Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

And now about her ideas. If you have read Wilde’s _Soul of Man Under Socialism_ you know the essence of Emma Goldman’s Anarchism. What is there about it to cause an epidemic of terror? It is merely the highest ideal of human conduct that has ever been evolved. Well, it is possible to get even the prejudiced to admit this much. Nearly everyone can see that government in its essence is tyranny; that one human being’s authority over another is a degrading thing; that no man should have the power to force his neighbor into a dungeon on the flimsy pretext that punishment is a prevention and a protection; that no man should dare to take the life of another man, on any basis whatever; that crime is really misdirected energy and “criminal types” usually sick people who should be treated as such; that “abnormal” people are those who have not found their work; that people who work should have some share of their production; that the holding of property is a source of many evils; that possessiveness and “bargaining” are mean qualities; that co-operation and sharing are splendid ones; that there should be an equality between giving and taking; that nothing worth while was ever born outside of freedom; and that men _might_ live together on this basis more effectively than on the present one. Even your “reasonable” man will grant you this premise; but then he plays his trump card: It may all be very beautiful—of course it is; _but it can never happen_! Oscar Wilde answered him in this way: “Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.”

Emma Goldman believes this. She does not belong with the rank and file of Anarchists. Cults and “isms” are too restrictive for her. “But you are an extreme Individualist,” the Socialists tell her. “No, I am not,” she answers them. “I hate your rigid Anglo-Saxon individualism. It is just because I am so deeply social that I put my hope in the individual.” It is because she hates injustice of any sort so passionately that she adopted Anarchism as the soundest method of combating it. If you have laws you must accept the abuses of law. Why not be more completely simple—why keep on pretending that we need a machinery which fosters tyrannies instead of giving freedom an unhandicapped path to begin upon its great responsibilities? This was the idealism upon which the American founders built—a minimum of government, at least, when that evil seemed to become a necessity. In her remarkable book that has just been published, Voltarine de Cleyre discusses this phase of the matter brilliantly in a chapter called “Anarchism and American Traditions.” There is no possibility of going into it minutely here, except to ask those who insist upon regarding Anarchism as an unconstructive force to read it.

These are the things Emma Goldman is trying to preach. She does not expect to see a new order spring up in response to her vision; so the facetious ones who poke their stale jokes at the unspeakable humor of a communistic society might save their wit for more legitimate provocations. All she hopes is to quicken the consciousness of those through whom such changes will come—to improve the individual quality. It reminds you of Comte’s suggestion, at the time when he fell deliriously in love, that all the problems of society could be solved on that divine principle. It is like Tolstoy’s dream prophecy—his prediction of the time when there will be neither monogamy nor polygamy, but simply a poetogamy under which people may live freely and beautifully.

And so Emma Goldman continues her work, talking passionately to crowds of people, sickened by audiences who listen merely out of curiosity, disheartened by the vapid applause of those who make their own incapacities the burden of their rebellion, heartbroken by the masses who cannot respond to any ideal, cheered by the few who understand, dedicated to an eternal hope of new values. This is the real Emma Goldman—a visionist, if you will, but at the same time a woman with a deep faith in the superiority of reality to imagination. How she has lived life! How gallantly she makes the big out of the little and accepts without complaining the perverted role which has been thrust at her. To have seen her in her home with its hundreds of books and its charming old pictures of Ibsen and Tolstoy and Nietzsche and Kropotkin; to have seen her friends, her nephews and nieces offering her their high adoration; to have watched her gigantic tenderness, her gorgeous flinging away of self on every possible pretext; to have listened with her to great music in a kind of cosmic hush that music is made by and for such spirits; to have heard her, “the crucified,” talk of the ideal she cherishes and how her expression of it has been so far below her dream; to have compared her, an artist in life, as incapable of spiritual vulgarity as a Rodin or a Beethoven, with a sensitiveness which makes her almost fear beauty, with a sweetness that is overwhelming—to compare her with the vulgarians who denounce her is to fall into a mad rage and long to insult them desperately. I said before that Emma Goldman was the most challenging spirit in America. But she is so much more than that: she is many wonderful things which this article merely touches upon, because it is impossible to express them all.

Science is after all but a reassuring and conciliatory expression
of our ignorance.—_Maeterlinck._

Poems

MAXWELL BODENHEIM

Expressions of a Child’s Face

Dawn?—no, the stunted transparency of dawn—
Color taken from the birth of a white throat
And shaken in a still cup till it gradually reaches strength
A sudden scattering of strained light—
The smile has lived and seemed to die.

Thought?—no, the invisible shudder of a perfume
Trying to leave the shadowy pain of a flesh-flower
A whisp of it whips itself away,
And leaves the rest—a cool, colorless struggle.

Sadness?—no, the growth of a pale inclination
Which knows not what it is;
Which tries to form the beginning of a swift question,
But has not yet developed trim lips.

And then what seems a smile
But is the sleeping body of a laugh.
It almost awakes, and throws out
Long breaths, in a green and yellow din.

Emotions

I

His anger was a strained yellow wire.
You leapt into it thinking to snap it,
But it flung you off silently.

II

Her happiness was too apparent—
Pleasant flesh in which you sensed heavy blood-clots.

III

Veering, weary birds were her hatreds.
They rested on you for years,
Then circled away, still weary.

