Chapter II

An old man runs down a little yellow road
To an out-flung, white thicket uncovered by morning.
So shall I swing to the white sharpness of death.

Preparedness.
The Road to Universal Slaughter

EMMA GOLDMAN

Ever since the beginning of the European conflagration the people of Europe have thrown themselves into the flames of war like panic-stricken cattle. And now America, pushed to the very brink by unscrupulous politicians, by ranting demagogues, and by military sharks, is preparing for the same terrible feat.

In the face of this approaching disaster it behooves men and women not yet overcome by the war madness to raise their protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated upon them.

America is essentially the melting pot. No national unit composing it is in a position to boast of superior race purity, particular historic mission, or higher culture. Yet the jingoes and war speculators are filling the air with the sentimental slogan of hypocritical nationalism, “America for Americans,” “America first, last, and all the time.” This cry has caught the popular fancy from one end of the country to the other. In order to maintain America military preparedness must be engaged in at once. A billion dollars of the people’s sweat and blood is to be expended for dreadnaughts and submarines for the army and the navy, all to protect this precious America.

The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but the America of the privileged class; the class which robs and exploits the masses, and controls their lives. And it is no less pathetic that so few people realize that preparedness never leads to peace, but is indeed the road to universal slaughter.

The American military ring with its Roosevelts, its Garrisons, its Daniels, and lastly its Wilsons, is moving the very heavens to place the militaristic heel upon the necks of the American people—using the same methods of the German diplomats to saddle the masses with Prussian militarism. If it is successful America will be hurled into the storm of blood and tears now devastating the countries of Europe.

Forty years ago Germany proclaimed the slogan: “Germany above everything. Germany for the Germans, first, last and always. We want peace; therefore we must prepare for war. Only a well-armed and thoroughly-prepared nation can maintain peace, can command respect, can be sure of its national integrity.” And Germany continued to prepare, thereby forcing the other nations to do the same. The European war is the fruition of the gospel of military preparedness.

Since the war began, miles of paper and oceans of ink have been used to prove the barbarity, the cruelty, the oppression of Prussian militarism. Conservatives and radicals alike are giving their support to the Allies for no other reason than to help crush that militarism, in the presence of which, they say, there can be no peace or progress in Europe. But though America grows fat on the manufacture of munition and war loans to the Allies to help crush Prussianism, the same cry is now being raised in America which, if carried into national action, will build up an American militarism far more terrible than German or Prussian militarism could ever be; because nowhere in the world has capitalism become so brazen in its greed as in America, and nowhere is the state so ready to kneel at the feet of capital.

Like a plague the mad spirit of militarism is sweeping the country, infesting the clearest heads and staunchest hearts. National security leagues, with cannon as their emblem of protection, naval leagues with women in their lead, have sprung up all through the United States. Americanization societies with well-known liberals as members, they who but yesterday decried the patriotic clap-trap of today, are now lending themselves to the befogging of the minds of the people, to the building-up of the same destructive institutions in America which they are directly and indirectly helping to pull down in Germany—militarism, the destroyer of youth, the raper of woman, the annihilator of the best in the race, the very mower of life.

Even Woodrow Wilson, who not so long ago talked of “a nation too proud to fight,” who in the beginning of the war ordered prayers for peace, who in his proclamations spoke of the necessity of watchful waiting—even he has been whipped into line. He has now joined his worthy colleagues in the jingo movement, echoing their clamor for preparedness and their howl of “America for Americans.” The difference between Wilson and Roosevelt is this: Roosevelt, the bully, uses the club; Wilson, the historian, the college professor, wears the smooth polished university mask, but underneath it he, like Roosevelt, has but one aim: to serve the big interests, to add to those who are growing phenomenally rich by the manufacture of military preparedness.

Woodrow Wilson, in his address before the Daughters of the American Revolution, gave his case away when he said: “I would rather be beaten than ostracized.” To stand out against the Bethlehem, Du Pont, Baldwin, Remington, Winchester metallic cartridges and the rest of the armament ring means political ostracism and death. Wilson knows that; therefore he betrays his original position, goes back on the bombast of “too proud to fight,” and howls as loudly as any other cheap politician for preparedness and national glory, for the silly pledge the Navy League women intend to impose upon every school child: “I pledge myself to do all in my power to further the interests of my country, to uphold its institutions and to maintain the honor of its name and its flag. As I owe everything in life to my country, I consecrate my heart, mind, and body to its service and promise to work for its advancement and security in times of peace and to shrink from no sacrifice or privation in its cause should I be called upon to act in its defense for the freedom, peace, and happiness of our people.”

