Chapter VI (1)

About a year ago the writer of these lines thus summarized the "Contemporaneous Russian Nihilism":

The bureaucracy celebrates its victory over the people. The
heretofore united forces are divided, the sacred ideal polluted,
the bitterly-fought-for constitution brought down to a mocking
buffonade, and the "Mighty Ham," whose coming was predicted a few
years ago by the illustrious Merezhkovski, has his day in the
degradated country. The Russian giant who had temporarily
awakened after a slumber of centuries, snores again hopelessly.
Over the vast continent reigns a suffocating atmosphere of
despair, decay, and demoralization. A thick fog of nihilism, not
the Nihilism of Turgenyev's times, but nihilism in its direct
negative meaning, enwraps the martyred land of the Czar, and one
can hardly discern a bright spot on the cloudy horizon.

In the past year the "cloudy horizon" has slightly brightened. Grave symptoms have appeared in the seemingly calm atmosphere which suggested Vereshchagin's _All is Quiet on Shipka_. Notwithstanding the strict censorship of dispatches one could easily discern from the news items that the volcano has not been extinguished yet. True, the orgy of the reactionary forces has not abated; freedom of spoken and written word is still a myth; the majority of the Douma is "a trillion times blacker than black"--to use a Bodenheimesque figure; the revolutionary organizations are dragging a pitiful existence in the underground, and the average citizen is still seeking safety from the cossack's knout in phlegmatic splein. Yet signs of gratifying unrest have been manifestly displayed of late in various camps of the Empire. The rapidly developing capitalistic class has come to realize the deadening effect of the bureaucratic regime on industry and commerce, and resolutions have been passed at numerous conventions of manufacturers, bankers, and other big business-men, condemning the stifling policy of the archaic government. The tragicomedy of the Beilis process which revealed the puerile helplessness of the rotten State justice, has united all cultured Russia in a tremendous protest against the existing order; lawyers, journalists, physicians, artists, teachers, and men of other liberal professions, signed fiery resolutions whose _leit-motif_ was Chekhov's sad verdict--"Such life is impossible!" The unrest among the army, and particularly among the navy, has had a great symptomatic significance. Multitudinous arrests among soldiers and sailors, sporadic trials of revolutionary military organizations, frequent transportations and transfers of regiments and vessels, declaration of martial law in some important ports,--such have been the albatrosses of the oncoming storm. After the crash of the proletarian uprising of 1905 the remnants of the revolutionists have concentrated all their forces against the stanchest citadel of Czardom--the army and the navy, justly considering that only a military _coup d'état_ could change things in present day Russia. The situation became definitely threatening last July, during the visit of President Poincaré, when the Russian proletariat, defying all manners and _bon ton_ towards "allied France," suddenly and unexpectedly marred the display of friendly demonstrations by an epidemic outburst of general strikes in St. Petersburg (or _must_ we, by order of Nicolas II., say--Petrograd?) and in other metropolises.

Amidst these pregnant preludes burst out the war bomb. For the tottering absolutism it came most timely as the saving trump. Whether we believe the press informations about the mad wave of patriotism overflowing Russia or not, there can be no doubt that in view of the threatening national catastrophy internal differences will lose their keenness and will give way to easily drummed-up imperial solidarity, as far as the average citizens are concerned. The uncompromising revolutionists will hardly have a considerable following, especially when we consider the fact that the Czar has been showing surprising tact and foresight of late by granting concessions to his subjects and lavishly extending tempting promises to the oppressed nationalities. The constantly humiliated and insulted citizen; the empoverished overtaxed moujik; the flogged workingman; the bleeding, robbed, deprived-of-rights Pole, Finn, Armenian, Caucasian, Jew, Lithuanian, Little-Russian,--all these elements that make up the abstraction "Russia" would have to possess a great deal of optimism in order to take seriously the spasmodic ejaculations of the drowning "Little Father" who has beaten the world's record as a perjurer. Yet one need not be a specialist in mass psychology to predict the success of Nicholas's bait. We may further prophesy that, whatever the outcome of the war, Russia will emerge purged and electrified, stirred and volcanized. Surely, "such life," pre-war life, will be "impossible."

The Silver Ship

SKIPWITH CANNÉLL

A silver ship with silken sail
Fled ghost-like over a silver sea,
Swift to an island leper pale
Where dead hands furled the silken sail.
Then to the island bore they me,
And left me, stricken, there to see
My silver ship with silken sail
Fade out across a silent sea.

The Butterfly

SKIPWITH CANNÉLL

One day in the lean youth of Summer, a butterfly was born upon the earth. To a brief day of beauty she was born, and to a long night.

Timidly her purple wings unfolded in the kind warmth of the sun. When they had grown strong, she began to flutter hither and thither, from flower to flower, a wingéd dream flitting as perfumes called her, from dream to dream.

At last, when the dark fingers of the night were clutching at the fields, from the brief stillness of twilight arose a brief summer storm. Only a few puffs of wind ruffled the grass, only a few growls of thunder silenced the birds, only a few warm drops of rain pattered among the trees. Then the storm passed and the sun shone over the wet earth as a sweetheart shines through her tears with promise of pardon.