IV

Her sorrows were clumsy, black bandages
Which seemed to hide wide wounds,
But only covered scratches.

To ——

You are a broad, growing sieve.
Men and women come to loosen your supple frame,
And weave another slim square into you—
Or perhaps a blue oblong, a saffron circle.
People fling their powdered souls at you:
You seem to loose them, but retain
The shifting shadow of a stain on your rigid lines.

To Handpainted Chinaware

Distorted ducks, smirking women and potshaped blossoms
Fastened to pale plates, you are dreary symbols of those who painted
you.
O ducks, you were made by women
Who sway in and out of the waters of life,
Content to catch morsels of food from birds flying overhead.
And you smirking women, were painted by men
Who unrolled little souls on plates,
Gave them faces which could not quite hide their ugliness ...
You alone almost baffle me, potshaped blossoms—
Were you fashioned by childless women, who made you the infants
Denied them by life?

Study of a Face

Her forehead is the wind-colored, sun-stilled wall of a country
church.
Trailing cloud-shudders overhead narrow it to a thin band of vague
light:
Two tarnished, exultant cerements of earth—cheeks—meet it,
And the three speak clearly, languidly.

An Old Man Humming a Song

Life was a frayed, pampered lily to him—
A lily which still clung to his gray coat,
Like an unbidden word whitening the death of a smile.
The half-smooth perfume of it touched the slanting, cambric curtain of
his soul,
And stirred it to low song.

The Spiritual Dangers of Writing Vers Libre

EUNICE TIETJENS

The spiritual dangers that beset a struggling poet are almost as numerous as his creditors, and quite as rampant. And woe unto him who falls a prey to any one of them! For poetry, being the immediate reflection of the spiritual life of its author, degenerates more quickly than almost any other form of human expression when this inner life goes astray.

There is first of all the danger of sentimentality, an ever-present, sticky danger that awaits patiently and imperturbably and has to be met afresh every day. True, if the poet yields to this danger and embraces it skillfully enough, the creditors aforementioned may sometimes be paid and much adulation acquired into the bargain—witness Ella Wheeler Wilcox—but it is at the price of artistic death.

There is the danger of giving the emotions too free rein, of producing, as Arthur Davison Ficke has said in a former number of THE LITTLE REVIEW, merely “an inarticulate cry of emotion” which moves us like “the crying of a child.” Much of our sex poetry is of this type. On the other hand, there is the equally present danger of becoming over-intellectualized—of drying up and blowing away before the wind of human vitality. Edmund Clarence Stedman went that way. Then there is the danger of determined modernity, of resolutely setting out to be “vital” at all costs and crystallizing into mere frozen impetuosity, as Louis Untermeyer has done—and the other danger of dwelling professorially in the past with John Myers O’Hara. There is too the new danger of “cosmicality,” of which John Alford amusingly accuses our American poets of to-day. And there are many, many other pitfalls that the unsuspecting poet must meet and bridge before he can hope to win to the heights of immortality.

But there seems to be a whole new set of dangers, especially virulent, that attend the writing of _vers libre_, free verse, polyrhythmics, or whatever else one may choose to call the free form so prevalent to-day. These dangers are inherent in the form itself and are directly traceable to it. For contrary to the general notion on the subject, it takes a better balanced intellect to write good _vers libre_ than to write in the old verse forms. It is essentially an art for the sophisticated, and the tyro will do well to avoid it.

The first of these dangers, and the one in which all the others take root, is a very insidious peril, and few there be who escape it. It is the danger of being obvious.

In writing rhymed or even rhymeless poetry of a conventional rhythmical pattern the mind is constantly obliged to sift and sort the various images which present themselves—to test them, and turn them this way and that, as one does pieces in a mosaic, till they at last fit more or less perfectly into the pattern. This process, although it sometimes, owing to the physical formation of the language, distorts the poet’s meaning a little, has the great artistic advantage of eliminating many casual first associations, which on careful thought are found not worth saying. It is precisely this winnowing, weighing process which the form of free verse lacks. Anything that comes to mind can be said at once, and with a little instinct for rhythm, is said. The result of this mental laziness is that the ideas expressed are often obvious.

But here a curious phenomenon of the human mind comes into play. Just as a physically lazy man will often perform great mental exertions to avoid moving, so the mind will frequently go to quite as great lengths to find unusual methods of expression to conceal, even from itself, this laziness of first thinking. The result is the attempt to cover with words the fundamental paucity of the ideas.

There are several principal effects which may result from this. One is brutality. A conception which, if spoken simply, is at once recognized as trite, may if said brutally enough pass muster as surprising and “strong.” A crude illustration of this is to be found in the recent war poetry of “mangled forms” and “gushing entrails.” Ezra Pound furnishes the most perfect example. Another effect is the tendency to the grotesque. This device is more successful in deceiving the poet himself than the other, though it has less general appeal. For it is possible, by making a thing grotesque enough, to cover almost completely the underlying conception. Skipwith Cannéll runs this danger, along with lesser men. A third peril is that which besets some of the Imagistes—the danger of reducing the idea to a minimum and relying entirely on the sound and color of the words to carry the poem.

