Chapter V: Pillar-Print by Harunobu

From an infinite distance, the ghostly music!
Few and slender the tones, of delicate silver,
As stars are broidered on the veil of evening....

He passes by, the flute and the dreaming player--
Slow are his steps, his eyes are gravely downcast;
His pale robes sway in long folds with his passing.

Out of the infinite distance, a ghostly music
Returns--in slender tones of delicate silver,
As stars are broidered on the veil of evening.

"The Dark Flower" and the "Moralists"

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

_The Dark Flower_, by John Galsworthy. (Charles Scribner's Sons, New
York.)

A book that has beauty as it's given to few books to achieve it has been the innocent cause of more ignorant, naïve, and stupid condemnation than anything published for a long time. Even the English critics--who usually avoid these shallows--in several cases hit the rocks with awful force. And all because a man with the soul of the old gods chose to tell, quite simply and with inexpressible beauty, the truth about an artist. _The Dark Flower_ was everybody's opportunity to deepen his vision, but nearly everybody decided to look upon it as an emotional redundancy. Perhaps this doesn't do some of them justice: I believe a good many of them considered it positively dangerous!

My quite spontaneous tribute to Galsworthy's Mark Lennan--before I'd heard anyone discuss him--was that here was a man a woman would be glad to trust her soul to. And, in view of how silly it is for a woman to trust her soul to anyone but herself, I still insisted that one could do it with Mark Lennan: because he'd not take charge of anyone's soul!--his wife's least of all. Of course, to love a man of his sort would mean unhappiness; but women who face life with any show of bravery face unhappiness as part of the day's work. It remains to decide whether one will reach high and break a bone or two over something worth having, or play safe and take a pale joy in one's unscarred condition. With Mark Lennan a woman would have had--à la Browning--her perfect moment; and such things are rare enough to pay well for, if necessary.

All of which is making a very personal issue of _The Dark Flower_; but it's the kind of book you've got to be personal about; you revise your list of friends on a basis of their attitude toward Galsworthy.

After I'd finished _The Dark Flower_--and it had never occurred to my naïve mind that anyone would disagree with me about it--various persons began to tell me how wrong I was. Mark Lennan was a cad and a weakling--decidedly the kind of person to be kept out of a good novel. The very beauty of the book made it insidious, someone said; such art expended in defense of immorality would soon tend to confuse our standards. Someone else remarked patronizingly: "Oh, _The Dark Flower_ may be well done and all that, but personally I've always had a passion for the normal!" But, most maddening of all, I think, were those readers of thrillers, of sweet, sentimental stories--those persons who patronize comic opera exclusively because they "see enough tragedy in life to avoid it in the theater"--who asked earnestly: "But, after all, what's the use of such books? What possible _good do they do_?"

On another page of this review such questions are answered with a poignancy I dare not compete with. I want to try, instead, to tell why _The Dark Flower_ seems to me an altogether extraordinary piece of work.

In the first place, constructively. The story covers three episodes of a man's love life: Spring, with its awakening; Summer, with its deep passion; and Autumn, with its desperate longing for another Spring. But the handling of the episodes is so unepisodic that you feel you've been given the man's whole life, day by day, from Oxford to that final going down the years--_sans_ youth, _sans_ spring, _sans_ beauty, _sans_ passion; _sans_ everything save that "faint, glimmering light--far out there beyond...." This effect of completeness is achieved, I think, by the remarkable intensity of the writing, by the clever (and by no means easy) method of sometimes allowing the characters the author's prerogative of addressing the audience directly. Highly subjective in everything that he does, Galsworthy has reached a climax of subjectivity here: _The Dark Flower_ is as personal in its medium as music.

In the second place--the great matter of style. Every page shows the very poetry of prose writing; there's an inevitability about its choice of beautiful and simple words that makes them seem a part of the nature they describe. For instance, to choose at random from a multitude of exquisite things: "... under the stars of this warm Southern night, burning its incense of trees and flowers"; or, "And he sat for a long time that evening under a large lime-tree on a knoll above the Serpentine. There was very little breeze, just enough to keep alive a kind of whispering. What if men and women, when they had lived their gusty lives, became trees! What if someone who had burned and ached were now spreading over him this leafy peace--this blue-black shadow against the stars? Or were the stars, perhaps, the souls of men and women escaped for ever from love and longing? ... If only for a moment he could desert his own heart, and rest with the trees and stars!" With a single clause like "for ever part of the stillness and the passion of a summer night" Galsworthy gets effects that some poets need three or four verses for. In one place he defines for all time a Chopin mazurka as "a little dancing dirge of summer"; in another gives you with one stroke an impression of his hero that it's impossible to forget: "He looks as if he were seeing sands and lions."

In the third place, Galsworthy's psychology is profound--impregnable. One simple characterization will serve to illustrate: he describes a man's face as having the candour of one at heart a child--"that simple candour of those who have never known how to seek adventures of the mind, and have always sought adventures of the body."

As to the lesson of _The Dark Flower_--its philosophy, its "moral"--I can only say that it hasn't any such thing; that is, while it's full to the brim of philosophy, it doesn't attempt to force a philosophy upon you. It offers you the truth about a human being and lets it go at that--which seems to be the manner of not a few who have written greatly. For the other sort of thing, go to any second-rate novelist you happen to admire; he'll give you characters who have a hard time of it and tell you just where they're right and where they're wrong. I can see how you feel you're getting more for your money.

