My Friend, the Incurable
Ἑυρηκα!—shoutedthe Incurable, when I came on my monthly call. I have solved the mystery that has baffled your idealists since the outbreak of the War. The puerile effusions of Hardy, Galsworthy, and other Olympians who in the mist of international hostilities confused Nietzsche with Bernhardi, are quite explainable. It is well known that our successful writers have no time or inclination to read other fellows’ books: they leave this task to journalists and book-reviewers. Hence their splendid ignorance of Nietzsche. The advent of great events showered upon the innocent laymen problems, names, and terms that have been aterra incognitato most of them, and justly so: for what has the artist to do with facts and theories,—what is Hecuba to him? But of late it has become “stylish” for men of letters to declare their opinions on all sorts of questions, regardless of the fact that they have as much right to judge those problems as the cobbler has the right to judge pastry. To the aid of the English novelists who wanted to say “something about the war,” but whose information on the subject was zero, came the dear professor Cramb. A quick perusal of his short work[1]supplied the students with an outlook and a view-point, and out came the patriotic cookies to the astonishment of the world. Such, at least, is my interpretation of the mystery.
[1]Germany and England, by J. A. Cramb. [E. P. Dutton and Company, New York.]
Professor Cramb’s lectures are not an answer to Bernhardi, as the publisher wants us to believe, but rather a supplement to the work of the barrack-philosopher whose theory of the biological necessity of war is beautifully corroborated with numerous quotations from the most ancient to the most modern philosophers, historians, statesmen, and poets. The general splendidly demonstrates the efficiency of German mind, the ability to utilize the world culture for the Fatherland, to make all thinkers serve the holy idea of war, from Heraclitus’s πὸλεμος πατήρ πάντων to Schiller’s Bride from Messina. Yet I, in my great love for Germany, should advise the Kaiser’s government to appropriate a generous sum for the purpose of spreading far and wide Cramb’s “Answer,” as the highest glorification of Teutonia. No German has expressed more humble respect and admirationfor Treitschke, Bernhardi, and other eulogists of the Prussian mailed fist than this English dreamer of a professor. For what but a fantastic dream is his picture of modern Germany as that of a land permeated with heroic aspirations, a mélange of Napoleonism and Nietzscheanism? Nay! it is the burgher, the “culture-philistine” that dominates the land of Wilhelm and Eucken, the petty Prussian, the parvenu who since 1870 has been cherishing the idea ofWeltmachtand of the Germanization of the universe.
Pardon me, friend, I cannot speaksina iraon this question; out of respect for Mr. Wilson’s request, let us “change the subject.” Come out where we can observe in silence the symphony of autumnal sunset. The Slavs call this month “Listopad,” the fall of leaves; do you recall Tschaikovsky’sFarewell Ye Forests? Sing it in silence, in that eloquent silence of which Maeterlinck had so beautifully spoken. I sayhad, for my heart is full of anxiety for that Belgian with the face of an obstinate coachman. His last works reveal symptoms of Monomania, that sword of Damocles that hangs over many a profound thinker, particularly so if the thinker is inclined towards mysticism. Maeterlinck, as no one else, has felt the mystery of our world; his works echoed his awe before the unknown, the impenetrable, but also his love for the mysterious, his rejoicing at the fact that there are in our life things unexplainable and incomprehensible. His latest essays[2]show signs of dizziness, as of a man who stands on the brink of an abyss. I fear for him; I fear that the artist has lost his equilibrium and is obsessed with phantasms, psychometry, and other nonsense. The veil of mystery irritates him, he craves to rend it asunder, to answer all riddles, to clarify all obscurities, to interpret the unknowable; as a result he falls into the pit of charlatanism and credulity.
[2]The Unknown Guest, by Maurice Maeterlinck. [Dodd, Mead and Company, New York.]
If there were no more insoluble questions nor impenetrable riddles, infinity would not be infinite; and we should have forever to curse the fate that placed us in a universe proportionate to our intelligence. All that exists would be but a gateless prison, an irreparable evil and mistake. The unknown and unknowable are necessary to our happiness. In any case I would not wish my worst enemy, were his understanding a thousand times loftier and a thousandfold mightier than mine, to be condemned eternally to inhabit a world of which he had surprised an essential secret and of which, as a man, he had begun to grasp the least atom.
