our college-bred President.
The more reason for those who still have a spark of libertarianism and
humanity left to cry out against this great crime, against the outrage
now being prepared and imposed upon the American people. It is not
enough to claim being neutral; a neutrality which sheds crocodile tears
with one eye and keeps the other riveted upon the profits from war
supplies and war loans, is not neutrality. It is merely hypocritical.
Nor is it enough to join the bourgeois pacifists, who proclaim peace
among the nations, while helping to perpetuate the war among the
classes, a war which in reality is at the bottom of all other wars.
It is this war of the classes that we must concentrate upon, and in that
connection the war against false values, against evil institutions,
against all social atrocities. Those who appreciate the urgent need of
cooperating in great struggles must oppose military preparedness imposed
by the state and capitalism for the destruction of the masses. They must
organize the preparedness of the masses for the overthrow of both
capitalism and the state. Industrial and economic preparedness is what
the workers need. That alone leads to revolution at the bottom as
against mass destruction from on top. That alone leads to true
internationalism of labor against Kaiserdom, kingdom, diplomacies,
military cliques, and bureaucracies. That alone will give the people the
means to take their children out of the slums, out of the sweat-shops
and the cotton-mills; that alone will enable them to inculcate in the
coming generation a new ideal of brotherhood, to rear them in play and
song and beauty; to bring up men and women, not automatons; that alone
will enable woman to become the real mother of the race, to give to the
world creative men, and not soldiers who destroy. That alone leads to
economic and social freedom, and does away with war.
Ellie
MARY ALDIS
She came to do my nails.
Came in my door and stood before me waiting,
A great big lummox of a girl—
A continent.
Her dress was rusty black
And scant,
Her hat, a melancholy jumble of basement counter bargains.
Her sullen eyes,
Like a whipped animal’s,
Shone out between her silly bulging cheeks and puffy forehead.
She dropped her coat upon a chair
And waited;
Then, at a word, busied herself
With files and delicate scissors,
Sweet-smelling oils and my ten finger tips.
She proved so deft and silent
I bade her come again;
And twice a week
While summer dawned and flushed and waned
She used me in her parasitic trade.
The dress grew rustier,
The hat more melancholy,
And Ellie fatter.
Each time she came I wondered as she worked
If thought lay anywhere
Behind that queer uncouthness.
She had a trick of seizing with her eyes
Each passing thing,
An insatiate greediness for something out of reach;
And yet she seemed enwrapped
In a kind of solemn patience,
Large, aloof and waiting.
We hardly ever spoke—
I could not think of anything worth saying;
One does not chatter with a continent.
Finally it was homing time;
The seashore town was raw and desolate
And idlers flitted.
The last day Ellie came
Her calm was gone, she had been crying.
Fat people never ought to cry;
It’s awful....
The hot drops fell upon my hand
While Ellie dropped the scissors suddenly
And sniffed and blew and sobbed
In disconcerting and unreserved abandonment.
I said the usual things;
I would have patted her but for the grease,
But Ellie was not comforted.
Not until the storm was spent
And only little catching breaths were left
I got the reason.
“I’m so fat,” she gulped, “so awful, awful fat
The boys won’t look at me.”
And then it came, the stammered passionate cry:
Could I not help?
Could I not find a medicine?
We talked and talked
And when at dusk she went, a teary smile
Hovered a moment on her mouth
And in those sullen, swollen eyes
A little hope perhaps;
I did not know.
The city and its interests soon engulfed me.
A letter or two,
A doctor’s vague advice to bant and exercise,
And Ellie and her woes passed from my mind
Until, as summer dawned again,
I heard that she was dead.
A curious letter written stiffly,
From Ellie’s mother,
Told me I was invited to the funeral
“By wish of the Deceased.”
Wondering I travelled to the little town
Where the sea beat and groaned
And sorrowed endlessly,
And made my way down the steep street
To Ellie’s door.
Her mother met me in the hall
And motioned,—
“She wanted you to see her,”
Then ushered me into an awful place, the parlor—
A place of emerald plush and golden oak
Set round with pride and symmetry,
And in the midst
A black and silver coffin—
Ellie’s coffin.
Raising the lid she pointed and I looked.
Somewhere in Florence Mino da Fiesole
Has made a tomb
Where deathless beauty lies with upturned face.
Two gentle hands, palms meeting,
Touch with their pointed forefingers
A delicate chin, and over the vibrant body
Clings a white robe
Enshrouding chastely
Warm curving lines of adolescent grace.