But the warm wind had blown the butterfly against a twig, so that her wings were broken; and the soft summer rain had crushed her to the earth, so that she died. But there had been one passing, whose dreams were in music, and he had felt her beauty in his own. And he spun a web of harmony from the rainbow of his sorrow and the skeins of her beauty, so that men who had lost their dreams were snared in his net, and women whose hearts were buried wept for the death of a butterfly....

The Tidings

SKIPWITH CANNÉLL

Once upon a time, in a certain secret city of the East, lived a woman who was a sorceress. And she awaited tidings of great joy or tidings of terrible sorrow.

All day long, from her housetop, she had peered across the desert, seeking the messenger who did not come. At nightfall her servants returned to her with rumors gathered in the market place. With rumors of sorrow they returned and stood in a row before her with averted faces.

When she had heard their fears, she thanked them, and going down from the housetop, she sought a hidden chamber where she could be alone and silent. When she had pondered for awhile, she piled rare herbs in a brazier, and wet them with strange liquors, and touched fire to them. The flames flickered and smoked, singing a soft happy little song all to themselves. But she could read no answer in the singing, and no meaning in the coils of smoke; and she was very sad. At last, with a despairing gesture, she took certain secret things from the chest whereof she alone had the key, and those things she laid upon the fire and watched until they were consumed.

As soon as the embers were cold and gray, she took from the carven chest a vial of jade and a jade cup. From the vial she poured out a pale green potion, and raising the cup in her hands, she drank it to the end. Then she lay down upon the marble couch. In a little while she slept.

A sweet, heavy vapor rose from the cup, filling the room with perfume. The dregs glowed with dull evil light, for the potion had been poison, and her sleep was death.

In the morning came a messenger, bearing tidings of great joy.

Longing

GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

It was indeed a world-historical movement, that old reformation of the Sixteenth century, snapping as it did the fetters of a Church that arrogated to itself all power in heaven and on earth, and defiantly asserting supremacy over the papacy. But the reformation of our day is much more radical and universal. Ours ends what that began, destroys what that established. The critical spirit of our time, this nothing can withstand unless it is in a position to justify and verify itself to the moral and rational judgment of mankind. In our time of day, what is church, what is state, what are society and law and sanctified custom--things that the old reformation partly inherited, partly organized, and wholly bequeathed to us? At best, tones for the musician's use, clay in the hands of the potter, or stuff for the sculptor's shaping, materials all, ductile or refractory, to be kneaded into forms for the habitation of man's free spirit, man's soul, man's life. This critical spirit of an all-inclusive reform of life, to which everything belonging to life is subject, for which science works and art as well, living and active in the heart of modern humanity in countless problems, like the woman problem, the labor problem, like national and international social problems, with all their subdivisions,--this critical spirit gives our time a prophetic character. It summons all progressive spirits to the great struggle against a common foe, against all those forces which have banded together for a standstill of life and have made a lucrative and social-climbing business out of retrogression.

Can there be any doubt as to the stand we ought to take with reference to these great movements? May we not greet them as a new spring-time of humanity whose light and warmth shall vanquish winter, and bring life, joy and peace into the land? "When the Day of Passover was fully Come"--may we not see this day in these movements, when a spirit of truth and soul and freedom shall brood over men, and lead them to higher goals and greater tasks of human being?

To be sure, our era is not arbitrarily made, not excogitated and invented by man. To be sure, great elementary forces of life will come, must come, to their unfolding in these movements. To be sure, the matter of real concern is a new structure of humanity, new cultural and social forms, new world-views, new life-views. No doubt these forces of life will carry the individual along with them, will come upon him and coerce him when he does not so will, will not at all even ask him what he wills, what he has to say to them, or how he regards them. But on this very account, in surveying the great whole of our life development we easily lose sense for what is individual and special. Where classes and masses of men encounter each other, where world-moving thought jolt and undermine thousand-year-old traditions and customs, removing their very foundations, there the individual human soul suffers abridgement, there we forget that even the largest number consists of units, and that the greatest numerical worth is judged according to the worth of these units.

Therefore a great social thinker must reflect ever anew that _man_ is the significant thing in every new social culture--is beginning and goal. To understand how to trumpet a word respecting _man and his personality_ into this social movement and seething, this is to do an essential service to the modern way of viewing life, this is to warn us that we are not entirely impersonal in the presence of pure objectivity.

No one has done such service to our age in so signal a manner, as _Friedrich Nietzsche_. He is not the preacher of _social_, but of _personal_, man. However, fundamental hater of socialism that he was, he yet became a mighty moving and impelling force for socialism. He, too, wills a new culture, _but he wills it through a new man_. Therefore, he shows us the way to this new culture in that which is most _personal_ to man, in man's _Longing_, or yearning, or craving,--in man's _Sehnsucht_,--a word of profound import to which none of these English words does justice.