I can't help feeling that everything Galsworthy has done has had its special function in making _The Dark Flower_ possible. The sociology of _Fraternity_, the passionate pleading of _Justice_ and _Strife_, the incomparable emotional experiments of _A Commentary_, the intellectuality of _The Patrician_--all these have contributed to the noble simplicities and the noble beauty of _The Dark Flower_.

The Garden

My heart shall be thy garden. Come, my own,
Into thy garden; thine be happy hours
Among my fairest thoughts, my tallest flowers,
From root to crowning petal thine alone.

Thine is the place from where the seeds are sown
Up to the sky enclosed, with all its showers.
But ah, the birds, the birds! Who shall build bowers
To keep these thine? O friend, the birds have flown.

For as these come and go, and quit our pine
To follow the sweet season, or, new-comers,
Sing one song only from our alder-trees,

My heart has thoughts, which, though thine eyes hold mine,
Flit to the silent world and other summers,
With wings that dip beyond the silver seas.

--_Alice Meynell's Poems._ (Charles Scribner's Sons.)

A Remarkable Nietzschean Drama

DEWITT C. WING

_Mr. Faust_, by Arthur Davison Ficke. (Mitchell Kennerley, New
York.)

Have you thought there could be but a single Supreme? There can
be any number of Supremes.--Whitman.

Mr. Faust is the embodiment of the Nietzschean attitude toward the universe. This characterization consciously ignores the legendary Faust of Goethe as having no vital kinship with his namesake. There is of course a skeletal likeness one to the other, but the hero in Mr. Ficke's drama is incarnated with modern flesh and endued with a supreme will. His unconquerable spirit is not that of Goethe's _Faust_ but of Friedrich Nietzsche. Incidentally and singularly it is the spirit of Whitman. And these two men, more than any other two or twenty in the realm of literature, represent the undying god Pan, or the spirit of Youth. Nietzsche and Whitman are the understanding comrades of the young-hearted and open-minded.

_Mr. Faust's_ creator may have no conscious knowledge of Whitman's poetry, which is a matter of no moment, but he has read Nietzsche, and that is momentous--indispensable--in relation to this splendid result of white-heat intellection. I say intellection because _Mr. Faust_ is not so much a work of art as a remarkable example of reproduction. I know that, although the thought and feeling of the work rise in places to the power of an inspiration wholly personal to the author, never "Thus Spake Zarathustra." For that is an original, authentic voice which, like everything else in nature, has no substitute or duplicate.

I can fancy a strong, healthy, organically cultured young man, just beginning to feel his way into the realities that lie outside the American cornbelt, by chance taking a peep into one of Nietzsche's great books, and, fascinated and quickened by that marvelously contagious god, leaping to new heights of his own manhood. I should guess that in this instance the young man, who happens to be a lawyer, thirty-one years old, living at Davenport, Ia., was temporarily Christianized by bad luck, illness or something of the sort, and in this extremity, kicked by Nietzsche, experienced the feeling of personal adequacy to which Mr. Faust gives utterance. Recovering himself, he avowed his own godhood, even to the last ditch! And that is the triumphant Youth--the Nietzsche--of the thing.

A day or two subsequent to the appearance of Mr. Ficke's book upon the market I had the pleasure of hearing it read, with well-nigh perfect sympathy and appreciation, by the foremost Nietzschean expositor in this country. Like other listeners I was amazed, charmed and aroused. Were these results referable to the play alone or in part to the reader, or to both? To what extent, I was compelled to ask, was the effect illusory or hypnotic? I had read some of Ficke's verse, which had given no intimation of anything in its author so heroically Nietzschean as _Mr. Faust_. I had consequently tabbed Ficke as probably a poetic possibility, provided he lived a dozen years in an involuntary hell, undergoing a new birth. Entertaining the doubts indicated by my questions, I read _Mr. Faust_ to myself, trying it in my fashion by the trees, the stars and the lake. Subjected to this test the play did not have the ring and lift which I had heard and felt when it was read--perhaps I should say given an added vitality--by a Nietzschean philosopher. It now impressed me as an extraordinary _tour de force_, reaching in some of its passages a species of accidental trans-Nietzscheanism.

Written in blank verse, the superior quality of which is admirably sustained, the style of the drama is undeniably poetical, as Edwin Björkman, the editor of Mr. Kennerley's Modern Drama Series, states in an interesting biographical sketch; but where there is so much consciousness of workmanship--so much preoccupation with an imported idea instead of sweeping control by an inner, personal urge like that, for example, which produced _Thus Spake Zarathustra_--poetry is not to be expected. What surprises me is that, despite this restriction, Mr. Ficke strides upward in many lines to the borderland of the gods. In the first three acts he writes as one possessed--as an intellectualist furiously interested in Americanizing, if you please, the racial implications of the philosophy of a superhumanity which will always be associated with the name of his temporary master, Nietzsche. In these acts there is a deal of amazing revealment of insight; of aspiration for transcendent goals; of the spiritual insatiability of man. And there is a cold humor. Underneath the whole thing lies its own by-product: social dynamite!

