Chapter III (1)

Personalities: Villon; Verhaeren; Parnell; Romain Rolland;
Dostoevsky

How do you do? Or, as Oscar Wilde preferred it, How do you think? It is so much more interesting. Tell me, if you can, spontaneously, freely, about your thoughts, reveal your personality, and we shall enjoy a most engaging conversation, as charming as any good novel or essay. Speak about yourself; people do this so much better than when they discuss others. To me the most enchanting reading has always been literature of Personality, such as subjective lyrics or chatty essays of the Montaigne category; but I am particularly interested in Letters and Memoirs, where the writer reaches transparency, unless he deliberately uses his pen as a masque for self-concealment, as is the case, to my mind, in _De Profundis_. True, an artist reveals his best in his artistic creation; you discover autobiographical contours of Goethe in Faust and Werther; Tolstoy’s restless searchings are mirrored in Besukhov, in Levin, in Nekhludov; Zarathustra and _Ecce Homo_ allow you a glimpse into the very crater of Vesuvius-Nietzsche. Yet through this medium you see the artist in his royal garb, so to speak, in his regalia; he seldom appears to you in his unceremonious morning-gown and slippers, to let you contemplate him not at his _best_ but in his quotidian intimate aspect. Exceptions? I admit a legion.

To be sure, Francois Villon[1] wore no stage array. His childish frankness and spontaneity account for the fact that he is to this very day an outcast among _bon ton_ salons, and even Robert Louis Stevenson stooped to condemn him. Of course he is a disgrace for the fraternity of writers: a thief, a robber, a murderer, a tramp, a debauchee, who possessed less tact than even his by-no-means puritanic confrère, Rabelais, and chanted most exquisite verses on most base topics. Villon is not in the least detached from his poetry: he is it, his very life was a song, a ballad. Filthy fifteenth century Paris, licentious monks, mercenary courtesans, tavern sages, knights of the road and candidates of the gibbet—in such an atmosphere the poet breathed, lived, and sang in the old picturesque French. Every adventure, every experience, impression, and emotion, Villon reflected in a ballad or a rondel, with equal beauty and sincerity; with equal compassion and loyalty he chanted to his religious mother and to the faded courtesan, to the duck-thief and to the creaking gibbet; and he poured a world of tender humor and sympathy into his greatest _Ballade des Pendus_, an epitaph for himself and his companions expecting to be hanged. You may love him, you may condemn him, but you cannot deny his absolute truthfulness, for his soul is unreservedly denuded, a quivering, appealing, humane soul.

[1] _The Poems of Francois Villon_, translated by H. DeVere
Stacpoole. [John Lane Company, New York.]

Ayez pitie, Ayez pitie de moy.
A tout les moins, si vous plaist, mes amis!

Villon is justly called “the father of French poetry”; his influence has been felt for nearly five centuries, from Rabelais to Verhaeren. Indeed, in the savage cosmic rhythm of the “enormous” Belgian I often hear the echo of the medieval “_Pauvre Villon_.” Verhaeren.... I must close my eyes when I think of this Titan. You cannot gauge him, you cannot see him in his entirety: an Atlas, bigger than our planet, detached from it. I think Verhaeren has been best loved, and perhaps best understood in Russia,—a land where realities are looked upon as symbols, else life would become a horrible absurdity. There he is endeared as the lyricist of the modern soul rent with eternal contradictions in the great task of transvaluation of values: a mystic with no God, a prophet with no blessing, a positivist without faith in man, a socialist without a political program, an anarchist without “action,” an urbanite longing for his village, a villager craving for the city. Verhaeren destroys rather than creates, wills rather than believes, yearns rather than attains. His movement lacks gracefulness; his attack, firmness; his flight, lightness; his love, tenderness; his architecture is without system, his system without method. And the more profound, the more palpitating and irresistible is the chaos of his titanic images heaped in masses, the more sincere are his wails, the more burning his tears. I think it was the admirable French critic, René Ghil, who observed that to Verhaeren the world appears as if in a flash of lightning, in an enormous, exaggerated form, and as such he embodies it in his work—also exaggerated, also enormous; that his poetry resembles the genius of Rodin hewing his Balzac out of marble and powerful dreams.

How differently is Verhaeren conceived in the Teutonic mind! The Austrian poet, Stefan Zweig,[2] has written an interesting book on the Belgian, an elaborate study of his personality and works, which substantiates my claim that people speak much more successfully about themselves than about others. Herr Zweig appreciates Verhaeren highly (and let me tell you sub rosa, my friend, that his general estimation of the Poet is but a pale echoing of the brilliant Léon Bazalgette in his book _Les célébrités d’aujourd hui_); he considers him the greatest poet living, he names him _the_ European poet in the same sense as Whitman is _the_ American poet. Soon, however, he falls into the Teutonic fallacy of preciseness-by-all-means, of violently accurate definitions which _must_ suit the facts, else—_desto schlimmer für die Fakten_. He wishes us to believe with him that Verhaeren is the poet of socialism, of democracy, that he has proclaimed his great Aye to contemporary life, with its greed, factories, and smoke; that a poet who wants “to be necessary to our time must feel that everything in this time is necessary, and therefore beautiful.” Thus with the German skill in fencing with Hegelian dialectics the critic endeavors to persuade us that Verhaeren must needs love modern life in all its aspects, that he is enraptured with all manifestations of contemporary spirit, from the urban “multitude” to that most hideous platitude, the Eiffel Tower. Mr. Zweig has utterly failed to see that Verhaeren does not feel the present, the contemporary, that he lives spiritually in the past and in the future, while the fleeting present is for him but a _symbol_, an alphabet of monstrous hieroglyphs, the mysteries of which he interprets prophetically. Has he not expressed his endless despair and maddening grief over the tragedy of the all-absorbing monster-city? Has the world not been to him a Golgotha, “an eternal illusion”? To Mr. Zweig Verhaeren is a happy, satisfied lover of all and everything. The poet and the painter, Maximilian Voloshin (one of whose poems appeared in THE LITTLE REVIEW), relates his impression of the Belgian: “When you see him for the first time you notice before anything else a deep furrow cleaving his brow, resembling two wide-spread wings of a flying bird. This furrow is himself. In it is his sorrow, his flight.” I wonder whether Mr. Zweig has observed the furrow; or did he deliberately overlook it in order to save his “structure”?

