Book Discussion

One Man, by Robert Steele. New York: Mitchell Kennerley.

“Thereis nothing which reflects the smugness of a people so much as the manner and temperament of its vice. And the temperament of American vice is more distinctly and monotonously bourgeois than any of its virtues”—from Ben Hecht’s “Phosphorescent Gleams” in the MayLittle Review. I have pondered over this maxim while reading Mr. Steele’s novel which is hailed by the critics as “the essence of America.” The hero is essentially American, horribly so. If the “average” type of any nation is repulsive, the American “Average” is a thousandfold more so. For he is more petty than vicious. The “one man” gives a confession of his life, full of puny deeds, from committing petty larceny to “picking up” a girl in the street and taking her to a “swell” hotel. The nauseating details have the flavor of the adventure stories which you may hear at a gathering of travelling salesmen in a provincial hotel lobby. What makes the boring Odyssey intolerably loathsome is its note of syrupy Christian penitence which the hero expresses after each penny-crime by falling on his knees and praying to his convenient god for forgiveness.

The book has been hailed as a masterpiece. It is as far from a masterpiece as a lewd “photo” is from art. The facts may be true, even autobiographical, as some critics presume; the confessions will furnish good material for Billy Sunday and his lesser brethren. But photography, even if it be pornography, is not art. Let me quote the ever-new Edgar Poe: “Art is the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of whatisin Nature,entitles no man to the sacred name of ‘Artist.’ ... We can, at any time, double the true beauty of an actual landscape by half closing our eyes as we look at it. The naked Senses sometimes see too little—but thenalwaysthey see too much.” I blush at the necessity of digging up ancient truths, but, my dear friends, read the reviews of Mr. Steele’s novel and you will admit with me the crying need of teaching the American critics the A-B-C of art.

The Need for Art in Life, by I. B. Stoughton Holborn. New York: G. Albert Shaw.

The Spirit of Japanese Art, by Yone Noguchi. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company.

The complete man must consist of three essential fundamentals—the Artistic, the Intellectual, the Moral (mark the initials: aim!); man’s aim should be the full expression of his tripartite nature; he must not leave out any of the three sides, nor develop any one at the expense of the rest. Unfortunately our age has achieved only two-thirds of the diagram, the I and the M, remaining wretchedly poor in the A part. When we look back we find that in the Renaissance period the A and I were overdeveloped, with the total lack of the M side. The Middle Ages present the presence of A and M and the absence of I. It is the Greek ideal we must look for in our endeavor for the complete expression of man. The Greek gentleman, the καλος κάγαθος, the reserved, the moderately good, the not excessively just, the harmonious, the symmetrical—he shall be our standard, our criterion for the completeness of being. Is not Mr. Holborn clever and Olympian and icy-cold?

Now listen:

The evening had already passed when I returned home with that hanging of Koyetsu’s chirography under my arm. “Put all the gaslights out! Do you hear me? All the gaslights out! And light all the candles you have!” I cried. The little hanging was properly hanged at the “togonoma” when the candles were lighted, whose world-old soft flame (wasn’t it singing the old song of world-wearied heart?) allured my mind back, perhaps, to Koyetsu’s age of four hundred years ago—to imagine myself to be a waif of greyness like a famous tea-master, Rikiu or Enshu or, again, Koyetsu, burying me in a little Abode of Fancy with a boiling tea-kettle; through that smoke of candles hurrying like our ephemeral lives, the characters of Koyetsu’s writing loomed with the haunting charm of a ghost.

It is painful for me to stop quoting the religious ravings of dear Noguchi. And all this pathos is about a bit of old Japanese writing! I cansee the indignant Mr. Holborn’s moderate condemnation of the Oriental’s unreserved passion, canting the cold-beautiful Μηδὲν ἄγαν (nothing in excess). But, O forgive me, Olympian gods, I must come back to the Burning Bush where Yone Noguchi worships Hashimoro, Hiroshige, Kyosai, Tsukioka, Utamaro, and other such rhythmical names; I am aware of the abyss of excess that yawns before me, but the exotic wine is so luring, so intoxicating, the call of the Orient is so irresistible—I plunge:

I will lay me down whenever I want to beautifully admire Utamaro and spend half an hour with his lady (“Today I am with her in silence of twilight eve, and am afraid she may vanish into the mist”), in the room darkened by the candle-light (it is the candle-light that darkens rather than lights); every book or picture of Western origin (perhaps except a few reprints from Rossetti or Whistler, which would not break the atmosphere altogether) should be put aside. How can you place together in the same room Utamaro’s women, for instance, with Millet’s pictures or Carpenter’sTowards Democracy? The atmosphere I want to create should be most impersonal, not touched or scarred by the sharpness of modern individualism or personality, but eternally soft and grey; under the soft grey atmosphere you would expect to see the sudden swift emotion of love, pain or joy of life, that may come any moment or may not come at all.

