Chapter IV (1)

Pro domo mea: on the vice of simplicity. John Cowper Powys—a
revelation

One of my critics sent me a New Year’s wish and admonition: “You are hectic. Why not see things as they are? You must learn to be simple.”

This is another attempt on the part of my good-wishers to cure me, in defiance of my resolute declaration that I cannot and do not want to be cured. Furthermore, I am in the position of a normal lunatic who considers the whole world, except himself, insane; not only do I refuse to learn the art of being simple, but I regard simplicity as a vice, a defect, a misery.

What is simplicity? I cannot define things; definitions are absurd, limiting, simplifying. In this case perhaps I ought to adopt the method of the school-boy who defined salt as “what makes potatoes nasty when not applied to.” It is an English joke which I have tried with discouraging results on the American sense of humor; it suits my purpose nevertheless. How would this do: “Simplicity is that which makes life dull when applied to?” No; decidedly, I cannot think in Procrustean formulas.

Nothing is simple. What nonsense it is to synonymize this word with “natural,” as if nature were not most complex and complicated! Neither is the primitive savage simple, for he conceives things not “as they are,” but through a veil of awe and mystery. Nor is the child simple, Messrs. and Mesdames Pedagogues; you may instruct it scientifically, tell it “plain truths” and facts, but the not-yet-educated young mind will distrust you and will continue to live in its illusionary, fantastic world. Not even beasts may be accused of that vice: recall Maeterlinck’s subtle dogs and horses.

Nothing is simple, although civilization has attempted to simplify a good deal. We have come to live in accordance with established standards, customs, regulations; inertia and routine have replaced impulse and initiative. Science has endeavored to explain away man’s dreams, to do away with religion, soul, imagination, to prove away our mysteries and wonders. Known stuff. Thus has come to be the matter-of-fact multitude, the simple, the all-knowing, those who act and think and feel “as everybody else does,” as they are taught and trained by the ingenious apparatus of scientific, moral, and social classifications, definitions, simplifications, in a word—the civilized man.

Yet side by side with civilization, machinization, automatonization, there is another powerful force moving the world: culture. Culture _versus_ civilization, this is how I gauge the issue. Do not ask me to define these words: let Professor Herrick do it. We are all civilized, of course; especially the Germans: witness their recent astounding achievements. Now try to apply the term “culture” to the activities of those _Kulturtraeger_ in Belgium and before Rheims—Q. E. D. Michael Bakounin “tried” it in 1848, when he suggested to his fellow-revolutionists in Dresden that they place on the besieged walls Raphael’s Madonna in order to avert the canon of the cultured Prussians; luckily the Saxons knew better their cousins, “the blond beasts.” Pardon this paroxysm of my old disease, Prussophobia. Bakounin, you see, belonged to the few, to the non-simple, to those who had an insight beyond the apparent, the fact, to the hectic, to the abnormal, if you please; “abnormal” is the label given to such individualities by the many, the civilized.

I am not so vulgar as to affect megalomania, when asserting that I am cultured: this is an _apologia_, a confession of my sins before my critic, the advocate of simplicity. When facing a sunset, I do not simply see a display of colors, nor do I think of the simple explanation of this phenomenon as offered by science, but I live through a world of associations, recollections of diverse impressions and reactions imprinted on my mind by Boecklin, Mallarmé, Debussy—by all the gods that make up the religion of modern man. Life external, simple facts, are to me an artless raw libretto, which, naturally, cannot in itself satisfy one who has come into this world with the intention of enjoying grandiose opera. I call it culture, this faculty of seeing things _creatively_, not in monotones, not through window-panes, but through multiplying lenses which collect the rays of all suns and concentrate them on the focus. Now, pray, is there any hope for me “to learn how to be simple?”

Life is composed of hundreds of grey days interspersed with a few scintillating moments, the few moments justifying our otherwise superfluous existence. In this respect I am not a Croesus, but the half dozen or so of meteoric flashes that have pierced through the ordinariness of my life I treasure grudgingly, and would not exchange them for years of continuous well-being. Congratulate me: I have become enriched now with another moment of rare beatitude, of indelible radiance. I was present at the transubstantiation of Oscar Wilde, performed by John Cowper Powys.

Was it a lecture? “Most certainly,” would advise me my simple friend. What a dwarfish misnomer for the solemn rite that took place in the dark temple, the “catacomb” of the Little Theatre! I close my eyes, and see once more the galvanized demi-god vibrating in the green light, invoking the Uranian Oscar. We, the worshipers, sit entranced, hypnotized, demundanized, bewitched; the sorcerer makes us feel the presence in flesh and spirit of the Assyrian half-god, half-beast, who had the moral courage of living his life actively, to the full; we follow bewildered the quaint meteor of Wilde’s genius illuminating the world for a moment, dropping down into a hideous pit, reflaming in the pale glimmer of discovered sorrow; we finally hear the sonorous requiem to Oscar’s break-down from the shock of having discovered a heart in himself. The lights are on, the sorcerer is gone, but we remain under the spell of the hovering spirit.

To quote Powys is as impossible as to _tell_ a symphony. It is the How and the What and the stage background that combine in creating the inexpressible charm of that experience. As to Oscar Wilde—well, what does it matter whether we agree with Mr. Powys’s interpretation or not? Wilde was my idol for a long time; I chanted dithyrambs to him and worshiped him fanatically. Later, in the perpetual process of dethroning gods, I observed the halo of the Prince of Paradoxes becoming paler in my eyes. Mr. Powys rekindled in my heart the sacred flame, for a moment at least, and gave me the rare sensation of reliving an old love.