[2] _Emile Verhaeren_, by Stefan Zweig. [Houghton Mifflin
Company, Boston.]

Yes, my friend, people seldom succeed in their attempt to interpret others. Would you classify biographies as literature of personality? Perhaps in the sense that they reveal the personality of the biographer, but then it depends upon the value of that personality. Here is an instance. The brother of Parnell writes his Memoirs[3], bringing forth a mass of details and anecdotes of “Charley’s” life. Charles Parnell has always been a fascinating personality to me. Long ago I heard a lecturer speaking on the great Irishman before a European audience of revolutionists; the listeners (by no means Irish!) were enchanted with the figure of the unique leader, with his powerful individuality and skillful strategy. I have pondered many a time over his portrait revealing the mysterious face of a medieval sorcerer, and have looked forward to a work that would help me in gaining a clearer idea of the “uncrowned King of Ireland.” His brother’s memoirs gave me a wealth of information about their family pedigree and about each individual member (their number is considerable), particularly about the writer’s business undertakings. About Charles Parnell I have learned numerous external facts and figures, but his intrinsic self is as little known to me now as before. Of what value is such a book which succeeds merely in introducing to you Mr. John Howard, an Irish gentleman of no particular interest?

[3] _Charles Steward Parnell: A Memoir_, by his brother, John
Howard Parnell. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

It is totally different when you are confronted with such a wonderful individuality as Romain Rolland[4]. Apparently it is a book of essays on Berlioz, Wagner, Saint-Saëns, D’Indy, Strauss, Debussy, and on some aspects of modern music; in reality you come to know the rich personality of Rolland and the reactions of his sensitive, graceful soul on the musical productions of our best-known composers. I am delighted with his influence on my views; not that he has altered them: musical opinions do not let themselves be proved or disproved; but he has _enhanced_ my attitudes, he has made me admire my favorites more profoundly and hate my torturers more thoroughly. Do not let your Editor know that Brahms’s symphonies prove as indigestible to Rolland as they have been to your humble Incurable. It is the reading of such a book that offers me the joy of looking into a great soul, and it reminds me of the exalted experience I have had in reading Wilde’s _Intentions_, or the essays of Przybyszewsky and Arthur Symons.

The unceremonious self-revealment of a great man, of which I spoke in the beginning, does not always appeal to my aesthetic sense. At times my feeling of delicacy is scalded at the sight of a repulsive negligee. It has painfully irritated me to read Dostoevsky’s letters[5] in the English translation: would that the Russians kept their dirty linen at home. The book reveals a petty tragedy of a great personality; eternal want, indebtedness, whimpering, small jealousy, narrowness, intolerance. We learn how most of his books were written in a hurry, under pressure of need, the author being aware of their inadequacy; we learn of his petty envy towards Turgeniev, his slighting of Tolstoy, his bigoted hatred of everything liberal, European, his sturdy opposition to the revolutionists, his obsequious demeanor before high officials. With the exception of a few bright spots, the pages produce the nauseating effect of a pathological museum. Such a pity.

Come, now, friend: _How do you think?_

IBN GABIROL.

[4] _Musicians of To-Day_, by Romain Rolland. [Henry Holt
Company, New York.]

[5] _Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky._ [The Macmillan
Company, New York.]

A Note on Paroxysm in Poetry

EDWARD J. O’BRIEN

Paroxysm is the poetic expression of that modern spirit which finds its most notable expression in other arts in the sculpture of Meunier, the polyphonic music of Strauss, the philosophy of Bergson, and the American skyscraper. It is the application of dynamics to poetry. It stands midway between romanticism, which is an escape into the past, and futurism, which is a flight into the future. Paroxysm is deep-rooted in to-day.

M. Nicolas Beauduin, its most noteworthy French exemplar, has many noteworthy disciples in France and Germany, and paroxysm is a well-known force in every literature except that of America, where its unconscious expression in life has been most remarkable. Students will find its philosophy set forth and its current phases in literature duly chronicled in M. Beauduin’s quarterly review, _La Vie des Lettres_. It is only possible here to offer a few very brief hints as to its literary aims and materials:

It aims to be a synthesis of modern industrial and mechanical
effort.

It repudiates the ivory tower.

It handles the materials of modern life directly, not in symbols.

It responds to the roar of factories and trains.

The poet is to be “an active lyric,” representing his age.

The poet’s vision is the cinematograph of modern life with its
continual mechanical transfiguration.

It is not sentimental.