I recall an evening at “The Vagabonds,” where some ultra-modern paintings were exhibited and bravely discussed. An idiotic friend of mine suggested that the Vagabonds pass an evening in contemplating the canvasses in absolute silence. The obliging chairman, who is a fair parliamentarian, had the suggestion voted upon with the result of one vote in favor of it. I recall that evening in connection with Noguchi’s lines about Koyetsu:

What need there be but prayer and silence? There is nothing more petty, even vulgar, in the grey world of art and poetry, than to have a too-close attachment to life and physical surroundings; if our Orientalism may not tell you anything much, I think it will teach you at least to soar out of your trivialism.

I refuse to say any more about the book, for I am tempted to quote him all the way through. If you wish to forget yourself and your environment, to melt away in the unreal atmosphere of Japanese prints—read Yone Noguchi’s little book.

Victory, by Joseph Conrad. New York: Doubleday, Page and Company.

The Slavs are not adventurous people in the Western sense of the word; for the most part an inland race spread over the great monotonous Plain,they are inclined for melancholy introspective searchings and spiritual struggles rather than for actual physical adventures. Their writers need not create for their heroes an atmosphere of dizzying stunts and elemental cataclysms; they find sufficient dramatic “plot” in the soul experiences of the restless yearning men and women who dwell not on a South Sea island but in ordinary cities and villages, fighting their human fights, wrestling with God and man, gaining their ephemeral victories, but more often suffering defeats. Yet, despite their lack of adventurousness, the stories of the Russian and Polish writers, from Dostoevsky to Kuprin and from Orzezsko to Zeromsky, have seldom caused a yawn in their reader.

The checkered life of Conrad has placed a distinct stamp upon his works, distinct from both the writers of his race and from the Western writers. We observe a dualism in his art, an eternal collision between fact and fiction, between realism and symbolism. His inborn Slavic mysticism is weighed down by the ballast of his rich experiences, and he continually wavers between the Scylla of lyric melancholy and the Charybdis of picturesque plot, preserving the equilibrium at times more and at times less skilfully. The reader thus finds in Conrad that which he is after. For my part, I am rather distracted by the over-complex plot ofVictory; I should much prefer to meet Heyst and Lena in less dizzy surroundings, for then the interesting psychology of the quaint lovers would appear accentuated, like the flame of a candle, and would not be blurred by a pyrotechnic mass of startling coincidences and marvellous adventures. The atmosphere of Doom that breathes throughout the story is reduced in the end to a sensational Eugène Sue-like climax—a heap of dead bodies.

Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit): A Tragedy in Four Acts; Pandora’s Box, by Frank Wedekind. New York: Albert and Charles Boni.

Poor, foolish Frank Wedekind. Hapless Idealist. Luckless dreamer. Have you readDer ErdgeistandPandora’s Box? He wrote them—this enfevered fancier. In two kindred flashes of madness he illuminated several hundred sheets of paper and out of them—out of their blood-shot words and illegitimate truths—a new figure is born for the bookshelf. Not an old figure in new binding and fresh rouge. Not a Lescaut or a Thaïs or a Nana. This mocking idealist of virtue removes indeed the eighth veil from Salome. He hurls into the midst of the twittering parlor thinkers and sex chatterers a most disturbing answer to the eternal question, “What is woman?” It didn’t disturb me because I don’t believe it. And anyway, I don’t mean that kind of disturbance. I mean, virtuous reader, it is impossible to consume Wedekind without blushing. If you were disappointed in Shakespeare and Balzac and Casanova and Jacques Tournebrouche and could findnothing to blush at in them, do not despair. Here is a fellow, this Wedekind, who will daub a real blush out of a rouge pot, a miserable fellow whom you can condemn and ostracize and, having relegated him to his proper place, enjoy thoroughly or secretly or not at all.

It was Wedekind who first made people blush by a tasteless dissertation on the ignorant smugness recognized by society as the proper state for a young woman’s mind. He called itSpring’s Awakening. It was chiefly instrumental in awakening theatrical writers and managers. They spread the blush at $2 a head and waxed fat. But how did they spread the blush? Did they talk like Wedekind did? Did the mawkish plagiarist Cosmo Hamilton talk like Wedekind—tastelessly, vilely, brutally, and—horrors!—indelicately? Not he. Mr. Hamilton and the other get-rich-quick propagandists wouldn’t talk that way for the world. They are nice gentlemen. Not for them the idealist’s leer. Rather the bathroom wink. They will reveal a delicious girl in her delicious boudoir wearing a delicious nightie. They will make her out a virtuous girl, charmingly endowed but utterly stainless.