To uphold the institutions of our country—that is it; the institutions which protect and sustain a handful of people in the robbery and plunder of the masses, the institutions which drain the blood of the native as well as of the foreigner and turn it into wealth and power; the institutions which rob the alien of whatever originality he brings with him and in return give him cheap Americanism, whose glory consists in mediocrity and arrogance.

The very proclaimers of “America first” have long before this betrayed the fundamental principles of real Americanism, of the kind of Americanism Jefferson had in mind when he said that the best government is that which governs least; the kind of an America David Thoreau worked for when he proclaimed that the best government is the one that doesn’t govern at all; or the other truly great Americans who aimed to make of this country a haven of refuge, who hoped that all the disinherited and oppressed coming to these shores would give character, quality and meaning to the country. That is not the America of the politicians and the munition speculators. Their America has been powerfully portrayed by a young New York sculptor I know; he has made a hard cruel hand with long lean merciless fingers, crushing in over the heart of the foreigner, squeezing out its blood in order to coin dollars.

No doubt Woodrow Wilson has reason to defend these institutions. But what an ideal to hold out to the young generation! And how is a military-drilled and trained people to defend freedom, peace, and happiness? This is what Major General O’Ryan has to say of an efficiently trained generation: “The soldier must be so trained that he becomes a mere automation; he must be so trained that it will destroy his initiative; he must be so trained that he is turned into a machine. The soldier must be forced into the military noose; he must be jacked up; he must be ruled by his superiors with pistol in hand.”

This was not said by a Prussian Junker; not by a German barbarian; not by Treitska or Bernhardi, but by an American major general. And he is right. You cannot conduct war with equals; you cannot have militarism with free born man; you must have slaves, automatons, machines, obedient disciplined creatures, who will move, act, shoot, and kill at the command of their superiors. That is preparedness, and nothing else.

It has been reported that among the speakers before the Navy League was Samuel Gompers. I have long ceased to believe what is reported in the press. But if that is true, it signalizes the greatest outrage upon labor at the hands of its own leaders. Preparedness is directed not only against the external enemy; it aims much more at the internal enemy. It is directed against that element of labor which has learned not to hope for anything from our institutions, that awakened part of the working people who have realized that the war of the classes underlies all wars among nations, and that if war is justified at all it is the war against economic dependence and political slavery, the two dominant issues involved in the struggle of the classes.

Already militarism has been acting its bloody part in every economic conflict, with the approval and support of the state. Where was the protest from Washington when “our men, women and children” were killed in Ludlow? Where was that high-sounding outraged protest contained in the note to Germany? Or is there any difference in killing “our men, women and children” in Ludlow or on the high seas? Yes, indeed. The men, women, and children at Ludlow were working people, belonging to the disinherited of the earth, foreigners who had to be given a taste of the glories of Americanism, while the passengers of the Lusitania represented wealth and station; therein lies the difference.

Preparedness, therefore, will only add to the power of the privileged few and help them to subdue, to enslave, and crush labor. Surely Gompers must know that, and if he joins the howl of the military clique he must stand condemned as a traitor to the cause of labor.

It will be with preparedness as it has been with all the other institutions in our confused life which were created for the good of the people and which have accomplished the very reverse. Supposedly, America is to prepare for peace; but in reality it will prepare for the cause of war. It has always been so and it will continue to be so until nation refuses to fight against nation, and until the people of the world stop preparing for slaughter. Preparedness is like the seed of a poisonous plant; placed in the soil, it will bear poisonous fruit. The European mass destruction is the fruit of that poisonous seed. It is imperative that the American workers realize this before they are driven by the jingoes into the madness that is forever haunted by the spectre of danger and invasion; they must know that to prepare for peace means to invite war, means to unloose the furies of death over land and sea.

You cannot build up a standing army and then throw it back into a box like tin soldiers. Armies equipped to the teeth with highly-developed instruments of murder and backed by their military interests have their own dynamic functions. We have but to examine into the nature of militarism to realize the truth of this contention.