I think that Mr. Ficke finished his play in three acts, but he added two more--to make it five, I was about to say, but in the fifth he achieves a measurable justification, for the last sentence, "Touch me across the dusk," is poetry--the wonderful words of the dying Faust, addressed to Midge, the only person who understood him.

Near the middle of the opening act, Faust, roused by an inquiring mind to an analytical protest against things as they are, says,

... I would go
Out to some golden sun-lighted land
Of silence.

That is poetical; it is cosmic in its feeling. Looking at a bust of Washington, he enviously--no, compassionately--remarks,

... Not a star
In all the vaults of heaven could trouble you
With whisperings of more transcendent goals.

At this juncture Satan appears, gains recognition by recalling an incident involving Faust with a blackmailing woman in a college during his youth, and thereafter tempts him into empty, unsatisfying paradises. In his wandering and winding pilgrimage through the world Faust makes the footprints that we recognize as those of our own humanity, seeking its way--somewhither. He is offered but rejects peace, happiness, salvation and all the rest of their related consolations, knowing that none of them could satisfy his restless heart. To his uncomprehending friends he is lost, and Satan himself, to whom in such circumstances he is obviously resigned by society, fails to claim him. But Midge, the heroine, knew him; she could touch him across the dusk, which was his kind of immortality. And so Faust, with a vague consciousness of his own godhood, a sense of his own supremacy, an unshakable faith in one thing--himself--passed from the earthly freedom of his will into the great release.

It is altogether too early in the morning of humanity to expect to see this play or one like it on the stage. That it should be written by a young American and published by a young Englishman is enough to satisfy those who would enjoy its presentation, and those to whom it would be Greek or "unpleasant," whether they saw it or read it, must wait for its truth through their children--across the dusk!

The Lost Joy

FLOYD DELL

There was once a lady (I forget her name) who said that love was for women one of the most important things in the world. She made the remark and let it go at that. She did not write a book about it. If she had considered it necessary she would doubtless have written such a book.

Consider the possibility--a book entitled _Woman and Love_, a book proving with logic and eloquence that woman ought to love, and that, unless she loved, the highest self-development was impossible to her and to the race!

It is not entirely absurd. Such a book might have been necessary. If half of all womankind, through some change in our social and ethical arrangements, refrained from love as something at once disagreeable and ungenteel, and if the other half loved under conditions disastrous to health and spirit, then there might have been need for a book preaching to women the gospel of love. It would have been time to urge that, hateful as the conditions might be, love was for women, nevertheless, a good thing, a fine thing, a wonderful and necessary thing. It would have been time to break down the prejudice which made one-half of womankind lead incomplete and futile lives, and to raise love itself to its proper dignity.

Well, we are in a condition like that today, only it is not love, it is work that has lost its dignity in the lives of women. It is not love, it is work from which one-half of womankind refrains as from something at once disagreeable and ungenteel, while the other half of womankind performs it under conditions disastrous to health and spirit.

There is need today for a book preaching to women the gospel of work. It is time to break down the prejudice which makes one-half of womankind lead incomplete and futile, because idle, lives. We need a book to show women what work should mean to them.

And, curiously enough, the book exists. It is Olive Schreiner's _Woman and Labor_. It is a wise book and a beautiful book. There are statistics in it, but there is eloquence flaming on every page. It is a book of the joy and the significance of work for women.

When Olive Schreiner says "work," she means it. She does not refer to the makeshifts which masquerade under the term of "social usefulness." She means work done with the hands and the brain, work done for money, work that sets the individual free from dependence on any other individual. It is a theme worth all her eloquence. For work and love, and not either of them alone, are the most important things in the world--the supremest expressions of individual life.

H. G. Wells on America

I came to America balancing between hope and skepticism. The
European world is full of the criticism of America; and, for the
matter of that, America, too, is full of it; hostility and
depreciation prevail--overmuch; for, in spite of rawness and
vehemence and a scum of blatant, oh! quite asinine, folly, the
United States of America remains the greatest country in the
world and the living hope of mankind. It is the supreme break
with the old tradition; it is the freshest and most valiant
beginning that has ever been made in human life.--_The Passionate
Friends._

Paderewski and the New Gods

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

I shall keep always, as my most unforgettable memory, the thought of a certain afternoon during Paderewski's tour this year when he walked quietly back across the stage, in response to an encore, and played Schumann's _Warum_. It was somehow heart-breaking. It was a more poignant questioning to me, than Arnold's

"unquenched, deep-sunken, old-world pain--
Say, will it never heal?"

Nothing that I have ever heard or seen has given me so vivid a sense of being in the presence of an art that is immortal.

It seems to have become hideously "popular" to love Paderewski. The critics will tell you that it's only done in America; that Europeans have any number of idols they put before him; and that we who persist in calling him "the greatest" are simply under the spell of an old hypnotism. There was a time, they'll concede, when he came like a conqueror, royally deserving the flowers we strewed. But now--there's Bauer, there's Godowsky, and Hofman, and Gans, and Busoni! One local critic has even gone to the length of saying that since the American public has sat at the feet of these men and learned sanity in piano playing it has no enthusiasm for Paderewski's "neurotic, disordered, incoherent" music--"his woeful exaggerations of sentiment and hysterical rhapsody." I should say some unpublishable things to that critic if we should ever discuss the subject.