Having established this fact they roguishly introduce into her boudoir an estimable young man and permit him to caress her dramatically. But the whole proceeding is stainless. It is drolly suggestive of unspeakable things—see box office receipts. But suggestiveness is necessary to bring home to people the blindness of virtue and the dangers that beset the underpaid young women who ignorantly make it its own reward—(if that means anything). Anyway, when the audience leaves it has been enlightened. Its taste has not been offended. Virtue has been shown to be a dangerous thing—that is, uneducated virtue has. Everyone agrees. And if not they disagree. In either case the discussion properly conducted (under the auspices of the “Amalgamated Virgins of the 21st and 22nd Wards”) is pleasing and improving. The press argues delicately and in good taste about sex hygiene. A new physiology is placed in the public schools containing information on the most effective way of brushing the teeth of the young and preserving the hair of the old.

And last week Coroner Hoffman told me that it was impossible to estimate how many girls were killed annually in Chicago by abortive operations. He put the number in the hundreds. Hooray! Death is the wages of sin.

But all quibbling aside, what does this low fellow Wedekind whom I started out by calling an idealist (I will prove it shortly) do? To begin with, he talks about sex. Not about stockings and undergarments and perfumed kisses, ankles, asterisks and anomalies. Everyone knows that this kind of talk, particularly when produced in drama form, is in the first place inexcusable, and in the second place unnecessary, and in the third place vulgar. And in the fourth place, instead of making the best of a bad job—that is, making his contributions a mental stimulus for snickering roués and ladies sensitive of their status—he insists upon being nasty withoutbeing covert. Is there anything more unpardonable? Nobody can enjoy nastiness. The argument is an endless one. It leads to nothing except blows or blushes.

As for the plays—I almost forgot I was reviewing them—Wedekind explodes volcanically on the subject he treats, and blows the question mark out of woman. He takes all the crimes a policeman ever heard of, rolls them up in a package of soft warm flesh and labels it “Woman.” He cracks his showman’s whip and calls attention to the texture of her skin and the white meat of her body. And then he sends her forth to ruin, to sweep like a polluted and wreck-strewn wave through life, breaking at last in a dirty crest on a foreign shore and leaving a scum behind her. Are these the worst things Wedekind could find to label woman—incest, butchery, lecherous animalism, bloody business and abandonment? Who but a sick idealist would pick a careless and care-free prostitute as a flaming example of woman at her worst? And is the power to destroy the most terrible power woman possesses?

Wedekind imagines that people idealize sex and hold it a beautiful force. Poor Wedekind, where did he get such an idea? And then he imagines that in reality sex passion is a smashing force that knocks people into each other’s arms, tumbles their heavens, smears their lives. He imagines that men and women love without thought, mate with the irresponsibility of hyenas. And imagining all this Wedekind creates a sort of droll fiend to prove it. Behold her—a creature to confound saints and sinners, to tear the beauty out of men’s souls and dance with muddied feet upon the finery of life. He dangles her before our eyes, naked and glorious—the diseased siren of the ages. And he calls her Lulu, the earth spirit.

He introduces her fresh and joyous and vibrating with tabooed emotions. She is in love with her own beauty. Her body thrills her with its whiteness and its movement. She already has felt its power. Were I in these plays I would as soon think of kissing Lulu as biting a stick of dynamite. But I am not an ideal conception. There are other men—Wedekind digs them up from every corner of life—who fall at her feet and who shoot each other and themselves for the sake of being contaminated by her caresses. Queer men, idealists. They tumble about her, whining, cursing, chanting, forswearing their Gods, their souls and their vanities.

And she tumbles with them, from one precipice down to another, faithful only to her nervous system. Her only virtue is a complete absence of the quality. If only Wedekind had invested her with a single human moral conviction—merely for the sake of completing her diabolically. If only he had made it possible for her to sin against something. But she hasn’t anything to sin against—not a conviction, not a moral. In this country she would be tried for her murders and treasons and sent to an asylum for incomplete people. What she does she does simply. When this hussy kills the father who owned her in order to save herself from his threats and then throws herself laughingly into the arms of the son, she does it allwithout malice. It is all natural, spontaneous. When she rebukes her own father for making love to her (she tells him he’s getting too old for such tricks), when she murders, deceives and pollutes she hasn’t any feeling of doing wrong, any reaction except one of satisfaction. If this isn’t an ideal I’d like to know what is. If everybody was like she is there would be no sorrow or suffering in the world. We would all be simple animals dashing around, biting each other, drinking from each other’s throats, feeling pain only when our nerves were touched and joy only when our nerves were touched. Wedekind imagines that this state is the true reflection of today. He exaggerates what according to his experience may be a logical prejudice and hurls it brutally behind the footlights and into the bookcase.