Militarism consumes the strongest and most productive elements of each nation. Militarism swallows the largest part of the national revenue. Even in times of peace almost nothing is spent on education, art, literature, and science in comparison with the amount devoted to militarism; while in times of war everything else is set at naught: all life stagnates, all effort is curtailed, the very sweat and blood of the masses are used to feed this insatiable monster—militarism. Under such circumstances it must become more arrogant, more aggressive, more bloated with its own importance. If for no other reason, it is out of surplus energy that militarism must act to remain alive; therefore it will find an enemy or create one artificially. In this civilized purpose militarism is sustained by the state, protected by the laws of the land, fostered by the home and the school, and glorified by public opinion. In other words, the function of militarism is to kill. It cannot live except through murder.

But the most dominant factor of military preparedness, and the one which inevitably leads to war, is the creation of group interests which consciously and deliberately work for the increase of armament whose purposes are furthered by creating the war hysteria. This group interest embraces all those engaged in the manufacture and sale of munition and in military equipment for personal gain and profit. For instance, the family Krupp, which owns the largest cannon munition plant in the world; its sinister influence in Germany, and in fact in many other countries, extends to the press, the school, the church, and to statesmen of highest rank. Shortly before the war, Karl Liebknecht, the one brave public man in Germany now, brought to the attention of the Reichstag the fact that the family Krupp had in its employ officials of the highest military position, not only in Germany, but in France and in other countries. Everywhere its emissaries have been at work, systematically inciting national hatreds and antagonisms. The same investigation brought to light an international war supply trust which gives a hang for patriotism, or for love of the people, but which uses both to incite war and to pocket millions of profits out of the terrible bargain.

It is not at all unlikely that the history of the present war will trace its origin to this international murder trust. But is it always necessary for one generation to wade through oceans of blood and heap up mountains of human sacrifice that the next generation may learn a grain of truth from it all? Can we of today not profit by the cause which led to the European war, can we not learn that it was preparedness, thorough and efficient preparedness on the part of Germany and the other countries for military aggrandizement and material gain; above all can we not realize that preparedness in America must and will lead to the same result, the same barbarity, the same senseless sacrifice of life? Is America to follow suit, is it to be turned over to the American Krupps, the American military cliques? It almost seems so when one hears the jingo howls of the press, the blood and thunder tirades of bully Roosevelt, the sentimental twaddle of our college-bred President.

The more reason for those who still have a spark of libertarianism and humanity left to cry out against this great crime, against the outrage now being prepared and imposed upon the American people. It is not enough to claim being neutral; a neutrality which sheds crocodile tears with one eye and keeps the other riveted upon the profits from war supplies and war loans, is not neutrality. It is merely hypocritical. Nor is it enough to join the bourgeois pacifists, who proclaim peace among the nations, while helping to perpetuate the war among the classes, a war which in reality is at the bottom of all other wars.

It is this war of the classes that we must concentrate upon, and in that connection the war against false values, against evil institutions, against all social atrocities. Those who appreciate the urgent need of cooperating in great struggles must oppose military preparedness imposed by the state and capitalism for the destruction of the masses. They must organize the preparedness of the masses for the overthrow of both capitalism and the state. Industrial and economic preparedness is what the workers need. That alone leads to revolution at the bottom as against mass destruction from on top. That alone leads to true internationalism of labor against Kaiserdom, kingdom, diplomacies, military cliques, and bureaucracies. That alone will give the people the means to take their children out of the slums, out of the sweat-shops and the cotton-mills; that alone will enable them to inculcate in the coming generation a new ideal of brotherhood, to rear them in play and song and beauty; to bring up men and women, not automatons; that alone will enable woman to become the real mother of the race, to give to the world creative men, and not soldiers who destroy. That alone leads to economic and social freedom, and does away with war.

Ellie

MARY ALDIS

She came to do my nails.
Came in my door and stood before me waiting,
A great big lummox of a girl—
A continent.
Her dress was rusty black
And scant,
Her hat, a melancholy jumble of basement counter bargains.
Her sullen eyes,
Like a whipped animal’s,
Shone out between her silly bulging cheeks and puffy forehead.

She dropped her coat upon a chair
And waited;
Then, at a word, busied herself
With files and delicate scissors,
Sweet-smelling oils and my ten finger tips.

She proved so deft and silent
I bade her come again;
And twice a week
While summer dawned and flushed and waned
She used me in her parasitic trade.
The dress grew rustier,
The hat more melancholy,
And Ellie fatter.

