Part 4

So misunderstood Nietzsche thought. He thought that the morality of "virtuous people" was, in fact, a foe of life, that the virtue of the weak was a grave for the virtue of the strong, and that, consequently the consciences of men must be aroused so that they could see the whole abomination of this, their virtue, of which they were so proud. To bridle and tame men is not to ennoble them; to make men too weak and cowardly for vice is not to make them strong and brave for the good. This anxious and painful slipping and winding and twisting between virtue and vice, this cannot be the fate of the future, the eternal destiny of man; this is to make man the eternal slave of man; to damn him in his innermost and idiomatic life to the lot of the eternal slave. Virtue and vice are values which men mint, stamps which men imprint upon their ever-changing conduct, not eternal values, born of life itself, sanctioned by the law of life itself. As time goes on tables of old values become sins. To obey them, to have the law outside and not inside us, is "to fall from grace" indeed. A law of life cannot be on paper, for paper is not living. Life must be the law of life. Life must interpret and reveal life. And life must be the criterion of life. What makes us alive, and strong, and mighty of will, is on that account good; what brings death and weakness, foulness and feebleness of will is bad. The courage which in the most desperate situation of life, in the most labyrinthan aberration of thought, dares to wring a new strength to live, is good; all pusillanimity, all over-mastery by pain, all collapse under the burden of life, all disappointing desert of the censure, "O ye of little faith, why are ye fearful?"--all this is bad. It will be a new day for man when he feels it wrong and immoral to lament his lot, to whine, but right and moral to earn strength from pain, a will to labor from temptation to die. Not the fear of the moral man to sin, but the fear to be weak, so that one cannot do one's work in the world--that is to be the fear in the future. The powerful will, nay, the will become power itself, the fixed heart, the keyed and concentrated personality; this means freedom from every slave yoke. And it means that life is no longer at the mercy of capricious and contingent gain and loss, but a King's Crown conquered in conflict with itself, with man, and with God.

Also sprach Nietzsche-Zarathustra!

Keats and Fanny Brawne

BY CHARLOTTE WILSON

He tried to pour the torrents of his love Into a tiny vase; a trinket--smooth, Pretty enough--but fit to hold a rose Upon some shrewd collector's cabinet. Toward that small moon the wild tides of his love Reared up, and fell back, moaning; and he died Asking his heart why love was agony.

And she? She loved the best she could, I think, And wondered sometimes--but not overmuch-- At poor John's queer, unseemly violence.

A New Woman from Denmark

Marguerite Swawite

Karen Borneman, by Hjalmar Bergström. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]

From the north, whence Ibsen's Nora challenged the world as far back as 1879, comes a fresh message of rebellion in the more radical figure of Karen Borneman. In judging this play of Bergström's, which has but now appeared in Edwin Björkman's translation, we must remember that it was written in 1907--before we had grown so sophisticated concerning the rebel woman in her infinite manifestations. And yet, because this vanguard of a new morality is still a slender company, the addition of a new member cannot fail to arouse a ripple of excitement in the watchful rank and file. For that reason, as well as for some novel characteristics of her own, Karen Borneman merits a word for herself.

Bergström chose the most obvious method of contrast in projecting his heroine upon a background of stringent restraint. Her father is Kristen Borneman, a professor of theology whose chief interest in life is the propagation of the principles contained in his magnum opus, Marriage and Christian Morality. Her mother is an apparently submissive woman who sometimes questions the edicts of her husband. Her brother, Peter, is an adolescent youth, already awake to the conflict between the natural man and the unnatural economic system, and seemingly bound for destruction. Thora, her young sister, is already seeking out the clandestine outlet for an excessive and dangerous sentimentality. Another sister, Gertrude, has suffered a mental collapse and is confined in an insane asylum. These children, the author seems to say, are the results of a chafing restrictive discipline, and natural instincts gone wrong--a conclusion weakened, not strengthened by over-illustration. When four of a family of eight show signs of a similar abnormal development one suspects not only the disciplinary system but the purity of their inheritance.

Be that as it may, the chief protagonist, Karen, is quite a normal person--except in the matter of courage, of which she possesses an inordinate amount. But then all new women are courageous to a fault. She is a woman of twenty-eight, mature, cultivated, and a successful professional writer. Her most salient claim to consideration in the early scenes of the play is her quiet assurance in the right of her position. She voluntarily opens up her past to the professedly liberal physician who seeks her hand.

