The Little Review

Literature Drama Music Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR

MAY, 1914

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The Little Review

Vol. I

MAY, 1914

No. 3

Copyright 1914, by Margaret C. Anderson.

On Behalf of Literature

DeWitt C. Wing

It is well-nigh incredible that Edwin Björkman, of his own free will, should have written the “open letter to President Wilson on behalf of American literature” which appeared in the April Century. Whenever a man of promise and power shows the white feather those who admire him suffer a keen, personal pain. And yet Mr. Björkman is by no means the last man whom I should expect to make a plea for an official recognition, through honors, prizes, and subsidies, of an American literature. A conventional literary man could have done it, but a great man never.

Mr. Björkman, after remarking the President’s ability to appreciate the importance of what he purposes to lay before him, asks, “Will this nation, as a nation, never do anything for the encouragement or reward of its poets and men of letters?” He thinks it ought to do something because “the soul of a nation is in its literature,” and because “we shall never raise our poetry to the level of our other achievements until we, as a nation, try to find some method of providing money for the poet’s purse and laurels for his brow.”

No specific proposal is made to the President. Mr. Björkman outlines the general question, instances England, France, Sweden, and Norway as bestowing honors and rewards upon their writers, and says that he has “learned by bitter experience what it means to strive for sincere artistic expression in a field where brass is commonly valued above gold,” and “should like to see the road made a little less hard, and the goal a little more attractive, lest too many of those that come after lose their courage and let themselves be tempted by the incessant clangor of metal in the marketplace.” Wherefore “on behalf of men and women who are striving against tremendous odds to give this nation a poetry equaling in worth and glory that of any other nation in the world” he appeals to the Chief Executive to take the lead.

A literature worthy of national fostering does not require it.

When President Wilson read Mr. Björkman’s letter—we may assume that he has somehow found time to do so—my little wager is that he smiled sadly, and perhaps recalled a sentence that he wrote nearly twenty years ago, when the spirit of youth gave a sort of instinctive inerrancy to his judgments. In an essay on An Author’s Company he said:

Literatures are renewed, as they are originated, by uncontrived impulses of nature, as if the sap moved unbidden in the mind.

In the same essay occurs this wide-worldly phrase:

There is a greater thing than the spirit of the age, and that is the spirit of the ages.

A man capable of the deep, wide thought which these excerpts contain is not the man seriously to consider Mr. Björkman’s appeal. Literature is not a response to a monetary or other invitation; it is as inevitable as the sunrise, and opportunity neither originates nor develops it. The conditions that govern the rise of sap and its transformations into beauty cannot be set up by legislation nor made easier by Nobel prizes. An artist of original power, born pregnant with a poem, a picture, or a symphony, will inevitably give it birth. His necessity is not to receive but to give. He is independent of the caprice of chance. He has no thought of a chance “for sincere artistic expression.” He is not interested in the control of circumstance; he is the instrument of something that controls him. Opportunity never knocks at his door; his door cannot be opened from without; it is pushed open by an indwelling, outgrowing guest. The process is as uncontrived as the unfolding of an acorn into an oak.

I fear that Mr. Björkman’s definition of art, if he have one, needs expansion. The so-called art which he wishes to have encouraged as something geographically local is an imitation which probably would suffice in a petty world of orthodox socialism, where writing was a kind of sociological business. Since unmistakable art is born, not manufactured or induced, it were folly to try to nurture it. Unborn art is nurtured by an inner sap; it cannot be fed on sedative pap. It always has been and always will be born of suffering, in unexpected, unprepared places, like all its wild and wonderful kin. Eugenics cannot be applied to its unfathomable heredity.

The soul of a nation is not in its literature but in its contemporary life. Literatures haven’t souls, even if, haply, they have considerable vitality or permanence. Literatures are intricate autobiographies, vague symbols of personal feeling, lifted by a modicum of consciousness into mystic articulation. The great literatures that are on the way will be more and more psychological. What people call love in the world of realism will play a sublimer part in the world of consciousness. Prose and poetry in which our conscious life is more intimately portrayed will challenge and in a million years increase consciousness, so that through emphasis and use this later acquisition of the race will transmute information into perfect organic knowledge. A larger consciousness will break up the chaos of unnumbered antagonisms in human relationships. The literature of description and the blind play of instinct has served its purpose and had its day. The literature of the future must deal with a vaster world than that in which animals prey upon one another. Such a literature will not bear the name of a man, a state, a nation, or an age.

We are opposed to the whole idea of nationalism; we even object to worldliness in literature; we want something still bigger: a literature with a sense of the planets in it. In this new day it is too late to fuss about nations, geographical literatures, and races. We are called toward the universe and mankind. In this land of blended nationalities our hope is to evolve a literature vitalized by the blood of multitudinous races and linked in pedigree with the infinite ages of the past. Walt Whitman’s poetry was cosmic; the new poetry will extend to the planets. The summit of Parnassus now rests in the gloom of the valley, and the poet of the future will look down from the higher eminence to which science has called him. Man today soars in flying machines in the old realm of his young imagination. Poets must outreach mere science.

What little patriots call a nation is a huge dogma that must be overcome. In poetry there must be an increasingly larger sense of the universe instead of nations as man’s habitation. National literatures are exclusive of and alien to one another; they should be interrelated and fundamentally combinable. There can be no local literature if the thought of the world is embodied in it, and any other quality of literature must lack integrity. Wild dreamers insist upon a literature that shall be superior to political boundaries. The idea of nationalism involves the setting up of barriers and the fossilizing of life. It is a small idea that belongs to the dark ages. If we are ever to expand in feeling, thought, and achievement we must rise above nations into the starry spaces. We shall at least be citizens of the world, and, if citizens of the world, then truth-seekers beyond the reach of land and sea.

The little question put to President Wilson by Mr. Björkman cannot escape a negative answer, unless through petty exclusions and barbaric insularities we continue trying to organize, cement, and perpetuate a nation—that smug dream of our forefathers who reeked with selfishness and reveled in a freedom that at the core was slavery. Statehood must give way to a universal brotherhood. And if this were achieved it would still be idle twaddle to talk about “providing money for the poet’s purse and laurels for his brow”; for a poet—I am not thinking of facile versifiers, who are capable of intoxicating emotional persons with philological colors and sensuous music—is rewarded not by money but by understanding, and he fashions his own laurel, even as the sea pink crowns itself with its ample glory. The kind of poet whose measure is taken by Mr. Björkman’s pale solicitude is already generously provided for by an unpoetic public, and there awaits his moist brow a laurel of uncritical, national homage.

Whitman, chanter of the earth’s major note, and Blake, exquisite singer of its subtlest minors, are clearly recognizable mutations. Apart from the work of four or five men English verse falls into infinite grades of imitative excellence and mediocrity. The best of it is highly finished manufactured or in part reproduced art, obedient to a commercial age, in which little men with renowned names gossip about nations, and worship the god of utility.

