Part 3

But on the whole her theory seemed to be that it was the simplest thing in the world for a child to play well--better, in some ways, than he will ever play later on; and very likely it's true. The newer psychologists have given us enough reason to think so.

It still comes with something of a shock to us here, however; and when we started for The Chicago Little Theatre one night two weeks ago to hear Master Ruby Davis, aged twelve, give a violin recital, it was with the most excited anticipations. I had never heard a child play the violin. Surely disappointment was inevitable....

A little boy walked quietly out on to the stage, smiling. (I heard afterward that some one had asked him if it didn't frighten him to face all those people. "Oh, no," he said, "I'm going to play my violin!") He had on a little soft white shirt and knickerbockers. His hair was almost auburn and curled away from his forehead; his eyes were blue and his skin the softest white. His hands were the long, slender, "artistic" type rather than the blunt, heavy type which is quite as common among first-rate violinists. "Antoine"--that was all I could think.

And then he lifted his bow and swung into the Haendel Sonata in A with all the assurance of a master. It was only a matter of seconds until you knew that he could not disappoint--ever: he knew how to feel! A musician may commit all the crimes in the musical universe, or he may play so flawlessly that you marvel; but none of it matters particularly. A phrase will tell you whether he is an artist--the way the notes rise or fall or seem to be gathered up into that subtle thing which is the difference between efficient Playing and Music by the grace of God.

Ruby Davis makes Music. And how he loved doing it! He played a Canzonetta by Ambrosia, and the Jarnefelt Berceuse, and other difficult things like the Pugnani Praeludium, and that Motto Perpetuo of Ries, beside the regulation Cavatina and the Dvorák Humoresque--every one of them, in spite of small deficiencies that will be corrected, with a quality that is genius. As nearly as I can register it this is the picture of him I shall remember:

A little slender, eager, swaying body, and a great violin above which his face seemed worshipping. His eyes turned deep blue as flowers when he raised his head for some lovely soaring tone or dropped it on his instrument over some deep G string melody. His mouth was the saddest little mouth I've ever seen, and somehow you could watch the music coursing through his cheek bones. His right foot kept moving gently inside his shoe, always in perfect time.

The New Paganism

DEWITT C. WING

One of the momentous achievements of applied science is the convincing demonstration that the earth is a living thing. It is as truly a live organism as any of the animals of which it is the mother. Life could not have been evolved by or from it if there had not been life in it. We do not require an inexplicable miracle to account for the evolution of man; we can trace his pedigree back to an ancestry with fins and gills, and of course it stretches far beyond that comparatively recent stage in his development. From the beginning of the world conditions have steadily grown more favorable to the habitation of the earth by the higher animals. Since man is a part of the earth, what he himself has done to bring about this auspicious change may be credited to the mind or life resident in the earth. Then there is essential goodness in the earth--which is not saying that there is no evil in it. The world is a better place for a man to live in now than it was when his ancestors occupied dismal caves. It is no illusion that, design or no design, the cosmic urge has been toward goodness, by which I mean an increasingly hospitable dwelling-place for men. There have been recessions, and there will be others, but, apart from faith and hope, established facts compel the man who understands them to declare his absolute and unalterable certainty that the inexorable law of life's becoming greater than it is cannot be nullified. So that, regardless of all poverty and misery, of all that is unlovely, of all the blind and passionate class hatreds and sex quibbles, the man who really thinks must think hopefully. There is indeed the most ample justification of optimism.

The world is God, and the man who worships it the new pagan. He comes off the same stock as the old pagans, who were called heathens--because they were not Christians. They were, in fact, the classic earth-lovers, and, hence, more truly the sons of God than the crusaders who, directed by an anthropomorphic Deity, tortured and killed them. The new pagan, who not only feels, smells, hears, and sees the earth, but comprehends the established scientific facts about it, finds a keener and larger delight and satisfaction in it than his forefathers could experience. He loves it with his heart and his mind. Having this attitude toward it, he wishes to serve it, prompted by the same motive which actuates him when he serves his immediate father and mother.