"Some years ago I--lived with a man.... You are a widower yourself. You may regard me as a widow or--a divorced wife."

And when he spurns her action as squalor, she indignantly replies, "Doctor, how dare you. A phase of my life that at least to me is sacred, and you cast reflections on it, that--"

There is a brevity, a terseness, about her words that create greater sense of her power than would any amount of emotional pyrotechnics. In the later scene with her father she is equally as simple:

"The sum and substance of it is this: I have been married twice.... I mean that twice during my life--with years between--I have given myself, body and soul, to the man I loved, firmly determined to remain faithful to him unto death." Then follows the recital of the two love affairs--the first with a brilliant but very poor journalist who died prematurely, and the other with a sculptor, Strandgaard, whom she left on the discovery of his faithlessness.

Her vision is of a time of greater freedom for self-expression:

"... the day will come when we, too, will demand it as our right--demand the chance to live our own lives as we choose and as we can, without being held the worse on that account. Of course, I know that this is not an ideal, but merely a makeshift meant to serve until at last a time comes which recognizes the right of every human being to continue its life through the race."

Her justification is the characteristic one:

"I have, after all, lived for a time during those few years of youth that are granted us human beings only once in our lifetime, and that will never, never come back again. What have these other ones got out of their enforced duty and virtue except bitterness--bitterness and emptiness? I have, after all, felt the fullness of life within me while there was still time, and I don't regret it!"

The clash with her father whom she loves tenderly she accepts as inevitable in spite of the pain it must bring them both. The ecstasy of a great vision softens to the note of personal loss as she leaves him:

"Yes--I do pity you, father! Don't think my heart is made of stone. The sorrow I have done you cannot be greater than the one I feel within myself at this moment, when perhaps I see you for the last time! But how can I help that I am the child of a time that you don't understand? We have never wanted to hurt each other, of course--but I suppose it is the law of life, that nothing new can come into the world without pain--"

Because Karen advocates a course generally denoted by the term (of wretched connotation) free love, she is not to be confused with those of lesser fineness who are fighting at her side. For instance, with Stanley Houghton's heroine in Hindle Wakes. Anyone who sees in Karen another Fanny Hawthorne, has failed to understand Karen's position. She is a woman of culture and of ideals in all matters of life, and especially in that of the sex relationship. "I have given myself, ..." she says, "to the man I loved, firmly determined to remain faithful to him unto death." This is a far cry from Fanny's reply to Alan: "Love you? Good heavens, of course not! Why on earth should I love you? You were just someone to have a bit of fun with. You were an amusement--a lark." To Karen the relationship is justified only by depth of passion, and she entered it with as great a solemnity and glow of consecration as did ever a serious woman a church-made marriage. To the many camp-followers of "established" feminism, those who don or doff their principles with the transient fashion,--to them Karen must seem a humorous, if not a pitiable figure. For she dares to have beliefs and gallantly cleaves to them.

Karen, then, is a new woman in the sense that in the moment of crisis she did not accept as inevitable the reply of convention, but weighed her need against the law, and, finding the latter wanting, fulfilled her need at the sacrifice of the law. On the other hand, she is not of those who break laws for the intrinsic pleasure of destruction.

"Of course," she admits, "it would have been ever so much more easy for me if, while I was still young, some presentable man, with all his papers in perfect order and a financially secure future, had come and asked for me--"

And she welcomes marriage with the good Doctor Schou in an attitude unpleasantly reactionary:

"... I believe every woman who has reached a certain age--and you know I am twenty-eight--will, without hesitation, prefer a limited but secure existence by the side of an honest man to the most unlimited personal freedom."

And worst of all, she, who throughout the play declares herself unconvinced of guilt or stain, at the close of the first act becomes quite mawkishly sentimental over Heine's pretty line, "May God forever keep you so fair, and sweet, and pure."

Because Karen exhibits these painful inconsistencies, she is no less possible or real or worthwhile. We who know many women emerging in diverse odd shapes from the travail of awakening have discovered just as inconsistent a combination of precipitation and reaction; and thus will it ever be until we have at length worked out our way to the most serviceable harmony. It is for this very reason that Karen is interesting: she is no superwoman, but our own imperfect sister.

