a two-fold warfare, one against suffering and one against pity? Ought
we? War upon pity—would not that be in contradiction to all that our own
generation especially calls good and great? Our generation has done its
best to develop in the human heart an ever-enlarging capacity for
pity—what would it say to a warrior who pitilessly took up arms against
pity?
_Friedrich Nietzsche_ was such a warrior, single-handed and alone! And
the venomous verbal onslaught upon Nietzsche by those who did not
understand him was equalled only by those who did. At first Nietzsche’s
own success consisted in supplying his opponents with new weapons
against himself. Of all the words which have been used as bludgeons to
break the head of this most resolute rebel against our previous moral
view of life, Nietzsche’s piercing words concerning pity and the pitiful
have most occupied the attention of his enemies. This may not deter us
from looking unabashed the great question squarely in the face. In the
end, is pity something to be overcome, a disease of the old culture?
Does the path of the new culture lead men out and beyond and above pity?
This is no longer a Nietzsche question merely. This is a question of the
moral life of our time. Perhaps this is the last weightiest question
which our time can put to men of dignity and depth of thought.
However, it is only fair to say at the outset that no one has any right
to fly into a rage at Nietzsche in particular for summoning men to arms
against pity, since, if rage is in order at all, the conventional
practices of our previous life furnished therefor occasion enough. Aye,
there is an old wide-spread fashion of averting the strain of pity which
is so mean and cool that almost anybody could fly into a frenzy over
it—the fashion, not of triumphing over pity, but of cowardly flight from
pity. Consider the whole conception of life of the so-called favorites
of fortune. To what lengths do they go that they may be spared the sight
of misfortune, that they may not be agitated by a touch of pity! How
they avoid, if at all possible, every place that would remind them that
there are want and misery, hunger and sorrow, in the world—as the
Parisians did, until Zola, the most calumniated author of the nineteenth
century, dragged these things, with their ensuing vices, out into the
light of day and made the French people look at them! How furious they
are, as the French were at great Zola, at anybody who dares to open
their eyes to the sad and harrowing realities of life! Nay, they have
invented a special art and religion that shall succeed in sparing them
pity; the former to conjure up a make-believe world in which life shall
be all sunshine and gladness; the latter to advocate the doctrine that
all pain is punishment from God, and that, since God must be just, He
will properly parcel out and administer pain and suffering. We do not
need to bestir ourselves in behalf of sufferers; that would be a wrong
against God; a doubt of the Everlasting Justice; hence all may not feel
pity for the wicked man upon whom God visits His wrath and punishment!
Thus the “good people” and the just harden their hearts. They have
stones which they heave at the poor sinner—especially at a “sinful
woman”—but no mercy, no pity, for those who are not as they are, and do
not think and feel and act as they do. They grow chesty: “Yes, if others
were as good as we are, then it would be as well with them as it is with
us!” With such pride they choke all feeling of kinship and connection
with others. Where pride grows, no pity can thrive. And at last pity
itself becomes a kind of pride, a sorry self-reflection as in a mirror.
The most subtle and dangerous way for men to free themselves from the
pain of pity, when they cannot stave it off completely, is to make it a
thing of pride and praise: “I thank Thee, God, that I am not like the
hard-hearted!” Then they revel and riot in their pity, then they rejoice
that they are so good-hearted, so tender-hearted, because they can see
no suffering without being touched and melted to tears. And the pitiful
call this their morality and their virtue. They make a “delicacy” of
their pity to set before themselves at the table of life when all of
life’s other gratifications and indulgences begin to grow stale and
tasteless. The tears of emotion that gush generously forth at the
spectacle of suffering humanity—even of frail and faulty humanity—taste
so good! Many is the time they have felt the weary weight of this
unintelligible world on listening to a sad story or seeing a play, and
screwed up melancholy and doleful countenances—maybe pity can be put
among the things that can make life, always requiring to be braced up a
bit, a trifle more interesting. And so pity is at last honored with a
place among the articles of luxury with which they enrich and adorn
their lives—their lives, always surprising them with some fresh sign of
poverty and patches!