The three most interesting human faces I know are Forbes-Robertson's, Kreisler's, and Paderewski's. In the English actor's there is a meeting of strength and spirituality (not the anæmic "spirituality" of certain new cults, but a quality of soul that makes him "a prince, a philosopher, a lover, a soldier, a sad humorist," all in the limits of one personality) that means utter nobility. It can be as cold as a graven image, or as hot with feeling as a poet's. Depth upon depth of subtlety plays across it--not the hypnotic subtlety of the Orientalist, but the austere subtlety of an English scholar and a great gentleman. In Kreisler's there is a meeting of strength and sensuousness that means utter fascination to the artist who would paint him--utter revealment to the musician who would analyze his art. For the secret of Kreisler's personality and his music lies in that finely balanced combination of qualities: a sensuousness that would be a little overpowering, a little drugging, without the gigantic strength that seems to hold it in leash. That balance makes possible his little air of military jauntiness, of sad Vienna gayety; it gives him that huge effect of power that always makes me feel I'm watching the king of the forest stride through his kingdom. You need never expect emotionalism from this musician; he's too strong to give you anything but passion. In Paderewski's face there is a meeting of strength and two other predominant qualities: sentience, I think, and suffering. It's difficult to express his great, interesting head in a series of nouns; but there are some that come near to it: mystery, melancholy, weariness, a sort of shattering sorrow; always the sense of struggle and pain, and always the final releasement--in music. For while you can conceive a Forbes-Robertson away from the stage, and a Kreisler apart from his violin, you can never for a moment think of Paderewski without his piano. Not that he's less of a man, but that he's the most sensitized human instrument that ever dedicated itself to an art.

To resort to the most overworked phrase in the language, Paderewski has a temperament. Somebody has said that no fat person ever possessed one; and after you've speculated about this till you begin to wonder what temperament really is, you can come back to Paderewski as the most adequate illustration. Ysaye is the best example I know of the opposite. When strength turns to fat ... well, we'll not go into that; but to make my point--and there's certainly nothing of personal maliciousness in it--it's necessary to reflect that obesity has some insidious influence upon artistic utterance. (Schumann-Heink is an artist in the best meaning of the word; but no one ever talked of her and temperament in the same breath, so she doesn't negate the issue.) But Ysaye's tepid, wingless, uninspired music--his utterly sweet but _fat_ music--that appears to attract thousands of people, is as lazily inadequate as its creator would be in a marathon. It's as though his vision had dropped slowly away with every added pound of avoirdupois. Or perhaps it's because vision has a fashion of dropping away with age....

Ah!--but Paderewski has the years, too, now, and his playing is as virile, as flaming, as it ever was. An artist--with a temperament--doesn't get old, any more than Peter Pan does. Paderewski's furrowed face shows the artist's eternal striving; his music shows his eternal youth, his faithfulness to the vision that furnishes his answer to the eternal "Warum?"

This is the secret of Paderewski's white magic. He's still the supreme god! Bauer plays perfectly within the rules--exquisitely and powerfully--and misses the top height by the mere fraction of a mood, the simple lack of a temperament; or, as O. Henry might have explained it, by the unfortunate encumbrance of a forty-two-inch belt. Hofman has an impatience with his medium, apparently, that leaves his hearer unsatisfied with the piano; while Paderewski, though he transcends the instrument, does so because of his love for the piano as a medium, and forces his hearer to agree with him that it's the supreme one. Godowsky forces things into the piano--pushes them in and makes them stay there; Paderewski draws things out, always, and fills the world with them.

I can think of no comparison from which he doesn't emerge unscathed. If I were a musical reactionary, this judgment would have no value here; but I'm not. Classical perfection is no longer interesting; Beethoven seems no longer to comprehend all music--in fact, the people who have no rebellions about the sterility of the old symphonies are quite beyond my range of understanding. But Paderewski plays the old music in a new way, gives it such vitality of meaning that you feel it's just been born--or, better, perhaps, that its composers have been triumphantly revalued, rejustified in their claim for eternal life. His Beethoven is as full of color as his Chopin; and who, by the way, ever started the popular nonsense about De Pachmann or anyone else being the supreme Chopin exponent? No one has ever played Chopin like Paderewski; no one has ever made such simple, haunting melodies of the nocturnes; no one has ever struck such ringing Polish music out of the polonaises, or such wind-swept cadences from the Berceuse; no one has ever played the Funeral March so like a cosmic procession--the mighty moving of humanity from birth to death and new life; no one has ever so visualized those "orchestras of butterflies that played to Chopin in the sun."

I have still one great wish in the world: that some time I may hear Paderewski play on a Mason and Hamlin--that piano of unutterable depth and richness. The fact that he's never used it is the one flaw in his performances, for no other instrument that I've heard gives you the same sense of drowning in great waves of warm sound. The combination would convince even the followers of the new gods. But, old or new, and even on his cold Steinway, no one has ever drawn from the piano the same quality of golden tone or dared such simplicity of singing as Paderewski. To put his genius into a sentence: no one has ever built so strong a bridge across the gulf that yawns between vision and accomplishment.