If there were no more insoluble questions nor impenetrable riddles, infinity would not be infinite; and we should have forever to curse the fate that placed us in a universe proportionate to our intelligence. All that exists would be but a gateless prison, an irreparable evil and mistake. The unknown and unknowable are necessary to our happiness. In any case I would not wish my worst enemy, were his understanding a thousand times loftier and a thousandfold mightier than mine, to be condemned eternally to inhabit a world of which he had surprised an essential secret and of which, as a man, he had begun to grasp the least atom.
These words were written by Maeterlinck a few years ago in his essay,Our Eternity. He has surely gone astray since. The last book is written in a dull pale style, in a tone of a professional table-rapper, enumerating legions of “facts” to prove the theory of psychometry or whatever it may be, forgetting his own words of some time ago: “Facts are nothing but the laggards, the spies, and camp followers of the great forces we cannot see.” What a tragedy!
Was Dostoevsky a mystic? Undoubtedly so, but not exclusively so. Far from being a monomaniac, he applied his genius to various aspects of life and wistfully absorbed the realistic manifestations of his fellow-beings as well as the inner struggles of their souls. Dostoevsky is the Cézanne of the novel. With the same eagerness that Cézanne puts into his endeavor to produce the “treeness” of a tree, brushing aside irrelevant details, does Dostoevsky strive to present the “soulness” of a soul, stripping it of its veils and demonstrating its throbbing nudeness before our terrified eyes. We fear him, for he is cruel and takes great pleasure in torturing us, in bringing us to the verge of hysteria; we fear him, for we feel uneasy when we are shown a nude soul. Perhaps he owed his wonderful clairvoyancy to his ill health, a feature that reminds us of his great disciple, Nietzsche. I do not know which is more awesome in Raskolnikov[3]: his physical, realistic tortures, or his mysterious dreams and hallucinations. In all his heroes: the winged murderer who wished to kill a principle; the harlot, Sonya, who sells her body for the sake of her drunkard father and her stepmother; the father, Marmeladov, whose monologues in the tavern present the most heart-gripping rhapsody of sorrow and despair; the perversed nobleman, Svidrigailov, broad-hearted and cynical, who jokingly blows out his brains—in the whole gallery of his morbid types Dostoevsky mingles the real with the fantastic, makes us wander in the labyrinth of illusionary facts and preternatural dreams, brings us in dizzily-close touch with the nuances of palpitating souls, and leaves us mentally maimed and stupefied. I think of Dostoevsky as of a Demon, a Russian Demon, the sorrowful Demon of the poet Lermontov, the graceful humane Mephistopheles of the sculptor Antokolsky.
[3]Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]
The tragedy of Raskolnikov is twofold: he is a Russian and an intellectual. The craving, religious soul of the child of the endless melancholy plains, keened by a profound, analytic intellect seeks in vain an outlet for its strivings and doubtings in the land where interrogation marks are officially forbidden. The young man should have plunged into the Revolution, the broad-breasted river that has welcomed thousands of Russian youth; but Dostoevsky willed not his hero to take the logical road. The epileptic Demon hated the “Possessed” revolutionists; he saw the Russian ideal in Christian suffering. “He is a great poet, but an abominable creature, quite Christian in his emotions and at the same time quitesadique. His whole morality is what you have baptised slave-morality”—this from Dr. Brandes’s letter to Nietzsche,—a specimen of professorial nomenclature.
I am thinking of a threefold—nay, of a manifold—tragedy of a youngman, who, besides being a Russian and an intellectual, is a revolutionist and is a son of the eternal Ahasver, the people that have borne for centuries the double cross of being persecuted and of teaching their persecutors. What makes this tragedy still more tragic is the element of grim irony that enters it as in those of Attic Greece: the Russian-Jewish-Anarchist is hurled by Fate into the country of Matter-of-Fact, your United States. The boy is poetic, sentimental, idealistic; imbued with the lofty traditions of the Narodovoltzy, the Russian saints-revolutionists, he craves for a heroic deed, for an act of self-sacrifice for the “people.” “Ah, the People! The grand, mysterious, yet so near and real, People....”[4]He attempts to shoot an oppressor of the people, is delivered to the Justice, and is sentenced to twenty-two years of prison confinement. The curtain falls, but does the tragedy end here? No, it only begins.
