as a woman you are the living incarnation of the past. You represent
conservatism and the anti-military virtues; you clog the wheels of
progress; you sap men’s energies and misdirect them from the triumphs of
achievement to the service of material things—or immaterial things. Your
effeminate beauty poisons art and furnishes countless photographic
realists with the means of selling paintings. The love of you has
vitiated poetry and music. Masquerading in the garments of caprice, you
have deceived man into accepting the traditional. As Futurists we detest
you. This is the first charge! (_A pause._)
THE WOMAN. You accuse me of being a woman. It is a grave charge. But
first, in order that I may have a chance to disprove it, I suggest that
you tell me what a woman is.
GREEN EARS. A woman is that whose place is in the home.
PURPLE HAIR. A woman is that which is ruled by instinct.
BLUE FACE. A woman is that which is beautiful.
YELLOW HAT. A woman is that which men call a mystery.
WHITE HEART (_rapturously_). A woman is that which men love.
RED SWORD (_vehemently_). A woman is that which men hate.
THE WOMAN. These are your definitions?
BLUE FACE. They are.
THE WOMAN. Then in order to prove that I am a woman you must prove that
they describe me. And you must prove that there is nothing else in me.
RED SWORD. We must prove nothing. We act.
THE WOMAN. Then why do you talk?
RED SWORD (_heatedly_). I deny that you are beautiful. And if you are
beautiful, I deny beauty.
YELLOW HAT. Is it not our caprice to be judicial? Come, Red Sword, do
not descend to flattery!
PURPLE HAIR. All our definitions have been proved a million times. They
are unprovable.
THE WOMAN. I admit them. What then? I will leave the home, I will learn
logic, I will cut off my nose, I will tell you my mystery, and I will
let your love and your hate kill each other. And I shall still be here.
WHITE HEART. Then you will not be a woman, you will be a feminist!
THE WOMAN. But I shall be I instead of what you think I am.
RED SWORD. You can not be you unless you are what we think you are.
BLUE FACE. Brothers, can we kill the woman and spare the feminist?
WHITE HEART. If you kill the woman you will make the feminist.
YELLOW HAT. No; the feminist is more female than the woman. The feminist
would inflict domesticity on the world. She wants all men for her
husband. She wants to tie pink ribbons on siege guns and abolish the
mountains to make room for the nursery. If we let the feminist live, man
can no longer find a place in which to be alone with his adventure. If
we let the feminist live we shall make the woman a giant. If we kill the
woman we shall kill them both at the same time.
GREEN EARS. Show us the feminist without the woman.
THE WOMAN. I will do so if you will cease to be men.
BLUE FACE. We have ceased to be men. We are supermen.
THE WOMAN. Then you see the subwoman.
RED SWORD (_fiercely_). We must kill what we see.
THE WOMAN. But have I not shown you that I am something besides a woman?
RED SWORD. You might show us that you are everything, and still I would
hate you. Hate is not hate unless it exists for its own sake.
THE WOMAN. At last you have spoken the truth. I am everything. And you
hate me because you hate me.
BLUE FACE. Gentle pickles in a vacillating pink mound. Inkwell is not
ink. Ink is not inkwell. Flying postman leathers purple letters.
THE WOMAN. But I have reserved my best defence to the last. I am a
descendant of Gertrude Stein!
RED SWORD. Descendant! What heresy! Gertrude Stein had no descendants.
She has ascendants!
YELLOW HAT. Deliver the rest of the charge.
RED SWORD. Be it known unto you that we are the sole surviving members
of the human race. By a process of selection we have killed all except
the best stock. You alone remain of the female sex. We charge you not
only in your capacity as woman, but in your capacity as mother. In order
to prove your right to live, you must justify mankind. We accuse you of
being the perpetuator of human beings! Defend yourself!
THE WOMAN. You are the sole surviving males?
YELLOW HAT. We are.
THE WOMAN. Then you may let me live. I shall not perpetuate the race.
WHITE HEART. Do not despair; _I_ will marry you!
GREEN EARS. Where are your manners? Has not Shaw taught us that women do
the wooing?
BLUE FACE. What have we to do with Shaw? Let us be serious about
frivolous matters.
RED SWORD. She is not to be trusted. It is necessary for her to defend
the race. Speak, woman!
