Part 3

The fountain bent and straightened itself In the night wind, Blowing like a flower. It gleamed and glittered, A tall white lily, Under the eye of the golden moon. From a stone seat, Beneath a blossoming lime, The man watched it. And the spray pattered On the dim grass at his feet.

The fountain tossed its water, Up and up, like silver marbles. Is that an arm he sees? And for one moment Does he catch the moving curve Of a thigh? The fountain gurgled and splashed, And the man's face was wet.

Is it singing that he hears? A song of playing at ball? The moonlight shines on the straight column of water, And through it he sees a woman, Tossing the water-balls. Her breasts point outwards, And the nipples are like buds of peonies. Her flanks ripple as she plays, And the water is not more undulating Than the lines of her body.

"Come," she sings, "Poet! Am I not worth more than your day ladies, Covered with awkward stuffs, Unreal, unbeautiful? What do you fear in taking me? Is not the night for poets? I am your dream, Recurrent as water, Gemmed with the moon!" She steps to the edge of the pool And the water runs, rustling, down her sides. She stretches out her arms, And the fountain streams behind her Like an opened vail.

* * * * *

In the morning the gardeners came to their work. "There is something in the fountain", said one. They shuddered as they laid their dead master On the grass. "I will close his eyes", said the head gardener, "It is uncanny to see a dead man staring at the sun."

* * * * *

Fool's Moneybags

Outside the long window, With his head on the stone sill, The dog is lying, Gazing at his Beloved. His eyes are wet and urgent, And his body is taut and shaking. It is cold on the terrace; A pale wind licks along the stone slabs, But the dog gazes through the glass And is content.

The Beloved is writing a letter. Occasionally she speaks to the dog, But she is thinking of her writing. Does she, too, give her devotion to one Not worthy?

The Poetry of Revolt

CHARLES ASHLEIGH

_Arrows in the Gale_, by Arturo Giovannitti. [Hillacre Bookhouse, Riverside, Connecticut.]

There are many ways in which we can approach this curious and portentous volume. We may confine ourselves solely to the technique of the writing, but, in so doing, we should ignore the most important and compelling part of the book: its spirit. There is something which flames through these poems that abashes one who would content himself with a sterile commentary on the versification; only those who are afraid of life would take refuge in such pedantic air-beating.

In this book there is a combination of two of the most significant personalities of our time. The preface is written by that miracle incarnate: Helen Keller. In it she gives us the background of the poems--a background of tumultuous class-conflict. The awakening of the working-class, and its surprising growth of self-reliance and militancy, is the inspiration of the book, and Helen Keller announces herself for it and with it.

Giovannitti himself is a remarkable man of remarkable antecedents. He emigrated from his native Italy at the age of seventeen, and was precipitated into our whirl of economic struggle. He worked in Pennsylvania in the coal mines and, later, assumed the position which he still holds: that of editor of the Italian revolutionary weekly, _Il Proletario_. In the now famous Lawrence strike he was one of those who were most valuable in stimulating the sense of solidarity among the workers and in maintaining their enthusiasm. Together with Joseph J. Ettor and Caruso, he spent several months in jail, awaiting his trial on a faked-up murder charge. They were acquitted, not so much because of the legal justice of their cause but because of the fact that their condemnation would have resulted in the paralysis of the textile industry. With their threat of general strike the workers forced the courts of their masters to deliver up to them their captive spokesmen. The excitement and publicity resultant from the Lawrence Strike brought into prominence the ideas of Giovannitti and others who were espousers of the Syndicalist idea, which in this country is expressed through the organization known as the Industrial Workers of the World.

It is necessary to have some idea of these matters in order to appreciate the _leit motif_ of this book. All through it flares that spirit of impatient revolt, that spurning of most of the scaffolding of our decrepit civilization which is usually held up for admiration to the budding youth of this country. Courts of law, churches, and parliaments all fall under the blinding fire of the bitter contempt of this workman in revolt.

Despite occasional faults in form or stress--and we must remember that Giovannitti is writing in an alien tongue--the poems are vibrant with life and some of them express with truest art things which are not always considered by our academic friends to be at all within the province of poetry.

Sometimes the formal verse forms are used and, at other times, the poet has recourse to the free rhythmic mode of Whitman. Personally, I think that the best work is in the free verse. _The Walker_, a jail experience of Giovannitti's, is a wonderful piece of work and should be bracketed with _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_. The finest thing in the book is _The Cage_, a poem which appeared originally in _The Atlantic Monthly_, and which is one of the few things which have preserved that journal from irredeemable mediocrity.