To many ears that program does not sound provocative, promising, alluring. _Sehnsucht_ is not a feeling that makes one happy and blissful--not a feeling to which one would like to accord a constant and abiding possession of one's heart. "Only he who knows _Sehnsucht_ knows what I _suffer_"--so sighed Goethe's Mignon, one of the most impressive and marvelous characters the poet-genius ever created, an Incarnate Yearning, self-consumed in unquieted longing of soul, in _Heimweh_ for a dreamily visioned distance, to walk in whose sunny beauty her feet were never destined. To preach _Sehnsucht_ is to preach hunger. To hunger is to ache. The gnawing of a hungry stomach--but what is that compared with the gnawing of a hungry heart, when everything that seems good and great and worth striving after becomes elusive, unattainable, unintelligible, to passionate longing? _Sehnsucht_ is not anxiety, it is worse than anxiety. Anxiety is petty; _Sehnsucht_ is great and deep. In anxiety, life is dark, and darkness terrifies and distresses man. In _Sehnsucht_, life is luminous, but the light blinds the soul. _Sehnsucht_ sees all light in a magical radiance, yet cannot clasp it; feels its overpowering attraction, yet cannot satisfy the eye with it. Prometheus chained to a rock, after he had filched the celestial spark from the gods! Tantalus, the luscious fruit just over his head, but wafted away as soon as he longs to grasp it with greedy hands! Yes, all the human heart's deepest pain, this is _Sehnsucht_. Whoever names a pain that is not _Sehnsucht_ has not peered to the bottom of pain's chalice.

"Woe to that man through whom _Sehnsucht_ comes!" we might almost cry. If you love me, do not stir up this yearning for the impossible that is in me, this hot, fervent craving, which can never find satisfaction, which can never enjoy the pleasures of life, or its own self. If you love men, save them from their very youth up in the presence of that tempestuous storm and stress into the Afar, where all solid shores vanish, all safe harbors are closed--save men, trembling, untranquil, from the everlasting question: Knowest thou the land? Knowest it well? Leave men their peace of mind, add no fuel to the flame of their discontent. Do not wrong them by letting them eat of the tree of knowledge. Do not show them the infinite expanse unrolling behind and beyond the narrow confines of their petty lives, thus spoiling the pleasure of their contentment, the joy they have in their limited and longingless life. Paradise is better than Wilderness. The familiar murmur of the brook in the meadow by the old home is more restful than the roar of the cataract or than the eternal haunting mystery and melody of the great sea. Such is the common cry of the lackadaisical, the longingless, the _laissez-faire_ people to all of us who "turn the world upside down."

Yes, we make all men sufferers--we who pilot their minds to what is not yet there, and to what they not yet are--we who show them a land lying undiscovered in mist or azure ahead of them. We make man seekers, we become disturbers of the peace--this is what they call our crime and blasphemy. Therefore, men give us a wide berth, warn others against our society, afraid of the yearning and hot hunger of soul which would come over them, were they once to hanker after a different fare from what they light upon in their troughs every morning, gorging themselves to an easy satiety--a different fare that would make them hunger ever anew, and arouse them to new longings. No, comfort men; free them from their painful Sehnsucht; teach them the foolishness of hitching their wagons to stars; tell them that all is well with them and make them content with any lot in life that may by chance be theirs! Then you will be their true benefactors; then you will heal the wounds from which the heart would otherwise so easily bleed!

Really? That is a good thing to do for men? The wise thing to say to the heart is: Break your wings in two, so you will not be tempted to brave the blue, to keep company with "the distant sea," to explore the Afar? The comforting thing to do for the slave is to gild his chains, so that he may have joy in their glittering splendor and show them off as worth their weight in gold? How easy it would be then for the Czar of all the Russias "to go to Berlin if it costs me my last peasant!" How easy for the Vatican to silence the modernist! Throne and altar, an _entente cordiale_ indeed, could then enjoy by "divine right" an unmolested and unworried repose upon a world of dumb, blind, brute peasants. But--

If I'm designed yon lordling's slave--
By nature's law design'd--
Why was an independent wish
E'er planted in my mind?

Why did God implant _Sehnsucht_ in the heart of man? "Thou hast made us for Thyself and the heart is restless until it rests in Thee," said Augustine long ago. Indeed, God is but another human name for Eternal Yearning.

All yearning is love--love that silently and secretly celebrates its triumphal entry into the soul. If you stood at the grave of a joy and felt pain over that which was lost, would not the pain of yearning be the measure, the consciousness, of your newly-awakened, ever-waking love? Would you like to calculate this yearning and exchange therefor coldness and indifference of heart? And if you felt a love so full and deep that moments had eternities concealed in them, even so, on the basis of this love yearning would live more than ever, it would open up to the soul new vistas, new goals, it would give love her life; and a love without yearning, which did not see beyond itself, did not love above itself, finished in that which it was, or it called its own--would quickly cease to be love. Yes, yearning redoubles all genuine love to man; it involves something becoming, something greater, purer, for which love lays the foundation and gives the impulse. Only he who knows yearning, knows what I _love_, so Mignon might have also said. There is something unslaked, unslakable, in every love, an insatiable hunger for more love, for better and purer love.

