The Ecstasy of Pain

The Ecstasy of Pain

Alexander S. Kaun

... Out of the effervescent hurricane of light burst forth a terrible song.

Despair, as if thousands of graves had torn open. As if the heavens had rent asunder, and the Son of Man had descended upon the earth to judge the good and the wicked. Millions of hands rose up to heaven in a mad horror of death—hands that prayed for mercy and charity. He heard a beastly roar, which like a geyser of a smoking sea of blood spurtled upward; and above all this he saw bony fingers that twisted and writhed in convulsions of fear and shouted to heaven: “Ad te clamamus exules filii Hevae, ad tesuspiramus gementes et flentes.”

And he saw a multitudinous crowd that was lashed with an insane ecstacy of destruction, and above them a heaven that yawned with disease and fire. He saw how those miserable creatures wriggled and serpentined in hellish madnesses of life; he saw the bleeding backs furrowed by the whips into chunks; he saw all humanity demented, obsessed, with an inspired frenzy in the bestialized eyes.

Slowly disappeared the procession of the doomed; wild cries intoxicated with despair died away in a death-rattle, and a sun, red like copper, shed a chatoyant green light on thepuddles of blood.

“Ad te clamamus exules filii Hevae!”

This is a fragment from an early poem of Przybyszewski,De Profundis. It is a proper background to all the works of the Pole, to his plays, essays, novels, poems. At least I see him in that light.

A reminiscence: On a rainy autumn night I went to hear him lecture. “... and if the psychologists will find contradictions in my words—I shall not feel dismayed. There are contradictions that are dearer to me than most perfect consequentialities.” From the dim light of the platform ached a face distorted with contempt and suffering, with the grim clairvoyance of the Beyond. At moments the eyebrows leaped up and bulged the forehead into thick, strained furrows, and the eyes suddenly burst in a flash that revealed unknown worlds, twisting your soul with awe and mystery. But soon the flame would extinguish, and the face would resume the masque of contemptuous weariness; the mouth-corners congealed a satanic would-be smile that prepared one for his famous “Heh-heh.” That face haunted me for many days and nights, as if my inner vision had been scalded by an unearthly chimera. My friends, who have seen his exaggerated portrait painted by Krzyzanowski, will understand me. Those who will read his works (if they are translated), will understand me.Homo Sapiens[1]is but a nuance of his multiplex creative spirit, though perhaps a most characteristic nuance. Przybyszewski, like Nietzsche, like Wilde, is a unique mosaique, in which the personality, the artist, his life and his works, are inseparable, indivisible units of the wonderful whole. Who can fathom this hellish cosmos, this mare tenebrarum of the modern man’s soul, which the mad Pole has traversed and penetrated to the bottom, and has cast out shrieking monsters and gargoyles illuminated with blinding, dazzling, infernal flames?

I cannot. Perhaps only pale glimpses of reflections.

Those who have heard Przybyszewski play Chopin tell us that no virtuoso can compare with his creative interpretation of his melancholy compatriot. In his profound essay onChopin and NietzscheI have been impressed not so much with the morbid theory as with the characteristic feature present in all his work—the reflection of his own personality. In his favorite artists, in his heroes, in his women, he has painfully sought an expression of his restless, boundless self. Thus Chopin becomes one of the numerous selves of Przybyszewski. Let me picture the Composer in the light of the Poet.

Specifically Slavic features: extreme subtility of feeling, easy excitability, passionateness and sensuousness, predilection for luxury and extravagance, and, chief of all, a peculiar melancholy lyricism, which is nothingbut the expression of the most exalted egoism, whose sole and highest criterion is his own “I.” These, and the profound melancholy of his native limitless plains with their desolate sandy expanses, with the lead-skies over them, have been influences keenly contradicting his flexible, light vivaciousness of the Gallic, his coquettish effeminacy, his love for life and light.

Subtracting the last two strokes, who is it: Chopin or Przybyszewski?