Poetry of the highest quality—great enough to burst a language—is the outflow of the unconfinable passion of exceedingly rare individualities that can be neither encouraged nor discouraged by any external condition. They are vagrant leaps of life, wild with the creative power of projecting variety. They come off the common stock as new forms having many characteristics common to their ancestors but expressing their unlikeness in mental or physiological development. Real poets are genuine “sports” or mutations; near-poets are made by cultivation. As a nation grows old and the impact of its culture upon all classes of people increases, the greater its production of so-called classical art; but this has nothing to do with what I mean by poetry.

What is popularly termed poetry may represent sincere work; it may answer to all the technical requirements of versification; it may possess a sheen of word-music; it may contain deep, subtle thought, and yet, despite all these customary earmarks, it is not real poetry. To be sure, thousands of critics will acclaim it as authentic, and lecturers will quote it as beautiful wisdom, but it is soon lost to eye and memory. And in a large sense this must be true of the greatest poetry.

One reason why we haven’t more and better contemporary poetry and prose is that we are under the tyranny of so-called masters. It is foolishly assumed that masterpieces are finalities in their fields. By talking, writing, and teaching this absurdity we set up popular prejudices against vital work of our own time, so that even literary artists, with an alleged sharp eye for genius, cannot identify an outstanding genius when it appears before them. Only that poetry or prose which is a reminder of or is almost as good as a celebrity’s work is accepted as art. We thus evolve “forms of appraisal” or standards with which we try to hammer rebels and geniuses into line. The artist who, confident, fearless, ample, and resolute, can go through this acid test without compromise (fighting, even dying, for his vision) is the hope of men. He does not ask for anything; he is a god; the gods merely command—not always posthumously—and all the world is theirs.

It is quite possible to encourage the profession of writing verse and prose by making the road easier and the goal more attractive for the weaklings who whine for nationalized alms, to enable them to pursue a craft; but literature in the big sense is created by all sorts of men and women who cannot withhold it, let the world approve, condemn, or ignore. Hence literature is incapable of encouragement.

In his Gleams, which are the most intimately personal things that he has published, Mr. Björkman reiterates the conviction that artists ought to have a better chance than they now enjoy to express themselves. For instance, he says:

He who is to minister to men’s souls should have time and chance to acquire one for himself.

And this:

The children will build up the New Kingdom as soon as they are given a chance.

These extracts from his Gleams taken in connection with our concluding quotation from his Century article indicate if they do not prove that Mr. Björkman regards artists as meticulous persons who must be coaxed, humored, coddled, and rewarded in order to incite them to creative activity. Obviously he means craftsmen when he uses the word artists. An artist is impelled to do his work, which is his pain, joy, and passion. If life is made easy for him the chances are that he will lose his independence and power, and descend to a popular success. Stevenson could not endure prosperity; once a man, accustomed to a hard, uphill road—he did his noblest work then—a sentimental public made it so easy for him that he eventually grew fairly Tennysonian in his output of pretty trifles.

A literature worthy of the name might address itself, in Whitman’s words, to authors who would be themselves in life and art:

I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes;

You shall not heap up what is call’d riches,

You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve,

You but arrive at the city to which you were destin’d—you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction, before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart.

The Challenge of Emma Goldman

Margaret C. Anderson

Emma Goldman has been lecturing in Chicago, and various kinds of people have been going to hear her. I have heard her twice—once before the audience of well-dressed women who flock to her drama lectures and don’t know quite what to think of her, and once at the International Labor Hall before a crowd of anarchists and syndicalists and socialists, most of whom were collarless but who knew very emphatically what they thought of her and of her ideas. I came away with a series of impressions, every one of which resolved somehow into a single conviction: that here was a great woman.

The drama audience might have been dolls, for all they appeared to understand what was going on. One of them went up to Miss Goldman afterward and tried, almost petulantly, to explain why she believed in property and wealth. She was utterly serious. No one could have convinced her that there was any humor in the situation; that she might as well try to work up a fervor of war enthusiasm in Carnegie as to expect Emma Goldman to sympathize in the sanctity of property. The second audience, after listening to a talk on anti-Christianity, got to its feet and asked intelligent questions. Men with the faces of fanatics and martyrs waved their arms in their excitement pro and con; some one tried to prove that Nietzsche had an unscientific mind; a suave lawyer stated that Miss Goldman was profoundly intellectual, but that her talk was destructive—to which she replied that it would require another lawyer to unravel his inconsistency; and then some one established forcibly that the only real problem in the universe was that of three meals a day.

Most people who read and think have become enlightened about anarchism. They know that anarchists are usually timid, thoughtful, unviolent people; that dynamite is a part of their intellectual, not their physical, equipment; and that the goal for which they are striving—namely, individual human freedom—is one for which we might all strive with credit. But for the benefit of those who regard Emma Goldman as a public menace, and for those who simply don’t know what to make of her—like that fashionable feminine audience—it may be interesting to look at her in a new way.

To begin with, why not take her quite simply? She’s a simple person. She’s natural. In any civilization it requires genius to be really simple and natural. It’s one of the most subtle, baffling, and agonizing struggles we go through—this trying to attain the quality that ought to be easiest of all attainment because we were given it to start with. What a commentary on civilization!—that one can regain his original simplicity only through colossal effort. Nietzsche calls it the three metamorphoses of the spirit: “how the spirit becometh a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.”

And Emma Goldman has struggled through these stages. She has taken her “heavy load-bearing spirit” into the wilderness, like the camel; become lord of that wilderness, captured freedom for new creating, like the lion; and then created new values, said her Yea to life, like the child. Somehow Zarathustra kept running through my mind as I listened to her that afternoon.

Emma Goldman preaches and practises the philosophy of freedom; she pushes through the network of a complicated society as if it were a cobweb instead of a steel structure; she brushes the cobwebs from her eyes and hair and calls back to the less daring ones that the air is more pure up there and “sunrise sometimes visible.” Someone has put it this way: “Repudiating as she does practically every tenet of what the modern state holds good, she stands for some of the noblest traits in human nature.” And no one who listens to her thoughtfully, whatever his opinion of her creed, will deny that she has nobility. Such qualities as courage—dauntless to the point of heartbreak; as sincerity, reverence, high-mindedness, self-reliance, helpfulness, generosity, strength, a capacity for love and work and life—all these are noble qualities, and Emma Goldman has them in the nth power. She has no pale traits like tact, gentleness, humility, meekness, compromise. She has “a hard, kind heart” instead of “a soft, cruel one.” And she’s such a splendid fighter!