It is this yearning that saves love from being blind; it gives love the strength and courage of veraciousness; it plunges the heart into a struggle of desperation when a man of our love does not keep his promise, when he becomes pettier and baser than we had believed of him; and yet in this struggle it achieves the victory of faith which mounts above all the pettiness and baseness of the man, to the certainty of its strength, that love faileth never. In every love we love something higher than itself, something for which the heart is destined and endowed. This is the yearning in our love, _a will_, which stirs in all deep feeling of the heart, and guards against the death which every moment, sufficient only for itself, harbors. Every love, therefore, is itself a yearning: love for truth is the power to grow beyond _a_ truth; love for righteousness is hunger and thirst after righteousness. In all the beauty that greets the eye and awakens exultation and joy in the heart, the soul ripens new sensitivity for new visions of the wonders of life, the heart widens so that it absorbs strength for new beauty and sees new beauty even in the darkness and dust of earth. A man without yearning is a man without love. And if one would guarantee man that satisfaction which one prizes as the most beautiful and most blissful lot on earth, then one must first stifle his heart or tear it from his breast; for as long as this heart still beats, and announces in every beat its insatiable hunger for love, so long will the man harbor and feel his yearning, which will not let the beating heart be satisfied.

But yearning is therefore not simply suffering, not simply love--of these we have been thinking--it is also life, the true life of man. The man who lives only for himself, and for the passing moment, does not live at all. And this is what Nietzsche says of man--man a transition and an end--yearning always interring an Old, always swinging a bridge across to a New--love loving the most distant and most future--vision sweeping up the ages to higher man. This, then, is man's hour of great self-contempt. All his happiness, his wealth, his knowledge, his virtue, seems too little to fill his soul. There is insufficiency, nausea, as to all that he esteems, a cry of wrath from the deep of his being, a cry that sounds like madness to all who call themselves good and righteous, to all who call their execrable smugness a delight.

But this is the great tumultuous yearning, the thunder of whose soaring wings is forever in modern ears. It proffers man a new table of values; forward, not backward, shall he look; love _Kinderland_, the undiscovered land in distant oceans, that he may make amends to the children for their being the children of their fathers!

In this song of jubilee of yearning, who does not hear the old ring, which was once preached as glad tidings, as gospel of humanity! There, too, it was the seeking that were saved, the hungering and not the sated, the starving and not the full. And they, too, had their Higher Man--the Christ they called Him, their Yearning, their Love, their Life. They sang: For me to live is Christ; I live, yet not I; Christ lives in me. And as long as this Yearning lived in them, they were creative spirits. They put a new face upon the world. They transformed the world after the image of their Higher Man. A living, a socially organized Yearning, this is what the whole Middle Age was, with its Below and its Above, where each lower man had in each higher man a rung of the heavenly ladder on which he should climb to a higher existence. A yearning hewn in stone, that was their dome; yearning they sang in their most impressive hymns and masses; and yearning breathed all those celestial figures as they lifted their glorified eyes to the Higher Man of Heaven, the Man Thorn-crowned, Crucified and Risen.

Then the glow of this yearning was cooled by the cold north wind of reality. Yearning petrified. There was no inclination to keep it from dying. They were swift to deal it a deadly blow. They thought they had accomplished marvels to have torn themselves loose from it. "No more _Sehnsucht_ now," they said, "for we have found happiness!" They smirked and they blinked. Their Higher Man died along with their yearning. The scholars indeed had discovered that this Higher Man was only "man," a Jewish rabbi whom the people of his day mistakenly held to be a Higher Man, a Messiah, but who now to them themselves and to all moderns belongs to Lower Man, to Past Man. To be sure, it goes against the grain of all of them for their Higher Man to vanish from life, from the yearning of man. Therefore, they seek painfully and anxiously for a "Dignity" which they may still claim for their _human_ Jesus. Above all, they thus forget that the Higher Man can never lie behind us, but only before us, not beside us, on a level with us, but only above us. Therefore, all their scholarship cannot rescue the Higher Man for us, and cannot give us back the Great Yearning. Only the living heart can do this, the heart that creates out of its own mystery a yearning. That heart with this yearning will overcome and retire the man of today--all who play the game as lords of today. The modern man of yearning looks beyond himself, works beyond himself, for a Man as high above present-day man as once the _Christusbild_ was above the men of the long-lost past--a Man who will bear all the deeps of the world and all the deeps of its woes in his heart, while at the same time thirsting in its deepest depths for the eternities. This great yearning, this suffering and loving yearning, this is more than all the wisdom of the scribes, all the subtleties and hairsplittings of the theologians, this is the sacred womb from which a Christ life is born ever and ever again. "Only he who knows yearning, knows what I _live_!"--so might Mignon's dear words be changed yet again. To save the Sehnsucht is to save the soul. _Also sprach Goethe--Nietzsche!_

The Wicked to the Wise

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

"A brilliant mind, gone wrong!" ...
O tell me, ye who throng
The beehives of the world, grow ye not ever weary of this song?

"The way our fathers went." ...
Yes, if our days were spent
Sod-deep, beside our fathers' bones, wise, needless were your argument.

"The wisdom of the mass." ...
Thank God, it too shall pass
Like the breathed film hiding the face grayly within the silvered glass.

"All's surely for the best!" ...
Aye, so shall be confessed
By your sons' sons, marking where down we smote you as we onward
pressed.