The trait most obviously common to both Poles is the unquenchable yearning, the eternal Sehnsucht, which filters through all their productions. In neither of them was it the yearning of healthy natures, in whom, as in a mother’s womb, it bears the embryo of fruitful life; it is not the yearning of Zarathustra “in a sunny rapture of ecstacy greeting new, unknown gods with an exalted ‘Evoi’!” Chopin’s longing, as reflected in Przybyszewski, is tinted with the pale color of anemia peculiar to a representative of a degenerate aristocracy (the Poet’s progenitor died of delirium tremens), with his transparent skin projecting the tiniest veins, with his slender figure and prolongated limbs that breathe with each movement incomparable gracefulness, with his overdeveloped intellect which shines in his eyes, as in the eyes of frail children who are doomed to early death. This longing is the incessant palpitation of a nervous, over-delicate nature, something akin to the constant irritability of open wounds, the continuous change of ebbs and flows of morbid sensitiveness, the eternal dissatisfaction of acute emotions, the fatigableness of a too-susceptible spirit, the weariness of one oversatiated with suffering. Yet this longing has in it also wild passion, “the convulsive agony of deadly horror,” self-damnation and thirst for destruction, delirium and madness of one who strains his gaze into the vast—and sees nothing.

Indeed I should like to hear Chopin’sPreludesrecreated under the longing fingers of Stanislaw.

Stanislaw Przybyszewski. Do pronounce it correctly, that you may hear the sound of rain swishing through tall grass. Przybyszewski has come to know himself so thoroughly and unreservedly, and, in himself, to know the modern man of the widest intellectual and artistic horizons, through a long excruciating internal purgatory. From the study of architecture and general aesthetics his restless, ever-searching spirit hurled him into natural sciences in the hope of finding positive answers to his burning questions. He came out loaded with an enormous baggage of facts and information; yet he had not quenched his everlasting dissatisfaction, but had acquired a sceptical “heh-heh” towards life and knowledge. He plunged into psychology, and found Nietzsche—to him the deepest searcher, possessor of the keen eye of a degenerate, which like a wintersun sheds its light with morbid intensity upon snowfields, clearly illuminating each crystal. With a “heh-heh” he dismissed the Loneliest One. For was not Nietzsche driven to create for himself a superman, as a consolation, as a hope, as “a soft pillow upon which could rest his weary inflamed head”? Did he for one moment believe in that ghost which he erected in the heavy hours of despair? Nonsense.Heh-heh. Had not his Falk, his homo sapiens, been crushed in his struggle to attain liberation and supermanship? Recall Falk’s self-rending meditations: “Conscience! Heh-heh-heh! Conscience! How ridiculously silly is your superman! Herr Professor Nietzsche left out of account tradition and culture which created conscience in the course of hundreds of centuries.... Oh, how ridiculous is your superman sans conscience!” Thus, step after step, killing god after god, burning his ships behind him, the all-knowing, the all-denying degenerate-nobleman Slav-cosmopolite has ascended the loftiest summit, or, as he would rather say, has descended into deepest hell—Art. An equipment hardly appropriate for an artist who sees “Life Itself” in color and fragrance and petals and varicolored mornings and varicolored nights and Japanese prints and ... but you may find the catalogue in the Editor’s rhapsody of last month. Przybyszewski’s background served him as an Archimedean lever to gauge and fathom the soul of modernity.

Let me attempt to present the quintessence of Przybyszewski’s modern Individuum, as he prefers to call an exceptional personality.

He considers himself a superman, aloof from the market-interests of the crowd. He is conscious of the fetters of his instincts and of the gradual sapping of his strength—hence the history of the Individuum turns into a sad monography of suppressed will and distorted instincts, a history of a mountain torrent which cannot find an outlet, and rushes into depth, dissolving obstructing strata, destroying and washing them away, and ruining the structure of the rocks in their very bowels.

Hence the longing for liberation and the yearning for expanse, a perilous “palpitating Sehnsucht and craving of the heights, of the beyond.” But this longing has another distinctive symptom: the consciousness of its hopelessness, the clear conviction that the passionately-desired goal is but an idée fixe. In this longing is expressed a spirit that ruins everything in itself with the corrosive acid of reason, a spirit that had long lost faith in itself, that considers its own activity diffidently and critically, a spirit that spies and searches itself, that has lost the faculty of taking itself seriously, that has become accustomed to mock itself and to play with its own manifestations as with a ball; a spirit not satisfied with the highest and finest human perceptions, that has come at last, after many searchings, to the gloomy decision that all is in vain, that it is incapable of surpassing itself.

