Chapter III

The Golden Symphony
(_A Screen by Sotatsu_)

Golden clouds, and a golden bridge
Lifting in a great arc, swinging in a high arc,
Under clouds of gold, over clouds of gold,—
From the long slow curve of a golden shore
Across wide spaces of dark river!...
And behold! a drifting miracle—
Behold the long steady advancing prow
Of a golden boat, heavier than the sun,
Quiet upon the dark river; bearing two lovers
In robes of state, intricate, luminous,
Upon this dim river—where the great arc
Of the bridge from clouds into clouds
Swings, from golden shore to golden shore,
From the gold earth to the gold heaven.

The Struggle

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

The story came to me from a woman, met on a train. The car was crowded, and I took the seat beside her. There was a man in the offing, who belonged with her,—a slender, girlish figure of a man, in a heavy brown canvas coat such as teamsters wear in the winter. He moved up and down in the aisle of the car, wanting my place by the woman’s side, but I did not know that at the time.

The woman had a heavy face and a thick nose. Something had happened to her. She had been struck a blow or had a fall. Nature could never have made a nose so broad and thick and ugly. She talked to me in very good English. I suspect now that she was temporarily weary of the man in the brown canvas coat, that she had travelled with him for days, perhaps weeks, and was glad of the chance to spend a few hours in the company of some one else.

Everyone knows the feeling of a crowded train in the middle of the night. We ran along through western Iowa and eastern Nebraska. It had rained for days and the fields were flooded. In the clear night the moon came out and the scene outside the car-window was strange and in an odd way very beautiful. You get the feeling: the black bare trees standing up in clusters as they do out in that country, the pools of water with the moon reflected and running quickly as it does when the train hurries along, the rattle of the car-trucks, the lights in isolated farmhouses, and occasionally the clustered lights of a town as the train rushed through it into the west.

The woman had just come out of war-ridden Poland, had got out of that stricken land with her husband by God knows what miracles of effort. She made me feel the war, that woman did, and she told me the tale that I want to tell to you.

I don’t remember the beginning of our talk, nor can I tell you of how the strangeness of my mood grew to match her mood, until the story she told became a part of the mystery of the still night outside the car-window and very pregnant with meaning to me.

There was a company of Polish refugees moving along a road in Poland in charge of a German. The German was a man of perhaps fifty, with a beard. As I got him, he was much such a man as might be professor of foreign languages in a college in our country, say at Des Moines, Iowa, or Springfield, Ohio. He would be sturdy and strong of body and given to the eating of rather rank foods, as such men are. Also he would be a fellow of books and in his thinking inclined toward the ranker philosophies. He was dragged into the war because he was a German, and had steeped his soul in the German philosophy of might. Faintly, I fancy, there was another notion in his head that kept bothering him, and so to serve his government with a whole heart he read books that would re-establish his feeling for the strong, terrible thing for which he fought. Because he was past fifty he was not on the battle-line, but was in charge of the refugees, taking them out of their destroyed village to a camp near a railroad where they could be fed.

The refugees were peasants, all except the woman in the American train with me and her mother, an old woman of sixty-five. They had been small land-owners and the others in their party were women who had worked on their estate. Then there was the one man, my companion’s lover, weak in body and with bad eyes.

Along a country road in Poland went this party in charge of the German, who tramped heavily along, urging them forward. He was brutal in his insistence, and the old woman of sixty-five, who was a kind of leader of the refugees, was almost equally brutal in her constant refusal to go forward. In the rainy night she stopped in the muddy road and her party gathered about her. Like a stubborn old horse she shook her head and muttered Polish words. “I want to be let alone, that’s what I want. All I want in the world is to be let alone,” she said, over and over; and then the German came up, and putting his hand on her back pushed her along, so that their progress through the dismal night was a constant repetition of the stopping, her muttered words, and his pushing. They hated each other with whole-hearted hatred, that old Polish woman and the German.

The party came to a clump of trees on the bank of a shallow stream. The German took hold of the old woman’s arm and dragged her through the stream while the others followed. Over and over she said the words: “I want to be let alone. All I want in the world is to be let alone.”

