THE LITTLE REVIEW
Literature Drama Music Art
MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR
OCTOBER, 1915
Songs and Sketches Ben Hecht
The Dionysian Dreiser “The Scavenger”
Leather Lane Mitchell Dawson
Etchings Alexander S. Kaun
The Truth Burt Harris
Romain Rolland Ellen Key
Poems— Witter Bynner
I Shall Come to You Again
Sicilia
Christian
Marriage
A Glimpse at Russia, An Editorial
Sophomoric Epigrams A. E. D.
Henri and Manship C. A. Z.
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
OCTOBER, 1915
No. 7
Copyright, 1915, by Margaret C. Anderson
Songs and Sketches
BEN HECHT
I.
Night
Who hath not sung to thee, Night? So silent; so deep. But this night
thou hast given thyself to me. Thy black wings brush silently against my
soul.
Thou hast come to me, for I feel thee resting like a soft sorrow on my
heart.
Thou who art alive with the shadowed wounds of ages hast heard me crying
out to embrace thee, my soul beseeching thee to fold me against thy
black bosom. And in answer thou hast let the mysticism of thy
wonder-gloom sink into me until my soul hath opened to receive its kiss.
Tonight no one but I shall sing to thee. For thou art my mistress. Thy
blackness and mine have wedded. And now thy dark kiss stingeth like a
pain in me.
Into thy long arms I give myself. Night, Night, thou art so filled with
longing. I hear the soft lament of thy deep heart murmuring to me.
Thy dim fingers trail across my face in a blind caress.
I feel thy yielding body that is spirit more than my spirit behind the
somber veils thou wearest. I possess thee and our sorrows swell into an
ecstacy.
Night, thou art the beautiful shadow thrown upon the earth by my sorrow.
I have carried thee a buried miracle in my soul of souls until this
hour—when thou hast taken wings and flown out of me to confront me.
Night, my Night, let me enter now into thy darkness until all life beats
in vain outside the obscurity of my soul. I would vanish from myself.
Night, my somber mistress, upon thy face my tears shine as stars and
make thee more beautiful.
Night, thou art infinity revealed. I will stir thy ancient fires on thy
cold lips until thou willst thunder to me with thy hidden voices out of
thy vast silence.
Night, I open my heart to hear but I hear only my heart crying out.
Speak.
Beautiful one, I sing to thee for bringing me the madness of silence. I
sing to thee, for thou art mine; for thou art fierce and pregnant with
still wounds.
Night. Behold! I know thee. I have seen the black flames of thy spirit
that burn in the depths of thee. I have heard the murmuring music of thy
tears.
Thou art glorious. Come. Come, thou and I shall make of our sorrow
rejoicing. Come, place thy long, cool fingers in mine and lead me
beyond.
Night! Night! Thy face is paling. Thou art stricken. Thou art treading
silently away without me.
Night—thou hast taken from me the pain of thy kisses. There hath come
into thy deep eyes a weariness. Thou art dying. Thou art dying from my
arms. The red glow of death burneth in thy face and is transforming
thee.
Night, where shall I find thee again? Where shall I seek thee?
The dreadful day that is thy white shadow hath come. And a part of me
hath died.
Sleep Song
I lay in a field of black flowers, and there were purple veins and green
that floated like thin worms about me.
There were soft thick shapes swaying liquidly, moving unseen, and I lay
under them gripped by soft thick mists.
Deep under them I lay hidden and they pulled me deeper into the field
rolling softly around me.
A sorrow that had pursued me in my soul left me as I vanished, left me
and floated above the flowers.
And I saw a white face drifting away like a pale bubble over the top of
my black garden.
A white face like a dim sorrow, like a mute pain, drifting far away; the
white face of a dead love searching in vain for me, in vain.
The day was a white monster, naked and bellowing; grinning after me with
its buildings that were jagged rows of dirty teeth. There was no place
to hide from my sorrow.
It lay in the sky that winked at me like a vast and blue and relentless
eye. And it lay in the sun that burned like a golden grotesque. It lay
in every laugh and in every beauty and in every little bird that lost
itself over the water.
I felt the black flowers grow blacker and higher and I moved deeper into
the blackness.
And then a sorrow that had pursued me in my soul left me as I vanished.
It floated away over the tops of the black flowers and I saw her white
face moving from me like a pale bubble.
I saw the white face of a dead love moving beyond the soft shapes that
swayed unseen; drifting away like a mute pain and searching in vain for
me, in vain.
I ran, but there was no place to run; for the monster day ran after,
glaring like a white torment, shouting and scampering after, and there
was no place to hide.
Now the day was a white grave opened to me. Now it was a wide wave
breaking over me.
And now it was a great bird, white-breasted and grey-pinioned, flying
after me and after, bearing my sorrow in its blue beak; racing after me
until its heart burst in the west and it sank, bleeding gorgeously
across the sky.
And still I ran; but now the night came, running after, and there was no
place to hide from my sorrow.
I fled in the streets before the darkness. But the stars found me and
the trees loomed after me and the houselights followed me and the
darkness wept around me—and they were my sorrow.
But there on the distant verge, where the night sinks exhausted into the
blood-red arms of the white monster leaping over the world again, I
fell; deep I fell.
Far into a hidden land where I lay hidden; hidden in a field of black
flowers that were threaded with purple veins and green floating like
thin worms about me.