Ruskin was sure that his beautiful England was desecrated when steel rails were laid across its green fields and factory smoke contaminated the golden air; he canonized the landscape, and when it changed, his heart ached. He was an artist, not a prophet. The industrialism that he hated disseminated his written appreciations of beauty. Machinery is the extension of man's personality and power; the instrument with which he is realizing the bounties and the Fatherhood of God. At present it is too much an end in itself instead of a means toward nobler results, but tomorrow will see the needed adjustment. Wherefore the new pagan is not saddened but gladdened at the sight of factories and the development of commerce. The awful carnage which commercialism entails is the price which we have been fated to pay for experience. Through commerce we are paving the way for the action of the world-mind--the collective thought of men. Collective thinking precludes socialism as well as individualism, and brings in humanism. The increasing complexity of civilizations symbolizes the enlarged intricacy of human life. Experience and consciousness are expanded by the maze of external detail through which a child in a modern state passes to maturity. The extension of a more highly organized civilization into every habitable region of the earth, and commercial and intellectual communication among all nations, will synthesize the thought of the world. Toward this goal every vital movement is directed, whether consciously or unwittingly. The germ of life was the original leaven, and it will leaven the whole lump. That races and states should disappear does not matter; if human life as a whole were to vanish the birth-labor that the world has begun would be retarded but not abandoned. Man would return in a few billion years. If not, a higher animal would; man himself is on the long way to ever-new heights. He has climbed up out of the sea, and with the birth of reason in his brain he began to ascend into loftier realms. The power of reason is a late acquisition, but it has provided the wondrous banquet at which the modern pagan feasts. It has enabled him literally to soar and revel in high, thin air.

All the fine arts are subsidiary to and dependent upon material progress, and the primal source of well-being is the soil. Man is a land animal, and he must have access to the land with the same freedom that a babe enjoys at its mother's breast; otherwise he will be stunted and dwarfed. The earth is the Old Mother, yielding an abundance of food for all her children. More reason and more consciousness on their part will induce them to share it with one another, not like unreasoning pigs but like reasoning men. The "new freedom" means eventually the accessibility of the earth to every man. In the meantime the biggest business at hand is to build soils as well as schools; to keep the land full of sap; to extend mechanism into the arts of agriculture; to unify the thought and purpose of city and country. All this will follow the world-mindedness that is being developed by industrialism and internationalism.

All constructive thought and action must deal not less with the city but more and more with the country--the land. Typical cities are sapping the wealth of life that grows up round them. The obsessed man in the market place needs the poise and power of the shepherd on the hill. The only true and durable magnificence of a state lies in the equitable use of its natural resources. No man who has thought profoundly wants to own land, but the majority of men do want to use it. That ought to be every man's privilege, for every man is in some fashion a lover of the verdant earth. But even the millions of us who are landless, because a few men legally own the earth, have occasional esthetic accesses to it, and if we passionately loved its beauty we should hasten the day of its release by an uneconomic monopoly. An intelligent love of the earth as a living thing is at the bottom of the dynamic impulse of man to be forever becoming.

And as these lovely days of wanton greenness steal like fairies into the secret recesses of his child-heart, man has a sense of eternal kinship with

... that small untoward class which knows the divine call of the spirit through the brain, and the secret whisper of the soul in the heart, and for ever perceives the veils of mystery and the rainbows of hope upon our human horizons; which hears and sees, and yet turns wisely, meanwhile, to the life of the green earth, of which we are part, to the common kindred of living things, with which we are at one--is content, in a word, to live, because of the dream that makes living so mysteriously sweet and poignant; and to dream, because of the commanding immediacy of life.

Gloria Mundi

EUNICE TIETJENS

In what dim, half imagined place Does the Titanic lie to-day, Too deep for tide, too deep for spray, In night and saltiness and space?

Oh, quiet must the sea-floor be! And very still must be the gloom Where in each well-appointed room The splendor rots unto the sea.

Through crannies in the shattered decks The sea-weed thrusts pale finger-tips, And in the bottom's jagged rips With ghostly hands it waves and becks.

The mirrors in the great saloons Sleep darkly in their gilt and brass Save when the silent fishes pass With eyes like phosphorescent moons.

On painted walls are slimy things, And strange sea creatures, lithe and cool, Spawn in the marble swimming pool And shall, a thousand springs.

For as it is, so it shall be, Untouched of time till Doom appears, Too deep for days, too deep for years In the salt quiet of the sea.

The Will to Live

GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

Like the sense for the true, the good, the holy, the esthetic sense is elementary. Man comes to himself as man in all alike. Without the effectuation of his peculiar artistic impulse, man, the born artist, could not find the real consecration and dignity of the human. Indeed, the worth of all human culture depends upon the sense for the beautiful. As religion is not restricted to some fragment of our experience but informs the whole, so culture requires that life shall be beautiful down to the commonplace and homely things of the daily round. The new program, to which this modern insight points, means a rebirth of our entire moral and social life.

