Part 4

And so, if we take up this great subject in a large way, as Nietzsche has done, we see that we have all broken with the old loyalty, and that the consummation of this breach has been life and blessing to us. We moderns all somehow live in a disloyalty which we have committed--imputed to us as transgression, viewed by us as our strength and pride. We have all become unfaithful,--as children to our parents, as pupils to our teachers, as disciples to our masters. We felt ourselves bound to them; we loosed ourselves from them. The paths they walked we have forsaken. In the strange untrodden land whither our vagrant feet have wandered, we "came to ourselves" in declaring disobedience to the laws of tradition, in breaking loyalty to the rules of the schools. It is precisely on this account that once again we have won spiritual life, a living art and science, a living religion and morality. We have snapped the fetters fastened upon us in the name of the old loyalty, and all that is great and fruitful and constructive in the life of the modern spirit is a monument of the disloyalty which its creators have built thereto. Nothing is gained any longer by our screening ourselves behind this word loyalty, and making believe that we shall not be found out! We owe it to ourselves and we owe it to the world to confess frankly that we have done with the old loyalty to the unchangeable and the finished, for that is to be loyal to an unreality, _since there is no such thing_. Even God, if he be the living God, cannot be the same yesterday, today, and forever. But we owe it even more to ourselves and to the world to strive for a clear position in reference to this question which is so profoundly agitating our entire moral world today. We may not abandon the field to those who would demolish the temple of the old goddess simply that they may celebrate upon its ruins the orgies of their caprice and inconstancy and characterlessness. If ever there was a doctrine whose right is easily turned into a wrong, whose truth into an error, whose blessing into a curse, it is this Nietzschean doctrine of the right and the duty of ceaseless change, of self-dependence, by which we are redeemed from slavery to the past. If the old loyalty--loyalty to the past--no longer holds men, wherewith shall they be held? Shall they be like the weathervane blown hither and thither by every wind of doctrine, or like the rudderless ship driven aimless and planless over the high seas by the midnight hurricane? Better a thousand times be tethered to the old loyalty than to be doomed to such a life of levity and poiselessness and flightiness.

But the new loyalty which we seek, without which we go forward into no future, should it not be more stable and enduring and loyal than the old? If a moment releases itself from what to it is past, and validates its right as a self-dependent life to its predecessor, a birth has transpired in man, and birth means pain. Without such pain, man has changed his situation, but not himself. A new color has come upon the motly manifoldness of his life--_he_ has remained the same. Trees do not have their roots in the air. Weaklings cannot make the real change--it needs a strength that they do not have. The strength to change really--only he has this who bears the new loyalty in his own bosom; loyalty not to his opinion, not to his learning and heritage, but loyalty to his _growth_, to the great eternal goal of life, to the great sacred task which he has yet to fulfil in life.

Loyal to ourself? Would that it might be so! But the self that we would at first be loyal to is not our self at all. It is foreign wares, loaded upon us,--first even in the nursery, slyly slipped subsequently upon our shoulders,--foreign words, foreign worths! Loyalty to what satiates, not the better loyalty to our hunger! We begin to live only when we live in our hunger; our hunger is we ourselves. It is a good satiety only if a new hunger comes from it. Loyalty to our self--this is to keep our life alive in us--a young glad life, that never grows old, because the old is ever transmuted into a new. This loyalty to ourself,--it is to expel from every truth its error, from every boundary its limit which blocks the vision into the wide world, the blue sky, and the distant sea.

Loyalty to men? Would that it might be so! But such loyalty costs so much trouble and toil. For the faithfulness that is genuine and living, there is no law, no binding _I must_, only a glorious _I will_. One day we shall have done with the loyalty which means master and servant, leader and led--the loyalty of the dog that is loyalest to him who feeds him best or beats him hardest. One day we shall understand what the loyalty of man means--this new loyalty toward man, in which souls meet and chime and work together, and live in each other, yet each remains itself and true to itself.

So, then, the law of change and of growth is the law of the new loyalty, as the law of fixedness and finishedness and finality was of the old. It is the duty of such new loyalty to protect itself against the deadening force of habit and of petrifaction, to guard itself against any obedience by which it would become disloyal to itself. Such loyalty is too honorable to humor inertia and laziness under its banner, too courageous to conceal cowardice behind a slave's patience.

But thought on our theme is usually lifted up to where the sky keeps company with the granite and the grass, to a religious elevation. Nor do we need stop short here. Ultimately the new loyalty is loyalty to God, the new God, of whom something must be said later. The God in whom all fulness dwells summons us to ever new truths, and reveals underground wells of living water throwing its spray aloft on life's ferns and flowers. To be loyal to him is never to sunder ourselves from his fulness and freshness, but to co-work with him who is forever making all things new.