_The Cage_ expresses the thoughts and emotions of the writer when he stood with his two comrades in the dock of Salem courthouse. The contrast is drawn between the outworn formalities and rites of the law and the lusty life of labor,--between the dead lives of the dismal practitioners of a stilted and tyrannical formula and the life of vigorous conflict of the awakening working-class.

This is the inside of the court-room:

In the middle of the great greenish room stood the green iron cage. All was old, and cold and mournful, ancient with the double antiquity of heart and brain in the great greenish room, Old and hoary was the man who sat upon the faldstool, upon the fireless and godless altar, Old were the tomes that mouldered behind him on the dusty shelves. Old was the man upon his left who awoke with his cracked voice the dead echoes of dead centuries, old the man upon his right who wielded a wand; and old all those who spoke to him and listened to him before and around the green iron cage. Old were the words they spoke, and their faces were drawn and white and lifeless, without expression or solemnity; like the ikons of old cathedrals. For of naught they knew, but of what was written in the old, yellow books. And all the joys and the pains and the loves and hatreds and furies and labors and strifes of man, all the fierce and divine passions that battle and rage in the heart of man, never entered into the great greenish room but to sit in the green iron cage. Senility, dullness and dissolution were all around the green iron cage, and nothing was new and young and alive in the great room, except the three men who were in the cage.

And, then, when the prosecutor speaks, we have an insight into the fervor with which Giovannitti greets the overthrow of the old and the budding of the new:

... he said (and dreary as a wind that moans thru the crosses of an old graveyard was his voice): "I will prove to you that these three men in the cage are criminals and murderers and that they ought to be put to death." Love, it was then that I heard for the first time the creak of the moth that was eating the old painting and the old books, and the worm that was gnawing the old bench, and it was then that I saw that all the old men around the great greenish room were dead. They were dead like the old man in the painting, save that they could still read the old books he could read no more, and still spoke and heard the old words he could speak and hear no more, and still passed the judgment of the dead, which he could no more pass, upon the mighty life of the world outside that throbbed and thundered and clamored and roared the wonderful anthem of human labor to the fatherly justice of the Sun.

To me such stuff as this means a hundred times more than a thousand sonnets to a mistress' eye-lash, or than the weak maudlinities of an absinthe-soaked eroto-dabbler, wailing puling repentance to a pale Christ. It is compact of life--life as it is today, made, not for the tittillation of dilletantes, but for the enjoyment and inspiration of men who can appreciate the meat of life redolent of sweat and blood and tears.

This is Giovannitti's picture of the Republic, after it had been gained with blood and sacrifice:

When night with velvet-sandaled feet Stole in her chamber's solitude, Behold! she lay there naked, lewd, A drunken harlot of the street,

With withered breasts and shaggy hair Soiled by each wanton, frothy kiss, Between a sergeant of police And a decrepit millionaire.

Love poems also figure in the book, but the dominant note is that of conflict. Giovannitti has realized the pregnant fact that in struggle is the greatest joy, that the ecstasy of growth and striving is worth more that the bovine placidity of "happiness." At the end of his love-song, _The Praise of Spring_, he says:

But shall I sing of love now, I who could only sing to the tune of the clarions of war? And shall I forget for a woman my black frothing horse that neighs after the twanging arrows in the wind? And shall I not lose my strength when her arms shall encircle me where thou hast girt me with the sword, O Gea, my mother immortal?

Giovannitti makes no claim for inclusion in Parnassian galleries. He believes that deeds count for more than words, and he essays but to make a handful of war-songs for the pleasure of his comrades.

Still may my song, before the sun's Reveille, speed the hours that tire, While they are cleaning up their guns Around the cheery bivouac fire.

And so, these are the rough-hewn songs of a man; of one who goes his way with his love upholding him and the Vision burning within him and the sound of battle forever in his ears and the whole-hearted hate of his enemy to spur him, and the stalwart comradeship of his fellows to make dear the thorny way.

The Nietzschean Love of Eternity

GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

After all, there have been great wars before this pan-European cataclysm; and, naturally enough, according to the psychological law of the expansion of the emotions, men have transferred their experiences of time to the content of eternity. Thus, amid the abomination of desolation which the Thirty Years' War brought upon the German Fatherland, one Johannes Rist, a clergyman residing in the neighborhood of Hamburg, sang his symptomatic song:

"O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort! Du Schwert, das durch die Seele bohrt! O Anfang sonder Ende! O Ewigkeit, Zeit ohne Zeit, Ich weiss vor lauter Traurigkeit, Nicht, wo ich mich hinwende!"