Still another result of the complete loosening of the reins possible in _vers libre_ is the immediate enlargement of the ego. It is not so easy to see why this should result, but it almost invariably does, and has since the days of Whitman. It usually goes to-day with the effect of brutality. The universe divides itself at once into two portions, of which the poet is by far the greater half. “I”—“I”—“I” they say, and again “I”—“I”—“I.” And having said it they appear to be vastly relieved.

The next step is to lay about them gallantly at every person or tendency that has ever annoyed them. “I have been abused” they say, “I have been neglected! You intolerable Philistines, I will get back at you!” It is odd that it never seems to occur to these young men that they can only hit those persons who read them, and that every person who reads them is at least a prospective friend. Those who neglect them they can never reach—and slapping one’s friends is an unprofitable amusement.

Examples of these unfortunate spiritual results of abandoning oneself too recklessly to the free verse form are numerous. James Oppenheim’s latest volume, _Songs for the New Age_—although it is in many ways an excellent work and deserves endorsement by all who really belong to the new age and are not merely accidentally alive to-day—nevertheless shows in places the tendency to obviousness and slack work.

More flagrant examples are to be found elsewhere. Take for instance Orrick Johns. Here are some stanzas from his long poem, _Second Avenue_, which took the prize in Mitchell Kennerley’s _Lyric Year_:

“How often does the wild-bloom smell
Over the mountained city reach
To hold the tawny boys in spell
Or wake the aching girls to speech?

The clouds that drift across the sea
And drift across the jagged line
Of mist-enshrouded masonry—
Hast thou forgotten these are thine?

That drift across the jagged line
Which you, my people, reared and built
To be a temple and a shrine
For gods of iron and of gilt—

Aye, these are thine to heal thy heart,
To give thee back the thrill of Youth,
To seek therein the gold of Art,
And seek the broken shapes of Truth.”

The same Orrick Johns wrote this blatant bit of free verse in _Poetry_ a few months later. Both the paucity of ideas and the enlarged ego are very well shown here:

No man shall ever read me,
For I bring about in a gesture what they cannot fathom in a life;
Yet I tell Bob and Harry and Bill—
It costs me nothing to be kind;
If I am a generous adversary, be not deceived, neither be devoted—
It is because I despise you.
Yet if any man claim to be my peer I shall meet him,
For that man has an insolence that I like;
I am beholden to him.
I know the lightning when I see it,
And the toad when I see it ...
I warn all pretenders.

But to see the tendencies of which we have spoken in their most exaggerated form it is necessary to go to Ezra Pound, the young self-expatriated American who wails because “that ass, my country, has not employed me.” His earlier work was clean-cut, sensitive poetry, some of it very beautiful. This for example:

PICCADILLY

Beautiful, tragical faces,
Ye that were whole, and are so sunken;
And, O ye vile, ye that might have been loved,
That are so sodden and drunken,
Who hath forgotten you?

O wistful, fragile faces, few out of many!

The gross, the coarse, the brazen,
God knows I cannot pity them, perhaps, as I should do,
But, oh, ye delicate, wistful faces,
Who hath forgotten you?

This, from _Blast_, the new English quarterly, is the latest from the same hand. The capitals are his own. The contrast needs no comment:

SALUTATION THE THIRD

Let us deride the smugness of “The Times”:
GUFFAW!
So much the gagged reviewers,
It will pay them when the worms are wriggling in their vitals;
These were they who objected to newness,
HERE are their TOMB-STONES.

They supported the gag and the ring:
A little black BOX contains them.
SO shall you be also,
You slut-bellied obstructionist,
You sworn foe to free speech and good letters,
You fungus, you continuous gangrene.

* * * * *

I have seen many who go about with supplications,
Afraid to say how they hate you
HERE is the taste of my BOOT,
CARESS it, lick off the BLACKING.

To attempt to lay the entire onus of so flagrant a spiritual and cerebral degeneration to the writing of _vers libre_ alone is of course impossible. But the tendency is clear. Fortunately, however, we are not all Ezra Pounds and there are still poets balanced enough to appreciate these dangers and to make of free verse the wonderful vehicle it can be in the hands of a genius.

Union

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

(_Translated from the original Bengali by Basanta Koomar Roy, author
of “Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet and His Personality.”_)

Beloved, every part of my being craves for the corresponding part of yours. My heart is heavy with its own restlessness, and it yearns to fall senseless on yours.

My eyes linger on your eyes, and my lips long to attain salvation by losing their existence on your lips.

* * * * *

My thirsty heart is crying bitterly for the unveilment of your celestial form.

* * * * *

The heart is deep in the ocean of being, and I sit by the forbidding shore and moan for ever.

But to-night, beloved, I shall enter the mysteries of existence with a bosom heaving with love supreme, and my entire being shall find its eternal union in thine.

War, the Only Hygiene of the World

F. T. MARINETTI

(_Translated from the French by Anne Simon_)

I want to explain to you the difference between Futurism and Anarchism.

Anarchism, denying the infinite principle of human evolution, suspends its impulse at the ideal threshold of universal peace, and before the stupid paradise of interlocked embraces in the open fields and midst the waving of palms.

We, the Futurists, on the contrary, affirm as one of our absolute principles the continuous growth and the unlimited physiological and intellectual progress of Man.

We aim beyond the hypothesis of the amicable fusion of the different races, and we admit the only possible hygiene of the World: War.