Each time she came I wondered as she worked
If thought lay anywhere
Behind that queer uncouthness.
She had a trick of seizing with her eyes
Each passing thing,
An insatiate greediness for something out of reach;
And yet she seemed enwrapped
In a kind of solemn patience,
Large, aloof and waiting.
We hardly ever spoke—
I could not think of anything worth saying;
One does not chatter with a continent.

Finally it was homing time;
The seashore town was raw and desolate
And idlers flitted.
The last day Ellie came
Her calm was gone, she had been crying.
Fat people never ought to cry;
It’s awful....
The hot drops fell upon my hand
While Ellie dropped the scissors suddenly
And sniffed and blew and sobbed
In disconcerting and unreserved abandonment.
I said the usual things;
I would have patted her but for the grease,
But Ellie was not comforted.
Not until the storm was spent
And only little catching breaths were left
I got the reason.
“I’m so fat,” she gulped, “so awful, awful fat
The boys won’t look at me.”
And then it came, the stammered passionate cry:
Could I not help?
Could I not find a medicine?
We talked and talked
And when at dusk she went, a teary smile
Hovered a moment on her mouth
And in those sullen, swollen eyes
A little hope perhaps;
I did not know.

The city and its interests soon engulfed me.
A letter or two,
A doctor’s vague advice to bant and exercise,
And Ellie and her woes passed from my mind
Until, as summer dawned again,
I heard that she was dead.
A curious letter written stiffly,
From Ellie’s mother,
Told me I was invited to the funeral
“By wish of the Deceased.”

Wondering I travelled to the little town
Where the sea beat and groaned
And sorrowed endlessly,
And made my way down the steep street
To Ellie’s door.
Her mother met me in the hall
And motioned,—
“She wanted you to see her,”
Then ushered me into an awful place, the parlor—
A place of emerald plush and golden oak
Set round with pride and symmetry,
And in the midst
A black and silver coffin—
Ellie’s coffin.
Raising the lid she pointed and I looked.

Somewhere in Florence Mino da Fiesole
Has made a tomb
Where deathless beauty lies with upturned face.
Two gentle hands, palms meeting,
Touch with their pointed forefingers
A delicate chin, and over the vibrant body
Clings a white robe
Enshrouding chastely
Warm curving lines of adolescent grace.
No sleeper this,—
The figure glows, alert, awake, aware,
As if some sudden ecstacy had stolen life
And held imprisoned there
The moment of attainment
Rapt, imperishable and fair.

Even so lay Ellie,
And when from somewhere far I heard
The mother’s voice
I listened vacantly.

The woman chattered on,
“The dress you know, white chiffon, like a wedding dress—
I never knew she had it,
She must ’a made it by herself.
It’s queer it fitted perfectly
An’ her all thin like that—
She must ’a thought—”

Then black-robed relatives came streaming in
To look at Ellie.
I watched them start
And look around for explanation.
The mother pinched my arm:
“Don’t ask me anything now,” she whispered;
“Come back tonight.”

Then old, old words were sung and prayed and droned,
While everybody dutifully cried,
And when the village parson
Rhythmically proclaimed—
And this mortal shall put on immortality,—
With a great welcoming
And a great lightening
I knew at last the ancient affirmation.
When evening came I found the mother
Sitting amidst her golden oak and plush
In a kind of isolated stateliness.

She led me in.
“’Twas the stuff she took that did it,”
She began; “I never knew till after she was dead.
The bottles in the woodshed, hundreds of ’em
All labelled “Caldwell’s Great Obesity Cure
Warranted Safe and Rapid.”
Oh ain’t it awful?” and she fell to crying miserably;
“But wasn’t she real pretty in her coffin?”
And then she cried again
And clung to me.

The Ecstasy of Pain

(Fragmentary Reflections on the Art of Przybyszewski)

ALEXANDER S. KAUN

... Out of the effervescent hurricane of light burst forth a terrible song.

Despair, as if thousands of graves had torn open. As if the heavens had rent asunder, and the Son of Man had descended upon the earth to judge the good and the wicked. Millions of hands rose up to heaven in a mad horror of death—hands that prayed for mercy and charity. He heard a beastly roar, which like a geyser of a smoking sea of blood spurtled upward; and above all this he saw bony fingers that twisted and writhed in convulsions of fear and shouted to heaven: “Ad te clamamus exules filii Hevae, ad te suspiramus gementes et flentes.”