And now I think we are at the end. The result? It is needless to state it, but I would not shrink from the thankless task. In a word, then, the new loyalty--in harmony with the whole great changed view of the world and of life--is loyalty to change and becoming rather than to finishedness and finality; to the future rather than to the past; to ideals rather than to conventions; to freedom rather than to authority; to personality rather than to institution; to character rather than to respectability; to our hunger rather than to our satiety; to the God that is to be rather than to the God that is. Thus the loyalty abides, but the objects of loyalty change and pass.

THE MILLINER

SADE IVERSON

All the day long I have been sitting in my shop Sewing straw on hat-shapes according to the fashion, Putting lace and ribbon on according to the fashion, Setting out the faces of customers according to fashion. Whatever they asked for I tried to give them; Over their worldly faces I put mimic flowers From out my silk and velvet garden; I bade Spring come To those who had seen Autumn; I coaxed faded eyes To look bright and hard brows to soften.

Not once, while they were looking in the glass, Did I peep over their shoulders to see myself. It would have been quite unavailing for me, Who have grown grey in service of other women, To have used myself as any sort of a model. Had I looked in the mirror I should have seen Only a bleached face, long housed from sunshine, A mouth quick with forced smiles, eyes greyly stagnant, And over all, like a night fog creeping, Something chill and obscuring and dead-- The miasmatic mist of the soul of the lonely.

When night comes and the buyers are gone their ways, I go into the little room behind my shop. It is my home--my silent and lonely home; But it has fire, it has food; there is a bed; Pictures are on the walls, showing the faces I kissed in girlhood. I am myself here; All my forced smiles are laid away with the moline And the ribbon and roses. I may do as I please. If I beat with my fists on the table, no one hears; If I lie in my bed, staring, staring, No one can know; I shall not suffer the pity Of those who, passing, see my light edge the grey curtain.

One night, long ago, merely for madness I stripped myself like a dancing girl; I draped myself with rose-hued silks And set a crimson feather in my hair. There were twists of gold lace about my arms And a girdle of gold about my waist. I danced before the mirror till I dropped! (Outside I could hear the rain falling And the wind crept in beneath my door Along my worn carpet.)

I folded my finery And prayed as if kneeling beside my mother. Whether there was listening I cannot say. There was praying! There was praying! Never again shall I dance before the mirror Bedizened like a dancing girl--never, my mother!

I have a low voice and quiet movements, And early and late I study to please. As long as I live I shall be adorning other women, I shall be decking them for their lovers And sending them upon women's adventures. But none of them shall see behind this curtain Where I have my little home, where I weep When I please, and beat upon the table with my fists.

"NUR WER DIE SEHNSUCHT KENNT"

MARGARET C. ANDERSON

In one of Chicago's big department stores of the cheaper type you may--provided you're something of a poet--walk straight into the heart of a musical adventure. It is that amazing, resentful, and very satisfying adventure of discovering genius at work, under the by no means unique condition of being unrecognized.

You go to one of the upper floors where the big lunch-room is. You find a table near a platform in the center, on which sit four musicians--a pianist, a 'cellist, a clarinet_ist_ (if there is such a thing), and a second violinist. You expect the usual clamor....

Suddenly you notice a fifth figure who has been sitting quietly in the background. She comes forward with a violin in her hand, and stands ready to play. There is something still about her--that quality of stillness which is invariably the first thing you notice in any dynamic. She seems not scornful of her surroundings, but quite indifferent to them; not arrogant, but sure of power; not timid, and yet incredibly soft and shy and serious. She is plainly foreign; she is German, looks French, and plays like a Viennese. Or, to be exact, she merges the German "heaviness" with the Viennese gay-sadness, and the result is a sensuousness that is both deep and clear, with the haunting wail that distinguishes all the music which comes from Vienna. She looks almost like a little girl; but you would notice her any place because of that stillness and the haunting appeal that always attaches to a certain type of eyes and mouth--the kind which seem to say: "I will make music for you; I will take you to a new world. I will do it because I can dream intensely."

She begins to play, and you understand why you watched her. The depth of it startles you at first--it is so big, so moving, so almost uncanny coming from such a small person, whose hands seem scarcely large enough to hold a violin. It is playing of the Mischa Elman type, without his emotional extravagances and with something that is more soul-shaking. If I were an Imagist I could find the right word; but this music eludes me. It is sure and simple. It grips you till you don't know whether you are listening to music or to the urge of some hidden inner self. It is a divine thing.

In the midst of it the waitresses rush back and forth, the patrons eat their food with interest, only pausing to applaud when some tawdry vaudevillian sings a particularly vulgar song. The dishes clang, some one upsets a tray with a great crash, and at intervals there is a tango outrage by a couple who know nothing about dancing. Underneath it all the violin throbs its deep accompaniment.