The Viennese Dramatists

ERNA MCARTHUR

One does not know quite how the modern literary movement in Vienna arose. Suddenly, some twenty years ago, there were some active young writers called "Young Vienna," in a collective way, who were supposed to be revolutionary and bent on originality. In reality these young people had no definite literary program such as had been issued in Berlin by the leaders of the new naturalist movement. They were a circle of friends, who had heard of the new and wonderful things that had been done. They came to know Ibsen and the great Russian and French novelists; they were of the generation which was to be moved to the utmost by the philosophy of Nietzsche. Of course these influences had been working in the whole German-speaking world. Art was being taken seriously again and the young people were yearning to produce something new and original of their own.

Hauptmann had started a kind of revolution in Germany by his first play, _Before Sunrise_, and the Viennese, who lived a little isolated in their town, grew excited and enthusiastic over these doings.

A young writer, Hermann Bahr, was a kind of apostle for the new art in Vienna. He was a man of agility, capable of unbounded enthusiasm, who could go into ecstasy for all kinds of movements--for realism as well as neo-romanticism, for Ibsen and Zola, for Maeterlinck and d'Annunzio. He had been traveling about in Europe, had come in touch with all the leading personalities, and had brought the news home to his Viennese friends; he wanted to make a new Vienna in every way. A few years later he was active in organizing the young painters, sculptors, and architects, who evolved a very original and striking art.

So it came to pass that Hermann Bahr was considered the leader of everything modern--which meant "crazy" to the good citizen of the day. It was this same milieu of the citizen, the bourgeois, that produced all the young writers. In consequence, they were absolutely anti-bourgeois in their way of looking at things, in the very natural contrast of fathers and sons. Hence, too, they had a certain culture, good manners, and a predominant interest in æsthetic questions, as there had been no occasion for them to know the primitive cares of life. But they were tired of the narrowness and tastelessness of their milieu; they wanted to do things differently--to live and love differently; to put art into their surroundings, their dwellings, their dress; good taste--this had been a tradition of the old Vienna, lost in the transition-state when the middle-class element obtained its precedence over the old aristocracy--was now to take its place again.

Apart from the dislike of these Viennese young men for the bourgeoisie there were really very few positive tendencies that could join them into a group. Consequently very different artistic individualities developed. Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the two most representative, have very little in common in their work. But there was a spirit of friendship among all of them; they liked to meet in the cafés, which had always been Vienna's center of social life, and to talk things over--the lightest and the deepest. A certain café used to be famous as the center of the young literary world. The old people who didn't like the whole business called it the café of the crazy self-worshippers (something to that effect), and this title has stuck to it since. Today, the house has been demolished, its glory has passed, but there are still legends and stories told of the wonderful talk, the hot and breathless debates that once filled these rooms from morning till night--and till morning again.

In all this there was no real rebellion against any local literary tradition. The great Austrian writers of the past always held their own places; but the great dramatists did not reign on the stage of that day. It was nearly exclusively devoted to the French salon-play--Dumas, Augier, and their German imitators. Naturally a generation which looked for the true and real in art could not have much in common with these.

But there were certainly some features in Grillparzer and Anzengruber felt as congenial by the moderns. Grillparzer had possessed a sensuous softness, a musical beauty of language foreign to the contemporary North German. Thus an element of color and light--the soul of modern impressionism--entered in his creations, breaking through the severe contours characteristic of his generation, though in general he set great value on the strict architectonic upbuild of his dramas. In his tragedy of _Hero and Leander_ perhaps the warmest love tragedy ever written in the German language, a strongly realistic description of Viennese type is hidden among the Greek clothing. Hero, consecrated priestess, who forgets her vows when she sees Leander, first full of reserve, then letting herself go in a full passion, might be the grandmother of Schnitzler's sweet girl out of the suburb. Here she wears a charming Greek dress, her lonely tower stands on the seashore, and her lover, Leander, must swim through the whole Hellespont to reach her. The modern poet makes it easier for his heroes; the tower gets to be a little room in a Viennese suburb and a walk in the twilight through a few quiet streets brings him to his goal without much exertion. (And so you might find other parental traits between the two Austrians.)

There is a melancholy strain in Grillparzer's personality and work which Schnitzler seems to have inherited. Side by side with the light-mindedness and ease of the Austrian, a certain tired melancholy and resignation seem to dwell. This sounds through many creations of Austrian artists. We hear it in Schubert's music and feel it in the charming plays of Ferdinand Plaimund, who saw the harmony only in an upper sphere of fairies and magicians, whereas the life of the human beings seemed tumultuous and disordered to him.

Austria did not make it easy for her gifted children, and Grillparzer suffered all his life in his official career. It oppressed him and warped his creative power. Ludwig Anzengruber had to suffer under the same disadvantages, but he had a greater fund of good humor to set against it. He was a man of vigor and _lebensbejahung_ (affirmation of life). Anzengruber was called the herald of naturalism and the Berlin people counted him as one of their number, producing his plays together with those of Ibsen and Hauptmann on the Berlin Free Stage.