To art for art’s sake, and art for truth’s sake, it opposes art
for life’s sake.

It discards personal sensation; it is not ashamed to be “cosmic.”

The evolution of poetry is to be as rapid and terrible henceforth
as material evolution.

It will sing the new man, the man-machine, the multiplied man,
the Man-Bird.

It exalts motion and repudiates equilibrium.

It is social.

It feels the need for violent motives of faith, and finds them in
the passion of the cities.

It cultivates a scientific technique.

It does not reject any words in forming a vocabulary.

It seeks swift, hurtling, dynamic rhythms.

It is based on “dynamic notions of qualitative duration, of
heterogeneous continuity, of multiple and mobile states of
consciousness.”

It perceives the elements of poetry contained in modern cities,
locomotives, aëroplanes, dreadnoughts, and submarines; in a stock
exchange, a Wall Street, or a wheat pit; and in every scientific
marvel and in the sonorous song of factories and railways.

It emphasizes their dynamic consciousness.

To sum up: It aims to attain and express with the quick, keen vigor and strength of steel, the whirling, audacious, burning life of our epoch in all the paroxysm of the New Beauty.

When M. Beauduin’s new volume, _La Cité des Hommes_, is translated and published in America, it will be less difficult to estimate the success with which paroxyst poetry may be achieved.

The New Beauty

NICOLAS BEAUDUIN

(_Authorized translation from the French by Edward J. O’Brien_)

Long years the poet had not understood
This powerful art bursting from forces in sight,
From the tamed element which revolts in cries,
From the victory of the spirit
Over the passive immensity of matter.

The modern beauty of joy and madness,
Of triumph and truth,
He saw her, in a passionate rhythm,
Flinging down the palaces of doubt and silence,
Vanquishing black scepticisms and torpors,
Rekindling the universe under her jets of vapor,
Destroying the vain mystery that disappears,
Covering the entire world with her network of iron,
Launching her towers, her bridges, her tunnels, her dockyards,
Over all the exasperated continents of the globe.

Ah! the new beauty, ardent, insatiate,
Strained toward conquest and the vastest life,
She was indeed the god whom nothing resists,
Dynamic beauty of swiftness and hope,
Rushing ever beyond, out of the blackness,
Dancing and paroxyst humanity.
He saw her at last, superb before him,
Entrapping error, mowing night;
She erected on the old barbaric soil
Her cathedral with its vertiginous walls,
Lit by the mad and whirling suns of the searchlights.

Beauty of brass, beauty of fire,
She was there visible as a god.
Beauty of vapor, geometric beauty,
Modern beauty who builds for her temple and landscape
High furnaces casqued with purple and gold,
Cities mad beneath their electric lamps,
Launching at conquered heaven in spirals of pride,
The rut of dynamos and the bustle of windlasses,
The multiplied brutal effort of the machines,
The fiery flight of aeroplanes in the air,
The frantic trolleys under their sheaves of lightnings,
And dominating the night of silence and hatred,
The terrible thunderous flight of hertzian waves.

The Artist as Master

_The Japanese Print: An Interpretation, by_ Frank Lloyd Wright.
[Ralph Fletcher Seymour Company, Chicago.]

HENRY BLACKMAN SELL

“‘A flower is beautiful,’ we say—but why? Because in its geometry and its sensuous qualities it is an embodiment and significant expression of that precious something in ourselves which we instinctively know to be Life, ‘an eye looking out upon us from the great inner sea of beauty,’ a proof of the eternal harmony in the nature of a universe which is too vast and intimate and real for the mere intellect to grasp.”

Yet our materialists would solve the Problem with their material intellects. And our theologians would solve it with their ecclesiastical deductions. The one would put Life in the cold hands of the scientist, expert in fact and figure; the other, gropingly indefinite, in the hands of the spiritual formulaist. Yet both are wrong. The Problem can be solved. The literal, objective guesses of the materialist are but flimsy realisms far from true. The indefinite, abstract dreams of the theologian are but the futile inaptitudes of man calculated to define that which cannot be defined.

But definitions are not what the world needs. The Solution would be interesting, but the Problem is fascinating. It is the Going and not the Goal that holds us to the bitter and the sweet, through mornings, noons, and nights, year by year.

If, then, we grant the Solution but a cold conclusion, and the Goal but a stagnation point, to whom can we turn but to the artists—those spiritual children of that great master who wept when he could find no imperfection in his masterpiece.

The artist, whose interests are in the _interpretations_, and not in the _translations_ of Life, and whose interpretations have given Life all that it holds sacred.

There is no power but has its root in his ....
There is no power
But his can withold the crown or give it
Or make it reverent in the eyes of men.

Written philosophies of artist craftsmen are rare. Their busy lives find little time for penning rules; but when one does speak, it is with the captivating force of original thought: the summary of attainments through many trials and many failures.

And it is with this sure touch of deep artistic experience that Frank Lloyd Wright draws from the geometric beauty of the mystic Japanese prints his philosophy of the artist as master of the Problem.

“Real civilization means for us a right conventionalizing of our original state of nature, just such a conventionalizing as the true artist imposes on natural forms. The law-giver and reformer of social customs must have, however, the artist soul, the artist eye in directing this process, if the light of the race is not to go out. So, art is not alone the expression, but in turn the great conservator and transmitter of the finer sensibilities of a people. More still, it is to show those who shall understand just where and how we shall bring coercion to bear upon the material of human conduct. So the indigenous art of a people is their only prophecy and their school of anointed prophets and kings. Our own art is the only light by which this conventionalizing process we call “civilization” may eventually make its institutions harmonious with the fairest conditions of our individual and social life.