I wish I could make a poem of it. I have thought of taking my poet friends there and having the thing done. But almost without exception the poets I know don't care for music essentially; though why a mind keyed to the tone qualities of words should be so tone-deaf in another medium has always been a mystery to me. And what a poet's opportunity here: "the boom and squeal," and out of it music that is as sacred as an organ meditation and as passionate as a Russian slave song!

However, generalizations will not serve to give any musician's special quality, and this one is so emphatically individual as to make description easy. To begin with, she was concertising in Europe as a wonder-child at the age of six. For a number of years her playing brought forth a chorus of superlatives from the critics: "her full blooming tone, her great taste in phrasing, economic use of the bow, glowing passion of interpretation; her fiery temperament, remarkable earnestness and will power, the soul, life, and emotion in her presentations." The verdict of a "a veritable artist soul" appeared to be unanimous; and one man summed up with admirable insight and simplicity: "Her chief excellence is in this: that she seeks her main task to be an artist in the real and earnest sense of the word, and whosoever comes to hear music does not go empty from her."

Friedrich Spielhagen wrote a sonnet to her, of which I have a careful, but metrically inadequate, translation:

Thou standst before us, a picture of wondrous charm; The little violin thou holdst, in tenderess, Half maidenly, half like a child in dress Hast soared away from Heaven's angel-farm Toward where thy large mild eye is dreaming.

And he ended it with these lines:

Thou movest thy bow; No sounds are these of nicely movéd strings, No, No! Thy own sweet soul rings out and sings The melodies that have with you come From yon high wide-sphered home, To where thy longing soul swings upward now.

Our apologies to Mr. Spielhagen for that more than atrocious twelfth line and for the other deficiencies! But the last line is particularly keen in its photography. It has the spirit of her.

After much touring in Europe she came to this country and played under the same promising conditions. The critics predicted that if she should decide to stay here she would probably out-rival our own few noted women violinists. And then came a period of sorrow, bereavement, hardship, and illness--and in the meantime the problem of living. That problem becomes a real one when an artist loves life just a bit more than her art and refuses to make that spiritual compromise which life tries to wrest from one in the hard places. One must live, and it takes money to do it rather than art. The romantic notion that all genius has to do is to stand up and make itself heard is one of the silliest notions the great public suffers from. Only the hundredth person recognizes genius when it proclaims itself; the rest are as blind as this department-store audience until the sign-posts have been put up, with letters large enough to be easily read. Also, the amount of machinery and money involved in the arrangement of concert engagements would surprise the public as much as the true stories of what it costs the "wealthy patron" to get his artist started toward recognition.

And so this particular genius will continue for a while to cast her pearls in a lunch-room, and a few of the discerning will find her out and thank their stars that they may hear such beauty at the small cost of a bad club sandwich and a worse cup of coffee.

If you go there you will be haunted by music for days afterward. I say "haunted" because that is the only word to describe your feeling of pursuit by melody. And I think I have discovered the reason for it. A poet once said that the only permanent emotion we human beings are capable of is--not love, as we like to imagine--but _longing_. And that is what this music says to you. It is the very essence of longing--the eternal seeking, the rapturous satisfaction, the disappointment, and the renewed quest. I have never heard such a quality of _sehnsucht_ in any music; it is almost more than you can bear. Of course, in these surroundings, you must listen to the complete gamut of new popular songs; but at intervals, when the managerial demand for "noise" can be ignored for a moment, you will be rewarded by the Thais _Meditation_ or a Schutt waltz or that exquisite Saint-Saens poem called _The Swan_--or even a Tschaikowsky song. Where does the tone come from, you keep wondering? Not from a wooden instrument, not from small human fingers, surely. It is tone of such richness and depth that you sometimes have the illusion of each note being sung twice. "It transcends music to me entirely and becomes a matter of life--or of soul," said a critic who listened with me the other day.

Through it all the artist's earnest face is still and unchanging. That is part of the fascination--the contrast of that tumultuous singing and the thoughtful, dreaming face that seems to control it all. "My violin belongs to me--yes," she says, "but that is such a cold word. It is part of my body. I feel it is growing on me just like my arms and hands. I could not live without it." If you watch her closely you will decide that her playing is the result of an extraordinary sensitiveness to life. If you know her, as I do, you will expand that judgment to this one: an extraordinary strength about life; for she is both deep and strong--qualities that are supposed to be inseparable, but which are so rarely found together that their combination means--a great spirit.