The thunder and blood of war are in it. The horrors of the war long have passed, but not those of the song. Today you may hear the old hymn sung from new hymn-books in German churches. Today still, school children commit it to memory in their schools--with what profound and terrible impression, who can say? All the pains which little children feel so quiveringly with their defenseless and susceptible natures, all these will continue unbrokenly in eternity. On this bank and shoal of time, children easily and happily forget the tribulations of a bygone hour--in eternity, never, never again! But might there not be also an eternity of childish play and joy? Even so, that could not tip the scale in view of the possibility of a comfortless and cruel eternity; especially since the possibility becomes a probability, and the probability a certainty, owing to the fact that the children are taught to consider themselves as lost and damned sinners--in Adam's fall they sinned all! Consequently the remote hope of bliss in "Jerusalem the golden with milk and honey blest" could not assuage the grief nor silence the terror and torture that filled the child mind. "Would that there were no eternity!"--often this must have been the secret thought of German children, and not of these alone.

This is the eternity of fear.

From the nursery and school to the world of thought! From gruesome pictures and poetry of the enigma of eternity to the solution in systems of the philosophers and theologians. From Rist of the Thirty Years' War to Spinoza with imperturbable philosophic calm--such was the great change through which many a German child passed--Spinoza who won his deepest insight into life by viewing all things _sub specie aeternitatis_. Or from Rist to Schleiermacher, who unveiled the august mystery of humanness as eternity in the heart--as eternity internal, dynamic, living, present, not external, mechanical, fixed, and future. It was the great transition from orthodoxy to romanticism.

Or else from all these men to _Friedrich Nietzsche_, him that was the godless one, who, in the end of the ages, also sang a song, a new song, of eternity. He both celebrated eternity in song and made no problem of it. He lived it and loved it as his first and truest love--plighted his soul's troth in unwavering loyalty: "Denn ich liebe dich, o Ewigkeit!" From dull and gloomy dreams and anxious fears did this eternity awaken him, from mortal ills did it redeem his life. Nietzsche had wistfully peered into the world's enigmatic darkness, his seeking and skeptical soul had chafed over the riddles and contradictions of life--no meaning, he cried, in this senseless play of life and death, truth and error; and only illusion and folly in all that men called joy and sorrow. There came to him, then, revelation of a new, of an eternal life. The present, with all the kaleidoscopic changes of life's little day, makes ready its own recurrence, each part of time being but a ring linked with the next, the whole becoming the ring of eternity, the true marriage ring of humanity--the seal and stay of an eternal bond between man and Ever-creative, Ever-reincarnating Life!

Ich liebe dich, o Ewigkeit. Perfect love casts out fear. This is the eternity of love. The godless one would lead the German heart, and all hearts, from "_Donnerworte_" and "_Schwerte_," from the _fear_ of eternity to the _love_ of eternity.

That is what Nietzsche would do. But is such an undertaking worth while in a day like ours? What does man care about eternity--his life so swift and short that he does not know on one day what he did or thought or wanted the day before? His treasures in time, will not his heart be there also, seeking its right and content there? Money ruling the world, time ruling money, why talk of eternity at all? A jolly hour, a sprig of mirth plucked by the way, is not that what the man of modern culture longs for, is it not enough to satisfy such longing as his? The earth overpopulated as it is with _Augenblicksmenschen_, as Nietzsche would say, and not with _Ewigkeitsmenschen_, why recall the love and hope of a long lost past?

Such queries may give us pause, but they may not stampede us. We may not forget that Professor Münsterberg, of Harvard, has written a great book bearing the impressive title, _The Eternal Values_. Nor may we be blind to the evidence that the thought so clearly and singularly espoused by the bearers of the better ideals of our new time is that of _the imminent and constant eternity in the human heart_, as unfolded by Spinoza and Schleiermacher and Nietzsche. Indeed, the question as to _what values are eternal values_, this eternity question, is central in our modern culture. Very superficial indeed would be our evaluation of modern life, most un-understood indeed would be the riddle of the soul of this life, did we ignore the ever clearer, ever mightier longing for eternity in this soul's abyss, and the unification of all deeper spirits upon the high task of giving an eternal content to our culture.

By taking some illustrations, one can see the need to supply the latter profound view to the former superficial judgment, if one is to do justice to the new movements of life in the modern world.

There is your modern poet. At first sight he seems to lack the illumination of that eternal light which never was on land or sea. You see the scorching sun beating upon the lone pilgrim as he plods through the burning sand to a goalless goal. You see faded, pale shadows. You do not meet with an idea that makes you feel that the poet yearns to interpret some eternal thought to this life of ours. Instead, life speaks only of itself and from itself. This is an abomination in the eyes of those who call themselves _Ewigkeitsmenschen_. They call it naturalistic, materialistic art. They upbraid an era in which a poet may dare to dissociate his poetry from the eternal ideal. Then you look again, you read more carefully, and you see the whole matter differently. The eternity that men claimed for their _thought_ is indeed gone. But eternity itself, the eternity of life, that is not gone, that abides. This realistic man of modern poetry, the more really he is apprehended, stands before us as the embodiment of a _necessity_, a necessity that transcends the individual, yet lives and weaves in him, a necessity that enunciates the law of life in the destiny of the individual--power of darkness or dawn of a new day! But necessity, law of life, this is but another name for eternity.