Autumn Song
My heart scatters tears over the dark day. The dull silvered poplar
leaves float in the air like dead butterflies.
It is the autumn come again, speaking with its soft-tongued winds to the
trees and to me.
It is cold. I have lost my warmth. I have lost thee. And the autumn has
come again to tell me of it.
Listen to the sad-tongued winds. See the storm faltering in the street.
It is cold.
It is the autumn come again, the autumn in whose wild sad treasures we
once laughed; once when your hot hands reached out to me like a bright
cry mocking the somber lisping of the twilight season.
Where are the songs I sang, the songs that leaped out of flame? Do they
echo still in your listening ears? Do they fall like warm tears in your
heart?
See the winds droop wearily into the trembling tree arms. See the street
grows pale. A dying panoply drifts across the grey-girthed sky.
Ho, Life, I have still a song for you. Though you come whispering to me
from the golden tombs of youth, from the scarlet graves of love, I will
make of the lament you bring me—music. I will make of the dull tears you
bring me—lyrics. I will clothe the grey ghosts of sorrow in rich
trappings.
For it is only she who hath died. It is only she whom I loved with all
my soul. Though my heart scatter tears over the dark day they are the
tears of plenty. For her death hath enriched me.
For the autumn is come again speaking with its soft-tongued winds to the
trees and to me things I have never heard before; things that her white
breasts never told me; things that her burning lips never said to me;
wild, sad things that the flame from whence my songs once leaped never
held for me.
The dull silvered poplar leaves float in the air like dead butterflies,
and they are beautiful.
Death Song
Last night you came and sat by my bed in a little dark room and boasted
to me like a child.
“I have come to destroy the sun,” you said; “I will take the great,
yellow sun in my fingers and blow on it once and it will go out like a
match.”
And I wondered, because the sun is so large and hot, how such a little
one as you could blow it out like a match.
But you said: “I will blow once into the night and the stars will
sputter like little flames in a great wind and scatter away in ashes.
And the moon will spin around and around like a bright coin until it
breaks into little black bits.”
And I wondered because the night was so far, how such a little breath as
yours could reach into its soul.
But you said: “I will go out and touch the trees and the green leaves
will shrivel and the brown trunks will vanish. I will breathe just once
on the houses, the great big houses of iron and wood and stone, and they
will sway like long pieces of black cloth in the wind and they will melt
into a dark mist.”
And I wondered and wondered.
But you said: “In an instant I will walk up and down all the roads you
have known; I will wander in all the fields you have wandered and pass
through all the highways you have been. And each place that I move in
will cease to be. Under my feet the earth will become a powder and
vanish.”
Then you said, for I had ceased to wonder and was listening sadly: “I
will go to your beloved whose hair is like the silk on the corn and
whose eyes are like the deeps of the sea and I will smile on her and she
will become as nothing. She will become as a speck of dust and she will
never be again.”
And I wondered again how such a little one as you could make my beloved
into a speck of dust when she was so beautiful.
But you said: “I will touch all the faces you have seen with the point
of my finger and they will change into little dark clouds and I will
blow them away with the stars and the moon and the yellow sun.”
And I thought of all the faces you boasted to destroy and
wondered—because there were so many.
But you said: “Do you remember the little bird you saw hopping on the
stones in the park one day: I will go find the little bird and lay my
hand on her and she will never hop on the stones again.”
I remembered the little bird.
And you said: “Do you remember the wide, green water that rolled itself
into a great colored ball and bounced up and down under the sun?
Listen—I will go and blow on the water and it will disappear into a
single drop. And I will bring this drop back to you to wear in your eyes
when they close.”
And I wondered and wondered.
But you said: “Listen:—there is an old woman who smiles when she thinks
of you. I will walk up behind her and touch her gently on the shoulder
and she will vanish.”
And I murmured, “Do not touch the old woman.”
But you said: “Listen:—I will lay my hand over all the wild notes and
sweet notes you have heard and they will be hushed. I will kill the
songs that lie unborn in the earth and the sea and the cherry trees and
in the white throats of birds and women and in the hearts of men.”
And I wondered how such a little one as you could hush so great a
chorus.
But you came closer to me and said: “I have come to destroy the world
for you, to pluck out every little blade of grass and every flower, to
brush away the stars and kick over the hills and tear up all the
fields.”
It was dark in the little room where we were and I sighed.
And you came closer to me and said: “I will gather up in a great, black
bag everyone and everything and every God you have known and I will drop
them into a great, black hole. And listen:—and then you will be alone.”
II.
The Synagogue
This street in the ghetto looks at night
Like a prison corridor,
And the houses facing it are dark cells.
And then you come to a block where the rickety, thin tenements
Rise like gnawed, patient pencils tracing crazy star lines
In the sky.
And then you come to the Synagogue of Judas the Servant,
A little church of the Jews
Crouching on its knees
And enveloped in the rags of cheap saloons and hovels.
It thrusts its iron star into the night
Like a strange voice whispering in a dark place.
And its stained walls impregnated with an ancient faith
Murmur stoically to the stars of burning prayers and hopeless sobs
And other things they have never heard.
And if you stand before it for a time
Strange wild things will cry out of the shadows,
And you will see the torn, bleeding image of a race
Whom Christ crucified.
In the Sun
O what a day!
