Read Ebook: The Little Review March 1914 (Vol. 1 No. 1) by Various Anderson Margaret C Editor

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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.

A Remarkable Nietzschean Drama

DEWITT C. WING

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Paderewski and the New Gods

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

"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 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.

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 enton?d 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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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