Why is it, then, that those who vocationally and constantly worship in the sanctuary of art--the priests in this sanctuary--often so easily and singularly fail in the consecration which the worship of beauty is supposed to supply to the human personality? The lives of those whose calling it is to exhibit and exemplify the beautiful, why are they often so very ugly, so bereft of lovable emotions? The shortcomings of the artist, why do we count among these the pettiest and the basest known to man? To be specific, why do we speak almost proverbially of an artistic vanity, an artistic sensitiveness, an artistic envy or jealousy? If we answered, "Because the shadows of the 'human all too human' seem so dark in the golden light of the artistic calling," that would be true, but it would not be the whole truth. Does not the professional occupation of oneself with art involve a danger to character? To live constantly in the world of the emotions, to fable and fantasy and dream, in all this there is so easily something weak, not to say "effeminate" and sickly, and hence enervating. Of great spirits this is true often enough--how much more of the lesser who sophistically find warrant in the weakness of the great for the greatness of their weakness! For instance, they have heard of "inspiration"--something not under the control of the artist, something that must "come upon him," but only when the divine hour strikes, as it struck at the pentecostal "outpouring" of the "spirit" upon the early Christians. Hence no care for a thousand things--in both cases--for which other men must care! Hence a standard of life different from that by which other men live! To be outwardly different from others, to set oneself above others, that is to be artistic. Because some great artists are different from other people in moods and manners and morals, it is naïvely concluded that to emulate the latter is to be the former, and right merrily does the emulation go on. It must be a grief to a real artist, this culture of the eccentric head and the more eccentric heart. Therefore we need a man to free us from these eccentricities, a man to lift us above these caricatures because he has himself put them beneath his feet. This man is Friedrich Nietzsche.

The sickness and the soundness of life, both these were in Nietzsche. In his demand for an artistic culture he put his finger upon the wound of present humanity. This demand was accepted, the meaning of the demand was lost sight of. This was the fatality--as if Nietzsche required a new artistic culture only, and not at the same time a new life culture! Beauty the form of life indeed, but strength, will, deed, the content--that was the brave burden of the prophet's message.

Nietzsche was born into a time that marked the climax of a more than millennial cultus of Death. The old songs of death as bridge of sunset into the eternal day of Bliss, songs of earthly lamentation and heavenly yearning and anticipation, these no longer came from the heart, to be sure; though still sung, the voices of "the faithful" grew ever thinner and thinner; and the songs were a monument of past piety rather than a witness to a present. Like vice, this earth which was once "a monster of so frightful mien" was first endured, then pitied, then embraced--and even wedded by man; its sufferings were healed and its delights enjoyed. The pain, the pleasure of earth, what does it mean? man's heart again asked as it asked in happy Greece long ago. But as time went by, the human mind was bruised and broken over this question, until it concluded that all we call life is a great illusion. And back and behind this life, with its tumult and fitful fever, there is the "vasty deep" of the infinite nothing. Life is a cheat. And now there is Weltschmerz, Lebenschmerz--simply a naturalistic form of the old ecclesiastical longing for death. It said the same "No!" to life that the old church song said--it, too, valued the day of death higher than the day of birth; it, too, urged that, since life is intrinsically evil, the cure of the evil is to live as little as possible.

Into such a world Friedrich Nietzsche was born, breathed its atmosphere, was himself once drunk upon its drugged drinks. The preacher of this modern yearning for Nirvana,--i.e., not metaphysical non-existence but psychological desirelessness,--was Schopenhauer as well as his disciple von Hartmann. This is the worst possible world, croaked Schopenhauer; No, moaned von Hartmann, it is not the worst possible world, it is the best possible world, but it is worse than none! And once Nietzsche called Schopenhauer his teacher--went forth as an enthusiastic apostle of the message of passive resignation to the inevitable sorry scheme of things, nay, of the message that the world is the work of an anguished god seeking redemption from the infinite misery of existence by the infinite negation of life.

And surely the anguish of Nietzsche fitted him, as no other, to be partner in distress of this anguished god. Surely he, if anyone, could say, To this end was I born and for this purpose came I into the world, to bear witness--to the body of this death. From his mother's womb was he set apart to suffer. Endowed with a transcendent and super-abundant fulness of spirit, every fresh and forceful impulse of his personality he felt as an indictment of the inexorable pitiless limitations within which his best innermost life was imprisoned. He was a voice crying in the wilderness, not only to men, but to himself. Each new flash of light which illumined his inner eye let him see the graves upon which he was treading, and revealed those who claimed to be alive in the mask of the death to which they had succumbed. In the abounding wealth of youth he felt a mortal sickness getting its grip upon him. As life dragged on, he felt more and more the hell tortures of pain from which he had to wring his work every hour of his existence.

