Read Ebook: Rosmersholm: Dramo en kvar aktoj by Ibsen Henrik Tangerud Odd Translator

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Ebook has 524 lines and 50148 words, and 11 pages

a kindly comet that would smash our petty planet into smithereens.

Also, there is your proletariat. And there is your culture on summits far out of his reach. The more inaccessible it is, shining there with a radiance that never falls upon him, the less does he reflect that all is not gold that glitters. Then there is your philanthropist, foremost in culture of mind and heart, surveying the masses far beneath him, in the slime and grime of life, and doubting at last whether any labor of love can lift men up to where he thinks men ought to be; whether, after all, it can bring joy to men who are sick and sore with the load of life.

This is the meaning of the superman of Friedrich Nietzsche. Malice and ignorance have vied--vainly we may now hope--in caricaturing it. The way to superman is the rugged, steep mountain path up to conscious deed and mighty achievement; not the gentle incline down to stupid indulgence, indolent disposition, enervating or bestial impulsive life. Not that! Superman is precisely the man who overcomes the man of today aweary of life and athirst for death.

This preaching of Superman might be called Messianic. It is the bold faith that we are not the last word of the Word of life; it is the glad hope that the best treasures, the greatest deeds, the supreme goals of humankind are still in the future. Nietzsche's message is a breath of spring blowing over the land proclaiming the advent of an issue from the womb of time of something greater, better than anything we have been, than anything we have called good or great; the advent of a new day when our best songs now will be our worst then; our noblest thoughts now our basest then; our highest achievements now, our poorest by-products then.

We shall usher in that day; superman shall be our will, our deed! Superman gives our life worth. Ours is the new, exhilarating responsibility, swallowing up and nullifying all the petty responsibilities which fret us today. We have to justify our lives to that great future, to that coming one, to our children. They, through us, must be greater, better, freer, than all of us put together. We are worth our contribution to the achievement of future man. Nay, only superman can justify the history of the cosmos! Consider pre-human and sub-human life, red in tooth and claw; consider human life, often not much better and sometimes much worse; consider ourselves, our meanness and our mediocrity. Is this all? Is this warrant for the long human and pre-human story? Can you escape the conviction that but for superman the eternal gestation and agony of cosmic maternity admits of no rational vindication?

Lines for Two Futurists

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

Why does all of sharp and new That our modern days can brew Culminate in you?

This chaotic age's wine You have drunk--and now decline Any anodyne.

On the broken walls you stand, Peering toward some stony land With eye-shading hand.

Is it lonely as you peer? Do you never miss, in fear, Simple things and dear,

Half-remembered, left behind? Or are backward glances blind Here where the wind

Round the outposts sweeps and cries-- And each distant hearthlight dies To your peering eyes?...

I too stand where you have stood; And the fever fills my blood With your cruel mood.

Yet some backward longings press On my heart: yea, I confess My soul's heaviness.

Me a homesick tremor thrills As I dream how sunlight fills My familiar hills.

Me the yesterdays still hold-- Liegeman still unto the old Stories sweetly told.

Into that profound unknown Where the earthquake forces strown Shake each pil?d stone

Look; and exultance smites Me with joy; the splintered heights Call me with fierce lights.

But a piety still dwells In my bones; my spirit knells Solemnly farewells

To safe halls where I was born-- To old haunts I leave forlorn For this perilous morn.

Yet I come! I cannot stay! Be it bitter night, or day Glorious,--your way

I must tread; and on the walls, Where this flame-swept future calls To fierce miracles,

Lo, I greet you here! But me Mock not lightly. I come free-- But with agony.

A New Winged Victory

Innumerable books have been written about the conflict of the sexes, about the emergence of the new woman. Most of them are dull books. But Mrs. Gillmore's is beautiful and exciting. I kept thinking as I read it: here is something absolutely new, absolutely authentic; something so full of vision and truth that it's like getting to the top of a mountain for the sunrise. Its freshness and its clearness are like cool morning mists that the sun has shot through.

But to discard vague phrases and get to the story--for it is not a tract, but a novel--or rather a poetic allegory--that that Mrs. Gillmore has written. Five men of representative modern types--a professor, a libertine, a soldier of fortune, a "mere mutt-man," and an artist--are shipwrecked on a tropical island. After a few days their attention is caught by what appears to be huge birds flying through the heavens. The birds come nearer and prove to be winged women! Then comes the story of their wooing, their capture, their ultimate evolution into what modern women have decided they want to be: humanists.