But if all guilt be revenged upon earth, punishment of this misuse of
pity may not be stayed. It is doubly punished and revenged—upon him who
practices it and upon him upon whom it is practiced. Or do we not know
that the pharisees of pity become ever more feeble and sentimental men,
losing all power and energy of will through pure emotionality? Or do we
not know that most crafty business speculation, speculation in pity, in
which sufferers magnify their least pains, expert in making an
impression with their “cases” in order to arouse the interest of the
pitiful, an interest which need not always be relieved by the clink of
coin, but which makes ready its punishment much more frequently with
idle hours spent in dreaming and weeping, with the unprofitable
breathing-out of pathos and reproach? Often enough the enthusiasts of
the kind and tender heart do not know what they do, but they rob men of
the marrow of life, they emasculate and coddle the soul; and the
emotional debauchery in which they live, requires ever stronger stimulus
which ever operates more enervatingly still.
Contemplating these devastations wrought everywhere in life by love’s
softness, one begins to cherish some respect for a Nietzsche who
preached to men “a hard bed,” love’s hardness. To be sure, if one is to
understand this preaching, one must keep in mind what the preacher says:
“My brethren, give heed unto each hour, in which your spirit wisheth to
speak in parables: there is the origin of your virtue.” Nietzsche speaks
in parables. For instance, his words on war and warriors—a good war
hallowing every cause—these, too, are parables. And hardness, bravery,
praised by him as the strength and consecration of life, truly this is
not the barbarity of prize-fighting or the brutality of lynching; this
is the high mind fearlessly going its own way, stampeded by no danger
into thinking and acting and being other than what it holds to be right.
Danger is but the acid test which such a mind applies to the ingredients
of its life. To such a mind, hardness is the characteristic of the gem,
of the diamond, which thus guarantees its genuineness, its sparkling
worth. Zarathustra-Nietzsche loves everything which steels the will and
augments life’s force. Therefore he loves his foe, for, thanks to his
foe, he never comes to a standstill and stagnates. Therefore his true
friend is the one who has become his best foe, who makes him sweat, who
summons him to risk hot war with him, to break a lance with him in an
intellectual passage at arms in which the soul struggles for its own yea
and nay. So, similarly, this Zarathustra-Nietzsche hates pity. Why? Not
because he is a brute. “Kind unto the sick is Zarathustra.... Would that
they were convalescent and conquering and creating a higher body for
themselves!” Not because, as we have seen, so much of pity is for self’s
sake and not for the sake of service, though this is an essential part
of the answer. Then why? Because it works an embarrassment for man,
because it knows no shame, no reverence, in the presence of the giant
forces which, for every brave soul, is concealed in great and deep pain.
Therefore he combats pity because it is a passion and not an action, and
yet life is not for passionists but for pragmatists. “All great love is
lifted above all its pity, for it seeketh to create what it loveth....
But all creators are hard.” “If thou hast a suffering friend, be a couch
for his suffering, but a hard bed, as it were, a field-bed; thus thou
wilt be of most use for him.”
Hearken ye, O Reader, to another Transvaluer of values Whose Person
Nietzsche “the Crucified,” excoriated at ill-starred moments, but did so
on the basis of that very “high mind” for which He, rejecting pity, went
to His Crucifixion! “And Jesus, Pilate handed over to their will. As
they led him off he was followed by a large multitude of the people and
also of women who beat their breasts and lamented him; but Jesus turned
to them and said, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me!’”
Now, as it seems to me, this Nietzsche preaching is not so far removed
from that other preaching which we are otherwise wont to call a gospel,
a good, a glad message! For this glad message was not a lamentation, but
a hymn of heroism and of victory, a call to creation! And I take the
liberty to repeat that the Preacher of this glad message forbade pity
for himself even in his dark and desolate hour—do you think what that
hour was?—when he appealed to weak and wailing and weeping womanly
souls, Weep not for me, weep for yourselves! And He Who Himself wills no
pity, Who bears in Himself a greatness which is elevated above all pity,
would he have willed to have men so weak and pitiful as we often enough
today imagine the Ideal of a Christ-man to be?
