demonstration that the earth is a living thing. It is as truly a live
organism as any of the animals of which it is the mother. Life could not
have been evolved by or from it if there had not been life in it. We do
not require an inexplicable miracle to account for the evolution of man;
we can trace his pedigree back to an ancestry with fins and gills, and
of course it stretches far beyond that comparatively recent stage in his
development. From the beginning of the world conditions have steadily
grown more favorable to the habitation of the earth by the higher
animals. Since man is a part of the earth, what he himself has done to
bring about this auspicious change may be credited to the mind or life
resident in the earth. Then there is essential goodness in the
earth--which is not saying that there is no evil in it. The world is a
better place for a man to live in now than it was when his ancestors
occupied dismal caves. It is no illusion that, design or no design, the
cosmic urge has been toward goodness, by which I mean an increasingly
hospitable dwelling-place for men. There have been recessions, and there
will be others, but, apart from faith and hope, established facts compel
the man who understands them to declare his absolute and unalterable
certainty that the inexorable law of life's becoming greater than it is
cannot be nullified. So that, regardless of all poverty and misery, of
all that is unlovely, of all the blind and passionate class hatreds and
sex quibbles, the man who really thinks must think hopefully. There is
indeed the most ample justification of optimism.
The world is God, and the man who worships it the new pagan. He comes
off the same stock as the old pagans, who were called heathens--because
they were not Christians. They were, in fact, the classic earth-lovers,
and, hence, more truly the sons of God than the crusaders who, directed
by an anthropomorphic Deity, tortured and killed them. The new pagan,
who not only feels, smells, hears, and sees the earth, but comprehends
the established scientific facts about it, finds a keener and larger
delight and satisfaction in it than his forefathers could experience. He
loves it with his heart and his mind. Having this attitude toward it, he
wishes to serve it, prompted by the same motive which actuates him when
he serves his immediate father and mother.
Ruskin was sure that his beautiful England was desecrated when steel
rails were laid across its green fields and factory smoke contaminated
the golden air; he canonized the landscape, and when it changed, his
heart ached. He was an artist, not a prophet. The industrialism that he
hated disseminated his written appreciations of beauty. Machinery is the
extension of man's personality and power; the instrument with which he
is realizing the bounties and the Fatherhood of God. At present it is
too much an end in itself instead of a means toward nobler results, but
tomorrow will see the needed adjustment. Wherefore the new pagan is not
saddened but gladdened at the sight of factories and the development of
commerce. The awful carnage which commercialism entails is the price
which we have been fated to pay for experience. Through commerce we are
paving the way for the action of the world-mind--the collective thought
of men. Collective thinking precludes socialism as well as
individualism, and brings in humanism. The increasing complexity of
civilizations symbolizes the enlarged intricacy of human life.
Experience and consciousness are expanded by the maze of external detail
through which a child in a modern state passes to maturity. The
extension of a more highly organized civilization into every habitable
region of the earth, and commercial and intellectual communication among
all nations, will synthesize the thought of the world. Toward this goal
every vital movement is directed, whether consciously or unwittingly.
The germ of life was the original leaven, and it will leaven the whole
lump. That races and states should disappear does not matter; if human
life as a whole were to vanish the birth-labor that the world has begun
would be retarded but not abandoned. Man would return in a few billion
years. If not, a higher animal would; man himself is on the long way to
ever-new heights. He has climbed up out of the sea, and with the birth
of reason in his brain he began to ascend into loftier realms. The power
of reason is a late acquisition, but it has provided the wondrous
banquet at which the modern pagan feasts. It has enabled him literally
to soar and revel in high, thin air.
All the fine arts are subsidiary to and dependent upon material
progress, and the primal source of well-being is the soil. Man is a land
animal, and he must have access to the land with the same freedom that a
babe enjoys at its mother's breast; otherwise he will be stunted and
dwarfed. The earth is the Old Mother, yielding an abundance of food for
all her children. More reason and more consciousness on their part will
induce them to share it with one another, not like unreasoning pigs but
like reasoning men. The "new freedom" means eventually the accessibility
of the earth to every man. In the meantime the biggest business at hand
is to build soils as well as schools; to keep the land full of sap; to
extend mechanism into the arts of agriculture; to unify the thought and
purpose of city and country. All this will follow the world-mindedness
that is being developed by industrialism and internationalism.