Of the other characters there is but one deserving special comment--Karen's mother, who to me is the most remarkable person Bergström has here created. She confesses to her husband that she has known for three years that Karen had been living in Paris with Strandgaard, but had kept the knowledge to herself because it had been too late to interfere, and because she did not regard the calamity as others would have in her place. From a terrible and bitter experience with another daughter, Gertrude, who had gone insane through the abrupt breaking off of a long engagement which had aroused primitive passion and left it unfulfilled, Mrs. Borneman had reached a revolutionary conclusion:

"... from that day I have--after a careful consideration--done what I could to let our children live the life of youth, sexually and otherwise, in as much freedom as possible. The result of your educational method, my dear Kristen, is our poor Gertrude, who is now confined in an insane asylum, as incurable. The result of my method is Karen, I suppose. I don't know if it is very sinful to say so, but I feel much less burdened by guilt than I should if conditions were reversed."

When Karen, however, defends her course as an abstract ideal of "every human being to continue its life through the race," and appeals to her mother to understand, Mrs. Borneman retreats with, "I wash my hands of it, Karen. I don't dare to think that far...."

It was her motherhood that had forced upon her the courage to overlook the law, and not any desire to throw over the old to set up a new law. The glory of the new vision means nothing to her in comparison with her husband's suffering to which she herself has added. She is the promise of a new type--the awakened mother.

As for the play as a whole, it appears to me that Mr. Bergström has tried to say too much in the slight space of one short play, for he has two distinct themes--the right of woman to love and life, and the relationship between marriage and children. The first is the chief theme, which is worked out in the story of Karen; the second is too important to be employed as a subsidiary thread, and instead of adding richness to the first it rather clutters and confuses it with unnecessary baggage. Mrs. Borneman pities one of her sons because he cannot afford to have children on his slender salary, and feels that her other son is not justified in blindly bringing child after child into the world, depending upon the rest of the family for their maintenance. She asks her husband:

"So it is not enough for two people to live together in mutual love?"

"No, Cecilia, that has nothing to do with marriage. What is so inconceivably glorious about marriage is that, through it, God has delegated His own creative power to us simple human beings--that He has made us share His own divine omnipotence."

The poor professor is made consistent to the point of absurdity, and the main issue befogged, when he cries out to Karen:

"And yet I could have forgiven you everything--your wantonness and your defiance--if you had taken the consequences and had a child! If you had had ten illegitimate children--better that than none at all! But you have arrogantly defied the very commandments of nature, which are nothing but the commandments of God!"

Perhaps this matter was included for the sake of Karen's reply:

"Do you think I am a perfect monster of a woman, who has never felt the longing for a baby? Not me does your anger hit, but that society which will not regard it as an inevitable duty to recognize the right of every human being to have children--as a right, mark you, and not as a privilege reserved for the richest and the poorest. There are thousands of us to whom the right is denied--thousands of men as well as women. But we, too, are human beings, with love longings and love instincts, and we will not let us be cheated out of the best thing that life holds!"

Technically the play is not so perfect a thing as Mr. Björkman's unbounded encomiums would make us believe. It opens, for instance, in the good old fashion scorned by Ibsen--with the gossip of servants, who are here engaged in laying the table instead of in the time-honored task of dusting. The whole action is cast within some eight hours, thus causing a use of coincidence to the straining point. The most commendable feature of technique is the admirably sustained suspense: the story of Gertrude overshadows the entire piece from the opening scene to Mrs. Borneman's avowal in the last act. The powerful use of the story as contrast to Karen's career is also unusual.

And yet in spite of its faults--perhaps because of them--we have found Karen Borneman the most stimulating play of the year. We hope one of our two organizations dedicated to the drama will put it on in the near future.

When the ape lost his wits he became man.--Viacheslav Ivanov.

Galsworthy's Little Human Comedy

No magazine that comes to this office is looked for more excitedly than Harper's Weekly. Poetry and Drama is a quarterly event that keeps us in a dignified intensity of expectation; and there are others. But Harper's is a weekly adventure in the interest of which we haunt the postman. At present it is featuring a series of sketches by Galsworthy--satirical characterizations of those human beings who pride themselves on being "different." Here is a man who knows himself for a philosopher; here is an "artist"; here is one of those rare individualities so enlightened, so superior, so removed, that there is only one label for him: "The Superlative."