THE WOMAN. Now indeed you have given me a heavy burden. What could be
brought forward as a defence for humanity? Why should anything exist?
YELLOW HAT. Why, indeed? That is for you to show. For aeons life has
perpetuated itself through a mere animal instinct. Yet through all that
time consciousness has been growing; will has at last come into the
ascendancy. Now for the first time man’s ego is really on the throne.
For the first time man, with power to extinguish himself, can demand an
adequate reason for his existence. And man is ready to hear the secret
of the sphinx. We have come to you, madam, as the last and most perfect
woman, as the final manifestation of the eternal mystery, to force you
on pain of death to divulge yourself.
THE WOMAN. But I thought mankind existed for the purpose of creating the
superman.
PURPLE HAIR. He did; but now he has created the superman. We are the
embodiment of the purpose. What next?
BLUE FACE. As futurists we refuse to accept the old answer. If our
existence merely pushes the problem forward a few generations, it is
futile. If, on the other hand, we are the crowning goal of man’s
endeavor, there is no need to create further.
THE WOMAN. You are superchildren using superlogic. How can a reason come
out of one who is ruled by instinct? How can a conservative satisfy a
futurist? But I will answer you, and my answer is this: I am a female so
that you may be males. I am a holder of traditions so that you may smash
them. And I perpetuate the race so that you may ask the reason.
RED SWORD. Come, come, this will not do. We are above the fogs of
mysticism. We are talking of final things, and we must have a definite
answer.
THE WOMAN. Then make a definite accusation.
PURPLE HAIR. We hold the human race guilty until it is proved innocent.
We assume the position of an all-wise intelligence, as aloof from the
earth as the farthest star. And we see a race of ant-things crawling on
two legs and going through all sorts of meaningless antics. Why is one
ant exalted? Because he has led an army which has killed a million other
ants. Because he has discovered how to make ants live a few seconds
longer. Because he has written a rhyme with ant-words or put a few
senseless daubs on ant-canvas. And when the ant asked himself what his
purpose was, he answered first, “To exist.” And his second answer was
like the first: “To create something more like myself than I am.” There
is no validity in these which a superior intelligence can recognize.
What is the third answer?
RED SWORD. Woman, defend yourself!
WHITE HEART. Stop! I love the woman and I demand her (_He jumps from his
seat and embraces her_).
THE WOMAN. Here, O supermen, is your answer! Man exists for that which
cannot be spoken, for that which cannot be thought. He exists for his
mystery, for that which he loves, for that which he hates. Man exists
for me!
GREEN EARS. And if he denies you?
THE WOMAN. You cannot have your future without your past.
RED SWORD. You see, I was right; we shouldn’t have listened to her. She
is her own argument; and she has to bring in the past. Away with her!
YELLOW HAT. Away with her; we exist for ourselves!
BLUE FACE. Remarkable apples, apple black, apple pink, blossom apples in
squirming shrieks. Skyrockets deserve apples. Bang!
RED SWORD. Stop using that antique language! I’m sick of it. It’s too
obvious.
PURPLE HAIR. Yes, we have proved that we can be more obscure in good
English.
RED SWORD. And now, brothers, the sentence! The execution!
ALL. The sentence, the sentence!
RED SWORD. Stand aside, White Heart, or I will kill you both at the same
time!
WHITE HEART. I shall die with her!
RED SWORD. You are not yet superman. We shall execute the last man and
the last woman together. (_To the woman_) Have you any last words? It is
traditional to have last words.
THE WOMAN. I will match my silence against your silence, my eternity
against your eternity!
RED SWORD. Come with me! (_He leads them out, right. There is an
oppressive silence. In a moment he returns, wiping his sword on his
gown. He takes his seat without a word. The light begins to fail, and
the room grows rapidly darker until the last few sentences are spoken in
an enveloping blackness._)
GREEN EARS. Man has produced the superman, and the superman has put an
end to mankind.
BLUE FACE. Brothers, we stand on an icy mountain peak in the twilight of
time.
YELLOW HAT. We experience a breathless emotion which no one has had
before, which there will be no more to have.
PURPLE HAIR. No longer do we feel the drag of the past; no longer do we
feel the lure of the future.
RED SWORD. We are the future. We are the goal of consciousness.
BLUE FACE. For this moment has mankind dragged out a million weary
years.