No sleeper this,—
The figure glows, alert, awake, aware,
As if some sudden ecstacy had stolen life
And held imprisoned there
The moment of attainment
Rapt, imperishable and fair.
Even so lay Ellie,
And when from somewhere far I heard
The mother’s voice
I listened vacantly.
The woman chattered on,
“The dress you know, white chiffon, like a wedding dress—
I never knew she had it,
She must ’a made it by herself.
It’s queer it fitted perfectly
An’ her all thin like that—
She must ’a thought—”
Then black-robed relatives came streaming in
To look at Ellie.
I watched them start
And look around for explanation.
The mother pinched my arm:
“Don’t ask me anything now,” she whispered;
“Come back tonight.”
Then old, old words were sung and prayed and droned,
While everybody dutifully cried,
And when the village parson
Rhythmically proclaimed—
And this mortal shall put on immortality,—
With a great welcoming
And a great lightening
I knew at last the ancient affirmation.
When evening came I found the mother
Sitting amidst her golden oak and plush
In a kind of isolated stateliness.
She led me in.
“’Twas the stuff she took that did it,”
She began; “I never knew till after she was dead.
The bottles in the woodshed, hundreds of ’em
All labelled “Caldwell’s Great Obesity Cure
Warranted Safe and Rapid.”
Oh ain’t it awful?” and she fell to crying miserably;
“But wasn’t she real pretty in her coffin?”
And then she cried again
And clung to me.
The Ecstasy of Pain
(Fragmentary Reflections on the Art of Przybyszewski)
ALEXANDER S. KAUN
... Out of the effervescent hurricane of light burst forth a terrible
song.
Despair, as if thousands of graves had torn open. As if the heavens had
rent asunder, and the Son of Man had descended upon the earth to judge
the good and the wicked. Millions of hands rose up to heaven in a mad
horror of death—hands that prayed for mercy and charity. He heard a
beastly roar, which like a geyser of a smoking sea of blood spurtled
upward; and above all this he saw bony fingers that twisted and writhed
in convulsions of fear and shouted to heaven: “Ad te clamamus exules
filii Hevae, ad te suspiramus gementes et flentes.”
And he saw a multitudinous crowd that was lashed with an insane ecstacy
of destruction, and above them a heaven that yawned with disease and
fire. He saw how those miserable creatures wriggled and serpentined in
hellish madnesses of life; he saw the bleeding backs furrowed by the
whips into chunks; he saw all humanity demented, obsessed, with an
inspired frenzy in the bestialized eyes.
Slowly disappeared the procession of the doomed; wild cries intoxicated
with despair died away in a death-rattle, and a sun, red like copper,
shed a chatoyant green light on the puddles of blood.
“Ad te clamamus exules filii Hevae!”
* * * * *
This is a fragment from an early poem of Przybyszewski, _De Profundis_.
It is a proper background to all the works of the Pole, to his plays,
essays, novels, poems. At least I see him in that light.
A reminiscence: On a rainy autumn night I went to hear him lecture. “...
and if the psychologists will find contradictions in my words—I shall
not feel dismayed. There are contradictions that are dearer to me than
most perfect consequentialities.” From the dim light of the platform
ached a face distorted with contempt and suffering, with the grim
clairvoyance of the Beyond. At moments the eyebrows leaped up and bulged
the forehead into thick, strained furrows, and the eyes suddenly burst
in a flash that revealed unknown worlds, twisting your soul with awe and
mystery. But soon the flame would extinguish, and the face would resume
the masque of contemptuous weariness; the mouth-corners congealed a
satanic would-be smile that prepared one for his famous “Heh-heh.” That
face haunted me for many days and nights, as if my inner vision had been
scalded by an unearthly chimera. My friends, who have seen his
exaggerated portrait painted by Krzyzanowski, will understand me. Those
who will read his works (if they are translated), will understand me.
_Homo Sapiens_[1] is but a nuance of his multiplex creative spirit,
though perhaps a most characteristic nuance. Przybyszewski, like
Nietzsche, like Wilde, is a unique mosaique, in which the personality,
the artist, his life and his works, are inseparable, indivisible units
of the wonderful whole. Who can fathom this hellish cosmos, this mare
tenebrarum of the modern man’s soul, which the mad Pole has traversed
and penetrated to the bottom, and has cast out shrieking monsters and
gargoyles illuminated with blinding, dazzling, infernal flames?