The distant goal of the anarchistic conception (a kind of sweet tenderness, sister to baseness) appears to us as an impure gangrene preluding the agony of the races.

The anarchists are satisfied in attacking the political, judicial, and economical branches of the social tree. We strive to do much more than that. We want to uproot and burn its very deepest roots; those that are planted in the brain of man, and are called:

Mania for order.

The desire for the least effort.

The fanatical adoration of the family.

The undue stress laid on sleep, and the repast at a fixed hour.

Cowardly acquiescence or quietism.

Love for the antique and the old.

The unwise preservation of everything that is wicked and sick.

The horror of the new.

Contempt for youth.

Contempt for rebellious minorities.

The veneration for time, for accumulated years, for the dead, and for the dying.

The instinctive need of laws, chains, and impediments.

Horror of violence.

Horror of the unknown and the new.

Fear of a total liberty.

Have you never seen an assemblage of young revolutionaries or anarchists?... _Eh bien_: there is no more discouraging spectacle.

You would observe that the urgent, immediate mania, in these red souls, is to deprive themselves quickly of their vehement independence, to give the government of their party to the oldest of their number; that is to say, to the greatest opportunist, to the most prudent, in a word, to the one who having already acquired a little force, and a little authority, will be fatally interested in conserving the present state of things, in calming violence, in opposing all desire for adventure, for risk, and heroism.

This new president, while guiding them in the general discussion with apparent equity, shall lead them like sheep to the fold of his personal interest.

Do you still believe seriously in the usefulness or desirability of conventions of revolutionary spirits?

Content yourself then, with choosing a director, or, better still, a leader of discussion. Choose for that post the youngest amongst you, the least known, the least important; only his role must never supersede the simple distribution of the word, with an absolute equality of time that he shall control, the watch in his hand.

But that which digs the deepest ditch between the futuristic and anarchistic conception, is the great problem of love, with its great tyranny of sentiment and lust, from which we want to extricate humanity.

Genius-worship is the infallible sign of an uncreative
age.—_Clive Bell._

The least that the state can do is to protect people who have
something to say that may cause a riot. What will not cause a
riot is probably not worth saying.—_Clive Bell._

Noise

GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

There is a discovery, by no means pleasing or edifying, that the student makes as he broadly surveys the history of humanity. All the great turning-points of that history seem to be inwardly associated with violent upheavals and fearful revolutions. And of all these revolutions, it may be doubted whether history records any one on so large a scale as that which confronts us under the name of Christianity, in the transition from ancient to mediæval ecclesiastical culture. It was not a single Crucified One that gave Christianity the sacred symbol of its religion; unnumbered thousands—mostly slaves—breathed out their poor lives on martyrs’ crosses. The old culture went down in rivers of blood—not too figuratively meant—and a new arose, or, better, was created. Now, what is true of this most important revolution of our antecedent cultural life is true also, in corresponding measure, of every new “becoming” in the history of peoples. No state, no church, no social form, has ever arisen but that the path of the new life has passed over ruins and graves.

Must this be so? Must it be eternally so? Is it a thing of historical inevitability, is it even a law of the very order of the world itself? The answer—first answer, at all events—is, Yes! To affirm itself, to persist as life,—this belongs as nothing else does to life’s very nature. What newly arises negates what has already arisen. All that is living pronounces a sentence of death upon all that has been alive and that now sets itself against the new life. Accordingly, we are wont to call life a struggle for existence. Old Greeks coined a phrase, _Polemos pater panton_: war is the father of all things. The right to life is the right of the strong.

In view of these things, may we fairly raise the question as to whether there are exceptions to so universal a rule? Were we to set up a different right, would it not be the right of the weak? Would it not be to make the sick and the infirm masters over the well and the strong? Would it not be to preach a decadent morality as do all the pusillanimous and the hirelings who beg for the protection of their weakness because they do not have the strength to drive and force their way through life?

The man who, for a generation, has been called the prophet of a new culture, this _Friedrich Nietzsche_, is he not, then, precisely the apostle of this man of might and mastery, of ill-famed _Herrnmoral_, master’s morality, especially? Napoleon, his Messiah—do you think? Did he not gloat and glory over the time when the wild roving _blonde Bestie_ was still alive in the old Germans? Did he not worship the beast of prey, memorialize the murderer, stigmatize the morality of Christianity as a crime against life, because of its saying, Blessed are the poor and the sick, the peaceable and the meek? If, now, the word of this new prophet should make disciples, should even revolutionize the times, should we close our churches and stop our preaching, as the first thing to be done? For the churches preach goodness and love, not might and dominion; see in man child of God, not beast of prey.

If all this were a partisan matter—for or against Nietzsche—I would have nothing to do with it. To join in the damnatory fulminations against this man, or to advertise mitigating circumstances for his thought, and to re-interpret the whole from such a standpoint, until the whole should seem less brutal and less dangerous—to do either the one or the other is not for me, but for those polemicists and irenicists who are adding to the gayety of nations in these otherwise heartbreaking times, by the high debate as to whether Nietzsche be both the efficient and the final cause of our present world war. Not to defend Nietzsche, not to condemn him, but to wrestle for a firm, clear, moral view of life in our seething times, this alone is most worth while, and this too is my task.

