has the aureole played with such bleeding radiancy around Thy
head, as now, when I have lost Thee forever.
“Homo Sapiens” Discussed by Readers
In another place I called _Homo Sapiens_ “the book of the age.” Surely
there has not been a more stirring work of literature since _Werther_.
Will the public respond? Is it true that the wall of American
indifferentism is impregnable? I am still optimistic about the
intellectual aristocracy of this country; that small circle of the young
in spirit, brave searchers and earnest livers, for whom art and life are
not merely diversions between meals and business transactions, but the
italicized essence of existence. To those few Przybyszewski’s book
should appeal; those should react.
I have been getting curious, and at times interesting, opinions of such
readers. I hope to receive more, and acquaint the _Little Review_ family
with them. On the whole, there prevails a note of depression and
uneasiness. One writes: “I had hoped to be left alone on a mountain peak
in a blaze of light and in the stress of wind; instead there is a
sardonic laugh, and I am again hurled into the maelstrom of a world that
cannot rise above suffering from its own passions.” A feminist remarks
sadly that the book demonstrates “the limit of man’s penetration. The
women are women still—not even women of the transition.” An incurable,
hopelessly struggling Puritan rages and curses both me and the author; I
give a few gems: “I’ve read your devilishly wonderful book!... It did
many things to me, which, thank God, have passed like a drunken
dream.... For three days I’ve been hideously torn up, slashed into
tatters, savage and fundamental. But you want my opinion! How can I tell
you, divorce it from myself, tear it out of my living flesh, when it has
become imbedded. That terrible, wonderful Falk! It makes you shudder
away from all temperamental people with experimental souls in their
fingers, and few convictions.... I became paralyzed with horror. At last
I cried out, writhed on the floor and prayed to some Power, any Power,
for pity, not to see myself, not to see life beneath the superficial
surface.... Go away, take your Slav fingers out of my soul! They force
me to look at truth, when I want to deal in lies. They force me to climb
the heights and peer into the hideous crevasses, when I want to browse
fatuously on the hillocks.” More such “drunken dreams,”
and the comfortable blinders will fall off the eyes of the
happiness-by-all-means-fiends.
I submit two letters of friends who have read my article and wished to
supplement my views. I humbly think that what they say is included in my
“reflections”; but I am also conscious of my inherent fault—conciseness
which borders on obscurity. Hence clarification is gratefully welcome.
I.
What you say about Przybyszewski I also think. But what you do not say
about _Homo Sapiens_ is what I feel most of all. There is something very
definite about _Homo Sapiens_, the book. It rises out of the mass of
flaming gibberish, dissected nerves, and poetical slashings. It rings in
the ears long after the book is closed. It is the most poignant cry of
the dying nineteenth century, and it comes out of lower depths than the
cry of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov,—shriller, madder, and more
penetrating....
Eric Falk is not a nuance. He is the whole of Stanislaw Przybyszewski,
the whole of modern wisdom and introspection, which is another word for
degeneracy.
Come now, pretend I am not reviewing it. Pretend I am something of a
clairvoyant.
See Przybyszewski creating him—Erick Falk. He is sitting at his desk. He
is going to write a book about man, not a type, not a silhouette, but
about Man complete. He wants the final man of his day, the Homo Sapiens,
the Zarathustran phantom.
This Przybyszewski is a thorough fellow, a biologist, a poet, a
physician, an historian, a psychologist. He lives on an operating table.
Knows his own insides.
“Come here, Zarathustra,” chuckles this Przybyszewski, and he coaxes him
off the heights, off the peaks where he is waiting to be fed by the
eagles.
And striding from the peaks comes Zarathustra. Who do you suppose it is?
Przybyszewski, of course.
They greet each other.
And Przybyszewski says to this self of his: “So you are the ultimate
clay, ha, ha.”
And this self answers: “Yea, behold in me the finite evolution, man
crowned by his own hard and subtly-won glories.”
“Come here,” purrs Przybyszewski. Remember, he is talking to himself—at
his desk.
Hesitating, frowning, and yet with the pure grimace of superiority
stamped on his face, this self approaches. And the book is on.
Przybyszewski’s inspiration is the fury of a madman, the derisive,
diabolical chuckling of a fanatical cynic.
“Come now, we will fly,” whispers Przybyszewski, and off they go—the
innocent Zarathustra and the steeped, slashbuckling Przybyszewski. And
remember still—they are one.
And the rest of it is the plot of _Homo Sapiens_, the book, which I will
skip....