And he saw a multitudinous crowd that was lashed with an insane ecstacy of destruction, and above them a heaven that yawned with disease and fire. He saw how those miserable creatures wriggled and serpentined in hellish madnesses of life; he saw the bleeding backs furrowed by the whips into chunks; he saw all humanity demented, obsessed, with an inspired frenzy in the bestialized eyes.

Slowly disappeared the procession of the doomed; wild cries intoxicated with despair died away in a death-rattle, and a sun, red like copper, shed a chatoyant green light on the puddles of blood.

“Ad te clamamus exules filii Hevae!”

* * * * *

This is a fragment from an early poem of Przybyszewski, _De Profundis_. It is a proper background to all the works of the Pole, to his plays, essays, novels, poems. At least I see him in that light.

A reminiscence: On a rainy autumn night I went to hear him lecture. “... and if the psychologists will find contradictions in my words—I shall not feel dismayed. There are contradictions that are dearer to me than most perfect consequentialities.” From the dim light of the platform ached a face distorted with contempt and suffering, with the grim clairvoyance of the Beyond. At moments the eyebrows leaped up and bulged the forehead into thick, strained furrows, and the eyes suddenly burst in a flash that revealed unknown worlds, twisting your soul with awe and mystery. But soon the flame would extinguish, and the face would resume the masque of contemptuous weariness; the mouth-corners congealed a satanic would-be smile that prepared one for his famous “Heh-heh.” That face haunted me for many days and nights, as if my inner vision had been scalded by an unearthly chimera. My friends, who have seen his exaggerated portrait painted by Krzyzanowski, will understand me. Those who will read his works (if they are translated), will understand me. _Homo Sapiens_[1] is but a nuance of his multiplex creative spirit, though perhaps a most characteristic nuance. Przybyszewski, like Nietzsche, like Wilde, is a unique mosaique, in which the personality, the artist, his life and his works, are inseparable, indivisible units of the wonderful whole. Who can fathom this hellish cosmos, this mare tenebrarum of the modern man’s soul, which the mad Pole has traversed and penetrated to the bottom, and has cast out shrieking monsters and gargoyles illuminated with blinding, dazzling, infernal flames?

[1] _Homo Sapiens, by Stanislaw Przybyszewski. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf._

I cannot. Perhaps only pale glimpses of reflections.

* * * * *

Those who have heard Przybyszewski play Chopin tell us that no virtuoso can compare with his creative interpretation of his melancholy compatriot. In his profound essay on _Chopin and Nietzsche_ I have been impressed not so much with the morbid theory as with the characteristic feature present in all his work—the reflection of his own personality. In his favorite artists, in his heroes, in his women, he has painfully sought an expression of his restless, boundless self. Thus Chopin becomes one of the numerous selves of Przybyszewski. Let me picture the Composer in the light of the Poet.

Specifically Slavic features: extreme subtility of feeling, easy excitability, passionateness and sensuousness, predilection for luxury and extravagance, and, chief of all, a peculiar melancholy lyricism, which is nothing but the expression of the most exalted egoism, whose sole and highest criterion is his own “I.” These, and the profound melancholy of his native limitless plains with their desolate sandy expanses, with the lead-skies over them, have been influences keenly contradicting his flexible, light vivaciousness of the Gallic, his coquettish effeminacy, his love for life and light.

Subtracting the last two strokes, who is it: Chopin or Przybyszewski?

The trait most obviously common to both Poles is the unquenchable yearning, the eternal Sehnsucht, which filters through all their productions. In neither of them was it the yearning of healthy natures, in whom, as in a mother’s womb, it bears the embryo of fruitful life; it is not the yearning of Zarathustra “in a sunny rapture of ecstacy greeting new, unknown gods with an exalted ‘Evoi’!” Chopin’s longing, as reflected in Przybyszewski, is tinted with the pale color of anemia peculiar to a representative of a degenerate aristocracy (the Poet’s progenitor died of delirium tremens), with his transparent skin projecting the tiniest veins, with his slender figure and prolongated limbs that breathe with each movement incomparable gracefulness, with his overdeveloped intellect which shines in his eyes, as in the eyes of frail children who are doomed to early death. This longing is the incessant palpitation of a nervous, over-delicate nature, something akin to the constant irritability of open wounds, the continuous change of ebbs and flows of morbid sensitiveness, the eternal dissatisfaction of acute emotions, the fatigableness of a too-susceptible spirit, the weariness of one oversatiated with suffering. Yet this longing has in it also wild passion, “the convulsive agony of deadly horror,” self-damnation and thirst for destruction, delirium and madness of one who strains his gaze into the vast—and sees nothing.