The Major Symphony

GEORGE SOULE

Round splendor of the harp's entonéd gold
Throbbing beneath the pleading violins--
That hundred-choiring voice that wins and wins
To over-filling song; the bright and bold
Clamor of trumpets; 'cellos that enfold
Richly the flutes; and basses that like djinns
Thunder their clumsy threatening, as begins
The oboe's mystic plaint of sorrows old:--

Are these the symphony? No, it is will
In passion striving to surmount the world,
Growing in sensuous dalliance, sudden whirled
To ecstasies of shivering joy, and still
Marching and mastering, singing mightily,
Consummate when the silence makes it free.

The Prophet of a New Culture

GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

A profound unrest tortures the heart of the modern man. The world, slaughtering the innocents, is meaningless; life, bruised and bewildered, is worthless--such is the melancholy mood of modernity. Today life is a burden to many to whom it was once a joy. Decadents, they call themselves, who rediscover the elements of their most personal life in everything that is weary and ailing. We are all more or less infected with this weariness and ennui. The blows which the spirit experiences from opposing sides today are so powerful that no one is in a position to endure them with equanimity. The forces resident within the soul no longer suffice to give support and stability to life. Hence our culture has lost faith in itself. Our civilization is played out. What the Germans call _Weltschmerz_ has come over us. Philosophers have fashioned it into systems; singers, into song--the sad but not sweet music of humanity; sufferers all, into a sharp cry for redemption. Deniers of the malady must have their eyes opened by physicians, scurrying around curatively in this humanity.

First of all, there are those who borrow their panacea from religion. They demand a reform of the ecclesiastical life according to the sense and spirit of primitive Christianity. They propose to recover the religion of Jesus, and to find in it healing for all the diseases of the times. But this remedy is so complicated that it reveals rather than heals the whole disunity and distraction of our present life. It was Tolstoi, in garb of desert prophet, who would restore original Christianity. He preached a radical reversal of our cultural life--a monastic asceticism, a warfare against all life's impulses, on whose development our culture is founded. And ecclesiastical liberals would do virtually the same thing when they try to extract from the religion of Jesus a food that shall be palatable to modern taste, and then call their _ragout_, compounded according to their own recipe, "original" Christianity.

There are other voices, noisier and more numerous. These hold Christianity in all its forms to be the hereditary evil of humanity, and see the salvation of the world only in a purification of life from every Christian memory. Owing to the brisk international interchange of ideas today, Buddhism has awakened a momentary hope, as if from the religion of far-off India a purer spiritual atmosphere might be wafted to us, in which we could convalesce from the Christian malady.

Now, what shall we say of all these strivings to heal the hurt of the modern mind?

All of them have one adverse thing in common: They would tear up an old tree by its roots, and put in its place another tree equally as old and equally as rotten. There is something reactionary in all of them. They want to cure the present by the past. It is precisely this that cannot be done. If Christianity was once original, spontaneous, creative, it is so no more. We cannot lead an age back to Jesus, which has grown out beyond him. And the Buddha-religion is no more youthful and life-giving than the Jesus-religion. It is indicative of the depth of the disgust and the extent of the confusion on the part of the man of today that such a hoary thing as Buddhism can make so great an impression upon him. A revived, renascent heathenism, even as compared with Christianity, would mean a reactionary and outlived form of life. That men of moral endeavor and scientific vision could hope for a substitute for Christianity, a conquest over Christianity, in a rebirth of paganism, is a new riddle of the Sphinx.

One way only remains out of the aberration and dividedness of our present life: not _backward_, but _forward_! No winning of a religious view of the world in any other way! No pursuit of the tasks of the moral life by those who seek a real part and place in the modern world, in any other way!

Hence, a man is coming to be leader--a man who, as no other, embodies in himself all the pain and all the pleasure, all the sickness and all the convalescence, all the age and all the youth, of our tumultuous and tortured times: _Friedrich Nietzsche_!

I do not know how many of you know the poet of _Zarathustra_. But if you do not know him, if you have never even heard his name, yet you do know him, for a part of him is in your own heart and hope. If you have ever thought seriously about yourself, if you have even tried to think seriously about yourself, you have taken up into yourself a part of Nietzsche as you have so thought. Even without your knowledge or intention, you have passed into the world of thought for which the name of Nietzsche stands. It has been only now and then, in quite significant turning points in human history, and only in the case of the rarest of men, that such an influence has gone forth as from this man. Once in the horizon of his power, and you are held there as by magic. And yet not in centuries has a name been so reviled and blasphemed as his. Anathematized from the pulpit, ridiculed from the stage, demolished by any champion of blatant and blind _bourgeoisie_, refuted regularly by pedants, he is still Friedrich Nietzsche, and, unlike most preachers, his congregation grows from year to year. Newspapers, always sensitive to the pulse-beat of mediocrity, tell us that "the man is dead"; that he belongs to the past; that he is already forgotten. But he is more alive, now that he is dead, than he was when he was living. Dead in the flesh, he is alive in the spirit, as is so often the case. Superficial misunderstandings, transient externals, regrettable excrescences--these were interred with his bones. The real and true Nietzsche lives, and has the keys of death and of hell. Who has the youth has the future--and this is why the future belongs to Nietzsche; for no contemporary so gathers the youth under his shining banner. And it is because the moral seething of our time, our struggle with questions of the moral life, are recapitulated and epitomized in Nietzsche, that he stands out, like an Alpine apocalypse, as the new prophet of our new day. The mysterious need of a man to find himself in another, another in himself, as deep calls unto deep or star shines unto star, is met in the resources of the great personality of Nietzsche.