The buildings are bursting into bloom—
Huge, dazzling flowers sweeping against the heaven;
Dizzy ferns waving like dreadful fans under the flying clouds.
The shining windows flutter down like a shower of golden petals.
O what a day!
The buildings are crashing into bloom;
Gleaming stalks of purple sprawling with a graceful frenzy into space.
Smoke monsters dance lazily over their heads.
The sky swims like a blue butterfly in and out among them.
The streets race away.
A golden wind sweeps with a roar through the world that has become a
fierce gorgeous garden, and it nods breathlessly.
Out of its blazing depths color leaps and the growling music of a torn
God singing in pain.
O what a day.
Beauty bursting into madness.
On the Beach
The lake comes gliding in and in,
And gliding out it goes,
Running up and back on the ribbon of the beach
That plays with its silver toes.
And the lake reaches down to the hem of its gown
With its cool curved wind of a hand,
And throws out its petticoat lacy and white
With a swish-swish over the sand.
Its blue dress fluttering, tinted with the sun,
Hangs from its girdle white-spaced,
And a far ship riding with its nose in hiding
Stands black like a buckle at its waist.
It begins to rain and the lake birds fly
With a whir and an angry screech,
As the thin grey fingers reach down from the sky
And tap, tap faintly on the beach.
Digging little holes for an elfin folk,
Pointing up the water like a grate;
And the sky moves closer like a gust of smoke
And behind it crouch and wait
Great half shapes and grey cloud apes,
And a grey, old water crew,
And the lake birds fly with their wings awry,
Searching in their faces for the blue.
Now the long rain chants in the grasses on the hill,
And the lake runs in with a frightened sound,
And sullen and wet the sand sinks low,
Like a heavy brown cloud on the ground.
On the hill top green the trees bend away
And brood as they lower and bend,
And grey things walk beyond the grey
Where the sands and the waters end.
The rain has stopped and the earth like a bride
Has hung white petals in her hair,
And the sky draws back till the white clouds ride
Like soft white gardens in the air.
And a butterfly flutters like an endless note
Over the lake’s thin brink,
And the sand takes off its heavy brown coat
And the cloud apes vanish and sink.
The gay water dawns and the grasshopper pipes
And the lake glides in anew,
Dressed in greens and in awning stripes,
And little birds leap toward the blue.
The Dionysian Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser is the greatest novelist in America. It is not a
distinction. He has written poor novels. His latest novel, The “Genius”
published by John Lane Company is loose in parts. It limps. It loses its
breath. It grows thin. But it is a novel of sweep and magnitude, of
sledge hammer blows and fine chiseling. In the caramel chorus of
America’s chirping fictionists Dreiser raises the smooth, virile voice
of an artist. And there is no voice like his in America.
I prefer to write of what Dreiser has done in The “Genius” than to tell
in detail of what it is about. Calmly, aloofly with a consummate
dispassion Dreiser has thrust his magic pen home into the heart of
American Puritanism. God forgive him. God forgive the publishers. God
forgive everybody who reads the book and forgive me who write about it.
For American Puritanism is a sacred thing, as sacred as the gilt on the
cathedral altar places, as hallowed as the bathroom in a bawdy house.
And Dreiser has peeled off the gilt and ruthlessly thrust open the door.
May he be cursed with the wrath of an avenging public conscience. May he
be made to wither under the distinction of being a maniacal sensualist,
a libidinous ruffian, a lascivious distiller of corrupting langours.
Amen.
Against the gray-dirt background, the shallow-hued smears of his many
contemporaries, Dreiser’s book stands forth like a red cry of truth. It
is not the book of a man enraged with the narrowness of a country,
sputtering against the insipidity of its composite ideals. Dreiser never
descends to the punitive hectoring of a Robert Herrick. Nor does he join
the plaintive assaults upon the pusillanimous conventions which
characterize the “advanced” fiction of the country. He does not make his
men and women vehicles for the antiquated day dream of brotherhood bosh.
He does not prostitute his work in dramatizing the current quibbles,
marketing asinine public convulsions in the literary capsules so
commonly compounded by our quack “creators.” All these things he does
not do and if the reading public of today will not reward him, the God
of Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Huysmanns, Shakespeare and Ambrose Bierce will.
What Dreiser does do is tell a straightforward story, tell it with all
the painstaking genius of the old Flemish painters. And he uses for his
background not the isolated strata of any single calling, but a
country—your world and mine and our neighbor’s. Life is greater than any
of its truths, sings Theodore Dreiser. There are many kinds of good,
many kinds of standards and many kinds of virtue. There is the virtue of
farmer Blue, the solid, masculine, clear and open virtue rooted in the
laws of the land and the rigmarole of society; thriving on the long,
brown roads, the ploughed fields and the homely beauties of existence.
And there is the virtue of Eugene Witla, the aesthetic, vibrating
pursuit of beauty rooted in the soul of the artist, thriving on the
illusive lust of women, the intangible urge of inspiration; spitting in
the face of laws unnatural to it and the fallacies that would be its
fetters. Yes, says Dreiser, (I do not quote him), life is a wide field
bearing on its bosom beautiful flowers that do not resemble each other
and that require widely different care and nourishment. To think that
such commonplaces should be distinctive notes in the art of a country!