Indeed I should like to hear Chopin’s _Preludes_ recreated under the longing fingers of Stanislaw.

* * * * *

Stanislaw Przybyszewski. Do pronounce it correctly, that you may hear the sound of rain swishing through tall grass. Przybyszewski has come to know himself so thoroughly and unreservedly, and, in himself, to know the modern man of the widest intellectual and artistic horizons, through a long excruciating internal purgatory. From the study of architecture and general aesthetics his restless, ever-searching spirit hurled him into natural sciences in the hope of finding positive answers to his burning questions. He came out loaded with an enormous baggage of facts and information; yet he had not quenched his everlasting dissatisfaction, but had acquired a sceptical “heh-heh” towards life and knowledge. He plunged into psychology, and found Nietzsche—to him the deepest searcher, possessor of the keen eye of a degenerate, which like a wintersun sheds its light with morbid intensity upon snowfields, clearly illuminating each crystal. With a “heh-heh” he dismissed the Loneliest One. For was not Nietzsche driven to create for himself a superman, as a consolation, as a hope, as “a soft pillow upon which could rest his weary inflamed head”? Did he for one moment believe in that ghost which he erected in the heavy hours of despair? Nonsense. Heh-heh. Had not his Falk, his homo sapiens, been crushed in his struggle to attain liberation and supermanship? Recall Falk’s self-rending meditations: “Conscience! Heh-heh-heh! Conscience! How ridiculously silly is your superman! Herr Professor Nietzsche left out of account tradition and culture which created conscience in the course of hundreds of centuries.... Oh, how ridiculous is your superman sans conscience!” Thus, step after step, killing god after god, burning his ships behind him, the all-knowing, the all-denying degenerate-nobleman Slav-cosmopolite has ascended the loftiest summit, or, as he would rather say, has descended into deepest hell—Art. An equipment hardly appropriate for an artist who sees “Life Itself” in color and fragrance and petals and varicolored mornings and varicolored nights and Japanese prints and ... but you may find the catalogue in the Editor’s rhapsody of last month. Przybyszewski’s background served him as an Archimedean lever to gauge and fathom the soul of modernity.

* * * * *

Let me attempt to present the quintessence of Przybyszewski’s modern Individuum, as he prefers to call an exceptional personality.

He considers himself a superman, aloof from the market-interests of the crowd. He is conscious of the fetters of his instincts and of the gradual sapping of his strength—hence the history of the Individuum turns into a sad monography of suppressed will and distorted instincts, a history of a mountain torrent which cannot find an outlet, and rushes into depth, dissolving obstructing strata, destroying and washing them away, and ruining the structure of the rocks in their very bowels.

Hence the longing for liberation and the yearning for expanse, a perilous “palpitating Sehnsucht and craving of the heights, of the beyond.” But this longing has another distinctive symptom: the consciousness of its hopelessness, the clear conviction that the passionately-desired goal is but an idée fixe. In this longing is expressed a spirit that ruins everything in itself with the corrosive acid of reason, a spirit that had long lost faith in itself, that considers its own activity diffidently and critically, a spirit that spies and searches itself, that has lost the faculty of taking itself seriously, that has become accustomed to mock itself and to play with its own manifestations as with a ball; a spirit not satisfied with the highest and finest human perceptions, that has come at last, after many searchings, to the gloomy decision that all is in vain, that it is incapable of surpassing itself.

Hence the pursuit of enjoyment. But this morbid seeking of enjoyment lacks that direct, self-sufficient bliss that results from the accumulated surplus of productive strength. The modern Individuum is deprived of that healthy instinct, therefore in place of naive joy experienced from the liberation of surcharged power he plunges into self-forgetfulness. All his life is reduced to pure self-narcotization. In the morbid straining of his abnormally-functioning nerves the Individuum-decadent rises to those mysterious borders where the joy and the pain of human existence pass into one another and intermingle, where the two are brought in their extreme manifestations to a peculiar feeling of destructive rapture, to an ecstatic being outside and above himself. All his thoughts and acts acquire a character of something devastating, maniacal, and over all of them reigns a heavy, depressing, wearying atmosphere, like the one before the outbreak of a storm, something akin to the passionate tremor of delirious impotence, something similar to the consumptive flush of spiritual hysteria.