The new day whose billows bear us afar began with doubt. First, a doubt of the Church and its divine authority. A violent, devastating storm swept over popular life. The storm was speedily exorcised. Again--

"The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled."

A new faith emerged from the old doubt, like sweet waters in a bitter sea, and kept man a living soul.

"The sea is calm tonight;
The tide is full."

But the calm proves to be treacherous. The tide of the new faith now in the bible, and in the doctrine derived from the bible, went back to sea, and now I only hear

"Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath
Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world."

The human spirit urged a new, mightier protest against the "It is written," which was said to put an end to all doubt. The new doubt, as free inquiry, as protestant science, flung down the gauntlet to the bible faith. No page of the sacred book remained untouched. Only one certainty sprang from this new doubt--the certainty that the sacred book was a human book. Therefore it had no right to rule over man. Man was its judge; it was not man's judge. It must be measured by man's truth, man's conscience.

How, now, should the timorous heart of man be quieted in the presence of this new doubt? At once new props were offered him--truth and the state. What science recognized as "true," what morals and _bourgeoise_ customs and civil law sanctioned as "good"--these were now proffered man, that he might brace up his tottering life thereby. "Trust the light of science, and you shall indeed have the light of life; do what is 'good,' and you shall be crowned with the crown of life." This was the watchword. Then there stirred in the womb of present-day humanity the last, ultimate, uncanniest doubt. If we doubt the Church, why not doubt the state, too? If we doubt faith, why not doubt science, too? If we doubt the bible, why not doubt reason, doubt knowledge, doubt morality? Even if what we call "true" be really true, can it make us happy? Can the men who have all the knowledge of our time at their disposal, can the scholars, can the cultivated, really become fit leaders of humanity through life's little day? Is not that which is called "good" grievous impediment in our pilgrimage? Law, morals--are not these perhaps a blunder of history, an old hereditary woe with which humanity is weighted down?

This doubt--long and ominously maturing throughout the spiritual evolution of our new time--finds its most radical, most conscious, and most eloquent expression in Friedrich Nietzsche. He launches this doubt not only against all that has been believed and thought and done, but against all that men believe and think and do today. He shakes every position which men have held to be unshakable. An irresistible, diabolical curiosity impels him to transvalue all values with which men have reckoned, and to inquire whether they are values at all; whether "good" must not be called evil, "truth" error. As Nietzsche ventures upon this experiment of his curiosity, as he advances farther and farther with it, suddenly he laughs with an ironic, uproarious laughter. The experiment is a success! In the new illumination all the colors of life change. Light is dark, dark is light. What men had appraised as food, as medicine, evinced itself to be dangerous poison, miserably encompassing their doom. And since men believed that all the forces present, dying, poisoned culture, were resident in their "morals" and their "Christianity," it was necessary to smash the tables of these old values. In full consciousness of his calling as destroyer of these old tables, Nietzsche called himself the immoralist, the anti-Christ. Morals and Christianity signified to him the most dangerous maladies with which men were suffering. He considered it to be his high calling as savior to heal men of these maladies. He sprang into the breach as anti-Christ. Like Voltaire, he was the apostle and genius of disrespect--respectability was the only disgrace, popularity the only perdition.

Nietzsche the Immoralist, Nietzsche the Antichrist! Dare we write his name and name his writings without calling down upon our much-pelted heads the wrath of the gods? Does he not blaspheme what is sacred, and must we not, then, give him a wide berth? There are the familiar words concerning false prophets in sheep's clothing, but ravening wolves within. Such wolves there are--smooth, sleek men, paragons of "virtue," and "morals," and "faith," but revolting enough in their inner rawness as soon as you get a glimpse of their true disposition. Conversely, might there not be men who come to us in wolves' clothing, but whose hearts are tender and rich and intimate with a pure and noble humanity? We know such men. Friedrich Nietzsche was one of them. He was a true prophet. All his transvaluations dealt deadly blows at the old, false, man-poisoning prophetism. What if more morals matured in this immoralist, more Christianity in this anti-Christ, more divinity in this atheist, than in all the pronouncements of all those who today still are so swift to despise and damn what they do not understand?

Even Christianity, at its origin, in its young and heroic militancy, was not so amiable and harmless as we are wont to think. It, too, was born of the doubt of that whole old culture; of the most radical protest again _status quo_. It, too, leagued with all the revolutionary spirits of humanity. And it, too, revalued all the values of "faith" and "morals." What if this new Nietzschean spirit of life's universal reform, this creative, forward-striving genius of humanity, be once yet again embodiment and representative of life's essential element of rejuvenescence and growth? What if true prophets are always men of _Sturm und Drang_, men of divine discontent, fellow-conspirators with the Future? Anti-Christs? These are they who blaspheme the holy spirit of humanity. Immoralists? These are they who say that life is good as it is, and therefore should stay as it "is" forever. Faith? This is directed, not to the past, but to the future; not to the certain, but to the uncertain. Faith is the venturesomeness of moral knighthood. Nietzsche was a Knight of the Future.