“I wish I might use another word than ‘conventionalizing’ to convey the notion of this magic process of the artist mind, which is the constant haunting reference of this paper, because it is the perpetual, insistent suggestion of this particular art we have discussed. Only an artist, or one with genuine artistic training, is likely, I fear, to realize precisely what the word as here used connotes. Let me illustrate once more. To know a thing (what we can really call knowing), a man must first love the thing and sympathize vividly with it. Egypt thus knew the lotus, and translated the flower to the dignified stone forms of her architecture. Thus was the lotus conventionalized. Greece knew and idealized the acanthus in stone translations. Thus was the acanthus conventionalized. If Egypt or Greece had plucked the flowers as they grew, and given us a mere imitation of them in stone, the stone forms would have died with the original. In translating, however, its very life’s principle into terms of stone well adapted to grace a column capital, the Egyptian artist made it pass through a rarifying spiritual process, whereby its natural character was really intensified and revealed in terms of stone adapted to an architectural use. The lotus gained thus imperishable significance; for the life-principle in the flower is translated—transmuted to terms of building stone to idealize a real need. This is conventionalization. It is reality because it is poetry. As the Egyptian took the lotus, the Greek the acanthus, and the Japanese every natural thing on earth, as we may take and adapt to our highest use in our own way a natural flower or thing, so civilization must take the natural man, to fit him for his place in this great piece of architecture we call the social state. And today, as centuries ago, it is the prophetic artist mind that must reveal this natural state idealized, conventionalized harmoniously with the life-principle of all men. How otherwise shall it be discerned? All the sheer wisdom of science, the cunning of politics and the prayers of religion can but stand and wait for the revelation,—awaiting at the hands of the artist that conventionalization of the free expression of life-principle which shall make our social living beautiful,—organically true. Behind all institutions or dogmatic schemes, whatever their worth may be, or their venerable antiquity,—behind them all is something produced and preserved for its aesthetic worth; the song of the poet, some artist vision, the pattern seen in the mount.

“Now speaking a language all the clearer because not native to us, beggared as we are by material riches, the humble Japanese artist has become greatly significant because he is the interpreter of the one permanent thing in the life of his people; that one permanent thing being the principle of a right conventionalization of life which makes of their native forms the most humanly significant, and most humanly joy-giving as in its ever varied moods and in evanescent loveliness he has made Fujiyama—that image of man in the vast—the God of Nippon.”

Evolution versus Stagnation

(_Being a Debate, with Rare Illustrations, by Major Funkhouser, Mr.
Lucian Cary, and The Camera, reported for_ THE LITTLE REVIEW _by
Herman Schuchert_.)

Place: Fullerton Hall.

Time: Thursday afternoon, December 10, 1914.

Characters: Mere and supporting members of the Drama League, and others mentioned above; also guards, committees, and a few men.

* * * * *

MAJOR FUNKHOUSER (_his remarks, condensed_).

Censorship of the movies is necessary because it must be.

Buildings, public rights, and milk are censored, and it is good.

Fifty per cent of a movie audience is under fifteen years of age.

I may be wrong sometimes, but I pass what I think they should see.

We must be big-brothers to our citizens of lesser intelligence.

I told my four daughters only what I thought they should know.

I believe in telling women as little as they may really need.

The working class wants salacious stuff; we must prevent.

These excerpts from banned films will illustrate my points:

* * * * *

THE CINEMATOGRAPH (_its pictures, briefly mentioned_).

Woman and man clutching each other in a raging, although amiable, passion.

Boy being taught how to pick pockets.

Hold-up.

Woman and man in furious love-experiments.

Mexicans burning bodies of dead rebels.

Doctors dressing Mexican battle-wounds.

Woman and man preparing the furnace of love.

Woman and man ....

Woman ....

Man ....

* * * * *

MR. LUCIAN CARY (_his ideas, pieced together_).

These pictures are positively abominable.

No human being could possibly want to see them.

If we must have censorship, the Major’s is as good as any.

Censorship with flaws is preferable to perfect censorship because perfect censorship would abolish the necessity of one’s judgment.

Imperfect censorship permits us, by its slips, to exercise our minds.

In no other civilized country is there such restriction.

Artists in America must keep their keenest visions to themselves.

Censorship deadens human perceptions.

Who wants cloistered virtues when true health is possible?

Man must learn to judge for himself; and he surely will do so.

America is unprecedented in its timidity of tastes and convictions.

* * * * *

MRS. HENDERSON _(in a bored manner)_.

It isn’t a question of arbitrary standard; it’s purely aesthetic.

The Major passes films of the most flagrant sentimentality.

Only legal restrictions are made, and these are futile.

The only satisfactory standard is that of individual taste.

Of course, the title of this debate was not quite the one used on this article. It was very tame—the title. But not so with the films. The Major had evidently selected his choicest ones—and a goodly number of these—which were reeled off in swift succession. Murder trod on the heels of love. Flaming moments of lust were split up by stage-robbers. Nigger babies, whose crime was that they didn’t need clothes, followed suicides.