Anzengruber applied the heightened sense for reality characteristic of modern art--be it called naturalistic or neo-romantic--to his own work and introduced a new material to the drama. The peasant story had been treated up to now in a moralizing way. The idyl of country innocence was to be shown and towns-people were to see the purer heart's sentiment under the dirtier shirts. Anzengruber showed the peasants in their reality, neither better nor worse. His fingers are unnatural and stiff in representing types of the cultured classes speaking the literary German; his peasant types are of wonderful vitality. There is the old stone-cutter who has thought out a deep pantheistic philosophy. He relates it in his simple way: how it all came to him--how he was lonely, poor, lying in his cottage up in the mountains, how he saw the sun lying on the meadow and wanted to live in the sunshine, not in his miserable hut when he felt near dying. And then, out in the sunny meadow, it comes to him like a revelation that he is not really ill, not really poor, because nothing can happen to him--because everything around belongs to him and he belongs to everything. This deep pantheistic feeling expressed in this unpathetic way gives him from now on a perfect good humor not to be disturbed. He goes among the peasants looking on at their quarrelings and grumblings and helps them out of their worst plights in a good-natured way, but without bothering them in the least with his philosophy or any tendency toward improving them or the world in general.

Anzengruber, with such religious views as he expressed here, had to be opposed to the Catholicism in which he was brought up. He fights against the clericalism which was weighing so heavily on the peasants. He could feel their needs, for, though he was born in Vienna and lived there nearly all his life, there was more country than town blood in his veins. This connects him closer with Hauptmann, the Silesian, so deeply influenced in his art by home environment, than with any of the young Austrian writers who were all born in the big towns and did not know what firm rooting in the soil means. Anzengruber's traditions could not be followed by them and there is the greatest contrast between his strong energetic work and the dainty, tender, delicate things produced by Schnitzler as the first product of the young Viennese school just a year after Anzengruber's death. This was _Anatol_, a little work full of grace, charm, and playfulness. The loose way in which the seven scenes were connected only by Anatol's figure was perfectly original. It was really nothing but little sketches put into dialogues characteristic of Vienna, the town whose special glamour consist in the dialogue of ordinary conversation; the pretty chat of the drawing room, the café raised to the dignity of a fine art; and with all this, having a lightness, a delicacy, a frothiness, a wit, and a quality of sadness not found anywhere else.

Women's influence penetrated this art--in Austria just as in the Latin countries the cult of women had always been a factor of culture and with this generation of poets her triumphal epoch started. She was put into the center. It was written around her and it was written for her. _Anatol_ belongs to those, for our days, improbable beings who only live for love; erotics are his sole occupation, his only profession. But he is not the victorious Don Juan full of self-confidence; he is rather quiet, with a shade of agreeable modesty,--a melancholic of love, he calls himself.

The young Hofmannsthal wrote an introduction to the work of his friend in dainty verses. They expressed the spirit of this art extremely well, so I will quote them partly, though it would require an artist to translate them in good form. He says:

Well, let's begin the play,
Playing our own piece
Early matured, sad and tender,
Our own soul's comedy;
Our feelings past and present,
Dark things lightly said,
Smooth words, joyous pictures,
Vague emotions, half experienced,
Agonies and episodes.

The sense of reality, which had been acquired in the school of Zola and Ibsen, was used here to make travels of discovery into the most interesting and unknown land of all--the over soul. And here the complicated, the unusual inmoods and feelings and emotions fascinated the young artists. Personality itself, though the center, took rather a passive part,--it simply came to be the scene of action, the meeting-place of all different impressions. People of the earlier time had been expressionists who projected their own ego into the outward world, whereas now they held themselves open to new impressions, observed them and their effect on the _I_ and then reproduced their observations in artistic form. Impressionism, predominant in painting at that time, had taken hold of literature. Of course, this passivity could only be a stage of transition, because each artistic individuality tends from the passive to the active; but this impressionism was a good means of assimilating all the new possibilities in the inside and outside world.

Schnitzler, born as the son of a famous Viennese physician, and prepared to be a physician himself, was trained to observe. He had a sure scientific eye for human problems, a kind, objective benevolence, and tender forbearance for all sides of human life.

_Anatol_, his first work, is typical of all the following. Here we see the principal figures, the complicated lover as hero, a friend as the _raisonneur_,--a remembrance of the French play,--and seven different types of womanhood. Here they all are--the simple sweet girl, loving with her whole heart; the woman, who loves to play with men; the lady of the world, she who would like to love, but has not courage to do it.