But for all that, I do believe we must penetrate much, much deeper into this new prophet’s spirit than either friend or foe has yet done, if we are to win from Nietzsche a deepening of our own and our time’s moral view of life.

Would that we might forget, for a moment at least, all that partisan praise and blame have scraped together respecting this most modern of all philosophers; would that we might accompany him into the most hidden workshop of his own thoughts and hearken to the personal confessions of his wonderful soul! And what would we hear there? This preacher of crash and catastrophe and cataclysm, temporal and eternal, speaking of “thoughts which come with dove’s feet and steer and pilot the world”; of “the stillest hours which bring the storm.” Zarathustra-Nietzsche hears the _Höllenlärm_, the hellish alarum, that men make in life, that life itself makes; he observes how men lend their ears to this noise, how they are frightened by it, or exult over it, how they think that the truth is the truer where the noise is the louder, how the howling of the storm signifies to men that something good and great must be taking place, some great event of history must be under way. Then Nietzsche sets himself like a flint against this evaluation of things: “The greatest experiences, these are not our noisiest, but our stillest hours. It is not around the inventor of new noise, it is around the inventor of new values that the world revolves, inaudibly revolves.” I speak for myself alone, but these are words, Nietzsche words, for which I would gladly sacrifice whole volumes of moral and theological works. These words sharpen the eye and the ear for life-values which the majority of men today pass by—pass by more heedlessly perhaps than ever. These great words supply us with a criterion for the evaluation of questions of the moral life, a criterion that no one will cast aside who once comes to see what it means. It is a criterion without which we do not yet comprehend life in its depths, because we so constantly contemplate things from a false angle of vision. Something of the men who are carried away by “hellish alarum” lives in all of us. Let there be stillness without, and we think that there is nothing going on. Let nature peal and groan outside there, so that all gigantic forces seem to be released; then we have respect for her, we discern in such over-power even a divine creative force or a divine destructive will. Let people collide, the earth quake from thunder of cannon, and we signalize such a day in our history, pass it down from child to child, and we call such and such a battle a world-historical event.

But we forget the best. A blustering and brewing pervades nature when Spring comes over the land to conquer Winter. When we hear the conflict we cry: “Spring has come!” Not so. The true, genuine Spring-life, nascent underneath the fury, makes no noise at all, weaves away inaudibly, invisibly, in tiny seeds, and conceals in itself the noiseless new germs of life.

Thomas Carlyle, though a trifle noisy himself at times, could finely write: “Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule.” Wordsworth, not unmindful of

“The silence that is in the starry sky”

yet, gazing on the earth about him, sang

“No sound is uttered,—but a deep
And solemn harmony pervades
The hollow vale from steep to steep
And penetrates the glades.”

And for Longfellow there is

“Hoeder, the blind old god
Whose feet are shod with silence.”

But the chief study of mankind is still man, not nature and the gods. Man’s silences! Yes, amid the smoke of powder and clink of swords, peoples slash each other; and the men who make such uproar the people call great. But the might and work of a people are to be found in that quiet heroism, of which no one can discern anything outwardly—that quiet heroism to which no one can unveil monuments in our cities. It is the inaudible battles of the heart that this heroism fights; and the quieter it is, the more gloriously it shines. Men with big voices and mighty lungs we hear. Their words excite, move to tears, arouse boisterous and voluble antagonisms. These who assemble about them such billowy mobs, we are tempted to think that they are the leading spirits, that a vast power must live in them, since they are so able to move inert men. But another prophet, modern also, has said to these bawlers in market places: “Do you think that he who stirs up scandal moves the world?” Nothing easier than to start a scandal! Also, nothing jollier for numerous men, to say nothing of women. But scandal is a roaring in the ears. It does not reach the heart. It irritates, over-irritates the nerves. It creates no blessings, no life. A tiny word that sinks down into the deep of the soul, and quietly does its work there of germinating and sprouting—this means infinitely more for the world than the “alarum” of all the professional and unprofessional bawlers. Deep rivers make least din. Light cares speak; mighty griefs are dumb. A heart must be profane indeed, in which there is nothing sacred to silence and the solemn sea. Once more, to quote Carlyle: “Under all speech that is good for anything lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time.”

It were well to begin at home, and learn to evaluate experience aright in our own being. There are moments in our lives when everything that we encounter disconcerts us; nay, when our whole being seems to be off the hinges, out of joint. Pain plows up our innermost selves. We could shriek from heartbreak and woe. We stand there undone. And men who see us and hear us moaning so piteously, groaning so painfully, have the feeling: “No pain like this!” But how mistaken they are! For there is a cry of the soul, heard of no one, more painful than all that can be pitied or lamented. There are labors and battles of the soul wherein nothing is hammered and driven, and yet _something new_ is formed. It is never so still in a man as when he makes up his mind to have done inwardly with some experience. As long as there is foaming and blustering within, we accomplish nothing. True work tolerates no tempest. We must be still. And when old values are broken, when we must lead life to new goals, the quiet hour must come in which a divine child of the spirit is conceived by the holy spirit; and the brightest light which we can kindle within will burn so quietly and clearly that no cloud of smoke shall ascend therefrom, and there shall be no flickering to bear witness of contact with the restless world. “There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.”