À propos of simplicity: Wilde proclaimed artificiality as the great virtue, and certainly lived up to his theory. Compare his short but italicized life with the last weary years of Tolstoy that were an attempt for “simple life.” Need I tell you which I prefer?

Muck and Music

ALFRED A. KNOPF

(_We disagree with Mr. Knopf in too many respects not to be eager to
print his interesting article._)

Dr. Karl Muck resumed charge of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the fall of 1912. Looking over the twenty-two programs which he has given since then one is forced to admit that his tastes are, to say the least, peculiar. There have been frequent performances of Beethoven and Brahms and occasional classical programs. These, perhaps, serve to keep his feet on solid earth, but at other times he soars into the realm of incomprehensible novelty and one can tell in advance where he will land just about as easily as if he were a German Zeppelin headed for Paris. One thing only seems certain—he cannot resist the virtuoso that is in him; he gluts us with what can only be called virtuosity for its own sake. If he offers a novelty (and when Brahms and Beethoven are taken care of he chooses, for the most part, to offer little else) it is sure to be some outrageously difficult affair—difficult both to play and to listen to. One cannot reasonably object to music merely because it is difficult to understand. The test is whether there is sufficient real beauty in it to repay careful and painstaking attention. And my point is simply that many of us feel that the beauty in Sibelius, Holbrooke, Reger, Lendvai, Mraczek, Loeffler, Mahler, Schmitt and others is disproportionately small.

The reasons for the New Yorker’s peculiar bitterness against Dr. Muck are not difficult to discover. He makes only ten appearances each season: the Philharmonic and the New York Symphony each gives many more concerts. From our point of view, would it not be better if we relied on Stransky and Damrosch (the merits of the one and the fripperies of the other are too apparent to call for comment here) for our first hearings of novelties? Then, if a particular composition seemed to warrant it, the Boston Orchestra could play it for us in its usual masterly manner. Just so long as New York worships the men from Boston in the mad feminine way it does, just that long will it resent Dr. Muck’s playing what it doesn’t want to hear. It was Theodore Thomas, I think, who, discovering that people cared very little for Wagner’s music, played it until they changed their minds. That is all very well when you have a Wagner, but I wonder just how heartily Dr. Muck admires the music he has recently served up to his New York audiences.

To begin with there was Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony. Now Sibelius is one of the great living composers. He is a genuine musician—by which I mean that you do not suffer all the agonies of stage fright when you hear a composition of his for the first time. He knows the business of his craft and you usually feel safe in his hands, thanks to three Symphonies and Finlandia. But how rudely this fourth symphony shakes your confidence! Call it musicianly: show how consistently-planned and executed it is: you won’t like it any the more. To be sure, Sibelius is a Finn and an intensely feeling one. He gives expression to the emotions of that curiously unhappy race. But music to appeal must be more universal than this angry symphony of ugly moods. You can’t explain it on cubist grounds—unless the Finns also call it disagreeable. But one ventures the guess that they, perchance, find it richly agreeable, in which case its performance should, by International law (or what is left of it) be confined to Finland.

Then there was _Schlemihl_—a symphonic biography by one Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek. This was the pièce de resistance at the evening concert. It is scored for one piccolo, three flutes, three oboes, English horn, three clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, double bassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, contra bass tuba, two trumpets off the stage, kettle drums, snare drums, bass drum and tambourine, Glockenspiel, Cuckoo, Xylophone, cymbals, triangle, tam-tam, two harps, celesta, organ, sixteen first violins, sixteen second violins, twelve violas, ten violoncellos, eight double basses, and a tenor voice. This huge orchestra, plus the detailed analysis of his work furnished by the composer, explains _Schlemihl_. It is an attempt to out-Richard Richard Strauss, and, like almost all such attempts, it fails. Reznicek recounts the life and fate of a modern man pursued by misfortune who goes to destruction in the conflict between his ideal and his material existence. A compound essentially of _Tod und Verklärung_, _Tyll Eulenspiegel_ and _Ein Heldenleben_, but at no time reaching the heights attained by Strauss in all three of these tone poems. Imitators somehow almost always fall down in two ways—they devote far too little attention to what they want to say and far too much to their manner of saying it. And as a not unnatural result of this, they forget, or appear to forget at any rate, that melody is the prime essential in great music. Wagner had melodic genius, as we all realize today, and that Strauss has it is no longer open to very serious questioning. Reznicek hasn’t. His music is all rather good, but none of it good enough to grip you as the finest music does. It has no great moments but only moments of very great sound. The house fairly quaked at some of the fortissimos. And yet _Schlemihl_ would be pleasant enough were it not so pretentiously bombastic and did it not last twice too long. But the mere existence of _Ein Heldenleben_, _Tyll Eulenspiegel_ and _Tod und Verklärung_ deprives _Schlemihl_ of any greater claim than that.