What, now, if the true pitiful love, the true mercy to men, were to
_harden_ them, to make them free from what meant only suffering to them?
It is, to be sure, very much more difficult to make men themselves
“hard,” so that the burden lying on their backs can not crush them than
it is to indulge their weakness and sensitiveness and to leave them as
they are. Indulgent parental hearts would a thousand times rather remove
all life’s burdens from their children than to place burdens upon their
children which they might learn to bear. So often our pity plays us a
sorry trick—we would rather do something for men than to repress our
pity, silence it, and then teach men how they themselves can do what is
good and necessary for them. We speak of a ministrant love, meaning a
love which knows nothing higher than to provide comforts, avert trials,
spare vexations, and everything which could shake a man to his
foundations. How much greater a service of love it would be to lead man
to himself, make him strong that he might be equal to what we had
thought we must take away from him! Pray, not for easier tasks, lighter
burdens, but for more power! This Nietzschean love is not only a greater
love, it also requires a greater, more tiresome work, it requires a
constant conquest of our pitying weakness, it requires a courageous
faith in man and a firm earnest appraisal of his power. And how entirely
different a service of friendship do we render a friend if we show a
hard love to him, if he break a tooth on us, as Nietzsche says, because
we do not flatter and fit him, but compel him, out of love compel him,
to assert himself against us, and to withstand our defense of our rights
against him! Foolish men seek their friends among the _Jasagern_, most
preferably, among those who are of their own opinion in everything. They
then call this an ideal friendship: two souls and one thought, two
hearts and one beat! But in such a friendship, their best, their own
soul, their sense of truth, and their courage for the truth, soon rusts.
To spare a friend the disillusion which he would suffer if he felt an
antagonism, an opposition, in the friendship, they have pity on him,
they learn to keep silent, and silence soon becomes a lie. Since they
dare not cause the friend the grief of discovering to him these lies,
they lie more, lie life-long,—all out of pity, out of their weak tender
love. How much nobler and greater that friendship whose ideal Nietzsche
sketches for us, in which we are gripped from the outset in a friend’s
contradiction and hostility! We seek and love in him precisely what is
not attuned to us, but is his own, and must forever remain his very own.
Such hard love which gives the friend a “camp-bed” and not one as “soft
as downy pillows are” and requires the like in return is the proudest
manliest friendship, is alone what brings our sluggish and pampered
natures forward, and makes us stronger, freer, richer in understanding
and experience. Every genuine love should be a spur, freedom, to us, not
an easy berth and a trammel in life.
We cannot, we ought not, refrain from pity in life. We cannot, we ought
not, stave it artificially from us. Pity belongs to man as man. It comes
stealing upon him, and ought so to come. But when it has come, he ought
not to be enmeshed in it. Still less ought he to let it grow rank. He
should ennoble it, overcome it, with strong will and energetic deed. For
pity is yet _suffering_ and all suffering summons men to conflict, to
defense. The sign that such overcoming has succeeded is that
_rejoicing-together_ has been born of _suffering-together_—is that the
conflict has issued in a victory in which hard militant love triumphs
over every weakness, and is grateful to the hardness which has given it
such a victory!
In his brilliant book on Nietzsche, “Who Is to Be Master of the World,”
Ludovici writes powerfully as follows: “What the units of a herd most
earnestly seek and find, is smug ease, not necessarily mastership. For
mastership entails responsibility, insight, nerve, courage and
_hardness_ towards one’s self, that control of one’s self which all good
commanders must have, and which is the very antithesis of the gregarious
man’s attitude towards himself.... Hardness?—He knows nothing of the
hardness that can command his heart, his mouth, before it attends to the
command of others; he knows nothing of the hardness that can dispel the
doubts of a whole continent, that can lead the rabble and the ruck to
deeds of anomalous nobility, or that can impose silence upon the
overweening importunities of an assembled nation. He knows _this_
hardness, that he could coldly watch the enemy of his private and
insignificant little interests, burnt at the stake; he knows _this_
hardness, that he would let a great national plan miscarry for the sake
of a mess of pottage;—the gregarious man and future socialist has this
so-called hardness; but so have all those who burn with resentment,—so
have all parasites and silent worm-gnawers at the frame-work of great
architecture.”