Lulu, bedraggled, walking the streets of London in the rain, looking for prey, Lulu wheedling quarters out of ragged sensualists, hiding her father and her lover and the woman who desires her while she “entertains” her victims, Lulu spreading disease, and then Lulu running wildly around the dirty garret in her chemise pursued and killed by a red-eyed, nail-bitten Jack the Ripper—that is the end of woman. Poor Wedekind. What an exaggerated opinion of virtue he must have,—an idealist’s. There is but one more thing. It is Wedekind’s master stroke.

He introduces a note of unselfishness and poetry as a climax. Lulu lies stabbed by the delighted and enthusiastic Ripper. And kneeling before the picture of her in her hey-dey is the “Countess,” the woman who loved her—a homo-sexualist—an irritating creature.

“I love you, you are the star in my heavens,” she cries purely. I don’t remember whether the Ripper kills her or not.What a mess!

B. H.

Rabindranath Tagore: A Biographical Study, by Ernest Rhys.New York: The Macmillan Company.

Shrill Chicago and thousands of similar examples of Western civilization have more to learn from a book of this sort than can be readily explained. Taking Chicago as fairly representative of the swiftest modernity, one must blush for the city of “I Will” whenever he picks up Ernest Rhys’s keen and quiet study of the talked-about Hindu. The blushes are for the vast herds whose only ventures upon new paths are to trample and set back, whose only ideals center in or near the stomach. In the white light of this book—reflected radiance from a first-magnitude luminary—Chicago and her kind appear as blundering heedless egotists who never listen. Their ears have not developed, their eyes are turned to the ground. “I Will”—what? To grow strong, high-minded, clean of heart, and wise of soul? Anything but this.

Tagore, by his very tolerance and avoidance of condemnation, seems vehemently to remind the thinker of all this—by force of the law of contrast. The clear-eyed Easterner even points out a scant virtue or two in Western civilization, such as the value of mastering materials, which the Westerner himself overlooks when in self-defense; and no blame is placed on the feverish civilizees. Tagore moves in a state of peace which is the very essence of activity, and has no part in the fanatics’ plan which begins with lassitude and ends in stagnation. He is a man of action, forceful, definite, wasting no energy nor sparing the use of it. Modern methods of doing things and “getting there” become mere feeble noises by comparison. This is not the tragedy, that Westerners blunder and fail,—the East has its failures,—but it lies in the fact that America arrogantly chooses not to listen, not to see and learn. A few scattered listeners must catch the harmonies intended for a whole nation, the majority having been sophisticated to extinction. The herds in Chicago and elsewhere will go on indefinitely in their own swaggering way, blind and deaf, sure beyond correction that the chief desirability lies in digestion, decoration, and diversion ... while Rabindranath Tagore and the beautiful element he personifies are ever-present, waiting within reach of all, working out the biggest things in the world, and living the last word of true joy.

Ernest Rhys is very gentle and sparing in making comparisons. He leaves this to his reader, and is mainly occupied with the re-creation of the steady magnetic atmosphere which is a natural attribute of Tagore. The paragraphs devoted to the boys’ school at Bolpur give one a feeling of something lost, at least to those who thirsted through the schools of the U. S. Rhys is successful in giving out an excellent idea of the great man and his works.

Herman Schuchert.

Militarism is the German spirit.Militarism is the self-revelation of German heroism.Militarism is the heroic spirit raised to the spirit of war. It is Potsdam and Weimar in their highest combination. It isFaustandZarathustraand Beethoven’s score in the trenches.For even theEroicaand theEgmontOverture are nothing but the truest militarism. And just because all virtues which lend such a high value to militarism are revealed to the fullest extent in war, we are filled with militarism, regarding it as something holy—as the holiest thing on earth—Werner Zombart.

Militarism is the German spirit.

Militarism is the self-revelation of German heroism.

Militarism is the heroic spirit raised to the spirit of war. It is Potsdam and Weimar in their highest combination. It isFaustandZarathustraand Beethoven’s score in the trenches.

For even theEroicaand theEgmontOverture are nothing but the truest militarism. And just because all virtues which lend such a high value to militarism are revealed to the fullest extent in war, we are filled with militarism, regarding it as something holy—as the holiest thing on earth—Werner Zombart.

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