In the clump of trees the German started a fire. With incredible efficiency he had it blazing high in a few minutes, taking the matches and even some bits of dry wood from a little rubber-lined pouch carried in his inside coat-pocket. Then he got out tobacco, and, sitting down on the protruding root of a tree, smoked, and stared at the refugees, clustered about the old woman on the opposite side of the fire.

The German went to sleep. That was what started his trouble. He slept for an hour, and when he awoke the refugees were gone. You can imagine him jumping up and tramping heavily back through the shallow stream and along the muddy road to gather his party together again. He would be angry through and through, but he would not be alarmed. It was only a matter, he knew, of going far enough back along the road, as one goes back along a road for strayed cattle.

And then, when the German came up to the party, he and the old woman began to fight. She stopped muttering the words about being let alone and sprang at him. One of her old hands gripped his beard and the other buried itself in the thick skin of his neck.

The struggle in the road lasted a long time. The German was tired and not as strong as he looked, and there was that faint thing in him that kept him from hitting the old woman with his fist. He took hold of her thin shoulders and pushed, and she pulled. The struggle was like a man trying to lift himself by his boot-straps. The two fought and were full of the determination that will not stop fighting, but they were not very strong physically.

And so their two souls began to struggle. The woman in the train made me understand that quite clearly, although it may be difficult to get the sense of it over to you. I had the night and the mystery of the moving train to help me. It was a physical thing, the fight of the two souls in the dim light of the rainy night on that deserted muddy road. The air was full of the struggle, and the refugees gathered about and stood shivering. They shivered with cold and weariness, of course, but also with something else. In the air, everywhere about them, they could feel the vague something going on. The woman said that she would gladly have given her life to have it stopped, or to have some one strike a light, and that her man felt the same way. It was like two winds struggling, she said, like a soft yielding cloud become hard and trying vainly to push another cloud out of the sky.

Then the struggle ended and the old woman and the German fell down exhausted in the road. The refugees gathered about and waited. They thought something more was going to happen, knew in fact something more would happen. The feeling they had persisted, you see, and they huddled together and perhaps whimpered a little.

What happened is the whole point of the story. The woman in the train explained it very clearly. She said that the two souls, after struggling, went back into the two bodies, but that the soul of the old woman went into the body of the German and the soul of the German into the body of the old woman.

After that, of course, everything was quite simple. The German sat down by the road and began shaking his head and saying he wanted to be let alone, declared that all he wanted in the world was to be let alone, and the Polish woman took papers out of his pocket and began driving her companions back along the road, driving them harshly and brutally along, and when they grew weary pushing them with her hands.

There was more of the story after that. The woman’s lover, who had been a school-teacher, took the papers and got out of the country, taking his sweetheart with him. But my mind has forgotten the details. I only remember the German sitting by the road and muttering that he wanted to be let alone, and the old tired mother-in-Poland saying the harsh words and forcing her weary companions to march through the night back into their own country.

The feeble and poor in spirit must not be allowed to judge
life.—_Nietzsche._

A Mischievous Rhapsody of the First Recurrence

I Zarathustra, declare myself! Ye have dulled me with priests; ye have sweetened me with girls; ye have betrayed me with envious anarchists.

Lo, I am not for the preacher, I am not for the woman, I am not for the oppressed! Ye say that by me ye shall save the world; I say that I shall destroy the world!

These things do I hold sacred—my strength, my lust, my joy. These ye shall feed, and die.

Too long have I stood silent in the cackle of my followers. Poultry after my corn! I have said, “Dost thou seek to multiply thyself? Find ciphers!”

I will give you a new law:—Love your enemy, for him ye may destroy. Fear your friend, for he shall steal your raiment.

Dost thou think that my aloofness is thy aloofness? Dost thou flutter upon a ridgepole because I stand upon a mountain? Fool, thou shalt starve unless thou peck the earth.

I say unto the preacher: Stick to the Nazarene; he hath deserved his Golgotha. But who shall make my words a law for me?