What is she fighting for? For the same things, concretely, that Nietzsche and Max Stirner fought for abstractly. She has nothing to say that they have not already said, perhaps; but the fact that she says it instead of putting it into books, that she hurls it from the platform straight into the minds and hearts of the eager, bewildered, or unfriendly people who listen to her, gives her personality and her message a unique value. She says it with the same unflinching violence to an audience of capitalists as to her friends the workers. And the substance of her gospel—I speak merely from the impressions of those two lectures and the very little reading I’ve done of her published work—is something of this sort:

Radical changes in society, releasement from present injustices and miseries, can come about not through reform but through change; not through a patching up of the old order, but through a tearing down and a rebuilding. This process involves the repudiation of such “spooks” as Christianity, conventional morality, immortality, and all other “myths” that stand as obstacles to progress, freedom, health, truth, and beauty. One thus achieves that position beyond good and evil for which Nietzsche pleaded. But it is more fair to use Miss Goldman’s own words. In writing of the failure of Christianity, for instance, she says:

I believe that Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society; in short, to the very conditions confronting us today. Indeed, never could society have degenerated to its present appalling stage if not for the assistance of Christianity.... No doubt I will be told that, though religion is a poison and institutionalized Christianity the greatest enemy of progress and freedom, there is some good in Christianity itself. What about the teachings of Christ and early Christianity, I may be asked; do they not stand for the spirit of humanity, for right, and justice?

It is precisely this oft-repeated contention that induced me to choose this subject, to enable me to demonstrate that the abuses of Christianity, like the abuses of government, are conditioned in the thing itself, and are not to be charged to the representatives of the creed. Christ and his teachings are the embodiment of inertia, of the denial of life; hence responsible for the things done in their name.

I am not interested in the theological Christ. Brilliant minds like Bauer, Strauss, Renan, Thomas Paine, and others refuted that myth long ago. I am even ready to admit that the theological Christ is not half so dangerous as the ethical and social Christ. In proportion as science takes the place of blind faith, theology loses its hold. But the ethical and poetical Christ-myth has so thoroughly saturated our lives, that even some of the most advanced minds find it difficult to emancipate themselves from its yoke. They have rid themselves of the letter, but have retained the spirit; yet it is the spirit which is back of all the crimes and horrors committed by orthodox Christianity. The Fathers of the Church can well afford to preach the gospel of Christ. It contains nothing dangerous to the régime of authority and wealth; it stands for self-denial and self-abnegation, for penance and regret, and is absolutely inert in the face of every indignity, every outrage imposed upon mankind.... Many otherwise earnest haters of slavery and injustice confuse, in a most distressing manner, the teachings of Christ with the great struggles for social and economic emancipation. The two are irrevocably and forever opposed to each other. The one necessitates courage, daring, defiance, and strength. The other preaches the gospel of non-resistance, of slavish acquiescence in the will of others; it is the complete disregard of character and self-reliance, and, therefore, destructive of liberty and well-being....

The public career of Christ begins with the edict, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”

Why repent, why regret, in the face of something that was supposed to bring deliverance? Had not the people suffered and endured enough; had they not earned their right to deliverance by their suffering? Take the Sermon on the Mount, for instance; what is it but a eulogy on submission to fate, to the inevitability of things?

“Blessed are the poor in spirit....”

Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there. How can anything creative, anything vital, useful, and beautiful, come from the poor in spirit? The idea conveyed in the Sermon on the Mount is the greatest indictment against the teachings of Christ, because it sees in the poverty of mind and body a virtue, and because it seeks to maintain this virtue by reward and punishment. Every intelligent being realizes that our worst curse is the poverty of the spirit; that it is productive of all evil and misery, of all the injustice and crimes in the world.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

What a preposterous notion! What incentive to slavery, inactivity, and parasitism. Besides, it is not true that the meek can inherit anything.

“Blessed are ye when men shall revile you ... for great is your reward in heaven.”

The reward in heaven is the perpetual bait, a bait that has caught man in an iron net, a strait-jacket which does not let him expand or grow. All pioneers of truth have been, and still are, reviled. But did they ask humanity to pay the price? Did they seek to bribe mankind to accept their ideas?... Redemption through the Cross is worse than damnation, because of the terrible burden it imposes upon humanity, because of the effect it has on the human soul, fettering and paralyzing it with the weight of the burden exacted through the death of Christ....

The teachings of Christ and of his followers have failed because they lacked the vitality to lift the burdens from the shoulders of the race; they have failed because the very essence of that doctrine is contrary to the spirit of life, opposed to the manifestation of nature, to the strength and beauty of passion.

And so on. In her dissolution of other “myths”—such as that of morality, for instance,—she has even more direct things to say. I quote from a lecture on Victims of Morality:

It is Morality which condemns woman to the position of a celibate, a prostitute, or a reckless, incessant breeder of children.

First as to the celibate, the famished and withered human plant. When still a young, beautiful flower, she falls in love with a respectable young man. But Morality decrees that unless he can marry the girl, she must never know the raptures of love, the ecstasy of passion. The respectable young man is willing to marry, but the Property Morality, the Family and Social Moralities decree that he must first make his pile, must save up enough to establish a home and be able to provide for a family. The young people must wait, often many long, weary years.... And the young flower, with every fiber aglow with the love of life? She develops headaches, insomnia, hysteria; grows embittered, quarrelsome, and soon becomes a faded, withered, joyless being, a nuisance to herself and every one else.... Hedged in her narrow confines with family and social tradition, guarded by a thousand eyes, afraid of her own shadow—the yearning of her inmost being for the man or the child, she must turn to cats, dogs, canary birds, or the Bible class.

Now as to the prostitute. In spite of laws, ordinances, persecution, and prisons; in spite of segregation, registration, vice crusades, and other similar devices, the prostitute is the real specter of our age.... What has made her? Whence does she come? Morality, the morality which is merciless in its attitude to women. Once she dares to be herself, to be true to her nature, to life, there is no return; the woman is thrust out from the pale and protection of society. The prostitute becomes the victim of Morality, even as the withered old maid is its victim. But the prostitute is victimized by still other forces, foremost among them the Property Morality, which compels woman to sell herself as a sex commodity or in the sacred fold of matrimony. The latter is no doubt safer, more respected, more recognized, but of the two forms of prostitution the girl of the street is the least hypocritical, the least debased, since her trade lacks the pious mask of hypocrisy, and yet she is hounded, fleeced, outraged, and shunned by the very powers that have made her: the financier, the priest, the moralist, the judge, the jailer, and the detective, not to forget her sheltered, respectably virtuous sister, who is the most relentless and brutal in her persecution of the prostitute.

Morality and its victim, the mother—what a terrible picture! Is there, indeed, anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood? The woman, physically and mentally unfit to be a mother, yet condemned to breed; the woman, economically taxed to the very last spark of energy, yet forced to breed; the woman, tied to a man she loathes, yet made to breed; the woman, worn and used-up from the process of procreation, yet coerced to breed, more, ever more. What a hideous thing, this much-lauded motherhood!