But they are. If you have read these things into novels before you have
not read them into American novels. I do not recall a single hero in
American fiction, who is not a Puritan, who does not suffer when he
sins, whom the indulgence of his desire for women does not inspire to
repentance and “reform” and success as the blue literary laws of America
demand. For further particulars on this general subject see Mr.
Mencken’s fulmination in last month’s Smart Set.
On this broad canvas of thought it is that Dreiser works. In his new
novel he begins in a little town in Illinois. Out of the midst of a
mediocre family living in the concentric provincialism of the middle
west he launches his young hero Witla—a lad suffering from dreams and
stomach trouble and a vague distinguishing unrest. His types are
masterpieces. His style, shorn of pretentious reticence or rhetorical
pomp, is the painstaking and poetical diction he revealed in Jennie
Gerhardt. But he is not infallible. There are sentences, paragraphs
which jar. Although his strokes in delineating character and situation
are swift and certain, his language often seems lame, his words watery,
his phrases trite. But these are as the flaws of a panoramic pen crowded
at moments to a point of impatience and not the faults of a weak writer.
The effect is untouched. His people breathe out of the pages. They are
personalities. From beginning to end Dreiser reveals a psychology of
character amazing in its range and detachment. Witla as a boy lives in
Alexandria, Illinois. Dreiser traces the development of his soul and sex
and struggle out of the blanketing bourgois of his birthplace. The young
’Gene answers the call of beauty, without knowing what it is that calls
him. He comes to Chicago. He is a laundry wagon driver, a collector for
an installment furniture house, a student of the old Art Institute, a
worker in the art department of a newspaper. Dreiser traces him out of
the half way stratas of Chicago to New York, to success, and then
through a labyrinth of incidents all interesting and big. He follows him
through one development after another until Witla, the painter, realizes
himself. I cannot begin to tell what the book is about. It is partially
a depiction of the struggle between an artist husband and a “good woman”
who is his wife, partly the struggle between the flesh and the spirit of
the same husband and the tale of their final adjustment. It is an
Odyssey of a type of man in whom the future of the arts rest as they
always have rested. In the 736 pages there are persons of every type.
You will meet everyone you have known and many you have dreamed of
knowing. Every shade of womanhood flashes between the covers. It is as a
novel should be—complete. It tingles with the quick spasmodic life of
the city, of the country, the factory, the field, the drawing room. And
above all, it breathes the atmosphere of America’s art life, the lively,
struggling workers of the studio.
Witla, however, remains Dreiser’s calm, masterful argument against the
one-sided perversions of the Puritan. Witla is a genius. What are you
going to do with him, you proselyting blue stocking? Such a detached
study in perfidious polygamy is enough to damn the very printers who set
the type for the book. Here is a man of strong ideals, great productive
talent, an indispensable contributor to life, who naively considers
setting up an establishment for his pretty model just after he has
proposed matrimony to the woman he loves at the time with all the finest
desires of his nature; a miserable fellow who ruins and ravishes without
compunction every shapely creature who crosses his path. He is without
even unconscious morality, innate morality. Woman is beauty when she is
anything and to possess beauty is the motive force in his life. His eye
possesses the beauty of the city’s filth and dirt, the beauty of
landscape, his mind possesses the beauty of books and talk and other
minds, and his body the beauty of passion wherever he encounters it.
Logical, natural, primitive and entirely artistic. But immoral? God,
yes. No one woman can satisfy a man unless he deliberately stunts
himself, is the Dreiserian Gospel. A man needs blonde women, brunette
women, short ones and tall ones, radical ladies and conservative
creatures—that is, a man like Witla does. And is Witla a supreme type, a
distinctive Sanine sort of fellow? Not a bit of it. Whether Dreiser
thought he is, I don’t know. He doesn’t say. But he isn’t. He is man and
not artist in his “sins.”
There is naturally more color to his escapades, to his “pursuit of
beauty,” for he is the “genius” with an eye to shades and a soul for
nuances not possessed by his more hum drum brothers. To him matrimony is
naturally a pit, a degradation, a series of cages, for he is the eternal
masculine. But how many men are there who have always been faithful to
their wives? What? I do not know of a single one. In his high lighted
type of Witla, Dreiser tells of this rudely, brutally and
beautifully—with the indifference of a Juggernaut and the cunning of a
magician.
Really, you of the firm-fireside-faith, what is there to be done? Here
is the Dionysian dastard who dares proclaim that life is a decent,
orderly routine and that life is also a wild, warm passionate thing;
that it is also a flame in which there is only one color, the red,
golden color of youth.
And the answer is—howl. A howl will go up, I swear it. It will start
from the critics.
I can almost read their forthcoming reviews as I close my eyes.
“A sensually depraved and degenerate type.”
“Striking at the bed rock of public solidarity, of home happiness, of
everything decent and worth while.”
And America’s reading public—“Horrible, filthy.”
Howl, you who have stultified your artists and buried them under the
gingerbread morality of your own monotonous lives. Dreiser is the one
novelist being published in America today who doesn’t listen to you, who
describes you at your various bests, who wrings the pathos and joys out
of your little worlds; who paints in with the brush of a universal art
what you and I are doing in Alexandria and Chicago and New York and all
the milk-station stops between.