Hence the pursuit of enjoyment. But this morbid seeking of enjoyment lacks that direct, self-sufficient bliss that results from the accumulated surplus of productive strength. The modern Individuum is deprived of that healthy instinct, therefore in place of naive joy experienced from the liberation of surcharged power he plunges into self-forgetfulness. All his life is reduced to pure self-narcotization. In the morbid straining of his abnormally-functioning nerves the Individuum-decadent rises to those mysterious borders where the joy and the pain of human existence pass into one anotherand intermingle, where the two are brought in their extreme manifestations to a peculiar feeling of destructive rapture, to an ecstatic being outside and above himself. All his thoughts and acts acquire a character of something devastating, maniacal, and over all of them reigns a heavy, depressing, wearying atmosphere, like the one before the outbreak of a storm, something akin to the passionate tremor of delirious impotence, something similar to the consumptive flush of spiritual hysteria.

In such clinical terms Przybyszewski sees the modern homo sapiens. Through this prism I perceive his Falk, doomed to utter failure and futility.

Falk an erotomaniac? Nonsense. His sexual relations are as pathological as the functions of his other faculties, not more. In his incessant search for an outlet, for discharge, for some quantity that might fill up his hollowed heart, Falk grasps woman as a potentional complement to his emptiness. He fails, naturally. To the artist woman is a narcotizer and wing-clipper; more often a Dalila or Xantippe than a Cosima Wagner or a Clara Schumann. Neither the exoticism of Ysa, nor the pillow-serviceability of Yanina, nor the medieval fanaticism of Marit, nor Olga’s revolutionary resignedness, have the power of checking the hurricane of his questing spirit for more than a moment, such moments when the tormented man erects for his consolation a phantom, be it a superman or a Christ. Falk’s quest for self-forgetfulness is futile. He lacks the healthy capacity of us, normal beings, for finding salvation in befogging our vision. No matter how we may indulge in self-analization, we usually stop at the perilous point and brake our searching demon with the same happy instinct that closes our eyes automatically at the approach of danger. Falk’s mental motor has no brakes; it hurls him into the precipice.

“I have never suffered on account of a woman,” boasts the old rake, Iltis.

“Because your organism is very tough, a peasant’s organism, my dear Iltis. Your sensibilities have not yet reached the stage of dependence upon the brain. You are like a hydromedusa which suddenly parts with its feelers stocked with sexual organs and sends them off to seek the female, and then does not bother about them any more. You are a very happy creature, my dear Iltis. But I don’t envy you your happiness. I never envy the ox his enjoyment of grass, not even when I am starving.”

Przybyszewski’s Individuum seeks in woman the miraculous expression of his most intimate, most precious “I.” He speaks in one place about the love of the “anointed artist,” which is a painful conception of an awful unknown force that casts two souls together striving to link them into one; an intense torment rending the soul in the impossible endeavor to realize the New Covenant, the union of two beings, a matter of absolute androgynism. For such an artist love is “the consciousness of a terrible abyss, the sense of a bottomless Sheol in his soul, where rages the life of thousands of generations, of thousands of ages, of their torments and pangs of reproduction andof greed for life.” Now recall Falk’s dream:

“He saw a meadow-clearing in his father’s forest. Two elks were fighting. They struck at each other with their large horns, separated, and made another terrific lunge. Their horns interlocked. In great leaps they tried to disentangle themselves, turning round and round. There was a crunching of horns. One elk succeeded in freeing himself and ran his horns into the other’s breast. He drove them in deeper and deeper, tore ferociously at his flesh and entrails. The blood spurted.... And near the fighting animals a female elk was pasturing unmindful of the savage struggle of the passion-mad males.... In the centre stood the victor trembling and gory, yet proud and mighty. On his horns hung the entrails of his rival.”

The epitomy of the sex-problem, heh-heh.

“I don’t envy the ox his enjoyment.” Przybyszewski despises happiness as something unworthy of an artist. A happy soul, he believes, is a miracle, the squareness of a circle, a whip made of sand. The soul is sombre, stormy, for it is the aching of passion and the madness of sweeps, living over ecstacies of boiling desire, the stupendous anxiety of depths and the boundless suffering of being. For the artist who creates the world not with his brain, but with his soul, all life is one “sale corvée,” a filthy burden, eternal horror, despair, and submission, fruitless struggle and impotent stumbling. For this reason love, the greatest happiness for ordinary males, becomes for the artist the profoundest disastrous suffering.