[1] _Homo Sapiens, by Stanislaw Przybyszewski. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf._
I cannot. Perhaps only pale glimpses of reflections.
* * * * *
Those who have heard Przybyszewski play Chopin tell us that no virtuoso
can compare with his creative interpretation of his melancholy
compatriot. In his profound essay on _Chopin and Nietzsche_ I have been
impressed not so much with the morbid theory as with the characteristic
feature present in all his work—the reflection of his own personality.
In his favorite artists, in his heroes, in his women, he has painfully
sought an expression of his restless, boundless self. Thus Chopin
becomes one of the numerous selves of Przybyszewski. Let me picture the
Composer in the light of the Poet.
Specifically Slavic features: extreme subtility of feeling, easy
excitability, passionateness and sensuousness, predilection for luxury
and extravagance, and, chief of all, a peculiar melancholy lyricism,
which is nothing but the expression of the most exalted egoism, whose
sole and highest criterion is his own “I.” These, and the profound
melancholy of his native limitless plains with their desolate sandy
expanses, with the lead-skies over them, have been influences keenly
contradicting his flexible, light vivaciousness of the Gallic, his
coquettish effeminacy, his love for life and light.
Subtracting the last two strokes, who is it: Chopin or Przybyszewski?
The trait most obviously common to both Poles is the unquenchable
yearning, the eternal Sehnsucht, which filters through all their
productions. In neither of them was it the yearning of healthy natures,
in whom, as in a mother’s womb, it bears the embryo of fruitful life; it
is not the yearning of Zarathustra “in a sunny rapture of ecstacy
greeting new, unknown gods with an exalted ‘Evoi’!” Chopin’s longing, as
reflected in Przybyszewski, is tinted with the pale color of anemia
peculiar to a representative of a degenerate aristocracy (the Poet’s
progenitor died of delirium tremens), with his transparent skin
projecting the tiniest veins, with his slender figure and prolongated
limbs that breathe with each movement incomparable gracefulness, with
his overdeveloped intellect which shines in his eyes, as in the eyes of
frail children who are doomed to early death. This longing is the
incessant palpitation of a nervous, over-delicate nature, something akin
to the constant irritability of open wounds, the continuous change of
ebbs and flows of morbid sensitiveness, the eternal dissatisfaction of
acute emotions, the fatigableness of a too-susceptible spirit, the
weariness of one oversatiated with suffering. Yet this longing has in it
also wild passion, “the convulsive agony of deadly horror,”
self-damnation and thirst for destruction, delirium and madness of one
who strains his gaze into the vast—and sees nothing.
Indeed I should like to hear Chopin’s _Preludes_ recreated under the
longing fingers of Stanislaw.
* * * * *
Stanislaw Przybyszewski. Do pronounce it correctly, that you may hear
the sound of rain swishing through tall grass. Przybyszewski has come to
know himself so thoroughly and unreservedly, and, in himself, to know
the modern man of the widest intellectual and artistic horizons, through
a long excruciating internal purgatory. From the study of architecture
and general aesthetics his restless, ever-searching spirit hurled him
into natural sciences in the hope of finding positive answers to his
burning questions. He came out loaded with an enormous baggage of facts
and information; yet he had not quenched his everlasting
dissatisfaction, but had acquired a sceptical “heh-heh” towards life and
knowledge. He plunged into psychology, and found Nietzsche—to him the
deepest searcher, possessor of the keen eye of a degenerate, which like
a wintersun sheds its light with morbid intensity upon snowfields,
clearly illuminating each crystal. With a “heh-heh” he dismissed the
Loneliest One. For was not Nietzsche driven to create for himself a
superman, as a consolation, as a hope, as “a soft pillow upon which
could rest his weary inflamed head”? Did he for one moment believe in
that ghost which he erected in the heavy hours of despair? Nonsense.
Heh-heh. Had not his Falk, his homo sapiens, been crushed in his
struggle to attain liberation and supermanship? Recall Falk’s
self-rending meditations: “Conscience! Heh-heh-heh! Conscience! How
ridiculously silly is your superman! Herr Professor Nietzsche left out
of account tradition and culture which created conscience in the course
of hundreds of centuries.... Oh, how ridiculous is your superman sans
conscience!” Thus, step after step, killing god after god, burning his
ships behind him, the all-knowing, the all-denying degenerate-nobleman
Slav-cosmopolite has ascended the loftiest summit, or, as he would
rather say, has descended into deepest hell—Art. An equipment hardly
appropriate for an artist who sees “Life Itself” in color and fragrance
and petals and varicolored mornings and varicolored nights and Japanese
prints and ... but you may find the catalogue in the Editor’s rhapsody
of last month. Przybyszewski’s background served him as an Archimedean
lever to gauge and fathom the soul of modernity.