I am not a disciple of the Dreiserian Gospel. I would like to argue with
him the certain superiorities of monogamy for the artist. But he has
limned a hero who is not a sugar-coated moralizer. He has ignored
superbly the mob-begotten mandates of literary excellence. Whatever his
faults of composition or construction, and there are not so many as his
friends endeavor to make out there are, he has magnificently booted the
reading public, the morally subsidized critics and the very publishers
in the coarsest regions of their bodies—their souls.
And for these things I hail him as the greatest novelist in the country.
I acclaim him as the only real, uncontaminated genius of these States
and pray to God that my friend Sherwood Anderson will hurry up and get
published so that there will be two of them.
THE SCAVENGER.
Leather Lane
Three restless gas-jets
In Leather Lane;
A thousand faces,
Wandering in the night,
Too dull for pain.
God saw;
God quenched the light.
But God had not choked
The clamor of gaunt curses
That stalk in Leather Lane,
Uncloaked,
Blatant with strength of dour years.
God heard;
God stopped His ears.
Ho!
God had forgot His nose,
And in the stench that rose
From Leather Lane,
God died.
—_Mitchell Dawson._
Etchings
ALEXANDER S. KAUN
I. Gratitude
On the play-grounds. The pretty girl and I withdrew from the noisy
festival to the desolate fountain. It was too hot to think, so I merely
talked.
An old, ragged, grey-bearded, gibbous Jew, with a basket over his arm,
was slowly approaching us.
The meaningless eyes of the pretty girl clouded.
“Peddlers are not allowed on the grounds. He must have sneaked in.”
The Jew stood at our side. He said nothing, but his timid eyes appealed.
It was too hot to think, but for a moment I thought that a waft of
eternity breathed upon me from out the sad, timid eyes, and from out the
folds of the soiled old coat, and from out the clotty grey beard of the
descendant of Isaiah and the Maccabees.
“I shall buy some peaches, yes?”
The pretty girl twitched her little nose.
“But they are dusty.”
“Oh, no. See, they are covered.”
The sad, timid eyes smiled at me. I looked into the depth of those
eyes-of-ages. A half frivolous notion passed through my mind: I raised
the fruit, and pronounced the ancient Hebrew blessing:
“_Barukh atah, Adonay, elohenu melekh haolam, bore pri haetz._” (Blessed
art Thou, O Lord, our God, creator of the fruit of the tree.)
The sad eyes became faintly radiant and moist. A suggestion of a smile
appeared around the hairy mouth. The lips mumbled something inaudible. A
lean brown hand rubbed the glossy side of the coat, and tremblingly
extended to me. I grasped it, embarrassed.
“_Lange Johren magt Ihr hoben, lange Johren auf Euch!_” (Long years may
you have, long years unto you!)
I turned to the pretty girl. With her handkerchief she was diligently
rubbing off a drop of juice from her white blouse.
It was too hot to think, so I resumed our playful talk.
II. Nocturne
It was night, and soft and blue and starry. A uniformed nurse emerged
from the dark alley of the park, and heavily dropped on the bench where
I sat. For some time she leaned backward, her eyes closed, her breast
heaving, her mouth half open. Then she looked widely, straightened
herself, sighed deeply, and casually glanced at me and at my box of
paints.
“Are you an artist?”
“Yes. Obviously, you are a nurse?”
She nodded, and burst forth into a rapid talk, as if she had long been
waiting for an opportunity to unburden herself.
“Just got off duty. See those lighted windows across the road? That is
our hospital. Ah, I shan’t stand it much longer. Moans and groans,
suffering, tears, madness—God! You know, it starts at twilight. As soon
as the sun sets all the miseries get loose. Even the quiet patients
become delirious and raise bedlam. And so till midnight. It will drive
me insane. Give me a cigarette, will you? There is nobody around at this
time.”
Her “shop talk” bored me. Silently I gave her a cigarette and a light,
and watched her inhaling the smoke eagerly and intently. Her grey
striped dress with the tight white apron outlined a light, slender body,
a supple breast, and full strong arms. Her face was in the shadow, but
my professional eyes noticed its lovely oval contours. The little white
cap seemed toyishly small on the vast mass of disobedient hair. She
flung away the cigarette, and turned to me:
“Thanks, stranger. Why don’t you say something? Ah, what a night! See
the blue mist away there beneath the trees, and see that big oak—it’s
like a tower. Gee, I am getting romantic. Ah, what a night!”
I was amused with her half bookish, half street-talk. Somehow she did
not irritate me, as the rest of the people did, with her trivial remarks
on things which I believed to belong exclusively to the realm of colors
and music.
“Look!” She grasped my hand. “See the star falling? There, it dropped
into the lagoon. Ah, I smell hyacinths, do you? Hey, if you are not
going to say something, I’ll smash you!”
She snatched off my hat, threw it high up in the air, and, laughing
loudly, ran away, dropping her cap on the grass. I picked it up, and
pursued her. She was a swift runner, and we raced a long while across
the wide lawn before I caught her. In the dim bluish light she stood at
my side, a savage figure with stormy cascades of hair over her face and
shoulders, with flashing eyes, open mouth, dilating nostrils. In my
professional delight (I never lose my self-consciousness) I seized her
by the waist and lifted her up above me. She waved her good arms and
shrieked in joy, tossing her Medusa-head, arching her tense chest,
quivering in ecstacy.
“Hey, there. Cut that out!”
A husky policeman on a motorcycle approached us. He dismounted, looked
at us (I was still holding her in the air), and burst into a hoarse
guffaw.