Take away from Przybyszewski his ecstacy of pain, and you rob him of his very essence, of his raison d’être, of his creative breath. When you read hisPoems in Proseyou face a soul writhing in hopeless despair, in futile longing, in maddening convulsions. But you cannot pity the artist. You are aware of the sublime joy in his sorrow, of the unearthly bliss that is wrapped in the black wings of his melancholy. In his poemAt the Sea, the elemental yearning of his soul reaches cosmic dimensions. Only one other poem approaches it in its surcharged grief—Ben Hecht’sNight-Song, if we overlook the latter’s redundancy. Allow me to give you a pale translation of the “Introibo” toAt the Sea:—may the Pole’s spirit forgive me my sacrilegious impertinence.

INTROIBOThou, who with ray-clad hands wreathest my dreams with the beauty of fading autumn, with the splendor of off-blooming grandeur, with inflamed hues of the burning paradise,—Radiant mine!How many pangs have passed as if in a dream, since I saw Thee for the last time, and yet mine heart doth shine amidst the stars which Thou hast strewn in my life, yet the thirsting hands of my blood yearn for the bliss Thou didst once kindle in my soul.Thou, who in evening twilight spinnest for me with still hands on enchanted harps heavy meditation on moments of joy that have flown away like a distant whisper of leaves,—on suns that, sinking into the sea, sparkle in the east with bloody dew,—on nights that press to their warm breast tortured hearts,—Radiant mine!How many times has the sun set since those hours when with Thy magic songs Thou pacified the sorrow of my soul,—and yet I see Thine eyes, full of moans and sadness, burning in an unearthly rapture, see the radiant hand stretching towards me and grasping mine with a hot cry.Thou, who transformest stormy nights into sunny days, in the depths of my dreams quenchest reality, removest into an infinite distance all near,—Thou, who enkindlest in my heart will-o’-the-wisps and bearest unto life black flowers—Radiant mine!A thousand times has the world transfigured since Thy look consumed the tarnishing glitter of my soul, and yet I see Thy little child-like face and the golden crown of hair over Thy brow, see how two tears had spread into a pale smile that glowed on Thy mouth, and hear the dark plaint of Thy voice.Thou, who breakest before me the seals of all mysteries and readest the runes of hidden powers, and in all the madnesses of my life flingest Thyself in a rainbow of blessing from one heaven to the other,—Never yet has the storm so strewn the rays of my stars, never yet has the aureole played with such bleeding radiancy around Thy head, as now, when I have lost Thee forever.

Thou, who with ray-clad hands wreathest my dreams with the beauty of fading autumn, with the splendor of off-blooming grandeur, with inflamed hues of the burning paradise,—

Radiant mine!

How many pangs have passed as if in a dream, since I saw Thee for the last time, and yet mine heart doth shine amidst the stars which Thou hast strewn in my life, yet the thirsting hands of my blood yearn for the bliss Thou didst once kindle in my soul.

Thou, who in evening twilight spinnest for me with still hands on enchanted harps heavy meditation on moments of joy that have flown away like a distant whisper of leaves,—on suns that, sinking into the sea, sparkle in the east with bloody dew,—on nights that press to their warm breast tortured hearts,—

Radiant mine!

How many times has the sun set since those hours when with Thy magic songs Thou pacified the sorrow of my soul,—and yet I see Thine eyes, full of moans and sadness, burning in an unearthly rapture, see the radiant hand stretching towards me and grasping mine with a hot cry.

Thou, who transformest stormy nights into sunny days, in the depths of my dreams quenchest reality, removest into an infinite distance all near,—

Thou, who enkindlest in my heart will-o’-the-wisps and bearest unto life black flowers—

Radiant mine!

A thousand times has the world transfigured since Thy look consumed the tarnishing glitter of my soul, and yet I see Thy little child-like face and the golden crown of hair over Thy brow, see how two tears had spread into a pale smile that glowed on Thy mouth, and hear the dark plaint of Thy voice.

Thou, who breakest before me the seals of all mysteries and readest the runes of hidden powers, and in all the madnesses of my life flingest Thyself in a rainbow of blessing from one heaven to the other,—

Never yet has the storm so strewn the rays of my stars, never yet has the aureole played with such bleeding radiancy around Thy head, as now, when I have lost Thee forever.