But not Nietzsche’s interpreter, but Nietzsche himself, shall have the
last word: “Praises are what maketh hard!—I do not praise the land where
butter and honey—flow! To learn to look away from one’s self is
necessary in order to see many things: this hardener is needed by every
mountain climber.”
_Also Sprach Aristoteles—Zarathustra!_
George Middleton’s One-Act Plays
CLAYTON HAMILTON
The one-act play is an art-form that is worthy of careful cultivation.
It shows the same relation to the full-length drama as the short-story
shows to the novel. It makes a virtue of economy of means. It aims to
produce a single dramatic effect with the greatest economy of means that
is consistent with the utmost emphasis. A one-act play, in exhibiting
the present, should imply the past and intimate the future. The author
has no leisure for laborious exposition; but his mere projection of a
single situation should sum up in itself the accumulated results of many
antecedent causes. The one-act play, at its best, can no more serve as a
single act of a longer drama than the short-story can serve as a single
chapter of a novel. The form is complete, concise, and self-sustaining;
and it requires an extraordinary focus of imagination.
No other American dramatist has so carefully cultivated this special
type of drama as George Middleton. His recently-published volume of
one-act plays, entitled _Possession_, was preceded by two other volumes,
called _Embers_ and _Tradition_. Each of these books contains half a
dozen plays. From the fact that Mr. Middleton has chosen to publish
these eighteen one-act plays in advance of their production, it is not
to be inferred that he is a believer in the closet-drama. A closet-drama
may be defined as a play that, being unfit for production in the
theatre, is fit only to be locked up in a closet. Mr. Middleton is not a
literary amateur, but a professional and practical playwright. He has
produced more than half a dozen full-length plays in the commercial
theatre; and such artists as Julia Marlowe, Margaret Anglin, George
Fawcett, and the late E. M. Holland have appeared in dramas of his
composition. All of Mr. Middleton’s one-act plays are written for the
stage; and—to quote from his own preface to _Possession_—he conceives
“the value of play publication not as a substitute for production but as
an alternative for those whose dramas may offer little attraction to the
manager because of theme or treatment.”
At present there is, unfortunately, scarcely any market in the American
theatre for one-act plays that take life seriously. It is against our
custom to provide a full-length drama with a curtain-raiser or an
after-piece; and the field for one-act plays in vaudeville is restricted
to slap-stick comedies and yelling melodramas. It is for this reason
that Mr. Middleton has been required to choose publication as an
alternative for production, in the case of these diminutive dramas. The
trouble is not at all that his pieces are unsuited to the stage: they
are admirable in technique, and—like all good plays—they would be more
interesting in the theatre than in the library. The trouble is only
that—for wholly artificial and accidental reasons—the commercial theatre
in America at present is inhospitable to the one-act play.
Mr. Middleton’s one-act plays reveal a wide range of subject-matter and
a corresponding versatility of treatment. No one of them is similar to
any of the others. Yet, pervading this variety of subject and of mood,
there is discernible an underlying unity. Each of them deals essentially
with woman—and with modern woman in relation to our modern social
system. Woman is, at present, a transitional creature, evolving from the
thing that man considered her to be in the far-away period of wax
flowers and horse-hair furniture to the being that she considers herself
about to become in the unachieved, potential future; and Mr. Middleton
has caught her in this period of transition, and has depicted her, under
many different lights, colored with her virtues and discolored with her
faults.