Behold, then, this Nietzsche, who flees all “alarum” and execrates all din as a falsification of the moral values of life; who lives preferably thousands of feet above the world there below, who lingers on the loftiest lands of life whither no whirring rattle of the day could rise! Could this Nietzsche find joy in men mauling and making a mess of each other? Could this Nietzsche preach a culture in which battalions in uniform should line up against those in blouse to see who knew best how to deal the deadly blow? Could he gloat over the field where the thunder of battle thundered the loudest? “Inventor” Krupp’s “new noise”—would that appeal to Nietzsche who wanted all silent save the dripping rain, and who worshipped sunshine alone? One might answer these questions in the light of one’s own experience. Let us suppose that we comprehend the meaning of the _stillsten Stunden_, the quietest hours, and the worth of those great happenings of which nothing reaches the newspapers, and which no _avant-coureur_ trumpets. Tell me, could we then detect even the slightest inclination to be our own heralds, and to sacrifice our quietest hours to the gaping and squabbling of men? Men—so the old gospels say—ought not to cast their pearls before swine, or give that which is holy to the dogs. But what is pearl, what is holy, if not what the Nietzschean still hour contains and produces? There is something so tender and beautiful in that hour that we shrink from expressing it, from translating it into thought, lest word and thought tincture its best perfume. Silence is sweeter than speech, more musical than song. Whoever has a deep in himself into which he alone descends and penetrates, a _plus_ of his life that remains after we have known and weighed all his words and deeds, protects this deep and this _plus_ from everything that could make a noise, from all mere words, from all intrusive and obtrusive tittle-tattle. _Sich eine Oberfläche anheucheln_, to feign a surface, to wear a mask, this is the original and fine insight into such psychology. Man envelops himself in unneighborliness, not to hold haughtily other men away from him, but to save himself from them, so that they may not clumsily finger some pearl which could not stand so rude a touch. Why speak in parables? Because it is not given unto them to know the mystery of the kingdom, said the Nazarene. Parables were a protecting shell encasing the most intimate kernel, which ignorance or awkwardness might otherwise corrupt or destroy. Nietzsche and the Nazarene held a deep and a _plus_ so uniquely their own that they intentionally sought, not to be understood, but to be misunderstood, with reference thereto.

Yes, there is a “surface” which only the man knows and uses who bears about a deep in his own being. There, hypocrisy becomes a protection of truthfulness; surface a protection of depth. Whoever “feigns such surface,” wears such mask, is infinitely more honest and veracious than he who has no silence in his deep which cannot be speech on his tongue—a speech which is often only motions and noises of the tongue of him who pries curiously into what he is inwardly incompetent to understand, or offers a superficial and voluble sympathy for griefs of which he is as innocent as a babe unborn, or a jaunty appreciation of values and verities and virtues for which he has never sweat even a drop of blood. To wear a mask, to lie, lie, lie,—that is the _truth_ of the soul as it hides its treasures and its sanctities from vulgarity and volubility!

‘The suitor of _truth_? Thou?’ Thus they mocked.
‘Nay! Merely a poet!
An animal, a cunning, preying, stealing one,
Which must lie,
Which must lie, consciously, voluntarily,
Longing for prey,
_Disguised in many colours,_
_A mask unto itself,_
_A prey unto itself._
_That_—the suitor of truth?
Only a fool! a poet!
Only a speaker in many colours
Speaking in many colours out of fools’ masks,
Stalking about on deceitful word bridges,
On deceitful rain-bows,
Between false heavens
Wandering, stealing about—
_Only_ a fool! a poet!

(_Italics_ mine.)

Thus, it is the Deep, the Unique, the Abyss within, that is the great Isolator. Nietzsche was indeed “the eagle that long, long gazeth benumbed into abysses, into _its own_ abysses!”

And he spoke in parables. Give heed—so Zarathustra counsels his disciples—to the times when your spirits speak in parables, for in these times is the origin of your virtue.

I said I would not vindicate Nietzsche. But what if his deification of force-humanity, of master-humanity, were _Oberfläche_, “surface,” mask, which he “feigned” or wore, in order to protect his pearls from sows, his holy of holies from hounds? What if _this_—scandalizing the scandalous!—were but picture and parable which Nietzsche flaunted to the people that they might wreak their vengeance thereupon? And the parable is so pertinently chosen that it says everything to men of sense and seriousness, hides everything from fools; that the pearls can be recognized if right eyes behold, but protectingly concealed from rude eyes and awkward hands.

Of course, Nietzsche was a homicide! So must we be! If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee; if thy right hand offend thee, hew it off, and cast it from thee. And there are things more offensive than an eye or a hand! These are the weaknesses which we pamper and grow in ourselves: thought-lessness which we wink at; old pet habits which have come to be just too dear for anything, especially for us to knife; above all, sickly sentiments, self-pity, from which even all our joys cannot rescue us—so that we do not have the courage to join those warriors who turn their weapons against their own selves, and to swear an “_I will_,” that is hard as steel, against all these softnesses and humors and self-commiserations. Surely, it were well to be force-men, master-men, so that we would not coddle our impotency or carry on a pleasure-pain play with our weakness.