In another place I calledHomo Sapiens“the book of the age.” Surely there has not been a more stirring work of literature sinceWerther. Will the public respond? Is it true that the wall of American indifferentism is impregnable? I am still optimistic about the intellectual aristocracy of this country; that small circle of the young in spirit, brave searchers and earnest livers, for whom art and life are not merely diversions between meals and business transactions, but the italicized essence of existence. To those few Przybyszewski’s book should appeal; those should react.

I have been getting curious, and at times interesting, opinions of such readers. I hope to receive more, and acquaint theLittle Reviewfamily with them. On the whole, there prevails a note of depression and uneasiness. One writes: “I had hoped to be left alone on a mountain peak in a blaze of light and in the stress of wind; instead there is a sardonic laugh, and Iam again hurled into the maelstrom of a world that cannot rise above suffering from its own passions.” A feminist remarks sadly that the book demonstrates “the limit of man’s penetration. The women are women still—not even women of the transition.” An incurable, hopelessly struggling Puritan rages and curses both me and the author; I give a few gems: “I’ve read your devilishly wonderful book!... It did many things to me, which, thank God, have passed like a drunken dream.... For three days I’ve been hideously torn up, slashed into tatters, savage and fundamental. But you want my opinion! How can I tell you, divorce it from myself, tear it out of my living flesh, when it has become imbedded. That terrible, wonderful Falk! It makes you shudder away from all temperamental people with experimental souls in their fingers, and few convictions.... I became paralyzed with horror. At last I cried out, writhed on the floor and prayed to some Power, any Power, for pity, not to see myself, not to see life beneath the superficial surface.... Go away, take your Slav fingers out of my soul! They force me to look at truth, when I want to deal in lies. They force me to climb the heights and peer into the hideous crevasses, when I want to browse fatuously on the hillocks.” More such “drunken dreams,” and the comfortable blinders will fall off the eyes of the happiness-by-all-means-fiends.

I submit two letters of friends who have read my article and wished to supplement my views. I humbly think that what they say is included in my “reflections”; but I am also conscious of my inherent fault—conciseness which borders on obscurity. Hence clarification is gratefully welcome.

What you say about Przybyszewski I also think. But what you do not say aboutHomo Sapiensis what I feel most of all. There is something very definite aboutHomo Sapiens, the book. It rises out of the mass of flaming gibberish, dissected nerves, and poetical slashings. It rings in the ears long after the book is closed. It is the most poignant cry of the dying nineteenth century, and it comes out of lower depths than the cry of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov,—shriller, madder, and more penetrating....

Eric Falk is not a nuance. He is the whole of Stanislaw Przybyszewski, the whole of modern wisdom and introspection, which is another word for degeneracy.

Come now, pretend I am not reviewing it. Pretend I am something of a clairvoyant.

See Przybyszewski creating him—Erick Falk. He is sitting at his desk. He is going to write a book about man, not a type, not a silhouette, but about Man complete. He wants the final man of his day, the Homo Sapiens, the Zarathustran phantom.

This Przybyszewski is a thorough fellow, a biologist, a poet, a physician, an historian, a psychologist. He lives on an operating table. Knows his own insides.

“Come here, Zarathustra,” chuckles this Przybyszewski, and he coaxes him off the heights, off the peaks where he is waiting to be fed by the eagles.

And striding from the peaks comes Zarathustra. Who do you suppose it is? Przybyszewski, of course.

They greet each other.

And Przybyszewski says to this self of his: “So you are the ultimate clay, ha, ha.”

And this self answers: “Yea, behold in me the finite evolution, man crowned by his own hard and subtly-won glories.”

“Come here,” purrs Przybyszewski. Remember, he is talking to himself—at his desk.

Hesitating, frowning, and yet with the pure grimace of superiority stamped on his face, this self approaches. And the book is on.

Przybyszewski’s inspiration is the fury of a madman, the derisive, diabolical chuckling of a fanatical cynic.

“Come now, we will fly,” whispers Przybyszewski, and off they go—the innocent Zarathustra and the steeped, slashbuckling Przybyszewski. And remember still—they are one.

And the rest of it is the plot ofHomo Sapiens, the book, which I will skip....