I say unto the woman: My scourge is yet upon thee. Dost thou set thyself against myself? I shall ravish thee when I desire thee. Who art thou to pretend manhood? Submit or deny thy life. Serve, or go barren into the earth.

I say unto the poor and lowly: I denied you my pity; now ye think to rob me of my scorn. Paltry ones! Shall I deny myself because of you? Lo, if I delight in riches, I shall take them. My life is not your life; my children are not your children. Cry not at my oppression; ye shall not move me. And if ye mock me with my own words, they shall scorch your tongues; ye shall go to a blacker oppression, ye shall find harder masters—yourselves!

And I say unto the priest, the woman, and the lowly: Touch me not; ye are my enemies! I have declared myself, and ye have not known me. I am life, I am splendor, I am eternity. Ye deny me as ye lay your hands upon me. Remain afar off; then may I be in you. I will keep you slaves; thus only shall I live.

_Also sprach Zarathustra!_

Poems

DAPHNE CARR

Welt Schmertz

I have crushed so many roses
That my hands
Drip with red fragrance.
But I would crush to death against my breast
The wind
That is raging drunk with the perfume of all flowers.

I have bathed in a hundred cool springs—
Still I am burning.
I would plunge into the ocean,
Diving down and down
To find myself
Freshly fluid
As a wave.

Prisoners

A wind runs through the room,
And leaps out of the window.
The white curtain springs after
Fluttering out.
But it is fastened tight inside.

My love kisses me
And goes
Waving good-bye
And laughing.
Am I also held fast in this room?

Leo Ornstein

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

Nietzsche thought Wagner was the artist of decadence; Arthur Symons thinks he was a unique genius. Nietzsche regarded him as the great corrupter of music:—“he has made music sick”; Symons says that to find a parallel for Wagner’s achievement we must look back to the Greeks, to the age of Æschylus and Sophocles. Each one proved his point. It’s a bit confusing, and you begin to wonder what Art is.

Have you ever found a definition of aesthetic values that will hold through the whole art miracle? I never have and never expect to. Even in Pater’s _The School of Giorgione_ you are merely told that since all art constantly aspires toward the condition of music, toward that perfect identification of matter and form, the chief function of aesthetic criticism is to estimate the degree in which all the arts approach to musical law. But musical law is constantly changing; and the criterion of the degree to which matter and form become identical will be a sort of sliding scale. And what every one wants to know is how to gauge that scale. Can you think of a single art judgment in the whole realm of aesthetics that you can use as an infallible touchstone; with which you can make a mediocre poet realize why his work is bad instead of good? You can make him realize, by the desperate wildness with which you shriek “It’s not well done”, that something is wrong; but to save your life you can’t convince him that you are talking about anything except your own instinct—as you aren’t; and of course he feels that his instinct may be just as good as yours—which of course it can’t! Suppose you choose one of the best definitions ever thought of,—Mérimée’s “all art is exaggeration _à propos_”; you find that you’re just as badly off as before: by what standard is the _à propos_ measured?

* * * * *

It was in this frame of mind that I heard Leo Ornstein’s music. First he came one night and played for us alone, on our Mason and Hamlin, in a half light and an atmosphere of intense excitement. None of us had decided beforehand that we should want to laugh or hiss or throw things at him, as they did in London two years ago. We expected something beautiful and we got it. He played his _Impressions of the Thames_, which he afterward described as a river of “towers and turrets and stars, of dark rushing water, of bridges and buildings, of desolate muddy banks, and then something which you cannot bear to look at any longer.” I can’t “see” music, so I only know that it was sound which interested and pleased and shook me. Then he played his _Funeral March_, which had something dark and vast in it; then some Ravel, the music of which interested me more than his playing of it; and finally the Schumann _Arabesque_, which he did so beautifully that I thought “Here is a man who plays just as he wants to, and probably comes nearer to what Schumann would have liked than all the strict interpreters with their flawless ‘taste’ have done.” It seemed to me that Ornstein did what he did with it—stretched its slenderness to a lovelier curve—in the interest of the piano; and that is the very best thing anyone can do with written music for the piano, even if the pedagogues can’t beat time to it.