... All this was intensified by the anarchy of sea and sky, by the incessant explosion of the waves, by the wind which seemed to sweep from end to end of a liquefying universe, by a downpour which threatened to beat their sodden bodies to pulp, by all the connotation of terror that lay in the darkness and in their unguarded condition on a barbarous, semi-tropical coast....

The storm, which had seemed to worry the whole universe in its grip, had died finally but it had died hard. On a quieted earth, the sea alone showed signs of revolution. The waves, monstrous, towering, swollen, were still marching on to the beach with a machine-like regularity that was swift and ponderous at the same time.... Beyond the wave-line, under a cover of foam, the jaded sea lay feebly palpitant like an old man asleep....

They had watched the sun come up over the trees at their back. And it was as if they had seen a sunrise for the first time in their lives. To them it was neither beautiful nor familiar; it was sinister and strange. A chill, that was not of the dawn but of death itself, lay over everything. The morning wind was the breath of the tomb, the smells that came to them from the island bore the taint of mortality, the very sun seemed icy. They suffered--the five survivors of the night's tragedy--with a scarifying sense of disillusion with Nature....

The sun was racing up a sky smooth and clear as gray glass. It dropped on the torn green sea a shimmer that was almost dazzling; but there was something incongruous about that--as though Nature had covered her victim with a spangled scarf. It brought out millions of sparkles in the white sand; and there seemed something calculating about that--as though she were bribing them with jewels to forget....

Dozens of waves flashed and crashed their way up the beach; but now they trailed an iridescent network of foam over the lilac-gray sand. The sun raced high; but now it poured a flood of light on the green-gray water. The air grew bright and brighter. The earth grew warm and warmer. Blue came into the sky, deepened--and the sea reflected it. Suddenly the world was one huge glittering bubble, half of which was the brilliant azure sky and half the burnished azure sea.

All this is gorgeous enough--this clear, vivid painting of nature. But when Mrs. Gillmore turns her hand to the supernatural, she is simply ravishing. For instance:

The semi-tropical moon was at its full. Huge, white, embossed, cut out, it did not shine--it glared from the sky. It made a melted moonstone of the atmosphere. It faded the few clouds to a sapphire-gray, just touched here and there with the chalky dot of a star. It slashed a silver trail across a sea jet-black except where the waves rimmed it with snow. Up in the white enchantment, but not far above them, the strange air-creatures were flying. They were not birds; they were winged women!

Darting, diving, glancing, curving, wheeling, they interwove in what seemed the premeditated figures of an aerial dance.... Their wings, like enormous scimitars, caught the moonlight, flashed it back. For an interval, they played close in a group inextricably intertwined, a revolving ball of vivid color. Then, as if seized by a common impulse, they stretched, hand in hand, in a line across the sky--drifted. The moonlight flooded them full, caught glitter and gleam from wing-sockets, shot shimmer and sheen from wing-tips, sent cataracts of iridescent color pulsing between. Snow-silver one, brilliant green and gold another, dazzling blue the next, luminous orange a fourth, flaming flamingo scarlet the last, their colors seemed half liquid, half light. One moment the whole figure would flare into a splendid blaze, as if an inner mechanism had suddenly turned on all the electricity; the next, the blaze died down to the fairy glisten given by the moonlight.

As if by one impulse, they began finally to fly upward. Higher and higher they rose, still hand in hand.... One instant, relaxed, they seemed tiny galleons, all sails set, that floated lazily, the sport of an aerial sea; another, supple and sinuous, they seemed monstrous fish whose fins triumphantly clove the air, monarchs of that aerial sea.

A little of this and there came another impulse. The great wings furled close like blades leaping back to scabbard; the flying-girls dropped sheer in a dizzying fall. Half-way to the ground, they stopped simultaneously as if caught by some invisible air plateau. The great feathery fans opened--and this time the men got the whipping whirr of them--spread high, palpitated with color. From this lower level, the girls began to fall again, but gently, like dropping clouds.... They paused an instant and fluttered like a swarm of butterflies undecided where to go.... Then they turned out to sea, streaming through the air in line still, but one behind the other. And for the first time, sound came from them; they threw off peals of girl-laughter that fell like handfuls of diamonds. Their mirth ended in a long, eerie cry.