[4]Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, by Alexander Berkman. [Mother Earth Company, New York.]
For he who lives more lives than oneMore deaths than one must die.
For he who lives more lives than oneMore deaths than one must die.
For he who lives more lives than oneMore deaths than one must die.
For he who lives more lives than oneMore deaths than one must die.
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
Raskolnikov wanted to kill a principle; he wanted to rid the world of a useless old pawnbroker, in order to enable himself tolivea useful life. He failed; the principle remained deadly alive in the form of a gnawing conscience. “I am an aesthetic louse,” he bitterly denounces himself. Alexander Berkman wanted todiefor a principle, to render the people a service through his death. He has failed. At least he has thought so. The Attentat produced neither the material nor the moral effect that the idealist had expected. Society condemned him, of course; the strikers, for whose benefit he eagerly gave his life, looked upon his act as on a grave misfortune that would augment their misery; even his comrades, except a very few, disapproved of his heroic deed. The icy reality sobered the naïve Russian. Was it worth while? For the “people?”
TheMemoirshave stirred me more profoundly than Dostoevsky’sMemoirs from a House of the Dead, far more than Wilde’sDe Profundis: the tragedy here is so much more complex, more appalling in its utter illogicality. On the other hand the book is written so sincerely, so heartedly, so ingenuously, that you feel the wings of the martyr’s soul flapping upon yours. Berkman becomes so near, so dear, that it pains to think of him. You are with him throughout his vicissitudes; you share his anguish, loneliness, suicidal moods; your spirit and your body undergo the same inhuman tortures, the same unnecessary cruelties, that he describes so simply, so modestly; you rejoice in his pale prison joys, your heart goes out to the gentle boy, Johnny, who whispers through the dungeon wall his love for Sashenka; you weep over the death of Dick, the friendly sparrowwhose chirping sounded like heavenly music to the prisoner; you are filled with admiration and love for the Girl who hovers somewhere outside like a goddess, “immutable,” devoted, noble, reserved; you are, lastly, out in the free, and how deeply you sympathize with the sufferer when he flees human beings and solicitous friends.... When I read through the bleeding pages, I felt like falling on my knees and kissing the feet of the unknown, yet so dear, martyr. Surely, thou hast known suffering....
Don’t sneer at my incurable sentimentality, you happy normal. The tragedy of Alexander Berkman is common to all of us, transplanted wild flowers. It is the tragedy of getting the surrogate for the real thing. Berkman and the Girl passionately kissing the allegorical figure of the Social Revolution—isn’t this the symbol of the empty grey life in this normal land? What do you offer the seeking, striving, courageous souls but surrogates, substitutes? Your radicals—they are nauseating! They chatter about Nietzsche and Stirner and Whitman, wave the red flag and scream about individual freedom; but let one of them transgress the seventh commandment or commit any thing that is notcomme il fautaccording to their code, and lo, the radicalism has evaporated, and the atavistic mouldy morality has come to demonstrate its wrinkled face. Has not John Most repudiated the act of his disciple, Berkman, because it was arealact and not a paper allegory? Of course, Most was German....
Hush! Were we not going to observe in silence the purple-crimson crucifixion of autumnal Phoebus? I have been as silent as the Barber of Scheherezade. Woe me, the Incurable!
Ibn Gabirol.
SufficienceHelen HoytI wish no guardian angel:I do not seek fairies in the trees:The trees are enough in themselves.
Helen Hoyt
I wish no guardian angel:I do not seek fairies in the trees:The trees are enough in themselves.
I wish no guardian angel:I do not seek fairies in the trees:The trees are enough in themselves.
I wish no guardian angel:I do not seek fairies in the trees:The trees are enough in themselves.
I wish no guardian angel:
I do not seek fairies in the trees:
The trees are enough in themselves.