So at the end I was beginning to think: perhaps this is the man who is to bring to the piano that something it still needs.

* * * * *

But the next morning, at his recital, I made an interesting discovery. Ornstein has brought nothing to the piano. He has brought something to the world of music: compositions which show that the piano music is more pliable than we had thought, and interpretations which show an exaggeration _à propos_. To the piano, as an instrument, he has brought what all the others have brought: virtuosity—and in this case a not exceptional virtuosity. This may sound like hair splitting, but it really is not.

Ornstein has done this: he has written some very interesting music, and he plays it as most composers of talent—perhaps of genius—would play their things if they had studied the piano as thoroughly as he. What is there in this to cause hysterics? The fact that it sounds different from the music you have been hearing? But that would seem to be a reason for interest, not merely for mirth. This reaction belongs in the same plane with patriotism and duty:—you laugh at what is strange, you love what is familiar, you obey what has been tested:—the three ready-made emotions, with which you can escape most effectively from art and life. So they howled at Ornstein. Two respectable women sitting near me, who would not have dared—what do I say? who would not have _been able_—to laugh at a minister’s treatise on good and evil or a president’s speech on loyalty to a flag, were so convulsed over Ornstein’s _Impressions of the Thames_ that they moved their seats to the rear of the theatre where they could not be watched,—where they could merely disturb the pianist by their audible snortings. The critics have done the same thing—laughed at Ornstein’s own music and criticised scathingly his manner of playing familiar music. Ornstein’s interest, I am sure, is chiefly in what he has to say, and second in the way he says it. He is a composer-virtuoso. I had hoped he would be a piano-lover. That is the kind of artist I am looking for with more interest than I have for anything else in this world.

As for Ornstein himself, I think he is a sincere person who means to go on doing his work. I sometimes judge the sensitiveness of a nature by the intensity of expression that moves across the cheek-bones. You might look carefully at Ornstein’s face instead of judging him by the fact that his hair falls into his eyes when he plays. Of course he has been indiscreet enough to mention that he does not like Beethoven. Why that is unforgivable I can’t imagine. A man may surely like what he pleases. The high genius of a Mozart or a Haydn is a thing he feels intensely. He admires Chopin deeply as an artist who could do one thing very well and was content to let it go at that. Grieg he thinks is not a worthy mouthpiece for all that Norway has to give a musician. He loves Debussy, but thinks that Ravel is the greater man: “Debussy stands beside a pond and tells you beautifully of all he sees there; Ravel plunges into the pond and gives you the life of it.” Stravinsky and Scriabine are the two he cares for most, as I remember. “Schönberg has worked out his theory before he has worked out his art.” Something of that sort might apply to Ornstein himself, as in the case of his Chopin _Nocturne in E Flat_: I disliked his “exaggeration” in it as much as anything I have ever heard on a piano.

* * * * *

Oh, does no one realize what the unique beauty of a piano is, and that there are secrets of sound in it which have not yet been touched upon?

Nocturne

(_From the French of Paul Verlaine_)

CLARA SHANAFELT

Your soul is like a lovely garden place
Where masque and bergamasque move graciously,
Playing the lute and dancing, yet of face
Half sad beneath their guise of fantasy.

The while they sing in minor key
Love conquering, life opportune,
They seem to doubt their own felicity—
Their song floats faintly upward in the moon,

In the clear moonlight, sad and fair,
That makes birds dream where dim boughs sway,
And fountains sigh their rapture on the air
From marble pools—the tall slim fountain spray.

White Mists[1]

There are grey stone rat-traps on the earth
Where human beings are put to die
By other human beings.
They die hour after hour, a million million times,
And still face death....

There is blue air between the clouds and the earth
Which they once saw;
There are gold stars,
And suns that come up red,
And trees that turn to purple in the evening—
But they cannot remember....

Now their days are bundles of soiled rags,
Their nights are stone....
I dare not think of them:
It drives me toward the whiteness of insanity.