Many of the most poignant and dramatic problems of present-day society
arise from the fact that the evolution of woman is proceeding more
rapidly than the evolution of her environment. While individuals
advance, traditions linger. Mr. Middleton’s favorite subject seems to be
a conflict between an advanced woman and a lingering tradition. The
author is himself a radical, and his sympathy is forever on the side of
the revolutionary individual; but his technical treatment is so fair to
both sides of the contention that it remains possible for conservative
readers to rank themselves against the individual on the side of the
lingering tradition. Scarcely any of Mr. Middleton’s women would be
pleasant to have around the house. Since most of them are discontented
with the conditions of their lives, they naturally make the worst of
these conditions instead of making the best of them. Hell hath no fury
like a woman in revolt; and many readers may dislike Mr. Middleton’s
heroines more heartily than he seems to like them himself. But to be
able to dislike a character is a proof that that character is real, and
must be considered as a tribute to the author’s art. The heroine of _The
Unborn_, in Mr. Middleton’s latest volume, refuses to have children
because motherhood might interfere with “her work,”—the work, in this
case, being merely a habit of attending to minor matters in her
husband’s photographic studio; but the intensity of impatience with
which the reader listens to her twaddle is an indication that this
character is really representative of a silly type of creature that is
not infrequently encountered in actual life. Again, in the play called
_Possession_, a woman who has been divorced for adultery attempts to
kidnap her little daughter from the house of her former husband, to
whose custody the child had, of course, been awarded by the courts. Her
adultery was inexcusable, because it had been occasioned not by an
irresistible and overwhelming love but merely by a superfluity of
leisure; and her attempt to kidnap the child was treacherous and
ignominious. She excuses herself, however, by telling her husband that
the process of child-birth had been painful, and that, therefore,
despite the judgment of the courts, their little daughter belonged more
to her than to him. The reader is, of course, annoyed by all this
nonsense; but this annoyance, once again, must be regarded as a tribute
to the reality of the author’s characterization. No heroine who was not
a living human being could make the auditor so ardently desire to climb
upon the stage and talk back to her.
Fortunately, it is not at all necessary to like Mr. Middleton’s women in
order to like his plays. One may admire Ibsen’s _Hedda Gabler_ without
wishing to be married to the heroine; and the pleasant thing about Mr.
Middleton’s women is that, while the reader is permitted to observe and
study them, he is also allowed to realize with hearty thankfulness that
he will never have to live with any of them. The world in which his
women move is a world of discontent. This discontent is truly
representative of the present transitional period in the evolution of
society; but it is not representative of that perennial reality of life
that remains oblivious of periods and dates. At all times, the really
womanly woman has been a lover of her life and has not found it
difficult to feel at home at home.
New York Letter
GEORGE SOULE
It would be difficult to imagine a more fantastic occasion than a debate
in New York on the justice of the cause of the Allies vs. that of
Germany between Cecil Chesterton and George Sylvester Viereck. The gods
permitted it to happen last week, much to the chagrin of the Allies, for
the hyphenated Germans took good care to fill the hall and hiss every
offensive statement. Mr. Chesterton, an honest fighter and a clever
polemicist, who has leapt through every phase of radicalism into the
enfolding charity of the Catholic Church, deserves to be known for his
journalistic achievements and his exposure of graft in high places
almost as much as for his brother Gilbert. Mr. Viereck, a sublime
egotist, has come into sudden favor with his countrymen by editing _Das
Vaterland_, although before that he had taken every known means to
secure notoriety for a naturally obscure individual. He began as a poet
of strange verse, both in German and English. When it became apparent
that it wasn’t going to sell, he issued a last volume which he called
his “swan song,” with the announcement that as this commercial age was
unappreciative of his poetry he would write no more, and anyone who
wanted a last chance to value him at it must buy this book. For himself,
he was going to get in line with the genius of the century and become a
Big Business Man, for he must make himself felt. He announced in a
stentorian wail his admiration for Theodore Roosevelt, and was much
chagrined when that celebrity would not let him trail along on the
skirts of his ample publicity. Later on, when Alfred Noyes began to sell
in large quantities, Mr. Viereck resumed his dictatorship of poetry, and
by scurrilous attacks attempted to draw Mr. Noyes’s fire—and newspaper
space. Now German Patriotism has lifted him to the headlines.
If Poetic Justice was present at the debate, she probably did not
receive much enlightenment on the questions which are now vexing her in
Europe. To quote any of the substance of the debate would be an insult
to her intelligence.