The long line of his dramas, novels, and novelettes--for he tried to express himself in all these forms--all speak of love and death. For the pathetic element soon creeps into Anatol's frivolousness. The presentiment of the transitory dwells in his creation--the end of love, the end of enjoyment and of passion, the end of life itself. But this permanent thought of death, not searching beyond the limits of this earth, gives a new intensity to the enjoyment of this life while it lasts. This feeling for life, for the simple joy of breathing, of seeing the spring once more, is one of Schnitzler's most elementary conceptions. You may look at any of his plays and find this true--the call of Life, expressed with the utmost intensity. A young girl hears the call of life--she is fettered to the bedside of her ill father who never lets her out of his sight. She must stay with him--always--without the smallest pleasure, and suddenly she hears that the man she loves, a young officer whom she has seen only once, when she has danced in his arms a whole night long, must away to the war never to return. She can stand it no longer; she gives her father poison, the whole sleeping potion, and rushes away to him who is her only thought. And now events go in a mad rush; she in his room, unknown to himself, hidden behind a curtain, she sees the woman he loves, the beautiful wife of his colonel, come to him. She wants him to stay away from the war, save his life for her sake, and then suddenly the colonel stands between the two and shoots down his wife. The officer he leaves to judge himself. Over the corpse of the other woman the girl rushes into the arms of the man, who can belong to her for the few hours left to him. And after all these breathless events, she remains alone, bewildered, as if after a heavy dream. She lives on and cannot understand that there is still room for her in the world, with all her crime and grief and joy. But a wise and kind friend explains the connection and wins her over to life once more. These are his words--the drama's conclusion: "You _live_, Marie, and it was. Since that night too and that morning, the days and nights go on for you. You walk through field and meadow. You pluck the wayside flowers and you talk with me here under the bright, friendly, midday sky. And this is living--not less than it was on that night when your darkened youth beckoned you toward gloomy adventures, which still today appear to you to be the last word of your being. And who knows, if later, much later, on a day like today, the call of the living will not cry within you much deeper, and purer, than on that day in which you have lived through things which are called by such terrible and glowing names as murder and love."

The whole play seems to be written for the sake of the last beautiful words. It is Schnitzler's greatest art to lift us to a sphere where everything seemingly important is solved, where tragedy and melancholy and sadness melt together into a wonderful serenity. His technique is full of subtlety; every little word and gesture has its place, its importance; we feel the weight of the smallest happening, the reality of a seemingly unmeaning fact, the deep consequence of a hasty word.

The milieu was nearly always Vienna. Here his over-cultivated, refined men were at home, here his soft and loving women. All the several circles, aristocrats, artists, physicians, business men, furnished material for his work; and even more than the people, the town itself grew to life. The elegant vivaciousness of the inner city, where the fashionable society meets at certain hours and fashionable little shops line the streets, the lonely little streets of the suburb, the wonderful charm of the Wiener Wald embracing the town with its soft rounded lines--all this rich flowering beauty that had surrounded him from childhood he gathered in his work. Perhaps more forcibly than any one else he brought Vienna's charm to our consciousness. And so he returned to Vienna what he had received from her.

Only two of his plays are outside the Viennese milieu--_The Green Cockatoo_, a grotesque that puts us marvelously well in the Parisian atmosphere shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution; and _Beatrice's Veil_, a Renaissance drama which tempted almost every artist in those days. This epoch's refinement, the powerful personalities peopling it, the intensity concentrated on the enjoyment of their life--in all this they saw something akin to their own life's ideal.

Schnitzler's plays have nothing of the fresco; they are more like Manet's small landscapes with their richness of color and their soft contours diffused in light.

He made one attempt at a drama in big, unusually big, dimensions. It takes about six hours to perform on the stage, longer than the second part of Goethe's _Faust_; it is a historic play of the Napoleonic time called _The Young Medardus_, but the Emperor himself remains in the background and only his shadow lies on the events. These take place in Vienna at the time that Napoleon had reached Austria on his triumphal march and resided for the time in Schonbrun, the Hapsburg's castle near Vienna. The Viennese people as a mass are characterized--these people so easily moved, so easily influenced, growing enthusiastic now for Napoleon, now in a hasty patriotic emotion for their own Emperor, principally wanting one thing: to see some exciting spectacle, to hear news, to speak over interesting happenings. The broadest part of the drama is occupied by a love episode between the hero Medardus--a cousin, if not a brother of Anatol, only about a hundred years back--and the beautiful, proud, cold Duchess of Valois, who is in Vienna to intrigue against Napoleon, claiming the right to the French throne for herself and her own family. The work is full of beautiful and interesting episodes, but there is not enough architectonic power to join them together to a unity.

It is too early to view Schnitzler in a historic way--he is fifty years old and in the middle of his work; certainly he signified much for his own generation, for they felt themselves understood by him and he influenced and even formed their attitude and feeling. Whether his figures have enough of the timelessness, of the deep, full-rounded humanity which will give them power to speak to future generations I do not know. In a mood of paradoxical humor, Schnitzler himself criticised his own creation more severely than any critic could. We see a marionettes' theater on the stage; the public there, eager for the play; the marionettes appear--all Schnitzler's own figures: the complicated hero, the sweet girl, the demonic woman, and so on. The poet is there, full of excitement. The marionettes are to give his new play, but there is a rebellion. The marionettes want to do what pleases them, live their _own life_. In the midst of confusion, a mysterious man appears on the stage with a long naked sword in his hand; he cuts through the threads; the marionettes fall in a heap. The poet asks, half grateful, half bewildered, "Who are you?" But the unknown man cannot tell him; he is an enigma to himself. He wanders through the world and his sword makes it apparent who only is a doll, who a man. Schnitzler doomed his figures with more severity to the fate of dolls than is due them.