And there again is your modern painter. He, too, presents us with a bit, often a tiny bit, of reality, of nature. A rotten trunk of some old tree; a dilapidated hut on a ledge; some God-forsaken nook of earth, lost and forgotten of man; a bent and broken man with his hoe; some poor wretch with pistol against his skull; some traveller bleeding unbandaged by the roadside--there they all are in the galleries of our modern realism. But look again, and you will see that the keen observant eye of your artist serves an artist's heart, seeks and finds eternity, and directs our slower vision to the eternal mystery he has found, the most inspiring of all mysteries--viz., greatness in the least and lowest, glory and beauty in the offensive and repellant, invaluable human worth and nobility in the depraved and downtrodden!

There also is your man of science as he moves out along new paths. Storming the sky, unlocking all the eternities so long sought for behind the world, what does the scientist's supreme power and consecration consist in but his steadfast and strenuous search for eternity? He not only seeks, he finds. He finds eternal life and eternal love in the daintiest fern, in the tiniest lichen. In the very dust beneath our feet he descries what was there before men were at all. He points us to men as they emerge from the unplumbed æonian abyss, bearing in their bodies still visible and tangible traces of an eternal life. He reveals an eternal content of being in all that lives and weaves and moves.

Truly, if there is no sign of an eternity in which we live, there is no sign of an eternity at all. But if you were to bring to its simplest and truest expression all that is great and overmastering in the life of the human spirit today, you would then have once again the exultant Zarathustra song: "Ich liebe dich, o Ewigkeit!" All that lends true worth to the life that now is and is to be, is contained in this song. A _present_ eternity we seek as the one thing needful. What we love must be near us, we must feel it and grasp it. Be it never so remote, it is the magic of love to bring the remote nigh our hearts, or, better still, to conquer space and time, so that there is no near and no far, only a life and love that is eternal!

To create such Ewigkeitsmenschen is the great goal of the new life, the prophecy of a new culture. For this new culture we need men who feel something in their own being that uplifts them above all the experience of the present, much as they may seem imprisoned therein, men who dominate life in a royal fashion, men who in confident freedom do not mind the storms which would hurl them from their path. We need men who survey the great connections of the world from peak to peak and overbridge them with their own souls, men who release destiny from its isolation and articulate it in the eternal cycle of human life, men whose own being contains all life according to its eternal substance, uttering their "yea and amen" to all that is called life as they blissfully surrender to the beauty of existence. This is the great apocalypse, life's cryptic mystery-manual, whose seven seals the poet-prophet of this new culture, Friedrich Nietzsche, has broken.

What is yet to be? What will a day, a year, bring forth? If the eye is far-seeing and far-seeking, what will the next century bring forth? The darkness tenting like thick clouds upon the mountains of the future mystifies, and the days, the times, the years, the centuries, coerce man under the burden of all their darknesses until he is a-weary even before he has taken up his pilgrimage into the untrodden. Then there flashes from the love of eternity a clear light which kindles the light of the future: _we ourselves are this light!_ Our existence is the cloud hanging heavily over the hills, cloud with prophetic and positive light, from which redeeming beams shall break.

Behind us lies the whole long grim past, a huge grave, with countless gravestones--the silent city of the dead which holds all that has been ever dear to the heart, all youth with their glad faces and forms, all glances of love, all divine moments. And all the dead compel all the living to conflict that the living may be controlled by life and not by death. From their graves the dead direct their deadliest shafts at the heart, at the living, to drag them down into the embrace of death. But something stirs in man that cannot be wounded, cannot be buried--_man's will_. The will bursts all tombs hewn from rocks, demolishes all graves, creates resurrections out of them, smashes churches and abbeys that heaven's pure eye may gaze through their rent roofs--the will building and bearing eternities! And who, through love of eternity, controls future and past, finds the earth quivering with new creative words, is himself such a word, even binds good and evil together, making the evilest worthy of being the sauce of life.

Ewigkeitsmensch!--the wind from the unexplored swells his sail, seafarer's gale roaring in from the boundless. When time and space vanish from sight, vanish coasts also, the last fetters drop away: the body feels its weight and burden is past! How shall we go about rescuing ourselves from this torture and casting off this oppression?