In such clinical terms Przybyszewski sees the modern homo sapiens. Through this prism I perceive his Falk, doomed to utter failure and futility.

* * * * *

Falk an erotomaniac? Nonsense. His sexual relations are as pathological as the functions of his other faculties, not more. In his incessant search for an outlet, for discharge, for some quantity that might fill up his hollowed heart, Falk grasps woman as a potentional complement to his emptiness. He fails, naturally. To the artist woman is a narcotizer and wing-clipper; more often a Dalila or Xantippe than a Cosima Wagner or a Clara Schumann. Neither the exoticism of Ysa, nor the pillow-serviceability of Yanina, nor the medieval fanaticism of Marit, nor Olga’s revolutionary resignedness, have the power of checking the hurricane of his questing spirit for more than a moment, such moments when the tormented man erects for his consolation a phantom, be it a superman or a Christ. Falk’s quest for self-forgetfulness is futile. He lacks the healthy capacity of us, normal beings, for finding salvation in befogging our vision. No matter how we may indulge in self-analization, we usually stop at the perilous point and brake our searching demon with the same happy instinct that closes our eyes automatically at the approach of danger. Falk’s mental motor has no brakes; it hurls him into the precipice.

“I have never suffered on account of a woman,” boasts the old rake, Iltis.

“Because your organism is very tough, a peasant’s organism, my dear Iltis. Your sensibilities have not yet reached the stage of dependence upon the brain. You are like a hydromedusa which suddenly parts with its feelers stocked with sexual organs and sends them off to seek the female, and then does not bother about them any more. You are a very happy creature, my dear Iltis. But I don’t envy you your happiness. I never envy the ox his enjoyment of grass, not even when I am starving.”

Przybyszewski’s Individuum seeks in woman the miraculous expression of his most intimate, most precious “I.” He speaks in one place about the love of the “anointed artist,” which is a painful conception of an awful unknown force that casts two souls together striving to link them into one; an intense torment rending the soul in the impossible endeavor to realize the New Covenant, the union of two beings, a matter of absolute androgynism. For such an artist love is “the consciousness of a terrible abyss, the sense of a bottomless Sheol in his soul, where rages the life of thousands of generations, of thousands of ages, of their torments and pangs of reproduction and of greed for life.” Now recall Falk’s dream:

“He saw a meadow-clearing in his father’s forest. Two elks were fighting. They struck at each other with their large horns, separated, and made another terrific lunge. Their horns interlocked. In great leaps they tried to disentangle themselves, turning round and round. There was a crunching of horns. One elk succeeded in freeing himself and ran his horns into the other’s breast. He drove them in deeper and deeper, tore ferociously at his flesh and entrails. The blood spurted.... And near the fighting animals a female elk was pasturing unmindful of the savage struggle of the passion-mad males.... In the centre stood the victor trembling and gory, yet proud and mighty. On his horns hung the entrails of his rival.”

The epitomy of the sex-problem, heh-heh.

* * * * *

“I don’t envy the ox his enjoyment.” Przybyszewski despises happiness as something unworthy of an artist. A happy soul, he believes, is a miracle, the squareness of a circle, a whip made of sand. The soul is sombre, stormy, for it is the aching of passion and the madness of sweeps, living over ecstacies of boiling desire, the stupendous anxiety of depths and the boundless suffering of being. For the artist who creates the world not with his brain, but with his soul, all life is one “sale corvée,” a filthy burden, eternal horror, despair, and submission, fruitless struggle and impotent stumbling. For this reason love, the greatest happiness for ordinary males, becomes for the artist the profoundest disastrous suffering.

Take away from Przybyszewski his ecstacy of pain, and you rob him of his very essence, of his raison d’être, of his creative breath. When you read his _Poems in Prose_ you face a soul writhing in hopeless despair, in futile longing, in maddening convulsions. But you cannot pity the artist. You are aware of the sublime joy in his sorrow, of the unearthly bliss that is wrapped in the black wings of his melancholy. In his poem _At the Sea_, the elemental yearning of his soul reaches cosmic dimensions. Only one other poem approaches it in its surcharged grief—Ben Hecht’s _Night-Song_, if we overlook the latter’s redundancy. Allow me to give you a pale translation of the “Introibo” to _At the Sea_:—may the Pole’s spirit forgive me my sacrilegious impertinence.