GREEN EARS. For this moment have been the countless joys of love, the
countless pangs of death.
YELLOW HAT. The thing-in-itself for which philosophers have sought—that
is here.
PURPLE HAIR. We have broken the spell of cause and consequence.
RED SWORD. Will has won its first and its last victory over fate.
GREEN EARS. The stupid serpent of wisdom swallowing its own tail has
grown great and finished the task.
BLUE FACE. Grubbing logic has looked into the mirror and discovered
itself to be gigantic caprice.
YELLOW HAT. Infinity has turned inside-out and become nothingness.
PURPLE HAIR. The great contradiction has annihilated itself.
RED SWORD. Let us keep silence before the solution of the ancient
riddle.
(_A long, dark silence. Slow curtain._)
There is something transitory in the moods evoked by rhyme. For
rhyme shimmers on the surface of language like sunlight on the
surface of a shallow stream; it conducts the mind as in a circle;
its sphere is a world of harmonious delights. Rhyme is to the
mind what sentimentality is to art.—_Francis Grierson._
The Liberties of the People
WILLIAM L. CHENERY
LORD VALIANT. The exercise of such tyranny over the minds of men has
been productive, in a great degree, of the miseries that have fallen
upon mankind. We have been happy in England since every man has been at
liberty to speak his mind.
MEDROSO. And we are very quiet at Lisbon, where nobody is permitted to
say anything.
LORD VALIANT. You are quiet but you are not happy. Your tranquility is
that of galley slaves who tug the oar, and keep time in silence. * * *
MEDROSO. But what if I find myself quite at ease in galleys?
LORD VALIANT. Nay, in that case, you deserve to continue there.
_—Voltaire._
Sunday afternoon, January 17, Chicago was given a vivid picture of the
liberties allowed the people. On that occasion the freedom of assemblage
and the right of free speech were ruthlessly and brutally denied a great
host of people because forsooth they were poor and unemployed.
Men and women whose crime was that they could not find work had
assembled at Hull House. After the meeting, it was suggested that a
parade would impress their needs upon the city. Immediately they were
attacked by the police, some of whom had been disguised in the tatters
of unemployed men and scattered into the crowd. Young girls were beaten,
women were knocked down, men were assaulted, and all in the name of law.
The assistant chief of police, Herman F. Schuettler, directed the
official lawlessness. This exponent of anarchy detailed fifty mounted
police to charge the assemblage of hungry men and women. And here is the
explanation given by Schuettler:
“We expected something like this to happen. We had refused these people
a permit and they took it upon themselves to violate the law. I have no
fault to find with the conduct of the policemen. Of course they may have
been a bit rough but I am sure they acted within their rights. They were
obeying orders.”
And then, poltroon fashion, the anarchistic police attempted to conceal
their stupid crimes and cruelties by stressing the fact that Mrs. Lucy
Parsons, one of the philosophical anarchists of Chicago, was a speaker
at the Hull House meeting! Could bureaucracy go further?
The episode is important because it is typical of what is going on all
over the United States. It is a by-product of our undigested industrial
order and also a promise of what the future has in store for us; it is
the prophecy of a future feudalism which is rising like a flood and
which will sweep us into impotency if we are not wise enough and strong
enough to plan a sound reconstruction. From San Diego to Portland, from
Los Angeles to New York, the fight is raging. In places the people have
definitely lost all the rights and privileges of a supposed democracy.
In Lead, S. D., in the Colorado coal fields, in parts of Montana, in
parts of the Michigan copper country, in West Virginia, in Pennsylvania,
and in Massachusetts, whole sections of the population have been
degraded by forces too strong for them to a condition of servility. A
servile people is not a threat of the future; it is a comment upon the
present. And among the servile peoples, the liberties have perished. The
question which now remains is only: “Is the remnant strong enough or
disciplined sufficiently to regain the fundamentals of freedom which
slipped away while we slept?”
It is not only the poor unemployed who have been battered about and made
to cringe. Preachers and professors have also felt the stultifying
constraint exercised by tired business men in moods of irritation.