“Well, I’ll be.... Beat it now. It’s improper.”
I handed her the mussed white cap. She twisted it with her fingers, and
her lips muttered somnolently:
“And at six thirty in the morning I must be on duty....”
III. Will to Power
At a crossing line on a Saturday night about 2 A. M. Tired men, women,
children, families, couples, waiting for a street car. Some lean towards
the wall, some sit on the sidewalk, on the garbage-box, on the curb.
Dull silence. The June night rolls on indifferently.
Suddenly the calm is disturbed by violent screams and oaths. A woman is
hurled out by invisible hands from the corner-hotel. She crosses the
street towards the waiting crowd, staggers, waves her big handbag, and
swears hideously.
No response. The ennui on the faces remains unstirred. The coarse solo
of the prostitute, who ejaculates fantastically ugly verbs, nouns,
adjectives, bespatters the velvet night.
A baggy figure in a battered derby rises from the sidewalk, and
hesitatingly accosts the woman.
“You stop this noise....” Then threateningly: “Want to take a ride?”
Her foul flux interrupted, the woman thrusts her red face into the
man’s, and hisses half coquettishly, half contemptuously:
“A ride? With you, sweetheart? Sure!”
He grabs her by the shoulder. His face grows pale.
“Come on, now. Move on, I tell you!”
The woman shrieks and struggles.
“Let go! Look what he is doing to me! Who are you? You are not a
detective.... Let go!”
The crowd does not stir. Some one yawns desperately. A little boy
whimpers, and clings to his dozing mother.
The man drags his shrieking victim. He pulls out a chain of keys, and
swings it triumphantly. The woman screams and hits her assailant on the
face with her heavy handbag. New figures appear from the adjoining
streets. A voice is heard:
“Maybe he is not a detective.... Hey, where’s your star?”
The man’s pale face twitches convulsively. The woman feels encouraged,
strikes him short, rapid blows, and shouts wildly:
“He is not a detective! Look what he is doing to me!”
A big fist plunges into the man’s face. He gasps, and falls. When he
rises, a shower of fists meets him. Many of the erstwhile indifferent
figures are now up, eager to lay a hand on the imposter. Like a toy, he
falls and rises, looking astonished, in a trance.
The long-awaited car suddenly plunges into the imbroglio. Men, women,
children, push and justle at the narrow entrance.
The man stands alone, hatless, wiping a bleeding face with his sleeve,
muttering faintly:
“I am a detective.... I am.”
The night rolls on indifferently.
The soul of music is something more than the soul of humanity
expressing itself in melody, and the life of music something more
than an audible dramatization of human life.—_Arthur Symons._
The Truth
BURT HARRIS
The truth, my friend? There is no truth. It is impossible for the human
mind to attain the truth. You can tell the truth with reservations, with
omissions. Perhaps you can speak the truth that is only part truth. Yes,
that is often done by virtuous people and by clever people. But to speak
the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, to place your soul
naked before either God or man,—that, my friend, is impossible. I have
listened to women lie. Sometimes it is only necessary to watch. And it
is the same with a man.
What? A man will tell the truth before God? You are quite wrong. A man
will lie to himself and he will lie to his God. I know. I listened to a
man lie to God. I will tell you the story.
The man’s name was Henry Spencer. You perhaps remember it. He was a
murderer. One of his victims was a tango teacher named Mrs. Allison
Rexroat. When the body of Mrs. Rexroat was found behind a clump of
bushes in a lonely spot the police somehow blundered upon a clew. In
four days they traced the murder of the woman to Henry Spencer. They
wove a net of evidence about him. Oh they are clever, sometimes, my
friend. On the fifth day Henry Spencer sat in the police captain’s
office and they sweated him. After five hours he confessed. Ordinarily
this means nothing. I have seen criminals confess to crimes of which
they were innocent. Sweating is an unintelligent process, but then
criminals are unintelligent persons and for a stupid mind the whole
affair becomes quite an ordeal. The police captain says, “You did.” The
criminal replies, “I didn’t.” It is very simple, my friend, but very
wearing; particularly when there are five policemen to say “You did,”
and none but yourself to say “I didn’t.” But it happened this time that
the policemen blundered upon a real confession. After five hours Henry
Spencer jumped to his feet and shouted, “Yes, I did. I killed her.” He
was led away. Two days later he repeated his confession and elaborated
on it. He sketched the murder, described the events leading up to it.
The policemen, highly elated, rushed out and verified all he had said.
They found the hammer he told them he had used where he said he had
thrown it. They found the effects of the murdered woman where he said he
had hidden them. Henry Spencer went to trial. A number of attorneys
defending him pleaded insanity. Spencer upset their efforts by rising in
the court room and informing the jury he was quite sane and that he had
committed a number of murders in his life. Given permission by the court
he informed them that his life had been an extremely illegal one. He
named five women he had killed. The police, highly elated, rushed out
and verified his statements. In concluding, the defendant again sought
to impress them with the fact that he was quite sane and willing to pay
the penalty for his crimes. In fact several times he cried out from his
seat, “Hurry up and hang me.”