The second Viennese writer whose name became known beyond the town's limits is Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He is a very different person from Schnitzler; both have the sensitive, refined, exclusively aesthetic valuation of things in common. But what was expressed more naively in Schnitzler came to be a program with Hofmannsthal. He joined a group of men with a strict "Art for Art's sake" program, exclusive and intended only for the few. The principal of this group was Stefan George, a lyric poet who had fashioned the German language into poems of such beauty of form as to rival the poetry of the French lyricists, like Baudelaire or Verlaine. It was an art that irritated people somewhat, like that of the Cubists and Futurists. It was extremely hard to understand; the sense organs were mixed up, as he spoke of sounding colors, fragrant tones, and colored sounds. Hofmannsthal, with a great feeling for language and form, grew to be his follower.

These poets called themselves Neo-Romanticists, because their art was crowded full of symbols. The older Ibsen, with his symbolic world, Maeterlinck, with his mysterious little plays, were their models; with these the great artists of form, Swinburne and d'Annunzio. It was an eclectic, much-traveled type, assimilating old and modern cultures equally well.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal is characteristic of the type of the aesthete, with a rather priestly, exclusive bearing still found today frequently in Germany. These were no more the old Bohemians with a preference for a deranged toilette and way of living, but elegant young gentlemen who liked to appear in frock coats with ties and waistcoats fabulously gay of color. Also, in their surroundings their liking went to the utmost refinement and luxury. They loved the dignified, the sensational, the sonorous. Hugo von Hofmannsthal certainly blessed his parents for giving him a well-sounding, sonorous name.

He had a great talent as a lyricist, and as an essayist, with the finest understanding for all foreign cultures as long as they responded to something in his own soul. His dramas are not in any way related to Vienna. He perused all history's epochs and took the material for his dramas from the Orient, out of the Italian Renaissance (his favorite epoch), and the classic art of the Greek. Many of his plays are not intended as original creations, but arrangements of older works. So he did with an old pre-Shakespearean English play by Thomas Otway and with the old mystery play _Everywoman_. Some of his little plays are lovely--the death of Titian gives a vision of the dead extravagance of Venice equalled by few modern productions. His most interesting attempt is an arrangement of _Elektra_ for the modern stage. His Greeks are barbarous, wild, full of unbroken primitive instincts. They are under the influence of an extreme nervous hysteria. Nietzsche had spoken of the Greek hysteria, which slumbered under their apparent serenity. Hofmannsthal put a picture of horror on the stage that keeps the spectator spellbound from the first to the last minute. Through the concentration in one act this intensity is still increased.

Since Richard Strauss put _Elektra_ into music, Hofmannsthal has devoted his art entirely to this composer. His last works are written as libretti for Strauss operas, and go through the world now in the wake of his music.

Finally, I would like to tell of a strange Viennese personality, no dramatist, but just as little a novelist, epic or lyric poet. The name of this man, who cannot be put into any of the ordinary literary compartments, is Peter Altenberg. He thought that most of the things told in dramas of five, or three, or only one act, were superfluous; the essential could be told in three lines as a rule. He wishes to give the extract and the reader might work it out for himself. He only writes very short sketches, apparently perfectly usual things, out of every-day life. But he discovered a little secret, namely, that the ordinary is really the most wonderful. Miracles do not exist any more, but the miraculous is there, everywhere. _Fairy Tales of Life_ he calls one of his books (in which he collects a number of sketches); but he might call them all by the same name. As in Maeterlinck's _Blue Bird_ the wonderful is everywhere, but we have not the eyes to see it. Well, Peter Altenberg has these eyes. His little sketches would seem untranslatable. They might seem, in a different language, perfectly banal little things, not worth the relating,--but suddenly a veil is removed and we see the world and things in a new light.

Peter Altenberg uses the most original style--one might call it a telegram style; it is very abrupt without any endeavor at a connected literary form. He wants, as he says himself, to describe a man in one sentence; an event of the soul on one page; a landscape with one word.

Everybody in Vienna knows Peter Altenberg. He is a poet of the street, who goes around and writes down his little sketches wherever he may be--principally in the cafes.

All the women must love him--for he has sung their praises all his life, like a minnesinger of the Middle Ages.

Editorials

Some Emma Goldman Lectures in Chicago

Beginning October 25, and continuing for three weeks, Miss Goldman is to give a series of new lectures in the Assembly Hall of the Fine Arts Building--an event which has already filled us with the keenest anticipations. There will be three on the war:--_Woman and War_, _War and Christianity_, and _The Sanctity of Property as a Cause of War_. There will be a series on the drama, as the mirror of rebellion against the tyranny of the past:--an introductory one on the significance of art in its relation to life, and others on the new Scandinavian, Italian, German, French, Russian, Yiddish, American, and English drama. These will be given on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights, and offer sufficient richness for one season. But there is even more. On Monday and Wednesday nights, at East End Hall on Erie and Clark Streets, Miss Goldman will deliver six general propaganda lectures, all dealing with the labor problem and the sex question. Tickets will be on sale at the office of THE LITTLE REVIEW; at The Radical Book Shop, 817½ North Clark Street; and may be had also from Dr. Reitman, 3547 Ellis Avenue. How interesting it will be to watch that part of the audience which attends the war and the drama talks as perfectly "safe" subjects making its discovery that the lecturer is a woman of simple nobility and sweetness, and that her propaganda is a matter of truth rather than of terror.

The Philistinization of College Students