* * * * *
Let me attempt to present the quintessence of Przybyszewski’s modern
Individuum, as he prefers to call an exceptional personality.
He considers himself a superman, aloof from the market-interests of the
crowd. He is conscious of the fetters of his instincts and of the
gradual sapping of his strength—hence the history of the Individuum
turns into a sad monography of suppressed will and distorted instincts,
a history of a mountain torrent which cannot find an outlet, and rushes
into depth, dissolving obstructing strata, destroying and washing them
away, and ruining the structure of the rocks in their very bowels.
Hence the longing for liberation and the yearning for expanse, a
perilous “palpitating Sehnsucht and craving of the heights, of the
beyond.” But this longing has another distinctive symptom: the
consciousness of its hopelessness, the clear conviction that the
passionately-desired goal is but an idée fixe. In this longing is
expressed a spirit that ruins everything in itself with the corrosive
acid of reason, a spirit that had long lost faith in itself, that
considers its own activity diffidently and critically, a spirit that
spies and searches itself, that has lost the faculty of taking itself
seriously, that has become accustomed to mock itself and to play with
its own manifestations as with a ball; a spirit not satisfied with the
highest and finest human perceptions, that has come at last, after many
searchings, to the gloomy decision that all is in vain, that it is
incapable of surpassing itself.
Hence the pursuit of enjoyment. But this morbid seeking of enjoyment
lacks that direct, self-sufficient bliss that results from the
accumulated surplus of productive strength. The modern Individuum is
deprived of that healthy instinct, therefore in place of naive joy
experienced from the liberation of surcharged power he plunges into
self-forgetfulness. All his life is reduced to pure self-narcotization.
In the morbid straining of his abnormally-functioning nerves the
Individuum-decadent rises to those mysterious borders where the joy and
the pain of human existence pass into one another and intermingle, where
the two are brought in their extreme manifestations to a peculiar
feeling of destructive rapture, to an ecstatic being outside and above
himself. All his thoughts and acts acquire a character of something
devastating, maniacal, and over all of them reigns a heavy, depressing,
wearying atmosphere, like the one before the outbreak of a storm,
something akin to the passionate tremor of delirious impotence,
something similar to the consumptive flush of spiritual hysteria.
In such clinical terms Przybyszewski sees the modern homo sapiens.
Through this prism I perceive his Falk, doomed to utter failure and
futility.
* * * * *
Falk an erotomaniac? Nonsense. His sexual relations are as pathological
as the functions of his other faculties, not more. In his incessant
search for an outlet, for discharge, for some quantity that might fill
up his hollowed heart, Falk grasps woman as a potentional complement to
his emptiness. He fails, naturally. To the artist woman is a narcotizer
and wing-clipper; more often a Dalila or Xantippe than a Cosima Wagner
or a Clara Schumann. Neither the exoticism of Ysa, nor the
pillow-serviceability of Yanina, nor the medieval fanaticism of Marit,
nor Olga’s revolutionary resignedness, have the power of checking the
hurricane of his questing spirit for more than a moment, such moments
when the tormented man erects for his consolation a phantom, be it a
superman or a Christ. Falk’s quest for self-forgetfulness is futile. He
lacks the healthy capacity of us, normal beings, for finding salvation
in befogging our vision. No matter how we may indulge in
self-analization, we usually stop at the perilous point and brake our
searching demon with the same happy instinct that closes our eyes
automatically at the approach of danger. Falk’s mental motor has no
brakes; it hurls him into the precipice.
“I have never suffered on account of a woman,” boasts the old rake,
Iltis.
“Because your organism is very tough, a peasant’s organism, my dear
Iltis. Your sensibilities have not yet reached the stage of dependence
upon the brain. You are like a hydromedusa which suddenly parts with its
feelers stocked with sexual organs and sends them off to seek the
female, and then does not bother about them any more. You are a very
happy creature, my dear Iltis. But I don’t envy you your happiness. I
never envy the ox his enjoyment of grass, not even when I am starving.”