Thus Eric Falk soars and Przybyszewski shows the sorry mechanics of his
wings, laughing, chuckling, for they are his own. Thus toward the middle
of the book you begin wondering. Falk is going to pieces, Falk the
immutable, the all knowing, the transcender, the ... the ... the ... the
Homo Sapiens. What is the matter? When he betrays a woman and causes her
death a hideous vapor suddenly envelopes his soul and befouls it.
Przybyszewski thrusts his radiant leer from behind Zarathustra’s mask
and hisses, “Conscience, ha!”
And thus it goes its merry way. To the edge of the precipice this mad
Pole pushes his whirling Falk, to the utter edge of known reason, known
psychology and known Passions.
And then suddenly the soarer falls. The mechanism comes clattering to
earth—to the bottom of the precipice. The lugubrious Stanislaw has led
his creation—himself—to the limits.
He has finished his book.
Piled on the desk lies the heap of glowing sentences, the history of
rhapsodic vivisection.
Przybyszewski has expressed himself.
He has uttered his most internal cry, the cry of a poet, a weaver of
plots, an anatomical expert, of an introspective vulture-minded
Disbeliever.
And now I call your attention to Mr. Przybyszewski at his desk—too tired
to rise. Gone are the golden thrills that quivered in him, gone
everything but the thin sardonic grin that lights the face of Eric
Falk—on the last page. And only Eric Falk’s last cry, “Vive L’Humanité”
is left him. So our Stanislaw, the idol of Bohemia, the tortured demon,
sits chuckling, a glass of cognac trembling in his fingers.
“Homo Sapiens,” he sighs with his inevitable sneer, that pierces through
his pity and pain like the point of a rapier, “behold thyself. Thou,
Eric, art man. Thou art the creaking vehicle for the golden theories,
the rainbow fantasies which have sifted out of the mental mists of the
century. And behold, thou creakest, thou groanest, thou breakest under
this lightest of burdens.”
The tired Przybyszewski quivers. His lips, mocking their way through the
delirious poison of thought and passion have kissed the intangible. He
has stripped his brain to its last cell and looked at it. And the cry
that rises out of the book comes condensed from his lips now—after it is
done. Nowhere is it written, nowhere is it heard except at Stanislaw
Przybyszewski’s desk—in Bohemia.
It is the answer, ha. Is it?
“Homo Sapiens, thou art clay. Thy mind is a super-chaos. Thy soul is a
petty mirage.”
II.
Przybyszewski transplants his readers from their ordinary mental
environment into those astral regions where metaphysical subtleties are
clothed with reality. Life is dealt with not on the surface strata of
its expressions but at its base where motives and ideas and emotions
have their source. And in spite of this fact, or rather because of the
uncanny clairvoyance of its author there is no perversion or befogging
of one’s point of view. These nebulous regions are lit up by the
ruthless penetration of an artist who is a scientist as well.
One’s first sensations are like seeing for the first time with the naked
eye the fan of nerves which spread out from the corona radiata, or
touching the single nerve trunks with the dissecting knife. In the same
manner the pathological Pole brings you into actual contact with the
cargos of these nerves, ideas, emotions, sensations. All the concealing
layers of evasions and of equivocations have been dissected away; there
lies spread out before you sections of naked consciousness. And so
subtle has been the dissecting work that there has been no
disarrangement and no death. All is still living, still functioning. And
your sensation of strangeness, almost of horror, is born out of
revulsion against a self-consciousness so intense as to seem almost
morbid. “I feel,” said a friend of mine, “as if I had been vivisected.”
Not so much this as that one has been vivisecting. Przybyszewski compels
you to co-operate with him in analysing psychological phenomena. At
moments you lift your eyes from the page, panting, almost physically
exhausted from the effort of concentrating on those tortuous, subtle
reactions which occur in the farthest recesses of consciousness and
spread upward in waves to the surface, where they often take on curious
irrelevant expression.
But that is sheer morbidity, cries your friend the Philistine. It is
introspection carried past the point of decency. But to the investigator
there is no point past which it is indecent to press. In him there is no
affectation of scruple to erect its artificial barricade. He must have
transcended all such petty egotism and have depersonalized himself. He
is constrained to this by that curiosity which is his master passion,
which generates itself and is dynamic in him as hunger or sex are
dynamic in the ordinary individual. This curiosity of the artist brooks
no bounds, short of the facts against which it brings up abruptly. And
so Przybyszewski for all his uncanny subtlety cannot be accused of
morbidity since he uses it not to distort but merely to reveal the
truth. If he has no false reverence neither has he irreverence. His
scalpel, always flashing and leaping, pauses a moment on a state of
emotion and, pointing, calls it by name. “For I am I,” says Falk. “I am
a criminal diabolic nature.” Or again:
“And so a certain man is suffering from love induced by auto-suggestion.