All constructive thought and action must deal not less with the city but
more and more with the country--the land. Typical cities are sapping the
wealth of life that grows up round them. The obsessed man in the market
place needs the poise and power of the shepherd on the hill. The only
true and durable magnificence of a state lies in the equitable use of
its natural resources. No man who has thought profoundly wants to own
land, but the majority of men do want to use it. That ought to be every
man's privilege, for every man is in some fashion a lover of the verdant
earth. But even the millions of us who are landless, because a few men
legally own the earth, have occasional esthetic accesses to it, and if
we passionately loved its beauty we should hasten the day of its release
by an uneconomic monopoly. An intelligent love of the earth as a living
thing is at the bottom of the dynamic impulse of man to be forever
becoming.
And as these lovely days of wanton greenness steal like fairies into the
secret recesses of his child-heart, man has a sense of eternal kinship
with
... that small untoward class which knows the divine call of the
spirit through the brain, and the secret whisper of the soul in
the heart, and for ever perceives the veils of mystery and the
rainbows of hope upon our human horizons; which hears and sees,
and yet turns wisely, meanwhile, to the life of the green earth,
of which we are part, to the common kindred of living things,
with which we are at one--is content, in a word, to live, because
of the dream that makes living so mysteriously sweet and
poignant; and to dream, because of the commanding immediacy of
life.
Gloria Mundi
EUNICE TIETJENS
In what dim, half imagined place
Does the Titanic lie to-day,
Too deep for tide, too deep for spray,
In night and saltiness and space?
Oh, quiet must the sea-floor be!
And very still must be the gloom
Where in each well-appointed room
The splendor rots unto the sea.
Through crannies in the shattered decks
The sea-weed thrusts pale finger-tips,
And in the bottom's jagged rips
With ghostly hands it waves and becks.
The mirrors in the great saloons
Sleep darkly in their gilt and brass
Save when the silent fishes pass
With eyes like phosphorescent moons.
On painted walls are slimy things,
And strange sea creatures, lithe and cool,
Spawn in the marble swimming pool
And shall, a thousand springs.
For as it is, so it shall be,
Untouched of time till Doom appears,
Too deep for days, too deep for years
In the salt quiet of the sea.
The Will to Live
GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER
Like the sense for the true, the good, the holy, the esthetic sense is
elementary. Man comes to himself as man in all alike. Without the
effectuation of his peculiar artistic impulse, man, the born artist,
could not find the real consecration and dignity of the human. Indeed,
the worth of all human culture depends upon the sense for the beautiful.
As religion is not restricted to some fragment of our experience but
informs the whole, so culture requires that life shall be beautiful down
to the commonplace and homely things of the daily round. The new
program, to which this modern insight points, means a rebirth of our
entire moral and social life.
Why is it, then, that those who vocationally and constantly worship in
the sanctuary of art--the priests in this sanctuary--often so easily and
singularly fail in the consecration which the worship of beauty is
supposed to supply to the human personality? The lives of those whose
calling it is to exhibit and exemplify the beautiful, why are they often
so very ugly, so bereft of lovable emotions? The shortcomings of the
artist, why do we count among these the pettiest and the basest known to
man? To be specific, why do we speak almost proverbially of an artistic
vanity, an artistic sensitiveness, an artistic envy or jealousy? If we
answered, "Because the shadows of the 'human all too human' seem so dark
in the golden light of the artistic calling," that would be true, but it
would not be the whole truth. Does not the professional occupation of
oneself with art involve a danger to character? To live constantly in
the world of the emotions, to fable and fantasy and dream, in all this
there is so easily something weak, not to say "effeminate" and sickly,
and hence enervating. Of great spirits this is true often enough--how
much more of the lesser who sophistically find warrant in the weakness
of the great for the greatness of their weakness! For instance, they
have heard of "inspiration"--something not under the control of the
artist, something that must "come upon him," but only when the divine
hour strikes, as it struck at the pentecostal "outpouring" of the
"spirit" upon the early Christians. Hence no care for a thousand
things--in both cases--for which other men must care! Hence a standard
of life different from that by which other men live! To be outwardly
different from others, to set oneself above others, that is to be
artistic. Because some great artists are different from other people in
moods and manners and morals, it is naïvely concluded that to emulate
the latter is to be the former, and right merrily does the emulation go
on. It must be a grief to a real artist, this culture of the eccentric
head and the more eccentric heart. Therefore we need a man to free us
from these eccentricities, a man to lift us above these caricatures
because he has himself put them beneath his feet. This man is Friedrich
Nietzsche.