The winged women differ in type as widely as the men; and each man chooses very quickly the type that appeals to him most. The libertine wants the big blond one, whom they've named "Peachy"; the professor likes Chiquita, the very feminine, unintellectual one; Billy, the mere man, falls violently and reverently in love with the radiant Julia, the leader of the group and the one your interest centers in immediately. Julia has a personality: she appears to be "pushed on by some intellectual or artistic impulse, to express by the symbols of her complicated flight some theory, some philosophy of life." She seems always to shine. She is a creator. In short, Julia thinks.

The men plan capture and finally accomplish it by a time-honored method: that of arousing the women's curiosity. Then follows a tragic episode when they cut the captives' wings, making flight impossible. Of course, marriage is the next step, and later, children are born on Angel Island--little girl children with wings, and boys without them. But all this time Julia has refused to marry Billy, though she's in love with him. Her only reason is that something tells her to wait.

Inevitably the women mourn the loss of their wings; and just as they become reconciled to a second-hand joy in their daughters' flights, Peachy's husband informs her that flying is unwomanly--that woman's place is in the home, not in the air --and that their daughter must be shorn of her wings as soon as she's eighteen.

The women hide and master the art of walking. While they're doing this their poor wings have a chance to grow a little, and by the time the men are ready to capture and subdue them a second time they have achieved a combination of walking and flying that puts them beyond reach. Then the men submit ... and Julia asks Billy to marry her.

That's all, except one short chapter about Julia. She has a son with wings! And then she dies--radiant, white, goddess-woman, whose life had been so fine a thing. The beauty of it all simply overwhelmed me.

Correspondence

Two Views of H. G. Wells

It is manifestly true that for the most of us free talk, intimate association, and any real fellowship between men and women turns with extreme readiness to love. And that being so, it follows that under existing conditions the unrestricted meeting and companionship of men and women in society is a notorious sham, a merely dangerous pretence of encounters. The safe reality beneath those liberal appearances is that a woman must be content with the easy friendship of other women and of one man only, letting a superficial friendship towards all other men veil impassable abysses of separation, and a man must in the same way have one sole woman intimate.... To me that is an intolerable state of affairs, but is reality.

The trouble lies with poor old human nature, I guess, and the way it wants what it cannot and ought not to have. But Wells says all unreality is hateful to him. Let's tear down the barriers, let's show up for what we are. Poor Smith wants something his neighbor has--well, let's give it to him, whether it's his neighbor's success or his wife or his happiness. Nature is still unbearably ugly in lots of ways. When we can train it to be unselfish and disinterested then it will be time to tear down barriers.

"M. M."

The description of a "little old Victorian lady" who sits in the background of our consciousness and plays conscience for us is charming; but.... She's a sweet-faced little lady to whom the universe is as clear as crystal and as simple as plane geometry. She is always knitting, and what she knits is a fine web of sentimentality with which to cover the nakedness of truth--"for it is not seemly, my dear, that anything, even truth, should be naked."

This web of hers is as fine as soft silk and as strong as chain mail. It's sticky, too. And it clothes truth so thoroughly that she grows unrecognizable to any but the most penetrating searcher--to H. G. Wells, for instance. It's natural enough that the old lady should dislike Wells, for he's found her out; he's made the astonishing discovery that underneath the web life is not sentimentally simple. He discloses to her scandalized eyes various unfortunate facts which she has done her best to conceal, as for instance the fact that there is such a thing as sex.

Right here the husband of the little lady has something to say: "The trouble with him and the class he writes of," he announces, "is that they aren't busy enough. Let 'em work for a living, be interested in something vitally for ten hours out of the twenty-four, and they'll forget all about their neighbors' wives and be content with good men friends and casual women friends." This is an excellent example of what Wells finds the next most disturbing element in life--"muddle-headedness," the lack of ability to think straight, to think things through. "Let Wells be vitally interested in something for ten hours of the twenty-four!" Doesn't he see that if Wells had ever limited himself to ten hours of interest he would be making shirts today? It is because Wells works twenty-five hours of the twenty-four at being "vitally interested in something" that he is one of the major prophets of our time. And the thing in which he is interested is life itself, the great unsolvable mystery, life which extends below the simple, polished surface that is all the Victorian lady knows as the sea extends below its glassy smoothness on a summer day.

One of the greatest things that Wells has done for some of us who came on him young enough so that our minds did not close automatically at his first startling revelation, is this: he taught us to look at life squarely, without moral cant, and with a scientific disregard as to whether it pleased us personally or not. We may not always agree with him--very likely we don't--but at least we must face the issue squarely and not take refuge in the vague sentimentality and slushy hopefulness of the Victorian lady.

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