After these two pieces Scheinpflug’s _Overture to a Comedy of Shakespeare_ proved quite simple and enjoyable. It is a musicianly piece of work lacking neither in melodic invention nor in skilful orchestration. The Allegretto Graziosa, in which an old English tune from the Fitz William Virginal Book is introduced, is wholly delightful. And having said that much, one really has said all. The overture can have no possible chance of immortality; it is not great music, it is not intensely interesting or unusually delectable: one feels rather that such compositions as this are the by-products of the daily practice of the art of music by men of no little talent but very little genius. As such, they demand an occasional hearing—today Scheinpflug has the stage: tomorrow someone else—what matter who, since none are really masters.

An occasional performance of Strauss’s early Symphonic Suite, _Aus Italien_, is probably quite justifiable because of his imposing importance among the composers of today. When a musician attains greatness almost everything he ever wrote becomes of interest to his disciples. _Aus Italien_ calls for little comment. First performed in 1887, it is difficult today to realize the great uproar and rage it evoked. Now it seems quite tame. It was indeed Strauss’s “first step towards independence,” and it is interesting as the connecting link between his very early work and _Don Juan_ and its successors. Its first movement “On The Campagna” is probably the most successful, reaching as it does gravely grey and tragic heights. A sense of oppressiveness fairly overwhelms the listener and there are chords that are exquisite. “Amid Rome’s Ruins” is not nearly so sustained and well-knit. The opening of the third movement, “On the Shore of Sorrento,” depicts with wonderful effectiveness the brilliance of an Italian sea under a dazzling sun—a brilliance that no one who has seen it is likely ever to forget. Strauss, for all his reputed blare and noise, handles his orchestra pianissimo in a manner immeasurably more impressive than anyone else of his time. (The opening bars of _Tod und Verklärung_ and the love scene in _Don Juan_ immediately come to mind). And you can measure a generation’s progress in orchestration by the unruffled placidity with which people nowadays listen to the at-one-time “brilliant, tumultuous, audacious, unusual, and bold” finale—“Neapolitan Folk-Life.”

Even the casual concert-goer must notice the amazing duplications that are being offered this season. For two or three seasons a particular composition is neglected; then suddenly it is played five times in half as many weeks. Stransky plays _Don Juan_; a week later Muck, as it were, shows us how it ought to be played. The Symphony Society plays Brahms’s Second Symphony and shortly thereafter Muck administers his reproach to Damrosch. Is there any reason why conductors shouldn’t meet occasionally and plan to avoid such ways? Muck appears the chief offender. His program stated that he was playing Ropartz’s Fourth Symphony for the first time in New York, but Stransky had played it only eight days earlier. When will we hear it again?

For this Symphony deserves another hearing. The only work by a Frenchman that Dr. Muck has offered this season, it is far more satisfying than any of his other novelties. The restless swing of the opening theme grips you at once—and your curiosity is piqued as the violins sing against the “Kernel” in the horns. The Adagio is not so successful—the theme sung by the English horn is not sufficiently melodious. You need only compare it with the heart-breaking Largo of Dvorak’s _Aus Der Neuen Welt_. But there are the most engaging rhythms—many of them typically Scotch in their snap. In fact did Ropartz’s gift for melody (it is far from negligible) approach his rhythmic talent, he might produce really great music. As it is, this Fourth Symphony interests and gratifies. But it is too long. Its three movements are played without a pause and one’s attention flags at times. It seems likely that this is inevitable in absolute music: only a program can really hold one’s attention for almost forty minutes. Strauss does it in _Ein Heldenleben_; but _Don Juan_, _Tyll Eulenspiegel_ and _Tod und Verklärung_ last only about twenty minutes each, despite the fascinating explanations that the program notes always give of their musical contents. Ropartz’s Fourth Symphony would be much better if played with pauses, and the sections are so clearly indicated that this could be done without great difficulty. But, on the whole, a hearing of his work makes one wish for more French music, with its charming, clear-cut rhythms so typical of the Gaul. (To my mind Ropartz’s indebtedness to César Franck is a matter of comparative unimportance. Disciple or not, he has brought to his task of writing music freshness and charm, a fund of melody and a quite adequate technique).

After listening to these five compositions, what effect would Beethoven’s _Egmont_ Overture naturally have? Relief,—pure unalloyed relief. And it confirms one in the feeling that relief is ever going to be one of the prime functions thrust by the musicians of today upon the greatest master of them all. Invariably he brings us back to earth, and as we sit listening to him in smug contentment, we can say over, without fear of contradiction: “This after all is music.”

While Hearing a Little Song

(_Solveigs Lied_)

MAXWELL BODENHEIM

A song flew lazily
Over my upturned head.
It dropped and I could see
The ivoried limbs, the spread
Of swaying, dream-colored wings,
And barely sense the drift
Of slender, cloud-voiced rings
Of notes which seemed to lift
The oval of my soul
Up to their lingering death ...
A purplish pallor stole
Down to my leaden breath,—
It was my melted soul
And the soft death of the throng
Of notes from the slim song.

A Hard Bed

GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

Warfare against suffering, this is man’s most natural fight. Suffering is an attack upon man, upon his will to live. On this account, he has a right to protect himself from suffering, to hold suffering far from him.

But the struggle seems futile. The host of sufferings seems illimitable. For each old suffering which we thought we had vanquished, ten new ones come of which we had never dreamt. Indeed, the capacity to suffer grows with the growth of man. The feeling of pain grows as the senses become sharper and finer. The higher a man’s development, the stronger becomes his ability to feel life’s pains. Even if we could exchange all the sufferings of life for pure joy and bliss, this latter life would be suffering still, a surfeit and a search, and I doubt not we would long for an hour of some old anguish again that would redeem us from a pleasure now grown oppressive and intolerable.