INTROIBO

Thou, who with ray-clad hands wreathest my dreams with the beauty
of fading autumn, with the splendor of off-blooming grandeur,
with inflamed hues of the burning paradise,—

Radiant mine!

How many pangs have passed as if in a dream, since I saw Thee for
the last time, and yet mine heart doth shine amidst the stars
which Thou hast strewn in my life, yet the thirsting hands of my
blood yearn for the bliss Thou didst once kindle in my soul.

Thou, who in evening twilight spinnest for me with still hands on
enchanted harps heavy meditation on moments of joy that have
flown away like a distant whisper of leaves,—on suns that,
sinking into the sea, sparkle in the east with bloody dew,—on
nights that press to their warm breast tortured hearts,—

Radiant mine!

How many times has the sun set since those hours when with Thy
magic songs Thou pacified the sorrow of my soul,—and yet I see
Thine eyes, full of moans and sadness, burning in an unearthly
rapture, see the radiant hand stretching towards me and grasping
mine with a hot cry.

Thou, who transformest stormy nights into sunny days, in the
depths of my dreams quenchest reality, removest into an infinite
distance all near,—

Thou, who enkindlest in my heart will-o’-the-wisps and bearest
unto life black flowers—

Radiant mine!

A thousand times has the world transfigured since Thy look
consumed the tarnishing glitter of my soul, and yet I see Thy
little child-like face and the golden crown of hair over Thy
brow, see how two tears had spread into a pale smile that glowed
on Thy mouth, and hear the dark plaint of Thy voice.

Thou, who breakest before me the seals of all mysteries and
readest the runes of hidden powers, and in all the madnesses of
my life flingest Thyself in a rainbow of blessing from one heaven
to the other,—

Never yet has the storm so strewn the rays of my stars, never yet
has the aureole played with such bleeding radiancy around Thy
head, as now, when I have lost Thee forever.

“Homo Sapiens” Discussed by Readers

In another place I called _Homo Sapiens_ “the book of the age.” Surely there has not been a more stirring work of literature since _Werther_. Will the public respond? Is it true that the wall of American indifferentism is impregnable? I am still optimistic about the intellectual aristocracy of this country; that small circle of the young in spirit, brave searchers and earnest livers, for whom art and life are not merely diversions between meals and business transactions, but the italicized essence of existence. To those few Przybyszewski’s book should appeal; those should react.

I have been getting curious, and at times interesting, opinions of such readers. I hope to receive more, and acquaint the _Little Review_ family with them. On the whole, there prevails a note of depression and uneasiness. One writes: “I had hoped to be left alone on a mountain peak in a blaze of light and in the stress of wind; instead there is a sardonic laugh, and I am again hurled into the maelstrom of a world that cannot rise above suffering from its own passions.” A feminist remarks sadly that the book demonstrates “the limit of man’s penetration. The women are women still—not even women of the transition.” An incurable, hopelessly struggling Puritan rages and curses both me and the author; I give a few gems: “I’ve read your devilishly wonderful book!... It did many things to me, which, thank God, have passed like a drunken dream.... For three days I’ve been hideously torn up, slashed into tatters, savage and fundamental. But you want my opinion! How can I tell you, divorce it from myself, tear it out of my living flesh, when it has become imbedded. That terrible, wonderful Falk! It makes you shudder away from all temperamental people with experimental souls in their fingers, and few convictions.... I became paralyzed with horror. At last I cried out, writhed on the floor and prayed to some Power, any Power, for pity, not to see myself, not to see life beneath the superficial surface.... Go away, take your Slav fingers out of my soul! They force me to look at truth, when I want to deal in lies. They force me to climb the heights and peer into the hideous crevasses, when I want to browse fatuously on the hillocks.” More such “drunken dreams,” and the comfortable blinders will fall off the eyes of the happiness-by-all-means-fiends.

I submit two letters of friends who have read my article and wished to supplement my views. I humbly think that what they say is included in my “reflections”; but I am also conscious of my inherent fault—conciseness which borders on obscurity. Hence clarification is gratefully welcome.