With the economic war raging all around her, with strife, misery, crime, disease, and insanity staring her in the face, with numberless little children ground into gold dust, how can the self and race-conscious woman become a mother? Morality cannot answer this question. It can only dictate, coerce, or condemn—and how many women are strong enough to face this condemnation, to defy the moral dicta? Few indeed. Hence they fill the factories, the reformatories, the homes for feeble-minded, the prisons.... Oh, Motherhood, what crimes are committed in thy name! What hosts are laid at your feet. Morality, destroyer of life!

Fortunately, the Dawn is emerging from the chaos and darkness.... Through her re-born consciousness as a unit, a personality, a race builder, woman will become a mother only if she desires the child, and if she can give to the child, even before its birth, all that her nature and intellect can yield ... above all, understanding, reverence, and love, which is the only fertile soil for new life, a new being.

I have talked lately with a man who thinks Emma Goldman ought to have been hanged long ago. She’s directly or indirectly “responsible” for so many crimes. “Do you know what she’s trying to do?” I asked him.

“She’s trying to break up our government,” he responded heatedly.

“Have you ever read any of her ideas?”

“No.”

“Have you ever heard her lecture?”

“No! I should say not.”

In a play, that line would get a laugh. (It did in Man and Superman.) But in life it fares better. It gets serious consideration; it even has a certain prestige as a rather righteous thing to say.

Another man threw himself into the argument. “I know very little about Emma Goldman,” he said, “but it has always struck me that she’s simply trying to inflame people—particularly to do things that she’d never think of doing herself.” That charge can be answered best by a study of her life, which will show that she has spent her time doing things that almost no one else would dare to do.

In his Women as World Builders Floyd Dell said this: “Emma Goldman has become simply an advocate of freedom of every sort. She does not advocate violence any more than Ralph Waldo Emerson advocated violence. It is, in fact, as an essayist and speaker of the kind, if not the quality, of Emerson, Thoreau, and George Francis Train, that she is to be considered.” I think, rather, that she is to be considered fundamentally as something more definite than that:—as a practical Nietzschean.

I am incapable of listening, unaroused, to the person who believes something intensely, and who does intensely what she believes. What more simple—or more difficult? Most of us don’t know what we believe, or, if we do, we have the most extraordinary time trying to live it. Emma Goldman is so bravely consistent—which to many people is a confession of limitations. But if one is going to criticise her there are more subtle grounds to do it on. One of her frequent assertions is that she has no use for religion. That is like saying that one has no use for poetry: religion isn’t merely a matter of Christianity or Catholicism or Buddhism or any other classifiable quantity. Also, if it is true that the person to be distrusted is the one who has found an answer to the riddle, then Emma Goldman is to be discounted. Her convictions are presented with a sense of definite finality. But there’s something splendidly uncautious, something irresistibly stirring, about such an attitude. And whatever one believes, of one thing I’m certain: whoever means to face the world and its problems intelligently must know something about Emma Goldman. Whether her philosophy will change the face of the earth isn’t the supreme issue. As the enemy of all smug contentment, of all blind acquiescence in things as they are, and as the prophet who dares to preach that our failures are not in wrong applications of values but in the values themselves, Emma Goldman is the most challenging spirit in America.

No sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this, too, will be swept away.... Observe always that everything is the result of a change, ... get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and to make new ones like them.—Marcus Aurelius.

Chloroform

Mary Aldis and Arthur Davison Ficke

A sickening odour, treacherously sweet,

Steals through my sense heavily.

Above me leans an ominous shape,

Fearful, white-robed, hooded and masked in white.

The pits of his eyes

Peer like the port-holes of an armoured ship,

Merciless, keen, inhuman, dark.

The hands alone are of my kindred;

Their slender strength, that soon shall press the knife

Silver and red, now lingers slowly above me,

The last links with my human world ...

... The living daylight

Clouds and thickens.

Flashes of sudden clearness stream before me,—and then

A menacing wave of darkness

Swallows the glow with floods of vast and indeterminate grey.

But in the flashes

I see the white form towering,

Dim, ominous,

Like some apostate monk whose will unholy

Has renounced God; and now

In this most awful secret laboratory

Would wring from matter

Its stark and appalling answer.

At the gates of a bitter hell he stands, to wrest with eager fierceness

More of that dark forbidden knowledge

Wherefrom his soul draws fervor to deny.

The clouds have grown thicker; they sway around me

Dizzying, terrible, gigantic, pressing in upon me

Like a thousand monsters of the deep with formless arms.

I cannot push them back, I cannot!

From far, far off, a voice I knew long ago

Sounds faintly thin and clear.

Suddenly in a desperate rebellion I strive to answer,—

I strive to call aloud.—

But darkness chokes and overcomes me:

None may hear my soundless cry.

A depth abysmal opens

And receives, enfolds, engulfs me,—

Wherein to sink at last seems blissful

Even though to deeper pain....

O respite and peace of deliverance!

The silence

Lies over me like a benediction.

As in the earth’s first pale creation-morn

Among winds and waters holy

I am borne as I longed to be borne.

I am adrift in the depths of an ocean grey

Like seaweed, desiring solely

To drift with the winds and waters; I sway

Into their vast slow movements; all the shores

Of being are laved by my tides.

I am drawn out toward spaces wonderful and holy

Where peace abides,

And into golden aeons far away.

But over me

Where I swing slowly

Bodiless in the bodiless sea,

Very far,

Oh very far away,

Glimmeringly

Hangs a ghostly star

Toward whose pure beam I must flow resistlessly.

Well do I know its ray!

It is the light beyond the worlds of space,

By groping sorrowing man yet never known—

The goal where all men’s blind and yearning desire

Has vainly longed to go

And has not gone:—

Where Eternity has its blue-walled dwelling-place,

And the crystal ether opens endlessly

To all the recessed corners of the world,

Like liquid fire

Pouring a flood through the dimness revealingly;

Where my soul shall behold, and in lightness of wonder rise higher

Out of the shadow that long ago

Around me with mortality was furled.

I rise where have winds

Of the night never flown;

Shaken with rapture

Is the vault of desire.

The weakness that binds

Like a shadow is gone.

The bonds of my capture

Are sundered with fire!

This is the hour

When the wonders open!

The lightning-winged spaces

Through which I fly

Accept me, a power

Whose prisons are broken—

. . . . . .

... But the wonder wavers—

The light goes out.

I am in the void no more; changes are imminent.

Time with a million beating wings

Deafens the air in migratory flight

Like the roar of seas—and is gone ...

And a silence

Lasts deafeningly.

In darkness and perfect silence

I wander groping in my agony,

Far from the light lost in the upper ether—

Unknown, unknowable, so nearly mine.

And the ages pass by me,

Thousands each instant, yet I feel them all

To the last second of their dragging time.

Thus have I striven always

Since the world began.