Przybyszewski’s Individuum seeks in woman the miraculous expression of
his most intimate, most precious “I.” He speaks in one place about the
love of the “anointed artist,” which is a painful conception of an awful
unknown force that casts two souls together striving to link them into
one; an intense torment rending the soul in the impossible endeavor to
realize the New Covenant, the union of two beings, a matter of absolute
androgynism. For such an artist love is “the consciousness of a terrible
abyss, the sense of a bottomless Sheol in his soul, where rages the life
of thousands of generations, of thousands of ages, of their torments and
pangs of reproduction and of greed for life.” Now recall Falk’s dream:
“He saw a meadow-clearing in his father’s forest. Two elks were
fighting. They struck at each other with their large horns, separated,
and made another terrific lunge. Their horns interlocked. In great leaps
they tried to disentangle themselves, turning round and round. There was
a crunching of horns. One elk succeeded in freeing himself and ran his
horns into the other’s breast. He drove them in deeper and deeper, tore
ferociously at his flesh and entrails. The blood spurted.... And near
the fighting animals a female elk was pasturing unmindful of the savage
struggle of the passion-mad males.... In the centre stood the victor
trembling and gory, yet proud and mighty. On his horns hung the entrails
of his rival.”
The epitomy of the sex-problem, heh-heh.
* * * * *
“I don’t envy the ox his enjoyment.” Przybyszewski despises happiness as
something unworthy of an artist. A happy soul, he believes, is a
miracle, the squareness of a circle, a whip made of sand. The soul is
sombre, stormy, for it is the aching of passion and the madness of
sweeps, living over ecstacies of boiling desire, the stupendous anxiety
of depths and the boundless suffering of being. For the artist who
creates the world not with his brain, but with his soul, all life is one
“sale corvée,” a filthy burden, eternal horror, despair, and submission,
fruitless struggle and impotent stumbling. For this reason love, the
greatest happiness for ordinary males, becomes for the artist the
profoundest disastrous suffering.
Take away from Przybyszewski his ecstacy of pain, and you rob him of his
very essence, of his raison d’être, of his creative breath. When you
read his _Poems in Prose_ you face a soul writhing in hopeless despair,
in futile longing, in maddening convulsions. But you cannot pity the
artist. You are aware of the sublime joy in his sorrow, of the unearthly
bliss that is wrapped in the black wings of his melancholy. In his poem
_At the Sea_, the elemental yearning of his soul reaches cosmic
dimensions. Only one other poem approaches it in its surcharged
grief—Ben Hecht’s _Night-Song_, if we overlook the latter’s redundancy.
Allow me to give you a pale translation of the “Introibo” to _At the
Sea_:—may the Pole’s spirit forgive me my sacrilegious impertinence.
INTROIBO
Thou, who with ray-clad hands wreathest my dreams with the beauty
of fading autumn, with the splendor of off-blooming grandeur,
with inflamed hues of the burning paradise,—
Radiant mine!
How many pangs have passed as if in a dream, since I saw Thee for
the last time, and yet mine heart doth shine amidst the stars
which Thou hast strewn in my life, yet the thirsting hands of my
blood yearn for the bliss Thou didst once kindle in my soul.
Thou, who in evening twilight spinnest for me with still hands on
enchanted harps heavy meditation on moments of joy that have
flown away like a distant whisper of leaves,—on suns that,
sinking into the sea, sparkle in the east with bloody dew,—on
nights that press to their warm breast tortured hearts,—
Radiant mine!
How many times has the sun set since those hours when with Thy
magic songs Thou pacified the sorrow of my soul,—and yet I see
Thine eyes, full of moans and sadness, burning in an unearthly
rapture, see the radiant hand stretching towards me and grasping
mine with a hot cry.
Thou, who transformest stormy nights into sunny days, in the
depths of my dreams quenchest reality, removest into an infinite
distance all near,—
Thou, who enkindlest in my heart will-o’-the-wisps and bearest
unto life black flowers—
Radiant mine!
A thousand times has the world transfigured since Thy look
consumed the tarnishing glitter of my soul, and yet I see Thy
little child-like face and the golden crown of hair over Thy
brow, see how two tears had spread into a pale smile that glowed
on Thy mouth, and hear the dark plaint of Thy voice.
Thou, who breakest before me the seals of all mysteries and
readest the runes of hidden powers, and in all the madnesses of
my life flingest Thyself in a rainbow of blessing from one heaven
to the other,—