The sickness and the soundness of life, both these were in Nietzsche. In
his demand for an artistic culture he put his finger upon the wound of
present humanity. This demand was accepted, the meaning of the demand
was lost sight of. This was the fatality--as if Nietzsche required a new
artistic culture only, and not at the same time a new life culture!
Beauty the form of life indeed, but strength, will, deed, the
content--that was the brave burden of the prophet's message.
Nietzsche was born into a time that marked the climax of a more than
millennial cultus of Death. The old songs of death as bridge of sunset
into the eternal day of Bliss, songs of earthly lamentation and heavenly
yearning and anticipation, these no longer came from the heart, to be
sure; though still sung, the voices of "the faithful" grew ever thinner
and thinner; and the songs were a monument of past piety rather than a
witness to a present. Like vice, this earth which was once "a monster of
so frightful mien" was first endured, then pitied, then embraced--and
even wedded by man; its sufferings were healed and its delights enjoyed.
The pain, the pleasure of earth, what does it mean? man's heart again
asked as it asked in happy Greece long ago. But as time went by, the
human mind was bruised and broken over this question, until it concluded
that all we call life is a great illusion. And back and behind this
life, with its tumult and fitful fever, there is the "vasty deep" of the
infinite nothing. Life is a cheat. And now there is Weltschmerz,
Lebenschmerz--simply a naturalistic form of the old ecclesiastical
longing for death. It said the same "No!" to life that the old church
song said--it, too, valued the day of death higher than the day of
birth; it, too, urged that, since life is intrinsically evil, the cure
of the evil is to live as little as possible.
Into such a world Friedrich Nietzsche was born, breathed its atmosphere,
was himself once drunk upon its drugged drinks. The preacher of this
modern yearning for Nirvana,--i.e., not metaphysical non-existence but
psychological desirelessness,--was Schopenhauer as well as his disciple
von Hartmann. This is the worst possible world, croaked Schopenhauer;
No, moaned von Hartmann, it is not the worst possible world, it is the
best possible world, but it is worse than none! And once Nietzsche
called Schopenhauer his teacher--went forth as an enthusiastic apostle
of the message of passive resignation to the inevitable sorry scheme of
things, nay, of the message that the world is the work of an anguished
god seeking redemption from the infinite misery of existence by the
infinite negation of life.
And surely the anguish of Nietzsche fitted him, as no other, to be
partner in distress of this anguished god. Surely he, if anyone, could
say, To this end was I born and for this purpose came I into the world,
to bear witness--to the body of this death. From his mother's womb was
he set apart to suffer. Endowed with a transcendent and super-abundant
fulness of spirit, every fresh and forceful impulse of his personality
he felt as an indictment of the inexorable pitiless limitations within
which his best innermost life was imprisoned. He was a voice crying in
the wilderness, not only to men, but to himself. Each new flash of light
which illumined his inner eye let him see the graves upon which he was
treading, and revealed those who claimed to be alive in the mask of the
death to which they had succumbed. In the abounding wealth of youth he
felt a mortal sickness getting its grip upon him. As life dragged on, he
felt more and more the hell tortures of pain from which he had to wring
his work every hour of his existence.
Who would have the effrontery to cast a stone at this man had he flung
down his arms into one of those graves, and cried with an old
philosopher: This may all be very well for the gods, but not for me! But
he did not lay down his arms! Freed from all encumbrances of conscience
and debilitating sense of sin which had paralyzed the Christian, and
from the Schopenhauer Welt- und Lebenanschauung, he welcomed all that
life had to offer and went unhesitatingly toward the universal goal of
annihilation with a blithe and unregretting spirit. Entertaining no
illusions about indeterminism or free-will or immortality, he rejoiced
in his strength, seized with avidity the passing moment, and fell
fighting to the last. He spoke his courageous "Yes!" to life, while
Schopenhauer, with his money and his mistress, and all the world beside,
were crying to him to say "No!" For this we must thank him. In this we
find an antidote to present-day tendencies to sink the individual in the
multitude, to subordinate men to institutions, and to apotheosize
mediocrity. Nietzsche met pain with a power which transformed even death
into life, and turned the day of his death even into a festival of the
soul. He taught himself and he taught others to believe in that power,
which alone is great,--to believe in the Power of the Will! Nietzsche,
like Jesus, proclaimed the inestimable worth of the individual man, saw
for him vast and glorious possibilities, sought the regeneration of
society through the regeneration of the individual. Both committed the
fortunes of the cause to which they devoted their lives to individuals
and not to masses of men. Both believed that the best was yet to be.