You will argue, my friend, that there was an instance where in the very
depravity of his nature a man attained the naked truth. You are quite
wrong. Henry Spencer killed the women he said he killed, but he failed
of the truth. For three months he had sat in his cell figuring the thing
out. He came to the conclusion that by telling truthfully of his crimes
and pleading truthfully of his sanity he would create the impression
that he was indeed a maniac. You see, it is quite simple. Lies are
always simple. It is only the truth which is impossible to understand.
Henry Spencer’s logic proved accurate. He convinced the jury that he was
a maniac. But he had placed too much faith on the technical
interpretation of the law. The jury sentenced him to hang, anyway. So
did the judge.
The date was set and Henry Spencer waited in the jail of a little town
in Illinois. It is the duty of a large number of people in the world to
save souls from Hell. Do not think I speak sarcastically, my friend.
There is nothing wrong in this, except, of course, its utter futility.
For two months the Rev. Mr. Williams, his wife, and his son visited
Henry Spencer daily in his cell. They taught him religion. The doomed
man was an illiterate. He had been brought up in the streets. He spoke
English vulgarly and he understood nothing. His mind was unformed and
his ideas of any particular life to be were as vague as his ideas of the
life that was.
So he became religious. This is quite a story in itself, his acquiring
“faith.” They played hymns in his cell on an old melodeon. Each night
the Williams family knelt with him and prayed. He found in the
Scriptures and their promise something that stilled the cold terror of
death. His nerves became quiet. In fact he became buoyant. You will say
it is impossible for a man to acquire genuine faith under such
circumstances. You are quite wrong, my friend. I will prove it to you
soon.
On the day preceding his execution Henry Spencer exhibited the only bit
of nervousness during his watch for death. He objected to the big clock
that hung in the corridor outside his cell. He didn’t like the way it
ticked. You know why. So they removed the clock. How kind people are to
those whom they are about to destroy. They quite resemble the Gods in
the matter.
I am coming now to the point of the story, so be patient, my friend. It
was a sunny morning in early July. Inside a stockade they had erected a
scaffold. During the night Henry Spencer sang hymns. The sheriff sat on
the doorstep of his home adjoining the jail listening and looking at the
moon and greasing a hempen rope with cold cream which he borrowed from
his daughter. He was a religious man and the hymns made him sad.
At ten o’clock the death march started from Spencer’s cell. Now there
were thirty-eight steps leading to the top of the scaffold which rose
high above the stockade top. I know this because a young man named Smith
and I walked up the steps the midnight before and counted them. After
counting them I made a wager with the young man that Spencer would never
reach the top unsupported. So I was exceedingly interested when the
death march entered the stockade. A number of persons were privileged to
march in the line, and the first to appear was Spencer. He was dressed
as if he were hurrying to a tennis game—white trousers, white shoes, a
soft white collar, and a white shirt. On the pocket of his shirt he had
pinned a red carnation. He walked with a light, springy step. Behind him
trailed the Rev. Mr. Williams and the others.
Henry Spencer wore a good-natured smile on his face. When he reached the
bottom step of the scaffold I held my breath. I watched him skip nimbly
up the stairs, never missing a step, never tripping or hesitating. Under
more virtuous circumstances the thing would have passed for heroism. At
any rate I lost the wager.
Spencer stood on the scaffold, the noose hanging over his shoulder. The
smile had not left his face. Several hundred necks were craned towards
him. I would have felt chilled to see so many necks at such a time had I
been he. The sheriff and his assistant began dressing him in a white
robe that covered him from the neck down.
He commenced talking at once.
“My friends,” he said, extending his arm. They strapped it to his side
as he did so but he continued unflustered. “I am glad of the opportunity
this gives me of telling you that for the first time in my life I am
happy. I have found a mother and a God and a friend while I have been in
jail waiting for death. Although it is going to cost me my life I am
glad I am here to tell you this. I have repented for my sins. I have
made my peace with my God and my fellow men. And I am happy, my friends,
happy. I have found a mother who has shown me the way to peace and
salvation. I am grateful to Him for the gladness he has put in my heart.
Oh, my friends—”
He raised his head to the sky. Standing against the sun in his white
robe, his face transfigured with a wonderful smile, he looked like some
Crusader giving himself into the arms of the Virgin. Above him stretched
the green leafy branch of a tree that rustled faintly in the breeze. A
little bird sat on a twig and chirped. And still above stretched the
pure blue sky with its white fleece clouds. Henry Spencer looked at it
all—life, the little bird, the sky, the green leaves—and smiled; smiled
as I have never seen a man smile before.
They strapped his ankles and then the sheriff adjusted the rope around
his neck with great care. His political future was dependent on his
task. Spencer resumed talking.
He recited two long psalms with never a wrong word, and I who had
listened to him five months ago sat astounded. His voice, his accent,
everything about him had changed. A theologian could have rendered the
psalms no more accurately. Then he looked at the sky again. I felt that
before his eyes the clouds rolled away and God revealed himself, a
gigantic figure seated on a golden throne. I felt that he saw the
cherubs and the angels he had read of in the scriptures, perceived the
jewelled streets and the harpists and Christ waiting with outstretched
arms and forgiveness.
“Yes, my friends,” he went on, “I am not afraid, for I have given myself
to Christ, pure in spirit, strong in faith.” He quoted from the Bible.
“See, I smile at it all, for believe me, O Lord, I am happy.” The
sheriff had lifted the white hood to the man’s head and was beginning to
adjust it. The smile never left his face, the light that blazed from his
eyes never dimmed. “I am going to heaven,” he said as they settled the
hood on his head, “and I want to say only one more thing before I go. My
friends, as I stand here, I tell you I am innocent of the murder of Mrs.