Yes, in these “stillest hours” there is also a “still” homicide and interment, a plucking out and a hacking off, and the warrior-hero does not betray the least pathos as he does this—there is no plaintive note in his voice. The greatest thing about the dying Socrates, sipping away at his cup of hemlock, was the total absence of pathos and self-pity. Ah, if we but took half the pains to marshal forces of will in ourselves, that we now devote to conserving our weak wills, and to adducing all sorts of plausible reasons for their impuissance! If we but actually learned _Herrenmoral_, master-morality, that were indeed masterful and understood mastership! We are called to be masters by our creator, not only masters of the earth, but also masters of the spirit. And mastership is a great sacred thing, which we ought to learn from world-masters. We ought to be hammers in life and not anvils. The great calamity among men is that they shrink from being hammers, and call the virtue of the anvil that lets itself be struck by the name of “patience.”

It is just not true that Christianity abhors master-morality and preaches a _Sclavenmoral_, a slave-morality. Yes it _is_ true of the cowardly and inert thing that men call Christianity, this religion of the study-chair and the barracks which can make use of no master, because it summons just those powers to rule whose whole strength consists only in the weakness of others. But there _is_ a Christianity which has been outright mighty force, outright master-instinct, this kingly Christianity, in whose presence a Pilate, and a Herod, with the entire host of their war-slaves, were feeble folk indeed; a Christianity of love and gentleness and meekness,—aye, aye, sir! But one can have gentleness in the heart,—and yet lay on with a club! That was indeed master-morality when the Son of Man made himself master of the Sabbath; when he with a whip of cords scourged the money-changers and mammonists out of the Temple! That was a force-man and a master-man who hurled his, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” against the weak heart of Peter.

How would it do for our churches to have a new festival, a festival of “the stillest hour,” memorializing the “invention of new values, around which the world revolves, noiselessly revolves”? Noises enough, often enough _Höllenlärm_, have there been in our churches, are yet, God knows! But it is not noise that rules the world. It is stillness which ultimately is the spiritual and moral might of the men who will possess the kingdom of earth. What if even the history of peoples “feigns a surface,” wears a mask, for those who having eyes see not, having ears hear not? What if men mistake _Höllenlärm_ for messages of great occurrences in history, and on this account hold themselves aloof from those phenomena and experiences in which _something new_, a life of the heart, presses on to its birth-hour? Yet the human race will not always need or require noise and masks as its history rolls on. The more men kill what is really worthy of death, the less will they set out to kill each other. The more powerfully the will becomes conscious of its calling to master, the more strenuously men strive after greatness, human greatness, the more ridiculous will it come to seem to them in the course of time that the force of man should be sought in the force of his muscles, the mastership of man in the hoarded prerogative of powder and lead. The day will yet come—as come it shall—when we will estimate our life, not according to its noisiest, but according to its stillest hours. And then a great and pure life will be created by what is done in the heart of man.

The Birth of a Poem

(_Translated from the Russian of Maximilian Voloshin by A. S. K._)

In my soul is a fragrant dusk of coming thunder...
Heat-lightnings coil there like blue-birds...
Lighted windows burn...
And fibres, long,
Slow-singing,
Grow in the gloom...
O the odor of flowers that reaches a scream!
Lo! lightning in a white zig-zag...
And at once all became bright and great...
How radiant is the night!
Words dance, then flash in couples
In an enamored harmony.
Out of the womb of consciousness, from the bottom of the labyrinth—
Visions crowd in a quailing host...
And the verse blossoms into a hyacinth-flower,
Cold, fragrant, white.

Editorials

_Why Socialists Went to War_

We have listened with much interest to the excuses for the German Socialists who went to war, as well as to the attacks on them for doing so. Now, though hesitating to obtrude our ignorance into the muddle of a complicated discussion, we can’t refrain from offering a suggestion.

The bottom reason for sudden activity under the stress of unusual circumstances is to be found, not in a conscious mental decision, but in the previously-formed habits of the individual mind. We are referring partly to the mob-emotion which has swept away so many even of the greatest souls of Europe. We are thinking more of the essence of Socialism, and the sort of emotional method which has been produced among its adherents—the material upon which mob-psychology had to work.

There is no essential difference between the method of German Imperialism and the method of German Socialism; the only difference lies in the objectives. Both insist on the supreme importance of the state, both work through cohesive organization and the almost unquestioning following of leaders. The habit of obedience, the instinct for organization, the gregarious mode of action—these are the very qualities of the individual German which have made it possible for the German Social Democratic Party to grow to such size and strength. What more inevitable, when the mobilization order went up, when flags flew and drums beat, than that the individual German Socialist should in his excitement shoulder his gun and march to war?

Of course, we don’t really know anything about it, and we haven’t the resources to make anything like a scientific investigation. But we strongly suspect that the morals of organized humanity will remain inferior to the morals of the individual until the individual habit of mind becomes one which denies to organized humanity supreme authority over the will.

G. H. S.

_Even Galsworthy!_

In _Scribner’s Magazine_ for November, Mr. Galsworthy has a stunning article on the War. And then at its close:—“Your Prussian supermen of Nietzsche’s cult...!”