But it is in The Philosopher that Galsworthy excels himself. It is probably the most consummate satire that has appeared in the last decade:

He had a philosophy as yet untouched. His stars were the old stars, his faith the old faith; nor would he recognize that there was any other, for not to recognize any point of view except his own was no doubt the very essence of his faith. Wisdom! There was surely none save the flinging of the door to, standing with your back against that door, and telling people what was behind it. For though he did not know what was behind, he thought it low to say so. An "atheist," as he termed certain persons, was to him beneath contempt; an "agnostic," as he termed certain others, a poor and foolish creature. As for a rationalist, positivist, pragmatist, or any other "ist"--well, that was just what they were. He made no secret of the fact that he simply could not understand people like that. It was true. "What can they do save deny?" he would say. "What do they contribute to the morals and the elevation of the world? What do they put in place of what they take away? What have they got, to make up for what is behind that door? Where are their symbols? How shall they move and leave the people?" "No," he said; "a little child shall lead them, and I am the little child. For I can spin them a tale, such as children love, of what is behind the door." Such was the temper of his mind that he never flinched from believing true what he thought would benefit himself and others. Amongst other things he held a crown of ultimate advantage to be necessary to pure and stable living. If one could not say: "Listen, children, there it is, behind the door. Look at it, shining, golden--yours! Not now, but when you die, if you are good."... If one could not say that, what could one say? What inducement hold out?...

This is merely the first paragraph. The rest is even better. Such an analysis ought to extinguish the Puritan forever--except that he won't understand it. He'll think it was aimed at his neighbor. He knows any number of men like that....

Knowledge or Prejudice

A critic writes us that he finds no fault with freedom of speech, and that Emma Goldman's disregard of ordinary moral laws and blasphemy of religion do not destroy the fact that she exists. But such an article about her as appeared in our last issue is well calculated to make us appear absurd, he thinks; it sounds like the oration of some one who is just beginning to discover the things that the world has known always; and he closes with this deliciously naïve question: "Do you believe in listening respectfully to advocates of free love, and, because of their daring, applauding them?"

Yes, we believe in listening respectfully to any sincere programme; we believe that is the only way people get to understand things. We even believe in listening seriously to insincere programmes, because the insincere person usually thinks he is sincere and helps one to understand even more. By doing all these things one is likely to reach that altitude where "to understand all is to forgive all."

As for "advocates of free love"--we recall the impatient comment of a well-known woman novelist: "When will people stop using that silly, superfluous phrase 'free love'? We don't talk about 'cold ice' or 'black coal'!"

And, though our applause was not confined to Emma Goldman's daring, as our critic would probably concede, is not daring a thing worthy of applause? Just as conflict is better than mediation, or suffering than security, daring is so much more legitimate an attitude than complacency.

But it is that remark about "things the world has known always" which exasperates us the most. The world has not known them always; it doesn't know them now. It has heard of them vaguely--just to the point of becoming prejudiced about them. And prejudice is the first element that sneaks away when knowledge begins to develop. If the world represented by our critic knew these things it might be roused to daring, too.

Rupert Brooke's Visit

Rupert Brooke was in Chicago for a few days last month. One of the most interesting things to us about his visit was that he so quickly justified all the theories we have had about him since we first read his poetry. First, that only the most pristine freshness could have produced those poems that some people have been calling decadent; second, that while he probably is "the most beautiful young man in England" it was rather silly of Mr. Yeats to add that he is also "the wearer of the most gorgeous shirts." Because Rupert Brooke doesn't wear gorgeous shirts; he appears to have very little interest in shirts, as we expected. He is too concerned with the big business of life and poetry. He is, as a very astute young member of our staff suggested, somehow like the sea.

"Books and the Quiet Life"

George Gissing has always had a peculiarly poignant place in our galaxy of literary favorites, and nowhere have we loved him more than in that little "autobiography" which he called The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. The portions of that book which have to do specifically with books and reading have been brought together by Mr. Waldo R. Browne and published with Mr. Mosher's usual incomparable taste.

A good many people have loved books as well as George Gissing did, perhaps, but very few of them have been able to express that love like this:

The exquisite quiet of this room! I have been sitting in utter idleness, watching the sky, viewing the shape of golden sunlight upon the carpet, which changes as the minutes pass, letting my eye wander from one framed print to another, and along the ranks of my beloved books....

I have my home at last. When I place a new volume on my shelves, I say: Stand there whilst I have eyes to see you; and a joyous tremor thrills me....

For one thing, I know every book of mine by its scent, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things....