Shall we, then, hate life? Shall we say that it were better not to be than to be? We might, did we not find strength and comfort in and with every suffering,—did we not allow every item or event of experience the democratic right to a trial by a jury of its peers and to our trust that it is worth while until it shall prove that it is not,—did we not experience that up from the abyss of every suffering, painful as it seems, a path leads to a summit where all sufferings are only shadows of a blinding flood and fullness of light; that all articulate and fit into the eternal process of an upward-striving life.

There is no question but that this is the workable view of life to present to the heart of man, draining, as one must, pain’s bitter cup for one’s self. But the sufferings one feels for others, sufferings in which one’s love, expressed in sympathy and pity, is complicated—this is another matter, here one may fall into mischievous aberration. There can be no doubt that the pain of our pity for others may be more painful than the pain of our own lives. In the throes of such pity, the woes of our own lives may seem small indeed, and finally fade away. To behold a human being that is deeply dear to us suffer is worse than it would be to suffer in his place. And if the man of moral elevation of soul feels equal in the end to all that brings pain to his own life, all the more defenseless does he feel with regard to the great all-prevailing misery which, in pity, celebrates its triumphal entry into his heart. Love is our noblest human power, and it is love that lets us feel such misery, it is love whose wealth of recognition and experience renders it possible for us to descry sorrow’s abysses, to anticipate them even in advance of the poor sufferer himself.

Now, may love be good, and pity bad? What a problem is here! May we war a two-fold warfare, one against suffering and one against pity? Ought we? War upon pity—would not that be in contradiction to all that our own generation especially calls good and great? Our generation has done its best to develop in the human heart an ever-enlarging capacity for pity—what would it say to a warrior who pitilessly took up arms against pity?

_Friedrich Nietzsche_ was such a warrior, single-handed and alone! And the venomous verbal onslaught upon Nietzsche by those who did not understand him was equalled only by those who did. At first Nietzsche’s own success consisted in supplying his opponents with new weapons against himself. Of all the words which have been used as bludgeons to break the head of this most resolute rebel against our previous moral view of life, Nietzsche’s piercing words concerning pity and the pitiful have most occupied the attention of his enemies. This may not deter us from looking unabashed the great question squarely in the face. In the end, is pity something to be overcome, a disease of the old culture? Does the path of the new culture lead men out and beyond and above pity? This is no longer a Nietzsche question merely. This is a question of the moral life of our time. Perhaps this is the last weightiest question which our time can put to men of dignity and depth of thought.

However, it is only fair to say at the outset that no one has any right to fly into a rage at Nietzsche in particular for summoning men to arms against pity, since, if rage is in order at all, the conventional practices of our previous life furnished therefor occasion enough. Aye, there is an old wide-spread fashion of averting the strain of pity which is so mean and cool that almost anybody could fly into a frenzy over it—the fashion, not of triumphing over pity, but of cowardly flight from pity. Consider the whole conception of life of the so-called favorites of fortune. To what lengths do they go that they may be spared the sight of misfortune, that they may not be agitated by a touch of pity! How they avoid, if at all possible, every place that would remind them that there are want and misery, hunger and sorrow, in the world—as the Parisians did, until Zola, the most calumniated author of the nineteenth century, dragged these things, with their ensuing vices, out into the light of day and made the French people look at them! How furious they are, as the French were at great Zola, at anybody who dares to open their eyes to the sad and harrowing realities of life! Nay, they have invented a special art and religion that shall succeed in sparing them pity; the former to conjure up a make-believe world in which life shall be all sunshine and gladness; the latter to advocate the doctrine that all pain is punishment from God, and that, since God must be just, He will properly parcel out and administer pain and suffering. We do not need to bestir ourselves in behalf of sufferers; that would be a wrong against God; a doubt of the Everlasting Justice; hence all may not feel pity for the wicked man upon whom God visits His wrath and punishment! Thus the “good people” and the just harden their hearts. They have stones which they heave at the poor sinner—especially at a “sinful woman”—but no mercy, no pity, for those who are not as they are, and do not think and feel and act as they do. They grow chesty: “Yes, if others were as good as we are, then it would be as well with them as it is with us!” With such pride they choke all feeling of kinship and connection with others. Where pride grows, no pity can thrive. And at last pity itself becomes a kind of pride, a sorry self-reflection as in a mirror. The most subtle and dangerous way for men to free themselves from the pain of pity, when they cannot stave it off completely, is to make it a thing of pride and praise: “I thank Thee, God, that I am not like the hard-hearted!” Then they revel and riot in their pity, then they rejoice that they are so good-hearted, so tender-hearted, because they can see no suffering without being touched and melted to tears. And the pitiful call this their morality and their virtue. They make a “delicacy” of their pity to set before themselves at the table of life when all of life’s other gratifications and indulgences begin to grow stale and tasteless. The tears of emotion that gush generously forth at the spectacle of suffering humanity—even of frail and faulty humanity—taste so good! Many is the time they have felt the weary weight of this unintelligible world on listening to a sad story or seeing a play, and screwed up melancholy and doleful countenances—maybe pity can be put among the things that can make life, always requiring to be braced up a bit, a trifle more interesting. And so pity is at last honored with a place among the articles of luxury with which they enrich and adorn their lives—their lives, always surprising them with some fresh sign of poverty and patches!