Very well. But at the same time he loves his wife unqualifiedly. And he
loves her so much that there can be no doubt of the reality of his love.
In a word he loves both the one and the other.”
But such a condition isn’t possible, the Philistine will cry out,
wounded at his most vulnerable point, his inflexible principles. “A man
can’t love two women at the same time.” This isolated case would
undermine the whole monogamistic theory. He sees one of his cherished
institutions tottering. And so he takes fright and refutes the fact. “It
can’t be, it isn’t possible.” But Przybyszewski continues to stand with
the scalpel wearily pointing. “My dear Sir, this is no question of
postulates, it’s a question of an individual instance. It _is_ possible,
because it occurs. Falk _does_ love two women at the same moment.” And
the Philistine will doubtless turn away snorting furiously and
unconvinced. “Przybyszewski,” he will sneer, “that degenerate Pole,
always half drunk with cognac, a Slav to boot. What does he know of life
or reality? They were all neurasthenics. Look at Artzibashev and
Andreyev and Dostoevsky. Yes, let us look at them, and remembering
Dostoevsky’s epilepsy, remember also Raskolnikov. A criminal’s
psychology lifted onto paper out of the limbo regions of consciousness
by the mammoth Russian’s bloody pen. Something more than neurasthenia,
this gift of analysis.
What, finally, is Homo Sapiens? Who is this writer-fellow, Falk, with no
conscience, with his “criminal, diabolic nature?” Does he only exist to
analyse himself, and his tortuous, painful psychologizings? Why is he,
what is he?—He is the self-conscious man, par excellence. This book is
the epic of consciousness. “The thing must be thought out,” says Falk.
And nuance by nuance it is thought out, rapidly but faithfully, under
your very eyes. You are invited,—no, compelled,—to take part in the
operation. Hence your feeling of fatigue. And again, after a page or
two, “He examined his own feelings.”
“But why a Falk?” the Philistine demands. “Falk is no average man. He is
a genius, and as such his psychology is specialized and distinct. Falk
is a neurasthenic, victim of erotomania. Even his lucidity is not to his
credit. Since he is a writer it is implicit in him, as muscle is in the
circus rider. He is bound to analyse his acts, to trace them back to
their motives. Falk presents an isolated case. If one is going to deal
with consciousness why not choose a less precocious exponent? Why not
the everyday consciousness of the average human being?”
And by the same token, why not a Falk, Mr. Philistine, since we are
agreed that this is a drama of consciousness. Of what use is the average
man in this extremity? The artist is the Homo Sapiens par excellence,
for it is in him that consciousness has reached its most complex
differentiation. “I am,” says Falk, “what they call a highly
differentiated individual. I have, combined in me, everything—design,
ambition, sincerity of knowledge and ignorance, falsehood and truth. A
thousand heavens, a thousand worlds are in me.” And recognizing this
fact he wrestles with it through some four hundred odd pages. That Falk
loved two women, or ten women, is not only possible, but probably
inevitable. What in the average man is a temperate reaching out for a
few specific joys becomes in a Falk the impulse of his whole being for
self-expression. It bursts out along a thousand channels, requiring as
many outward aspects as there are sources in his personality. And it is
this devious stream of a human consciousness that we are following
outward to its expression in words or acts, and backward to its source,
as we dissect with Przybyszewski Falk’s mental protoplasm.
“Futile,” sneers the Philistine, “utterly futile. If that is a Homo
Sapiens, give me a subman. Your Falk knew no happiness and he gave none.
He only strewed suffering in his wake both for himself and others. He
was without scruples and without conscience. Where did he get to with
all his differentiation? He wrote a few books, to be sure, but what were
they in the scale of the women he ruined, the men he did to death? Even
of his own misery? His gift of introspection was a sharp knife turned
against himself, since he cried out in the end: ‘to be chemically
purified of all thoughts.’ Homo Sapiens indeed!”
You can see Przybyszewski wearily twisting the scalpel in his nerveless
hands, you can see the smile that twists his lips just before they curve
about the waiting cognac glass. “No, he was not happy, it is true he did
strew misery in his wake. He was neurasthenic and degenerate and
criminal. He was all these things and all the other things which you
have forgotten or never perceived. For he was Homo Sapiens. And such as
he is I have drawn him. Ha, ha—Vive l’Humanité!”