I am afraid I am too much of a musician not to be a romanticist. With out music life to me would be a mistake.--_Nietzsche to Brandes, 1888._

* * * * *

All restlessness, misery, all crime, is the result of the betrayal of one's inner life.--_Will Lexington Comfort in "Midstream."_

EDITORIALS

Our New Poet

Charles Ashleigh, who makes his appearance in this issue, was born in London twenty-five years ago. He was educated in England, Switzerland, and Germany, and speaks French, German, and Spanish, "as well as two or three varieties of English and American slang." He has wandered in Europe, South America and this country, traveling on foot through Argentine, Chile, and Peru, and in the States as a hobo. He has been sailor, newspaper man, tramp, actor, farm hand, railroad clerk, interpreter, and a few other things. He has written verse, short stories, social studies, literary criticism, and lectured on his travels as well as on sociological, literary, and dramatic subjects. Quite unlike those poets who insist that they have no opinions on any subject--that they simply photograph life--Mr. Ashleigh states his creed in this way: "I am interested in Labor, literature, and many other aspects and angles of Life. Men and deeds are to me of primary importance and books secondary." We look for big things from this young man.

Two Important Books

Mary Austin has written a study of marriage which she calls _Love and the Soul Maker_. It appears to be about as big a thing on the subject as any American woman has done. Will Lexington Comfort has written an autobiographical novel which he calls _Midstream_. It tells the truth about a man's life, and is also a big thing. Both will be reviewed in the August issue.

The Congo

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay's new poem, _The Congo_, is to appear in _The Metropolitan_ for August. Mr. Lindsay's opinion is that the best effect will be got by reading it aloud.

The Basis for a New Painting

Truly these Imagists are enchanting! The following examples are selected from the anthology published by _The Glebe_:

Fan-Piece for Her Imperial Lord

O fan of white silk, clear as frost on the grass-blade, You also are laid aside.

Ezra Pound.

In A Garden

Gushing from the mouths of stone men To spread at ease under the sky In granite-lipped basins, Where iris dabble their feet And rustle to a passing wind, The water fills the garden with its rushing, In the midst of the quiet of close-clipped lawns.

Damp smell the ferns in tunnels of stone, Where trickle and splash the fountains, Marble fountains, yellowed with much water.

Splashing down moss-tarnished steps It falls, the water; And the air is throbbing with it; With its gurgling and running; With its leaping, and deep, cool murmur.

And I wished for night and you. I wanted to see you in the swimming-pool, White and shining in the silver-flecked water. While the moon rode over the garden High in the arch of night, And the scent of the lilacs was heavy with stillness.

Night and the water, and you in your whiteness, bathing!

Amy Lowell.

Au Vieux Jardin

I have sat here happy in the gardens, Watching the still pool and the reeds And the dark clouds Which the wind of the upper air Tore like the green leafy bough Of the divers-hued trees of late summer; But though I greatly delight In these and the water lilies, That which sets me nighest to weeping Is the rose and white colour of the smooth flag-stones, And the pale yellow grasses Among them.

Richard Aldington.

Ts'ai Chi'h

The petals fall in the fountain, the orange coloured rose-leaves, Their ochre clings to the stone.

Ezra Pound.

Liu Ch'e

The rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the courtyard, There is no sound of footfall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them.

A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.

Ezra Pound.

NEW YORK LETTER

GEORGE SOULE

GEORGE BRANDES--A HASTY IMPRESSION

The man who fought the big battle for Ibsen and Nietzsche should have filled Madison Square Garden; as it was, the little Comedy Theatre wasn't large enough to hold the audience, although Scandinavian patriotism accounted for a good deal of it. He came on the stage with Brander Matthews, the apotheosis of the academic, and the contrast was striking. Matthews was tall, dull, professional. Brandes, with his keen face, alert eyes, and shock of grayish hair, was possibly the most fully alive person in the room. He radiated interest--human connection with anything vital.

We were all a little sorry his subject was Shakespeare; we wanted to hear of something modern. And when the first part of the lecture was read, couched in scholarly but terse English, we felt cheated. It was good criticism, and informing, but it wasn't the sort of thing we had expected from Brandes. Suddenly a spark shot out. (The quotation is from memory):

We cannot emphasize too strongly the fact that all works of literature which have a real effect on mankind, all works which endure hundreds of years, find their inspiration not in books, but in life.

The words were pronounced with excited intensity. Soon came another:

We used to define the genius as the man who interprets his age; now we know that the genius is the man who, working against his age, creates new times.

Dr. Brandes broke into a lively sally at the Baconians. He spoke of Shakespeare's errors in scholarship. These Bacon would surely have avoided, but of Shakespeare's great lines Bacon could not possibly have written one. He ended that section with something like this:

The Baconian theory was founded by the uneducated, it was developed by the half-educated, and it is now held solely by idiots.

The audience was immensely pleased at his sharp fire.