Who would have the effrontery to cast a stone at this man had he flung down his arms into one of those graves, and cried with an old philosopher: This may all be very well for the gods, but not for me! But he did not lay down his arms! Freed from all encumbrances of conscience and debilitating sense of sin which had paralyzed the Christian, and from the Schopenhauer Welt- und Lebenanschauung, he welcomed all that life had to offer and went unhesitatingly toward the universal goal of annihilation with a blithe and unregretting spirit. Entertaining no illusions about indeterminism or free-will or immortality, he rejoiced in his strength, seized with avidity the passing moment, and fell fighting to the last. He spoke his courageous "Yes!" to life, while Schopenhauer, with his money and his mistress, and all the world beside, were crying to him to say "No!" For this we must thank him. In this we find an antidote to present-day tendencies to sink the individual in the multitude, to subordinate men to institutions, and to apotheosize mediocrity. Nietzsche met pain with a power which transformed even death into life, and turned the day of his death even into a festival of the soul. He taught himself and he taught others to believe in that power, which alone is great,--to believe in the Power of the Will! Nietzsche, like Jesus, proclaimed the inestimable worth of the individual man, saw for him vast and glorious possibilities, sought the regeneration of society through the regeneration of the individual. Both committed the fortunes of the cause to which they devoted their lives to individuals and not to masses of men. Both believed that the best was yet to be. Both believed in the inwardness, the self-dependence, and the autonomy of personality. Neither ever side-stepped or flinched.

Today we are suffering from impuissant personality, from cowardice, from weakness of the will. Taming the great wild strong instincts, making them small and weak, choking them, so that man can will nothing or do nothing great and original and special--this is what we call civilization. A comfortable existence, this is the final end of life, according to this civilization. No conflict, no danger, for these menace comfort! Not to know the comfort of a calm, safe existence from which you can look down upon the struggles in a neck-breaking life far below--that is barbarism indeed! And is not this comfort a virtue, buttressed by moral principles at that? So buttressed, one's slumbers are not disturbed. And may not one add to this virtue of comfort that other cardinal virtue of hatred of all that keeps matters stirred up, all that causes unrest, that causes sleepless nights and stormy days? What the man of civilization hates he calls "bad," what he loves he calls "good." Accordingly, as Nietzsche saw and said, the weak are the "good" people, the brave and the strong are the "bad." Accordingly, also, it is comfortable to be "moral." All one needs is to attune one's life to the "common run," to quarantine against every profound disturbance, to steal by every dangerous abyss of life. And if powers stir in man which do not amiably submit to taming, why, "morality" may be used as a whip to lash these insubordinate stirrings into subjection. And if the living heart crouches into submission under the lash, why, such crouching is called "virtue," and the daring to resist and escape the lash, this of course is "vice." In a word, the most will-less is the most virtuous. Thus--such was Nietzsche's uncanny insight--"moral laws" are devices for disciplining the will into weakness! "Morality" is a poison with which man is inoculated, so that his strength may be palsied. "Morality" is itself death to a man, a will to weakness, a destruction of the will, while life is a will to power, a will to self-affirmation.

Every virtue has its double, easily confounded with it, in reality the exact opposite of it. Take meekness, peaceableness. It is a virtue which the cowardly, the over-cautious, arrogate to themselves--those who duck and bow and bend so as to give no offense, and to conjure up no violent conflict. Yet to be peaceable and meek is in truth supreme strength, having one's own stormy heart under control, and being absolutely sure of power over the militant spirits of men. Humility is a sign at once of smallness and of greatness. Patience is at once a lazy lassitude and an active steadfast strength. Chastity may be reduced vitality, fear of disease, fear of being found out, lack of opportunity, slavery to respectability, poverty, or it may be temperance and self-control in satisfying sex-needs. And so on. Every virtue may arise because a man is too weak for the opposite. And this virtue which walks the path of virtue because it lacks the courage and the strength not to do so, this complacent, harmless, untempted virtue, men make the universal criterion of all virtue, the codex of their morality. Today still the pharisee, not the publican, the son who stupidly ate his fill in his father's house, not the "prodigal" who hungered in the far country, heads the scroll of the virtuous. To fear and flee vice, or to "pass a law," this is the current solution of morality, dinged into us from youth up, not to confront vice, battle with it, conquer and coerce it!