Both believed in the inwardness, the self-dependence, and the autonomy
of personality. Neither ever side-stepped or flinched.
Today we are suffering from impuissant personality, from cowardice, from
weakness of the will. Taming the great wild strong instincts, making
them small and weak, choking them, so that man can will nothing or do
nothing great and original and special--this is what we call
civilization. A comfortable existence, this is the final end of life,
according to this civilization. No conflict, no danger, for these menace
comfort! Not to know the comfort of a calm, safe existence from which
you can look down upon the struggles in a neck-breaking life far
below--that is barbarism indeed! And is not this comfort a virtue,
buttressed by moral principles at that? So buttressed, one's slumbers
are not disturbed. And may not one add to this virtue of comfort that
other cardinal virtue of hatred of all that keeps matters stirred up,
all that causes unrest, that causes sleepless nights and stormy days?
What the man of civilization hates he calls "bad," what he loves he
calls "good." Accordingly, as Nietzsche saw and said, the weak are the
"good" people, the brave and the strong are the "bad." Accordingly,
also, it is comfortable to be "moral." All one needs is to attune one's
life to the "common run," to quarantine against every profound
disturbance, to steal by every dangerous abyss of life. And if powers
stir in man which do not amiably submit to taming, why, "morality" may
be used as a whip to lash these insubordinate stirrings into subjection.
And if the living heart crouches into submission under the lash, why,
such crouching is called "virtue," and the daring to resist and escape
the lash, this of course is "vice." In a word, the most will-less is the
most virtuous. Thus--such was Nietzsche's uncanny insight--"moral laws"
are devices for disciplining the will into weakness! "Morality" is a
poison with which man is inoculated, so that his strength may be
palsied. "Morality" is itself death to a man, a will to weakness, a
destruction of the will, while life is a will to power, a will to
self-affirmation.
Every virtue has its double, easily confounded with it, in reality the
exact opposite of it. Take meekness, peaceableness. It is a virtue which
the cowardly, the over-cautious, arrogate to themselves--those who duck
and bow and bend so as to give no offense, and to conjure up no violent
conflict. Yet to be peaceable and meek is in truth supreme strength,
having one's own stormy heart under control, and being absolutely sure
of power over the militant spirits of men. Humility is a sign at once of
smallness and of greatness. Patience is at once a lazy lassitude and an
active steadfast strength. Chastity may be reduced vitality, fear of
disease, fear of being found out, lack of opportunity, slavery to
respectability, poverty, or it may be temperance and self-control in
satisfying sex-needs. And so on. Every virtue may arise because a man is
too weak for the opposite. And this virtue which walks the path of
virtue because it lacks the courage and the strength not to do so, this
complacent, harmless, untempted virtue, men make the universal criterion
of all virtue, the codex of their morality. Today still the pharisee,
not the publican, the son who stupidly ate his fill in his father's
house, not the "prodigal" who hungered in the far country, heads the
scroll of the virtuous. To fear and flee vice, or to "pass a law," this
is the current solution of morality, dinged into us from youth up, not
to confront vice, battle with it, conquer and coerce it!
So misunderstood Nietzsche thought. He thought that the morality of
"virtuous people" was, in fact, a foe of life, that the virtue of the
weak was a grave for the virtue of the strong, and that, consequently
the consciences of men must be aroused so that they could see the whole
abomination of this, their virtue, of which they were so proud. To
bridle and tame men is not to ennoble them; to make men too weak and
cowardly for vice is not to make them strong and brave for the good.
This anxious and painful slipping and winding and twisting between
virtue and vice, this cannot be the fate of the future, the eternal
destiny of man; this is to make man the eternal slave of man; to damn
him in his innermost and idiomatic life to the lot of the eternal slave.