And when it dies I still must struggle ...

. . . . . .

The voice I knew so long ago, like a muffled echo under the sea

Is coming nearer.

Strong hands

Grip mine.

And words whose tones are warm with some forgotten consolation,

Some unintelligible hope,

Drag me upward in horrible mercy;

And the cold once-familiar daylight glares into my eyes.

He stands there,

The white apostate monk,

Speaking low lying words to soothe me.

And I lift my voice out of its vales of agony

And laugh in his face,

Mocking him with astonishment of wonder.

For he has denied;

And I have come so near, so near to knowing ...

Then as his hand touches me gently, I am drawn up from the lonely abysses,

And suffer him to lead me back into the green valleys of the living.

“True to Life”

Edith Wyatt

A recent sincere and beautiful greeting from Mr. John Galsworthy to The Little Review suggests that the creative artist and the creative critic in America may wisely heed a saying of de Maupassant about a writer “sitting down before an object until he has seen it in the way that he alone can see it, seen it with the part of him which makes him This man and not That.”

Mr. Galsworthy adds: “And I did seem to notice in America that there was a good deal of space and not much time; and that without too much danger of becoming ‘Yogis,’ people might perhaps sit down a little longer in front of things than they seemed to do.”

What native observer of American writing will not welcome the justice of this comment? Surely the contemporary American poems, novels, tales, and critiques which express an individual and attentively-considered impression of any subject from our own life here are few: and these not, it would appear, greatly in vogue. Why? Everyone will have his own answer.

In replying to the first part of the question—why closely-considered individual impressions of our life are few—I think it should be said that the habit of respect for close attention of any kind is not among the American virtues. The visitor of our political conventions, the reader of our “literary criticism” must have noted a prevailing, shuffling, and perfunctory mood of casual disregard for the matter in hand. Many American people are indeed reared to suppose that if they appear to bestow an interested attention on the matter before them, some misunderstanding will ensue as to their own social importance. Nearly everyone must have noted with a sinking of the heart this attitude towards the public among library attendants, hotel-clerks, and plumbers. This abstraction is not, however, confined to the pursuers of any occupation, but to some degree affects us all. In the consciousness of our nation there appears to exist a mysterious though deep-seated awe for the prestige of the casual and the off-hand.

Especially we think it an unworthiness in an author that he should, as the phrase is, “take himself seriously.” We consider the attitude we have described as characterizing library attendants and hotel-clerks as the only correct one for writers—the attitude of a person doing something as it were unconsciously, a matter he pooh-poohs and scarcely cares to expend his energy and time upon in the grand course of his personal existence. You may hear plenty of American authors talk of “not taking themselves seriously” who, if they spoke with accuracy, should say that they regarded themselves as too important and precious to exhaust themselves by doing their work with conscience.

This dull self-importance insidiously saps in our country the respect for thoroughness and application characteristic of Germany; insidiously blunts in American penetrative powers the English faculty of being “keen” on a subject, recently presented to us with such grace in the young hero’s eager pursuits in Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street; and disparages lightly but often completely the growth of the fresh and varied spirit of production described in the passage of de Maupassant to which Mr. Galsworthy refers. This passage expresses the clear fire of attention our American habits lack, with a sympathy it is a pleasure to quote here in its entirety. De Maupassant says in the preface of Pierre et Jean:

For seven years I wrote verses, I wrote stories, I wrote novels. I even wrote a detestable play. Of these nothing survives. The master (Flaubert) read them all, and on the following Sunday at luncheon he would give me his criticism, and inculcate little by little two or three principles that sum up his long and patient lesson. “If one has any originality, the first thing requisite is to bring it out: if one has none, the first thing to be done is to acquire it.”

Talent is long patience. Everything which one desires to express must be considered with sufficient attention and during a sufficiently long time to discover in it some aspect which no one has yet seen or described. In everything there is still some spot unexplored, because we are accustomed to look at things only with the recollection of what others before us have thought of the subject we are contemplating. The smallest object contains something unknown. Let us find it. In order to describe a fire that flames and a tree on the plain, we must keep looking at that flame and that tree until to our eyes they no longer resemble any other tree, or any other fire.

This is the way to become original.

Having besides laid down this truth that there are not in the whole world two grains of sand, two specks, two hands, or two noses alike, Flaubert compelled me to describe in a few phrases a being or an object in such a manner as to clearly particularize it, and distinguish it from all the other beings or all the other objects of the same race, or the same species. “When you pass,” he would say, “a grocer seated at his shop door, a janitor smoking his pipe, a stand of hackney coaches, show me that grocer and that janitor, their attitude, their whole physical appearance, including also by a skilful description their whole moral nature so that I cannot confound them with any other grocer or any other janitor: make me see, in one word, that a certain cab-horse does not resemble the fifty others that follow or precede it.”

One underlying reason why American writers so seldom pursue such studies and methods as these is the prevailing disesteem for clearly-focussed attention we have described. Another reason is that the American writer of fiction who loves the pursuit of precise expression will indubitably have to face a number of difficulties which may perhaps not be readily apparent to the writers of other countries.

Naturally enough, in his more newly-settled, or rather his settling, nation, made up of many nationalities, the American writer who desires to “particularize” a subject from his country’s contemporary history, and “to distinguish this from all the other beings and all the other objects of the same race,” will have many more heretofore unexpressed conditions and basic circumstances to evoke in his reader’s mind than the German or French or English writer must summon.

For instance, the young French writer of de Maupassant’s narrative who was to call up out of the deep of European life the individuality of one single French grocer, would himself have and would address an audience who had—whether for better or worse (to my way of thinking, as it chances, for worse)—a fairly fixed social conception of the class of this retail merchant. The American writer who knows very well that General Grant once kept an unsuccessful shoe store, and that some of the most distinguished paintings the country possesses have been selected by the admirably-educated taste and knowledge of one or two public-spirited retail dry-goods merchants; and who also has seen gaunt and poverty-stricken Russian store-keepers standing among stalls of rotten strawberries in Jefferson Street market, in Chicago—that writer will neither speak from nor address this definite social conception according to mere character of occupation which I have indicated as a part of the French author’s means of exactitude in expression.

Nothing in our own random civilization, as it seems to me, is quite so fixed as that French grocer seated in his doorway, that de Maupassant and Flaubert mention with such charm. Nothing here is so neat as that. To convey social truth, the American writer interested in giving his own impression of a grocer in America, whether rich or poor or moderately prospering, will have to individualize him and all his surrounding condition more, and to classify him and all his surrounding condition less, than de Maupassant does, to convey the social truth his own inimitable sketches impart.