Thus Eric Falk soars and Przybyszewski shows the sorry mechanics of his wings, laughing, chuckling, for they are his own. Thus toward the middle of the book you begin wondering. Falk is going to pieces, Falk the immutable, the all knowing, the transcender, the ... the ... the ... the Homo Sapiens. What is the matter? When he betrays a woman and causes her death a hideous vapor suddenly envelopes his soul and befouls it. Przybyszewski thrusts his radiant leer from behind Zarathustra’s mask and hisses, “Conscience, ha!”

And thus it goes its merry way. To the edge of the precipice this mad Pole pushes his whirling Falk, to the utter edge of known reason, known psychology and known Passions.

And then suddenly the soarer falls. The mechanism comes clattering to earth—to the bottom of the precipice. The lugubrious Stanislaw has led his creation—himself—to the limits.

He has finished his book.

Piled on the desk lies the heap of glowing sentences, the history of rhapsodic vivisection.

Przybyszewski has expressed himself.

He has uttered his most internal cry, the cry of a poet, a weaver of plots, an anatomical expert, of an introspective vulture-minded Disbeliever.

And now I call your attention to Mr. Przybyszewski at his desk—too tired to rise. Gone are the golden thrills that quivered in him, gone everything but the thin sardonic grin that lights the face of Eric Falk—on the last page. And only Eric Falk’s last cry, “Vive L’Humanité” is left him.So our Stanislaw, the idol of Bohemia, the tortured demon, sits chuckling, a glass of cognac trembling in his fingers.

“Homo Sapiens,” he sighs with his inevitable sneer, that pierces through his pity and pain like the point of a rapier, “behold thyself. Thou, Eric, art man. Thou art the creaking vehicle for the golden theories, the rainbow fantasies which have sifted out of the mental mists of the century. And behold, thou creakest, thou groanest, thou breakest under this lightest of burdens.”

The tired Przybyszewski quivers. His lips, mocking their way through the delirious poison of thought and passion have kissed the intangible. He has stripped his brain to its last cell and looked at it. And the cry that rises out of the book comes condensed from his lips now—after it is done. Nowhere is it written, nowhere is it heard except at Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s desk—in Bohemia.

It is the answer, ha. Is it?

“Homo Sapiens, thou art clay. Thy mind is a super-chaos. Thy soul is a petty mirage.”

Przybyszewski transplants his readers from their ordinary mental environment into those astral regions where metaphysical subtleties are clothed with reality. Life is dealt with not on the surface strata of its expressions but at its base where motives and ideas and emotions have their source. And in spite of this fact, or rather because of the uncanny clairvoyance of its author there is no perversion or befogging of one’s point of view. These nebulous regions are lit up by the ruthless penetration of an artist who is a scientist as well.

One’s first sensations are like seeing for the first time with the naked eye the fan of nerves which spread out from the corona radiata, or touching the single nerve trunks with the dissecting knife. In the same manner the pathological Pole brings you into actual contact with the cargos of these nerves, ideas, emotions, sensations. All the concealing layers of evasions and of equivocations have been dissected away; there lies spread out before you sections of naked consciousness. And so subtle has been the dissecting work that there has been no disarrangement and no death. All is still living, still functioning. And your sensation of strangeness, almost of horror, is born out of revulsion against a self-consciousness so intense as to seem almost morbid. “I feel,” said a friend of mine, “as if I had been vivisected.” Not so much this as that one has been vivisecting. Przybyszewski compels you to co-operate with him in analysing psychological phenomena. At moments you lift your eyes from the page, panting, almost physically exhausted from the effort of concentrating on those tortuous, subtle reactions which occur in the farthest recesses of consciousness and spread upward in waves to the surface, where they often take on curious irrelevant expression.

But that is sheer morbidity, cries your friend the Philistine. It is introspection carried past the point of decency. But to the investigator there is no point past which it is indecent to press. In him there is no affectation of scruple to erect its artificial barricade. He must have transcended all such petty egotism and have depersonalized himself. He is constrained to this by that curiosity which is his master passion, which generates itself and is dynamic in him as hunger or sex are dynamic in the ordinary individual. This curiosity of the artist brooks no bounds, short of the facts against which it brings up abruptly. And so Przybyszewski for all his uncanny subtlety cannot be accused of morbidity since he uses it not to distort but merely to reveal the truth. If he has no false reverence neither has he irreverence. His scalpel, always flashing and leaping, pauses a moment on a state of emotion and, pointing, calls it by name. “For I am I,” says Falk. “I am a criminal diabolic nature.” Or again:

“And so a certain man is suffering from love induced by auto-suggestion. Very well. But at the same time he loves his wife unqualifiedly. And he loves her so much that there can be no doubt of the reality of his love. In a word he loves both the one and the other.”