Your reporter was fortunate enough to find an acquaintance, sitting in the rear of the hall. This lady married a man of millions. He liked the way she did _Florodora_—liked it so well that he gave her a chance, which she has since made much of. She is charming, because she has retained the frankness of the stage and merely exchanged the shoddy furs and diamonds for the real thing. She confided that _The Follies_ were simply right, and that the Drama League was radically opposed to the movies in any or all forms, and that she adored winter because it kept reminding her of Christmas. She is a supporting member of the League, and the only one present who waived her constitutional prerogative of a front seat. Her sisters-in-league were availing themselves of their privilege. They wanted to be where they could not get out, in case the pictures were really good.

And they were—sickening. Not a member left. Not a whisper. All eyes focused upon the screen, where horrors of war and of love (in which there seemed to be nothing fair) were showing. When their nervous systems could stand no more, some lady’s locomotive and oral powers returned, and the reel was stopped.

Then came Mr. Cary, who found it difficult not to speak over their heads with his simple language and big ideas. The audience whispered and began to show the tips of countless yellow-feathers. They could stand horrible pictures; but this talk was too much. It was too sane and calm and cutting. Yellow feathers showed, full length. Women left in twos and threes, although the first person to go out was a male. Cary’s short, admirable paragraphs were divided in this manner:—three ladies on the right of the hall would balance their departure under cover, as it were, of the departure of three sisters on the left. This mental cowardice was worse than the pictures.

An intolerable discussion followed. A huge wave of ancient yet ever-modern philistinism raised itself among the majority of those who remained, and surged across the hall to drown Mr. Cary and Mrs. Henderson. Major Funkhouser found his feet again, and assumed the big-brother-protector attitude, to repeated grand-stand advantages. As long as they had seen the pictures, what matter if the public didn’t? Evolution lost the day. Stagnation was an immediate success. Your reporter left, grinning.

Free, dost thou call thyself? Thy ruling thought would I hear of,
and not that thou hast escaped from a yoke.—_Nietzsche._

Dawn in the Hills

FLORENCE KIPER FRANK

Out of the vast,
Flooding and flowering the cool, skyey vast,
Day, day at last!
Squandering, spilling, pouring white-flecked fire,
Higher and higher
The light of the sun mounts into the dim of the sky.
And all the little fields that lie
At the foot of the hills that hold them in mothering tender,
Sweet with translucent, shimmering green,
Lay themselves bare to the sun, and the hill-trees slender,
Upward reaching thin arms of prayer,
A-shiver with ecstasy, tipped with sheen,
Sway to the quivering call of the fresh-stirring air.

Through the night have I waited Thy summons, through the night have
I lain
Racked with unutterable, ancient, blackening pain.
And the soul of me touched not Thy presence nor felt Thee about me,
And the soul of me, sick with its hate and dismay, was minded to rout
Thee,
Yea, from itself to tear Thee, enduring without Thee.
But now have I found Thee again, O my Comrade, again!
In the light of the morning and white of the dawn I behold Thee.
See, with my arms outstretched, I enclose and enfold Thee.
With a shout that the darkness is light, I enclose and enfold Thee.

Now feed me with life as with rain is nourished the flower!
Crown me with ecstasy, drench me with power!
See, I am bare to Thee as the fields are bare to the sun.
Resplendent, vivid, ever-living One,
This is the moment, this the creative hour!
Lo, I am one with thee,
I partake, I am washed anew.
Out of lies this is true,
Out of the dark of lies and entangling hates this is true,
That Thou who art ever-living, out of death shall create anew.

What weakling spirit knew thee gray and old,
Thou flaming one,
Thou fructifying sun,
Thou trumpet-call of morning to the blood,
Thou surge of the earth flood!
Youth of the universe art Thou, militant, bold.

Naught to Thee is decay,
When the spirit rots in its shroud,
And the horrible thoughts of night have way,
And life is a noisome cloud;
A noisome cloud of the fen,
Dank with the spirit’s decay!
O out of the morning laughest Thou then,
Out of the singing day.
Out of the morning leapest Thou,
Laughing at fear and pain,
And the horrible thoughts of night give way,
And the soul is created again.

The hills now are flooded with light and the trees rejoice
With happy voice.
The smell of the sweet, green things is in the air.
The breeze is a prayer.
And my soul, O my Comrade, my living soul is a prayer.

And rapture gives way to peace.
The dawning faints into the day.
Out of night have I found release,
Out of death, the way.
And my heart is calm with Thee, my heart that went forth with a shout.
Thou hast compassed me wholly about.
With the floods of Thy peace Thou hast compassed me wholly about.
I am elate with power.
Past is the creative hour.
I am calm for the ways of men.
Shall I not proclaim Thee then
To the doubting lives of men!
Out of the dawn have I plucked Thee.
I go to the world of men.

The Bestowing Virtue

GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

The thou is older than the I; the thou hath been proclaimed holy, but the I not yet; thus spake Zarathustra.