Again, ours is a very changing population. Its movement of life through one of our cities is attended with various and choppy and many-toned sounds communicating a varied rhythm of its own. To return to our figure of the retail tradesman—if this tradesman be in Chicago, for instance, he may neither be expressed clearly by typical classifications, nor shown without a genuine error in historical perspective against a static street background and trade life. This background must have change and motion, unless the writer is to copy into his own picture some foreign author’s rendition of a totally different place and state of human existence. The tune of the story’s text, too, should repeat for the reader’s inward ear the special experience of truth the author has perceived, the special ragged sound and rhythm of the motion of life he has heard telling the tale of that special place.

May one add what is only too obvious, and said because I think it may serve to explain in some degree why individual impressions of American life are not greatly encouraged in this country? It will be quite plain that such a limpid, clear-spaced, reverent style and stilled background as speaks in one of Mr. Galsworthy’s stories the tragedy of a London shoe-maker’s commercial ruin, would be false to all these values. It will be quite plain that such a bright, hard, definite manner as that which states with perfection the life of the circles of the petty government-official and his wife in The Necklace would be powerless to convey some of the elements we have selected as characterizing the American subject we have tried to suggest.

But many American reviewers and professional readers and publishers, who suppose themselves to be devoted to “realism” and to writing of “radical” tendency, believe not at all that the realistic writer should adopt de Maupassant’s method and incarnate for us his own American vision of the life he sees here, but simply that he should imitate the manner of de Maupassant. Many such American reviewers and professional readers and publishers believe not at all that the radical writer should find and represent for us some unseen branching root of certain American social phenomena which he himself has detected, but simply that he should copy some excellent drawing of English roots by Mr. Galsworthy, or of Russian roots by Gorky.

The craze for imitation in American writing is almost unbelievably pervasive. The author here, who is devoted to the attempt to speak his own truth—and the more devoted he is the more reverently, I believe, will he regard all other authors’ truth as theirs and derived exactly from their own point of view—will find opposed to him not only the great body of conventional romanticists and conservatives who will think he ought to stereotype and conventionalize his work into a poor, dulled contemporary imitation of the delightful narratives of Sir Walter Scott. He will also find opposed to him the great body of conventional “realists” and “radicals” who will think he ought to stereotype and conventionalize his work into a poor, blurred imitation of the keen narratives of Mr. H. G. Wells.

Sometimes these counsellors, not content with commending a copied manner, seriously urge—one might think at the risk of advising plagiarism—that the American author simply transplant the social ideas of some admirable foreign artist to one of our own local scenes. Thus, a year or two ago, in one of our critical journals, I saw the writer of a novel about Indiana state politicians severely blamed for not making the same observations on the subject that Mr. Wells had made about English national parliamentary life in The New Machiavelli. Not long since another American reviewer of “radical” tendency harshly censured the author of a novel about American under-graduate life in a New York college, because the daughter of the college president uttered views of sex and marriage unlike those expressed in Ann Veronica.

This sort of criticism—equally unflattering and obtuse, it appears to me, in its perception of the special characterizations of Mr. Wells’s thoughtful pages, and in its counsel to the artist depicting an alien topic to insert extraneous and unrelated views in his landscape—proceeds from a certain strange and ridiculous conception of truth peculiar to many persons engaged in the great fields of our literary criticism and of our publishing and political activities.

This is a conception of truth not at all as something capable of irradiating any scene on the globe, like light; but as some very definite and limited force, driving a band-wagon. People who possess this conception of truth seem to argue very reasonably that if Mr. Wells is “in” it, so to speak, with truth, and is saying “the thing” to say about sex or about the liberal party, then the intelligent author anywhere who desires to be “in” it with truth will surely get into this band-wagon of Mr. Wells’s and stand on the very planks he has placed in the platform of its particular wagonbed. It is an ironical, if tragic, comment on the intelligence of American reading that the driver I have chanced to see most frequently urged for authors here should be Mr. H. G. Wells, who has done probably more than any other living writer of English to encourage varied specialistic and non-partisan expression.

We have said that to tell his own truth the American writer will have to sit longer before his subject and will have more to do to express it, than if he chose it from a country of more ancient practices in art, and of longer ancestral sojourns. We have said that he will be urged not to tell his own truth considerably more than an English or German or French writer would be. These authors are at least not advised to imitate American expression, and they live in countries where the habit of copying the work of other artists is much less widely regarded as an evidence of sophistication than it is here.

The American writer must also face a marked historical peculiarity of our national letters. The publishing centres of England and of Germany and of France are in the midst of these nations. Outside the daily press, the greater part of the publishing business of our own country is in New York—situated in the northeast corner, nearly a continent away from many of our national interests and from many millions of our population. By an odd coincidence, outside the daily press, the field of our national letters in magazine and book publication seems to be occupied not at all with individual impressions of truth from over the whole country, but with what may be called the New York truth.

The young American author in the Klondike or in San Francisco who desires to sit long before his subject and to reveal its hitherto unrecorded aspect must do so with the clear knowledge that the field of publication for him in the East is already filled by our old friend the New York Klondike, scarcely changed by the disappearance of one dog or sweater from the early days of the gold discoveries; and that no earthquake has shaken the New York San Francisco.

Of course we know, because she almost annually reassures the country on these points, that New York instantly welcomes all original and fresh writing arising from the remotest borders of the nation; and that in all these matters she is not and never possibly could be dull. Yet one can understand how the Klondike author, interested, as Mr. Galsworthy advises, in seeing an object in “the way that he alone can see it” and “with the part of him which makes him This man and not That,” might feel a trifle dashed by New York’s way of showing her love of originality in spending nearly all the money and energy her publishers and reviewers have in advertising and in praising authors as the sixteenth Kipling of the Klondike or the thirtieth O. Henry, of California. This is apt to be bewildering, too, for the readers of Mr. Kipling and O. Henry, who have enjoyed in the tales of each of these men the truth told “with the part of him which makes him This man and not That.” It is possible to understand, too, how the young author in San Francisco may feel that since New York’s consciousness of his city has remained virtually untouched for eight years by the greatest cataclysm of nature on our continent, perhaps she overrates the extreme swiftness and sensitiveness of her reaction to novel impression from without; and might conceivably not hear a story of heretofore unexpressed aspects of San Francisco told by the truthful voice of one young writer.

These are some of my own guesses as to why individual impressions of our national life are few and why they are not greatly in vogue in America. Whether they be poor or good guesses they represent one Middle Western reader’s observation of some of the actual difficulties that will have to be faced in America by the writer who by temperament desires to follow that golden and beautiful way of Flaubert’s, which Mr. Galsworthy has mentioned.

This writer will doubtless get from these difficulties far more fun than he ever could have had without them. They are suggested here in the pages of The Little Review, not at all with the idea of discouraging a single traveler from setting out on that splendid road, but rather as a step towards the beginning of that true and long comradeship with effort that is worth befriending which our felicitous English well-wisher hopes may be The Little Review’s abiding purpose.

“Henceforth I ask not Good Fortune: I, myself, am Good Fortune.”