Howard Crosby Warren gave an appallingly lengthy list of professors who
have been discharged from universities all over the land within the last
two or three years because they exercised the most commonplace latitude
in the choice of their sentiments and their pronouncements. A Florida
professor had to forego his position because he doubted the finality of
the wisdom of the ante-bellum teachers in the South. A professor at
Marietta College, Ohio, was forced to resign because his political
opinions were displeasing to his masters. A professor at Wesleyan was
driven out on account of his opinion concerning the observance of the
Sabbath. But why go on? The number is tediously inclusive.
So great has this evil become among teachers that an association of
University professors was organized in New York in early January. From
it college presidents and deans were expressly excluded. The members of
the association, actuated no doubt by motives of middle-class
respectability, announced that they were not to be considered a trade
union; but, for all their dislike of the dignity of labor, they have
found it necessary to fight as a body for the retention of the liberties
essential to self-respect.
The attack on the Chicago unemployed, who made nothing like so much of a
parade as the visitors to a ball park any summer afternoon, nor so much
of a street jam as the fashionable attendants at a Mary Garden opera,
illustrated the direction in which the attack is being made. The real
government of men is industrial, and not political, as every one knows.
Consequently the genuine tyrannies, or abuses of government, can be
discovered naturally among the incidents of industry.
Dr. Annie Marion MacLean of Adelphi College, Brooklyn, read a living
document upon this phase of the question at a conference held by the
economic and sociological associations at Princeton during Christmas
week. In the course of her investigation, says Paul U. Kellogg in his
report of the meetings in _The Survey_, Dr. MacLean had been told by
girls how their foremen had warned them against telling what their pay
was, of loft building doors locked, of foul air, and what not. The head
of an employer’s utopia had told her he would keep out unionism by
making examples of the talk leaders. How? By firing them. She told of
strikers suppressed by the police for what they said, while
strikebreakers inside the factory, hurling insults at them from the
windows, went unmolested. “Working women have the right to state the
beliefs they hold without forfeit of their livelihood,” said she. “They
need reassurance that liberty is more than a catch word. The box-maker,
the bobbin girl, and the doffer have the right not only to life but to
liberty and free speech in a land which is supposed to be the home of
freedom.”
Professors are denied the right of free speech because colleges and
universities are organized on business principles. Scholars and teachers
are deprived of the franchise in all vital matters affecting university
life. They are clerks. Tired business men are the masters of education,
and tired business men have but one great principle: loyalty to the
organization. Criticism seems sacrilege. Incidentally, that accounts for
the fact that the great inventions in business have been made by
outsiders; but that is not my story.
The same tired business men operating through the police take away the
essential liberties from trade unionists, from the unemployed, from
socialists, and from the I. W. W.’s when the occasion arises. The police
acquire the habit of tyranny and then set to work to practice it on
their own account. What reason under heaven could have persuaded Herman
F. Schuettler to order an attack on hungry men and women, inoffensive,
armed only with banners bearing fragments of the Lord’s Prayer? Surely a
Christian litany is not an incitement to riot. “Give us this day our
daily bread”—if this be treason, we may well pray for annihilation at
the touch of some vagrant comet.
But the police are pawns in the great game of the modern world, the game
of hide and seek for sovereignty. Blind and stupid, they do the
occasional desires of their masters and then, filled by a lust for
repression, go on to satiate their unwholesome appetites.
Hitherto I have assumed that the somewhat constitutional guaranties of
free speech and free assemblage—the two go hand in hand—were actual
rights. Theodore Schroeder, leader among the libertarians, has been
prominent long among the small group which has ceaselessly stressed our
fading freedom. Schroeder has an article in _The Forum_ in which he
makes a witty attack upon Comstockery and upon the censorship which has
grown up in the Post Office Department—a censorship prudish and powerful
enough to exclude the Chicago Vice Report from the mails. This
censorship of the imagined obscene is puerile and petty in sufficiency
for any appetite, but it is useless to discuss it here. The reaction is
always more potent than the action where obscenity is charged, as
witness our own September Morn. Schroeder, albeit, announces his freedom
of speech to be “a natural and a constitutional right.”
Society, so far as I know, recognizes no natural rights and modern
philosophy seems to sanction none. As for constitutional rights, every
constitution, unless it be dead, is subject to amendment. The real
foundation for the liberties of speech and assemblage is discovered in
the social need for them. Without freedom the common weal withers and
perishes. That, then, is the basis and incidentally it affords a rod by
which any attempt at censorship, by the police, by factory foremen, by
the post office, by university trustees, and even by a sluggish popular
taste, may be measured.