The Spring Recital
THEODORE DREISER
SCENE:
A prosperous First Church in the heart of a great city. Outside the
city’s principle avenue, along which busses and vehicles of all
descriptions are rolling. Surrounding the church a graveyard,
heavily shaded with trees, the branches of which reach to the
open windows bearing soft odours. Over the graves many full blown
blossoms, and in the sky a full May moon. An idling sense of
spring in the gait and gestures of the pedestrians. In front of
the church hangs a small lighted cross, and under it swings the sign
“Organ Recital, 8:30, Wilmuth Tabor, Organist.” The doors giving
into the church are open. The interior, save for the presence of
a caretaker in a chair, is empty. On either side of the pulpit,
below a great dark rose window, burns a partially lighted
electrolier. In the organ loft, over the street doors, a single
light.
FIRST STREET BOY (to his companion, ambling to discover what the world
contains, and glancing in as they pass). Gee! Who’d wanta go to church
on a night like this?
SECOND STREET BOY. I should say! Didjah see the old guy with the
whiskers sitten’ inside?
FIRST STREET BOY. Sure. A swell job, eh? (Their attention is attracted
by an automobile spinning in the opposite direction, and they pass on).
AN OLD LADY (to her middle-aged daughter, on whose arm she is leaning
... sympathetically and reminiscently). The dear old First Church! What
a pity its parishioners have all moved away. I don’t suppose the younger
generation cares much for church going anymore. People are so
irreligious these days.
THE DAUGHTER. Poor Mr. Tabor. I went to one of his concerts in the
winter and there were scarcely forty people there. And he plays so
heavenly, too. I don’t suppose the average person cares much for organ
music.
(They pass with but a glance at the interior.)
A BELATED SHOE CLERK (hurrying to reach Hagan’s Olio Moving Picture and
Vaudeville Theatre before the curtain rises, but conscious that he ought
to pay some attention to the higher phases of culture, turning to the
old door-keeper). When does this concert begin?
THE OLD DOOR-KEEPER (heavily). Half past eight. (He glances at the sign
hanging over the youth’s head.)
THE BELATED SHOE CLERK. Do they have them every Wednesday night?
THE OLD DOOR-KEEPER. Every Wednesday. (The Clerk departs, and the old
man scratches his head.) They often ask, but they don’t come in. (He
shifts to a more comfortable position in his chair.) I see no use to
playin’ to five or six people week in and week out all summer long.
Still, if they want to do it they have the money. It looks like a good
waste of light to me.
(Mrs. Pence and Mrs. Stillwater, two neighbors of the immediate
vicinity, enter the church door.)
MRS. PENCE (a heavy pasty faced woman in white lawn, lowering her voice
to a religious whisper as they enter). Yes, I like to come here now and
then. I don’t know much about music but the organ is so soothing. We had
a parlor organ when I was a little girl and I learned to play on that.
MRS. STILLWATER (short, blonde, and of a romantic turn, but with three
grown sons). I just think the organ is the loveliest of all instruments.
It’s so rich and deep. Isn’t it dim here? So romantic! I love an old
church. (They seat themselves in a pew.) I don’t suppose people want
much light when they hear music. See the moonlight in that window over
there, isn’t it lovely?
(A pair of lovers enter.)
THE BOY. I’ve heard of him. He’s a well-known organist. I love Grieg. I
wish he would play the Nocturne in G Minor.
THE GIRL. Oh yes, or Solveig’s Lied. Isn’t it dim here.
(They enter a pew in the most remote corner. She squeezes his hand and
he returns the pressure.)
THE ORGANIST (a pessimistic musician of fifty, entering and climbing
slowly to the organ loft. As he does so he surveys the empty auditorium
gloomily.) Only four people! (He turns on the bracket lights, uncovers
the keys, and adjusts the sheets of his programme before him. Surveying
himself in the mirror, and then examining the opening bars of The
Toccata and Fugue in D by Bach, he pulls out various stops and looks
into the dim, empty auditorium once more.) What a night! And me playing
in this dim, empty church. It’s bad enough to be getting along in years
and have no particular following, but this church! All society and
wealth away to the sea shore and the mountains and me here. Ah, well (he
sighs). Worse and worse times still succeed the former. (He sounds a
faint tremolo to test the air pressure. Finding all satisfactory, and
noting the hour by his watch, which stands at eight-thirty, he begins
the Overture to “The Magic Flute,” this being a purely secular
programme).