_Another New Poet_

Mr. Scharmel Iris is a young Italian poet, born in Florence, who at the tender age of ten, and later, was praised by Ruskin, Swinburne, Francis Thompson, Edmund Gosse, and other men who may be assumed to know what good poetry is. Ruskin wrote: “He is a youth of genius and his poems are marvelously beautiful. His heart has felt the pathos of life and he has set this pathos to music.” Swinburne said: “He writes with imaginative ardor, and impassioned is the word which best illustrates his utterance. He is genuine and sincere, and his lovely poems display energy of emotion and a true sense of poetic restraint.” Thompson was more superlative: “I believe Scharmel Iris to be a poet of the first rank,” he stated. “His poems are sublime in conception, rich in splendid imagery, full of remarkable metaphors and new figures, and musical in expression.” Of course it has been difficult for a young man of such talent to find a publisher or a public; but at last a volume of his work is to be brought out by the Ralph Fletcher Seymour Company. The book will be called _Lyrics of a Lad_, and will be ready about Christmas time. Beside a preface by Maurice Francis Egan and an interesting title-page decoration by Michele Greco, it will have a frontispiece portrait by Eugene R. Hutchinson, the photographer who should never be referred to by any noun except “artist.” Personally, we love Mr. Iris’s work; we use the verb thoughtfully, because his poetry is not merely the sort which interests or attracts; it remains in your mind as part of that art treasure-house which is your religion and your life.

_Prizes for Poetry_

An interesting announcement comes from _Poetry_ in regard to two prize offers. One—the Helen Haire Levinson prize of two hundred dollars for the best poetry by a citizen of the United States published in the magazine during its second year—has been awarded to Mr. Carl Sandburg for his _Chicago Poems_. This is a particularly gratifying decision, for Mr. Sandburg’s is a new voice which must be reckoned with in American poetic production. The second is a one hundred dollar offer for the best war or peace poem on the present European situation, and has been given to Miss Louise Driscoll of Catskill, New York, for a poem called _Metal Checks_, which appears in the November issue.

My Friend, the Incurable

At dusk I pass an ugly red building with shrieking fat black letters on its façade—Home for Incurables. Shrill grass, narcotic carnations, hazy figures in rocking chairs and on the balconies, melting in the liquid gold of autumn twilight—a harmony of discord that screams for the spiritual brush of Kandinsky. There are no signs of pain or grief on the faces of the doomed: a profound calmness they bear, a resolute quiescence, reminding us of Dante after he had seen hell or of Andreyev’s resurrected Lazarus. “To be sure, they are quite happy,” explained the obliging Doctor. “These men and women have come to be free of struggles, of doubts, and of the anguish of hopes. The knowledge of their fate, the ultimate, irrevocable truth, is a relieving balm for the tired spirits—nay, even for the hopeless bodies, for as soon as they cease fighting their disease they learn to adapt themselves to that disease, to consider it an inseparable part of their existence. I can show you a number of patients who are actually in love with their affliction, who would resent the idea of being turned normal. Look at the hilarious face of that fellow yonder at the fountain; he is intoxicated with sunset, and appears to be the happiest of mortals, despite his terrible disease. A queer case, an un-American case.”

The doctor uttered a fearful Latin term and told me the history of that patient. A European, he has been for many years afflicted with something like “sentimentalomania,” a peculiarly Continental ailment. Skilful physicians had tried in vain to cure him; change of climate and environment had been of no avail: even in Siberian tundras and in foggy London his disposition remained unaltered. In despair he went to Berlin, where, he was advised, the gravest case of sentimentality would be annihilated; the reaction proved almost fatal, for the Spree and the _Sieges Allee_ made such a nauseating impression upon the poor fellow that his illness was complicated by a severe outbreak of Germanophobia. As a last resort, the famous specialist, Herr Dr. Von Bierueberalles, bade him taste the influence of the sanest atmosphere on earth, that of the States. When even the harshest and most practical American treatment had failed to knock out the unfortunate’s folly, he was pronounced hopeless and offered a place among the incurables, which offer he willingly accepted, and acquiesced. He has since become accustomed to his disease and bears it rather with defiant joy.

At times, when I seek relief from practical values and sane standards, I come to have a chat with my friend, the Incurable. Henceforth he will have the floor.

* * * * *

With whom do I side in the War? Why, of course, with Germany! Perhaps my attitude shows that I have not been completely cured from the Prussophobia that I had contracted in Berlin; as it is, I sincerely wish to see the German boot victorious on the whole continent and over the mouldy Britons, a rude, dreamless, wingless Napoleon brooding over old napping Europe. Picture the ruined cathedrals of Belgium and France “restored” into comfortable barracks for the braves of the Fatherland; picture the boulevards of Paris and Brusselles, the quays of the Neva and the Thames, ornated with the statues of the most Christian Wilhelm and of his illustrious ancestors down to the Great Elector of Brandenburg; picture the excellent _Schutzman_ reigning supreme, physically and spiritually, from Vladivostock to Glasgow,—think what an abyss of hatred, of stirring electrifying hatred will arise among the rotting nations, and out of hatred self consciousness, endeavors, cravings, to be crystallized in torrents of new art creations! As for Germany, I have no fear for the duration of her hegemony; she will undoubtedly choke from indigestion. But oh, how I dread the reverse outcome! The victory of the Allies will push Progress a century backward; it will strengthen the tottering absolutism in Russia; it will swell the piggish arrogance of the French bourgeois; it will augment the insular hypocricity of the English Philistine; it will still more, if it is possible, vulgarize international diplomacy and greed, arousing the appetites of the so-called Democracies.