If the powers of Olympus would lend to men some creature of infinite
wisdom and taste, some creature versed in the weary evolutions of the
past, and pregnant with the unformulated tendencies of the future
through which an increasing happiness may be attained by men, then well
might that creature assume a censorship of human thought and speech. But
salvation cannot be won so lightly, for the seed of happiness is with
men. No one lives, or has lived, with the power to say what idea was
valuable to the world and what idea was baneful. The human substitutes
which have been commissioned during the absence of this all-wise and
all-prophetic authority have been uniformly dull, limited, and poisonous
to the best hopes of the future.
Since, then, we may not have a wise authority, why not frankly face the
situation? We blame the police, and justly, for their cruelties; yet
upon them American society has imposed an impossible task. We have
demanded free speech and free assemblage by our fundamental law, and
privately we have told the police not to obey the constitution. Who’s at
fault? New York knows. Last winter at Madison Square Garden the same
sort of folly was enacted as that which disgraced Chicago on Sunday,
January 17. Then Arthur Woods, police commissioner, saw a great light.
He made an experiment in freedom. It worked hugely to his credit and,
parenthetically, to the discredit of some of those most noisy in
demanding the right. The emptiness of many of the speakers was exhibited
and that was all. The existing order was unruffled.
As a result of his enlightenment Commissioner Woods made a request at
the conference on the old freedoms held at Princeton: “Policemen are
entitled to definite orders,” said the commissioner. “People in this
country have the constitutional right to freedom of assemblage and
freedom of speech. The police have not only the responsibility to permit
it—but to protect them in its exercise, and the police should be so
instructed.”
The police should be so instructed; the welfare of the race demands it.
But they won’t get instructions until powerful organized groups of
citizens find expression. Upon this organization rests the future.
A Hymn to Nature
(_This fragment, a “Hymn to Nature,” unknown to us in the published
works of Goethe, was found in a little bookshop in Berlin, and
translated into English by a strong man and a strong woman whose
lives and whose creations have served the ideals of all humanity
in a way that will gain deeper and deeper appreciation._)
Nature!
We are encompassed and enveloped by her, powerless to emerge and
powerless to penetrate deeper.
Unbidden and unwarned she takes us up in the round of her Dance and
sweeps along with us, until exhausted we fall from her Arms.
She creates ever new Forms; what is, was never before; what was, comes
never again—everything is New and yet ever the Old.
We live in the midst of her and are Strangers to her.
She speaks incessantly with us and never betrays her Secret to us.
We have unceasing Effect upon her and yet have no Power over her.
She appears to have committed everything to Individuality and is
indifferent to the Individual.
She builds ever and ever destroys and her Workshop is inaccessible.
She is the very Children—and the Mother—where is she?
* * * * *
She is the only Artist.
With the simplest Materials she arrives at the most sublime Contrasts.
Without Appearance of Effort she attains utmost Perfection—the most
exact Precision veiled always in exquisite Delicacy.
Each of her Works has its own individual Being—each of her Phenomena the
most isolated Conception, yet all is Unity.
She plays a Drama.
Whether or no she sees it herself we do not know and yet she plays it
for us who stand in the Corner.
There is an eternal Life, Growth and Motion in her and yet she does not
advance.
She changes ever, no Moment is stationary with her.
She has no Conception of Rest and has fixed her Curse upon Inaction.
She is Firm.
Her Step is measured, her Exceptions rare, her Laws immutable.
She has reflected and meditated perpetually; not however as Man but as
Nature.
She has reserved for herself a specific all-embracing Thought which none
may learn from her.
* * * * *
Mankind is all in her and she in all.
With all she indulges in a friendly Game and rejoices the more one wins
from her.
She practices it with many, so occultly that she plays it to the End
before they are aware of it.
And most unnatural is Nature.
Whoever does not see her on every side, nowhere sees her rightly.
She loves herself and ever draws to herself Eyes and Hearts without
number.
She has set herself apart in order to enjoy herself.
Ever she lets new Admirers arise, insatiable, to open her Heart to them.
In Illusion she delights.
Whoever destroys this in himself and others, him she punishes like the
most severe Tyrant.
Whoever follows her confidently—him she presses as a child to her
Breast.
Her Children are Countless.