Why, then, should not a magazine of the Future interpret Nietzsche the prophet of a new culture? Man as the goal, beauty as the form, life as the law, eternity as the content of our new day--this is Nietzsche's message to the modern man. In such an interpretation, Man and Superman should be the subject of the next article.

How a Little Girl Danced

NICHOLAS VACHEL LINDSAY

_Being a Reminiscence of Certain Private Theatricals_

(Dedicated to Lucy Bates)

Oh, cabaret dancer,
_I_ know a dancer
Whose eyes have not looked
On the feasts that are vain.
_I_ know a dancer,
_I_ know a dancer,
Whose soul has no bond
With the beasts of the plain:
Judith the dancer,
Judith the dancer,
With foot like the snow
And with step like the rain.

Oh, thrice-painted dancer,
Vaudeville dancer,
Sad in your spangles,
With soul all astrain:
_I_ know a dancer,
_I_ know a dancer,
Whose laughter and weeping
Are spiritual gain;
A pure-hearted, high-hearted
Maiden evangel
With strength the dark cynical
Earth to disdain.

Flowers of bright Broadway!
You of the chorus
Who sing in the hope
Of forgetting your pain:
I turn to a sister
Of sainted Cecelia,
A white bird escaping
The earth's tangled skein!--
The music of God
In her innermost brooding!
The whispering angels
Her footsteps sustain!

Oh, proud Russian dancer:
Praise for your dancing!
No clean human passion
My rhyme would arraign.
You dance for Apollo
With noble devotion:
A high-cleansing revel
To make the heart sane.
But Judith the dancer
Prays to a spirit
More white than Apollo
And all of his train.

_I_ know a dancer
Who finds the true God-head;
Who bends o'er a brazier
In Heaven's clear plain.
_I_ know a dancer,
_I_ know a dancer,
Who lifts us toward peace
From this Earth that is vain:--
Judith the dancer,
Judith the dancer,
With foot like the snow,
And with step like the rain.

The Dream of the Children

The children awoke in their dreaming
While earth lay dewy and still:
They followed the rill in its gleaming
To the heart-light of the hill.

From their feet as they strayed in the meadow
It led through caverned aisles,
Filled with purple and green light and shadow
For mystic miles on miles.

--_From A. E.'s Collected Poems._

The Critics' Critic

GALSWORTHY AS A GREEK

Do you read Arthur Guiterman's rhymed reviews? They are not to be taken too seriously, of course, though they are generally sane; but in the one on _The Dark Flower_ he asks if such things don't tend to weaken our moral fiber! Wow! Probably Homer might be said to do the same thing; we'd better take it out of the schools, hadn't we? There's an episode I recall about a female person named Helen, who was torn from her adoring husband, etc., etc. You know I don't believe in weakening moral fiber, but beauty _is_ beauty. All I could think of, in reading _The Dark Flower_, was Greek classics. Do you remember that exquisite thing (is it Euripides?)--

"This Cyprian
She is a million, million changing things;
She brings more joy than any god,
She brings
More pain. I cannot judge her; may it be
An hour of mercy when she looks on me."

Galsworthy's hero was just a Greek, swayed by Aphrodite. There's no question of morals. And besides, he behaved pretty well--for a man!

THE CASE OF RUPERT BROOKE

I can't share THE LITTLE REVIEW'S estimate of Rupert Brooke. I'm reminded immediately of something I found not long ago by Herbert Trench:

"Come, let us make love deathless, thou and I,
Seeing that our footing on the earth is brief,
Seeing that her multitudes sweep out to die
Mocking at all that passes their belief.
For standard of our love not theirs we take
If we go hence today
Fill the high cup that is so soon to break
With richer wine than they.

Ay, since beyond these walls no heavens there be,
Joy to revive or wasted youth repair,
I'll not bedim the lovely flame in thee
Nor sully the sad splendor that we wear.
Great be the love, if with the lover dies
Our greatness past recall;
And nobler for the fading of those eyes
The world seen once for all."

Swinburne's

"From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free"

I like better so far as the music of it is concerned; and fully as well, perhaps, as far as ideas go. There is something rather conscious and posing in Mr. Trench's effort. And you see why I think of him when I read Rupert Brooke. There is the same _memento mori_, the same hopelessness of outlook. It seems a pity to me, when a man can write as well as Brooke does in _The Hill_ and in that exquisite sonnet beginning "Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire of watching you," that he should waste his time on stupid, unpleasant cynicisms like _Wagner_ and that _Channel Passage_, in which he doesn't know which pain to choose--nausea or memory. I believe an Englishman can't achieve just the right degree of mockery and brutality necessary for such an effort. Take Heine, if you will--(I'm a Heine enthusiast); _he_ could do it with supreme artistry. Do you remember the sea poems--especially the one where he looks into the depths of the sea, catches sight of buried cities and sees his lost love ("ein armes, vergessenes Kind")? It finishes with the captain pulling him in by the heels, crying, "Doktor, sind Sie des Teufels?" Heine can touch filth and offer it to you, and you are rather amused--as at a child. But Englishmen are too self-conscious for anything of that sort. You are shocked and ashamed when they try it, feeling in a way defiled yourself by reading. It irritates me, and I wish Mr. Brooke would stop it, right away. He's too worth while to waste himself.