But if all guilt be revenged upon earth, punishment of this misuse of pity may not be stayed. It is doubly punished and revenged—upon him who practices it and upon him upon whom it is practiced. Or do we not know that the pharisees of pity become ever more feeble and sentimental men, losing all power and energy of will through pure emotionality? Or do we not know that most crafty business speculation, speculation in pity, in which sufferers magnify their least pains, expert in making an impression with their “cases” in order to arouse the interest of the pitiful, an interest which need not always be relieved by the clink of coin, but which makes ready its punishment much more frequently with idle hours spent in dreaming and weeping, with the unprofitable breathing-out of pathos and reproach? Often enough the enthusiasts of the kind and tender heart do not know what they do, but they rob men of the marrow of life, they emasculate and coddle the soul; and the emotional debauchery in which they live, requires ever stronger stimulus which ever operates more enervatingly still.

Contemplating these devastations wrought everywhere in life by love’s softness, one begins to cherish some respect for a Nietzsche who preached to men “a hard bed,” love’s hardness. To be sure, if one is to understand this preaching, one must keep in mind what the preacher says: “My brethren, give heed unto each hour, in which your spirit wisheth to speak in parables: there is the origin of your virtue.” Nietzsche speaks in parables. For instance, his words on war and warriors—a good war hallowing every cause—these, too, are parables. And hardness, bravery, praised by him as the strength and consecration of life, truly this is not the barbarity of prize-fighting or the brutality of lynching; this is the high mind fearlessly going its own way, stampeded by no danger into thinking and acting and being other than what it holds to be right. Danger is but the acid test which such a mind applies to the ingredients of its life. To such a mind, hardness is the characteristic of the gem, of the diamond, which thus guarantees its genuineness, its sparkling worth. Zarathustra-Nietzsche loves everything which steels the will and augments life’s force. Therefore he loves his foe, for, thanks to his foe, he never comes to a standstill and stagnates. Therefore his true friend is the one who has become his best foe, who makes him sweat, who summons him to risk hot war with him, to break a lance with him in an intellectual passage at arms in which the soul struggles for its own yea and nay. So, similarly, this Zarathustra-Nietzsche hates pity. Why? Not because he is a brute. “Kind unto the sick is Zarathustra.... Would that they were convalescent and conquering and creating a higher body for themselves!” Not because, as we have seen, so much of pity is for self’s sake and not for the sake of service, though this is an essential part of the answer. Then why? Because it works an embarrassment for man, because it knows no shame, no reverence, in the presence of the giant forces which, for every brave soul, is concealed in great and deep pain. Therefore he combats pity because it is a passion and not an action, and yet life is not for passionists but for pragmatists. “All great love is lifted above all its pity, for it seeketh to create what it loveth.... But all creators are hard.” “If thou hast a suffering friend, be a couch for his suffering, but a hard bed, as it were, a field-bed; thus thou wilt be of most use for him.”

Hearken ye, O Reader, to another Transvaluer of values Whose Person Nietzsche “the Crucified,” excoriated at ill-starred moments, but did so on the basis of that very “high mind” for which He, rejecting pity, went to His Crucifixion! “And Jesus, Pilate handed over to their will. As they led him off he was followed by a large multitude of the people and also of women who beat their breasts and lamented him; but Jesus turned to them and said, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me!’”

Now, as it seems to me, this Nietzsche preaching is not so far removed from that other preaching which we are otherwise wont to call a gospel, a good, a glad message! For this glad message was not a lamentation, but a hymn of heroism and of victory, a call to creation! And I take the liberty to repeat that the Preacher of this glad message forbade pity for himself even in his dark and desolate hour—do you think what that hour was?—when he appealed to weak and wailing and weeping womanly souls, Weep not for me, weep for yourselves! And He Who Himself wills no pity, Who bears in Himself a greatness which is elevated above all pity, would he have willed to have men so weak and pitiful as we often enough today imagine the Ideal of a Christ-man to be?

What, now, if the true pitiful love, the true mercy to men, were to _harden_ them, to make them free from what meant only suffering to them? It is, to be sure, very much more difficult to make men themselves “hard,” so that the burden lying on their backs can not crush them than it is to indulge their weakness and sensitiveness and to leave them as they are. Indulgent parental hearts would a thousand times rather remove all life’s burdens from their children than to place burdens upon their children which they might learn to bear. So often our pity plays us a sorry trick—we would rather do something for men than to repress our pity, silence it, and then teach men how they themselves can do what is good and necessary for them. We speak of a ministrant love, meaning a love which knows nothing higher than to provide comforts, avert trials, spare vexations, and everything which could shake a man to his foundations. How much greater a service of love it would be to lead man to himself, make him strong that he might be equal to what we had thought we must take away from him! Pray, not for easier tasks, lighter burdens, but for more power! This Nietzschean love is not only a greater love, it also requires a greater, more tiresome work, it requires a constant conquest of our pitying weakness, it requires a courageous faith in man and a firm earnest appraisal of his power. And how entirely different a service of friendship do we render a friend if we show a hard love to him, if he break a tooth on us, as Nietzsche says, because we do not flatter and fit him, but compel him, out of love compel him, to assert himself against us, and to withstand our defense of our rights against him! Foolish men seek their friends among the _Jasagern_, most preferably, among those who are of their own opinion in everything. They then call this an ideal friendship: two souls and one thought, two hearts and one beat! But in such a friendship, their best, their own soul, their sense of truth, and their courage for the truth, soon rusts. To spare a friend the disillusion which he would suffer if he felt an antagonism, an opposition, in the friendship, they have pity on him, they learn to keep silent, and silence soon becomes a lie. Since they dare not cause the friend the grief of discovering to him these lies, they lie more, lie life-long,—all out of pity, out of their weak tender love. How much nobler and greater that friendship whose ideal Nietzsche sketches for us, in which we are gripped from the outset in a friend’s contradiction and hostility! We seek and love in him precisely what is not attuned to us, but is his own, and must forever remain his very own. Such hard love which gives the friend a “camp-bed” and not one as “soft as downy pillows are” and requires the like in return is the proudest manliest friendship, is alone what brings our sluggish and pampered natures forward, and makes us stronger, freer, richer in understanding and experience. Every genuine love should be a spur, freedom, to us, not an easy berth and a trammel in life.