In times most ancient—at culture’s dawn of day—the individual was swallowed up and lost in the life of the tribe. He did not count as an individual, but was valued only as a member of the group to which he happened to belong. Subsequently, man’s endowment to personality entered upon its unfolding—the first syllables of the long human story were stammered. Man began to become a self. To be a self was to specialize into a difference from all other men. From that moment on, the entire course of evolution may be considered as a progressive differentiation and specialization of the human personality. At the outset there were only a few splendidly and highly endowed natures that felt a distinct life of their own welling up in themselves from mysterious springs of being. They took up the gauge of battle against others, against the mass which attempted to subject and assimilate them to its peculiarity. Mass meant monotony. But the differentiating energy and impetus encroached further and further, passing from the great to the small, pushing into the mass whose members no longer wanted to be mass, herd, but men. The might of spiritual personality opposed itself to the superiority of corporeal peculiarity. Psychical feeling more and more became personal. Character increasingly received a distinctive stamp. Along with this, the impulse to self-dependence began to stir even in those men who were outclassed in physical strength by their stronger human brothers. Later, when the head and heart, and no longer the fist, formed the strength of man, woman pressed into the circle of life’s evolution. She was no longer a mere exemplar of the genius. She, too, would be personality. This course of events signified an infinite refinement and enrichment of cultural life on the one side; on the other, it gave rise to the question as to how, in this differentiation of men into even more decidedly pronounced personalities, a cohesiveness could be originated among them that would save life from disintegration and consequent decay. At bottom, the individual is not sufficient unto himself. Self-dependent, he would be miserably impoverished and stunted—of this there can be no doubt, according to the most elementary laws of life. Hence, along with the formation of human personality, there is a refinement of those forces of life which seem summoned to secure a bond of fellowship among men: law, custom, a benevolent disposition toward others, the feeling of sympathy for others. Even Nietzsche, who foresees a future in which all these older group forces and moral impulses shall be obliterated, and every man pander to his own self alone and his own peculiarity in willing and feeling, in thinking and speaking—even Nietzsche cannot help preaching a new love that shall bind men together. Even Zarathustra confesses: “I love men! My will, my ardent will to creation, impels me constantly to men—as the hammer to the stone!” To be sure, this Zarathustra-love is to grow out beyond and above what we call love to-day, what we call Christian love. There is to be a Beyond Christianity. The new love will be as high above the old love as Above-Man will be above man. Beyond-man means Beyond-love. How earnestly and ominously does this preaching of a new love pierce like a sword into the heart of our time! A new test of the worth or unworth of our moral view of life! Were we even convinced that the best and purest features of the old Christian love would re-appear in any new love, still the question would not be elucidated—the question whether this old love would thereby become new again, would become living again, save through a storm of thunder and lightning that should purify the heavy, stuffy atmosphere which has gathered about the word love itself.

You will know them by their fruits—of nothing is this so true as of love. Where there is power, an effect must ensue, and in the effect, not only the right of the power, but the kind as well, manifests itself. Now, love wills to promote the life of another with its own life. Love wills to do good to its object, to redress some wrong, supply some lack, help some need, remedy some defect, and the like. Therefore, the fruits of love are gifts—hence, _die schenkende Tugend_, the bestowing or the giving virtue, of Nietzsche’s phrase. Accordingly, only a possessor can give. Who possesses most—the rich—give most! Who needs gifts is poor, and since poverty is great, becoming ever greater, gifts are needed to meet the needs. Thus, human love has become the practice of beneficence—the work of the rich by which they help the poor. The greatness of benefactions, this becomes a criterion for the greatness of love. We have but to think of the “foundations” and “benevolent funds” and “charitable institutions” and “unions” for the care and keeping of the poor, as well as of the incalculable sums which are given in private for the relief of want, in order to be impressed with the “fruits” which have grown on the tree of human love. How magnificent, how imposing these “fruits” are! How much love there is in the world today, in this world in which so much good is done! Who could doubt it? Who could deny it? Who? Who but Friedrich Nietzsche!

The loathsome vanity and the refined hypocrisy with which this beneficence is prosecuted, such obvious strictures as these, Nietzsche passes over without a word. This genus “benefactor” that does what it does just to benefit itself, is so lowdown to the Zarathustra-poet that he will not honor it with a notice. He simply classed it with the gilded and counterfeit rabble, _Pöbel_, with the culprits of wealth, who pick their profits from sweepings. Then there is the criterion of the numerical worth of the gift, not the ratio of the gift to the possessions of the giver, this criterion for the evaluation of love was so external, so deceptive, to Nietzsche, that he left it, too, out of account. What impelled Nietzsche to his depreciation of this whole species of beneficence was something different, something deeper. All these gifts, great and numerical as they may be, are alms, and who has only alms to give to man is a poor man, and Zarathustra feels—well, listen to what he says to the saint!

Zarathustra answered: “I love men.”

“Why,” said the saint, “did I go to the forest and desert? Was it not because I loved men greatly over-much? Now I love God: men I love not. Man is a thing far too imperfect for me. Love of men would kill me.”

Zarathustra answered: “What did I say of love! I am bringing gifts to men.”

“Do not give them anything,” said the saint. “Rather take something from them and bear their burdens along with them—that will serve them best; if it only serve thyself well! And if thou art going to give them aught, give them no more than an alms, and let them beg even for that.”

“No,” said Zarathustra, “I do not give alms. I am not poor enough for that.”

_I am not poor enough for that._ Priceless words! You read these words and you think of truly kindhearted men who sigh: If I were only rich so I could do good! They envy the rich their possessions, not for the sake of the pleasures and comforts which possessions permit their possessors to provide, but in the wholly honest feeling of the blessings which they could scatter with their wealth. Then comes Nietzsche, and says to these kindhearted men, You are only poor noodles, if you have nothing better to bring the world and men than this blessing of wealth. Then he points them to gifts the least of which outweighs a million donations.