(Enter through a north window, open even with the floor of the organ
loft, a horned fawn, with gay white teeth grimacing as he comes, begins_
_pirouetting. He carries a kex on which he attempts to imitate the
lovely piping of the overture).
THE FAWN (prancing lightly here and there). Tra aa ala-lala! Ah,
tra-la-la, Ah, tra-la-la! Tra-la-leee! Tra-la-leee! Very excellent! Very
nice! (He grins from ear to ear and espying the church cat, a huge
yellow tom who is mousing about, gives a spirited kick in its
direction). Dancing’s the thing! Life is better than death, thin shade
that I am!
THE CAT (arching his back and raising his fur). Pfhs-s-st! Pfhs-s-st!
(The fawn pirouettes nearer, indicating a desire to dance with it,
whereupon the cat retreats into a corner under the organ).
THE FAWN. Ky-ey-ey! You silly dolt! (Kicks and spins away).
THE ORGANIST (noticing the spit-fire attitude of the cat). He seems to
see something. What the deuce has got into him, now? I wonder whether
cats do see anything when they act like that. (He drifts into a frail
dance harmony, yielding to the seduction of it and closing his eyes).
THE BOY LOVER. Wonderful! So delicately gay and sad! It’s just like
flowers blooming in the night, isn’t it? (His sweetheart squeezes his
hand and moves closer).
SIX HAMA-DRYADS (sweeping in from the trees and circling about,
wreath-wise under the groined arches of the ceiling. They are a pale,
ethereal company, suiting their movements to the melody and its
variations).
Arch of church or arch of trees,
Built of stone or built of air,
Spirits floating on a breeze,
Dancing gayly anywhere.
Out of lilac, out of oak,
Hard by asphodel and rose,
Never time when music spoke
But a dryad fled repose.
Weaving, turning, high and low
Where the purpled rhythms fall,
Where the plangent pipings call,
Round and round and round we go.
THE FAWN (dancing forward and about them). I can dance! Let me dance!
(He grins in the face of one).
THE HAMA-DRYADS. Go away! Don’t bother!
THE CAT (prowling under the organ). I saw a mouse peeping out of that
hole just now. Wait! (He crouches very low, ready to spring).
THE ORGANIST (dreamily). This passage always makes me think of moonlight
on open fields and the spicy damp breath of a dark dewy wood, and of
lilacs blowing over a wall, too. So suitable, but I would rather live
than play. (He sighs. A gloomy ghost with sharp green eyes enters from
the sacristy, and pauses in the dark angle of the wall).
THE GHOST (a barrel house bum a dozen years dead, and still enamored of
the earth). What’s doing here, I wonder? (He stares). A lot of fools
dancing. (Turns and departs).
THE GIRL. Oh Sweetheart, isn’t it perfect. (She lays her head on his
shoulder).
THE BOY. Darling!
THE CAT (springing). There! I almost caught him. (Peers into the hole).
Just the same, I know where he is now. (He strolls off with an air of
undefeated indifference).
THE ORGANIST (missing a note). This finale isn’t so easy. And I don’t
like it as well, either. I always stumble in the allegro. (He wipes his
brow, improvises a few bars, interpolating also a small portion of the
triumphal march from “Aida”). This is different. I can do it better. (He
begins upon the Grail motif from “Parsifal”).
MRS. STILLWATER (shifting her arm and moving her knee). I never like
loud music as well as the softer kind. That middle part was beautiful.
MRS. PENCE. Well, I can’t say I like loud music, either, but now this—
(The Hama-dryads cease dancing and drift out of the window, followed
by the fawn. An English minister, once of St. Giles, Circenster, who
died in 1631, a monk of the Thebaid, A. D. 300, and three priests of
Isis, B. C. 2840, enter, each independently of the others. On
detecting the odour of reverence they visualize themselves to
themselves as servitors of their respective earthly religions—the
Egyptians in their winged hoods, the monk of the Thebaid in his
high pointed cowl, the Rector of St. Giles in his broad-brimmed
hat with the high conical crown, knee-length coat, and heavy,
silver-buttoned shoes.)
THE MINISTER (to himself). An unhappy costume, yet it is all that
identifies me with my former earthly self, or with life. (He notes the
Egyptians and the monk, but pays no attention to them for the moment).
FIRST PRIEST OF ISIS (to his brothers). A house of worship. How the awe
of man persists. I thought I detected the rhythm of melody here.