We cannot, we ought not, refrain from pity in life. We cannot, we ought not, stave it artificially from us. Pity belongs to man as man. It comes stealing upon him, and ought so to come. But when it has come, he ought not to be enmeshed in it. Still less ought he to let it grow rank. He should ennoble it, overcome it, with strong will and energetic deed. For pity is yet _suffering_ and all suffering summons men to conflict, to defense. The sign that such overcoming has succeeded is that _rejoicing-together_ has been born of _suffering-together_—is that the conflict has issued in a victory in which hard militant love triumphs over every weakness, and is grateful to the hardness which has given it such a victory!

In his brilliant book on Nietzsche, “Who Is to Be Master of the World,” Ludovici writes powerfully as follows: “What the units of a herd most earnestly seek and find, is smug ease, not necessarily mastership. For mastership entails responsibility, insight, nerve, courage and _hardness_ towards one’s self, that control of one’s self which all good commanders must have, and which is the very antithesis of the gregarious man’s attitude towards himself.... Hardness?—He knows nothing of the hardness that can command his heart, his mouth, before it attends to the command of others; he knows nothing of the hardness that can dispel the doubts of a whole continent, that can lead the rabble and the ruck to deeds of anomalous nobility, or that can impose silence upon the overweening importunities of an assembled nation. He knows _this_ hardness, that he could coldly watch the enemy of his private and insignificant little interests, burnt at the stake; he knows _this_ hardness, that he would let a great national plan miscarry for the sake of a mess of pottage;—the gregarious man and future socialist has this so-called hardness; but so have all those who burn with resentment,—so have all parasites and silent worm-gnawers at the frame-work of great architecture.”

But not Nietzsche’s interpreter, but Nietzsche himself, shall have the last word: “Praises are what maketh hard!—I do not praise the land where butter and honey—flow! To learn to look away from one’s self is necessary in order to see many things: this hardener is needed by every mountain climber.”

_Also Sprach Aristoteles—Zarathustra!_

George Middleton’s One-Act Plays

CLAYTON HAMILTON

The one-act play is an art-form that is worthy of careful cultivation. It shows the same relation to the full-length drama as the short-story shows to the novel. It makes a virtue of economy of means. It aims to produce a single dramatic effect with the greatest economy of means that is consistent with the utmost emphasis. A one-act play, in exhibiting the present, should imply the past and intimate the future. The author has no leisure for laborious exposition; but his mere projection of a single situation should sum up in itself the accumulated results of many antecedent causes. The one-act play, at its best, can no more serve as a single act of a longer drama than the short-story can serve as a single chapter of a novel. The form is complete, concise, and self-sustaining; and it requires an extraordinary focus of imagination.

No other American dramatist has so carefully cultivated this special type of drama as George Middleton. His recently-published volume of one-act plays, entitled _Possession_, was preceded by two other volumes, called _Embers_ and _Tradition_. Each of these books contains half a dozen plays. From the fact that Mr. Middleton has chosen to publish these eighteen one-act plays in advance of their production, it is not to be inferred that he is a believer in the closet-drama. A closet-drama may be defined as a play that, being unfit for production in the theatre, is fit only to be locked up in a closet. Mr. Middleton is not a literary amateur, but a professional and practical playwright. He has produced more than half a dozen full-length plays in the commercial theatre; and such artists as Julia Marlowe, Margaret Anglin, George Fawcett, and the late E. M. Holland have appeared in dramas of his composition. All of Mr. Middleton’s one-act plays are written for the stage; and—to quote from his own preface to _Possession_—he conceives “the value of play publication not as a substitute for production but as an alternative for those whose dramas may offer little attraction to the manager because of theme or treatment.”

At present there is, unfortunately, scarcely any market in the American theatre for one-act plays that take life seriously. It is against our custom to provide a full-length drama with a curtain-raiser or an after-piece; and the field for one-act plays in vaudeville is restricted to slap-stick comedies and yelling melodramas. It is for this reason that Mr. Middleton has been required to choose publication as an alternative for production, in the case of these diminutive dramas. The trouble is not at all that his pieces are unsuited to the stage: they are admirable in technique, and—like all good plays—they would be more interesting in the theatre than in the library. The trouble is only that—for wholly artificial and accidental reasons—the commercial theatre in America at present is inhospitable to the one-act play.