Now, Nietzsche had no contempt of wealth with which to insult his fellowmen’s intelligence. Nor was he a socialistic indicter of beneficence. Nor was he even a rigorous critic of the doubtful disposition, so often manifest in such benevolent activities. But perhaps his plain words on the poverty of almsgiving seem so weighty precisely because he must be acquitted without further ado of speaking from contempt, from the standpoint of Christianity, or from the milieu of poor folk. And yet it was this most soaring spirit of the nineteenth century, this aristocrat from top to toe, compared with whom even a Goethe seems like a plebeian, it was precisely he who—as from an aerie up among the eagles—looked down with such abysmal contempt upon the highest and noblest triumph of riches—namely, the ability to bestow benefits—that he detected, even in this triumph, only testimony to the poverty of riches. Along with this, at all events, Nietzsche passed damnatory judgment upon a _Kultur_ which estimates the distances among men, the measure of their greatness according to the distinctions of possession, and therefore derives the right of the influence which it accords the individual from the sums which he donates by way of alms. Then, too, what has the man to do with his possession! It is not his _personality_ which has assigned him a place in life where a confluence of industrial goods crystallize around him! What does it signify as to the worth of a man that he has cast his baited hook into the stream of life just where a big hungry fish swims by and bites! And if, now, this most contingent of all contingencies, that a man should get rich, is considered by his generation as the peculiar deed of a hero, the deed which he was in a position to compass in life,—if the mere fact that a man releases, in the shape of benefits and alms, a part of this wealth which he could not spend upon himself if he would is a phenomenon around which the conversation of the day revolves, of which newspapers in special articles and telegraphic dispatches have so much to say, then this is a sign of the decay of our moral culture, and we cannot be thankful enough to the man who has jolted us out of such aberration of ideas and made us see with eyes no longer blinded by the glitter of gold!

Aye, wealth a man does need who wants to give. Wealth he needs for the sake of his giving love. But he must create this wealth himself. He must wrest wealth from all values. He must coerce all things to himself and into himself. All these things must stream back from the well of living water within him as the gifts of his love. Insatiably does the soul seek after treasures and gems because her virtue is insatiable in her will to give. This is the soul’s thirst to be an offering and a gift, and hence she thirsts to house all wealth in herself.

Vulgar souls give what they have, noble souls what they are—this is the well known saying that mirrors the meaning of Nietzsche. Love’s highest labor is to create something great out of its ownself, that it may be able to give unceasingly out of its own fulness and yet never be exhausted! No mountain is too steep and no valley too deep for love, because love herself must know heights and depths that she may give to others what she has seen and known there. Do we fear lest we succumb to a weakness? Then we must force the weakness underneath our feet because we need our strength to give strength to others. Would we say to virtue: Thou art too hard for us; take thy laurel and let us sin? Now, the hardest is spur to our love, to steel our wills, our courage, so that courage may gush into the souls of others also. What we have made out of our own selves, this, this alone, is our wealth, this is the gift by whose bestowal men can become rich. A thought of our own which we have acquired; a light of our own, which we have kindled in our innermost being; a lofty enthusiasm for what is great; an energetic aversion to all that is common and base,—this is our true wealth, the gift that enriches us while it is given to others. Poor indeed are the people who can give only alms; rich indeed are those who give themselves to men, who proffer their most intimate gifts to men, who say to men’s hidden hearts and hopes: Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have, I give unto thee!

Why are we so deeply involved in hard necessity that our life can not dispense with alms and therefore with the people who make a virtue out of this giving of alms! Simply because we have so few such truly rich men who thirst to become offerings and gifts for man! These men can we have, can we become ourselves, only when duty and righteousness, and not benevolence and inclination, shall decide in an ordering and helpful way, as to the requirement of life. Behind every benefit which is necessary there is concealed an unrighteousness of life which makes the benefit necessary. All alms with which the world cannot dispense today is an accusation against our culture, a confession of how poor we are in the midst of all our wealth. It will be the first great step towards a new culture when we first learn to measure the unworth of these benefits by the eternal worths which alone are worthy of man, which man forms in himself as new fructifying deeds, as the lightning of thought which detonates from his soul, as living beauty to which he gives shape in his own being.

Then if all duties which are based on right and law, shall cease to be considered as something special, something great, if their fulfilment shall be no longer marveled at as a feat of virtue, because these duties shall have become self-evident and natural, then shall man be illumined by new and greater duties which shall make him a debtor to life, then shall he call his wealth and the fulness of his being his debt which he can pay only in constant creation for man, in ceaseless giving to man! “Therefore, nobler souls will it: they will to have nothing _gratis_, least of all life! Whoever is of the _Pöbel_ wills to live _gratis_, but we others to whom life gave itself—we ever meditate as to what we can best give in return and, verily, that is a noble saying which says: what life promises us, that will we keep for life!” In simpler language: Not to merit a reward, heavenly or earthly, will we give, will we assemble in ourselves the highest gifts, to lay them down as offerings upon the altars of men, but we will give to return thanks for all that we have undeservedly received. Bickering and calculating as to whether we have had our just dues, haggling over hopes which have not done what they promised, we will have none of this, but thanks, thanks, that as men we have gained some material from the saddest life, created joys out of its pains, wealth and worth out of its weakness and loss. This, this, in Nietzsche’s immortal words, is _eine Umwertung der Werte_, a transvaluation of values in the moral life, from which a new moral culture can issue. In our labors we are ever shadowed by the still, lurking thought of returns and rewards, we calculate, and calculate ever in our own favor, that somewhere life has left us in the lurch. Could we but once reverse this matter: It is not life that is obligated and indebted to us—we are obligated and indebted to life! In the former way of counting we always come out with a deficit, with a poverty: in the later, with a balance, with a wealth: we still have something for which we gave nothing, did nothing, with which we have done no good!