THE FEMINIST DISCUSSIONS

Do you know the story of the man, elected by some political pull to a judgeship in Indiana, who, after listening to the argument for the plaintiff, refused to hear anything further. "That feller wins," he said decisively. On being told that it was customary and necessary to hear the defendant's side also, he duly listened, with growing amazement. "Don't it beat all?" he said, pathetically, at the close; "now the other feller wins."

In much the same frame of mind I read the articles that are appearing in the current magazines on the subject of feminism and militancy. Edna Kenton's in _The Century_ is the only one that is content to give one side of the case. Decidedly, you will say on reading it, "That feller wins." _The Atlantic_ prints an admirable article by W. L. George on Feminist Intentions, and follows it hastily with a rebuttal by E. S. Martin (_Much Ado About Women_), fearing, I imagine, lest it would seem to be bowing its venerable head before new, profane altars. _Life_ gets out a really excellent suffrage number, sane and logical and reasonable, and has followed it up ever since with all the flings it can collect against suffrage, militancy, or feminism in any form. A recent amusing instance of this is a letter by one Thomas H. Lipscomb, who signs himself, alack! A Modern Man, and adds that his name is legion. Judging by the terror in the communication Mr. Lipscomb's modernity goes back as far as the Old Testament Proverbs, and the womanly ideal he so passionately upholds is in all respects the one the writer of this particular proverb acclaims. I have heard it used as a text so often, and have had it grounded into the very framework of my being so consistently, that it seems almost strange and irreverent to regard it with an alien and critical eye. And yet--just see what is expected of the poor thing: She

Seeketh wool and flax and worketh willingly with her hands.
Bringeth her food from afar.
Riseth while it is yet night and giveth meat to her household;
Considereth a field, and buyeth it; with the fruit of her hands
planteth a vineyard.
Her candle goeth not out by night.

She

Layeth her hands to the spindle; and her hands hold the
distaff.
Maketh fine linen, and selleth it, and delivereth girdles unto the
merchant....

together with a few other airy trifles such as bearing and rearing children, I suppose. But most significant of all--

Her husband is known in the gates where he sitteth among the
elders of the land.

I should think so indeed! There seems to be little else left for him to do.

I can almost hear the writer smacking his lips over this description, which no doubt tallies closely with Mr. Lipscomb's own notions.

For all this she is to

Receive of the fruit of her own hands, and her own works shall
praise her.

Possibly women have tired a little of letting their own works praise them--and nothing else! But I am taking the letter too seriously.

To go back to _The Atlantic_, I find Mr. George, who is in full sympathy with the movement of which he writes, classifying the demands of the feminists as follows: Economically, they intend to open every occupation to women; they intend to level the wages of women; in general, they wish to change the attitude of those who regard women's present inferiority to men (they frankly admit that there is inferiority in many respects) as inherent and insuperable, by demonstrating that it is due merely to long lack of thorough training--(an old friend, apparently, in a new dress!) They wish also gradually to modify and change existing marriage laws so that they will be equally fair to both sexes.

A careful re-reading of Mr. Martin's article fails to reveal much in the way of counter argument to Mr. George's forcible appeal. There's a great deal of courteous agreement and some rather good satire, but against the specific counts of the feminists' intentions Mr. Martin raises no telling argument. We hear that whereas fathers wish all earthly blessings for their daughters, mothers do not, as women are jealous of women; also that mothers fear the modern woman on account of their sons, for whom they in turn wish all possible good: the modern woman will not make a good wife! Angels and ministers of grace defend us! In a double quality as daughter to a devoted and loving mother, and as a devoted and loving mother to a most precious daughter, I throw down my glove.

I am sure Mr. Martin has never acted in either of these capacities, so precious little he knows about it! Besides, I do want my son to have everything that the world provides in the way of blessings and happiness, so I want him to have as a wife a thoroughly modern woman with an awakened soul and a high ideal, to finish the good work in him which I have at least endeavored to begin.

As I read further, however, the cat begins to poke a cautious head out of the bag. Women, Mr. Martin argues, are not responsible for the blessings the feminist movement is trying to bring them. It is men! That is why he is so particular to tell us of the careful solicitude of a father for his daughters. Men, right along, have procured all happiness for women; or, if not men exactly, at least a sort of _Zeit Geist_--I believe he calls it "necessity." And the poor deluded feminists are simply the little boys running along by the side of the procession and hollering. The procession is made up of vague forces, "working nowadays for the enlargement and betterment of life for women"--forces, he quaintly complains, that are "making things go too fast their way already."

So we must take all credit from Luther and Knox and Calvin and the reformers of all times and give it to the _Zeit Geist_. They, too, are little boys, I suppose, who ran along and hollered. At least they hollered lustily and well, and the feminists are in good company.

And the peroration--every true woman will appreciate this: "What a husband sees in forty years, maybe, of the good and bad of life for a woman; what a father sees in his daughters and the conditions of modern life as they affect girls--those are the things which count in forming or changing the convictions of men about woman's errand in this current world."

Well! However far the _Zeit Geist_ has progressed in other directions, it is plain that it has not made inroads on Mr. Martin's consciousness of the present state of affairs. Who has given men the power and right to decide about woman's errand in the world? For lo! these many years we have been letting husbands, fathers, and brothers decide for us just what it were best for us to do; and if the new idea has any significance at all it is just this: that we feel able to decide for ourselves what we most want and need.