Impression

George Soule

Her life was late a new-built house—

Empty, with shining window panes,

Where neither sorrow nor carouse

Had left red stains.

A passing vagrant, least of men,

Entered and used; her hearth-fire shone.

She mellowed, he grew restless then—

Left her alone.

Now she is vacant as before,

Desolate through the weary whiles;

Yet play about the darkened door

Shadows of smiles.

Art and Life

George Burman Foster

Odium theologicum—it is a deadly thing. But the ridicule and obloquy, formerly characteristic of credal fanaticism, seem to have passed over in recent years into the camp of art connoisseurs. No denying it, it was a Homeric warfare that reverberated up and down the earth from land to land, and from century to century, between what was ever the “old” faith and the “new.” In this year of grace, however, it is the disciples of “classic” art—aureoled with the sanctity of some antiquity or idealism—and “modern” art—in whatever nuance or novelty of most disapproved and screaming modernity—who hereticize each other, who even deny each other right of domicile, save, perhaps, in the unvisited solitudes of interstellar spaces. To be sure, those august and frozen solitudes of the everlasting nothing may be conceivably preferable to the theological Inferno, though probably this question has not yet received the attention from critics and philanthropists that its importance would seem to merit.

At the outset it seemed as if the religious warfare had a certain advantage over the esthetic—it agitated more people, and seized men in their idiomatic and innermost interests, while, on the other side, but small and select circles participated in partisan questions and controversies respecting art. But it looks now as if it would soon be the other way around. The people face religious problems with less and less sympathy and understanding. But art, art of some kind and some degree, they are keenly alive as to that, and quick to appraise or to argue. The churches are ever emptier; the theatres, concert halls, museums, “movies,” ever fuller. A religious book—short of epoch-making—finds, at best, only a reluctant and panicky publisher; a new play, a new novel, see how many editions it passes through, how hard it is to draw at the libraries, even after the staff and all their friends and sweethearts have courteously had first chance at it!

Now, it is of no use to quarrel with this turn matters have taken. And we miss the mark if we say that it is all bad. Off moments come to the best of us when we grow a bit tired of being “uplifted” and “reformed.” Humanity has turned to art and, in doing so, has, on some side of its life, moved forward apace, mounted to higher modes of existence, and, whether the church knows it or not, along the steeps of Parnassus and in the home of the muses has heard some music and caught some glimpses of the not too distant fatherland of the divine and the eternal.

First-rate spirits of light and leading have pointed the way to a new esthetic culture—prophetic spirits who in blackest night when deep sleep had fallen upon most men saw the rosy-fingered dawn of our new day. It was to be a day when beauty should be bidden to lead the dance at the ball of life. There were serious philosophers—there was Kant, who contemplated art as the keystone in the sublime structure which modern knowledge and moral will should be summoned to erect in life. There was Schopenhauer, to whom art was the unveiling of the riddle of the world, the most intimate revelation of the divine mystery of life. There was the hero of Baireuth, who, in his artistic creations, summed up all the spiritual and moral forces of humanity, and made them fruitful for the rebirth and fruition of our modern day.

Among these prophets of a new esthetic culture, Friedrich Nietzsche occupies a quite special place, and influences the course of coming events. As a most enthusiastic apostle of the gospel of a world-redeeming art he first flung his fire-brand into the land, but only to scorn and blaspheme soon thereafter the very gods he had formerly so passionately worshipped; now degrading them to idols. His faith in art, not this art or that, but in all art, in art as such, pathetically wavered. Still the artist in him himself did not die; its eye was undimmed and its bow abode in strength. And though he later confronted every work of art with a malevolent and exasperating interrogation, all this was only his pure and pellucid soul wrestling for better and surer values, for new and nobler revelations, of the artistic genius. Indeed, it was precisely in these interrogations that he was at once our liberator and our leader—our liberator from the frenzy into which the overfoaming enthusiasm as regards art had transported men; our leader to a livelier, loftier beauty summoned to the creation of the humanest, divinest robes for the adornment of humanity as a whole.

The great movement and seething in the artistic life of our age signifies at the same time a turning point in our entire cultural life. This turning point discloses new perspective into vast illimitable distances where new victories are to be achieved by new struggles. The great diremption in our present world, making men sick and weak, calling for relaxation and convalescence, appears at a definite stage as the opposition between life and art. Life is serious, art is gay—so were we taught. Seriousness and gaiety—it was the fatality of our time that these could not be combined. So art and life were torn asunder. Art was no serious matter, no vital matter, satisfying a true and necessary human requirement. Art was a luxury, a sport, and since but few men were in a position to avail themselves of such luxury, art came to be the prerogative of a few rich people. Down at the bottom, in homes of want and misery, life’s tragedies were real and fearful; life was real, indeed, life was earnest, indeed; at the top, however, pleasures claimed the senses and thoughts of men; so much so, that even tragedies served but to amuse; tragedies were an illusion of the senses, not realities of life and pain. What God had joined together man had put asunder—and there was art without life, life without art, and both art and life suffering from ailments which neither understood.

There was a time when men worked, too, but it was a beautiful halcyon time, when pleasure and joy throbbed in the very heart of the work itself; when a sunny serenity suffused life’s profoundest seriousness. Art pervaded all life, active in all man’s activities, present in every nook and corner whither his vagrant feet wandered. Indeed, art was the very life of man, revealing his strength, his freedom, his creativeness, with which he fashioned things after his own image and according to his own likeness. Every craftsman was an artist, every peasant a poet. Man put his soul into all that he said and did, all that he lived; his work was a work of art, his speech a song, his life beauty. No man lived by bread alone; everyone heard and had a word that was the True Bread. His cathedrals—domes of many-colored glass—preached it to him; his actors sang it to him; even his priests were artists. With a sort of divine humor, man thus subjected to himself all the anxiety and need of life.

Then, later, man came to think that he could live by bread alone. Even the True Bread came to be mere bread—public influence; political power. And then man’s poor soul hungered. And when he longed for a Living Word that was not mere bread, he was given printer’s ink and the “sacred letter” of the Bible. But this—ah, this was no soul’s food. So the soul lost its soul. Then, as man had no soul to work with, he had to work with his head, his arms, his feet. Man ceased to be an artist who breathes his living soul into his life, an artist who illumined all the seriousness of life with the sunshine of his living love. Would he art, he could not make it, he had to buy it. Could he not buy it, he had to do without it. Thus, life became as jejune and rational as a Protestant service, where, to be sure, there was no priest more, but also no artist, only scribe and theologian—where religion became dogmatics, faith a sum in arithmetic, Christianity a documentarily deposited judicial process between God and man. To be sure, under certain circumstances, decoration and color, even pomp and magnificence, may be found in this church, but no living connection between the outward appearance of these churches and their inner and peculiar service. Thus, too, our private dwellings have lost living union between their appointments and their inmates. What all are curious to know about these houses is whether the men who dwell in them are rich or poor, not whether they have souls, and what lives in their souls, should they have any.