How would it do to put such thankfulness to the test? When the heart is shaken with sorrow’s power—it is life’s gift to feel such shaking, in such shaking love can feel the storm raging. Even such gift you would not have _gratis_. You would make some return—the bravery with which you settle for it. You come to know despondency, a new deed, and your thanks therefor is that you have been permitted to overcome a paralysis of your energy. If, with freer vision and with broader heart, your eye has become alert and keen for human folly and lamentation, and these attack you as cowardice and disgust of life, then you take this as a gift that you will not have _gratis_, you will give something as counter-gift and thanks: a more energetic will, that will go to the bottom of folly and grief, with the fineness of feeling which has been bestowed upon you—you will dig deeper, search out more earnestly the genuine values of life, so that your cowardice and your _ennui_ at life may become a new strength and a new joy for life. If you feel your hands tied, if the world seems a prison at whose bars you lunge, but whose rods you cannot break, if then a horrible feebleness befalls you, and your best will confesses that you are too weak,—then take this, too, as a gift for which you learn to give thanks, for even the restriction of your power creates a new freedom, the pressure of the impossible ceases with your learning, thus, the possible, the necessary, of your life. Poor? You may be rich, immeasurably rich, not for yourself indeed, but for others, that you may communicate to them, give to them and yet never give out! Be debtor of life, that in your poverty you may make many rich. Be debtor of love, that you may never be able to pay your great eternal debt. Confessing and obligating yourself to such debt, your life gains that eternal worth which increases the more you spend of it, which receives, the more you give of it. Poor, yet having all things; poor, yet making many rich—_also sprach Paulus-Nietzsche_.

After this Zarathustra went back into the mountains and the solitude of his cave and withdrew from men, waiting like a sower who hath thrown out his seed. But his soul was filled with impatience and longing for those he loved; for he had still many gifts for them. For this is the hardest: to shut one’s open hand because of love.

It is the business of the very few to be independent: it is the
privilege of the strong, and whoever attempts it, even with the
best regret but without being obliged to do so, proves that he is
probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He
enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousand-fold the
dangers which life itself already brings with it; not the least
of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way,
becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of
conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far
from the comprehension of men that they can neither feel it nor
sympathize with it, and he cannot any longer go back! He cannot
ever go back again to the sympathies of men.—_Nietzsche._

Editorials and Announcements

_Mrs. Havelock Ellis_

Mrs. Ellis’s visit to Chicago has been a series of revelations. At first she was a little disappointing: in her lecture on James Hinton and his sex ethics—particularly in the discussion which followed it—Mrs. Ellis did not loom as large as some of her more “destructive” contemporaries. The thing was beautifully done, of course—a gorgeous bit of interpretative art; for Mrs. Ellis chooses words with a poet’s care and presents ideas with an economy that is invigorating and restful at the same time. But in so far as the lecture reflected her own ideas it had some of the limitations to which the eugenist point of view is always open: the failure to go quite the whole distance. Compared with the directness and honest thoroughness of the few pioneers who are advocating birth control—like Margaret Sanger, whose little pamphlet on the subject will cost her ten years imprisonment if the authorities can get hold of her—the ideas of Mrs. Ellis came with a certain inadequacy. But later she cleared herself of the charge of cultism by her laughing remark to some one who discussed eugenics with her: “Eugenics? A mere spoke in the wheel, and a very dogmatic spoke at that. Heaven knows we don’t want a race of averages.” One of her most delightful afternoons was given over to her Cornish stories. She read one called _The Idealist_, which ought to be studied by all those who draw their rigid distinctions between “normal” and “abnormal”. As Mrs. Ellis said, “This story is an attempt to show that those people we so piously consider the worst of us are sometimes the best of us.” And so this charming woman with her simplicity, her humor, her frankness, her idealism, and her fine boyishness is a personality one must not fail to know. She returns to Chicago on February 4, to lecture on sex and eugenics in Orchestra Hall. That lecture will be given exclusively to women and will include a discussion of sex abnormalities, as well as a paper on the subject written especially for the occasion by her husband, which Mrs. Ellis will read.

_A Journal of Ideas_

The New Republic is the first weekly in America which has dared to assert that ideas are interesting, even if they are new. We have had one kind of weekly whose main purpose is to pay dividends to its owners. Dividends demand advertising, advertising demands large circulation, circulation demands pleasing as many people as possible, pleasing many people has seemed to demand piffle and dishonesty. We have had another kind of weekly which confines itself to academic criticism and frankly gives up any attempt to speak to the nation. _The New Republic_ is run neither for dividends nor for ancient prestige. It proceeds on the assumption that we can find writers who are both honest enough and intelligent enough to speak things of a value not determined either by capital or by the mob. It hopes that their product may be so interesting that the people who want to read it will be sufficiently numerous to support the paper. It hopes vastly more that the ideas and opinions so enunciated will introduce a powerful and much-needed element of disinterested intelligence into American public life. The way in which these hopes are put into print will have much to do with the success of the attempt. But it is hopeful that somebody with adequate resources and equipment is actually engaged in the attempt to relate honesty and intelligence with the democracy.

_John Cowper Powys_