Virtue and vice are values which men mint, stamps which men imprint upon
their ever-changing conduct, not eternal values, born of life itself,
sanctioned by the law of life itself. As time goes on tables of old
values become sins. To obey them, to have the law outside and not inside
us, is "to fall from grace" indeed. A law of life cannot be on paper,
for paper is not living. Life must be the law of life. Life must
interpret and reveal life. And life must be the criterion of life. What
makes us alive, and strong, and mighty of will, is on that account good;
what brings death and weakness, foulness and feebleness of will is bad.
The courage which in the most desperate situation of life, in the most
labyrinthan aberration of thought, dares to wring a new strength to
live, is good; all pusillanimity, all over-mastery by pain, all collapse
under the burden of life, all disappointing desert of the censure, "O ye
of little faith, why are ye fearful?"--all this is bad. It will be a new
day for man when he feels it wrong and immoral to lament his lot, to
whine, but right and moral to earn strength from pain, a will to labor
from temptation to die. Not the fear of the moral man to sin, but the
fear to be weak, so that one cannot do one's work in the world--that is
to be the fear in the future. The powerful will, nay, the will become
power itself, the fixed heart, the keyed and concentrated personality;
this means freedom from every slave yoke. And it means that life is no
longer at the mercy of capricious and contingent gain and loss, but a
King's Crown conquered in conflict with itself, with man, and with God.
Also sprach Nietzsche-Zarathustra!
Keats and Fanny Brawne
BY CHARLOTTE WILSON
He tried to pour the torrents of his love
Into a tiny vase; a trinket--smooth,
Pretty enough--but fit to hold a rose
Upon some shrewd collector's cabinet.
Toward that small moon the wild tides of his love
Reared up, and fell back, moaning; and he died
Asking his heart why love was agony.
And she? She loved the best she could, I think,
And wondered sometimes--but not overmuch--
At poor John's queer, unseemly violence.
A New Woman from Denmark
Marguerite Swawite
Karen Borneman, by Hjalmar Bergström. [Mitchell Kennerley, New
York.]
From the north, whence Ibsen's Nora challenged the world as far back as
1879, comes a fresh message of rebellion in the more radical figure of
Karen Borneman. In judging this play of Bergström's, which has but now
appeared in Edwin Björkman's translation, we must remember that it was
written in 1907--before we had grown so sophisticated concerning the
rebel woman in her infinite manifestations. And yet, because this
vanguard of a new morality is still a slender company, the addition of a
new member cannot fail to arouse a ripple of excitement in the watchful
rank and file. For that reason, as well as for some novel
characteristics of her own, Karen Borneman merits a word for herself.
Bergström chose the most obvious method of contrast in projecting his
heroine upon a background of stringent restraint. Her father is Kristen
Borneman, a professor of theology whose chief interest in life is the
propagation of the principles contained in his magnum opus, Marriage and
Christian Morality. Her mother is an apparently submissive woman who
sometimes questions the edicts of her husband. Her brother, Peter, is an
adolescent youth, already awake to the conflict between the natural man
and the unnatural economic system, and seemingly bound for destruction.
Thora, her young sister, is already seeking out the clandestine outlet
for an excessive and dangerous sentimentality. Another sister, Gertrude,
has suffered a mental collapse and is confined in an insane asylum.
These children, the author seems to say, are the results of a chafing
restrictive discipline, and natural instincts gone wrong--a conclusion
weakened, not strengthened by over-illustration. When four of a family
of eight show signs of a similar abnormal development one suspects not
only the disciplinary system but the purity of their inheritance.
Be that as it may, the chief protagonist, Karen, is quite a normal
person--except in the matter of courage, of which she possesses an
inordinate amount. But then all new women are courageous to a fault. She
is a woman of twenty-eight, mature, cultivated, and a successful
professional writer. Her most salient claim to consideration in the
early scenes of the play is her quiet assurance in the right of her
position. She voluntarily opens up her past to the professedly liberal
physician who seeks her hand.
"Some years ago I--lived with a man.... You are a widower yourself. You
may regard me as a widow or--a divorced wife."
And when he spurns her action as squalor, she indignantly replies,
"Doctor, how dare you. A phase of my life that at least to me is sacred,
and you cast reflections on it, that--"