Mr. Middleton’s one-act plays reveal a wide range of subject-matter and a corresponding versatility of treatment. No one of them is similar to any of the others. Yet, pervading this variety of subject and of mood, there is discernible an underlying unity. Each of them deals essentially with woman—and with modern woman in relation to our modern social system. Woman is, at present, a transitional creature, evolving from the thing that man considered her to be in the far-away period of wax flowers and horse-hair furniture to the being that she considers herself about to become in the unachieved, potential future; and Mr. Middleton has caught her in this period of transition, and has depicted her, under many different lights, colored with her virtues and discolored with her faults.

Many of the most poignant and dramatic problems of present-day society arise from the fact that the evolution of woman is proceeding more rapidly than the evolution of her environment. While individuals advance, traditions linger. Mr. Middleton’s favorite subject seems to be a conflict between an advanced woman and a lingering tradition. The author is himself a radical, and his sympathy is forever on the side of the revolutionary individual; but his technical treatment is so fair to both sides of the contention that it remains possible for conservative readers to rank themselves against the individual on the side of the lingering tradition. Scarcely any of Mr. Middleton’s women would be pleasant to have around the house. Since most of them are discontented with the conditions of their lives, they naturally make the worst of these conditions instead of making the best of them. Hell hath no fury like a woman in revolt; and many readers may dislike Mr. Middleton’s heroines more heartily than he seems to like them himself. But to be able to dislike a character is a proof that that character is real, and must be considered as a tribute to the author’s art. The heroine of _The Unborn_, in Mr. Middleton’s latest volume, refuses to have children because motherhood might interfere with “her work,”—the work, in this case, being merely a habit of attending to minor matters in her husband’s photographic studio; but the intensity of impatience with which the reader listens to her twaddle is an indication that this character is really representative of a silly type of creature that is not infrequently encountered in actual life. Again, in the play called _Possession_, a woman who has been divorced for adultery attempts to kidnap her little daughter from the house of her former husband, to whose custody the child had, of course, been awarded by the courts. Her adultery was inexcusable, because it had been occasioned not by an irresistible and overwhelming love but merely by a superfluity of leisure; and her attempt to kidnap the child was treacherous and ignominious. She excuses herself, however, by telling her husband that the process of child-birth had been painful, and that, therefore, despite the judgment of the courts, their little daughter belonged more to her than to him. The reader is, of course, annoyed by all this nonsense; but this annoyance, once again, must be regarded as a tribute to the reality of the author’s characterization. No heroine who was not a living human being could make the auditor so ardently desire to climb upon the stage and talk back to her.

Fortunately, it is not at all necessary to like Mr. Middleton’s women in order to like his plays. One may admire Ibsen’s _Hedda Gabler_ without wishing to be married to the heroine; and the pleasant thing about Mr. Middleton’s women is that, while the reader is permitted to observe and study them, he is also allowed to realize with hearty thankfulness that he will never have to live with any of them. The world in which his women move is a world of discontent. This discontent is truly representative of the present transitional period in the evolution of society; but it is not representative of that perennial reality of life that remains oblivious of periods and dates. At all times, the really womanly woman has been a lover of her life and has not found it difficult to feel at home at home.

New York Letter

GEORGE SOULE

It would be difficult to imagine a more fantastic occasion than a debate in New York on the justice of the cause of the Allies vs. that of Germany between Cecil Chesterton and George Sylvester Viereck. The gods permitted it to happen last week, much to the chagrin of the Allies, for the hyphenated Germans took good care to fill the hall and hiss every offensive statement. Mr. Chesterton, an honest fighter and a clever polemicist, who has leapt through every phase of radicalism into the enfolding charity of the Catholic Church, deserves to be known for his journalistic achievements and his exposure of graft in high places almost as much as for his brother Gilbert. Mr. Viereck, a sublime egotist, has come into sudden favor with his countrymen by editing _Das Vaterland_, although before that he had taken every known means to secure notoriety for a naturally obscure individual. He began as a poet of strange verse, both in German and English. When it became apparent that it wasn’t going to sell, he issued a last volume which he called his “swan song,” with the announcement that as this commercial age was unappreciative of his poetry he would write no more, and anyone who wanted a last chance to value him at it must buy this book. For himself, he was going to get in line with the genius of the century and become a Big Business Man, for he must make himself felt. He announced in a stentorian wail his admiration for Theodore Roosevelt, and was much chagrined when that celebrity would not let him trail along on the skirts of his ample publicity. Later on, when Alfred Noyes began to sell in large quantities, Mr. Viereck resumed his dictatorship of poetry, and by scurrilous attacks attempted to draw Mr. Noyes’s fire—and newspaper space. Now German Patriotism has lifted him to the headlines.

If Poetic Justice was present at the debate, she probably did not receive much enlightenment on the questions which are now vexing her in Europe. To quote any of the substance of the debate would be an insult to her intelligence.