Allison Rexroat.”
And they hanged him.
The truth? The human ego is too weak for truth. What do you say, my
friend?
We carry faithfully what we are given, on hard shoulders, over
rough mountains! And when perspiring, we are told: “Yea, life is
hard to bear!” But man himself only is hard to bear! The reason
is that he carrieth too many strange things on his shoulders.
Like the camel he kneeleth down and alloweth the heavy load to be
put on his back.—_Nietzsche._
Romain Rolland
ELLEN KEY
(_Authorized translation from the Swedish by Mamah Bouton
Borthwick. Copyright, 1914._)
I.
In Clamecy, a quiet town in Nivernais in Central France, Romain Rolland
was born in 1866. His family had dwelt for centuries in the little
place, both as country folk and townspeople. Quite contrary to the
inference one would draw from _Jean Christophe_, neither German nor
other foreign ancestry is discoverable in the family lineage; Rolland is
descended from pure French Catholic burgher stock. His parents devoted
themselves with loving zeal to his education; his mother endowing him
with a musical sense and love of music that made music, from earliest
childhood, his passion and joy; his father, a notary in Clamecy, gave up
his profession that he might accompany his young son to Paris.
It is not the external events of his life, but the spiritual atmosphere
and environment of his native town, that Rolland depicted in the sixth
part of _Jean Christophe_, under the sub-title, “Antoinette.” The
landscape of Nivernais is a mingling of rivers and canals, great forests
and Mont de Moran’s peaks. The region unites memorials of the Keltic and
Gallic-Roman times and cathedrals of the Gothic period, stimulating the
historical sense which, next to the sense of music, is most
characteristic of Romain Rolland.
He entered the _Ecole Normale superieure_ in Paris, when about fifteen
or sixteen years of age, and later went to the _Academia di Francia_ in
Rome. He considers the friendship formed there with Malvida von
Meysenburg[1] profoundly significant in his development. As she was a
faithful friend of Mazzini and Herzen, of Wagner and Nietzsche, in
middle age, so in her old age she was the friend of Romain Rolland. “Her
memory is sacred to me,” he recently wrote, and he had continued in
regular correspondence with her from 1890 until her death in 1903.
[1] See my article in _Verk och Människor_, in which I endeavored
to show my countrymen the value to them of _Memoiren einer
Idealistin_.
Rome exercised a profound influence upon his entire spiritual life. He
spent there the years 1889 and 1890, and has since made frequent visits
for longer or shorter periods. Italy is the country which, next to
France, he knows best and loves most. Germany, on the other hand, which
he has described in _Jean Christophe_ so vividly that one is convinced
he must have passed a great part of his life there, he knows only
through some minor journeys.
In 1895, he received his doctor’s degree at the University of Paris, and
presented two theses.[2] He was, first, instructor in the History of Art
at the school he had attended; later he became professor of History of
Music at the Sorbonne, a position he will probably resign; partly,
because an automobile accident injured his arm so that he can no longer
illustrate his lectures on the History of Music with the piano; partly,
because he has found the combination of authorship and lectures too
great a strain upon his delicate health.
[2] _Histoire de l’Opera en Europe, avant Lully et Scarlatti_,
(Les origines du theatre lyrique modern), and also _Les causes de
la decadence de la peinture italienne_.
Concerning the literary impressions that were decisive in his
development, he says that his education, like that of most young
Frenchmen, was founded upon the classics of the seventeenth century. He
found his way, himself, to the writers who gave him spiritual
sustenance: Shakespeare, Goethe, and the Encyclopedists, especially
Diderot.
In 1886, along with his school comrades, he became acquainted with
Tolstoy. In his book on Tolstoy, Rolland says, “He was the purest light
that illumined our youth, the cheering star in the twilight of the end
of the century—our only real friend in contemporary European art.” It
was Tolstoy’s intoxicating adoration of life that enraptured the young
Frenchmen as well as the young Northerners. It was the realism in
Tolstoy’s art that “opened the portals to life”; it was the mysticism in
Tolstoy’s nature that opened their ears to “the music of the soul for
which they longed” ... “Tolstoy was to our generation what Werther was
to the youth of the eighteenth century.”
“But,” wrote Rolland in a letter, “the most potent influence in my life
was and continues to be—music. It has been an ever-flowing spring, not
only for my emotional life, but also for the interpretation of life.
For, to him who can rightly listen, music is a language that can
interpret the subtlest emotions of the soul, and reveal manifold secrets
which literature has never been able to express. If in any degree I
understand the German soul, it is due to music.”
Romain Rolland is familiar, alike, with the old German masters of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and with those of most recent
times. _Jean Christophe_, the world’s greatest novel concerning a
musician and music, is therefore written by a thoroughly-trained
connoisseur and practitioner of music; a man who demonstrates that, for
his own and for his hero’s individual culture, music is the most
profound determining influence.
Even though Romain Rolland differs from Tolstoy in questions pertaining
to his conception of music, still it is in Tolstoy’s spirit that he
glorifies in this form of art its universal breadth, its power—beyond
national boundaries and personal limitations—to unite mankind in and
through the joy of beauty, which is one of the highest conditions of the
soul.