And because art had no soul of its own more, it became patronizing and mendicant—coquetting for the favors of the rich and powerful, sitting at their tables, perhaps even picking up the crumbs that fall beneath the tables. Art, ah, art sought bread—mere bread—and adopted the sorry principle that to get bread was the sacredest of all duties.

Art without life, life without art! Then came that mighty movement of spirits to bring art and life together again, to reconquer and recreate and reestablish a view of life in which man should learn to see and achieve beauty once yet again. Of that movement, Friedrich Nietzsche was the purest and intensest herald. Bold, fiery spirit, with words that burn, he uttered what had been for a long time a soul-burden of all deeper spirits. This burden of souls was that an art creation should go on in every human life as its highest and holiest calling; that, without the living effectuation of the artistic power of the human soul, all human culture would serve but beastliness and barbarity.

To this end our poet-philosopher returns to the Urgrund, the abyss of nature’s life, from whose mysterious deep all tempestuous, wild impulses tumble forth and struggle for form and expression in man. It is life which seeks death in order to renew itself in the painful pleasure of its destruction, perceived but then by man in the thrill of delight which prepares the way for his most original eternal revelation. To breed pleasure from pain; to suck forces of life from the most shocking tragedies; to eavesdrop on the brink of the abysmal so as to fashion sweet phantoms in the divine intoxication of the soul,—this is music, this is art, in this, man struggles beyond and above his whole contradictory nature, transfigures death, creates forms and figures in which he celebrates his self-redemption from seriousness, from the curse of existence. Here, at last, art is no sport, no fiddle-faddle, but at once highest and gayest seriousness. It returns from the service of death which it has performed, to its life, which it receives from “every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” Herein lies the over-powering, the prophetic, in this Nietzschean preaching of art. It tells us that we are very far from comprehending life when we have but measured its length and breadth with yardstick and square; that nature is far different from what scholars have figured it out to be, or from what investigators have seen of it with telescope and microscope. It teaches us to listen to the old eternal murmurs of the spirit, whose sigh we hear indeed, but whence it comes and whither it goes we never know—murmurs and sighs which bring forth the elementary forces, instincts, passions, and friendships in man, which men fashion and shape, regulate and direct indeed, but whose coming and going, whose ebbing and flowing, is not within their power. Inspiration, divine in-breathing—a dead concept as applied by theologians to their Bible—comes into its own again in human nature as a whole, it is the true element in man’s life, by virtue of which the soul feels within itself a creative life—its own proof that its dependence is no slave-service, but freedom; that its deepest suffering of pain is itself creative life, creative pleasure.

Is it, now, the tragic fatality of a sick soul, is it the demoniac play of a spirit of negation when precisely the very preacher of this grandiose art-prophecy goes astray in his own preaching, when he finally thrusts it from him, with shrill laughter? The poet-philosopher begins to think concerning his preaching! Art makes the thinker’s heart heavy! Art ever speaks a language which thought cannot express. Art strikes chords in the human heart, and there are at once intimations of a Beyond of all thought. And the thinker of today has bidden good-bye to every Beyond of his thought. Nothing unthinkable was to be left for the feelings. So the thinker felt a stab in every art for his thinker’s heart, a doubt whether he should hold fast to the incomprehensible or sell himself to the devil of the universally comprehensible. And this doubt becomes an open confession of sin in the Zarathustra poesy: poets—and Zarathustra himself was a poet—lie too much! It is adulterated wine which they set before the thirsty. They muddy all their streams so that they shall appear deep. Into the kingdom of clouds they go, and build their air-castles on all too airy foundations. Thus, Zarathustra, poet, grows weary of their lies; he is a bit tired even of himself. And so, now, this doubt-respecting art slips into the soul of even its most enthusiastic prophets—nor are they the worst artists at whose souls these doubts gnaw! To create a beautiful culture in which man shall receive a higher revelation of life, and mount to a higher stage of his development, to this, art which receives its consecration in dizziness and dream, is not yet called. In fact, these artists do lie too much! They seek life indeed, they hunger for life; but, because life is too living to them, too natural, they create an artificial glow in whose heat they think they first have life. Thus, the second deception becomes worse than the first. The devil of matter-of-fact prose is driven out by the beelzebub of over-stimulated nerves, and men flee from the monotony of every-day life to the refinement of sensibility, which art shall superinduce. Poets do lie too much, not because they tell us fairy tales—fairy tales could be the beautifulest, holiest truths! But because they simulate feelings they do not have—feelings which arise in them not naturally but narcotically! Sculptors, painters, do lie too much, not because they create forms and colors which no man’s eyes have ever seen, but because they create their own selves unfaithfully—an alien life which they have somewhere inoculated themselves with and given out as their own. Even architects lie too much, because they compel their works to speak a foreign language, as if stone should be ashamed to speak as stone, wood as wood, iron as iron!

The Nietzschean doubt respecting art—today this has become a demand for truth in art and for truthfulness in the artist! And from these a third—the demand for simplicity! And all this is of a piece with the purpose to live a simple life.

Man does not live by bread alone. It is a living question for the sake of future humanity that our art shall give the True Bread to the heart of man, so that we may form a life in us and around us, a life whereon shall not repose the dead weight of a culture artificially burdened with a thousand anxieties and cares, but a life wherein man shall breathe freer, because he breathes the fresh free air of life itself. Beautiful life, artistic culture; this means the opposite of what many mean by it today—it means, not upholstered chairs, not more cushions and carpets, not motlier pictures on the walls, and not a pleroma of all varieties of ornaments overloading stands and tables, but it means a life full of soul, warm with the sunshine of love, it means that all man does, all that environs him, shall find through eye and ear the mystic pathway to the heart, to bear witness there of a joy and an ardor, of a freedom and a truth, inspiring men to cry: It is good to be here, let us build tabernacles! For such beautiful life, so little is required, yet so much! So little sumptuousness, so much soul! So little money, so much man!

Patriots

ON THE “7:50”

Parke Farley

As you go in and out upon the train,

You’re always reading poetry?

... Yes.

At first it slightly did embarrass me

To have the people stare,

Like you, over my shoulder,

Catching, as it were, a sudden flashing thigh,

Or gleam of sunlight on a truth laid bare,

Then sizing me up from the tail of the eye.

I used to shield the books, and myself, too,

But now I have grown bolder—I don’t care ...

They say this morning train from Lake Forest to Chicago

Carries more money, more living money

Than any train of its length and size in the world.

There’s the Club car, for Bridge, and then the Smoker,

And four or five other coaches.

It makes one feel rich merely to ride upon it ...

No, it’s not Keats or Shelley—yes, well enough,

But these are living.

I like them young and strenuous,