A more serious event was Richard Bennet’s recent production of Brieux’s _Maternity_. Considering the deadly earnestness with which author and cast struggled to inculcate lessons, the apathy of the public in respect to moral instruction was pathetic. On the night of my visit there was exactly one normal “theatre-goer” in the house. There was a sprinkling of people who had long admitted what Brieux has to say, and went from “high-brow” reasons. There was a young society matron who had escaped from her husband for the evening and is taking an amateurish interest in social questions. There were numerous persons who are always on the lookout for a chance to cackle at what they consider broad humor. These blonde ladies furnished an interesting refutation of one of Brieux’s theories. In one scene various women tell their troubles, emphasizing the fact that all women are united in their sorrows and understand them, whereas men do not. Immediately after this the drunken husband returns and disgusts and outrages the wife. There were many laughs in the audience to greet him—but not one from a man. Even the blonde ladies’ fat escorts tried to quiet them while the rest of us were hissing.

Granville Barker opens this week with _Androcles and the Lion_ and some of the other recent London productions. A number of the backers of the old “New Theatre” are guaranteeing his expenses, a fact which is a historical corroboration for Mr. Barker’s wit. When he was brought over as the chosen manager for that institution, he objected to the immense size of the house. “But the alterations you suggest would cost us a million dollars,” he was told. “If you don’t make them, it will cost you three million,” he replied, and sailed back to London. His popularity with the New Theatre guarantors has been steadily increasing from that day to this.

There is even a rumor that if the present experiment succeeds, the New Theatre project will be resumed. This whisper aroused an answering howl from the American managers and actors. Why should good American money be spent in encouraging English talent, especially in such a disastrous season? they wailed. The answer was, in effect, the one that should be made to the whole “made in America” propaganda. What has American production done that it should be encouraged? When “made in America” comes to have any relation to honesty and intelligence, it will be time enough to invoke “patriotism” in its favor. In the meantime, the more disastrous foreign competition can be to our present shoddy products, the better.

This ironic year has produced few more strange reversals than the one which has brought Mr. McClure to the status of an employee of Mr. Munsey. When a man has apparently won his life campaign and written so engagingly of it as has Mr. McClure in his Autobiography, we begin to regard him as beyond the touch of the fates. Perhaps the present eventuality should be taken, however, merely as another proof that in our present arrangement of things it is less profitable to have a touch of genius than to become the owner of trust companies. At any rate _McClure’s Magazine_ has apparently not profited much in recent years by Mr. McClure’s separation from its editorial policy.

There is one real consolation in a season which has brought such material devastation to commercial managers and magazines. When conventionally-planned “successes” don’t succeed, success comes to have less meaning. People who are after money in the promotion of artistic products are in their desperation more ready to try less “safe” ways of getting it, while the others have a decidedly better chance of gaining a respectful public attention.

Music

KREISLER AND SHATTUCK

In certain realms, words are opaque and stupid things. In others—oh, comforting thought!—they seem to become transparent and almost intelligent. Following this out consistently, it becomes easy to write a page about Arthur Shattuck, pianist, and very difficult to say anything at all about Fritz Kreisler, violinist.

Arthur Shattuck was a disappointment. His faults, in a lesser man, would have been considered the sign of mere mediocrity; but in himself, they are obtrusive and disagreeable. An exasperating contrast existed between what may be called his style, with its rhythmic sureness and its admirable perspectives, and his great lack of tonal beauty. He cracks out hard tones. Any particular phrase of Mr. Boyle’s concerto for piano with orchestra, when passed on from the orchestra to the solo instrument, lost its lyric curve and became flat and lifeless under Mr. Shattuck’s long, aggressive hands. When another pianist, Ernest Hutcheson, played the same work with the composer conducting the New York Philharmonic, a certain phenomenon was lacking which appeared when Frederick Stock conducted the work with the Chicago Symphony. This phenomenon (let it be whispered) was a strange prominence of the brass choir of the orchestra in certain portions of the work which led one to believe that Mr. Stock was, perhaps, more interested in the orchestral accompaniment than in the performance of the soloist. If this were as true as it appeared, it is on a par with another startling fact:—that the public is really learning something about tone-values and the possible beauties of piano music. What else could account for the numerous confessions caught in snatches in the corridors and stairways, the composite of which was, “He left me cold”?... Arthur Shattuck is a millionaire.

A compassionate attitude toward Chicago was considerably relieved by the sight of the Auditorium-full which paid to hear Kreisler. Think of so many people being moved by such good taste! And, what was better still, they all behaved well. Kreisler deserved their tribute of attentive silence. Such violin playing hasn’t been heard in Chicago since the same artist was here last season. There is no describing Kreisler’s tone; a magic circle of stillness encloses it, which words have not learned to cross. In the memory it is a living beauty, penetrant and bewitching. Praise and appreciation are miserable things in the presence of this man’s music. Fritz Kreisler is a genius.

HERMAN SCHUCHERT.

Book Discussion

Ellen Key’s Steady Vision

_The Younger Generation, by Ellen Key._ [_G. P. Putnam’s, New
York._]

In the present amusing reign of boisterous propagandic voices, it is good to find a thinker who describes the exciting truth in simple terms. The many are able to catch glimpses of the truth; between glimpses, they shout and wave their inefficient arms for the enlightenment of their brothers, and for their own joy. The few see the truth steadily and, because they see steadily, become so passionately enthusiastic that they are driven to express themselves in quiet, mighty phrases. Such phrases imprint vital ideas upon the mind of the seeker, while pitiable confusion alone results from the shouts and wavings. In _The Younger Generation_, Ellen Key tells simply and surely her conclusions about vital things.