But such a condition isn’t possible, the Philistine will cry out, wounded at his most vulnerable point, his inflexible principles. “A man can’t love two women at the same time.” This isolated case would undermine the whole monogamistic theory. He sees one of his cherished institutions tottering. And so he takes fright and refutes the fact. “It can’t be, it isn’t possible.” But Przybyszewski continues to stand with the scalpel wearily pointing. “My dear Sir, this is no question of postulates, it’s a question of an individual instance. Itispossible, because it occurs. Falkdoeslove two women at the same moment.” And the Philistine will doubtless turn away snorting furiously and unconvinced. “Przybyszewski,” he will sneer, “that degenerate Pole, always half drunk with cognac, a Slav to boot. What does he know of life or reality? They were all neurasthenics. Look at Artzibashev and Andreyev and Dostoevsky. Yes, let us look at them, and remembering Dostoevsky’s epilepsy, remember also Raskolnikov. A criminal’s psychology lifted onto paper out of the limbo regions of consciousness by the mammoth Russian’s bloody pen. Something more than neurasthenia, this gift of analysis.

What, finally, is Homo Sapiens? Who is thiswriter-fellow, Falk, with no conscience, with his “criminal, diabolic nature?” Does he only exist to analyse himself, and his tortuous, painful psychologizings? Why is he, what is he?—He is the self-conscious man, par excellence. This book is the epic of consciousness. “The thing must be thought out,” says Falk. And nuance by nuance it is thought out, rapidly but faithfully, under your very eyes. You are invited,—no, compelled,—to take part in the operation. Hence your feeling of fatigue. And again, after a page or two, “He examined his own feelings.”

“But why a Falk?” the Philistine demands. “Falk is no average man. He is a genius, and as such his psychology is specialized and distinct. Falk is a neurasthenic, victim of erotomania. Even his lucidity is not to his credit. Since he is a writer it is implicit in him, as muscle is in the circus rider. He is bound to analyse his acts, to trace them back to their motives. Falk presents an isolated case. If one is going to deal with consciousness why not choose a less precocious exponent? Why not the everyday consciousness of the average human being?”

And by the same token, why not a Falk, Mr. Philistine, since we are agreed that this is a drama of consciousness. Of what use is the average man in this extremity? The artist is the Homo Sapiens par excellence, for it is in him that consciousness has reached its most complex differentiation. “I am,” says Falk, “what they call a highly differentiated individual. I have, combined in me, everything—design, ambition, sincerity of knowledge and ignorance, falsehood and truth. A thousand heavens, a thousand worlds are in me.” And recognizing this fact he wrestles with it through some four hundred odd pages. That Falk loved two women, or ten women, is not only possible, but probably inevitable. What in the average man is a temperate reaching out for a few specific joys becomes in a Falk the impulse of his whole being for self-expression. It bursts out along a thousand channels, requiring as many outward aspects as there are sources in his personality. And it is this devious stream of a human consciousness that we are following outward to its expression in words or acts, and backward to its source, as we dissect with Przybyszewski Falk’s mental protoplasm.

“Futile,” sneers the Philistine, “utterly futile. If that is a Homo Sapiens, give me a subman. Your Falk knew no happiness and he gave none. He only strewed suffering in his wake both for himself and others. He was without scruples and without conscience. Where did he get to with all his differentiation? He wrote a few books, to be sure, but what were they in the scale of the women he ruined, the men he did to death? Even of his own misery? His gift of introspection was a sharp knife turned against himself, since he cried out in the end: ‘to be chemically purified of all thoughts.’ Homo Sapiens indeed!”

You can see Przybyszewski wearily twisting the scalpel in his nerveless hands, you can see the smile that twists his lips just before they curve about the waiting cognac glass. “No, he was not happy, it is true he did strew misery in his wake. He was neurasthenic and degenerate and criminal. He was all these things and all the other things which you have forgotten or never perceived. For he was Homo Sapiens. And such as he is I have drawn him. Ha, ha—Vive l’Humanité!”

[1]Homo Sapiens, by Stanislaw Przybyszewski. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Back to IndexNext